Family Entertainment Blog

Doctor Who and exuberant sidekick Donna team up following their successful series opener - which attracted nine million viewers - to battle it out in ancient Rome next week.Newly released pictures show the Doctor and Donna squaring up to a series of outrageous baddies in notorious volcano hotspot Pompeii.
 
This week’s show will include cameos from Peter Capaldi - of satire The Thick of It - and Quadrophenia’s Phil Davis.

The series four opener on Saturday wiped the floor with the competition, attracting nine million viewers, 300,000 more than episode one of series three last year.
BBC One’s programme Casualty recorded 7.1m viewers, while its latest musical talent show I’d Do Anything, plus the National Lottery each secured 6.8m viewers.
ITV’s long running clip show You’ve Been Framed recorded 4.7m while Harry Hill’s TV Burp secured 5.5m and Duel 5.6m.

Exotic: Donna and the Doctor will meet even more weird and wonderful characters in episode two

Rome is burning: The popular programme’s opening episode attracted nine million viewers

Saturday’s episode saw the Doctor reunited with Catherine Tate as the Doctor’s new companion Donna, reprising her role from the 2006 Christmas Special The Runaway Bride.
The latest series secured an audience share of 39.4 per cent.
Billie Piper also made a surprise appearance in the initial episode as Rose Tyler.

Reunited: Catherine Tate reprised her role from the 2006 Christmas Special The Runaway Bride

A BBC spokesperson said: “This is a great start for the new series of Doctor Who. The show kicked off a fantastic night of family entertainment on BBC One which pulled in big audiences across the evening.”
The previous third series of the show secured an average 7.03 million viewers.
The series will also see Billie Piper returns as Rose Tyler and Freema Agyeman will also re-appear as Martha Jones.

Meanwhile, someone who should know a thing or two about being the daughter of a timelord is actress Georgia Moffett.
The daughter of former Doctor Who actor Peter Davison, is to star in the hit BBC1 show.

Bizarre: Georgia Moffett, daughter of former Dr Who timelord Peter Davison (left), will play the part of a woman who claims to the daughter to the current timelord David Tenant
Bizarrely she will play the part of a woman who claims to be the child of the current timelord, played by David Tenant.
Moffett, 23, who is the daughter of Davison and his former wife, squeaky voice US actress Sandra Dickinson, makes an appearance in the sixth episode.
Insiders are saying very little about her part other than she claims to be the daughter of Doctor Who, a claim of which the sci-fi hero is “dubious”.
Moffett has had a colourful life already having seen her parents marriage fall apart when she was eight and then herself falling pregnant at 16.

Daddy Doctor: Georgina as she appears as the Doctor’s alleged daughter
She has since carved out a successful acting career having starred in ITV shows The Bill, Where The Heart Is and Bonkers.
The mother, whose son is called Ty, has previously starred alongside her 56-year-old dad in BBC sitcom Fear, Stress and Anger.
Moffett, whose character is called Jenny, grew up with Doctor Who as a child when her father played the role.
She became pregnant at 16 during her GCSEs after taking antibiotics while on the pill, not realising they can negate its contraceptive effects.
By the time she found out she was having a baby she was no longer with the father.
At the time she had waited three months to tell her parents eventually presenting her mum with a picture of her ultrasound scan as she broke the news.
She did not have the courage to tell her dad, so she told her stepmother.
Bizarrely her best friend at school was the daughter of Colin Baker, the actor that succeeded Davison as the timelord.
She is said to be still close to both her parents, but has admitted that her mother and father do not talk to each other.
Her mother famously starred in The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy and she even starred alongside Davison in a stage production of The Owl and The Pussycat.
Davison, as well as Doctor Who, is famous for his appearances in All Creatures Great And Small, At Home With The Braithwaites.
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SAN ANTONIO - Memphis kept missing. Mario Chalmers wasn’t about to. Chalmers’ 3-pointer with 2.1 seconds left in regulation put the game in overtime, and Kansas pulled away to a 75-68 victory on Monday night for its first national championship since Danny and the Miracles 20 years ago.
Mario and the Miracles? That has a good ring to it, too.Chalmers’ game-saving 3 came after Memphis missed four of five free throws that would have put the game and the title out of reach. It completed a comeback from nine points down with 2:12 left.

“It’ll probably be the biggest shot ever made in Kansas history,” Kansas coach Bill Self said.

The ending made a mockery of Memphis coach John Calipari’s theory that his players, one of the country’s worst with 59 percent free-throw shooting, didn’t have to be good because they would always come through when the stakes were highest.

“It will probably hit me like a ton of bricks tomorrow, that we had it in our grasp,” Calipari said.

All those bricks meant something in a game where every point counted. So did Rose’s two-point shot off glass initially ruled a 3 — and correctly overturned — with 4:15 left.

Nothing about Chalmers’ 3-pointer was in doubt.

“I had a good look at it,” he said. “When it left my hands it felt like it was good, and it just went in.”

Although Chalmers will go down in history, the most memorable overall performance came from Rose, the Memphis freshman, who completely took over the game in the second half, scoring 14 of his team’s 16 points during one stretch to lift the Tigers to a 60-51 lead with 2:12 left.

