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Doctor Who
1963 · TV series · 25 min episodes · 26 seasons
Created by Sydney Newman, C. E. Webber, Donald Wilson
DramaActionAdventureScience FictionFantasy
The adventures of The Doctor, a time-traveling humanoid alien known as a Time Lord. He explores the universe in his TARDIS, a sentient time-traveling spaceship. Its exterior appears as a blue British police box, which was a common sight in Britain in 1963 when the series first aired. Along with a succession of companions, The Doctor faces a variety of foes while working to save civilizations, help ordinary people, and right many wrongs.
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99 comments on Hacker News
I keep getting rate limited or shadow banned so I just get a new account every few months. Works for me.
I guess this comment triggered the rate limit:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48162842
> Some wealthy techbro from /r/datahoarders is going to purchase this to store all episodes of Doctor Who in uncompressed 10-bit 4:2:2 FFV1 Matroska remuxes with redundant PAR2 recovery archives.
> except to the extent that dumb mistakes might result in danger
That "except" goes all the way up to starting WW3. Or a leak from a viral research lab, and by "leak" I mean "mail order" and by "research lab" I mean "the companies who already ship custom DNA and RNA retroviruses": https://duckduckgo.com/?q=companies+who+already+ship+custom+DNA+and+RNA+retroviruses&t=iphone&ia=web
If you can prove that simply not training on horror stories would work, it would make a lot of people very happy.
Unfortunately, I don't think it does a single thing to solve, for example, Elon Musk just plain asking some future version of Grok to take over the world for him.
Nor would merely failing to include them in traing data stop certain entire fictional scenarios such as that Doctor Who episode where the android repair bots weren't told that the crew were off-limits as spare parts, or the other Doctor Who episode where the utilitarian robots started killing everyone who was upset because they calculated net positive utility from upset people ceasing to exist. Well, except for the bit where the Doctor saves the day, because they are not real.
I am reminded of The Doctor Who episode where the original Mona Lisa was destroyed and only one of many copies clearly marked "THIS IS A FAKE" underneath the pigments survived.
https://youtu.be/9iCBN5V2x18?si=TUF5kFbQGeQ927io&t=5798
But also, crypto and anything crypto-adjacent is planet-killing garbage in my book.
The literal reason for including companions from day one was so that the husbands had something to watch. The BBC have never hidden the fact that the companions were always there for eye candy.
When you look at the pre-UNIT episodes (before Dr Who went colour), the actors often left after only one season because they were fed up with their role just being there for the doctor to rescue. It’s something they’ve commented on in interviews since.
And you can see that when you watch them.
There’s also the the running joke of bringing in a female character who was supposed to be a computer programmer yet she never seemed to use a computer.
And there was another companion who used to talk pseudo-science with the doctor but they slowly dumbed her down as the show went on.
Unfortunately back then, female roles weren’t written to be strong and independent like they are now. Not just in Doctor Who, but in TV in general. And while things did improve in the 80s, you’re still greatly overstating things.
To talk more about that last point, let’s look at Ace. She really wasn’t written any differently to modern companions.
That all said, one thing I absolutely hate about the modern era, or Russel T Davis, specifically, is all the Doctor and Companion romantic plots. There was absolutely no need for any of that.
Somebody spent a small fortune trying this a while ago with disliked results https://nypost.com/2025/04/13/entertainment/ailing-doctor-who-superfan-spends-fortune-to-recreate-97-lost-episodes-to-see-complete-series-before-he-dies/
There are several "holy grails" in British TV history.
Lost Doctor Who episodes are one of them. Dad's Army also has lost black and white episodes (the colour ones have been repeated ad nauseam all my lifetime).
I can think of a few others. Scotch on the Rocks was a political hit piece written by Douglas Hurd showing an armed Scottish uprising along the lines of Northern Ireland. It was supposed to frighten people away from Scottish nationalism, but ended up causing copycat incidents. It vanished shortly after being broadcast probably because of its unintended effects.
The ultimate would be some of the pre-WW2 television broadcasts. Most of these were broadcast in the London area and practically nowhere else. Almost no one had recording equipment back then.
You're correct but as Uvix has said, BBC Enterprises made film copies for overseas sales before the original tapes were erased.
The earliest episode to survive on its original videotape is Ambassadors of Death episode 1 from 1970. None of the original 60s tapes still survive, though I believe there is at least one tape that we know used to have Doctor Who on it but which now has another programme.
The earliest episode to survive in its original medium is possibly The Dalek Invasion of Earth episode 5 (The Waking Ally). That's because, while this was shot on electronic studio cameras as usual, there were no videotape machines available to record.
Instead the output of those cameras was telerecorded straight to 35mm film. AIUI the negative of that telerecording still exists.
I view Doctor Who as part of a great tradition of sci-fi that pushes boundaries. Tennant's era was a primetime TV show that featured gay characters (Captain Jack in particular) without treating it like it was a big deal. When at the time it really wasn't that common (particularly in kid-friendly TV).
These attempts overshoot at times, like when Star Trek TNG put male crew members in "skants"[1] but they can always course correct. If you let minor things like that ruin your viewing of the show then that's on you, not them.
[1] https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Starfleet_uniform_(2350s-2370s)#Skant
The BBC has also been posting classic Doctor Who episodes for free.
https://www.youtube.com/@ClassicDoctorWho
Another great example of this is British SF, especially 20th century Doctor Who and Blake's 7, vs American SF such as Star Wars/Trek. The British version can be much bleaker. And of course Red Dwarf, which doesn't translate at all into American. (There was a single pilot episode)
Edit: someone downthread mentioned Limmy's Show and Absolutely, to which I would add Burnistoun. Scottish humor is even more grimly fatalist than English.
I think it could just be that America is a much bigger market with much higher production values in TV and Film, so British people get their fill of competent, triumphant heroes from American media.
America has plenty of beloved sad sacks too. Charlie Brown, Donald Duck, Goofy, George Costanza, Eeyore (originally British but very popular in America and popularized by Disney) to name a few.
British media has carved out a bit of a niche for itself, but British people are also consuming other English language media.
And you also have plenty of British media where the hero is competent, triumphant, masterful, and autonomous with (frequent if not ubiquitous) standard happy endings. Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Sherlock Holmes, Doctor Who.
The old episodes are very quaint. They are quite clearly produced on shoestring budgets, some of the plots are quite weak and i found it hilarious how bad the actors were at faking violence. But none of that mattered, because the team were clearly passionate and enjoyed what they were doing and did a good job so the end product is charming. Production standards have obviously moved on massively since the 1980's and we are better off. The modern episodes are much more highly polished and coherent but not necessarily more popular. Like someone else pointed out the massive influx of disney money did nothing and only exacerbated the train wreck which was the recent doctor who seasons.
