10 Most British Doctor Who Moments
6. The Weather Is Always Terrible
Anyone who lives in the UK knows that good weather is a rarity, even in the spring and summer months.
This is something Doctor Who has always acknowledged (sometimes by choice, sometimes not).
Examples of rain featuring as a plot point include the Judoon’s H₂O scoop in Smith and Jones (which feels like a gag about how it can be raining at one end of a street and completely dry at the other), the “same rain” in Blink, and the clouds of Cyber-pollen in Death in Heaven.
On a similar theme, there’s the joke about Amy being “dressed for Rio” in The Hungry Earth… and therefore totally unprepared for rural Wales.
Then there are the times when bad weather has unintentionally made it into the show – for instance the Doctor and Martha’s reunion at the end of The Family of Blood, when you can literally hear the rain falling. And rain is clearly visible in one of the forest scenes of Demons of the Punjab, with Jodie Whittaker’s curlier hair being the main giveaway.
Elsewhere, wet weather on location forced Steven Moffat to make two amendments to the script for The Time of Angel/Flesh and Stone (River noting that there’s a “chance of rain” on Alfava Metraxis before exiting the TARDIS, and the Doctor explaining that there’s authentic rain in the Byzantium forest).
Rule one: the weather forecast lies.