Doctor Who writer Steven Moffat expressed confidence that there is plenty of interest among production companies to bid on the competitive tender for the programme once the BBC releases its Invitation To Tender (ITT), a document in the formal bidding process to invite independent production companies to compete for the contract to produce existing, returning BBC television programmes.

Moffat made several predictions about the future on the Half the Picture podcast with host Billy Barnell.

“‘No one cares about Doctor Who anymore!’… screams 14 headlines. Do you read your own work back, you pillocks?! Dear god, people are circling already trying to get hold of that! It’ll be fine.”

“A show that’s talked about as endlessly as that isn’t going anywhere. Promise you.”

“Meanwhile, you’ve got all of Doctor Who all of it on your iPhone, right? You can sit and watch anything that we haven’t accidentally lost and you’ll be fine, right? Just watch it all end to end and give them time to get it going. But it will be back and it will be good.”

“Absolutely confident. That’s not insider knowledge. I just know how stuff works.”

The former Doctor Who showrunner and recent writer also spoke briefly on the time it takes for the tender process to play out and for future Doctor Who series to go into production, likely years.

“It might take a moment but if it’s an entirely new team which I think it will be they need a moment they need a moment to sit back and say ‘Okay, what’s it going to be this time? Who’s it going to be this time? What sort of show is it going to be?’ They need a moment. Don’t… don’t go rushing into that.”

“I don’t mean 16 years. We didn’t need 16 years. That was… that was nuts. That was nuts. It was just crazy. Doctor Who was so cheap back in the day. It made money. It was so cheap. They made it for nothing. There was no real reason for them not to make it. I think rights got tied up in all sorts of nutty ways. So, no, it won’t be off like that.”

Moffat also spoke to the historical significance, versitality and resilience of Doctor Who.

“It’s more just different people thinking about it in a different way. I mean, the thing about Doctor Who is that it’s ancient. It’s ancient. It’s like the pyramids or something in terms of television.”

“It’s old, old text, this ancient machine, but all every single piece of it is new. It’s always it’s an old thing made out of new things. It’s always a new Doctor. It’s always a new companion. It’s always a new TARDIS. It’s always a new writer, a new producer… every piece of it you’re looking at is new. If you can be old and new at the same time, then you have all the advantage of myth and all the novelty of invention at once.”

“So it needs that churn of new people coming in and doing new and interesting and exciting things that all kind of ending up being exactly the same ‒ because it is. Yeah, still Doctor Who. Yeah, a box falls out of sky, man falls out of box, says ‘There’s something wrong here’, blows everything up and runs away to another planet, right? I mean, that’s it. Come on, let’s not over-complicate it.”

The BBC announced its intention to put Doctor Who out to competitive tender on June 10, 2026 and will publicly issue the Invitation To Tender this same year.