Unlike The Day of the Doctor, which started out awesome, and got even more awesome, Doctor Who Live: The Afterparty started off mediocre, and then just got worse (with the exception of the K-9’s numbercruncher and the Classic Doctors interview). Here are my main issues:
- First, the big one. Who … which abdominally insane person, thought it a good idea to let 1 Direction onto the afterparty?! I have nothing against 1 Direction. I have nothing for them. I don’t care about them, not a single iota of me does. I watched this show for Doctor Who stuff. NOT 1 Direction. I doubt any Whovian turned from BBC One to BBC Three to listen to 1 Direction use the Doctor Who 50th to plug themselves. The, what, 5+ mins wasted on them could’ve been used to talk to more Doctor Who people, like the companions, of which I think all the surviving ones were there, but only a few were talked to. But, luckily, Time itself agreed that it was such a stupid idea, that Time itself broke, and we ended up with the interview crashing down in failure.
- Ok, what the heck happened with that Companion Competition, when they got everyone to stand up, and then sit down. Ok, to start with, while I love his character of Jake, and I’m sure Andrew Hayden Smith is a lovely fella, why was he there? He was never a companion, not even arguably. His character is classed as recurring, and that’s all. Also, the first question was ‘who hasn’t travelled in the TARDIS’, and Daphne Ashbrook didn’t sit down. Sorry, but Grace never travelled in the TARDIS. But that’s just nitpicking. The whole thing didn’t even work. Several people sat down for certain questions, and the presenters, obviously failing to cope with the chaos begotten from the ill-thought out segment, neglect to mention this, instead commenting with an oblivious ‘ah, so no one’s sitting down’ repeatedly. You could see Mark Gatiss barley hiding his exasperation between a polite smile (indeed, the presenters, recognisers how out of depth they were getting, turn to him to ask what to do, and he just says everyone should sit down, in a non-so subtle way of telling the presenters to quit while they were ahead and move to the next segment). This had all the potential to be amazing, if it was better thought out, and more time given to it (rather than 1 Direction). Also, rereading my paragraph, I am being a bit too harsh on the presenters. More blame is obviously on the producers’ head.
- The rest of the episode was underwhelming bits and pieces of interviews with fans. The good bits (such as interviews with companions) were short compared to the crap mentioned above.
The only stand out parts were the montages (I always love a video montage to epic music 😀 ), the Classic Doctors interview and K-9’s number crunch at the end.
So yeah. An underwhelming afterparty to an overwhelming special.