Another film that had a huge impact was monty python and the holy grail which was produced with a budget of 75p and ends abruptly because the money ran out. But they just turned that into a running joke throughout the whole movie.
I remember seeing Doctor Who for the first time circa 2011 when it was on Amazon Prime. First few seasons were very much early 2000s TV, and then suddenly it got all big budget Netflix style in season five.
The older look doesn't bother me, though. The same thing happened with The Expanse.
Related? There are also missing Beatles performances that were also recorded over by the BBC — one of which (do I have this right?) made an appearance in an early Doctor Who episode? I think that Doctor Who episode is still in tact.
My biggest annoyance is that it wasn't until Matt Smith that they started recording the new Doctor Who episodes correctly with film, everything including David Tenant was all camcorder.
It started, funny enough, out of seeing the very first Doctor who episode from the 1960s, where the doctor and crew land on prehistoric Earth and primitive man is having trouble making fire, and the doctor has to figure a way on how to encourage humans to create fire on their own.
My own deal evolved from there into I should always probably have a lighter in case I need to light something of flame, not in a pyromaniac way, but in the way of, "does anybody have a lighter?" Type of way. Somebody leaving to light a candle, start a campfire, need to light a smoke, whatever.
Or even to melt the ends of a nylon rope to hedge against unraveling.
This has oddly come in handy more often than one would think.
Piracy also offers audio description, allowing blind people to enjoy described media, for shows movies that don't have them on streaming services, like Doctor Who. An audio description site offers audio description for the original and revival series. Streaming offers none of that. They also do third-party audio description cause studios can't be bothered.
It also offers video games that can be emulated, and with OCR nd AI image descriptions, can be played by blind people. It also offers EBooks in many different formats which can b loaded onto accessible apps or Braille displays and read, without needing apps which may or may not be accessible, but which will always need connection to a phone or computer. And you can read all this offline.
So when I find companies, like Big Finish and Graphic Audio, which offer their stuff in downloadable, DRM-free formats, I pay them good for their stuff, because they respect me.
> UK garage and rave culture took off in the UK with influences from reggae, soul and R&B. Now with the help of BBC Radio 1
I think there's an important middle step here, which is stuff that wasn't "banned" but was nevertheless not on the playlist, and the pirate radio stations whose personnel gradually went mainstream. Both from the Radio Caroline era (Jonnie Walker, rock) and Kiss FM (Trevor Nelson, UK garage). Let's not forget the government's attempts to ban the rave scene.
In comics you had 2000AD and Judge Dredd, inspired by the French Metal Hurlant.
> If you really want to argue for British dystopian science fiction movies
Not movies, but TV: Doctor Who (often dystopian), Blake's 7, the Prisoner, and the little-seen but extremely prescient Doomwatch. And of course the darkest nuclear apocalypse movie, Threads. Filmed in the parts of Thatcher-era Sheffield which looked like they had already been nuked.
UK always simply had less money and a narrower set of TV/radio gatekeepers. The diversity and inventiveness is there nonetheless. So, yes, a lot of things have to get American money and licenses in order to be made.
I think of some older movie series like Dirty Harry or Death Wish which were developed over a long time but didn't focus on nostalgia but rather tried to make a really different movie each time. Some later Death Wish movies are silly (Charles Bronson's ability to get weapons in the mail is like Wile E. Coyote) but they're never the same. At least the last three Star Wars movie had a cast that seemed to come right out of Doctor Who.
I’m pretty sure the others are suggesting that you don’t generate the word list through coding but when you encounter words you don’t know. What helps us remember is context (“I saw that in the Doctor Who episode where the big bad is-“) where a word list doesn’t give that context.
Yes, you can crank through and memorize things without context. It is more painful and less effective overall.
Hardly killed. I've been watching Doctor Who since the 1970s and there's been a lot of variation in quality over that time. I stopped watching it sometime around the Colin Baker era as I lost interest in it, but started watching it again with the Christopher Eccleston reboot. Then, I started getting disillusioned with the Peter Capaldi episodes - possibly the best actor for playing the Doctor, but given awful scripts (except "Heaven Sent" which is possibly the best ever episode). I struggled through Jodie Whittaker's seasons as I didn't like her portrayal nor the stories, but now I have to say that I really enjoy Ncuti Gatwa's Doctor even though there's been good and bad episodes of his.
I actively dislike Disney (except maybe TRON and the Black Hole), but I don't think they've killed Doctor Who.
> I also can’t imagine the film masters were trashed, or that the show was composited to video tape.
Happens more than you'd think (in the past, at least - it's obviously much easier now with digital storage.) Couple of examples I remember off the top of my head:
re: Adrian Maben making a Director's Cut DVD of "Live In Pompeii"[0]
"While searching in the French and English film laboratories for the unused negative we learnt of a disaster. On the initiative of the French Production Company, MHF Productions, the 548 cans of 35mm negative and prints of the rushes had been stored at the Archives du Film du Bois d’Arcy outside Paris. One of the employees, a certain Monsieur Schmidt, "le Conservateur," unfortunately decided that he wanted to make extra storage space on his shelves for more recent films and that the Floyd footage was without interest or value. The 548 cans of negative and the prints of the Pink Floyd unused rushes and outtakes were incinerated."
re: Dr Who missing episodes[1]
"Further erasing of Doctor Who master videotapes by the Engineering Department continued into the 1970s. Eventually, every master videotape of the programme's first 253 episodes (1963–69) was destroyed or wiped. The final 1960s master tapes to be erased were those for the 1968 serial Fury from the Deep, in August 1974."
[0] https://www.brain-damage.co.uk/other-related-interviews/adrian-maben-live-at-pompeii-2003-with-brain-d.html
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_missing_episodes
That Doctor Who episode was my introduction to the serie. <3
Mad Max, obviously, Night of the Comet, The Quiet Earth, A boy and his dog. I think the early 80s was a good time for the genre.
Planet of the Apes, Soylent Green, and that other Charleton Heston movie with zombies that I can’t remember (not a huge fan of zombies)
The Road is a fairly recent movie that fits.
British TV had Space 1999, lots of early Doctor Who and an attempt at the Tripods series by John Christopher. By far my favorite was “Survivors” written by Terry Nation - who needs zombies when you’ve got actual problems to deal with!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p00vh9yb/doctor-who-19631996-season-17-city-of-death-part-1
Coincidentally, Doctor Who has an unusual system where individual writers own the copyright to some of the characters they introduce, which means there's a lot of not-very-good spinoff novels (and an Australian TV show) featuring only that authors' characters.
