Doctor Who fans, we all know that Ncuti Gatwa was the first non-white actor to play the Doctor right?
No of course not, because Jo Martin was the Fugitive Doctor a few years ago right?
Nope. And no, I’m not talking about a kid that played the timeless child, as five out of the seven children we saw weren’t white.
Or even that Sacha Dhawan technically played a regeneration of the Doctor when he did that whole forced regeneration thing. Remember when it comes to regenerations, no, means no.
But, no, before any of these Lenny Henry played a version of the Doctor in a comedy sketch on the Lenny Henry Show in the 1980s.
But should this count as an official incarnation of the Doctor?
I’m inclined to say yes when you consider that these days there’s a million secret past lives of the Doctor, but at least for this one there is compelling evidence.
Firstly, the sketch was produced by the BBC, had the official Doctor Who theme which showed then current Doctor Colin Baker’s face and transformed it…or you might say,
regenerated it into Lenny Henry’s face.
The sketch also used the actual Doctor Who set and Tardis, the companion was Peri and there were real life Cyberman in the story.
But let’s explore this further.
The story begins with Henry’s Doctor getting up and seemingly having just regenerated,
which is how Colin Baker’s Doctor would also regenerate into Sylvester McCoy’s “Seventh Doctor”. Henry’s Doctor doesn’t exactly wear the same clothes as the Sixth doctor usually does, but they’re still of this ilk.
With the title sequence suggesting that the Sixth Doctor regenerates into Lenny Henry’s Doctor we could take what he is wearing as something that the Sixth Doctor possible could have been wearing.
With Henry’s Doctor not seeming to mind the fashion choice of his predecessor,
it could well be that this is an incarnation of the Doctor between the Sixth and Seventh as we don’t see the Doctor’s face before his regeneration into the Seventh Doctor in Time of the Rani.
Now, yes, we do see he has curly blonde hair and what appears to be white hands,
but we see as he’s turned over his face becomes nothing but white light and so the mismatch between the appearances could be explained as part of the regeneration into the white Sylvester McCoy.
This would place the story as something that happens before Time and the Rani.
But if we are going to try to justify this, we still have an issue of Henry’s Doctor directly referencing his companion as Peri when the Doctor’s companion at the time of his regeneration into the Seventh Doctor was Mel.
And by the time the Doctor becomes Sylvester McCoy, Peri was now out the picture.
So, if we were to try to place this episode into this point of time, how can we explain Peri being back and Mel being missing?
The simplest way to do this is to say that this wasn’t Peri.
Or at least not the Peri who was the companion at the time the episode was made.
It simply could be a different companion also called Peri, just as the Doctor has now had two companions called Rose, or it more likely, as the Doctor has only just regenerated into Henry’s incarnation, he may simply have not been fully with it, just as we’ve seen with the likes of Peter Capaldi’s Twelfth Doctor being especially out of it,
and made the mistake and said Peri instead of a different name.
But if this isn’t Peri or Mel, who is it and where was the actual Peri and Mel. And what happened to this other Peri after this episode?Well, the sketch is short so it’s possible that maybe Mel could have just been somewhere else, and whoever this other Peri is, they no longer travelled with the Doctor after this story. I know this sounds like a lot of stretches to make this work, but the point is to see if it’s possible that it could work…and so far, it still can.
Other things of note in this story are that we get an evil Cyber-Woman, and this happens a long time before we would get it in the main show or the Torchwood episode Cyber-Woman.
The characters also go to Earth in the year 2010 which obviously was the same year that the Eleventh Doctor properly started off on his adventures with Amy Pond, so it’s possible that the eleventh Doctor and Lenny Henry’s Incarnation could have crossed paths.
Coming all the way back to Ncuti Gatwa’s Fifteenth Doctor, there are a few similarities between Gatwa’s Doctor and Henry’s Doctor, other than the fact that they are both played by black actors.
They both sport a thin moustache on their faces, and both wear long brown leather trench coats.
Another of Gatwa’s costume’s also looks very similar, but no scarf…that is unless you go to the Doctor Who comic where Gatwa does wear a long multicoloured scarf.
Oh, and if we go with the idea that Henry’s Incarnation regenerates when paired with Mel as his companion, Ncuti Gatwa’s Fifteenth Doctor was literally pulled into existence by Mel who separated him from David Tennant’s Fourteenth Doctor.
And that still isn’t all. Just as the Fifteenth Doctor has a juke box in his Tardis and sings in episodes, so does Henry’s incarnation of the Doctor.
And Gatwa’s Doctor is also from the era where the BBC started to canonise previously disputed Doctors including The Brain of Morbius Doctor incarnations from the Fourth Doctor story, and Richard E Grant’s Doctor, which appears in live action, which raises the question of whether it was meant to be Richard E Grant’s animated Shalka Doctor,
or his Red Nose Day Curse of Fatal Death Doctor.
If it’s the latter, then you can question where were the other Red Nose Day Doctors…Which actually brings me back to Lenny Henry.
Because in 2023 the BBC produced another Comic Relief sketch where Lenny Henry regenerates into David Tennant as the Fourteenth Doctor. And oh boy, if we’re going to continue to take this too seriously and try to justify how this can be cannon, this may be tricky now.
