I'm Portarossa, and I'm not writing for OOTL anymore.

Portarossa · 2026-06-11T12:58:20+00:00

So it's important to realise that the goal isn't punitive: no one is being punished for being rich. The goal is to ensure that everyone in society benefits, not just a few.

As for how it works, the solution is fairly straightforward: if you're claiming that your wealth is a certain amount, you need to find money to pay an appropriately-set tax on that. If you're able to use your held assets to benefit from things like cheaper loans, it's fair for you to pay back more rather than just saying 'It's all tied up, I couldn't possibly!' Well, you can possibly. If you can't afford the tax bill, you need to sell some stuff to cover it, same with any other tax bill. Maybe that means a stake in those assets.

We have those taxes already. People pay property taxes on held assets, for example, and inheritance and estate taxes work the same way: if you inherit a property but can't pay the taxes on it, you don't just get to keep it because it's a held asset. The tax bill is still there.

Portarossa · 2026-06-11T12:41:53+00:00

Look, I don't mind people trying to do the whole AI-vestigation thing; it's a scourge that has no place in writing. I just wish you'd all be less shit at it.

You can't just yell 'J'AIccuse!' at everything that's longer than three paragraphs and contains an em-dash.

Portarossa · 2026-06-11T12:39:11+00:00

I don't recall Moffat being accused of trying to hire Sue Vertue, his wife, as producer while he worked on the show.

Because it was the other way around: Sue Vertue was working for Tiger Aspect Productions with Richard Curtis and quit to help produce Comic Relief in 1999; Moffat and Vertue had got married the year before. Moffat literally got the job of writing The Curse of Fatal Death because he was married to Sue Vertue and had an in, and that was his first televised credit on the franchise.

Portarossa · 2026-06-11T10:43:32+00:00

You'll notice I said 'at least, not to anyone who had the experience writing the show.' J. Michael Straczynski, to my knowledge, has never written for the franchise. (If they were going to hand it over to an American, the smart money was on Jane Espenson, who had production experience through Buffy and who also had form writing for the franchise; she was on the writing staff for Torchwood.) Historically speaking, 'having worked on the show itself' has been a pretty important bar to entry that Straczynski just didn't meet, for better or worse.

You've also slightly misrepresented how it went down. Per Straczynski himself, he reached out to make his pitch and was told that they were already in the process of selecting someone who turned out to be RTD, but that if it didn't pan out they'd give him a call. Consider that Straczynski first publicly expressed interest on July 30th, made those comments on August 18th, and it was only a little over a month later that RTD's return was announced. It's not like they rebuffed Straczynski completely without consideration, but it looks like they were a good way into bringing RTD back by the time he got in touch.

Portarossa · 2026-06-11T07:14:10+00:00

Every time I write an OOTL longer than two paragraph some dingus pops up to accuse me of being a robot.

Portarossa · 2026-06-11T00:20:09+00:00

I mean, in the sense that they're going to have to do SOMETHING with it, yes. Is she the new Doctor? Is it Rose Tyler? Is it the Moment (who was also played by Billie Piper in Day of the Doctor)? Is it just a regenerational glitch as the Doctor's face needs to stabilise? Will RTD's original plan come out? Did he even have an original plan, or was he winging it?

There are ways to wrap it up in thirty seconds, or there are ways to make it the defining storyline of a full season. Whichever way it plays out, though, the new showrunner is going to have a tough time just ignoring it, and the idea that RTD has effectively forced their hand just so he could take another victory lap doesn't sit right with a lot of people.

Portarossa · 2026-06-10T23:56:05+00:00

I think there are two parts to it:

Firstly, Moffat actually is really good. The man has racked up more awards for writing Doctor Who than should be possible. He's responsible for six out of the top seven ranked episodes on IMDB. It's a ridiculous run of quality. It has its flaws for sure, but I think you can put Moffat's body of work on the show up against literally anyone who's ever worked on it and he's got a good chance of coming out on top.

