6.31pm BST

Good evening everyone, and welcome to a very special – and potentially quite weird – Doctor Who liveblog. Tonight, after months of frantic speculation, we’ll finally discover the identity of the new Doctor. And then we’ll be disappointed because they aren’t who we thought they’d be. And then we’ll probably just give them the benefit of the doubt because it’s only a TV show and none of this probably matters very much in the larger scheme of things.

The BBC is unveiling the new Doctor in the only way it knows – by building the whole thing up into a slightly unnecessary dollop of live light entertainment programming filmed in front of a studio audience. Think of it as A Song For Whorope. Or The Whoice. Or The X Doctor. Or Who & Who’s Doctorday Whokeaway (Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway). That’s enough puns now. This is serious, for crying out loud. This is Doctor Who.

It’s impossible to know exactly when the new Doctor will be unveiled. All we can say for sure is that it’ll happen at some point before 7:30pm. However, given Doctor Who’s notoriously slapdash history of keeping secrets secret, expect it to leak on Twitter any second now.

But who? Who will it be? All signs seem to be pointing towards an older man – the bookies are currently split between Peter Capaldi (who would obviously be brilliant) and Ben Daniels (who played the British photographer you wanted to punch in the face from House of Cards) – but what the hell do I know? Today Daniel Rigby (Eric Morecame from Eric And Ernie and the annoying floppy-haired geek from the BT adverts) and Aneurin Barnard (from The White Queen) have suddenly become favourites. Nobody knows anything, basically.

That said, a tweet by photographer Rankin earlier today pointedly used the word ‘he’, and some potentially spoilerific BBC URLs have been doing the rounds this afternoon, so that might narrow things down a little.

I’ll be back here at 7pm when the Doctor Who special starts. If you enjoy liveblogs that are 28 minutes of filler, 30 seconds of excitement and then three minutes of frenzied Googling, you’ll be back here too.