DOCTOR WHO:

THE UNFOLDING
EVENT
Marketing, Merchandising
and Mediatizing a Brand
Anniversary

Matt Hills
 Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event

DOI: 10.1057/9781137463326.0001
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DOI: 10.1057/9781137463326.0001
 Doctor Who:
The Unfolding
Event – Marketing,
Merchandising and
Mediatizing a Brand
Anniversary
Matt Hills
Aberystwyth University, UK

DOI: 10.1057/9781137463326.0001
© Matt Hills 2015

Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-46331-9

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First published 2015 by
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www.palgrave.com/pivot
doi: 10.1057/9781137463326
 With much love to Emma, who sometimes watches
Doctor Who but prefers The X Factor

DOI: 10.1057/9781137463326.0001
 Contents
Acknowledgements vii

Introduction: Media Anniversaries – Brand,

Paratext, Event ... and the Hype of the Doctor 1
1 Marketing the 50th Anniversary –
Brand Management and the Cultural
Value of the Doctor 27
2 Merchandising the 50th Anniversary –
Public Service Consumption in the Name
of the Doctor 56
3 Mediatizing the 50th Anniversary –
Cinematic Liveness and the “Developing
Art” of the Doctor 80

References 109
Index 140

vi DOI: 10.1057/9781137463326.0001
 Acknowledgements
I would like to thank all my colleagues at Aberystwyth
University who have been helpful since my move there,
especially Glen Creeber, Beck Edwards, Kate Egan, Anwen
Jones, Steph Jones, Ceris Medhurst-Jones, Jamie Medhurst,
Lisa Richards, Sarah Thomas and Kath Williams. Thanks
also to everyone who has shared Doctor Who-related things
with me, including assorted 50th-anniversary events: Kim
Akass, Gaz Bailey, Piers Britton, Gregor Cameron, James
Chapman, Ross Garner, Catherine Johnson, Matthew
Kilburn, Danny Nicol and Harry Ward. Much appre-
ciation has to go to Dan Hassler-Forest for all his work
on our co-edited “Transmedia” book series at Amsterdam
University Press. I would also like to say a big “thank you”
to all my PhD students – past and present, at Cardiff and
Aberystwyth – who have been (and continue to be) such a
pleasure to work with.
In relation to the book you’re now looking at, Palgrave
Macmillan has been unfailingly patient and supportive;
my thanks there go to Sneha Kamat Bhavnani, Chris
Penfold and Felicity Plester. Also, many thanks to Paul
Booth for his valuable feedback on the manuscript, and
to Jon Gray for providing such a lovely (para-)paratextual
endorsement.
Beyond the many worlds of academia and Doctor Who,
thanks – as ever – are due to Mum, Dad, Stuart, Teresa,
Eleanor, Paul, Helen and Amy. And my heartfelt thanks go
to Emma and Noodles the cat for all the wonderful times
we’ve spent together, with many more hopefully to come.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137463326.0002 vii

 Introduction: Media
Anniversaries – Brand,
Paratext, Event ... and the
Hype of the Doctor
Abstract: Given the rise in media/brand anniversaries, I
consider Doctor Who’s 50th in 2013 as a case study. Such
anniversaries could be dismissed as pseudo-events, but we should
not devalue them as mere hype. Instead, I deploy a paratextual
approach, developed to become more phenomenological.
Rather than focusing on paratext–text relations, the media/
brand anniversary raises questions of inter-paratextual, para-
paratextual and meta-paratexual relationships of meaning. I also
address how media/cultural studies and philosophical approaches
to “media events” may be useful, arguing that previous work has
overly emphasized the ritual centrality (and national unification)
of media events. I conclude that a rigorously paratextual take on
anniversaries as “unfolding events” is required. This Introduction
thus develops, and contests, theorizations emerging from the
“paratextual cohort” in screen studies.

Keywords: anniversary; brand; Doctor Who; media event;

meta-paratext

Hills, Matt. Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event –

Marketing, Merchandising and Mediatizing a Brand
Anniversary. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
doi: 10.1057/9781137463326.0003.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137463326.0003 
 Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event

The Sunday Times TV critic A. A. Gill has recently opined that “[w]e
are being overwhelmed by anniversaries, like the continuously circular
Mayan almanac that marked the propitiousness of every day by remem-
bering all the previous events that had fallen on it” (2015: 14). He may
have a point; anniversaries have become a standardized part of media
culture – an increasingly unremarkable convention premised on cele-
brating the supposedly remarkable. James Bond celebrated his fiftieth in
2012 with “Global James Bond Day” falling on Friday 5 October.1 Star
Trek’s fiftieth is looming on the horizon in 2016. Similarly, Thunderbirds
commemorates its fiftieth anniversary in 2015, with the occasion due to
be marked via a range of new merchandise licenses.2 UK soap EastEnders
commemorated its thirtieth anniversary in February 2015 with a series
of live episodes, and Neighbours’ thirtieth birthday also falls in 2015. In
the same year that the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) SF TV
drama Doctor Who toasted its golden jubilee, the eleventh Doctor, Matt
Smith, featured on the cover of his alma mater UEA’s fiftieth anniversary
magazine (UEA 2013), whilst the ninth Doctor, Christopher Eccleston –
absent from Who’s celebrations – participated in the National Theatre’s
fiftieth celebration (Haill 2013). The rise of the programmed anniver-
sary has, perhaps surprisingly, not been widely interrogated in media/
cultural studies, despite featuring in work on TV, memory and nostalgia
(Holdsworth 2011: 1), and appearing in New Dimensions of Doctor Who
(Hills 2013a), at which point scholars were still looking ahead to the
programme’s big anniversary.
Doctor Who began on 23 November 1963, designed as a way of uniting
family audiences, and bridging BBC1’s gap between sports results and
early evening entertainment on a Saturday night. It featured a mysteri-
ous figure known as “the Doctor” (eventually revealed to be an alien
“Time Lord”) who travelled in space and time with his companions in
the TARDIS, a vessel disguised as a then-contemporary Police Box. The
series rapidly became a cultural phenomenon with the 1960s popularity
of “Dalekmania” merchandise capitalizing on the unusual design of its
science fiction monsters, the Daleks. And despite ups and downs, it was
a BBC staple through the 1960s and 1970s – its life extended by virtue
of the lead character being able to periodically “regenerate” into the
form of a different actor – before then starting to fall out of favour in
the late 1980s. Eventually cancelled in 1989, Doctor Who returned for a
US/UK co-produced “TV Movie” in 1996 before being reimagined by
Russell T Davies and BBC Wales in 2005. It now stands as one of the

DOI: 10.1057/9781137463326.0003
 Introduction: Media Anniversaries 

BBC’s superbrands, sold widely overseas and capitalized upon by BBC

Worldwide, the BBC’s commercial arm (see Jacobs 2012a and 2012b). My
aim in this monograph is to tackle Doctor Who’s 2013 celebrations as one
example of the wider trend for media anniversaries and to theorize such
commemorative practices more generally by drawing upon literature on
“paratexts” and “media events”, as I will outline in the next two sections.
Thus, although Doctor Who may already be “the most written-about
programme on British television” (Cooke 2015: 243), it is the “major
event” status of its 50th anniversary that specifically interests me here
(ibid.).
First, though, why have media anniversaries become so popular? In
part, I would say that their consolidation has been linked with “the
emergence of branding as a discourse” (Moor 2007: 5). And despite Liz
Moor’s suggestion that branding can be altered in different institutional
encounters (2007: 144), it tends to be enacted in reasonably stable ways
via media anniversaries. Focusing on TV, Catherine Johnson argues
that three specific textual attributes have supported branding activi-
ties, namely “longevity; transferability; and multiplicity ... [B]randing
favours ... texts that are most likely to offer multiple points of engage-
ment for viewers” (2012: 159–160). And if these qualities might best
underpin the maintenance of programme/broadcaster brands then
anniversaries can also intensify branding-friendly attributes, creating
a feedback loop between brand practice and TV show. Anniversary
brand extension permits an even greater degree of transferability
than might be usual: under the guise of cultural commemoration, a
TV series can find its character/narrative/design elements carried
over into documentaries, histories, docudramas, conventions, Proms,
special screenings and Q&As, coins, stamps, assorted merchandise of
all stripes and price points and even royal receptions. Multiplicity is
further heightened by this proliferation of products, tie-ins, associated
texts and “intertextual commodities” (Marshall 2004: 23), with differ-
ent markets and demographics being targeted by variant items. As
Simone Murray has pointed out:
At the core of the contemporary phenomenon of media branding lies the
abstraction of content from the constraints of any specific ... media format.
Content has come to be conceptualized in a disembodied ... form: any media
brand which successfully gains consumer loyalty can be translated across
formats to create a raft of interrelated products, which then work in aggregate
to drive further consumer awareness of the media brand. (2005: 417)

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 Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event

The anniversary, by justifying a spike in brand activity, permits this

“aggregate” to be culturally and affectively licensed, positioning it as
an issue of (fan) cultural capital rather than as a purely commercial
venture. And, of course, longevity is another key rationale: the media
anniversary is premised on highlighting cultural endurance. In terms of
brand management, then, anniversary celebrations are hugely valuable.
They cut through the noise of an “attention economy” (Webster 2014:
49), garnering audience awareness and potentially even exerting a social
pressure whereby viewers feel they should “join in”. Adam Arvidsson
has perceptively argued that the “purpose of brand management is to
guide the investment of affect on the part of consumers ... it is a matter of
creating an affective intensity, an experience of unity between the brand
and the subject” (2006: 93). And a TV birthday party also enables this
fusion by seeking to link audience memories, emotions and personal
self-narratives to narratives, in this case study, of Doctor Who and
the BBC (Banet-Weiser 2012: 8–9). In fact, one might almost say that
the brand anniversary enumerates affect. That is, within an “Episteme of
Affect” (Brinkema 2014: xi) it articulates affective intensities with an
objective interval of time – for example, 10, 20, 30, 40 or 50 years. This
challenges Aeron Davis’s view that “promotional culture ... feeds into
a large ... erosion of ‘trust’ ... due to the fast turnover of goods” where
“consumption can be a precarious, insecure and unstable occupation”
(2013: 195). Against this, anniversary commemorations necessarily valor-
ize longer-term arcs of meaning. What might otherwise seem too nostal-
gically indulgent, or overly subjective, is corroborated by quantification,
and by a “trust in numbers” to confer significance (Porter 1996). Rather
than a scenario where quantification and qualia are cut adrift from one
another (Boyle 2000), the media/brand anniversary integrates individual
affects with mass-mediated “emotional governance” (Richards 2007) and
hegemonic numerical objectivity.
Anniversaries therefore hold out the promise of cultural convergence
– they can unite marketing and production teams (contra Porter 2012:
75), as well as diverse (transnational) audiences, and they can unify
generations of viewers caught up in “re-promotion” of an old(er) series
(Grainge 2008: 140), as well as locking together subjective affect and
objective calendrical time. This is less a case of “ontological ambiguity”,
which Martin Kornberger suggests characterizes the (un)real brand as
an image (2010: 5), and more a case of ontological bridging. Anniversaries
represent one way in which a programme brand can progress via loops

DOI: 10.1057/9781137463326.0003
 Introduction: Media Anniversaries 

or intervals “that entangle the consumer” (Lury 2004: 9). In Brands: The
Logos of the Global Economy, Celia Lury focuses on the time of brands and
how they are updated and periodically overhauled. She notes that “in
most cases the brand has no single temporality, but rather co-ordinates
multiple temporalities” (2004: 13). These might include being of-the-
moment alongside being everyday, or being rare and collectable along-
side being reliably available. Lury gives Swatch watches as an example,
with the brand being organized through temporal logics of fashion –
updating its lines seasonally – as well as via temporalities of collecting,
that is, through special, limited releases (ibid.). Who’s media anniversary
also permits this kind of heterochronic diversity; across Doctor Who’s
50th there were collectors’ items such as a Silva Screen “TARDIS edition”
soundtrack release (Fairclough 2014a: 38) and rare ticket items such as
being a VIP at the 23rd November ExCeL “Celebration”. Seeing “The Day
of the Doctor” (hereafter sometimes abbreviated to “Day” or “DotD”) at
a 3D cinema screening meant being part of a commemorative “moment”,
while the show’s mass market merchandise retained a ready availability.
However, the media anniversary is not only a matter of product
diversity within branded unity. Jennifer Gillan (2015) has discussed what
she terms “brandcasting”: this is television aimed at reinforcing corpo-
rate or channel/programme brands, which hybridizes promotion and
content. It becomes unclear whether brandcasting is promoting itself
as a brand, or whether it offers up media “content”. Paul Grainge and
Catherine Johnson make a similar argument when they recount how
“branded entertainment encapsulates the fluid boundaries of promotion
and content within contemporary screen culture and reveals the shifting
industrial configurations, and trade theorizations, that sit behind this
change” (2015: 24). Brandcasting involves pervasive activities of brand
management, and BBC Wales’ Doctor Who has had several brand manag-
ers/executives since its 2005 return, such as Ian Grutchfield and Edward
Russell. Managing the Who brand means ensuring semiotic consistency
across intertextual commodities, making sure that commercial strategies
are appropriate, and safeguarding “the ‘reputational asset’ of the BBC’s
corporate brand” (Johnson 2013a: 107).
At the same time, “brandcasting is always conflicted and often
contested, because as much as it tries to pre-create meaning, it cannot
predetermine it” (Gillan 2015: 11). Managing a brand can therefore
involve becoming caught up in tensions and contradictions, between
public service broadcasting and commercialism (Catherine Johnson

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 Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event

2013b: 316) or between textual “world-building” and tie-in licensees’

“world-sharing” (Thompson 2003: 102; Derek Johnson 2013: 109).
If media anniversaries have been somewhat neglected by TV/cultural
studies, then more general work on the culture of anniversaries has
remained overly judgmental. For example, William Johnston concludes
that the “cult of anniversaries helps cultural programmers to achieve
consensus” (1991: 39) over which incidents, texts and creators deserve
commemoration in a socially fragmented, postmodern context where
cultural value allegedly cannot be presumed. For Johnston, anniversa-
ries lead to “commercial overkill” (1991: 66), where a “free market in
commemorations” dominates public discourse (1991: 69). Indeed, the
first example of a “pseudo-event” given in Daniel Boorstin’s critique of
PR and celebrity, The Image, is that of a planned, commercialized “anni-
versary” aimed at boosting business:
The owners of a hotel ... consult a public-relations adviser. They ask how to
increase their hotel’s prestige and so improve their business ... The public rela-
tions adviser ... proposes that the management shall stage a celebration of the
hotel’s thirtieth anniversary ... The celebration is held, photographs are taken,
the occasion is widely reported, and the object is accomplished. Now this
occasion is a pseudo-event. (1963: 21)

For Boorstin, the “pseudo” component means that any such anniversary
constructs the cultural status it supposedly commemorates: “the celebra-
tion itself becomes evidence that the hotel really is a distinguished
institution” (1963: 22). Following Boorstin, we could perhaps argue that
Doctor Who’s fiftieth was a pseudo-event aimed at reinforcing the show’s
status as a BBC flagship drama; at offering a rationale for public service
broadcasting’s (trans)national capacity to generate cultural unity; and
at leveraging the Doctor Who brand in a manner congruent with BBC
Worldwide’s mission to return funds to the BBC.3
Continuing a critical approach to anniversaries, TV Studies’ scholar
Billy Smart has questioned the validity of such events, noting that
The difference between commemoration of the fiftieth anniversaries of Doctor
Who last year and The Wednesday Playy in 2014 could hardly have been more
marked. I feel as though I have lived through general elections that got less
press coverage than the Doctor Who anniversary, while the only attention
given to The Wednesday Playy was half a dozen BFI screenings ... I don’t see
why ... [media texts] should automatically become more worthy of my interest
now just because they first appeared in 1964. (2014 online)

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 Introduction: Media Anniversaries 

Smart raises the question of what qualifies for anniversary lionization.

Why celebrate Doctor Who so fulsomely in 2013, yet barely commemo-
rate The Wednesday Playy in 2014? It would seem that anniversaries are
present-oriented: they celebrate the past, but only on the basis of its stra-
tegic value in and for the current moment. Anniversaries tell us about
broadcasters’ priorities as they stand now. The Wednesday Playy may be
valorized by scholars (Dunleavy 2009: 74–76), but it does not possess
wide contemporary currency. By contrast, Doctor Who already enjoys the
likes of Christmas Specials (Brabazon 2008; Budgen 2014) and substan-
tial merchandise/overseas sales, remaining powerfully articulated with
Britishness (Selznick 2010; Sweet 2014). The Wednesday Playy may facili-
tate a mode of “BBC nostalgia” (Holdsworth 2011: 95 and 113), but Doctor
Who’s 50th anniversary role was arguably more as a BBC metonym, where
it is possible “to perceive ... Who as exemplifying key aspects of the tran-
sitions that have occurred in the BBC’s role” (Hayward and Fitzgerald
2013: 148). Indeed, the Beeb’s director general, Tony Hall, could not resist
equating Doctor Who and the BBC when he contributed to the Radio
Times in anniversary week:

If I may be allowed a small plug, it was the BBC that brought William Hartnell
to that scrapyard in 1963. The BBC who nurtured it and invented the miracle
of regeneration to explain cast changes. And after the decision to cancel the
show was reversed, it was the BBC who reinvented it with some of the best
acting and writing on television, anywhere in the world. And you can now
watch the Doctor ... in 206 territories ... Each has fans tuning in and buying
the merchandise ... All that helps the BBC generate income to spend on high-
quality programmes at home. (2013: 29)

The anniversary evidently has a commercial intent, but this plug also
testifies to the BBC’s role in “nurturing” programmes. There is an
implicit “risk rhetoric” here (Becker 2007: 281), a sense of the BBC
behaving in ways that outright commercial television supposedly would
not, and taking more of a chance on a show. The BBC’s 1980s running
down of the series, culminating in its 1989 cancellation, is glossed over:
“the decision to cancel the show” is grammatically unattributed. Yet
we are told that it was the BBC, via marked and attributed agency, who
“invented” and “reinvented” the series. Such an account renarrates
Who’s past in defence of a specific BBC agenda and public service iden-
tity in the present day. Rather appropriately for a TV programme about

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 Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event

time travel, Doctor Who’s fiftieth would seem to be a celebration of the

past that is, more significantly, about the BBC making an argument for
its relevance now. There is precious little that’s nostalgic about BBC
Worldwide tooling up for a merchandising bonanza. Nor was there
a strong sense of nostalgia about the deployment of a synchronized
cinema/TV release, targeted at reinvigorating the BBC’s capacity to
provide “mediatized ritual in ... limited, singular, authentic time”, a task
that is “becoming increasingly difficult as continuous broadcasting,
dissemination, sharing, circulation and remediation means that ... ritu-
als can now be played out ... in different time zones and personal
times ... experienced in new, multi-temporal ways” (Sumiala 2013: 87).
By demarcating a multi-platformed and cinematic-televisual “zone of
liveness” on 23 November 2013 (Crisell 2012: 45), the BBC constructed
its “Day of the Doctor” as a day of imagined national and cultural unity
stretching beyond television screens.
In this book I want to explore Doctor Who’s fiftieth in relation to the
hype which attended it, addressing the build-up to 23 November as well
as after-the-event critique and celebration. An increasingly influential
approach to this kind of promotion and merchandising has been “para-
textual” analysis (Gray 2010; Adams 2014: 231), and it is that I’ll develop
next before moving on to consider another strand of scholarship on
“media events” (Dayan and Katz 1992). By “paratexts” are meant all the
bits of media content that circulate around – and in relation to – film/
TV texts, whether these are trailers, posters, magazines, DVD making-
ofs and so on. And paratexts can also occur at the boundaries of a film/
TV text, for instance: a title sequence, theme tune or credits list. What
all these satellite materials share is a sense of attempting to frame the
text “itself ”, directing audience attention in particular ways. The term
paratext is originally drawn from literary theory addressing how novels
are framed, for example, by book covers and forewords or author inter-
views (Genette 1997a: 4–5; Moody 2007; Phillips 2007). As the pioneer
of paratextual analysis, Gerard Genette, has noted, paratextuality is “first
and foremost a treasure trove of questions without answers” (1997b: 4).
I want to focus on some new questions, even if final answers are not to
be found: why might the paratextual paradigm need to be developed
towards a more strongly phenomenological stance? What is it about
media anniversaries that calls for meta-paratextual analysis? These are the
issues I turn to next.

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 Introduction: Media Anniversaries 

Anniversary conventions: rethinking paratexts

The media anniversary draws on a number of by now conventional

industry practices. Creating a “milestone moment” (Holdsworth 2011:
36) in narrative terms can be linked to recommodifying established or
ageing intellectual property; anniversary editions allow rights owners to
spark new ancillary after-markets, keeping products “alive” and revivi-
fied (Klinger 2010: 4; Murray 2005: 417). And anniversaries have given
rise to specific genres of merchandise – anniversary-badged DVDs/
blu-rays; collectors’ editions of action figures which can be highly desir-
able to fans who have grown up alongside a franchise (Luckhurst 2014:
8); and themed books which collate reproductions of memorabilia from
across the years (Hearn 2013).
Contemporary film and TV anniversaries can also be understood
in relation to other, earlier brand anniversaries. With “Global James
Bond Day” and Skyfall preceding Doctor Who’s golden anniversary, both
showrunner-fan Steven Moffat and an SFX X reviewer intertextually linked
Who to Bond. Interviewed in The Guardian, Moffat suggested that Skyfall
offered a template for “DotD”:
“It’s such a hell of a thing to work on, and there is a sense of responsibility,”
admits Moffat ... ”In the end I thought, let’s just try to make it a really, really
good d one. Do what James Bond did with their 50th – a story that’s so good in
its own right that it stands up as a 50th special.” (Harrison 2013 online)

And reviewing the episode in commercial fan magazine SFX, X Russell Lewin
likened its opening TARDIS action sequence to the recent Bond movie:
“We began by sweeping over London Skyfall sky to Trafalgar Square...Early
on the TARDIS smashing the Daleks’ tops off made a statement of ambi-
tion” (2013: 125). While this journalist-fan’s invocation of James Bond fits
into a discourse of cinematic television – Doctor Who is assumed to show its
“ambition” by becoming Bondian – Moffat’s referencing works in a rather
different way. Here, he stresses a notion of textual quality, as if tuning out or
wishing away the “Burden of the 50th” and all the publicity surrounding it
(Harrison 2013). Bond is cited not as a code for action–adventure TV with
a filmic scope, but rather as a model for prioritizing textual storytelling over
paratextual business, and thus for elevating the “text itself ” in relation to
other (downplayed) branded content. Moffat’s position is one that implicitly
devalues hype as a frivolous distraction.

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 Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event

Bond and Who have not only collided intertextually via their brand
anniversaries. Writer Naomi Alderman links Skyfall to a “Doctor Who
theory”:
Skyfalll in my view is ... the British people’s first attempt at groping towards
an acceptance of the fact that one day the Queen is going to die ... She’ll be
replaced by this man who’s ... a bit awkward, and we’re not sure if we can
trust him ... Bond is a particularly British kind of role, and Doctor Who is the
same. The actor may change but the character is always the same. It is about
the monarchy, that sense of continuity. ... Somebody who will keep the firm
running. (Stevens with Alderman 2014: 13)

Doctor Who’s anniversary was, in fact, paratextually affirmed by a royal

visit in July 2013,4 during which Prince Charles attempted a robotic
Dalek voice. But despite this seal of approval from the heir to the British
throne, neither the Doctor nor James Bond can simply be aligned with
a “sense of continuity”, as Alderman implies. Their more than 50-year
runs have also been marked by discontinuity (Britton 2011: 17) and by
different “moments” or phases of ideological (re)configuration (Bennett
and Woollacott 1987: 42; Chapman 2013, 2014: 43–44). And where James
Bond’s 50th anniversary “special”, the film Skyfall, has been analysed
as a matter of Bond’s ageing body (Dodds 2014: 120) or as represent-
ing a “nostalgic longing” for a Cold War political context (Hasian Jr
2014: 572), “discourses around the fiftieth [Doctor Who] anniversary –
as exemplified in press releases, media coverage and interviews ... –
provide insight into ... the sense that Doctor Who is an achievement to
be celebrated for its ... place in British popular culture ... [while] there
is also an emphasis on its future” (Chapman 2014: 57). Less centrally
focused on ageing and the past, November 23rd’s special Who episode
“DotD” featured a brief cameo from Peter Capaldi, for example (who
had been recently cast as the twelfth Doctor), gesturing to the show’s
imminent rebranding (Hills 2014b) as well as powerfully rewriting its
Time War backstory (Wittenberg 2013: 7; MacRury and Rustin 2014:
299).
It is ironic that Steven Moffat draws on Bond’s anniversary to suggest
that hype should be filtered out in favour of good storytelling, since he
enacts this move in paratextual promotion for Who’s anniversary – a
Guardian interview published on 18 November 2013. Devaluations of
hype occur as hype, suggesting that we still need to look beyond the “text
itself ” to paratextual arrays of signification.

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 Introduction: Media Anniversaries 

Paratextual study has, in point of fact, been incredibly useful thanks

to the manner in which it has moved beyond traditional textual analysis
alone. As Jonathan Gray and Amanda Lotz have argued:
To parse out all paratexts ... is conceivable, yet an analytical exercise alone,
and one that moves away from the audience’s experience of the program
with each subtraction ... While “textual” analysis may continue to extricate
paratexts for the sake of a more easily manageable “close reading” ... one must
always remember the damage that is being done to the text-as-experienced
by engaging in such analysis. (2012: 134)

Paratextual study aims to (re)construct the industry and audience relays

through which viewers may actually encounter a text, rather than arti-
ficially stripping out all the staging posts of paratexts in order to posit
some “pure” text–audience encounter – an encounter that is no longer
the “text-as-experienced” by readers. Paratextual analysis thus aims to be
more rigorously phenomenological, that is, attentive to how texts mean,
and how this is a process unfolding over time: “we must move away
from questions of textual ontology – what is the text? – to questions of
textual phenomenology – how does the text happen?” (Gray 2010: 41). As
such, Jonathan Gray’s work investigates “the importance of approaching
textuality phenomenologically, seeing how it becomes ... , and paratexts
are often an all-important first outpost” (2013: 102).
However, while Gray offers an impressive argument for paratextual
work – and has been positioned as part of a “paratextual cohort” of
scholars all turning away from the “text itself ” (Doherty 2014) – this
approach generates a number of issues. First, there is the paratext–text
relationship. Although Gray allows that what are defined as “paratexts”
and “texts” can shift position (2010: 125), and also that some paratexts
can be disarticulated from textual meanings altogether (2010: 210), he
continues to assume that paratexts most significantly relate to primary
texts. What this replaying of John Fiske’s earlier positing of a “direct”
relationship between secondary and primary texts (1991: 65) seems to
disavow is the possibility that paratexts might relate just as strongly to other
paratexts. For example, the official Doctor Who Magazine (hereafter DWM)
certainly works paratextually to (p)review Doctor Who TV episodes as
texts. But it also reviews spin-off novels and assorted merchandise, as
well as reviewing the anniversary webisode “The Night of the Doctor”
(hereafter sometimes given as “Night”), BBC3’s Doctor Who Live: The
Afterparty, BBC2’s The Science of Doctor Who and so on. DWM M is a licensed

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 Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event

paratext which itself devotes coverage to an array of other branded para-

texts. Its relationship is not simply to an anchoring text. As Thomas A.
Bredehoft has pondered, perhaps we need a new category here, a “sort
of ... inter-paratextual ... referencing” (2014: 143–144).
However, Gray’s work does move “beyond the single paratext”, ponder-
ing “how entire release strategies and marketing plans are created, tying
paratexts together so that their individual acts of creation of value and
meaning are co-ordinated and complementary” (2013: 103). But this
moves prematurely from individual paratext–text relations to an entire
system, rather than permitting contingent disruptions and even contra-
dictions across paratexts. Such a move addresses inter-paratextuality,
but only by positing planned, co-ordinated paratexts. What might be
considered as para-paratextuality, for example, the fan-journalistic
reviewing of merchandise, remains underexplored by this presumption
of integrated industrial paratexts.
By contrast, some of Doctor Who’s fiftieth anniversary paratexts were at
odds with one another: the earliest merchandise, for example, a themed
Monopolyy edition, did not carry the “50” TARDIS logo, which subse-
quently became a marker of licensed anniversary merchandise, hence
appearing to be aligned with unofficial material such as Radio Times’
features carrying an imitation of the BBC graphic (Gatiss 2013: 16) rather
than with official products. And the tie-in novel Engines of Warr (Mann
2014) was promoted by BBC Books as a “War Doctor” novel – that is,
featuring the John Hurt version of the character introduced in “DotD”
(Guerrier 2014: 49) – whereas an official toy sonic screwdriver and
action figure released shortly after 23 November 2013 were described in
their packaging as belonging to “the Other Doctor”, using the character’s
description in the “Day” screenplay (Pixley 2014: 16). Thus subsequent
commercial BBC paratexts were at odds with pre-planned merchandise
paratexts (the “Other Doctor’s Sonic Screwdriver” was available at the
ExCeL “Celebration” the day after the anniversary special had been
broadcast). Instead, Engines of Warr took its cue from the War Doctor’s
end credit in “Night”. Here, a non-televised paratext (the anniversary
special’s script) was inter-paratextually reinforced by planned merchan-
dise that had to be manufactured in advance of TV transmission, but this
merchandise was then overwritten by a red button/online paratext, “The
Night of the Doctor”. The end result is a curious one: fans can browse
commercial websites where “the Other Doctor’s Sonic” is illustrated in
product packaging photos, alongside descriptions of “the War Doctor’s

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 Introduction: Media Anniversaries 

Sonic” in website text.5 It may be argued that these paratextual tensions

are insignificant to textual meaning, or to audience engagements with
the anniversary. But fans are often paratextual completists (Mathijs and
Sexton 2011: 23) and are therefore keenly aware of inter-paratextual
inconsistencies. Also, altering the nomenclature of one of the Doctor’s
incarnations inflects how the John Hurt Doctor is understood – as a
dark, world-weary warrior (Crofts and Lynch 2014: 3) rather than simply
as an “other” addition to the show’s mythos.
Gray’s emphasis on paratext–text relations in Show Sold Separately
(2010) potentially downplays the extent to which paratexts can become
texts in their own right (Gillan 2015: 14; Grainge and Johnson 2015: 35;
Calbreath-Frasieur 2015: 228). And although his discussion of The Lord
of the Rings permits (para)textual oscillation (Gray 2010: 125), a number
of writers have challenged the conceptual division of texts and paratexts
more strongly (Gascoigne 2011: 25; Bredehoft 2014: 156; Brereton 2012:
204; Lunenfeld 2000: 14). Texts and paratexts can collapse together in
a series of ways. For example, a very brief clip from “Day”, showing the
Doctor and Clara looking at the “Gallifrey Falls” painting, was circulated
online ahead of the episode’s broadcast. But was this textual or paratex-
tual? (Hills 2014a: 183). It was not edited into a trailer format, and thus did
not recontextualize its brief moment of the Doctor and Clara standing in
front of Time Lord artwork, but merely replayed their gaze at an absent
object (the reverse shot being withheld). Pointedly acting as a lure for the
episode – what are the characters seeing? – this textual excerpt of just
a few seconds’ duration became an instance of paratextual promotion
before reverting to textual status after broadcast, when it no longer made
any sense for audiences to deliberately view it in isolation. Paratexts and
texts can also be folded together in other ways (Rolls and Vuaille-Barcan
2011: 167): “DotD” concluded with an oneiric dream sequence in which
Doctors one through to eleven lined up as if for a marketing image,
strongly recalling publicity paratexts for the anniversary (Hills 2014c:
103–104). Utilizing a dream sequence meant that “narrative pyrotechnics”
integrating all of Doctor Who could be deployed (Burkhead 2014: 42–43),
as well as blurring extra-diegetic marketing and diegetic imagery.
Philip Sandifer has argued that from 1980 story “The Leisure Hive”
onwards “any competent reading of Doctor Who has to remain aware
of the paratext because the paratext is genuinely part of the storytell-
ing” (2014: 271). Paratext and text are viewed as entirely intertwined
here, and although Sandifer modifies this argument for BBC Wales’

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 Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event

