Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-1506468-20131118205754/@comment-188432-20131120162050

Parodic doesn't have to mean comical. Though certainly that's a common definition, a parody is really something that imitates something else, but obviously falls short of being that something else. You can have an otherwise serious "parody of a wedding" simply by having no one present with the legal authority to perform it.

The Ultimate Guide sketch is a parody of a television episode because it cannot exist without the bit in the middle. The Doctor and Clara are shown to reflect upon the contents of the documentary that comprises the bulk of the show, so it's like a regular episode of Doctor Who, but it's not a regular episode. The plot resolution comes through the conveyance of non-fictional information.

Put another way, it fails Rule #1 of our four little rules.

Here are some additional comments from Talk:The Ultimate Guide (2013 documentary):


 * ...the sketch is an invalid source because it could not exist without reference to the documentary. It is thus essentially non-narrative. It's rather like all those puzzles in old Doctor Who Annuals which were introduced in an apparently in-universe way.  Or The Making of Doctor Who, which has elements supposedly written by the Doctor.  Or Tales from the TARDIS, a comic series in very early issues of Doctor Who Magazine which had the Fourth Doctor introducing a story, like The War of the Worlds or some old back-up comic strip from Marvel US anthological comics  — none of whose stories can actually be considered to be a part of the DWU.


 * A more recent example of the kind of thing we've disqualified in this regard is the National Television Awards Sketch 2011. Because the "narrative" of that sketch depends on believing the Doctor was somehow involved with the non-fictional awards show itself, we obviously can't include it, because that would logically mean that everyone who was in that awards show was a part of the DWU.  In the same way, we'd have to believe that Tovey's narration, the actors who played DWU characters, and every other interviewee were themselves a part of the DWU in order to admit the sketch.