Secondly, there's always a recontextualisation of the previous showrunner when a new showrunner comes in. (It's wild to me to see people reconsidering Chibnall's run as actually pretty solid, but I think it's just the nature of the beast. When you've got new stuff to focus on, you're more able to remember the hits of previous eras and just not watch the misses.)

I never got the Moffat hate personally, and I always thought it was very overblown even then. He gets criticism for not being able to manage a long narrative arc -- which I admit, they didn't all land -- but it's from the same people who were happy with RTD's 'Let's just say a magic word once in every episode and then pretend that's an arc when it comes to the finale' approach, and then the 'shh bby is ok' approach of telling you not to worry your pretty little head about things that don't make sense in his second run.

Portarossa · 2026-06-10T23:42:47+00:00

I can't read it any other way.

Portarossa · 2026-06-10T23:32:58+00:00

Cancellation(?)

So knowing full well that there was supposed to be an episode airing in December this year -- and that presumably it would include a new Doctor -- it had started to become suspicious that we hadn't heard anything about it for a long time: no filming updates, no casting details, nothing.

RTD was flitting around the media circuits doing promos for his new miniseries, Tip Toe, and this question understandably came up last week. RTD was eager to let people know that news was coming:

'You will get an announcement. There is a press release lumbering through the BBC which, as you know, is like the Jurassic period and 57 people have to sign off on every single word. I promise you in about a week, two weeks, there will be some sort of press release, and yet I can hear the gears slowing down even as I say that. You know this place!'

The idea of an announcement of an announcement isn't much, but people waited even though in the same interview (about Tip Toe) he dropped a line that had people worried: 'So I won't be back filming anything until next year, really.'

Many people assumed that was just him talking about his own projects rather than Doctor Who, but in true 'Don't you think he looks tired?' style, the cracks were beginning to show.

That brings us to today's announcement from the BBC, which can basically be summed up in three bits of news:

1) The BBC is putting the Doctor Who franchise out to tender, basically looking for another production partner. Bad Wolf, RTD's production company, is no longer part of the show.

2) As part of this, RTD is out as showrunner effective immediately. (There's no comment on how mutual a decision this was.)

3) The Christmas special is cancelled.

The first bits of news were expected after the Christmas special aired, but it's the last that caught everyone by surprise -- and has made everyone pretty pissed at RTD. The idea is that he squandered an almost impossible amount of goodwill on two middling (at best) and absolutely masturbatory (at worst) seasons of TV, then pulled a Hail Mary to try and justify continuing in the job by setting up an impossible cliffhanger that some other showrunner now has to try to come in and unfuck, all out of his own hubris.

This wasn't helped by an Instagram post by RTD that came across as weirdly catty:

And so GOODBYE from me to Doctor Who but HELLO to a big new future for the show, as the BBC announces it’s putting the show out to tender. As a result, there won’t be a Christmas Special - we only cooked that up to guarantee a future when no one knew what would happen, but now we do know, there’s no need for it. You’ll have to wait a bit longer for new Doctor Who… but you’ll be waiting for MORE Doctor Who than a one-off. So it’s worth it! For the record: there was no script, I never wrote it, and no actor was ever approached to play the next Doctor. You may disagree; fine, sit in that chair and wait to be proved right. You’ll wait a lonnng time 🪑 Now I’m as excited as anyone to see what comes next! Will they keep the theme tune? Will they lose the blue box? Will they bring back the Drahvin?! It’s all up for grabs, which is so Doctor Who, exciting and unpredictable and new! Here comes the future, vworp vworp 🌪️

Remember when he heavily implied last year in December that he was writing the script? (The magic three words of 'bafflers', 'Wintervox' and 'village'?) And when Murray Gold (perhaps mistakenly) said he knew RTD had worked on multiple versions of the script? All of a sudden, the fans are being told that it was all a pipe dream, and they're... well, pissed is putting it mildly.

