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  1. All the bookies favourites have denied it’s them. So it’s either someone out of left field, like Matt Smith was, or it’s an established name they’ve managed to keep very, very secret.

    I think they might just be brave enough to choose a woman this time around (cue fanboy misogyny) but as to who that might be? Ann Widdicombe, obviously. 😂

  8. No demands for a LGBT yet I see. Maybe it’s time to go the HIGNFY route and have a new doctor every week. If it’s any clue the Beeb are repeating the last series of Death In Paradise starting this week which may (or may not) be a nod towards Kris Marshall. I actually think Maxine Peake has all the right acting chops (great at comedy and drama and seems physically fit enough for all the running about) to be a Time Lady.

  11. I’d love a female Doctor. I was initially ambivalent about it, until I saw Kris Marshall being bandied around and realised just what a boring, predictable, anodyne choice that would be. Unfortunately I can see the Beeb playing it safe while the new production team beds in.

    Earlier in this series I half thought Bill was being set up as the new Doctor. Didn’t turn out that way, but it would have been a nice soft intro for a black, gay, female Doctor. Which would have been awesome, if only to watch half the internet literally explode.

    • Half the internet explode? That sounds like a wicked act of sabotage hatched by those dastardly daleks.

      Can I nominate Mark Heap? That would confuse the Cybermen.

      He could have Wilson the dog as his companion! Sorted!

      Jarvis Cocker or John Cooper Clarke would also get my vote.

  15. Kris Marshall would be a huge mistake. Safe, boring, predictable.

    I’d like to see a woman get it. Currently the new name being bandied about is Jodie Whittaker from Broadchurch….

  18. I think the casting of Jodie Whittaker is an excellent choice. If I was an eight-year-old Doctor Who fan, I would be jumping up and down with excitement, seeing that a girl like me could be the cool hero, instead of the sidekick.
    It amuses me how grown men on Twitter are losing their shit over the fact that a fictional time-travelling, shape-shifting alien with a GENDER-NEUTRAL title (it’s not Mr Who, it’s Doctor Who!) will be playing by a woman. No, wait a minute, no, no it doesn’t.
    But, I really hope she’s good. Because, unfairly, as the first woman, if the new series isn’t great, it won’t be anything to do with her acting, the writing, or the directing – the idiots will say it’s because she’s a woman, (because as the first woman, she’ll be representing all women). Well, I hope she represents her two hearts out.

  19. Irony [ˈaɪərəni] (n): When a man, howling with rage about a fictional alien on a kids’ TV show being played by a woman, uses the phrase “liberal snowflake”.

  20. Confused Daleks, “But The Doc-tor is a male. You are not The Doc-tor.”
    Repeat randomly with Cybermen, Sontarans etc for three years or so.
    Personally, I would have liked to see Lenny Henry have a go.

      • Oddly the only ‘they’ve ruined Doctor Who! moment I’ve seen on my Facebook timeline from the many fans in my contacts was from a woman. I didn’t feel like engaging with her in her time of grief.

        • The BBC’s ‘Casting Splits Fans’ story – current second most read on the site – includes only two dissenting voices, both women. The original tweets and facebook posts of these have about 10 ‘likes’, while the positive comments in the piece have up to 50k.

          I dunno, it seems like a lot of people are disappointed there wasn’t more of an outcry. They’d all got their withering responses lined up but there’s hardly anyone to fire them at.

          http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-40626224

          Interesting too that one of the most celebrated and repeated put downs on Twitter involves a man calling a woman a bitch. It’s okay though because we don’t like her.

  23. She was fantastic in Attack The Block, one of my favourite films of recent times (John Boyega also brilliant in it). I think that should be enough to calm down any anxious nerds. (Haven’t seen it? Sort it out!)

    She’s great at slightly worried seriousness, can do action. Suspect she is probably a fan of the genre.

    Perfect choice.

    They just need to write better stories. It’s been awful for a while now.

