okmatewanker

When I went digging for the Tory press loosing their shit over Dr Who I found the Telegraph were being almost reasonable about it:

What has happened to Doctor Who? Of late, there’s been a flurry of irritable reviews about Russell T Davies’s triumphantly expensive return to the Tardis, complaining about the show’s crowbarred-in references to genocide, refugees, gender pronouns and transgenderism. What is with this barrage of political correctness being hurled at our kids?

In some ways, it is business as usual – Davies has played with gender and sexuality across his entire career, and definitely since resurrecting Doctor Who in 2005. Captain Jack Harkness, played by the now unmentionable John Barrowman, stormed into Davies’s first season as a bisexual troublemaker who snogged Billie Piper’s Rose and Christopher Eccleston’s Doctor in the same episode. Captain Jack spin-off Torchwood saw every major character have some sort of non-heterosexual relationship.

After that, characters such as Bill Potts (gay), Madame Vastra and Jenny Flint (married Victorian lesbians), and Clara Oswald (bisexual) took the baton on. It all meshed smoothly, few people complained, and the nation got on with its Saturday evening teatime viewing entirely unruffled.

But suddenly it’s all started to feel a little clunky. In last year’s 60th anniversary special, a transgender character, Rose (played by Yasmin Finney), saved the day because she was non-binary, and in the second of the weekend’s double-bill, The Devil’s Chord, American drag artist Jinkx Monsoon appeared from inside a piano and admonished a fusty music teacher to use the pronoun “them”.

It’s tempting to think that Davies is looking for an outraged reaction.

...

This week he gave an interview in which the journalist pointed out that one of the papers Davies had in mind had given the episode a five-star review. Was he annoyed? “Very annoyed,” he said. “I’m sure it won’t last.”

The Welshman has claimed that “anti-queer thinking is on the rise.” Possibly. But not in Doctor Who. In the 1960s, Max Adrian’s King Priam and Derren Nesbitt’s leather-clad Tegana were clearly gay. There was a lesbian subtext to Ace and Karra in the 1980s. A thinly disguised Alan Turing showed up in the Curse of Fenric (1989). Admittedly, Alpha Centauri, the hermaphrodite one-eyed alien from the Jon Pertwee era, looked a little too much like a giant green penis to make any kind of statement beyond “are you pleased to see me?”. There’s a reason Doctor Who has a large LGBTQ+ following.

And there’s a reason storylines about refugees, genocide, poverty, evil empires and all the other political topics from the recent episodes fit neatly into Doctor Who - it’s always had messages. Take the piece from The Spectator which denounced the show’s “politics” and complained about “a growing tendency on the part of the Doctor to moralise tediously about peace, love, and brotherhood”, and citing the Doctor’s “ludicrous enthusiasm for ecological cranks”. That was written in 1973.

As Tony Jordan, the 64-year-old co-ordinator of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society, says over the phone: “People who complain that Doctor Who is too progressive either haven’t seen it or else they haven’t watched it for a very long time, and they’ve forgotten what the show is like.”

“Doctor Who has always been at the cutting edge of progressive viewpoints,” he points out. “The very first episode in 1963 was produced by a Jewish woman in her late 20s and directed by a gay Asian man. Whenever the front pages get overexcited about, say, the Doctor becoming a woman, real fans just sigh.”

Then start to go a bit off the rails:

The truth is, the Doctor is a One Nation Tory, bestowing his ideas of kindness across the universe by any means necessary. “Doctor Who has generally been both gently progressive and vaguely establishment in tone,” explains Jonn Elledge, journalist, fan and author of A History of the World in 47 Borders. “As well as fighting monsters, the Doctor overthrows tyrants and fights evil empires, but historically did so in the guise of a vaguely patrician man who went to a sort of space Oxbridge.”

Elledge cites a handful of stories you could call right-wing – including The Dominators (1968) and The Sun Makers (1977) – and points to Pertwee, a posh chap in a velvet smoking jacket whose best mate is a brigadier. Very patrician.

Although our comrades on more far left instances would probably have reading of Dr Who that would suggest he's just a time-and-space reactionary.