Doctor Who/He/Him 

Doctor Who, or Doctor WTF? as it should probably be called, is no stranger to these pages. With their black Scottish Doctor of ambiguous sexuality played by Ncuti Gadwa, they have already played the woke card at least once. I say ‘at least once’, as I hear they are at it again. And, like all the best reviews, this one comes from someone who has not watched (and has no intention of watching) the show.

But, as a small child, I was a huge fan. I always wondered why I recalled the shooting of JFK and the first episode of Doctor Who so vividly; they both took place on the same day, apparently. I was also sure that I had seen the first episode of Doctor Who twice, and I had: they repeated it the week after JFK’s death in case anyone had missed it.

In those days, for a small child, Doctor Who was both terrifying and fascinating. The Daleks were an ingenious concoction with their angry electronic ‘exterminate’, and the way they glided along silently. We were convinced there were Daleks in our local abandoned railway station. Well, maybe it was just me then but, as I lived across the road from the station, I did have most to lose if there really were Daleks over there. In those days these robotic monster egg boxes could not fly. My room was on the first floor so, at least, I felt safe in bed. Imagine if I had been a kid in 2005 when they had learned to fly? There would not have been a dry bed in the house.

The most fascinating thing about the show, in addition to the time travel (which even I knew was an unlikely prospect) was the Tardis. The size of a police box on the outside and the size of a house on the inside, it had us all wondering how and if that could even be possible. It was not uncommon to hear primary school kids speaking confidently about Einstein’s theory of relativity (maybe the ‘special’ one…maybe not) and how, if you ran into the police box quickly enough you could alter the space-time continuum. We all tried it in our garden sheds (again, maybe that was just me). But honestly lads, which one of us has not walked past a police box and wondered if it was bigger on the inside. Let’s face it, none of us has actually been inside one, have we?

So, the show that was once terrifying and educationally stimulating continues in the same vein. However, it is no longer grappling with the intricacies of natural philosophy or frightening the pants off young kids with terrifying robots. No, indeed, it is now grappling with far more important and frightening questions such as ‘can a woman have a willy?’ It now features an actor, Yasmin Finney, portraying a trans character. Maybe he/she is actually trans; I have no idea. Then there was the recent androgynous alien character about whom The Doctor made an assumption related to gender, and got pulled up for possible misuse of pronouns. I must admit to having viewed this scene and it was truly cringeworthy. As if to complete the circle of wokeness, Isaac Newton is encountered in the current series, and he’s black. This is unfortunate given that he has actually been cancelled by some universities on the grounds that he invested in the slave trade. Next they’ll be telling us he didn’t invent gravity.

This is all in a recent mini-series filler before the series proper returns next year, with said Ncuti Gadwa at the helm of the Tardis. The mini-series features David Tennant, a recycled Doctor, with Catherine Tate, a recycled companion, who both prove beyond doubt that time travel does not halt the ageing process. As for Doctor Who, surely it is time it was packed up neatly in the Tardis, after all there is plenty of room, and the time travel switch set to infinity and beyond, but not back again. Exterminate!

Roger Watson is a retired academic, editor and writer. He is a columnist with Unity News Network and writes regularly for a range of conservative journals including The Salisbury Review and The European Conservative. He has travelled and worked extensively in the Far East and the Middle East. He lives in Kingston upon Hull, UK.

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