Doctor Who: 20 Things You Didn't Know About The Ninth Doctor

6. Eccleston Was Tricked Into A Ninth Doctor Reference

Christopher Eccleston Heroes
NBC

Post-Doctor Who, Eccleston played the role of Claude Rains in the popular sci-fi series Heroes, whose showrunners were big fans of the Whoniverse.

In his memoir I Love The Bones Of You: My Father And The Making Of Me, Eccleston states that the writers and executives of Heroes wanted him to dress in a similar way to Tom Baker's Fourth Doctor, requesting that he wear a scarf.

Not wanting to be so blatantly self-referential, Eccleston refused, but the writers did get him to make a nod to Doctor Who when they put the word "Fantastic!" in the script for one of his episodes, something that Eccleston failed to register:

"They inserted the line ‘Fantastic!’ into the script. I didn’t realise until too late that it was a trope from Doctor Who."

Those sneaky, sneaky showrunners.

Contributor
Contributor

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!