The Doctor isn't woke - he's a classic liberal
- Publication: The Times
- Date: 2024-12-21
- Author: Ben Dowell
- Page: Saturday Review, p. 6
- Language: English
The writer Steven Moffat left the Time Lord in 2017. Now he's back with a Christmas episode that is full of 'optimistic nonsense.'
There was some slightly unfair snickering among hacks at the press screening of this year's Doctor Who Christmas special. It is called Joy to the World and is written by the former showrunner Steven Moffat, a man with a reputation for, well, slight grumpiness.
"I think it's my face," he says with an ungrumpy smile from the office in the home in west London that he shares with his wife, the TV producer Sue Vertue. "I think I have a grumpy-looking face. I'm not grumpy, I'm not pessimistic and I write a lot of optimistic nonsense."
He certainly has for the latest special, which he was delighted to be asked to guest-write by his friend the present (and former) showrunner Russell T Davies, who was too busy. It imagines a Time Hotel where Ncuti Gatwa's Doctor and the guest star Nicola Coughlan (of Bridgerton and Derry Girls fame) as the titular Joy open doors into fabulous new worlds from history. I won't spoil anything, but it is a riot that eats up the extra cash that the show has under its co-production deal with Disney as rapaciously as one frightening CGI creation tries to gobble up our Time Lord.
Gatwa is in the 2025 series, so you might think he has every chance of surviving. And while Moffat killed off his two Doctors, Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi, at Christmas, he doesn't count a Doctor's regeneration as dying. In any case, he notes with a smile, it was Davies who "killed Kylie Minogue at Christmas" in a 2007 special that featured an interstellar RMS Titanic.
"I don't think the idea behind the Christmas story is that it's all sweetness and light and lovely. It should have an element of joy, but it should also be scary and it should also be sad. I don't mean to be mordant, but there is always an element of loss about Christmas because there will always be one empty chair. Everybody gets together, but that's also kind of a head count, isn't it? It's an extraordinarily emotional day. And in our culture it's the only one we do. We only have that one day where we do all that.
"I always sort of think of it as a week, the liminal week — Christmas and new year. And it's an extraordinary thing we all do. The air right now is churning with planes flying home and the railway lines are clattering and everyone goes back to the people they love, and they hunker down for a week and get ready for a new year. I love all that."
Christmas is certainly fun chez Moffat, where he and Vertue still insist that Christmas stockings are hung (despite the playfully exasperated protests of their sons Louis and Josh. who are in their twenties). A carrot and half-eaten mince pies are left out for Santa and white footprints put on the carpet.
Grumpy? The very thought, although there was a time in the 2010s when this Paisley-born son of a teacher was running Sherlock and Doctor Who and could be a little testy. They were the two biggest BBC dramas of the time, with the most ardent and critical fan bases. Christmas Day was his one day off and he admits he looked at online reactions a little too much before quitting as Doctor Who showrunner in 2017. At last week's screening he advised one of the executives to avoid his mistake.
"The current people who make the show are always getting a kicking, and the old ones always turn out to be great. I'm sure there are people who don't talk about me fondly, but the further you recede into the unthreatening past as a problem solved and put away, the fonder people are of you."
As a fan himself he understands the passion, which was only intensified by being in charge. What was it about the show that got into his bones as a child?
"The slightly different way of putting that question is, why didn't I grow out of it like everybody else, or at least grow to a different relationship? When I was growing up just about everyone in the class was watching Doctor Who. It wasn't an exceptional thing. But then they move on to other things. And clearly, at the age of 63, I have failed."
He continues to be drawn to the extraordinary oddities of a show with a "density of terrific ideas that can set little heads aflame and that outmatches anything". He reels off a list and adds: "What day of madness occurred somewhere in west London when someone said we could put the word 'sonic' in front of the word 'screwdriver? What other show would have cast a strange, hawklike, brooding. slightly villainous-looking creature like Tom Baker as a children's hero, and for it to become wonderful? And why give him that scarf? It makes not a lick of sense but, my God, was that a good idea."
