Russell T Davies, the long-time writer and showrunner for Doctor Who, has concisely explained why it’s so popular amongst gay people: here was a man travelling with a beautiful woman but showing no interest in her, in a programme that because of its low budget used a lot of glitter and silly outfits to portray sci-fi settings.
The more recent series (post-Tennant) have been progressively more superficially ‘progressive’, explicitly demonstrating diversity and ticking minority boxes. We have had ethnic minority companions, supposedly disabled travellers, a female doctor, a sexless drag villain and now we have a gay, dark-skinned doctor.
Yet for all this apparent forward-thinkingness the programme has been surprisingly conformist and conservative, along a very different axis. Sometimes when you add detail and remove ambiguity you take something away.
The areas in which we stand out are always most important to us; the constant friction with the rest of the world makes us permanently aware of our differences. Our areas of normality can be taken for granted; this is the definition of privilege.
Gay boys a few decades ago treasured the Doctor because he was a man (a hero, no less) whose plotlines were not intimately entwined with being intimate with women. He had friends, often called companions, about whom he cared deeply, as friends. He also tended not to win through action and violence, which appealed to gay boys who often, for a variety of reasons, were not actively sporty and physical themselves.
The Doctor was an intellectual hero with principles, friends, knowledge and wisdom. Romance was not central to his life, nor to saving the world. For decades there has also been fan fiction of Doctor romances.
It’s only natural for those gay people to think it celebrates the Doctor by making him an overtly gay man, keen on romance with men; it brings out to the open what he has, for them, always been.
They have the privilege of not even realising how conformist many of the plotlines over the years have been, exacerbated by the declining quality of the writing. The Doctor, for me, was a hero because he was an intellectual, driven primarily by his mind. Here was someone with self-control who could nonetheless find meaningful friendships. A man who wasn’t a gibbering dotard except to deceive his enemies.
I enjoyed plots in which things happened, or bad things were prevented by doing the right thing and a very clever thing. I liked to see intelligence triumphing, rather than being portrayed as a disability that makes someone a laughing stock, or as a narrow, technical expertise that only people who are lesser in most other ways can have.
I like to think of myself as intelligent and principled, but even if I’m not as much as I’d like to be, they certainly are things I value. It was nice to see a hero who wouldn’t kill because he thought it wrong; who would risk his life to give his probable enemies a chance not to be evil. The driving force of those events were his deep commitment not to specific people, but to his principles. Where gay boys saw a nerdy gay I saw a principled intellectual. The two interpretations remained possible for a while; the character was not too explicitly narrowed down, and appealed to a broad audience.
Even the Doctor’s love for Rose Tyler wasn’t too troublesome for the gay audience; mostly they interacted as friends, and the tragedy was that they didn’t acknowledge their love until it was too late. It wasn’t overtly lustful.
More recent series have deviated from what I enjoyed about the show. We have seen repeated plots about the power of love; aliens have a dastardly plan but their technology or plans cannot handle the power of human love which is a convenient deus ex machina that saves the world. Amy and Rory had whole plot arcs about how their devotion was an all-powerful force; Kylie Minogue had a gloriously heroic appearance in a mere one-off Christmas special episode as someone who sacrificed herself because it was the right thing to do. A unifying feature of the Tennant era was the willingness of the good people with whom the Doctor surrounded himself to sacrifice themselves for good, leaving him behind as the apparent beneficiary and cause of their death.
This, for me, is meaningful drama. I don’t want to see someone desperately saving the world because someone they love is in jeopardy and love drives people to heroism. I want to see someone saving the world because it’s the right thing to do. I think it’s probably a better implicit message for the children who are the supposed audience; ‘do the right thing and have principles even when it’s hard’ is more important than ‘fall in love and if you never let it go you’ll be a hero’.
I’m not asexual but my life, dreams and hopes do not revolve around romance. Doctor Who was a wonderful escape from usual fictional fare which believes that everything has to be entangled in romance. Although it’s science fiction, it was far more realistic in depicting greed, selfishness and outright evil being overcome with intelligence, brilliance and principles rather than through the miraculous confluence of love interest with the general good.
I suspect that the Daily Mail remains a supporter of recent Doctor Who, despite its obvious diversity, because underneath that superficial diversity is the conservative conformism that says that the best thing in life is to love a partner and self-sacrifice for children; that emotion is the greatest thing humanity has to offer. Doctor Who is now trying to say that these minorities can take part in this conservative ideal; whereas before it was portraying a different way of life, driven by principles and intelligence, which are anathema to the Daily Mail.
I want to see a man who is in control of himself; a man of amazing intelligence and knowledge who isn’t reduced to a babbling wreck by awkward situations but whose mind allows him either to continue to think and plan while babbling, or who sees such emotional outbursts for the waste of time that they are (in an urgent life-threatening situation anyway).
The Doctor’s famed garrulousness wasn’t someone out of his depth; a precocious thief who is actually just an ‘everyman’ who is lost and in need of rescue. That portrayal that has emerged at times, especially for the female doctor, is a horrific betrayal of what I think is the key to the character. The character is evocative because of his legitimate authority. He might hate the military, hierarchy and authority, but people end up listening to and obeying him because he deserves it. The name ‘Doctor’ is a title of people outside of formal hierarchies of generals or CEOs but which nonetheless implies knowledge and expertise. It’s a name that says ‘respect and authority should come from who a person is, not the position they occupy’. We give the title to the most learned, and medics specifically help others; all these considerations make the Doctor’s name an unsubtle reminder of who the character should be.
How do we give the audience a sense of jeopardy when the main character doesn’t break down in fear? Three ways: we can rely on the audience to understand the situation; we have companion(s) who can be less self-controlled; and we can have actors act with subtlety and writers write with subtlety, making the firmness or shortness of a command reflect the urgency of a situation without having someone bawl or cry.
I know it’s a children’s show, and people think that children need everything overacted, but I think we misjudge children. They might be tolerant of hyperemotive behaviour, helped along by Tik-Tok and social media in which inane gurning seems to be the way to get clicks and views, but they still understand more intelligent behaviour. Given the obsession with teaching children and showing them good role models, such as through diversity, it makes more sense for children’s television to depict less uncontrolled, self-indulgent behaviour.
How come we want our heroes to model good values when it comes to being gay or dark-skinned, but showing a hero babbling incoherently when standing on a landmine is fine; a way to connect with the everyman? Do we want a protagonist to be an everyman, which nowadays seems to mean being devoid of virtue or appeal; or do we want him to be a role model?
Much of modern media seems to want to depict people from all backgrounds as protagonists, but not to depict those protagonists as worth following. Why have a role model who models bad behaviour? Do we want gay ethnic children thinking ‘oh, now I know that I too can break down in stressful situations rather than dealing with them’?
I want a character whose wisdom and virtue stand out: a protagonist whose intelligence and knowledge define the plots, rather than a hero who has an intelligent friend who helps him out while he does the important stuff of action and wooing a woman. I love action films; I would also appreciate this alternative. I loved it when every bit of babbling the Doctor did turned out to serve a purpose; when he had a final argument or act to do if people were not persuaded by his verbiage. When he could pull a lever after grandstanding for a minute or two, and shrug; his begging and expostulating were genuine, but not his only option. They were the option he chose first to avoid more drastic action.
If I could daydream about being Optimus Prime, a giant shape-changing robot from outer space, I doubt other children need protagonists who look exactly like them. What we need is a variety of protagonists demonstrating different virtues. There can always be the plain power fantasies of being Superman without his kindness or self-sacrifice. But it’s the actual characters that draw children in, and the Doctor’s character, and that of the show in general, is being assassinated.
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