The first artificial intelligence to try its hand at Doctor Who was WOTAN. In 1966 it sat in the brand-new Post Office Tower, decided humanity had run its course, and announced in a flat electronic drone that “Doctor Who is required.” Sixty years on, the BBC’s director-general appears to agree, though he would like it to arrive as a 50-minute file in his inbox.
Russell T Davies is not amused. On Wednesday’s edition of BBC Radio 4’s The Media Show, the man who brought the programme back in 2005 (and did it again in 2023) took aim at Matt Brittin’s remarks at the Royal Television Society convention last month. Brittin, a former Google executive who became director-general in March, said someone had sent him an unofficial, entirely AI-generated episode of Doctor Who “the other day. It’s pretty good.” Nobody has said who made it, and the BBC declined to comment at the time.
“That’s a clumsy thing to say in a media industry where he’s got writers and artists,” Davies told the programme, according to the PA report. He added that Brittin “hasn’t worked in television for that long and might not be so fruity with an opinion in future”, and that after the speech, “My inbox went ping ping ping ping ping, so God knows what his was like.” Which is about as close as a television grandee gets to publicly reversing the TARDIS over someone’s foot.
Davies says he doesn’t use AI for his own scripts, and that he is “very much” worried it could replace writers. He has also heard of some writers using AI prompts for a first draft, which he finds “shocking”. “What are you paid for otherwise? What are you there to do?”
To be fair to the director-general, he has been backpedalling at a speed that would impress a Dalek on an escalator. In the same RTS session he told Laura Kuenssberg that “I don’t think anything we do should be replaced by AI”, although he would let AI make and present programmes “within guardrails”. At a BBC staff town hall this month he admitted he had “got in trouble” for the Doctor Who line: “I was just trying to make the point: look at the pace of change and what this stuff can do.” Writers will note the difference between “pretty good” and “not a substitute for humans” when the person saying both is the one who signs off the budgets.
Tucked behind the row was the news Doctor Who fans actually wanted. Davies confirmed that there will be no 2026 Christmas special, which was scrapped in June when he left the show and the BBC put it out to tender. More usefully, he put a rough date on the next era: “You’ll start to see production with a brand-new Doctor, a brand-new companion, summer next year.” Davies is no longer running the show, and the BBC hasn’t yet named the company that will make it, so treat that as an informed expectation rather than an official schedule. Even so, it is the closest thing to a timetable fans have had since the tender began. If cameras roll in summer 2027, the earliest we are likely to see the results is 2028. The known bidders include Line of Duty‘s Jed Mercurio and STV, which wants the TARDIS in Scotland (we covered the bidders last week).
Davies has been in a reflective mood generally. In excerpts from his memoir, The Queerest of Folk: A Life in Television, he says of the Disney+ partnership, “To be honest, it didn’t work from day one,” and that Disney “didn’t know the slightest thing about Doctor Who – only what I’d told them.” It has been quite a fortnight for people who used to be in charge of things telling us what they really thought.
The irony, of course, is that the programme has been warning us about this for most of its existence. WOTAN wanted to replace humans because they were inefficient. The Kaldor robots in The Robots of Death were the perfect servants until somebody reprogrammed them. The cheerful emojibots of Smile killed off colonists who failed to look happy enough. Whoever eventually wins the keys to the TARDIS might commission a story about a machine that writes a perfectly serviceable episode of a beloved family drama, to the delight of a senior executive. It would be pretty good.
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