Last night BBC America showed the third season Doctor Who<\/i> two-parter, “Human Nature”\/”Family of Blood,” in a two-hour long block.<\/p>\n
If you missed it last night and you have BBC America, have no fear — they’re repeating it again this afternoon.<\/p>\n
Watching the two-parter in a single sitting last night, it occurred to me how much better the story works as a single block. Watching it last spring as two separate episodes, the structural flaws of the second part are more obvious. The pacing is off in separate episodes, but as a single, two-hour long piece, the pacing works better.<\/p>\n
Afterwards, I had another thought.<\/p>\n
I don’t hear about British viewers of Doctor Who<\/i> talking about repeats of Who<\/i> or Torchwood<\/i>.<\/p>\n
So, I wonder. Are<\/i> there repeats?<\/p>\n
The Sci-Fi Channel shows Doctor Who<\/i> a few times, and they also have done episode marathons. BBC America has done episode marathons of Torchwood<\/i>; they just did one of the first half of the second season a few Sundays back.<\/p>\n
Does BBC1 spend six hours on a Sunday afternoon showing Doctor Who<\/i> marathons every couple of months, to keep the Time Lord in front of the audience? Does BBC2 or BBC3 run Torchwood<\/i> marathons?<\/p>\n
Or is the BBC’s attitude more like, “You’ve watched it once. You missed it? You’re shit-outta-luck.”<\/p>\n
Personally, I love BBC America’s episode marathons. They ran a Father Ted<\/i> marathon a few years ago for St. Patrick’s Day. They’ve done Jonathan Creek<\/i> marathons. Blackadder<\/i> marathons, too.<\/p>\n
From the way that fans don’t<\/i> mention repeats in the UK, would I be wrong to conclude that they don’t happen? Are repeats a uniquely American thing?<\/p>\n
I genuinely don’t know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Last night BBC America showed the third season Doctor Who two-parter, “Human Nature”\/”Family of Blood,” in a two-hour long block. If you missed it last night and you have BBC America, have no fear — they’re repeating it again this afternoon. Watching the two-parter in a single sitting last night, it occurred to me howContinue reading “On Doctor Who Viewing”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[131],"tags":[224,4082,4112],"class_list":["post-1743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-television","tag-bbc-america","tag-doctor-who","tag-television","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1743","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1743"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1743\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}