BSB - Part One: "I don't know why you say 'Goodbye' I say 'Hello'."
Interviewed for the New Jersey Network’s The Making of Doctor Who in 1988, producer John Nathan-Turner explained his wish to leave the series by saying it needed “taking into the nineties”. He felt this was not something the producer who had been around to “take it into the eighties” could do. Yet as the decade turned, he was still working in Doctor Who’s production office, even though Doctor Who was no longer being made. JNT had known since September 1989 there be no “Season 27”. That he wouldn’t be taking Doctor Who into the nineties, but then neither would anyone else.
Without a series to plan, he worked on merchandise approvals and an extended VHS version of The Curse of Fenric (1989), requested by BBC Video’s Penny Mills on discovering how much material had been cut from the story for timing reasons. Nathan-Turner and director Nicholas Mallet re-edited it, re-incorporating as much cut material as they could, with Mark Ayres composing new music for the reintegrated sections. Then, one Friday in August, John Nathan-Turner left the BBC and walked into a job at the UK’s newest television service.
British Satellite Broadcasting had launched in March 1990 as a rival to Sky. BSB, as it was known, was repeating Doctor Who starting with the first episode. It planned to show every complete story. In order. BSB was also planning a Doctor Who weekend over 22-23rd September, with thirty hours of programming. It was an example of what we’d now recognise as the streaming technique of prioritising driving sign ups over anything else. Doctor Who’s regular audience may have been tiny by BBC standards, but even a fraction of it would translate into great numbers for the fledgling BSB.
Nine monochrome serials, most never re-shown in the UK or released on VHS, were being repeated that weekend. So were The Three Doctors (1972/3) and the surviving episodes of The Abominable Snowmen and The Web of Fear (1967). All of which will get their own instalment of The Long Way Round over the next few weeks, this being where I first saw them, having successfully begged and pleaded with my parents for the opportunity to gorge on undiscovered treasures from the past. My Dad had, I think, been thinking of getting satellite anyway, and that my grandparents already had Sky made getting the rival network seem like a good idea, I suspect.
As well as all this archive plenty, Doctor Who fans would be served by new material, of a kind. There would be new interviews with figures from the series, with BSB’s chatshow 31 West renamed 31 Who for the duration. Hired as an advisor, JNT also joined 31 West’s presentation team. Sadly neither he nor Doctor Who had a future at BSB. Because BSB didn’t have any kind of future. Sky and BSB “merged” on 2nd November. It was a hostile takeover that ensured a monopoly and in practice, BSB’s services and branding vanished, replaced with Sky’s. Their attempt to run all of Doctor Who had stalled two episodes into the first Dalek serial. They hadn’t even reached the end of 1963.
They1 say that the flame that burns half as long burns twice as bright, and there was certainly something dazzling about that brief two day period where I saw twenty seven episodes of Doctor Who, some of which I had thought I would never see at all. The writer Paul Cornell famously defined Doctor Who fandom’s 1983 celebration at Longleat House in Wiltshire as “our Woodstock”. I’ve been known to fatuously claim the nineteen nineties as a whole as “our ‘Nam”. I’m not sure what the BSB Weekend was. Our Royal Wedding? A sort of backwards looking nostalgia fest involving a lot of videotaping of live events? I suppose the difference is that pretty much no one who has ever recorded a Royal Wedding off the television to keep has ever watched it again, where as like all decent people I’ve seen The Keys of Marinus loads of times.
I’d like to claim I was secretly disappointed in BSB’s schedule. After all, a reasonably high percentage of the serials they were showing had recently been made available on VHS and I’d already seen them. But I honestly didn’t care. The full schedule looked like this. (The titles of stories I’ve already covered on Psychic Paper are links to the pieces, which have come out from behind the paywall for the occasion.2 If you’re not already any kind of subscriber, you will need to become a free subscriber to access them, but that’s just a matter of putting your email address in the box.)
Saturday 22 September 1990
9:00am 31 Who
9:15am An Unearthly Child; followed by 31 Who.
11:15am The Daleks: Episodes 1-3
12:35pm Doctor Who's Who's Who; followed by 31 Who.