Who – where paratexts regarding narratives of the show’s production

become added-value extras rather than essential to understanding the
text (2014: 272) – he nevertheless suggests that “some paratext is still
necessary to understanding the show at all. The new series requires that
the audience know what a season premiere or a season finale is” (ibid.).
In this case, the paratexts that Sandifer refers to represent ways in which
TV series are structured industrially, and which have become part of
fan audience discussion; concepts of the season premiere/finale offer, in
essence, another way in which paratext and text have collided.
In Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, Gerard Genette’s taxonomy of
paratexts includes the following type: “By factual I mean the paratext that
consists ... of a fact whose existence alone, if known to the public, provides
some commentary on the text and influences how the text is received”
(1997a: 7). The anniversary, I would suggest, belongs in this category, but
it does more than influence how “Day” is received – it also co-ordinates,
without systematically foreclosing, an array of commemorative paratexts.
Thus, as a factual paratext, Doctor Who’s anniversary does not simply
perform a para-paratextual or inter-paratextual role. That is, it is not
only a paratext that frames other paratexts (like DWM M reviews) or that
connects paratexts within a coherent marketing campaign (such as reus-
ing and modifying a standard promotional image for “DotD” online and
in cinema posters). Rather, the media anniversary is meta-paratextual: it
stands as a key, privileged paratext which informs and underpins a vast
swathe of further content produced across the “paratextual industries”
(Consalvo 2007: 183).
Genette was aware of the possibility that what I’m terming a meta-
paratext could take on this kind of enhanced role, although he viewed
the issue as a deviation from standard paratexts: “like all relays, the
paratext sometimes tends to go beyond its function ... , from then on
playing its own game to the detriment of its text’s game. ... Actually, the
same principle holds ... for the author as for the reader ... watch out for
the paratext!” (1997a: 410). Indeed, paratextual expectations linked to
Doctor Who’s golden anniversary – a subject of fan speculation well in
advance, with fans already asking what was in store at the 2012 Official
Convention (Williams 2013) – were so great that Steven Moffat discussed
“Day” as a responsibility:
I don’t think I’ve ever worked on anything that was as difficult ... and as much
of a responsibility as writing the 50th anniversary episode ... I wanted every-
body to love it. I knew that was impossible, but I wanted people – from those

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 Introduction: Media Anniversaries 

who had never seen it, to the absolute diehard fans who hate every episode
I’ve written – to love it. So it was monstrously difficult and very hard: the
uncastable cast, the impossible brief, the unwritable script. (in Armstrong
2014: 11)

The anniversary is positioned as a pressure acting on Moffat: a definite

case of “watch out for the paratext!” However, it is important to note that
paratexts cannot be assumed a priori to act as “strong” determinants
of textual meaning (Gray 2008b: 47), nor to function transparently as
windows on production. In some cases, paratexts might instead playfully
iterate producers’ understandings of fans’ expectations. For example,
in 2013, Steven Moffat’s DWM M column was temporarily commandeered
by the previous showrunner Russell T Davies: “Well, that was a bit
disappointing. I was hoping for one of the classic producers”, comes the
punchline, with Moffat referencing fans’ hopes that “classic” Doctors
(pre-2005) would feature in “DotD” (Moffat 2013a: 6). This relates
much more to fannish prefigurations of the anniversary than to textual
meaning or production activity. In other instances, paratexts can contest
Doctor Who’s branding discourse rather than feeding into it. This was
the case when Russell T Davies spoke about whether BBC Wales’ Who
would celebrate its tenth anniversary (2005–2015) two years after the
overall show’s fiftieth:
The former showrunner ... replied with a polite “thanks but no thanks” when
approached by the Corporation. “Someone from the branding team sent me
a very lovely email saying do you want to do something ... I don’t know what
they imagined: a talk or a convention perhaps. I just said no ... A programme
can’t have its fiftieth and then it’s tenth ... that’s just confusing”. (in Dowell
2015 online)

Both Moffat and Davies negotiate with “the anniversary” as a co-ordinat-

ing meta-paratext – Moffat displaying sensitivity to potential fan disap-
pointment, and Davies refusing to co-operate with tenth anniversary
plans from the BBC’s brand management team. Self-reflexive anniversary
paratexts therefore explicitly engage with fan/industry prefigurations of
commemoration, rather than aiming to shape textual meaning or offer
specific insights into “behind-the-scenes” production practices. While
the anniversary, as a factual paratext, can inform and inflect an array of
associated paratexts – shaping a kind of anniversary paratextual “set” –
some of these paratexts also speak back to their meta-paratextual under-
pinning. Media/brand anniversaries do not only permeate merchandise,

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 Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event

hype and marketing, their meanings, expectations and operations can

also be challenged and refined within paratextual interventions.
In what follows, then, I will be exploring a range of paratextual rela-
tions. The anniversary meta-paratext constitutes a privileged framing
of many other paratextual products and promotional bits of meaning,
whilst inter-paratexts centrally reference other specific paratexts. Para-
paratexts, meanwhile, work to (re)frame a targeted paratext. In actuality,
even these analytically defined relationships do not take us into a fully
phenomenological expression of paratextual arrays, since multiple
paratexts might reflect on one another via chains of contextualization,
or audiences might position the leading anniversary text, “Day”, as mere
paratextual support to prestige docudrama An Adventure in Space and
Time, say, or to something else, such as their everyday use of Doctor Who
stamps across 2013. However, exploring paratexts not only, or definition-
ally, as activations of “textual” meaning takes us further into the experi-
ence of contemporary media culture.
Several provisos remain. First, paratextual surrounds tend to be
nationally specific – this study is very much rooted in the UK context,
and alternative analyses could be carried out in the United States,
Australia or Canada, for instance, given that Who has previously been
theorized in relation to these national contexts/identities (Knox 2014;
Catriona Mills 2013; Frey 2013). Secondly, I approach “DotD” as the
central text around which other materials are paratextually positioned
– this, I would say, is the constellation of (para)textual relations offi-
cially, temporally and discursively posited by the BBC, and my case
study thus deliberately investigates such a frame. For example, Doctor
Who Live: The Afterparty was broadcast on BBC3 immediately follow-
ing on from “Day”; the notion of coming “After” here implies that the
main, textual focal point of the anniversary was the November 23rd
episode. Likewise, the multi-Doctor Big Finish audio and anniversary
celebration, “The Light at the End”, was released a month earlier than
expected on 23 October 2013, as if to avoid clashing with the main
textual event of “DotD”, thereby gaining a space of its own (for fan
discussion and reception) in the commemorative calendar. And yet
“Day” was not identified or labelled as an “anniversary special” in any
of its “peritexts” (credits and titles inside the text) – instead, this classi-
fication existed purely through “epitexts” outside the text, for example,
publicity interviews, journalistic coverage and fan discussion (Genette
1997a: xviii). At the same time, though, the peritextual function of the

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 Introduction: Media Anniversaries 

episode title, “Day of the Doctor”, worked to reinforce the actual day of
(first) broadcast as significant and commemorative – if anything, this
peritext made more sense in terms of supporting the primary textual
position of “DotD” at the heart of a surrounding paratextual array
than it did in terms of cueing understandings of the episode’s narra-
tive (whilst also fitting into a sequence of similarly structured titles:
“Name of the Doctor”, “Time of the Doctor”). Taking on a publicity
function in advance of broadcast, then, “Day of the Doctor” is not
only a peritext in Genette’s terms, but is also both inside (appearing
on-screen) and outside the text, circulating promotionally ahead of the
episode. Although Genette suggests that the “time of the title’s appear-
ance raises no problem, in theory: the title appears upon publication
of the original ... edition” (1997a: 66), this literary fact is no longer the
case either for books or TV shows – titles are typically revealed far
ahead of texts, acting as hermeneutic lures and self-adverts. And in this
instance, blurring epitext and peritext resulted in a story title that not
only fed into paratextual hype but also aimed to reinforce the central,
textual status of the episode.
This emphasis on an important “Day” of Doctor Who reminds us that
paratextual hype is not the only component of a film/TV anniversary
that needs to be theorized. Anniversaries are also, by definition, highly
time-sensitive: they celebrate a specific temporality and a given interval
of time. Consequently, they are frequently enmeshed in discourses of
“liveness” and the importance of audiences participating in a here-and-
now moment of consumption. The “Day of the Doctor” was 23 November
2013, with cinemas being instructed on when to begin their screenings
in order to guarantee simulcasts with BBC TV. The area of academic
study that I want to consider next, then, before bringing it into dialogue
with paratextual analysis, is that concerning “media events”. What kind
of event is a media anniversary? And how might the “event concept”
(Biltereyst and Meers 2006: 72) be particularly useful in thinking about
media/brand anniversaries?

Anniversary moments: rethinking media events

If the “pseudo-event” (Boorstin 1963: 22–23) gives rise to an overly bleak

view of anniversary celebrations, then a rival stance on media events has
been viewed as rather more positive – that of Daniel Dayan and Elihu

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 Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event

Katz (1992). Paddy Scannell argues that their groundbreaking Media

Events
is a book about television with “a halo”, auratic television we might call it ...
The aura of the extraordinary event shines brightly as it ... stands out from
the ordinary, the humdrum and routine. The occasional event comes with
(creates and generates) a sense of occasion ... Media Events ... is a study of
television that properly acknowledges its worldliness; that does not approach
it as if it were a problem, a social disorder or pathology. (2014: 178)

Following this alternative lead, we could view media anniversaries not as

commercial exploitations or attempts at cultural consensus-building, but
rather as experiential moments of “social transcendence” (Rojek 2013:
14). Scannell strongly contests academic perspectives on the TV event
that reduce it to “ritual” with a societally centring and ideological impact
(Couldry 2003). However, for critics such as Rojek (2013) and Scannell
(2014), media events have a phenomenological value, something alleg-
edly missed by critical readings:
A deflationary view of events refuses to acknowledge the possibility of the
greatness of occasions. It will always see through that aspiration and find a
way of puncturing it ... Media events are precisely not to be judged by the
usual political criteria, and if they are, they will simply slip through your
fingers like butter. Anyy political interpretation of media events is deflationary.
(Scannell 2014: 178)

Set against this, however, is the possibility that critical and celebratory
interpretations of the media event may not constitute a binary: the
transcendent experience of an event can still be commodified within an
“experience economy” (Pine II and Gilmore 1999: 12) or within themed
“Disneyization” (Bryman 2004: 12–13; Dixon 2013: 79). Events can thus
be “regimented with well-nigh military precision and professionally
managed in order to convey the appearance of spontaneity and the
presence of solidarity ... [by] the PR-media hub” (Rojek 2013: 21). The
difficulty this poses is that by attempting to deconstruct any critical/
celebratory binary, we may end up positing one side of the anniversary
coin as fundamental and the other as epiphenomenal – for example,
audiences feel that commemorative events are memorable and person-
ally, communally or socially valuable, but really they are caught up in
structures of commodification, brand management, and immaterial/fan
labour (Hardt and Negri 2004: 108; Fuchs 2014: 64–65; De Kosnick 2013).
Or alternatively, peoples’ event experiences appear to be pre-structured

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 Introduction: Media Anniversaries 

or interpellated by capital and the “PR-media hub”, but in factt (fan) audi-
ences can experientially transcend these cultural-political co-ordinates
via personal/cultural memory work, intense use value or the heightened
fan cultural capital of “being there” (Jenkins, Ford and Green 2013; Hills
2014f; Auslander 1999: 58n38). What’s needed is a truly “both-and” stance
rather than a weighting or (in)authenticating of dimensions of the media
event which ends up being either deflationary or inflationary.
If it is important to avoid rigging the scholarly game a priori for or
against media anniversaries, then it is also important to ascertain exactly
how they might fit into taxonomies of the “event”. Dayan and Katz
define the media event as follows: such occurrences are “interruptions
of routine; they intervene in the normal flow of broadcasting and our
lives. ... Typically, these events are organized outside the media, and ... the
media only provide a channel for their transmission” (1992: 5). Rather
counter-intuitively, then, for these writers the entertainment brand anni-
versary would not be a true media event. Dayan and Katz offer other
criteria:
These events are preplanned, announced and advertised in advance ... There
is an active period of looking forward, abetted by the promotional activity
of ... broadcasters ... Media events privilege the home. This is where the “historic”
version of the event is on view, the one that will be entered into collective
memory ... Media events preview the future of television ... Indeed, the genre
of media events may itself be seen as a response to the integrative needs of
national and, increasingly, international communities. (1992: 7, 22–23)

In addition, Dayan and Katz suggest that media events briefly suspend
the multiplicity of audience interpretations and practices – social
networks no longer intervene, they argue:
[Though i]nterpersonal networks and diffusion processes are active before
and after the event ... fostering intense hermeneutic activity over its interpre-
tation ... during the liminal moments, totality and simultaneity are unbound
... All eyes are fixed on the ceremonial centre ... Social integration of the high-
est order is thus achieved via mass communication. (1992: 15)

There are a number of ways in which this definition does, and does
not, fit Doctor Who’s 50th or other media/brand anniversaries. Dayan
and Katz were prescient in describing media events as the “future” of
television, given their increased accumulation as a way of seeking to bind
(trans)national audiences together across a fragmented mediascape.
Akin to the planned finales of long-running TV series, anniversaries are

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 Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event

also a perfect example of the “announced and advertised” media event,

quite unlike catastrophes (Doane 1990; Zelizer 1993; King 2005). But
Who’s 50th obviously did not hail from outside the media, and it also
did not straightforwardly privilege the home. One might argue that it
was viewing on the big screen in 3D which was prioritized as the gold
standard for golden anniversary spectatorship, being positioned as more
extraordinary than merely viewing at home. Nor can one sensibly posit,
in an era of social media, that social networks are suspended in the
centring moment of an anniversary event (Dayan and Katz’s argument
belongs to a pre-Internet era). Quite to the contrary, “DotD” helped to
drive social media traffic (BBC Worldwide 2013a; Doctor Who Tumblr
2013). And neither can it be implied that “totality and simultaneity are
unbound”, as if all audiences are transfixed by a socially integrative media
event. Brand anniversaries typically inflate the ratings for a TV show,
but they remain the province of committed fans and casual audiences
(Henderson 2014: 115), rather than magically integrating all of a nation in
focused attention (Moran 2013: 4 and 373).
Bearing in mind these difficulties with Dayan and Katz’s model,
a number of scholars have sought to reconceptualize media events.
Andreas Hepp and Nick Couldry propose a new subset:
popular media events break with the everyday but in a much more routine
way; they do not monopolize ... media coverage in total, but in a certain
segment ... ; they do not happen “live” but in a continuous development ... ;
they are mostly organized by the media themselves not just as pre-planned
but as completely commercialized; ... often they ... generate the attention of
certain cultural segments (e.g. ... youth cultures). (2010: 8)

The emphasis on “continuous development” resonates with Dayan

and Katz’s stress on “an active period of looking forward” linked to
broadcasters’ “promotional activity”. Given the paratextual approach
I have already introduced, we might note that both media events and
“popular media events” clearly call for paratextual study. And yet despite
recognition of an unfolding temporality that precedes and prefigures
the “moment” of an event, media events have most often been treated
as matters of ritualized integration, reinforcing a “media centre” within
society rather than addressing the multiplicity of narrative figurations
circulating before, after and around an event (Couldry 2003). We might
say that as a result of the event’s “extraordinary” status, moments of
transcendent television – and thus broadly textual orientations – have
spuriously taken precedence over paratextual approaches.

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 Introduction: Media Anniversaries 

Zizi Papacharissi’s recent book Affective Publics offers one way forward,
observing that
affective structures of storytelling [linked to platforms such as Twitter] turn
an event into a story and ... these stories may sustain a variety of distinct, yet
imbricated, events. The events may be read as super-empirical events, blend-
ing the empirical with the virtual, and thus sustaining both accounts of actual
and wanted, desired outcomes. (2015: 56)

Live-tweeting as an event unfolds (or is anticipated) enables people’s self-

narratives and communal affects to become imbricated (2015: 56–57),
making it vital that the rhythms and affects of (re)narrated paratexts
are studied. Social networks don’t switch off in the face of contempo-
rary media events: rather, they are energized by, and in turn work to
narratively (re)activate, the paratextual prefigurations and after-images
of a brand anniversary. Paratexts aren’t just read in relation to texts; they
are themselves narrated – especially by completist fans – as part of an
“extensive arc” (Bassett 2007: 30) pieced together through promotional
fragments, some planned, some subverted, some contradictory or
incoherent.
Other philosophical approaches have also sought to move away from
the broadcast, mass-mediated text of any given media event by drawing
on notions of the event as a Lyotardian singularity (Bennett, Kendall and
McDougall 2011: 161–162; Bennington 2005: 127), although given that
media anniversaries iterate a set of PR/industrial conventions and brand
discourses, it seems difficult to argue that they can be understood in such
a manner. Likewise, critical-theoretical philosophies of the “event” have
stressed its rhythmic, virtual potential lying beyond subjective percep-
tions (Ikoniadou 2014: 21; Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 156), along with
viewing an event’s emergence as operating outside clear lines of cause
and effect (Žižek 2014: 4–5, drawing on Badiou 2007). It is hard to avoid
the feeling that there is a full-blown romanticization of the event (as
rupture or transformation) taking place here, one which even goes so far
as to resist classifying “events into species and sub-species ... [because]
such an approach ignores the basic feature of an event: the surprising
emergence of something new which undermines every stable scheme”
(Žižek 2014: 7).
There is something of this hyperbolic romanticization in Scott Lash
and Celia Lury’s otherwise productive work tracing media events as
“objects” rather than texts (see also Staiger 2000: 163). For Lash and

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 Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event

Lury, a key methodological commandment is to “ ‘follow the objects’.

We were self-consciously developing a sociology of the object ... along its
biographical trajectory” (2007: 16; Appadurai 1986; Kopytoff 1986). As
Lash and Lury go on to argue:
In our methodological assumption that media are objects is also implicit the
understanding that media are not texts. Perhaps media did work at one point
predominantly as texts – that is, as if they were narratives, or as if they were
discursive in their effects – but to investigate media as objects assumes that
they are no longer texts. You interpret texts. You use objects. ... [M]edia have
come to act less as texts and more as things ... or as environments. (2007: 29)

For these sociologists, a media event is not simply an integrative text or

broadcast, but is instead an intersecting number of different trajectories,
where “the biography of a single object combines the paths of ... value
chains” (Lash and Lury 2007: 39). Any given event, for instance, Doctor
Who’s golden jubilee, can therefore be studied by following it as an
“object” through all its platforms, transitions, merchandising, memes
and commentaries, considering not only the “temporal sequencing of
production, distribution, and consumption, but also ... duration or differ-
entiation ... This enabled us to consider our objects ... as a set of relations,
that is, always coming into existence” (Lash and Lury 2007: 17–18). Any
such model of an event carries with it paratextual as well as temporal
implications: again, we need to do more than isolate out paratext–text
relations, focusing significantly on temporal sequences of paratexts, and
the duration of anniversary (para)texts as well as their modulations and
changes. This fits well alongside Papacharissi’s turn to the “becoming of
the event” through narrative and affective infrastructures (2015: 56), as
well as the typology of differing event “levels” set out by Daniel Biltereyst
and Philippe Meers (2006: 75). As Biltereyst and Meers point out, media
events can circulate at very small-scale marketing levels, or at very wide-
ranging societal levels, and without properly considering these different
reaches (and movements between them), “the concept of the ‘media
event’ is often under-theorised” (Biltereyst and Meers 2006: 74), if not
falsely assumed to be nationally/communally integrative and culturally
omnipresent.
However, although Papacharissi avoids repositioning media events as
wholly extra-hermeneutic and beyond audiences’ narrative discourses
– quite the reverse, she is interested in the “rhythms” and “polyphonic
tonality” (2015: 59–60) of affective-narrative appropriations via social

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 Introduction: Media Anniversaries 

media – Lash and Lury go on to embrace this mode of Deleuzian

romanticization:
Investigators, subjects and objects are, in this view, singularities ... They are
events ... In phenomenology ... [sense-making] is established in meaning and
narrative. In, let us call it cartography, ... sense-making happens through
some sort of navigation ... It is ... not sense-making through interpretation or
the construction of narratives. It is, instead, knowing through ways of doing,
some sort of orientation or navigation. (Lash and Lury 2007: 31)

Oddly, this opposition to any hermeneutics of the media event runs

somewhat counter to the analysis actually offered by Lash and Lury.
When they discuss Wallace and Gromit, for example, they argue that the
International Licensing Manager at the BBC was concerned with licens-
ing products that would make sense if imagined as part of the characters’
lives. Fans picked up on this cross-product narration of merchandising
(2007: 100–101), whilst those working on the Wallace and Gromit licenses
constructed a distinction between themselves and Disney, who were said
to push for a far greater range of merchandise that was less tied to char-
acter authenticity (2007: 101–102). Despite Lash and Lury’s theoretical
commitments, it is hard to see such industrial/consumer narratives as
being consistent with an anti-hermeneutic stance. Instead, in line with
those who have stressed the discursive construction of media events
and objects (Fiske 1994: 4–5; Hills 2015; Kelleter 2014: 3 and 32), there
is a sense that anniversary moments, and the heightened moments of
media events more generally, need to be read in relation to the “ambient
chorus” of paratexts which stretch before and after them (Papacharissi
2015: 59), as well as layering into a phenomenological polyphony of
inter-, para-, and meta-paratextual relations through which extra-
diegetic narratives can emerge and/or be contested. Although watching
new Doctor Who may have “always been an ‘Event’ for fans” (O’Day 2013:
7), who have staged viewing parties for series premieres/finales, as well
as attending BFI premieres in recent years, this communal contextu-
alization of television remains rather different from the way in which
brand anniversaries function as events. Industrially pre-programmed,
and often thoroughly commercial, contemporary media anniversary
commemorations nevertheless open onto contingency and contestation,
both in terms of involving multiple industrial agents (Johnson 2013a:
99) and in terms of being refigured or (re)narrated by audiences. Such
events may not be anti-hermeneutic “becomings” or singularities whose

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 Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event

effects transformationally outrun their causes, yet if “culture is a flow

of unique events, these could still be understood as texts but paratext
and appropriation would be always-already a part of the chain of events”
(Bennett, Kendall and McDougall 2011: 162). It is in this sense, and as
part of an anniversary constellation of (para)texts, that I will continue to
discuss Doctor Who’s texts.

From Unfolding Textt to U

Unfolding Event

Thus far, I have suggested that paratextual approaches have often been
insufficiently phenomenological to tackle the multi-paratextual array
of materials co-ordinated (but not foreclosed) by the “anniversary” as
a factual paratext itself. Here, the anniversary acts as a meta-paratext
supporting brand discourses and corralling large numbers of other para-
texts. Within such a proliferation, the notion of any direct relationship
between “paratext” and “text” is lost amid the “explosive” production and
(potentially completist fan) reception of dispersible textuality (Mathijs
and Sexton 2011: 23; Austin 2002: 30). Paratexts take on cultural value and
status in their own right, and in relation to other paratexts, rather than
simply being tied back to a primary text (Calbreath-Frasieur 2015: 228;
Fiske 1991: 65). But if we perhaps need to complicate or extend the work
of the “paratextual cohort”, we also need to critique earlier approaches
to media events. In this instance, work has either been “deflationary”, in
Paddy Scannell’s terms (2014: 178) – viewing “pseudo-events” as tanta-
mount to manipulation/ideology – or it has emphasized the ritualistic
centring and social integration of media events over any consideration
of how events can present an unfolding temporality of anticipation and
remembrance. Although Zizi Papacharissi has productively revisited
contemporary media events as “super-empirical” blends of social media
and mass media narration, fractured into multiple stories and competing
or dispersed versions of any given “event” (2015: 56), this move still tends
to stress an in-the-moment version of media events, live-tweeted via the
refrains of Web 2.0 users. But anniversaries are a different kind of event
from in-the-moment catastrophes or disruptive political happenings,
since the anniversary can be scheduled and anticipated. Where paratex-
tual approaches have been less phenomenological than they really need
to be, media events’ work has been overly text- or broadcast-oriented
and hence typically insufficiently paratextual.

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 Introduction: Media Anniversaries 

I am theorizing what amounts to an unfolding event, that is, an array

of textual and paratextual materials that follow an inter-related (and
sometimes contingently delayed or rescheduled) release chronology,
and which audiences can speculatively await as well as specifically
revisit – for instance, Doctor Who’s 50th anniversary was reactivated by
the release of Engines of Warr (Mann 2014) at the end of July 2014, the
availability of the “Year of the Doctor” DWM Speciall (Pixley 2014) in
August 2014, and the unofficial, fan-created charity anthology Seasons
of Warr (May 2015) in early 2015. The unfolding event therefore follows
a hermeneutic arc (Ricoeur 1984, 1985, 1988; Bassett 2007: 178; Singh
2014: 174) which exceeds any one text – it is prefigured via audience
expectations, and producer–audience interactions, configured via an
array of (para)textual materials, and subsequently refigured by audience
understandings and further producer–audience exchanges, as well as by
forms of cultural recognition (reviews, features and awards). Unfolding
events therefore frequently give rise to “redecoding” (Gray 2006: 34–35),
as they have an after-the-fact “long tail” of neo-refiguration which is
never fully completed. Jonathan Gray observes that “ ‘[a]nniversary
journalism’ will later ... assign new meanings” to historical happenings
(2010: 45), but more than this, media anniversaries can enjoy their own
later anniversaries. For example, Doctor Who’s tenth anniversary Radio
Times Special from 1973 was reissued as part of the programme’s fortieth
anniversary merchandising (Radio Times Shop 2003). And the twentieth
anniversary TV story, “The Five Doctors”, received a twenty-fifth anni-
versary rerelease on DVD (i.e., 45 years after the show began). On this
BBC Worldwide model, it is not wholly implausible to suppose that a
new version of “DotD” might be reissued in 2023 as a tenth anniversary
edition of the fiftieth anniversary special (Richards 2013: 57).
If TV studies’ scholarship is itself rampantly paratextual – although
not always “academic merchandising” (Hastie 2007: 88) – then this
book is itself inter-paratextual. Where my previous monograph on Who
referenced a story title from the show (Hills 2010), this time around
my title refers to Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text (Tulloch and Alvarado
1983), the very first scholarly book published on the series. The Unfolding
Textt was also an anniversary tie-in of sorts, issued in the programme’s
twentieth year (Booy 2012a: 107). More than 30 years later, my shift from
“unfolding text” to “unfolding event” suggests that we can no longer
simply carry out textual analysis of the “primary” text (or production
study used to illuminate “the text itself ”). We need, like the “paratextual

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 Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event

cohort”, an orientation which addresses the hype generated within

media culture, hence exploring “the wider textual universe” (Menotti
Gonring and Crisp 2015: 7) of paratextuality. But as far as anniversaries
are concerned, we also need to think about how paratexts relate to other
branded paratexts in a variety of ways, rather than artificially isolating out
paratext–text relations and so reducing the phenomenological density of
audience–paratext encounters. At the same time, we need to analyse the
anniversary as an event that can be pre-textually prefigured as well as
post-textually refigured – that is, as a hermeneutic arc rather than as an
“object” without narrative, a pure singularity, or a ritualistically unifying
broadcast. In short, I am suggesting that we need to integrate a revision-
ist paratextual approach with a “media events” approach in order to
adequately analyse the marketing (Chapter 1), merchandising (Chapter 2)
and mediatizing (Chapter 3) of brand anniversaries. I will begin this
task by focusing on a number of Doctor Who’s 50th anniversary trailers/
posters.

Notes
 http://www.007.com/celebrate-the-50th-anniversary-of-james-bond/
 http://www.licensing.biz/big-interviews/read/itvs-ge-s-trudi-hayward-on-the-
50th-anniversary-of-thunderbirds/039554
 http://www.bbcworldwide.com/annual-review/annual-review-2014.aspx
 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01c8v3w
 http://www.entertainmentearth.com/prodinfo.asp?number=UT05152

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 1
Marketing the 50th Anniversary –
Brand Management and the
Cultural Value of the Doctor
Abstract: This chapter considers how the BBC used spin-off
texts – positioned as paratexts – in the build-up to “The Day of
the Doctor” and afterwards. Anniversary publicity incorporated
BBC paratexts drawing on its public service ethos. However,
tensions between this ethos and commercial “fan service”
inflected the anniversary’s blurrings of promotion and content,
beginning with a San Diego Comic-Con trailer. Doctor Who’s
anniversary paratextual array acted as a BBC metonym,
standing for the Corporation’s identity. But brand discourses
were never omnipresent: Who’s 50th confronted damaging
rumours and spoilers via worker paratexts. And acclaim such
as a Guinness World Record didn’t securely consecrate the
show. Chapter 1 therefore considers how paratexts can open up
devaluing discourses as well as aiming to elevate Doctor Who’s
cultural value.

Keywords: awards; BBC metonym; insecure consecration;

inter-paratexts; rumours; Trailers; worker paratexts

Hills, Matt. Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event –

Marketing, Merchandising and Mediatizing a Brand
Anniversary. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
doi: 10.1057/9781137463326.0004.

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 Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event

Having argued that we need a more phenomenological approach which

takes in relationships between paratexts, and that we need a rigorously
paratextual approach to popular media events such as anniversaries, in
this chapter I will analyse how Doctor Who’s 50th was marketed. As Liz
Moor has remarked, “branding is perhaps the most dominant form of
marketing discourse currently in circulation” (2007: 144). Yet, precisely
because of its links to marketing and commerce, hype can sometimes
be a dirty word; its “pattern of (over-)exposure signals a lack of social
and cultural ‘value’ ... on the part of the ... [media text]” (Austin 2002:
65; Gray 2010: 113–114; Hills 2013d). And hype can be assessed by audi-
ences as a false promise (Gray 2008b: 47). If Steven Moffat sought to
tune out anniversary expectations in terms of “telling a good story” (see
the Introduction), he also mused on hype as a threat to the Who brand:
“There has been more hype than I thought possible, and vastly more
than I thought (in my weaker moments) wise” (Moffat 2013b: 6).
Thomas Austin’s Hollywood, Hype and Audiences argues that any
“dispersible text” (i.e., a blockbuster) has elements purposefully designed
into it that can be broken apart from the film and marketed or merchan-
dised by themselves, in the hope of drawing audiences into the “primary”
text:

These processes of dissemination, recruitment, and ancillary consumption

are anticipated ... by the particular construction of the dispersible text, and
are commonly represented by the term “hype”. In addition to their commer-
cial function, such mechanisms multiply and complicate the promises,
interpretations and invitations-to-view offered on behalf of the [text]. (Austin
2002: 30)

Austin stresses this multiplicity: “hype” cannot be viewed as univocal

and nor is it always integrated, contra industrial fantasies of “integrated
marketing communications” where a campaign seamlessly moves across
a range of media channels or uses them in complementary ways (Powell
2013: 5). A range of different paratextual voices can instead overlap,
generating harmonies in some cases, but clashing discordantly in others.
Hype therefore leads to a range of extra-diegetic narratives which
surround something like Doctor Who’s celebration. These narrative arcs
do not necessarily “belong” to specific paratexts, but instead emerge
through the accumulation and status of assorted paratexts (e.g., are they
“official”; are they leaks; are they fan-generated?). The next chapter will
explore the anniversary hermeneutics of public service broadcasting

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 Marketing the 50th Anniversary 

versus commercialism, while Chapter 3 addresses different media (this

was a “TV” anniversary marked by 3D cinema screenings). Here, I
prioritize the issue of Doctor Who’s cultural value, considering how
an array of paratexts – and texts positioned as paratextual supports to
“DotD” – attempted to reinforce Who’s presumed cultural capital, whilst
also navigating off-brand contingencies and paratextual conflicts.
I will begin with what has been termed the “Early Trailer” for “Day”,
though it should be noted that speculation over the anniversary special
predated this (Pixley 2014: 11), as did fans’ analysis of “DotD” filming
at locations such as Trafalgar Square, London, and Mamhilad Park
Industrial Estate in Wales (see Griffiths 2013: 318–319). I will then
consider a specially filmed anniversary trailer made by Red Bee Media,
before turning to fan-made paratexts such as “The Day of Doctor
Who” (Brockhurst 2014). After addressing these, I will address indus-
try paratexts which challenged Doctor Who’s brand management and
information control, such as the BBC’s own Newswatch, Private Eye
reports, and actor Tom Baker’s approach to publicity. I’ll then zero in on
the week or so leading up to “Day” (Klinger 2006: 8) when the density
of hype increased significantly in the United Kingdom, constituting
a further wave of anniversary prefiguration via The Science of Doctor
Who and An Adventure in Space and Time (Biltereyst, Mathijs and Meers
2008: 38).
In the closing section, I’ll explore the anniversary’s immediate “cultural
afterlife” (Singh 2014: 170) in a variety of refigurations such as Doctor
Who Live: The Afterparty, and The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot. Although
scholars have sought to distinguish paratexts that extend diegetic narra-
tive – dubbed “transmedia storytelling” – from those that do not (e.g.,
Bolin 2011: 100; Mittell 2015: 261), it is my contention that in marketing
terms there can be no hermeneutically “unincorporated” paratext (Gray
2010: 208). However semiotically thin or redundant a paratext may
appear to be by itself, and however cut adrift from the diegetic universe
it may be, it can still add to the “aura of omnipresence” surrounding a
text (Klinger 2011: 207), or communicate a sense of rampant commer-
cialism (Wasko and Shanadi 2006: 36). Treated inter-, para- or meta-pa-
ratextually, paratexts will always resonate with, or resolve into, emergent
narratives of a franchise’s success, failure, durability, artistry and so on.
However, these are narratives off a franchise, not narratives in a franchise.
Although it may well be possible to analyse “trailers and sneak-peeks”
from a transmedia perspective, as well as going “beyond fiction” to

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 Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event

address any narrative, whether documentary, journalistic, branding or

marketing, as transmedial (Scolari, Bertetti and Freeman 2014: 4), work
on transmedia storytelling has nonetheless tended to centre on diegetic
expansions (Jenkins 2006, 2007 and 2011) akin to the appearance of
the eighth Doctor, Paul McGann, in webisode “Night of the Doctor”, or
diegetic intersections such as The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot. By contrast,
my interest lies in how the factual paratext of a brand anniversary
can underpin cultural narratives about a TV show’s history and hype,
status and reception. Such issues, I would say, are better understood as
paratextual (re)framings – as “omnidiegetic” material (Sarah Atkinson
2014: 7) traversing production information, industry knowledge, brand
values andd transmedia storytelling – rather than being approached purely
as transmedial experiences. Given my focus on paratextual narratives of
the anniversary itself, I will conclude by analysing industry/fan awards
in 2014, considering how these reframed the 50th. First, though, what of
early paratexts for “DotD”?

