Seventh Doctor (The Lenny Henry Show)
- You may be looking for 9.5th Doctor.
The seventh incarnation of the Doctor emerged suddenly after a misdirection of the TARDIS caused a fatal injury of his previous incarnation. Following his regeneration, he and Peri arrived on Earth in the year 2010 where they encountered the Cybermen and their leader, Thatchos. (NOTVALID: Untitled)
Behind the scenes
This parodical sketch (which unexpectedly correctly predicted that the Sixth Doctor would regenerate on the floor of the TARDIS after extreme turbulence, as later seen in TV: Time and the Rani) also introduced the first incarnation of the Doctor in any licensed BBC material to feature a black actor in the role of the Doctor. Colin Salmon's implicit Doctor Moon notiwhtstanding, it wouldn't be until the casting of Jo Martin in 2020's Fugitive of the Judoon that a person of colour would portray a unique, mainstream TV incarnation of the Doctor, the Fugitive Doctor.
In 2023, Lenny Henry starred in another parodical Doctor Who sketch, this time for Comic Relief: Lenny Henry Regenerates into David Tennant. Therein, he regenerated into a version of David Tennant's Fourteenth Doctor. Although not explicitly identified as such in the short, the character portrayed by Henry was identified as a "9.5th Doctor" by the YouTube Shorts upload of the regeneration clip. In this sense, Henry joined Jim Broadbent and Richard E Grant in having portrayed two distinct non-mainstream versions of the Doctor.
