Doctor Who travels forward in time ... to Sunday nights

By Yohannes Lowe

and Tristram Saunders

DOCTOR WHO has been moved to Sunday nights after Peter Capaldi complained that the BBC was allowing the sci-fi show to be “pushed around” by Strictly Come Dancing.

The drama will return to BBC One on Oct 7 – the first time in the show’s 55-year history that it has been aired on Sunday nights – with Jodie Whittaker, its new star, replacing Peter Capaldi as the time-travelling Doctor.

The scheduling change follows complaints from Capaldi that the programme was “not being looked after” as he thought the Strictly Come Dancing live shows were being favoured.

Capaldi said: “I think maybe their eye was taken off the ball, or the show was seen as a thing they could just push around. It’s not. It’s a special thing… If you’re going to have a family show, I think you have to build up a little ritual around it – and that ritual usually starts with having it on at the same time.”

Following last year’s hit Taboo –a show that was hoped to “reinvent BBC drama” for Saturday nights – this year’s Saturday dramas, such as Hard Sun, and Troy: Fall of a City, disappointed with low ratings.

Since its re-launch in 2005, Doctor Who has aired on Saturdays, usually in an early evening slot, as an outlier in a schedule dominated by light entertainment programmes.

Its loss from the Saturday schedules may be seen as a blow to the broadcasters’ recent campaign to put drama at the heart of the channel’s Saturday line-up.

Charlotte Moore, director of BBC Content, said: “With Chris Chibnall at the helm and Jodie Whittaker’s arrival as the new Doctor, we are heralding a brand new era for the show and so it feels only right to give it a new home on Sunday nights at the heart of BBC One’s autumn schedule.”

The opening episode, titled The Woman Who Fell to Earth, will follow on from the cliffhanger at the end of the 2017 Christmas special when the Doctor was last seen falling from the Tardis.

Mr Chibnall, the incoming head of the show, has said that this series will include a complex backstory spanning decades, with new monsters as well as the reintroduction of old favourites, like the Daleks.

‘We are heralding a brand new era for the show and so it feels only right to give it a new home on Sunday nights’