Why Doctor Who is secretly Tony Benn

Who inspired Who? Leave aside for one moment the hyperventilating BBC enthronement of Peter Capaldi, though we shall return to him later. I mean way back at the beginning, 50 years ago. The Doctor was invented by a committee of middle-ranking BBC executives — but who was the role-model for this anti-establishment, vaguely dotty but distinguished figure?

Come on! With hindsight, the inspiration must surely have been Tony Benn — and I’ll prove it to you. Having inherited the title Viscount Stansgate, Benn used an act of parliament in 1963 to disclaim his place in the House of Lords; in 1963, the Doctor, for his own part, disclaimed his place among the Time Lords.

Benn then went on to spearhead Harold Wilson’s white heat of technological revolution, presiding over such marvels as the Post Office tower and Concorde. On television, Doctor Who was similarly eye-rollingly enthusiastic, fighting Daleks (fascists) and Cybermen (communists) with a sonic screwdriver of his own devising.

Can’t you see it yet? Like Benn, the Doctor is otherworldly, yet lovably so. Like Benn, the Doctor has a tendency to stand his ground (or to put it another way, has an infuriating and, to some, misguidedly stubborn self-belief). Like Benn, the Doctor was regarded as rather too mercurial and extreme to lead his own people. Like Benn, the Doctor is someone who by rights should always have been a fringe figure, yet for years has commanded mainstream affection.

Yet the Doctor, right at the very start, wasn’t quite a classic Beeb liberal. He evolved. In the initial episodes in 1963, William Hartnell’s mysterious Doctor was sharp, unsentimental, authoritarian — more of an obstreperous Quintin Hogg.

In the first Dalek story, his seething impatience with the drippy pacifist humanoids being terrorised by the creatures is explicit.