But Kansas (37-3) used the strategy any smart opponent of Memphis’ would — fouling the heck out of one of the country’s worst free-throw-shooting teams — and when Rose and Douglas-Roberts made only one of five over the last 1:12, it left the door open for KU.

“Ten seconds to go, we’re thinking we’re national champs, all of a sudden a kid makes a shot, and we’re not,” Calipari said.

Hustling the ball down the court with 10.8 seconds left, no timeouts and trailing by three, Sherron Collins handed off to Chalmers at the top of the 3-point line, and Chalmers took the shot. It hit nothing but net and tied the score at 63.

Robert Dozier missed a desperation heave at the buzzer, and Rose went limping to the bench, favoring his right leg. Brandon Rush, Darrell Arthur and Darnell Jackson scored the first six points of overtime to put Kansas ahead 69-63.

Memphis, clearly exhausted, didn’t pull any closer than three the rest of the way. Rose played all 45 minutes in what could very well be his last college game.

“Overtime, they kind of beat us down,” Calipari said. “I didn’t sub a whole lot, because I was trying to win the game at the end.”

Arthur was dominant inside, finishing with 20 points and 10 rebounds, lots on dunks and easy lay-ups off lob passes. Chalmers finished with 18 points. Rush had 12 and Collins had 11 points, six assists and did a wonderful job shutting Rose for the first 28 minutes.

Rose wound up with 18 points in a game that showed how ready he is for the NBA. He was 3-for-4 from the line, however, and that one miss with 10.8 seconds left is what almost certainly would have sealed the game and given the Tigers (38-2) their first title.

“It wasn’t really the free throws,” Rose said. “If we’d done things before the free throws, we would’ve been in good shape.”

Instead, the title goes back to Lawrence for the third time in the fabled program’s history.

The inventor of the game, James Naismith, was the first Jayhawks coach. It’s the school that made household names of Wilt Chamberlain, Manning — and yes, even North Carolina’s Roy Williams, the coach who famously left the Jayhawks, lost to them in the semifinals, but was, indeed, in the Kansas cheering section Monday wearing a Jayhawks sticker on his shirt.

After the game, Self didn’t exactly end speculation that he might also bail for his alma mater, Oklahoma State.

“I’m not going to say that couldn’t potentially happen because I guess it potentially can,” Self said.

This game was not about coaches or sidestories, though. It was about the game, and what a dandy it was — a well-needed reprieve from a more-or-less blah tournament in which 42 of 63 games were decided by double digits.

This was the first overtime in the title game since 1997, when Arizona beat Kentucky 84-79.

“Being up seven, being down nine, being up two, down five, going to overtime,” Kansas center Cole Aldrich said. “We fought it out, and it’s surreal. It’s nuts.”

Rose went crazy during Memphis’ second half run. A 3-pointer here, a scooping layup for a three-point play next. Then, the capper, an off-balance, 18-foot shot off glass with the shot-clock buzzer sounding. Officials at first credited Rose with a 3, but went to the replay monitor and saw he was clearly inside the line.

Even with the point deducted, Memphis has a 56-49 lead and all the momentum. Most teams would have been demoralized.

Clearly, Kansas is not most teams.

In fact, the Jayhawks are a team that has come together in tragedy over the last several months. The deaths of friends and family of Jackson, Sasha Kaun and Rodrick Stewart all cast a bit of a pall over this team, making Jackson wonder at times if staying at Kansas was even worth it.

Just when the Jayhawks looked to be moving past their bad times, Stewart fractured his kneecap, a freak accident during Kansas’ practice Friday at the Alamodome.

But it was another injury that might have been most responsible for blending this championship formula. Rush tore up his knee during a pickup game last May, and his NBA plans were put on hiatus.

He worked his way back into shape this season and is playing his best right now. He didn’t have the most impressive stat line of the night, but it hasn’t all been about stats for him in this, his junior season. His defense was stellar, as usual, and surely his experience and resolve played into Kansas’ refusal to go away.

He set the table.

Chalmers got the glory.

“That has to be one of the biggest shots in basketball history,” Stewart said.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Teenagers with a bedroom television tend to have poorer diet and exercise habits and lower grades in school than those without one, U.S. researchers said on Monday.While many studies have examined TV viewing habits of young people, researchers at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health said little had been known about the consequences in particular for older adolescents of having a bedroom TV.

They questioned 781 adolescents, ages 15 to 18, in the Minneapolis area in 2003 and 2004. Of them, 62 percent reported having a television in their bedroom.

Not surprisingly, those with a bedroom TV were more apt to watch it a lot, clocking four to five more hours in front of a television per week, the researchers said. Twice as many of the teens with a bedroom TV were classified as heavy TV watchers — at least five hours a day — compared to those without one.

Girls with a bedroom television reported getting less vigorous exercise — 1.8 hours per week compared to 2.5 hours for girls without a TV. They also ate fewer vegetables, drank more sweetened beverages and ate meals with their family less often, the researchers said.

