Doctor Who and the Warriors of Culture
Exploring the long history of controversy in a 60-year-old cultural phenomenon
Doctor Who is 60 years old, which is no mean feat for a piece of cultural fiction and it’s even more notable, perhaps, because unlike its close cousins in Star Trek, Sherlock Holmes, James Bond etc. that it’s made it to this point (wilderness years notwithstanding) without reboots, spin-offs and so on. The Doctor’s face (and gender) may change but what we’ve been following for the past 60 years has been the same character and the same narrative, something that none of the storyworlds mentioned above can boast.
It’s celebrating this milestone with a set of special episodes featuring the return of fan favourites David Tennant and Catherine Tate before Tennant hands over the TARDIS keys to Ncuti Gatwa in a Christmas Day episode. So far, so laudable, if not particularly controversial.
However, the first of those specials, The Star Beast, has found itself tangled up in controversy. This has mostly centred around the inclusion of a trans character, Rose, and the pivotal nature her identity played in the resolution of the plot. For what it’s worth, I thought it a terrific episode and one which did a surprisingly great job of living up to the 1980 comic strip upon which it was based. It’s not often that reboots and adaptations don’t manage to trample all over your childhood memories but this is one of those rare occasions.
It’s fairly predictable that the episode met with howls of protest from the usual culture warriors — from YouTube and X, to old media culprits like the Telegraph, Mail and Express. The hashtag #RIPdoctorwho made a brief appearance and the other side of the debate countered by pointing out that the show that these people professed to admire has always been a bastion of progressive values. And so it struck me that now might be a good time to weigh up both sides of this argument, while taking a brief retrospective at the many controversies the show has raised over the years.
Is Who really progressive?
The quick answer and the one that it’s relatively easy to come up with at a cursory inspection is, yes, yes it is. The show’s first producer was the first woman in British television to work in such a capacity and the first serial was directed by a gay, Muslim man. (If such a thing were to happen today, I’ve no doubt there would be the usual complaints about box-ticking by predictable corners of the media but it’s interesting that it went relatively unremarked upon at the time, to the best of my knowledge.) Add to that the examples of progressive arguments dressed up in the trappings of an SF/Fantasy adventure, whether it be on questions of environment, equality rights or environment (there’s at least one from each era of the show) and you have a pretty convincing argument.
And yet, is that really the whole story? Because for every story that pushes these progressive buttons there’s probably at least one other one in each era that can be interpreted as the opposite. Doctor Who remains loved after so many decades because it is a ‘loose and baggy monster’ of a narrative and often maddeningly inconsistent in any worldview that it seeks to espouse. It is perhaps an essential part of its charm. But let’s break this down a bit further into particular eras or decades (while acknowledging that is by necessity a rather rough-and-ready metric that tends to combine disparate production teams and even lead actors).
The 1960s
Or the black-and-white years. This is an era that can be subdivided into the tenures of William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton as the First and Second Doctors. But both these sub-divisions are dominated by the cultural phenomenon in their own right that is the Daleks. The second Hartnell story introduces these monsters and they loom over these two Doctors in particular as Dalekmania exploded as a cultural phenomenon and then faded.
But what is the Daleks actually about? And can we describe it as epitomising Who’s progressive values going forward. Ostensibly, yes. It’s primary themes are of racial hatred and the folly of nuclear Armageddon. The Daleks are obvious Nazi analogues but they also represent totalitarianism and unbridgeable cultural divides. They can be read as an analogue, perhaps not just of Nazism but of Stalinism (perhaps it’s a little fanciful but when watching the recent colourised version, it did cross my mind that the Dalek city did look a little like the Kremlin). But as a concept, they’re closely related to the SF threats of 50s SF — and that more often than not was a thinly veiled metaphor for the ‘reds under the bed’.
And then there’s the Thals. While writer Terry Nation would make the Thals grittier and more hard-bitten in the subsequent years, in this first serial they are rather fey and ineffectual (at least initially). They resemble 60s flower children, although they predate them by a few years and are defined by their obstinate adherence to pacifism at any price. It’s something that is educated out of them (rather callously) by Ian and we have to ask what is the message here? War is evil but necessary? The Daleks probably has to be considered within the context the often-massive CND marches of the day and the contemporary debates are uni- and multi-lateral disarmament. The overall message of the serial might not be as progressive as might like (and could even be considered a little confused) but here we are in the show’s second story and it’s clearly engaging with contemporary politics and that surely has to give the lie to the oft-repeated modern complaint that the show has suddenly become ‘too political’.
