The competition for the TARDIS keys is beginning to take shape, with Jed Mercurio’s Hat Trick Mercurio, World Productions and STV Studios reportedly bidding to produce the next era of ‘Doctor Who’. There are familiar names, plenty of police drama credentials, and a Scottish proposal which could make Wales considerably less enthusiastic about the whole regeneration business.
According to Deadline, all three companies have entered the BBC’s competitive tender process. Two BBC Studios labels are also expected to put forward proposals, although those labels have not been named.
Nobody has won anything yet, and this is not necessarily the complete list. However, it does give us something more interesting to discuss than another round of people declaring the programme dead while the BBC actively tries to commission more of it.
Hat Trick Mercurio, the company run by Jed Mercurio and Hat Trick founder Jimmy Mulville, has reportedly submitted a proposal with Mercurio attached as an executive producer.
I love Mercurio’s work. ‘Line Of Duty’ and ‘Bodyguard’ are fairly substantial things to have on your CV, and he also has science fiction experience through the BBC’s ‘Invasion: Earth’. This would hardly be someone wandering into a meeting and asking which one is Doctor Who and which one is the Dalek.
That said, I do have a slight wobble. The resolution of the H storyline in ‘Line Of Duty’ was, for me, distinctly uninspired after all that build-up. That was his own show, with mythology he had created. Taking on something with more than sixty years of history, several generations of fans and enough continuity arguments to fill a small moon is a rather different proposition.
An executive producer credit does not tell us how much of that creative responsibility he would actually take on, though.
As we discussed when the BBC opened the tender, the broadcaster is open to moving away from a strict showrunner model. That could leave room for an executive producer overseeing the whole operation while someone else serves as head writer, potentially with a writers’ room.
Mercurio could therefore sit at the top of the production tree without personally writing the series. He might help shape stories, oversee a writing team, or take a more hands-off role while another creative lead handles the Doctor’s adventures. None of that has been confirmed.
His involvement is interesting. How reassuring you find it probably depends on what his actual job would be, and we do not know that yet.
World Productions has reportedly submitted a separate bid, which Deadline describes as effectively leading ITV Studios’ efforts to land the contract.
Its credits include ‘Line Of Duty’, ‘Bodyguard’, ‘The Party’, ‘Karen Pirie’, ‘Showtrial’ and ‘Vigil’. That is a strong drama record, including several major BBC hits. The company clearly knows how to make television people want to watch.
The question is how that experience translates into ‘Doctor Who’.
There is genre experience in the back catalogue, notably the 1998 vampire thriller ‘Ultraviolet’, plus ‘Pulse’, written by Paul Cornell. However, much of World’s best-known output sits firmly in the world of gritty, adult drama. Police investigations, political tension and people having a thoroughly miserable time under expensive lighting.
I would not automatically object to some of that sensibility finding its way into ‘Doctor Who’. A bit of grit can be useful. But the BBC’s brief is for broad family viewing, with humour, adventure and scares that send children behind the sofa. That takes a different touch from making everyone on the sofa suspect their spouse of murder.
There is also something wonderfully mischievous about the prospect of an ITV Studios credit appearing on one of the BBC’s flagship programmes. Yes, World already makes BBC dramas. Yes, this is how the industry works. You can still imagine somebody in Broadcasting House needing a quiet lie-down when they see it attached to the TARDIS.
STV Studios offers another intriguing option. The group behind ‘Blue Lights’ and ‘Criminal Record’ has reportedly teamed up with Screen Scotland on a proposal to move production north of the border.
Both are great shows. Both are also gritty police dramas, so there is a similar question about how STV would approach the family adventure side of ‘Doctor Who’. Producing excellent television is a good start, but the actual pitch still needs to show how you get from a tense crime drama to a convincing alien planet.
Scotland itself would be a perfectly good place to make the series. It has plenty of fantastic locations, just as Wales does. The complication is that ‘Doctor Who’ has become closely associated with Welsh production, and the BBC’s tender actually states a preference for Wales.
If anyone fancies starting a small inter-Celtic diplomatic incident, announcing that Scotland has nicked the TARDIS would certainly get the ball rolling.
Would a Scottish production also mean a Scottish Doctor? There is no casting information to suggest that, and production geography does not dictate the lead actor’s nationality. Still, we have already had four Doctors played by actors born in or brought up in Scotland: Sylvester McCoy, David Tennant, Peter Capaldi and Ncuti Gatwa.
Perhaps they could just bring David Tennant back. Again. But let him use his actual accent this time. At this point, the man should probably have his own reserved parking space inside the TARDIS.
Then there is BBC Studios, which you would expect to be very interested in keeping the series within the wider BBC group.
Deadline reports that two of its labels are expected to bid, but we do not yet know which ones. That leaves a rather large gap when trying to judge what their versions of ‘Doctor Who’ might look like, or who would actually be running them.
My instinct is that keeping production within the BBC family would be an attractive outcome for the corporation. That is an assumption about what might appeal to it, rather than evidence that the tender has already been decided. Until we know the labels and their creative teams, BBC Studios is a familiar umbrella over some very unfamiliar proposals.
The initial tender stage has now closed, with interviews planned for January and a decision expected in March 2027. Whoever wins needs to deliver the family adventure the BBC has asked for, with a production team capable of making it work.
Preferably with an answer to its big mysteries that does not leave half the audience staring at the television and asking whether that was really it.
‘Doctor Who’ is available now on BBC iPlayer. The BBC is targeting the new series for 2028/29, with no confirmed UK premiere date.
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