Trailers and tributes: from SDCC to 1973

Screened at San Diego Comic-Con in July 2013 (Kelly 2013), the very
first trailer for “Day” was subsequently made widely available to UK
fans on the story’s 2 December DVD/blu-ray release. This illustrates how
national and fan-cultural contexts can lead to very different experiences
of paratextual arrays (Brunsdon 2010: 73) depending on whether these
are available to audiences or collected together on DVD releases. The
lack of this trailer’s pre-textual availability to UK-based fans was picked
up on when Steven Moffat was interviewed by trade magazine Broadcastt –
another case of one paratext being para-paratextually debated:
Comic Con attendees ... got first glimpse of a trailer for the 50th anniversary
special, a bone of contention for some British fans who felt that licence-fee
payers were being slighted. Moffat is having none of it. “Comic Con has a
history of screening exclusive material ... [D]on’t you think it would have been
a little bit early for everyone to see it? We were creating a buzz about it among
the people who’d slept out all night for it”. (Parker 2013: 27)

However, the binary that’s set up between “everyone” and “exclusive”

SDCC content fails to engage with fan arguments that they, as a culture
and a community, wished to have access to official new Who material in

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 Marketing the 50th Anniversary 

July, some four months ahead of transmission. Moffat’s exclusivity/mass

opposition has an excluded middle – namely, UK and digital fandom
(Booth 2010), which now tends to expect advance, target-marketed
promotional material as a matter of course. As Keith Johnston has
pointed out, one major development of the Internet era has been the
“idea of ‘modeling’ ... [trailers] for the fan/cult audience ... As trailers were
debated and picked apart online to reveal potential ‘spoiler’ information,
trailer production complicated the process, adding in more images and
increasing the pitch of editing” (2009: 137). By ignoring this “online
concept of modeling trailers to attract particular elements of Internet
fan culture” (Johnston 2009: 150; see also Hartwig 2012: 226–227), the
SDCC paratext didn’t only cue speculation over “DotD” for those who
were lucky enough to see it (Kernan 2004: 13), it also worked against
fan audiences’ expectations of paratexts, opposing an overarching narra-
tive of fan-targeted online provision. Hence we need to remember the
“complex temporality of trailers” (Johnston 2009: 24) which can act as
post-textual extras for paratextually completist fans, but can also be
prefigured by paratextual industries and audience expectations. Trailers
are always-already prefigured in a series of ways, regardless of any other
relationship they might possess to a text.
Protecting SDCC’s fan cultural capital while building the Who brand
in America therefore meant pitching one fannish expectation (that
SDCC would deliver something special to in-person attendees) against
another (that the “Day” trailer would circulate online, targeted at wider
fandom). Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford and Joshua Green call this the
Comic-Con “push for exclusivity” rather than a broader online “push for
publicity” (2013: 145). They suggest that the latter approach from market-
ers – combining “real-time happenings in San Diego” with Twitter feeds
and video uploads – may be more successful, as it allows “passionate cult
audiences” to participate in spreading and co-promoting trailers and
other marketing paratexts (Jenkins, Ford and Green 2013: 146).
The result of BBC America’s decision to prioritize exclusivity over
publicity was frustration for all those online fans unable to attend the
Con. But promoting “DotD” in this way also raised the issue of whether
BBC America (and BBC Worldwide) should still primarily be account-
able to UK fan audiences within a global TV marketplace. The decision
to screen a trailer exclusively at SDCC suggests that Who’s US-oriented
brand strategy – as well as attempts to strongly limit the flow of paratex-
tual information – remained divorced from any UK public service BBC

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 Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event

identity whatsoever. Moffat justifies the practice by referring to SDCC’s

identity – it “has a history” of securing extremely desirable exclusive
screenings, we’re told – but notably neglects the BBC’s history.
Any separation between the BBC as a (UK) public servant and the BBC
as a (US/international) marketer for Doctor Who becomes somewhat
problematic – if not untenable – when trailers can circulate transnation-
ally via digital fandom. The strategic efficacy of premiering a trailer at
SDCC was that it built on the Con’s relationship with Who as a brand:
[S]hows like Doctor Who gain more status, being compared to and billed with
colossal Hollywood franchises ... and San Diego Comic-Con diversifies its
market and cult audience to include international Doctor Who fans ... Thus, in
the process, Doctor Who becomes a recognizable international brand, moving
away from the traditional UK series. ... San Diego Comic-Con offers BBC
America and Doctor Who the status of appearing in Hall H ... Comic-Con has
in effect changed Doctor Who as [an] international cult text. (Geraghty 2014:
111; Salkowitz 2012: 103–104)

The post-broadcast UK DVD release relabelled this SDCC promo as

an “Early Trailer”, wholly exnominating Comic-Con, as if conscious
of the controversy that had been sparked among UK fans. Despite this
paratextual non-integration (and attempt to rewrite the trailer’s origins
and history) the US source of the trailer remains evident, given that it
refers to the anniversary episode being shown “THIS FALL”. The SDCC
trailer also uses intertitles to frame its excerpts in a specific way, stat-
ing that “THIS FALL ... THE DOCTOR WILL FACE ... HIS DARKEST
DAY ... AND HIS GREATEST THREAT ... HIMSELF”. The implication
is that John Hurt is playing a villainous doppelganger version of the
show’s title character. Through what Lisa Kernan terms “discontinuity
editing”, the SDCC trailer’s “alternation, combination and abbreviation
of scenes ... construct[s] a new trailerr logic, differing from (yet, obviously,
related to) the narrative logic” of “Day” (2004: 10). Yet as audiences
would discover, Hurt’s “War Doctor” is not, in the end, a threat to the
tenth and eleventh incarnations. But the “trailer logic” displayed here is
one which uses narrative gaps between images to endow “what we do
see ... with a kind of ... underdeterminacy that allows audiences to create
an imaginary ... [episode] out of these fragments ... filling-in ... trailer
enigmas with an idealized ... [text]” (Kernan 2004: 13). Even viewed
after “DotD” as a DVD/blu-ray extra on the vanilla release (Johnston
2014: 85–86) or on the subsequent 2014 “50th Anniversary Collector’s

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 Marketing the 50th Anniversary 

Edition”, trailers still facilitate this textual idealization, especially when

they diverge from the text.
When the BBC eventually released a trailer that was aimed at the
mass/UK audience then this was original work from Red Bee Media,
who have enjoyed a long-term relationship with BBC Wales Doctor Who
in terms of producing its promotional, interstitial TV material (Grainge
2011: 98–100; Ellis 2011: 64). As Who historian Andrew Pixley notes,
Red Bee Media ... came up with ... a ... piece to emphasise the Special’s 3D.
This began in monochrome ... and then used a 3D bullet-time technique
to take the viewer on a journey through ... images from the show’s 50-year
history ... [The] First Doctor ... was presented in high-resolution colour for the
first time, created in Photoshop by Framestore VFX from a black-and-white
still of the actor taken during the story The Web Planet. (2014: 12)

This trailer very much corresponded with the “modeling for fans” scenario
recounted by Johnston (2009: 150), being made up of many objects and
characters from the show’s past, as well as zooming past material (William
Brown 2013: 50) in a way that called for freeze-framing to spot the numer-
ous intertextual references. This was not a trailer tied directly into “Day”,
even if it concluded by promoting the anniversary hashtag #savetheday.
It certainly gestured towards “DotD”, but it also reinforced a sense of the
anniversary’s overarching event status, being readable as a celebratory
promotion of the brand as a whole. For one thing, it was composed of
archive photographs and original footage rather than extracts from
“DotD”. But it also began with digitally simulated crackles as well as being
in black and white, connoting the show’s longevity (and by implication
cultural value) before racing through, and past, all the different Doctors.
Those from the end of the 1980s (e.g., Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy),
when the show was getting relatively low ratings in the United Kingdom,
are marginalized and glimpsed very briefly whereas images of William
Hartnell, Jon Pertwee, Tom Baker and David Tennant, whose tenures all
corresponded with peaks in popularity for the series (Hills 2013d), are
very much focused on. This special trailer relates to the factual paratext
of the 50th anniversary itself, hence taking on meaning in relation to
the 50th as a meta-paratext. In addition to bidding for Who’s historical
and cultural value, this is “high-end” TV in its own right (Nelson 2007),
marked by high production values (Grainge and Johnson 2015: 212).
Indeed, Steven Moffat has acknowledged that the high-res colour image
of William Hartnell is not an effect that the production team could have

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 Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event

afforded to emulate in the TV show itself. Discussing the appearance of

all previous Doctors in “Day”, he notes: “I know some people think we
can reconstruct them with CGI, but we really can’t! Even what we did
in that terrific trailer with William Hartnell ... that takes forever for one
shot!” (Moffat in Spilsbury 2013b: 21).
Doctor Who fans have also created their own versions of anniversary
marketing paratexts (Johnston 2011: 152; Booth 2012a; Geraghty 2011:
98–102), such as the official “DotD” poster image: “Graphic artist Colin
Brockhurst has created ... material from an anniversary special ... that never
took place” (Daily Pop 2014). “The Day of Doctor Who” (Brockhurst 2014)
is a kind of mash-up, but what it intratextually combines are “classic” and
new Who, reworking the 50th anniversary image of David Tennant, John
Hurt and Matt Smith as if it were a 5th anniversary featuring the first
Doctor William Hartnell, his successor Patrick Troughton and a “miss-
ing” Doctor played by Peter Cushing (Cushing had been the Doctor in
two 1960s Dalek movies). As Chuck Tryon comments, such mash-ups
enable fans to showcase their “cleverness, illustrating one’s facility with a
text” (2009: 151), here via the “remixing” of 50th anniversary art (see also
Williams 2012).
This creation of “fake paratexts” for non-existent texts occurs across a
range of different fandoms; David Church has discussed the creation of
invented paratexts for imagined exploitation movies, for instance (2015:
138–139). Church argues that such fan productivity “relies on creating a
longing for lost objects that never actually came to pass” (2015: 139; Mayer
2014: 163). And the counterfactual 5th anniversary story that Brockhurst
imagines works playfully in a number of ways for Doctor Who fans. It
integrates the 1960s TV series and Cushing movies into one (fictionally)
canonical episode – something that not even Steven Moffat was able to
do in “DotD” when it proved too expensive to pay for the rights to use
the Cushing movie posters on-screen (Moffat 2014b: 6).
Colin Brockhurst’s transformative and mimetic productivity (Hills
2014e) – a mode of activity that can also readily be theorized as “fan
pastiche” (Booth 2015b: 18) – depicts a fictional anniversary five years
ahead of the programme’s first actual anniversary story, “The Three
Doctors”. By 1973, actor William Hartnell was unfortunately in such
poor health that he took little part in the tale, appearing only on a moni-
tor screen instead of interacting in person with the second and third
Doctors played by Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee (Arnold 2014: 62).
By contrast, “The Day of Doctor Who”, imagined as occurring five years

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 Marketing the 50th Anniversary 

earlier, projects a more vital Hartnell, presumably playing the fuller role
in a multi-Doctor story that many fans have always wished for.
Brockhurst is not alone in creating faux anniversary paratexts by drawing
on Doctor Who’s history of actual paratextual promotion. In the pre-video
era of televisual “scarcity” (Ellis 2000: 39; Bould 2012), when information
about Who was less readily available than today, Radio Times Anniversary
Specials such as those released in 1973 and 1983 became objects of great
fan affection, not least because they introduced young fans to the show’s
history (Magrs 2012: 166–167). In an act of homage to these programme
guides of yesteryear, Wonderful Books created a “Not-Radio Times
Special ... to mark the 8th anniversary of Dr Who ... This book is produced
as an homage to the 1973 Radio Times Dr Who Special” (Smith 2013: 3). The
fanzine carefully emulated the layout and features of the 1973 Special, but
for an imagined birthday celebration of BBC Wales’ Who (2005–2013). Its
comedic and absurdist choice of a random number (rather than the cultur-
ally constituted milestones of ten, twenty, or fifty years) seems to be a result
of its projected anniversary coinciding with the fiftieth, hence reinforcing
the point that Doctor Who is “heterochronic” (Harrison 2014: 2) and that
various phases of the show can be differentially celebrated. The “Not-Radio
Times Special” tacitly critiques the brand anniversary by parodying its use
of a conventional, yet still arbitrary, 50-year milestone.
Although “audience-created paratexts” can often challenge industry-cre-
ated narrative worlds (Gray 2010: 143), for example, fan fiction that rewrites
official TV texts, in these instances fans use paratextuality to reference and
rework other paratexts, creating inter-paratextual references, and parodic
transformations, rather than reworking Doctor Who’s televised diegesis. The
50th anniversary was also commemorated by fans who crowdfunded docu-
mentaries about fandom itself on Indiegogo (Who’s Changing: An Adventure
in Time with Fans) and Kickstarter (Doctor Who: Celebrating 50 Years of
Fandom). These fan-created paratexts were relatively unusual by virtue of
focusing on the show’s fandom rather than on the worlds of Who (Capital
City Entertainment 2014; Flip the Switch Media 2014).

“Alien associations” and paratextual tensions

At other moments, however, official and unofficial paratextual promotion

can be very sharply distinguished. The BBC’s Newswatch programme, a
format where viewers register their complaints about BBC news, added to

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the hype surrounding the anniversary by airing the following grievance:

“Please could the BBC stop including items about the 50th anniversary
of Dr. Who in their news bulletins ... when all they are really doing is
not-so-very subtle advertising for the anniversary episode on Saturday?”
(Jill Digby in BBC 2013). Meanwhile, another viewer complained that
“Dr. Who isn’t real! So he shouldn’t really be featured on the news” (Pat
Lilley in BBC 2013), while the non-BBC Radio Times also published a
letter decrying the hype surrounding the anniversary (Thompson 2013:
154). Paul Royall, editor of BBC News at Six and News at Ten, offered this
Newswatch rebuttal of alleged “BBC advertising”:
Well, it wasn’t a plug. We have a remit to cover ... arts and entertainment ... and
Doctor Who is a massive global brand ... And so our coverage of Doctor Who
is in that context, and is about Doctor Who’s unique place in British broad-
casting history and its impact on cultural history and entertainment history
within the UK and around the world. (in BBC 2013)

As Gray and Lotz remind us, “even within industry-created paratexts,

we may see several players jockeying for power” (2012: 134), whether
this involves a marketing team clashing with a showrunner, or as here,
one aspect of BBC coverage generating critical forms of anti-hype hype
by way of contesting other aspects of the BBC’s output. And yet Royall’s
news agenda defence offers a near-perfect encapsulation of on-brand
bids for cultural value: being a “massive global brand” supposedly makes
Who deserving of news coverage, whilst its “unique” place (Lury and
Moor 2010: 45) in multiple fields of broadcasting, entertainment and
(perhaps most importantly) culturall history also aims to consecrate the
brand as a source of cultural capital rather than linking it to economic
capital. However, there is no attempt to ground value in “critical
discourse [and] ... intellectualization of ” the product (Baumann 2007:
16). Although Andrew Milner has mused that “[n]o doubt, television
studies will eventually get around to canonising Doctor Who” (2012: 13), a
case could be made for this having already happened (Hills 2013f; Bould
2014). But despite these academic shifts, there is no substantial sign
of critical “intellectualization” in Who’s brand anniversary (Matthew
Sweet’s Me, You and Doctor Who installment of The Culture Show w on BBC2
being an honourable exception). The implication is that a conjunction
of branding and history is sufficient to make the case for Doctor Who’s
cultural value: within “liquid modernity” (Bauman 2000, 2005, 2011)
brands have perhaps come to possess an in-built legitimacy due to their

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 Marketing the 50th Anniversary 

integration into normative consumer culture. Having said that, Who also
benefits from its status as public service TV drama, meaning that as a
contemporary brand it is somewhat insulated from charges of commer-
cialism (Baumann 2007: 168), allowing it to combine large-scale cultural
circulation (Bourdieu 1993) with public service “agents of legitimation”
(Collins 2010: 32–33), even if this legitimacy is not entirely beyond
reproach.
While BBC Newswatch and Radio Times complaints focused on
hype as intrusive or misleading, Private Eye (2013) offered up far more
damaging paratextual criticisms of Who’s production culture. Not long
after the show’s executive producer, Caroline Skinner, had been inter-
viewed by the commercial fan magazine SFX, discussing how she’d
been planning the 50th anniversary for 18 months (Setchfield 2013a:
53), Private Eye alleged that she’d left the series due to an altercation
with Moffat:
[T]he BBC announced last week that Caroline Skinner had “decided to step
down” just weeks before ... the show’s 50th anniversary [special] is due to be
filmed ... Skinner had in fact been absent from the programme’s offices ... ,
after she and showrunner Steven Moffat had an extremely noisy and public
falling-out ... which ended with Moffat being led away ... while bellowing at
Skinner that “you are erased from Doctor Who!” (Private Eye 2013: 10)

It was certainly unusual to replace an executive producer – who had

been centrally involved in prepping for the anniversary – shortly before
filming “DotD”. But whatever the truth of this propagated rumour
(Sunstein 2014: 12) – seemingly aimed at holding BBC Wales transpar-
ently to account – it is striking that neither the production team nor
Caroline Skinner have, to this day, officially discussed the reasons for
her strangely (mis)timed departure. Where “ ‘top-down’ corporate
paratexts” (Caldwell 2011: 175) can often seem blandly homogenized
in their marketing functions, offering “pseudo backstage” behind-the-
scenes reportage (Evans 2010: 595) safely “anecdotized” for on-brand
consumption (Davies with Hadoke 2014), Private Eye’s coverage sounds
a very different tone. This is a media industry paratext, albeit without
official BBC status. For Private Eye to run the story they must have been
satisfied with its source, however, so it’s feasible that this could be seen
as a “ground-up worker paratext” (Caldwell 2011: 176) – a leak coming
from a BBC insider. John T. Caldwell argues that rather than assuming
that audience or fan-created paratexts alone can subvert official industry

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 Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event

accounts, it is just as likely that intra-industry paratexts will, on occasion,

contest brand management and marketing practices (2011; Hills 2013b).
The supposed quote from Moffat – “you are erased from Doctor Who!” –
has proven to be eerily accurate. Skinner has barely been officially
mentioned since her departure. The fourth Doctor, actor Tom Baker, has
been one of few personnel linked to Who to raise the topic of her abrupt
dematerialization. At a Horror Channel press launch, Baker discussed
how Caroline Skinner had persuaded him to return to TV Doctor Who.
He recounted calling the BBC, only to find that she was no longer in
her post: “And it was only later that I found out she had been murdered
by someone else at the BBC, who was after her job but I never heard
of her again and at that time you see, I’d agreed to do [“The Day of the
Doctor”] ... I miss ... meeting with Caroline, she was very sweet” (Baker
in Reynolds 2014 online). The murder is Baker’s melodramatic anecdotal
invention, but it nonetheless hints at dark deeds, while Baker himself
refuses to be silenced.
Caldwell may not have had former leading men in mind when posit-
ing the operation of “ground-up worker paratexts”, but Tom Baker has
been remarkably resistant to brand management’s information control.
He was also quoted by the Huffington Post, a mere four days before the
50th anniversary date:
[W]e can announce that the Fourth [Doctor] is returning for the 50th. “I am
in the Special,” said Baker. “I’m not supposed to tell you that, but I tell you
that very willingly and specifically; the BBC told me not to tell anybody but
I’m telling you straightaway.” When asked to confirm, a representative from
the BBC ... had this to say: “... [A]nything is possible in Doctor Who.” (Sagers
2013 online)

Baker’s refusal to bow to industrial discipline resonates with his eccentric

and mischievous star persona, but is perhaps also a marker of the power
that he has in relation to Who’s history, now being the senior actor to
have played the title role (whilst his performance as the Doctor remains
greatly popular with fans and well-remembered by general audiences).
Much like Caroline Skinner’s peculiar exit from her Who role, Baker’s
Huffington Postt spoiler has not subsequently been officially, publicly
discussed. Evidently, a major part of contemporary brand management
involves treating unwanted paratextual disruptions as non-existent, and
hence imagining them as erased from Doctor Who as an unfolding and
massively multi-paratextual event.

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 Marketing the 50th Anniversary 

Consequently, all the paratexts corralled, co-ordinated and gathered

under the paratextual sign and context of the 50th anniversary cannot be
made to cohere into one consistent narrative of production and recep-
tion: there is “an overflow of possibilities that remain virtual ... From
their virtual presence arise the ‘alien associations’ which begin to
accumulate and so to bombard the formulated gestalten, which in turn
[can] become undermined” (Iser 1978: 126). Wolfgang Iser’s notion of
the “text as an Event” (1978: 125), where readers are compelled to select
meanings and possibilities in order to build textual consistency, can be
transferred to the level of paratextual hermeneutics, especially where
fan completism is concerned. Fans are likely to para-paratextually
curate a vast range of relevant marketing (and brand-disruptive) para-
texts, from which they will then have to select out in order to constitute
any paratextual consistency. This is not so much a matter of the “shap-
ing of textual boundaries” by fans (Sandvoss 2005: 132), but more about
paratextual “gleaning” (Garvey 2013: 47–48). But “alien associations”
that can threaten a brand-managed and paratextual “gestalt” – that is,
a harmoniously on-brand chorus – will linger on in fan memory, even
when they are disavowed and subsequently silenced within ongoing
marketing. Such “alien” viewpoints, much like official paratexts, can
also be self-contradictory or incoherent. While Steven Moffat utilizes
a Guardian interview to play down hype (see the Introduction), Private
Eye dramatizes an image of Moffat as an aggressive control freak at the
very same time that its “ground-up worker paratext” demonstrates that
top-down marketing, and showrunner pronouncements, can never
fully control the contingencies and controversies that swirl in the
vortex of a paratextual array.
Still, soundbite attempts are made to configure a paratextual narra-
tive of the anniversary: it is about “a great story ... that looks forward
as well as backwards” (Moffat in Pixley 2014: 11). It’s about “ensuring
the next 50 [years]” (Moffat in Setchfield 2013b: 50), and thus avoid-
ing implications of a “nostalgiagasm” that would make sense only to
lifelong Who fans (Setchfield 2013a: 51; Moore 2014: n.p.). A range of
texts were also mobilized paratextually (blurring the text/paratext
line) in the few weeks ahead of “DotD” in order to reward long-term
fans, as well as marketing the anniversary in public service terms as
educationally valuable and historically informative, and it is these that
I’ll consider next.

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 Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event

“The 50th starts NOW”: the week (or so)

of the Doctor

The Science of Doctor Who, broadcast on BBC2 on Thursday 14

November, kicked anniversary marketing up a gear, falling on the same
day as the rush-release online of “The Night of the Doctor” after an
apparent threat that it was about to be leaked: “ ‘Surprise! The 50th
starts NOW! ...’ tweeted the BBC at 11.18am” (Pixley 2014: 9) as they
announced the webisode’s availability, and as brand management prac-
tices again had to respond to contingency and disruption. Reviewing
assorted anniversary texts for SFX, Jordan Farley pondered: “The Day
Of The Doctor? More like The Week Of The Doctor” (2013: 124), and
other commercial fan magazines also collated para-paratextual reviews
of The Science of Doctor Who, An Adventure in Space and Time and
“The Night of the Doctor”. Although these titles could all be viewed
as texts in their own right, I would argue that they nevertheless func-
tioned as paratexts, creating a sense of supportively building up to, and
acting as marketing material for, the textual centre of gravity “DotD”.
Contextually, these shows are all positioned relationally as leading into
and prefiguring “Day”. “Night” does so most explicitly, of course, since
it offers a diegetic prologue to the anniversary special, allowing Paul
McGann to perform Steven Moffat’s distinctive, quickfire dialogue
(Southall 2014: 41).
Being made available earlier than planned gave “Night” a “clear run of
attention, and it made its own publicity, going straight online, so it really
was a perfect storm ... of fandom” rather than merely being perceived as
a “footnote” to “DotD” (McGann in Cook 2014: 18). For Graham Kibble-
White, writing in DWM, this was a “gift” to Who’s “most faithful friends”
(2013a: 77). Although “Night” functioned as a paratextual support and
lure for “Day” in promotional terms, it also offered something that
fans had desired for decades: “finally finishing the story that began in
1996 [with the TV Movie] and connecting up the most disparate bits of
Doctor Who” (Kibble-White 2013a; Hellekson 2014: 238). Most notably, it
integrated the eighth Doctor’s “TV Movie” tenure with his BBC-licensed
Big Finish audio adventures and BBC Wales’ Who. This six-minute
adventure displays what Roberta Pearson and Maire Messenger Davies
term “extended seriality” (2014: 128), that is, the deliberate linking up
of different TV series in a franchise (their case study is Star Trek), or
here, different moments in Doctor Who’s history and different media

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 Marketing the 50th Anniversary 

incarnations. Pearson and Messenger Davies note that extended seriality

is especially useful as a narrative “stunt” to “commemorate ... anniversa-
ries” (2014: 134), a role that it plays for Doctor Who. Long-term Who fans,
whose encyclopedic knowledge of the show leads them to read for conti-
nuity, have shown a fan-cultural interest in hyperdiegesis, treating the
Whoniverse as “a vast ... narrative space ... which ... operate[s] according
to principles of internal logic” (Hills 2002: 137), and which can therefore
be pieced together and assigned a (quasi-)coherent timeline (Parkin and
Pearson 2012).
But rather than fans having to read for hyperdiegetic continuity –
trying to repair continuity errors and filling narrative gaps in fan fiction
or analysis – “Night” and “Day” represent a “superlative unification of
classic- and new-era Doctor Who into a single, unbroken narrative” (Robb
and Simpson 2015: 309). This is a “gift” which rewards long-standing
fan interpretations of the show. However, the unified hyperdiegesis
produced here is complicated by the existence of other commemorative
stories – whose canonical status remains unclear – produced across
the anniversary year by AudioGo, Big Finish and IDW Comics. These
products allow fans “to buy into anniversary commemorations in a
range of ways. Dedicated fans may thus consume multiple multi-Doctor
stories ... , suggesting that this ... has become a way for BBC Worldwide
to maximize profits instead of a device primarily used to integrate Who’s
hyperdiegesis” (Hills 2014c: 109).
If “Night” offers fan service to devotees, The Science of Doctor Who
works very differently to reinforce brand differentiation. In this case, the
BBC’s Reithian public service remit to inform and educate is strongly
articulated with the anniversary. The BBC Media Centre (para-)para-
textually positioned the programme as “a special night for Who fans as
well anyone with a thirst for understanding” (2013b), making clear that
this would be an educational appropriation of the Doctor’s adventures.
Presented by Professor Brian Cox, Science was an old-fashioned lecture
combined with drama inserts filmed on the TARDIS set – in these, Cox
interacted with the eleventh Doctor, Matt Smith. Connections made
to Doctor Who in the lecture material were somewhat underdeveloped,
and the programme awkwardly layered popular science on to its Doctor
Who “hook”: “ ‘BBC Science was keen to get involved in the Doctor’s
50th ... which is how this idea developed’, explained BBC producer Milla
Harrison-Hansley, whose previous credits included programmes such
as ... Horizon” (Pixley 2014: 94).

