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Doctor Who: The Tenth Coming
He was anti-authoritarian, flamboyantly dressed and brilliant at foiling plots to destroy life on Earth. Doctor Who - 40 next week - may have seemed out of place in the 1980s, says Matthew Sweet. But could his experience at battling street crime and killer crops make him the perfect 21st-century hero?
16 November 2003

Just before he became the most employable writer-producer in British television, I sat down with Russell T Davies at the sticky bar of a Mancunian pub to discuss his future. We were meant to be talking about Queer as Folk, then three weeks from transmission. Fortunately, as the hero of the series was a man who liked to sit in front of his VCR declaiming, "I bring Sutekh's gift of death to all humanity!", it wasn't difficult to chivvy Davies towards another subject in which I knew he had a pressing interest. If the BBC brought back Doctor Who, would he take the job? "Sure," he said, and four years later, they've finally popped him the right question.

The timing was surely no accident. Doctor Who turns 40 next Sunday. Four decades have passed since an astrakhan-wrapped William Hartnell catapulted an audience still reeling from the previous day's assassination of JFK on a 26-year journey into the unknown. Since that inaugural Saturday teatime, three Doctors have gone to their graves and Tom Baker has become an old man with white hair - though his anecdotes, thankfully, all remain the same. For the first time since 1995, when an ill-fated TV movie with Paul McGann fulfilled the actor's gloomy prophecy that he would turn out to be "the George Lazenby of Doctor Whos," the papal process of choosing a new incumbent for the role has begun. The smart money is on Bill Nighy, the cadaverous, twitchy, tumbledown scene-stealer of State of Play and Love, Actually. If he gets it, he will be the first Doctor Who to have had a serious chance of a Christmas Number One.

On the first weekend of this month, a convocation of 1,200 loyalists gathered to celebrate their idol's anniversary at a grandly anonymous central London hotel. Two months ago, the attendees anticipated that the main talking point would be something called The Scream of the Shalka, a six-part animated adventure starring Richard E Grant as the Doctor (officially his ninth incarnation) and Sir Derek Jacobi as the Master, currently being broadcast on the BBC website. But canvassing opinion in the hall - and being very careful to avoid the man in the Colin Baker costume with a wig like an eviscerated shih-tzu - I discovered that their attitude to this birthday treat was one of indifference. "We don't care, do we?" declared Mark Gatiss, the League of Gentlemen star, as he compered one of the events. "It's coming back on the telly!"

There'll be at least one important difference, though, between the programme's 20th and 21st-century incarnations. The new Doctor Who will be one of the BBC's flagship programmes. Davies and his co-conspirator, Mal Young, Controller of Continuing Drama Series, have secured a commitment to five series of 13, 45-minute episodes. They'll be able to afford an expensive actor for the lead role. They'll get billboard ads, Radio Times covers and publicity spots across the media. The original programme rarely enjoyed such security.

The rest of the article is worth reading, and the last couple of paragraphs give some good suggestions for what direction to take the new series. But what's interesting here is this bit... five series of 13 45-minute episodes? Dare one hope this isn't a typo or a bit of unsubstantiated gossip?

And poor McGann - thankfully, if you count the Audios, he hasn't really turned out to be the George Lazenby of Doctor Who. Part of me still harbors a desire for him to show the rest of the world what we Big Finish listeners have been enjoying.