No TWIDW or TTW July 31 & A News Update
(posted 30th Jul 2010, 9:16am - TWIDW post #1083)

This Week In Doctor Who and Torchwood This Week will not be producing a July 31 issue due to technical and travel issues. TWIDW and TTW will be back on August 7th. For most stations (particularly stations who made the information available), you should be able to extrapolate the Doctor Who and spinoff shows' schedules out to then from the July 24th edition.

July 31 would have been an interesting edition, since as far as I can determine, no countries on Earth were going to premiere new episodes of anything in the Doctor Who universes in the next week - we've all gone into repeats for the moment. But there were some developments of interest that I want to pass on:

1) CBC Bold in Canada http://www.cbc.ca/bold did NOT air Doctor Who - Voyage Of The Damned. Hours after last week's column went out, Canadian TV station CBC Bold removed the July 28 "CBC premiere" of Voyage Of The Damned and replaced it with 2 hours of coverage of a Winnipeg comedy festival. Bold has not rescheduled the episode at this time and it is unclear if their Doctor Who repeat run is continuing. This showing of Voyage Of The Damned (the episode CBC skipped for 2 years and 8 months) would have been interesting as it was scheduled for 4 days after SPACE Channel http://www.spacecast.com finally premiered the episode in English for Canada. CBC - you know TWIDW's deadline and when Radio Free Skaro http://www.radiofreeskaro.com checks for news - you could have updated the schedule 1 day earlier so we would have been up to date and not left a bunch of bewildered Doctor Who fans watching Winnipeg comedy - or was that your cunning plan all along?

2) KERA 13 Dallas TX http://www.kera.org still has Doctor Who - The Eleventh Hour scheduled for late Saturday July 31 at Midnight Central Time. If this is correct, then PBS stations in the USA are now able to get Doctor Who episodes less than 4 months after the UK premiere and right after BBC America finishes the run, not to mention before the DVDs come out. Not that long ago the time lag was 2 years. Of course, KERA hasn't aired the "specials" yet, so I suspect this will turn out to be the Christmas 2008 episode The Next Doctor instead. Or if they're going to repeats, either The Runaway Bride, Smith and Jones, Voyage of the Damned, or Partners in Crime.

That's all the breaking or timely schedule news right now. Back with the regular edition and all the listings on the 7th of August.

Benjamin Elliott
This Week In Doctor Who and Torchwood This Week