1983: Could THE DOCTOR be a WOMAN? | South East at 6 | Science Fiction | BBC Archive 

That's like saying beige is the most underrated colour.....It really isn't.

@@lewis7515 I’m not saying he’s ‘the best’ doctor, as if you can truly compare the better doctors. I’m just saying he was really good and you don’t hear people talking about the 5th doctor. You hear ‘9 is the best,’ or ‘3 is the best.’ I even hear a lot of people saying 8 is their favourite. Peter Davison should get a little more love. 10 as an archetyp is based on 5 and Tennant is most people’s favourite

@@brobs0463 He’s my co-favorite, with Jon Pertwee.

​@@brobs0463I didn't suggest that you said he's the best. You said he's, "the most underrated".... If most people don't talk about him as much as they do the other Doctors, there may actually be a reason that's to do with his impact, among most people. You, can characterise that in several ways - and, you, choose to call it being, "most underrated". I, simply say that to do so is exactly like saying, "This plain cheese sandwich is the most underrated meal" - when it really isn't: it's rated just as highly as it deserves.

@@lewis7515 Whatever mate, it’s just opinions

I didn’t know Troughton suggested that they cut the episode count, it was a very good idea

@@doctorwhoproductions834 Yes, he said that it was too exhausting for the cast and crew.

If they had copied Romana's characterization, Jodie would've been received far better

@@mevolander8478 100% An aside: Romana's ability to fully shapeshift was never further explored.

It was standard practice to train people in the performing arts to speak and act like that, no matter where you were from. In modern England/UK you'd find people who come across like that in the upper middle class and in the South East of England. I live in Surrey, which is in the South East of England, and most people either have that middle class sound, or sound like they are from South London. There was also a local country accent, but I believe that has died out now. The last people I know of who had the local accent were in my grandfather's generation.

The Queen's English as I like to call it is disappearing at an alarming rate, I sometimes struggle to understand what is being said on TV these days😢

@@rogerbeattie2263 Don't you mean The King's English Roger?

@@hopebgood It will always be Queens English to me

@@rogerbeattie2263 🙄 You make Jacob Rees-Mogg seem modern.

I had to rewind that bit! 🤣🤣

Nice to know, I'll remember that

Nobody cares .

Didn't realise this (not sarcasm like other comments)

Matt Smith was 26 when he was cast, is and still is to this day the youngest actor to star as The Doctor

@SimonAckerman agreed

He recently turned up in Beyond Paradise as the love interest of a character played by Barbara Flynn. It made me smile seeing them together again.

PHYSICS!

Casanova is not canon.

@@FreeAssange Perhaps so, but he still married The Doctor's daughter. That's a toughie to get my head around.

That was standard BBC back In the day . Much clearer diction and internationally understandable .

Yes

Definitely! Here is my alternative universe female Doctors 1-5: Margaret Rutherford, Hattie Jacques, Sheila Hancock, Miriam Margoyles, Polly James.

@@dogbreaththe3rd851 You may not like her but she is eccentric and formidable, qualities which all these women share.

@@robalexander8065 No consideration for Beryl Reid or Maggie Smith?

She's great actress, but not doctor Who material.

I have no idea what you said, but I concur.

I respect this level of geekery

Apply the what?

When he took over, I really did not like him, as I was a mega fan of Pertwee, but Baker is very, very good. And the Tom Baker years are probably some of the best of Who. I hate to say it, but I think I may have finally grown up, as I just cannot get into Doctor Who anymore :( I am going to have to run a test - get some beers and watch all the Doctor Whos from the start. Although, I should probably start from Pertwee, which is where I actually started watching the show.

That's an insult to the three previous Doctors who without them there wouldn't even be a 4th Doctor.

A lot of older people that tuned in back then actually hated Baker’s Doctor portrayal after Hartnell, Troughton and Pertwee. But he is definitely the most iconic and popular I think years later. He had such a long run and most of his stories were huge integral plot lines in the history and story

What does that exactly mean?

