BBC America is celebrating Doctor Who's 50th Anniversary with the first ever live simulcast from YouTube Space Los Angeles.

The station has joined with Nerdist Industries to screen a pre Anniversary show on the station and streamed globally on BBC America's YouTube Channel. Hosted by Veronica Belmont, the Doctor Who 50th Live Pre-Show will air November 23, 2:30pm ET (1930 GMT) just prior to the premiere of Doctor Who’s 50th anniversary special The Day of The Doctor.

Doctor Who 50th Live Pre-Show will be an all-out celebration of 50 years of Doctor Who and its passionate fans. As the world awaits the global simulcast of the anniversary special, the pre-show will feature a live curation of fan-created content being shared on social media from celebrations around the globe, plus chats with special guests including YouTube star Phil DeFranco.

Perry Simon, General Manager, BBC America commented:Liam Collins, Head of YouTube Space LA. Veronica Belmont, co-host of the science fiction and fantasy YouTube video show, audio podcast, and book club The Sword and Laser, added:Following the anniversary special, BBC America’s YouTube channel will host a YouTube-exclusive post-show at 4:00pm ET. In addition, BBC America and BBC America’s YouTube channel will simulcast a primetime pre-show at 7:00pm ET, which will look at the day’s events ahead of BBC America's primetime broadcast of the anniversary special.

The Doctor Who 50th Live Pre-Show will culminate a week-long Doctor Who week on YouTube, featuring content from popular YouTube channels like Nerdist, EmergencyAwesome, Doctor Puppet, PBSideaChannel, How to Cook That, and Rugburn.

Doctor Who: The Ultimate Guide had an unofficial overnight rating of 0.73 million viewers, a 2.9% share of the total television audience.

The two hour BBC Three documentary looked back over fifty years of Doctor Who and included specially shot sequences staring Matt Smith and Jenna Coleman. It was the highest rated show on BBC Three for the evening and the highest rated show for all digital TV during the transmission.

An additional 0.16 million watched the repeat at 00.45 getting a 4.9% share of the total audience at that time.

Winner of the day on digital was I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here Now with just over a million viewers.

Doctor Who: The Ultimate Guide is repeated on Friday at 7pm and is now available on the BBC iPlayer.

The BBC has announced more details of the BBC Three celebration programme Doctor Who Live: The Afterparty, which will immediately follow the premiere of The Day of the Doctor.

Presented live from London’s South Bank, Zoe Ball and Rick Edwards will be joined by Matt Smith and guests to discuss the Doctor's most epic adventure yet. A host of previous Doctors and their time-travelling companions will also take part in what is described as an ultimate celebration of 50 years of Doctor Who.

As well as all the gossip on The Day Of The Doctor, there will be exclusive interviews, monster moments and fans around the world giving their reaction, as they showcase how they are celebrating the special anniversary.

One Direction, the English-Irish pop boy band, will also be joining the party as they gate-crash the show live from LA to wish the Doctor a happy birthday.

Zai Bennett, Controller of BBC Three, says:

The Science of Doctor Who had an average overnight audience of 2.6 million viewers, according to unofficial figures.

The lecture in which Professor Brian Cox explains the physics that allows Doctor Who to travel through space and time, was the second highest rated programme on BBC Two for the day. It scored a 12.1% share of the total audience, beating the ITV offering, Breathless, which had 2.2 million watching. On BBC One the fundraising concert, Children in Need Rocks, had an average of 4.2 million viewers. Bedlam, on Channel 4 had 1.2 million watching with Slaughter at the Farm: Countdown to Murder getting 1.3 million.

Overall The Science of Doctor Who was the 16th most watched programme of the day. The programme is available to UK viewers on the BBC iPlayer and is repeated next Friday on BBC Two at 11.05pm.

The repeat of Buzzcocks: The Doctor Who Special, hosted by David Tennant and featuring Bernard Cribbins and Catherine Tate, had an average audience of 1.6 million watching, an audience share of 8.5%, and was 28th for the day.

BBC Radio Wales has announced it will dedicate its daytime schedule to Doctor Who on Thursday, November 21 - two days before the worldwide broadcast of the special 50th anniversary adventure, The Day Of The Doctor.

Two of the station’s daytime programmes, Jason Mohammad and Eleri Siôn, will be broadcasting live from the Doctor Who Experience in Cardiff Bay on the day, with a host of special guests ready to tell the Welsh story of the legendary time traveller. Radio Wales will also be re-broadcasting the Doctor Who Prom that was performed at the Royal Albert Hall in London in July this year.

