June 3, 2025

Ncuti Doc Thing

To start with this week, here’s a time capsule; something I wrote for The Guardian back when Ncuti Gatwa‘s casting as the New Doctor Who was announced. Some more recent thoughts on the show’s current situation follow after this repeat and my favourite picture of Gatwa as the Doctor. Think of it as like a Tales of the TARDIS, if you will. But not the Jamie and Zoe one, or I’ll just start crying like a baby again.

The casting of a new Doctor Who prompts speculation equalled only by that surrounding the appointment of manager of the England men’s football team or of a new actor to play James Bond. Like those other roles, this is in part because who fills it is perceived to say something about British culture. Doctor Who is, in cliche, a ‘national institution’, a term first applied to it almost all of its lifetime ago.

A new Doctor was headline news in the twentieth century. Peter Davison has often commented that his friends thought he had died as his picture flashed onto the BBC Nine O’Clock News when he was cast in 1980. But the years since the series’ 2005 revival have seen announcements on an even larger scale. Matt Smith, Peter Capaldi and Jodie Whittaker’s castings were television events. A special mini documentary, a live ‘reveal’ show and a minisode transmitted during the BBC Wimbledon Final coverage respectively. 

This time it was different again. Bad Wolf, the production company responsible for the next series of Doctor Who, tweeted a picture of a post made by actor Ncuti Gatwa to his almost three million instagram followers. It consisted of two hearts and a blue box. This drove hours of online speculation on both sites before Bad Wolf confirmed that Gatwa would be succeeding Whittaker. 

It’s a marketing truism that the best medium to communicate through is the one favoured by your intended audience. The intent was clear, to create social media buzz which could be followed by a formal press release, both timed so as to make Doctor Who the main topic of discussion on the red carpet at Sunday’s BAFTAs. Short video clips from the BAFTAs, ideal for online promotion and television, created a perfect circle. Online reaction suggested Gatwa’s casting had engaged exactly the audience which research by Ofcom suggests BBC programming has the hardest time reaching. In publicity terms, it was undeniably an extraordinary success.

Meanwhile, on that red carpet Doctor Who showrunner Russell T Davies, Gatwa by his side, stressed his new lead was cast after a ‘blazing’ audition, one given when the production team had all but decided to offer the role to another actor entirely. That’s not something that would surprise anyone who saw his starbright Demetrius in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Shakespeare’s Globe, but it also emphasised that Gatwa won the role on merit. It was a surely deliberate cutting off at the knees of the more negative side of the online reaction. This inevitably came from those who indulge in Culture War, the affectation by those on the right that someone from a designated out group doing anything at all constitutes an aggressive act against them personally.

Those who attempted to critique Gatwa’s casting without reference to his three BAFTA nominations, and BAFTA Scotland wins, for Netflix’s Sex Education, merely demonstrated their own divorcement from the contemporary culture on which they were affecting expertise. And there is something very contemporary about a role sometimes seen as an exemplar of Britishness being played by an actor who settled in Scotland as a child, having fled Rwanda, a country very much in the news due to more recent government policy concerning refugees. 

Davies also took time to casually critique the government’s attitude to both Channel 4 and the BBC, before heading into a BAFTA ceremony which noticeably rewarded socially conscious programming and diversity. Although not Davies or Gatwa, both of whom were denied in the categories in which they were nominated.

BAFTA Scotland were less skilled in their comms than Bad Wolf, welcoming Gatwa as the ‘third Scottish Doctor Who’ when he’s actually the fourth. There, the online opprobrium was divided as to whether they had forgotten David Tennant (who affected a mockney accent for the role) or Sylvester McCoy whose influential and admired tenure (1987-89) was perhaps a victim of unconscious assumptions about the series’ twentieth century leads. 

Assumption too, played a part in discussion as to whether Gatwa is the first person of colour to be the Doctor. Jo Martin has played the part, but not as the series lead. Further back, Tom Baker’s father was a Jewish seaman, Peter Davison’s a Guyanese engineer. The role has also been disproportionately played by Catholics, to the extent that Tom Baker and McCoy both trained for life within the church before becoming actors, and Colin Baker gave it serious thought. There are peculiar patterns in the casting of Doctors Who, such as how most actors who have played Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty Four have also played the Doctor. Maybe it's something to do with the programme’s innate anti authoritarianism. Perhaps the role’s mystical nature is why, as well as the wannabe churchmen mentioned above, it has been filled by two actors - David Tennant and Gatwa - whose fathers were church ministers.

