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

Bringing back Tennant as a new incarnation was a controversial move – but it wasn’t the first time a returning Doctor had been mooted.

Back in the 1980s, Doctor Who founding father Sydney Newman actually suggested bringing back Patrick Troughton to replace Colin Baker. And to be fair, there was some logic to the idea.

At the time, Troughton was the oldest surviving Doctor actor, following William Hartnell’s death in 1975. He’d also returned to the show already on three separate occasions, appearing in The Three Doctors, The Five Doctors and The Two Doctors.

In true 60th style, Troughton’s return would only have been temporary, with Newman making an equally radical (for the time) proposal for the next Doctor... that they should be female.

Of course, it would be many years before either suggestion was taken seriously. However, the Fourteenth Doctor foreshadowing continued in Doctor Who’s 1990s Wilderness Years, when thanks to a series of returns and public appearances, Jon Pertwee essentially became the face of the show again.

And lest we forget, even before the 60th Tennant had reappeared in various expanded media projects such as headlining Time Lord Victorious, meeting past Doctors in Big Finish’s Out of Time series, and constantly gatecrashing Thirteenth Doctor video games and comics.

All of which is to say that, in hindsight, we really should have seen this one coming.