(This was originally written for May Day.)

Some people think Doctor Who is inherently left-wing. This is bullshit. But… like much bullshit, there’s a fibrous grain of truth in there somewhere if you don latex gloves, break the crust and delve deeply enough into the contents of the pat.

Doctor Who started just before the worldwide explosion of dissent and protest that represents the real point of what is called (inaccurately) “the 60s”. It ran through the years of the Vietnam war, the end of the post-war economic boom, the worldwide wave of protests by students and workers, France in ’68, the Prague Spring, the height of the civil rights movement, the ascendancy (and murder) of Martin Luther King Jnr., the rise of the women’s movement and feminism, the rise of the gay liberation movement, etc. It ran during interesting times. It reflected the massive changes in social attitude that were transforming Western culture – how could it not, being a product of Western culture? It reflected something amorphous and overhyped (but real) that we call “the liberal consensus”, which is easy to take for granted now but which was a drastic change in the whole nature and consciousness of Western capitalist society, brought about by the struggles of kids, students, minorities, oppressed people and workers. It was, for the most part, shaped by creative people who were interested in their world and had a tendency to be open-minded, liberal and tolerant in their outlook, i.e. people like Barry Letts. And, later, it reflected the backlash against these changes which were lead, on this little island, by Margaret “Evil Edna” Thatcher, a backlash of which a younger generation of lefty/eco/liberals like Andrew Cartmel were strongly disapproving.

Moreover, the show was originally a product of a state-funded public service broadcaster that didn’t have to compete in the marketplace in order to survive and had a mandated role to reflect the entire nation. Beyond wanting there to be someone for the kids to identify with (and Dad to lust over) there wasn’t much time spent on demographics and other such marketing preoccupations (at least not compared to today). Reith may have been a reactionary old patrician, but Reithianism in the abstract is almost a quality-not-quantity ethic with paternalistic distortions. And the cheap-and-cheerful nature of the old series gave it a strange freedom, at least some of the time. The BBC always used the show as a cash cow, but it has only become so near-crucial to BBC prestige and revenue in recent years. And there is also the philistinism of management to remember – a BBC bigwig might send an angry memo to a producer if he thinks an episode is too scary for the nation’s chidlers while missing the fact that the same episode is sub-textually critiquing Western imperialism.

Given all this, and given the variety of writers who contributed to it over the years, it would be amazing if Doctor Who hadn’t occasionally aligned itself with workers – especially during times of heightened class struggle.…

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