Tonight the first episode of Doctor Who of the new series (series four of the new new series and somebody will no doubt be able to tell me which actual series of Doctor Who it is if you take into account all the other Doctors. As it happens BBC Four is showing a William Hartnell Dalek story tonight (on right now as I write)).
Well not everyone knows that the BBC issue a commentary on the new series as a podcast which is available either from iTunes or from the BBC 7 website. Though the new Doctor Who Flash based website may have the audio files there as well, it’s not working for me on my Mac, none of the links work.
The podcast has the cast and crew talking about the episode.
Now what I didn’t know having subscribed via iTunes for the first three seasons which had podcasts, the last Christmas episode did not have a downloadable podcast, it was available as a stream only!
Why we’re doing things a little differently this Christmas. You’re probably wondering why the commentary for Voyage Of The Damned isn’t available as an MP3 and isn’t on iTunes.
This is because the BBC is only currently allowed to offer big downloads like this if they’re related to radio shows.
We’re working to reach a new agreement and get this and future commentaries back as downloads before Series Four, but in the meantime we’re streaming the one for Voyage Of The Damned.
Huh!
Well they did manage to sort things out and thanks to BBC 7 we have the downloadable version back with us.
What a bizarre limitation, I wonder who insisted on that?
It is recommended that you watch the episode without the commentary first and then either listen (as I do) or watch again with the commentary.
I do like some commentaries (the cast commentaries on the Lord of the Rings films are really fun to listen to) and the Doctor Who ones have been pretty good in the past – though season three was my least favourite, here’s hoping that this new series of commentaries is better.