Whovians rejoice. Our mighty ABC has toiled long and hard and has prevailed against insert generic Doctor Who baddie here to make sure that this year’s Doctor Who Christmas special is fast-tracked to Aussie screens on Boxing Day morning.
I don’t presume to know exactly why people love Doctor Who so much — let’s be honest, it went downhill after Tennant — but they do. (Although in all honesty I haven’t watched any of Malcolm Tucker Peter Capaldi as The Doctor, so maybe my compass is a little bit broken.
In any case, “Doctor Who Christmas special The Return of Doctor Mysterio and the animated series Doctor Who: The Power of the Daleks will be fast-tracked to ABC iview on Boxing Day morning”. That’s the word this afternoon from ABC TV publicity, which says the special will screen “immediately after” its UK airdate and will also be re-broadcast at 7:30PM on Boxing Day evening.
More than that, the Doctor Who: The Power of the Daleks animated series is also being broadcast on Boxing Day, a long time since its only showing in the UK some 50 years ago.
Doctor Who: The Power of the Daleks animated series is one of the most celebrated Doctor Who adventures, and yet no complete film recordings are known to have survived. The master negatives were destroyed in an archive purge in 1974. This brand new animation, being released 50 years after its only UK broadcast, is based on the program’s original audio recordings, surviving photographs, and film clips.
The six-part adventure features the regeneration – or as it was then called “renewal” – of First Doctor, William Hartnell, into Second Doctor, Patrick Troughton, and follows the Time Lord and his companions Polly (Anneke Wills) and Ben (Michael Craze) as they do battle with the Daleks on the planet Vulcan.