Eruditorum Press

No nationalism but Terry Nationalism

Elizabeth Sandifer

About Elizabeth Sandifer

http://www.eruditorumpress.com

Elizabeth Sandifer created Eruditorum Press. She’s not really sure why she did that, and she apologizes for the inconvenience. She currently writes Last War in Albion, a history of the magical war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. She used to write TARDIS Eruditorum, a history of Britain told through the lens of a ropey sci-fi series. She also wrote Neoreaction a Basilisk, writes comics these days, and has ADHD so will probably just randomly write some other shit sooner or later. Support Elizabeth on Patreon.

Posts by Elizabeth Sandifer:

Playing Pat-a-Cake With The Wall (Underworld)

18

The Doctor enjoys the wonders of things he can’t
arbitrarily walk through.

It’s January 7th, 1978. Wings remain at number one with “Mull of Kintyre,” and, as mentioned, stay there for the whole story. Bonnie Tyler, Donna Summer and The Bee Gees also chart. So that’s not entirely exciting.

Since Doctor Who went on its Christmas break, the Copyright Act of 1976 took effect in the United States, changing American copyright law to be based on the life of the author instead of the date of publication. A referendum in Chile supported Augusto Pinochet’s policies, which is a less impressive electoral feat than it sounds given Pinochet’s overt fondness for the mass slaughter of his political opponents. And the United States returned the Holy Crown of Hungary to Hungary, having been keeping it safe in Fort Knox since World War II.

While during this story, riots erupt in Nicaragua after the assassination of a leading critic of the government. Rose Dugdale and Eddie Gallagher become the first people to marry in prison in the Republic of Ireland. And speaking of Ireland, the European Court of Human Rights acquits the United Kingdom of torturing prisoners in Northern Ireland, but does find that they mistreated prisoners.

While on television, it’s one of the great punching bags of Doctor Who: Underworld. A story that I could simply and cavalierly lay into for a myriad of faults and get absolutely no comments from anybody suggesting that I was being too hard on the story or being unfair. This is the one Tom Baker story to slot in the bottom ten on the Doctor Who Magazine Mighty 200 poll. Lawrence Miles declares it the worst story of the 1970s. It’s crap. it’s garbage. I kinda liked it.

I mean, it wasn’t good by any measure, but it’s not even the worst Baker and Martin script of Season Fifteen, little yet the worst Doctor Who story of the 1970s. (I’m not through the 1970s yet, but I’m pretty sure The Monster of Peladon is the single worst.) For the most part, on this story at least, Tat Wood’s review in About Time is spot on – there’s nothing bad that you can say about this that can’t also be said about The Time Monster, and unlike The Time Monster there are at least some valid production reasons for why their backs were so up against the wall.

Star Wars was a mixed blessing for Doctor Who. This is an altogether more positive interpretation than most people would give you. The more common view would have to be that Star Wars was a disaster for Doctor Who because Doctor Who could never hope to match its effects and so looked cheap and silly after Star Wars. This, at least, is clearly nonsense – The Invisible Enemy looked cheap and silly just fine on its own.

All of which said… Underworld is horrendously cheap and silly. Amusingly, one aspect of the story manages to simultaneously be the most appallingly cheap looking and the part of the story that served as a road map for future stories, which is the CSO work.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 21 (Star Wars)

, 87

I never drank the Kool-Aid here. I mean, Star Wars was fine. I enjoyed the movies when I watched them – probably third grade? But the fact that I have to ask the question shows pretty clearly the extent to which this was not a rabbit hole I fell down. I attentively rented the entire trilogy from my local grocery store (ah, the 90s), if only to finally suss out the difference between it and Star Trek, watched them, and was later very puzzled by people who fell in love with them. I still find them terribly overrated, and the continual grating of my ambivalence against people who do love Star Wars has pretty much worn me down to active dislike of the franchise. So, you know. We’re doing this because we have to, not because I’m jumping for joy at the entry. Or maybe because I’m secretly a bitter misanthrope who delights in the wave of comments that this will inevitably generate.


Still, regardless of my feelings, there’s no arguing with the film’s historical importance. There is a clear line that can be drawn across the history of science fiction, splitting it into “before Star Wars” and “after Star Wars.” Doubly so if the science fiction is in a visual medium. So for Doctor Who, there’s a huge difference in how The Sun Makers, the last story to air before Star Wars opened in the UK, was watched, and how Friday’s story, Underworld, the first to air after it. And we can’t not talk about it.

