An Adventure in Space and Time, the BBC’s upcoming docudrama about the creation of Doctor Who in 1963, has cast its William Hartnell/First Doctor: David Bradley, best known as Filch in the Harry Potter movies. (He also appeared in the recent Doctor Who story “Dinosaurs on a Spaceship.”) Good choice, I’d say:
The rest of the cast, from The Guardian:
[T]he 90-minute drama will feature Hollywood and stage star [Brian] Cox as the BBC’s head of drama Sydney Newman, who is credited with the creation of the show. [Call the Midwife’s Jessica] Raines will play the show’s legendary producer, Verity Lambert… Waris Hussein, the director of the first episode, which was called An Unearthly Child, will be played by Sacha Dhawan (Last Tango in Halifax, History Boys).
November 23 falls on a Saturday this year… as it did 50 years ago. Will An Adventure in Space and Time air that evening? Or will that be the day the 50th-anniversay special airs? Or could we get a big prezzie and get both on the same night? The suspense is killing me…
(If you stumble across a cool Doctor Who thing, feel free to email me with a link.)
Good choice not just because of the physical resemblance – we can be quite sure that Bradley is up to the task.
What’s odd is how all the actors are noticeably older than the people they’re playing were at the time. Particularly 70-year-old Bradley for then-55 Hartnell, 66-year-old Cox for then-46 Newman, and to a lesser extent with Raine and Dhawan, each about four years older than Lambert and Hussein.