Why we haven’t got the 50th trailer… yet

Guest contributor Henry de Ferrars examines.

Don’t get me wrong – I want a 50th anniversary special trailer as much as anyone else, but people are getting so fixated on this one trailer that they’re ignoring all of the other advertising that the BBC have been inconspicuously weaving into our lives. At the time of writing this, the 50th Anniversary is under three months away, and some fans are getting nervous because they fear that a consequence of no trailer soon may lead to a drop in popularity of the anniversary. They fear that people will be completely unaware of when the 50th Anniversary is, and what is happening in it. I’m going to prove them wrong.

The Advertising

Since that start of the year, the BBC have been cleverly weaving Doctor Who into people’s everyday lives. Anyone that’s been to Terminal 5 in Heathrow Airport recently must have seen the TARDIS and Dalek display they have put up (they may have even been lucky enough to see some Cybermen marching down the check-in hall).

Doctor Who has also been headline news. I turned on my TV on June 1st and put on the news, expecting to hear about Syria or some sort of government mess-up, but instead I heard that Matt Smith was leaving the show at the end of the year. When I was rummaging through my TV guide yesterday, I saw that the Doctor Who Proms was pick of the day for the bank holiday. Then there was Doctor Who Live: The Next Doctor, the slightly over the top reveal of Peter Capaldi’s 12th Doctor, on at prime-time on a Sunday.

I’m not going to forget the controversial Comic-Con slot. The Doctor Who panel had their biggest audience ever, and probably the biggest amount of people in the audience dressed up as a Doctor Who character too. The success of Doctor Who in America is still rising – I recently went to America, and met some very friendly Americans at one of the resorts I was staying at. While speaking with them about American shows like Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones, they brought up Doctor Who and spoke about how they had now gone back and starting watching William Hartnell episodes after seeing his edition of Doctor Who Revisited on BBCA, and how they couldn’t wait for the 50th Anniversary.

The Timing

I don’t believe that there has been any lack of Doctor Who “advertising” over the last few months. People are expecting a trailer now because it seems so close. This is an episode we have all been waiting for since 2005, rather than the start of a new series that we only start anticipating when the last series finished about a year ago. When a new series is starting on the BBC, we tend to receive teasers and trailer about three to four weeks before the actual series begins. At the time of writing, the 23rd November is twelve weeks away.

Comic-Con

I know that Comic-Con got a trailer early, but that happens for everything, whether it be the next superhero film or Doctor Who. At both the X-Men and Spider-Man panels, trailers were released exclusively for Comic-Con, as they have been in the past. If I remember correctly, a teaser for The End of Time was also premiered at Comic-Con (and then leaked). The fact of the matter is that you can’t walk out of Comic-Con leaving the audience empty handed. It is the biggest sci-fi convention in the world, and the fact that Doctor Who has managed to maintain its slot over the last few years is a true example of its popularity over the pond.

Conclusion

We all need to be patient. I don’t think that BBC have made or are making any mistakes in terms of their marketing and advertising. We don’t need a trailer yet, but I think that because we know it’s there, floating around in the BBC network just waiting to be aired, makes us want it even more. God knows what the BBC and Moffat have planned, but I can assure you that it will be big and it will be fantastic, and that the only thing we can do at the moment is wait. After all of this has passed over, we can proudly say that we are the fans who waited.