What the hell’s going on with Doctor Who?

The BBC have today announced that the proposed Doctor Who Christmas special due to air in six months’ time has been scrapped and that the show will be put out to competitive tender.

While initially surprising, this does make sense of the fact that we’ve had no set reports, and really an episode due to air in late December should have completed filming by now. So what’s happened, and what’s going to happen next?

Let’s start with a history lesson. Doctor Who came back in 2005 because Russell T Davies wanted to do it and he found sympathetic ears in Jane Tranter and Lorraine Heggessey. He steered the show through five very solid years and smoothly handed over to Steven Moffat who in turn appointed his own successor in the form of Chris Chibnall.

My views as to the quality of the episodes is exhaustively documented, but from the outside, it’s clear that by the end of the Capaldi era the show had started to become dense, to turn inward, to be for the fans. Jodie Whitaker’s first episode raked in an enormous 11 million viewers. The rest of the season shed half of them. But those 5 million or so did stick around, through the Timeless Child, through the Flux, through The Power of the Doctor. But it was clear something wasn’t working.

My guess is that Russell T Davies volunteered to come back and save the show, rather than the BBC begged him. And his price was bringing Doctor Who to Bad Wolf, the first time the show had been made by an outside production company. To me this was a much bigger change than the Disney money. This was Russell exercising deep creative control. I suspect that he wanted to keep Doctor Who at Bad Wolf under a series of showrunners that he would choose.

All he had to do was make the RTD2 era a success.

He failed.

Again, my views on the various stories are well documented, and overall I enjoyed the 2023-2025 vastly more than the 2018-2022 years (literally three stories that I think rise to the level of competent, and one of them is a left field pick). But there was a clear success/fail metric and just looking at the numbers, this era of the show failed.

Sure, television viewing habits have changed, and sure Russell wasn’t facing the same kind of competition that Chibnall or even Moffat was up against. But the late Capaldi shows were still regularly getting 5-6 million on average, whereas the two Ncuti Gatwa seasons averaged around half that. That can’t all be attributed to Paramount+ and YouTube.

Part of the problem, I’m afraid to say, is that whereas in 2005 he was determined to make the show as broadly accessible as possible. I think in 2023-25 he was determined to win the culture wars. Now, I’m on the same side, but the fact remains you don’t grow the audience for a show by picking one side of a debate, no matter how stupid the debate is. Disney evidently saw things the same way as they failed to re-up.

There’s also the matter of the barely-revealed production crisis which beset The Reality War, which seemingly meant that an ending had to be conjured out of nowhere. And now the showrunner is playing an elaborate game of consequences with himself, which isn’t ideal.

The Christmas special gave him breathing room. 60 minutes on a December evening to sort out the Billie Piper muddle and set a course for the 2027 show. But that only makes sense if the BBC are continuing with the same team. Having RTD create the transition and then appointing a new team means two games of consequences and you only have to look at the Star Wars sequels to see where that leads.

So, it’s a new broom and no Christmas special. Let’s look at the runners and the riders. I’m ruling out Bad Wolf, even though the results of a fair competitive tender could mean the incumbent returning, and I’m also ruling out BBC Studios as I think if the BBC wanted to bring the show back in house, they would have just done so. This is an appeal to find a new creative direction for the show. But most indies don’t come with an RTD like figure attached. So really this about finding a new head writer and finding a new production home for the show – and the former matters much more than the latter.

Peter Harness could create Peter Harness’s version of Doctor Who equally well at Sister, Lookout Point, World Productions or Kudos. But so could Sarah Dollard, or Toby Whithouse or Kate Herron or James Graham or Sally Wainwright.

I think the big question will be, does this go to someone from within the Who family, or does it go to an outsider? I’d be fascinated to see what Jack Thorne’s version of the show looked like, but does Jack Thorne want the job? He certainly doesn’t need it. Toby Whithouse I imagine would be thrilled to get the job but is he the heavyweight that would justify this late-in-the-day switching of the points?

As ever, time will tell.