Due for release on 13 July is Celebrate Regenerate, a new book packed with pieces from over 250 fan writers (including my good self) from all over the world that have been brought together by editor Lewis Christian.

Fan-made and not for profit, the plus-300 page book is filled with reviews and articles covering every televised Doctor Who story. The reviews will be accompanied by a wealth of fan art and a few exclusive interviews with Series 1 director, Joe Ahearne; writer Tom MacRae, and writer Joseph Lidster which will be published alongside some other special features in the book.

There is still time to get your name in the book as a 'companion' supporter of the project and you may still want to contribute a review. The deadline for reviews of the final eight episode of Series 7, just transmitted, is 3 June 2013 and the deadline to get your name in the book is 1 July 2013.

For further information about how to buy a copy of the book and its availability as a PDF download then click on the link to Celebrate Regenerate's FAQ.

The cost of a physical copy of the book will be for manufacturing and shipping via Lulu.com only - no artists, writers or contributors are gaining any money from this project - and it is unauthorised and unofficial. The book is ultimately just for fun and it’ll make for a great addition to people’s bookshelves and / or downloads.

Following the review of Dr. Who and the Daleks our celebration of the centenary of Peter Cushing's birth and the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who continues with the second of the 1960s Dalek films being re-released and restored in high definition by StudioCanal, Daleks' Invasion Earth 2150 A.D.

Roberta Tovey, who played Susan, remembers having conversations with producer Milton Subotsky about Aaru greenlighting a second Doctor Who film as they were completing the filming of Dr. Who and the Daleks in April 1965. Peter Cushing had also indicated he was willing to return to play Dr. Who but, with his usual charm, suggested this would only be possible if Tovey was invited too.

After the box office success of the first film, producer Joe Vegoda was keen to capitalise on 'Dalekmania' and, despite Subotsky briefly contemplating a cinema version of Terry Nation's The Keys of Marinus serial as a sequel, Aaru swiftly announced their second to feature the Daleks, The Daleks Invade Earth, in December of the same year.

Based on the Terry Nation six-part serial The Dalek Invasion of Earth, Subotsky again worked with the series' story-editor David Whitaker to shape the material into a feature length script. Whitaker, who this time would receive an on-screen credit, provided notes and suggestions to a script Subtosky had planned using a series of wall charts.

To celebrate two anniversaries this year StudioCanal are this month releasing the two 1960s Dalek films - Dr. Who and the Daleks and Daleks' Invasion Earth 2150 A.D. in honour of the centenary of their star Peter Cushing's birth and the 50th anniversary of the Doctor Who BBC series which spawned the two films. Both films have been extensively restored for their Blu-ray high definition debut.

The two films, produced by Aaru Productions, emerged out of the 'Dalekmania' created by the BBC transmission of Terry Nation's seven-part Doctor Who story The Mutants (aka The Daleks) in December 1963 and its sequel The Dalek Invasion of Earth almost a year later in November 1964. The Daleks were an overnight success in 1963 and ´Dalekmania´, as it was known, was one of the first commercial merchandise booms generated by a TV series. At its peak in 1964, it incorporated everything from sweet cigarettes, games, play suits, clockwork and battery operated toys to the Dalek and Dalek World books co-written by Terry Nation and David Whitaker, soap, slippers, wallpaper and the Go-Go's Christmas 1964 novelty record single, the prophetic 'I'm Gonna Spend My Christmas With A Dalek'.

Aaru Productions was formed by Joe Vegoda's Regal International Films to produce films in association with Milton Subotsky and Max J. Rosenberg's company Amicus. New Yorkers Subotsky and Rosenberg had originally established their own partnership with the production of Junior Science educational films made for American television and they had been involved with Eliot Hyman in the first negotiations with Hammer to remake Frankenstein from Subotsky's own script. While Subotsky was a hands on producer, writer and editor, Rosenberg, a financier and lawyer, was very much the silent partner in the company which would eventually become Amicus.

Mario Bava's first horror film in colour, I tre volti della paura (The Three Faces of Fear aka Black Sabbath, 1963), followed the making of La ragazza che sappeva troppo (aka The Girl Who Knew Too Much) in 1962 and was shot at Cinecitta and Titanus Studios. An anthology consisting of three tales, Bava's film joined an impressive tradition of earlier films utilising a sequence of stories, written either by a single or multiple authors, which were often individually handled by name directors.

