Guest contributor Craig Sightings thinks that BBC publicity is spoiling too much.



Disclaimer: If you still haven’t watched Face the Raven, this contains spoilers.

Last week Clara faced her greatest enemy, the entity only known as… BBC publicity.

So as we all have witnessed by now, Face the Raven saw the apparent death of Clara Oswald. I have a big problem with this and it’s not the character’s exit, rather the fact it was not a surprise at all, instead just an inevitability. What should have been a shocking and unexpected moment was instead ruined by BBC publicity basically telling the fans this was going to happen all along.

Allow me to elaborate. Since the beginning of Series 9 we’d been told the episode would be a “shocker” and “very sad,” or variations upon in the various officially sanctioned interviews and previews. Doctor Who fans are smart. They can piece together episodes from the tiniest clues, so it doesn’t take a genius to work out that all of them added up to say “Clara is going to die.” Then on top of that, last week the publicity went even further. Just in case you had any doubt left, the BBC released a TV trailer actually showing Clara’s very final moments (“let me be brave”), Capaldi then appeared on The Graham Norton Show stating it was the end for Clara.

So, all this adds up to absolutely zero surprise when the moment finally rolled around in the episode itself. I cannot believe BBC publicity were so stupid about the whole thing. Now I know what you’re thinking: “But publicity is good, It gets more people watching!” While it’s true we want the show to be watched by as many people as possible, when it comes at the expense of spoiling the storyline it is the sign of a bad move.

I think the BBC should have instead kept it as secret as possible, much like Adric’s demise in the Classic era. I’m not sure if it was a result of declining overnight ratings that prompted them to go so unusually overt with spoilers about this episode, but I think few can argue that Clara’s final moments would have had much more of an impact if the episode had not been publicised so blatantly. I knew nothing about Game of Thrones’ grisly Red Wedding and it hit me hard for a good few days after. With Doctor Who I felt the whole thing had been exposed early.

Then we have the other problem. I already know Clara is not actually 100% gone, at least we haven’t seen the last of her. This is because we have seen both pictures and the cover of Doctor Who Magazine showing Clara in a waitress outfit and the Doctor in the background, scenes that didn’t occur in Face the Raven. DWM also confirms Jenna Coleman in the cast list for Hell Bent. On top of that we had the infamous Steven Moffat preview in the Radio Times that revealed dialogue from a key scene. So, not only did we basically know she seemingly died before air, but also that it is not the final time we see the character (in some form).

What concerns me further is that the official synopses for the final two episodes reveal some absolutely massive spoilers, and the BBC or production team once again approved these for public consumption. I won’t spoil the details here, but many fans have a good idea of what to expect from the episodes already and I suspect we already know the teased “massive” cliffhanger which again is something I wanted to experience from viewing, not something that originated from a usually safe source to read.

While I think BBC publicity mostly responsible, I think some fans have a hand in it too. I think we are living in a culture now where people want to know everything about a show or movie before it airs. I’m not saying it’s all fans, but the problem is, those who don’t want to see spoilers are being forced into it now because you can’t escape them wherever you look. We’re not just talking about obscure filming reports on a random Facebook page, but official magazine covers, interviews and trailers shown to mass audiences before you even have time to react.

In conclusion, I would have preferred to have watched Face the Raven believing was a ‘normal’ adventure, then all of a sudden you get a shock as Clara is killed off. BBC publicity put paid to that whether you are a hardcore fan or more casual viewer, and I feel that is a great shame. It seems that they are now less careful about what information they are putting out there and it needs to be toned down again.