WHO GOES THERE?
MARION MCMULLEN looks at some of the Time Lord’s famous regenerations
Doctor Who star Jodie Whittaker is preparing to regenerate with Sex Education actor Ncuti Gatwa stepping in to play the famous Time Lord. He will be the 14th actor to play the part.
2 William Hartnell was the first actor to play Doctor Who in 1963 and the first to encounter both the Daleks and the Cybermen. It was the toll of defeating the Cybermen in the episode The Tenth Planet that caused his Time Lord to collapse and begin to regenerate.
3 Patrick Troughton was seen morphing into the second Doctor. Only a few minutes of the episode remain, but the surviving footage shows the first regeneration.
Patrick played the role until 1969 and featured in 119 episodes saying: “I believed totally in the possibilities implied in the series. I never thought of it as fantasy. Far from it.”
4 The third Doctor, Jon Pertwee, was seen regenerating into Tom Baker in 1974 episode Planet Of The Spiders after he stumbled out of the Tardis and collapsed in front of Brigadier Lethbridge-stewart and Sarah Jane Smith. Tom portrayed the Time Lord for seven consecutive seasons – the longest any actor has played the role.
5 The regeneration seemed to go wrong when Peter Davison said goodbye to the BBC sci-fi favourite in 1984 with Colin Baker taking over the role. The Time Lord fell to the floor crying out that it felt different this time. Colin Baker went on to play the sixth Doctor until 1986.
6 Sylvester Mccoy’s, below, regeneration was seen in the 1996 Doctor Who movie when Paul Mcgann took over the role. He woke to find himself in the morgue of an American hospital. Paul reprised the role in the 2013 mini-episode The Night Of The Doctor, which depicted the Eighth Doctor’s final adventure and his regeneration into the War Doctor (played by John Hurt).
7 Christopher Eccleston’s regeneration into David Tennant took place aboard the TARDIS in 2005. The new Doctor wanted to know if he had ginger hair. David met his wife, Georgia – the daughter of fifth Doctor Who Peter Davison – when she appeared as the Time Lord’s cloned daughter in the 2008 episode The Doctor’s Daughter.
Saving the world came at a cost and David Tennant’s Doctor said: “I don’t want to go” as he regenerated into Matt Smith in 2010. Matt’s Doctor wailed “And still not ginger” as he took stock of his new look.
9 The Thick Of It star Peter Capaldi, became the 12th Doctor in 2013. A lifelong fan of the series, he previously played Lobus Caecilius in the 2008 episode The Fires Of Pompeii.
10 Jodie Whittaker regenerated as the Doctor aboard the TARDIS in 2017 and her first words were “Oh, brilliant”, just before explosions blasted all around her and she was ejected into space. The Broadchurch star made TV history as the first woman to take on the role.