  24. Just watched the intro film. Goddam, it’s great. Properly cinematic for a change. Intriguing possibility that she’s somehow picked up the tardis key and ‘become’ the Doctor.

  25. This is getting weird. First Marisa Tomei is the new Aunt May, now Jodie is The Doc – if they continue recasting beloved characters from my childhood with people I fancy, the mooted new Judge Dredd tv show could have Rachel Riley in the title role..

  27. Someone on twitter has pointed out that between this, Rey in Star Wars, Charlize Theron in Mad Max and Wonder Woman just now at the cinema, there are some pretty damn cool women roles in sci fi just now.

    • Furiosa is probably the single best role in any big Hollywood movie of the last ten years. Shout out also to Amy Adams in Arrival.

      Wonder Woman, not so much from where I was sat.

      • I wasn’t all about WW either.

        Saw a fabulous Twitter thread where a woman was saying something to the effect that she was a bit tired of women doing insane martial arts as the standard for blockbuster feminism. What she wants to see is just women being women, completely on their own terms: operating as human beings, doing a job, getting stuff done, being accorded the sort of agency and layered complexity that male actors take for granted. I think Amy Adams in Arrival is a great example of that.

        • Totally agree.

          I think Wonder Woman is about as empowering to women as a Schwarzenegger movie is to men. If you equate power with violence then it’s all well and good, but take that away and what you’re left with is a six foot tall doe-eyed ingenue with a killer bod being lead around by a handsome war hero who tries to curb her shopping habit.

          I’ll tell you who was badass in that movie: the Robin Wright Penn character.

      • It is not impossible that an alien could be sexually divided between roles that could be described as “male/female” but it is anthropocentric to assume that those roles would parallel, not just humans, but the whole of DNA based life.
        Aliens could reproduce parthogenetically or they could require more than two parties to come together to reproduce.
        I think it was Ursula Le Guin’s novel The Left Hand of Darkness that introduced the concept of “ambisexuality” where individuals of an alien race did not have a fixed sexuality, but it changed.
        For reproduction to take place, you have to have initially a self-replicating molecule. On earth that evolved into DNA which requires (in most cases) two sources to mix to reproduce (but I can still recall basic biology where single cell organisms like the amoeba grow and split).
        The basic point I was trying to make is that alien lifeforms cannot be human life forms (as opposed to humanoid, which is possible but unlikely).
        For a better understanding of what I’m trying to get at, I’d refer you to Stephen Jay Gould’s Wonderful Life and Simon Conway Morris’s The Crucible of Creation both of which consider the implications for life on earth of fossils uncovered in the Burgess Shale in Canada, though they come to different conclusions about evolutionary convergence and diversity.

  30. My favourite tweet on the topic, not that I’m particularly interested either way, was “Woman cast in children’s TV show. Fucking grow up”. From a woman, BTW.

  32. To quote Quantick

    “People saying there are no complainers on their timeline re female Doctor: YOUR TIMELINE IS NOT THE WHOLE OF TWITTER”

    It’s gratifying to see that the top comments on the casting are all positive with few negative comments getting retweets and likes. But there is bile out there and if I were you I wouldn’t go searching for it. Uber fan and overgrown toddler Ian Levine for example

    Ian Levine‏ @IanLevine 19h

    “THIS IS REALLY SHIT – IT SUCKS – IT’S STUPID – KILLS THE SHOW. I want nothing more to do with it and I HATE CHRIS CHIBNALL – HE CAN FUCK OFF

    Ian Levine‏ @IanLevine 19h
    19 hours ago

    CHRIS CHIBNALL MAKES ME WANNA VOMIT

    He has put the final nail into Doctor Who.

    RIP

  33. The more I read from the neanderthal sections of social media about the new Doctor, the more I am reminded of something Sid once said:

    “I’ve met the man in the street, and he’s a cunt”

  34. Wasn’t there a loose end in an earlier series concerning “The Doctor’s Daughter”?
    What if Doctor #13 was to give birth on Xmas day. In a space-manger.
    Now that would be pretty interesting.

