[Closed] And the new Dr Who is......

Just reading this. He was really good in Sex Education, a natural. Much as I like Jodie, I don't the writing in the last series was up to much. I hope this gives the series a nudge.

It needed good writing Jodie was never the issue In my opinion.
RT Davis is back now I read.
New doctor makes no odds it's the scripts that make it.

New doctor makes no odds it’s the scripts that make it.

Have to disagree with you there. A good script is important, but you need a good actor to get the best out of them, or any tom,dick or harry could be considered an actor.

I have no idea who he is. But that worked really well for Matt Smith… so fingers crossed.

Never seen sex ed so not a clue who this guy is. I don't think Dr Who made the most of Jody so hopefully they'll do this guy justice 🤞

I may for the first time in 35+ years watch an episode of it now

You detty pigs

@dyna-ti
I meant thay could have stuck with Jodie if the writings good Jodie as the doctor would have worked.

I guess a lot of Dr Who fans will now go and watch Sex Education. So they’ll learn what sex is. This is a good result all round. 😀

It bums me out that all the "doctor must be a man" arseholes think they've been proved right, just because Jodie Whittaker got served up such a shitshow of scripts and concepts. Hope they don't give all the racists the same gift.

Tromboner comes good!

Not watched a full episode in years, the quality went down a little, not sure if they cut the episode budget or whatever, but for any new 'Doctor' to work, they'll need to be given half decent scripts and a budget. Would also be useful to try something slightly different, without forcing it too much.

I think the Jodie Whitaker era was 70% script and 30% her. Either way it was awful. They have one chance to get this right or they will have killed it off, plus as Northwind says if they mess it up with this actor the gammons will blame the actor and woke casting.

As long as RTD doesn't just phone the scripts in i think it will be OK. Everything he does right now turns to gold and he's a huge Doctor Who fan - can't see him not investing properly in it.

I think it's been a bit crap after Christopher Ecclestone and Billie Piper and I've been watching it since William Hartnell.

Not watched a full episode in years,

Yeah, I stopped watching it when Tom Baker was replaced!

It bums me out that all the “doctor must be a man” arseholes think they’ve been proved right, just because Jodie Whittaker got served up such a shitshow of scripts and concepts. Hope they don’t give all the racists the same gift.

Yep… You need a good entertaining story and the rewriting of cannon on a whim just seemed arrogant.

He’s great in Sex Education , I assume he’s also going to play a gay doctor as well for max gammon head blasting. 🙂

I just hope he gets the story’s he deserves.

plus as Northwind says if they mess it up with this actor the gammons will blame the actor and woke casting

TBH It’s a funny one as it’s a childrens program,so in reality it should really be focusing on its target audience, not us.

More Daleks and explosions please DoD aged 54

The direction of the last few has been a bit frantic, against a story line & writing that was a bit rubbish. JW had to do lots of 'right kids, here's the message' speeches to camera which seemed to be shoe-horned in to the show. As a light entertainment show it's become less and less entertaining over the past few years - at times JW could be great, capturing the awkward 'alien' nature of the character but in the next scene she's whipping out that bleedin sonic screwdriver again because the writers have been too lazy to think of anything else (or is there a huge merch deal behind it that I've missed?). Hope the new fella gets better material to work with.

And more Daleks and explosions please +1.

It'll be interesting to see if the new Dr is Ncuti or Eric... Brilliant either way.

I think it’s been a bit crap after Christopher Ecclestone and Billie Piper

Ecclestone is possibly my favourite, but the David Tennant and Matt Smith series were fantastic too.

Peter Davison was 'my' doctor. It is a useful tool for ageing people.

Peter Davison was ‘my’ doctor. It is a useful tool for ageing people.

That makes you a couple of years younger than me, then.

I've been listening to (a lot of) the Big Finish "full cast audio dramas" over the last few years. Davison / The Colin / McCoy are prolific but based on that lot I think my current favourite Doctor is Paul McGann. He was in New Who for about five minutes and got the best line of the entire run.

Am I the only person to notice that he played a teenager in Sex Education but was in his late 20s!

This might actually entice me to watch an episode as I've liked him as a character in the few things I've seen him in. Unlike JW, who I've never really taken to as an actor. She just seemed to be a bit of a female Ecclestone as Dr Who (not a good thing in my book). Of the modern Doctors, only Tennant has been any good for me. Here's hoping that Ncuti can knock it out of the park.

Am I the only person to notice that he played a teenager in Sex Education but was in his late 20s!

