Don't Shoot - He's British! parts two and three

[parrot_knight]

More musings on Doctor Who and national identity from me have been published at John Connors's Time Lines blog. I've written an introduction with more ideas at The Event Library, and the posts themselves are available at part two and part three.

Also posted at http://sir-guinglain.dreamwidth.org/2016/09/13/dont-shoot-hes-british-parts-two-and-

Comments

[daniel_saunders]

Interesting! Particularly about the fourth Doctor being more imperialistic than is widely acknowledged - I'll have to think about that one. He certainly fits in with imperial society in Talons not raising an eyebrow about Litefoot senior's involvement with the punitive expedition to China. There possibly is a mid-twentieth century sense of British imperialism being relatively benign when compared to the totalitarianism of Magnus Greel, in a similar way to the way George Orwell, no imperialist, saw the British Empire as preferable to the Nazi Reich and Japanese Empire.

Regarding Oscar Wilde as an influence on Tom Baker, there are some photos of Wilde that make him look like the missing link between Pertwee and Baker, I'm thinking particularly of this one.

written by authors who had lived through or fought in the Second World War

I've been of the opinion for a while that there are a couple of key divides in Doctor Who. One is those who grew up before the programme was on versus those who grew up watching it. The other is those

[parrot_knight]

I'm sure you are right about a faith in benign British imperialism. Hinchcliffe would have made the Doctor a more backward-looking figure if left to his own devices, in some ways anticipating the way Peter Davison Doctor's character could have developed. Oddly, I think there's something of Davison in that Wilde picture too - and Wilde himself defined himself as a rebel against the expectations of family and education, rather like the Doctor in the 1970s