In 2021, when the extraordinary news broke that Russell T Davies will return to Doctor Who as showrunner, the announcement had some close parallels with the first time he took charge of the programme back in 2003. On both occasions, this development took the vast majority of fans completely by surprise – both revelations happened on the last Friday in September, and both of them related to productions that weren’t due to make it to the screen until the year after next.
However, if history had gone slightly differently, Davies could have ended up writing Doctor Who for BBC One some years earlier. “In late 1998, I had a friend working as a drama producer at the BBC, and he knew that Mal Young’s department was very keen on resurrecting the Doctor,” he explained in Doctor Who Magazine issue 338 (December 2003). “So a meeting was arranged, and I met with Mal’s development producer, Patrick Spence. It was just an ordinary, inconclusive, getting-to-know-you meeting. Nothing was written down, nothing was decided beyond a general agreement that the programme could be great again.”