At this moment in space-time, there is no one at the controls of the TARDIS. Doctor Who is currently on an extended hiatus while the BBC tries to figure out what to do with the long-running franchise. Disney+ stepped away from its co-production partnership after the series failed to meet the streamer’s expectations. Russell T. Davies and his Bad Wolf production shingle left the program with a dangling cliffhanger that isn’t going to be answered any time soon. The holiday special it was teeing up with the return of Billie Piper has been canceled.
The BBC is tendering pitches for a new production company. There is one person many people would rally behind to fix the situation, but based on his own past comments, it’s really hard to tell if he even wants the job. Fans have literally been begging for this actor to play The Doctor for over a decade. They should go one step further and just let him run the whole show.
Fans have been calling for Richard Ayoade to play The Doctor for quite some time. The British comedian is best known from his role as Moss on The IT Crowd. His comedy is filled with wit, burning sarcasm, and exasperation at the world around him. In 2026, that may be just what The Doctor ordered. One complaint of the Disney+ era was its almost toxic positivity. That wouldn’t be an issue with an Ayoade Time Lord. If he can infuse the Doctor with his own acerbic tendencies, Ayoade could become the most relatable Gallifreyan in the show’s history. Lots of fans imagine him running down hallways with a Sonic Screwdriver, we imagine him running the whole show.
Ayoade is no stranger to making strange TV. Before The IT Crowd, he co-created Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace with Matthew Holness. While starring in the series as Dean Learner, Ayoade would also direct every episode. The show featured a breakout performance from Matt Berry, who would also appear on The IT Crowd and later co-lead What We Do in The Shadows. Meant to parody low-budget genre TV, the absurd series presented itself as a lost 1980s hospital drama complete with deliberately bad acting and cheap effects.
Ayoade’s absurdity wouldn’t be foreign to Doctor Who. Some of the series’ most enduring stories came from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams. The sci-fi author served as a script editor on the show and wrote the episodes “The Pirate Planet” and “Shada.” Adams understood that big sciency ideas become easier to digest when there is odd humor in the recipe. Darkplace operates within the same mixture of ridiculous and imaginative.
The writer-director has made two films that explore the layers of the human experience. He wrote and directed Submarine, a coming-of-age story about a young man struggling to control the world around him while he tries to direct his life like a movie. He followed that with The Double, a dark comedy about a man played by Jesse Eisenberg who is replaced by a more charismatic version of himself. With these projects in mind, Ayoade comes across as a creator who is interested in using heightened perspectives to explore loneliness, identity, and the human psyche. Doesn’t that sound like a great baseline for a new Doctor Who?
When Peter Capaldi announced his departure from Doctor Who in 2017, The Guardian included Ayoade in its top seven actors to take over the role. At the time they said he checked all the “British eccentric boxes” but questioned if he could land the emotional weight the Doctor would need. Fans disagreed with that assessment. When Whovians were asked who they wanted to see take up the mantle after Jodie Whittaker, a 2021 Metro poll placed Ayoade at the top with 38% of the vote.
For his part, Ayoade has mostly stayed out of any public conversation around the role. When asked about the casting rumors on a podcast in 2012, Ayoade gave a direct answer and said he didn’t even like Doctor Who. Unfortunately, Ayoade’s comedy persona makes his declaration hard to take at face value. The only other time he’s acknowledged the fan campaign was before the announcement of the Thirteenth Doctor when he tweeted, “Can’t wait to find out if I’m Doctor Who! Fingers crossed!“
As the BBC’s competitive tender process gets under way there are reports that former Doctor Who writers have been approached to partner on pitches. One of these companies should smarten up and connect with Ayoade. The themes of isolation and social anxiety that the director has explored could be exactly how to connect the Doctor with an increasingly taxed audience. Unlike past showrunners, Ayoade doesn’t carry the weight of being a Doctor Who superfan. His willingness to explore something other than positivity and nostalgia would be a welcome respite from the grinning Gallifreyan we’ve seen for the past few cycles. The BBC needs a showrunner to chart Doctor Who‘s next regeneration. Fans want an actor who can redefine the character. We think Richard Ayoade can do both.
