In Memoriam Freddie Mercury

So dear friends your love is gone

Only tears to dwell upon

I dare not say as the wind must blow

So a love is lost, a love is won

Go to sleep and dream again

Soon your hopes will rise and then

From all this gloom life can start anew

And there'll be no crying soon

Brian May

Freddie Mercury (5 September 1946 - 24th November 1991)

Lis Sladen, 1948 - 2011

I was just about to settle down to write for the evening when I saw Nicola Bryant's tweet flash up in a Tweet Deck notification. I stopped in my tracks, rereading it over and over again. Trying to make it make sense. Trying to understand.

For ten minutes I watched as the rest of Twitter did the same. Is it true? It's not true. Is this some cruel joke? When it was confirmed by DWM there could be no doubt, if there ever really had been any given the number, and the integrity, of the sources.

I sat in much the same position for hours. Reading tributes as they came in from all quarters. Seeing the breaking news banner on the BBC website. Hearing of the Newsnight piece. I didn't know Lis personally, I was just a fan, but I wonder how she would have felt at the scale of the reaction to the news of her horribly untimely passing. She didn't like a fuss, they say. We must all try to do better.

It's difficult to find a positive angle to this terribly sad news, but I guess we should realise how lucky we fans are that Russell T Davies, and the success of his vision of Doctor Who, allowed Sarah Jane to have so many new adventures on television over the last five years, and that yet another generation of children were able to fall in love with her.

I don't have anything to say that hasn't been put better by tens of fans already. She was the archetypal companion, she was an inspiration. She was Sarah Jane Smith, and I loved her.

Goodbye Lis. x

BBC News
Guardian
The Doctor Who News Page
Tom Baker's tribute
Sam Watts
Cathode Ray Tube
Keith Topping
Tony Lee
Last of the Famous International Fanboys
IO9

Edward Woodward, 1930 - 2009

Edward Woodward, star of The Wicker Man, Callan, The Equalizer and Common as Muck, to name but a few, has died at the age of 79.

I feel terribly sad at the loss of someone who has been a screen presence throughout my life, and has left such a fantastic body of work behind them.

BBC item

Wikipedia

IMDB

Edgar Wright on Edward Woodward

Michael Jackson, 1958 - 2009

Ricardo Montalbán, 1920 - 2009

Khan Noonien Singh, Last of the genetic Supermen.

Wikipedia

Patrick McGoohan, 1928 - 2009

Perhaps oddly it is not his awesome turn as Number Six in The Prisoner with which I most strongly associate Patrick McGoohan. In fact as a self confessed genre nut it's unusual that of all his roles, as he strode through cult film and television during a fifty year career, the performances I most cherished were in two relatively mainstream pictures, both of which have sat comfortably in my top ten favourite films of all time for some years.

Hell Drivers (1957)

Ice Station Zebra (1968)

The world seems a weaker and smaller place for the loss of this magnificent actor and great intellect.

The Guardian

BBC News

IO9

IMDB

Oliver Postgate, 1925-2008

BBC Item

Wikipedia

Oliver Postgate's website

Charlton Heston, 1924 - 2008

Charlton Heston played so many great and significant parts, in so many important films, yet it is as the last man on Earth, Robert Neville, in The Omega Man that he made the greatest impression on me, waking me to a world of science fiction possibilities as I discovered the Post-Apocalyptic sub genre.

The expression 'Larger than life' is bandied about a fair bit but was probably first coined by someone just after meeting Heston. It's partly about the roles he played in such excellent films as Ben Hur, El Cid, Planet of the Apes, Soylent Green, The Greatest Show on Earth, The Ten Commandments, Earthquake, The Three Musketeers, Touch of Evil, The Awakening and his splendid, if unlikely, turn as Sherlock Holmes in Crucible of Blood.
He was a fearless actor and to a young boy discovering cinema in the 1980's he seemed to loiter in every section of the video shop whispering 'psst, check out these Biblical Epics, hey - try these disaster movies.'

In recent years he's been a figure of some fun for his time as President and spokesman of the NRA (particular after 'film-maker' Michael Moore's 'documentary' Bowling for Columbine) but some mockers tend to forget that Heston has never been afraid to stand up for what he believes in, whether it was marching with Martin Luther King, supporting 1968's Gun control Act, or opposing McCarthyism.

The Guardian

The BBC

Childhood's End

Sir Arthur C Clark 1918 - 2008

Truly, Madly, Deeply

Anthony Minghella, 1954 - 2008

Verity Lambert, OBE (1935 - 2007)

It has not been my intention to write every night this week, there just seems to be a lot to talk about recently. Most of it has been good news but today brought a sad, sad development. This afternoon I was dismayed to read on Outpost Gallifrey that Verity Lambert had passed away.

There were a lot of amazing things about An Unearthly Child, the first ever episode of Doctor Who. Beyond the genius of Sydney Newman's initial concept there's the fact that it was produced by a twenty-eight year old woman; the BBC's youngest producer and the only female one (pictured with Carole Ann Ford courtesy of Steve Hill). Of course it also had an Asian director, Warris Hussein, so it was a remarkably progressive show before you even consider the TARDIS or the Daleks that were to follow.

Despite going on to a career that spanned forty-four years and saw Verity involved in many successful shows she was always happy to talk about her first offspring. It was a beautiful touch when the team behind the current series of Doctor Who name checked Verity and Sydney Newman as the fictitious parents of the Doctor's alter ego John Smith.

It's simultaneously terribly sad and yet somehow fitting that this sad news should fall on the forty fourth anniversary of the broadcast of that first episode of Doctor Who, extraordinary in so many ways.

Thank you Verity, and God bless.

BBC News article

Official Doctor Who site

The Guardian

Wikipedia