Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-26975268-20130309221950/@comment-188432-20130310065008

An anniversary is not a series. They are in many ways the polar opposite of each other.

Of course there's a source for "season" referring to the BBC era and "series" referring to the BBC Wales era. I say a source. I mean hundreds of sources, because I'd wager there isn't an issue of Doctor Who Magazine which doesn't use the word season. All of the Handbooks use that language, so let's see, The First Doctor Handbook, page 54. There's a specific source. The Discontinuity Guide (and therefore the official BBC website). There's another source. Anything written by Jean-Marc Lofficier. There's another handful of sources. Every single info text on every single classic series DVD eventually uses "season x" to tell you the season to which the story you're watching belongs. In DVD commentaries, no less than Barry Letts uses seasons all the time. Verity Lambert certainly used either the words "third season" or "season three" to describe The Time Meddler.

The old series has, for as long as it's been discussed, been considered divided into things called seasons which were numbered in whole integers from 1 to 26. There's zero conjecture about the "season for old Who, series for new Who" thing. This is why Paul Cornell, when he talked about that period of time between The War Games and Spearhead from Space, invented a thing he called the "Season 6B theory". Not the "Series 6B theory". Season.

I know that it is fashionable today for some British fans to openly rebel against the word season because they believe that it is a North American word. But almost everything that has ever been published professionally has consistently used the word "season" in connection with Doctor Who produced between 1963-89, and "series" for anything made by BBC Wales.