Canada (Space)

SPACE (1997-2000)

Channel Profile

SPACE, a Canadian cable channel specialising in Science Fiction, was launched on 17 October 1997. It used the slogan "SPACE: The Imagination Station".

Stories bought and broadcast

WILLIAM HARTNELL

Seventeen stories, 76 episodes:

A	An Unearthly Child	4
B	The Daleks	7
C	Inside the Spaceship	2
E	The Keys of Marinus	6
F	The Aztecs	4
G	The Sensorites	6
J	Planet of Giants	3
K	The Dalek Invasion of Earth	6
L	The Rescue	2
M	The Romans	4
N	The Web Planet	6
Q	The Space Museum	4
R	The Chase	6
S	The Time Meddler	4
X	The Ark	4
Z	The Gunfighters	4
BB	The War Machines	4

PATRICK TROUGHTON

Six stories, 34 episodes:

MM	The Tomb of the Cybermen	4
TT	The Dominators	5
UU	The Mind Robber	5
WW	The Krotons	4
XX	The Seeds of Death	6
ZZ	The War Games	10

JON PERTWEE

Three stories, 18 episodes:

AAA	Spearhead from Space	4
BBB	Doctor Who and the Silurians	7
CCC	The Ambassadors of Death	7

Only Spearhead from Space aired in colour; the other two Pertwees were in black and white.

TOM BAKER

One story, two episodes:

4B

The Sontaran Experiment

2

The reason why a single Tom Baker serial was purchased by SPACE, was because they had contracted to buy 130 episodes (which, if stripped five days a week, provided an industry standard run of 26 weeks). However, when the station discovered that the 129th and 130th episodes would be parts one and two of the seven-parter Inferno, they instead acquired this two-parter to make up the 130 episodes they had paid for.

PETER CUSHING

One movie:

Daleks Invasion Earth 2150AD

Transmission

SPACE purchased a package of 130 episodes, with several re-run rights.

We're not sure of the exact date on which the series commenced, but based on the dates we do know, the first episode of An Unearthly Child screened (probably) on Monday, 20 October 1997, three days after SPACE went live. Initially, each episode aired weekdays, with three screenings per day: 7.30am, 1.30pm, and again at 7.00pm. (We've put only the 7.30am slot in the Airdates table.)

Episodes were broadcast commercial-free, but with a semi-obtrusive station ident logo at the bottom corner.

The series did not perform as expected, with the result that the 7.00pm evening screening was dropped, and the third screening was pushed back to 3.30am of the following morning!

From Sunday, 11 January 1998, a separate repeat cycle was added to the schedules. Starting at the beginning again with An Unearthly Child, the fresh run aired on Sundays at 8.00am, with a repeat of the same episode at 3.30am Monday morning. The 8.00am screenings stopped on 24 January 1999 (with The Chase part one); from that date only the 3.30am repeats continued. Those repeats stopped on 5 April, with a one-off screening of The Space Museum part one.

The Tomb of the Cybermen, 3 February 1998 on SPACE (Winnipeg Free Press)

The "lost" Patrick Troughton serial The Tomb of the Cybermen had its Canadian television debut in February 1998, a fact that was mentioned in the Winnipeg Free Press. (This screening was potentially also the first television screening of the serial since its recovery in 1992.)

The brief run of Jon Pertwee 18 episodes started on Monday, 23 March 1998.

And the single Tom Baker serial, The Sontaran Experiment, the last serial of the 130-episode package, aired 16-17 April 1998.

The following week, the station went back to the beginning, and started a second run of repeats, from An Unearthly Child part one. (The Sunday/Monday repeats stream was up to The Keys of Marinus at this time.)

On Tuesday, 21 April 1998 at 8.00pm, SPACE screened the Reel Time Pictures made-for-video documentary I WAS A DOCTOR WHO MONSTER. (This was repeated on Tuesday, 15 September 1998, at 3.00pm, and again a week later at 4.00pm, and again on 28 March 1999 at 4.30pm.)

One curious side-effect of there being a stream of weekday repeats as well as a separate Sunday/Monday stream, was that for one week in May 1998, the two streams overlapped, so that part five of The Keys of Marinus aired three times that week! And later that year on 27-28 December 1998, part one of The Space Museum screened three times!

On 29 March 1999', the regular 3.30am Monday repeats came to an end, with The Time Meddler. And with the regular weekday repeats also coming to a natural end two weeks later, the unused "Monday" repeats were slotted into the regular weekday cycle; therefore The Sontaran Experiment was followed by The Ark rather than An Unearthly Child.

And from that point on, episodes now aired seven days a week at 7.30am, a regular schedule that continued right through until the final episode was aired by SPACE on Friday, 10 March 2000.

In two and a half years, the package of 130 episodes had been cycled through six times. Adding in the discontinued Sunday/Monday repeats, some of the Hartnell serials also played for a seventh time.

On Monday, 24 January 2000, the Peter Cushing movie, "Daleks Invasion Earth 2150AD" screened, at 9.00pm. It was re-run on Saturday, 25 November 2000 at 2.00pm.

This was the final screening of Doctor Who on SPACE until the debut of the new series in 2005...

TV listings

Our Airdates table as been extrapolated from archived editions of Benjamin F Elliott's on-going This Week In Doctor Who.

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