10 Times Doctor Who Appeared Where You'd Least Expect

8. In A Crossover With Benedict Cumberbatch's Sherlock

Doctor Who Matt Smith Sherlock Benedict Cumberbatch WhoLock
BBC/YouTube: John Smith

For the duration of the Steven Moffat era, there were regular, semi-serious shouts for him to do a crossover with Doctor Who and Sherlock, two massive shows he was in charge of between 2010 and 2017.

Moffat was asked about this potential crossover on a yearly basis, with his answers ranging from "I'm fine with it", to "it's not going to happen", and as you'd expect, his flip-flopping didn't exactly put the matter to bed.

As time went on, it started to feel like the crossover was never going to happen, so it was a welcome surprise when one extremely talented Doctor Who fan took matters into his own hands. If you want something done... do it yourself.

A few weeks before the Eleventh Doctor's regeneration in 2013, Ben Pickles - or, as most fans will know him as, John Smith VFX - uploaded a video called WhoLock to his YouTube channel, which saw the Eleventh Doctor meet Benedict Cumberbatch's Sherlock through the magic of visual effects and clever editing.

Though obviously not as polished (or as long) as fans would've wanted from an official crossover, it did scratch that itch, and its popularity helped Pickles get a job on Doctor Who as a VFX artist.

Among a host of other contributions, he created the trippy Series 11 title sequence in 2018, and he did a smashing job, we must say.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!