Under the guidance of writer/producer Russell T Davies, Doctor Who is queerer than ever, says Richard Watts.In 2003, when the BBC announced that Russell T Davies, the creator of
Queer as Folk, was to be put in charge of a new series of
Doctor Who, few would have expected that the revived science fiction series about an alien wanderer in time and space would become one of the most lauded television programmes of the 21st century.
But not only did the new Doctor Who become a runaway success – inspiring two spin-off series to date in the child-friendly The Sarah Jane Adventures and the far darker, adult-oriented Torchwood; as well as generating critical and popular acclaim – it’s also become one of the most inclusive television programmes ever made in terms of representing gay, lesbian, bisexual and gender-fluid characters on-screen.
Anyone who has watched the last three seasons of Doctor Who will be familiar with some of the elements Davies has brought to the show; most notably the roguish, sexually-omnivorous Captain Jack Harkness, a Time Agent turned conman from the 51st Century, played by openly gay actor John Barrowman.
According to Davies, the inclusion of Captain Jack (first introduced in the 2005 story ‘The Empty Child’) was a deliberate attempt to subvert the usual depiction of bisexuality on television.
“I thought: ‘It’s time you introduce bisexuals properly into mainstream television,’” he recently told the New York Times. “The most boring drama would be – ‘Oh, I’m bisexual, oh my bleeding heart’ night-time drama. Tedious, dull. But if you say it’s a bisexual space pirate swaggering in with guns and attitude and cheek and humour into primetime family viewing - that was enormously attractive to me.”
Such characters aside, what’s the attraction of a programme like Doctor Who for lesbian and gay viewers? According to occasional MCV contributor and Sensis film critic Tim Hunter, it’s the titular character’s outsider status.
“It’s about the fact that he seems like an outsider from the rest of society. As a 13 year old boy who hadn’t quite come to terms with his sexuality yet, I just found that quite appealing,” Hunter says.
“The reason Doctor Who as a character has gay appeal is because he doesn’t necessarily identify with regular people; and I think a lot of gay men growing up tend to identify with that, because they too, including myself, feel like we’re outside of society; not quite the same as everyone else. The Doctor is like that too, but he embraces it … and I think there’s a lesson there for gay men; that being different isn’t necessarily a bad thing. And I think that’s become even more [pronounced] in this new series that Russell T Davies has been doing,” he concludes.
As well as introducing queer characters such as the omnisexual Captain Jack and the transgendered ‘last human’, the Lady Cassandra, Davies has also injected a gay sensibility into the programme; typified by the 2007 Christmas special, Doctor Who: Voyage of the Damned.
The movie-length episode, which screens on ABC 1 this Sunday night, features gay icon Kylie Minogue in a story which references such camp delights as 1972’s The Poseidon Adventure and the 1997 film, Titanic, leavened with a healthy dash of science fiction.
“Kylie is probably my favourite guest we’ve had. Having her on the show was amazing. Just having her working with us was brilliant,” an enthusiastic Davies told Welsh newspaper the Swansea Evening Post earlier this month.
As well as La Minogue, Doctor Who: Voyage of the Damned also stars out gay actor Russell Tovey (best known for his role as the sports-loving Rudge in the film The History Boys), and features a subplot involving marriage rights for androids: a clear reference to the on-going debate around same-sex marriage.
Gay and lesbian characters also feature regularly in the programme’s fourth season, which starts on the ABC next week; a situation which has some fans up in arms about what they describe as Davies’ “gay agenda”.
“[I]t’s completely over-egging the series to have throwaway gay references all over the place just to give the show a PC, all-inclusive feel,” rants poster ‘Spud McSpud’ on the pop-culture website Ain’tItCoolNews.com. “[Davies] seems to want to portray in new Who the idea that there are gay/bi people in every walk of life, everywhere you go!”
Not everyone is so opposed to the regular representation of same-sex attracted characters on Doctor Who, however.
“[Davies] takes Doctor Who and pushes the envelope the whole time, not in terms of taste and decency but in terms of ideas and emotional intelligence, the size of feeling and epic stroke of narrative breadth,” Jane Tranter, the BBC’s head of fiction, told the New York Times last week.
No-one at the BBC had a problem with Captain Jack, or with any of Davies’s plotlines, she added.
“How ridiculous would it be that you would travel through time and space and only ever find heterosexual men?”
Doctor Who: Voyage of the Damned screens on ABC 1 this Sunday June 29 at 7:30pm. Season Four of Doctor Who commences the following week.
This article originally appeared in MCV #390 on Thursday June 26.