@@El--Grimaldi I mean "sloop so low as now"

@@friendlyotaku9525 horrendous poor writing , terrible acting , contrived politically driven messaging. Under the guise of diversity but actually all driven and controlled by old white men and the Crown establishment . Back in the day it was written by truly creative free spirits who weren’t under direction .It was actually way more subversive then against the status quo . When supposed ‘progressiveness’ echoes the talking points of Royalty, multinational corporations and bankers , that’s the opposite of freedom and choice . It’s why they put a 61 year old white man back In charge . Horrendous

Michael, change that to an afternoon with just alan partridge

She’s probably too old for the part now, but a few years ago she would have been great.

@@DiRtYLaWs2007 she was great in Steven Moffat's _The Curse of Fatal Death._ Sadly a very short comedy role. I think Niamh Cusack would've been fantastic as the Doctor when she was in her 40s or 50s - especially with those enigmatic eyebrows!

I was actually looking forward to see how she played the role, but then they let her use her own voice! I really don't like her natural voice. The voice she put on for her role in that police series (with David Tennant) set in the West Country, I wish she used that for Doctor Who. I think I might have actually grown out of Doctor Who now, which is a shame, as I have not been able to get back into it since Tennant left.

And the writing was awful, and the ratings went into the crapper. Should 007 be a woman? No. Should Mary Poppins be a man? No.

​@@ifly-fsxneither 007 nor mary poppins are shapeshifting, fundamentally genderless aliens in lore now are they?

@ifly-fsx are James Bond and Mary Poppins Time Lords? No? Then shush!

What? When did he do that??

Maggie Smith would have been great - back then. Now though, you would run the risk of ending up with terrible writers (far too many about), and no matter how good the actor, you'll suffer.

@@ChuckstaGaming You could have the best writers in the world and the best actress, but it will always be an enormous challenge. David Tennant in a great actor, but I'm not sure he could replace Uma Thurman in Kill Bill. Certain roles have a strong presence and personality imprint, which is unique to that role and is difficult to fulfil by an actor/actress. Ratings are always a good indicator.

LOL

And yet he had one of the most successful careers after Doctor Who. Even David Tennant and Matt Smith only had one or two other visible roles, but so did Peter.

@@whophd yes but you ask anyone to name them and they probably couldn’t that’s the issue

​@@CricketEngland The Last Detective was really geat

He had his own detective series Campion, on the BBC.

She just tried to be a female Tennant, she was like a wet mop.

Totally agree with, luckily Doctor Who wasn't put into hibernation after Jodie Whittaker like when the series was let down by the writers during the Sylvester McCoy years. My Doctor Who era was Jon Pertwee/Tom Baker and you would get the odd story that was a bit stupid but it always bounced back.

Nahh she was just bad too. Even a good doctor can carry a bad script.

She was awful. The character suits a woman about as much as wonder woman suits a man

Jodie grew on me, and Jo Martin won me over within her first minute. Chibnall's era wasn't always great, but there's still a lot that was. Like 80s Who that had to grow post Tom Baker, modern Who had to grow beyond Tennant's as well. Tough acts to follow.

I’m not alone in thinking Whittaker was let down by some really poor writing, and you could say the same for some of Smith’s and Capaldi’s stories which were where cracks started appearing. Also, the ceiling has been broken as far as female doctors go, it won’t be seen as a one-off experiment and there will CERTAINLY be female doctors again in the future.

​@@DiRtYLaWs2007 I think Whittaker was awful as well as the writing of her stories. I didn't see a single highlight moment from her and to be honest, some of her later episodes had decent material. Everytime she'd get outshone by her companions and supporting cast. She had the acting range of a loaf of bread.

