The death of Doctor Who will be studied in the future. How the BBC managed to take a runaway, and highly profitable success, and drive it straight off a cliff is really rather staggering, not because of how, but because of when it was done.
Self-inflicted harm by creatives inserting their own personal views and pecidillos into shows and movies is nothing new. What was curious about Doctor Who was the strange sense of timing. The world is exiting the hyper-progressive stage, and some small semblance of common sense is starting to prevail, even across the media.
The Olympics realised there were only two genders, Marvel sat among the smoking wreckage of Phase 4 and realised that a change of course was needed, grown men have stopped being allowed into women’s spaces based solely on their feelings, and even Disney is thinking “We might have overdone this a bit!”
Against this turning of the tide, Doctor Who under returning showrunner and writer Russell T. Davies, seemingly viewed the prevailing wind and just thought “Nah… full woke, damn you!”.
Then, jamming the rainbow throttle against the stops, giving the world a black Doctor, acting like the flamboyantly gay actor who played him, whose long-standing asexuality was stretched to the limit behind hints and innuendos. Meanwhile, episodes featuring transexuals, drag queens, and heavy-handed messaging became the norm. Even more heavy-handed messaging than usual.
Fans deserted the show in their millions. Even Disney looked at this and thought, “Too much for even us, right now!” and walked away from their co-production deal.
Would the man at the helm, whose decisions were behind the implosion, take any kind of accountability? Would he f*ck!
Russell T. Davies participated in a masterclass in France on Wednesday, where, of course, everything was somebody else’s fault and that you should never assume that social media is the voice of fans, avoiding “fall(ing) into the trap of talking about fans and assuming that means the online voice”.
Russell, trust me, a little bit more listening to that online voice would have avoided all this. He continued:
“I think they are different things. I know they’re different things, I absolutely know that, and that online voice, which is hostile, exists on X, which is a hate site. We shouldn’t be surprised to find hatred on it, because it’s a hate site … It’s very dangerously assumed that that is the fan voice.”
Again, his timing seems off here. He is still making the noises of 2015 to 2022, where something being less censored is a tool of “hate” and opinions that run contrary to the orthodoxy are weaponized speech. He’s out of date here.
Davies maintains the position that social media is “the collapse of journalism” and decries the fact that journalists now quote opinions that match online discourse:
“…suddenly they’re in newspaper articles, suddenly you find critics quoting those voices…”
No time for any introspection from Davies. His next project is for UK Channel 4 and is called Tip Toe. He calls it his:
“…angriest and darkest show yet…”
Tip Toe stars Alan Cumming and David Morrissey as a bar owner in Manchester and his long-standing neighbour, who get caught up in a feud. His message with this show:
“[that] simply being gay in 2026 is political. People will hate it. My word, this show is going to get called woke on a colossal scale, but I’m happy to be called woke.”
Oh, Russell, you are doing the meme.