The success of the Daleks both boosted the show and skewed it throughout the 1960s and right up to 1969 there were regular suspiciously Dalek-like robotic analogues for totalitarianism being resisted by beatific peace-loving peoples. Often these were extremely watchable (The Krotons), sometimes less so (The Dominators) but they were to a greater and lesser extent operating off the template laid down by The Daleks. The one exception perhaps is the underrated (and still largely missing) Galaxy Four which knowingly reversed the trope, with the Thal-like Drahvins being the ultimately psychotic villains and the robotic Chumblies being the servants of the physically repulsive but benevolent Rills (who are not dissimilar from the mutants inside the Dalek casings).
The other 60s trope that we probably have to talk about is The Historicals. These were a staple of the Hartnell years but were phased out shortly into Troughton’s run due to declining viewing figures. But initially these were a key aspect of the show’s rather Reithian mission statement — to educate and inform the show’s young viewers. However, as many others have pointed out, they tended to do this in a rather problematic way. It’s hard to escape the questionable optics of a box with a sign marked ‘POLICE’, and all its associations of officialdom and state power depositing four white, middle-class obviously English people in various historical situations from the Stone Age to the French Revolution to the Battle of Culloden. History is being viewed in rather the same way as it was in many of the already-antiquated history books of my school years — from a white, Western perspective that was often deeply condescending, if not outright racist and classist.
The second problem with the historicals, which Chris Chibnall also found when he attempted to revive them during his tenure as showrunner, is that they’re so damned passive. No matter how many times the Doctor warns his companions that they must never interfere in the course of history (‘not one word’ must be changed) they inevitably have to lest they be reduced to impotent observers and that never makes for good drama. And so, even if their interventions are subtle, they must still take place and it’s hard not to read these at least partly in the light of colonial interventions of the dying days of the British Empire or of the clandestined operations of the CIA in Indochina/Vietnam and elsewhere. Lip service might be paid to the autonomy of civilisations other than our own but the assumption of privilege to interfere, no matter how well intentioned, is always assumed to exist.
The 1970s
With the historicals being swept away by this time, and with Terry Nation taking the Daleks away from the BBC to try and make his fortune with them elsewhere, Who found that it had time to breathe and to explore new directions. Once again, we have two Doctors for this decade but this time there’s a clearer thematic demarcation between their eras. Pertwee’s Doctor found himself largely Earthbound in the present day as a punishment by the Time Lords and as a result of this found himself embroiled in far more overtly political situations. While being (debatably) a far more of a authority figure himself, Pertwee’s Doctor found himself working for the military, trying to find diplomatic solutions between humans and aliens and generally wrestling with Blimpish (and often xenophobic) bureaucrats and politicians. But even when he ventured off-world, he was still faced with surprisingly England-of-the-1970s problems — the accession (or not) of an ailing feudal society to a modern economic alliance in The Curse of Peladon or troubled industrial relations in its later sequel.
But most of all, Pertwee’s era is remembered for environmental concerns, most notably in Inferno and The Green Death, and of the show’s Classic run at least he must surely be remembered as the most overtly political Doctor.
There was a change of tack when Tom Baker took over the role, however. This is probably because Baker brought an inherent quirkiness to his interpretation of the role that ultimately spilled over into overt goofy humour. His Doctor only occasionally commanded the instant authority of Pertwee’s and would more usually rely upon being perceived as a disarmingly engaging oddball. Consequently, there’s very little overt politics in Baker’s run. His early years are dominated by a Gothic turn that made no secret of plundering literary and cinematic sources, from Egyptian mummies to Frankenstein to Sherlock Holmes. But after this ran into trouble with Mary Whitehouse and her fellow morality campaigners, this was replaced with a growing reliance on Baker’s obvious facility for humour until the show veered dangerously close to Pythonesque, knowingly postmodern pastiche.
Nevertheless, there are still glimpses of seriousness in the Baker run, the most notable being his agonising over whether to destroy the Daleks before they even become a threat in Genesis of the Daleks. This moral relativism is a new turn for the Doctor and it’s hard to imagine that Hartnell’s or even Pertwee’s Doctor would have had that much problem of destroying them once and for all. But such moments of seriousness grew increasingly rare and when the show touched on politics in the future it was with its tongue firmly in its cheek. Take The Sunmakers as a case in point. It’s clearly an often amusing parody of the British taxation system but it’s hard to discern just what point is being made, save that paying taxes is superficially annoying, no matter what social utility they ultimately facilitate.
