Compiled by Adam Kendrick

On Wednesday June 10th 2026 at exactly 11am, the BBC announced that Doctor Who would be put out to competitive tender and that plans for a Christmas special had been shelved. As part of this decision, Russell T Davies would step down as showrunner after five years at the helm and Bad Wolf Productions would not be involved in the next series, potentially leaving the cliffhanger of Ncuti Gatwa regenerating into Billie Piper unresolved. While the BBC remains fully committed to the programme’s future, there is nevertheless no televised Doctor Who in production for the first time in twenty-one years, outside of an animated spin-off series for Cbeebies by Blue Zoo Animation Studio.

In these tumultuous times, The Tides of Time reached out to members of the Oxford Doctor Who Society and asked them for their thoughts on what should or will happen to Doctor Who next. Is it time to shake up the weekly format? Should the showrunner position be scrapped? And how can they resolve that cliffhanger of Ncuti Gatwa regenerating into Billie Piper now?

MATTHEW KILBURN

The BBC will advertise the competitive tender for Doctor Who in due course, probably within the next two to three months. The bidding process will take several months, but I’m optimistic that a new production company will be in place in the first half of 2027. They won’t necessarily be anyone that we have heard of before in the corporate sense, but we might very well know some of the names attached. I don’t know how long the process of finding funding for a series will last or who will lead it – BBC Studios, as distributor (contrary to the ‘AMC+ leak’ of a little while ago, which suggested BBC Studios would lease distribution rights to Sony internationally, I don’t see BBC Studios letting go of the international distribution of Doctor Who), and/or the production company. Writing, casting, hiring everybody, will follow the allocation of the production contract.

DAN EVANS

With the BBC rapidly losing popularity amongst the general public, multiple restructurings in the broadcasting sector, and an expansive difficulty in remaining ‘neutral’, it appears as though the situation with Doctor Who is, quite frankly, the least of its worries. For me, I think the BBC needs to get itself in order before it can deliver a clear focus on Doctor Who, whether that be a few years or even a few decades; it’s hard to tell in the current climate. Nevertheless, once the ruckus has calmed down, and the BBC once again develops a clear sense of direction, only then should they reconsider airing the Greatest Show in the Galaxy. Rest assured, while the next episode of Doctor Who is yet to show its face, the show’s future is far from being all over…

ADAM KENDRICK

It’s been frustrating how after such a promising start to the Disney era, the wheels have seemingly fallen off the show and we’re now facing another indefinite hiatus. Although there were lots of problems beyond the showrunner’s control (e.g. the end of peak TV in 2023, the unrealistic expectations required before Disney would even consider a third series, New Who now being as old as Classic Who was when Attack of the Cybermen first aired), I can’t help but feel with hindsight that Russell T Davies’ approach might have been a mistake and was at odds with the BBC’s objectives of bringing the show to a wider international audience. Instead of wiping the slate clean so that the show could bring in a new generation of fans, “Season One and Two” have been Series Fourteen and Fifteen in all but name – a continuation of the same niche show that’s been running for twenty years, albeit with a significantly larger budget.

What I would like to see is a soft reboot that strips the show back to its fundamentals, rather than simply resetting the series counter. That means stop worrying about continuity or unresolved plot threads and ignore everything that happened previously. Start the next series with the companion(s) meeting the new Doctor (a la Rose/The Eleventh Hour/The Woman Who Fell To Earth) without any reference or acknowledgement of that misconceived Billie Piper cliffhanger. Quietly discontinue officially numbering the incarnations of the Doctor (the fans can keep track of this themselves) and simply focus on having The Doctor and their companion(s) travelling through time and space in the TARDIS. Once you’ve established the main characters and their dynamics, then you can start thinking about bringing back the Daleks, Cybermen, Weeping Angels and so forth.

I would also like to see the show experiment with the format in the future. For the most part, the weekly anthology format has remained unchanged from 2005, which means that the show is wildly different every week but becomes more expensive to make, resulting in fewer episodes per series. Perhaps it should consider switching to a serialised format, with longer stories told over multiple episodes if not the entire series – the relative success of The War Between The Land and the Sea demonstrates that this approach can work. Alternatively, if the budget becomes significantly more restricted, the show could instead become a series of one-off feature-length specials that are simultaneously released in cinemas and on television every couple of months. Finally, I do wonder whether the showrunner structure has become a poisoned chalice in recent years. There have only been three people in the entire world who have occupied this position, and only one of them is now generally viewed positively by the fandom. It might be time to move towards a writer’s room approach with multiple executive producers sharing showrunning duties, rather than placing the entire fate of our show on the head of one person.

