Everyone is moaning about a female Doctor but Steven Moffat has already done a Doctor Who with Joanna Lumley as the Doctor . Big Finish have also done Doctor Who with a female Doctor. OK, so JL was the Doctor for Comic Relief but she still carried if off successfully. Arabella Weir was incredible as the Doctor.
I don’t want to see the Doctor changing sex but I am not averse to it if it happens.

i dont think a woman doctor would make me watch it id stop watching the doctor in the series from 1963 has allways been a man and should continue to do so it would be too big a change for me to watch

Yeh, I agree, I would never watch the show again if the doctor was a woman….

@Steve

Not sure which of the BF cd’s you were listening to with Arabella Weir as the Dr but in the one I listened to she was – to say the very least – not my fave by a VERY long way ! Awful voice, desparately bad charactorisation too !

I absolutly love Doctor Who, but a woman Doctor will never fit the role like the other Doctor actors did. Nothing will ever stop me from watching the show, but it won’t be something to rave about. If they do use a woman doctor, I hope she will only be a 1 series doctor at the MOST. I don’t think the writters know that this decision will stop Doctor Who from being so popular. I hope that they will change their mind and keep the tradition that has been going since 1963 of a MALE Doctor.

@Prisoner 0 / Right hand side of the Tardis
i couldnt have put it better than u did i totaly agree with all points u made :)

I doubt they’d ever have a female Doctor. For one thing, I think many fans would object to it, and for another the format has been the same since the start of the show in ‘63. Someone described Matt Smith’s casting (before he’d been announced) as “he or she”. It’s a teaser that newspapers bring out every time! Like it says above, I would take it with a very, VERY big pinch of salt. ;)

It certainly would give Doctor Who a new lease on life.
As a show no boy would watch.
Once the main character becomes a woman, it become a – you guessed it – girl’s show.
It can’t be true. I don’t see many boys buying female action figures, and we all know how the BBC love milking people for their money with merchandise.
If it is true… Well, at least Doctor Who made it to 50. That’s impressive. Shame it wont make it to 60.

Okay, this discussion is making me a bit angry. Not with any of you guys, not with the press, but with the idea that a female lead would destroy a well-loved, well-supported show.

When J. K. Rowling was writing Harry Potter, she decided not to put her name simply as Joanne Rowling for fear that it would put boys off. There is a habit of pandering to boys by including male characters or hiding the female aspects of shows/books/films, either by relegating the female characters to secondary roles or by omitting them altogether. The same is not done for girls. We are expected to like Harry Potter, Doctor Who, any other major franchise you can think of, despite the lack of a female lead. Any book not specifically about feminine issues is more likely to have a male lead than a female one, so as not to turn off half the audience. Of course, there are exceptions: The Hunger Games stands out as being topical. But the overall trend is one which we might be tempted to call patriarchy, except that I think it’s patronising boys.

Must we abide by and perpetuate these societal customs that dictate that girls will read/watch a book/show regardless of the gender of its main character, whereas boys must be given a male lead to be interested? It’s a sad state of affairs. Can we not encourage boys to read good books regardless of the lead’s gender? Can we not get them watching shows with women in the lead role? Children’s television has made an admirable move towards this, with shows like Tracy Beaker and of course the Sarah Jane Adventures, but there’s still much more that can be done.

I, for one, maintain my constant opinion: if the writing is good enough, they can do anything. It is canon that Time Lords can regenerate into Time Ladies thanks to The Doctor’s Wife. And so I would welcome a female Doctor, not only as a very interesting character development, but as a sign that gender paradigms in mainstream culture are being shifted to show that yes, girls will watch anything so long as it’s good, but so will boys.

/rant

@TSG
An interesting post, but far too much to reply to, lol

@Tom
I doubt it because I saw this somewhere else and it was posted on the 1st of April sooo, to me this is an April fools joke :)

A female doctor would be an interesting twist, but I’m not sure it would work. Boys would probably stop watching the show, especially if the companion was female aswell as the Doctor

I was watching the older seasons a few weeks ago and noticed how light hearted and fun they were to watch and ever since moffat took over its all serious. But i adapted to the changes but if he makes the doctor a woman then im seriously done with the show, it just wont be the same and its a change that is not needed in and probably will lose alot of viewers.

… I think I wasted my time writing that social analysis.

@TSG
It wasn’t a waste of time TSG, but I personally don’t agree with female rolemodels for men. Again, there’s no way of me going into why because I tend to write a lot, but I will say it’s not a sexist thing.