Doctor Who attempted to overthrow Thatcher

[Blowfeld]

Doctor Who in war with Planet Maggie
Marc Horne

Sylvester McCoy, the actor who played Doctor Who for two years in the 1980s, has revealed that left-wing scriptwriters hired by the BBC wrote propaganda into the plots in an attempt to undermine Margaret Thatcher’s premiership.

His revelation will reinforce suspicions about antipathy within the corporation to Thatcher’s government. Norman Tebbit, then the Tory party chairman, claimed at the time that the BBC was in the hands of a “Marxist mafia”.

McCoy took over as the seventh Doctor three months after the Tory leader had been elected in 1987 for a then unprecedented third term.

“The idea of bringing politics into Doctor Who was deliberate, but we had to do it very quietly and certainly didn’t shout about it,” said McCoy.

“We were a group of politically motivated people and it seemed the right thing to do. At the time Doctor Who used satire to put political messages out there in the way they used to do in places like Czechoslovakia. Our feeling was that Margaret Thatcher was far more terrifying than any monster the Doctor had encountered. Those who wanted to see the messages saw them; others, including one producer, didn’t.”

In the end, unlike the so-called velvet revolution in Prague, the “Tardis revolution” failed. Reviewers have since spotted the obvious parodies of Thatcher but audiences hardly noticed the subversion at the time and, if they did, it was a turn-off. Viewers left the programme in droves and Doctor Who was shelved before Thatcher was forced to resign in 1990.

Andrew Cartmel, the show’s script editor during the late 1980s, confirmed its deliberate anti-Thatcher slant.

He said last week that John Nathan-Turner, who produced the show throughout the 1980s, had asked him during his job interview what he hoped to achieve in the post.

“My exact words were: I’d like to overthrow the government,” said Cartmel. “I was a young firebrand and I wanted to answer honestly. I was very angry about the social injustice in Britain under Thatcher and I’m delighted that came into the show.”

He assembled a number of “angry young writers” to produce storylines that they hoped would foment anti-Thatcher dissent. They included Ben Aaronovitch, son of the late Marxist intellectual Sam Aaronovitch, and Rona Munro, who went on to become a scriptwriter for Ken Loach, the socialist film-maker.

Under Cartmel’s direction, Thatcher was caricatured as Helen A, the wide-eyed tyrannical ruler of a human colony on the planet Terra Alpha.

The extra-terrestrial character, played by Sheila Hancock, outlawed unhappiness and remarked “I like your initiative, your enterprise” as her secret police rounded up dissidents.

The Doctor persuaded “the drones”, who toiled in the factories and mines, to down tools and rise up in revolt, an echo of the miners’ strikes and printers’ disputes during Thatcher’s first two terms in office.

Helen A remained oblivious as close colleagues turned against her. Prophetically, she was shown shedding a tear as she finally realised that power was slipping from her grasp.

The three-part serial in which she featured, The Happiness Patrol, began in November 1988, in the same week that the prime minister was filmed waltzing with President Reagan in the White House.

The following year Cartmel wrote an emotive speech for the Doctor about the evils of nuclear weapons. It borrowed heavily from material obtained from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which was a persistent thorn in the side of the government.

A spin-off Doctor Who children’s novel called Turlough and the Earthlink Dilemma, which was published under licence by the BBC in 1987, featured a despotic villain called Rehctaht — Thatcher spelt backwards.

Sophie Aldred, who played Ace, the Doctor’s feminist companion, said a shared contempt for right-wing ideology had inspired “a real bonding process” for cast and crew.

“Thatcher was our prime minister and we weren’t happy,” she said.

However, ratings slumped from a high of 16m, when Tom Baker was the Doctor a decade earlier, to 3m and the show was taken off air twice: in 1986-7 by Michael Grade, then the director of programmes — who said it had “no redeeming features” — and again in 1989, two years after Grade had left the BBC.

“We were going out against Coronation Street so hardly anybody, apart from the most ardent of fans, saw the programme,” said Cartmel.

“Critics, media pundits and politicians certainly didn’t pick up on what we were doing. If we had generated controversy and become a cause celebre we would have got a few more viewers but, sadly, nobody really noticed or cared.”

Cartmel said he and his colleagues were at pains to ensure that Jonathan Powell, the then controller of BBC1, did not become aware of their agenda. “The BBC certainly would not have liked any hint of political axe-grinding,” he said.

A BBC spokesman said yesterday: “We’re baffled by these claims. The BBC’s impartiality rules applied just as strongly then as they do to programmes now.”

Poison pens

There is a rich tradition of writers having a veiled dig at politicians and settling other scores through fiction.

- Anthony Horowitz admits his Alex Rider spy novels have been “coloured” by his feelings towards Tony Blair and new Labour.

In Eagle Strike an officious and incompetent security guard called Prescott comes to a sticky end;

while in Point Blanc, after a boat is dropped on the hapless home secretary, a witness quips, “That’s the last Straw”.

- The Turning Wheel, a short story by Philip K Dick whose work inspired the film Blade Runner, featured a religion founded by The Bard Elron Hu — a play on L Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology.

- Dick Cheney, George W Bush’s loyal deputy, was reported to have been left in a rage after he was lampooned in the 2004 Hollywood blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow. The film’s odious vice-president Becker, played by Kenneth Welsh, brings the world to the brink of destruction by peddling a big oil agenda in the face of looming environmental catastrophe.

- One individual was not enough for Dylan Thomas, who poked fun at the insular residents of Laugharne, Carmarthenshire, in his classic work Under Milk Wood. To spare their blushes he referred to the community as Llareggub — or “bugger all” spelt backwards. It was often changed to Llaregyb.

You can find this story here Doctor Who attempted to overthrow Thatcher

[Kristatos]

This is hardly news. You'd have to have been asleep not to realise that Helen A was based on Thatcher.