I suspect that the great affection with which Baker’s run is remembered is the source of much of the discontent with current Who by a small contingent of culture warriors. Their conception of the show is of a disarmingly arrogant white dude experiencing new cultures with a lack of inherent seriousness and with a relativistic textual richness that privileged them as the source of any change and authority in the situations and civilisations encountered. There’s little sense of the stakes involved in much of Baker’s Who because it knowingly makes clear that these are situations we’ve seen before and the only real novelty is in the sleight of narrative hand which the Doctor will use to resolve the situation.
And yet, it would be wrong to say that the Baker era, for all its metatextual playfulness is wholly apolitical. The lack of seriousness in the Fourth Doctor is a political play in itself and, like his predecessor, there is always an edge of mocking disdain in any of the Doctor’s dealings with authority and he is far less indifferent to injustice than the First and Second Doctors appeared to be. You just have to dig a little deeper with this Doctor. Where the Third was a vaguely left-wing proto-environmentalist, the Fourth is essentially an anarchist and a Situationist who could have come straight out of a campus protest of the times.
The 1980s
Things change once again in the 1980s, although in a far more piecemeal fashion as befits this troubled decade for the show — in which it went through three Doctors and an 18-month hiatus in production. Baker’s successor, Peter Davison, was a much younger Doctor and with a much bigger TARDIS but again there’s very little in the way of overt political messaging. Instead we’re starting to see what we might call highly conceptual Who — in Davison’s first season we see stories based around Buddhism, infinite recursion and MC Escher but also the start of an often plundering of its own past and the creation of what Matt Hills described as ‘database narratives’.
This continued into the troubled era of Davison’s successor, Colin Baker. Like his 70s namesake, Baker II was a far more vivid presence than Davison but was let down by some poor production decisions and a lack of apparent support from the production team, not to mention the higher-ups at the BBC. Baker II is remembered as a ‘failed’ era but in truth it contains just as many strong stories as his predecessor’s run and we do start to see a return to social commentary in Who, with the likes of Vengeance on Varos and Mark of the Rani. The siege mentality that assailed the production team of the time does often bleed into the show but this often gives it a nice sense of defiance.
However, the perceived slip into irrelevance and obsolescence continues after the notorious sacking of Baker II and his replacement with Sylvester McCoy. And for his first few stories, McCoy seems a just as disastrous replacement, with a lack of presence and saddled with just as poor a costume as his predecessor. But then something clicked and McCoy finds his Doctor-Mojo. There’s an increase in overt political commentary in stories like The Happiness Patrol, Paradise Towers and even The Greatest Show in the Galaxy but there’s now a new emphasis and centrality to the companion in Ace and how the Doctor’s influence forms their growth as a character. There’s also a darker take on the Doctor as not-necessarily-wholesome and often manipulative presence. Both these elements would become fundamental parts of the post-2005 reboot.
The TV Movie and the 2005 reboot
By the end of McCoy’s truncated run (cut off by sudden cancellation in 1989), the show was on the verge of becoming something very interesting. We had a Doctor who had acquired an alien ambiguity worthy of the First Doctor and a fusion of social commentary, database narrative and character progression of the companion as the main narrative focal point that would continue into the reboot.
But first we had to go through the TV Movie with Paul McGann as the Doctor. I say ‘go through’ but I don’t necessarily mean this negatively. McGann was a great Doctor although obviously didn’t have much to work with in a single 90-minute movie. His long subsequent run on Big Finish audio adventures (which is a huge body of work and beyond the remit of this blog, I think) has shown his potential and his cameos in the reboot, and the continual rumours of a spin-off featuring his Doctor, show that he has definitely made an impact on the show.
But let’s focus on the 2005, masterminded by Russell T Davies. It’s an update, of course, but an extremely savvy one that incorporates the elements of the TV movie (like the steampunk TARDIS console) and the fusing of social commentary with character development (and not just in the companion. Rose might be the narrative focus of the first two series of the reboot but the Doctor’s PTSD and survivor’s guilt over the Time War are no less significant).
There’s not much point talking about eras in the reboot, in my opinion, as we’re talking about a trio of showrunners who know each other and belong to the shared community of Who fandom anyway — Steven Moffat and RTD are close friends and Chris Chibnall wrote for both of their eras, not to mention being heavily involved in the spin-off series Torchwood. While each has made their own mark on the series, there’s a much clearer continuity between them all.