Wait until you find out how old the Derry Girls are.

Younger roles played by older actors is far from unusual.

Anyway, yeah. Interesting choice. I've never heard of him, might have to go watch Sex Education to see what his acting chops are like.

Gotta say, Whittaker hasn't been my favourite regeneration so far. Weak scripting aside, she never really felt to me like she was a character to be taken seriously. She was a carbon copy of Matt Smith, all the eccentricity but none of the gravitas. Which is a shame because I really wanted her run to prove all the neckbeards wrong, just feels like a bit of a missed opportunity.

Looks like we are slowing ticking the PC boxes then. Who's next, someone outwardly or a disabled person ?

David Tennant and Matt Smith series were fantastic too.

+1

Peter Capaldi is also quite entertaining having watched The Thick of It before re-watching his performance as The Doctor.

Malcolm Tucker seems to be lurking just below the surface - in my eyes anyway.

@FD Why not?

Sounds a great idea. A disabled actor playing the Doctor that is. They could have just the one heart or something.

Looks like we are slowing ticking the PC boxes then. Who’s next, someone outwardly or a disabled person ?

Back under your bridge, there's a good chap.

Told you it would upset the gammons/trolls😁

It never ceases to amaze me that people are quite happy to accept a shape-changing alien with two hearts flying through time and space in a phone box, yet can't wrap their minds around one of those shapes looking female or brown.

More seriously: crying "political correctness" because a TV show has cast a black actor is kinda troubling. Apologies if I've got the wrong end of the stick here and I'm trying to see another angle that I've missed, but I'm struggling to interpret that post as anything other than simple racism.

I'm assuming it's not a commentary on his sexuality unless the poster hasn't watched the show in a decade; Yaz is gay, Captain Jack would have shagged anything that moved regardless of gender (because John Barrowman was basically playing himself) and there have almost certainly been others along the way so none of this is new.

I love these threads, it helps me populate my list of people that I never want to interact with 🙂

I think you're being a bit harsh on those of us that didn't stop watching Doctor Who long into adult life there Simon. 😉

Matt Smith.... gravitas...

Good choice of word. Incredible stage presence. Any excuse to listen to/post this:

Peter Capaldi is also quite entertaining having watched The Thick of It before re-watching his performance as The Doctor.

Malcolm Tucker seems to be lurking just below the surface – in my eyes anyway.

I never watched The Thick Of It, but I’ve seen enough clips to know exactly what Tucker’s character was like, and as you say, he was never far from the surface with Capaldi’s Doctor. Certainly one of my favourite Doctors, along with the first, William Hartnell, who was ‘my’ Doctor, as I watched it from the first episode, ‘An Unearthly Child’ - there was something dangerous about his Doctor, anger bubbling just under the surface, barely held in check, and Capaldi has that.

Comments about the gender and apparent ’race’, ie colour of the Doctor completely ignore something that’s been perfectly obvious for many years, the Time Lords are all different, and change when they regenerate, the Doctor had a wife, who was a Time Lord, so by definition his granddaughter, Susan, would be one, but should her character ever reappear, there’s no guarantee the character would be female, or white.
This isn’t’ woke’ bullshit, it’s part and parcel of what the Gallifreyans are, it’s just never been obvious, but it should be if any thought was given to it. I remember when Matt Smith’s Doctor first saw his reflection, he said “still not ginger”, with a rather surprised tone of voice.

"My" Doctor was Tom Baker. A while ago I went back to watch some older episodes just to see what they were like, my biggest takeaway was just how good Patrick Troughton was.

or a disabled person ?

Davros has had this particular box ticked since 1975.

Just wait until you hear about the gay brown immigrant who directed the first ever episode in 1963.

Just wait until you hear about the gay brown immigrant who directed the first ever episode in 1963.

... and the first producer, Miss Verity Lambert.

Dorks, the lot of you

🙂

Yes, that blew my mind. But I guess he was mid twenties when they filmed the first season.

Dorks, the lot of you

Geeks.

Yeah, I stopped watching it when Tom Baker was replaced!

Same

When I hear clips on the radio advertising, it highlights just how bad the scriptwriting (and acting) is, just hearing the voices

Noting that the BBC are probably box ticking (which they undoubtedly are), isn't a bad thing. They bend themselves out of shape trying to be diverse at times.

It's whether or not you think it's a bad thing that's the defining view.

Personally, I don't give two hoots if Dr Who is black, asian, female, gay, disabled, whatever. Some roles I don't see the need to be diverse - 007 should remain to the typecast (for me) - in the same way that Shaft shouldn't be a white dude.

