What actually is What if Doctor Who Wasn’t Axed?

The What if Doctor Who Wasn’t Axed? series began in 2016 exploring an alternate universe in which Doctor Who was never cancelled in 1989, instead continuing into a twenty-seventh season and beyond. Over the following decade, the project evolved into an expansive speculative series charting an alternate production history for the programme, continually revised and refined to reflect the most plausible version of events.

By 2021, the series had caught up to the present day, and since 2023 had been running with an appropriate distance behind real-world events, depicting a version of Doctor Who with an additional fifteen years of uninterrupted development.

Beginning on 22 June 2026, exactly a decade after the launch of the original video, the series restarted from the beginning with a brand-new documentary retelling of the WIDWWA timeline.

Why did you reboot WIDWWA in 2026?

I decided to reboot WIDWWA in 2026, instead of continuing forward, to mark the series’ tenth anniversary by returning to its roots and fixing the long-standing structural flaws of its early years. The original early seasons were rushed, relied too heavily on existing expanded universe media without narrative logic, and lacked proper consideration for realistic production or personnel, making a comprehensive remake feel inevitable to correct those ill-thought-out decisions. Furthermore, continuing the timeline forward became increasingly unsustainable due to real-world commitments, alongside a waning personal interest in crafting “future” WIDWWA stories, which had already stalled after 2024. At the same time, the massive acceleration in generative image technology finally provided the tools needed to visualise this alternate universe in vivid, highly realistic detail. Combined with improved documentary-style video editing and writing skills honed over the past decade, rebooting the series allowed me to break away from a rigid, unsustainable release schedules to deliver a high-quality, definitive version of the project that truly fulfils its original vision.

Why do you use AI in your videos?

Since its inception, WIDWWA’s core mission has been to present the most accurate and realistic version of a universe where Doctor Who didn’t end in 1989, and AI image generation is the evolving technology that finally allows me to realise this alternate timeline in vivid detail. I actually first experimented with machine-learning image models for the series back in 2019 when the tech was in its infancy, but this new iteration fully embraces it to achieve a specific level of realism, such as replicating a 1990 BBC 1-inch videotape camera screencap, that traditional artists simply cannot recreate. To maintain total control over this quality, my models have been uniquely trained and customised to a standard that cannot be easily replicated by anyone else, and I can guarantee that absolutely no cloud compute or cloud-based services were used to create these visuals; every single image has been run entirely locally on my own M4 Mac.

Why is the What if Doctor Who Wasn’t Axed? wiki no longer on FANDOM?

In June 2021, the decision was made to move our wiki from FANDOM to Miraheze. The new platform led to many advantages including the ability to use a domain name (wiki.widwwa.co.uk), increased customisation and the ability to turn off SEO tools.

Why did you choose to turn of SEO tools on the wiki?

The What if Doctor Who Wasn’t Axed? series can already appear incredibly confusing when found by new viewers, however, what was often more confusing was when the wiki was discovered as people’s first entry into What if Doctor Who Wasn’t Axed?. Not only did this create the false impression that the series was nothing more than just a wiki, with seemingly incredible detail about something fictional, but also it allowed people to view the series with absolutely zero context. This led, more often than not, to a negative impression of the series and its community.

Additionally, on the wiki, there are many pages for cast and crew members, some of which aren’t the most well-known names in our universe. This meant that sometimes when searching for a particular person, their WIDWWA Wiki page was visible in the first few results on Google. This just led to blatant misinformation about real people.

Turning off SEO has allowed for the WIDWWA Wiki to be a database of What if Doctor Who Wasn’t Axed? for people already familiar with the series and actively want to find out more information. It avoids a negative first impression of the series and misinformation around real-life people.

I would like to develop my own version of What if Doctor Who Wasn’t Axed? is this allowed?

Yes, that is more than okay!

The concept of What if Doctor Who Wasn’t Axed? is an old one, as many have speculated about it in the past. However, What if Doctor Who Wasn’t Axed? was the first time the idea was dedicated into an actual series exploring an alternate timeline from 1990 to the present day. Therefore, we do recommend that anyone planning to make a series in the same style as What if Doctor Who Wasn’t Axed? follow a few guidelines, which we issued in January 2020.

The major points include factors such as using a different name, as What if Doctor Who Wasn’t Axed?, specifically, is the name of this series; making sure not to steal any original creative content from What if Doctor Who Wasn’t Axed? and to avoid using actors in suspiciously similar parts to the ones they played in What if Doctor Who Wasn’t Axed?. The main thing to remember is to just “be original” and you can’t go wrong.

The full set of guidelines can be read here.

These are only guidelines and cannot be enforced but we’d appreciate it if you didn’t repackage our work and pass it off as your own. Some things can just boil down to coincidence, but if you’re reading this, then you’re obviously a fan of What if Doctor Who Wasn’t Axed? and naturally very aware of our characters and stories. Therefore, we just ask, politely, then if you plan to make your own series, inspired by What if Doctor Who Wasn’t Axed?, that you keep these guidelines in mind.

I thought Paul McGann played the Ninth Doctor in What if Doctor Who Wasn’t Axed?… what happened?

The early years of What if Doctor Who Wasn’t Axed? featured many things that we were unhappy with, later on, due to them being more than likely very unrealistic. In January 2020, a post called “The Retcon-athon” was released detailing changes to the early years of the series. A year later, the decision was made to take this one step further and replace Paul McGann as the Ninth Doctor.

The reason Paul McGann was originally chosen was because he was the Doctor in 1996 in the real world, so it’d make sense for that also to be the case in What if Doctor Who Wasn’t Axed?. This logic was misguided and deeply regretted. The decision was wrestled with for several years, and considered during the 2020 “Retcon-athon”, but in 2021, the decision was made to replace Paul McGann with the much more realistic choice, Michael French, as the Ninth Doctor.