Boys with a bedroom TV reported having a lower grade point average than boys without one, as well as eating less fruit and having fewer family meals, the researchers said.

“It really clearly points out that there’s some merit to not allowing your child to have a TV in the bedroom,” said Daheia Barr-Anderson, one of the researchers.

“When you upgrade your TV in the living room and you have this smaller TV that’s out of date but still usable, parents should really resist putting it in one of your children’s bedrooms — and resist the pressure from the child to have a TV in their bedroom,” she said in a telephone interview.

SURPRISE ON OBESITY

The American Academy of Pediatrics urges parents to remove TV sets from children’s bedrooms, the researchers noted. The findings were published in the academy’s journal Pediatrics.

Boys were more likely to have a television in their bedroom than girls — 68 percent versus 58 percent.

Teens from the highest income families were far less likely than those from all other income levels to have a bedroom TV, the survey found.

Among black teens, 82 percent reported having a bedroom TV, compared to 66 percent of Hispanics, 60 percent of whites and 39 percent of Asian Americans.

The researchers tracked body mass index — a measure based on height and weight — and found that having a bedroom TV had no influence on whether teens were obese.

Barr-Anderson said that finding was a surprise, considering that previous studies looking at younger children — one on elementary school kids and one on low-income preschoolers — found that having a bedroom TV was an even stronger predictor of obesity than the time spent watching TV.

Both boys and girls with a bedroom TV reported spending less time reading and doing homework, although the researchers said the differences were not statistically significant.

SEATTLE - A tangled, torn parachute found buried last month last month is not the one used by plane hijacker D.B. Cooper when he bailed out of a plane over the Pacific Northwest, the FBI said Tuesday. Investigators reached that conclusion after speaking with parachute experts, including Earl Cossey, who packed the chutes provided to Cooper that rainy November night in 1971.

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“From the best we could learn from the people we spoke to, it just didn’t look like it was the right kind of parachute in any way,” said FBI spokeswoman Robbie Burroughs.

Further digging at the site in southwestern Washington turned up no indication that it could have been Cooper’s, she added.

A man calling himself Dan Cooper — later mistakenly identified as D.B. Cooper — hijacked a Northwest Orient passenger jet from Portland, Ore., to Seattle on Nov. 24, 1971.

At Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, he released the passengers in exchange for $200,000 and four parachutes and asked to be flown to Mexico. He jumped out the back of the plane somewhere near the Oregon line.

Some of the cash has been found, but his fate is unknown, and investigators doubt he survived.

Children playing near a recently graded road found the parachute, and they urged their father to call the FBI because they had seen recent news stories about Cooper’s case. The parachute was the right color, and the location was in the middle of what could have been Cooper’s landing zone.

That got the attention of FBI agent Larry Carr, who drove to the site to see the find for himself.

But Cossey told Carr that Cooper’s parachute was made of nylon. The one the children found was made of silk and did not feature a harness container. Cossey sold parachutes at a skydiving operation in Issaquah in the 1970s.

Cossey has been through the drill before; this is the third time the FBI has asked him to examine parachutes to see whether they might have been Cooper’s.

One chute found long ago — he couldn’t remember when — was just a “pilot chute,” used to pull the main chute out of the pack. The other time, in 1988, it was a parachute found by a Columbia River diver seeking clues to Cooper’s fate.

“They keep bringing me garbage,” Cossey said. “Every time they find squat, they bring it out and open their trunk and say, ‘Is that it?’ and I say, ‘Nope, go away.’ Then a few years later they come back.”

Cossey, though sounding cantakerous, appeared to relish the spotlight Tuesday. He answered his cell phone with “D.B. Cooper” and said he got a kick out of telling some reporters that the parachute was, in fact, the hijacker’s.

One reporter called him back angrily, saying he could be fired for writing a false story, but another said the newsroom enjoyed the April Fool’s joke.

“I’m getting mixed reviews,” Cossey said. “But I’m having fun with it; what the heck.”

NEW YORK - Like father, like son? The 4-year-old son of “Crocodile Hunter” Steve Irwin wasn’t at all alarmed when he was recently bitten by a baby boa constrictor, according to his mother.
“He picked one of them up and it bit him on the finger, and he was so proud to have copped his first hit,” Irwin’s widow, Terri, said Monday at an appearance at FAO Schwarz with her two children to promote a new line of toys.
“He said, ‘I hope it wasn’t venomous,’ so I assured Robert I wouldn’t actually let him play with venomous snakes,” she added.Terri Irwin said the couple’s 9-year-old daughter, Bindi, was first bitten by a snake when she was 18 months old.The girl, who is featured in the Discovery Kids Channel show “Bindi the Jungle Girl,” posed for cameras with a new action figure in her likeness.
 
“It’s every little girl’s dream to have an exact look-alike doll. It’s amazing,” said Bindi, who was signing action figure toys of her late father.

Steve Irwin, known through his nature TV series as a wrangler of crocodiles and snakes, died in 2006 from a stingray’s barbed tail during an underwater documentary shoot. He was 44.

Irwin provoked an international outcry in 2004 after being filmed holding his then 1-month-old son while feeding a snapping crocodile