I watched 9 in 3-d on my Meta Quest 3.
The villain in the last three movies is hard for me to take seriously because he seems to have stepped out of an episode of Doctor Who.
I appreciate the last three movies though for outdoing themselves in scale as did early space operas such as Skylark of Space.
I see Star Wars as a project that suffered because it went on for way too long; there were major changes in the external culture inside of and between the last two trilogies that make them hard to watch together.
This makes me wonder how the stats compare for other forms of media, like TV shows, books, video games, comics, etc. Feels like there's probably more of a mix of attitudes and settings in these mediums, at least from the few I've seen.
Like in television, you've got Black Mirror which usually has near contemporary stories set in horrifically messed up versions of our world, but also Doctor Who and Star Trek, which are far more optimistic and deal with a far wider mix of settings and time periods. Like Utopia, a dystopian story set in the year 100 trillion where the simple passage of time has destroyed all but a handful of worlds via entropy, and the last remaining humans are trying to survive a dying universe.
And there are arguably more stories in those mediums that do deal with outside threats more than internal ones, often due to the 'monster of the week' structure some of these shows and stories run on. If you want sci-fi stories with external threats, virtually every sci-fi game you can think of has you killing hostile aliens and mutants and monsters by the thousand. Plenty that don't have any ties to Earth or current events too, and simply take place in a completely independent setting with entirely original problems.
There is a Doctor Who episode where they went to Pompeii.
I like the origin of “Silurian”, especially the caveat in the second sentence.
> We name the hypothesis after a 1970 episode of the British science fiction TV series Doctor Who where a long-buried race of intelligent reptiles ‘Silurians’ are awakened by an experimental nuclear reactor.
> We are not however suggesting that intelligent reptiles actually existed in the Silurian age, nor that experimental nuclear physics is liable to wake them from hibernation.
License fee evasion is one of the top traffic sources in the British court system, the idea that it's done "on the honour system" is mendacious. There are people in prison right now for not paying it. The BBC is at its most foundational level a state-backed company built on state power.
Doctor Who is a children's show and dates from the 50s. Red Dwarf is a comedy and hasn't been made for decades. As I said: the BBC thinks sci-fi is for children or to laugh at, and barely even that.
> it may be the most popular in your circle, or your mind, but this is demonstrably, obviously untrue
It's a few years ago now but e.g.
https://tbivision.com/2018/04/25/netflix-ordered-more-sci-fi-after-genre-hits-says-ampere/
"following the success of flagship series like Stranger Things, sci-fi and fantasy was the most popular genre on Netflix"
If you look at the list of the top shows on Netflix then sci-fi, fantasy and horror are consistently amongst the most popular shows:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-watched_Netflix_original_programming
The BBC just doesn't do these, at all.
> what ideology is against sci-fi?
The BBC was fundamentally founded on a deeply classist Reithian ideology and it has never fully discarded this culture. It thinks its primary role is to improve the public and TV/radio production is just a means to that end. Given a choice of making an expensive period drama (what it calls "culture"), an expensive lecture on climate change or an expensive sci-fi/fantasy show they will never pick the latter, it just culturally displeases their executives at a very fundamental level to do so. Netflix also has problems with ideology [1] but it doesn't hold them back to the extent of neglecting whole genres of TV/movie output (with the possible exception of news, but you could argue that combining entertainment and news isn't natural and only an artifact of bandwidth constraints in earlier eras). Netflix's primary mission is just to give people what they want to watch.
[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/netflix-blackwashing-parodies
>quasi-communist
I must have been asleep the day paying for things became communist. the BBC has the same payment model as netflix, except you pay yearly instead of monthly, and it’s done on an honour system instead of at the door. total communism, man
>no sci-fi
Doctor Who? Life on Mars? Red Dwarf? Doctor Who is arguably the biggest or second biggest sci-fi show of all time. it’s certainly the biggest to remain under one name
>the most popular kind of tv show
it may be the most popular in your circle, or your mind, but this is demonstrably, obviously untrue
>ideological reasons
what ideology is against sci-fi? are you trying to claim the BBC are luddites? or that sci-fi is inherently… right-wing? or what?
>bias in news reporting
why not just cut to the chase?what you really mean is “I’m compromised intellectually by my political position”
Its like the setup for one of those episodes of Doctor Who that involves lots of running down long corridors
There's definitely a mindset thing going on here.
It reminds me of how old television shows (like Doctor Who) are often missing good chunks of the early runs because they recorded over the tapes. Television was seen as ephemeral and if they never intended to broadcast it again then there was no need to store thousands of feet of tapes for episodes that (they believed) would never be wanted again.
I can imagine something similar happening with video games—they put in the work, shipped the product, and didn't think what they had done was important enough to preserve for posterity, because who actually thinks that about their own work?
> One can't help but wonder how much fantastic material is out there, seen by only a small audience, only to be lost and never seen again.
A lot of BBC content like that is just gone because they used to reuse tapes to save on costs. I don't know if they were still doing it into the 2000s but entire chunks of iconic TV shows like a third of the first six Doctor Who seasons are just straight up gone [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_missing_episodes
Not even just films. The BBC was notorious for taping over old programmes to save money on tape and thus there's early episodes of Doctor Who that are lost along with some classics such as episodes of Hancock's Half Hour.
I'd suggest that tapes should be digitised and that way they're far easier for the public to watch and categorise them so that other hidden gems can be found again.
How do you know if they're worth preserving or not if you can't see them?
And "worth preserving" is a term that can be seen from a myriad of perspectives. Whether it's good or not is only one factor.
A film or television episode might be worth preserving because:
* it's an early work or appearance by someone who would go on to be significant
* it's a product of its era displaying the context, fashions, language, politics, events and attitudes of the time
* it's actually really bad, but demonstrates what bad film-making looked like in that time
* it's a cherished childhood memory of someone who mentions that in their autobiography, and so scholars may wish to have access.
Probably loads of other reasons why something is worth preserving beyond a basic question of "is it any good?".
The BBC destroyed and disposed of a large number of episodes of Doctor Who from the 1960s, and a lot of time and effort has been put into recovering and restoring copies of these because they are a part of the ongoing narrative of the evolution of British television.
(GPT4)
In this script from a Doctor Who episode, Clara and the Doctor are having a conversation about the internet. Doctor Who is a British science fiction television series that follows the adventures of the Doctor, a Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey, who travels through time and space in the TARDIS, a time-traveling spaceship.
Clara, the Doctor's companion, is trying to access the internet but is unable to find it. She asks the Doctor about its whereabouts, and the Doctor seems to be confused by the question, as the internet is not something that can be physically found.
