Not a moment too soon
Alec Charles, Dean of Arts at the University of Winchester, author of Out of Time
In my 2015 book Out of Time: The Deaths and Resurrections of Doctor Who, I noted that in the Doctor Who of the twenty-first century, gender should be no more relevant as a point of discrimination than ethnicity or sexual orientation, and that the very nature of the series called for greater diversity in its core casting decisions.
Last year I wrote a piece for The Conversation which argued that to cast another white man in the lead role of Doctor Who would suggest an abject failure in the BBC’s progressive momentum and confidence in itself. I was shortly afterwards asked to appear in a discussion of media representations of gender and ethnicity on BBC Radio Scotland. There were three of us discussing the point and a presenter. We were all men.
I’m reminded of an occasion at a former institution (I’ll not say which) at which an open meeting to promote Athena SWAN (the initiative which accredits universities’ attempts to enhance gender balance in opportunities for academic advancement) was presented by three men. Or the Today programme’s all-male presenter line-up on this year’s international women’s day.
When in July 2017 Jodie Whittaker was cast as Doctor Who, I was invited onto another regional BBC radio show whose presenter trotted out the hackneyed argument that what was important was that the BBC should always cast the best actor for the job. While I concurred that Ms Whittaker was doubtless the best actor for the role, I pointed out that the previous 15 actors to take the role had all been white men, and that therefore (if one ignores the possibility of discrimination in casting) one must either believe that white men are innately better actors than people who aren’t white men, or that producers had somehow beaten odds less likely than one-in-thirty-thousand to achieve this extraordinarily improbable coincidence. A few months later I returned to the same show to respond to the perceived ‘political correctness’ of the diversity of the casting of the other new Doctor Who regulars: a young British Asian woman, a young black man and a middle-aged white man. It was unclear who (outside the media) perceived this as ‘political correctness’ in the implied pejorative sense.
Of course, it may well be that audiences are rather more progressive than the media perceive or portray them to be. When in June it was announced that Segun Akinola had been appointed as the new regular composer of Doctor Who’s incidental music, the Metro reported that ‘internet whiners purporting to be fans of Doctor Who bemoaned that Akinola had been hired to tick diversity boxes’ and that such so-called fans considered his hiring a case of ‘political correctness gone mad’. The Telegraph followed this up with a heartfelt article arguing against those ‘faceless bedsit whiners purporting to be Doctor Who devotees [who] bemoaned that it was political correctness gone mad’. My own researches online have located the few examples of such attitudes which are specifically cited in these articles, but no others. On the contrary, the Twittersphere displayed an overwhelming backlash against the views of this tiny minority — even despite the Express’s attempt (on 27 June) to whip up some controversy by headlining its report of Akinola’s appointment as: ‘BBC One drops HUGE bombshell ahead of new series’.
Certain sections of the press inevitably relish any opportunity to provoke storms in teacups. On 3 September the Star appeared similarly scandalized when it announced that the Doctor’s ‘change of gender will BARELY get mention in new series’.
(We may admit however that there was some truth to the Mirror’s claim that the series’ fans online have been sniggering excessively about the suggestion that the newly redesigned sonic screwdriver ‘bears a strong resemblance to a vibrator’. One is forced to ask whether those fans would be passing such comments if it were still a man in the lead role.)
I’ve recently contributed a chapter to a new Science Fiction Companion edited by Jack Fennell for Peter Lang, in which I suggest that Jodie Whittaker’s casting represents a belated move in popular screen science fiction (exemplified also by Rogue One, The Last Jedi, Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel) to transcend its roots in pandering to the tastes of adolescent males and to embrace the potential for radical meditations upon gender achieved by many of the genre’s key literary practitioners.
My next book, Underwords: Re-reading the Subtexts of Modernity — due to be published shortly by Peter Lang — in part (through close readings of a range of modern texts) explores divergent trends in certain cultural representations of patriarchal history, and (in noting such divergence) observes that the age of Donald Trump is also the era of the #MeToo movement. It suggests that our ability to characterise historical momentum as the product of more progressive imperatives may — in a critically utopian sense — afford ways of imagining and therefore of demanding and realising the possibilities of radically better futures. The appearance of Jodie Whittaker as the new Doctor Who — a surprisingly significant moment in contemporary British culture — offers to form part of that ameliorative optimism. Much rides on her shoulders; but audiences of a series that has always thrived on change may well prove rather less resistant to this latest development than some in the media have anticipated.