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 Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event

However, the programme also featured an invited lecture audience

comprising a number of celebrities, as if the producers were uncertain
that combining Who and science via Brian Cox would prove enough
of a draw for viewers at home. This celebrity angle is played up by the
programme’s inclusion on the “50th Anniversary Collector’s Edition”
DVD/blu-ray, where it is titled A Night with the Stars: The Science of
Doctor Who. Such paratextual non-integration, with the same “extra
content” being repurposed across its cultural career, suggests that the
original BBC2 title was felt to be too dry by BBC Worldwide rather
than sufficiently edutainment-oriented. Interviewed for the Radio
Times, Brian Cox made no mention of the show’s celebrity participants,
instead representing it entirely as an effort to inspire children’s interest
in physics:
I passionately believe we need to get more kids interested in science ... and
I think good science fiction is a way of getting them interested. And
because you’re interested in the programme, you’re interested in time
and space, which might make you want to learn about relativity. (Cox in
Holmes 2013: 22)

And yet this target audience was far from clear to the DWM
M reviewer,
John Binns, who complained:
mentions of Doctor Who were in fact pretty thin on the ground. This ... raises
the question of who the show was for, given that it was essentially The Royal
Institution Christmas Lectures but with a largely adult studio audience ... a late-
ish timeslot, and a frankly difficult subject matter with minimum Doctor Who
trimmings. (Binns 2013a: 80)

For this fan-critic, Science wasn’t linked to Who significantly enough

to merit its title, instead coming across as an incoherent and spurious
paratext that was merely trading on Doctor Who’s anniversary. However,
for BBC Science the show clearly represented a chance to extend the
Who brand into an educational arena, deploying Brian Cox as a “public
service personality, whereby certain personalities’ televisual images are
deemed able to carry the institutional voice of a public service organiza-
tion through evoking Reithian edicts” (Bennett 2011: 112; Bonner 2011:
51). The Radio Times feature even went as far as equating Cox and the
Doctor (Holmes 2013: 22), attempting to further cement the alignment
of science education and science fiction. The Science of Doctor Who very
much demonstrates how Who’s 50th anniversary acted as a metonym for
the contemporary BBC itself. There is an attempt, albeit rather hesitant

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 Marketing the 50th Anniversary 

and anxious, to regenerate public service values via Doctor Who. But at
the same time this appeal to Reithian education – linked to the philoso-
phies of Lord Reith, the BBC’s first director general – remains tempered
by contemporary celebrity discourses, by opportunistic brand stretching,
and by a personality-presenter orientation. Science’s incoherence thus
refracts the incoherence of the BBC’s desire to combine public service
values and traditions with discourses of brand management enacted
in a neoliberal celebrity/consumer culture. It is perhaps unsurprising
that DWM M was unimpressed by the relatively low Who quotient of The
Science of Doctor Who; where “Night” was quite clearly designed to satisfy
fans’ wishes, Science remains tangential to fan-cultural concerns, instead
following a very different BBC agenda whereby the show is plugged
into science education, presumed to be inspiring a new generation of
scientists.
The docudrama An Adventure in Space and Time – broadcast on
Thursday 21 November – also bids for Who’s cultural value, albeit
through the discourse of history rather than science. Adventure
recounts a fictionalized version of Who’s 1960s origins at the BBC, its
title being taken from “the phrase the Radio Times used to describe
Doctor Who in its programme billings between November 1963 and
June 1969” (Pixley 2014: 64). This reference to Who’s early listings-
magazine coverage illustrates another way in which paratexts can be
folded back into texts, even while An Adventure in Space and Time acts
simultaneously as a paratext promoting the 50th birthday. Writing in
History on Television, Ann Gray and Erin Bell consider how the anni-
versaries of major events offer public service broadcasters a chance to
justify their cultural role:

Anniversaries provide the opportunity for ... national broadcasters to create

and air material which offers knowledge of nationally and internationally
significant past events, and also attempts to cement the position and reputa-
tion of a particular broadcaster, as in so doing they also demonstrate their
own role as part of national history. For public service broadcasters such as
the BBC, commemorative programming emphasizes their role in creating
and maintaining a memory of the past. (2013: 100)

As such, Adventure was a prestigious TV production, duly nominated

for a BAFTA award. Its meticulous historical recreations of Doctor Who’s
early sets, including the original TARDIS interior, and its redressing of
Television Centre, mark out the “high production values employed which

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 Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event

signify ‘quality’ and carry with them a stamp of authority and legitimacy”
(Gray and Bell 2013: 68). Ann Gray and Erin Bell further comment that
“the drama-documentary has become a common genre in this category”
(2013: 101) of anniversary commemorations, especially as it removes diffi-
culties caused by any lack of original documentary footage and allows
a more empathetic approach to be taken via dramatization (2013: 69).
Indeed, the writer and co-executive producer of Adventure, Mark Gatiss,
stressed that his script very much needed not to be entirely fan-oriented,
instead focusing on human drama which could potentially find a wider
audience: “I had to take off my inner anorak ... my hope was always to
celebrate the show and create a human interest story that could appeal
to anyone” (Gatiss 2013: 19). However, as a BBC2 programme, Adventure
was evidently not a mass audience proposition; it would have fitted well
into the BBC Four precedent for upscale historical biographies, except
for the fact that the channel had stopped commissioning original drama
by this point (Pixley 2014: 63).
An Adventure in Space and Time reinforced the BBC’s reputation for
high-quality historical reconstructions, and returned to Who’s begin-
nings in order to highlight the programme’s longevity (Rolinson 2014:
217) and retell some of its fan-circulated “legends” (Hartley with Green
and Burgess 2008: 224 and 238). Just as The Science of Doctor Who sought
to integrate BBC Science and an educative stance into anniversary
commemorations, Adventure’s docudrama credentials aim to naturalize
Who as a matter of historical interest and cultural significance (Hills
2003: 187), elevating both it and the BBC in terms of brand status. This
BBC metonym was covered paratextually by journalist-fans in terms of
Television Centre’s role in the drama. Writing for the present-day Radio
Times, Patrick Mulkern reminded readers: “Everyone [on the production]
is keenly aware that An Adventure in Space and Time will be the last drama
made at TV Centre before it shuts down, and they’re ... using ... actual
offices and corridors, redressed to their 1960s heyday” (2013: 20). And
DWM’s regular reviewer, Graham Kibble-White, poeticized the presence
of Television Centre on-screen:
All these different [Doctor Who story and production] realities, couched
inside each other. Director Terry McDonough responds to that, visually
containing the bustling universes within the greater vessel that is Television
Centre. Those numerous fish-bowl lens shots looking up from within the
concrete doughnut show its hooped corridors circling in the sky. Doctor Who’s
everythingness is contained there too. (2013b: 79)

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 Marketing the 50th Anniversary 

Adventure’s historical awareness therefore didn’t only illuminate Who’s

on-brand “self-descriptions” (Kelleter 2014: 3–4) by dramatizing the
programme’s cultural and historical worth – for example, producer Verity
Lambert was depicted as an innovative force battling against a previous
generation of older male BBC executives, all set against a cod backdrop
of the mythic “swinging sixties”. The docudrama also unwittingly served
to highlight the BBC’s decision to divest itself of Television Centre in
2013, becoming a lightning rod for tensions besetting the contemporary
Corporation.
Other para-paratextual stresses within fan journalism fell upon the
re-creation of the 1964 “Dalek Invasion of Earth” sequence where Daleks
trundled across Westminster Bridge with Big Ben in the background
(Mulkern 2013: 21; Gillatt 2013: 29). This docudrama/diegetic image
was not unlike the anniversary’s own marketing images of members
of the royal family interacting with Daleks: each represented quasi-
surrealist blends of Doctor Who design (Britton and Barker 2003: 134)
and icons of Britishness. The re-creation of “Daleks plus Big Ben” also
enabled DWM M to construct a trans-anniversary account: Mark Gatiss
had previously participated in a 30th anniversary reconstruction of the
scene, before then pitching Adventure to the BBC as a 40th anniversary
celebration and finally overseeing it for the 50th (Gillatt 2013: 29–30).
The historical value that’s affirmed here is thus not only one of public/
national worth. Personal history is inter-paratextually testified to: this
is a history not just of institutions and Who stories, but also one of
fans ageing with the programme, reliving previous anniversaries, and
constructing self-narratives of loyalty via “personal event memories”
(Pillemer 2000: 50–51).
Through SDCC exclusives and specially commissioned promotion,
through discourses of fan service, science and history, “DotD” was
prefigured in a variety of ways, and the factual meta-paratext of the 50th
anniversary was in turn paratextually opened to multiple audiences and
articulated with differing constructions of cultural value (textual coher-
ence across 50 years; an aura of cultural omnipresence; longevity) and
differing dimensions of brand distinction (the “gift” of public service
provision giving fans something they’d hoped for since 1996; educational
inspiration; iconic Britishness). But inter- and para-paratextual prefigu-
rations of marketing also confronted “alien” associations and awkward
contingencies, sometimes responding only with corporate silence. Acting
as what I’ve termed a “BBC metonym”, rather than as outright “BBC

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 Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event

nostalgia”, Doctor Who’s 50th channelled a series of tensions surrounding

contemporary brand management and the BBC’s identity (“interna-
tional” or US branding versus serving the UK public; educational aspi-
rations condensed onto celebrities and personalities; commemorating
history versus disposing of much-loved historical assets).
In the next section, I will move on to address how Who’s brand anni-
versary took on an incoherent paratextual “afterlife” (Singh 2014: 170),
both in the immediate timeframe post-“DotD”, and in 2014 industry/fan
award ceremonies.

Accidents and acclaim: from The Afterpartyy

to award ceremonies

Steven Moffat had promised that Doctor Who would “take over televi-
sion” (Jones 2012)1 in 2013, and as if to make his point, an episode of
Doctor Who Live, subtitled The Afterparty, followed on BBC3 immedi-
ately after the transmission of “Day”. EastEnders’ 30th followed a related
template, with EastEnders: Backstage Live beginning on BBC1 straight
after the final live special (Friday 20 February 2015) before continuing
on BBC3.
An initial episode of Doctor Who Live, The Next Doctor, had unveiled
Peter Capaldi as the twelfth Doctor back on Sunday 4 August 2013. As
if to prove the live status of parts of these shows, each was beset by
difficulties. On Doctor Who Live: The Next Doctor, studio guest Rufus
Hound made a number of gaffes. In her study Live Television, Stephanie
Marriott remarks that “[i]neptitude, performed or otherwise, may well
be enough to convince viewers that what they are watching is happen-
ing now” (2007: 43), and both episodes of Doctor Who Live scored
highly on this front. Constructing Doctor Who production news as a
glitzy reality TV-style “reveal”, The Next Doctorr was opposed by a Doctor
Who Appreciation Society (DWAS) reviewer for being inauthentic to
the spirit of Who:
My favourite bits were all pre-recorded. Whenever the show returned to the
studio, it fell apart ... Rufus Hound will go down in Doctor Who history for
his spectacular fluffs ... Do we want to see more of this in the future? ... I don’t
think this is the way to go. Doctor Who is not The X Factor. (Bryant 2013: no
page numbers)

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 Marketing the 50th Anniversary 

Reconfiguring Who as live “event” TV means potentially drawing in

new viewers, as well as utilizing a “reality” format which may specifi-
cally attract a BBC1 mainstream audience or BBC3’s youth audiences.
However, this fan review constructs a strict binary of Doctor Who versus
The X Factor, suggesting that there are limits, for some fans, over how
the show should be paratextually extended. It is also worth noting that
“Saturday evening shows” like The X Factorr were specified as Who’s
competition when the programme returned to BBC1 in 2005 (Russell
2006: 41). Contra fan authenticities, however, practices of brand manage-
ment suggest that variant paratexts can be highly productive for targeting
different audience segments, capitalizing on the “transferability ... [and]
multiplicity” of a brand (Johnson 2012: 159).
For his part, Rufus Hound was moved to blog about his experience on
the show, para-paratextually confessing:
So, I was on That Doctor Who Live tonight and I totally dicked it up. ... I’m
sorry. ... I love Doctor Who ... and I got all over excited. So there, on live, inter-
national TV, I just went into melt down. ... I said Peter Eccleston. Who is ... not
a man who has ever portrayed the internal beating of two hearts. So, I’m a bit
gutted because I really wanted to try and represent the fans. (2013 online)

Doctor Who Live: The Afterparty did not, unfortunately, fare much better.
Fan commentary suggests that the “less said about Doctor Who Live:
The Afterparty, the better” (Robb and Simpson 2015: 312), while it was
described in SFX X as “a shambles, plagued by embarrassing technical
difficulties” (Farley 2013: 124). Even officially licensed paratexts such
as DWM, who typically show some degree of restraint with regard to
criticizing Doctor Who’s paratextual iterations and brand extensions,
decided that “perhaps ... there’s no better way to react to the (almost)
live link-up to One Direction ... than Steven Moffat’s ... head in hands ...
[F]rankly it’s likely that most of the enjoyment to be had went against
the grain of what was intended” (Binns 2013b: 81). And the ever-
diplomatic Andrew Pixley refused to openly criticize The Afterparty,
observing only that the “One Direction link-up was attempted; unfor-
tunately problems with a delay on the line rendered the contribution
from Louis Tomlinson and Niall Horan impractical and the programme
moved on” (2014: 97).
Whereas Doctor Who Live: The Next Doctorr featured as a perfectly logical
extra on the standalone DVD/blu-ray release of Peter Capaldi’s opening
story “Deep Breath”, The Afterpartyy was notably omitted from the “50th

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 Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event

Anniversary Collector’s Edition”. In this case, as Charlotte Brunsdon has

eloquently argued, the “ ‘noise’ and ‘limitations of the institution of
television’ are not just an interference in the content of television, they
are – at least in part – the whisper of history, the textual traces of trans-
mission at a particular time on a particular channel” (2010: 73). Such
traces can be “attenuated” or even “stripped away” in the movement
from TV transmission to a DVD/blu-ray box set and its recontextualiza-
tions (Brunsdon 2010; Fairclough 2014b: 67). Who’s disastrous anniver-
sary link-up with One Direction, again specifically seeking to reach
youth audiences rather than Doctor Who fandom per se, has hence been
removed from the consumerist, fan-targeted record of the 50th. Treated
as a kind of polluting interruption (Jacobs 2011) or “damage [to] the
core show” (Julie Gardner in Russell 2006: 31), The Afterpartyy has been
removed from official, paratextual circulation. It remains somewhat
legendary among certain circles of fandom, not least for Steven Moffat’s
despairing action of burying his head in his hands on live TV. But in
terms of marketing and brand management, The Afterpartyy – much like
Caroline Skinner’s departure and Tom Baker’s magnificent auto-spoiler –
has been marginalized and silenced. Of course, the absence of The
Afterpartyy could be linked to rights issues – for example, needing to get
clearances from all involved – but one would expect a contemporary live
paratext to have issues of ancillary distribution integrated into contracts
and agreements, and evidently no such issue prevented Doctor Who Live:
The Next Doctorr from becoming a DVD/blu-ray extra.
From the ridiculous to the sublime: The Five(ish) Doctors Reboott has
had praise para-paratextually lavished upon it in an inversely propor-
tional relationship to the amount enjoyed by The Afterparty. Initially
available on the BBC’s red button service after “Day”, and curated on the
“50th Anniversary Collector’s Edition”, this was a star-studded mocku-
mentary written and directed by the fifth Doctor himself, Peter Davison.
Here, Steven Moffat happily lampoons his own showrunner authority
(he’s depicted as the villain of the piece), whilst Russell T Davies offers a
vibrant comedy turn, making this one of his rare engagements with the
50th anniversary (Davies with Hadoke 2014).
Fan responses in this case have often been highly celebratory: “In
terms of sheer fan-pleasing brilliance, ‘The Five(ish) ...’ may have been
the highlight of the entire 50th celebrations, despite being relegated to
the red button” (Farley 2013: 124). Likewise, in Who Beyond 50 Brian J.
Robb and Paul Simpson state that “the hilarious The Five(ish) Doctors

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 Marketing the 50th Anniversary 

Reboot ... [was] the true highlight of the 50th anniversary for many older
fans” (2015: 312). Five(ish) also cleverly works as paratextual storytelling –
its behind-the-scenes satire implies, in a final twist, that actors Peter
Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy were present in “DotD”, albeit
hidden under sheets. This allows fans to imagine that these “classic”
Doctors were featured, in person, in the anniversary special after all:
Speaking at the Doctor Who Celebration press conference, Steven [Moffat]
explained that Peter [Davison]’s script “solved a problem for me because I
wanted all the Doctors properly involved ... as best we could”. ... Peter was also
provided with a copy of the script for The Day of the Doctor so that he could
integrate his story around ... scenes appearing in the Doctor Who adventure
itself. (Pixley 2014: 82)

Contributors to the DWAS newsletter Celestial Toyroom have been

particularly vocal in terms of wishing that Davison, Baker and McCoy
were also featured physically, as they are now, in “DotD”. In his discus-
sion of watching “Day” at the ExCeL “Celebration” in issue 431/432,
Bernard Brannigan adds: “One slight quibble – could all the surviving
Doctors not have appeared as The Curator? ... a 50th anniversary episode
will not come around again” (2014: n.p.). And in issue 441, in a feature
called “Day of the Doctor – Reboot”, William and Imogen Turner discuss
their dream versions of the Special, again involving “Doctors Five, Six
and Seven”, and stressing that “an anniversary which delights everyone
should have ALL of the Doctors in their own proper scene” (2015: n.p.).
This fan sentiment runs wholly counter to the reality TV representation
of selected audiences in Channel 4’s Googleboxx (series two, episode ten,
broadcast on 27 November 2013) where multiple families are shown
watching the very end of “Day”, as non-fan parents and older viewers
muse about which Doctors (from the dream sequence line-up of all
eleven) they had watched when younger: “oh, I liked him”; “so the two
that I remember are the second and the third one ... that’s probably when
I watched it”. Rather than worrying about how involved the different
Doctors were, these casual audiences used the closing image of “Day of
the Doctor” as a kind of memory prompt.
Some scenes in Five(ish) were filmed at the “Project Motormouth 2”
charity convention because so many Who actors were present, along with
writer–director Peter Davison (Pixley 2014: 83). This results in a curious
incarnation of para-paratextuality: the convention circuit as one distinct
mode of paratextual experience comes, at least partly, to support the

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 Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event

production of Five(ish) as a (para-)paratextual aspect of the anniversary

campaign, alongside BBC Wales’ official support, of course. Arguably,
the finished product could not have been achieved without both of these
factors being unified and capitalized upon by Peter Davison.
Whilst these post-“Day” additions to the anniversary’s paratextual
array of TV extras were available on 23 November itself, the anniversary
did not end there. Instead its meanings and narratives have been reacti-
vated over time, both through the fan reviews I’ve quoted here, as well
as through vast numbers of tweets, social media activity and online fan/
audience responses. “DotD” also became available on British Airways
routes from 24 November:
[W]e’ve teamed up with British Airways to give Doctor Who fans ... an
opportunity to watch the much-anticipated 50th anniversary episode on
board starting the day after its initial BBC1 broadcast ... Our inflight enter-
tainment supplier, Inflight Television, will ... transport the coveted “Day of the
Doctor” episode to ... London Heathrow and Gatwick airports as soon as the
initial broadcast has finished. (Gummer 2013 online)

As Stephen Groening has analysed, “flag carriers” like British

Airways, “who are charged with representing the nation, often do
so through ... cultural activities” such as films and TV shows that are
especially aligned with the national identity concerned (Groening 2014:
13). Consequently, the in-flight entertainment menu “frames and fills
in notions of national culture and identity” (ibid.). The circulation of
“Day” in this way might also pose contextual questions about how an
episode filmed for 3D cinema release is consumed via a small screen and
headphones. Groening suggests that the classical film studies’ view that
“cinema’s immersive power lies in the image” is inverted for the airplane
passenger, where sound becomes primary and immersive, offering a way
of blanking out any surrounding distractions (2014: 7). Regardless of
such audio-visual debates, the Who brand is once more positioned here
as powerfully and self-consciously “British”, contextualized by the para-
textual surround of British Airways and its co-branding (Danesi 2006:
94–95). Such a deal regarding in-flight entertainment is also embedded
in, and related to, London Heathrow’s already established partnering
with Doctor Who in the anniversary year:
Heathrow is delighted to be able to bring an experience like never before
this summer, with games, competitions to enter, and interactive displays
around the airport. Get involved and send us your best Doctor Who

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 Marketing the 50th Anniversary 

pictures and stories via Twitter, Facebook and Instagram using the hashtag
#WhereDoYouWantToGo. (Heathrow 2013: no page numbers given)

The “Time Traveller Passport” pamphlet detailing Who activities

on-site at Heathrow offered an unusual timetable: “Meet a Cyberman
as it storms through the terminal. Tuesday 16 July. Between 11.15am to
4.15pm ... Saturday 10 August. Between 9.00am to 11.30am” (Heathrow
2013: no page numbers). Clearly aimed at children – including an
advert for Doctor Who Adventures and a Where’s Wally-style “Where’s the
Doctor” cartoon – this initiative is at least partly about “breaking the
physical boundary of the TV screen” (Charlie Mawer, executive creative
director of Red Bee, in Grainge 2011: 98), bringing Doctor Who monsters
and experiences into audiences’ everyday lives. In the case of Heathrow,
this means transferring Who temporarily into a “non-place” (Augé
2009a) which may nonetheless still be thrilling for younger travellers,
thus aiming to integrate paratextual brand extensions into children’s
memories of holiday adventures.
Jonathan Gray makes the point that texts may never escape “toggling”
(2010: 45) by paratexts after-the-fact of their broadcast and initial recep-
tion; this can still happen “fifty years following the watching” of an
episode (2010:44). One way in which texts can be re-inflected – usually
rather closer to their original release – is via the winning of awards. For
instance, “DotD” received the Radio Times Audience Award BAFTA in
2014, with TV writer Boyd Hilton publicizing its chances by arguing
that it’s “rare that a programme lives up to the hype. This did” (Hilton
2014: 19; Skinner 2014: 19). Faith Penhale and producer Marcus Wilson
collected the award, with Penhale joking that “if we’d known, I think
someone famous would be standing here”.2 Penhale’s presence at the
BAFTA podium was linked to her role as executive producer on “Day”,
yet she might not have been recognizable to many of those watching –
even seasoned Doctor Who fans – having worked on Who only as a
stopgap replacement for Caroline Skinner, as well as having a far more
industry-facing profile compared to the “celebrity” of Steven Moffat as a
showrunner-brand (Bennett 2014: 198; Newman and Levine 2012: 42).
The lack of anyone “famous” (neither the showrunner nor on-screen
talent) seemed to paratextually imply that the Who production team
had not taken the Audience Award wholly seriously. It is voted for by
members of the public (for this, one might say fans organizing online)
rather than conferred by BAFTA itself, having previously been won
by Game of Thrones, Celebrity Juice and The Only Way Is Essex. Penhale’s

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 Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event

humorous response to her situation – as an exec producer parachuted

in who ended up collecting the production’s BAFTA – appeared to be
a little off-message. However, she then firmly reverted to an on-brand
statement: “this award really is for anybody who’s had a hand in Doctor
Who over the last fifty years”. Elsewhere, especially in intra-industry
paratexts such as Broadcast, Penhale has iterated an “executive”, manage-
rial BBC discourse on the 50th as “a moment to celebrate what the BBC
does best” (Penhale in Parker 2013: 27). But the 2014 BAFTA Audience
Award, and its acceptance speech, toggle “DotD” in incoherent ways
rather than strongly or univocally conferring prestige upon it. The award
is implicitly both recognized and yet downgraded (as if it is a second-
class or “improper” BAFTA) by the apparent decision not to involve
Doctor Who’s A-list celebrities.
Likewise, the fact that Who’s anniversary was recognized with a
Guinness World Record, presented on 24 November at the ExCeL
“Celebration”, also failed to securely consecrate it (Baumann 2007:
167). The award was clearly prearranged, both as a photo opportunity
for fans attending the ExCeL and as a promotional item intended to
reinforce the anniversary’s “unique” cultural value. Yet it recognized
BBC Worldwide’s achievements in purely corporate, numerical terms;
as the BBC Worldwide Annual Review for 2013–2014 notes, the “Doctor
Who 50th Anniversary episode was simulcast in 98 countries and in 15
languages” (BBC Worldwide 2014). This allowed the Guinness Book
of World Records to insert itself, as a brand, into proceedings, further
multiplying the number of “promotional subjects involved” (Wernick
1991: 107). Building on Daniel Boorstin’s “pseudo-event”, we might dub
this a pseudo-award, thoroughly integrated into marketing and brand
discourses. Where the media/brand anniversary typically leads to a meta-
paratextual unfolding event (with the anniversary-as-paratext justifying
and co-ordinating heightened paratextual circulation), this Guinness
World Record feels like meta-hype. It is hype about hype – an award for
the size and scope of a simulcast, that is, what amounts to a sales and
distribution effort (and, indeed, Who’s TV drama simulcast world record
was later beaten by the CSII franchise on “World CSI Day”, 4 March 2015;
see Wagmeister 2015). Although the 23 November record was trumpeted
in some para-paratextual quarters (Lewin 2013: 124), its cultural value
remained liminal, hovering between valorizing award and devalued
hype. James English has suggested that cultural prizes and awards have
typically been subjected to widespread criticism; joining in with this

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 Marketing the 50th Anniversary 

process blunts any chance of genuine critical understanding (2005: 189).

Instead, English argues that awards should be viewed as always-already
involved in a “game” of “imperfect convertibility of (economic) capital
with (symbolic) capital” (2005: 183). Awards thus negotiate between
marketing and legitimation, between commercial value and cultural
status, with their awkward articulation of these realms demarcating their
very fascination.
If BAFTA and Guinness re-inflections of “Day” were more or less inco-
herent – contra work on paratexts which assumes their univocal or strong
meaning (Gray 2008b: 47) – then other awards for “DotD” conferred far
more unified fan-cultural value and approbation, for example, an award
from DWM itself: “One story which united everyone in their praise was
The Day of the Doctor – the new champion of the world at Number One
in our poll” (Griffiths 2014: 64). Some audiences particularly embrace
re-decoding – just as they embrace paratextual completism – and as an
example, Doctor Who fans especially “like to argue ... about which is the
best ... story” (McKee 2007: 233). The “pleasure of the debate itself which
fuels ... discussions” (McKee 2001: 26) means that fans are involved in
endemic re-decoding, also debating favoured Doctors, as well as eras
and periodizations of the show (Booth 2014; Booy 2012b). Despite the
“DWM M Awards” of 1998 billing themselves as a “definitive, once-and-
for-all statement of the Doctor’s greatest adventures” (Gillatt 1998: 5),
the magazine again asked fans to rank all stories in 2009 and 2014. The
second poll was occasioned by 200 stories having been broadcast and
was dubbed “The Mighty 200” (Spilsbury 2009), whilst the most recent
poll assessed the best of Who’s first five decades:
As with our 1998 and 2009 polls, we asked you to assign a mark out of 10 for
every story that you’ve watched (or listened to ...), so that we can calculate
an average score. We’ve then presented the results in five sections, decade
by decade, so that we can declare winners for the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 2000s
and 2010s, before revealing the complete chart rundown of every single story.
(Spilsbury 2014a: 3)

Invoking “five decades” makes it clear that the most recent survey is
intended to form part of the meta-paratextual anniversary array of cele-
brations. However, the fact that Doctor Who hasn’t actually been on-air
for 50 years means that this anniversary poll is forced to structure itself
into decades to reflect the programme’s absence from TV screens across
the 1990s (bar the Doctor Who/EastEnders crossover “Dimensions in

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 Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event

Time” and the “TV Movie”). This results in the last of the poll “decades”
only covering four years: “ ‘it’s not the 50th anniversary consecutively,’
Tom [Baker] points out, cheerfully. ‘It’s certainly the 50th year since it
started, but it hasn’t been 50 consecutive years, has it?’ ” (Tostevin 2013b:
18). While this 2014 fan vote is precariously narrated via five decades, its
commemorative function is also prescribed:
[T]his is a celebration of Doctor Who. This isn’t about “bests and worsts” – it’s
clear from your entries that every story has its fans ... We’re not here to bury
the adventures that have finished near the bottom ... In some ways, they might
be the stories that are most special to us – the ones that we secretly love.
(Spilsbury 2014a: 3)

This editorial framing of DWM’s survey results aims to present an

egalitarian, democratized and levelled reading of the survey’s other-
wise connoisseurial “stratification” of Who (Blank 2007: 180; Pickford
2007). Nonetheless, going straight in at number one effectively renders
“Day” an instant classic within fandom, converting fans’ “affective
response ... [into] community consensus on the value” of the story
(McKee 2001: 21; Richard Atkinson 2014: 60). The vote thus testifies
to fandom as a version of what Papacharissi (2015) calls an “affective
public”, albeit one which keeps open the possibility, if not the expecta-
tion, of subsequent re-decoding. For Steven Moffat, the validation of
“DotD” as fans’ favourite story supposedly offered emotional closure:
“I feel like I can finally put the 50th to bed now, and not worry about
it anymore” (in Spilsbury 2014b: 63). But for Who fandom, the “best”
story award amounts to a provisional, temporary re-decoding. Like
insecurely consecrating award ceremonies, these DWM M Awards are also
liminal, then – not merely because they are caught between “an economy
of prestige” (English 2005) and the blandishments of hype, but rather
because their “definitive, once-and-for-all statement” is never finally
definitive. It will be interesting to see whether “DotD” retains its poll
position in future, or whether fan votes in 2014 were boosted by feel-
good anniversary affects linked to the appearance of Tom Baker and all
incarnations of the Doctor. Whether or not “Day” falls from the top spot
in future, the “DWM M Awards” nonetheless position readers as part of a
“brand community” (Kornberger 2010: 131) critiquing “bad” Who while
co-creating value for the BBC by lending “classic” status to a subset of
stories (Murray 2005: 426).

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 Marketing the 50th Anniversary 

In this chapter, I have suggested that brand discourses linked to Doctor

Who’s anniversary marketing blur text and paratext by contextualizing
special programmes in the 2013 “takeover” of television as paratextual
supports to “DotD”. Paratexts are not always integrated (e.g., the SDCC/
Early Trailer; BBC Newswatch/BBC News coverage), and in some cases
disruptive “alien associations” are generated by rumours or spoilers.
Typically, these paratexts are ignored and marginalized by Who’s brand
management practices (though in some cases the production team have
attempted to create false spoilers; see Moffat 2014a). Brand managers
also confront threats to their informational control via the paratextual
contingencies of live TV. Insofar as integrated marketing communica-
tions are attempted, the 50th anniversary strategically capitalizes on
valorizing public service associations with science, education, history
and “Britishness”; meanwhile managerial paratexts strive to position
Doctor Who as a marker of the Corporation’s distinctiveness. Although
fan awards or world records might be assumed to confer cultural value
on the Doctor, they do so somewhat insecurely by acting as incoherent or
provisional paratexts. As a “BBC metonym” – freighted by multiple insti-
tutional agendas and anxieties – Doctor Who’s celebrations are entangled
in tensions between mythic history and current policy, as well as educa-
tion versus celebrity and corporate silence versus transparency. In the
next chapter I want to specifically consider the extensive merchandising
surrounding the 50th. Can we theorize this as a special set of material
paratexts, through which consumers support the BBC’s mission? Or does
merchandise again bring into focus problematic contradictions for the
twenty-first-century BBC, this time between public service broadcasting
and commercialism?

Notes
 http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2012-12-19/steven-moffat-the-doctor-who-
50th-anniversary-will-take-over-television
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPjQYPdXY-A

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 2
Merchandising the 50th
Anniversary – Public
Service Consumption in
the Name of the Doctor
Abstract: This chapter considers how Doctor Who’s
anniversary underpinned a wide range of merchandise.
Such material might be viewed as corroding the BBC’s
public service remit, but I argue instead that “public
service consumption” has formed an important part of
Who’s history – fans’ decommoditization of merchandise
has aided in cementing audience affection for the BBC’s
distinctiveness. I also examine how the ExCeL “Celebration”
was saturated in memory discourses, with merchandising
being pre-decommoditized as “souvenirs”. Merchandise
acutely raises the work of para-paratexts, given that its
paratexts are themselves framed by books such as The Vault,
commemorative brochures, or fan reviews. I conclude by
addressing how the BBC’s public service brand was disrupted
by glitches in capitalist realism such as BBC Worldwide
licensees going out of business.

Keywords: BBC Worldwide; capitalist realism; ExCeL

“Celebration”; merchandise; para-paratexts; public
service consumption

Hills, Matt. Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event –

Marketing, Merchandising and Mediatizing a Brand
Anniversary. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
doi: 10.1057/9781137463326.0005.

 DOI: 10.1057/9781137463326.0005
 Merchandising the 50th Anniversary 

Thus far, I have considered how Doctor Who’s brand anniversary acts as
a metonym for the current BBC, rather than straightforwardly offering
“BBC nostalgia”. In this chapter, I want to address how BBC Worldwide’s
commercialization of the anniversary (via merchandising and events such
as the “Celebration”) results not in a corruption of “pure” public service
broadcasting/PSB (Johnson 2013a: 101), but rather feeds on, and into, the
BBC’s public service identity. Despite installing a discursive and symbolic
firewall between its “public service brands” and its “commercial brands”
(Ferrell Lowe and Palokangas 2010: 130), and using brand management to
navigate public service and commercial activities (Johnson 2013a: 110; Leys
2003: 148), I will argue that the BBC actually utilizes (fan) consumerism
to maintain and regenerate its public service ethos: “The merchandising
potential of ... [Doctor Who] in its fiftieth year demonstrates how to a large
extent the programme’s cultural value is both reflected and promoted by
the BBC’s commercial activities” (Wallace 2013 online).
Yet if Who’s cultural value underpins its commercial value – with the
consumption of material paratexts acting as “a kind of grout” (Rehak
2013: 40) that helps cement affection for the programme – then the
BBC’s attempts to separate out public service broadcasting and commer-
cialism become thoroughly untenable. Even feeding commercially
generated profits back into public service provision merely dramatizes
the fact that commerce and public service have become not opposed
terms, but instead moments in a circuit of decommoditization (Sassatelli
2007: 154) where the commodity form of merchandise mediates between
public service TV heritage and audiences’ love for BBC shows. Once
again “following the object” (Lash and Lury 2007: 16) means noting that
debates about public service communication’s “robust” health, “difficult
struggle” to survive, or state of “jeopardy” (Hendy 2013: 127; Tracey 1998:
279; Tunstall 2015) all downplay the point that today’s PSB is constituted
just as much through audience consumer(-fan) cultures as it is through
a model of TV funding and production. Public service TV has almost
always been addressed as an expert culture, insulated from “bounded”
commoditization (Sassatelli 2007: 154). Here I want to consider it as
(re)constituted through the consumption of TV’s “material objects”
(Bonner 2012: 177). Merchandising and public service consumption are
thus stages in a broader circuit of value, drawing attention to
the flows that precede and follow moments of commodification, like a river
that draws together many sources, passes through a dam, then flows on.
The dam represents the moment of commodification, the place where the

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energy of the river is turned into commodifiable electricity. [But we need to

consider] ... the larger, flowing system, not just the element that can be pack-
aged and sold. (Condry 2013: 164)

Despite symbolic boundaries constantly being reinstated between the

public service BBC and its commercial subsidiaries, then, analytically it
remains vital to approach the BBC’s PSB as a feedback loop of decom-
moditization, with merchandised commodities intervening between the
“immaterial labor” of publicly funded creatives and that of the consum-
ing public (Hardt and Negri 2000: 290–294). Discursive separations of
public service/commerce do not only operate at managerial levels of the
BBC, of course. These discourses also feed into the art/commerce binary
of Doctor Who’s showrunner, as Steven Moffat discursively cleaves “crea-
tive” production decisions from the commodity sphere:
[I]f you end up making the show less good because you’re worried about
Doctor Who hats, or something, then you’re in trouble. But ... [y]ou have to be
over all of it, because the moment you’re nott over it, then something suddenly
appears [as merchandise] that is bonkers and wrong ... . It doesn’t mean that
mistakes don’t get through, they do. But in general there are some very good
people out there who are quite obsessively monitoring what we make in the
name of the Doctor. (Moffat in Spilsbury 2013b: 6)

Merchandising has become increasingly significant to Who’s brand-

oriented universe, as well as to BBC Worldwide’s revenue generation,
the BBC Shop’s operation (offering assorted “exclusives”), and the
phenomenon of the media anniversary. Oddly, though, the topic of
merchandise has been relatively underdeveloped in TV studies until
quite recently, while the specific role of BBC Worldwide in relation to
Doctor Who’s cultural life and the role of Who in extending the BBC’s
culture of commercial licensing (Bentley 2013) both remain vastly under-
researched despite the mass of scholarship regarding the series. Calling for
the development of “off-screen studies” (2010: 4), Jonathan Gray devotes
a chapter to toys and games in Show Sold Separatelyy (2010: 175–206). This
focus has continued in work on Cult Collectors (Geraghty 2014 and 2006;
Bryant, Bielby and Harrington 2014) and on board games as paratexts
(Booth 2015a; Fortune 2014a), with the Intellect “Fan Phenomena” book
series also touching on fan-created merchandise (Howe 2013 and 2014).
And action figures, in particular, have attracted scholarly commentary
(see Fleming 1996; Bainbridge 2010; Godwin 2014). But such work
has often focused on particular kinds of interaction with merchandise

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 Merchandising the 50th Anniversary 

(e.g., collectors), as well as specific types of merchandise (games or

figures). The co-ordination of multiple merchandise types via a justify-
ing factual paratext – that is, a meta-paratextual media anniversary – has
not yet been substantively analysed. Addressing this gap, in what follows
I will approach 50th anniversary intertextual commodities in relation to
the public service-commercial “biographies” of these objects, following
Bob Rehak’s lead in pursuing “a corrective to media scholarship that too
often emphasizes the texts of ... TV ... while losing sight of the material
forms these texts assume in lived experience” (2013: 29).
Unpacking what I mean by public service consumption, I shall start by
looking at different strata of merchandise, especially “high-end” licenses
(Wasko and Shanadi 2006: 31) and “tie-in” products that function in a
hyperdiegetic manner, before moving on to examine 50th “Celebration”
souvenirs, as well as the ways in which market forces disrupted the BBC’s
public service discourses across the anniversary year.