It could and thats a big could of actually worked if wokeness didn’t ruin this day and age and was so heavily stuffed in Doctor who’s agenda now. Like if they were actually serious about a black Doctor. The actor Lennie James or Lenny Henry would of been a phenomenal choice and I actually would of been so behind something like that. Ncuti Gatwa and Whittaker just aren’t The Doctor. Whittaker did have it bad with some truly dire writing I must say tho

Nu-hu's stories have always been garbage.

Whittaker had potential but wasn't given much of a chance to shine (although yeah, I agree, there were good episodes), and I'd hate for the takeaway to be "Doctor Who can only work when it's a man in the role". It's worth another shot at some point. Not saying let's kick Gatwa out, because I wanna see him get as much of a chance as anyone else (and I think he's off to a solid start), but once he's done with it, I hope the search for the next Doctor isn't limited to men just because that's what's been known to work.

(upvote for the second para BTW - Tom Baker was great but he's not my Doctor and the show has had great periods since IMO)

@@anonymes2884 you're right 👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼

That's entirely possible - he was a massive Whovian around this time.

@@dogbreaththe3rd851 Disney have led the charge for decades undermining creativity with their heavy lobbying of indefinite corporate copyright with intl compliance. They are the very definition of corpirate totalitarians, and should literally be tried at New Nuremberg along with Bibi et al.

Sheer nonsense. Moffat was great.

Thus confirming that 'Doctor Who' has been going downhill (in some fans' estimations) since at least 1984 :).

​@anonymes2884 Since 1989 actually, Colin Baker's era was superb thankyou.

Er, "doctor" is a gender-neutral term, Dear.

@@primalconvoy yes, I know that, just wanted to be different.

​@@primalconvoy"Doctor" is indeed gender-neutral, but "doctress" is not. There are other fine feminitives like "actress", "waitress", "princess" or "aviatrix". Don't be prescriptive, dear.

@@TinLeadHammer excuse me!!!!!

That is HAVE, not OF. Should have! Maybe get away from the TV for an hour, read a book. Join the library.

That's the real issue - the writing quality. It's dire these days, it seems.

​@@ChuckstaGaming Sew true.

@@lewis7515 lol, oops - I corrected it :) That's not the first time I confused seams with seems 🤦‍♂

Tom Baker will always be the Doctor for me. But I don't get upset by the direction the show takes. New generations want completely different media. The show isn't for me anymore and I don't think it should be. It was always a fantasy for teenagers and as long it keeps working for them and with Disney buying it, who knows whether it will continue to work. They have a habit of grinding licences into the ground.

@@dogbreaththe3rd851 and now could you type that in English??!

@@dogbreaththe3rd851 😂 ok sweetheart keep your jackboots on

Despite all the squabbling and arguing on this thread; I would love that Tom Baker Doctor Who type to come back and have that sort of semi-morbid, semi-ironic dark humour he had back in the day. It was just incredible. Looking back it was amazing. Also I watched some old repeats back in the 80s of the Pertwee, William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton Doctor Who's and they were incredible also; as a kid I was excited that even 20 years ago back then starting in 1963 the BBC could make incredible tv like that before I was born. Learn from the old masters is my advice to any future Doctor Who writer and actor.

@@user-ub1dz8js7s back to the days of hiding behind the sofa from Davros! lol

uh, no. you would not be able to outright dismiss the idea of considering a FDoc these days lol

Yes indeed. Kathryn Janeway played by Kate Mulgrew. And excellent she was too.

The outstanding Star Trek "Voyager" series. Captain of the Voyager (a small exploration vessel "lost" in an unexplored quadrant of the galaxy) was Katherine Janeway. Star Trek Voyager was / is highly regarded by both fans and critics.