So, to begin with, in this sketch Lenny Henry is referred to by his name. So, this would surely establish that Henry isn’t playing the Doctor…although he might be.
Let’s go with the idea that this Lenny Henry incarnation of the Doctor is the same as the previous version we had seen 38 years earlier in the Lenny Henry Show sketch.
We saw that he had just regenerated from Colin Baker’s Sixth Doctor in the 1985 sketch.
The story ends without showing that Henry’s Doctor dies, so we can’t directly say this leads into the events in Time and The Rani.
So, let’s say that the Henry Incarnation continued to live for many more years.
That would explain the older appearance of Henry in the 2023 sketch.
And just like David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor, and Jo Martin’s Fugitive Doctor,
maybe the Lenny Henry incarnation was hiding on Earth in human form, and perhaps didn’t even realise that he was an incarnation of the Doctor.
If you remember the Tenth Doctor went by the name John Smith whilst the Fugitive Doctor went by the name Ruth Clayton. So maybe Henry’s incarnation went by the name Lenny Henry.
We see that Lenny Henry feels sick, and then has a violent regeneration into an incarnation of the Doctor played by David Tennant.
Now, whilst everyone will assume this is David Tennant playing the Fourteenth Doctor as he was at the time the episode went out, we saw how Jodie Whitaker’s Doctor became the Fourteenth Doctor, and we also saw how Christopher Eccleston’s Ninth Doctor became David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor.
So, if we are going to say this can work as canon, who the hell is this David Tennant incarnation?
Well, if I come back to the idea that Henry’s incarnation could have justifiably regenerated into Sylvester McCoy’s Seventh Doctor, we can perhaps clean up some of the issues there.
Now, whilst it’s true that we never see the regenerating Doctor’s face before he becomes Sylvester McCoy, an issue I had justifying with that change was that the Doctor’s hands were clearly a white actor.
Now, we could say that this was mid regeneration, but maybe the hands were white because we were actually seeing another David Tennant incarnation regenerate into Sylvester McCoy.
But then, you still have to figure out why he would be dressed like the Sixth Doctor and not like David Tennant looks as the Fourteenth Doctor.
Simple really, the Fourteenth Doctor regenerating from Jodie Whittaker’s Thirteenth Doctor introduced the idea that his clothes could regenerate too.
So, either this David Tennant incarnation regenerated into familiar clothes just as the Fourteenth Doctor took on both the appearance and clothing style of the Tenth Doctor,
or maybe this disputed David Tennant incarnation just decided to wear some of his old clothes from when he was the Colin Baker Sixth Doctor.
And this would mean that David Tennant has actually played four separate incarnations of the Doctor in Doctor Who.
His original Tenth Doctor, the should be named Eleventh Doctor when he regenerated and retained the look of his Tenth form, the Meta Crisis Doctor which grew out of his hand after he syphoned off excess regeneration energy into his hand which itself had already grown back after he first became the Tenth Doctor, the Fourteenth Doctor who regenerated from Jodie Whitaker, and this unnumbered Doctor who regenerated from the Lenny Henry incarnation.
Oh, and this would also mean that Lenny Henry has played possibly two incarnations of the Doctor if you accept that both times he played the Doctor he was in fact the Doctor, but don’t accept my theory that they were one and the same incarnation of the Doctor.
And does any of this make sense within cannon? Yes, it absolutely could.
Doctor Who has been riddled with continuity issues over the Doctor’s regenerations,
and this really started during the era of Tom Baker’s Fourth Doctor in the Brain of Morbius story.
Even though these were cannon by their inclusion in a TV episode, most people ignored these until they were later solidified in cannon during the Jodie Whitaker era.
And if the War Doctor could be a hidden Doctor, and also the Fugitive Doctor be a hidden Doctor, maybe there are hidden Lenny Henry incarnations of the Doctor.
And yes, we know Matt Smith referred to himself as the Eleventh Doctor to Craig played by James Corden, but the numbering has long since been messed up.
And outside of Matt Smith pointing to himself and saying Eleventh, the Doctor, of course never refers to themselves by a number as part of their name.
Certainly, it has been referenced as to how many regenerations the Doctor has used and how many the Doctor has left, but it also makes sense that the Doctor may lie.
‘The Doctor lies’ is a concept which is firmly established in lore, and maybe the Doctor lies to hide how many regenerations they have used and have left.
Although it seems like a natural process for a Time Lord to have thirteen regenerations, just as a cat is meant to have nine lives, it’s also something that is established that the Time Lords have some control over as they granted the Master a new regeneration cycle.
So maybe you can have more regenerations quite easily, and you just take them like an injection or a tablet which you get from the Gallifreyan High Council.
And this would perhaps explain why some later regenerations were more worried about running out of regenerations if Gallifrey was destroyed in the Last Great Time War and the Regeneration shop was closed.
So, what do you think? With previously non canon Doctors recently having been confirmed to be part of the canon of the show, could either appearance of Lenny Henry as The Doctor be counted as official canon?
Let me know what you think in the comments!
You can get loads more Movie and TV Show articles in the Movies section of the site, and don’t forget to check out all our pop culture videos and Geek Battle Podcast on the Geek Battle social channels below:
