Doctor Who: 10 Most Cringeworthy Moments Of The Revived Series So Far
5. The Doctor Speechifies (Various)
The Big Finish audio Jubilee (written by the lovely writer of Dalek, Rob Shearman) featured a campy American-style trailer imagining the Doctor as the sort to do rousing "rally the troops" style speeches and it worked well because it was so silly. It also worked because the Doctor wasn't known as someone given to speeches. Sure, there was the Fourth Doctor's beautiful tribute to humanity in Ark In Space and the Seventh Doctor could occasionally trot out a few good monologues too, but primarily the character just wasn't known for that sort of thing.
The first time it really happens is at the end of Bad Wolf when the Ninth Doctor vows to save Rose Tyler before blowing the Daleks out of the sky. There, it works really well. He even does a decent one in the next episode, though he forgets for a moment that it's the Draconians who call him The Oncoming Storm, not the Daleks. (Honestly, did no one read The New Adventures!?) Then the Doctor apparently gets hit with the "I am awesome" stick during his regeneration and starts giving speeches like this at the drop of a hat, even when everything in the script suggests that his mostly hostile listeners should just go ahead and shoot him while he's babbling away. (This trope gets turned up to 11 with the Eleventh Doctor, ironically enough, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.)
The Tenth Doctor loves the sound of his own voice and this is no more apparent than in The Christmas Invasion and The Girl in the Fireplace, just to name the two worst offenders. Rather than doing what any sensible alien invaders would do and surging forward to secure the interloper, the Sycorax simply take the Doctor's curt "I'm busy!" as a command to behave themselves while he babbles about his regeneration and who he may or may not be for the next five minutes. Given that they could cut him down at any moment during that speech, Harriet Jones was probably right - they really did deserve to die. If they had killed him, they'd still be alive and viewers would have been spared some terrible cringing.
The same goes for The Girl in the Fireplace, too, and for far less reason than to give Rose something to be pissed off about. Just as she's trying to repeat the whole "Ongoing Storm" lie to the clockwork androids menacing her and Mickey, the Doctor shows up apparently drunk, singing and berating the androids for being "thick" (mind you, it's a funny speech) before proving how thick they actually are by immobilising them. He needn't have bothered, though. They were pretty damned immobilised just from listening to him. They must've been programmed using ALGOL to be that easily brought down by speech (thank you, Zoe Herriot).