Doctor Who Confidential

I can’t remember exactly when we acquired a taste for this kind of ‘making of’ material. Was it when DVDs came along with all that extra room for stuff? Or was it something to do with the gaping maw of multichannel TV and the pressing need for hundreds of extra hours of programming? Or—bit more of a stretch this one—is it a symptom of our increasing media literacy: would a peep behind the cameras just have confused us if we’d seen it in 1968 or 1978? In our house we still ask each other ‘what side is that show on?’ which is a phrase that I think recalls the moment when British TV acquired a second channel in 1954.

The revelation of the ‘making of’—which seems obvious now—is that there’s so much of interest in the process of making TV shows (in the making of anything for that matter) and, consequently, so much useful content locked up there. TV executives would call this kind of programming ‘efficient exploitation of assets’. Geeks and media professors might call it ‘meta-content’—content about content—and I find myself wondering just how many levels down you could actually go. Would Doctor Who Confidential support a ‘making of’ of its own?