The new Doctor Who talks about bi-generation and a close encounter with the Fab Four.
There are many firsts in the new season of Doctor Who. Yes, it was announced two years ago that the 15th incarnation of the titular Time Lord in the world’s longest-running sci-fi show would be black and gay. He’s played by Ncuti Gatwa, who’s queer, Rwanda-born, and – like three Doctors before him – Scottish. It’s also the first one with the involvement of Disney in the BBC perennial, and the first to involve that other ancient British pop culture institution, The Beatles. More of which later.
Gatwa’s Tardis tenure comes after Jodie Whittaker – the first woman and 13th Doctor – was regenerated after three seasons into a Doctor played by David Tennant, who had already been the 10th incarnation. Which made him, briefly, the 14th as well, before Gatwa’s arrival in a special last year when his Doctor “bi-generated” from Tennant’s character. Tennant had been the Time Lord Gatwa had watched while growing up in Edinburgh.
“David was my doctor,” Gatwa tells the Listener. “When I think of the Doctor, that’s who I have in my mind – other than me, now. It was such a full-circle moment – he kind of inspired me to get into acting and now to have a role that I really wanted, to have the baton passed over from him felt surreal and magical at the same time.”
That bi-generation scene also left the two characters with one set of clothes between them. It gave Gatwa’s Doctor another first: The only one in 60 years to arrive without any trousers. Remind him of his character’s Y-fronted first bow, and his laughter risks taking up much of the Listener’s allocated short interview time.
But as the early episodes of the new season show, at least some of the Disney money in the BBC production has gone on giving his Doctor abundant wardrobe choices, including pants. “There are a lot more of them,” says Gatwa, still giggling. “So that’s nice.”
Today, Gatwa and Millie Gibson, who plays the Doctor’s new companion Ruby Tuesday, are side by side in a Los Angeles studio on international publicity duties.
Neither was a total unknown before getting the call-up. Before boarding the Tardis, Gibson, 19, was part of another venerable British television institution, Coronation Street, for three years as teenage troublemaker Kelly Neelan, who encountered characters nastier than Daleks. “Yeah, I’m really rooting for the ones running for 60 years. That’s my only category at the minute. It’s like proper British telly I’ve got under my belt at the minute.”
The now 31-year-old Gatwa put his youthful good looks into his breakthrough role as Eric Effiong, the best friend of Asa Butterfield’s lead character in Sex Education, the four-season Netflix hit that ended last year. His other post-Sex Ed roles have included an American fighter pilot and POW in World War II mini-series Masters of the Air. Oh, and he was one of the many supporting Kens in Barbie. Good preparation for someone who will soon have his own action figure.
Given his connection to Tennant, how does he feel about becoming “the Doctor” to a different generation? “Yeah, to know that you’re going to be that for kids that might not get that elsewhere. It was really cool.”
Next door in LA is Russell T Davies, the writer-producer credited with reinventing the franchise from 2005 with a run of premiere-division Brit actors and stories that had fun with old Doctor Who touchstones and arch enemies. It’s all helped give the 21st-century Doctor Who an international audience it never really had in the 20th century.
New Zealand was the first place the show screened outside the UK in 1964, but we’re paying for it now. The involvement of Disney as global distributor means Kiwi fans need a Disney+ subscription for the new series. It previously screened free on TVNZ and Prime through direct deals with the BBC.
“You mean you don’t think paying for something wonderful is okay?” replies an effusive Davies, when asked to defend the new Who paywall. “That subscription system is what makes your Marvel shows and your Star Wars shows soar stratospherically above what our Doctor has in terms of its image and its picture.
“And actually, that’s not fair. Doctor Who deserves to be up there, but it’s been made by the British Broadcasting Corporation in the past and there’s a limit to which you could spend public money on special effects. I genuinely don’t think it’s right for the science-fiction corner to demand too much of that licence fee. That’s not right.”
There may be more money in the kitty, but the production can’t afford some things – like Beatle songs. The second episode time travels to 1963 so Ruby and the Doctor can see The Beatles record their first album. Only somebody has stolen all the good music in the world and the walls of EMI Studios (later Abbey Road) are reverberating with a very bad Paul McCartney song about a dog (not the good later ones he wrote about his pets).
It’s a Doctor Who meets The Beatles story – set in the year both entered British pop culture – without any Beatles songs in it. Davies says it was a 20-something director friend who suggested the Fab Four excursion. The 61-year-old thought, well, that’s a story. But knowing the impossibility of licensing Beatles music in screen productions, the episode became a fantasy about music being locked away. Though there is a clever allusion to a famous chord in the band’s canon. “We were saying can we use these two chords, those two notes? No. At one point. I said can we just reduce it to a single note? And they said no. It’s a slightly mad copyright rule but never mind, we got around it by ignoring it.”
That episode’s story and a few others in the new series – one is titled “Regency”, which Gibson describes as “my very own Bridgerton” – might be stuck in the past but Davies says the new incarnation of Doctor Who has 2024 in its sights.
“I now think the world is turning in such a way that the Doctor is needed more than ever. This show has a real place in the world to say what it’s saying and especially to reach out to a young audience with optimism and to say there is hope. He’s a good person who stands up for what is right and that’s a great ambition to have.”
The new series of Doctor Who and the 2023 specials are screening now on Disney+.