The Doctor then mentions the time as "twelve oh seven," while Clara's clock shows "half past three." This discrepancy in time indicates that they are likely in different time zones, as the Doctor implies. In the context of Doctor Who, this could also mean they are in different points in time, since the Doctor can travel through time.
Clara is concerned about whether the time difference will affect her phone bill, to which the Doctor replies that he dreads to think about the potential cost. This adds a bit of humor to the scene, as the Doctor often has a nonchalant attitude towards everyday human concerns.
Overall, this script showcases the humorous and whimsical nature of Doctor Who, with the characters engaging in a lighthearted conversation that intertwines elements of science fiction and everyday life.
>Any of these would hold a lot more water if anyone who had this opinion actually did any work to to solve whatever problem they were having, while respecting the creators interest
I take a different tack here, that sometimes would cause me to disregard the creators' interests.
Morally, piracy is preservation. The vast majority of computer software would not be properly preserved if it wasn't for the contemporary pirates. Companies like Nintendo and Apple are not the greatest stewards of software on their platforms, and there are entire classes of works (prototype/development versions of software) that wouldn't be well-preserved in any case.
Plus, respecting the creators' interests in all cases would also allow creators to demand that a work be lost to time, and quite honestly I don't philosophically or morally think that creators should even have the right to do that in the first place, once they have released a work to the public.
Anything less than unabashed piracy risks letting works die. By "die", I don't mean "at the bottom of the totem pole in terms of popularity", I mean "no longer exist in the world at all". Look at the various episodes of classic Doctor Who that have been recovered thanks to fan recordings or private collectors of film.
"2010: The Year We Make Contact" is a much more accessible movie that holds up pretty well. It also feels like a payoff after investing so much time being confused/bored by 2001.
I was 11 when "Logan's Run" came out. Yes it's kinda loaded with 70's sex tropes for the first act, but it's also equal parts goofy and a really good film.
The original "The Day The Earth Stood Still" holds up.
"A Boy and His Dog" is a bit crude here and there, but might resonate with a 12yo.
"Quatermass and the Pit" (aka "Five Million Years to Earth") is both intense and fairly tame.
A lot of old TV series hold up - Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, UFO, Space 1999, Star Trek TOS, etc all have some excellent episodes.
I absolutely love "Dark City" and "12 Monkeys" but I'm not sure they'd have held my interest at 12.
Doctor Who, both old and new are excellent. Though I'm partial to the Tom Baker era.
The Stargate franchise is pretty good.
"Moon" (2009) is a bit cerebral but a good SF story.
Yup. Kind of amazing what you can do with decent stories. Blake's 7 and 70s Doctor Who were notorious for cheezy effects, sets, props and costumes. But the stories really were pretty decent. Blake's 7 eventually annoyed me by how slow it progressed, but if you relax and accept that it's slower than your typical trek episode, it's perfectly fine.
The same era saw Survivors, The Tripods and Children of the Stones. Cheezy effects but very decent stories and still worth watching.
Every time I want to watch a specific movie I have to search all the streaming services I have access to and often its not there.
So these days I just buy the DVD from ebay from a few bucks, it arrives in a couple of days. Feels no different to the 1980's when I went to the video shop and brought home a VHS.
I've gone back to physical media. Streaming has shot itself in the foot.
I've cancelled most of my streaming services cause in Australia the free to air streaming services are really great anyway.
I do pay for Britbox for the classic Doctor Who, Blakes Seven and other dorky delights.
Reminds me of the Dr. Who episodes recovered via Arecibo.
https://dailypop.wordpress.com/2011/11/01/lost-doctor-who-episodes-found-in-deep-space/
Can you name some of the obscure 70s sci-fi? I would like to watch them. My downloads are TV series for Logan’s Run, Planet of the Apes, Battlestar Galactica, etc, but it’s limited and probably not too obscure and also… American besides the 70s Doctor Who saved Survivors (was that 80s?)
In a sense, I agree with you. But in another sense, I think it’s important to remember that copyright is a restriction on people’s behavior that does not naturally exist, but has been created by law.
It’s easier to see the moral case for this if we think about cases other than the simple “pirating” of a show. For example, preservation. Doctor Who is a popular show that predates the practice of saving the original tapes. There are several episodes that have been lost forever because the BBC did not routinely record (or routinely recorded over) their own broadcasts. Many other episodes were thought to be lost, but thanks to enterprising individuals who made unauthorized copies, have since been preserved. Is the world worse off or better off with those people?
Or take Star Wars. George Lucas famously hated that anyone could prefer the pre‐Special Editions of the original trilogy, and only grudgingly allowed it to be released once afterward, in a highly compressed anamorphic format on one set of DVDs. No other version has been released since. People who like the original special effects, dialogue, and editing have since done 4k scans of original theater prints from the 70s and 80s. People don’t deserve to be able to watch copies of those—legally speaking, the copyright holder Lucas (and now Disney) is the arbiter of that. But would a world without the option be better than our world today?
And remember, laws are capricious. The movie industry was terrified of home video. They thought it would materially damage them by removing the desire to watch movies in theater, where they made their money. (Remember MPAA president Jack Valenti testifying before Congress? “I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.”) The VCR came within one vote of being outlawed as a piracy tool by the Supreme Court. A 5–4 decision. Because it survived, though, the people received a huge benefit from the new capabilities (like time shifting and media shifting) provided by this technology. And the movie industry benefited too, earning billions of dollars by embracing this new market… after they had tried to murder it in its crib.
How would today’s world look if one justice had voted the other way?
In the 1970s it seemed common for tv shows to be shot on video in the studio but on film outside, perhaps because video cameras were too large or sensitive for outdoor use. The audience simply became accustomed to the large difference in appearance between indoors and outdoors in tv shows. IIRC, Doctor Who and Benny Hill went through this change during episodes frequently. It also reminds me of the first time I went over to a friend's house who had a large tube standard def tv after I had switched to HD. The scanlines that had always been invisible to my brain were suddenly very obvious. Funny how we adjust.
>We were so desperate for sci-fi stuff that we watched Doctor Who, for God's sake!
Doctor Who was great, opinion disregarded.
I can't tell if the Bezos Rings show is bad or not yet, it certainly has some very corny scenes but it does some things well (for example the casting is very good imo, all the actors are distinctive/weird looking instead just being blandly handsome and forgettable like 99% of shows). I've definitely seen worse.
The Peter Jackson movies were also pretty corny in parts and had no surprises except for the unconscionable omissions, but I quite enjoyed them anyway. Maybe this was mostly affection for the source material, idk. I don't expect the Bezos Rings show will be as successful, but it might be. We will see.
