Will the Beeb finally bend and have a lady play the role or will they stick with the tried and tested?
I've a theory we'll see both Doctor's (Capaldo and his replacement) work together prior to Capaldo's regeneration into his successor but I've got theories about all sorts of weird things.
Olivia Coleman might be a good choice as she was Prisoner Zero talking about The Doctor in his Tardis not knowing where the cracks came from. It let's Moffat go full circle to the 11th hour and let's Chinballs work with someone who did well for his Broadchurch show.
Still, could be anyone: Who do you think will play the 16th Doctor?
That's a good choice as well, Stephen was good as Dirk Gently in the 2010/12 BBC series of the same name, plus really liked him in Houdini and Doyle as well (Episodes he was okay).
Could also be a nod to Douglas Adams put in again, like how Tennant said: Not bad for a man in his Jim-jams. Very Arthur Dent. Now, there was a nice man.
Agree he'd make a great choice, and I also liked him in Dirk Gently (wish they'd made more episodes!) and Houdini and Doyle (whatever happened to that show? It didn't return!)
Houdini and Doyle was excellent, I could have done with more of it but I also like it as a story that has been told and is still special without it being spoiled by over saturating it for syndication.
I enjoyed it once I got past that it wasn't going to resemble the actual lives of Houdini and Doyle - i.e., Doyle was Scottish not English (though he might've actually talked like that, according to something I read, probably on IMDB chatboard); Houdini and Doyle met much later; Houdini was already married to Bess; Houdini's mother passed away at a later date, etc
I enjoyed it for the character polarity; the creator of Sherlock Holmes with their penchant for the paranormal and the magical showman who had no belief in the supernatural whatsoever.
A very smart turn of fiction based on two real life friends.
Friends until they had a major falling out, regarding their believer/skeptic relationship. I think it had to do with those two girls who photographed fairies at the bottom of their garden - which later turned out to be fake.
And Houdini, though a skeptic, wanted to see his deceased mother. But of course all the mediums turned out to be phonies. If I recall correctly, there was something about Doyle's second wife fancying herself a medium too with "news from beyond" for Houdini from his mother - which turned out to be fake as well, enraging Houdini.
"Spiritualism" was very fashionable amongst middle class women in Europe then, having sprung up from such notable figures as Emanuel Swedenborg, Charles Fourier, Alessandro Cagliostro and Franz Mesmer with the peak being the story of two sisters; Kate and Margaret Fox of New York in the USA who claimed to have made contact with a spirit in 1848 and yet refuted this as fraudulent 40 years later. By that point the damage had been done and many women's groups had people who believed in the supernatural.
With Darwin's theories breaking down our understanding of evolution and the civil wars across Europe weakening the Church's hold on religious certainties much of the intellectual populous sought their meaning elsewhere and science and the supernatural seemed the most likely.
I really don't know where I would have been in that spectrum personally. I am a person of reason these days but take away a century or two and I don't know if romantic stories of dinosaurs or volcanic gods might have had me wishing for them to be true.
Same here. Person of reason, a skeptic and an atheist. Used to be interested in new age-y type things when I was younger, but now I can't buy into any of that. I still find interest in the occult and supernatural - though mostly as a subject to write about. Hard to say where I would've stood had I lived in the 19th century - closer to Houdini or Doyle? Probably would've read Darwin and Twain (with his skeptical eye toward religion) and Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories on one hand, and Doyle's more fantastic fantasy/sci-fi novels, along with Madam Blatsky, Verne, H. Rider Haggard, etc, on the other
Tesla certainly had an interesting life. I think it's been turned to legend since then as I'm sure any reasonable scientist these days could recreate anything available to Tesla at the time and so discussions of transmitting electricity over vast distances are either sheer theory on his part or limited to what we understand by the many minds who have read up on his works.
Edison certainly showed the ugly side of humanity around then, something which I am thankful can't be upheld in countries with their own intellectual property laws.
Who knows how stifled we've been by patents.
You seem like the perfect Whovian though, we share a lot of similar interests from that period of Earth's history :)
I think one of the characteristics for a Whovian - beyond liking the show, of course, and not holding on too tightly to certain aspects where the current never measures up to an imagined "golden-age" past - is to have a curiousity about history, science, and the world, and to not take things too seriously.
I'm an Anglofile from way back. The first British show I saw, I think, was "My Partner, The Ghost" - which was called "Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased)" in Great Britian. Or maybe my first British show was "Vision On," a children's program I haven't thought about in years, let alone fully realized was British until now. In any case, I was a youngster.
I haven't heard any update on who will play the next Doctor. Last I heard was Kris Marshall was a possibility, as was as Brian Blessed. I hope Chibnall is at least considering Mangan.