British science fiction television series Doctor Who debuted on North American television in January 1965 on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). It appeared in syndication in the United States beginning in 1972. This article explores the connections of that series to distribution, broadcast and fandom in Canada and the United States.

History

The beginning Doctor Who had an early Canadian connection. The series was conceived by Canadian expatriate Sydney Newman while he was the BBC's Head of Drama. The series may have been inspired by a short-lived segment (canceled because parents complained that it was "too frightening" for their children) on the Canadian version of Howdy Doody. The segment featured a character surprisingly similar to the Doctor, a puppet called Mr. X who traveled through time and space in his "Whatsis Box" teaching children about history. Newman oversaw this series while working as head of programming for the CBC.Kentor, Peter TV North, pg. 78. Whitecap Books, Vancouver/Toronto, 2001 Newman maintained a guiding influence over Doctor Who until he left the BBC in 1967 and was in talks with the BBC in 1986, when the show was foundering, to reformat the show and take the role of executive producer.

The series made its North American premiere in January 1965 on CBC with the broadcast of William Hartnell's first 26 episodes, fourteen months following their first airing on the BBC. The CBC did not renew the program and it would not reappear on the network for 40 years.

The film Dr. Who and the Daleks would be the very first exposure of Doctor Who in the United States released in July 1966. However, because the TV series was relatively unknown at the time, the film performed poorly in the box office.

The 1970s: Doctor Who sold to the United States The BBC series was originally sold to television stations in the United States in 1972, with Time-Life Television syndicating selected episodes of Jon Pertwee's time as the Doctor. The series did not do well, despite an interesting write-up some years earlier in TV Guide. Apparently, program directors of the commercial television stations that picked up the Pertwee series did not know that the program was an episodic serial, and so it was constantly being shuffled about in the programming schedules.

In 1978, Tom Baker's first four seasons as the Doctor were sold to PBS stations across the United States. This time, though, Time-Life was ready to have the Doctor poised for American consumption, by having stage and screen actor Howard da Silva read voiceover recaps of the previous episode and teasers for the next one which would inform the viewer as to what was going on. To accommodate the teasers up to three minutes of original material was cut from each episode. PBS program planners took the show at face value, but it soon achieved cult status. A few commercial stations including WOR-TV in New York City and KVOS-TV in Bellingham, Washington also aired the show for a few years.

Return to Canada: TVOntario and CPN In Canada, TVOntario aired the program starting in 1976 with The Three Doctors and continued with the rest of the original series on a weekly basis until 1990 with series airing two to three years behind the BBC. TVO was also available to many viewers in the United States living in states bordering the Great Lakes. In order to fulfill the network's originally strict mandate as an educational broadcaster, TVO's transmissions of the Third Doctor's stories were hosted by Dr. Jim Dator, a futurist teaching to the University of Toronto, while the first three seasons of Fourth Doctor stories were hosted by science fiction writer Judith Merril, who called herself the "UnDoctor". Both hosts would fill out the show's half-hour time slot through introductions and longer extros which would analyze and discuss the episode critically for several minutes often explaining how a story was at variance with scientific concepts, how it related to science fiction genres, or putting the episodes in a socio-political context."That time when Doctor Who educated Ontario" by Ed Conroy, BlogTO (3 September 2012) Afterward, this broadcast requirement was relaxed and the extra time was used for the network's standard short subject programming such as Eureka!. TVO continued to broadcast Doctor Who until it lost the rights to the programme in 1990.

Meanwhile, in other parts of Canada, Doctor Who became accessible again in the late 1970s as cable television provided many areas with PBS stations piped in from the US, and thus that network's broadcasts of Doctor Who. There were also some local broadcasts of the series outside Ontario: for example, between November 1978 and February 1979 a Saskatchewan-based pay-cable provider, the Co-operative Programming Network (CPN), aired Doctor Who episodes on its Just for Kids channel.

