There’s speculation that we’ll learn more about the upcoming Doctor Who 60th anniversary this weekend (15th- 16th July 2023) — potentially even a trailer.
Rumours began to circle after the BBC Doctor Who Twitter account (which is like Threads but not owned by Facebook) tweeted four screenshots from a trailer, showing David Tennant as the Fourteenth Doctor, Ncuti Gatwa as the Fifteenth Doctor, Jacqueline King as Donna’s Mum, Sylvia Noble, and Neil Patrick Harris as a mysterious villain. These screenshots were overtly stills from the trailer, with time captures reading 51 seconds, 42, 47, and 17 seconds.
Added together, these make 157, or 15/7, i.e. 15th July.
Tenuous? Perhaps, but possible too. Doctor Who marketing has been pretty darn clever, and we can’t see the Twitter account posting something like that without some sort of deeper meaning, especially not with the trailer times are the bottom of each shot.
And that date is expected to be the women’s final at Wimbledon. Doctor Who has a history with this occasion. On Sunday 16th July 2017, after the men’s Wimbledon finale, Jodie Whittaker was revealed as the Thirteenth Doctor in a special teaser.
So there’s some precedent. And showrunner, Russell T Davies, knows a great PR opportunity when he sees one: the 2022 Wimbledon men’s final achieved a peak audience of 7.5 million, plus over 2 million streams via iPlayer, while last year’s women’s final peaked at 3.1 million viewers on BBC1. That’s a big audience.
We’ve not seen loads of advertising around the 60th anniversary, so maybe things will hit into a higher gear very soon.
Or perhaps nothing will happen. We’ll see this weekend…
