November 4, 2025

"Look to the future now, it's only just beguuuuuu-un."

The announcement of a 2026 Doctor Who Christmas special less than a week after I wrote this led to considerable joy in this household and I’m sure many others. It’s also led, and generating far less joy in the process I’m sure, to the post you’re reading now, because I feel a need to try and unpack something. Not necessarily what’s going on, but how fans respond to things like this.

In the hour or so after the announcement I received a lot of texts ironically quoting a particular line from Doctor in Distress.¹ I’m sure you’ll know which one if you’re a fan of a certain age. (If you’re not then here’s a link, although I shall not be responsible for the impact on your sanity.) Another friend who is a little younger was puzzled by this response. It would never occur to them to make such a joke, and they weren’t sure they understood it without footnotes.²

This sparked off a series of thoughts about how fans exist in if not generations then certainly cohorts and how the one I’m in and that immediately above it are in some ways defined by the fear of Doctor Who being cancelled. To the extent that plenty of us (not me, for a change) were worrying that Doctor Who was on the verge of being canned in the 2007, in which an episode of it was the second most watched television programme of the entire year.

Younger generations are different. I am not, as I was for a long time, one of the last generation of Doctor Who fans. There’s a small group of people who became fans of a dead show and then had the miraculous experience of see it revived. There’s also a much bigger group, well, a series of groups really, who became fans of a new show and then found out there was an old one and either fell in with that too or didn't. They aren’t constantly looking out for the spectre at the feast. Or at least, they weren’t until now.

Because I think you can see that contagion passing through the ages in some of the fan response to what is unequivocally good news. People are now worrying that there’s not more detail over what will come after Christmas next. They’re trying to parse “the BBC remain fully committed to the show and will announce plans for the next series in due course to ensure the Doctor’s adventures continue” for double meanings, when it’s about as unambiguous and unequivocal statement ever made by a PR on behalf of a media conglomerate / public service broadcaster.

I mean, of course we don’t much yet. They probably don’t know much themselves. In some ways this is a bigger thing than just Doctor Who. One of the many, many ways that 24 hour news and social media have driven people mad is in the expectation that something must be responded to by someone else the moment you hear about it, or that a few minutes passing between new bits of information being released constitutes some kind of negligence, rather than being a necessary aspect of how things happen when you do things other than stare at your phone.

I like Doctor Who, and I want it to be made, to be popular and successful and to be good. I also want it to be Doctor Who I like. In that order of importance. I did not enjoy, the cast aside, very much about the first half of the 2018 series of Doctor Who; but it still saddened me to see pubic enthusiasm, viewing figures and AI drift away over that ten week run. Because a version of Doctor Who that’s successful albeit not-for-me increases the chance of there being a later version of Doctor Who that is for me. Because Doctor Who only has a chance of being any of the above if it’s actually being made. You can’t win if no one’s taking the bet - and even if there’s never Doctor Who for me again then, well, I think Doctor Who is a thing that people should have the opportunity to have. I really do think it’s that culturally important, at least on this tiny, damp little island.

Read through that announcement again (link here). We’d have killed for that announcement in 1991 and do mean that announcement. There are sentences in there that we’d have done some light maiming for word for word. Yes, including RTD’s involvement. Even tweens who didn’t know he was a fan had seen Dark Season and were safely storing the VHS against a future need.

We know that, because of the near untrammelled delight with which fandom responded to the firm announcement of what became the 1996 Doctor Who TVM in January of that year, with a lot of potential criticisms of it being an American co-production short circuited, whether by design or not, by the simultaneous announcement of the casting of Paul McGann as Doctor Who.

We’ll get to that TVM relatively soon in The Long Way Round. Suffice to say it was not a rebirth. More a “for one night only” kind of deal, and aware of history’s tendency to rhyme, other corners of fandom are worried about resonance there too. But come on, at least it means no year that never was. I’d be loathe to see twenty first century Doctor Who go a year without at least a single episode. I still want it to run for at least twenty seven consecutive calendar years. Just as I used to idly hope that the late Queen Elizabeth II would live to the summer of 2024 and thus take down the Sun King’s record, or as I would still like someone to be Doctor Who longer than Tom Baker was. I have a feeling that the redrawing of such long established records changes the way we feel about things. Alters the frame of reality. But then Jodie Whittaker supplanted Jon Pertwee as the second longest serving Doctor Who, and we no one really noticed, so maybe I’m wrong about that too.

But suffice to say, even if the upcoming Christmas episode were all that’s left to come of our show - and it isn’t, it clearly objectively isn’t - a single prime time Doctor Who episode in a premium bit of broadcast real estate? One written by the paradoxically safely radical pair of hands of Russell T Davies? That’s an amazing thing to me. An AMAZING thing. Even twenty years into a revival that’s thankfully not yet over. Because I lived through those months and weeks and years of the biggest news in DWM being the announcement of a set of Toby Jugs or a documentary knocked together on somebody’s camcorder which you could buy on VHS in a speciality shop for only slightly more than that month’s widescreen release of the Aliens Special Edition.

Is fandom’s collective unconscious so scarred by fear that it passes through fankind like a contagion? Are we unknowingly adherents of a self-replicating meme? Does fan pass misery onto fan, one might ask. And then immediately regret such larkin’ about.

I can’t claim to be immune, but I also can’t quite help myself. Which is to say, I’m excited. New Doctor Who? It is, as the BBC announcer said in the heady seconds before The Christmas Invasion began, “the present we’ve all been waiting for.”