I tire of this strawman argument. There are many perfectly reasonable and legitimate arguments why the Doctor should be played by a male actor that have *nothing* to do with sexism, misogyny or chauvinism. For example, an argument Davison himself put forward was that the Doctor is one of the few positive male role models in film and TV today; he's compassionate, open-minded and uses his intelligence to solve problems instead of reaching for a gun. Davison's concern was that gender-swapping the character would take this uniqueness away and, potentially, prevent younger male viewers from identifying with the character. No sexism there, I think you'll agree. Another argument that's equally as valid is that while it's just about possible to accept Colin Baker regenerating into Sylvester McCoy, or Christopher Eccleston regenerating into David Tennant, changing the character's sex might just be pushing the believability of the concept to absolute breaking point. After all, you need to accept on some level that all these different iterations of the character are still essentially William Hartnell's Doctor, albeit with another face and focusing on different character traits. With the casting of Jodie, there was also the argument that this was stunt-casting, or a shallow - perhaps even cynical - attempt to make a show that has otherwise always been forward-looking and genuinely progressive superficially more 'PC'. Again, these are all perfectly reasonable: I honestly don't know why people like you insist on smearing the opinions of others purely because you disagree with them. On the subject of Jodie herself, I've always liked her as an actress, but - in my view - she was miscast as the Doctor and brought nothing of value to the role. (And yes, I will concede the scripts didn't help.) Anticipating your follow-up response to this comment, no - I would prefer it if the Doctor had remained male, but if I was asked to choose a suitable female candidate for the role, I would've approached either Olivia Coleman (obvious choice) or the wonderful character actress Lucy Montgomery. They would've been far more in-tune with the role, and perhaps even made Chibnall and co.'s abominable scripts more bearable to sit through.

@@richardenglish2195 Although there are not many male characters with the same values as the doctor in pop culture, those values are perfectly valid if they come from a woman and there are no reason for a young male to not assimilate them (or maybe there are, but we already discarded those reasons, right?). The premise of the doctor is that no matter how they look, the motivation for every incarnation is the same and that's discovering life, defending that life, helping as many as possible whenever possible. It's the method that changes every time and that changes are the soul of the show itself. Decidedly that changes in the series are not always for good but as for the gender of the doctor, that's not a barrier that shouldn't be surpassed because it's not an issue for themselves (as a character, because in the context of the show the time lords don't attach their identity on gender but on the ideas, the motivations, etc.) so we should be way ahead of that conversation at this point. Now, I also have preferences for other female actors over Jodie Whittaker TBH, but that doesn't demerit her work on screen. The best next example is Jo Martin who in a couple of scenes nailed the role of the doctor, but then again, the script's were the spine of 13th, all the flaws and lacks and also the good traits came from Chibnall, not from Jodie. I myself don't like completely the 11th doctor, for an example and that's not because I don't like Matt Smith, but it's a well known fact that not all the fandom enjoyed all of the scripts of Steven Moffat as a show runner and some people think that he writes the best under RTD wings and I somehow agree with that. Without all the drama, the idealisation of the doctor and the "connecting the dots" thing for every season finale (not to mention how he writes female characters), I do enjoy Matt Smith's doctor and Moffat's stories over all, 12th included and more recently, 15th received some of the good writing from Moffat. My point is that the performances for "new who" have been excellent over all, so the actors are not to blame if something doesn't work and Jodie's performance was fun and light hearted, bringing new light over the doctor's character and personally, I loved her in the role, but she could have done so much more with better writing guiding her performance.

@@DoctorMysterio15 I'm not saying compassion, open-mindedness, etc are invalid if they come from a female Doctor; the point is that those qualities are very rare in male characters in popular franchises. If you take away the ones that actually do exist, you suggest to younger audiences that only women are capable of those properties and, therefore, perhaps deprive young men of male role models who can move beyond traditional representations of masculinity. This is a complicated subject, which, as I attempted to argue in my previous comment, goes far beyond lazy category definitions such as 'sexist', 'chauvinist', etc. That said, fair point about Jodie unfairly taking a lot of the flak for poor creative decisions. Capaldi suffered the same at Moffat's hands, but then, alas, people will sometimes confuse the face of the show with the creatives behind the scenes. My view of her performance isn't coloured by the piss-poor scripts she was given, more on her particular take on the Doctor, which, to me, didn't sit right. But then, it's all subjective.

