InnerSPACE | Blog

Doctor Who is a British institution, and despite his alien origins, the Doctor is as British a character as any in the canon of English literature. Despite (or perhaps because of) the program’s essential Britishness, Doctor Who has been a runaway international success since two schoolteachers stumbled into a impossibly huge police box in 1963.

In fact, it was the early popularity of the program overseas that decades later would ensure the preservation of episodes fandom thought long lost. In the 1960s and 1970s the BBC habitually recorded over their old video tapes in order to save storage space. To our modern eyes this behaviour seems remarkably short sighted, but at the time there was no home video industry, and once something had appeared on-air it was very rare it would ever be rebroadcast.

However, due to the Doctor’s popularity around the world, many episodes were filmed off TV screens and sent to foreign stations. Many William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton episodes are still missing or destroyed, but in 1992 “Tomb of the Cybermen” was discovered in a TV station in Hong Kong. Other bits and pieces have also surfaced over the years from foreign television stations,  and to this day rumours swirl within fandom of lost episodes hidden in Zimbabwe and elsewhere. Dedicated fans have even reconstructed lost episodes based on photographs of individual scenes taken for posterity (known colloquially as ‘telesnaps’).

For North American fans, our exposure to the Doctor came chiefly through American public broadcasting. For years PBS stations all over the country carried the Doctor’s adventures in “omnibus” editions, combining the separate episodes into a movie-style format, in the process all but eliminating one of the more prominent impacts of seeing things in an episodic fashion -- the cliffhanger.

An entire generation of viewers consequently never understood the sheer thrill of Classic Who cliffhangers, since whatever scrape the Doctor got himself into would seamlessly resolve itself mere seconds later, rather than having to wait a whole week to know what happens. Despite the differences in how we saw the stories, Doctor Who gained a huge fan base in the United States and Canada which continues to this day.

With the return of the series in 2005, international exposure went into overdrive. After all, the world is a much more interconnected place than it was in 1963, and with the internet it is possible to share one’s enthusiasm for the Doctor all over the world in real time; similarly, television is also a much more global enterprise than ever before. Countries you wouldn’t think of as breeding grounds for Doctor Who fandom are in fact huge devotees of the Gallifreyan’s misadventures. The program, which is so popular in South Korea it has aired on four different channels, was recently honoured at the  Seoul International Drama Awards. On a recent trip to Egypt, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Dubai television shows the program on a daily basis. And though I don’t know the breadth of the Doctor’s reach across the planet, Benjamin Elliot maintains the This Week in Doctor Who list, where he meticulously tracks EVERYTHING new in the world of Who.

No matter where you live, there’s a way for you to enjoy Doctor Who. And if you live in Canada, you’re already in the right place. SPACE is where you’ll find this year’s specials and the new series starring Matt Smith next year. Across the world is where you’ll find your fellow fans. All that’s really left is for us is to get the show broadcast on the Moon and Mars. If there’s a better reason for mankind to make the move off-world, I’d like to hear it.
 

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Warren Frey blogs about Doctor Who and is one of the hosts of Radio Free Skaro, Canada's most popular Doctor Who podcast. You can follow the RFS guys on Twitter: Dubbayoo and Legopolis and  Freyburg
We love Warren Frey.