There is certainly something in the series which appeals to the marginalised, despite its centrality to British television culture. In the nineteen nineties Time Out used ‘Doctor Who fan’ as a euphemism for gay, so overwhelmingly so was its extended fanbase. But Doctor Who’s slightly penumbral relationship to the country it's often considered to represent makes perfect sense. It was created by the Canadian Sydney Newman, and its first episode was written by Australian Anthony Coburn, produced by Verity Lambert, a Jewish woman, and directed by Waris Hussein, a gay Muslim born in Lucknow when India was still part of a British Empire. 

Gatwa’s casting is somehow revolutionary while also being precedented. But then that's the paradoxical nature of Doctor Who. As the late Radio 1 DJ John Peel said of his favourite band, The Fall, it's somehow always different and yet always the same. 

And we’re back…!

And how do we feel now that it’s over? The Fifteenth Doctor’s era, I mean. I’ve really enjoyed this season, and not just because - as regular readers will know - I basically always enjoy Doctor Who. Fortunately for me, while there were rumours about what may or may not happen at the end of this run, I managed to ignore or avoid pretty much all of them. Net result? Me grinning like an idiot after that final scene. But as the credits rolled, something didn’t feel quite right - and it wasn’t the absence of a credit for Ms Piper’s character.¹ Eventually, I worked out what it was.

For me, most Doctors this century have had an invisible moment, one you only know about once it’s happened; it’s when they pass from feeling brand new to feeling like they’ve always been there, and Gatwa didn’t get that. We were still in the brand new phase, and then he was gone. Now, maybe that’s a function of my age. After all, most fans over forty find it impossible to believe that Jodie Whittaker was Doctor Who for longer than Jon Pertwee, even though it’s factually correct; and I know people who were adults in the 1980s who felt like that about the Davison, Baker C and McCoy Doctors.

To me, that latter triple example is ridiculous. The two years or so between each of those Doctors opening and final bows covered huge, significant periods in my childhood. But that’s the thing about being adults still watching a programme that’s in part for children, whether you’re doing it in 1984 or 2025; we experience the passage of time entirely differently to the most important section of the audience.

Nevertheless, I do worry about the recent (and future?) combination of short series of Doctor Who with long gaps between them. That it might prevent the show becoming the constant in young viewers’ lives that it sort of needs to be. It’s hardly science but the continuous thirteen week run of 2005 felt complete, had a weight as a “book”, in a way the last two seasons, spread out over around a year don’t. Not quite not yet. Maybe it will tighten in the rewatching.

It’ll be worth a rewatch too. Even if we just take the Gatwa Doctor’s sixteen solo stories (sadly ignoring the astonishing co-hosted The Giggle) there’s a dazzling amount of variety and innovation on display. I’ve not much time for fan complaints that this year’s fabulous chiller The Well was too much like The Impossible Planet (2006) too soon. This is basically like saying there’s no point in making Earthshock (1982) because they’d already made The Moonbase (1967). Except that the gap between The Well and The Impossible Planet was actually longer.

This has surely been an extraordinarily fecund period for the show. Boom / 73 Yards / Dot and Bubble is one of the strongest, richest three story runs in all of Doctor Who. The Well / Lucky Day / The Story and the Engine / The Interstellar Song Contest is an outrageously good run of four. We’ve had two absolutely bell-ringingly joyous, and radically different; Christmas episodes, the latter of which casually waltzes through enough material for a whole season of a lesser programme as part of its middle act, while the first seems determined to create a whole new kind of Doctor Who story while no one is paying too much attention.

Which is to say, it brought a fairytale logic to the show, to go with the fairytale aesthetic beloved of the Moffat era. With its, in effect, magic gloves and singalong-a-goblins, there’s something really radical for Doctor Who there, hidden under the tinsel and a blockbuster structure soothing to anyone watching from under a cloud of advocaat on Christmas Day.

In fact, we’ve had so many new kinds of Doctor Who television story of late it’s been startling. Gay Regency SF romantasty (Stagecoach Punk?)? A conceptually baffling but utterly compelling splicing of A Warning to the Curious and The Dead Zone? A really spiky take on ‘Dr Lite’ that used the Doctor’s segregation from the production to incendiary effect, and The Story and the Engine, the central dramaturgy of which is so far outside my wheelhouse I need to roll myself over to another continent to find the right vocabulary to discuss it properly; and as I haven’t done that yet all I can really do is stare in awe at the confidence it has in its approach. Because it really is genuinely startling.

