Doctor Who (in-universe)

Doctor Who was a BBC science fiction series that chronicled the adventures of the Doctor. (PROSE: The Terror of the Umpty Ums)

History
On 26 March 1963, Winston Churchill approached a Mr Newman at the BBC, having noticed in The Times that he wished to make a new type of drama. Churchill wondered if he would be interested "in the story of an old, very dear friend" whose name was "The Doctor". (PROSE: "My dear Mr Newman")

A TV series beginning Doc- was a science fiction programme produced by the BBC first broadcast at 5:15 pm on Saturday 30 November 1963. (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks, PROSE: Who Killed Kennedy)

There was a novelisation, Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks, which was published by Target Books. (PROSE: Bafflement and Devotion)

In 1974, the Third Doctor regenerated into the Fourth Doctor. (PROSE: Fanboys)

In 1978, Iris Wildthyme helped Geoff Love to develop the theme tune. (PROSE: Bafflement and Devotion)

Prior to 1981, after being on the show for around seven years, the Fourth Doctor regenerated into the Fifth Doctor, who would be appearing in the upcoming season.

By 1981, the Wirrn, Zarbi, Sontarans, Krynoids, Zygons, Mechanoids, Yeti, and the Brain of Morbius all had been featured in the show, serving the role of the villains. One of the serials was called "The Seeds of Doom", and two novelisations (among many), "State of Decay" and "Planet of the Spiders", were published by Target and sold in WHSmith's. These were based off serials of the same name. (PROSE: Fanboys)

By the 21st century, Cybermen, Weeping Angels, Sontarans, and Slitheen had appeared. David Karpagnon, an orphan with dissociative personality disorder, watched the show around this time. The Doctor helped him with his problems from inside his head. (PROSE: The Terror of the Umpty Ums)

By 2020, the show had 12 series that were available on BBC iPlayer. The ninth included episodes such as "The Magician's Apprentice", "The Witch's Familiar", "Under the Lake", "Before the Flood", "The Girl Who Died", "The Woman Who Lived", "The Zygon Invasion", "The Zygon Inversion", "Sleep No More", "Face the Raven" and "Heaven Sent". There also existed at some point an episode titled The Day of the Doctor.

In 2020, the two Osgoods conversed over Zoom. One of the duo goes onto BBC iPlayer after ending the chat, and she scrolls past several episodes of Doctor Who from Series Nine, until she decides to watch The Zygon Invasion. (WC: The Zygon Isolation)

At some point during the 21st century, the Doctor was played by a woman. (PROSE: The Terror of the Umpty Ums)

Other accounts of the Doctor appearing in Earth fiction, sometimes as a character called "Doctor Who", suggested that some of the movies and TV programmes about the character were based on records and testimonies of the real Doctor. (PROSE: Stop, Thief!, Salvation, The Day of the Doctor) It has been suggested that when the Doctor's existence has become too noticeable to a world, they have a favorite "panic button", going back in time and introducing themselves as a fictional character in that world's mythology. (PROSE: Afterword)

Parallel timelines
In one reality, where the Doctor did not appear to ever have existed as a real individual, from 19 September to 24 October 1964, a six-part story entitled The Outlaws was first broadcast, starring actor William Hartnell as a version of the First Doctor. The six episodes were titled: "The Deserted Castle", "The Thief of Sherwood", "The Alchemist", "Errand of Mercy", "Ransom" and "A Guest For the Gallows". Episodes 3 and 5 were missing but still existed as off-air recordings. It had the production code "I".

The guest cast for "The Deserted Castle" included William Russell in a dual role also as Robin Hood, Archie Duncan as Little John, Ronald Hines as Will Scarlet, Frank Thornton as the Sheriff of Nottingham, Anneke Wills as Maid Marion, Milton Johns as the peddler, Carl Bernard as a villager and Ivor Colin as a man-at-arms. The writer was Godfrey Porter, the title music was by Ron Grainer with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, the incidental music was composed and conducted by Harper C Bassett, the story editor was David Whitaker, the designer was Barry Newbery, the associate producer was Mervyn Pinfield, the producer was Verity Lambert and the director was Patrick Whitfield.

While doing an alchemy demonstration for the Sheriff in Episode 3, the Doctor nearly blows himself up while mixing chemicals, leaving him absent for two episodes while Hartnell recovered from a short illness.

The Daleks appeared in one of the first eight stories of this version of Doctor Who; the tenth story was titled Planet of Giants and followed on from a cliffhanger in which the fault locator warned of a build-up of pressure within the TARDIS.

In 1986, Godfrey Porter wrote a novelisation of The Outlaws entitled The Thief of Sherwood for Target Books. (PROSE: The Thief of Sherwood)

The Eighth Doctor encountered a version of the Doctor Who TV series in a parallel universe where he realised that he did not exist as a real individual; instead, he encountered the actor Tom Baker, who resembled the Doctor's fourth self. (COMIC: TV Action!)

The Eleventh Doctor also found himself stranded in a "meta-fiction universe" where Doctor Who existed as a TV programme with a long and storied history; to his surprise, all of the series' episodes matched events in his past exactly. (COMIC: The Girl Who Loved Doctor Who)

Behind the scenes
The existence of the TV series Doctor Who within the Doctor Who universe is a metafictional gimmick with a long and storied history within licensed Doctor Who fiction. The show itself stopped just shy of confirming the existence of a series called Doctor Who within its universe on two occasion; the first was in Remembrance of the Daleks, where a TV series whose title began with "Doc…", and which debuted on the same date as the real-life Doctor Who, was briefly mentioned — only for the characters (and viewers) to miss the full name of the programme. Many years later, a poster featuring the Twelfth Doctor, Clara Oswald and the Doctor's TARDIS was glimpsed in the background of the Series 8 episode In the Forest of the Night, but with no title visible.

As a significant part of popular culture of Earth history in their own universe, television programmes and books based upon the Doctor have also been referenced in other in-universe sources; some, like Sarah Jane Smith's Doctor series, were reminiscent but distinct from real-life Doctor Who productions, while others, such as the mention of the two Peter Cushing movies in Steven Moffat's Day of the Doctor novelisation, intentionally matched pieces of real-life Doctor Who fiction. However, though instances such as the short story Stop, Thief! (where Winston Churchill commissions a "BBC TV programme about the Doctor's life") push the implication as far as it may be pushed, no story deemed valid by this Wiki has yet directly posited an in-universe TV series called Doctor Who as existing in the Doctor's own universe and being based in some obvious causal manner on the Doctor's "real" exploits. The 2020 webcast The Zygon Isolation came closest, but still did not explicitly spell out that its account of an in-universe Doctor Who was causally based on the real Doctor's adventures.

As an in-universe concept, Doctor Who has been more consistently used in parallel universes — where the logically thorny implications of the series known to the viewer simultaneously being a true account of a time-traveller's life, and a piece of fiction which the same individual could theoretically watch, would be lessened. The Eighth Doctor discovered the existence of Doctor Who in TV Action! while the Eleventh Doctor dealt with chapters of his life being chronicled as episodes of a television programme in The Girl Who Loved Doctor Who. The articles from The Thief of Sherwood, which depict an adventure with the First Doctor, Susan, Ian and Barbara where they meet Robin Hood, is placed in "an alternate version of our world", belonging to the Doctor's multiverse, by authorial intent.