Warning: contains no spoilers

A troiler is trailer that contains spoilers. There are far too many of these. As in: ‘Next week in Doctor Who, Bille Piper returns, Captain Jack has sex with a Cyberman, Donna accidentally goes off to work for Josh in The West Wing, David Tennant regenerates into Chris Evans, and everything gets sorted out when Davros turns out to be Old Man Withers from the amusement arcade.’

This sort of thing is really bloody annoying. Ministers get stick when they ‘pre-announce’ things in the media that they ought to be saying to Parliament, so surely the BBC deserves a kicking for this kind of crap?

This is also one of the few things I really loathe about the internet – there are just so many conduits of information that things no honest, decent person would want to know in advance will leak out and get discussed at great length online before the programme’s even been broadcast. It’s easy to accidentally stumble into one of these things for the few seconds needed to have the plot twists lobbed at your retinas.

I’m sure there’s some clever time-travel joke to be made about how apt this is, but really, people, this is no laughing matter. Suspense and surprise are precious things, and those of us who get all our emotional stimulation from television need our innocence protected.

I’m out for most of the weekend, so I’m going to have to ferociously avoid all TV and internet (plus Sunday papers) until I can get home and watch the damn thing normally like a proper fan who wants to actually enjoy watching it. I’m considering getting some tinfoil to wrap around my head so that I can keep the spoilers out.

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