Okay. This is, if not a eulogy or a valediction, then a discussion of the recently departed. Accentuating the positive is on the order of service. The autopsy, if you think one is needed, can come later. Now is not the time for plopping out organs to work out why the patient is no longer with us. What does need to happen now is a singling out of the absolutely titanic performance from Millie Gibson at the centre of 73 Yards. She wasn’t teething when Russell T Davies first worked on Doctor Who. She wasn’t born when he wrote Queer as Folk, and yet here she is holding one of the most complex scripts of his entire career together virtually single-handed, appearing in damn near every scene, no nearly every shot.²

It’s perhaps a shame that Varada Sethu wasn’t given a similar opportunity to carry an episode this year, with the returning Millie Gibson instead being the star of Lucky Day as well. Sethu’s quizzical, challenging turn as Belinda Chandra has also been a delight. Her calling the Doctor on his bullshit in The Robot Revolution, and refusing to be flanned by his usual “D’you wanna come with me?” shtick has been a highlight of the whole modern series. I’ve seen it called “Donna like”, and while this is of course the highest of high praise, it also misses the point. By the time Donna is in the TARDIS full-time she desperately wants to be there. Belinda doesn’t, and while she can’t quite not enjoy phone box travel, she always has somewhere else she’d rather be and says so; albeit not in the caustic way my beloved Tegan Jovanka once did.

It is, of course, no disrespect to Gatwa to suggest that one of the best episodes of his era is one he isn’t really in, and no one should take it as such. After all, we’ve all seen Blink and Turn Left, right? Not to mention Love & Monsters.³

Besides, Gatwa should not need reassuring by anyone, least of all me. His operatically huge, emotionally incontinent, constantly mobile Doctor emerged complete in The Giggle, and unusually for a C21st incarnation has seemed emotionally centred, with his personality settled; a Doctor who knew who he was and what he was doing, with no journey to go on, just adventures to have.

There have been moments of crisis, such as the anger at what Sutekh “made me into” or his terrifying fury at the end of The Interstellar Song Contest, but this Doctor’s frequent tears have been for others, not himself. In Jungian terms, he’s been very integrated. Perhaps the most self-confidently himself Doctor since Tom Baker’s, even if his tenure may be destined to be remembered for the opposite reason Tom’s is.

Gatwa was earmarked by many for movie stardom before he became Doctor Who, and while he has worked in UK domestic theatre around the series, some feel that’s still his destiny. It has, of late, seemed increasingly ridiculous to even contemplate the idea that the season might end with him “incumbent”, given that we don’t when or if the next episode of the series will be made, let alone shown.⁴

It seems broadly understood by people who know more about these things than I do that Disney have an option to co-fund (or not) more episodes, and that the period of time they have available to exercise that option (or not) has not yet elapsed. Sooner or later they’ll make a decision. Or the moment will pass. In the meantime, it’s better for both Doctor Who and Doctor Who for there to be an obvious parting of the ways. But how can you accomplish that without guaranteed future production?

A final scene in which this Doctor changes his face but we don’t see to whom? That offers its own problems for the show. A cliffhanger ending? A joke ending? The rumoured originally planned ending of The Power of the Doctor where the Doctor regenerated into a baby and / or the Timeless Child? Bring back an old Doctor? (“Been done, hasn't it?”) What could work as both a kind of capstone to twenty years of C21st Doctor Who and a potential springboard to a future that may or may not come to pass? What could hold for six months or two years or longer?

Gasp.

Clever old Russell.

If you’d asked me last week, and you didn’t, I’d have guessed at something similar but involving Jo Martin. That too would have made some kind of emotional sense, but been equally hard to parse. Some people would have gone “Oh, she was from the future after all”. Others would assumed that like David Tennant she was now two Doctor Whos. It would have been simultaneously both mysterious and not really needed explaining, and in the same way what happened is. But what happened was better.

If the Disney funded version of the Doctor Who continues, or a post Disney but still Bad Wolf / Russell T Davies version of the show emerges relatively quickly, you can see how a Billie Piper led series, one pulling on the loose ends of the Gatwa era, could come together in relatively short order. A year ago RTD told Radio Times he had four scripts ready to go for any putative Series 3 / 16 / 42 / Fnarg + 11. That’s half a series. The Reality War’s sudden revival of the “the boss” strand first mentioned in The Star Beast, the lack of resolution in the Susan Foreman subplot, and the sequel hunting escape of the Mrs Flood version of the Rani seem to indicate Bad Wolf are keen to continue.⁵ Those are all things that could have been easily tidied away in an edit if they weren’t. This is surely a version of the show that isn’t ready to let go yet, and hopefully it won’t have to.

