For the record, I grew up with
Doctor Who. One of my earliest memories is of watching
Logopolis twice, which always puzzled me. How could I have seen it twice? But I distinctly remember watching Tom Baker falling off Jodrell Bank and knowing what was about to happen, because I had seen it already.
And then I found out about the "
Five Faces of Doctor Who" repeats of 1981. The show's producer wanted to bring the audience up to speed in advance of Peter Davison's first adventure, so
Logopolis was repeated only a few months after it had been shown the first time. I have no idea what else I did on 03 December 1981, but I do know that in the evening I sat in front of the television watching Tom Baker fall to his death for the second time. Davison. Davison. Davi-son. Robert Davi. Davi-son. Not Davidson. Not Davidson. No.
But I lost interest completely the moment
Red Dwarf came out. That show made
Doctor Who look sad. It had better writing, the limited effects looked more professional, and despite being a comedy it had more interesting sci-fi ideas. I have watched a grand total of two (2) episodes of the new
Who and have no desire to watch any more, although I'm broadly familiar with its swift rise, its imperial period, and its eventual decline.
Having said all that, I think Lumley would have been warmly received in 1999. Whatever controversy there might have been about a female Doctor would have been outweighed by Lumley's natural charisma. My recollection is that after
Sapphire and Steel her career went nowhere until
Absolute Fabulous, so she was still something of a blank slate in 1999 - the audience would have been interested to see her in a serious role. I reckon she would have done a good job. At the very least she would have been convincing as a more action-packed Doctor, along the lines of Jon Pertwee.
But it strikes me that, as mentioned by DougM, the timing was all wrong. The new
Who benefited enormously from advances in CGI and television production in the early 2000s The same thing benefited the
Battlestar Galactica reboot. We'd be talking about a show from the same era as e.g.
Space: Above and Beyond or the BBC's own
Invasion Earth, but with a need for lots of practical Earth-based effects rather than just CGI spaceships. It would have either looked cheap, or it would have had a lot of talking heads.
Mention of Jon Pertwee makes me wonder if it might have worked with the Doctor stuck on Earth. But the end result would have probably been derided as a copy of
The X-Files, which was way past its prime in 1999 but still "a thing". An
X-Files-esque version of
Doctor Who with a decent budget and decent writing circa 1999 might actually have worked, but my recollection is that sci-fi was still looked down upon in 1999. The broadsheets pooh-poohed it. Television executives didn't want to be associated with it. And it was still the era when BBC shows had six episodes a series and that was it for a year.
So at best it might be a fondly-remembered curiosity, but not a pop cultural phenomenon on the same level as Tennant-Smith-era modern
Who. I just think 1999 was too early for the commitment required to make it work.