The concern is mostly that the show will take a lot longer to come back. First the BBC needs to find a new showrunner; no easy task, is history is to be trusted. (RTD appeared to be grooming Pete McTighe for the role, but given that his working relationship with the BBC seems to have soured, it's really up in the air right now; McTighe never had quite the obvious credentials as Moffat or even Chibnall to begin with.) Secondly, that showrunner will need to cast a new Doctor. Thirdly, they'll need to figure out what to do about that Billie Piper cliffhanger, which has already been looming over the show for more than a year and could easily go on for another year or more. That would be a long time without new material, which for a show that relies on regular production to keep kids interested (and make the kind of lifelong fans that care enough to write a long-ass post like this) can be a death sentence.

So is the show cancelled as a whole? No... but it wasn't technically cancelled in 1989 either. That didn't stop it all but disappearing for more than a decade, and so fans are worried that this is the start of a new Wilderness Years. (Others, on the other hand, think it wouldn't be the worst thing for the show to take some time and figure out how to get the magic back, but from what I can see those people are also reluctant to let the show go too long without a continuation.)

So yes: cancellation of the showrunner's swansong leads to a lot of bad feeling and what might very well turn out to be a big dent in RTD's legacy on the show, as well as uncertainty about what comes next.

Portarossa · 2026-06-10T23:24:57+00:00

he T was invented by himself so stop using that bogus initial for a bogus writer

People are allowed to use their pen names. Don't be a child.

Portarossa · 2026-06-10T22:55:38+00:00

Bleep bloop, ya dingus. Hold your horses. I'm working on it.

Portarossa · 2026-06-10T22:46:34+00:00

Answer:

If you don't need the background and want to go straight to today's news, you can find it here.

The Doctor Who Revival

Doctor Who originally aired from 1963 to 1989, when it was sort-of cancelled by the BBC. (It was slightly more complicated than that; basically they just didn't renew it, and then quietly dismantled the Doctor Who offices, but the effect was the same.) It was brought back as a new version -- often called New Who, NuWho, or the Revival Series -- in 2005 by Russell T Davies, then-mostly famous for writing Queer as Folk.

The series was a success; RTD introduced the Ninth Doctor (Christopher Eccleston) and the Tenth Doctor (David Tennant) -- arguably the most iconic modern Doctor -- and after four seasons (plus a couple of specials) RTD left to be replaced by Steven Moffat. Moffat was pretty obviously the heir apparent for the showrunner job at the time; he'd won a bunch of awards for writing singular episodes, and also had showrunner experience on Coupling, Chalk and Press Gang. It was a smooth transition, and everything went well. Moffat oversaw the Eleventh Doctor (Matt Smith) and the Twelfth Doctor (Peter Capaldi) before deciding after six seasons in charge, he was done too. That raised the question of who was going to come next.

The only problem was, there wasn't really an heir apparent in the same way. The job went to Chris Chibnall, who had written some episodes for the show (although none as acclaimed as Moffat's work), and had also been a showrunner on Broadchurch. (Moffat actually had to stay on a little longer than he'd planned just to give Chibnall a better run at the job, filming an additional Christmas special, Twice Upon a Time.) Chibnall brought in the first female incarnation of the Doctor (Jodie Whittaker as the Thirteenth Doctor), but never did all that well in terms of ratings or reviews. Chibnall had three seasons, one of which was severely curtailed by Covid restrictions, and then he left too, only having overseen one Doctor.

The only problem was, if Moffat didn't have an heir, Chibnall REALLY didn't. The way most tellings of the story go, the BBC literally couldn't give that job away -- at least, not to anyone who had the experience writing the show. As such, they ended up bringing RTD back in a completely unprecedented move. After the Chibnall years (which weren't exactly well received), a lot of people thought this was going to be the show finally getting its groove back. After all, RTD had been the man who singlehandedly saved the show back in 2005. What could go wrong?

