* Or series 33 depending on your point of view

Doctor Who series seven has been given the greenlight with Matt Smith returning for another 14 episodes (including a Christmas special). This was announced by , Head of Communications for BBC1, Fiction, Daytime and HD via Twitter and later confirmed by on🎐 the same social networking system.

Tweeted: “So. Farewell then #Doctor_Who -- full story on the chaos at the BBC (and in the Tardis) in the new issue of Private Eye ” in a clearly desperate attempt to boost sales, while claimed that Matt Smith was off to Hollywood to seek fame and fortune. The Private Eye story then claimed: “Programme chiefs in London were horrified to learn recently that BBC Wales is proposing not to make a full series of Doctor Who in 2012, but instead to put the pr♈ogramme on hiatus and merely bash out four specials as it did in 2009. Which will leave an enormous hole in the BBC1 Saturday night schedule and a bigger one in the profits of BBC Worldwide, and will mean the corporation will be paying lead actor Matt Smith to spend most of the rest of this year doing nothing.” No need to worry about your licence fee going to waste now though (and, oddly, their own story didn’t even back up their sensationali✃st “Farewell then #Doctor_Who” claim).

However, as some internet speculation has pointed out, niether of the BBC tweets (from Moffat and Hodges) mention when series seven wouldꦺ air. Let those conspiracy theories gestate…

Meanwhile, at least one writer (other than Steven Moffat) seems to have been revealed for series seven: reports that writer John Fay is listed as writing an episode according to his representatives’ website, (although the reference appears to have been removed now). Fay wrote two episodes of Torchwood: Children Of Earth , as well as another episode of the upcoming Torchwood: Miracle Day .