Doctor Who on Call at Stonehenge

Stonehenge – no stranger to mystery – was shrouded in a cloak of foggy secrecy on Tuesday night, as the BBC filmed scenes for a forthcoming episode of Doctor Who inside a closed set at the iconic Wiltshire monument. Rumour has it that the first few instalments of the new season of the long-running cult timr-travelling sci-fi drama – expected to air sometime in the next few months – will be set “sometime in the past.”

Dr Who anoraks observing from the edges of the set, hoping to catch a rare glimpse of filming, spotted the Time Lord himself – played by Matt Smith, the 11th Doctor to date – between the standing stones and clouds of dry ice, as well as his new sidekick Amy Pond (played by Karen Gillan) and a returning character, archaeologist River Song (played by Alex Kingston). 

Stonehenge has cropped-up a number of times already in the Doctor Who cosmology, although it’s never yet appeared in a TV episode. In 1965, during the last instalment of the show’s second season, allusions were made to the monument having been constructed by a renegade Time Lord called The Monk circa 1500 BC, using “anti-gravity lifts” (an original extreme Stonehenge building theory if ever we’ve heard one).

In a Doctor Who novel in the 70s, a bad guy called the Ragman was defeated there; in another book a few years later the Doctor was taken prisoner at the site by The Monk. Most recently, in a 2005 webcast comic book, a fleet of extraterrestrial villains were seen to land near Stonehenge.

Keep a look out for the Stonehenge’s Doctor Who-debut when the famously spooky show hits BBC1 in the spring, if you can drag yourself out from behind the sofa.

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