IT was good of you to allow Mark Smith column inches to find his inner "yer da" (“Casting a woman as the Doctor isn’t clever, it’s sad and predictable”, The Herald, July 17).

I doubt the casting of Jodie Whittaker is, as he claims, desperation for ratings and a need for the show to prove its "status as a promoter of diversity and equality".

In many ways it's about the show doing what it has always done of late and casting an exceptional actor in the title role.

When Whittaker was announced my dad made a joke about parking the Tardis, my daughter, however, punched the air and shouted, "Yesss! Doctor Who's a girl."

I don't doubt his Whovian credentials, but after 12 previous male doctors (13 if you include John Hurt's war doctor) the decision to make the next one female hardly deprives boys of a hero, as Mr Smith frets.

It just means this hero is, at the moment, a woman.

James Mackie,

1 Bruce Road, Glasgow.

I WISH to protest in the strongest possible terms that the new Doctor Who is merely a white cisgendered woman and not a black disabled gluten-intolerant self-harming vegan lesbian with Asperger's who reads The Guardian.

Let's face it, it's about the only way they'll get any sort of viewer back after Peter Capaldi's disastrous shortbread and haggis kitsch tenancy – the worst Doctor since Peter Davison and our surgery's locum.

Mark Boyle,

15 Linn Park Gardens, Johnstone, Renfrewshire.