Genesis of the Blahleks

How one anonymously sourced story about Doctor Who being cancelled regenerated into a whole news cycle of dubious reports...

Previously: Five for February: Brilliant journalism books

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There are many more important stories than the future of Doctor Who as an ongoing series, but the way The Sun’s shaky cancellation claims yesterday spawned a series of definitive takes across the British press today is a great example of how rumour regenerates into fact. The Sun report — labelled as an exclusive in the way that a story that no one else wanted can easily be — opens with certainty…

Doctor Who is facing the axe, with star Ncuti Gatwa poised to quit and crew claiming to be laid off.

… but quickly shifts to weasel words:

But [Gatwa] is already believed to have filmed his regeneration exit scene — and crew fear the BBC will shelve the show after 62 years.

“Believed” by whom? And which crew members “fear” the show will be shelved? Well, it’s that handy category of source — the anonymous “insider” — who claims:

“Ncuti doesn’t want to be tied to the series beyond this and plans to relocate to Los Angeles with several Hollywood projects standing by for him. His team also see a lot of fan backlash from the series, and don’t want the perception of him still being The Doctor to get in the way of any future work. 

The show has been poorly managed in recent years and there’s a lot of people who’ve been working on this show for years and now being cast aside due to poor leadership. People warned some episodes were getting too caught up on an agenda rather than telling a story and those people got shouted down, ignored.”

That quote fits so perfectly with the publication’s agenda that it reads like the product of total invention or motivated prodding on the writer’s part to get the right lines. The Sun then says that “Ncuti’s first series, which began last May, attracted between 2.25 million and 3.18 million viewers — a tiny fraction of what it used to pull in”, without noting that the numbers it quotes are the over-night ratings rather than the +7 day or +28 day numbers which take into account streaming viewership. In the case of the 2024 Christmas special, Joy to the World, the +28 day rating was 6.8 million. It’s lower than previous series but not the disaster that The Sun wants to present.

Inevitably, readers of The Sun story have to wade through more anonymous quotes from “the insider” and speculation from the writer before they reach a statement from the BBC placed right at the end of the piece:

A spokeswoman for the show said: “Doctor Who has not been shelved. As we have previously stated, the decision on season 3 will be made after season 2 airs. The deal with Disney+ was for 26 episodes — and exactly half of those still have to transmit.”

But that line wasn’t enough to stop stories from The Sun, The Times, The Daily Mail and other publications which took the original Sun claims as gospel. The Sun’s follow-up, a snarling anti-woke opinion piece by its TV editor, Rod McPhee, who wrote the original news story, came with the headline:

Like A Question of Sport & Football Focus, Doctor Who’s demise is another example of BBC wrecking classic TV with wokery

So, despite the BBC’s statement, the show’s “demise” is treated as a fact. Over at The Sun’s sister paper, The Times, the story gets an equally definitive headline in print:

Win for the Daleks as Doctor set to bow out

But the report opens with a paragraph as full of weasel words and caveats as The Sun’s initial claims:

The star of Doctor Who is said to be on the verge of leaving the series after disappointing viewing figures and concerns over the show’s popularity in the United States.

That usefully vague formulation (“is said to…”) appears again a few paragraphs later:

Gatwa, who starred in the Netflix comedy drama Sex Education, is said to have already filmed his ‘regeneration’ exit scene.

Readers wanting to know who has been doing all this saying have to wait until the final paragraph where The Times finally admits that its source is… The Sun:

The Sun claimed that crew working on the latest series were disgruntled after being told not to expect any more work on a Doctor Who series for another decade. 

In The Daily Mail, the ‘news’ that’s not really news yet gets a full-page piece penned by the paper’s entertainment editor Grant Tucker, headlined:

As ‘cringe making’ woke storylines see viewers plummet, how Disney is set to pull the plug on Doctor Who

Tucker tries a little harder than The Times by bolstering his argument by opening with the observation that Disney executives were a no-show at the Gallifrey One Doctor Who fan convention in Los Angeles last weekend. But having used up a quarter of a page on that anecdote, which admits that producers from the BBC and the production company Bad Wolf were there, he quickly shifts to rehashing The Sun’s line:

… viewer unrest comes amid rumours that the latest Doctor, Ncuti Gatwa, is on the verge of quitting after just two seasons and the show could soon be cancelled. 

As with The Sun, readers have to get right to the end of the article before they’ll reach the BBC’s statement but the Mail gives it an even shorter shrift:

While a BBC spokeswoman told the Mail, ‘Doctor Who has not been shelved’, an insider said: ‘Everything is now pointing in the direction of a prolonged break once the next series has aired. It will be back to the drawing board for the Doctor Who team.’ 

Now, I come neither to praise Doctor Who nor to bury it. Gatwa has suffered from the same problem that bedevilled Jodi Whittaker and Peter Capaldi before him — scripts that haven’t been nearly as good as his performance. But the papers’ eagerness to jump on this ‘Doctor Who is done’ rumour is more about an opportunity to hammer away at one of their favourite obsessions — ‘wokeness’ — than it is about whether the show is entertaining or well made.

The Sun today complains about the Jodie Whittaker-era episode ‘Revolution of the Daleks’ from 2021 for “[appearing to tackle] the thorny topic of prejudice… after a year dominated by Black Lives Matter protests”. McPhee rolls his eyes because “the episode featured a minority of Daleks who were victimised by the wider Dalek community because they consider them to be ‘genetically impure’… [the Doctor] also highlights the hypocrisy often involved in any form of prejudice, even one shown by groups of fictional aliens wheeled around in metal bins.”

And there’s the fundamental argument beneath all of the bluster from these tabloid writers: They want to say that Doctor Who should be silly while being deadly serious that there shouldn’t be anyone who doesn’t look or sound like them in the stories or any plotlines that seem even remotely political. Terry Nation, who created the Daleks, made it clear that they were based on the Nazis, but god forbid a storyline about the demonic pedal bins should be about prejudice.

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