And that continuity largely means the same intertwining of character and social messaging. All three showrunners have been accused of the same clumsy introduction of social issues into the show but it’s simply not true. It’s always been there, as I’ve hopefully illustrated. And then they usually counter this by saying that it’s more heavy handed than it was in the past but this isn’t true either. The political messaging of The Ambassadors of Death, The Green Death or even The Daleks is as subtle as a brick and the new interation of the show has definitely evolved from that. The real truth, I suspect, is that the themes of nuclear disarmament or industrial labour relations are safely enough in the past not to provoke a reactionary reaction. If those stories, or others, had aired in the current age of social media interaction and partisan culture war they would have met with just as much outrage by those who profess to consider them part of some pre-lapsarian nirvana.
Which brings us back to The Star Beast. The resolution that entwines Rose being trans with the plot point solving of Donna’s metacrisis might not be what we would have seen back in the 70s but it is an evolution of it and it certainly wouldn’t have been out of place in McCoy’s final season. The reason the show has endured 60 years is that it is a lot more pliable than any of the other major fictional franchises. Each era of the show reflects the times in which it was made and that means that it has politics and social commentary hardwired into its DNA. Far more than other long-standing shows, which have essentially survived by reimagining the basic premise (with varying degrees of success), Doctor Who has instead evolved at a steady pace. One era builds upon the ones that preceded it. To deny any one aspect of that evolution is to rather miss the point and to run the risk of neutering the entire unfolding narrative.
However, this has to be balanced by the less progressive aspects of the show — largely but not limited to the Classic series. There is, of course, the representation of the female characters, which seemed to fluctuate wildly — there’s a world of difference from the coolly capable Barbara Wright to the walking scream-machine that was Victoria. But it’s interesting to note that we don’t seem to be talking about a straight progression but rather a constant fluctuation between strong female characters and rather more sexist tropes. It’s not until the mid-70s and the introduction of the companion Sarah-Jane Smith that we see a true, consistent progression (although even then there are, arguably, lapses.) And then there’s the question of a female Doctor. For an idea first mooted at the start of the 1980s, this is something that took an embarrassingly long time to happen and I personally feel it probably should have happened round about then.
And then there’s race. As discussed above, there’s the fundamental problem of a Police Box with a bunch of white, middle-class ostensibly English folk popping up in 13th century China or the Aztec empire as containing echoes of colonialism. But then there’s the more direct problem of representation. As with the female Doctor, it takes an embarrassingly long time for the show to have a companion of colour but there’s also the question of the casual racism the show indulged in particularly in the first 15 years or so of its run. There’s the dubious Toberman in Tomb of the Cybermen (a story that’s not short of a few other dodgy racist tropes) and Tony in Terror of the Autons, both played by Roy Stewart. Then there’s Troughton browning up to play his Mexican doppleganger in The Enemy of the World. And, of course, there’s also the vexed questions around The Talons of Weng-Chiang — is it deeply Sinophobic or is it meta-textually playing with the racism of Victorian popular culture on which it riffs?
Not that the rebooted show gets off entirely free either. There’s definitely a lot more positive representation post-2005 in Martha Jones and her family, as well as Bill Potts and now Yasmin Finney as Rose v2. But there’s also the occasional mis-step too. It’s hard to look at the character of Chantho in Utopia as not being a little problematic, for example.
But problematic is not necessarily bad, particularly when looking back in hindsight. If those things leap out at us now then that shows us that the programme is continually evolving, growing and moving beyond its former mistakes or attitudes. Those who ask for it ‘go back to what it was before’ are not only asking for the impossible, they’re actively inviting the show to stagnate and die.
Because, to repeat, Who has always held up a mirror to the society in which it was made. In the 1960s, it was the twin fears of nuclear holocaust and of totalitarianism — we must never forget that WW2 and the literal fallout from it were still very much in living memory back then and the show was very much playing/commenting upon real fears of the society of the time with its ambivalence to ‘peaceniks’ and of the internecine tensions of the Cold War. This evolved into the environmentalism of the 1970s and the troubled 1980s were perhaps troubled because there was a sense of bewilderment at how to engage with the society of the time. We thankfully never had to deal with a Yuppie Doctor (although you could perhaps make an argument that that’s precisely what Davison’s Doctor is) and the then still-nascent rise of neo-liberalism, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the so-called End of History were perhaps rather difficult for Who to get a handle on. That’s perhaps why in the Colin Baker and McCoy eras there’s a sense of social rebellion but allied to a sense of decay and obsolescence. Which is why Baker’s Doctor rails at a once unassailable but now complacent and corrupt Time Lord High Council and McCoy revels in the “sound of empires toppling”.
So now, as then, Who is still engaging with the society in which it is created and, for better or worse, that means it has no choice but to do so in the rather fractitious environment of what we seem to be calling the ‘culture wars’.