BBC Radio Wales’ Editor, Steve Austins, says: From 10am on Radio Wales Doctor Who Day, Jason Mohammad will be chatting with Jenna Coleman about her role as the Doctor’s current companion, Clara Oswald, and Steven Moffat, the show’s head writer and executive producer, will be answering listeners’ questions. Mohammad will also be talking to the curator of the Doctor Who Experience, Andrew Beech, and there will be a special item about how Wales has benefited from its association with the long-running series.

Mohammad’s connection with the series is stronger than some listeners of his Radio Wales show may appreciate, as he’s appeared as a newsreader on both Doctor Who and the spin-off series, The Sarah Jane Adventures. He’s therefore experienced some of the passion the fans have for the series at first hand. Eleri Siôn will take over the live broadcasts from the Doctor Who Experience from 1pm, with an interview with location manager Iwan Roberts about his job and some of the Welsh locations used on the series. There will also be an exclusive look behind the scenes as the BBC National Orchestra of Wales records the music for The Day Of The Doctor, including interviews with composer Murray Gold and conductor Ben Foster. Film critic Gary Slaymaker will also assess the impact Doctor Who has made on film.

BBC Radio Wales can be heard globally via the BBC Website.

BBC Three has announced it will host a celebration show, Doctor Who Live: The Afterparty directly after the BBC One screening of The Day of the Doctor.

No details are yet available on the content or the guests on the programme.

General entertainment channel Watch reaches the Ninth and Tenth Doctors' eras this weekend with its UK premiere run of the BBC America celebratory series The Doctors Revisited - and Doctor Who News has been given exclusive clips from both the latest documentaries.

The 11-part series, consisting of 30-minute episodes, features the story behind each Doctor, alongside footage from their era, plus a specially-curated selection of stories, and the next two editions centre on the Doctor as played by Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant.

See the clips below:


Doctor Who: The Doctors Revisited - The Ninth Doctor airs on Saturday 9th November at 2pm, followed by the episodes Bad Wolf at 2.30pm and The Parting of the Ways at 3.30pm.

Doctor Who: The Doctors Revisited - The Tenth Doctor airs on Sunday 10th November at 2pm, followed by the episodes Silence In The Library at 2.30pm and Forest of the Dead at 3.30pm.

The series will conclude on Saturday 16th November when Watch focuses on the Eleventh Doctor's era.

BBC Two have released the trailer for their forthcoming programme The Science of Doctor Who, an investigation of science concepts behind the series to be presented by Professor Brian Cox next Thursday, 14th November at 9:00pm.

The BBC America series celebrating each of the actors to have played the Doctor will be shown on Watch, the channel's schedule has revealed.

The Doctors Revisited will be broadcast at weekends, with the premiere of The First Doctor to be shown on Saturday 12th October at 2:00pm, followed by the accompanying story The Aztecs; Sunday will then see The Second Doctor at the same time, accompanied by The Tomb of The Cybermen. The following weekend then sees The Third Doctor on the Saturday alongside Spearhead From Space, and The Fourth Doctor alongside Pyramids of Mars on Sunday.

The documentaries were orginally broadcast monthly by BBC America, and were shown in Australia and New Zealand during August by BBC Worldwide's UKTV.

Other programming to accompany the launch of Doctor Who Revisited on the 12th October includes the documentaries The Companions at 4:30pm and Doctor Who Explained at 5:30pm, both of which are repeated before The Second Doctor on the Sunday.


Watch's schedules don't currently extend beyond the 20th October, but based on the pattern above the Fifth and Sixth Doctors are expected for 26th/27th October, Seventh and Eighth on 2nd/3rd November, Ninth and Tenth on 9th/10th November, and the Eleventh on the 16th - completing the series one week before the 50th Anniversary itself!

BBC Radio 2 has told Doctor Who News it is to produce a documentary entitled Who is the Doctor? to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who.

The 90-minute programme will be broadcast on Thursday 21st November, just two days before the celebration date. More details when we have them.

Also on Radio 2, former companion to the Sixth Doctor, Bonnie Langford, will be Graham Norton’s guest this Saturday. The actress, who played Mel from 1986 to 1987 is scheduled to appear at around 12.15pm UK time. Questions can be sent to Norton at the usual address graham.norton@bbc.co.uk

BBC Radio 2 can be heard worldwide via the BBC website.