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Canadians Miss Out On Doctor Who Season Finale
darthcamaro writes "Canadians were among the last people in the world to get the season 4 finale of Doctor Who which already aired in the UK and Australia. The Canadian public broadcaster — CBC — decided to cut out nearly 20 minutes from the episode, leaving fans wondering what was going on. Doctor Who isn't the easiest show to follow at the best of times — but Canadians are now up in arms (or at least hockey sticks) over their taxpayer-funded broadcaster's lack of respect for SciFi hosers."
I thought the Doctor's companion was an attractive black woman, but instead I see a redhead pictured in the article. Boy I've really fallen behind. What season is USA's Sci Fi Channel currently airing? 3?
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
The wife and I watched it months ago. The Internet is my TV station.
Doctor Who thwarts the Dalek invasion of Earth. Earth is not destroyed. None of the main characters die.
Do you also need to buy CliffsNotes for Teletubbies?
Protip: The number of Canadians that have watched SCTV and/or recognize "hoser" as a reference to another Canadian is likely now in the minority.
Signed,
Anonymous Hoser
News for canadians, eh? Stuff that goes with your gravy fries.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
You've got to love the idiots who run TV stations. Why? Because they're simply perfect idiots. Cutting 20 minutes from an episode? Such amazing idiocy.
Reminds me of a couple of years ago when I set my VCR to tape the weekly episode of 24. Yes I said VCR. Now get off my lawn.
There was a football game before 24. No problem right? Game will be over. I'll still be able to get all of 24 taped and watch it when I get home.
I get home. VCR is going. Great. I'll just let it finish taping 24 and then sit down and watch it from the beginning. No problem.
Problem. The football game was over before 24 was set to air. But someone decided that it was imperative to air commentary and discussion of the football game that was just played and this ran 15 minutes or so into 24. Was there really a need for this? I mean, come on, you just watched the fucking game so you know what happened.
Did they decide to delay 24 so people could see all of it? Nope. Just cut right on into 24 minus the first portions that they'd blotted out with football commentary.
And hand me another Elisnore!
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
For the truly lazy, this article describes how to use Miro, the open source media player and download app to find and download TV series from the Internet via BitTorrent.
Be aware, in the article one VITAL step in the set up process is left out, but IS covered in the comments.
Set it up and let it run in the background. No more compulsively checking trackers, Miro does it all for you.
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
Hmmm ... was this a 12+ hour "War and Peace," watch-until-you-drop mini-series episode? Or a normal 2 hour special, or what? 18 minutes sounds like an awfully lot of footage.
I know that one of the "C's" in CBC stands for Canadian, but it sounds like the other one stands for circumcision: "Hell, you can cut 18 minutes off the top of *anything*."
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
CBC is on strike, guy! and will continue to strike untill we get some of that internet moneh!
Doctor Who really seems to make the most sense if you watch it in the UK in sequence with its spin-offs such as Torchwood or the Sarah Jane Adventures, because in the Season 4 finale there are tie-ins to the spin-offs as well as some earlier episodes in the season that refer to story lines happening on the spin-offs. In other words, watching Doctor Who in America on the 1 season delay sans spin-offs leads to confusion because you don't know what's going on.
I applaud the BBC folks for thinking so creatively about spin-offs playing off against Doctor Who, and vice-versa, but it falls apart against the reality of the region-segregation that they still like to practice.
It's a pity, because many BBC shows are more cutting-edge than Hollywood fare these days and they would play really well here as-is. Except, Hollywood likes to re-produce and re-package them as watered-down, lamer versions. A couple examples are "Coupling," a Friends-like show written by Steven Moffat that was hilarious, that Hollywood tried to Americanize and which was done so poorly that it was DOA; "Top Gear," which is an entertaining auto program and which would do just great here, but which Hollywood has again felt the need to destroy by Americanizing it. "The Office" and "What Not to Wear" are two other examples.
Accordingly, maybe Bit Torrent is the only real way to go in the end.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Is Sarah Jane Adventures showing in Canada? If not, I could see the CBC editing out the Sarah Jane & Luke parts out of fear the viewers will have no clue why she is there and who Luke is.
If you watch the credits I believe it mentions the Canadian Film Board which has always made me believe that it is partially funded by Canadian tax payer dollars.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
You managed to get a laugh without revealing that the doctor regenerates -- very sporting of you.
