Have been avidly watching Dr Who since I was three years old (seriously! I can remember watching the first doctor, then all the way through up to when I left home & didn’t have a telly but there were a couple of doctors there that weren’t much chop, so don’t reckon I missed much…until Chris E came along …thought he was brilliant! anyway, my Mum says I loved it!!! Last year I found a vid/dvd of series 1 and watched it again and cannot really see why a 3yo would be so fascinated, but there you go, there’s no working some things out.) Now watch with my 13yo son but my husband doesn’t ‘get it’…
Ooops. sorry so much waffle, just estab. POV as long-time Dr Who interest….
Yes, feel must reserve judgement until see how new boy goes…must say would like to see how Rupert Grint would go in role BUT I WAS DISAPPOINTED to see yet another white/caucasian face…was hoping for maybe Asian face…Indian, Chinese background, perhaps African or Middle-eastern? With a proper Pommie voice ofcourse…though would have to be handled well in writing/direction, maybe another time….
Don’t have problem with doctor being male. Don’t see why the Doctor should regenerate into a female body…nothing wrong with having strong female roles as companions, I always liked Lalla Ward’s character, ‘Ramona’, wasn’t it? Beautiful, serious and seriously intelligent (though am I correct in thinking that she wasn’t actually human, or didn’t come from earth or something? Hmmm….)

Haha Melissa, I see what u did thar!

When Matt Smith becomes the Doctor, he will be 27 years old. So much younger! Oh, such a child compared to all the others! Why, the youngest Doctor before him was . . . oh, wait. He was 29.

He’ll be two whole years younger than Peter Davison was, when he took the reins as the Fifth Doctor.

So Matt Smith’s casting is superficial casting based on nothing but his looks? And you can tell that based on–a photograph. Without ever having seen his acting. Talk about superficial.

Fortunately, most people will wait to see what he does with the role before judging him. If he actually is bad–and there’s no reason at all to think that he will be–then he’ll presumably be fired as unceremoniously as the widely-disliked Colin Baker.

Just another tempest in a teapot.

Only white males get to be the Doctor. And, on top of that, we, the actual audience behind the idealised audience, are now (moar tahn evar!) meant to love him, cementing our loyalties to this leading role, which only white males are allowed to play. And to love him based on the most superficial of characteristics, the looks and the gender that mark the role as off-limits to others, so that we still get to identify with the companions, and are only catered to inasmuch as that remains within the bounds of a dynamic as adjuncts to the hero.

Lots of food for thought. Congrats, Ide! You’ll get an email soon.

Keep the conversation going!

Although companions were originally conceived as viewer-identification figures (back when the title character was a tetchy old guy, and two schoolteachers were the newcomers discovering the universe, and the teenage girl had to be made less alien), the Doctor’s female companions have also often had the reputation of being cast as eye candy “for the dads” — and they, the dads, were probably not meant to identify with their eye candy. However, over the years and given the turnover rate for companions, it’s become pretty much self-evident that the Doctor himself is the viewer-identification figure to many (who aren’t necessarily “the dads”), in no small part because of his privileged position as the narrative’s hero. And, even given the Rose-as-RTD-Mary-Sue argument, the companions’ fates in the new series have hardly been happy ones, and the Doctor’s emo angst and loneliness and general increase of “characterisation” have made him ever more of an object meant for gathering viewer empathy and identification.

But the casting of a younger Doctor hypothetically meant to be more appealing to the idealised [ie, white, superficial, easily condescended-to] fangirl demographic, while putting the Doctor in the eye candy position, also has a distancing effect in terms of identification possibilities. We’re meant to admire and appreciate him, to want him romantically, but — not so much to be him, although the increased youth of the actor in the part also puts him closer to the idealised fangirl demographic in terms of age.

Only white males get to be the Doctor. And, on top of that, we, the actual audience behind the idealised audience, are now (moar tahn evar!) meant to love him, cementing our loyalties to this leading role, which only white males are allowed to play. And to love him based on the most superficial of characteristics, the looks and the gender that mark the role as off-limits to others, so that we still get to identify with the companions, and are only catered to inasmuch as that remains within the bounds of a dynamic as adjuncts to the hero. (It also stands to reason that they’d emphasise those characteristics, as they have progressively rewritten, for the sake of drama and expediency, other attributes that made this particular white male hero figure interesting.)

Stephen Moffat and Matt Smith may turn out to do very interesting things with the part, but I doubt that they’ll undo that dynamic.

Nor do I think that having an old character in a younger body is especially original — it’s been done often, with vampires or Immortals, and was notably done only a couple of years ago with Kyle Schmid in the part of Henry Fitzroy, but he was in the part of the eye candy/sidekick/love interest to a character played by an actress more than ten years older than him (Christina Cox) in the actual leading role of Vicki Nelson.

To help with Rachel’s question at 31 here’s the YouTube clip of some homegrown video. It might be the Tammy Wynette version too. Bonus! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8TLxa9Icc8