Doctor Who: 10 Actors Who Could Or Should Have Been The Doctor

4. The Eighth Doctor - David Troughton

Although televisual Doctor Who ceased production in 1989, the Seventh Doctor continued to appear in the New Adventures range of novels. By the mid-90s, however, the editors at Virgin Publishing were running out of places to take the character and decided that a regeneration might shake things up for the better. And rather than inventing an entirely fictional Eighth Doctor, he would be based on an existing actor - Patrick Troughton€™s son, David. David Troughton had already appeared in Doctor Who in The Curse of Peladon but by time the regeneration was proposed, he was well-respected in his own right with a distinct presence from his father. Tall and heavily built, the proposed concept for his Eighth Doctor - as remembered by writer Paul Cornell - was that he would be €˜square jawed and strong€™ but never entirely comfortable about it. The key word was €˜fragile€™ and he would have been a deeply contradictory character. The idea got as far as a photo shoot with Troughton clad in a thick Arctic explorer jacket - before the BBC quashed it. They were already planning their own Eighth Doctor and had an exhaustive list of potential actors, two of whom would go on to play the Doctor years later. It€™s a shame that this alternative Doctor never saw the light of day but equally, he would have lacked the legitimacy that Paul McGann, as a televisual incarnation, immediately possessed. It€™s an intriguing idea, though, and one that might well have worked had Virgin been given the chance.