If Doctor Who were like Football
Ten ways the world would be different if Doctor Who was taken as seriously as football seems to be...
- Episodes would still only be 45 minutes long, but they'd have a three-hour slot on prime time TV to allow time for pre- and post-episode commentaries from Bonnie Langford and Matthew Waterhouse.
- A new episode would be a socially acceptable reason to take a half-day off work.
- Matt Smith, Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill would each currently be earning £20million a year, and practically every supporting actor during the Russell T Davies era would have been on a multi-million pound loan deal from Eastenders.
- Pubs would advertise the screening of new episodes on big-screen TVs, and you won't be able to go in for a quick pint without the bloke next to you at the bar bleating on about how the Doctor "didn't want to do that" and should have simply reversed the polarity of the neutron flow "like they did in the good old days".
- Every episode would begin with a two minute silence in memory of Katrina, Sara and Adric, even though they died years ago and nobody actually remembers them any more.
- Female companions would be regularly criticised in trashy womens' magazines for daring to appear in public without makeup.
- After each broadcast we'd go straight to Steven Moffat for his analysis of how the episode went.
- People would stay up until silly o'clock in the morning to watch episodes broadcast from different time zones.
- Extra police would have been deployed in 1996 to deal with rioting in the streets after that line about the Doctor's ancestry.
- There would be a bronze statue of Tom Baker outside Television Centre.