Doctor Who: The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe

“Regard all critics as useless and dangerous"


Especially this. Especially me.

Witness the recent television revolution demonstrated by such innovations as Young James Herriot, young Endeavour Morse, young Merlin, young Robin Hood and an infantile Doctor Who. At this rate I’m beginning to think that The Simpsons gag about Watchmen Babies will be a reality by 2013.
One thing I am prepared to bet money on is that the next Christmas Who offering will be a play on Alice in Wonderland. Think about it, a teenage girl, sexual imagery and a chance for a lead to wave around his sonic phallus. It is almost too good to be true.
There is no point in writing a review of the Christmas special, the trailer says it all – young girl, Doctor grinning and talking about Christmas (you know Christmas, it is the religious festival that all Time Lords and aliens seem to celebrate) and more shots of the Doctor waving various extensions of his masculine sexuality around. Same old, same old.
There is one concern aside from my usual gripes. At what point has the supposed great and good of the intellectual world lost the ability to see what is going on here? I can understand reporters and reviewers from the tabloids not caring. The average tabloid TV review reads more like a gossip column and then Simon found out his wife had cheated on him, he was distraught... However even The Guardian, apparently a bastion of cultural insight, is singularly unable to present a review able to deconstruct the true nature of the present show. This is where I have to concede Chomsky was more or less on the right track, in considering that the intellectuals (horrible word but it is useful in criticizing those who set themselves apart and above the rest of us) commentators and anyone else who is meant to analyse and observe our culture betray the society they live within by avoiding the truth. The fact that Moffat gives us a show with an ithyphallic lead who hangs around pre and post pubescent women and joyously kills anything not remotely human hardly seems to raise eyebrows, let alone thorough analysis. I suppose what it says is that providing you get a journalist pissed on free booze, be they from The Sun or The Guardian, they won’t actually care what kind of amoral bilge your spewing out.
And here we have the beginning of a much greater problem. I do not hate Moffat. I disagree with him, what he does and what he offers to the greater cultural consciousness but I do not care about him for good or ill. Ultimately he is just a manifest symptom of a much wider issue, that of cultural degeneration. For example both Channel 4 and the BBC promote an aspiration to mediocrity that is almost absolute and all pervading. When you watch Channel 4 now, where almost every programme is a variation of Skins or Big Brother reality style contests, remember this is the shipwreck Mark Thompson created. This was the station which gave us A Very British Coup, GBH, a live reading of V by Morrison and actually dared to show foreign language films at peak times and now it is the very worst kind of commercial whore, one that continually underestimates the intellectual capabilities of its audience. The executives at Channel 4 hate their audience because they genuinely believe they are stupid. It is little wonder that we then find the BBC giving us young Robin Hood, young Merlin and a juvenile Doctor all of whom are practically identical.

As I said Moffat is just a symptom. There are bigger problems to deal with than him. Our culture is stuck in a peculiar kind of torpor at a time when people will soon need it.
I believe The Iron Lady will be out soon, the flattering biopic which ignores the fact that the woman and her acolytes wanted to re-create society by outlawing homosexuality, placing women back in the home, censoring writers and their output (witness the outcry over V or The Monocled Mutineer), returning to Victorian ideals of workers’ rights (19th Century trade unionists were imprisoned or shipped to Botany Bay) and making greed the route to power. It was a desperate time for those who believed in liberty but there was a resistance against the odds.
Here I can offer a minor segue... You know how I am always banging on about the amorality/immorality of the modern show, well I may seem like I’m about to contradict myself. Now we all know the story of Remembrance of the Daleks to the point that re-naming it Genocide of the Daleks seems to make sense. Here is the thing; I have no problem with it. Good people do bad things; a hero must become tarnished by the battles he fights. It is not just good drama, it is actually right to show a hero take a road which raises questions about his motivations. The term hero is mired in confusion, a hero is not good beyond all good, nor should they be. Such Christian Puritanism is nothing short of hypocrisy. Look how He-Man spent every episode using brawn and brute force to overcome difficulties only to offer a moral lesson at the end of each episode. Hypocrisy. See how in Die Hard 4, the McClane hero character spends 2 hours proving how right wing paranoia and violent confrontation are justified while maintaining an unnatural interest with his daughters sexuality (the basic gist is that he is the only man worthy enough to fuck his daughter by right of battle). Hypocrisy. Take how Disney promote morality under the auspices of a neo-right Christian concern whilst making stars who can financially exploit an audience whose hormones are at fever pitch. Hypocrisy.
If you want a moral show, without the hypocrisy, you have to look to South Park. It is quite simply the greatest satire of our times, extraordinarily clever and insightful but often misunderstood or simply disregarded. As I said morality should not be confused with Christian puritanism but be considered an honest unerstanding of ourselves as individuals and the world we live within.
When the Doctor destroys the Daleks in Remembrance it is a moral question and one the show and its fictional characters raise. Yet it is also important to remember the political context in 1987. The right was in ascension and the left had no way to stop it (partly self-inflicted due to the delusions of the extreme left wing) It was a desperate time, all bets were off and the future was looking bleak. Against this backdrop it is no wonder the Doctor finishes the Daleks for good, it is merely an expression of frustrated reason and a desperate compassion. In the modern show the Doctor is not actually standing for anything, other than lusting after women (who he probably first met when they were children) or trying to sell (toys, himself, a stagnant value system) When he orders the genocide of The Silence he has no idea who or what they are, he actually seems more interested in flirting with the woman who turned out to be his best friends baby daughter. When the Doctor assembles his army to rescue Amy and her child (his future girlfriend) he abandons the humanitarianism and compassion the show previously stood for by acting as though his actions have a price to be paid by those he helps. The disturbing inference is that the Doctor believes he has a God-like right of power over peoples lives and deaths; in payment of a debt incurred through previous help he expects you to die for him. Instead of investigation, analasys and reason he, like the most regressive of action heroes, resorts to force as his first option. This is why the sonic screwdriver is now an all purpose weapon of mass destruction and sexual metaphor (consider what the gun means to the average action hero - it is an extension of aggression, will and instinct over rivals, an image of physical and sexual dominance) There is no morality here, only hypocrisy and amorality, simply because morality is the ability to question both the self and the actions one undertakes. Morality does not equate with Puritanism, a hero does not have to be blameless but they do have to be honest and self aware because the negation of awareness, compassion and justice is the main expression of evil.
Now, socially speaking, we are back on the brink. The right wing are back, led by an unholy trinity who have no conception or ability to imagine outside of themselves (effectively this negates any feelings of compassion that could have been engendered for others) Politically we have been betrayed and undermined by a decade of Babel styled politicians who sought to obscure truth so only lies could be believed. This time my concern is there is no one to speak out or stop the degeneration. Our writers, our artists and intellectual betters all seem to lack the dynamism seen in their forbears. Our drama is nothing more than soap opera designed to provide a fix to emotion junkies, our art has been turned into mere novelty for the noveau riche by Saatchi, our writers are involved, work for and complicit with advertising (itself a form of financial expoitation which deadens free thought through mediocrity) our novelists seem unable to tell the difference between a novel and film script... I could go on but you get the general idea. The complacency present in modern society and culture was dangerous, will be dangerous and is dangerous. There are more important things going on now and likely to develop over the coming years than some bloke and his head boy lead who have taken a once glorious show and made it regressive, ithyphallic and amoral.

Although it is part of the problem, it is not the main problem. Doctor Who was once something more than it is now and, rather sadly, so were many other things.

It is time for the obsession with mundanity to end.