Doctor Who: 10 Qualities That Made Peter Capaldi's Doctor Great
3. The Carefree Musician
BBC America have promoted Peter Capaldi’s Twelfth Doctor as the ‘rock and roll’ Doctor, perhaps because in his younger days he played in a band alongside The Late, Late Show host and Doctor Who fan, Craig Ferguson. Troughton had his recorder, McCoy the spoons, and Capaldi his Yamaha SVG 500 electric guitar.
Capaldi recalls first mentioning it as a joke, but to his delight the producers went along with the idea of bringing his real-world guitar skills to the Doctor. Loathe it or love it, the Twelfth Doctor standing on a tank and playing the guitar to a 12th century audience will forever be one of his most iconic images.
Often dismissed as a gimmick, the electric guitar is an important character defining quality. This is a Doctor who uses his music to convey the fact that he doesn’t really give a stuff when it comes to honouring the laws of time as laid down by his people.
But the Twelfth Doctor is not a one trick pony when it comes to his musical tastes and expression, he also uses the guitar to contemplate with the earworm of Clara’s Song (Hell Bent) and to illustrate with a riff on Beethoven’s Fifth (Before the Flood). The guitar is the rule breaker; literally, in the mixing up of musical styles and the breaking of the fourth wall, but also symbolically, when it is used to convey the Doctor’s freedom.