Stray Doctor Who thoughts
I remember last year I was sitting in a cafe and the people next to me started talking about the new series of Doctor Who. I eavesdropped (I couldn’t not, it was quite a small cafe) and one of the blokes said the show had become “too PC.”
He said this in Leicester. In LEICESTER! He had only to look out of the window and there were tons of Yazs, Ryans, Graces, and tall blonde snappily-dressed women walking around right under his nose. And Doctor Who is currently using Sheffield as its home base, where there are also tons of Yazs, Ryans, Graces, and tall blonde snappily-dressed women walking around .
See, I hear that a lot about Doctor Who these days – “Too PC! Too pandering!” and I just fundamentally don’t understand it. Like, if you want to complain about the plots, go ahead! Every Doctor Who series is a very mixed bag and honestly I thought the one with the killer bubble wrap was pretty silly too. But who is it pandering to? Women? People of colour? In that case, in what way was the original Doctor Who not pandering to white men?
I think really Mandip Gill, aka Yaz, said it best:
But I just fundamentally don’t understand how someone can walk among all different kinds of people and then decide he doesn’t want those same people to be in the sci-fi TV shows he watches.