Doctor Who: 10 Things You Didn't Know About The Fourteenth Doctor

3. COVID-19 Was Responsible For Tennant’s Return

The COVID-19 pandemic was an awful time but it did have one very unexpected benefit for Doctor Who fans.

The road to the Fourteenth Doctor began two years before he arrived on screen. It all started with the Doctor Who: Lockdown tweetalongs, which brought fans and creatives together to watch old episodes during those pandemic days when we were all stuck indoors.

RTD, David Tennant and Catherine Tate first got involved for a tweetalong of The Stolen Earth & Journey’s End in April 2020. But it was the tweetalong for The Runaway Bride later in the year that changed everything, with the trio continuing the conversation afterwards via text.

As part of this exchange, Tate commented that she’d love to do it all again, with Tennant responding that he’d come back to Doctor Who in a “heartbeat”.

Believing it to be his duty, RTD took the proposal of a Tennant/Tate return to the BBC, and the rest is history, with the BBC then coercing him to come back as showrunner. And thus, RTD2 was born!

It’s one of the few good things to come out of COVID, and a wonderful example of Doctor Who’s past shaping its future. Essentially, people watching old Tennant & Tate stories together actually brought them back. We manifested this!

Now if only we could do the same for Eccleston, Smith and Capaldi… though please let's not have another pandemic shall we?