Who recalls TVNZ’s decade of neglect?

The state broadcaster hasn’t even named a channel for the new series. Those who remember how it used to treat the show should be worried, says James Croot.

TVNZ has every right to be a cock-a-hoop about winning back the rights to screen Doctor Who. After all, the 2018 season of the near 55-year-old British sci-fi series is one of the most hotly anticipated and potentially divisive shows of the year.

Right from the moment Jodie Whittaker was announced as the 13th Doctor, the internet has gone into overdrive as ‘‘fans’’ debated whether she was the right choice, or even whether a woman should play the Timelord at all.

Potentially just as polarising was the later news that The Chase host Bradley Walsh would be one of her three ‘‘companions’’ in the Tardis.

Whatever your opinion (and mine is that Whittaker, as Broadchurch proved, is simply one of the finest actors in the UK today), it certainly means viewers will be desperate to see the show when it debuts later this year, something our state broadcaster must have been aware of when weighing up its bid.

But despite its commitment to streaming episodes on TVNZ On Demand immediately after the UK broadcast, there’s something slightly uncomfortable about it only making a promise to air the show on one of its broadcast TV channels within a week.

The fact it hasn’t even named what channel it will be on, let alone a day and time, should worry Whovians who remember just how shabbily the show was treated in the late 1980 sand 1990s.

In its release announcing the news on Monday, TVNZ mentioned it had been almost 22 years since the show last played on its channel. What it failed to disclose was that was the one-off American audience-oriented TV movie that the broadcaster only deigned to screen five months after the UK and the US. It was the culmination of what was almost a decade a neglect.

New Zealand was the first territory in the world to take the show from the Brits – the first episode debuted here in September 1964, 10 months after it began broadcasting on the BBC.

A steady steam of episodes continued for the next two decades, until sometime during the Peter Davison tenure when TVNZ bosses began to lose interest. Instead of new episodes, we got endless repeats of the same Jon Pertwee Earth-bound adventures.

In the end, it ‘‘dumped’’ all the remaining Davison and Colin Baker episodes on late afternoons one summer, before attempting to show renewed enthusiasm for the show when the 25th anniversary came around in 1988 (although bizarrely it played the Silver Nemesis episode out of context with the rest of the Sylvester McCoy stories, thus confusing everyone).

The Sky TV-owned Prime channel (which must be gutted at losing one of the few ‘‘family-oriented’’ jewels of its prime-time programming) did a great job of establishing a consistent time-slot (and closing the gap with the UK broadcast, even simulcasting the occasionally significant episode) for the show since its reboot in 2005.

A generation of Kiwi viewers now see Doctor Who as synonymous with early Sunday-night viewing, but given TVNZ has found anything other than reality shows or documentaries a difficult sell in that slot it’s hard to see it following suit.

While I’m sure there will be many Whovians who embrace and demand the instant online fix, TVNZ also owes it to the wider viewing audience the show attracts to find a suitable broadcast home and time, and more importantly, stick to it.

The worst thing it could do is start changing the timeslot three episodes in because a Wednesday night doesn’t rate as well as it hoped.

But then, this is the company that thought Heartbreak Island was suitable 7.30pm viewing and has a Friday night line-up that lurches wildly from the family-friendly Ellen’s Game of Games to Naked Attraction.

A generation of Kiwi viewers now see Doctor Who as synonymous with early Sunday-night viewing.