The wait for the next era of Doctor Who finally has a rough date attached to it. Russell T Davies, the showrunner who brought the series back in 2005 and again in 2023, says the show will be back in production next summer — with a completely new TARDIS team in place.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4's The Media Show, Davies insisted that a new series is definitely happening, even though he is no longer involved in it. "You'll start to see production with a brand-new Doctor, a brand-new companion, summer next year," he said.
Davies speaks as an outsider now. He and production company Bad Wolf exited the series earlier this year, Disney+ stepped away as co-financier after Ncuti Gatwa's two-season run, and the BBC cancelled the planned 2026 Christmas special before putting the show out to competitive tender. The BBC formally launched that tender on September 17, inviting producers to pitch their own vision for the series — with firm requirements that any pitch develop at least one new companion and that the BBC retain all intellectual property in the show. Pitches could also include third-party investment, a nod to the costs that helped sink the Disney partnership.
Whoever wins the tender inherits the biggest unanswered question in British television: who plays the Doctor. Gatwa's Fifteenth Doctor regenerated into Billie Piper's Rose Tyler at the end of the last series, but the BBC has never confirmed that Piper is taking over the role. Davies has previously said that no actor was ever approached to play the next Doctor, and that the cancelled Christmas special was never written — which leaves the casting, like the production contract, entirely open.
The interview also pulled Davies into the BBC's running AI row. Director-general Matt Brittin, who joined the BBC this year after a career at Google, told a Royal Television Society conference in September that someone had sent him a fully AI-generated, 50-minute episode of Doctor Who and that it was "pretty good," though he added it was not going to replace humans. The remark drew instant criticism, and Brittin later told staff he had "got into trouble" over it, stressing, "I want to be really clear: Humans are leading, and I believe in human creativity, enhanced by whatever tools."
Davies was not impressed. "That's a clumsy thing to say in an industry where he's got writers and artists and it specifically affects people, they're the first to take the blow," he said, adding that Brittin "hasn't worked in television for that long and might not be so fruity with an opinion in future." He joked that his own inbox "went ping ping ping ping ping, so God knows what his was like."
On the wider use of AI in writing, Davies said he has heard of writers using AI prompts to produce first drafts and finds it shocking. "What are you paid for otherwise? What are you there to do?" he asked. He does not use the technology on his own scripts, but he worries it will start to replace writers — and suspects that in some cases it already has.
For now, the show's only confirmed screen future is a separate animated Doctor Who series for CBeebies, already in production. The flagship series' next era belongs to whoever wins the tender — but if Davies is right, cameras will be rolling on it, with a brand-new Doctor and companion, next summer.