Distinguishing “prestige” products and developing

brand “fanagement”

It cannot be assumed that all Who fans are automatically consumers of

merchandise. Paul and Katie Booth interviewed 115 attendees at “Chicago
TARDIS”, a major US convention (2014: 261), and found that fans of
classic Who (1963–1989) placed an importance on consuming products,
whereas fans of BBC Wales’ Doctor Who (2005–) tended to stress fan
works that they’d created:
When asked how they would distinguish themselves as a “fan” rather than a
casual viewer, many classic Who fans cited the money they spent or the things
they purchase[d] as important elements in expressing their fandom ... Some
classic fans referred to the purchasing of more expensive priority seating at
convention events as a marker of how committed a fan was. Other classic
fans remarked that they realized their enthusiasm for the show when they
started to buy merchandise. (Booth and Booth 2014: 266; see also Williams
2015: 181)

The appeal of Who merchandise is also testified to by the fact that fan
websites have been set up specifically to share industry announcements
and news.1 At the fan-run Doctor Who Site: Merchandise Guide, a poll
regarding 50th anniversary products was set up, receiving a total of
12,172 votes. Of these, 36.36 of respondents (4,426) said they’d only be

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 Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event

buying the 50th merchandise they liked, while 16.82 (2,047) opted for
aiming to buy “a fair amount”, 12.25 (1,491) said “most of it”, and a size-
able 20.24 (2,464 votes) voted for “I intend to buy all of it”.2
Academic work on franchise-based merchandising has argued that
these product ranges are typically marked by a binary between “expected
mass markets of the mainstream consumer” and “superior ... merchan-
dising ... marketed for an executive consumer” (Conrich 2006: 122). Janet
Wasko and Govind Shanadi likewise separate out “typical” merchandise
such as “toys ... [and] action figures” (2006: 30) from “not-so-typical and
high-end merchandise” such as “stamps, ... jewelry, and furniture” (2006:
31; Fiske 1992: 44). Somewhat problematically, however, what seem
to be neutral descriptions are actually structured around a child/adult
separation:
merchandise has crossed over or moved away from being recognized as a
possible toy or plaything to being valued as an exquisitely manufactured,
sculpted or crafted object ... [in] products aimed at adult consumers and
connoisseurs ... within fan or collectors’ markets. (Conrich 2006: 127)

And when Wasko and Shanadi discuss franchises being “honoured” by

merchandise, they single out “the release of stamps and coins” (2006: 32)
which often have an official state-endorsed value as well as character-
izing adult worlds of expenditure and communication. There is a sense
here that dismissals and revaluations of merch have been linked with
a crucial child/adult distinction. Some merchandise is seemingly more
securely articulated with cultural value, such as costly screen-accurate
replicas as well as icons of “banal nationalism” (Billig 1995), that is, coins
and stamps. When the BBC Media Centre announced Worldwide’s plans
for 2013 they singled out specific items of merchandise:
BBC Worldwide Australasia has collaborated with the New Zealand Mint to
produce a commemorative coin featuring the TARDIS which will be classi-
fied as legal tender to the value of $2 (NZD). ... A huge range of new products
will also be released throughout 2013. A set of 11 celebratory Doctor Who
stamps ... will be available to purchase from March 26. (BBC Media Centre
2013a online)

Surprisingly, “high-end” merchandisers such as This Planet Earth

(manufacturers of replica Daleks) or Rubbertoe Replicas, who would go
on to produce a replica of the Vortex Manipulator prop seen in “DotD”,
were not promoted here. Presumably this was because such paratextual
products might potentially attract negative press/fan commentary for

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 Merchandising the 50th Anniversary 

being excessively expensive (i.e. too obviously commercial). Instead,

BBC Worldwide para-paratextually promoted affordable yet prestige
items linked to the likes of the Royal Mail, playing safe with “material
markers” of Britishness (Edensor 2002: 113). Hence these were also
solidly positioned not as children’s playthings or toys, but rather as a way
for fans, interpellated as adults, “to attain haptic-panoptic control over
images” from Who by handling material artefacts (Lancaster 2001: 102).
Such items represented “extra-diegetic merchandise ... concerned with
the series as a television programme” (Johnson 2007: 16) rather than
being linked to a connotatively “childish” immersion in play.
However, if alignment with the Royal Mail was strongly on-brand,
echoing many other anniversary associations with the monarchy and
Britishness, Doctor Who’s processes of brand management nevertheless
received short shrift in May 2013’s Stamp and Coin Martt magazine:

The Association of Great Britain First Day Cover Collectors ... recently
warned cover producers[:] “... copyright issues surrounding Doctor Who are
the strictest [we] have ever come across ... Do not under any circumstances
be tempted to put any image or wording on your covers relating to Doctor
Who ... A licence for just mentioning Doctor Who or anything to do with ... [it]
is £1000. The BBC will vigorously pursue through the courts anyone infring-
ing copyright. ... It is a minefield like no other”. (Uncredited 2013: 42–43)

It is remarkably rare for Who’s licensing and financial matters to be so

openly and critically discussed in the public domain, but this para-para-
textual opposition evidently hails from a hobbyist group outside Doctor
Who fandom who feel that the BBC are restricting their “enthusiasm”
for first-day covers (Longhurst 2007: 104). Licensing discussions would
usually be culturally sequestered as a matter of industry “professional-
ism”, while BBC Worldwide’s commercial operations are exempt from
Freedom of Information requests, as are BBC production issues (finan-
cial information relating to the filming of “DotD” in Trafalgar Square
very unusually entered the public domain as a result of an FOI request
made to the Greater London Authority, however3).
“Prestige” and “mass-produced” merchandise should not be taken as
fixed, brand-defined categories. What is industrially defined as “high-
end” merchandise at one moment – fans’ initial opportunity to own a
Doctor Who story on video in 1983, for instance – can be normatively
recontextualized as “mass market”, accessible merch subsequently.
Along with many fans, William Merrin has marvelled at the price point

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 Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event

of Who’s earliest video release, which came shortly ahead of the show’s
20th anniversary: “the first Dr Who video commercially released by the
BBC ... cost £39.99, the equivalent of £121 in 2013” (2014: 37). And given
that the prestige/mass binary is often a masked version of child/adult
cultural meanings, it is also possible for the same piece of merchandise
to shift, over time, from being “mass” to “high-end”, especially when
this is correlated with a former child audience growing up into adult
collectors (Cross 2008: 163). Yesterday’s cheap, easily available kids’ play-
things can be tomorrow’s rare and expensive collectibles in the form of
“second-hand fandom” (Geraghty 2014: 181). As Jason Bainbridge points
out, via merchandise such as action figures “children’s entertainment and
adult entertainment [can] become virtually indistinguishable” (2010:
838; Noxon 2006: 117). Rather than stratifying and segregating child/
adult identities, merchandise represents “a point of intersection for adult
pleasures and childish fantasies” (Bainbridge 2010: 839).
Public service consumption, like other modes of (fan) consumption,
can thus revalue merchandise as “collectibles” or as privately meaningful
artefacts. Frances Bonner has argued that the material objects of televi-
sion – its spin-offs and mementos – function “not simply as triggers for
memories of past television ... [but] as technologies of attachment” (2012:
174). By this, Bonner means that merch such as a replica “in the shape
of Doctor Who’s sonic screwdriver ... is likely to gather more stories if it
exists in an active relation with a fan-owner” (2012: 179), accumulating
and condensing a web of social and personal memories. Such material
artefacts attract, orient and bear the immaterial and affective labour of
fans, essentially sustaining and circulating fans’ love for a TV show. But
this immaterial labour emerging through commodities is preceded by
the immaterial labour of BBC creatives, which David Hendy also charac-
terizes in terms of affect:

Love ... captures that sense of devotion to the work itself that has always
supposedly been a feature of employment at public service broadcasters such
as the BBC. It also speaks to the way the whole process involves thoughtful-
ness towards others. ... The broadcasters don’t really produce programmes they
think are good for us ... . They usually “make programmes they are keenest to
make.” (Hendy 2013: 88, citing Alasdair Milne)

And it is this boundary to commercial activity (Born 2004: 510) that

positions the BBC as a purveyor of unusual “corporate cultural capital”
(Lury 1996: 113), blurring state and market via its programme brands. The

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 Merchandising the 50th Anniversary 

immaterial, affective labour of public service broadcasters is mirrored

by the memories, literacies and affective labour of fans (Booy 2012a:
189), while commodification is – perhaps counter-intuitively – the glue
that binds these moments together. This differs structurally from wider
processes of media audience/fan consumption and decommoditization,
since here the BBC’s initial production is also objectively, institutionally
decommoditized. Without public service consumption, without a gener-
ation of fans reading Target novels and Doctor Who Weekly, Who would
have been far less likely to hold the passions of fans who would then be
inspired to become media professionals, academics, journalists and crea-
tives of all incarnations. As broadcaster Matthew Sweet reminisces, “If
you were born in the 1960s or 1970s, you too may measure out your life
in Doctor Who” (2012: 120). Who’s greatest PSB success story, framed by
and through public service consumption, is rooted in the merchandising
of memory, and the commodification of memorialized affects that can
never finally be owned by any one individual (Landsberg 2004: 147).
However, rather than addressing merch as the commodification of
memory which is then frequently singularized and decommoditized,
scholarly approaches to merchandise often end up devaluing one specific
mode of “othered” brand extension. This can be “expected” or “typical”
merchandise (assumed to be uninteresting and not in need of detailed
analysis), or it can be the supposedly meaningless “unincorporated”
paratext (Gray 2010: 208–210). Equally, it might be the “superficial” para-
textual game, for example Doctor Who Monopoly or Doctor Who Yahtzee,
that Paul Booth suggests do not meaningfully engage with the TV show’s
diegesis and thus do not reward further study as unique paratextual
board games, given the parameters of his specific analysis (2015a: 9–10).
And yet the effect of this argument is to rule out discussion of some of
the earliest pieces of 50th anniversary merchandise, with the Monopoly
set having been announced on 24 February 20124 (Yahtzee was also an
early merchandise announcement, on 16 August 2012). Booth is quite
right to note that “while Doctor Who Monopoly might have one or two
elements that set it apart from traditional Monopoly, for the most part
the ingredients are similar enough to make them virtually identical” in
terms of game mechanics (2015a: 10). But it is precisely the transforma-
tions from Monopolyy to Doctor Who Monopolyy that make the Who version
interesting. For instance, monsters and narrative threats are hierar-
chized, in line with the sets of Monopolyy properties that move from the
least to the most valuable. This results in Cybermen and Master stories

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 Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event

being rendered second-tier, whereas Dalek and Omega/Rassilon stories

are the most valuable (with Autons and Ice Warriors being relegated to
the least valuable sets). And the references on Chance and Community
Chest cards (Gallifrey and UNIT decks) also cue fan knowledge of
specific episodes, for example, “You receive a traffic penalty for flying the
TARDIS down a motorway. Pay £15”. There are also errors that would be
likely to annoy fans, for example, the “Arc of Infinity” square – named
after a fifth Doctor story starring Peter Davison – boasts an image of
Omega from a completely different story, 1973’s “The Three Doctors”,
meaning that a 50th Anniversary Collector’s Edition of Monopoly doesn’t
accurately recollect the show’s 10th anniversary. And with only six
customized playing pieces, players cannot identify with each Doctor;
for instance, anyone who wants to commemorate the first Doctor
within their anniversary game is out of luck. Despite containing errors
or omissions that should probably not have been signed off via brand
management processes – illustrating the difficulty of being “over all of it”,
in Moffat’s terms – Doctor Who Monopolyy nonetheless converts a familiar
board game into a distorted, selective rendition of the Whoniverse.
If we should perhaps aim not to exclude specific kinds of merchan-
dise, we should also remember that – just like other forms of paratext –
intertextual and material commodities can be semiotically incoherent
rather than carrying clear meanings. One example of this merchandised
incoherence was an anniversary Dalek model branded with the Union
Jack, and carrying “2013” emblazoned under its eye-stalk. Tim Edensor
notes that the Union Jack can be “highly adaptable” (2002: 25), contextu-
alized in reactionary and progressive uses, and used subculturally as well
as with the state’s authority. But aligning the Union Jack with a Dalek
remains remarkably unusual: diegetically, Daleks are lumps of hate,
intent on destroying anything that is unlike them. This merchandise
is simultaneously “pseudo-diegetic” (accurately reproducing a Dalek
likeness from the series) and “extra-diegetic”, since the flagging really
makes sense only in relation to the programme brand being perceived as
“British” (Johnson 2007: 15–16). Although the Daleks were positioned as
part of Great Britain’s World War II effort in “Victory of the Daleks”, that
story’s Dalek design is not specifically referenced here. This paratext’s
“2013” badging also marks it out as anniversary merchandise, glossing
its strangeness as a “special” commemorative release. Furthermore, a
life-size replica of this Dalek model was inter-paratextually present at
the BBC Shop at the ExCeL “Celebration” (which I shall analyse in more

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 Merchandising the 50th Anniversary 

detail shortly), making its muddled collision of diegetic and extra-diegetic

meanings a promotional sign for the BBC’s overall 50th merchandising.
Condensing fantastical SF-adventure, Britishness and the history of an
iconic design, the Union Jack Dalek was legible only if articulated with
the meta-paratext of the anniversary – understood as a brand paratext
for Doctor Who as a whole – rather than being aligned with any specific
text such as “DotD”. Viewed in terms of paratext-text relations, however,
this Dalek becomes somewhat absurd or incomprehensible. Its livery
makes little sense if read through the texts of Doctor Who.
Although academics have stratified merchandising paratexts – thereby
marginalizing specific kinds – BBC Worldwide and its licensees have
frequently targeted fans as a loyal market across “high-end” and d “mass-
market” segments. Fans can often be paratextual completists. Even given
the fact that participants in the Doctor Who Site: Merchandise Guide
anniversary poll were more likely to be predisposed towards an interest
in merchandise collecting, and that they may also have viewed the full
acquisition of merch as a mark of fan authenticity, 2,464 votes for buying
“all items” remains a striking response.

“Tie-in” merchandise: a trans-anniversary paratext

Some items of anniversary-related merchandise co-opted and rewarded

fan knowledge even more extensively than “DotD”. What I’ve elsewhere
called fanagement “appropriates fan readings in a ... disciplining manner,
but at a niche, paratextual level” (Hills 2012: 410) – fan readings are disci-
plined because certain interpretive communities and fannish interests
are reflected in officially licensed materials, but not directly in the TV
text. Original tie-in novels are a primary cultural space where this proc-
ess can unfold, particularly as tie-in writers are often recruited partly on
the basis of their own fan cultural capital:
[T]ie-in writers use fandom and nonwork viewing habits as an informal
source of research ... Intimate connection with the series gives tie-in writ-
ers easy access to the minutiae of continuity, already seen to be paramount
among the concerns of licensors ... This fandom also hypothetically gives the
writers easier access to their implied reader. (Clarke 2009: 443–444)

As such, tie-in writers are called upon to combine fan expertise with
“playing by the rules of the on-air series” (Clarke 2009: 445) rather

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 Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event

than speculatively transforming the TV canon, as fan fiction frequently

does. As Robb and Simpson comment, “the introduction of a whole
new incarnation of the Time Lord [in ‘DotD’] was a boon to the Doctor
Who spinoff industry” (2015: 302). And George Mann’s Engines of War
(2014) capitalized on this new “gap” in the Whoniverse’s televised
adventures (Evans 2014: 88), that is, the War Doctor’s participation
in the Time War. Writing in Transmedia Television, M. J. Clarke has
outlined how tie-in writers adopt specific creative strategies in order to
fit in with established TV storytelling but also make their novels value-
added. One technique is “using flashbacks and recollections to subtly
suggest that ... new elements (non-repetition) were part of the charac-
ters’ lives all along (non-contradiction)” (Clarke 2013: 85). It should be
noted, however, that this was exactly what Steven Moffat did when he
introduced the “Other Doctor” after Christopher Eccleston refused to
take part in “DotD”. Another tie-in strategy involves exploiting “unex-
plored gems”, which means “drawing on elements implied in the on-air
series, but not directly addressed” (Clarke 2013: 79). Arguably this, too,
is what “DotD” does by focusing on the details of the Time War and
“the Moment”, a Time Lord superweapon introduced in the Russell T
Davies era.
However, even if “Day” accords with many of Clarke’s “tie-in” strat-
egies, Engines of Warr still exceeds the TV celebration’s fan service in a
significant way. “DotD” unites all incarnations of the Doctor, despite
making an on-screen error in clips of the seventh Doctor and featuring
the character in two different costumes (something pointed out by many
writers to DWM; see Moffat 2014d: 7). But Engines of Warr goes a step
further in unifying Who’s hyperdiegesis and creating “a bridge between
the twentieth and twenty-first-century runs of the show” (Mann in
Wright 2014: 76), doing something which would not be readily achiev-
able on television. It integrates settings from “The Five Doctors” (1983)
and “DotD” (2013), specifically combining elements from the 20th and
50th anniversary specials. Fan readers will bring to mind brightly lit
video images of the Gallifreyan High Council Chamber (Mann 2014: 129)
alongside the moodily lit War Room (2014: 123), condensing together,
in literary form, two vastly different TV aesthetics from 1983 and 2013
television productions. Any attempt to bridge these on-screen would be
immediately jarring, or inauthentic to 1983’s use of video, but in novel
form George Mann is able to craft a trans-anniversary tale which cuts
across Who’s history, folding together “The Five Doctors” and “The Day

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 Merchandising the 50th Anniversary 

of the Doctor”, whilst also leading directly into the most recent special
(Mann 2014: 312).
In terms of offering hyperdiegetically unifying fan service, Engines of
Warr is structurally akin to “Night of the Doctor”, another transmedia
paratext. But it derives its impact from recognizing that specific TV stories
are likely to be nostalgically and affectively recalled by fans, suturing
together trans-anniversary storytelling by recognizing that “viewing the
[special] is a distinct experience” compared to other franchise-derived
consumption (Thompson 2007: 331). Engines of Warr is a paratext which,
rather than seeking to re-decode “DotD”, self-consciously recognizes
how particular TV episodes exist at the core of fandom’s affection. As
Andrew Howe has noted of merchandise, “items of popular culture asso-
ciated with the show allow fans to access their memories and re-enter
the show vicariously” (2013: 48; Gray 2010: 184).
Public service consumption may, in this case, devolve into fan serv-
ice. Yet it remains in the interests of the BBC to merchandise shows
that audiences “love to watch” (Tony Hall in BBC Media Centre 2015
online), since it is these brands which can best facilitate circuits of
decommoditization where public service television is celebrated by
audiences, ultimately enabling the BBC’s cultural reproduction and
legitimacy. Perceiving major BBC brands such as Doctor Who as overly
commercial – or even indistinguishable from commercial TV (see Fry
in Benson and Foster 2008: 51) – fails to consider how they become inte-
grated into audiences’ everyday lives, memories and affects. Likewise,
decrying the “ ‘stacking up’ ... of events ... which are churned through
commemorative cycles that ... spin ever closer to the present” (Hoskins
2014: 118) or the “sentimental, aesthetic, commercial ... interest in
objects ... belonging to the recent past ... [e.g.] the 1960s” (Virno 2015: 53)
fails to explore how brand anniversaries can (re)commodify memories
within circuits of decommoditization, as they do for the BBC. Jean
Seaton’s recent history of the Corporation’s troubled 1970s and 1980s’
operations argues for PSB’s “value of failure” (2015: 244), where shows
are allowed to continue despite having lower ratings than a commercial
system would permit. For Seaton, this enables creative recalibrations and
longer-term successes rather than pursuing market-led short-termism.
But public service consumption and merchandising can also be said
to operate within a longer timeframe – it too permits the generational
(and inter-generational) holding of affect. All too often, though, public
service broadcasting is legitimated through an anti-market discourse,

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 Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event

as in Seaton’s rather thin analysis of “public service popular” television

(2015: 232–256), rather than the value of media tie-ins and consumerist
material objects being properly recognized.
If the 50th partly meant converting fans’ affective labour into exchange
value for BBC Worldwide – positioning fan-consumer engagement and
paratextual arrays as evidence of “public interest” (Booy 2012a: 81) –
then public service consumption was also rendered highly visible by
the ExCeL “Celebration” which ran from 22 to 24 November 2013. It is
this that I’ll move on to consider next, as well as an unusual piece of
anniversary merchandise which commemorated earlier Doctor Who
memorabilia, making it not only para-paratextual but also an instance
of merchandising about processes of public service consumption and fan
memory.

Commemorating the “Celebration” and curating

the paratexts of yesteryear

The “Celebration” was a commercial event run via BBC Worldwide, but
given that it commemorated a programme brand already managerially
contextualized as “what the BBC does best” (Penhale in Parker 2013:
27) then any clear separation of public service TV and commercial-
ism seemed tenuous at best (Hills 2013c and 2014d). The “Celebration”
certainly demonstrated a complicated “interrelationship between the
commercial and public service aims of the corporation” (Johnson 2013a:
106). I would agree with Catherine Johnson that while
it may be tempting to see the adoption of branding as indicative of a broader
commercialization of the BBC and its core programming activities, the
picture is more complex than that ... Indeed ... understanding Doctor Who as
a brand makes it increasingly difficult to untangle ... commercial and public
service values. (2013a: 101)

But reading this entanglement as more than the pollution of PSB by

market forces means recognizing how contemporary public service
television is intertwined with neoliberalism (Weissmann 2012: 178). That
is, BBC discourses aim to defend and legitimate the Corporation as an
object of audience affection and cultural value that has market distinc-
tion rather than thoroughgoing market distanciation. And yet the BBC
dare not pursue the full logic of public service consumption – that is,

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 Merchandising the 50th Anniversary 

centrally promoting the fact that purchases from BBC Worldwide go

to fund the BBC’s PSB mission – since this would serve to weaken the
discursive cleavage of public service and commerce that characterizes
the BBC’s current position. It would strengthen the political possibility
of subscription services as a future governmental policy, dangerously
weakening the case for a universal licence fee.
The move towards public service consumption can be illustrated
by examining the role of merchandising in the 20th anniversary event –
“The Doctor Who Celebration: Twenty Years of a Time Lord”, held on 3 and
4 April 1983 at Longleat – compared to the 50th “Celebration”. In the 1983
commemorative programme, mentions of merchandise are restricted
to the following scheduled events: “Sunday 3 April 1.00pm, Auction in
merchandise sales tent ... Monday 4 April, Auction in merchandise sales
tent” (BBC Enterprises 1983: 6–7). By contrast, the daily Show Planner
guide from the ExCeL has the following to say:
Every Doctor Who fan has at least one piece of merchandise – well prepare
yourself for a collection bigger than Henry van Statten’s ... Head over to the
Official Event Merchandise Shop to pick up your 50th Celebration souvenirs.
Do not miss out on your souvenir items to remember your special day at the
event ... Visit The Official BBC Doctor Who Shop for fantastic show offers,
exclusive merchandise and more ... Visit the licensee shopping area ... Plan a
visit as part of your day! (BBC Worldwide 2013b: n.p.)

Fandom and consumption are naturalized as coterminous: every fan

has “as least one piece” of merchandise. Visitors are directed to a “shop-
ping area” and exhorted to plan time for this (see also Forde 2013: 65).
Yet shoppers do not visit a series of stalls offering commodities: rather
than choosing to consume, as good neoliberal subjects, attendees are
instead invited to peruse “a collection” blurred with diegetic meanings
as if to make it more alluring – van Statten being a character from the
2005 story “Dalek”, although there his collection is a mark of villain-
ous megalomania, so the allusion is rather contradictory. Attendees
are also repeatedly incited to acquire “souvenirs”; commodities are
thus pre-decommoditized and singularized in these merchandising
discourses (Kopytoff 1986: 80–81), aligned with fannish/personal
use value.
The “Celebration” brochure also introduces itself explicitly as “a
memento of a truly historic event” (Scott 2013: 3); the “Celebration” is
saturated in “banal commemoration” (Vinitzky-Seroussi 2011) where

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 Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event

almost every item is seemingly proposed as a memento or souvenir. The

other word which predominates in these representations is “Official” –
shops and event merchandise are repeatedly and para-paratextually
marked as such, as if to frame a “canon” of merchandise. And yet there
was a profound mismatch between pre-decommoditized “souvenirs” and
the “Celebration” experience of sluggish, lengthy queues of customers.
As DWAS’s reviewer curtly noted, the BBC Shop “in the hall was perma-
nently queued out and there just wasn’t time to wait in line” (Brannigan
2014: n.p.; Hills 2013c).
It may be unsurprising that the “Celebration” was drenched in
commemorative discourses. Nicolle Lamerichs has argued that this
tends to characterize conventions more generally, although I would say
that the process was heightened in this instance: “The convention is a
memory place that, although public, relies on private meaning and past
experiences ... [It]is not a historical site but a constructed one in which
the place is arranged to have connections to fiction” (Lamerichs 2014:
268). For example, visitors entered Hall N11 of the ExCeL through a
replica of the Totter’s Lane I. M. Foreman gates, thereby blurring material
and textual space by placing people in the same position as characters
Barbara and Ian at the very start of Doctor Who’s diegesis in its open-
ing (1963) story. The event’s brochure was also para-paratextually tied
in with this fan-consumer re-enactment: “It’s been fifty years since two
inquisitive teachers followed Susan Foreman into a curious police box,
hidden away in a junkyard – and thanks to the mysterious Doctor they
found inside that magical box, the adventure hasn’t stopped since!” (Scott
2013: 3). Furthermore, the junkyard gates were also over-determined
by a range of possible associations: they had been replicated in and for
An Adventure in Space and Time, so fans might also have associated the
physical artefacts with their emulation there. And their signage appeared
at the start of “Day”, so visitors on 24 November could potentially recall
their likenesses from at least three media sources. By aligning the entry
to Hall N11 with viewers’ historical and narrative entry to the world of
Who, the “Celebration” expected and interpellated a “mediatised gaze”
(Urry and Larsen 2011: 20), also facilitating the digital circulation of
“performances of the now” via smartphone photography (ibid. 2011: 185)
as people posed with the staged TARDIS and junkyard setting. But more
than this, it also enabled fans to experience a media-derived “prosthetic
memory” (Landsberg 2004) or what Mark Duffett calls an “imagined
memory” (2013: 229; see also Bryant, Bielby and Harrington 2014: 30).

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 Merchandising the 50th Anniversary 

This is not purely a fantasy, since it relates to something that happened

to the actors playing Barbara, Ian, Susan and the Doctor:
It is therefore a kind of fantasy which authenticates itself as a (desired)
“memory” by a process of valorization in the narrative of ... the media. The
term points to the inadequacy of phrases like “cultural memory” ... Imagined
memories are spaces of emotional investment ... In a sense ... they are commod-
ity templates – valorized ... by stories and characterized by their own rarity
value. ... [T]hose who were originally there become privileged witnesses,
starting points for further commodities (such as documentaries ... and anni-
versaries). (Duffett 2013: 229)

The “Celebration” was hence not only saturated with memory discourses,
operating as a material and highly affective “place of memory” in
Lamerich’s terms; it was also a commodity template for fans’ imagined
memories – although by drawing on established histories of Doctor
Who it strongly incorporated fan discourses into its commodified
materiality.
Fans very much expect Who merchandise; a recurrent feature in the
DWAS newsletter involves identifying the “Item Most Likely to Become a
Toy”. This ran as follows for “Day”: “It just amazes me that there has been
no release of a John Hurt action figure yet ... although apparently a War
Doctor Sonic Screwdriver was released as a convention exclusive at the
Doctor Who Celebration” (Moore 2014: n.p.). In fact, convention “exclu-
sives” were typically available after the Con. The Retail Area featured the
following sellers, with stands being identified in the Show Plannerr via
numbered “DW” codes:
DW1: Big Finish, DW2: Plastic Head, DW3: Millennium FX, DW4: Cubicle 7
Entertainment, DW 5 and DW6: Doctor Who Experience, DW7: Rubbertoe
Replicas/Big Chief Studios, DW8: Stamp Centre, DW9: Abbyshot Clothiers,
DW 10: NZ Mint, DW11 and DW12: Sci-Fi Collector, DW13: Dark Bunny
Tees, DW14: Underground Toys, DW15: Forbidden Planet, DW16: Royal
Mail, DW17: Doctor Who Figurines, DW18: Sci-Fi Collector, DW19: This
Planet Earth. (BBC Worldwide 2013b: n.p.)

