Between 6 and 10pm almost 2 million more people were watching TV live on New Years Day 2018 than Christmas Day 2017.
Guess that’s the Amazon effect, and sales starting on Boxing Day. *shrug* Maybe they were testing new TVs bought in the sale. There’s a reason Christmas carries a status for shows. And I guess it depends on what who’s demographic is these days. I stand by my suggestion that Christmas Day is where you want your family series. Which is what it nominally is. Even if you want your teen and early twenties audience in, well, guess who’s in a retail job working New Year’s Day? Guess how you get new viewers? That visitor who you put the Who special on for by their request, then the kids and everyone is stuck watching it....or the kids have it on, and the family visiting on Christmas evening get stuck watching it too. If Christmas isn’t an important slot why did Moffat and Capaldi drag themselves through one more show for it? Oh. And we are less than a month from this special and the hype machine has given us nothing. A scarf and a second of a Matt Smith era speech in the mouth of Jodie. There’s a rumour about Daleks. But it’s just a rumour, and I am told not to believe in those. We might want to believe the loss of the Christmas slot this year is no biggie. We can hop though loops to say why it isn’t so. But...it is.
There's a limit to the number of hours in the day on Christmas Day, Who never had a Christmas slot before 2005 and frankly it just got lost in the morass and personally I'm looking forward to not having to shut myself away from family for an hour to watch it. It's not the end of the world at the end of the day.
I am not particularly het up about it. For some while now, I have accepted the shows trajectory. I do think it will be a shame if it fades into obscurity again, but I am not gonna champion it much either...loss of the Christmas slot is a bad omen.
Of course it's eminently possible Chibnall said "Do I have to do a Christmas special" On another tack it's worth noting that the finale on Sunday is the latest a series of modern Who has finished, literally just two weeks before Christmas Day, which might be another factor, by shifting to NYD there's more of a break between the end of the series and the special.
Yeah, all of that makes sense, particularly the need for a break. But let's not go crazy and drag logic into the discussion...
No, I argue the point. Possibly out of habit. There’s either the ‘christmas Special isn’t important, New Years is as good, must be better in fact, because that’s what the show has got and I like the show.’ Argument, which ignores all the facts about the place of the Christmas Special as a thing in the BBC and wider cultural landscape. And is motivated by a need to defend the show against what is seen as a detractor statement. Now it’s ‘why do you care’ well, why does anyone? There’s evidence, from the actions of the previous production team, that actually it is a big deal. That actually trying to avoid big gaps between series is a big deal. Why do I care? I dunno anymore. Apparently forty years ish of fandom isn’t enough to validate having an opinion amongst fans, unless it’s the right opinion, no matter how politely expressed. Familiarity with the TV landscape over here isn’t either apparently. ‘The Christmas Special’ carries a cultural weight here, has done for ages....Two Ronnies, Morecambe and wise, Only Fools and Horses.....all the nominal ‘family shows’. Who has been part of that landscape for thirteen years, and now that’s changing. You can think Jodie is the second coming of Troughton/Baker/Tennant and still logically see that as not a good sign, if you know that. I don’t much like being a Cassandra, but it’s not looking like we will see sixtieth anniversary specials frankly. I would like to be wrong, but atm even if the show is running, Chibnall looks like he will be taking the year off in 2023, and we will probably see arguments that maybe the sixty-first or sixty-third is the best place for a anniversary after all....
If we're honest, most, if not all, of the classic series "locations" were gravel quarries...and the occasional forest, probably no more than 20 miles outside London. Did they ever go to Africa, or even Scotland?
There was also the Azores, a region of Portugal. EDIT - they went to Wales for The Five Doctors. That’s more than 20 miles.
Quite right, Lanzarote in in the Canary Islands, so Spain. I keep getting them mixed up. Spain was visited twice; Planet of Fire and The Two Doctors.
There was also a car park. And an Mod Base. A lake...somewhere.... They did a lot on their teeny budget. I mean, Arundel is practically in Bognor Regis. And they used the same locations Spielberg was using. (Camber Sands, and probably the gas works they used in Silver Nemesis because that was in tons of films. Biggles for instance.)