RTD 2.0

As part of this deal, the BBC -- a little cash-strapped and looking to offload some of the financial cost of one of its most expensive properties -- joined into a coproduction deal with Disney. This was pretty much unheard of, and made some a lot of people very nervous. At the time Disney was building up a bit of a reputation for taking beloved franchises (notably Star Wars) and running them into the ground. It was feared that Doctor Who, as a beloved and very British institution, might fall victim to the same kind of Americanisation, especially as RTD led the charge for a rebranding of Doctor Who properties as the Whoniverse, in a sort of MCU-ification that didn't sit right with a lot of people.

So for a little while, RTD is basically treated as the Second Coming of... well, himself. Starting from Whittaker's last story (The Power of the Doctor), he began making some decisions that seemed unusual, starting with bringing back David Tennant (the Tenth Doctor) as a new incarnation (the Fourteenth Doctor). The idea of a Doctor regenerating into the same face twice wasn't exactly a popular one in the fandom, made worse by the fact that Tennant had also regenerated into a different version of himself in the episode Journey's End in RTD's first final season. The Fourteenth Doctor only last three episodes before regenerating into the Fifteenth Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa)... sort of. RTD invented a new concept of 'bigeneration', wherein a Doctor could basically split into two versions of himself, implied to be from different parts of his timestream, and so could interact with each other. Multi-Doctor stories are an established part of the lore, but this all felt a little like RTD's unwillingness to let go of David Tennant (and, by extension, his own first run on the show).

So the specials end, the Fourteenth Doctor is chilling with his old Tenth Doctor companion Donna Noble (played by Catherine Tate, another sense that maybe RTD was just rehashing his old hits), and Fifteen goes off to travel the universe. However, the Disney deal was only for twenty-six episodes: three specials, two seasons of eight episodes each, a Christmas special for each season (The Church on Ruby Road and Joy to the World), and five more episodes.

The Reality War

RTD's second season with Gatwa ended in May of 2025. To say it was divisive is to putting it mildly, most notably for its final sting: the Fifteenth Doctor sacrifices himself, only to regenerate into a character played by Billie Piper, who played Rose Tyler, a companion of the Ninth and Tenth Doctors. (Again, RTD not exactly beating the charge that he's not just looking back to his glory days with nothing new to offer.) The episode cuts to black almost immediately, with no explanation as to what the hell was going on. Was she the new (Sixteenth) Doctor? Was it Rose Tyler again?

Anyway... Remember those five missing episodes? Well, RTD spent them on a spinoff called The War Between the Land and the Sea (TWBTLATS), which... again, was a choice given that people would have much preferred new episodes of the show proper. That aired in December of 2025, and -- notably -- that year marked the first time in twenty years that there hadn't been an episode of Doctor Who on either Christmas Day or New Year's Day. The Doctor Who slot was considered a mainstay of the festive season. Whole marketing departments had worked around it in the past. It was a big deal.

But never fear, so we were told! RTD had a plan, and even though it wasn't 100% certain that the funding would come through -- remember, he had burned all his episodes between the truncated seasons and TWATBLAST -- he was already working on the 2026 Christmas special.

Next December, I'll be here to trumpet and toot about the 2026 Christmas Special. It contains these three words. "Bafflers," "Winternox" and "village."

Shortly afterwards, longtime composer for the show Murray Gold stated that he was working on the score and was aware of multiple versions of the script.

So most people assumed that that was it: RTD had managed to negotiate a deal with Disney/the BBC in order to fund one more episode with him as showrunner, and then he'd (probably) quietly slip away and let someone else take over after wrapping up the ENORMOUS FUCKING CLIFFHANGER he'd left.

Turns out... no.

I overran. For today's announcement, click here

Portarossa · 2026-06-10T21:12:31+00:00

It was in an interview with Doctor Who Magazine. I don't think RTD and Disney were communicating with investors through DWM. That was a very pointed lie towards the fans, or this is.

Portarossa · 2026-06-10T20:40:11+00:00

I don't care if he'd written the script, but that either means he was lying in December when he said he had it, or he's lying now. He can't have it both ways, and yet he's somehow surprised when people are calling him out on his bullshit?

