Posted in: BBC, TV, TV | Tagged: doctor who

Doctor Who: How RTD, BBC & Bad Wolf Made Things Tougher For New Team

Here's how Russell T. Davies, Bad Wolf, and the BBC made life even more difficult for the team that won the Doctor Who tender bid.

Published Tue, 23 Jun 2026 07:37:09 -0500

by Ray Flook

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Remember that time before Marvel Studios' 2021 film Spider-Man: No Way Home came out? Despite being presented with both images and video from filming, Andrew Garfield continued to deny, deny, deny that he was returning as Peter Parker for the multiverse-spanning feature film. Of course, he ended up in the film (along with Tobey Maguire's Peter Parker), with many praising him for not breaking and sticking to his denials until it was pretty much premiere time. Of course, the flip side was that now that that card has been played, fans and media folks are going to dial up their efforts to get anything and everything they can spoiler-wise from sets moving forward. How things played out with Doctor Who kinda reminds me of that very situation, except a whole lot worse. It's not that the show is being put out to tender, or that Russell T. Davies and Bad Wolf are departing. It's not even that there won't be a Christmas Special. It's that there never was a Christmas Special.

There are going to be a whole lot of folks spending a whole lot of time trying to nuance the timeline of what happened between October 2025 and earlier this month, and looking to explain that certain decisions were made for the "greater good" of the long-running series. But in the end, the Christmas Special was a lie that was rolled out and propped up over the span of eight months. Some people claimed they had seen scripts, while others claimed Davies had written multiple scripts. We heard rumblings that filming on the Christmas Special would kick off in September… but wait! It turns out the Christmas Special was already filmed, earlier this year! But in the end, there's nothing – or, as Davies posted on Instagram: "For the record: there was no script, I never wrote it, and no actor was ever approached to play the next Doctor."

With that in mind, we wish the best of luck to whoever walks away with the winning bid to craft a new direction for the long-running show – they're going to need it. Because spending months debating a Christmas Special that was never really real in the first place has left an already not especially happy Doctor Who fanbase a lot angrier and a whole lot less trusting. They are going to scrutinize, analyze, and pick apart every little thing that's said, done, or officially released. If you're a new team, keep that in mind. You're going to need to be as open and transparent as possible if you're looking to mend fences. Is it fair? Nope, especially considering the new team has the unenviable task of revitalizing a show that's been around for well over 60 years, keeping long-running fans happy, and discovering new ways to attract new viewers. But that's the situation that they will find themselves in; here's hoping that they understand and appreciate it.

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