Doctor Who boss reveals plot details of the scrapped 2026 Christmas special

Doctor Who's two-time former showrunner Russell T Davies has revealed some of the plot details for the scrapped 2026 Christmas special.

The most recent episode of the sci-fi series ended with Ncuti Gatwa's Doctor regenerating with Billie Piper's face, and a festive episode was initially announced with RTD at the helm to follow up on that ending.

However, it was confirmed in June that the special was no longer going ahead, with the show going out to competitive tender as per BBC protocol. The winner of that tender is set to be announced next March.

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In an excerpt from his new memoir The Queerest of Folk published in The Guardian over the weekend, Davies revealed a little bit about the story he had in mind.

"I pitched it to the BBC, and they loved it," he said. "An olde-worlde English village intercut with a huge, mysterious spaceship, an outer-space festival called Winternox, and lots and lots of Daleks, with something very unexpected hidden away … Oh, yes, I liked it!"

Davies explained that even though the special was announced in October last year, he didn't even get the contract to write the script until March of this year, and by that point it looked untenable to get everything together in time.

He then confirmed rumours that there had been discussions about reworking the Christmas special into an Easter one, and that became part of his plot idea.

He said: "For a while, I became obsessed with the notion of a Christmas story transmitting at Easter, because, as part of the plot, time was out of joint. The Doctor running around shouting: 'It's not really Christmas!' A bit meta, but fun."

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But then Davies wondered what the point of the special was, and admitted that it probably wouldn't have been loved by the fanbase.

"There’s a huge era behind us, there’s a huge era ahead of us, what’s this thing in the middle? A single episode which is neither here nor there, neither fish nor fowl," he said.

"It really existed to please the fans, except the irony is, it was exactly the sort of episode that fans would not be pleased by."

With that in mind, and aware of the financial difficulties currently facing the BBC, he went to the broadcaster in early May and was the one to suggest dropping it.

"I think they’d been waiting for me to say it," he continued. "We'd all been too polite with each other, them not wanting to let me down, me not wanting to let them down. But this new plan sets the show free."

That does leave the issue of the Billie Piper regeneration unresolved, which is a potentially confusing thing to explain for a new era looking to bring in a new audience. Davies, however, thinks that the whole thing can be easily dealt with, noting how the 1996 TV movie's 'revelation' that The Doctor is half-human was just ignored afterwards.

Doctor Who can be streamed on BBC iPlayer.

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Joe Anderton is a freelance news writer at Digital Spy, having worked there since 2016. In his time, he's covered a host of live events and interviewed celebrities big and small. A big fan of TV and movies both mainstream and obscure, Joe also enjoys video games and in particular PlayStation. Joe currently does not use Twitter, but he only ever used it to tell people to watch the film Help! I'm a Fish.