“High-end” licensees were well represented, in the form of the New

Zealand Mint, the Royal Mail, This Planet Earth and Rubbertoe Replicas,
while the likes of Big Chief Studios, Underground Toys and Dark Bunny
Tees all offered show “exclusives” (i.e., advance availability) on specific
“DotD” merchandise after its broadcast. Indeed, Dark Bunny’s “Space –
Time Telegraph” T-shirt was sufficiently authentic that it included the

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 Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event

same typographical error as seen on-screen, referring to “Brigadier

Left-Bridge Stewart” rather than “Lethbridge Stewart”, again high-
lighting errors in accuracy and consistency within production/brand
management.
From the Totter’s Lane junkyard to a staged re-creation of the
Radiophonic Workshop near the N11 visitor’s exit, the “Celebration”
offered what’s been called a “Disneyised” themed space for public
service consumption: “For the ... fan, [theming] ... offers desirable sites
for social interaction and consumption in coordination with the object
of fandom” (Dixon 2013: 79). Kevin Dixon discusses these industry/
consumption practices in relation to football fandom, but his analysis
remains highly relevant to the “Celebration”. Named after the Disney
company, Disneyization (Bryman 2004: 12; Wasko 2001: 113; Jenkins
2014: 250) refers to the ways in which narrative universes and characters
are extended into multiple sites and types of consumption:
For those who buy merchandise ... the items serve as reminders of visiting a
place, of having a particular kind of experience, or of their enjoyment of a
character or prop. Increasingly, people anticipate the possibility of being able
to buy merchandise and may even be disappointed if the opportunity to do so
is not available. (Bryman 2004: 81)

The “Celebration” catered to this fan-socialized expectation of merchan-

dise, where perhaps “the most significant ... by-product of Disneyised ...
procedures is the self-regulating relationship that has developed
between the fan and the brand logo” (Dixon 2013: 91). “Official Event
Merchandise” carrying the “Celebration” dates and the DW/TARDIS logo
included postcards, posters, bookmarks, stickers, patches, keyrings and
T-shirts. Fans could also purchase BBC Shop pin badges of the “TARDIS
50 Years” logo that demarcated official anniversary merchandise. And
this anniversary logo was printed on carrier bags, so that shoppers
became part of the anniversary’s branding by virtue of any purchase.
The “Celebration” is therefore constituted as an experience that itself
calls for commemoration (Pine II and Gilmore 1999: 12–13) rather
than simply acting as a celebration of Who’s history and cultural value.
Mass-produced, low-cost items of memorabilia are offered up as pre-
programmed souvenirs, where it is the material rather than textual
status of these objects that is crucial (Godwin 2014: 115; Sandvoss 2005:
90; Hills 2013e: 114), along with the worth given to them by fan attendees
(Woodward 2007: 30). Susan Stewart has theorized souvenirs as moving

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 Merchandising the 50th Anniversary 

“history into private time” (1993: 138) and referring back, by way of
authentication, to an experience or event. Stewart concludes:
Within the operation of the souvenir, the sign functions not so much as object
to object, but beyond this relation, metonymically, as object to event/experi-
ence ... It will not function without the supplementary narrative discourse
that both attaches it to its origins and creates a myth with regard to those
origins. (1993: 136)

Stewart (1993: 151) goes on to rather awkwardly counterpose the “souve-

nir” to the “collection”, where the latter is assumed to remove objects
from their temporality in favour of pure classification (see Baudrillard
1996: 95 and 105; Banash 2013: 55). In reality, items in a collection can
surely carry narratives of their acquisition in exactly the same way as
souvenirs. Having said that, official “Celebration” souvenirs make sense
fan-culturally for the reason that people “do not need or desire souvenirs
of events that are repeatable. Rather we need and desire souvenirs of
events that are reportable” (Stewart 1993: 135). And being at the ExCeL
was nothing if not “reportable” to fellow fans, just as Longleat attendance
in 1983 subsequently took on the status of a fannish badge of honour.
The appropriation and personalization of commodities through
memory and affect – whether this is mass-produced or high-end
merchandise – has been a key way of thinking about fan consumption.
Lincoln Geraghty argues that convention memorabilia does not simply
symbolize consumption:
Fans bought things because they meant something, it brought them closer
to that very text they were remembering and celebrating ... Collectibles and
souvenirs from a convention can be seen as mementos of the special moment
when fans got close to the actors who inspired them and the television
shows ... they cherish. (2014: 93)

But this approach focuses only on fans’ decommoditization, that is, one
moment in the biography of objects. It does not address the issue of fans’
valorization of a TV text such that they would want to attend a conven-
tion in the first place, nor does it consider the “business advantages” of
“what we might call ‘overflow rich’ content” (Gray 2008a: 95) in terms
of targeting fan memories and affects. We might say that an event like
the BBC Worldwide “Celebration” aims to commodify fans’ “intensely
individualized personal meanings” (Geraghty 2006: 219) of Who, sell-
ing their memories – and desired, imagined memories – back to them.

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 Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event

Rather than ambiguously resistant textual poachers, these fans are firmly
on-brand “textual commemorators” (Hills 2014g) whose immaterial
labour of memory, passion and enthusiasm comes to stand as a reserve
for future commodification and capital. Yet neither this commodifica-
tion nor fans’ decommoditization (Belk 2001: 158) have any logical or
cultural primacy – they are interdependent and indivisibly part of the
same phenomenon. As Ian Condry argues, “it makes more sense to
speak of this hybrid market as the market” (2013: 183).
Furthermore, in this instance I would argue that fans’ passionate
engagement is articulated with Doctor Who’s history within public
service TV – even before young fans would have been aware of the
BBC’s cultural-political identity, Who was a strikingly unusual show,
committed to the virtues of knowledge, eccentricity and improvisation.
It can readily be categorized as an example of the tendency that Mark
Fisher calls popular modernism: “the more challenging parts of public
service broadcasting ... [formed] part of a UK popular modernism,
as ... [did] postpunk, brutalist architecture, Penguin paperbacks and the
BBC Radiophonic workshop” in the 1960s and 1970s (2014: 22). As such,
public service consumption responds to Who’s distinctiveness in the
cultural marketplace, and its “corporate cultural capital” (Lury 1996: 113),
as well as ultimately generating economic capital that returns to public
service funding, albeit as a small fraction of the BBC’s overall revenue.
It therefore makes no sense to view contemporary public service as
set apart from consumerism and from audiences’ immaterial labour
(Terranova 2004: 80) when it is wholly imbricated in such neoliberalism –
and, indeed, when the intensely individualized meanings of fandom
fit perfectly well into discourses of “consumer choice”. Where PSB has
been seen as an expert system, professionalized and disconnected from
audiences (Burns 1977: 136–138; Hendy 2013: 89) for their own benefit,
I am suggesting that public service experiences, values and discourses
also necessarily emerge on the consumption/audience side. Public service
is always more than a funding model or a mode of broadcasting; it is also
a form of market distinction, literacy and (fan) audience creativity (Booy
2012a: 189). Fans may act as a “brand community” co-creating value for
BBC Worldwide, but they also co-create cultural value – memory, myth
and longevity – for the BBC, as they did during the “wilderness years”
when Doctor Who was not active as a TV show (Bonner 2012: 178).
In this sense, public service TV has already been implicitly partici-
patory where Who is concerned, rather than needing to radically or

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 Merchandising the 50th Anniversary 

fundamentally evolve in response to Web 2.0 (Jones 2009: 205). Critics

who assess public service TV as under threat in the twenty-first century
(Barwise 2004: 25; Tunstall 2015) do so by conceptualizing it only as a
detached expert culture and political–economic structure rather than as
part of the cultural world shaped by consumer capitalism. This is a world
where both broadcasting institutions and fan-consumers can chart
their cultural/personal histories by creating new meanings for old texts
(Geraghty 2014: 181), thereby exhibiting
the ways in which fan interests contribute to the structure and dynamics of
the twenty-first-century life-course ... Leading social theorists have argued
that the institutional pillars that have ... structured the life-course are desta-
bilizing, and that as a result the trajectory of individual lives is better under-
stood as increasingly shaped by personal interests as well as institutional
mandates ... [D]o fan interests now provide a point of reference for adults ... to
navigate the life-course? (Bryant, Bielby and Harrington 2014: 32)

The case of Doctor Who’s 50th would suggest an affirmative answer to

this, as would the rise of media/brand anniversaries more generally. The
ExCeL “Celebration” was, of course, only one commodification of Doctor
Who’s “cultural heritage” (Hearn 2013: 312) in the anniversary year,
replete with souvenirs of its own paratextual, experiential status. Another
piece of merchandise took an unusually exaggerated para-paratextual
approach by collating a record of memorabilia and merchandise from
across Who’s 50-year history – Doctor Who: The Vaultt (Hearn 2013).
The Vault’s author, Marcus Hearn, signed copies at the BFI Southbank
on Saturday 5 October 2013, meaning that a paratext aimed at curating
paratexts could, in turn, become a souvenir object for fans, articulated
with an anniversary BFI screening of the Paul McGann “TV Movie”
from 1996. Interviewed about The Vault, Hearn positioned it in this way:
My aim for the book was to create a “museum” for Doctor Who ... there are
Doctor Who exhibitions but there’s nothing that covers the show’s entire
history in real depth. ... [A]ll the elements that you’d need ... – all the props and
costumes and scripts – are scattered around so many disparate sources ... It
struck me that the only way to create something resembling a Doctor Who
museum was to do it in a virtual way – ie, within the pages of a book. (Hearn
in Meikle 2013: 11)

And just as the “Celebration” sells an experience (Ndalianis 2011: 6),

so too does The Vaultt “turn ... to reproductions of a lost ordinary [i.e.
ephemera, memorabilia and merchandise] that supports a profoundly

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 Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event

emotional and embodied experience [where] the object is, in some sense,
a kind of self-conscious prop that enables it” (Banash 2013: 65). The Vault
recognizes fans’ “second hand fandom” and collecting (Geraghty 2014:
159) as well as the way in which fandom conserves and archives histories
of the show. Fan-collectors have, over time, become individual owners
of extremely rare material objects from Who’s history; many original
props, costumes and toys are now “in private collections. So it was a
case of tracking down all those collectors and persuading them to let us
photograph their items. ... We weren’t able to get everything we wanted”
(Hearn in Meikle 2013: 11). Audience-side ownership – that is, private
fan ownership outside the BBC – therefore partially disrupts this project
directed at recognizing (and specifically recommodifying) fans’ public
service consumption.

The dematerializations of “capitalist realism”

Other capitalist contingencies also threatened derail and disrupt BBC

Worldwide’s anniversary plans. AudioGo, the company releasing “Destiny
of the Doctor” – an eleven-part monthly audiobook series culminating
in November 2013’s planned release and box set – went into receivership
before the set could be completed on schedule. This starkly dramatized
a crucial difference between the BBC as a public service institution and
BBC Worldwide’s commercial partners. While the BBC’s existence can
be trusted at a level of basic “ontological security”, that is, it persists over
time and is not at the mercy of market forces, commercial enterprises
can potentially go out of business at any moment, especially in a post–
Financial Crash context. The result of AudioGo’s demise was that products
branded under a BBC license couldn’t be accessed and purchased, at least
for a time. Yet pre-booked advertising for AudioGo continued: “Happy
50th birthday, Doctor. We’re celebrating in style! ... Congratulations
on your half-century from all at AudioGo” (AudioGo 2013). This state
of affairs threatened to have a negative impact on the BBC brand as a
“reputational asset” (Johnson 2013a: 107), displacing the BBC’s attempt
to discursively separate PSB and commercialism with a scenario where
PSB values of trust and perdurability began to be undermined by the
market.
Other commercial issues also interrupted or attenuated the trust that
has typically been linked to PSB, including production delays with Silva

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 Merchandising the 50th Anniversary 

Screen’s anniversary “TARDIS Edition” that was eventually released in

late November 2014. And at least one product branded as 50th anniver-
sary merchandise continues to be released in Doctor Who’s 52nd year,
namely Cubicle 7’s series of role-playing Sourcebooks (Fortune 2014b:
43). But perhaps the major market interference which afflicted the 50th
concerned the fate of Harlequin Goldsmiths. This involved a very “high-
end” merchandise licence granted by Worldwide for golden anniversary
hallmarked gold jewellery and statuaries, with some pieces costing
thousands of pounds. The Harlequin licence formed a major part of BBC
Worldwide’s anniversary press release, promising to unite cultural and
commercial value:

Harlequin ... has created a collection of Limited Edition ... gold statuar-
ies ... For the first time in the company’s history, the Goldsmiths’ Assay Office
has granted BBC Worldwide the use of its iconic trademark to form part of
a new ... hallmark – the Doctor Who 50th Anniversary mark. Only Doctor
Who statuaries and jewellery manufactured by Harlequin ... in 2013 will bear
this special hallmark, following which the mark will be discontinued and the
punch presented to the BBC archives. (BBC Media Centre 2013a online)

Unfortunately, Harlequin was beset by production difficulties, and went

out of business just months after its Who range had been announced.
In place of archival legitimacy and cultural memory, Harlequin’s website
went offline, and the failed company quite understandably had no pres-
ence at the “Celebration” (unlike the New Zealand Mint and Royal Mail,
other “prestige” retailers specifically referred to in Worldwide’s press
release). Currently, the scattered traces of Harlequin include an inactive
Tumblr5 and an equally moribund Facebook group.6
These “glitches in capitalist realism” remain only as very marginal
traces – one has to go looking for them, and know they are present, to
have any real chance of uncovering them (Fisher 2009: 60). Instead,
BBC Worldwide’s brand stewardship of Who tends to convey what
Mark Fisher refers to more generally as contemporary capitalism’s
“confabulated consistency which covers over anomalies and contradic-
tions” (ibid.). Harlequin, rather like former executive producer Caroline
Skinner, simply dematerialized from subsequent press releases, the
“Celebration” event and DWM’s reviews coverage. Recent academic
work has explored the commodification of media memories (Landsberg
2004; Garde-Hansen 2011; van Dijck 2007) as well as the phenomenol-
ogy of film and TV remembrances (Burgin 2004; Augé 2009b; Monaco

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 Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event

2010; Bonner 2012), but here we confront a case where the memories
of a “brand community” (Kornberger 2010: 157–158) are directly at odds
with official celebratory paratexts and brand narratives. Public service
consumption and paratextual completism hold on to counter-narratives
and counter-memories, rather than being subordinated to “the practices
of the BBC [and especially BBC Worldwide – MH] as ... institutional
practices of memory” (Holdsworth 2011: 113).
In this chapter, I’ve analysed what I’ve termed “public service consump-
tion”, and Doctor Who’s merchandising, not as attacks on PSB value(s) but
rather as part of a circuit of decommoditization. The BBC’s “corporate
cultural capital” and decommoditized immaterial labour finds a mirror
and a counterpart, I have suggested, in fans’ affective labour. Material
objects of TV, which trigger memories that can in turn be recommodi-
fied, hence act as “technologies of attachment” (Bonner 2012: 174) for
consumer-fans and audiences, holding remembrances and emotions
that help, over the longer term and across generational arcs of meaning,
to keep PSB alive and loved by its viewers. Perhaps Doctor Who’s greatest
public service success has been inspiring its own twenty-first-century
showrunners. But this captures, in microcosm, what I mean by a circuit
of decommoditization: audiences’ love for the programme eventually
and unpredictably feeds back into its production culture, but also feeds
into a rushing vortex of other cultural forms and professions within
which an appreciation for the BBC becomes embedded (even when fan-
consumers are outside the United Kingdom, and so are not licence fee
payers within the Corporation’s public funding mechanism). Doctor Who
would not have achieved this without the merchandising of memory,
and without an entire paratextual industry of books, magazines, toys and
figures. Focusing on an anti-commercial “value of failure” (Seaton 2015:
244), and thus on creative persistence/trust, fails to properly address
the commercial-public service value of success. And to dismiss brand
anniversaries as mere commodifications of memory fails, ultimately, to
analyse the specificities of public service consumption carried out in the
name of the Doctor.
The next chapter shifts focus from merchandise and consump-
tion to examine the “liveness” of Who’s brand anniversary. Although
merchandising shifts Doctor Who across different media, “DotD” itself
was simultaneously transmitted on television and d exhibited in cinemas,
hence taking on an unusually multiple role in today’s “mediatic system”
(Auslander 2008: 5). Transitions between film and television are generally

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 Merchandising the 50th Anniversary 

sequential – a film appearing only much later on television – or a matter

of adaptation. But on 23 November 2013, audiences could choose to
attend cinema screenings or watch on TV. In what ways did this make
“DotD” special? Was this simply a case of television seeking to elevate
itself culturally by appropriating the status of film?

Notes
 For example, http://merchandise.thedoctorwhosite.co.uk/
 http://merchandise.thedoctorwhosite.co.uk/doctor-who-50th-anniversary-
merchandise/
 See http://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/0210-attachment-redacted.
pdf5B15D.pdf
 Thus constituting the first listed item at http://merchandise.thedoctorwhosite.
co.uk/doctor-who-50th-anniversary-merchandise/.
 http://harlequingoldsmiths.tumblr.com/
 https://www.facebook.com/pages/Harlequin-Goldsmiths/500662526611188

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 3
Mediatizing the 50th
Anniversary – Cinematic
Liveness and the “Developing
Art” of the Doctor
Abstract: This chapter addresses how Doctor Who navigated
the “mediatic system” via its anniversary paratextual array.
Part of constructing “The Day of the Doctor” as a popular
media event involved releasing it in 3D in cinemas. A series
of BFI screenings also built up to the big day, adding an aura
of “liveness” to Who’s celebrations. TV Studies has thought
of television’s relationship to cinema as one where TV aspires
to become “cinematic” and legitimize itself. Exploring how
3D TV was used as an “event”, I argue that there are signs of
“cinematization” in play. However, Who’s media anniversary
also aligned notions of liveness and fan communitas with
movie screenings in order to unusually enact a valorizing
“televisionization” of cinema and a “technologization” of TV.

Keywords: 3D Cinema; BFI; cinematization; fan

communitas; liveness; mediatic system; televisionization

Hills, Matt. Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event –

Marketing, Merchandising and Mediatizing a Brand
Anniversary. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
doi: 10.1057/9781137463326.0006.

 DOI: 10.1057/9781137463326.0006
 Mediatizing the 50th Anniversary 

If the merchandising of memory through public service consumption

represented one trajectory of the 50th (Chapter 2), while paratextually
bidding for cultural value via science education, history and “Britishness”
represented another (Chapter 1), then Doctor Who’s dramatic move into
cinema theatres offered a further strand to the anniversary’s paratextual
array. Continuing to “follow the object” (Lash and Lury 2007: 16) – or
rather the anniversary as an unfolding “popular media event” (Hepp and
Couldry 2010: 8) – in this concluding chapter I will analyse Who’s event
status as 3D cinema, as well as considering the monthly “Doctor Who at
50” BFI screenings which ran across 2013, and Who’s iteration as part of
the year’s BBC Proms.
My theoretical framework draws on Philip Auslander’s (1999 and
2008) discussion of “mediatized culture”. Auslander’s concern is with
how the “liveness” of theatrical performance has been reconfigured in
a culture pervaded by recorded media. As such, his notion of mediati-
zation addresses how different media “acknowledge their status within
a mediatic system” (2008: 5). For Auslander it is “television, not film”
(2008: 11) which is dominant within the current mediatic system of rela-
tions, although he does suggest that the Internet has contested this situa-
tion, leading to an “unresolved struggle for dominance” between TV and
Web 2.0 (2008: xii). However, a considerable body of work in Television
Studies suggests that Auslander may have prematurely elevated TV
above film. In Legitimating Television, Michael Newman and Elana Levine
argue that one “ubiquitous legitimating strategy” for television has, in
fact, been what they call “cinematization”:
certain kinds of television and certain modes of experiencing television
content are aligned with movies and the experience of movies ... It is seldom
flattering to liken a movie to a TV show, but TV shows are routinely praised
for being cinematic ... Legitimation works in part by aligning television with
that which has already been legitimated and aestheticized. (2012: 5)

Cinematization actually accords with Auslander’s argument that we

need to think of media within a system of relations, that is, within
wider mediatization, but it nonetheless locates the hierarchy of film
and TV rather differently. Scholars analysing “high-end” or “quality”
TV drama have examined the extent to which it can be described as
“cinematic” (Nelson 2007: 10–11; Creeber 2013: 86–101), while over-
views of TV drama have equally posited an enhanced “televisuality”
(Caldwell 1995) emerging from the 1980s onwards – one that has

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 Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event

“reduced the remaining aesthetic distinctions between television and

cinema” (Dunleavy 2009: 211). Sometimes referred to as the “HBO
effect” (DeFino 2014; Rogers, Epstein and Reeves 2002), this kind
of “cinematic TV” has been aligned with premium cable in America
(Sepinwall 2012; Martin 2013), leading to a situation where national
imaginaries are layered onto cinematization:
The emphasis on the national in ... U.K. discourses about American Quality
Drama ... underpins the genre’s quality aspirations. ... [I]t is exactly the fantasy
of a national system in which controlling show-runners have access to
cinematic production techniques that fuels the UK imagination of a better
television drama. The nation as a mark of authentication ... remains a central
construct ... in an industrial context which has become distinctly transna-
tional. (Weissmann 2012: 184–185)

Television’s legitimization (Bignell 2007: 158) has become articulated not

only with cinematization via fantasies of “American Quality”, though;
latterly, TV drama’s valorization has also been linked to a wave of
imported Scandinavian series, dubbed a part of cross-media “Nordic
Noir” (Peacock 2014: 2). Here, TV drama’s legitimation has hinged on
a slower-paced “public service crime” drama (Redvall 2013: 159) which
reflexively integrates social/political debates with genre codes (Ward
2013). However, despite there being multiple avenues through which
to seek to discursively elevate “extraordinary” TV over and above
“ordinary television” (Bonner 2003), Doctor Who is a prime-time family
entertainment show and the kinds of prestige offered by emulating
Nordic Noir or US premium cable would invoke niche, “quality” audi-
ences. Cinematization, though, can be innovatively literalized in such
a way as to offer mass/populist legitimation rather than drawing on
potentially elitist/intellectualizing discourses (Baumann 2007: 16), and
this is the strategy pursued around the 50th. Television isn’t metaphori-
cally “cinematic” here, that is, akin to film: instead, television becomes
cinema, as “DotD” is given a limited cinema release in 3D alongside its
2D/3D TV transmission. I think that Brett Mills and Deborah Jaramillo
are right when they argue that invoking the “cinematic” problematically
constructs an othered, devalued form of non-cinematic TV (Mills 2013:
64), and that the term also obscures any serious consideration of TV
aesthetics in their own right and complexity (Jaramillo 2013: 74). Yet the
case of Doctor Who’s anniversary adds further levels of complication to
the debate, for here it is Who itself that is being positioned as “ordinary”

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 Mediatizing the 50th Anniversary 

in relation to an “extraordinary” anniversary film/episode. Or to put it

another way, since it would be extremely curious for a programme brand
to imply its own devaluation, prior “quality TV” is further elevated by
temporarily entering the multiplex (Hills 2010: 147–171). Indeed, this
is a strategy that HBO have emulated with Game of Thrones (Denham
2015), recognizing that the literalization of a powerful cultural metaphor
confers additional status and imitating the template established by Who.
Digital convergence is layered onto a rhetorical convergence of film and
television in such cases, although these processes still hinge on securing
brand distinctions (Andrews 2014: 10–18).
At the level of aesthetics, Doctor Who’s production team clearly had to
learn how to effectively make a 3D episode, with discourses of “research-
ing”, “training” and “testing” surrounding the filming and special effects
of “Day” (Cook 2013: 16; Pennington 2013a: 28–29; Arnopp 2014: 53–54),
making this a special, non-routinized event within the show’s production
culture as well as for audiences. When “TV goes to the movies” as part of
a celebratory paratextual array (Creeber 2013: 86) then cinematization is
evidently being drawn on, but at the same time, discourses of television
are not merely subordinated to cinema in this case. “DotD” also uses
3D across film and television, suggesting that there is a legitimating
“technologization” here that outruns bidding for “cinematic” worth. And
“Day” also draws on Doctor Who’s series memory and its effectively long-
form status via Tom Baker’s appearance (as well as featuring many intra-
textual references), hence bringing the temporality of a long-running TV
show into the cinema theatre (Gorton 2009: 124), albeit not by adapta-
tion but via co-existence as film and TV. And “DotD”, as I will go on to
demonstrate, re-inflects the movie theatre as a “zone of liveness” (Crisell
2012: 45; Elsaesser 1998: 211; Sarah Atkinson 2014: 47), thereby enacting
what can be described as a “televisionization” of cinema. These nuances
have led me to combine Auslander’s “mediatized culture” approach with
Newman and Levine’s stance, despite Auslander’s assertion of televisual
cultural dominance, and despite the fact that “mediatization” has also
functioned in sociological discussions as a marker of pervasive media
culture and “media life” more generally (Deuze 2012: 182; Janissary
Collective 2014: 82; Hepp 2013: 143; Lundby 2009; Hjarvard 2013). This
second set of meanings does, though, feed into my discussion here, as
the relational mediatic system that Who’s 50th navigates also testifies
to the permeation of contemporary culture by mediated memories and
authenticities.

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 Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event

I shall begin by discussing Doctor Who’s anniversary move into BFI

Southbank, where a monthly series of screenings were hosted across
2013 – it being noted that this was not, of course, the programme’s fiftieth
year, but was instead its forty-ninth, leading up to the 50th birthday on
23 November. Brand and marketing discourses configured this calendri-
cal understanding of 2013 as an anticipatory build-up to the anniversary
event, whereas mathematical logic would have suggested holding such
screenings from November 2013 onwards. In branding terms, though,
once the “event” of the anniversary has occurred then a new set of
paratextual narratives has to be configured rather than returning to “old
news”. Commemorations thus began “long before the relevant date ... on
the ... grounds that we were within the ‘anni’ of the anniversary”, a pattern
repeated in other TV anniversaries (Hartley with Green and Burgess
2008: 238). Bradford’s National Media Museum represented a rare case
where commemorations actually began on the anniversary date: it ran
an exhibition from 23 November 2013 to 9 February 2014, “Doctor Who
and Me: 50 Years of Doctor Who Fans”1 (Wheeler 2014: n.p.). By contrast,
the BFI participated in what appeared to be a co-ordinated instance of
paratextual brand management, but to what extent was this actually
the case?

“Mini-conventions” in the National Film Theatre: the

British Film Institute and Doctor Who’s anniversary
“communitas”

At first glance, the BFI’s commemoration of Who seemed thoroughly

integrated into a marketing campaign, where each month of 2013 was
themed around the relevant Doctor – the first Doctor in January, the
second Doctor in February, the third Doctor in March and so on.
Forbidden Planet’s megastore on Shaftesbury Avenue similarly themed
its area of Doctor Who merchandise by month and Doctor, and sequen-
tial Penguin ebooks, IDW comics and AudioGo releases also followed
a related release pattern. However, the assumption that these were fully
co-ordinated paratexts is contradicted by the BFI team responsible for
organizing “Doctor Who at 50”, Justin Johnson and Dick Fiddy. Says
Fiddy: “In what way we should celebrate was initially up for grabs. It was
actually Justin’s idea to have an ongoing celebration that stretched over
the whole year” (in Hammond 2013: 237). This suggests that different

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 Mediatizing the 50th Anniversary 

partners in the anniversary celebration were able to establish their own

levels and types of involvement, rather than following a strictly policed
“brand calendar” for 2013. Justin Johnson notes that

[I]n 2012 we’d shown every Disney animation – one a week for a whole
year – to celebrate the release of their fiftieth animation ... So my feeling was
that, with there being eleven Doctors up to Matt Smith, we could run a year-
round celebration, screening a different story from a different Doctor each
month up to the anniversary in November. The thought was that we’d run
each screening like a mini convention and try to get the best possible guests
on board to talk about the episodes. (in Hammond 2013: 237)

Rather than powerful strategic co-ordination, then, established industry

and organizational practices are iterated, contra any notion of a media
anniversary as “unique”. Doctor Who benefitted from the prior BFI Disney
season, but the BFI’s approach was also, in some senses, far closer to a
traditional public service ethos than that of the three-day “Celebration”
run commercially by BBC Worldwide. For the price of a BFI cinema
ticket, attendees were treated to an impressive variety of guests per
screening, the majority of whom were happy to freely sign autographs
for fans. Set against this, many autographs had to be booked and paid
for at the ExCeL “Celebration” (even if some guests at the live DVD
commentaries ignored this situation and signed for fans). Furthermore,
the BFI didn’t pay industry/Who personnel for their involvement: “Most
of the people we’ve approached are used to getting a fee when they go to
a convention. But we don’t make any money from these events – we’re a
not-for-profit organization – and all of them have been happy to ... give
up their time for free” (Johnson in Hammond 2013: 237). And rather
than tickets being available on a competitive consumerist basis (first
come, first served) – as was the case for the “Celebration”, and where VIP
tickets sold out rapidly for 23 November – the BFI ran a ticket lottery for
these in-demand events from May 2013 onwards.
Being institutionally detached from commercial forces, as well as
carrying the cultural capital of the British Film Institute, and hence
resonating with the Who brand’s Britishness, these events attracted
some unusual contributors. Christopher Eccleston, who had declined
to appear in “DotD” and was instead momentarily digitally composited
into the episode (Moffat 2014c: 6) – and who had furthermore not
participated in BBC Worldwide’s commercial “Celebration” – sent the
BFI a message which was read out to fans: “I love the BFI. I love the

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 Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event

Doctor and hope you enjoy this presentation. ... If Joe [Ahearne] agrees
to direct the 100th anniversary special, I will bring my sonic and a stair-
lift and ... I, the Ninth Doctor, vow to save the universe and all you apes
in it” (quoted in Robb and Simpson 2015: 266). This all had the curious
effect of consecrating the BFI season more substantially than the BBC’s
official yet consumer-oriented “Celebration”, lending these BFI events
a lustre of symbolic capital. The eighth Doctor Paul McGann, also not
present at the commercial ExCeL event, likewise participated in the BFI
screening of the 1996 “TV Movie”, attending a Q&A along with Geoffrey
Sax (director) and Daphne Ashbrook (companion Grace Holloway).
This session was rearranged, contingently disrupting the Doctor-by-
month pattern, in order to secure its line-up of guests. Running at 10am
on a Saturday (5 October), and involving Big Finish guests as well as the
seventh Doctor’s script editor Andrew Cartmel, this very much had the
feel of a convention, discussing the “wilderness years” in the 1990s when
Who was no longer being made for television rather than focusing purely
on televised Doctor Who.
The BFI itself also has a longer history of commemorating Who. In
1983, it recognized the show’s 20th anniversary with a 2-day series of
screenings on 29–30 October entitled “Doctor Who – The Developing
Art”. In the programme notes, Jeremy Bentham writes about Who in a
way that might now seem rather idiosyncratic for an anniversary event:
Very little of the material being screened would be held up, in the widest
context, as supreme examples of classic television. However, what we hope it
does reflect is a consistency of high standard programme making which has
given enormous pleasure to millions of television viewers world-wide. It is
good quality television and, more than that, it is memorable television that
stays affectionately in the minds of many generations. (1983: 3)

There is no real sense of legitimating “cinematization” in this paratextual

analysis, however. Bentham is more interested in valorizing Who for
its “experimental ... technical” achievements such as Scene-Sync, which
was used for “matching live actors onto model landscapes” or “Colour
Separation Overlay [which] received its maiden voyage on the seven
part serial Doctor Who and the Silurians” (1983: 3). Despite Doctor Who
being screened at the National Film Theatre, it is very much the “devel-
oping art” of television production technique and craft that’s stressed.
And rather than arguing for Who’s cultural value, in a pre-programme
brand era Bentham’s commentary strikes an almost apologetic note. The

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 Mediatizing the 50th Anniversary 

(weakly) legitimating discourse offered is instead a resolutely populist

and emotivist one – Doctor Who brings “pleasure to millions of television
viewers” and “stays affectionately in the minds” of these audiences. This
is curious, given that Bentham had pursued an auteurist reading of Who
in the pages of Doctor Who Monthly, tracing the “cinematic” status of a
particular director’s shot choices (Booy 2012a: 50), and positioning the
programme’s producers as sources of meaning, decades before the show-
runner concept would be industrially normalized for “quality” TV (ibid.
2012a: 55). Bentham had also contributed factual appendices to Doctor
Who: The Unfolding Textt (Tulloch and Alvarado 1983), and so was aware
of an intellectualizing bid for legitimation circling the show at the time
(1983: 2). Yet writing for NFT audiences rather than for the fan readers
of Doctor Who Monthly, Bentham’s “Overview” specifically seemed to
back off from an “aesthetics ... rooted in authorship” (Booy 2012a: 53), as
if aware that these tentative, early bids for Who’s cultural capital in the
1980s might not be fully recognized and validated in a cinephile context.
Indeed, “Doctor Who – The Developing Art” occurred relatively early
in the BFI’s history of screening television, occasioned just as much by
union agreements as by a desire to commemorate the show. As Richard
Paterson, a key member of the “TV Projects Group” at the BFI at the
time, has recounted:
A set of negotiations ... brokered by ... contacts with the unions, led to the
negotiation of an agreement to allow the NFT to exhibit television to paying
audiences, the Performers’ Alliance Agreement. This initiative was eventually
signed in 1980 but its necessity was proved by the 1976 TV Drama season
at the NFT ... which required no fewer than four hundred letters being writ-
ten to individuals appearing in the programmes to obtain their permission.
(Paterson 2012: 231)

It was as a result of the Performer’s Alliance Agreement that the BFI

went ahead “with seasons at the NFT (including David Mercer, Doctor
Who and an all-day Jewel in the Crown screening)” (ibid. 2012: 233).
Television was thus not securely consecrated within the BFI at the time,
instead being a relatively new entrant to National Film Theatre venues.
Perhaps this partly explained Bentham’s hesitancy and his retreat from
discourses of authorship that would subsequently migrate from fandom
into the TV industry and the cultural mainstream. At this moment in
1983, however, Doctor Who was far more “developing” towards legitimacy
rather than acting as part of an established TV “art” – it fell between

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 Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event

