On Doctor Who's 60th birthday, here's a post about Doctor Who and birthdays.
During the 1980s a lot of Doctor Who episodes were shown on my birthday. One of them even scored a direct hit on my 18th birthday. I remember being mildly peeved that I'd miss the show because it clashed with a slap-up party my family had organised. The party was obviously excellent, especially the Devil's food cake with its 18 candles, but these were the days when you had to watch the show at the time or you'd never see it.
I checked back recently and was amazed to see that my birthday had coincided with a new episode of Doctor Who in four consecutive years. This seemed somewhat improbable.
There haven't been any since, alas, but six birthday episodes seemed quite a lot.
And this got me wondering... Which day of the year has seen the most new Doctor Who episodes?
This is the kind of question for which Wikipedia and spreadsheets were invented.
The answer turned out to be obvious, and it wasn't my birthday. But 9th March turned out to be in the Top 5, and I'll deliver you a proper countdown at the end of today's post.
What's crucial here is the chosen day of the week for transmission, which in the mid-1980s just happened to coincide with my birthday four years running.
Tuesday 9th March 1982: Earthshock [series 19] Wednesday 9th March 1983: Enlightenment [series 20] Friday 9th March 1984: The Caves of Androzani [series 21] Saturday 9th March 1985: Timelash [series 22]
Prior to series 19 Doctor Who had been a Saturday evening institution, but with the arrival of Peter Davison in 1982 it was suddenly shunted to Mondays and Tuesdays instead. The chosen weekdays drifted later in the week in 1983 and 1984, then reverted to good old Saturday for Colin Baker in 1985.
Series 1-18: Saturday Series 19: Monday/Tuesday Series 20: Tuesday/Wednesday Series 21: Thursday/Friday Series 22 & 23: Saturday Series 24: Monday Series 25 & 26: Wednesday New Who: usually Saturday
9th March thus managed to ride the timestream four years running, as did several other dates a whole number of weeks before and after. 10th March, by contrast, totally missed out and to this day has only debuted a single episode back in 1973.
If you rely solely on Saturdays, individual dates will only see a new episode every 6 years or so. It's those weekday twiddles that have boosted certain dates above others... that and special episodes outside the normal run of events.
23rd November, for example, has delivered five new episodes - the very first, the 50th anniversary special and three standard episodes in 1968, 1987 and 1988.
Two things which make a significant difference to the ultimate tally are...
• how long each series was
• when in the year it was transmitted
Here's a summary table.
Series have got a lot shorter since the show began. In the 1960s three-quarters of all Saturdays saw the premiere of a new Doctor Who episode. In the 1970s that dropped to half, and since 1982 each series has only contained about a dozen episodes. This means that of the 871 episodes so far screened, 80% were part of the classic series and only 20% are from the new.
The timing of the series has varied greatly too. Classic series tended to debut at the start of September or just after Christmas. Since 1982 the spread of dates has shrunk - sometimes an autumn thing, sometimes winter and sometimes spring.
If you look at the table and check the columns, particularly early on, you'll see the real Who hotspot turns out to be 'Christmas to Easter'. January, February and March have therefore seen the most Doctor Who episodes, so that's where the maximum coincident dates are going to be. July and August, on the other hand, have hardly seen any.
By my calculations, 42 days of the year have never seen the debut of a new episode. You have to scroll all the way through the calendar to 15th June to find the first big zero, followed closely by 22nd and 29th June. During July and August the majority of days are episode-free, but after that only 20th and 27th December are missing. Even 29th February managed an episode during the historical story Marco Polo, way back in the first series in 1964.
It's about time I got round to answering my original question.
In second place, with seven episodes apiece, we have 1st January, 5th January and 12th January.
5th and 12th January are part of the weekly sequence which includes 9th March, because what happened on my birthday happened to them too. But they also got lucky in Jodie Whittaker's second series, elevating them both from six episodes to seven. n.b. 19th January, 26th January and 2nd February would also be in joint 2nd place if only BBC technicians hadn't gone on strike in 1980 causing the cancellation of Shada.
1st January is a late arrival in the top tier. It had only delivered three episodes during the classic era, but has since been topped up with four New Year Specials between 2010 and 2021.
Behind all of those, with six episodes apiece, are ten different dates. All of them are in January, February or March. One of them is my birthday and here are the others marked on the calendar in yellow.
You can see a very strong weekly pattern which runs through from 5th January to 30th March.
The deviation in February is because Resurrection of the Daleks was shifted from Thursday to Wednesday in 1984 to keep out of the way of the Winter Olympics. The extra blob on 1st March is because the pattern gets nudged by a day during leap years.
For good measure, here are dates with five episodes marked in grey.
A stripe down the calendar is now plainly seen, two days wide, all the way from the start of January to the middle of March. n.b. 22nd March and 29th March would also have appeared in grey had the 1983 series not ended two weeks early so its production slot could be given to The Five Doctors, the 20th anniversary story, which was screened in November.
Fourteen further dates later in the year have also accumulated five episodes. Eleven of these are the weekly sequence from 6th September to 15th November. One is 23rd November - anniversary day - as previously discussed. One is 25th November, or will become so on Saturday, being the date for the 20th and 60th anniversary specials. And the other is 27th May, boosted by being the day of transmission for the one-off Paul McGann movie, the only official 'episode' between 1990 and 2004.
Finally let me reveal the date with more Doctor Who episodes than any other. Way more, as it turns out. It is of course Christmas Day.
There have been 14 Christmas specials altogether, including every 25th December from 2005 to 2017. They started out under Russell T Davies as a cornerstone of festive viewing, then slowly slipped in the ratings and now New Year's Day is deemed a safer bet for a holiday episode.
The only Christmas Day episode in the original series was 'The Feast of Steven', episode 7 of The Daleks' Master Plan, which was broadcast on 25th December 1965. It was scripted as a pantomime and was supposed to be a crossover with Z Cars but didn't quite turn out that way, and it is perhaps just as well that no film of it survives.
Here's the final countdown...
Which day of the year has seen the most new Doctor Who episodes?
On Doctor Who's 60th birthday, here's a post about Doctor Who and birthdays.