  37. The outraged fans nailed here by the Facebook page, I See You:

    “I see you, Jodie Whittaker.

    I see you walking through the woods with your hood up, your back to the camera, the dry leaves crunching under your feet. I see the key materialising in to your hand and I hear the rasping of the Tardis landing, that peculiar, familiar, metallic sound, like a Cyberman having a rusty wank in an echoey barn. I see you throw back your hood, Jodie Whittaker, your lips parting in to a smile, your face full of the promise of fun and adventure and… hang on a minute. You’re a bloody woman. What the Gallifreyan crap is this?

    You’ve done it now, Jodie Whittaker. You’re the thirteenth Doctor and after decades of adventures through time and space in which the character has kidnapped countless teenagers despite being the hero, lived in a phone box that’s bigger on the inside, never once taken a shit and fought a race of nazis played by dwarves hiding in upturned bins you’ve gone and stretched the whole franchise beyond any sense of credibility by having the audacity to get a job on merit whilst simultaneously owning a vagina.

    It’s political correctness going too far again, Jodie Whittaker. How could a fictional alien with two hearts who has lived for thousands of years and regenerates into a whole new person when they die ever become a woman? It makes no scientific sense. How could a woman ever know what to do with a magical vibrating stick when there’s not a man around to help her?

    You’ve turned the comments section of Youtube into a war zone, Jodie Whittaker. Casting you is leftie nonsense, meaningless appeasement of the snowflake generation, a gimmick, a betrayal of the character that makes no narrative sense – even though the Doctor has already been thirteen very different characters. Yes, he’s always been a man, but he’s also an utterly absurd alien in a kid’s TV show. Casting Morgan Freeman as the lead role in a biopic of Princess Diana would make no narrative sense. When you’re playing a time-hopping crusader from a different galaxy who fights Peter Kay in a giant rubber fatsuit it’s a bit of a fucking stretch to complain about the show’s artistic license when it comes to lopping Peter Capaldi’s cock off.

    A lot of it is nothing but sexist nonsense, obviously. And for some it’s simply too much of a change for a character that’s always had a fundamentally male thread running through the spine of the Doctor’s history and perspective. But can we step the hell back and remember the real issue here – it’s a kid’s TV show, and in that same godawful Peter Kay episode, a man implied that he was fucking his girlfriend’s face in a paving slab he carried around with him. That. That is, was, and always will be the stupidest decision Doctor Who will ever make. Casting a very good actor in a role she’ll be perfectly bloody good at couldn’t be further away from that decision.

    And as for the ‘political correctness going too far’ bollocks again? If it’s gone too far, someone’s going to have to show me the point at which it presumably went just far enough. I can only assume if we’re now overstepping the mark that there must have been a point a while ago at which we hit genuine equality in terms of opportunity and representation. What with all the hate crime, repression, online trolling and sexual harassment I think I must have missed it.

    I see you, Jodie Whittaker, knowing full well you were taking a role that was going to come with a shitty wheelbarrow full of backlash and doing it anyway. I see your perfectly calm and reasonable appeal for the fans to not be fearful of the change. I see you standing up and taking a punt at a role that a thousand other actors would kill for, only this time you’ll also be showing little girls that they can be the main character, the fearless hero, the adventurer. And with any luck, the sensible parents will point out to their little boys that they shouldn’t give one single solitary Sontaran fuck when the lead actor on their favourite show just happens to also have a uterus.
    Because it’s for them, Jodie Whittaker, and all the pearl-clutching fanboys need to remember that their Doctor, whoever it was, whichever one they watched in their formative years, hasn’t and won’t ever change in terms of what he meant to them. It’s just time for something different, something new; time for you to be the Doctor for a whole new generation, and to show them that anyone who says you can’t be can go and fuck a paving slab.

    I see you, Jodie Whittaker. I fucking see you.

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