From ageing heroes to awful companions, various missteps have led the Doctor to battle his scariest baddie yet – plummeting ratings. What will it take to win fans back?

Everyone has a different idea of what Doctor Who’s “former glory” is. Everyone has their Doctor, everyone has their era. But one thing most fans can agree on is that the last couple of seasons have not been especially glorious. There have been good episodes, but for every Heaven Sent or Flatline there were three or four Robot of Sherwoods or Kill the Moons. Michelle Gomez made quite an impression as Missy, but Ashildr and Danny Pink will hardly go down as classic characters.



It’s hard to put a finger on exactly how and when the show started to go downhill, but at some point Doctor Who went from the top of my viewing pile to the bottom. And it’s not just me: figures for the ninth season occasionally dipped below 6m – the lowest the show has seen since Russell T Davies brought it back in 2005. Something is obviously going wrong.

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The easiest place to lay the blame is on the shoulders of Peter Capaldi, whose arrival coincided with the start of the show’s popular decline. Capaldi is a great actor but there’s a chance that, after two young Doctors, his age counted against him with viewers. When Doctor Who began in the 60s, children were used to watching much older adults on TV. Now, with the popularity of YA films and an abundance of teen TV shows, a middle-aged, grey-haired adult may be less appealing to young audiences, even if he’s sporting sonic sunglasses and an electric guitar. When Chris Chibnall, the incoming showrunner, casts the next Doctor, he needs to shake things up.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Two arrogant geniuses … Clara (Jenna Coleman) and The Doctor (Matt Smith) in Day of the Doctor. Photograph: Adrian Rogers/BBC/PA

To my mind, though, the show began to deteriorate in Matt Smith’s final year, so perhaps the show depends as much on the companion than the Doctor? Try as I might, I never warmed to Jenna Coleman’s smug Clara Oswald. She was the epitome of everything writer Steven Moffat tends to get wrong with his female characters: so keen to make her “special”, he forgot to make her likeable. One thing Davies excelled at was remembering that the companion is what grounds the show. With Clara, we were watching two arrogant geniuses, leaving us no one to hitch a ride with.

Thankfully, if the first episode of season 10 is anything to go by, Bill Potts seems to have solved that problem. Pearl Mackie’s Bill occasionally falls victim to Moffat’s tendency to hammer a point home, but she’s probably the most human companion since Donna Noble (or perhaps Rory). She’s no Girl Who Waited or Girl Who Died. She’s a grown woman who makes her own choices while bowing to the Doctor’s knowledge of time and space. Mackie even made me tear up after just 20 minutes in her company. I spent two and a half years with Clara, yet didn’t get so much as a speck of dust in my eye when she “died”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Solving the unlikeable companion issue … Bill Potts (Pearl Mackie). Photograph: Simon Ridgway/BBC

But the main problem with the show is the same one Davies faced in the specials that brought his era to a close: Moffat is running out of steam. Doctor Who sucks its showrunners dry, especially when they also stick to a fairly static pool of writers. His mind-boggling, fairytale sci-fi is losing its internal logic, and he’s beginning to rehash old concepts. What was once dazzling is becoming stale.

It doesn’t help that the BBC seems to struggle to get a single season of Doctor Who out every year. Splitting seasons or releasing specials doesn’t suit the tastes of our binge-watching generation. We lose interest.

Essentially, Doctor Who must become new again. It’s a programme built on the concept of regeneration, and if the showrunners aren’t as willing to change as the Doctor is, what’s the point? The show cannot stand still.

Fans are already looking ahead to what Chibnall will do, who his Doctor will be – but he faces something of an impossible task. We’re hungry for the new, yet constantly complain that today’s fare isn’t as good as “our” era. We’ve basically created a paradox for ourselves. How very Whovian of us.

Doctor Who returns on 15 April at 7.20pm on BBC1.