The Best Doctor Who Story Never!

At the weekend --inspired by the 50th anniversary shenanigans, I spent many an hour transferring my entire collection of original Doctor Who episodes from DVD onto the external hard drive on my media server, so I could access them directly through XBMC instead of faffing around with discs.

Much fun and frivolity ensued, as I wrestled for quite a while, trying to find a naming convention for the files that would allow XBMC to index the episodes [about which, more in another post].

As I scanned through the hundreds of episodes I had, I got the feeling that certain words such as ‘terror’, ‘horror’ etc. cropped up quite a lot. So I thought what jolly japery it might be to do a bit of nerdy geeky data-analysis and find out the most popular words for a Doctor Who series name. Then I could string a few of the top words together to make the ultimate Doctor Who series title.

If you want to know how I did the nerdy stuff, then read on after the big reveal. If you only want to know the results, I can tell you that the most popular words [ie. more than 3 occurrences] used in classic Doctor Who series titles are:

99 THE

46 OF

9 DALEKS

7 SPACE

7 PLANET

6 DEATH

5 INVASION

4 TIME

4 TERROR

4 IN

4 EVIL

3 FROM

I therefore propose that the best Doctor Who story never made would have been: