Auntie has announced there won't be a Doctor Who Christmas special this year. They've also - and not before time - sacked the revolting Russell T Davies and decided to put the show's production "out to tender". In other words, to all extents and purposes the TARDIS is grounded for the foreseeable future. The angry Scots leftist, the dreary baby-killing northern woman and the icky gay black man have together driven the viewers away, and for the time being they're not coming back.
Doctor Who's relationship with politics in the "real" world has of course been rather ropey. When the show started in the early 1960s, England was still officially a conservative country, but the coming of Harold Wilson and all his works was already very much on the cards. The Doctor himself was brought down to earth - and joined the Army! - at about the same time as the country's bluff was called (to use Christopher Booker's memorable phrase) when the "Tories" returned to power in the 1970s - only for them to do everything a genuinely conservative government would never have done, including banjaxing the economy and taking Britain into the EEC.
The results of this were of course inevitable: Labour were returned to power, and the Doctor returned to his travels in time and space - only for the show then to become a sort of national comfort blanket during the chaotic years of the Labour-Liberal lunacy in the late 1970s. The coming of Mrs T and the 1980s then did for Tom, and whereas the show struggled on, trying to be a modern, exciting "Global Britain"-type brand, the BBC had decided that they hated it - partly because it was science-fiction (too whacky, too futuristic!) and partly because it was too old-fashioned (too much like Dixon and All Creatures!).
In fact for all that the script editor at the time (before the days of the "show-runner"!) had vowed to use the show to bring down Maggie, there's an eerie sense in which the Beeb's hysterical and contradictory attitudes to Doctor Who (stupid kids' show, and too violent!) mirrored their schizophrenia about Mrs Thatcher's Conservative Party (bunch of rich toffs making everyone poor - and also everyone's too rich, and they're vulgar!). But hey, the 1980s were a goofy time! Fittingly perhaps, first time round the Doctor went out supporting Stalinism and hunt saboteurs, and the Iron Lady was herself finally toppled shortly afterwards. The Mutually Assured Destruction of Left and Right did in practice have a certain poetry to it. The Berlin Wall was down: Nelson Mandela was out of gaol. Socialism and conservatism were both dead. Tomorrow belonged to the liberal internationalists.
Only in practice it wasn't to be. By 2005, the Blajorite "End of History" experiment was already in trouble. The improbability of the trans-Atlantic friendship between Tony and Dubya had rather twitched the curtain on the uncomfortable realities of global power: political alliances are fragile indeed, even if we like to imagine they're "apolitical". And thus when the world came tumbling down again in 2008 the Doctor was ready for it, becoming once again a sort of comforting TV dad (or at least eccentric TV uncle/insufferable TV older/younger brother, etc.) at a time when socio-economic "uncertainties" were unskilfully swapped out for the banal platitudes of (once again!) coalition government... and yet more liberalism!
In truth it was of course the Brexit vote of 2016 the pushed the entire British Establishment over the edge, and the people in charge of Doctor Who as much as everyone else. When the series came back in 2017 for Capaldi's final season, the writing had fallen off a cliff and the show was a bitter, angry, mean-spirited shade of its former self. Everything from the British Empire to the Catholic Church was a scapegoat in plain sight for the woes of an upper middle class "elite" who had lost control of the country. Doctor Who itself had now become officially unwatchable.
And in practice that was that. From then on, the show-runners' only even vaguely defined agenda was to make the viewers suffer: woman Doctor, black Doctor, black woman Doctor, and so on! David and Catherine came back, along with Rusty D himself, but don't relax - because they were all just as angry as everyone else in the BBC, not to mention Fleet Street, academia, Whitehall, the Church of England, the "health" service, and every single political party apart from Ukip (or the Brexit Party, or Reform UK, or whatever they're calling themselves this week).
So, does the "death" of Doctor Who mean that it's all over - at least for the time being? Personally, I wouldn't bet on it. My prediction is that if Reform win the next election the "Old Who" will make a comeback not so much as a organ of state propaganda as as a nostalgia-themed bargaining chip in the BBC's own political battle just to say alive itself.
Whether anyone will actually feel nostalgic about it though - after its systematic desecration and degradation by Chibnall, and then by RTD himself - is another matter.
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