But knowing that Star Wars was transformative is not equivalent to understanding why. Let’s first set aside the question of innovation. Whether or not Star Wars was, in fact, innovative in terms of what it does with science fiction (I don’t think it particularly was), there’s really no way to argue that Star Wars didn’t mark a huge turning point in how science fiction was seen by the broader culture. It’s clearly not that Star Wars was when science fiction broke into the mainstream – there are far too many successful sci-fi movies from previous decades to take that claim seriously. But Star Wars is the tipping point in a transition between two modes of science fiction that we’ve been talking about since nearly two seasons ago. And for those who have been keeping track, that means that Star Wars is, in the broader culture, the point where Doctor Who’s view of science fiction becomes the dominant one. So that’s interesting.

Some history. The question of what the first piece of science fiction was is one with a wealth of possible answers. On the other hand, the point where science fiction emerged as a distinct genre is rather easier to pin down – it happened in 1926 when Hugo Gernsback created Amazing Stories – the first pulp to be devoted entirely to science fiction. The first thing we should note about this, then, is that science fiction in its original form did not exist in its “hard” manifestation.
…

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Wrong With Authority (The Sun Makers)

46

It’s Marlon Brando playing Professor X!

It’s November 26, 1977. ABBA remain at number one with “Name of the Game,” but are overtaken by Wings with “Mull of Kintyre,” a Paul McCartney-penned ode to Scotland that will manage a nine week run at #1 that will keep it in place through Christmas and, indeed, through the next story. Queen, the Bee Gees, and the Brighouse and Rastrick Brass Band also chart.

In real news, British Airways establishes regular Concorde service between New York and London. The International Fund for Agricultural Development is established at the UN. The President of the Central African Republic declares himself emperor, and in the US the cable channel Nickelodeon launches, albeit under its original name of Pinwheel, which would last about eighteen months before the channel relaunched as Nickelodeon.

While on television we have Robert Holmes, frequent genius and occasional cynical dick, penning his departure script. This was actually filmed prior to Image of the Fendahl, which was the script Holmes actually departed during, with Anthony Read picking up midway through. But in running order it serves to continue the spurious tradition Dicks cited of the outgoing script editor getting a script on or around his departure date. (Actually, as I noted at the time Dicks pulled the trick on Holmes, the tradition was kind of real. In practice, Dicks was the seventh regular script editor of Doctor Who, and four of his six predecessors got a writing credit in the story after they left.)

The Sun Makers is a bit of an odd duck. Much like The Horror of Fang Rock, it is a story that it is currently very much trendy to enjoy. But whereas Fang Rock is very much a rediscovered classic that everyone now appreciates, The Sun Makers serves as more of a shibboleth – a story used to determine whether someone is a trendy Doctor Who fan or simply a traditionalist spouting received wisdom. Real fans love this story as an overlooked classic.

Except, of course, the problem with trendy classics is that there quickly becomes the countertrend. Now that everyone knows to revere The Sun Makers as an inadvertent triumph for Robert Holmes, the trendy thing to do is to complain about it. The easiest way to do this is to be political about it, which is easy enough if you’re a leftist nut job like me. Because this story is overtly a political satire about the horrors of taxes. And if you, say, happen to live in a country where one of the two political parties is stringently opposed to any tax increases whatsoever even though the tax rates are at a near historic low and even though this is one of the two major reasons for a massive budget deficit… well, it’s just kind of hard to get excited about a story that rails against the evils of taxation.

This is not quite fair, though. First of all, a blanket position that taxes are always good is as ludicrous as the belief that cutting taxes is always a good idea.…

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Wearing a Bit Thin (Image of the Fendahl)

16

I wonder if I could have slipped in the Ingrid Bower
version of Kronos or the Hosts from Voyage of the Damned
and had anybody fail to notice…

It’s October 29th, 1977. Baccara, a Spanish vocal duo that represented Luxembourg in the 1978 Eurovision contest with a song entitled “Parlez-vous français?,” are at number one with “Yes Sir I Can Boogie.” This moment of utter nationalistic confusion is short-lived, and ABBA take over with “Name of the Game” one week later and hold it through the end of this story. Rod Stewart, Queen, The Carpenters, The Bee Gees, and the Sex Pistols also chart. The latter also has their memorably titled “Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols” come out the day before the first episode of this story airs.

In other news, Harvey Milk is elected City Supervisor of San Francisco. Anwar Sadat visits Israel, while General Hugo Banzer, leader of the military government in Bolivia, moves the date for the transition back to a constitutional democracy up two years to 1978. (In practice this would go poorly when Banzer’s supporters attempted to steal the election.) And Greek archeologist Manolis Andronikos locates the tomb of Philip II of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great.

While on television, Doctor Who spins its wheels. I’m not entirely convinced that the 1970s actually have a story less likely than this one to evoke strong opinions in people. Nobody loves it. Nobody hates it. It’s pretty much the third best story in the weakest season of the 70s, and that’s about what there is to say. Tat Wood’s defense of it in About Time amounts to “well it’s better than The Daemons,” which is true enough, but hardly inspiring. Lawrence Miles dislikes the tell-don’t-show style of the exposition. And most of the online reviews are masterpieces of the “a little good, a little bad” formula of reviews. And at 73rd place on the Doctor Who Magazine Mighty 200 poll, it seems like “a little good, a little bad” is pretty much the default consensus.

Watching it, it’s easy enough to see why. Much like The Invisible Enemy, this is heavily Doctor Who by Numbers. Unlike The Invisible Enemy, though, it’s Chris Boucher writing, and he’s good enough to avoid massive embarrassment. Even still, of his three scripts for the series it’s very difficult to muster anything like an argument that this isn’t his weakest. Whereas The Face of Evil was a thrilling deconstruction of the entire series and The Robots of Death was a particularly adroit and complex genre piece that commented extensively on its parent genre, this is… a very good rewriting of Quatermass.

The reasoning is simple enough. As with The Invisible Enemy before it, this is a story that’s trying to avoid ruffling any feathers. It’s in the horror mode that’s familiar to Doctor Who, but even this is largely defanged, with the violence actively kept off-screen. There are a few good scares, but for the most part this looks like what it is – a horror script that people are trying to tone down.…

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In the Year 5000, This Was Cutting Edge (The Invisible Enemy)

15

It’s October 1, 1977. The late Elvis Presley remains at number one with “Way Down.” One week later he is unseated by David Soul with “Silver Lady,” which holds number one for the remaining three weeks. Yes, Rod Stewart, The Stranglers, and Meco also chart, the latter with a recording of the Star Wars theme, although that movie won’t premiere in the UK for another two months.

In real news, four Palestinians hijack a Lufthansa flight to Somalia to demand the release of members of the Red Army Faction. Five days later an unusually large number of Red Army Faction members commit suicide in prison in a manner that is not in the least bit suspicious and does not lead anyone to conclude that they were actually murdered. Pele retires from professional soccer, Queen Elizabeth II opens the Canadian Parliament, Anita Bryant is hit in the face with a pie by gay rights activists, and the Atari 2600 is released.

While on television we have The Invisible Enemy. There are some stories that nobody, ever, has identified as their favorite Doctor Who story, and The Invisible Enemy is a prime example of that species. It would be nice to insert a sentence beginning “It’s not that the story is bad, but” at this point, but there’s a major barrier to that – the story is bad. It’s bad in a way Doctor Who hasn’t really been in a long time. Really it hasn’t been since The Time Monster that we’ve had a story was bad in this specific fashion. Most of the same ingredients, in fact, are on display: a script from writers known to have some specific and severe weaknesses, a particularly egregious set of failures on the part of the design departments, and a handful of acting performances that make you wish they were merely forgettable.

But because the series has kept the basic quality level so high for so long – only The Monster of Peladon and The Android Invasion have really been full-out turkeys over the five seasons between The Time Monster and this – there’s something jarring about hitting The Invisible Enemy. Part of it is, perhaps, the fan’s knowledge that, far from being the freakish anomaly it appears to be when you reach it chronologically, this is the first of many stories over the next few years that are turkeys like this. 60% of the bottom ten stories and about 50% of the bottom quarter of stories in the Doctor Who Magazine Mihty 200 poll come from the Williams or Nathan-Turner eras of the classic series, whereas only eight of the top quarter do. Apres Croc Roches, le deluge. (Assuming Google Translate didn’t just screw me.) But more of it, I think, is just the sheer size of the gulf in quality between this and Talons of Weng-Chiang, which was the story made before it, or, for that matter, between this and Horror of Fang Rock. It’s difficult to believe that it’s the same people making it.…

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Side Trip: Paradise Dungeons (2)

20

Hello once again, and welcome to the second sample chapter (the first chapter, if you missed it, is over here) of my proposed Wonder Woman project, Paradise Dungeons. Here we start to get at some of the intensely weird and deeply problematic stuff that makes Wonder Woman such a fascinating topic.

