Doctor Who Series 11: 10 Big Questions We Are Asking After 'Rosa'
7. Did The Doctor Really Meet Elvis?
From Puccini to Marilyn Monroe the Doctor has always loved to name drop, and this incarnation is no different. In The Ghost Monument the thirteenth Doctor claimed that the sun glasses she picked up in Sheffield were like the ones she’d received from Audrey Hepburn or Pythagoras. This week she says she gave Elvis a mobile phone, which he then passed on to Sinatra. It’s not always clear, or indeed possible, that the Doctor is always telling the truth.
Elvis has never featured in a televised episode of Doctor Who. The tenth Doctor and Rose were trying to get to see him on the Ed Sullivan show when they ended up in London 1953 instead (The Idiot’s Lantern), so maybe, offscreen, they eventually did.
We do know, however, that the Doctor was pals with Frank Sinatra. The eleventh Doctor even performed a duet with ol’ blue eyes in Hollywood 1953. So whilst the handing over of the phone from Elvis to Sinatra is a bit of script padding at least we have reason to believe that Sinatra may owe the Doctor a favour.
Sinatra was an active supporter of the civil rights movement, saying as early as 1947 that "We've got a hell of a way to go in this racial situation. As long as most white men think of a Negro as a Negro first and a man second, we're in trouble.” Unless some of the script had to be cut, it’s a surprising omission not to have referenced that fact in some way: Sinatra, unknowingly, playing a huge part in the cause, or maybe the Doctor letting him in on her secret.