The Doctor Who Confidential Controversy

So, Doctor Who’s making of show has been cancelled. Regular readers will know that I am a big fan of Doctor Who. That said, I am struggling to really care about the demise of Confidential.

The first reason is because, try as I might, I could never quite buy into that series. Yes, it would occasionally throw an interesting light on elements of the episode I’d just watched, but more often than not the whole thing felt like an over-long come-down after the main event. Having just watched an episode of Doctor Who I can make up my own mind as to how good I think it is. I don’t need RTD or Moffat telling me, in often an embarrassingly gushing manner, why they think it is a classic. As a result of this, I stopped watching Doctor Who Confidential relatively early in its run. But, as chance would have it, I saw the recent episode of the show relating to the episode Closing Time.

Unfortunately, it merely reinforced my thoughts about the show; overlong and self-indulgent. Yes, it was interesting to see how the Doctor jumping through the window stunt was done. But frankly I could not care less about some Radio 1 DJ I’d never heard of being in the background to a scene. Nor do I have any real interest in Matt Smith and James Corden arsing around on set. I have no doubt that their little videos seemed amazingly funny to them during the long, arduous night shoots necessary for the episode. Unfortunately, in the cold light of day, they would probably work far better as half-remembered moments in the lives of those two actors rather than videos destined for viewing by the wider public.

The second reason why I can’t get excited about the demise of Doctor Who Confidential is that, quite frankly, it is a fucking miracle that it existed in the first place, let alone ran for over half a decade. I cannot think of any other show in TV history that has had a 45 minute making of show broadcast straight after the new episode from the parent show. It represents a fantastic investment of time and resources not in Doctor Who itself, but rather people talking about Doctor Who. It is no wonder that the format became (at least for me) rapidly very staid, if not outright boring. There are only so many conversations you can have about the mighty Who, particularly if you are not allowed to have conversations like “Partners in Crime - that was a bit shit, wasn’t it?”

Of course, it is perhaps unfortunate that Confidential has gone in the same year that the death of its star has ended The Sarah Jane Adventures and Torchwood has almost certainly committed suicide across ten long, thankless weeks. And I would feel happier about the show being axed if its budget was being put towards the increasingly cash-strapped parent programme, although I expect the money can’t be reinvested because it just isn’t there anymore. But ultimately for those truly lamenting the loss of Doctor Who Confidential it might be helpful to think about it this way – it is best not to mourn it, but to celebrate the fact that it existed, and ran for so long, in the first place.