Casting Jodie Whittaker: lots of planets have a Skelmanthorpe!

By Danny Nicol

University of Westminster

From 2018 onwards the Doctor in Doctor Who will be played by Jodie Whittaker, a casting which has inspired much excitement for its gender change as well as, sadly, some disapproval from a minority of the programme’s viewers.   The present blogger shares the majority view, as shown by earlier posts on this blog, and is very pleased indeed at the BBC’s choice.  But lest we get too bogged down in gender, this post tries to ring the changes by focusing on a different aspect of the new lead actor: Jodie Whittaker’s strong Yorkshire identity.  Will she play the Doctor in her own accent?

The new Doctor

It is widely accepted that Doctor Who is not only about planets, space stations, ray guns and monsters.  It is also just as much about what it means to be British.  It is widely acknowledged in Doctor Who scholarship that the show perennially articulates a sense of national identity.  Yet the issue of national identity is in many respects highly political. 

In this regard Jodie Whittaker hails from Skelmanthorpe, a village in Yorkshire in Northern England.  Yorkshire is the United Kingdom’s largest county and Skelmanthorpe is noted in the Survey of English Dialects (1950-1961) as having a particularly rich form of dialect.  Whittaker seemingly acted with her own accent in her breakthrough role in Broadchurch (2013-2017).  Will she be allowed or encouraged to do so in Doctor Who?

The BBC has traditionally strongly favoured “received pronunciation”, the standard English spoken in southern England, also sometimes known as “the Queen’s English” and “BBC English”.   Three Doctors have thus far bucked the tradition: the seventh Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) and twelfth Doctor (Peter Capaldi) used Scottish accents and the ninth Doctor (Christopher Eccleston) used a Northern English accent.  Conversely David Tennant, a Scottish actor, was obliged to play the tenth Doctor with a London accent.

It was Christopher Eccleston’s Northern accent which proved particularly controversial.  Not only did the Doctor have to explain to a sceptical companion-to-be Rose Tyler that he really was an alien because “lots of planets have a North!” but behind the scenes the actor’s insistence on playing the Doctor with a Northern accent caused a rift with the Doctor Who production team, contributing to his leaving the role after only one series.  Eccleston insisted on using a Northern accent for a political reason: he wanted to challenge discrimination based on the assumption that there was a correlation between accent and intellect.  

The Doctor and Rose none too subtly
articulating British identity -
with Captain Jack providing a contrast

Great Britain is an island, and England a nation, in which the economic centrifugal force is towards London and the South East, as very recently underlined by decisions on the country’s railway links.   Other parts of the country, not least the North, have been economically marginalised under forty years of neoliberalism.  This has been reflected in Brit-Grit films such as The Full Monty (1997), Brassed Off (1996) and I Daniel Blake  (2016) which have depicted people having to rely on each other as the State has retreated from its economic and welfare roles.  Yet despite the Doctor’s recent insistence that London is “a dump” (“The Zygon Inversion” (2015)), much of Doctor Who is still set in London and the south east.  This needs to change.  And if Doctor Who is to be a programme which reflects the whole of Britain there should be no objection in continuing to reflect this in the Doctor’s richly diverse identity – including her accent.