Unsurprising news from the BBC on the future of Doctor Who.
In the short term, its planned Christmas episode for 2026 is cancelled. After that, the BBC is putting production of its series out to tender to whomever wants to make it. Doctor Who – one of the BBC’s prized in-house production achievements and arguably what reinvigorated its Cardiff production base – is effectively on hiatus.
For some, it was inevitable. Series exec Russell T Davies, though hailed for bringing it back in 2005 with Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper as Rose, the Doctor’s companion, is now regarded as the cause of the series going off the rails. Unfollowable stories, indecipherable dialogue, and wholesale change to the canon shifted the series beyond what most fans had invested in in the first place. The series increasingly prioritised arguments over telling stories. When that became the norm, the show began to draw the criticism the BBC likely could do without. The most recent series conclusion saw outgoing Doctor Ncuti Gatwa regenerate into Billie Piper – a storytelling strategy that was in keeping with the ever more fantastical direction of travel the series had taken, but few could plausibly explain, least of all Russell T Davies himself.
The advantage from the BBC’s point of view of tendering for external production is that the timeline for Doctor Who’s return is open-ended and liable to change, and undoubtedly the subject of even more gossip, rumour and misinformation. For a Corporation with a new Director General looking to cut £500m, not making Doctor Who isn’t going to really make a significant dent on that figure. Episodes before Disney’s involvement were reported as budgeted between £1m and £3m. With series between 10 and 13 episodes, that’s a total of up to £40m not spent in the short term, with the option to never spend it ever in the future, maybe helping things along a little bit more if the need arises.
It feels as though Doctor Who has been on life support for ten years now. Somebody needed to put it down. The announcement severing ties with Bad Wolf Studios and Russell T Davies is a humane act. It may well be the best outcome if no one can make a convincing case for making the show in the future. The BBC is asserting its commitment to the show, stating in its subheader, ‘Doctor Who remains an important part of the BBC’, at the same time as enacting withdrawal from it. By retaining the IP and committing to distributing the new series whenever it comes, the show isn’t cancelled so much as archived. Not unlike those video copies of the early shows I’ve got stashed in the attic.
