Talk:Vodafone advertisement

Licence to use the Doctor?
Is there any evidence at all this passes rule 2 of Tardis:Valid sources? As one of his last performances, this should definitely be mentioned at Jon Pertwee but this seems like a case where the audience are meant to know who Pertwee is playing but that his identity is never explicity divulged as to not infringe copyright. Borisashton ☎  18:08, 31 May 2021 (UTC)


 * I see what you're getting at. The story notes (posted by the same person who created the article) outright state: "While Pertwee's character is not named directly, context makes it clear that the audience is intended to recognise him as the Third Doctor." If no one can provide any evidence of copyright permission, we will have to do as User:Borisashton suggests. Shambala108 ☎  00:39, 1 June 2021 (UTC)


 * If there's any doubt that he's meant to be playing the Doctor, I have found an article which affirms this and discusses it in the context of Pertwee's legacy and the show's public perception, if James Cooray Smith is considered a reliable source. He is not called "the Doctor" in dialogue, but that could just be because he has an extremely specific structural function to fill in this advertisement series, where a real supernatural entity (exactly equivalent to the one the agents have just debunked) always appears in a non-speaking role in the last five seconds or so, and even then the ad does make a point of displaying the word "DOCTOR" prominently on Pertwee's time-traveller character's door. It doesn't seem likely that Vodafone would publicise the details of the legal arrangements behind a five-second cameo stinger at the end of one ad in a series of several, but given that this is a professional production by a major corporation with an A-list cast I would assume everything was above board. Gowlbag ☎  02:00, 1 June 2021 (UTC)
 * Oh, we all know he's "meant" to play the Doctor. But the thing is, Sylvester McCoy is very much "meant" to be playing the Seventh Doctor in Punchline. There is no way to come away from the audio thinking he isn't meant to be the Seventh Doctor. But the script studiously avoids saying so in quite so many words, just to have legal plausible-deniability.


 * And I'm not sure "trusting a major corporation and A-list cast" is entirely within precedent if we've got reason to suspect something is amiss. The LEGO Batman Movie is major a production as it gets, yet we still deleted it when we found no evidence that its Paradigm Daleks appeared with due authorisation. Scrooge MacDuck ☎  10:39, 1 June 2021 (UTC)