This Week In Doctor Who was born in July 1998. It was a weekly guide to all
Doctor Who broadcasts around the world. TWIDW was a reference, an archive, and a
hope that Doctor Who would return to prominence on television for new fans to
discover. There were many highs and lows. The game changed when Doctor Who
actually returned to television, bigger and more popular than ever. TWIDW went
from covering a forgotten old show to covering a vibrant hit. In January 2011 I
published what would turn out to be my final edition. In April 2011 I went
public that I was retiring from writing the column. I discussed some of the
details, but not all of them. Here is the story of how I decided to close the
door on the second biggest journey of my life (biggest before I got married).

In all these years, I have never gotten any financial benefit from This Week In
Doctor Who. My family thought that I should. I was advised to write a book. I
was advised to contact the BBC and get them to bankroll TWIDW so I could be
official, get information more efficiently, and afford to use better tools to do
the column well. I was advised to try to use my work on TWIDW to get media jobs.
Apart from Doctor Who belonging to the BBC and all the copyright issues
involved, I always viewed the column as a project I did because I was a big fan
of the show. I wanted to help Doctor Who because I liked Doctor Who. This was my
contribution to the world of Doctor Who. The only benefit I was ever likely to
get was the appreciation of fans who utilized the column, or found out about the
show because of the column. That was and is enough.

For years, I thought I could handle the increased workload of Doctor Who's
success. So the show's been picked up in a bunch of countries. I was pretty good
at tracking, and if you just look for the local language version of the word
Doctor you tended to find Who or House. Torchwood – usually look for the places
airing Doctor Who. Sarah Jane – look for kids' channels. K9 – well, by the time
of K9 I was having other issues.

Most of you know that I've been having health problems for close to 2 years. It
takes a lot of time and energy to look through all these schedules and piece
together the data, and it's a challenge when you're healthy. I injured my back
while moving, an injury that significantly slows me down and depresses me, an
injury that I am still trying to get fixed. I was moving because we were trying
to short sell my house. I was one of the more impressive casualties of the
housing market – the previous owners manipulated things to make the house look
good and I bought when prices were ludicrously high for even the crummiest
places. When your home's value goes from $271,000 to $80,000 in 24 months while
just about everything in the house is breaking and there's no chance of finding
the former owners to make them deal with selling a place that should never have
been on the market without prior renovation – well, it took a long time to clean
up that mess. And that's before you throw in a mortgage company that was taking
money for not foreclosing on my property, saying that they would look at the
short sale paperwork, and constantly trying to foreclose the property at the
same time (Bank Of America).

When I got the house issue off my back, I thought things would improve. My back
was going to get better with proper health care (it didn't – but I did not know
that then). I would have more time. Well, the injury hasn't gotten better and it
leaves me tired. It saps my focus. I can pretty much handle my job, where I know
that I'm getting a paycheck at the end. But to put focus and energy on much else
– it is a challenge to keep anything from falling by the wayside.

This Week In Doctor Who is not a sprint – it is a marathon. Not all the stations
update their listings at the same time. You need to be able to look at a little
bit here, save the file, go do something else. Come back, do a bit more, and
save. All through the week. Much as I do not want to admit it, I currently
cannot do a project like This Week In Doctor Who unless it is my primary work.
If it was the 40 hour a week job that you do in the day and then drop to rest
with family and friends, I could just about do it, on my better weeks. If the
BBC did not think This Week In Doctor Who was worth it to finance and use in the
last 7 years as Doctor Who has come back to live, they're not going to think it
now. The column is never going to be more than a hobby unless someone at the BBC
gets the bright idea to do a version themselves or to find fans who can do what
I've done.

Of course, This Week In Doctor Who might have been doomed anyway. I was getting
less and less satisfied with the quality of the column, even when I got it
published on time. Finding schedules is getting harder. So is being able to
promote some of these TV stations with a straight face. If I had been healthier
in body and mind This Week In Doctor Who was going to have to change. It was
time for me to do battle with the Mediocrity that is overshadowing the
presentation of Doctor Who and its spinoff.

I have always wanted to get people interested and invested in catching Doctor
Who broadcasts on television. Doctor Who is a TV show. It can be other things as
well, but the TV episodes need to work on TV, just like Movies need to look
their best in a Movie theatre and you wouldn't want to buy a paper book in a
Bookstore (physical or virtual) where the spine was ripped off before you got
it.

Unless you live near Seattle, Washington, when was the last time you saw classic
Doctor Who (pre-2005) on your TV? We've let 26 years of a TV show just melt
away, figuring that it's okay as long as the episodes eventually become
available on DVD. Oh, and if a station airs Classic Who they have to skip the
Dalek stories, because there's been a contract dispute since 2003 and somehow
BBC Worldwide has been uninterested in solving the problem in spite of the
commercial potential of anything with the Doctor Who label on it these days.

Oh, and you don't really watch a TV show on TV in most cases these days. The TV
show is just the background filler for the station. It's the screen saver in the
background which they put text messages and channel logos over. The closing
credits – well, we can't possibly risk people not sticking around for our text
messages, so we'll just omit that section of the show. And no one cares anymore
if a show is edited or time compressed. None of it matters. We are either
supposed to accept it like sheep or spend money. The TV broadcast is the FREE
PREVIEW! If you want to see the real show in an unadulterated form anytime soon,
you buy or rent it from a place like iTunes or Amazon in the days of weeks
afterwards. If you want to guarantee good quality and a chance at a physical
product that will survive your next hard drive crash or a copyright dispute
causing files to be recalled, you can buy DVDs and Blu-Rays at a later date. But
TV as something for people to enjoy on its own merit? Being able to turn on a TV
show for the first time and just find yourself drawn into the story for a while?
The concept is practically gone, and we are not supposed to mourn its passing.
Well, if watching a TV show on TV does not matter at all, then This Week In
Doctor Who's time was over anyway, because the reason for the column does not
exit.

