LONDON 1965!!!

LONDON 1965!!!

Every generation of 'Doctor Who' fans seem to evolve their own set of catchphrases and I think we've just seen Ian's excited cry of "London, 1965!" from 'The Planet Of Decision' being adopted by Twitch viewers in the last few hours.

As I write this, it's the morning of Wednesday 30th May 2018, and the first three Hartnell serials have been streaming in pretty decent quality, with only a few annoying adverts getting in the way.

There's something ridiculously exciting about this experiment which illustrates the shared nature of television. Yes, we've all got everything on DVD, but a live transmission can still call to us, because we know that other people will be watching at the same time.

The chatroom was going so fast last night it was almost impossible to follow, but it's either calmed down a bit now or my reading speed has dramatically improved. And it's amusing to see what people pick up on, viewing these episodes for the first time.

"He died beside the toilet rolls!" and "First Doctor needs some exercise!" are just some of the comments that jumped out, but it's not so much the content, just the fact that so many people are joining in with the experience.

We did a tiny bit of live-tweeting for Serial A last night and at about 7.38pm there were some 13955 viewers on the Twitch stream. Some were long-in-the-tooth fans such as ourselves, of course, but never forget that for a fair proportion, this was their first ever experience of 20th century 'Doctor Who'. And the magic still works, judging by some excited comments this morning!

 This is a bold experiment and it seems to be working. Fandom is growing in new and interesting ways because of it.

In between the episodes is a general First Doctor trailer, which is the source of the joyful "LONDON 1965!!" quotes and a couple of quiz questions which don't serve much purpose apart from suggesting that Susan's last name might have been Finn.

Maybe that too will be fondly recalled in years to come, though...

We'll be dipping in and out as the schedule progresses just to see what's going on.

But the fact that television made nearly 55 years ago can still find an audience that is prepared to engage with it is a wonderful thing.

But watching 'The Firemaker' followed by 'The Dead Planet' did get us thinking about where the Doctor goes for his bath in the unshown scene...

Sorry about planting that image! :-)

(By Andrew Trowbridge)