PBS Volunteering

If there's one thing I really hate doing, and the hatred of doing it has only grown worse over the years, it's answering phones. I hate answering phones at work, I hate answering phones at home... and I'm not really all that inclined to answer phones for PBS, either. But I do it anyway. Last night's Doctor Who marathon at the "other" PBS station was very nice.

Instead of just picking a single story to marathon, my husband (who is their Doctor Who advisor) picked seven single episodes, one from each Doctor, that were good examples of each Doctor's era. This was done because of the 40th Anniversary. The "thank you" gifts were pretty nice, too. There was a pin and a light-up pen at the lowest levels, then a Dalek Calendar and The Curse of Fatal Death video. The new Doctor Who book was a high level one that got a lot of interest (both from people pledging and from the folks in the studio who couldn't stop looking at it). And there was also the "end of the universe" videotape collection of all the Doctor Who stories that hadn't yet been released on video in the US (including some really, really bad ones).

The drive went well, and at the end we just covered the cost of showing Doctor Who for another six months. Even more amusing was that Eric became the fourth "talent" during the pledge breaks and got a lot of screen time. He introduced the episodes and explained why he chose each one. At least I think he did, I was busy answering phones most of the time and didn't get to see much of him. As he explained to folks, at the time he picked the stories, the Dalek stories weren't available so there are no daleks in his list. He also expected the station to be able to get the color version of the Third Doctor story he picked, but that didn't work out.

1. An Unearthly Child (first ever episode, still holds up 40 years later)
2. The War Games part nine (in which the Doctor calls the Time Lords)
3. Daemons part four (the whole UNIT family, and the Master, in a classic Pertwee era story)
4. City of Death part two (just because)
5. Enlightenment part one (because it was really hard to find a good fifth Doctor tale)
6. Trial of a Time Lord part thirteen (because of the rant against the Time Lords and, by coincidence, it reveals that the Valeyard is also the Doctor)
7. Silver Nemesis part three (Cybertwits and "Doctor, who are you?")

We also had a birthday cake in the studio (along with the usual pizzas), and party hats and noisemakers. Even the Klingons wore party hats. We got a little loopy as the night wore on, and had an awful lot of fun, especially for people doing live TV. We had just enough volunteers to fill the seats, but no extra. And the floor crew was a new one, mostly inexperienced (the station is part of a school, so the crew is always students), so there were a number of flubs and near-disasters that were both funny and frightening. Then again, that's part of the appeal of this PBS station, as it doesn't have a slick crew and tons of money to waste. Sometimes they mess up, and that's ok because it's a place of learning.