1980s In the mid-1980s, as more stations began to show the existing 1960s episodes, Lionheart (the program's American distributor in the 1980s) dispensed with the older Time-Life tapes containing the Howard Da Silva narrations. Lionheart also offered stations the choice between the standard 25-minute episodes, or a longer version that some stations termed Whovies. These "omnibus editions", or, "movie versions" as they were also known, edited multi-part serials into a single, feature-length film, by cutting out the opening and closing credits, as well as the recap of the cliffhanger, between episodes. (Some edits were clumsy, particularly during Davison-era stories that frequently would have scenes interrupted by partial credit sequences, or feature the sudden appearance of the "electronic scream" sound effect that usually accompanied cliffhangers). This was the most common format used for PBS broadcasts of the series in the 1980s and 1990s. The shortest of these, representing two-episode serials, ran approximately 45 minutes. The longest "Whovie" release, a compilation of the 10-episode The War Games serial, ran for an uninterrupted four hours, though it was more often shown in two two-hour segments; the 14-episode The Trial of a Time Lord was, however, broadcast as four parts, divided, as with the novelisations of this story, into the serial's four major plot lines. This practice carried into the earliest VHS releases in the U.S. and the UK, particularly the first release of The Brain of Morbius which was considerably truncated. It was roundly disliked by many fans and the practice was dropped by the early 1990s.

Success of the program in America was sealed by personal appearances of cast members and production staff at science fiction conventions, and by the national airing on PBS of the 20th anniversary special "The Five Doctors" two days before the BBC. In November 1983, on the weekend after the airing of "The Five Doctors", four actors who played the Doctor (Patrick Troughton, Jon Pertwee, Peter Davison and Tom Baker) and many of those who played the Doctor's companions over the series' first two decades on television appeared at a standing-room-only event in Chicago, the start of a Thanksgiving Day weekend celebration that continues annually (Chicago TARDIS).

In 1986, BBC Enterprises launched the Doctor Who USA Tour, a two-year travelling exhibition featuring props and memorabilia from the series. Housed in a 48-foot trailer adorned with alien landscapes from the show, police box entrances, and a replica of the TARDIS interior, the tour brought the program’s world to life for American audiences. Many stops also featured guest appearances by cast members.

The statewide PBS chain New Jersey Network was enthusiastic on the series, scheduling pre-1970 serials as well as being the first to broadcast the new season of the program in 1985. NJN staff member Eric Luskin hosted and produced three documentaries on the series, the latter a "behind the scenes" look at the production of the 25th anniversary story Silver Nemesis.

On 22 November 1987, during a broadcast of the serial Horror of Fang Rock on Chicago, Illinois PBS affiliate WTTW-TV an unknown hacker wearing a Max Headroom mask jammed WTTW's broadcast signal and replaced it with their own audio and video for 88 seconds, concluding with the masked man being hit on his bare butt with a fly swatter. This incident was investigated by the Federal Communications Commission but the culprit's identity was never determined.

After the series ended production in 1989, the number of stations broadcasting Doctor Who declined, although the program’s popularity in the United States had already been in gradual decline for several years. By this time, most stations opted to purchase omnibus “movie versions” of the serials rather than the fourteen individual episodes produced annually during the show’s final four years, resulting in stations receiving only four feature-length stories each January.

Meanwhile, Iowa PBS, the statewide PBS network for Iowa, experienced a surge of interest in Doctor Who, which it broadcast as part of a Friday late-night science fiction marathon alongside Red Dwarf and other British science fiction programs. IPTV holds the distinction of being the only television network, station, or channel in the world to have aired Doctor Who virtually continuously from its debut in 1974 through the present. As of 2014, this amounted to 35 out of 40 years, interrupted only by a five-year hiatus between 1979 and 1984 and a few other breaks lasting only weeks or months.

Proposed Nelvana animated series In 1990, following the cancellation of the live action series, the BBC approached the Canadian animation house Nelvana to propose an animated continuation of the show. The cartoon series was to feature an unspecified Doctor incorporating elements of various BBC series Doctors and was not to be oriented to an audience younger than that of the live action series but was intended to be a continuation of the cancelled series but in animated form in order to save costs but with design elements that would promote merchandise sales.

According to Nelvana's Ted Bastien: "We went through a lot of development on it, then we were scripting and storyboarding it and about 4 scripts had been written. It happened really fast".

Concept art was prepared depicting several possible versions of the Doctor modelled on actors such as Peter O'Toole, Jeff Goldblum and Christopher Lloyd with elements of the wardrobes of previous Doctors. and new versions of allies such as K-9 and enemies such as the Daleks and Cybermen. The Master was to be "half-man, half robot with a cybernetic bird accessory and a face modelled after Sean Connery." The show was also to feature female companions from Earth, and space battles which the BBC would not have been able to afford for the live action series.

The series would have been Nelvana's biggest show to date, however, according to Bastien, "it was pulled out from under us" after a British animation studio told the BBC that it could do what Nelvana intended for a much lower price. The project did not proceed further and no pilot was produced.

Later years

1996 television movie