Okay, so on the one hand we need – we absolutely require – drama from every conceivable source, and also my writing is unquestionably improved when an editor asks why I’ve not included something. Or actually when an editor just says “Eh?”

Writers, editors, publishers, producers, cast and crew, we’re all needed and a good idea from anywhere must be seized upon.

But.

Otherwise, drama and actually I think all writing, is not a democracy.

This is on my mind because of Doctor Who and the now weeks of commentary about it being cancelled and how the current Doctor, Ncuti Gatwa, has already filmed his final scene, his regeneration ready for the next Doctor.

My reaction to the regeneration is easiest to say: it’s so? Doctor Who is now made incredibly far in advance — I mean there can be two years before writing and airing — that it could well be that Gatwa has done all he was planned to do. We’ll find out when we find out.

But the rest of it, about cancellation. That’s coming in a little trumpet of accusations that the show is too woke, that showrunner Russell T Davies is too smug to take criticism, that kind of thing.

I’ll say it now: I don’t believe you can be too woke. There aren’t many absolutes in the world, but woke is good and asleep is bad, that’s one of them.

I also don’t believe that Davies is smug and I can’t see any evidence. Speaking of seeing, you should see that man get an award: I can’t think of anyone else whose speech is not about themselves and instead has them pointing out a dozen people in the audience and enthusing about their writing. In detail.

But given that I don’t know where this smugness idea comes from and so I’m guessing in the dark, my impression is that it is based on the premise that he doesn’t do what the fans tell him to. However, anyone thinking the next season of Doctor Who will be different because of fan reaction to the last one is, well, let’s say uninformed.

Because that next run has already been made. Which you’d presume fans would know if anyone does.

I think it is unusual for a UK-based series to be made as far in advance as Doctor Who now is, but it is far from unusual for a show to be finished before the critics and fans get to pile on.

There used to be this thing that new shows got a lot of press when they were commissioned for a second series, like that was absolute proof of success and popularity. Presumably sometimes it is, but more often the show was originally commissioned for two runs and that fact just wasn’t announced. So when we hear that a show has been picked up, it already has, it is already under way, and may even have finished. I know of an Apple TV+ drama, for instance, whose makers were deep into development of series three, four and five before officially getting picked up for any of them.

So there’s a practical and actually I think bleedin’ obvious reason why fan reaction isn’t and cannot be listened to. But there is more and it’s not tied to how some fans also expect the show to change every week based on their response to the last episode.

Drama is not and cannot be a democracy.

Idiotic choose-your-own-ending dramas aside, we only and exclusively get to vote on a show’s future in one specific way. We get to decide to watch or not.

I have reviewed Doctor Who professionally, I’ve written about it for Radio Times magazine and had the peculiar experience of looking up the Wikipedia coverage of an article and finding myself quoted. But what I hope I’ve never done is say definitively that a show should do X or Y, that its failings are A or B.

I mean, I’ve been known to say that the dialogue in some show or other is shite altogether — Radio Times may not have printed that verbatim — but I don’t expect the writer to listen to me. I just expect to find something else to watch next time.

With Doctor Who, fans are telling the show makers what they’re doing wrong and what they must do about it. But that always seems to boil down to how the makers should make Doctor Who be as it used to be. And if that were even possible, we would be so bored.

I believe this is ultimately what happened to Star Trek: Enterprise and why I stopped watching that show. If you Google it now, you’ll learn that the last season was the best, but this is a history written by the victors kind of thing. The last run was a fan favourite because it just did what fans like. It repeated previous Star Trek type stories, it seemed to me to have decided to throw away what made it different from the other shows. I don’t know, clearly, but it seemed to me that the show was not moving forward and so I stopped watching.

If there is nothing else I can do except watch or not watch, if there is nothing specific I can usefully say a show must do even if I have an opinion, then there is still something more nebulous that I can be certain of. It is that if a show does not ever surprise us with something new, it is dead.

So while I didn’t especially adore every minute of the last run of Doctor Who, it did have “73 Yards” and “Dot and Bubble”. They each broke the show’s format but I believe in doing so they shored up that format and made the series feel alive.

That’s something Doctor Who is very good at, the way that its stories can have life and vigour and energy. That’s what I want and the show — any show — cannot deliver if it is somehow able to react to fan criticisms.

It’s not as if there’s a shortage of anything else to watch.