'Doctor Who' Banished From Our Timeline Just Like Gareth Roberts Said?

Reports the show will disappear for a decade may be pop culture history repeating

The British tabloid Sun reported on Tuesday that Doctor Who is on the verge of cancellation. Star Ncuti Gatwa “is already believed to have filmed his regeneration exit scene — and crew fear the BBC will shelve the show after 62 years.” Emphasis added:

An insider said: “Ncuti doesn’t want to be tied to the series beyond this and plans to relocate to Los Angeles with several Hollywood projects standing by for him.

“His team also see a lot of fan backlash from the series, and don’t want the perception of him still being The Doctor to get in the way of any future work.

“The show has been poorly managed in recent years and there’s a lot of people who’ve been working on this show for years and now being cast aside due to poor leadership.

“People warned some episodes were getting too caught up on an agenda rather than telling a story and those people got shouted down, ignored.”

[…]

The insider said: “Word on set is that the BBC will shelve the series for at least five years. The crew were told not to hold their breath for work on the series for at least ten years.

A BBC spokesunit jumped on RadioTimes, the usual damage control website, to deny the rumors. “This story is incorrect, Doctor Who has not been shelved,” the anonymous source said. “As we have previously stated, the decision on season 3 will be made after season 2 airs.” That decision is up to Disney Plus, which contracted for 26 episodes, only half of which have been aired.

The next day, the tabloid Daily Mail reported that no Disney personnel were at last weekend’s Doctor Who convention in Los Angeles. “‘It was very noticeable that Disney was not a part of such an important date in the Doctor Who calendar, especially considering it was held in their own backyard,’ observed one insider. ‘Many feel Disney are ready to walk away.’”

Unwatchably woke, the show’s audience “represents a tiny fraction of the sort of numbers it used to attract.” Whatever anonymous show spokespeople say, “Disney are remaining ‘irritatingly tightlipped’ about the future of the deal, BBC insiders say, and it is creating a ‘big headache’ as talent grows restive.”

“Everything is now pointing in the direction of a prolonged break once the next series has aired. It will be back to the drawing board for the Doctor Who team,” yet another nameless BBC insider tells the Daily Mail. It will not be the first time this has happened. Doctor Who was absent from television for 16 years before Russell T. Davies revived it in 2005.

After Davies returned to the show in 2023, plot lines and dialogue began to feature ‘gender identity,’ while the Doctor played by Ncuti Gatwa was homosexual, the first time the character had ever displayed any form of sexuality whatsoever in sixty years. Even the look of the show declined as fans wondered just what all that Disney money was being spent on. No doubt Disney wonders, too.

These reports — that the Doctor may once again leave television for an extended period of time in hopes that everyone will forget just how bad the show got to be — are exactly what legendary Doctor Who writer Gareth Roberts called for in his podcast with me last year.

I offered three ideas to fix the show. “One, you would retcon the last two Doctors. Two, you would reboot the show. Or three, you would just say, it's a lost cause. I'm not going to do it for love or money.” I asked Gareth what he would choose.

In the very unlikely event this was offered to me, I would definitely choose number three, because I think the brand is so tainted now that it would be very difficult to continue with it straight off the hoop of what's gone on for the last few years. that it needs another good rest. It needs another good like 10 years off the air for people to get nostalgic about it and for enough water to hopefully flow under the cultural bridge that it could be brought back and rebooted in a sort of charming, agreeable way rather than a kind of skew-eyed political way.

Then Gareth explained how feelings about the show changed when it had been off the air long enough to become a source of nostalgia instead of an embarrassment.

When I began to be off the air, and if I mentioned to people in passing, you know, tradesmen or, you know, people at barbers, that kind of thing, that I was involved with it, it was always like a kind of, “Oh, my God” reaction. It was like “That old rubbish,” you know. Then as it returned, and I was involved in it at the time of its greatest success under David Tennant and Matt Smith, then people in that situation were like, “Oh, my God, do you work on Doctor Who? Oh, my God, that's fantastic. Oh, will you sign this? That's fantastic. Oh, I love Karen Gillan” and all that sort of thing. And then in the last few years, it slipped very much back into that previous feeling you get. “Oh, oh, okay. All right. Right.” And, you know, they used to look away, chuckle their feet, look embarrassed when you say that you were involved in it. So that's what's happened. And I think that's why it's become so associated with, in this country particularly, with nerds again. Whereas it's sort of cast off its nerdiness marvelously. sort of accumulated nerdiness in the ‘80s, died, came back without, and then gradually that all crept back in again. And then it's been overlaid with this horrible, horrible wokeness.

I did that interview for The Distance because we were discussing his book, Gay Shame: The Rise of Gender Ideology and the New Homophobia. Here is the YouTube version of the interview.

I recently interviewed Gareth again for Osborne Ink. We discussed an episode of the seminal 1967 television show The Prisoner and its historical context. We plan on having more of these discussions about pop culture history in 2025, and I always publish them for premium subscribers first, so if you are a free subscriber, consider upgrading for instant access.