GEORGIA HARPER

I would have loved to see Billie Piper have a crack at it, but that seems very unlikely now – I wouldn’t imagine we’d get more than a throwaway reference to that one strange past regeneration to plug the gap! As someone who enjoyed The Reality War more than most, at the time it made me think about Doctor Who‘s potential in cinemas. Could we see a change in format to maybe one film every year or two?

IAN BAYLEY

Nearly five years ago, when RTD returned as showrunner, I accused Doctor Who of trying to recapture its past glories by changing one of its variables back to the 2005 setting. Of course, the word “one” was a massive understatement. Russell was joined by David Tennant, Steven Moffat, and Murray Gold. Jane Tranter and Julie Gardner too as founders of Bad Wolf. Every effort was made to force the stars back into alignment and still 2005 didn’t happen again. The completely fresh start with re-numbered seasons on a new streaming service gave way to compulsory backward references to Susan (last seen in 1964 or 1983 if you count that), Sutekh (1975, not counting repeats), Omega (1983), The Rani (1987 or 1993 if you count that). Doctor Who truly is a show that is eating itself, to an even greater extent than it was in the 1980s and a few years away from its doom, a doom we know can’t happen this time due to its commercial strengths. And we got to those re-appearances by eschewing the Daleks, Cybermen and the Master who had already been chewed over for the umpteenth time in the Chibnall era, the era that got our backs up initially by spurning them for the whole of Series 11.

That’s what we need to go back to. We need to have a showrunner with the confidence to make the timeless-yet-still-sixty-three-years-old show walk on its own two feet unaided by the zimmer frame of the past. Somebody with a clear vision of what Doctor Who should be (or a deep insight into why it is so great) who spends their time entirely on that without writing any of the scripts. We remember Gene Roddenberry and Gerry Anderson for the shows that form their legacy and yet they wrote almost nothing. Or to keep things really simple, why not go back to the simple division of labour that served us so well in the past: Producer, Script Editor and the writers.

THOMAS BARKER

Perhaps Flux was a harbinger of what may become of Doctor Who, in that it becomes a serialised programme again or a series of ‘event’ TV movies akin to the BBC Sherlock series. While a consistent format lends itself well to terrestrial TV, I wonder if experimenting with the way the show is delivered (two-parters, three-parters, shorter or longer episodes) will lead to more experimental storytelling?

Managing the revival of the programme may not have to fall to one person, for I think the showrunner format may have had its day. It would be fantastic to see the programme managed by someone (or a group of people) who grew up with NuWho. The best outcome would be someone who tips a hat to the canon we have without becoming overtly reliant on it for material or iconography. Injecting that fresh perspective, grounded in an appreciation of what Doctor Who represents, will hopefully reinvigorate the programme and take us into exciting territory, just as it was doing in its twilight phase in the McCoy years via Andrew Cartmel (and John Nathan-Turner). Sidestep the Piper cliffhanger, go for a 2005-style in medias res reboot, and tell new stories that carve out a new branch of the Doctor Who family tree that, in 15 years’ time, will themselves be sources of inspiration for new creatives. All of this sounds incredibly easy, but the reality is that decreasing budgets, more competition, and a shift in how audiences consume ‘content’™ means the show needs to adapt to survive. I’m sure it will!

SAM SHEPPARD

What’s that you say? The Christmas special isn’t happening? I’m sure the Doctor Who fandom is being extremely normal about this, right? Right? To be honest, I actually do understand some of the doom and gloom. Doctor Who is facing an uncertain future, and the RTD2 era ended in a bit of a shambles. I enjoyed Ncuti Gatwa’s performance as the Doctor, and I’m sad that the Fifteenth Doctor’s tenure ended in such a rushed, messy way, with most of his era’s overarching storylines unlikely to ever get a proper resolution. The important thing to remember, though, is that Doctor Who is emphatically not dead, whatever certain sections of the fandom might have you believe. On the contrary, the fact that the BBC have put the show out to tender seems like a positive sign. It suggests that the BBC values Doctor Who highly, and is keen to secure a long-term future for the show. Having said that, I do feel that, if the show is to survive and thrive, then there are two major issues that need to be addressed.

