“Doctor, Doctor…can’t you see I’m burning”
The Power of the Doctor features no fewer than eight actors playing the Doctor1 in new material. Even for a twenty first century series now rather keen on multiple Doctor stories and other, associated revivals of its distant past2 this was a record.
It was also not the first production to feature David Bradley, David Tennant and Jodie Whittaker. One of the minor notes of interest raised when it was announced that she would succeed Peter Capaldi as Doctor Who was that she had appeared in Broadchurch with both Davids, making that series retroactively one in which three Doctors had appeared, with their characters even sharing scenes.
How many other examples of this are there? How many film and television production feature multiple Doctors Who? It’s more than you might think.
Unless you think it’s a lot, admittedly.
The earliest examples predate the series itself. The film Will Any Gentleman? (1953) features both William Hartnell and Jon Pertwee in big supporting roles, ten and fifteen years before they first played the Doctor respectively. They even converse at one point and some enterprising soul has uploaded that conversation to youtube.
Hartnell rounded out his pre Who appearances with his The Three Doctors castmates by appearing with Troughton in an episode of Dial 999 entitled 50,000 Hands in 1959. Hartnell plays a villain and Troughton a sort of (non-cosmic) Hobo. They appear in the same scene, and on the same location, but their characters don’t actually talk to each other, and it’s possible they weren’t even at the location on the same day. Curiously, the star of Dial 999 was Robert Beatty, who would also be on hand the next time the two actors appeared in the same production, The Tenth Planet Episode Four
Hartnell never appeared with any of his other successors, as his career and even Tom Baker’s barely overlapped. Troughton, on the other hand, was a hugely prolific actor on television and film. As well as working in Doctor Who itself with all but one of his predecessors and successors cast as Doctor Who within his own lifetime, he also crossed paths with Peter Davison in an episode of All Creatures Great and Small and with Colin Baker in Swallows and Amazons: The Big Six (1984)3 , in both cases before he appeared opposite them in multi-Doctor stories.
If we’re looking to play bonus cards here Troughton also appeared on stage with Official 1974/5 Stage Play Doctor Trevor Martin and in Laurence Olivier’s Oscar winning film of Hamlet (1948) plus Hammer’s The Gorgon (1964) with two time film Doctor Who Peter Cushing, and in half a dozen television plays and series between 1947 and 1981 with 1983’s replacement First Doctor Richard Hurndall (almost all of which were live in the days before television was ever recorded for posterity).
Trevor Martin also appeared in the film Three Kinds of Heat with Seventh Doctor Sylvester McCoy, the 1993 Doctor Who radio drama The Paradise of Death with Jon Pertwee and The War Games Episode 10 with Patrick Troughton - playing the Doctor in none of these instances - if you want to keep score for him. While Hurndall appeared with Pertwee in an episode of Whodunnit? (The Final Chapter, the deleted DVD can be googled) and was a guest in the penultimate episode of Series Four of The Brothers, one of the stars of which was Colin Baker.
Back to Doctors who have their own number; Pertwee never acted with Tom Baker aside from the handover scene shot for Planet of the Spiders (1974) and both of them featuring (separately) alongside all the other Doctors living as of 1993 in Dimensions in Time. Pertwee also managed to appear with Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy outside Doctor Who. Doctor Who’s “wilderness years” brought several straight-to-VHS SF productions designed to appeal to Doctor Who fandom, and more than one of them featured more than one Doctor. The Airzone Solution (written by future voice of the Daleks Nicholas Briggs) has Colin Baker in the lead, with Sylvester McCoy and Peter Davison in big supporting roles and a cameo from Pertwee.
Pertwee has a larger role in The Zero Imperative, which also features Baker and McCoy in sizeable roles and has a wordless one scene cameo from Davison. The Zero Imperative isn’t a sequel to Airzone, but was once described by writer Mark Gatiss (you know who he is) as “Carry On Airzone. Same cast. Different story”. It also features Pertwee era companion Liz Shaw, played here as in 1970 by Caroline John. She doesn’t seem to notice that Pertwee’s character looks like Doctor Who though. But to be fair, Colin Baker’s Doctor never noticed that he looked like Commander Maxil from Arc of Infinity (1983) either.
At the time he was cast, Paul McGann hadn’t appeared on film or TV with any of his seven predecessors (although he and Sylvester McCoy would shortly make a documentary together about the 1996 Doctor Who in which they both appeared), meaning that’s more or less it for twentieth century Doctors appearing together on film, television or straight to VHS things, until they all (bar Tom Baker) appeared as themselves in Peter Davison’s The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot.
When Doctor Who came back a combination of the long time it’d been away and the relative youth of the twenty first century Doctors meant that it was unlikely they’d have shared the screen with any of their predecessors. (William Hartnell died before Matt Smith and Jodie Whitaker were even born, and both Hartnell and Troughton were gone before Ncuti Gatwa was.)
Christopher Eccleston hadn’t worked with any of his predecessors on being cast. Later in 2005, though, things got complicated again. Eccleston’s immediate successor David Tennant is very briefly in Jude, the 1996 film adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, which stars Eccleston, and again the two future Doctors share a scene.
