Spectator Competition: Who's who?

Spectator

25-06-2025

For Competition 3405 you were invited to submit a scene in which Doctor Who has regenerated into someone very unexpected. Plenty of interesting transformations resulted, featuring among others Paddington Bear, Mary Berry and two Jacob Rees-Moggs, but the winners of the £25 vouchers are below.
The Doctor, regenerating as a tall, meaty-faced man in jeans, a plaid shirt and his mid-sixties, soon got clumsily busy for comic effect with screwdrivers, sonic and otherwise, setting about the Tardis console and causing Fleetwood Mac to play at excessive volume before sending us zagzigging erratically across spacetime on a far from grand tour. 'What could possibly go wrong?' he bellowed, overemphasising every word in apparent exoneration of his haphazard driving skills. When finally we materialised, it was in a sodden wheat field near Chipping Norton and Daleks were massing. 'I've seen off South Oxfordshire Council,' The Doctor chuntered, 'so this lot should be an absolute doddle.' Utilising the element of surprise, The Doctor whipped off the top of each Dalek to reveal inside a startled, black-clad gay ballet dancer. They fled, The Doctor pursuing them for the damage they'd done to what turned out to be his durum wheat.
Adrian Fry
Jax watched helplessly from behind the containment field as The Doctor melted and reformed. She was astonished to see a middle-aged, portly, bald white man in a blue suit, with a mauve tie that overlapped his name tag on its lanyard. Only the letters 'Ric H' were visible. 'Help, Doctor, get me out!' she yelled.
'Alas, Jax, a writ of habeas corpus does not run on Chagos. Although some Time Lords hold that Gallifreyan law is 'grandfathered' from the colonial period, the better view is that, absent positive Xiblaxian law –'
'Then use the sonic screwdriver!'
'It's a Level 5 quantum-electric emitter, not lic-ensed here, I'm afraid.'
'But we have to stop the Xiblaxians invading Earth!'
'Their not being signatories to the Galactic Sentient Rights Treaty, whereas Earth is, makes that intricately tricky.'
In desperation, Jax transformed herself into a co-elenterate and oozed through a gap in the field…
Frank Upton
The Tardis, looking strangely like a muddy Range Rover, came crashing Earthwards into an armour-strewn wheat field. Out stepped a man in red corduroy trousers and a chequered jacket. 'All right, then, Ange,' he said, 'where are we?' A flame-haired Deputy Time Lord in high-vis vest and golden training shoes read from her chart: 'Well, Doctor –'
'Hang about. Just call me Nige when the cameras aren't watching. I'm so thirsty after all that warp speed stuff. Got a fag, by the way?'
'Yiss, Nige, but they 'aven't been invented yet. We're in medieval France, right near't'end o't'Undred Years' War wi' England.'
'Right, so we've got three immediate ishoos for this latest series. One, how do I introduce tobacco to 15th-century Europe? Two, at least one episode must be called 'Daleks in Best Bitter Battle'. And three, why stop after only 100 years? This English/French stuff could run and run!'
Nicholas Lee
Regenerated, The Doctor proved a conservatively dressed, fogeyishly fastidious old Etonian whose preferred method of communication was the newspaper article. He immediately set about having the Tardis refurbished after the manner of a Georgian rectory, particularly concerned not to own a television, for all that he would be pursued across spacetime for a licence. Said Tardis, reliably unreliable, haphazardly materialised on alien worlds or at historical periods beset by extraterrestrial incursions unrecorded even in Macaulay. This new Doctor, rising above such nonsenses, tarried onlywhere anecdotes about Margaret Thatcher might be authenticated or country sports freely engaged in. If his forthright, witty arguments failed to convince the Daleks of the folly of authoritarianism, it can only have been that they did not number among his readers. His symposium in a disused quarry with Walter Bagehot and T.E. Utley on constitutional democracy will be published here, culminating in the traditional cliffhanger.
Russell Clifton
Their time had come at last. For millennia the Time Lords had thwarted the Daleks' universe-conquering ambitions. Now the Lords were tired and predictable, their clock was running down. This time they had failed to find their human stooge. Ha! The invincible Daleks would rumble forwards, exterminating everything in their path.
Their Doctors had always been ridiculous figures – a hammy old man, a TV scarecrow, lots of boring white Englishmen. There was even a Scotch one. As for the woman and the black African! – woke Time Lords: what a joke! Things were hotting up on Planet Earth; the next encounter would be Armageddon for those feeble poseurs.
The familiar screeching sound approached, the Daleks awaited their moment of triumph. The door opened and a giant lettuce appeared, screaming, 'I was right all along. We have ten years to save the West!'
Basil Ransome-Davies
The Tardis slowly stopped spinning, teeter–tottered for a moment, then fell on its side. The front door (now the roof) was pushed open and a portly middle–aged man awkwardly clambered out. He was wearing a dark blue suit and matching tie, charmingly paired with a bright yellow life-jacket. He ran his hands over himself, noting the bulging belly, balding pate and thick jowls. He looked horrified. 'No,' he gasped. 'Surely not. Can I really have regenerated as… Ed Davey?' At that moment a Dalek materialised, making vague robotic threats. Doctor Davey-Who fumbled in his jacket for his sonic screwdriver, dropped it, tripped over his trouser legs and fell in a pond where, bobbing gently, he felt grateful for his lifejacket. A passing canoeist tried to help. Doctor Davey-Who somehow upended the vessel and both men were now floundering. The Dalek, watching from the sidelines, said: 'Ex…traordinary. What an idiot.'
Joseph Houlihan
No. 3408: Some like it hot
You are invited to submit a poem about heatwaves (16 lines maximum). Please email entries to [e-mail] by midday on 9 July.