From: ira2p@faraday.clas.Virginia.EDU (Iain Robert Asplin)
Subject: Re: PBS & SCIFI CHANNELS
Organization: University of Virginia
Date: Mon, 17 Aug 1992 16:00:18 GMT

In article <2168.130.uupcb@ssr.com> doug.vermes%acc1bbs@ssr.com (Doug Vermes)  writes:
>
>-> Oh, it will come out.  There's a definite start date now.  I can't
>-> remember if it's September 12 or September 21 ...
>->
>-> The cable company in this county has had a spot ready for SFC (that's
>-> "Sci-Fi Channel" -- not "StarFleet Command"!) for a while ...
>-> Unfortunately, I live in the small area where a smaller, more
>-> expensive cable company reigns ...
>Let's hope so... My PBS station cancelled Doctor Who at the end of
>February... Right after Caves of Androzani, too! Anyway... My cable
>company is SUPPOSED to do a major overhaul of their cable lineup in
>early '93, so I can only HOPE that this will include the Sci-Fi
>channel... But, from what Iain Robert Asplin said, commercials in
>between Doctor Who episodes??? That can get kind of frusterating. Who am
>I kidding? VERY frusterating! But, any Doctor Who is better than no
>Doctor Who.
>         - Doug
>---------
It's worse than that Doug.
Well, sort of.
As I understand it, the SciFi Channel will be like any other commercial
cable network in that they will interrupt their shows like the broadcast
networks do for time for commercials.  By doing this, they raise their
revenues from advertisers.  The only alternative to that is by becoming
a premium channel where subscribers need to pay an extra fee on top of
their basic service to get this channel.  Given the two choices, I'll
take the commercials any day.  
So far SciFi has the rights to the Hartnell and Troughton stories in
episode format, and from what I hear, they will air one part a day
twice a day, once in the early afternoon and a repeat of the same episode
late at night in case you missed the first one and want to nab it with
a VCR or just happen to be awake.
Here is a PRETEND schedule:
Monday   An Unearthly Child episode one  (twice in the day, afternoon and night)Tuesday episode two
Wednesday episode three
Thrudsay episode four
Friday The Daleks episode one
Then a break over the weekend and they will pick up with episode two of Daleks
the next Monday.  Something like this is how SciFi will be running the show.
Each episode will have commercial interruptions, but how often they will come
or how many commercials will be in each break is as yet unknown.
What is known is that SciFi has promised not to edit material out of the
episodes to make them fit a half-hour *exactly* time slot, since if you add
six to eight minutes of commercials tto a 25 minute show you come over a 
half-hour.  They are a cable station, and thus not need to worry quite so
much about the broadcast standard of starting every single show exactly
on the hour or the half-hour.  WTBS is a very good example, everything they
show starts five minutes after the hour!

>
>By the way... did you ever notice how the TARDIS slowly became a LOT
>more reliable? In The Seeds of Death (2nd Doctor), the Doctor wouldn't
>even THINK of trying to use the TARDIS to get the T-Mat repairmen to the
>moon. However, in Logopolis, the Doctor doesn't think TWICE about
>setting the coordinates to move the TARDIS 3 feet to land around the
>other police box! Has the Doctor been tinkering with the TARDIS console
>in his spare time?? Maybe surprise visits to the Gallifreyan TARDIS
>Repair Garage??? <G>
>                                                                                                                      

Yes, the Doctor was tinkering with the console quite a lot.  
In the Sixth Doctor's first few stories he really does quite an overhaul
on the ship's systems.  Here's a line from "The Mark of the Rani:"
Peri: You man it isn't the TARDIS malfunctioning again?
The Doctor: Malfunctioning?  Malfunctioning !?!  MALFUNCTIONING!?!!!?!
	After all the work I've done on it?

the short hops started getting accurate after the Doctor made his trip
into E-Space in Season 18.  In "Full Circle" the Doctor expresses doubts
about the short hops he needs to make in that story.
In the very next story, "State of Decay," while they're still in E-Space,
he again speaks about how tricky these short hops are, but then K9
offers the explanation of why they're working so well in these last two stories
Since E-Space is a smaller Universe, the co-ordinates are much more stable,
i.e. there isn't as much Universe for the TARDIS to get lost in.
Also remember that the TARDIS is a living thing and probably quite capable
of learning, or at least if it isn't the Doctor is.
So when he returns to N-Space, the Doctor is much better at short-hopping
for a reason similar to this example:
Imagine a student studying calculus.  In the class he is enrolled in he
or she needs to understand and use partial derivatives, something which is
actually quite simple, but something which was missed in this student's
previous courses, and so the student struggles through this course
only getting answers half-right most of the time and missing very, very 
often.  Now imagine that the professor takes the student to a class
where they are learning partial derivatives, the student spends a few days
there learning this stuff, then goes back to his or her more challenging
course and starts succeeding brilliantly.
This is what I think happened with the Doctor and the TARDIS in E-Space.
Whilst they were there, they figured out what it was they were doing wrong
all this time in short-range navigation in an environment that was easier
to get around in, thus making their simple errors now easy-to-see and
not shrouded in a few dozen other things that could be going wrong in
the full universe.


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