Even more than the regular issues of Doctor Who Magazine, I’ve always seen the Yearbook as a journal of record. That’s why this latest volume begins with Part One of Spyfall and covers all the episodes broadcast in 2020. The last of these was transmitted on 1 March, and while the questions posed in The Timeless Children left many of us in a mild state of shock, it wasn’t long before we were all preoccupied by real-life anxieties.
I’m sure we’ll all remember 2020 as the year our lives were impacted by the COVID-19 virus. In the midst of the greatest public health crisis in living memory, the Doctor Who fan community responded with positivity. The pandemic, and its ensuing national lockdowns, prompted some remarkable examples of DIY creativity. The ‘Tweetalongs’ initiated by DWM’s Emily Cook developed into increasingly sophisticated codas and other offshoots from the series, some of which have been collected in the BBC Books anthology Adventures in Lockdown. Other fans and professionals found similarly innovative ways to bene fit good causes, as you’ll see in the following pages.