@@richardenglish2195 @richardenglish2195 Of course, most of the male characters do go carrying weapons and shooting at troubles, but there's plenty of male characters that also do align with goodness and kindness in books, comics, TV, cinema, etc and them also had to recurre to get physical some time or another. Hell, ultimately even the doctor has been at the other end of the gun multiple times. However, due to the complexity of the subject, it can't be narrowed to saying that the doctor can't be female and I'm not remarking that point because of you specifically, but for all those who think that by the mere fact of altering the doctor's gender is enough to condemn the actual course of the series. There are plenty of other complaints cemented in some other forms of intolerance and/or radical opinions in the form of how "woke content" is poisoning the pop culture and so on. Even here in RU-vid people is making content upon this kind of discourse and to me, that has more to do with some sensitive fibres being touched subjectively than with a fact. It's as some people says: "If it shocks you, it checks you" and maybe they should consider where the real problem is.

My main problem with the Chibnall era is that there were too many companions. Three in the first series (four in the first episode!) so the scriptwriters had to give them all something to do with their own sub-plot. It was just too cluttered & messy. Especially for a new Doctor. Maybe gradually introduce more later on, but not when the audience are just getting used to a new Doctor and suddenly the Tardis is like Picadilly Circus.

The 3rd Doctor's era was full of marxist and anti-capitalist elements though, allthough the modern series 2005+ has a lets say "different" way of doing it, it's nothing actually new.

@@ChadOldman Not the same

@@machineguncrally7020 Ah, do you mean you find theres too much of a focus? Classic who definitely had it's politics but didn't really smack you around the head with it and felt more "naturally" part of the story IMO....

@@ChadOldman Yeah thats bang on. Its not the same as todays evil and indoctrinating influence and message

I liked her. I thought her performance needed tuning but as she was a slave to the writing she didn't really have much choice. She's a good actress if you see her other stuff so I blame the writing 100% I liked the idea of a female doctor ever since Joanna Lumley became the Doctor for a children in need sketch. She nailed it so well I was up for her doing the role for real.

@@ClayMann Margaret Rutherford or someone like her might have made a good Doctor.

​@@ClayMannJo Martin was much better I thought

All of those criticisms were literally nothing to do with the doctor being a woman, false equivalence

@@liamastill6733 I didn't say that the Doctor shouldn't be a woman but that it turned out badly along with the issues I mentioned piled on top. Jodie Whittaker wasn't right for the character but I suggested Margaret Rutherford above and others have suggested Sheila Hancock, Tilda Swinton and Maggie Smith, who are all good choices.

It could be. But it didn't. Why? Mix poor casting choice (Jodie), aggressive social messaging and very poor Chibnall scripts and you have a recipe for disaster.

a non binary dwarf

Turn that crap off. Go watch the old school episodes

There's going to be a drag queen in it..... Perverse.

Nobody gets this upset about kids Disney princes and princesses, and they even kiss sometimes! 🙄 Go fearmonger somewhere else

lesbian lesbian lesbian lesbian lesbian lesbian

Hello There! The world has moved on past your small minded bigotry.

JNT: 'it is feasible that the Doctor could turn into a woman'.

I thoroughly enjoyed the Doctors from Pertwee to including Davison (I have never watched the first two Doctors), and Eccleston and Tennent were great too, but the others weren't that good and modern Who needs to be put out of its misery.

Companions

She was. Get over it.

@@FrankNFurter1000what do you mean? There have only been five doctors and they’ve all been men. Even in the video he says it’s unlikely that a woman will be the doctor.

@@Dynastone You stated that the doctor will never be a woman, which implies even since this interview, omitting Jo martin and Jodie Whittaker.

@@FrankNFurter1000 what are you on about? I don’t know who those two are but they certainly aren’t one of the five people who have played the Doctor.

@@Dynastone Whatever keeps you happy, love.