> Here's the thing. Art is individual to its creator. Only Van Gogh can paint a Van Gogh. Only Shakespeare can write Shakespeare. Only Tolkien can write Tolkien.
> Rings of Power could never, ever be Tolkien. It could be, at best, competently made "I Can't Believe It's Not Tolkien." Yet, Partially-Hydrogenated Tolkien Substitute still could have been a good show.
Okay. Sure. But they can launch movements where people try to expand on what they've already created. In this case, the Rings of Power show is beautiful, jaw droppingly beautiful in scale and execution, showing a world larger than has ever been depicted on TV before.
https://winteriscoming.net/files/image-exchange/2022/08/ie_91003.jpeg
https://winteriscoming.net/files/image-exchange/2022/08/ie_91007.jpeg
A lot of attention to detail has been paid in the little things and I think it's amazing.
But that's besides the point. The point is that these are shows and properties meant for the young, people in their teens or those who are growing up. The Hobbit was meant for children. The Lord of the Rings for adolescents. These are stories meant to fire up a young person's imagination and get them to dream bigger than before.
By reducing these properties to an audience of adult fans, I feel, does them a disservice. As yes, absolutely media can be made to be enjoyable to all ages, but trying to please these fans is often an exercise in self immolation as whatever you create will never be as rosy as the memories from their childhood. But they are a powerful market. They are the ones buying the merch usually, instead of parents buying it for little kids. And so they have an outsized say on what happens within the product.
It's baffling to me to see older generations maintaining a stranglehold over the stories that they enjoyed when they were younger.
I think we should give these series and places room to grow and become into something more for each successive generation. And enjoy the process of that growth.
Because almost every single person who is disappointed by this series is a diehard, middle aged, Tolkein fan (often male). Who grew up with Tolkein in the 80s, a time when its very reading was an act of mild rebellion. From the article,
> Wayyyy back in the 70s and 80s, science fiction/fantasy/superhero content hadn't completely taken over the culture yet. New nerd content was rare and treasured.
> The Superman movie (1978) was mind-blowing. (I’m old enough to remember when Superman was a good guy.) A new Star Trek series was an impossible dream. Battlestar Galactica was cherished. We were so desperate for sci-fi stuff that we watched Doctor Who, for God's sake!
This is not true anymore. And in that change, the stories that have been told and whom they're being told to has changed as well. And that genuinely seems to bother these middle-aged fans. And I think that's okay. It's hard to let go, but let go they must so that future generations can cherish what they cherished, with fresh, unblemished eyes.
I'm eager for someone to start recreating the missing episodes of Doctor Who. The audio still exists and there are publicity shots from many of the missing episodes
I would be happy to complete your Doctor Who collection. It's definitely worth watching all of it.
This is called the "Silurian hypothesis" and is named after the Doctor Who episode that showed an advanced dinosaur race called the "Silurians" that went into cryo millions of years ago.
Some real geologists explored the idea (someone could find the paper and subsequent news articles) and I think the conclusion was that on geological time periods, there might not be much left for us to find.
Go to YouTube. You will find lots of old BBC stuff; the BBC largely doesn’t bother with active enforcement for anything before 1980 or so.
Now, start a website selling Doctor Who episodes, and see how far your incomplete enforcement argument gets you with the court.
>Why isn't everything the BBC has ever made available on a streaming service for license free payers?
1. Rights issues. The BBC doesn't actually own the bundle of exclusive rights to a lot of the content that they commission. The rights belong to the independent production companies that actually make the shows.
2. Regulation. The BBC has often been blocked by regulators from having a comprehensive SVoD service other than for catch-up, because it was seen as a threat to commercial entities (like Netflix).
3. Missing archives. Not so much an issue these days, but historically archiving was not a priority, at all. Many programmes were broadcast and then forgotten about. There are episodes of classic Doctor Who which are just lost to time now, for example.
> For example, Disney reportedly shovels $25m per episode into its prestige Marvel shows. The Crown on Netflix costs7 between $6.5m and $13m per episode, and so on.
> With the best will in the world, there’s no way in hell that Doctor Who is ever going to have that sort of money spent on it8...
> My fear for the BBC is that as generational turnover takes place, the BBC will remain outpaced and its cultural relevance will continue to decline. How can the BBC compete in a world where Disney can crank out an infinite stream of Mandalorians and WandaVisions11, while the BBC has to make do with less cash and an obligation to make worthy documentaries...
Oh no, it can't afford to make superhero-themed stuff. We're doomed!
There's an important place for stuff that isn't easily-translated superhero-themed special effects blockbusters. Frankly, I view the dominance of those blockbusters to be more of a disease than an important trend that needs to be aped.
>You should be able to watch every episode of Doctor Who on demand since the original black & white pilot
I hate to break it to you, but not even the BBC has that.
Most of their early work was never archived, as the technology to actually do so either didn't exist (television predates magnetic video recording), was so expensive as to make full archival prohibitively expensive, or was explicitly prohibited by contractual arrangement. No, seriously, TV actors insisted that tapes were wiped and reused after a period of time so that reruns would not usurp the market for new productions. The same goes for a lot of other countries' early television. Just finding working copies of all of those Doctor Who episodes is an ongoing preservation project.
Things like not being able to pay for iPlayer outside of the license fee is a similar problem - politics dictating the market. The BBC's license-funded activities are specifically firewalled from the part of the business that sells commercial TV internationally. Even if that particular diktat didn't exist, the BBC would still be following the ordinary TV business practice of selling each show off on a per-country basis. Even the big streaming services do this with their own originals, many of which are not streaming-exclusive outside the US. The idea that you have a single "owner" that just does everything and sells the work globally is mostly unheard of outside of the videogame industry.
> iPlayer was, after all, one of the first streaming services: a genuine bit of innovation from the Beeb.
This is absolutely worth remembering, iPlayer was revelatory 12 or 13 years ago. Infuriatingly the innovation seems to have stopped there.
Case in point, it's a corporation nearly 100 years old, yet its back catalogue is extremely poor. You should be able to watch every episode of Doctor Who on demand since the original black & white pilot, instead you're mainly limited to items shown in the last month, plus some randomly curated stuff. Channel 4 has a better online archive.
When I lived outside of the UK I would have paid a subscription fee equal to the licence fee to gain access to iPlayer. It's worth paying for! But there's no way to give them money for services other than be a licence payer within the UK.
Wasn’t it standard practice to just record shows over old tapes for a while, leading to the loss of a number of episodes of Doctor Who?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_missing_episodes
To be fair there are outliers in the UK too. The Doctor Who series has been going on since 1968 with 861 episodes too. It’s probably worth ignoring the outliers here and focusing on the median show.