The idea of a television series being deliberately rested so it can renew has been getting a bit of a revival of its own on social media of late. The problem is that, like Omega, it’s pure myth. Like Strauss-Howe generation theory, it’s a bit of nonsense that has punched its way into the discourse and taken up residence, without any basis in fact or being of any use to anyone at all.

The previous times it was talked about with Doctor Who it was an ex post facto excuse. A Michael Gradian soundbite about “prescribing a good long rest” so the series could sort itself out. But that was untrue on all fronts. The series had been cancelled, then revived due to tabloid pressure. No real creative changes - and no changes of creative personnel - followed. He was just saying something, anything, to make the questions from the press pack stop.

The second time Doctor Who went away, the language echoed the first, but this time the series really was not being made anymore - and because the BBC did not want to make it anymore. It was that simple. When, largely at the urging of forces outside the BBC, let alone BBC Drama, Doctor Who came back to BBC One for one night only, the initial reception (9m viewers, top ten for the week, AI of 75) indicated an audience was there for Doctor Who in 1996. But a willingness and perhaps a financial model to make it were not. It was a decade before the stars aligned to even try hard again. In neither of these “hiatuses” was the programme being consciously rested.

“Hiatus” is a word Doctor Who fandom seemed to pick up from other, US-based television fandoms. In the days of network hegemony in US TV you’d sometimes get a massive retooling of failing shows between seasons, or at a mid-season break. This was usually to see if a long running series could be restored to former glories, or if a failing new investment be turned around. The second of these was usually called “a hiatus”. Twin Peaks had one in the middle of the second season, when it went off the air with several complete episodes unshown and with more still in production, while the network and the people who actually made it argued about creative and timeslot changes that might allow the series to be renewed for a third year. It wasn’t, they just burned off all the episodes made before and after the change of direction and called it a day instead.

And, crucially, this also isn’t the same thing as either what’s happened to Doctor Who in the past, or what some people are suggesting now. Nor was Twin Peaks’ own revival a quarter of a century after its cancellation an example of successfully letting a series go away so it can come back ‘rested’. It was, as these things always are, an active resurrection. Necromancy not a nap.

Because series don’t get ‘rested’. They stop because people either don’t want to make them or think no one wants to see them. Then, later, sometimes years, sometimes decades later, some of them come back. Because people now want to make them or think people want to see them. But that’s not one process. It’s two separate ones, and you’ve no guarantee the second will ever take place.

The closest thing to what’s proposed by some fans is what happened between The Power of the Doctor and The Star Beast. Where Doctor Who was off the air for over a year while its relaunch was being worked on. But even then that relaunch was announced before the end of the previous era was shot, let alone shown. “Letting it rest”? It’s not an idea we should take seriously. Lying fallow is for fields, not franchises.

Yeah, I hate the word “franchise” too, but I like alliteration. What am I supposed to do?

I don’t know anyone involved in the making of current Doctor Who. In so much as there is anyone currently making Doctor Who. But I do know people who make other programmes, including drama, for BBC channels; and the impression I get checking with them even now is that BBC One does want more Doctor Who and as soon as it can have it, thank you very much. Which has been the case every day since the day after Rose went out twenty years ago.

We can argue the specifics of ratings, AI, chart positions, publicity and sales another time. The fact is, Doctor Who is one of the few IPs the BBC actually owns, and while it’s complicated it is, in a fractured landscape, a programme with an audience, albeit not as large an audience as it used to have. But the hard-headed and ‘in the round’ assessment of the series’ value that escaped BBC One, BBC Drama and BBC Enterprises in 1989 should fairly naturally follow for those organisation’s successors now. Not least because - and contra to how most Doctor Who fans like to see ourselves and it - a corporate culture that should enable that exists at the BBC in the way it didn’t in 1989.

To be frank, my main worry about the series’ semi-immediate future is either that there is no way to make it without co-production money and that that is not forthcoming, or that people believe that there is no way to make it without co-production money even though there may be. As was the case in the middle 1990s.

But even that is an older problem, really. There’s an argument that the whole history of Doctor Who since 1970 is just a series of attempts to find a way to make a series conceived for monochrome 405 line pictures on 9” screens on the other side of the room.

There is of course a view that it doesn’t matter if there’s more new television Doctor Who again soon, or even at all. But I’m not sure why anyone reading a deep dive Doctor Who newsletter would be of that opinion. For my part, I think television is better for having new Doctor Who in it, I think UK culture as a whole is better for having new Doctor Who in it, and I’d rather live in that better, happier world.

Time to make a wish.