Update: Okay apparently there is at least one person on my f-list who doesn't want to know who the new Doctor will be and actually expects to avoid being told (even though they've probably heard accurate rumours already). For that reason the wonderful news is now hidden under a cut, but trust me, there's really cool stuff in under there. Check it out!
This is the twelfth Doctor! (Or is it thirteenth now that John Hurt is apparently the incarnation in between McGann and Eccleston?)....
Peter Capaldi!
Naturally he's known best for his role as the ranting and raving spin doctor Malcolm Tucker in "The Thick Of It". Also many will know him very well for his incredibly dark and harrowing performance in "Torchwood: Children of Earth" as well as his rather briefer appearance in the Doctor Who episode "The Fires of Pompeii". However, he has been in a LOT of other stuff.
The earliest performance of his I recognise is in the movie "Local Hero". It's a wonderful little film and Peter Capaldi has a relatively small but fairly important role in it. Capaldi also played the nefarious Angel Islington in Neil Gaiman's "Neverwhere" series and played Rory in the tv adaptation of Iain Banks' "The Crow Road".
I hope that Capaldi keeps the Scottish accent that we now know so well. It'd be strange to hear him playing the Doctor without it. I'm also interested to how they handle his relationship with River Song. While some might think it a strange new pairing, it must be remembered that she comments on how young Matt Smith is during his first Weeping Angels storyline.
I feel that Capaldi's abilities to do darker dramatic material might also allow for a darker Doctor. I've been rewatching some of Sylvester McCoy's stories (as the Seventh Doctor) and some of those were not only extremely creepy, but there's also a mysteriousness to the Doctor himself in those episodes, whereby it is clear that he often knows more than he is prepared to let on. Before the end of Sylvester McCoy's run, the show had been allowed to become properly terrifying, with the sea vampires of the "Curse of Fenric" storyline properly freaking me out. Of course Capaldi himself would have been in his 30s by the time I was watching Doctor Who. The Doctor when he wrote a letter to the Radio Times would have been Jon Pertwee. Though that being said, when he was play-acting as the Doctor at the age of 9, that would have been during Patrick Troughton's era. A much more inspiring incarnation of the Doctor (to my mind at least).
Here's the interview with Peter Capaldi when he was first revealed as the Doctor:
(video link)
And here, because it had to be done, is a trailer for Doctor Who interspersed with clips of Peter Capaldi in his (up til now) iconic role as a Malcolm Tucker (from "The Thick Of It" and the corresponding movie "In The Loop"):
(video link)