When the 2nd series of Torchwood premiered in early 2008, I had just upgraded to
HD and had the HDNet channel. HDNet's US service had a deal to air Torchwood 16
days after it ran on BBC America, or about 26 days after it aired on BBC Two/BBC
Three. I waited for HDNet's broadcast on the first 10 episodes, finally
switching to BBC America for the last 3, but watching HDNet later. HDNet had the
channel logo on, but otherwise they actually tried airing the TV show. No crap
on the screen. No editing. No closing credit destruction. I waited to be able to
see the TV show as a TV show, instead of filler for what the station was
selling.

Doctor Who was airing same day as the UK for a number of weeks on BBC America
this year, but that just meant a chance to see it look terrible sooner. I
couldn't show people those terrible recordings – I had to show them BBC America
On Demand from my cable later, because that looked good, wasn't time compressed,
and it felt like a TV show.

The public TV stations can air Doctor Who one year after BBC America, and
assuming the station doesn't put a lot of their own junk on the screen, you get
a full, clean broadcast. The PBS run should be heralded. It should be highly
prized. Doctor Who on free TV (especially now that the first run is on BBC
America, which is not on the cheaper cable tiers). When it began in 2007, NOBODY
CARED! Only 40 PBS stations touched it at all, and it's less than 15 stations
now. The few stories about the launch of the PBS run were cribbed from MY report
based on the details Ken Patterson (then of KTEH) alerted me to at the Gallifrey
convention when we were both supposed to be relaxing. Maryland Public TV bought
the first series, buried it in late night, did no advertising, and constantly
pre-empted it. Was This Week In Doctor Who supposed to be the engine that drove
the PBS run? I tried my hardest. Ken kept in contact with me as long as he was
at KTEH. I have an occasional contact at WILL Urbana, IL. I have a regular
contact at Milwaukee Public TV. The rest is utter silence. Are you watching your
PBS Who run? Did you tell them that BBC Worldwide sold them the incomplete 47
minute International Edit of Last Of The Time Lords instead of the original 51
minute version? Did any of them even notice the error? It seems like this should
be an easy success and we let it be a flop. It does not help the cause of airing
a show as a show instead of as filler for something else.

Fans only care if BBC One's broadcast is unedited the first time around. Fans
care about that because that's the version that gets pirated around the world.
That's the version that people use to get screen grabs. That's the version you
want if you're editing together a fan video about the Tenth Doctor's romance
with Rose/Martha/Donna/Jackson/Captain Jack/a box of oreos. Put an animated
Graham Norton on top of the BBC One Pirate Special, and people go beserk. If it
happened on BBC America, or ABC Australia, or Prime New Zealand, or any of the
BBC Entertainment channels, and people would have just went – ah, Graham
Norton's back for a new season – how many weeks till Jo Brand makes another
appearance?

Of course, how will you even know if the show's being treated badly if you can't
find it? Most of the stations airing the K9 series are local versions of the
channel Disney XD (specialized version of the Disney Channel aimed at boys).
Disney likes having a different version of their channel in every country. They
like hyping how multi-cultural and international they are. But you just try to
visit Disney XD in any country that is not your own. You get tossed back to your
local version. You CANNOT find Disney listings for any country besides your own
from a Disney site. And Disney XD often doesn't turn up in proper listings in
local countries.

This brings us to the final insult to my work. I was looking up listings on the
Western European BBC Entertainment Channel when I found myself unable to write
any further. I had two sources for this channel's listings, and the BBC
Entertainment website was flatly contradicting the Radio Times website. Also,
BBC Entertainment stopped putting listings online for programming from Midnight
to 6AM on all of their channels. It's important enough to air shows then, just
not important enough to tell people what's on. I spent 15 minutes going page by
page through BBC Entertainment to correct broadcast times for Doctor Who and
Torchwood. Then I noticed that the listings were exactly 5 hours off from the UK
Radio Times info. This BBC Entertainment site – ALL of the BBC Entertainment
sites – had been reprogrammed to change all schedule information to match your
computer's clock, instead of the time that shows were airing in the country of
the BBC Entertainment channel. It was like the sites had been specifically
modified to be harmful to ME. To use these sites, I have to 1) know how many
time zones each one is away from me, manually converting every single listing
and 2) cope with the fact that I will not be able to find 6 hours of the
schedule, 6 hour which for several of the stations is their primetime. And
that's when I stopped. That was the straw that broke the camel's back. I've been
interested in how TV listings work since 1983, 2 years before I discovered
Doctor Who. I've hardly looked at any in 6 months. It was that hard a blow.

We accept mediocrity even when it would cost nothing more to do stuff well. We
don't care if anyone else can see Doctor Who or the spinoffs in a good format as
long as we have our own supply taken care of. We think that junk is the natural
order of things and if we get anything better, than we should be grateful.

I could not have kept smiling and supporting networks that handle Doctor Who and
other shows terribly. I love new Doctor Who. But I hate how it gets presented on
TV most of the time. I do not want to be an enabler any more. If I was healthy,
I still would not want to be an enabler. I'd be an activist fighting to change
this for the better.

I will always be writing. I expect to always be a Doctor Who fan. I just won't
be writing This Week In Doctor Who anymore. Until next time, take care.

Benjamin Elliott – One Man From Manassas
July 22, 2011