Russell Davies says his new Doctor will have a "modern action heroine" for a sidekick. Which seems to me to miss the point of a sidekick. If your sidekick is too able to take care of herself, you end up requiring badder baddies to create any sense of peril (or you have to make her twist her ankle during the chase scene, or something), and your hero has to get commensurately more powerful, and you end up risking a ridiculous escalation.
I’ll just hope the reporter is not accurately representing Mr Davies’s intent.