1:40pm The Daleks: Episodes 4-7; followed by 31 Who.
3:30pm The Edge of Destruction; followed by 31 Who.
4:30pm The Yeti Rarities: The Abominable Snowmen: Episode 2
5:00pm The Yeti Rarities: The Web of Fear: Episode 1
5:30pm 31 Who
6:00pm The Space Museum; followed by 31 Who.
8:00pm The Keys of Marinus; followed by 31 Who.
11:00pm The Aztecs; followed by 31 Who.
1:00am Dr. Who and the Daleks
Sunday 23 September 1990
9:00am 31 Who
9:15am The War Games: Episodes 1-5
11:30am Whose Doctor Who; followed by 31 Who.
12:45pm The War Games: Episodes 6-10; followed by 31 Who.
3:00pm The Dominators
5:15pm 31 Who
5:45pm The Mind Robber; followed by 31 Who.
8:00pm The Three Doctors; followed by 31 Who.
10:00pm Daleks' Invasion Earth 2150 A.D.
11:30pm The Yeti Rarities: The Abominable Snowmen: Episode 2
12:00am The Yeti Rarities: The Web of Fear: Episode 1
12:30am The Edge of Destruction
I mean, gosh. Look at that. Cor. An embarrassment of riches, and the occasional rich embarrassment. For those who don’t know, Doctor Who’s Who’s Who was next of kin to the The Making of Doctor Who mentioned above; another one of several 1980s made documentaries from the United States’ New Jersey Network, a PBS station with several Doctor Who enthusiasts on its staff, who made a point of doing interviews at conventions to be culled into documentaries to give viewers something exclusive during “pledge drive” season. Who's Doctor Who was something much older and odder, a 1977 Melvyn Bragg documentary widely seen as the first attempt to take Doctor Who seriously as a cultural object. It is currently on iplayer, although it contains, shall we say, some attitudes that are both outdated and offensive.3
The reason The Edge of Destruction appears twice on that schedule, by the way, isn’t because it’s so amazing they wanted to show it twice. (Although it is, and they should have done.) No, it’s the result of a mistake made by someone at BSB on the Saturday morning, who decided to the put second episode on before the first. I know, right? As if that serial wasn’t odd enough. Imagine watching it for the first time from the middle to the end and then from the beginning to the middle. Like Star Wars.
I’ve always suspected that that mistake happened because that story’s episodes have near synonymous titles The Edge of Destruction / The Brink of Disaster.4 But I’ve no reason to think that really, and it presupposes that the person who did it thinks like I do. Which is implausible, as well as unfortunate for them. Edge will be the next instalment of The Long Way Round, later this week. The rest of the stories without links in them will then follow in that order.5 It’s a list which includes several stories I would seriously consider taking to a desert island, so I think it’s going to be a fun few weeks.
Around the time Whose Doctor Who? was made Doctor Who’s then script editor Robert Holmes said in an interview that he couldn’t remember who it was who said that the "golden age of science fiction was whenever the speaker was fourteen”, and while I was a little younger than that when BSB’s Doctor Who weekend happened, it does have a certain shiny metal Cyberman killing vibe for me. But here’s a thing. When I started thinking about this point in Psychic Paper, my memory was that this weekend took place on the 24th and 25th November 1990. I.e. that it was timed to coincide with Doctor Who’s anniversary. Hence the thought that this introduction to it would be released today. But it didn’t. Happen in November 1990, I mean. It was in September. Affixed to a weekend of no particular significance in Doctor Who lore. I was conflating it with another Doctor Who weekend three years later, on a different channel entirely. We’ll get there eventually. It just goes to show that, as someone else once said in relation to Doctor Who, “the memory cheats”.
I’m sure you can remember who. 6
People who like quoting Blade Runner. ↩
It’s Doctor Who’s birthday - and if you thought we did that in March, well, we did. But Doctor Who is like the monarch. They have two. ↩
The Daleks are kind of like people with autism, due to their similar inability to feel empathy. Apparently. ↩
(Presumably any third episode would have been called The Lip of Oblivion.) ↩
“…dovetails beautifully.” ↩
The person mentioned in this post. ↩