Some important things about Doctor Who that often get forgotten
Overly Devoted Archivist
It was created primarily by two Jewish people, Sydney Newman and Verity Lambert.
Actually, that deserves repeating: CREATED PRIMARILY BY TWO JEWISH PEOPLE. Shout it loud.
And yes, Verity Lambert’s contribution is erased about as often as you’d expect. Not by the show itself – she’s had characters named after her, an episode dedicated to her – but Wikipedia’s Doctor Who page hasn’t even given her a creator’s credit! Humph.
Daleks are based on Nazis. Yes, they really are. After a while, the show started to veer wildly about as to whether there are any ‘good’ Daleks, how the Doctor should react to them etc – but…yeah.
Russell T Davies, creator of the revived show, is gay. (He wrote the original Queer As Folk.) Which is also forgotten slightly more than you’d expect.
Jack Harkness is roughly based on John Barrowman himself. (People often say ‘Moffat can’t possibly be homophobic because he invented Jack’ but from what I can tell he didn’t seem to have much say at all into what Jack’s sexuality was.)
Not too far into Freema Agyeman’s era as Martha, the Sun (godawful British tabloid) wrote a small article clamining she’d been fired from the show due to being ‘difficult to work with’. Not true, obviously. Freema got a lot of crappiness in general due to her status as the first WOC companion: this must not happen again.
Helen Raynor is the only female writer to have written for the revived show. (Four episodes.) Afterwards, she got abuse of the ‘women shouldn’t write for Doctor Who!’ kind from (the male-dominated side of) fandom. This also must not happen again.
Speaking of females behind the scenes: the sheer gorgeousness of the most recent episode, Dark Water? Down to Rachel Talalay.
