I just got off a video conference chatting to a captain of industry. I cannot tell you his name because he has friends in low places. Also, I am not at liberty to divulge the purpose of our call because the topic was so secret that I had to cover my ears when he told me. When he finally gestured that I could remove my fingers from my ears (I’m assuming this is what his gestures were intending to communicate), he informed me that what he hadn’t just told me was very exciting, and you can’t say fairer than that.

But that’s not what I wanted to talk about.

Since we hadn’t touched base for a couple of years, and since we are both ardent fans of Doctor Who, we commenced our conversation by discussing how well the current Doctor Who, played by Jodi Whittaker, is faring in the role.

Naturally, this caused us to compare and contrast Jodi to the other Doctors who have carried the torch since the 2005 reboot: Christopher Eccleston (2005), David Tennant (2005–2010), Matt Smith (2010–2013), and Peter Capaldi (2014–2017).

Sad to relate, we both agreed that Peter Capaldi had fallen short of the mark. I’m sure this wasn’t all his fault because the majority of his scripts were pretty pathetic. Peter starred in Series 8, 9, and 10, but I would be hard pushed to recommend the majority of these episodes to my friends. Having said that, the last two episodes of Series 9 (“Heaven Sent” and “Hell Bent”) will stay in my mind as long as I still have one, as will the final two episodes of Series 10 (“World Enough and Time” and “The Doctor Falls”).

But that’s not what I wanted to talk about.

Do you know the Scottish-American comedian Craig Ferguson? To be honest, I’m not a huge fan myself, but he has his moments. To the best of my knowledge, Craig’s breakout came when he played the role of the store manager on The Drew Carey Show.

Although Craig normally talks with a Scottish accent, he used an over-the-top upper-class English voice for his manager role “to make up for generations of English actors doing crap Scottish accents.” Ironically, one of the main targets of Craig’s ire wasn’t English at all, but rather Canadian actor James Doohan who played Scotty the engineer on the original Star Trek (I’m embarrassed to admit that this is the first time I learned Scotty wasn’t actually Scottish).

But that’s not what I wanted to talk about.

I just discovered that when Craig was a teenager, he was the drummer in various Scottish punk and post-punk bands, including Night Creatures, Exposure, Ana Hausen, and The Bastards from Hell, who later renamed themselves as the Dreamboys (you can’t say they weren’t without a sense of humor).

Why am I waffling on about this here? Well, can you guess who fronted the Dreamboys as vocalist? Why, it was none other than Peter Capaldi.

You’re welcome.