Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-26975268-20130201045831/@comment-188432-20130208205022

SmallerOnTheOutside wrote: Hmmmmmmm, interesting answer. But shouldn't you consider the BBC America repeats of one story per Doctor historically significant, as it was/is in celebration of the 50th Anniversary, plus I think the first time BBCA aired those episodes? That's only in the same logic as the repeat of The Unearthly Child in the 90s is historically significant, which I agree with. Well, no, not exactly. See BBCA exists on reruns. Indeed, every broadcaster out of the UK depends on reruns of Doctor Who, since they don't originate the programme. So Imamadmad's point is well-observed: BBCA is not demonstrably more special than Space, ABC, TVNZ, CBC or any other national re-broadcater.

The difference with the November 1963 rebroadcast of "An Unearthly Child" is that it happened on the originating channel, and one that almost never reruns anything. As North Americans, you and I don't have too much experience of this phenomenon. If ABC reruns an episode of Castle, or SyFy shows us BSG one more time, we might be disappointed. But we don't think of it as extraordinary. It's a part of the everyday television experience in North America. It's what our broadcasters do because none of them actually has original content to fill their schedules for 365 days of the year.

But this isn't so with the BBC, and it especially wasn't true with the original version of Doctor Who. Most Doctor Who stories have, to this day, never been rebroadcast on BBC1. That's why BBC tv and BBC1 reruns of The Evil of the Daleks are worth noting, while BBC2 and BBC3 repeats of The Family of Blood are not.