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
Please feel free to turn in all your documentation at your leisure; I'd convince you to stay but I don't want to share a ghetto with someone who's never seen Dr. Who!
I watched the CBC broadcast version and didn't notice anything odd. It was fast-paced toward the end, but then a lot of them are like that. Am watching the full-length version on their site now to see what difference I can see.
Maybe the CBC could get the same editor to cut the Pirates of the Caribbean movies down to a reasonable length. That would be sweet.
Flaimbiat? ive been thinking there was a troll using mod points to disagree with people, this proves it. Canadians missing some new dr.who (maybe if it was one from the original series it would be geek worthy), is not news, its 2008 they have the internet.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
even Canadians get lucky sometimes.
Life on Mars is another example of this.
www.isohunt.com
Here's why.
Be honest, what would you want to face as your adversary as a program planner? An angry mob of beer filled football fans or a bunch of geeks? I mean, let's be reasonable. One group will show up at your doorstep and crush a beer can on your head, the other one might write you an angry email. IN RED.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
...and nobody noticed.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Try smoking hot.
..........FULL STOP.
Oh, and: I know that I'm exceptionally bad at English when I'm still dead from a party last night (it lasted until 10 am today, and I slept until 7 pm).
Luckily tough, going outside also gives me shitloads of creative output time. :)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Blame Canada! Oh wait...
Your local television station merely serves as a redistribution point. Local affiliates have little right to tape delay or re-schedule network block programming. To do this requires paper work and authorization. (To double broadcast a show requires additional fees because the actors were only paid for one airing!).
So yes, football seasons suck and the networks don't make it easy to work around.
Contracts vary from production to production, but in most cases it's always been possible to drop the commentary (if provided) to end on time. Sports productions units usually try their best to to wrap up cleanly or at least assist.
For overages, sometimes it's been possible to stop broadcasting and flip to network. The problem with that is normally commercial time for sporting events was a higher revenue earner then prime time.
So it may or may not be their fault, but rather contractual obligation.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
Umm, no.
Please re-read the post you replied to. The poster said quite emphatically that the game was over. As in, they finished it, and everybody knew the final score.
This is nothing like cutting off a game that hadn't finished yet.
I watched the final episode on the "Ceeb" and thought it was disjointed and incoherent. Now I know why.
Changing the topic a bit, I find the new Dr. Who series to be overly sentimental, even maudlin. I prefer good ol' space opera without all the tears. Give me "Annihilate them!" over "I'll miss you, Doctor." any day.
I'll presume by "Canadian Film Board" you mean the NFB, and I can't find any reference to their involvement online.
It wouldn't fit the NFB's purpose to simply support the show, but they may have had resources that were licensed by it. And it may have been some other organization entirely -- can anyone back up the parent posts with detail?
tardis.wikia has this:
http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Canadian_Broadcasting_Corporation
Funding in that sense would typically be investment in production in exchange for broadcasting rights. Partnership deals like that are normal for the CBC, which is not the same type of organization as the NFB.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Broadcasting_Corporation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Film_Board_of_Canada
If you'll check the credits for more shows, you'll notice the CBC, BBC, and other similar organizations often turn up in each other's credits. There's a long history of combining resources, and more elaborate partnerships ultimately involving the trading of shows rather than outright purchases of licenses.
The American "The Office" is terrible? Do you know what fans of "Pushing Daisies" would give to have their show last five seasons? "Three's Company" a "poor copy"; granted, Three's Company was never about being sophisticated but is a guilty favorite and almost always seems to a pillar of the Nick-at-Nite lineup. What's next, deriding "Sandford and Son"?
This is why I download. I live in Canada and we constantly have to wait for shows or not get them at all. Global one of the networks here would buy exclusive rights to Stargate SG1 and then never show it so we would not get the new episodes until a year later. I try to watch stuff legally and I even go to the websites that now play full tv shows, but they never work for people in Canada. I download shows because I refuse to wait a year to watch them.
Since when has Canada mattered? Seriously, is Canada important in entertainment, or anything else for that matter? Sure you have Moosehead and hockey sticks. That hardly makes you a first world nation.
My sister had broken her arm. It was so bad, they put some sort of metal bar through her arm to hold her arm in a single position. Because of the pain, she was on some powerful medication. To put it mildly, she was not her normal self. Many hippies have spent decades attempting the mental state those drugs put my sister in.
