Madame In A Box

As I had anticipated, Peter Capaldi called time on his tenure as Doctor Who this week. I was a little disappointed but unsurprised. The Chris Chibnall Era next year represents a new broom and perhaps Pearl Mackie as Bill Potts will be gone too- although we haven't even seen how she'll be received.

Amid the wistful observations and criticisms of lost opportunities, falling ratings and Byzantine story arcs - many of which I have to agree with, on many levels- the perennial Gallifreyan Question de nos jours was posed again, everywhere: will the next Doctor be female?

 Olivia Colman and Tilda Swinton, the front runners for the role as nominated by tv pundits, don't appeal to me at all. In the late 90s, after a Doctor Who tv series starring Paul McGann was apparently dead in the water, I sketched and wrote some story ideas for a punky female Doctor - a kind of bluestocking Sporty Spice in Vanessa Bell's clothes, as played by my old colleague Louise Goodall, from My Name Is Joe and Taggart.

But nearly twenty years later, I have cooled on the idea. Even Hayley Atwell in her hat doesn't quite work for me.

Who-writer Paul Cornell dismisses Female Doctor naysayers as sexists. I have been a huge fan of Batgirl and Ms. Marvel in the last couple of years and of the strong women in Who lately, including River Song and Michelle Gomez's Missy. But why must the nerdy boys, gay and straight across the world, lose the one role model who demonstrates that it's cool to be clever; that violence and gunplay is not  the only answer; someone who represents the Goths, the cosplayers, the Warhammer and Minecraft fans, the autists and the geeks?  A male Doctor Who doesn't diminish women; I don't think it's sexist at all.

My personal preference would be for an actor of a different ethnicity, as another kind of role model. Riz Ahmed, Sacha Dhawan or Richard Ayoade perhaps. In fact, last year, I sketched an Ayoade Doctor and his companion, a sparky Glaswegian from the 50s I named Sadie Spieritz.

.However, it strikes me that between the spikey, austere Capaldi Doctor and the hyperactive, childlike performance of Matt Smith, a less eccentric, slightly ( only slightly) more mature model might be required. A safe pair of hands in the form of a  BBC television series lead, in the mould of Peter Davison in the early 80s.

Having just quite Death in Paradise, Kris Marshall is my tip for the Tardis. It may very well be that a female Doctor will take the reins in  time- but I don't think that likely just yet.

River Song is a character who inhabits the world of Doctor Who and yet isn't required to actually be him. In the Big Finish audio box set The Diary of River Song volume 2, Doctor Who's kind-of- wife-cum-assassin encounters both the Seventh Doctor on an imperilled spaceship and has an office romance with the Sixth Doctor, while investigating a company selling dreams to psychic parasites. Both  Doctors team up with Daniel Defoe in the final episode. I wasn't always sure what was happening there, as an ersatz planet Earth tried to overwrite the original, in a storyline that reminded me of Hickman's Avengers World series. The muddled cosmic sturm and drang is redeemed in the second episode Five Twenty-Nine: a poignant and gripping allegory for terminal illness which might win another audio award for author John Dorney.

The first "female Doctor" was actually Romanadvoratrelundar. James Goss's novelisation of The Pirate Planet ,while not quite as delightful as City of Death, is a witty re-imagining of the 1978 tv serial utilising the original scripts and story proposal. Charming and silly, the Fourth Doctor and Romana mk I are an amusing team and remain one of my favourite pairings. I would very much welcome an adaptation of Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen, the lost Douglas Adams Who story.

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