In 1932, Edmund Goulding's Grand Hotel and Paramount's anthology If I Had a Million, a portmanteau film helmed by seven directors, provided early Hollywood examples of this format and it continued into the late 1940s with Tales of Manhattan (1942) and Flesh and Fantasy (1943). European directors popularised it in the 1950s. Roberto Rossellini directed segments in several anthology films, including L'Amore (1948), Les Sept péchés capitaux (1952), Siamo donne (1953), and Amori di mezzo secolo (1954). I tre volti della paura or Black Sabbath emerged just after Boccaccio '70 (1962) the Italian anthology film directed by Mario Monicelli, Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti and Vittorio De Sica.

British studios, such as Gainsborough and Ealing, had followed suit. W. Somerset Maugham's short stories provided material for a trilogy of anthologies, Quartet (1948) and the two sequels Trio (1950) and Encore (1951). Ealing's Dead of Night (1945) is also regarded as one of the first significant examples of the horror portmanteau film, although this tradition had a long track record, starting with Richard Oswald's silent Unheimliche Geschichten (1919). It was British company Amicus who really put the horror anthology on the map with a string of successful films in the 1960s and 1970s, including Dr. Terror's House of Horrors (1964), Torture Garden (1967), The House That Dripped Blood (1970), Tales from the Crypt (1972), Asylum (1972), Vault of Horror (1973) and From Beyond the Grave (1974).

The Name of the Doctor
BBC One HD
18 May 2013, 7.00pm

The review contains spoilers

The problem with The Name of the Doctor is that, nostalgia and fan service aside, it feels familiar and comes across as an exercise in confirming some already astute guesses about Clara's mystery. The revelation about her is rather anticlimactic when it comes. Let's also get one thing out of the way. Anyone remotely believing the episode would reveal the Doctor's name was on a hiding to nothing. The Doctor's greatest secret isn't his name and I'm sure Moffat understands that, after all the attempts he's made to reinstate mystery into the Doctor's character and origins, an episode where the Doctor tells us his real name would be utterly counterproductive. He will always be Doctor Who?

So what is his greatest secret if it isn't his name? That he's already dead, at least in the physical sense, and what we're watching are the traces of a life already lived? Yes and no. It does seem rather apt given the funereal atmosphere in which The Name of the Doctor unfolds but the big secret is he's been hiding an illegitimate incarnation all these years. There's a mad man in the family attic and John Hurt's playing him.

Baron Blood (1972) marked the true beginning of Mario Bava's fruitful partnership with producer Alfred Leone. Leone, who was a successful self-made business man through his real estate deals and investments, moved into television production in the mid-1950s and steadily invested in and produced television series and films in Italy and internationally.

As B&L productions, he snapped up the rights to Italian films and then sold them to other distributors, including American International Pictures, but would also keep his hand in real estate development, later investing in properties in North Beach, Florida with prominent financier turned film producer David. B Putnam. AIP would have a greater influence over Bava and Leone's work in the early 1960s and through into the mid-1970s but it was during Putnam's ill-feted production of 1968's Four Times That Night (AKA Quante Volte... quella notte) that Leone was first impressed by Bava.

The production of the film was in difficulty and Putnam asked Leone to step in and resolve the issues with the Italian film company Delfino Films. Leone was persuaded to take over production on the Rashomon-inspired sex farce and hired Bava, of whose reputation he had limited knowledge at the time. He particularly admired the way the director managed to boost the production values of a film made on a very small budget. 'Bava and I became good friends by the end of the production of Four Times. Earning his respect did not come easily, however; having proved myself on the set and off was the result. Bava was not excited about Baron Blood or other projects at the time, and it took a great deal of time and patience to convince him to do Baron Blood.' (1)

Joining the re-publication of Peter Cushing - The Complete Memoirs on book shelves to celebrate the centenary of the much-loved actor's birth this month is the extraordinary collection The Peter Cushing Scrapbook. A beautiful A4 landscape soft bound book in full colour, this 328 page treasure trove is only available direct from Peveril Publishing and is an overwhelmingly lovely and exhaustive pictorial history of Peter Cushing's life and career.

Wayne Kinsey, a highly respected Hammer Films researcher, historian and author of many detailed books about the studio (Hammer Films – the Bray Studios Years, The Elstree Studios Years, A Life in Pictures, the Unsung Heroes and On Location), and fantasy films historian and author Tom Johnson  (Hammer Films – an Exhaustive Filmography, Peter Cushing – the Gentle Man of Horror and his 91 Films and The Films of Oliver Reed) collaborated with Joyce Broughton (Cushing’s faithful secretary and aide for over 35 years) to compile this definitive, essential book.

