User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates/@comment-1272640-20161205203836/@comment-188432-20170525021639

The notion that the article only considers the pre-filmed portion part of the skit is fairly illogical and offends the spirit of T:OFF REL, actually. It's like saying you'll take Earthshock part 1, but not part 2.

I've never seen such an assertion on a Tardis article before, and it seems to me a kind of "trick" to steer clear of a likely-losing inclusion debate on the "part 2" that happens at the Royal Albert Hall.

Either the story stands as a whole, or it fails.

And this fails. See, SOTO has the most compelling point here. There is a difference between the Eleventh Doctor -- and Matt Smith appearing as the Eleventh Doctor.

We have a number of visual records of an actor appearing as the Doctor at a live event, like the opening of a business, but we don't think of them as being the First Doctor opening a supermarket, for instance. We consider them to be "William Hartnell appearaing as the First Doctor". Or "Tom Baker and Lalla Ward as the Fourth Doctor and Romana II" appearing in a Prime Computer commercial.

Clearly what's going on here is that Moffat wrote a little pre-filmed bit to allow for Matt Smith and Jenna Coleman to *poof* onto the stage with a little bit of flare. But it's Smith-as-Doctor, not Doctor. Are we really to believe that the Eleventh Doctor knows who Ben Foster is? Should we now consider the conductor of all the music on Doctor Who as a character in the DWU? No, that's a fairly big stretch.

The clencher for me is that the actors aren't credited as the Eleventh Doctor and Clara in the broadcast version, which is where we're supposed to take credits from. It's just a "special appearance" by Matt Smitha and Jenna Coleman -- who, by the way, do return to the stage as unambiguously themselves later on.

And taken as a whole event, and not just the skit in isolation of the event, the thing we're calling Bodyswap at the Proms (for reasons not entirely clear to me, btw) immediately leads into a behind-the-scenes documentary about makeup and prosthetics for the characters of Strax and Madame Vastra, who then "appear" on stage. So why are we not calling that a story, too? Cause it's obviously not. It's just a little bit of fun using the characters, in support of a behind-the-scenes bit.

So, as Bwburke and SOTO have already pointed out, it's NOTVALID.