I'm sorry; for "long lasting UK series" it's really hard to beat Doctor Who...
The Bill may have more episodes, but Doctor Who has been running for 20 years longer.
"We name the hypothesis after a 1970 episode of the British science fiction TV series Doctor Who" - The Silurian Hypothesis: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in the geological record? https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.03748
That may be true, but in this case the term was actually inspired by the episode of Doctor Who.
Nigeria found some Doctor Who episodes recently:
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2013/oct/11/doctor-who-lost-episodes-found-download-bbc
BARB is talking about a potential audience. In my building, for example, it would consider that there are 12 households with Terrestrial TV as potential audience. There's an aerial on the roof, and in 2018 when I last checked, the routine job to fetch the TV listings out of the data stream was still working on a PC I had connected to the aerial socket. That job may still be working but I haven't checked - like most people in this building, and your comment's parent, I don't actually watch live TV so I don't need the listings data any more if it's still being collected.
So that's 12 households you're counting as "TV viewership" that don't watch live TV. They could watch any hypothetical TV show or advertisement, but they in fact will not. They would not disagree with your parent poster.
My mother (retired) is the only person I know who watches live TV. My Facebook is full of people chatting about TV shows (Sabrina, Doctor Who, etc.) but none of them watch it live. Some of them have paid subscriptions to various sources of TV, and many of the same people also have "pirate" hookups to get TV that isn't available in a timely fashion, as described many times they aren't unwilling to pay they're unwilling to be inconvenienced.
And we're seeing just the same end result, with gaps missing in the cultural record. For example, there are Doctor Who episodes that simple don't exist anymore [1]. The contracts of the time specified a maximum number of broadcasts, after which they were taped over. Now, with loss of compatibility, closing of multiplayer servers, logon servers, games are going the same route. Another loss of culture.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_missing_episodes
> Of course, they're also 24 episodes long so they run for most of a year,
This hasn't been true for shows I'm interested in for a long time, and to be honest I kind of miss it. Especially for shows that used to have longer runs but are now shorter, the pacing seems off. There used to be a season-wide arc alongside individual episodes that may or may not have anything to do with that arc in particular.
You might say that episodes that don't tie into the season are filler, and I get where you're coming from. But in sci-fi specifically, I'm so sick of the trope of "there's a thing that threatens the very fabric of the universe", and literally everything the main characters do between learning about it and resolving it are related. I miss lower stakes episodes that balance out the larger stakes in the overall season.
I'm thinking specifically of Doctor Who in that last paragraph. (which to be fair is not US TV, but I can name some US/Canadian shows that took a similar route) It used to be that the doctor could have a romp around a new planet or an interesting period in history, the doctor or his companions would learn something new, and then they'd move on. Those kinds of one-offs are what the show is built around IMO. But now with fewer episodes every season, the very fabric of the universe is always threatened, and every companion is the most important person ever born, and everything you see on screen reinforces those two ideas. They keep mentioning adventures off-screen, I think because the writers recognize that they're losing something by not having those unrelated adventures happen where the audience can see.
(The latest season of Doctor Who is at least a step back from that, but it had plenty of its own problems, not least of which is a very crowded main cast that ended up underdeveloped as a result. The only character that I felt was interesting in the first episode didn't make it to the main crew, which is probably why they were developed so much better than the rest.)
Technically some of Doctor Who has not survived, but that's for unrelated reasons (there simply aren't any known recordings of some episodes.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_missing_episodes
Are they? That's far more for production stereotypes than viewer convenience or expectations, or at least seems so. Down to current fashion, and the expectations of the kids in the production team -- or the execs signing off. The most popular aliens in Doctor Who are dustbins with a sink plunger (Daleks). One of Star Trek's most popular the tribble. I get really tired of rubber enhanced blue aliens, with a few forehead bumps, and utterly perfect English. I'd rather have a few of the sillier ones from the 50's B movies or B&W Dr Who make a come back than yet another tedious perfect humanoid with augmentation...
Though I also like to intersperse the fiction with history and anthropological. I can picture the fiction better, and find I enjoy it more with a clearer idea of how people actually lived, struggled, died etc. I also end up judging some of the historical fiction against the actuality too -- some authors are far more accurate than others.
I am sure most productions could go vastly further than they try to, as 95% of all historical and fantasy (e.g. GoT) drama are 21st century views, mores and habits in cute -- and in the case of armies perfectly matched and colour matched -- costume. I think this article does a disservice to what we could show. We could show a much closer representation of actuality without triggering revulsion, or making racism or sexism acceptable again, spoiling the show, or losing viewers. Heck, even half the supposed documentaries get fundamentals wrong! Some accuracy we would indeed struggle with, but I suspect most could handle and enjoy far more than we're ever given!
Being unfilmably dark didn't stop GoT filming the series climax in the dead of night, outside. It was unwatchably dark for pretty much a whole episode, without a poorly lit castle or smoke filled long house in sight.
Overall I think it's more a lack of imagination, or laziness. Adaptation so it becomes the usual formula with new overlay. I appreciate the rare ones that are faithful, or do depart from the usual tedium that much more as a result, and often forgive other glitches or ropy moments. I'm usually much more damning of poor adaptation than costuming or habit. :)
Can you recall any more specifics of the story you watched? I'm very familiar with the history of Doctor Who, but I'm not aware of any episode or story having aired without sound effects. Any details you have will help me narrow down the episode you're referring to.
Government bureaucracy isn't noticably better. Everyone was writing over their tape archives back then, including the BBC (see: Doctor Who lost episodes) and, uh, NASA (the moon landings).
The BBC did that to save money for new magnetic tape used for archiving. They thought that parts of their archives were just not valuable enough to preserve and chise to overwrite them instead. Unfortunately, some of the overwritten material turned out to be much more interesting and valuable in retrospect, for example a host of Doctor Who episodes which are now lost completely.
There's so many layers to that question. The major influencer though was most likely syndication.
Shows were designed to onboard viewers at any point in the series. This would enable shows to appear in random order across multiple networks and viewers would just accept them as they were.
Shows which juggled long term serial arcs while staying accessible to the random viewer seemed to be viewed retrospectively as the best of that era. Shows like X-Files, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Babylon 5, etc.
Shows which were purely episodic such as Star Trek: TNG or old Doctor Who don't hold up quite as well. They're still enjoyable episode to episode, but there's something missing that we've become accustomed to in modern television. Perhaps if you feel the rose colored glasses starting to slip into place in the future, you could look back on some of those shows that didn't age as well.
We've thrown out syndication as a concept, so what we're left with is almost lazy writing since they don't have to put a bow on every episode after exactly 46 minutes.
