“Lloyd George Knew My Father”
Back in the early noughties, Britain was a different place. It was governed by a Labour Party led by a barrister with asymmetric hair, whose attempts to appeal to the centre ground of British politics had recently garnered a parliamentary majority of around 170, albeit from a near record low turnout. Meanwhile on the newspaper’s back pages, rather than its front, expectations and discontent were both high as the England men’s national football team played in the knock out stages of a competition under someone who, while statistically their most successful manager, had not quite managed to win anything yet. Many of those same newspapers also devoted column inches to Russell T Davies’ newly rebooted version of Doctor Who, with many critical of its overt diversity, including an episode in which Doctor Who himself kissed a roguish male anti-hero in an episode set in British history.
It was a whole other world. No, hang on, let me rethink that.
A while ago I wrote an article about what the relationship, if any, was between UK Prime Ministers and the Doctor Who made and transmitted during their administrations. It’s out of date now, of course, but you can find it in the archive, although several bits of anecdote from it are likely to recur in the following post, even if deployed for different purposes. (Regular readers will be aware of the drill, I suspect.) Twentieth century Doctor Who rarely engaged in party politics, except through analogy and metaphor. Multiple villains in 1980s stories are clear analogues of then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher1 but no one speaks her name out loud at any point in the series until 2006. The monster in The Sun Makers (1977) is openly inspired by author Robert Holmes’ ire at then Chancellor of the Exchequer Denis Healey2 but he’s never actually come up in conversation in the show at all.