“vulgar” cultural practices, as Bourdieu would term the “sphere of

the arbitrary”, and the consecrated arts of “noble” cultural practices
(Bourdieu 1990: 96–97). Instead, Who uneasily occupied the “sphere of
the legitimizable” (1990: 96), meaning that its value could be assumed by
“limited groups of amateurs” (1990: 97), that is, fandom, albeit without
any wider legitimation.
Writing in “Event TV: Fan Consumption of Televised Doctor Who in
Britain (1963–Present)”, Andrew O’Day has studied the way in which
Who fandom constructs communal viewings of the show as fan-cultural
“events”. Interviewing Jeremy Bentham, O’Day solicits his memories of
“The Developing Art”, only to find that then – as now – the involvement
of actors who rarely participated in fan events was a keenly remembered
highlight:
I doubted Richard Paterson’s claim that the NFT had booked [second Doctor]
Patrick Troughton to appear on the Sunday. That doubt persisted ... right up
to the moment when ... the great man himself abruptly ambled into the NFT
café ... The sound of jaws hitting the floor in shared astoundment was almost
audible ... I think my personal favourite [memory] is still the Tex Avery-style
double-take that one fan performed during ... [the second Doctor story] “The
War Games” when he suddenly realised the voice of the Doctor on screen
was identical to the voice he could hear ... in the seat behind him. (Bentham
in O’Day 2013: 12)

Acting as a consecrating and consecrated institution – formally

distanced from industry and fan markets – the BFI attracts perform-
ers who might otherwise shun commercial fan events. The memorable
co-presence of stars and fans, sitting together in the cinema audience,
lends an aura of “communitas” to these events. Anthropologist Victor
Turner identified this “existential quality” of experience as break-
ing “in through the interstices of structure ... It is almost everywhere
held to be sacred ... because it transposes or dissolves the norms that
govern structured and institutionalized relationships” (Turner 1969:
114–115). Communitas temporarily liberates subjects – here, fans of a
TV programme – from the hierarchies and social/cultural structures
through which they relate to their beloved show and its celebrated
actors, in so doing flooding fans “with affect” (Turner 1969: 115).
However, as Turner also points out, this “immediacy of communitas
gives way to the mediacy of structure”, and the two continue to operate
in a dialectical relationship (1969: 116). Although communitas is clearly
related to an experience of “unified” community and togetherness, this

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 Mediatizing the 50th Anniversary 

is not to say that memories of the “same” ritualized, bounded commu-

nitas cannot be given differently individualized meanings (Delanty
2010: 33): the fan that Bentham’s account refers to was evidently lucky
enough to be sat just in front of Patrick Troughton, crucially within
earshot. It has even been argued that “the most powerful dimension
of liminality is its solitariness” (Blackshaw 2010: 94), given that the
bounded nature of communitas generates a subjective sense of intense
affect and vitality that seems disconnected from social structures and
thus from others, even if a co-present crowd or audience can be imag-
ined as sharing in the collective experience. However individualized
it is as “authentic” fan experience and memory, communitas emerges
here through a spontaneous and unplanned encounter with Doctor
Who’s lead actor (Ferris and Harris 2011: 21). Clearly, norms of cinema
attendance still persist; the fan cannot attempt social interaction with
Troughton during the screening, but can only overhear his presence.
Hence, although this “unification” of fan and celebrity as part of the
same BFI audience gestures to Victor Turner’s notion of communitas,
and an “anthropology of collective joy” (Edith Turner 2012), it is
apparent that social norms of behaviour (and structure) are not wholly
suspended. This fan-celebrity co-presence is different in kind to a pre-
staged, industrially and commercially managed one – that is, a paid-
for autograph queue at the “Celebration” – but the Doctor Who actor
remains celebrated and “extraordinary” in the very moment that their
status, and their usually sequestered self, is repositioned as engaged in
the “ordinary” practice of cinema-going.
There is a danger of romanticizing fannish communitas and commu-
nity here (Joseph 2002: 30–68; Esposito 2010: 6), and we should note that
perhaps voluntary fan attendance at a commemorative event like “The
Developing Art” or “Doctor Who at 50” is more “liminoid” than “liminal”
(Turner 1974; Couldry 2003: 34), that is, it is not fully detached from
social statuses and realities, and not entirely removed from commercial/
consumer identities. And yet calling this “liminoid” perhaps goes too far
in the other direction, suggesting an unreality of fan community, or its
failure to live up to the purity of “liminal” communitas via a somewhat
unhelpful true/false binary. As Nick Couldry has remarked in passing,
there “are traces ... of ... everyday liminality ... in ... fandom” (2003: 33), and
these traces become more evident in events such as “The Developing
Art”. Rather than separating fan-celebrity encounters into a tripartite
system of “pre-staged”, “unstaged” and “fan-staged” (Ferris and Harris

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 Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event

2011: 18, 21–22), it would be more useful to discern a continuum of

“everyday liminality” and fan communitas whereby different degrees of
social, institutional and industrial structure intervene and map onto the
liminal experience. For example, queuing for a long time to get into the
BBC Shop at the “Celebration”, or queuing to have a photo taken with
Peter Davison to be made into a Royal Mail “Smiler” stamp set, might be
heavily marked with commercial meanings. By contrast, chatting briefly
to “Celebration” guests such as Graeme Harper or Fiona Cumming
after the remediation of a live DVD commentary (Bolter and Grusin
2000), and requesting an unpaid-for, freely given autograph, may be
less clearly stamped by neoliberal consumer subjectivity. Within the
same organized event, then, fans can move between celebrity encoun-
ters, engaging in differentiated and distinguishable experiences of fan
communitas.
If the legitimization of Doctor Who as “cinematic” remained insecure
in 1983 – with memories of “everyday liminality” proving to be more
significant than discourses of cinematization – then by 2013 this situ-
ation, and this balance, had very much changed. The legitimating
equation of Doctor Who with cinema is readily set out, both by Jeremy
Bentham and by Andrew O’Day in his academic commentary: “Bentham
compares ... [fan-run] new series launch parties with ‘going to the cinema
and seeing a film.’ Furthermore, the [present-day] BFI premieres of
episodes remind one of film premieres” (O’Day 2013: 21). Cinematization
is enacted here as unremarkable, just as Who exists matter-of-factly
within 2013’s monthly BFI Southbank Guides. Furthermore, different
Doctors are paratextually introduced in the BFI’s scheduling Guides in
ways that replay established fan aesthetics and understandings. We’re
told that Tom Baker’s “portrayal casts a long shadow over the series, even
to the present day” (Fiddy and Johnson 2013a: 11); that Peter Davison’s
“Doctor was a stark contrast to the humour and swagger of his pred-
ecessor” (Fiddy and Johnson 2013b: 17); and that Colin Baker “had to
battle with as many off-screen dramas as he did on-screen” (Fiddy and
Johnson 2013c: 17). Rather than fan interpretations existing in “limited
groups”, cut apart from the BFI’s institutional framing of film and TV,
by the time of the 50th then BFI and fan interpretations effectively
dovetail, that is, fan readings become authoritatively “factual” here. It is
this shared legitimation which enables the “Doctor Who at 50” strand to
be conceptualized as a series of “mini conventions”, quite unlike “The
Developing Art”, where Bentham’s “Overview” has the awkwardness

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 Mediatizing the 50th Anniversary 

of one (fan) style of reading anxiously encountering another imagined

(cinephile) interpretive mode.
A contemporary discourse of cinematization also operates in somewhat
unexpected places, as when Philip Hayward and Jon Fitzgerald observe
that from “2005 on, [Murray] Gold pursued a more cinematic approach
to scoring than the often experimental musical styles associated with
the Radiophonic Workshop” (2013: 144). Doctor Who’s current status as
“cinematic” television is clearly not only a matter of its visual style, with
“integrated strategies...such as the...Doctor Who Prom...[providing] the
BBC with enhanced exposure of its valuable commodity” (Hayward and
Fitzgerald 2013: 148–149). In fact the Doctor Who BBC Prom for 2013
(13–14 July) did several unusual things. First, it featured the Radiophonic
Workshop’s music more significantly than any previous Who-themed Prom
had done, as these events had previously focused on Murray Gold’s scoring
alongside well-known pieces of classical music. A “Classic [Who] Medley”
contextualized the Workshop’s output in terms of heritage rather than
experimentalism, however: this stridently dehistoricized and decontextu-
alized remembrance had nothing to say about the factors that consigned
the trailblazing Radiophonic Workshop to history, such as the policy of
Producer Choice introduced by John Birt in 1991 (Niebur 2010: 214).
Secondly, and as well as unifying different eras of Doctor Who’s music,
Prom 2 on 13 July also offered the “world premiere” of a celebratory
“anthem” entitled “Song for Fifty” (Beek 2013: 28). This was accompanied
in the programme by “Create a Soundtrack” winners in two categories,
ages 14–16 (senior) and 11–14 (juniors), making visible the Proms’ strat-
egy of reaching out to younger audiences. Like the British Film Institute,
the Proms effectively offered another connotative “home” for Who’s anni-
versary, again reinforcing the show’s “Britishness”, though in a far more
pronounced fashion than the BFI. Also, akin to the British Film Institute,
the Proms represented a consecrating institution incorporating Who.
Doing so enabled the “sphere of legitimate culture” (Bourdieu 1990: 95)
to represent itself as accessible and non-elitist, operating within the same
educational/inspirational discourses as Professor Brian Cox’s framing
of The Science of Doctor Who (Holmes 2013: 22). Rather than a situation
where one “passes gradually” from consecrated art to individual (because
unschooled) tastes (Bourdieu 1990: 96), boundary interplay within the
mediatic system can work to the advantage of each different medium and
institution. Where Who’s anniversary was dignified and substantiated by
the Proms and the British Film Institute, they in turn raised their profile

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 Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event

and reach, hoping to bring in new consumers – especially children – and

thus ensure their longer-term cultural reproduction.
The Doctor Who Proms also integrated “cinematic” big screens showing
clips from the series alongside orchestral and Radiophonic Workshop
performances. The sense of shared audience experience aligned with
“Brit-myth” (Rojek 2007), consumerist merchandising (a programme
shaped like a TARDIS, assorted posters etc) and a “mediatised gaze”
(Urry and Larsen 2011: 20) did not appear to override or corrode the
value of liveness here as Philip Auslander has implied – quite to the
contrary, in fact. As Dennis Kennedy argues:
Auslander’s book is important ... Yet I doubt that many spectators are as
perplexed about the live as he implies. ... At ... concerts the giant video screens
which double the musicians’ presence ... [have a] force only because of the
authenticating live manifestation of the performers’ bodies ... the original has
by virtue of its rarity achieved added monetary appeal. Perhaps this is true of
the live as well. (2011: 8)

At the Proms, though, the screens showed moments from Doctor Who
rather than merely mediatizing performers’ presence, thus remediat-
ing the TV programme as part of a skillfully timed and executed live
performance. The presence of actors in the venue, for example, Jenna
Coleman and Matt Smith, was also performatively integrated with
a played-in, recorded Who skit, extending the diegetic Whoniverse
partially, and very much reflexively and playfully, into the live event’s
hermeneutics.
Where these kinds of events emphasized values of fan communitas
and “liveness”, whether of a performing orchestra and/or show-related
guests, the same qualities also became part of Who’s unusual anniversary
navigation of the mediatic system. The programme’s 3D cinema release
did more than merely pursue “cinematization”, also simultaneously
conferring the status of event-led “televisionization” on movie theatres
up and down the United Kingdom, as I’ll now go on to analyse.

“Liveness” in the multiplex: 3D and the anniversary

dimensions of Doctor Who
In this part of my discussion, I want to approach Who’s 50th birthday
deployment of 3D in three ways. First, I’m interested in how a legitimat-
ing discourse of cinematization was strongly present in production

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 Mediatizing the 50th Anniversary 

discourses surrounding “DotD”, where 3D techniques were bench-

marked against industry (and critical) standards of what constitutes
“good” 3D film in the twenty-first century. Secondly, I want to consider
how the mediatization of “Day” as a 3D cinema release alongside its TV
transmission also relied on a legitimating “technologization” whereby 3D
could itself be promoted as extraordinary and eventful. Ironically, this
legitimating strategy draws on the self-same discursive repertoires that
have undermined the consumer take-up (and industry future) of 3D TV
in general (Simon Brown 2013). And finally, I will argue that Auslander’s
mediatization thesis, where liveness is eroded in and by mediatized
culture, needs to be rethought in relation to simulcast cinema screen-
ings and TV broadcasts such as “DotD”. This simultaneity builds on the
emergence of live “alternative content” screened in cinemas, such as
theatre performances (Barker 2013: 2), to construct a specific legitimat-
ing discourse for cinema – here, one of televisionization. This challenges
Auslander’s account, suggesting instead that liveness, as auratic event-
fulness, can remain a valued (re)framing of mediatized culture (just as
“mini conventions” and live Q&As – along with performers, producers
and fans sitting together in the audience – conferred auratic value on the
BFI’s “Doctor Who at 50”).

First dimension: “good” 3D as enhanced

storytelling and enhanced Doctor Who

First, then, I want to consider industry standards and industrial/critical

hierarchies of 3D in terms of how it has been discussed and mediated for
audiences. 3D has frequently been dismissed as a gimmick and a distrac-
tion, especially in relation to its history in 1950s exploitation/B-movies.
As William Paul has noted, 3D’s central problem is “its inability to
become invisible” (1993: 331; Isaacs 2014: 254), thereby allegedly pushing
audiences out of diegetic immersion. Doctor Who’s production team were
moving into uncharted territory for the current show, and consequently
researched contemporary industrial norms of “good” 3D:
Nick [Hurran, the director] did an awful lot of research about which 3D films
work, and which ones don’t ... He came to the conclusion – slightly heart-
sinking if you’re the showrunner – that the only really good 3D film is James
Cameron’s Avatar, whose budget considerably exceeds our own. Except, Nick
wasn’t talking about the size, he was saying that it’s not about jabbing things

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 Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event

out of the screen ... but about giving seductive depth that makes you want to
reach into the screen. (Moffat in Cook 2013: 16)

In this statement, paraphrased in other fan magazine interviews

(e.g. in Setchfield 2013b: 52), Moffat reproduces industry and critical
understandings of 3D. That is, he replays a distaste for what has been
termed “emergence” or “negative parallax” – the effect produced when
something seems to appear out of the screen as if present in the cinema
theatre. Dominant discourses of “tasteful” and narratively integrated 3D
call for a minimization of negative parallax, as in John Belton’s scholarly
commentary, which also nominates Avatarr as an exemplar: “If ... [3D]
is ever to become a norm, it must cease calling attention to itself. This
is what James Cameron sought to do in Avatarr by keeping the depth of
his image behind the stereo window and limiting emergence as much
as possible” (2012: 194). This notion of reduced emergence has led to
normative industrial expressions of a 3D “depth-oriented aesthetic that
can bind stereoscopic effects to character-oriented narrative tasks; the
approach checks and controls protrusion while seeking expressive meth-
ods for handling the space behind the screen” (Higgins 2012: 207). That
hierarchies of cultural value are at stake here is sharply clear in Scott
Higgins’ summary of film aesthetics: “If protrusion brashly announces
the ... technology’s thrill-value, a restrained, depth-oriented aesthetic has
developed as a more respectable ... option” (ibid. 2012: 198; Prince 2012:
210). Similarly, Keith Johnston traces the critical history of 3D discourses
in popular journalism and the film industry, again uncovering a binary
whereby “emergence” is devalued as a “sideshow”:
Examining the reception trajectory of 3-D as a cinema technology since
1951 has revealed that critical language, and critical agendas, have remained
constant, focused on the aesthetic limitations of the technology rather than
its artistic possibilities. The ... popular discourse around 3-D ... has ... demon-
strated ... discernible split[s] in critical commentary between ... immersive
story and sideshow attraction. (2012: 259)

It has therefore become important, in terms of film/TV production

culture, “to distance digital 3D from the fairground ... [P]roducers have
sought a less obtrusive approach to 3D, which is taken to be more
commensurable with ... narrative” (Rogers 2013: 186). Where a “fair-
ground” or “sideshow”-style attraction is more important than narrative
immersion – indeed, where non-immersion and the visibility of 3D
precisely as an impressive effect may be prioritized – then one would

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 Mediatizing the 50th Anniversary 

expect negative parallax to be emphasized. This is exactly the case in the

3D film which concludes the theme-park style walkthrough element of
“The Doctor Who Experience”, where a Weeping Angel’s fingers and a
Dalek plunger loom alarmingly out of the screen, very much jabbing at
the presumably awed spectator. By contrast, there is no such pronounced
and deliberately aesthetically invasive “emergence” in “DotD”. Who’s
TV production discourse staunchly occupies and iterates “the parallax
debates” surrounding contemporary 3D (Klinger 2013: 186; Johnston
2012: 247; Mathijs 2005: 453; Elsaesser 2013: 220–221), demonstrating
Doctor Who’s long-established capacity to assimilate and adapt other
cultural materials (Sleight 2012: 201; Harmes 2014: xviii).
Where emergence is used in the anniversary special, it is discur-
sively articulated with narrative immersion by industry professionals.
Permitted to visit on-set filming of “DotD” – a sequence in which the
John Hurt, David Tennant and Matt Smith Doctors discuss activating
a Gallifreyan superweapon called “the Moment” – the Telegraph’s Neil
Midgley published the following paratextual thoughts:

[T]he director Nick Hurran and his team – especially the stereo supervisor
Adam Sculthorp ... – agonise over the look of the scene. “We’re trying to make
it a natural experience”, Sculthorp says. He argues that 3D done well enhances
a film’s story. The red jewel, for example, will be pulled forwards into what
Sculthorp calls “theatre space” – a term coined to describe an extreme 3D
effect that makes an object appear to leap out of the screen. “We’ve used the
‘stereo depth’ in that shot to hopefully take the viewer and make them feel
how important it is”, he explains. (2013: 51)

The “red jewel” here is the activation mechanism of the Moment –

narratively, it is the nuclear button, the device that will initiate genocide
and destruction on a planetary scale. Negative parallax is thus justified
on the grounds of storytelling threat and significance, illustrating “the
role stereoscopic design can play in the production of ... meaning” (Purse
2013: 137). Of course, 3D is very considerably integrated into the narra-
tive of “DotD”, given that Time Lord art such as the “Gallifrey Falls”
painting is shown diegetically to be three-dimensional – an effect which
fantastically reveals a planar surface to be stereoscopic just as effectively
in 2D as 3D. Indeed, the requirement for “Day” to work in 2D and 3D,
given that most of its television viewers would be watching in a 2D TV
format (Moffat in Cook 2013: 16), may also have restricted the produc-
tion team’s use of extreme emergence. But it remains the case that this is

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 Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event

paratextually and discursively positioned as a matter of creating “good”

3D rather than as an aesthetically compromised “2.5D” minimizing
negative parallax (Phil Streather in Higgins 2012: 206).
For all the anti-emergence discourses reproduced by Who’s production
team, “Day” does still draw on significant moments of negative parallax.
For instance, in the “Last Day of the Time War” action sequence we
see a Dalek menacingly move towards the camera and into our theatre
space (or living room) in 3D. Laser blasts also pulse out into the audi-
ence’s space, albeit not being aimed directly at viewers since this would
non-immersively emphasize the 3D image’s irreality (Sandifer 2011: 72),
whilst “stereoscopic debris” floats around battling and fleeing Time Lord
characters, making “boundaries between the film’s membrane and the
viewers’ bodies unclear” (Ross 2015: 126–127). This marauding Dalek
menace draws on 3D’s cinematic history: “[emergence] is most preva-
lent in those films we might expect to rely on ‘cheap shocks’ ... [such as]
horror [movies]” (Purse 2013: 131). It aligns negative parallax with the
horror genre in terms of conveying spectacular threat (Rogers 2013: 203),
very much enacting an “exhibitionist confrontation” with the viewer
(Heffernan 2004: 26; Gaudreault 2009). As such, the use of Dalek/Time
War emergence in “Day” works to position Doctor Who’s TV horror as
cinematic, not through gore (Jowett and Abbott 2013: 13) or CGI per se
(Wheatley 2006: 182–184) but specifically through 3D aesthetics.
In line with valorizing depth and positive rather than negative paral-
lax, Steven Moffat repeatedly publicized the 3D of “DotD” via Clara’s
entrance to the TARDIS:
It means that when Clara rides a motorbike into the TARDIS, we’ve got the
best into-the-bigger-on-the-inside moment ever ... You actually see it – and
feel it – as you would if you were to go through those doors for real. It has
that depth. (Moffat in Cook 2013: 16)

This “best ever entrance into the TARDIS” (Moffat in Parker 2013: 24)
supposedly makes the narrative “a world that you want to get inside”
(Moffat in Setchfield 2013b: 52). But it also integrates 3D into the
Whoniverse, demonstrating that it can be used to improve upon Who’s
pre-existing conceits rather than deforming and distorting the show’s
(branded) identity. Producer Marcus Wilson told Broadcastt magazine:
“we couldn’t let one layer [i.e. 3D filming] dictate. I was very clear that
this had to look and feel like ‘Doctor Who enhanced with 3D’ rather than
‘Doctor Who does 3D’ ” (in Pennington 2013a: 28).

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 Mediatizing the 50th Anniversary 

These interview paratexts condense together immersion and what’s

presumed to be aesthetically effective, brand-friendly 3D. Keenly
evidencing “parallax debates”, Who’s production discourse views emer-
gence as a disruptive gimmick, to be used sparingly and purely in service
of narrative. However, Barbara Klinger has argued that rather “than
focusing on negative parallax’s perceived deficits”, it can be critically
apprehended as a “multifaceted element” of many 3D texts (2013: 186).
Klinger very much challenges the notion that emergence is a marker of
“bad” and obtrusive 3D cinema:
Negative parallax ... acts as a branding device that focuses attention on corpo-
rations ... Through negative parallax, company titles typically float delicately
or more boldly toward the audience ... Further, because of their dimensional-
ity, floating titles introduce a film’s 3D effects, setting the stage for more to
come. Since company credits tend to float rather than fly, their self-promotion
seems textually appropriate rather than ostentatious. (2013: 195).

And this is very much true of “Day”, where retro Doctor Who and current
BBC logos “float” above the title sequence and opening shot. 3D had
already been introduced in multiplex screenings, however, via a playful
paratext designed especially for the cinema and featuring Matt Smith
and David Tennant, in character as the Doctor, activating the 3D effect.
Those watching 3D TV would, however, have been introduced to 3D
via the titles, focusing attention on the BBC and Doctor Who as firmly
coupled public service/programme brands operating as the twin hearts
of anniversary commemoration.
Klinger also argues that emergence, and its projectile elements, can
forge “significant links between the mise-en-scene of transmediated
texts, merchandise and everyday life. In this sense, negative parallax
multitasks: it promotes corporations ... and represents things ready
for play” (2013: 196). One example of this was the Dalek Patrol Ship,
shown whizzing out of the screen, which despite minimal appearances
otherwise in “Day” and “Time of the Doctor” was subsequently made
available as a toy. Thus, to view emergence only as a failing of outdated
and gimmicky 3D does it a considerable disservice.
Yet by aligning “DotD” aesthetically with the likes of James
Cameron’s Avatar, and assiduously and paratextually performing
established film industry discourses of “good” 3D, the cinematization
of 3D Doctor Who is rampantly enacted. Whether viewed in 3D in the
cinema or the home, “Day” is contextualized not merely as cinematic

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 Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event

television, where due to digital effects “the dividing line between feature
film and TV is now very fine and Who can claim to have embedded that
in UK TV production culture” (Will Cohen, Chief Executive of Milk
VFX, in Pennington 2013b: 34). More than this, the anniversary special
is aligned with an assumed and reproduced “gold standard” of 3D/
cinematic storytelling.

Second dimension: a television “special” ...

in 3D and 2D

The appeal of 3D arguably also lies in its capacity to make “DotD” extraor-
dinary, enabling it to stand out from standard Who. Although the series
had used 3D before, in the 1993 30th anniversary Doctor Who/EastEnders
crossover “Dimensions in Time” – as well as in 1980s merchandise such
as Viewmaster cards (Schröter 2014: 14–15) – this occasion was distinc-
tive in terms of offering 3D in the cinema and as part of the BBC’s 3D
TV trial. This simultaneously positioned it as literal cinematization and
as part of TV’s technological unfolding. Simon Brown has analysed
contemporary 3D TV as a kind of “special effect that sits on top of ... the
normal run of programming and ... standard programme aesthetics as
an added attraction designed to draw attention to itself ” (2013: 44). This
“added” TV attraction means that 3D TV remains firmly positioned as
an “event” within the UK TV industry. Although such a status evidently
suited the Doctor Who production team, it also denied 3D TV “the kind
of normalisation that is necessary” for it to become a more mainstream,
accepted part of television technology (ibid.), though fans may have
purchased a 3D blu-ray release of “DotD” in the hope that 3D TV would
become more normalized and accessible in the future. Nevertheless,
there is a legitimating discourse of technologization here which operates
differently in relation to 3D TV when compared to already normalized
3D cinema, thus moving across the two media rather than cinematization
being the sole legitimation strategy at work. But this also generates some
discursive difficulties for Who. A cinematic “depth-oriented aesthetic”
is aimed precisely at removing the cultural taint (and excessive, anti-
immersive and anti-realist visibility) of 3D as a “fairground” gimmick
or novelty. Yet 3D TV continues to be a “gimmick” in televisual terms,
ignoring “one of the key ways people use and watch television: seriality.
Event television ... may get high audience ratings but the bulk of television

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 Mediatizing the 50th Anniversary 

is not an event, it is a habit: a daily or weekly occurrence, and a desire for

continued plural (not singular) pleasures” (Johnston 2013 online)
For Keith Johnston, then, 3D TV remains a novelty rather than
moving towards wider consumer take-up and any integration into seri-
alized, habitual TV consumption. Indeed the BBC’s trial was cancelled
after the announcement that “Day” would be filmed in 3D, making
it one of the BBC’s final 3D productions for the time being. It is not
surprising that production discourses surrounding the anniversary
special would so intently reiterate a cinematization narrative of immer-
sive 3D; this can be read not only as elevating “ordinary TV”, but also
as seeking to aesthetically normalize the “novelty” of 3D TV even while
reproducing “event” connotations. In this context, 3D becomes multi-
discursive. Paratextually, “DotD” is neither a “series of aesthetic experi-
mentations ... seeking to define the new language of 3D TV” (Simon
Brown 2013: 44) nor is it “tarnished and diminished through the use of
words like ‘gimmick’ and ‘novelty’ ” (Johnston 2013 online). Rather, it is
simultaneously event TV and normalized 3D cinema – “extraordinary” and
“ordinary” as it moves across media contexts and across technologized/
cinematized legitimations.
The fanzine Whotopia included a number of fan reviews of 3D
cinema screenings in different countries (America, Australia and the
United Kingdom). Writing about a Chicago screening, Triona Guidry
remarked:
I don’t think anyone cared if the movie was in 2D or 3D. Although I attended
a 3D showing, the theaters in my area sold out of both. It wasn’t about the
special effects, as longtime fans are well aware. This was about participating
in a passionate tribute to a show that has been a part of us for a very long
time, and it was thrilling to share it with so many others. (Guidry 2014: 69;
see also Wilson 2014: 71)

Although perceiving 3D Doctor Who as a “special effect”, just as Simon

Brown does in his academic analysis, Guidry then immediately shifts
into a well-established fan trope – that Who is about much more than
surface gloss and VFX (Tulloch and Jenkins 1995: 170). 3D is far from
“invisible” to this fan commentator (i.e. as a part of realist, immersive
drama); instead, it is deliberately tuned out, interpreted as an irrelevance
in the face of shared experience. The “thrilling” quality here is not one
of aesthetics and effects, but is rather a matter of fan communitas once
more, as fans are united in a “passionate tribute”, co-present together as

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 Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event

a cinema audience (Swanson 2015). Free from the issue of fan-celebrity

interaction (and individualized, authenticating fan memories of sitting
near to a celebrated lead actor), this fan audience seems likely to attain
a high level of everyday liminality. Indeed, anecdotally, my own attend-
ance at “DotD” at the O2’s “Sky Superscreen” was marked by a highly
unusual experience of collective joy – when Tom Baker’s voice was first
heard, off-screen, there was a burst of applause and celebratory cheering,
but this spike in audience noise cut absolutely dead in the next instant, as
all the co-present fans simultaneously realized that if they continued to
whoop and holler they would actually be drowning out Baker’s dialogue.
Here, fan communitas was instead promptly marked by normative fan-
cultural silence and attentiveness, a state of affairs punctuated only by
the momentary celebration that fell silent in unison. Structures of disci-
plined and disciplining fan identity (Zubernis and Larsen 2012), of being
a “good” fan, thus impinged on collective expressions and floodings
of affect.
In contrast to the celebration of fans’ “passionate tribute”, other
contributors to Whotopia’s international assessment of “DotD” screen-
ings respond to cinematic 3D as the “gold standard” viewing context:
“The first sequence to show off the 3D comes ... where Clara drives her
bike straight into the TARDIS. That really worked well ... In all, The Day
of the Doctor was one of the best new-Who episodes ever and on the big
screen in 3D was perfection” (Furlong 2014: 72). Clara’s entrance into the
TARDIS – so insistently hyped by Steven Moffat – takes advantage of
rapid movement forward into diegetic space, just as the “flythrough” of
the Time Lord painting “Gallifrey Falls” does; Sara Ross has discussed
this as “a staple [3D] strategy because of its ability to both showcase 3D
spectacle and also bind visual novelty to story [and here, to Who’s mythol-
ogy – MH] ... At the same time, [this motion] ... remains spectacular in
2D versions, making it a good fit for a market in which non-3D ... ancil-
lary technologies” remain significant (2012: 210).
This need for “DotD” to work in 2D and 3D is also picked up on in
fan analysis. Whotopia’s Huntsville, USA correspondent Matthew Kresal
applauds a number of “shots which look interesting on a normal screen
but perhaps look at their best in 3D. ... [P]raise is certainly due to the
production team of the special for making it work both in 2D on televi-
sion and some cinema screens as well as 3D” (2014: 73). Kresal’s review
also draws on the discourse of 3D’s depth-oriented aesthetics, placing
“DotD” in the category of “subtle” 3D movies:

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 Mediatizing the 50th Anniversary 

I’ve often been ... unimpressed with 3D movies. Only two things I’ve seen
in 3D in a cinema have impressed me: the 2012 upscaled release of James
Cameron’s 1997 film Titanic and The Day of the Doctor. Both worked because
the use of 3D was made subtle with nothing rather absurdly leaping out of
the screen at the audience as has often been the case or being so subtle as to
be difficult to notice (as was my experience with Tron: Legacy back in 2010).
(2014: 73)

If 3D TV made sense to Steven Moffat and the production team as one

way of constituting “Day” as a television event, then Triona Guidry’s fan
reading – re-orienting her cinema screening’s “event” status around fan
community rather than 3D visuals – demonstrates very well how “Day”
became a multi-discursive and unfolding event. It was also the “live”
co-presence of a cinema audience that rendered “DotD” as eventful,
something that theorists of liveness and recording such as Andew Crisell
have previously noted:
[“Liveness”] appears to characterise even a non-live medium like the cinema,
for part of our pleasure in going to see a film is that others are in the audito-
rium with us ... [W]e value liveness not just for the instantaneous nature of its
messages but for the sense it gives us of being part of a larger community –
all ... viewing ... at the same time ... In other words, whether the primary
medium is live ... or recorded ... , a kind of live secondary communication ... is
established between the members of its audience. (2012: 16)

Third dimension: “liveness” and the

“televisionization” of cinema

However, the relationship of “DotD” to liveness was more complex than

“live secondary communication” alone would account for. UK cinema
premieres were timed to coincide with BBC1’s transmission, and cinema
partners (i.e. venues screening “Day”) were warned to avoid generating
spoilers: “This one ... is for the fans. They see it first. No previews, no
press screenings for celebrities and ‘opinion-formers’ ... This time we’re
going to show the real audience to the front row” (Moffat 2013b: 6). This
directive once more reflects a sense of fan communitas, and an egalitar-
ian levelling of hierarchies, although it lacks the (temporary) unification
of fans and celebrities offered by the likes of the NFT.
By offering a shared cinema and television premiere, tied into “live
secondary communication” and an imagined community of co-viewers,

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 Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event

“DotD” was able to regenerate a sense of collective viewing (as well as

evidencing it in movie theatres), raising the possibility that viewer-
spectators were “being invited to re-engage with ... past, shared, cultur-
ally embedded practices of television viewing” (Piper 2011: 414). This,
however, raises the spectre of “BBC nostalgia” once more (Holdsworth
2011: 94–95), implying that Who’s 50th anniversary could have been
aimed at demonstrating the BBC’s public service potency in terms of
unifying (trans)national audiences in a fixed temporality of the “event”:

It is certainly obvious that much of the present talk of the “end of television”
seems to be linked in one way or another to the impending loss of broadcast-
ing’s fixed temporal regime of everyday eventfulness. It is this regime which
seems most vulnerable in an age of multiple platforms, rolling news, ... and,
most significantly, the extended availability of discrete programmes. (Piper
2011: 422)

