Doctor Who, the British Broadcasting Corporation’s (BBC’s) longest-running television drama series, constantly projects imaginings of Britain and Britishness; the aim of this book is to explore them. Ostensibly, Doctor Who is a science fiction series (indeed, it is the world’s longest-running science fiction programme), but it is as much a programme about what it means to be British. Doctor Who’s Britishness raises an array of questions: can a long-running and multi-authored programme like Doctor Who project a coherent vision of Britishness over time? Is the show’s Britishness descriptive or normative, smug or critical, reactionary or progressive? How does Doctor Who’s Britishness confront pressing social issues such as class , gender , race and sexuality , as well as the tensions between the country’s four nations? How does the presentation of Britishness respond to globalisation and to the rise of the transnational corporation? What impact have Britain’s controversial military interventions made on Doctor Who’s depiction of national identity ? These are the questions that this book seeks to answer.
This opening chapter has several objectives: first, it locates this study within the literature on national identity , politics and popular culture . It draws on John Street ’s and Liesbet van Zoonen ’s insights regarding the inseparability of political communication from popular culture .1 The chapter also draws support from Michael Billig ’s and Tim Edensor ’s work on the relationship between national identity and popular culture .2 The close interconnections highlighted by these writings show that programmes such as Doctor Who are in the business of national identity and politics and, as such, their contribution merits scholarly analysis just as much as the narratives advanced by politicians.
Secondly, the chapter shows why Doctor Who is a particularly fruitful source of commentary on national identity . The programme’s template and tropes provide a multiplicity of avenues for its political output, and a wealth of opportunities for satire , allegory and metaphor .
Thirdly, this chapter aims to demonstrate how the exploration of national identity is pivotal to Doctor Who. Britishness is no peripheral matter. Rather, regardless of whether the Doctor’s escapades are set in contemporary Britain, foreign climes, faraway planets or dystopian futures, Doctor Who’s characters are frequently coded as British and a judgement is handed down as to the merits or demerits of their British qualities.
Finally, the chapter considers the book’s interpretative methodology, engaging with Alan McKee ’s well-known article “Is Doctor Who political?” and drawing upon the nature of legal interpretation.
National Identity: Politics, Law and Popular Culture
Doctor Who merits study because it makes a substantial contribution to debate surrounding British national identity and to the political controversies connected to it. The objection might be made that Doctor Who is a family-orientated and not particularly highbrow science fiction television programme, hardly deserving scholarly analysis. Yet in fact, there are sound reasons why works of popular culture such as Doctor Who warrant attention on matters of national identity , just as much as the pronouncements made about Britishness by the country’s politicians. First, the importance of popular culture in a general sense has now been recognised by the academy. As Jim McGuigan observes, there is an increasing intellectual assumption that the symbolic experiences and practices of ordinary people are more important analytically and politically than Culture with a capital “C”. Writing in 1992, McGuigan identified as a great academic advance the fact that scholars were taking an appreciative, non-judgemental attitude to ordinary tastes and pleasures.3 We should welcome academia treating popular culture more seriously because it impacts so deeply on the lives of millions of people.
Against this backdrop, there is a strong case to claim that the worlds of politics , national identity and popular culture , far from being discrete, are in fact intimately connected. A number of scholars have drawn attention to this close relationship. John Street , for instance, argues that both the popular media and politicians are engaged in creating works of popular fiction which portray credible worlds that resonate with people’s experience.4 To this extent, he maintains, political performance should be understood in similar terms to those which apply to popular culture . He further contends that popular culture plays a part in politics not so much through its explanatory power but rather by its ability to articulate the feelings and passions that drive politics.5 In other words, for Street, the division between the pleasures and passions of politics and those of popular culture is almost entirely artificial. Furthermore, Street sees popular culture as being able to produce and articulate feelings which can become the basis of an identity. Popular culture, he argues, can become involved in politics through the way it offers forms of identity. Street contends that both within and between politics and popular culture , there is a constant struggle to articulate identities; that is, a battle is fought over the claim to represent competing identities, not least national identity .6
Liesbet van Zoonen goes further by arguing that works of popular culture actually are politics. This, she holds, is because politics is more than just what politicians do; politics is also a “field” existing independently from its own practitioners, one which accommodates the continuous struggle about power relations in society.7 Politics , she contends, has to be connected to the everyday culture of the citizen, lest it become an alien sphere, dominated by strangers about whom no-one cares or bothers.8 She suggests that the style of popular culture may offer a way into politics for people otherwise excluded or bored. She proposes that popular culture be acknowledged as a relevant resource for political citizenship, one which can make politics more engaging and more inclusive. On these readings, popular culture is politics pursued by other means. As such, it is as worthy of academic attention as the constant efforts of politicians to fashion national identities which resonate with voters.9
The relevance of popular culture to constructing a sense of Britishness is reinforced by Tim Edensor ’s work on national identity . Edensor argues that, until recently, “the masses” uncritically accepted “high” or “official” culture as the dominant signifier of national identity. He observes that of late, however, various accounts have suggested that popular culture has become important.10 These accounts suggest that we now use a huge and proliferating resource of popular culture which operates to form a sense of national ident...