The final minute of Newsnight isn’t traditionally where you go for huge television spoilers. In fact, it isn’t really where you go for anything, unless you’re into the sort of laboured, pseudo-current anti-joke designed to make Andrew Neil half-heartedly wheeze into his lap. However, the final minute of yesterday’s Newsnight might – might – have just announced Phoebe Waller-Bridge as the 13th Doctor.

The “revelation” – if we can call it that – came in the form of a few clips from Saturday’s Doctor Who followed by a clip of a vlog where Waller-Bridge nervously avoided a Doctor Who question, over which Newsnight flung a hokey regeneration effect. There, that’s it. That’s literally all that happened.



If that really is how the new Doctor was announced, it seems especially perverse. We know from Peter Capaldi’s appointment that the BBC prefers to herald a new Doctor with a ramshackle live show made, featuring and hosted by people who visibly couldn’t give a stuff about Doctor Who. To casually fling it out on Newsnight, without so much as a botched One Direction satellite interview, seems unlikely.

And yet I’ve decided to run with it, for one simple reason: I really, really want Waller-Bridge to be the next Doctor.

She’d be perfect, wouldn’t she? Although tonally quite different to Doctor Who, Fleabag was the ideal calling card for the role. It proved that she can do funny. It proved that she can do knowing. It proved that she can do sad and complicated and withering and scared and angry. These are all fantastic traits to have if you’re going to play an ancient, lonely time-travelling god figure. Plus she can do Chris Chibnall, as any of her slightly superfluous scenes in the second series of Broadchurch can attest.

She also benefits from how relentlessly British she is. She somehow combines contemporary relatability with the sort of catastrophic poshness that tends to play well overseas. She’s already a big draw – she’s been a guest on The Tonight Show, which isn’t something you can say of many BBC3 stars – and Doctor Who would only cement her status as an export to be proud of.

Some might have reservations about her based on Fleabag, which was the exact scientific opposite of a family-friendly Saturday teatime show. But Peter Capaldi was Malcolm Tucker before he was the Doctor, and being a volcano of bulgy-veined expletives didn’t do him any harm, did it?

And, look, the only other name being bandied around is Kris Marshall, and he’s such a lazy choice that he’d be in danger of killing the series dead. There’s something depressing about the prospect of a Kris Marshall Doctor. There’s no risk to him. He’d be a Doctor designed by committee. He’d be a fake Irish pub of a Doctor. He doesn’t have the sparkily fierce intellect, or the towering sharpness, of Phoebe Waller-Bridge. He plays people who worry about the internet. He isn’t suited at all. But he’d make a great companion. A companion to Phoebe Waller-Bridge, perhaps?

But stop making me get excited. As great as Waller-Bridge would be as the Doctor, the fact remains that her star is probably rising too fast to allow it. So far, her best work has been her own; Fleabag marked her out as a writer of immense talent, giving her more or less free rein to do anything she likes, so it’s unlikely she’ll junk this newfound momentum to be a cog in a show written by someone else. And if she just wants to act? Well, she has Hollywood blockbusters for that now.



So let’s not get our hopes up. Phoebe Waller-Bridge is absolutely the best choice for Doctor Who, but Doctor Who probably isn’t the best choice for her. Still, we can dream.