Tennant had also appeared in the same episode of The Mrs Bradley Mysteries as past Doctor (and his future father in law) Peter Davison back in 2000. Plus, he had a tiny cameo in the 2003 Doctor Who webcast Scream of the Shalka, starring Richard E Grant as a Doctor everyone agrees doesn’t count, although no one seems quite sure why. If we count Grant’s Doctor, we have to acknowledge his role as The Great Intelligence in the 2012/13 series of Doctor Who, and his starring role in Withnail and I, opposite Eighth Doctor Paul McGann. (And if we don’t, it’s too late, I’ve mentioned him now anyway.)
Matt Smith, cast as the Doctor at the age of twenty six, hadn’t had much time to appear with any of his predecessors (although he, along with Tennant, features briefly in The Five(ish) Doctors reboot), and the retrospective addition of the veteran John Hurt to the roll of Doctors Who brought a surprisingly small number of appearances with other Doctors to the table, despite Hurt’s huge and varied career. He’d appeared with McGann in the documentary Alien Encounters (2007) about the Alien film series in which they also both appeared (but never together) and Hurt and Eccleston are also among the interiewees for Muse of Fire (2013) a documentary about Shakespeare. Including documentaries would double the length of this list at a stroke, but these are worth mentioning, partially because they aren’t about Doctor Who at all, and because both got limited cinema releases.
Twelfth Doctor Peter Capaldi had, of course, already played the Roman Caecilius in the Doctor Who story The Fires of Pompeii opposite David Tennant. He had less noticeably appeared in Channel 5’s Hotel! as the manager of the titular hotel, opposite Paul McGann’s spoof heroic lead (the programme is a sort of parody of Airplane! If such a thing is possible.) The 1991 series Selling Hitler, about the early 1980s Hitler Diaries fraud saw Capaldi appear with Tom Baker, with Baker as hoaxed publisher Manfred Fischer and Capaldi as historian Thomas Walde. The tremendous 1996 BBC adaptation of Tom Jones features then past and future Doctors, with Capaldi as the outrageous Lord Fellamar and McCoy as the quietly sinister lawyer Dowling.
David Bradley’s long career has included appearing with John Hurt in the first and last Harry Potter films and with David Tennant in the fourth. He and Tennant also appeared together in 2005’s BBC Musical drama Blackpool. Bradley’s credits alongside Matt Smith include the The Sarah Jane Adventures story The Death of the Doctor (as the voice of an alien puppet monster buzzard thing), the Doctor Who episode Dinosaurs on a Spaceship (as the villain Solomon) and An Adventure in Space and Time, in which he starred as William Hartnell, and in which Smith made a cameo. Bradley also starred alongside Christopher Eccleston in Our Friends In The North. At the beginning of his career he also appeared in an episode of ITV drama A Family at War (1971), one of the stars of which was Patrick Troughton. He and Peter Capaldi are also both in the 1989 BBC series Shadow of the Noose, about the turn-of-the-twentieth-century barrister Sir Edward Marshall-Hall. (He might not seem like a significant historical figure to you, but this was the second series in ten years - after ITV’s Lady Killers - to dramatise some of his more famous cases.) On top of this, Bradley is also in a 2011 episode of BBC cold case drama Waking The Dead with Paul McGann, with McGann playing a senior police officer and Bradley a crooked property developer shielding a murderer. McGann and Bradley had previously shared the screen in 2007 BBC Drama True Dare Kiss and 1998 Dickens adaptation Our Mutual Friend. Phew!
Our Mutual Friend also featured the titular The Next Doctor, David Morrissey, who had appeared with Bradley and Tennant in Blackpool. Okay, his character isn’t actually the Doctor, but at this point, let’s chuck him in. It doesn’t matter, though, as whether we include him or not Bradley has worked with more other Doctors than any Doctor, including all the twenty first century Doctors to date.
When cast Jodie Whitaker had already appeared in the film St Trinian’s 2 (2007) with David Tennant (he was the villain, she the stoned school admin) as well as Broadchurch. The casting of Jo Martin as the surprise “Fugitive Doctor” in Whittaker’s first multi Doctor story (and era highlight) Fugitive of the Judoon (2020) unexpectedly brought inside Heart to Heart (2020) in which Martin played Joy, and David Tennant was the voice of the titular Heart. Then Martin appeared with pretty much all her living predecessors and / or successors (it’s uniquely complicated in her case) in the lockdown morale booster Big Night In before a bunch of them came back for The Power of the Doctor.
This is where we came in. And now you’re here, you can tell me what I’ve missed while I have a lie down. I have a fever.
Or at least a hologram that looks like them.
Such as The Night of the Doctor (2013) or Tales of the TARDIS (2023).
In the Doctor Who Appreciation Society’s Celestial Toyroom Annual 2023 Colin recalled The Two Doctors as being the first and only time he worked with Patrick Troughton; although they first met at Troughton’s son David’s wedding in the early 1970s. So presumably they didn’t share any scenes / days.