She was watching TV late one night and called me up and told me about this great science fiction show. It was witty, the writing was wonderful. She laughed, She cried. She was on the edge of her seat. But she couldn't remember the name. She remembered that there was a doctor or surgeon on it and they were in a phone booth...
Dr. Who?, I suggested.
That's it!
Dr. Who? I replied again. Are you sure it was Dr. Who?
Yes, she told me, it was wonderful.
The next week, she saw the show again. This time, not enwrapped in her druggy little fog. She called me up the next day and told me she changed her mind about the show.
I've watched the show many times since then, and as far as I am concerned, being sober doesn't help improve the coherence of the plot. Frankly, I would find it hard to tell if our local station cut out vital scenes which hurt the clarity of the overall plot.
>For example, smoking in your car with a kid in California is ATTEMPTED MURDER.
[citation needed]
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Yeah, but imagine what if they cut off the game or even the commentary about the game you just saw.
Imgaine, viewers might realize how utterly stupid they are if nobody told them how to interpret all the funny statistics.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Given the episode in question, this is more of a blessing than a curse. The Season 4 finale is almost worse than the Season 3 finale.
I'm looking forward to Stephen Moffat taking over from Russel T Davies in 2010. Hopefully he'll be able to bring some intelligence (or just plots that make sense) back to the show.
When Doctor Who first came out, Season 1, I could catch it a week later than the UK on a Canadian channel. However during Season 2 they suddenly stopped airing it. And never properly carried it after that. Then SciFi channel in the US started carrying it... But they did not air it at a normal fixed time and day. They kept jumping it around, AND were playing it out of order also!
I got fed up and started getting it off Torrent sites. I am a HUGE Doctor Who fan, and I live in the US, and I am really REALLY disappointed with how Doctor Who is being presented to the US and Canadian audiences! I have watched every episode of the classic series from Doctor #1 through Doctor #6.
So it may or may not be their fault, but rather contractual obligation.
Contracts don't just spring spontaneously out of the freshly-plowed Earth. If the contract obliges them to do something, then it's because they agreed to said contract with said obligations in place, and it is still therefore their fault.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
Or it feels like it. I think it's GOT to be something approaching 50%. Every 4 minutes there's a 4 minute commercial break. It's unwatchable.
SciFi network is just as bad, so is TBS. Comedy Central is getting to that point. When they start running interludes DURING a stream of commercials to remind you what channel you're on, because you probably zoned out around commercial #20, it's all going in the crapper, isn't it?
This isn't the first time the CBC has pulled a stunt like this, and once a similar non-event, it pulled the plug on a CFL game during a lightening delay in Saskatchewan and switched to a lame movie instead because they couldn't find the executive producer's phone number, was likely a contributing factor in the CBC losing the broadcast rights to one of the most popular sports in the country.
The pursuit of absolute tolerance leads to the most rigorous and ludicrous intolerance. - REX MURPHY
I, for one, didn't even realize they cut anything until I saw this story.
You let the government handle your television broadcasting, you end up with government quality television broadcasting. No surprise at all. Letting the government provide your television is like hiring the mafia to babysit your kids: it's not what they're best at.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
I think that should read loltwat, cause you're just a big CUNT!!
Science fiction TV show gets chopped up by the powers that be so they could fit in more commercials in a government sponsored programming?
That is SF, fanboy factor, freedom of speech violation and possible misuse of authority by TV media.
Don't bother turning your decoder ring.
Just stick your hand in the fing.. I mean ring remover box. It is quite painless. Honest.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
it's a shorter edit made by the producers of Dr Who themselves, of course, for American broadcast or re-runs in 1h. The CBC doesn't have the time or means to create seamless removal of the scenes and bits of dialogs and story, with all the music and everything, as the edit was.
The biggest thing that was removed was the eventually moot effort by Martha Jones to destroy the earth. There was some dialog by the half-human Doctor during his first and last appearance. Nothing that helps clarify the story.
You didn't miss much.
Jack Bauer beats up or kills everyone in the end.
Unless they manage to squeeze in Chuck Norris as well.
But then you also have nothing to worry about, cause having both Jack Bauer and Chuck Norris in the same show would cause universe to implode.
