User:SOTO/Forum Archive/Inclusion debates/@comment-30970988-20170118180633/@comment-188432-20170126064652

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Answers were given back in 2011 (!) at Talk:Minister of Chance, Dan Freeman gave an interview to The Flashing Blade Podcast in which he explicitly said it wasn't in the DWU. But TFB isn't on iTunes (or I think other podcast aggregators) anymore, and I'm obviously on a new computer since 2011. So I don't have it to hand here in 2017. I hope you'll forgive me for not scouring the internet for it now.

Truth is, the reasons for not including The Minister of Chance series are easy to demonstrate, using solely the interview Nate mentioned above.

Only, he didn't give the most salient passage, which is the final paragraph:

So the only answer I can make to the question originally posed [is the minister part of the DWU?] is that at the moment the BBC are not licensing the Minister Of Chance character for use in Doctor Who output. But he was a Time Lord when he first came to our ears in Death Comes To Time, and he's still a Time Lord - still the same character.

So:

  1. The BBC aren't licensing the Minister of Chance character
  2. in Doctor Who output
  3. And the BBC wholly own the concept of Time Lords.
  4. Yet Freeman insists it's the same character and that the MoC is explicitly a Time Lord.

In other words, it fails Rule 2 of our four little rules:

A story that isn't commercially licensed by all of the relevant copyright holders doesn't count.

You just can't call a character a "Time Lord" unless the BBC say you can, and they didn't. And the BBC have some kind of ownership of the Minister of Chance character, otherwise Freeman wouldn't talk about the BBC licensing the character. This, of course, is quite apart from the BBC's outright ownership of Time Lords, generally.

It also isn't set in the DWU, because Freeman explicitly said that the BBC aren't licensing it for use in Doctor Who material. So if it's being used, logically it isn't being used in the DWU.

So The Minister of Chance, as a series, fails on at least two counts by Freeman's own admission.

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