“Did somebody Call the Doctor?” 
(I’m so, so sorry)
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Her brother-in-law is Paul McGann! She’s married to Stephen McGann.
She could write a multi-Doctor epic featuring all the McGann’s as different multiverse versions of 8!
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He’s also in Call The Midwife as, ironically, the doctor, which I think is hilarious. He’s also just fantastic, and weirdly, I think could make a great Valeyard casting.
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The War Between the Land and the Sea may be held back slightly to mitigate breaking the No More Gap Years promise RTD made a while back. Not Doctor Who but Who-adjacent enough that if you squint he can say he delivered.
I do hear things occasionally from people on the inside and some of it’s worrying but nothing is confirmed until it’s confirmed, no matter how much I trust the person telling me a plausible thing. Unless they’re at the top then it’s just recycled gossip as far as I’m concerned.
The way I look at it, the show’s short term future immediately after the Disney deal ends (which I personally believe is coming quite soon) sort of depends on Bad Wolf and the BBC. The show can obviously continue afterwards but where I think it could lead to a hiatus is if RTD himself is demotivated by the Disney deal falling apart (seeing it as backward step for example), with no obvious showrunner for the BBC to install if he decides to step down again. But even that’s worst case scenario because if we take him at his word then he’s said he’d be quite happy to continue making it without Disney.
And as has been said, the BBC won’t want to do without it if they can help it. So I’m not going to run around and scream that the sky is falling. But I do think it isn’t going as well with Disney as either party would have liked. I’m not necessarily talking viewing figures either, they tend to be weaponised a lot by people with agendas and wilfully misconstrued to prove said agenda. They may factor into it (it’s a running ‘joke’ at this point how many shows are being cancelled by streamers at the moment because they’ve overspent and not got the return they wanted). No, I mean more in working relationship.
But again, I know nothing and quite happily await concrete confirmation of the actual score down the line. The BBC will want to keep making Doctor Who. Disney (in my opinion) likely won’t after Season 2, maybe Season 3. Russell may or may not depending on factors we may never know, in which case like I say it could depend on who takes over.
Whatever happens happens and even if it goes quiet for a bit I can’t see any potential (and I stress potential) hiatus being as long as the last one. 2005 does show I think that we will have Doctor Who as a major British cultural export for a long time yet. It just may need recalibrating occasionally is all.
EDITED TO ADD - I think The War Between the Land and the Sea being held back to paper over a gap year is because Disney are waiting to see about Season 2 before firmly green lighting Season 3. Best case scenario of Disney being on board for Season 3 is still apparently contingent on Season 2 so even if all is rosy there’ll still be more of a delay between 2 and 3 than between 1 and 2.
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I don’t honestly think the Disney Plus deal is at risk of stopping so soon. I hear it’s doing decently well on the platform, and the waiting to confirm a third season until the second is out is pretty standard from how I hear D+ does things.
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My hot take. I love Doctor Who but at the end of the day it is just a TV show. It has a rich history & legacy but nothing lasts forever. It’s inevitable that it will stop one day.
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Oh, all things come to an end, and Doctor Who on TV will eventually, but this thing fans always do where they think Doctor Who is always on the brink of cancellation is perhaps a swing too far the other way. (Not necessarily what Stokes is doing to be clear.)
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When I was watching Doctor Who as a youngster, long before I’d come across the term ‘canon,’ I did have a sense of what was, for want of a better word, ‘real’ Doctor Who, and what was not. Basically that sense amounted to what was on the telly was ‘real’ (canon) and the stuff I was reading in TV Comic and the annuals wasn’t… not even if I really, really enjoyed the non-canon stuff. And that’s the point, it didn’t make the non-canon material any less enjoyable.
Being autistic myself, I find myself unable to entirely throw out the idea of canon in Doctor Who. So, privately, in my own head, I don’t just enjoy the Whoniverse, I enjoy a Multi-Whoniverse. If something in a Doctor Who novel, comic or Big Finish story is contradicted by something on TV, then it’s because they happened in a parallel timeline/universe. To steal from Star Trek, the television series is the ‘Prime’ universe (or Whoniverse) and Big Finish is the Kelvin universe. It’s not a perfect workaround but enough so that it works for me. I share in the hope it might help.
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I think my approach is best exemplified by this quote from the Doctor in Camera Obscura:
“What if the ‘real’ timeline is like a musical score, with infinite ornamentations possible? There can’t be a perfectly correct performance of the score, because a score is a guide, not a definition. It opens possibilities rather than closing them off. Why shouldn’t time be like music?”