But ultimately I think there are those that feel that the 90's were the pinnacle of Hollywood. I recently read an article claiming '99 to be the best year in cinema. We're just living in a perpetual era of disruption and it's going to take a few more decades until people consistently figure out the new successful formulas that are unbeatable until the technology fundamentally shifts again.
TV was very mysterious back then. I would not see most of the episodes in a series as I had no way to record anything nor any idea when they were on besides having a TV Guide (which we never bought) or the local newspaper tv listings which got thrown out more often than not. TV was more of a random access experience back then. You got what you got. Saturday mornings were pretty awesome as far as cartoons went, but in some ways they weren't--it felt like not a lot of thought or effort was put into that programming and it was mostly about toy commercials. I watched a shitload of Saturday morning cartoons. I would usually get up at 6am and watch the national anthem which played both verses, and then some goofy local show involving a very fat lady and her dog would come on and she would talk about local scene stuff that I had no idea about. After that wa PBA bowling (TV Tournament Time). Cartoons came on around 7:30 or 8am, I think, and ran until about 11am. Maybe bowling was after, can't recall.
For most people, especially kids, shows had no continuity at all. I remember trying to watch Robotech (re-runs?) in the mid '80s and once in awhile I'd see two episodes in a row that were in the correct order. Doctor Who was the same way except that was on PBS and often times I could see a couple in a row. Things didn't change until my parents got cable sometime around 1985 or so.
One more anectdote I'll share: My kids both loved Scooby Doo so we bought all the old episodes on DVD. What strikes me most about the cheap animation is how few characters there were in Scooby Doo. If the gang was walking in a town or an amusement park, there were almost no local color--no people at all. That gives the show a creepy, xenophobic vibe. The gang is always all alone in an alien landscape, sort of like they were transported into an alternate reality.
I haven't been with xs4all since their earliest days because I had internet through my university back then, but I do know them from when they were still called Hacktic Netwerk.
They're great. Their helpdesk is widely known to be the best. I've got my digital TV through them, and when I called their helpdesk because it failed to record an episode of Doctor Who, their helpdesk could point me to a website where I could watch it legally. They're geeks like me. In fact, I've known quite a number of people who work/worked there.
I'd be really sad to see them go, and I agree with the article: it sounds unlikely that KPN will fight for digital rights the way XS4all has done.
Wait, what is this going to mean for my email address? I hope they'll keep xs4all.nl email addresses active, or this is going to cause a lot of problems for me.
We had VCRs with timed record from the early 80s onward and had a _large_ collection of recorded VHS.
We got into the habit of recording a few minutes before and after the show was supposed to air, as things frequently did not run on schedule. Especially recording things on the major TV networks and recording Doctor Who off NJN who would keep the fundraiser drives going as long as they could before starting an episode.
The only problem with this was sometimes my brother had a habit of taping public access porn over whatever was in the VCR...but that wasn't exactly a problem either. :)
Off-topic, but the name "time crystals" just sounds like something straight out of a Doctor Who episode.
Those are the reasons I think it could work... yes, the stories span centuries, but they are laid out in specific chapters, which not only are short enough to work in the scale of a TV show, but would allow for cast changes on a regular basis, and could be more of a Doctor Who-style series, with different eras expressed by different show-runners, directors and casts.
And it likewise works OK for the characters to not be fully fleshed out immediately - they aren't on TV either, as the actors and writers get used to the characters.
This is the theme of a few episodes of Doctor who. Characters marked there skin with a pen/sharpy, every time they saw an alien. The aliens automagically wiped the memory of anyone who saw them.
It doesn't appear that Doc Brown, within the scope of the movies that we see, ever came to grips with just how horrifying the universe he lives in is. It's got many of the same issues that proof of and access to an infinite multiverse does.
Doctor Who fits somewhere in the middle, where the universe is more mutable than you might like but still is supposed to have some general flows and rules about what can't be changed, albeit presented as being so complicated than only the Doctor can even hope to understand them. And when writers process this properly there is always a sort of manic, edge-of-sanity element to the Doctor which makes sense.
Gandalf doesn't live in the same sort of universe, though. He lives in something more like our real universe, where actions have consequences and can't be undone, or sidestepped by just shooting a portal gun and stepping across to the next universe. And also, perhaps even more importantly, he lives in a universe where it is not possible for a time traveler from the far future to suddenly appear or for Rick to step out and just start killing people because he's in a bad mood and who cares about fantasy-era bumpkins?
I don't think Rick is too far out of line, in terms of the universe he lives in.
Hey, it's a fellow Doctor Who fan (seems rare)! Also binge watching recently, and yes, good point.
TV shows and movie franchises often replace cast. Sometimes with the new actor / actress playing an existing character.
* Sometimes it's done out of necessity so the changes are glossed over (Dumbledore changed characters due to Richard Harris sadly passing away, or when actors/actresses get fired from soap operas),
* sometimes it's made a feature (eg Doctor Who regenerations)
* and sometimes they'll just introduce a new leading character to replace the old one (eg the crime comedy "Death in Paradise" which has had 3 different leading inspectors as the previous actors have left the show).
Few people, if indeed anyone, are irreplaceable in their careers.
That's actually the plot of a Doctor Who episode, a planet on which some civilization trapped ancient evil (tm).
Yes! Star Trek's time travel episodes have been notorious since the 1960s. Back to the Future is great, but very much belongs to a certain generation. Doctor Who is a British series, not very well known in the USA. Not everyone would recognize the name TARDIS and know it comes from that show.
Some concrete things that B5 contributed and innovated on (as I understand it, perhaps I'm missing some things):
Extensive use of CGI to drastically reduce set costs. The core of the B5 show takes place on relatively extensive sets that are reused throughout the series, with one-off locations presented with large amounts of composited CG backgrounds. All of the space and planetary footage is rendered, and this choice of setting (simplified lighting and shot composition) played heavily to the favor of the tech at the time--I think most if not all of the work was done on Amigas and Video Toaster.
Heavy interaction with the fanbase using Usenet. I think that B5 was probably one of the first times, if not the first time, that fans got to significantly interact with the folks who were creating a show in a meaningful way. These days, it's pretty obvious and common to have shows use their online presence and discussion panels and whatnot to create organic advertising, but back in the day having JMS show up and answer questions and explain why things happened the way they did was pretty amazing.
Tightly and long-plotted series storyline. Compared with basically any of the Star Treks (and DS9 is quite arguable because reasons), Doctor Who, Buffy, X-Files, or other contemporary shows, B5 Had 5 years of plot to get through and managed to do so. Every episode (barring some crap chunks of season 1) brings in a new plot line, advances an existing plot line, or closes up a plot line. This is a series that really bears watching twice specifically so that you can see how seemingly little things telegraph well in advance important later points. At least through season 4 I never felt that there was an ass-pull or a moment where the narrative didn't know where the hell it was going. I felt like the writer(s) respected me and were going to take their time to weave a good narrative, however long that took.