The fact that you would feel just fine while watching the awesomest "24" episode EVAR! would be a clear indicator that we are all dead already and that you are in heaven.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
"Sci-Fi Hosers".
Best. Label. Ever.
Aside from the horrible camera quality and even worse acting, Doctor Who has been somewhat entertaining for me. If the taxpayers don't like what their tax dollars are going to, can't they just pull the funding and put it somewhere else?
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
TeeVee is a hideous, brain-sucking monster. But in a very selfish way, I'm semi-glad it exists. The sheep, (oh, dear lord, who will think of the SHEEP??), will actually spend time abusing themselves with advertising and television-imposed life schedules and all the other crap TeeVee inflicts, and through their doing this, they ensure that there's a market big enough to justify the existence of shows like Doctor Who. --Which is available world-wide on the internet, ad-free, like minutes after the credits roll on television sets all across Britain.
Of course, internet media entertainment isn't a whole lot less brain-sucking. My last great sin a couple of months back was to download and watch every $#&@(@# episode of that retarded island show, "Lost". My ears and eyes were bleeding and I was practically shouting at the screen through most of it, but that's my monkey to deal with. --And it's like every second episode of Doctor Who was written by chimps. What a shame. But the episodes which shine, SHINE! --I mean, yes, Doctor Who feels maybe one or two steps removed from Muppets In Space, but you know, I loved the Muppets as well.
As Neil Gaiman put it; "Doctor Who is one of those rare shows I can watch with my daughter and we can both enjoy!" (That's me quoting from memory, but the sentiment is accurate.)
And Right-On, you know? Positive, smart, encouraging messages through SciFi? We haven't had that since. . . Geez, TNG? Has it really been that long? And I love the new emotionally-aware angle to the Doctor. Man, I went back and rented some old Tom Baker episodes, and was stunned at how flat they were. When I was a kid, I thought that man was the coolest dude in the universe, but it was positively missing huge chunks of humanity. "Just-the-facts" Sci-Fi doesn't cut it for me anymore, apparently.
-FL
List of what was cut from the episode
http://www.dwin.org/article.php?sid=262
The TV station managers of today were the pimply, mouth-breathing projectionists of yesteryear. Focus! Focus!
I agree about the extra commentary, but I have rather strong feelings about cutting of the end of sports programming ... or I guess the end of any programming I guess for that matter. Just this week I was watching Champions League Soccer on TSN2 (Canadian ESPN), and they just cut off the last twenty minutes to go into hockey pregame. I was livid, and called their number and left a long rant about how dumb their programming was. The match didn't run late or go into extra time, and soccer game lengths are extremely predictable, but they still decided to cut off the end to do pregame.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-K9ZmSMLsw
This is the best restaurant I ever eat in
That's what you get for being Canadian. :)
A better question is when there are tons of channels on cable devoted solely to sports why are sports interrupting regular programming in the first place?
If you want to watch football, baseball, basketball, or hockey or whatever that is great but why does it have to be on when something else I want to watch is on at that same time every other week?
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
As usual, it was a Russell T Davies campy almost-but-not-quite musical cheesefest. Just about any fact about Doctor Who that you thought was canonical was blatantly ignored. The greatest sin of all was throwing away a regeneration. For god's sake. Regenerations are probably the most precious thing in the Doctor Who universe and Davies thought he'd end his Who career (after all, he doesn't have to fix the plot holes he made) by simply throwing one away for a completely dumb plot twist. Of course it doesn't matter now that no rules are followed any more. And could anything have been more sickly that seeing all of the Doctor's wannabe lovers (and their pathetic families) fawning after him? The whole finally was nothing but laughable. The scene of the Tardis towing the Earth was beyond laughable. The faster Stephen Moffat takes over, the better.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
That's nothing, my cable provider uses US feeds for certain shows and Canadian feeds for others but sometimes they use a Canadian feed of the same show.
For example on CBS they may be showing a Canadian feed of CSI but if you live in the US you also see CSI but there may be a difference of a minute and usually the next show coming on will bump the last minute of the Canadian feed! It happens all the time and the time difference probably due to the difference in commercials shown, means you may miss the last minute or two of a show, yeah CSI and oh I don't know a little thing like, oh I don't know, let's say for example who the fuck killed who!!
At least with Canadian shows they don't censor most stuff, the US stations are terrible, I mean what is it with the word ass that is so offensive? They can actually say ass and show a person's ass on Canadian TV.
