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Originally Posted by
dps
Yeah, my local PBS station normally only did the big fund-raising pledge drives a couple or so times a year, but sometime around 1980 apparantly they were getting good ratings with Doctor Who, so they decided that it would be a good program to use for fund-raising on a regular basis.
It probably wasn't quite as bad as I've made it sound. I may not have the details exactly right--after all, it's been 30 years--but I think what was happening was that they were showing an episode of Doctor Who in the afternoons after school, and that episode wasn't interrupted by fund-raising except during their big pledge drives. But they were showing a big block of episodes all day Saturday, and started interrupting those for fund-raising all the time. The thing was, that happened about the same time I went away to college. I didn't get to see the episoded shown on weekday afternoons, but I usually came home on the weekends, so I would get to see the episoded shown on Saturdays, which were the ones being butchered. I gradually lost interest in watching them that way. I can't even remember exactly when I stopped watching, but it was sometime during Davison's run. I do remember watching a few episodes that had Turlough in them, including The Five Doctors, but I don't remember watching any with Peri (and as a straight college-age male, I certainly would have remembered Peri) so it guess it was sometime in 1984 (by that time, the local PBS station had caught up with current episodes--instead of being a couple of years behind, I think we were getting stories just a couple of months or so after the UK).