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Friday 5 September 2008

Doctor’s dilemma

Dr Who (BBC1)

I detect the hand of executive producer Russell T. Davies. Right from the start, he’s had this thing about bringing New Who up to speed with the socio-political values of the modern age: all security guards/lab technicians/visiting trade delegations/space-cruiser commanders to be played wherever possible by someone black or Asian; a general right-on vibe of green-tinged, anti-war, anti-capitalism; an insistence that Doctor Who’s female assistant should not just be there to scream, get captured and be rescued, but should be a rounded, valid person who in her intuitive, clever, feisty female way is every bit as important and interesting as the Doctor himself.

But it’s not called Doctor Who and His Interesting, Feisty and Equally Valid Assistant. It’s called Doctor Who. And if Davies remembered this — instead of boring us rigid with interludes in which we have to pretend to care about the female assistant’s emotional turmoil and her simmering infatuation with the Doctor — I don’t think all the girls in the audience would desert. Girls like monsters too, you know.

Another of Davies’s hobby-horses is his cultural relativism. On a principle similar to ‘One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter’, he clearly reckons that there’s no such thing as a truly evil alien — hence his barmy attempts a few series ago to invest Daleks with feelings — and that if they do behave badly it’s probably the fault of their wicked, neocolonial human oppressors.

This was the theme of this week’s Ood episode (written by Keith Temple) in which, despite having glowing red eyes, murderous tendencies and faces like mouldy, vomited spaghetti, the Ood were a delightful peaceloving race who communicated through beautiful telepathic keening somewhere between whale music and J.S. Bach. The reason they’d gone rotten, it turned out, was that a nasty capitalist, played by Lord Percy from Blackadder, had enslaved them.

Doctor Who, as is his tiresome wont these days, expressed his horror at this latest example of humans behaving badly. ‘Oi, don’t blame me, innit,’ went Donna, or something like it. ‘It’s been years since we had slaves on our planet.’ Oh really, says the Doctor. And who makes your cheap clothes?

More articles from: James Delingpole | this section

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