Robson on Doctor Who

[sawyl]

Todays cultural highlight wasn't the Doctor Who prom, fun though it was. Rather, it was Justina Robson's blinder of an interval feature on the history of the series.

There were some wonderful moments. The Doctor, with his moralising and dirty hands, was compared to Tony Blair, while Rose was described as being, "...like Joan of Arc without the annoying religious fixation." There was also a fun investigation of what existence would be like if the Daleks every succeeded in their attempts to wipe out all other life in the universe — a cross between a Beckett play and an episode of Cooking with Dalek Caan, apparently.

But my favourite moment involved the comparison of Doctor Who to organised religion. Any early screening of the first Russell T Davies episode was described as, "as close as many [of us] get to a religious meeting." Then, after noting how the moralistic nature of the stories a society chooses to tell itself — and how these often rebound, showing the creators to be less serious than they might have wished themselves to be — Robson impishly says:

I merely point out that this year the church going population in the UK was 899,000, whereas, Dr Who polled ten million viewers? What me? Compare a trivial contemporary pot-boiler with an ancient and revered text and the best story ever told? Me!?! Wouldn't dare!

At which point, I jumped up, hands in the air, shouting, "Testify!" Except that I didn't. I'm far too uptight and English for that. Instead I thought to myself, "I say, she's quite right, you know." Which amounts to the same thing...