And what are the culture wars exactly? It’s basically extreme ideological political partisanship, most likely caused by the entering of the final stages of late-stage capitalism. The global crash of 2008 was a wake-up call to neo-liberalism that there would be an end, sooner rather than later, and that the myth of infinite growth had been exposed to be just that — a myth. Couple with a digital paradigm shift into global communication that effectively neutered the monopoly of gate-keeping Old Media in everything from newspapers to TV to publishing, plus a climate emergency that could no longer be ignored or fobbed off with platitudes and vague conference commitments then what we have is the sound of the empire of post-industrial capitalism toppling. With their backs essentially against the wall (or as I like to think of them like the villains of a bad action movie scooping the contents of their personal safe into suitcases just before they escape to their private jets to their personal island), the cheerleaders of neo-liberalism have resorted to contracting their ideology to the baldest, most extreme, terms and without an Iron Curtain to rail against it’s ‘progressives’ that become the enemy. There’s also a petulance there that their ‘end of history’ (by which they largely meant society becoming ‘frozen’ in some moment just post-1989, a future that was simply more of the then-present of laissez-faire economics, endless markets and triumphant individualism) didn’t actually hold.
In fact, the ‘history’ that has unfolded over the last three decades has meant momentous changes to how we live, work and express ourselves, possibly even the greatest since the industrial revolution. Standing still is not an option and I suspect most people know this deep in their hearts. The deep nostalgia both of the Right for a time when LGBT as well as basic gender rights could be comfortably moneytised yet marginalised and complaints about systemic racism could be placated by a few token gestures and the wider subsuming of potentially dangerous cultural currents into the mainstream, and that of the Left for industrial communities and a social infrastructure that has been utterly swept away by neo-liberalism are equally self-defeating and with that defeat comes an anger and frustration that is both strangely childish and demonstrably dangerous. We live in the time of the “slow cancellation of the future”, to use Mark Fisher’s term, a time where the economic and environmental challenges we face require bold action but in which we are ruled by people who have no appetite for it and are more intent not just on maintaining a status quo but what was a status quo some 20 or 30 years previously.
For Who to somehow ignore all this seems to me the most un-Who-like thing I could possibly imagine. Certainly, it seems well-nigh impossible for the writer of Years and Years (a series that brilliantly analysed, not to mention predicted, a lot of these trends) to be expected to take such an approach.
But neither do I believe that those who claim that Who has been captured by the ‘left wokerati’ (to use a Daily Mailism) are correct either. The era most often cited by the ‘go woke, go broke’ brigade is the Chibnall oneand I’d argue that it was quite possibly one of the most socially conservative ones of the entire show. Or perhaps to put it more charitably, it tried to reflect both sides of current cultural debate without taking the firm side of either. Thus we can get the pseudo-historical Rosa and shortly afterwards the capitalist parable of Ker-Blam (I can’t imagine any other Doctor, even the anarchically apolitical Fourth Doctor leaving a situation where people are consigned to meaningless labour simply in order to simply give them something to do and to prop up the continued existence of a bloated corporation. Even the First Doctor would have pulled the plug, I suspect, and the Seventh would almost certainly have left the place a smoking ruin.)
Not to say that you can’t point any fingers at RTD and co. as there is definitely an element of mischief-making, if not outright trolling to how these concepts are often presented. You only have to look at certain social media threads and YouTube channels after an episode to see that certain buttons are being pushed and you can’t help but feel that this is at least partly deliberate, in the same way that JN-T used to try and confect tabloid outrage at graphic content back in the doldrums of the 1980s. And you can absolutely see the temptation to prod the bear of reactionary ire but in the end I don’t think the show needs to. It’s more than proven that Who can be innovative and socially responsive in its stories without this sense of elbow-nudging glee. I suspect the show would benefit from rising above the point-scoring to focus on integrating this commentary directly into the narrative, instead of this sense of cheeky asides. Many of the most reactionary voices are not that interested in the show per so and merely want a focus point to stir up discontent. They’re going to vent either way so it might be as well just to ignore them, not make them part of the meta-narrative around the show.
But rather than reacting negatively to a trans-positive storyline or an Asian Sir Isaac Newton, I’d be more surprised if they weren’t there in this current climate because that would suggest that Who had lost something vital and fundamental of its DNA somewhere along the line. Much of the criticism the show currently faces is paradoxically because it hasn’t changed at its most fundamental level, indeed refuses to do so, but also simply by dint of the fact it has survived for 60 years — the same 60 years that have seen the significant change outlined above — and that it continues to look to the future and reassess the past in a time when do so currently elicits various kinds of political discomfort.