However, following this backward-looking stance would neglect to

consider that “DotD” did not only instantiate a televisual “regime
of ... eventfulness”, but also incorporated cinema. Thus, it is more
convincing to supplement Helen Piper’s analysis with Thomas Elsaesser’s
consideration of the cinematic “event-scenario” (1998: 212). Elsaesser
argues that to remain culturally relevant and vibrant then cinema needs
to respond to its lack of liveness, something which is typically linked to
television (and increasingly, to Twitter, Facebook and Web 2.0): “What
is it that the cinema can set against this, how does it compensate for its
rival medium’s ... sense of ‘being there’, in order to have been there …?”
(1998: 211). For Elsaesser, part of the answer lies in first-run films, where
consumers are charged a premium for a “time advantage ... [A]udiences
pay a premium for seeing a film ... when it has the attention of the press
and the general public. Its commodity value resides in its temporal-
ity ... [as] an ‘event’ ” (1998: 212). And it is suggested that the blockbuster,
preceded by a marketing build-up of hype, characterizes cinema’s event-
scenario best, taking “place in a kind of count-down time” (1998: 214).
Of course, “Day” and the day of 23 November emulated this use of
“count-down time” by forming the projected (but not absolute) end
point to a sizeable paratextual array and a build-up stretching back to
the beginning of 2013, at least. As the editor of DWM M put it, “My God,
it feels like we’ve been counting down to the 50th anniversary for a
millennia” (Spilsbury 2013a: 5; Tostevin 2013a). Rather than entirely
approximating to a “blockbuster” release, however, 3D cinematic “DotD”

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 Mediatizing the 50th Anniversary 

was a simulcast – a television premiere which audiences could watch at

the cinema. Fitting into the genre of “alternative content” (Barker 2013:
6–7), the anniversary wasn’t a live theatre performance available for one
night only – rather, it occupied a televisual “zone of liveness” (Crisell
2012: 45) which enabled participating cinemas to “reinject ‘the lost
aura of the event’ ... to deliver a ... concentrated burst of hereness” in the
manner of live TV (Marriott 2007: 120). Sarah Atkinson, in her study
of “emerging cinema” which incorporates theatrical (or here, televisual)
elements of co-presence and liveness, argues that a “move towards
liveness in the cinematic realm signals a significant aggrandizement of
cinematic consumption in an expansion and deepening of what can now
be perceived to constitute a ‘cinematic’ experience” (2014: 49).
This is a notable inversion of Auslander’s mediatization thesis. Far
from liveness being dominated or displaced by mediatized culture
(2008: xii and 24), in this multi-discursive instance both cinematization
and televisionization are enacted. That is, TV Doctor Who is legitimated
by temporarily becoming a cinema screening (a manoeuvre which was
replayed around Peter Capaldi’s opening story, “Deep Breath”, directed by
Ben Wheatley and accompanied by a live Q&A with Capaldi et all which
was beamed into cinema theatres from the Empire Leicester Square).
But at the same time, cinema is also expanded and deepened by virtue
of being drawn into an anniversary “zone of liveness” in UK screenings,
and thus is legitimated via a “live” televisual logic and aura. And although
this televisual liveness is “live secondary communication” or simulcast-
ing rather than “real” or “full” liveness (Crisell 2012: 93; Bourdon 2000),
it nevertheless represents a valorizing “event-scenario” which addresses
Elsaesser’s concerns as to how cinema can emulate television – and now,
Web 2.0 – in terms of capturing everyday eventfulness (Sarah Atkinson
2014: 47). For Auslander, and as Martin Barker has argued, liveness
appears to be defined as a “lack of technological intervention”, and this
presumption inhibits it being viewed, instead, as “a mode of participa-
tion, a sense of shared purpose. It denies the possibility of heightening
participation through technological means” (Barker 2003: 35) as occurs
in the case of Doctor Who’s anniversary simulcast. The legitimating
discourses drawn on here – a combination of (3D) cinematization and
(the time-bound, collective/co-present viewing of) televisionization – do
not relationally pit liveness against recording so much as reintroduce an
“aura” of the live, and the event, into the transmission and screening of a
recorded TV drama. This reintroduction is simultaneously technological

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 Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event

and discursive, but it also notably lacks an intellectualizing component

(contra Baumann 2007: 16). “DotD” is hence legitimated in a resolutely
populist manner, as “auratic” cine-televisual and tele-cinematic culture
that – even while it deconstructs media ontologies – proclaims its public
service accessibility and “mass” status (Moffat in Spilsbury 2014b: 63).
In this short monograph I have argued for the importance of taking
seriously and analysing brand anniversaries rather than seeing these
unfolding events only as commercial exercises. The proliferation of such
anniversaries has been noted elsewhere (Gill 2015; Garner 2015), but
I have taken Doctor Who’s 50th as a case study in order to think more
precisely about accompanying paratextual arrays and their phenom-
enological interactions and disruptions. Alongside these concerns, I
have analysed the programme brand as a “BBC metonym”, challenged
the notion that merchandise consumption is inimical to a public service
ethos via a concept of “public service consumption” and addressed the
unusual “televisionization” of 3D cinema screenings. To wrap up my
tripartite investigation of marketing, merchandising and mediatization,
I will consider what general/specific attributes mark out Who’s recent
anniversary, moving towards a comparative stance.

Conclusion: anniversary discourses and

“history in the making”

Time travel may well have become increasingly important to Doctor

Who since its 2005 reinvention (Booth 2012b: 113), but the show has a
history of anniversary commemoration that has been carried over from
its “classic” phase. It is this longer history that permits trans-anniversary
remembrances within fandom, as well as fan service aimed at cueing
dedicated audiences’ memories of previous anniversary specials – for
example, intertextual dialogue in “Day” citing “The Three Doctors”
from 1973, or references to 1983’s “The Five Doctors” in Engines of War
(Mann 2014). Yet Who’s 50th anniversary celebrations occurred in a very
different cultural–industrial context to its earlier milestone birthdays
(Hills 2013a). In a “liquid modern” consumer culture (Bauman 2000)
where commodity life cycles are accelerated and accelerating, relative
marketplace longevity – even on the scale of a decade or so – becomes
a badge of honour and a claim for cultural value, as does the cross-
generational persistence of media content. And within the world of “TV

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 Mediatizing the 50th Anniversary 

III”, where branding and digital culture have come to frame television as
an object (Rogers, Epstein and Reeves 2002), anniversaries also enable
intellectual properties to extend their paratextual presence and reinforce
their market position. Such “heritage brands” are recognized leaders in
their commodity “constellation” (Ferrell Lowe and Palokangas 2010: 133
and 135). However, these brands – whether they are the world’s longest
running science-fiction TV show or world-leading PSB – cannot merely
trade nostalgically on the past. On the contrary, “heritage is about
clarifying contemporary relevance ... ‘Heritage brands are distinct in that
they are about both history and history in the making’ ” (Ferrell Lowe
and Palokangas 2010: 136, citing Urde, Greyser and Balmer 2007: 7).
Anniversary discourses therefore offer a double articulation: they look
back over the past but also assiduously (re)make a TV show or film
franchise as relevant to the here-and-now. They are pre-structured as
anticipated events, via “count-down time” (Elsaesser 1998: 214) and the
circulation of paratextual arrays, and are hence nominated as historical
(for broadcasters and audiences alike) before they have even occurred.
Double articulation is accompanied by a present that is “incessantly
duplicated” as “spectators ... collect their own life while it is passing” (Virno
2015: 55), participating in what’s paratextually announced as “history in
the making”.
The programming of brand anniversaries is further evident in the
manner in which one commemoration emulates another, and is then in
turn industrially imitated more generally. Doctor Who’s 50th was compared
to James Bond’s 50th (Moffat in Harrison 2013), while the BFI iterated
their treatment of Disney films with a Who season, and EastEnder’s 30th
borrowed the structural approach of Doctor Who Live: The Afterpartyy by
following its final “anniversary special” with a “backstage” show. Doctor
Who’s 2013 Guinness world record for simulcasts was likewise emulated
and surpassed by CSII in 2015, while Who’s innovative use of cinema screen-
ings, and literal “cinematization” of TV, has been appropriated by HBO’s
Game of Thrones. It is tempting to view anniversary commemorations as
a series of discursive practices through which “history in the making”
can be promoted as a social good, whilst entertainment brands align
themselves with cultural rather than commercial value at the same time
as retaining a commercial agenda. Doctor Who’s media/brand anniversary
was certainly complicated by virtue of the BBC’s public service identity,
but despite the distinct shaping of public service paratexts (e.g. stressing
science education, Britishness, consecrating institutions like the BFI and

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 Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event

the Proms, and 1960s cultural history), the underlying structure of brand
“culturalization” tends to remain present across auratic public service
and commercial contexts. The embedding of anniversary discourse
within institutional strategies asserting contemporary relevance also
extends to Tony Hall’s recent defence of the BBC itself, ahead of Charter
renewal. Praising EastEnder’s 30th anniversary live shows in terms of
“risk rhetoric” (Becker 2007: 281), Hall went on to argue that the Beeb
faced a crossroads:
Down one path lies a BBC reduced in impact and reach in a world of global
giants. ... A sleep-walk into decay for the BBC, punching below its weight
abroad, and Britain diminished as a result. Which means a UK dominated
by global gatekeepers, partial news and American taste-makers. Down the
other path is a strong BBC helping bind the country together at home and
championing it abroad. ... An internet-first BBC which belongs to everyone
and where everyone belongs. A BBC celebrating its hundredth birthday but
with its best days ahead of it. (in BBC Media Centre 2015)

Anniversary discourse is entwined here with a “strong BBC”, just as Who’s

50th was intertwined with rationales for the BBC as an innovative public
service broadcaster, that is, looking to the future with 3D drama that
could compete with the best of cinema, as well as “binding the country
together and championing it abroad” via a popular media event and a
world-record-winning number of international simulcasts. Anniversary
discourse, which could easily be mistaken for “BBC nostalgia” (or other
forms of nostalgic glow) is more concerned with illuminating brand
relevance, emphasizing “nowness” and forward-looking cultural value
in the marketplace. Likewise, Doctor Who’s production discourse on
the 50th remained multi-temporal: looking back meant anticipating the
show’s “next 50” years via some kind of discursive time travel (Moffat in
Setchfield 2013b: 50).
And while the commodification of hyped anniversaries has become an
industrial template, fan cultures in turn have come to expect that their
beloved shows will be celebrated; Ross Garner (2015) argues that Twin
Peaks’ 25th anniversary began in a “dispersed” form in fan paratexts and
speculations, before eventually being rendered official by David Lynch
and Showtime’s announcement of a new series (before then threatening
to unravel). But whether anniversaries are “hyped” (i.e. carefully planned
via brand management which can still be disrupted) or “dispersed” (i.e.
emerging through audience appropriations of anniversary discourse),

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 Mediatizing the 50th Anniversary 

such proliferating media practices carry their own emergent, refigured

hermeneutics. Unlike Lash and Lury’s exhortation to “follow the objects”
(2007: 16), these are not cultural navigations set apart from narration,
although the stories they can tell cut across diegetic and extra-diegetic
worlds (also unlike established discussions of transmedia storytelling).
Who’s 50th was a matter of Tom Baker’s cameo and an “extended serial-
ity” that traversed and integrated, if only momentarily and eventfully,
the Whoniverse (Pearson and Messenger Davies 2014: 128). But it was
also about spoilers, rumours, “Celebration” queues, fan communitas and
failed “high-end” merchandise licensees. There is no singular ideal reader
here: even if fandom tends to be paratextually completist (within the
limits of national territory, online community or language), paratextual
arrays can still be “gleaned” differently for variously telling moments,
whether these are “Moffat facepalm” gifs, memes such as “you are erased
from Doctor Who!” or official behind-the-scenes accounts. Rather than
fixing textual meaning, paratextual arrays facilitate multiplicity, interact-
ing inter-, para- and meta-paratextually, and leaving room for audiences’
resistance to social media or fan-cultural “refrains” (Papacharissi 2015:
59; Brereton 2012: 204–205). Although I have not focused substantively
on social media here – such work would realistically require another
three chapters or even a separate study – it can still be said that anni-
versary discourses and their “commemorative cycles that ... spin ever
closer to the present” (Hoskins 2014: 118) enmesh audience memories
with diegetic world-building. Far from overwhelming us, as A. A. Gill
suggests (2015: 14), such birthday festivities can involve the gift form of
popular media events:
[W]e can and do arrange to give ourselves experiences in order to have them –
this is the fore-givenness, the gift, of experience. In making things happen
in order to have an experience, we voluntarily submit to the pre-planned
occasion for the sake of the experience of it ... In doing so, we get to own the
experience. ... To be open to the event means to allow oneself to be possessed
by it; not simply “to enter into the spirit of the occasion” as they say, but also
the reverse – to let the spirit of the occasion ... enter into one’s self. (Scannell
2014: 187–188)

And this enables a circuit of decommoditization through which

consumer culture’s effectivity (and here, public service consump-
tion) can be re-performed. Media/brand anniversaries have grown in
cultural density and popularity, I would ultimately hazard, due to their

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 Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event

over-determination: they can temporarily hold together commerce and

culture, past and future, industrial template and branded uniqueness,
individual and nation, live aura and mediatization, commodity and
souvenir, and nostalgia and relevance. No series of artefacts can ever be
all things to all people. But even while remaining framed by corporate
interests, for example Doctor Who acting as a BBC metonym, or BBC
Worldwide iterating capitalist realism, then brand anniversaries –
unfolding events marked by arrays of inter-, para- and meta-paratextual
relations – surely succeed in being many things to many people.

Note
 http://www.nationalmediamuseum.org.uk/PlanAVisit/Exhibitions/
DoctorWhoAndMe/Introduction.aspx

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 Index
3D cinema, 81 fan communitas, 88–90, 92,
alongside 2D/3D TV 99–100, 101, 107
transmission, 82 marketing, 27–55
Doctor Who’s anniversary mediatic system, 78, 81, 83,
and, 92–3 91–2
“DotD” using, 83 mediatizing, 80–108
future of, 106 merchandising, 56–79
“good” 3D as enhanced paratexts, 9–17
Doctor Who, 93–8 press release, 77
liveness and televisionization rethinking media events,
of, 101–4 17–24
television “special” in 3D from unfolding text to
and 2D, 98–101 unfolding event, 24–7
50th Anniversary Collector’s Arvidsson, Adam, 4
Edition, 32–3, 42, 47–8 Ashbrook, Daphne, 86
Atkinson, Richard, 54
academic merchandising, Atkinson, Sarah, 30, 83, 103
25, 60 attention economy, 4
action figures, 9, 12, 58, 60, AudioGo, 41, 76, 84
62, 71 Auslander, Philip, 81, 83, 92,
Affective Publicss (Papacharissi), 21 93, 103
Alderman, Naomi, 10 Austin, Thomas, 28
“alien associations” Avatarr (movie), 93, 94, 97
inter- and para-paratextual awards
prefigurations, 45 BAFTA, 43, 51, 52, 53
paratextual tensions, 35–9 ceremonies, 46, 54
rumours or spoilers, 55 “DWM M Awards,” 53
An Adventure in Space and Time industry/fan, 30, 55
(docudrama), 16, 29, 40,
43–4, 70 Bainbridge, Jason, 62
anniversary Baker, Colin, 33, 49, 90
brand extension, 3, 47, Baker, Tom, 29, 33, 38, 48, 54,
51, 63 83, 90, 100, 107
conventions, 9–17 banal nationalism, 60

 DOI: 10.1057/9781137463326.0008


BBC America, 31–2
BBC Media Centre, 41, 60, 67, 77, 106
BBC metonym, 7, 27, 42, 44–5, 55, 57,
104, 108
BBC Shop, 58, 64, 70, 72, 90
BBC Wales, 5, 13–15, 33, 35, 40, 59
BBC Worldwide, 3, 25, 41
achievements, 52
anniversary plans, 76, 76–8
capitalist realism, 76–7, 108
co-creating value, 74
commercial arm, 3, 6, 8
“DotD” promotion, 31
merchandising, 57–8, 60–1, 65, 68–9
promotion, 31, 42
Bell, Erin, 43, 44
Belton, John, 94
Bentham, Jeremy, 86–90
BFI (British Film Institute)
commemoration of Who, 84–92
“Doctor Who–The Developing Art”
programme, 86–90
premieres, 23, 90
screenings, 75, 81, 87, 90
ticket lottery, 85
“TV Movie” 50th anniversary event,
75, 86
Big Chief Studios, 71
Big Finish, 16, 40, 41, 71, 86
Biltereyst, Daniel, 22
Binns, John, 42
Birt, John, 91
Bond, James, 2, 9, 10, 105
Bonner, Frances, 62
Boorstin, Daniel, 6, 52
Booth, Katie, 59
Booth, Paul, 59, 63
Bradford’s National Media
Museum, 84
brandcasting, 5
brand community, 54, 74, 78
brand “fanagement,” 59, 65
Brands: The Logos of the Global Economy
(Lury), 5
Brannigan, Bernard, 49
Bredehoft, Thomas A., 12
DOI: 10.1057/9781137463326.0008
Index 
Britishness
Doctor Who’s, 81, 85, 91, 105
icons of, 45, 65
markers, 55, 61
Broadcastt (magazine), 30, 52, 96
Brockhurst, Colin, 34–5
Brown, Simon, 93, 98, 99
Brunsdon, Charlotte, 48
Caldwell, John T., 37, 38
Cameron, James, 93, 94, 97, 101
Capaldi, Peter, 10, 46, 47, 103
capitalist realism, 56, 76–9, 108
Cartmel, Andrew, 86
“Celebration,” ExCeL, 5, 12, 49, 52, 64,
68–70, 73, 75, 85–6
brochure, 69–70
Show Planner, 71
Celestial Toyroom (DWAS
newsletter), 49
“Chicago TARDIS” convention, 59
Church, David, 34
cinema, televisionization of, 83, 92, 93,
101–4
cinematization, 81–3, 86, 90–2, 97–9,
103, 105
Clarke, M. J., 66
Coleman, Jenna, 92
commercial brands, 57
commercialism, separating PSB and,
5, 29, 37, 55, 57, 68, 76
Condry, Ian, 74
consecration
BFI events, 86–7, 88, 91, 105
brand, 36, 52
cultural practices of, 88
insecure, 54
consumer capitalism 75, 77
consumer choice, 74
corporate cultural capital, 62, 74, 78
Couldry, Nick, 20, 89
Cox, Brian (Professor), 41–2, 91
Crisell, Andrew, 101
Cubicle 7 Entertainment, 71, 77
Cult Collectors (Geraghty), 58
Culture Show, The (BBC2), 36
 Index
Cumming, Fiona, 90
Cushing, Peter, 34
Daleks
“The Dalek Invasion of Earth”
sequence re-enacted, 45
Dalekmania, 2
Union Jack and, 64, 65
Dark Bunny Tees, 71–2
Davies, Russell T, 2, 15, 48, 66
Davison, Peter, 48, 49, 50, 64, 90
Dayan, Daniel, 17, 19–20
“Dimensions in Time,” Doctor Who/
EastEnders crossover, 98
Disney films, 105
Disneyization/Disneyisation, 18, 72
dispersible texts, 24, 28
Dixon, Kevin, 72
Doctor Who
3D and enhanced storytelling, 93–8
3D and liveness of anniversary,
92–3
50th anniversary, 5, 7, 19, 25–6, 28,
46, 75, 104–5
BFI (British Film Institute)
commemoration of, 84–92
commemorating the ExCeL
“Celebration,” 68–76
fan communitas, 88–90, 92, 99–100,
101, 107
golden jubilee, 2, 3
production of 3D episode, 83
production team, 4, 33, 37, 51, 55, 83,
93, 95–6, 98, 100–101
sonic screwdriver, 12, 62
tenth anniversary, 25
Doctor Who Appreciation Society
(DWAS), 46, 49, 70, 71
Doctor Who Prom, 3, 81, 91–2, 106
Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text
(Tulloch and Alvarado), 25, 87
Doctor Who: The Vaultt (Hearn), 75–6
“Doctor Who and Me: 50 Years of
Doctor Who Fans,” 84
Doctor Who Live: The Afterparty, 11, 16,
29, 46–8, 105
Doctor Who Magazine (DWM), 11, 14, 15,
25, 40, 42–5, 47, 53–4, 66, 77, 102
Doctor Who Monopolyy (game), 12, 63–4
“Doctor Who–The Developing
Art,” BFI’s 20th anniversary
programme, 86–90
Doctor Who Weeklyy (magazine), 63
Doctor Who Yahtzee (game), 63
“DotD” (“The Day of the Doctor”),
5, 9–10, 12–17, 29
3D techniques, 83, 93, 95–103
Eccleston declining to appear in, 85
executive producer change, 37
fan favourite, 54
limited cinema release, 82–3
merchandising, 60, 65–7, 71, 78–9
paratextual narratives of, 39, 40,
45–6, 49, 55
Radio Times Audience Award
BAFTA, 51–2
San Diego Comic-Con (SDCC)
paratext, 31–4
social media, 20
Duffett, Mark, 70, 71
“Early Trailer,” 29, 32, 55
EastEnders (UK soap), 2, 46, 53, 98,
105–6
Eccleston, Christopher, 2, 66, 85
Eccleston, Peter (error in Doctor Who
Live: The Next Doctor), 47
Elsaesser, Thomas, 102
emotional governance, 4
Engines of Warr (Mann), 12, 25, 66–7, 104
English, James, 52–3
ExCeL “Celebration,” 5, 12, 49, 52, 64,
68–70, 73, 75, 85–6
experience economy, 18
fanagement, 59, 65
fan communitas, 88–90, 92, 99–100,
101, 107
“Fan Phenomena” book series,
Intellect, 58
fans, as brand community, 74
Farley, Jordan, 40
DOI: 10.1057/9781137463326.0008

Fiddy, Dick, 84, 90
Fisher, Mark, 74, 77
Fiske, John, 11
Fitzgerald, Jon, 7, 91
The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot
(mockumentary), 29–30, 48–50
“The Five Doctors,” 25, 66, 104
Ford, Sam, 31
Foreman, Susan, 70
Game of Thrones (HBO), 51, 83, 105
games, Doctor Who themed, 12, 63–4
Gardner, Julie, 48
Garner, Ross, 106
Gatiss, Mark, 44, 45
Genette, Gerard, 8, 14, 17
Geraghty, Lincoln, 73
Gill, A. A., 2, 107
Gillan, Jennifer, 5
Global James Bond Day, 2, 9
Gold, Murray, 91
Grainge, Paul, 5
Gray, Ann, 43, 44
Gray, Jonathan, 11–13, 25, 51, 58
Green, Joshua, 31
Groening, Stephen, 50
ground-up worker paratexts, 37–9
Grutchfield, Ian, 5
Guardian (newspaper), 9, 10, 39
Guidry, Triona, 99, 101
Guinness Book of World Records, 52
Guinness World Record, 52–3
Hall, Tony, 7, 67, 106
Harlequin Goldsmiths, 77
Harper, Graeme, 90
Harrison-Hansley, Milla, 41
Hartnell, William, 7, 33–5
Hayward, Philip, 7, 91
Hearn, Marcus, 75–6
Hendy, David, 62
Hepp, Andreas, 20
Hilton, Boyd, 51
Holloway, Grace, 86
Hollywood, Hype and Audiences
(Austin), 28
DOI: 10.1057/9781137463326.0008
Index 
Horan, Niall, 47
Horror Channel, 38
Hound, Rufus, 46, 47
Howe, Andrew, 67
Huffington Postt (online news), 38
Hurran, Nick, 93, 95
Hurt, John, 12, 13, 32, 34, 71, 95
IDW Comics, 41, 84
Image, The (Boorstin), 6
imagined memory, 70
Indiegogo (Who’s Changing: An
Adventure in Time with Fans), 35
inter-paratexts, 12
anniversary, 14, 16, 25
Dalek model and, 64
inconsistencies, 13
personal history and, 45
references, 35
intertextual commodities, 3, 5, 59
Iser, Wolfgang, 39
Jaramillo, Deborah, 82
Jenkins, Henry, 31
Johnson, Catherine, 3, 5, 47, 57, 61,
64, 68
Johnson, Derek, 6
Johnson, Justin, 84, 85, 90
Johnston, Keith M., 31, 33, 94, 99
Johnston, William M., 6
Katz, Elihu, 17, 19–20
Kennedy, Dennis, 92
Kernan, Lisa, 32
Kibble-White, Graham, 40, 44
Kickstarter (Doctor Who: Celebrating
50 Years of Fandom), 35
Klinger, Barbara, 97
Kornberger, Martin, 4
Kresal, Matthew, 100
Lambert, Verity, 45
Lamerichs, Nicolle, 70, 71
Lash, Scott, 21–3, 107
Levine, Elana, 81, 83
Lewin, Russell, 9
 Index

licensing
high-end, 59, 60, 62, 71, 73, 81, 107
merchandise, 2, 4, 6, 11–12, 23, 58–9
liveness, 101
cinema, 101–4
value of, 92
Who’s 50th, 92–3
“zone of ” (Crisell), 8, 83, 103
Lotz, Amanda, 11, 36
Lury, Celia, 5, 21–3
Lynch, David, 106
McCoy, Sylvester, 33, 49
McDonough, Terry, 44
McGann, Paul, 30, 40, 75, 86
Mann, George, 66
marketing
accidents and acclaim, 46–55
“alien associations” and paratextual
tensions in relation to, 35–9
rush-release of “Night of the
Doctor”, 40
trailers and fan tributes, 30–5
Marriott, Stephanie, 46
Mawer, Charlie, 51
Me, You and Doctor Who (Matthew
Sweet), 36
media events, 3
paratextual analysis and, 8, 17, 26
rethinking, 17–24
Media Events (Dayan and Katz), 18
mediatic system, 78, 81, 83, 91–2
mediatization, 104, 108
Auslander’s thesis, 81, 83, 93, 103
“Day of the Doctor” as 3D cinema
release and, 93
mediatized culture, 81, 83, 93, 103
Meers, Philippe, 22
Mercer, David, 87
merchandise
action figures, 9, 12, 58, 60, 62, 71
appeal of Who, 59–60
high-end, 60, 62, 71, 73, 81, 107
licensing, 2, 4, 6, 11–12, 23, 58–9
tie-in, 65–8
merchandising
academic, 25, 60
BBC Worldwide, 57–8, 60–1, 65,
68–9
brand “fanagement” and, 59–65
“capitalist realism” and, 76–9
commemorating the “Celebration”
and, 68–76
cross-product narration of, 23
Doctor Who’s golden jubilee, 22, 55,
57, 57–9, 65
franchise-based, 60
of memory, 63, 81
“prestige” products, 59–65
public service consumption and,
57–8, 63, 67–9, 78, 81, 104
shared audience experience, 92
trans-anniversary paratext as, 65–8
Merrin, William, 61
Messenger Davies, Maire, 40–1
meta-paratextual media/brand
anniversaries, 8, 14–16, 23, 24, 29,
33, 45, 53, 59, 65, 107–8
Midgley, Neil, 95
Mills, Brett, 82
Mills, Catriona, 16
Milner, Andrew, 36
Moffat, Steven, 9, 10, 14–15, 28, 30–4,
37–40, 46–9, 51, 54, 58, 66, 96,
100–101
Monopoly, Doctor Who themed,
12, 63–4
Moor, Liz, 3, 28
Mulkern, Patrick, 44
Murray, Simone, 3
National Film Theatre, 84–92
National Media Museum, 84
negative parallax, 94–7
Neighbours (UK soap), 2
New Dimensions of Doctor Who
(Hills), 2
Newman, Michael, 81, 83
Newswatch (BBC programme),
29, 35–7, 55

DOI: 10.1057/9781137463326.0008

New Zealand Mint, 60, 71, 77
Night with the Stars: The Science of
Doctor Who (DVD/blu-ray
version), 42
O’Day, Andrew, 88, 90
One Direction, 47, 48
ontological ambiguity, 4
ontological bridging, 4
ontological security, 76
Other Doctor’s Sonic Screwdriver, 12
Papacharissi, Zizi, 21–2, 24, 54
paratexts, 3
completism and, 53
curating of, 68–76
fans creating their own anniversary
marketing as, 34
tensions and “alien associations,”
35–9
top-down corporate, 37
Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation
(Genette), 14
paratextual analysis, 8, 11, 17, 24–6, 86
Paterson, Richard, 87, 88
Paul, William, 93
Pearson, Roberta, 40, 41
Penhale, Faith, 51, 52
Performer’s Alliance Agreement, 87
Pertwee, Jon, 33, 34
Piper, Helen, 102
Police Box, 2, 70
Private Eye (magazine), 29, 37, 39
production team, Doctor Who, 4, 33,
37, 51, 55, 83, 93, 95–6, 98,
100–101
promotional activity, 19, 20
promotions, see marketing
prosthetic memory, 70
public service broadcasting (PSB),
57–8, 63, 67–9, 74
separating commercialism and, 5,
29, 37, 55, 57, 68, 76
“value of failure” (Seaton) and,
67, 78
DOI: 10.1057/9781137463326.0008
Index 
public service consumption,
merchandising and, 57–8, 63,
67–9, 78, 81, 104
push for exclusivity (SDCC), 31
push for publicity, 31
Radiophonic Workshop, 72, 74, 91–2
Radio Times (magazine), 7, 12, 36, 37,
42–4
Anniversary Specials, 25, 35
Audience Award BAFTA, 43, 51,
52, 53
Red Bee Media, 29, 33, 51
Robb, Brian J., 48, 66
romanticization of event, 21, 23, 89
Ross, Sara, 100
Royall, Paul, 36
Royal Mail, 61, 71, 77, 90
Rubbertoe Replicas, 60, 71
rumours, 37, 55, 107
Russell, Edward, 5
San Diego Comic-Con (SDCC), 27,
30–2, 45, 55
Sandifer, Philip, 13–14
Sax, Geoffrey, 86
Scannell, Paddy, 18, 24
Science of Doctor Who, The (BBC2),
11, 29, 40–4, 91
Seasons of Warr (May), 25
Seaton, Jean, 67–8
“second-hand fandom” (Geraghty),
62, 76
SFXX (magazine), 9, 37, 40, 47
Shanadi, Govind, 60
Show Sold Separatelyy (Gray), 13, 58
Simpson, Paul, 48, 66
Skinner, Caroline, 37, 38, 48, 51, 77
Skyfalll (James Bond movie), 9–10
Smart, Billy, 6–7
Smith, Matt, 2, 34, 41, 85, 92,
95, 97
social transcendence, 18
sonic screwdriver, 12, 62, 71
Stamp and Coin Martt (magazine), 61
 Index

Stewart, Susan, 72–3 fan-targeted online, 31

Sweet, Matthew, 36, 63
TARDIS, 2, 9, 41, 43
Anniversary logo, 12, 72
Clara’s entrance to, in “Day of the
Doctor”, 96, 100
commemorative coin, 60
merchandise (Proms
programme), 92
photo opportunity at the ExCeL
“Celebration”, 70
Silva Screen “TARDIS edition,”
5, 77
televisionization, of cinema, 83, 92, 93,
101–4
Tennant, David, 33, 34, 95, 97
This Planet Earth, 60, 71
“The Three Doctors,” 34, 64, 104
Thunderbirds (television series), 2
Time Lord, 2, 13, 66, 69, 95–6, 100
time travel, 8, 104, 106
Time Traveller Passport (Heathrow
promotion), 51
Time War, 10, 66, 96
Tomlinson, Louis, 47
Totter’s Lane, 70, 72
Trafalgar Square, 9, 29, 61
trailers
50th anniversary, 26
“Early Trailer,” 29, 32, 55
sneak-peeks, 29
Transmedia Television (Clarke), 66
Troughton, Patrick, 34, 88, 89
Tryon, Chuck, 34
Turner, Imogen, 49
Turner, Victor, 88
Turner, William, 49
Twin Peaks, 106
Underground Toys, 71
Union Jack, Dalek model branded
with, 64, 65
“value of failure”, and public service
broadcasting, 67, 78
van Statten, Henry, 69
Vortex Manipulator, 60
Wallace and Gromit licenses, 23
War Doctor, 12, 32, 66, 71
War Doctor Sonic Screwdriver, 71
Wasko, Janet, 60
Wednesday Play, The, 6, 7
Whoniverse, 41, 64, 66, 92, 96, 107
Whotopia (fanzine), 99, 100
Wilson, Marcus, 51, 96
Wonderful Books, 35
worker paratexts, ground-up, 37–9
Yahtzee, Doctor Who themed, 63

DOI: 10.1057/9781137463326.0008