Feedback — Who in America
Jim Ryan comments:
Dear David,
I found your site through a webcrawl, to see who else out there remembered Doctor Who, and was surprised by your article about Who fans in America. As an American Who fan myself, it was interesting to read your findings.
As an update on the matter here, times have not been good for the faithful who are out of touch with each other. When the Beeb priced old episodes out of everyone’s hands, the outlets who had carried it (the PBS stations, and then later cable’s Sci-Fi Channel) were forced to drop it. Recently, it came back on the digital outlet BBC America — at 0800 hours on weekdays! There aren’t enough devoted Who fans who are willing to be late for work and school five days a week to keep it on the air here. The impression we get in America because of all this is that, yes, the BBC is proud of Doctor Who, but also embarrassed by it, and they try and kill it after it builds some audience. The fact that the TV movie with Paul McGann over here only got a 5.6 Nielsen was cited as why they never produced a new series just reinforces this perception.
I at least try and keep the faith as best I can. I recently sold a Doctor Who-based story to the webzine Roofttop Sessions, entitled ’Act Naturally’, in the hope of keeping interest up. I actually heard back from a fellow contributor to the zine, who said the piece brought back all her memories about the show. A woman I’d known for years, and only with this one piece do I find that she’s also a fan of the Doctor!
In some ways, American fans are like the titular enemies in Tomb of the Cybermen in that we’re out there, just waiting for the signal to revive…
Here’s the list of the feedback items available here:
→ How I Killed a Fanzine (or, What’s an EFG?)
→ The Doctor and I (a fan’s biography)
→ Doctor Who in America
→ Funny Search Engines
→ Or just head back to the Feedback Index
This page last updated by David J Richardson on Sun, 27 Apr 2003.