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BBC Studios/Bad Wolf/James Pardon“Whatever I was doing – maybe cleaning up or doing homework – when I heard the ‘oooh-oooh-oooooh’,” Adesoji Kukoyi says, mimicking the iconic Doctor Who theme tune, “I dropped everything and ran straight to the television.”
As a child growing up in 1980s Nigeria, Mr Kukoyi was infatuated with sci-fi sensation Doctor Who. British shows like Allo Allo and Fawlty Towers aired regularly as a cultural hangover from the colonial era, but none captured Mr Kukoyi’s imagination like the time-travelling Doctor did.
“He always spoke to me,” 44-year-old Mr Kukoyi, who currently has a vintage Doctor Who theme as the ringtone on his phone, tells the BBC.
“Like there’s somebody watching out for us… yes, we make mistakes, but we do our best, especially if we have a teacher that will lead us on the right path.”
Mr Kukoyi has been watching Doctor Who for decades, so when he heard that on Saturday an episode will, for the very first time, be set in Nigeria, he was elated.
“I was watching last week’s episode with my wife and the preview [for the following week] said: ‘Welcome to Lagos, Nigeria’. I screamed like a little girl!” Mr Kukoyi says.
The setting is momentous not just for Mr Kukoyi – a native of Nigeria’s biggest and liveliest city Lagos – but for the show too. Saturday’s adventure will be the first primarily set in Africa.
It is fitting that the producers chose Nigeria for this milestone – in 2013, fans worldwide were delighted when nine lost Doctor Who episodes from the 1960s were unearthed in a Nigerian TV facility.
Adesoji KukoyiAriyon Bakare, who in the upcoming episode plays the mysterious Barber, says fans can expect “a time-bending cultural ancestral collision” and “hair, lots of hair”.
The preview also teases a vibrant barber shop, a brimming Lagos market and a towering, monstrous-looking spider.
Fans speculate that this creature is Anansi, a legendary character in West African and Caribbean folktales, but scriptwriter Inua Ellams is keeping specifics under wraps.
As for why the show has enjoyed such popularity in Nigeria, he says: “There’s something Nigerian about the Doctor. Nigerians are sort of loud, gregarious people… the Doctor is mysterious, boisterous, sort of over-confident but somehow manages to save the day.”
Ellams, who moved from Nigeria to the UK as a child, also considers why in 62 years, a character known to traverse the universe has barely spent any time in Africa.
It could be that no writer has felt confident enough to produce an authentic African story, he says, or it might be down to the Doctor’s need to “blend into his environment and be inconspicuous”.
“Ncuti Gatwa [who plays the Doctor] being an actor of African descent means that we can tell new stories with the Doctor and negotiate in different spaces because of his appearance.
“And this is the brilliance of the show – every Doctor creates new opportunities to tell new stories in different ways,” Ellams tells the BBC.
BBC Studios/Bad Wolf/James PardonBut these fresh Doctor Who stories have a smaller reach than the old ones did, as the show is no longer broadcast on Nigerian public TV. If you are in the country and want to catch up on the Doctor’s exploits, you would have to subscribe to streaming service Disney Plus.
Regardless, Mr Kukoyi insists that a dedicated troop of Nigerian Doctor Who lovers will be sitting transfixed on their sofas on Saturday evening, bearing witness to the Tardis materialising in Lagos.
“I’m waiting with baited breath,” he says. “Finally, he is coming!”
Mr Kukoyi – whose first experience of the Doctor was one played by a stripy scarf-wearing Tom Baker – says his young daughters are not so taken with his beloved show.
He is “trying to get them onboard”, he says.
Perhaps seeing the Doctor wearing traditional Nigerian clothing, squeezing his way through a quintessential Lagos market and getting caught up in local folklore will help them fall in love with the show the way their father once did.
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