Doctor Hugh?

I don't know how serious the rumors were that there was serious consideration of Hugh Grant joining Doctor Who as Christopher (don't call me Ian) Eccleston's replacement, but it's an interesting idea. He did once play the Doctor for about a minute in “The Curse of the Fatal Death”, and he has the wit and sincerity to perhaps create his own style of the alien charm that is the character. This might have been a good idea for him too, since he's faced for a long time the problem of being typecast into the same type of character in an endless stream of romantic comedies, after helming the flagship of the genre, Four Weddings and a Funeral, and he did just do a movie with the queen of the RomCom section at the video store (if not the box office), Drew Barrymore. He himself has commented on the difficulty of finding a fresh take on the guy from 4W+1F when he's asked to play him for the seventeenth time. I could be forgetting something, but the last time I remember seeing him do something else besides feckless charm in a RomCom was a small part in The Remains of the Day, and that was going on 15 years ago. I suppose his character from About a Boy was enough of a selfish bastard to avoid that trap, and in Love, Actually he was essentially playing Tony Blair, and not the guy from Notting Hill, again. The other nice thing would have been that with Hugh Grant as the lead, Doctor Who would have gotten more mindshare in America, and we might have gotten more of it over here a little quicker. As it is, David Tennant has been great as the new Doctor, with a perfect mix of solemnity and humor, but I can't help wondering about the road not taken.