Not only does it chronicle in depth the actor's work on stage, television and in the cinema but it also explores his superb talents as a watercolor artist and cartoonist, his hobbies as a model theatre builder and his work as a silk scarf and jewellery designer. It brings together unseen materials from Joyce's own collection as well as rare pieces from director Roy Ward Baker's estate and a wide range of items from familiar names including writers, historians, documentarians and collectors Marcus Hearn, Denis Meikle, Don Fearney, Stephen Jones, Uwe Sommerlad, Simon Greetham, Christopher Gullo and Richard Golen among many others.

Nightmare in Silver
BBC One HD
11 May 2013, 7.00pm

The review contains spoilers.

It has to be said, the expectations for another Neil Gaiman-penned episode of Doctor Who have been exceptionally high. I think the pressure to perform, certainly after the award winning success of the very popular The Doctor's Wife nearly two years ago, can be detected in the interview with Gaiman in this week's Radio Times. He confesses "It has a few little scary bits" and, judging it on marks out of ten, "It’s running at about a five or a six. I’d love to do a nine. I’d love to do something that sends adults behind the sofa, too." Well, about five or six is an apt summation of Nightmare in Silver's remit to make the Cybermen, last seen skulking beneath a department store threatening James Corden's baby, properly scary again.

Being a Neil Gaiman script there is, however, more to Nightmare in Silver than vicarious scares and not only does the story tap into the ever-evolving history of the Cybermen and the accompanying anxieties about a posthuman future where potentially our biology is transformed by artificial intelligence and wearable or implanted technologies, but it also explores the Romantic legacy of the stories of E.T.A Hoffman and Shelley's Frankenstein, musing on the responsibilities that come with the use of power, self-sacrifice and chess strategies.

‘You’re being a very stupid woman’
‘That isn’t a very original observation’

Enter Eric Saward, if you'll pardon the expression.

Christopher Bidmead, the then current script editor of Doctor Who, was on the look out for new writers and a senior drama script editor at BBC Radio recommended former schoolteacher Saward, having worked with him on a number of radio plays on Radio 4's Saturday Night Theatre.

His writing career stretched back to the 1960s, with his first radio play The Shelter, submitted to BBC Radio in 1965, followed by a series of thrillers including 1972's The Fall and Fall of David Moore, Circumstantial Evidence in 1974 and Small Monet in 1976. Saward had previously never written for television but he was invited by Bidmead to submit an outline for a story in the Spring of 1980.

His inspiration for what was then titled The Invasion of the Plague Men derived from the academic studies of a former girlfriend. She had been looking at the architecture of the rebuilt London in the post-Great Fire of London period and noted how, within months of the Fire, there was an almost total extinction of the infected flea-carrying black rats which had caused an outbreak of bubonic plague in 1665, killing about 15% of London's population.

Combining this background with a desire to explore his own interest in medieval England, he also saw it as an opportunity to use his character of Richard Mace, transposing the actor-manager of his 1880s set radio plays to the 17th century. 'Victorian actor, detective, drunk and master of disguise' Mace assisted the London police in five plays: Assassin (broadcast in Radio 4's Afternoon Theatre strand in 1974), Pegasus (1975), the unproduced plays The Arch Villain and The Professor, and The Nemesis Machine, transmitted in 1976. (1)

The Crimson Horror
BBC One HD
4 May 2013, 6.30pm

This review contains spoilers

As Mark Gatiss acutely acknowledges in this month's Doctor Who Magazine, the Paternoster Gang of Silurian detective Madame Vastra, her 'companion' Jenny Flint and their Sontaran butler Strax are the new era's equivalent of Jago and Litefoot from classic series favourite The Talons of Weng-Chiang. Even though there was some discussion back in 1977 about giving the two Victorian characters their own spin-off drama we had to wait until 2009 and Big Finish's The Mahogany Murderers before we saw them as lead characters in their own milieu. If The Mahogany Murderers was the pilot for what has now become an enduring Jago and Litefoot audio series, then surely Gatiss's The Crimson Horror will intensify the clamour for a Paternoster Gang spin-off proper? It's certainly the feeling you get when the Doctor only makes his entrance about 15 minutes into the episode and after the first quarter of an hour is completely and satisfyingly owned by Vastra, Jenny and Strax. 

Gatiss returns to his The League of Gentlemen roots - diabolical goings-on up North - and weaves in the archness of his 'Lucifer Box' novels, the gaslight ghastliness of The Unquiet Dead and more than a passing acquaintance with classic horror cinema. It's Yorkshire, 1893 and there's a 'dark and queer business' going on at Sweetville, the factory and lodgings overseen by the domineering and pious matriarch Winifred Gillyflower (Dame Diana Rigg) and, when Mr Thursday (Brendan Patricks) arrives to investigate his brother Edmund's death, the tone of the episode - one positively drowning in 'the deplorable excesses of the penny dreadful' - is immediately established.