6 Things About... Who?

1. The interesting thing is that one of the main comments that's been thrown around about Matt Smith – more so than 'blimey, he looks just like the bloke who played Adam in one of Torchwood's more competent episodes, if you ignore that godawful bit where Cap'n Jack has to act like a confessional father-figure to the most whiningly banal "precious memories" that the team can come up with' – is that he's "an unknown". It wasn't so long ago that people were complaining that Christopher Eccleston was too well-known, that the new Doctor should be an unknown, just like Tom Baker and Sylvester McCoy and... well, no-one else at all, actually (William Hartnell was famous from The Army Game and the very first Carry On film, Troughton was in numerous TV productions and Hammer films, Pertwee was a huge star - albeit on the radio - from The Navy Lark, Davison was a massive TV name after his stint in All Creatures Great And Small, Colin Baker's role as Paul Merroney in The Brothers got him voted as TV Baddie of the Year in some tabloid or other, and most people knew who Paul McGann was even if they didn't know from where). Now, the key surprise - apart from the obvious 'bloody hell, he's eight' - is that they've cast someone who's... not unknown, exactly, but certainly not a name most people remember. Doctor Who has moved so much in the TV landscape that picking a not-that-famous actor has become subversive by definition. The programme is now seen as belonging in the same landscape as Strictly Come Dancing and Ant and Dec, and you wouldn't replace Dec with – say – Evan from Teachers. So this, is immediately, something of a good thing. Whatever the motivation behind the casting is, it isn't due to publicity and casting a name and all that malarkey. That can only be a good thing, and let's face it, they could have gone and cast David Walliams. Things could have been worse.

2. The age is an issue, obviously. Now, the Doctors have tended to get younger anyway, and there's an obvious reason - if the character is going to literally be reborn, he should get younger. This isn't a nit-picky SF objection, it's just that Peter Davison 'regenerating' into Jon Pertwee would have seemed bloody stupid. One of the benefits of casting an older actor would simply be to get away from the Doctor as a sex-object who all the companions want to get off with, and getting away from this idea of the Doctor as being God and Father Christmas and Ooh What a Dreamboat all rolled into one. So instead they cast a 25 year-old, and... well, the "endlessly perfect" idea just doesn't seem viable now. Matt Smith isn't going to seem all-powerful and always in control and inevitably victorious, because he looks like he might go into a sulk at any minute. In many ways, this is a bit like casting Peter Davison; after years of a practically invulnerable Doctor, who we never seriously believed was going to lose, we have someone who's delicate and sulky and uncertain. As someone who's never been fond of people declaring what the Doctor should be, and welcomes any attempt to mix the formula up a bit, I'm intrigued enough.

3. Let's be fair, though; it's not like we went and did anything really amazing, like getting Andy Serkis. I saw Smith in about half of The Ruby and the Smoke (it was kind of boring, so I went and did something else instead), and I even remember him from Party Animals. He's already been characterised as Tennant-lite, and certainly they look rather similar. For all that, though, there was something... slippery about him in both roles. This isn't someone who you automatically trust, this is someone who looks like he might let you down at any minute. Party Animals was a horrible, horrible programme, but what Smith did was turn in a performance where you never quite knew which way he was going to jump, and you never knew where his moral compass pointed. So the casting isn't bad, it's just rather... uninteresting. Had they gone and hired Robert Carlysle (oh god, if only), or Max Beesely, or Chiwetel Ejiofor (and there's no way in the world I've spelled that right), I would have been genuinely uncertain how they were going to play it. Part of what made Paterson Joseph an interesting option was that he generally plays self-obsessed or emotionally uninvolved characters, and I couldn't see him in the role. In much the same way, before I saw Christopher Eccleston being the Doctor, I couldn't tell how you how the hell he was going to approach the part (I had a notion it would be like a softer and nicer version of his army officer in 28 Days Later, just because he played it with a posh English accent). But already I can visualise Smith as being a slightly less omnipotent version of David Tennant, and that can't be a good thing.