We've come a long way though, I remember when cable TV stations would show 'interludes' of nature scenes between shows when they didn't have enough video to put on the air. Talk about nutty.
You are NOT alone in this gripe. But the station figures football is paying them more airtime so they see it in their eyes to say, "fuck the rest of the non-paying tv watchers of their regularly scheduled shows."
Bottom line is whoever pays the most money wins.
Easy... plenty of cheap bastards who rather watch it on local tv or cable than go to PPV or pay extra for sports channels.
Canadians do get Chicago WGN not WGN America that has more black outs.
With networks - CBC, sci-fi, BBC America's ass-raping of oldschool Doctor Who, etceteras - acting like this..... is it any wonder that the computer-savvy types are getting their TV through bittorrent?
Seriously. First Run, shortly after it airs, no commercials, usually 480i but often 720p, UNEDITED Show You Like, down your pipe........ or wait months or even YEARS to get the same thing, often censored, heavily edited, or in this case, missing HUGE CHUNKS?
Does the CBC really think anyone's going to watch their shat-upon Who when better, more complete alternatives are available?
In this day and age, you'd think second-run countries (Canada, USA, Australia, etc) would be jamming in out-takes or following up an episode with the accompanying Doctor Who Confidential in order to give their audience more bang-for-the-buck than they can get through other means.
Alas.
Imagine my reaction - I saw the classic Doctor Who episode Robot on BBCA and Robots of Death on PBS... I downloaded both years later and - SHOCK! - HOLY CRAP! - Robot was nearly DOUBLE the length and SO MUCH BETTER.... and Robots of Death... well, the local PBS affiliate had seen fit to effectively disembowel it.
How can i possibly support such corporations, when the BBC gives me the whole product ?
You do know who makes Dr Who don't you? Its the BBC which is pretty much quasi-government (its independent in terms of editorial control but its budget gets set by the government).
So your argument that a government controlled entity can't possibly show decent quality TV produced by another government controlled entity really doesn't make sense. The BBC is probably the finest global broadcaster in terms of overall content, originality and political coverage. HBO will have a shot from a quality perspective but politics?
Government control can indeed be a very bad thing (look at Italy or Venezuela) but one thing you can't do is complain about it in a thread talking about Dr Who.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
I'd be pleased if I could get back 20 minutes of the time I spent watching the first series of New Who. It's a nothing but a spiteful parody of the original show.
here here. There be some truth in those words.
Program preempting aside, my current favorite station to hate is BBC America. After years of begging and pleading, they finally decided to carry Top Gear in the US, starting in 2007.
In England, Top Gear is presented on BBC Two in an hour-long format, with no commercial breaks. The entire hour is filled from opening to ending credits, and each segment segues into the next. However, here in the US, it's presented into an hour-long block with commercials, which means that it's now pared down to roughly 39-41 minutes of content.
So for each episode, you lose the entire "News" segment they do in the middle (which usually segues into another bit), but that only makes up for about 8 minutes or so. Which means they also cut parts from car reviews, interactions with the audience, "the Cool Wall", and other bits & pieces (including chunks of power laps), plus they splice in these awful cut sequences made by BBCA. And if all of that weren't bad enough, the US airing is several seasons behind. The episodes they were airing in late 2007 I had seen back in the summer of 2005 while vacationing in Prague!
If TV stations don't want people turning to Bittorrent, then stop ruining our favorite programs! I'd forgo BBCA all together, if they simply offered the show on R1 DVDs uncut, but they don't do that either. So I download each & every episode instead, it's the only way I can stay current and discuss it with friends back in England. I'm literally sitting here, money in hand, ready to purchase box series of the show, and they won't offer them. Congrats, BBC, you made a downloader out of me.
News for canadians, eh? Stuff that goes with your gravy fries.
That would be cheese curds.
Perhaps you mean a different thing than I do when you say "science."
I mean, it just aggravates me when have to put my Tim Horton's coffee and doughnut to point out that some of us don't even own a hockey stick.
I'm so steaming mad, I'm taking my toque off, and putting down my Margaret Atwood novel to listen to the Tragically Hip sing Fireworks.
Not every igloo comes with a shed to store the stuff in, you know.
I'm gonna snowmobile home now.
Skot Nelson music is my saviour / i was maimed by rock and roll
Boowho.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere