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Christopher Eccleston Drops Doctor Who Fun in Anti-Gambling Ads PSA

Doctor Who jokes are the sugar on the pill for a PSA that Christopher Eccleston stars in for The Coalition to End Gambling Ads (CEGA).

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Christopher Eccleston joined the campaign to end gambling advertising in the UK with some light Doctor Who references. We can no longer say he's a former Doctor, as he has returned to playing the Ninth Doctor in current audio dramas from Big Finish. Anyway, Eccleston has appeared in a Public Service Announcement short film, "Stacking the Deck," from The Coalition to End Gambling Ads (CEGA), which is calling on the UK Government to respond to the evidence and urgently start restricting gambling advertising.

Doctor Who: Christopher Eccleston in PSA Against Gambling Ads
Image: Stack the Deck Screencap; BBC

Eccleston plays himself and, in a bit of spoofery, shows up as himself in an opening skit where he's hired to film an advertisement for a gambling app. He nixes any mention of Doctor Who with the threat of the BBC "suing the arse off them" if the production tried to associate the Doctor with gambling, since kids watch Doctor Who. They hired him because David Tennant was too expensive. He also refuses to high-five a CGI bear since that's a kid's character being used to promote online gambling, and ends up storming out of production in a huff. Eccleston then goes on to interview the widow of a gambling addict and a researcher who point out the dangers of gambling addiction and how insidious the industry has become, another awful thing in the Dickensian dystopian nightmare that is the UK right now.

There is an abundance of evidence that gambling is harmful to a significant proportion of people who engage with it, as well as to those around them, and that advertising is key to getting people to start gambling, and to gambling more once they've started. There is also evidence that gambling advertising threatens people's recovery from addiction when they have been able to stop. In 2026, CEGA will conduct further work into which elements of gambling advertising should be prioritised for restriction. Their official YouTube channel could use a bit more information to explain their mission, as they're still not very visible online, and their acronym is the same as The Center for Global Action's (also known as CEGA). At least Eccleston and his Doctor Who association are helping to make it more instantly recognisable.

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Adi TantimedhAbout Adi Tantimedh

Adi Tantimedh is a filmmaker, screenwriter and novelist. He wrote radio plays for the BBC Radio, “JLA: Age of Wonder” for DC Comics, “Blackshirt” for Moonstone Books, and “La Muse” for Big Head Press. Most recently, he wrote “Her Nightly Embrace”, “Her Beautiful Monster” and “Her Fugitive Heart”, a trilogy of novels featuring a British-Indian private eye published by Atria Books, a division Simon & Schuster.
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