4.Let's acknowledge something here; anything that Doctor Who has just done will, in the mind of fans – even me – probably be heralding the imminent destruction of the programme. This is related to the fact that all new Doctor Who is, by definition, rubbish. It remains rubbish for a minimum period of six years, after which it's re-evaluated in comparison with the current output, which is – of course – rubbish. The only things which largely bucked this trend were the 1996 telemovie and Eccleston's first series, even though one of those wasn't any good at all and both of them had their share of detractors. We were so damn grateful to have the boy on television that we didn't really feel the need to be mean-spirited; whereas since then we've got cocky, expecting everything to be as good as the Eccleston series and criticising everything that diverges from it in any way. I've previously thought that The Runaway Bride indicated that the series had thoroughly run out of ideas, before Smith and Jones showed up and prove me wrong; I was prepared to give up on the show entirely after The Unicorn and the Wasp, so Silence in the Library was very well-timed. The point is that I'm already thinking up negatives about Matt Smith before I've seen him in the role, but there's a point worth remembering; everyone wants to be Doctor Who these days, and if Matt Smith was better than everyone else... well, we can't be looking at a Bonnie Langford-type disaster. The only truly disastrous piece of Doctor Who casting was Colin Baker, because he was cast at a time when Doctor Who still had something approaching credibility – and many of the subsequent problems weren't really Baker's fault. Sylvester McCoy wasn't the greatest actor in the world (although nowhere near as poor as he's supposed to have been), but at that point they probably only had six applicants anyway. So we can safely assume that Smith is going to be at least half-decent, the only question is whether he'll be half-interesting. The other thing worth remembering is that Steven Moffatt isn't just a massive fan of Peter Davison's Doctor, he understands why Davison's Doctor works; so it's interesting, and hopeful, that he's cast someone who could be seen as a Davison-analogue.

5. Since you're asking: Tom Baker; Eccleston; Davison; Tennant; Troughton; McGann; Hartnell; Pertwee; McCoy; Colin Baker. There are fair-sized gaps from 2 to 3, and from 3 to 4, and there's something of a gulf between 8 and 9. But I like all of them except Colin Baker's Doctor, which tells you something; namely, Doctor Who isn't as difficult a part as people think it is. It's obvious to everyone that screen presence is a prerequisite – obvious to everyone except John Nathan Turner, anyway – and charisma doesn't hurt, although the two are pretty close anyway. Yet actor after actor has said the most challenging thing about the role is reciting huge amounts of technobabble with conviction, and what sets Tom Baker apart from the others is his ability to hide bad writing (Eccleston didn't have much bad writing to hide, and while both Davison and Tennant can make bad scripts watchable, they don't disguise how bad the script is). It's not that difficult for an actor to look haunted 'n' lonely every now and then, and one of the problems with Tennant was that he made it way too easy for the writers. Give the boy technobabble, and he makes the scene watchable by talking unfeasibly fast. Give him half-acceptable physical comedy, and he'll play it to the hilt. Ask him to eulogise the Brilliant qualities of humans, and he'll look so delighted that you just want to tousle his head and buy him a Gummy Bear. Ask him to look moody, and he'll do that thing where he stares magnetic at something just out of line with the camera, about seven hundred miles in the distance. In other words, having an actor as easily likeable as Tennant wasn't such a good thing. Eccleston's Doctor was different. He was – is – a marvellously forceful actor, but you can't see Eccleston doing that radiation-in-my-shoe scene from Smith and Jones in a blue fit. Point being, the actors had to give him things that were better. This was partly character – it's more difficult to make a character likeable if he tells you that humans are stupid apes, rather than going on about how great they are – but Eccleston's bearing was part of who that character was.

6. I seem to have used the words 'easy' and 'difficult' a lot here, and in the reverse order to the way they're usually written. It's got precedent. Way back in 1969, you'll remember that companion Liz Shaw was written out of the series, to be replaced by the bright 'n' bubbly Jo Grant. The problem with Liz Shaw was that she was a brilliant scientist, and therefore made it difficult for the writers to explain scientific ideas; Jo Grant was something of an airhead, so the Doctor had to explain everything in simple terms. Obviously, when Jo came in, the quality of the programme dropped overnight. Give writers an easy option, and they'll use it; give them a choice between "interesting but challenging" and "dull but straightforward" and they'll go for the second option every time. Eccleston was spikey and unpredictable and rude and difficult; Tennant was easy, way too easy. Matt Smith might suffer from not being David Morrissey - teasing us all with Morrissey was pretty foolish, given the circumstances - and he isn't dissimilar to Tennant, but he's younger and kind of weird-looking. From the kick-off, that makes the writers' job that bit harder. So that, at least, might at least take us somewhere slightly more challenging.