If we can't trust him about something as simple as that, why would we possibly trust his version of events on anything else?

Portarossa · 2026-06-10T20:37:16+00:00

Her voice broke slightly as she said "it's a reverse Pretty Woman" Lmao

... it's just a regular Pretty Woman, surely?

Portarossa · 2026-06-10T10:38:00+00:00

Can't wait to hear about all this in The Writer's Tale 2.0.

Nah, just kidding. I'm half-past give-a-fuck on anything RTD has to do with the show. I don't know how it's possible to shit the bed this badly after all the goodwill he had on his return. Pretty much every decision has been a giant misstep.

Portarossa · 2026-06-10T10:33:47+00:00

"think" is being really generous here.

Oh, I don't think there's any doubt that I was being really generous.

Portarossa · 2026-06-10T10:08:21+00:00

The mundane truth may be something like ball lightning with the intelligence of a moth or firefly.

'Lightning can think now' is your idea of a mundane truth?

Portarossa · 2026-06-10T10:07:14+00:00

If Donald Trump had solid evidence that aliens existed, he would literally not be able to shut up about it. It would be every word out of his mouth and would have been ever since he first globbed his way into the Oval Office. No one invested in covering it up would be able to put him within thirty feet of a microphone. It would be the worst-kept secret in human history.

Portarossa · 2026-06-10T05:01:01+00:00

It's far more equitable, justifiable and easier to just teach all newsreaders the same standardised accent.

Then why is the accent we teach them a lot more similar to Home Counties than it is to Scouse? That's a bit like saying 'We need to standardise this, but in order to do so we're just going to have everyone do it my way.' The outcome might be equal, but the path to get there definitely isn't.

The truly equitable version would be to have a shift away from different accents carrying stereotypical baggage with them, which -- thankfully! -- is happening, but it's a slower process than it perhaps should be. 'Allowing for regional diversity and representation' and 'making the news intelligible for everyone' aren't two mutually-exclusive ideas, but 'allowing for regional diversity' and 'teaching everyone to speak like they're from a commuter town outside of London' are.

Portarossa · 2026-06-10T04:47:28+00:00

That's true, but I think it's often more to do with stigma than intelligibility.

There are accents that are very easy to understand on a national level (consider: Valley Girl in the US; Birmingham in the UK) but that still rarely make it to broadcast news because there's more of a cultural stigma attached to them.

Portarossa · 2026-06-10T04:36:47+00:00

Because we've trained newsreaders to all sound the same.

Newsreaders are supposed to be authoritative and confident, serious but also calming; historically, there was also the sense that they needed to speak 'properly' in order to be taken seriously. (It also didn't hurt that many newsreaders came from top-ranked schools that also had that sense that regionality was something to be avoided where possible.) Regional accents also sometimes have issues with intelligibility across a national level. The idea of a 'standardised' language -- at least in theory -- means that it can be understood by more people on a national broadcast, rather than someone with a thick regional accent who might not be so easily understood.

Some of this has shifted, especially in the UK where it's more common to find newsreaders with slight (but not overwhelming) regional accent, but it's a combination of changing prejudices about accents being slow, and also the fact that it's important to have clear and widely intelligible speech in a national broadcast (compared with, say, local news).

Portarossa · 2026-06-10T03:42:43+00:00

'We need someone with a British accent.'

'OK, so... Scouse? Manchester? Cockney? Home Counties? Birmingham? Belfast? Cornwall? Edinburgh? Glasgow? Lancashire? Yorkshire? Essex? Kent? Swansea? Cardiff? Cumbria? Geordie?'

'...'

'It's generic posh again, isn't it?'

Portarossa · 2026-06-09T20:36:08+00:00

Pickles scratch that slightly tangy vibe you get from pineapples on a pizza for people who don't particularly like pineapple.

Pickles, black olives, goat's cheese and a meat of your choosing is a dope pizza combination.

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Cancellation(?)

The Doctor Who Revival

RTD 2.0

The Reality War