I’ve really loved writing both of these chapters, and really want to continue the project. But there are also limits to how much spec writing of one sort I can do. Simply put, there’s not a huge real book market for the sorts of things I do. People occasionally ask why I don’t shop TARDIS Eruditorum to a proper publisher, and the answer is simple – because nobody in their right minds is going to publish a ten volume set of Doctor Who criticism. Even Mad Norwegian caps out at six volumes. Paradise Dungeons is only shooting to be a one volume book, but it’s still a sprawling critical tome about the BDSM themes in Wonder Woman and their impact on feminism. I think it’s a great topic and I’m really excited to write it, but let’s face it – no publisher wants this book. (Please note – if you are a publisher and want this book, e-mail me.)

Which is to say, if you want to see more, head over to the project’s Kickstarter page and pledge some money. A $10 pledge gets you the book, and to be honest, I think that’s a pretty fair deal. And please, spread the word. Seriously. I need to start making some money off of this writing thing.

And we’ll be back again on Thursday with The Invisible Enemy. Oh dear.

Clay (1942)

The early years of any major comics character are always a bit unnerving to read. On the one hand, the early issues, almost inevitably, are where many of the iconic elements of the character are established, making them among the most influential and fundamental stories of the character. On the other hand, the nature of establishing the major tenets of what the character will be in turn means that over these stories, the character isn’t quite right yet. But with Wonder Woman all of this becomes even more complex because of how uncomfortable or inept many of the later creators are with the feminist and BDSM themes of the early days. The result is that the first year’s worth of Wonder Woman comics – the first twelve issues of Sensation Comics and the first two of Wonder Woman itself – are at once the purest and most complete statement of what the character is about and a sketchy, at times even clumsy, attempt at working out the character.

Let’s start with what is, to a modern reader, by far the most shocking aspect of these comics: Marston and Peter’s excessive fondness for extreme racial stereotypes. The horrifyingly racist depictions of the Japanese can at least be explained, if not excused, by the wartime climate. The minstrel-style black characters, stereotypical Mexicans, interchangeability of the deformed midget Japanese with all other East Asian nationalities, and villainous and treacherous Hawaiians, on the other hand, are much harder to explain without resorting to the uncomfortable but likely accurate truth that Marston and Peter held a host of racist prejudices and that their comics reflect these.…

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I Lived. Everyone Else Died. (The Horror of Fang Rock)

12

I was going to bring the use of the
book/VHS covers as the
illustrations to a close after Talons
and the close of that bit of my
childhood memories, but this cover
is just way too good. All it needs is
a K-KLACK!

It’s September 3, 1977. Anyone sensing a general turning backwards in the music charts will feel quite vindicated upon seeing that Elvis Presley is at number one with “Way Down,” although they will presumably be mollified by realizing that it’s only at number one because he died two weeks previously. This means that it stays there for four weeks, with Carly Simon, Donna Summer, and SPACE, French pioneers of the space disco subgenre, also chart.

In other news, since The Talons of Weng-Chiang and Philip Hinchcliffe’s tenure crashed to their conclusions, the Red Army Faction in Germany murdered federal prosecutor and ex-Nazi Siegfried Buback, and then later Banker Jurgen Ponto. Residents of Dover, Massachusetts witness the Dover Demon on the prowl in one of cryptozoology’s iconic moments. Queen Elizabeth II began her Silver Jubilee tour. Shooters opened fire on a crowd of demonstrators in Turkey, killing at least 34. The shooters were never captured, and if you concluded that they were US-funded anti-communist forces you sure as hell wouldn’t be the only one. Star Wars came out in the US, but we don’t care about that so much yet. The Supremes play their final concert in London and disband, and the Son of Sam killer is captured in New York, which also enjoys a 25 hour blackout marked by looting.

