A Note on Tonight's Doctor Who Live-blogging

In an almost unprecedented event, I actually have a social commitment tonight. (Sunday night social events are never terribly common, but this one’s a must.)

So I’ve set up the live-blogging of Doctor Who in advance, and it’ll be published at 8:30, at the end of the ABC airing of the episode.

This means that tonight’s episode has been live-blogged in a slightly different fashion than usual.

I don’t think I’ve ever talked about the process of live-blogging for this site, and particularly for Doctor Who.

The Eurovision live-blogging is traditional live-blogging: I type what we think about the song entries but I don’t attempt to make the post particularly comprehensible for people who aren’t watching the broadcast. It’s the sort of live-blogging you find with, say, the Oscars or The Guardian‘s lovely live-blogging of World Cup games.

But Doctor Who is a little different. It’s still what I think of as true live-blogging, in that I put the episode on, start typing, and don’t pause the episode at any point during the process.

(Well, except that one time. And I was quite tipsy. Even then, I explicitly mentioned in the post that I was pausing the episode.)

I also try very hard in these posts to make the live-blogging comprehensible to someone who isn’t watching the episode right then—or even someone who hasn’t watched it in a while—while still keeping up with the plot.

It’s remarkably difficult sometimes.

That’s why I occasionally miss talking about key points, or don’t transcribe key bits of dialogue, or, just sometimes, think that the Doctor’s stabbed Amy when he’s actually bitten her.

But this one will be a bit different. Since I’m watching the episode on my computer, I’ll have to pause it at times, in order to type. And I’m thinking this is a good, one-off opportunity to use a different structure and, perhaps, deepen the live-blogging a little.

We’ll see, shall we?