Now that yearly stats are available on the site, and we can input the exact date of when we’ve completed them in our Diaries; I thought it would be fun to find out what the stats of everyone’s first year of Doctor Who look like.
Feel free to share the stats from the earliest year with completed Doctor Who stories in your Diary. And please share any thoughts you have about the stats.
I’ve spent a couple of days googling around, and I finally managed to find the exact dates when Series 1 was first broadcast in Finland so that I could date the episodes correctly in my diary. I first watched Series 1 and The Christmas Invasion with my Dad between September 2006 and December 2006. I then had a break from DW until the summer of 2013, when I watched series 4-7 when they were broadcast on Finnish TV every weekday from May to July; followed by Day, Night and Time on the day of broadcast; Series 2-3 when they were repeated in the summer of 2014; and then, from Series 8 onwards, as they were broadcast in Finland, usually a couple of days after their UK broadcast.
I even found a dedicated Doctor Who page hosted by our national broadcaster, which had a fairly active comment section for a couple of years. I used to post there and discuss Who with other Finnish fans in 2013-2014. It was fun reading those old comments of mine, and some of them were pretty awkward, haha
Anyway, here are the stats for my first Who year, 2006:
Tbh, I don’t think it’s entirely accurate, I think I was already well into the twelfth Doctor era around New Year’s, I probably went through the first three or so seasons in just a couple of days, much quicker than I logged them here, because I’d been sick and was genuinely doing nothing but watching Doctor Who those first few days. After that I watched like three, or four if there was a cliffhanger, episodes a day, because I was new at uni and hadn’t really found friends to spend my free time with, so studying and watching Doctor Who were like my only activities lol. I watched New Who mainly in order, except that I started with Christmas Invasion (I liked David Tennant) watched about the first half of season two, then went back for season one and watched in order after that. I did the new specials somewhere in between, I don’t know where precisely.
By January I’d watched all of Doctor Who, then started on Torchwood and after that Classic Who in February/March and by mid February I had bought my first Big Finish audio, so, uh Doctor Who took permanent residence in my brain pretty much immediately.
My first ‘proper’ year would have been when The Trial of a Time Lord was broadcast - that’s the first year I have clear memories of watching from beginning to end.
I can’t remember clearly enough to date anything, but for me it was around like 2011-2013(?) for me when it became easy to see nuwho on streaming sites in the US. We didn’t have cable or satellite when I was a kid so before then I just grew up on PBS and whatever my dad liked enough to torrent. I think I remember Netflix having classic added at some point too and I vaguely recall watching what I think was Earthshock and Curse of Fenric.
Mine is 2014, during which I was making my way through all the reboot series that had aired up until that point. A pretty cool time where I got to stumble on every single episode completely blind knowing little about what came next.
I sadly do not remember 2008 too well, and it doesn’t help that I mad binged both classic and nuwho that year so I’d only really be able to track series 4 and a couple classics accurately
I mean I would post it, but I am pretty sure all I had in my first Year of Doctor Who was Season 24, Series 1-3, The first Half of Series 5, Day of the Doctor, the TV Movie and the Five Doctors. And sadly I don’t remember when the dates were (and yes an odd collection but one that I still remember well having seen as my first of Who ) That was around 2018, for some reason I didn’t return to the Show for a while sadly
) That was around 2018, for some reason I didn’t return to the Show for a while sadly 