While during this story, gang violence in San Francisco results in the Golden Dragon Massacre, the US agrees to give the Panama Canal to Panama at the end of the century, the Red Army Faction kidnapps Hans-Martin Schleyer, a major head of what is basically an inverse union – an association of employers. The Faction’s goal in this is to secure the release of RAF prisoners by the West German government. And Mark Bolan, the glam rock icon better known as T. Rex, dies in a car crash. Oh, and the moment on Happy Days that led to the term “jumping the shark” takes place.

While on television, we have a story with fascinating critical dimensions that we need to disentangle before we go much further. For one thing, we’re starting off the Graham Williams era, an era that the word “polarizing” seems barely to scratch the surface of. There really is a visible dividing line that takes place between the Hinchcliffe and Williams eras. The first fourteen seasons of Doctor Who are, all in all, considered to be overwhelmingly solid. Sure, they all have their detractors, but the critical consensus on the first fourteen seasons is that the series defaulted to very good.

No such consensus exists for the final twelve seasons. It’s not that they’re hated – every one of them, even seasons 22-23, have their firm defenders. But the position that Graham Williams and/or John Nathan-Turner’s tenures on the show were flat-out unsuccessful is a thoroughly mainstream one in fandom, and not without reason.…

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Side Trip – Paradise Dungeons (1)

5

Hey all. Some quick orders of business, and then on to our somewhat unusual show for the day.

First off, I’m pleased to announce that the print edition of the Hartnell essays now exists. You can buy it here. It is, sadly, only available from amazon.com, and international readers will have to pay for international shipping. It is, however, quite lovely, and the perfect gift for the overeducated and underemployed Doctor Who fan in your life this holiday season. It’s $16, which is the price at which I get the same royalty I do selling the Kindle edition for $5. Speaking of the Kindle edition, it remains available on Amazon.com, .co.uk, .de, and .fr. Buy it with Euros while you still can.
Finally, an announcement about an odd week of posts. This week TARDIS Eruditorum will post on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. On Monday and Wednesday I’ll be running sample chapters of the next project I’m trying to get off the ground, a book I’m calling Paradise Dungeons. Basically, it’s a psychochronography of Wonder Woman, focusing on the way in which a piece of feminist bondage utopian propaganda unexpectedly became a popular culture phenomenon, and what that means throughout the 70 year history of the character.
Instead of doing this one as a blog, I’m doing this one straight-up as a book, and attempting to pre-finance it via Kickstarter. So if you like the sample chapter below, please swing by the project’s Kickstarter page and kick in a few bucks. For a $10 contribution you get the book when it’s written, and beyond that there are various other shiny toys available. And, of course, please spread the word. I’m really excited about this project. (And promise it will not interfere with your God-given right to three horrifically wordy posts about Doctor Who a week.)
And we’ll be posting again tomorrow with The Horror of Fang Rock, of which Steven Moffat notes that “There’s the obligatory THE and OF – and all the other words rock. One of them actually.”
Man’s World (December 1941)
The first thing we have to admit is that she does not get a glorious debut. Batman and Superman, the two better-selling members of DC’s supposed “Trinity” of characters, got famous debuts. Action Comics #1 and Detective Comics #27 are two of the most valuable comics in the world, with their debuting characters splashed across the cover in two of comics’ most iconic images. Wonder Woman, on the other hand, debuted as a backup feature in All-Star Comics #8 that was, for lack of a better word, an advertisement.
This is not quite as bad as it sounds. If we’re being honest, All-Star Comics in general was an advertisement. To understand this, however, we need to first explain what DC Comics in general looked like in 1941. The bulk of DC’s line were not single-character comics like Batman or Superman but anthologies featuring a lead story and several backups. So, for instance, Action Comics #43, which came out the same month as All-Star Comics #8, featured a thirteen-page Superman story as its lead feature, followed by five stories featuring more obscure characters (The Vigilante, Three Aces, Mr.
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Time Can Be Rewritten 15 (Eye of Heaven, BBC Books,

, 7

Apparently the RSS feed failed to pick up Wednesday’s post about Mary Whitehouse. If you missed it, it’s over here. 