Genuinely terrible characters and no-win situations. Nowadays it's become somewhat in-vogue to have darker and edgier storylines, but at the time seeing a show willing to do just really evil things (killing children) and having horrible tragedies occur (depicting the permanent loss of at least one alien race that we'd gotten used to seeing around) was rare. Not only was it rare, but it did so in conjunction with a fundamentally optimistic view about people and the future--which is exceptionally rare these days.
Displaying competent and important women and LGBT characters. Delenn is an obvious example for her work with the Minbari and later actions, but Susan Ivanova is probably one of the most capable yet human characters I've seen in television science-fiction. Additionally, the way the show explored her interactions with Talia Winters was basically pushing those themes about as far as you could in television at the time it came out.
Honestly, the only show I'd put in the same ballpark would be the anime epic Legend of Galactic Heroes. I'd strongly suggest, if you enjoy these things, treating yourself to B5 seasons 1-4 and seeing just how well done this material can be even in the absence of large budgets or well-known actors.
Yeah right. This is the BBC you're talking about. They had to ask pirates to send them their copies of ancient Doctor Who episodes when they realised there was some value in them.
Dammit, I started reading and I was all... OMG, they could recover the lost Doctor Who episodes! Then saw the date.
YOU GO TO HELL AND YOU DIE!!!
Wait, what? NASA had tapes with missing Doctor Who episodes?
Let's not forget all the Doctor Who episodes that take place in the past, which effectively means they can raid the wardrobes of whatever BBC period drama is being filmed that week...
Probably because more people saw the last star wars film opening weekend than have watched doctor who in its entire history.
>When you say, "I want to be that thing...", you necessarily have to also say, "... that means I will stop being this thing." I don't watch television. I don't follow professional sports. I don't work out at gyms. I don't read the latest books. I don't go to the latest movies. I don't play video games. I don't have a bowling league.
Oh, absolutely. I was always rather creating than consuming and I noticed two things: people wondering "how do I keep up with all this stuff I do" and me wondering "when do they read all these books and watch all these shows they're talking about at parties and that I know nothing about". I have never read or seen such titles that some people would instantly invalidate my geek card if they learned about it.
Recently I've decided that I need to finally read Discworld and also started watching Doctor Who. Although I think I needed and well deserved a break, it makes me feel kinda uneasy when I go to sleep with just "watched some episodes/read some chapters" as an achievement of the day instead of "made this feature working/investigated and fixed this bug/finished another part of animation/recorded a new song" etc. (not counting stuff made at work of course)
It's just one or another indeed.
Agreed. It's almost...accidentally perfect.
I mean, considering:
1) The video cuts out -precisely- at the point in Dr. Who where the guy says "A massive electric shock -- he must have died instantly!" ...probably accidental, but just perfect..lol
2) The block of shows on WTTW (Channel 11) on Sunday night were often very, very avant-garde in content. To be able to take it to an entirely higher level like that, against the backdrop of already weird stuff...thats just priceless..
3) The fact that the public was split between those who found it hilarious, and those who found it frightening... what more could you ask for?
As a hack, with all its warts and confusion, it's a triple axle quadruple salcow kind of performance. :)
BTW, speaking of weird -- I've been asked on occasion, how weird. Check this out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBgEjyn8ArM
This is "The Shivering Man". There was a show that aired late nights on Channel 11 at the time, called Image Union.. Image Union was sort of a showcase for short subject amateur/experimental/avant-garde films and videos. It was on the air about maybe half an hour or an hour after Doctor Who every sunday night, and usually ended the scheduled broadcast day.
One of the films that aired on Image Union around that time (1987-1989 or so) was "The Shivering Man". Here, you've got a ballet dancer in a red dress jumping around guy covered in talcum powder having a conniption fit/seizure, followed up by a fat bald guy in a chair who, uh, suggestively..sprinkles.. when the chair is shaken..lol..
Tame by internet standards, but totally WTF-worthy by late 80's Chicago public television standards. By running this sort of stuff, they were all but inviting a visit from Max, if you ask me. Weird attracts weird.
It's a frustrating practice, and indeed, not limited to the Simpsons - even Doctor Who has suffered from cuts, on BBC America, of all places.
SNPP, perhaps not surprisingly, has a catalog of Simpsons syndication cuts, arranged by season:
http://www.snpp.com/episodes/scg.html
One of the artifacts of this is that Canadian music can sometimes be segregated to its own station, as if "Canadian music" was a genre. XM did this for example.
As a Canadian though there are few Canadian shows I'm interested in. Maybe the occasional CBC DocZone, but that's about it.
I would like to see more of BBC model over here, it seems to work out swimmingly for them. (Doctor Who, Horizon, Top Gear, This World, and that's before you get to the one-off films)
It's an episode of Doctor Who!
So, it's just a coincidence that it happened on the day that the first episode of Doctor Who was broadcast?
:)
Marvel and Doctor Who and Darth Vader aren't really related to IT though. I'm aware of all three, and seen a couple of the Star Wars movies, but that's it. By her argument, Trish would be alienating to me, a male in IT as well. People in all fields have hobbies and interests outside of work. I don't think this is a sexism or even IT issue.
The BBC makes a show of "cutting costs" by closing down promotional sites for a pile of mostly-cancelled TV shows and handing off some sites that might actually count as "content" to the British Library. (Meanwhile, they leave up stuff like this because people actually watch Doctor Who: http://www.badwolf.org.uk)
Why is this a story, even in web circles? Why all the hyped-up outrage?
Are people associated with the BBC shilling this?
I've only really started using it recently, and I can watch an entire Doctor Who episode at full quality with only 4 bars of service (iPhone 4). At weaker signals the quality drops before it buffers (I'd honestly rather it buffered).
Of course, I'm not in SF or NYC or anywhere else with notorious bad AT&T service.
I'd need to see that in writing.
Bee Movie after something as monumental as the Seinfeld show? That's a wash-out. Reminds me of the scene in Extras where Ricky Gervais goes to work for Doctor Who.
How are these brief entries any less important than descriptions of the complete episodes of BSG, Doctor Who, The Wire, or dozens of other TV shows? Yes, I've read many of those episode articles and I'm sure they get more hits, but we're talking about making information available to anyone who might needs it. Who can say this is needed, this is not?
It seems odd that a real person can't get an entry but there are probably thousands of fictional characters written up.