The Daily Telegraph is keen to pick up on the story that Sydney Newman, arguably the closest thing Doctor Who has had to a creator, was asked in the middle of its “cancellation crisis” in 1986 to give his thoughts to the BBC brass on how to take the show forward. Newman suggested all sorts of things but the most interesting was that, after having Patrick Troughton play the character initially, he wanted the Doctor to regenerate into a woman. Cue lots of reaction which is no doubt why the Telegraph published it.

What’s fascinating is that the Telegraph treats this as though it were recently unearthed information. Certainly it came back to light due to a documentary on the series final years on the Time and the Rani DVD, but Newman’s memo to Michael Grade has been known for almost 15 years. Indeed, the entire memo was republished in David Howe, Mark Stammers and Steven James Walker’s 1996 book Doctor Who: The Eighties. Indeed, they published it in complete unexpurgated form, which included not only the salacious bit about making the Doctor a woman, but the rather dull bits about how he’d make Doctor Who an educational series again like he originally set it up to be in 1963. (I discuss this further in my essay about Newman in Time, Unincorporated, volume 2 to make a brief plug).

Between this and the last February’s Happiness Patrol non-controversy, it’s a sign of how popular the show has become that even old news has become publishable news.