Credit: Michael Putland/Getty
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“Some opinions kill vulnerable people!” “There should be consequences for being an awful human being!” “We shouldn’t give people with dangerous views a platform!”
As I read these condemnations on Twitter, I struggled to recall the despicable stance I had espoused. Had I advocated the random euthanising of toddlers? Suggested it was reasonable to inject sleeping pensioners with methamphetamine? Waged a campaign to kick kittens in the teeth?
No. What I had said to rouse this chorus of internet disgust, was that men aren’t women. I’d observed that men who claim to be women seem often to have a restricted view of what women are. I had said all this in a statement in response to being depublished from a collection of short stories about Doctor Who, a whimsical children’s television programme.
This is a story of how the selling of Doctor Who got taken over by the woke. It acts, I think, as a curious microcosm of the mania that’s infected the institutions of public and cultural life across the West.
For most of its life, Doctor Who has been the kind of thing you’d expect: cheerfully liberal, middlebrow mainstream. It has typical BBC values bubbling away at low level — the UN is always good, any kind of corporation is inherently evil, etc. It’s hardly ever been outspokenly political, though one script editor in the Eighties did try to bring down the Thatcher government with it.
As for the Doctor’s moral code — he doesn’t use guns or knives against his enemies. This is for the same reason that Mr Tumble and the Octonauts don’t; because children aren’t to be encouraged to shoot or stab people. But the Doctor has used other methods to see off his non-human enemies — gassing, bombing, shoving into liquid ice, etc. (Nobody ever points out this screaming hypocrisy because it’s all part of the fun.)
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