I'm sure someone will pick some inherent racism out of that

Some roles I don’t see the need to be diverse – 007 should remain to the typecast (for me) – in the same way that Shaft shouldn’t be a white dude.

Don't confuse 007 the agent with James Bond the character, but the comparison with Shaft is an interesting one and it's making me think a bit, so thanks.

Don’t confuse 007 the agent with James Bond the character

Well, yes. I was going to say James, rather than 007 - but still in the context of the story, they are 'usually' one and the same. JB being replaced by a black woman as 007 was not a problem, they were bringing in JB's replacement, who could have come from any background - the whole furore over that was ridiculous

There is "diversity" => equal opportunities for all and there is "diversity" => positive discrimination. To conflate the two would be a mistake (assuming it's not done intentionally1).

As far as I'm aware, Whittaker was chosen because she auditioned as the best actor for the job rather than due to any woke agenda of "let's hire a woman this time". It's not like they needed to do that solely as a box-ticking exercise, they'd already ticked it with Missy.

The role of 007 doesn't "need to be diverse" but I'm seeing little reason why it can't be. Is being a suave psychopath and serial shagger the exclusive domain of middle-aged white blokes?

Shaft on the other hand, the whole point of the character is that he was black, was it not, it's central to the character? (I've never seen it.) You couldn't diversify that any more than you could cast Rupert Grint in a biopic of Nelson Mandella. It's not an equivalence (and indeed, "whitewashing" is problematic generally).

(and we're away...)

Apparently the studio (MGM) were trying to shoehorn a white actor into the original Shaft, thankfully that didn't happen. It wasn't originally written to be based around a badass cool black dude tbh

Its not about positive discrimination or equal opportunities for actors. It's about representation and putting a diverse range of role models on screen that so everyone can identify with them.

It's a GOOD THING.

Am I the only person to notice that he played a teenager in Sex Education but was in his late 20s!

There are lots of good reasons why they didn't cast teenagers in those roles, and the clue's in the name of the programme.

Shaft on the other hand, the whole point of the character is that he was black, was it not, it’s central to the character? (I’ve never seen it.) You couldn’t diversify that any more than you could cast Rupert Grint in a biopic of Nelson Mandella.

That's exactly the reasoning. In the MCU, Black Panther could only ever be played by a Black actor, because the character's race is so central to the role, and only white actors could play Hydra characters because of the links with the Nazis, but the race of other characters is irrelevant so could be anyone.

Shaft on the other hand, the whole point of the character is that he was black, was it not

Not really originally, it did however develop into what we know now

You might be wondering: Why on earth would you cast a milquetoast Bay Aryan to portray a character known for being A) an African American icon and B) smooth as shit? That's because neither of those things was true until the movie was well into production. Before that, the only thing Black about John Shaft was the color of his skin. Shaft's creator, pulp fiction author/"very WASPY person from Ohio" Ernest Tidyman, had no interest in or experience of inner-city African American life, only wanting to pen "a detective story, not a Black power tome." The singular reason he described John Shaft as "a big, black man in a grey lightweight wool suit moving quickly through the morning" on page two was that Tidyman's (also white) editor wanted to tap into the rising market of African Americans buying cheap crime thrillers.

007 should remain to the typecast (for me)

Do you mean Scottish?

The singular reason he described John Shaft as “a big, black man in a grey lightweight wool suit moving quickly through the morning” on page two was that Tidyman’s (also white) editor wanted to tap into the rising market of African Americans buying cheap crime thrillers.

That may well be true but despite what it might've said in a first draft, that is what was popularised in published works and Shaft became known for being "the first black action hero." It may have been little more than a cynical marketing gimmick to start with but it's one which is now firmly established.

Again, whitewashing is a problem. Idris Elba crops up time and again as a fan favourite to replace Daniel Craig. I can see little valid reason how anyone could find that casting objectionable. But the reverse just isn't the case, are we really going to see a reboot of "the black private dick that's a sex machine to all the chicks [who would] risk his neck for his brother man" starring Ralf Little?

(mind you, that's a photoshop waiting to happen😂)

I can see little valid reason how anyone could find that casting objectionable

I object

I can't bear his acting

But the reverse just isn’t the case, are we really going to see a reboot of “the black private dick that’s a sex machine to all the chicks [who would] risk his neck for his brother man” starring Ralf Little?

I'd pay to watch that 🤣