In an extract from his book The Queerest of Folk: A Life in Television shared by The Guardian, former Doctor Who showrunner Russell T Davies stated his frustration with the leaks which came out of production and how it partly lead to his decision not to proceed with the Doctor Who 2026 Christmas special.

“I thought quietly to myself: I’ll spend a year working on this, but it’ll all be leaked before it gets on air.”

“When it comes to science fiction, the problem of leaking online is now so vast and so pernicious it threatens to ruin everything. And it’s more ferocious than ever with Doctor Who. Every decision we ever made, every single plot twist, every single moment, all the way up to the appearance of Billie in the very last seconds of the last series finale, was leaked. It’s absolutely extraordinary, and I swear it did a lot to destroy the profile of the show. It introduces a cynicism among fans, because they’re not surprised by anything any more. Their response to a leak is weariness, an instant assumption that whatever has been leaked won’t work. They instantly imagine the worst version of it, and then, when they eventually see it, it inevitably confirms their bias. So we had to work for two years knowing that leaks were happening, and yet we were powerless.”

In this case, the leaks were posted as comments on the posts of a specific YouTube channel. Once the initial leaks posted by this particular account were found to be accurate, every subsequent comment from this account was distributed on various online forums and social media.

As someone who is fascinated by advance news that comes from location filming, supporting artiste casting calls, and cast and crew CVs, I have to agree that plot leaks that come from inside sources such as post-production crew are ruiners rather than mere spoilers. Whether the leaked plot details affect the reception of the described scene is another matter.

The person responsible for the leaked plot details was eventually identified but refused to name their source.

“The BBC managed to track down the person who was putting the information online, but it was a member of the public. They were probably friends with someone at some point in the delivery chain of Doctor Who, and we simply didn’t have the legal right to seize that person’s emails. I wish we did. This was my copyrighted material – why don’t I have the legal right to get that person arrested? But the BBC was always very scared of how that would look – a member of the public being prosecuted for simply breaking copyright; it would be like breaking a butterfly on a wheel.”

“To this day, we don’t know who the leaker was, which made us suspicious of every single person we worked with. There were some tricky conversations at work. But somewhere down the line, all these episodes go through a hundred technical processes in a hundred different suites, and I’m quite sure it’s just some random person sitting in the back of a room – not the person in charge, but the person whose job it is just to press play on every single thing we ever did, who’d then tell his mate, who’d then post it online. That person is still out there. They might be reading this and frothing with glee. Well done, mate, enjoy your masturbation. But we were powerless, absolutely powerless, to do anything.”

It is not always the case that nothing can be done. This scenario has happened previously with a leak of a scene from the Doctor Who Series 11 premiere The Woman Who Fell to Earth. In that case, members of the public who knew of or posted the scene cooperated with the investigators and the source of the leak was identified but not prosecuted. This is probably the best-case scenario as it insures the leaks from this source stop and the leaker, who violated their signed non-disclosure agreement (NDA), never works in the industry again.

In Two days, 9 October 2026, The BBC will inform production companies that applied to the Doctor Who competitive tender whether they made the longlist of tenderers that will continue to compete to win the contract to produce future series of Doctor Who. The production company with the winning pitch will have to contend with this same potential problem of leaks coming from the inside.