First of all, I believe that a new era of Doctor Who needs new writers. I’ll be honest here, I was always a bit sceptical about the idea that Russell T Davies would come back to run Doctor Who a second time, with David Tennant returning to play a new incarnation of the Doctor. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed a lot of things about the first RTD era – but if I want to revisit that era, I could just go rewatch the old episodes on iPlayer. In the meantime, I want to see Doctor Who moving forward, trying new things and drawing in a new generation of fans. The idea of RTD and all the old gang coming back just made it feel like Doctor Who had become backward-looking and creatively stagnant, trying to recapture the “glory days” of 2008 and win back lapsed fans. Maybe that’s why I never really liked the idea of bi-generation. While I do like the idea of an emotionally exhausted Doctor finally getting to take a break and reset, Fourteen getting to hang around indefinitely felt like a reflection of the show’s inability to move on from the past, with the spectre of David Tennant constantly looming over his successors like Banquo at the feast. And look, I get it, 2023 was an anniversary year, and a certain amount of self-indulgent nostalgia is justified in that context. But after the anniversary specials, we had an era chock full of returning characters and villains from Classic Who (complete with Fifteen watching Pyramids of Mars on a handy tablet), and ending with Billie Piper returning for a quick cameo as somebody who may or may not have been the Sixteenth Doctor (jury’s still out on that one). I’m a huge Classic Who fan, but even I’ve started to feel like present-day Doctor Who has gotten stuck in a rut, relying too much on nostalgic callbacks.

Maybe that’s an inevitable reflection of who is writing for the show. It’s not just Russell returning; for years now, so much of Doctor Who has been written by a small, insular circle of older male fans who grew up with Classic Who. This isn’t to criticise any of those writers, but I think that it’s a situation that needs to change, and I’d like to see more diversity behind the scenes. I do appreciate that the show has already taken some steps in this direction, bringing in new writers such as Juno Dawson and Inua Ellams, but I’d argue that future incarnations of the show need to go further. My biggest hope is that the next era of Doctor Who (whenever it may appear) will be overseen by new writers who can bring a fresh vision to the programme. I want a Doctor Who that says “look at the exciting new adventures we can take you on,” not one that says “hey, remember how excited this show made you feel in 2008?”

But would it really be possible to find new people willing to take on the role of Doctor Who showrunner? It’s easy for me to be an armchair expert and criticise the decision to bring back an old showrunner, but it’s worth remembering that there is one very good reason why RTD came back: namely, the fact that nobody else apparently wanted the job. This, then, is the other major issue that needs to be addressed. If Doctor Who is going to survive, I’d argue, the very idea of the show being helmed by a single “showrunner” needs a rethink. It’s no secret that being showrunner for something as complex, expensive and notoriously difficult to produce as Doctor Who is an unimaginably demanding and stressful job, one which has dire implications for your physical and mental wellbeing. On top of that, being Doctor Who showrunner means you are acting as the public face of the show, and that opens you up to all sorts of criticism and abuse from fans who hold you personally responsible for everything they don’t like about the show. Give Doctor Who the best years of your life and try hard to keep the show on an even keel, and what is your reward? A bunch of vitriolic fans criticising your every decision and portraying you as some kind of egomaniacal villain.

In short, being Doctor Who showrunner is a demanding, thankless task, once described by Mark Gatiss as a “poisoned chalice”. No wonder nobody wants to take on the job. I’d argue, then, that if Doctor Who is going to continue, then the Powers That Be need to move away from the idea of a single person assuming responsibility for the entire show, and toward a more collaborative model of production – one in which the enormous burden of managing the show is spread out among multiple people. And I will throw up my hands and admit, I’m not an expert in TV production. I don’t know exactly how all of this would work, or if it’s even possible to make such a change. But what is the alternative? Can we really find somebody else willing to drink from the poisoned chalice?

At the end of the day, I believe that Doctor Who will come back one day, but I do have some reservations about all this. I hope that the next era will be made with sincerity and originality, and not by some unscrupulous group looking to make a quick buck from a familiar IP. And I hope that the next era can be made in a more sustainable way – one that doesn’t involve repeatedly throwing writers into the unforgiving Doctor Who machine so that they can be chewed up by its gears and spat out.