Man* gets job

(* possibly a wo-man.)

In a bit less than an hour and a half, the BBC announce who'll be playing the eleventh Doctor Who, though they won't appear in the show for another year. The internet has gone crazy-mad and I keep getting texts begging what I know. Which is, of course, nothing.

I'm a bit baffled by the terror and anger cramming the airwaves from other people who also know nothing. They're damning actors they don't know have got the job based on not liking them in some other role. Or they're *still* suggesting candidates after all the phone lines have closed.

No wait, we didn't vote for this one, did we?

But we've been here before. There was anger and terror in early 2004 - a year before the series came back so triumphantly - when Billie Piper first got cast as Rose. A year ago, otherwise sage-like mates panicked that Catherine Tate would ruin the series. (There are, admittedly, a few strange individuals who still speak of new Doctor Who as a failure, based solely on the drumming in their heads.)

Likewise, there were those who hated the idea of Daniel Craig being cast as James Bond just 'cos he was blond (they didn't mind Bond flitting between being Scottish, Australian, English, Welsh and then Irish, so long as he had dark hair). A pre-titles sequence in black-and-white quickly made them forget their colour prejudice...

(Note they don't mind Felix being Black or M being a woman...)

I really don't mind if Eleven (get me and my net lingo) is black or a woman or Paul McGann. I'm keen to see what the new chaps in charge can come up with; the same old show and yet surprising. That's what I've always loved about Doctor Who - hotly, wetly, not altogether healthily - and it seems to be missing the point by several miles to argue that there's no precedent.

So hooray for whoever it is - a blacked up Shane Ritchie or Jennifer Saunders in drag.

But most importantly, it doesn't matter what I think anyway.