Among the most stereotypically overdone debates in all of Doctor Who fandom is the debate that took place over the long interregnum between the so-called “rad” and “trad” schools of novels. This was a proper debate, and thus characterized by each side considering the other’s position to be self-evidently silly and essentially unworthy of discussion. Proponents of the “trad” school – short for traditional – favored novels that closely hewed to the approach and aesthetics of televised Doctor Who. They tended to view the “rad” school, with their preference for more radical and experimental novels, as a strange sort of Doctor Who fan who was only fond of Doctor Who when it wasn’t much like Doctor Who. The “rads” on the other hand largely viewed the traditionalists as silly an unadventurous sticks in the mud who failed to appreciate that anything that is traditional Doctor Who now was, at one point or another, radical Doctor Who. (The other 99% of fandom just read books and enjoyed some while not enjoying others.)

As is usually the case with a divide like this, the truth of the matter is that both sides of the debate are rather silly. We’ve already seen how “trad” novels can be subversive and challenging to the aesthetics and approaches of their eras. And we’ve followed the progress of the series closely enough to know that the idea that all changes are radical shifts is nonsense. The series has often improved incrementally, with “normality” being established through small shifts. The Hinchcliffe era really only did a dramatic revolution of a story twice: once with Genesis of the Daleks, and even that is still 80% just “generic Terry Nation story done really well” and would probably have qualified as “trad” by the standards that characterized this deeply silly moment of debate because it had Daleks in it and felt like a Terry Nation script. And then, of course, once with The Deadly Assassin, which is unquestionably “rad.” Still, one example does not change the fact that even in an era full of iconic stories, not much is actually “rad” in televised Doctor Who. And so in this regard we recognize that in fact the very act of writing a Doctor Who novel means that you’re signing up to try to do radical and interesting things within a prescribed form – a tradition, if you will. And that criticizing “trad” novels while extolling the virtues of “rad” ones is the height of idiocy. Right? Good. Moving on.

Here we begin to see the other side. Jim Mortimore is one of the archetypal “rad” writers, which should surprise nobody who has been reading the Time Can Be Rewritten stuff from the beginning. In this novel he manages to avoid casually reconfiguring reality every chapter via an Aristotle-infused video game being played on the TARDIS. Instead he tells his story through two distinct sequences of alternating chapters in which even and odd-numbered chapters each tell a different part of the story.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time For Tea 20 (Mary Whitehouse)

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Photoshopped? Oh, probably.
It is, above all else, a profoundly stupid way to go down. Philip Hinchcliffe, after three years of making an enormously compelling case for why he is the best producer of Doctor Who since Verity Lambert, is given the sack in order to appease Mary Whitehouse. Three years of dark fairytale postmodernism with a flare for the cynically epic come to a close because of the incessant complaints of a crazy woman. Not with a bang but a whimper.
There’s an odd justice to it, though. If the one aesthetic crime we can firmly get to stick to the Hinchcliffe era is hubris, there becomes a poetic justice to the era being taken down by a deluded fool with the visual literacy of a donut. It’s oddly fitting that a show that is at times so cavalier about the material consequences of what it does should go down to a hack that should have been trivial to refute. Doubly so for it to happen under Robert Holmes, who isn’t sacked here, but whose hatred for the banal evils of the world makes the show getting brought down by Whitehouse on his watch a particularly savage irony.
Let’s discuss some facts then. One of those people who spent almost her entire working life as an old lady, Whitehouse, starting in 1964, was a high profile campaigner in the UK on the issue of excessive sex, violence, and moral depravity on television. An outspoken and evangelical Christian, her initial battle of choice was with Hugh Greene, the Director General of the BBC when Doctor Who was created. It was under Greene that the BBC took its most concrete and visible steps to be a channel not about imposing the ideology and worldview of “establishment” Britain but about creating programming that appealed to all of Britain. Most concretely, this manifested in the production of things like Z-Cars or Cathy Come Home. And Whitehouse hated it. She believed that Greene was “responsible for the moral collapse” of the UK, that he spread “the propaganda of disbelief, doubt, and dirt… promiscuity, infidelity, and drinking,” and that the correct role of the BBC was to “encourage and sustain faith in God and bring Him back to the hearts of our family and national life.” 
It is possible, and many have done this, to look at the nature of this argument as an art versus commerce debate. This does not even involve ignoring the obvious theocratic implications – the UK is, after all, technically a theocracy, though it manages its condition well through a longterm regimen of secular democracy and keeps acute attacks to a minimum. 
(Because someone is going to comment, the titular head of state is also the titular head of the church. The line between it and destructive theocracy is, in the case of the UK, one of active and continual choice not to do anything unseemly with the fact that they are ruled by a monarch who is also the head of the church.
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