The Doctor Who Parodies That Were Actually Auditions

Science fiction is very serious business, dealing with philosophical and social themes in ways that other genres simply can’t, asking questions about humanity and the nature of existence. Unfortunately, while science fiction is very, very serious, sometimes people have felt the need to make fun of it, even creating elaborate parodies. Recently we had a look at the complicated relationship Star Trek has had with the various works that have parodied it.

But perhaps even more than Star Trek, the biggest target for folks looking for something the spoof has been Doctor Who. We don’t know why, all those sets looked really convincing to us, and the special effects are pretty impressive if you think about the budget constraints they’re working under.

There is one reason though. One dark secret nestled in the heart of everyone who has ever decided to put on a comically long scarf and shake the screwdriver at some bins “for a laugh.”

Every parody is secretly a completely sincere audition.

And an even darker secret? Sometimes they work.

The Lenny Henry Show

Lenny Henry’s Doctor Who sketch in 1985 features a Doctor that wears a leather jacket and has a companion who fancies him, and sees him battling Cybermen led by an evil Cyber Thatcher in the far off year of 2010. While the leather jacket, Black Time Lord and implied TARDIS hanky panky are all extremely Nu Who, the Thatcher-parody Cybermen could be straight out of Andrew Cartmel’s era on the show.

As parodies-that-are-secretly-auditions go, Henry hits all the right notes. He delivers technobabble, does weird stuff to the TARDIS console, and of course, runs up and down lots of corridors.

And the work pays off, eventually.

A mere 35 years after his Doctor Who sketch, Henry appeared in the show itself as the villain Daniel Barton in the story “Spyfall.”

Every Episode of Popular Time Travel Show

The comedian Alasdair Beckett-King is best known for his online sketches, including Every Single Scandinavian Crime Drama, Every Mind-Bending TV Show, and eventually, inevitably, Every Episode of Popular Time Travel Show.

“I was quite nervous about doing Doctor Who because I don’t have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the lore,” Beckett-King says. “Usually I write sketches on my own, but for that one I recruited my comedy pals Declan Kennedy and Angus Dunican, who gave me lots of gags. I think I was most excited about spoofing the new-Who era visual effects, and doing a dodgy impression of Dan Starkey’s Strax.”

The thing is, the way a comedian approaches playing a parodic version of the Doctor is not all that different from an actor taking on the lead role in the show. In an interview with the Radio Times, Tom Baker said of playing the Doctor, “It’s just me trying to be amusing, or trying to be heroic in an amusing way.”

Meanwhile, when Beckett-King performed his sketch he says, “I suppose I did end up playing the Doctor as quite like myself, more due to a lack of acting range than a deliberate attempt to place my stamp on the character.”

He adds, “I had no choice about doing a generic Doctor, because I can’t really do Tom Baker, except occasionally when aiming for Patrick Stewart and missing. But I think veering between the generic and the specific is part of the fun of a parody: trying to do a supermarket own-brand version of the thing you’re spoofing and still hit all the familiar notes: a scarf, a jaunty hat, a vaguely professorial insouciance.”

Not long after Every Episode of Popular Time Travel Show went out, Beckett-King found himself in the BBC produced audio series Doctor Who: Redacted.

“Who says MANIFESTING doesn’t work? Me, I say that,” Beckett-King laughs. “I don’t know why I was cast, but I do wonder if the sketch was part of the reason. I played an alien foetus nicknamed ‘The Floater’ who was trying to kill the Doctor, in spite of being an interdimensional turd in a jar. I respect the hustle. It was a comic character, but I tried to approach it the way I generally approach spoofs – by playing it straight as I could.”

Inspector Spacetime

Inspector Spacetime started off as a one-note gag in the sitcom Community (created by Dan Harmon of Rick and Morty, if you want to talk “stuff that really wishes it were Doctor Who”). The character Abed becomes bereft at learning that one of his new favourite shows dies after six episodes (it’s British), only to then discover “Inspector Spacetime,” a series about a detective who travels through space and time in a phone box fighting robotic bins called “Blorgons.”

Nobody from the show-within-a-show has appeared on Doctor Who (yet), but Abed does meet an Inspector Spacetime superfan played by Matt Lucas … who goes on to become the Doctor’s companion Nardole.

Doctor Who Night

Let’s talk about Doctor Who’s “Wilderness Years,” the 16 years between Sylvester McCoy’s final story, “Survival” and Christopher Eccleston grabbing Billie Piper’s hand at the start of “Rose,” with only Paul McGann’s movie in between.

Why should we talk about lengthy Doctor Who hiatuses? No reason. No reason at all. Because obviously Doctor Who is alive and well and we’ve got a UNIT miniseries coming out in 2026 and producer Jane Tranter has said “it will keep going, one way or another” even if Russell T Davies is off writing for Channel 4 and searching Google’s News tab for “Doctor Who” mostly brings up articles about medical malpractice… we’re fine! We are fine.

