It is great news that the BBC has made available a huge amount of old Doctor Who content on iPlayer as part of the show’s 60th anniversary celebrations. I am especially pleased that all surviving episodes of ‘Classic’ Doctor Who––or just ‘Doctor Who’ as I know it––are now available to watch; An Unearthly Child the only exception. Despite having watched many of these episodes in the past, I have some significant gaps in my viewing, which it will be good to rectify. Significant gaps, which enlarge to gaping great gulfs the more I look at the site. A good proportion of Hartnell; a fair few Davisons; the same for Colin Baker; and practically all of McCoy. In fact, when I come to consider it, the only episodes that I have really watched have been during the Troughton, Pertwee and Tom Baker eras and, even then, there are glaring omissions. I realise that I have never seen The Mind of Evil or The Time Monster, FFS, and both of these occur during my favourite period of the show––the Pertwee/Manning years.
The suddenly-revealed scale of my Who-ignorance has come as a shock to me, and presented me with something of a dilemma. I could, of course, just attempt to watch all the episodes I have never seen before but, given how many this will be, would it be any greater endeavour to watch the entire run of ‘Classic’ Doctor Who––Doctor Who––all the way through from Hartnell to McCoy––I don’t count McGann––in chronological order, from beginning to end?
It sounds like a mammoth undertaking, but just how long would it take to watch every episode of Seasons 1 through 26 in real time? Even just trying to work out this figure is another mammoth undertaking in itself. I roughly tot up the number of episodes and multiple by 25––the average running time in minutes. During the Colin Baker years, there were quite a few episodes, which ran for 45 minutes, so I add on a bit extra for those. And then there was The Five Doctors, which ran for 90 minutes, so I add that to the mix, too. Stir it all around a bit, and I come up with a total of 16340 minutes; 272 hours; almost eleven and a half days. Over a week and a half of solid viewing, 24/7. It’s not gonna happen. Be more realistic. Say, I watched for one hour a day. It is still the best part of nine months glued to the screen. The BBC will probably have taken down the site before then, and I’ll have to wait until the 65th anniversary, or the 70th anniversary celebrations before I get another chance to see them.
I am left with a quandary.
Never mind, I’ll watch The Mind of Evil while I think about it.
© Bradley Dunbar
Bradley Dunbar battles his completist urges.
Bradley Dunbar’s latest book Surviving Herne Bay: With a Few Life Lessons from Doctor Who is due out from Mudskipper Press in 2024.
Mudskipper Press 