an emo who?

an emo who?

So the next Doctor isn’t going to be Paterson Joseph after all, like I first thought, which is a bloody shame. I suspect the novelty of a black Doctor wouldn’t be as such a triumph after all this Obama business and would have probably been seen as pointless bandwagonism. Which is a shame because Paterson had the acting chops to pull it off, which when coupled the with a sense of style and fun he had previously shown as The Marquis de Carabas in the BBC’s Neverwhere, would have very exciting to watch.

By all accounts this will be Steven Moffat’s Doctor, Moffat being the writer that penned the darker more thrilling and, frankly, better recent episodes, so  Smith is going to have to be a bit darker than the previous incarnations, not that Moffat can’t write brevity it’s just when he does he does it with subtly and deep humor, which require the exact right pitch from the actor playing the Doctor. If they pull it off, it will be a welcome relief from the Davis/ Tennant gear crunching roundabout of pathos/bathos moments that sometime make Doctor Who recently seem clunky and shallow in places.

So what about this new boy then, a lot been made of how young he is, but he doesn’t look that young, when you take into account that David Tennant is nearly 40 and looks like a eleven year old, Matt Smith is certainly in that vein. And if you’re after someone who looks otherworldly then Smith’s skull, which is reminiscent of old photographs of people with gigantism, coupled with hair helmet and eyes that seem to occasionally leave his sockets, certainly fit the bill.

Smith, yesterday

Smith, yesterday

One thing that the Doctor HAS to be is quintessentially English, and when seen in interviews Smith certainly has the look of a weirdly animated Hugh Grant, kind of nervous and arrogant at once. This contradictory nature is, for me, the essence of the Doctor he is at once, curious and jaded, excitably but in control, whimsical and clown-like but also one of the most important figures in the universe. We in England have a problem nailing down our national identity but I think it our core nature of contradictions that make us who we are and why that’s make the Doctor so identifiably English.