To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Sci Fi Show Doctor Who the BBC had decided to have a simulcast live screening in movie theatres around the world of the 3D special so that fans could see it at the same time as the UK broadcast with no worries about internet leaks/spoilers before it airs in respective territories.

This was an unprecedented first for a live simultaneous worldwide broadcast in movie theatres and proved to be a logistical nightmare managing the event.

Silly BBC thought there would be limited interested in the theatre broadcast. Only the Scotiabank theatre had been chosen in Toronto on one of their smaller screens. Within minutes of tickets going on sale they were sold out.

The problem was the official release from Cineplex told people to go on their site at 9am. Their site crashed due to volume. However people were still able to buy them from a rival site movietickets.com where they were already able to buy them from the day before. So those of us that did what we were told by Cineplex were out of luck.

This caused major fan backlash inundating Cineplex customer service. Thru facebook groups we got the names of the execs at Cineplex and pointed out the debacle. Cineplex were limited by the BBC in terms of how many tickets they could release but they did go back to the BBC and got the screening moved to a bigger theatre.

They also opened additional theatres for the repeat Monday screening after the original live Saturday event. The website still kept saying sold out but thru some freak occurrence of repeated retrying I managed to get in and grab a ticket.

On event day I got to the theatre after noon expecting there to soon be lineups for the sold out 2.50pm showing. Already there were people in line dressed up in costume. There was also a tv crew from the cable channel Space to cover the event and the exclusive screening of the anniversary special on their channel.

It was almost like a private fan party in the theatre which was sold out for this exclusive screening. The Space channel had set up their own lighting and cameras to cover live reaction from fans as well as a backdrop where fans in costume could take their pics to send back to the BBC to show the strong Canadian fan support.

There was also a CBC news cameraman there. Minutes before the special aired the Space camera crew went to live broadcast with their team from inside the theatre

The special lived up to expectations. Some were worried people about being in a crowded theatre people will be talking thru the whole thing but it was deadly quiet after some opening cheers.

The only time fans reacted again was at two surprise appearances near the end. First of the mysterious appearance of the 'new' 13th Doctor whose episodes will air in late 2014. Second was the shock appearance of most popular 4th Doctor actor Tom Baker playing a mysterious caretaker.

It was strange seeing the number of high school and university aged fans who were probably about the age I started. Also listening to how much they thought they knew about the original series as most joined with the new series.

The screening set a Guinness World Record for the largest worldwide simultaneous screening of a tv show and also broke the Space channels ratings records despite an early afternoon Saturday showing. Fans are hopeful there will be more such movie specials.