Anyway, during the last (sorry, I mean, only) Wilderness Years, a brief crack of light in the darkness was BBC 2’s “Doctor Who Night” on November 13, 1999. It featured documentaries, introductory segments filmed by an ambiguously-in-character Tom Baker (cue a slew of fan theories that he’s the “Curator” from “The Day of the Doctor”), a disappointing paucity of actual Doctor Who episodes (they only managed the final episode of “The Daleks” and a rerun of Paul McGann’s move), and a selection of short sketches starring Mark Gatiss and David Walliams.

Those sketches included “The Pitch of Fear,” which imagined Sydney Newman pitching Doctor Who as a show that would run for 26 years, “The Kidnappers,” the weakest of the three that saw Gatiss and Walliams playing obsessive fans who’ve kidnapped Peter Davison, and finally, “The Web of Caves.” This is the only outright Who parody of the three, and is obviously the one where they’re having the most fun. It’s shot in black and white, in a Quarry, with Walliams as an ineffectual Doctor Who baddie. Gatiss plays the Doctor, again, not as an outright impression of any one incarnation, but as an audition for his own spin. When he steps out of the TARDIS and says, “Where have you bought me to this time old girl,” he’s not performing a sketch, he’s living out a fantasy.

And sure enough, when Doctor Who came back, Mark Gatiss was involved, writing several episodes of the show and appearing in it as Professor Richard Lazarus of “The Lazarus Experiment,” while Walliams would later turn up as the cowardly, oppressor appeasing alien Gibbis in “The God Complex.”

Curse of the Fatal Death

1999 was in many ways a highpoint of the Wilderness Years. In addition to getting “Doctor Who Night,” fans were also treated to a Comic Relief sketch “The Curse of the Fatal Death.” Once again, the Doctor here is not an impression of an existing Doctor, but a new “Ninth” Doctor, played by Rowan Atkinson with just a tiny whiff of Blackadder. It has plenty of gags, but those gags come with production values at the more polished end of the classic series, and real sense that everyone involved just really wanted to make some Doctor Who.

“I’m pretty certain the first Who I ever saw was the Comic Relief parody with Rowan Atkinson, and based on that I wanted to grow up to wear tank tops and be Doctor Who,” Beckett-King recalls. “I still think of the Doctor as ‘Doctor Who’, to the irritation of Whovians everywhere. So, I came to Who through parody, like I came to Citizen Kane via The Simpsons.”

As far as future CV performance goes, Curse of the Fatal Death may be the most successful Doctor Who parody ever. The Doctor dies and regenerates multiple times over the course of the episode, and among others he turns into Hugh Grant, who got offered the role for real when Russell T Davies revived the show.

Grant has said, “I was offered the role of the Doctor a few years back and was highly flattered. The danger with those things is that it’s only when you see it on screen that you think, ‘Damn, that was good, why did I say no?’ But then, knowing me, I’d probably make a mess of it.”

Another incarnation, Richard E. Grant would later go on to play the Ninth Doctor in the animated revival “Scream of the Shalka,” although some enjoyed that more than others. Russell T Davies has told Doctor Who Magazine, “I thought he was terrible. I thought he took the money and ran, to be honest. It was a lazy performance. He was never on our list to play the Doctor.”

Yet Richard E. Grant returned to play the Great Intelligence in season seven, and when the episode “Rogue,” under Davies’ second tenure as showrunner, revealed all the Doctor’s past incarnations, Richard E. Grant’s face was in there.

But the big success story from “Curse of the Fatal Death” was the writer, one Steven Moffat, and here’s where things get weird. Because obviously Moffat eventually went on to write some of the best beloved episodes of the Doctor Who 2005 revival, and then became the showrunner himself.

And if you watch Curse of the Fatal Death having seen Moffat’s series of Doctor Who, you start to notice certain things. Like that the Doctor faces the Master and the Daleks at the same time, which the Doctor wouldn’t actually do at the same time until “The Magician’s Apprentice /The Witch’s Familiar,” written by Moffat. Both even feature a joke about why the Daleks would have chairs.

And the plotline features a lot of characters going backwards in time to set events up that they can take advantage of in the present, something fans have come to know as “Timey Wimey,” a phrase coined by, and used to describe, a lot of Steven Moffat’s Doctor Who plots.

In “The Curse of the Fatal Death,” The Doctor uses up their final regenerations, and then the universe, unable to do without him, allows the Doctor to regenerate into a Thirteenth, female incarnation (Joanna Lumley). Under Steven Moffat, the Doctor would use up their final regenerations, then realising the universe is unable to do without him, Gallifrey allows the Doctor to regenerate into a Thirteenth, female incarnation (Jodie Whittaker). “The Curse of the Fatal Death” isn’t just an audition for writing Doctor Who, it’s practically a speed run of everything Moffat wanted to do with it.