It’s about time. After years of febrile speculation and fan-theory, it’s now official: Doctor Who will soon be played by a woman, and the iconic five-decade-old BBC science fiction behemoth will regenerate into a series with a modern understanding of gender. The paroxysms of delight from the show’s legion of female, queer and progressive viewers have been met by a chorus of horror from people who are outraged at the idea that a fictional time-travelling alien from the planet Gallifrey could possibly be a woman. The argument that they cast the best actor for the job, and the best actor happened to be Broadchurch star Jodie Whittaker, fails to convince those for whom the future can never be female, and time can never be rewritten, and unlikely heroes can never win the day, and tradition should always take precedence over justice, equality and fairness It’s just possible that those people have missed the point of Doctor Who.
This is a family show, and the writers always give you plenty of warning so you can hide behind the sofa when a particularly scary apparition stalks onto the screen – like a living statue that can kill you faster than blinking, or a woman playing your favourite character. In the final episode of the last series, The Doctor, in their latest incarnation as Peter Capaldi, explained to his companion that yes, Time Lords are indeed flexible on “the whole man-woman thing”.
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