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Richard Ayoade
2009-2012


"This angst business is boring. I'm bored. Come on! Let's go on a quick, twenty minute, self contained adventure. It'll be fun."

The return of Doctor Who in 2009 after nothing since a book series in the mid nineties ruffled feathers not just because it had a black doctor but because the series ran online only through BBC Open.

The series was despised by critics, when it wasn't ignored. Richard's performance was deemed to lack emotional depth and the planet-of-the-week surreal feel of it was seen as completely out of sync with the needs of a modern, sophisticated audience who were hungry for gritty realism and tackling serious issues. The series was very popular.

In the end, critics couldn't help but take notice. But they continued to dislike the story lines and declared that the series had finally jumped the shark whenever the actual viewers were most happy with it. By series three, where the Doctor accidentally taught the Daleks to love and had a doomed romance with a Dalek, the show had won the accolade of Most Popular Show That No-one Admits to Watching. Though the number of conventions and fan-fics showed that the stigma against admitting to like it was mostly in the heads of the TV experts.

The show avoided having a single companion, and instead the Doctor travelled with a number of people depending on what themes and mood the episode required. The Doctor playing the role of guide and counsel for an adventure that usually tackled other issues. Ayoade admitted very readily that this was because he wasn’t a fantastic actor, and having other actors on board helped to carry the show. However, his enthusiasm for the part and for the stories usually shone through and he remains very popular with the fans.

Ayoade's time as the Doctor came to an end when he was captured by The Auditor, a drab man in a grey suit who was meant to be a Time Lord police officer. The Doctor was strapped inside a box with no exit, filled with antimatter, and thrown into a black hole. The Doctor escaped using the Schrodinger Device - which operated on the Uncertainty Principle. Inside an inescapable box there was no way to know whether someone was alive or dead. As the Doctor was alive when he activated the Schrodinger Device, somewhere in the universe there must be an unopened box where he was dead. By ending his life he teleported to that box, and regeneration began...
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