October 09, 2011

The Tomfiles: #12 - Death of Doctor Who Confidential (2005-2011)

The news that Doctor Who Confidential has been axed has come as a great shock and sadness to a great deal of people. It has even prompted a campaign to get set up on twitter to try and bring the show back. This is due to the fact that the BBC has had its licence fee frozen by the Government until 2016. As a result this means that the BBC has to cut its budget by 16% as well as having to take control of the World Service and some of the costs of the Welsh language channel S4C. Over the last few months, the BBC has around 2,000 job losses as well as loss of sports coverage including Formula One.

The show was created in 2005 purely as a way that new fans to the show could understand its history and why the Doctor is the way he is and why the TARDIS is bigger on the inside than on the outside. It last around 45 minutes and in recent years has focused on interviewing the cast and looking at some of the people that make the sets and other stuff. Ok this is mildly interesting but after about 25 minutes I have found myself getting restless and wanting to change channels. In the most recent series, I have not even watched them because I have found them to be very poor in entertainment.

BBC Three has had its budget cut by 10% or £8.5 million pounds. According to the BBC website it’s “to nurture and develop shows for BBC One with some reduction in drama, music and entertainment”. Now this means that we are supposedly getting more original programming which will be worthy of the licence fee but considering this is the channel that gives us ‘Lee Nelson’s Well Good Show’, ‘Snog Marry Avoid’ and ‘Don’t Tell the Bride’ I’m not holding out much hope. However despite these shockingly bad shows they do show ‘Family Guy’, ‘American Dad’ and ‘Russell Howard’s Good News’ so if they do more of these shows as opposed to bridal vanity shows then that will be ok.

No other drama gets a behind the scenes show apart from Eastenders which occasionally and I mean occasionally gives us a one hour show. So why is Doctor Who so special? Most shows that are released on DVD get a behind the scenes disc and even when they release Doctor Who on DVD they present the cut down version of Confidential. Ultimately the main reason why DWC was axed was because it was probably too expensive. When you think about how much time is spent interviewing people, recording what’s going on and more then it must stack up to a whole lot. Considering what the ratings are for this show it’s a very poor return rate.

As long as Doctor Who is on the air, should we really be bothered that DWC has been axed. No, Doctor Who was and still is the main priority and the fact we are all getting so het up about it is frankly baffling. If the show were to come back in some shorter format then that would be fine but I won’t miss DWC. Let’s not forget that people are losing their jobs and some of them may find other jobs but some won’t and if you compare some job losses to the cancellation of a mildly interesting show then you should see which the inferior problem is. Doctor Who Confidential has been a supporting show to the main show but lets get our priorities right. DW is the show we should be enjoying and when they decide to cut that then we should get angry until then, let’s pause for a moment and wave goodbye to DWC.

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