It looks like it’s finally going to happen. This afternoon, one of the freelance contributors to “a rival publication” tweeted that Celebrity Mastermind was being bumped from its 7pm slot on BBC1 on Sunday evening, to make way for the thing we’ve all been waiting for – before rapidly deleting his tweet after learning that this particular item of news (or rather, this announcement of an item of news) was supposed to be embargoed until midnight tonight. 

Oops.

The news, of course, is that the name of the twelfth Doctor (widely expected to be Peter Capaldi, after his betting odds took a very sudden and dramatic fall earlier in the week) is to be revealed to the public.

More interesting is that this announcement is presumably to take place in front of a live studio audience, duped into believing that they were merely attending the recording of a pilot for a new show about long-running TV programmes, the first episode of which was, innocuously, to be looking back over fifty years of Doctor Who. Looking forward to the next few, more like.

Peter Capaldi (famed for The Thick Of It) has appeared in Doctor Who before, of course: as Caecilius in the 2008 David Tennant episode The Fires of Pompeii – as well as taking on the role of John Frobisher in spin-off show Torchwood: Children of Earth.

A long term fan of the series (in fact, he even had a letter on the subject published in the Radio Times at the age of 15), it is possible Capaldi might even have lobbied Steven Moffat for the role, inadvertently furthering the showrunner’s “Scottish agenda” in the process, and he would become the third Doctor from north of the border since Sylvester McCoy took the part in 1987.

Of course, it’s also possible that the BBC will announce someone else entirely. But YouTube fans wouldn’t have nearly as much fun overdubbing anything other than Malcolm Tucker’s ripe dialogue onto clips of new Doctor Who, so our money’s on Capaldi.

But watch this space!

UPDATE: The BBC have now confirmed that the Twelfth Doctor will indeed be revealed this Sunday, in DOCTOR WHO LIVE: THE NEXT DOCTOR, on BBC One at 7PM. As Moffat says, “The decision is made and the time has come to reveal who’s taking over the TARDIS. For the last of the Time Lords, the clock is striking twelve.”

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