This leaves room for all adventures as slightly different permutations of a single, highly chaotic, ever-changing history. The Doctor can become a human and fall in love with Joan Redfern in his 7th and 10th incarnations. There can be 3 Atlantises and the Brigadier and co can fight Silurians and Axons in 2 decades at once. The Doctor can be the Timeless Child and the Other and half-human and a full-blooded Time Lord and a human from the 49th century who invented the TARDIS running from Palladian hordes which are also the Enemy all at once. Their mother can be Tecteun and Penelope Gate and the woman from The End of Time all at once. And I frankly find that beautiful, in a way.
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It’s honestly supported in Orphan 55, too.
DOCTOR: Just before you did. Look, I know what you’re thinking, but it’s one possible future. It’s one timeline. You want me to tell you that Earth’s going to be okay? Cos I can’t. In your time, humanity is busy arguing over the washing-up while the house burns down. Unless people face facts and change, catastrophe is coming. But it’s not decided. You know that. The future is not fixed. It depends on billions of decisions, and actions, and people stepping up. Humans. I think you forget how powerful you are. Lives change worlds. People can save planets, or wreck them. That’s the choice. Be the best of humanity. Or…
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Further supported in other EU canon by Galifrey’s past being constantly assailed and the entire timeline of the universe basically being in constant change. Gallifrey and the Time Lords try and enforce order over time, but they simply can’t be 100% successful. So all the changes in the timeline can just be chalked up to that. Is it "A wizard did it"ing the entire problem? Yes, but when your protagonist comes from a nigh-immortal race of god-like alien wizards, I think you can get away with that, stop talking about whether things are canon or not-canon and do what I do, have much more fun trying to make it ALL FIT TOGETHER. There’s a reason AHistory is so good but also so beautifully lunatic - once you transcend the question of “is it canon” there’s a whole broader world.
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While it could probably be its own Thing, I think it’s too related to the Post RTD Idea that I will just post it:
Been seen a lot of People lately who want the Show to be gone for a while. What do you think? Should the Show be taken off the air for a while? And do you think if it does happen, it will come back?
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I am not sure that it will come back if it goes off-air. I think that people romanticise the wilderness years but I don’t think that a second wilderness year will bring anything good to the show. More Doctor Who is not a bad thing.
To me, it sounds more like people who stop listening to a band when it gets popular because it is too mainstream.
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Should it be cancelled? No.
Will it be cancelled? Probably, at some point. No TV show runs forever.
Will it come back? Oh yes. Always. There’s a healthy EU to keep it going and there’s always someone who will think that it’s time for another go.
I don’t think DW is comparable to this. The show is far from being “mainstream”. It might have been back in the Tennant and Smith days, but not today. Mainstream is something that goes beyond the fans and is a constant presence even among casuals. I don’t see or hear DW spoken about outside of fan circles or TV/sci-fi media publications, and hardly even in the latter. It’s not something everyone knows or automatically watches because everyone else does. DW isn’t niche like it used to be, but it also isn’t mainstream. It’s somewhere in between. And that’s partly because it’s sci-fi, which is rarely mainstream. Star Wars comes the closest, I’d say.
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I don’t really want it to be cancelled, I just think it probably eventually will be at some point. Getting more than, say, 3-5 seasons of a show is increasingly difficult.
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I am not saying that it is mainstream it is more the mentality that something is better the more indi it gets.
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That’s because you are in Finland my friend 
Over here in good ole Blighty, Doctor Who is definitely part of the zeitgeist.
If you go into a small building and it seems larger inside, everyone will say “it’s like a TARDIS in here!” and there is no confusion.
People mention Doctor Who or Daleks or something in general speech just as part of conversation.
Most people grew up with it on TV whether they were born in 1963 or 2005!
It’s also on TV on Christmas Day, the one day of the year when everyone parks their bums in front of the telly and most will put BBC One on. Even if they don’t watch it, they will see the constant adverts for it on our main channel, and the BBC have done huge advertising campaigns in the past. They once replaced the announcer on the London Underground who says “mind the gap” with Nicholas Briggs’ Dalek voice.
So whilst actually watching the show may not be mainstream, in the UK it’s a part of our DNA!
I don’t want it to be cancelled, I think that would be a terrible thing, but I 100% believe it would come back.
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What Doctor Who would come back as might be an entirely different question…
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This attitude really irritates me because inevitably it comes from people dissatisfied with whatever the current era is. It is usually framed as wanting the show to be given time to ‘course correct’ or a chance for the creatives to breathe and come back with something amazing but, ultimately, it more or less boils down to ‘I don’t want it so no one else gets to have it either’. It’s childish and selfish.
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Doesn’t make a lick of sense either, cancellation is not a prerequisite to a change of direction and getting new blood in. There’s a lot of romanticism of the Wilderness Years from people who weren’t there. I wasn’t there either, but I’ve seen fans fret over the gap years, yet they think they’d take 16+ just fine, with no guarantee of any return?
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