Hello there, I'm Theo!

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Hi, y’all! I’m Theo, a devoted Doctor Who fan from Finland. I became a Whovian back in 2013 in time for the 50th anniversary, and I haven’t looked back since.

I was first introduced to DW way back in 2006, when Series 1 with Eccleston was broadcast on Finnish television. I was 10 years old and watched the show with my dad. I remember thinking it was cool, but I had no idea of its long history or the treasure trove of stories waiting for me down the line. I forgot about DW until they began broadcasting all New Who seasons on Finnish TV in the summer of 2013 before joining the Day of the Doctor simulcast (Target novelizations, mainly) in November.

In the last decade, I’ve watched New Who several times, Classic Who a couple of times (currently on my third rewatch round), and Torchwood, of course. I’ve also listened to a lot of Big Finish (a never-ending project, haha) and began reading DW novels last year.

I was excited after hearing about this site (and its forums; they are rare these days!). I know I’m going to visit this site and the forums frequently, as they are full of useful information and great tools for tracking and rating stories, not to mention the opportunity to chat with like-minded Whovians.

I’m excited to see where you’re taking the site next. Keep up the good work!

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Welcome! Glad to have you here :smile:

I’m always curious about how the show is presented / received worldwide. Is it popular in Finland? Is it available for free or on a paid channel? Is it dubbed or broadcast in English?

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Welcome to the forum!

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Doctor Who has always been a fairly marginal phenomenon in Finland, and the fandom has been around for about a decade or so. Our biggest platform is the Doctor Who Finland Facebook group, which, as of writing this, has 1305 members, most of them inactive.

Classic Who and the DW spinoff shows have never been broadcast here. Series 1 of New Who was broadcast in the spring of 2006, followed by The Christmas Invasion. I guess the ratings weren’t high enough at the time, because after that, the show disappeared until the summer of 2012, when they had a Doctor Who marathon on TV, showing every New Who episode every weekday from June to August (usually very late in the evenings). They repeated this the next summer leading up to the 50th anniversary, and this is when Doctor Who started becoming a bit more popular over here.

We received every new episode from series 8 onwards a few days after the BBC broadcast. During the late Capaldi years, they broadcast new episodes on the Sunday after their UK broadcast, which made us Finnish fans very happy, as we felt very privileged about not having to avoid spoilers for days or weeks while waiting for the new episodes to drop. Our broadcaster was usually very good at listening to the fandom’s wishes and always trying to broadcast the new episodes as quickly as possible (their good relations with the BBC helped a lot). The Whittaker years saw a slight dip in popularity, and the fandom isn’t quite as active now as previously, but some of us are still actively devouring every aspect of the Whoniverse.

DW was broadcast exclusively by our national broadcaster YLE and one of our major TV channels (YLE 2, which is essentially our BBC One). Finland’s Netflix had the Tennant/Smith seasons at some point, but not anymore. YLE usually slotted Doctor Who in the evenings during prime time, with repeats in the middle of the night. This changed after the Whittaker era, and now we watch the show on Disney+ with the rest of the world, though finally, on the same day, it’s broadcast in the UK!

In Finland, only children’s TV programmes are dubbed, so we received the episodes in English with Finnish subtitles. It’s become something of a meme among Finnish fans to point out all the fun ways the translators have tackled the various sci-fi terms that pop up on the show.

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Nice, thanks for your detailed response!

Send the Facebook group this way :wink:

Is there anything I can do to the site to aid you from a Finnish fan perspective? We also have fans from other countries and I’ve been wondering stuff like that. I can’t really translate the site right now although could look at that later… but as it’s not dubbed most fans have great English.

Some countries have their own platform for streaming Classic Who and I was considering adding links, although streaming services come and go, so it might be a lot of effort for a short-lived return, and it would need to be done with the help of someone with access.

Although Disney+ has been contentious, with some fans (mainly Australian) angry that it’s gone from their free TV channel to a paid service, one big positive is uniting everyone on the same platform and giving everyone the show at the same time! There’s a lot to be said for that!

Oh, do the Disney+ links on the site work for you to take you to the right episode? I have to source them from USA fans, as we don’t have it on Disney+ in the UK, and I’m hoping they are universal links :crossed_fingers:

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Welcome aboard, dear chap!

And I see, looks like you Finnish fans didn’t have the same luck we Italians had. We’ve got a couple of Tom Baker serials back in the 80s and some Hartnell and Troughton serials all dubbed in Italian + all of NuWho! (Well, almost, RAI, the Italian public TV network, renounced the eights after Series 12, so Flux and the 2022 Specials didn’t arrive here) But thanks to Disney+, DW is finally back in the “Bel Paese”!

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I don’t think there’s anything in particular right now that could aid me as a Finnish fan at the moment. Thanks for asking :slight_smile: Translating the site probably shouldn’t be a top priority, as most fans watch, listen to, or read everything in English anyway and likely understand the language well enough to manage :smiley:

Unfortunately, there’s no legal way to stream Classic Who in Finland right now. One can access the iPlayer in certain ways, of course, and the episodes are out on the internet if you know where to look, but the only way to legally watch Classic Who in Finland is to order the DVDs or Blu-rays from the UK, and that’s expensive business. We’ve had Britbox in Finland for a couple of years, and there’s loads of great British drama (new and old) on it, but they’ve never added any Doctor Who content despite multiple requests from fans. A crime, if you ask me!

The Disney+ debacle hasn’t been very vocal over here, since most people seem to subscribe to Duinsey+ currently anyway, but Doctor Who feels like a show that belongs on publicly funded TV.

I tested the Disney+ link for The Church on Ruby Road, and it took me directly to the correct page on Disney+ Finland, so it seems to work fine :+1:

This is the Facebook group. It’s private and requires an application to join and see the content, but it shouldn’t be a problem (the admins usually take a bit longer to check that the person isn’t a bot if the applicant has a foreign-sounding name).

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Nice to meet you @TheLeo :smiley:

It is interesting to hear about how Doctor Who has been broadcast globally! Tom Baker in Italian sounds like a fun experience, even for someone like me who speaks no Italian at all. I’m so used to watching everything in English that I don’t know whether I could sit through a dubbed NuWho episode. That’s why I’m grateful it’s never been a trend over here :slight_smile:

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Welcome. Interesting to read how Doctor Who is known in your country.

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