In more than five decades of adventuring through time and space, Doctor Who has appeared not only on TV, but on film, radio, and across a vast range of books, CDs and LPs. Last week the show started exploring another dimension, with 500 classic episodes live-streamed in a viewing marathon on Twitch.
For the uninitiated, Twitch, is a video platform mostly devoted to gaming. When you sign up, you are asked to pick out some favourite video games and that choice shapes the channels and streams that are recommended to you. It’s an inherently interactive space: gamers are able to stream themselves playing to potentially huge worldwide audiences, with comments running in real time alongside their videos. And it is an intriguing place to suddenly start broadcasting black-and-white 1960s TV.
Twitch is devoting seven weeks to showing Doctor Who stories from the original 1963-1989 run of the show on its Twitch Presents channel. So far, Twitch claim the stream has had more than 60m totals views, with thousands of people watching the episodes simultaneously. Kezia Newson, who writes about the show as one of the contributors to The Time Ladies blog, has likened it to enjoying Doctor Who in “a gloriously large living-room party”.
The comments sidebar moves extremely fast, but still allows for communal jokes to emerge and develop. For example, every time Ian Chesterton (played by William Russell) and Barbara Wright (Jacqueline Hill) have been on screen together, unaccompanied, a joyous chorus of “KISS! KISS! KISS!” rises up, referring to the are they/aren’t they ambiguity of their relationship in those 1960s scripts.
Twitch has also added whole new catchphrases to Doctor Who fandom. In between each Hartnell episode a short trailer of clips from his era is repeated, to the point where key phrases from it, such as Ian exclaiming “London, 1965!”, have become social media shorthand for the whole marathon.
Where is the money in this? Presumably, the BBC hopes that the stream will spur DVD sales and interest in the show worldwide. While Twitch is using it to drive subscriptions at $4.99 a month, for which you get 18 exclusive Doctor Who-themed emotes to add to your comments.
Broadcasters with significant TV archives of cult material will be looking on with interest. Although there are a few new chatshow segments, featuring an array of Doctor Who writers and actors including author Paul Cornell and Katy Manning (who played Third Doctor companion Jo Grant), the main attraction is essentially old television being turned into appointment-to-view events.
You can easily imagine shows with extensive back catalogues and big fanbases such as Coronation Street, EastEnders, Top of the Pops or The Simpsons exploring the approach. Twitch has previously tended to stream anime rather than ancient TV, a format much more closely aligned to its usual gamer demographic.
The event has seen the hashtag #DoctorWhoOnTwitch break out of the realms of the gaming video service and on to other social media platforms. Series two’s oddball story The Web Planet trended on Twitter when it was streamed. Not bad for a piece of archive TV featuring a war between giant fibreglass ants that bump into the camera and bee-like moths that fly like pantomime Peter Pans.
However, watching episodes back-to-back that were originally designed to be watched a week apart in an era when there was no home recording does highlight some of the limitations of the Who format. The propensity of the Doctor’s female companions to unfortunately trip and damage their ankles just as the Tardis needs to make a quick getaway has not gone unnoticed by the contemporary audience that’s now binge-watching the show.
The marathon comes at a sensitive time for Doctor Who fandom, as the first series with a woman in the lead role approaches. Some fans have said they will refuse to watch the show with Jodie Whittaker as the Doctor, and there has also been consternation at the BBC unifying all merchandise under the new logo introduced for Whittaker’s tenure, abandoning the old series’ more more retro look.
Not everyone is thrilled by the addition of the Twitch comment stream, either, with suggestions that it whizzes by too fast to engage with, and detracts from the experience of watching the show. Newson disagrees, saying: “The live reactions have added a new charm to stories. Watching it via Twitch has brought hilarity, friendship and brought the fandom together closer than it was before. The show is what binds us together, and we’re all sharing in its joy, everywhere at the same time.”
For Doctor Who fans, the adventure on Twitch is only just beginning. Multiple stories will be streamed every week night until 23 July. Indeed, there is a bumper supply of Doctor Who online at the moment: the BBC is also making every episode of the show made since its 2005 reboot available on iPlayer in the runup to the new series.