Talk of Baker and his jelly babies reminds us how uniquely British this all is, although it is now made with Disney and competing for eyeballs in the streaming marketplace. Next year's series will be the second and final one covered by the megabucks deal that has made the CGI even more spectacular. At yet, it has not yet been renewed. Will it?
"I've got no idea. I don't think anyone has got an idea. There's a lot of fuss being made about this. But can I just gently point out most shows are not commissioned before they go out. Russell obviously had his first two commissioned at the same time. But as you know. it's absolutely normal to wait until the show is going out to see if it comes back again. There's nothing unusual about that."
Even if Disney pulls out (and I am not saying it will), he still thinks the show will be "fine" and can continue under the sole auspices of the BBC. I wonder what he thinks of people who say it has become too woke and socially conscious, culminating, for instance, in a Davies episode featuring a transgender character and which seemed to make claim that the universe is nonbinary. Does the show have an agenda to make the world a better. kinder place. and that a problem?
"I think a lot of fiction works that way. How do people learn how to be good except through fiction? That's what heroic fiction is. You can argue that's what religion is. It's a set of constructed myths giving you an ideal to work towards. Fairytales, in effect, tell used life is always like and what you should be doing about it. Imagine in a world without stories, how would you know how to be good? A story without a moral dilemma pretty much doesn't happen. There's a moral fable element to Doctor Who, but I can't think of a where there isn't."
Accusations that the show has become too "woke" only tell "half a story", he adds, pointing to a 2017 episode, Oxygen, that he wrote for Capaldi in which the Doctor was "denouncing capitalism." The same year a Frank Cottrell-Boyce episode. Smile, had the Doctor saving the world by "using capitalism", he says (you can look them up to see if you agree)
"If you're to harvest the show for things that you don't agree with so you can feel pleasurably irate, help yourself. But don't pretend that you've uncovered our secret agenda. Because we don't have one.
"The entire culture war is like the Time War. It's a war that absolutely no one notices is going on and we don't have the budget to show anyway. Literally no one cares about any of this guff. Literally nobody. You know, maybe a few fatuous media lovers like me wandering around in our tiny bubble with all the other pinheads give a shit about this, but check the bus queues and restaurants in Britain. Go and listen outside the living rooms. Do you think they're talking about any of this bloody crap? Course they're not. Most of them wouldn't know what the word 'woke' meant, except, you know, as a distinction between being asleep and not, for goodness' sake. Stop it. Nobody cares. The Doctor is a classic liberal in the sense that he thinks he should be in charge and someone should get him tea."
Moffat may also still be a classic liberal, but not being in charge is probably good for his health. He wanted to be missed when he left, but would have been more heartbroken if the show hadn't succeeded without him and he can watch it and contribute as a fan (he also wrote Boom, an acclaimed episode for the most recent series). There are no plans for more episodes from him.
"It is, as David Tennant once said, definitely the first line of the obituary, no question about that, and I'll always be associated with it. I did it for too many years. Too many people know me from that show. I don't mind that at all, not one tiny bit. It's lovely for people who look intimidatingly old to tell me that they grew up watching my show. That's absolutely gorgeous. No problem with that at all. As to whether or not it will [be my last story], that honestly depends on schedules and whether anyone wants me, and whether I've got an idea that anyone wants. I try to be in work, so I might not always be available.
"At some point Russell will leave again, and that will not be me taking over, I can assure you of that. I hope a whole flood of new people will come in. And I think that would be slightly weird for me to be bobbing around in my late sixties with a bunch of 20-year-olds making it."
He is working on something he cannot talk about and sounds happy, I tell him, even with the world as it is and the imminent return to the White House of Donald Trump, a bête noir in previous interviews I have done with him, and someone he could probably imagine as a Doctor Who villain. But he even seems sanguine about that.
"It's an interesting objection, isn't it, calling people populist? I always worry about that because this is a democracy. How the hell else are you going to get voted in? And if over half a country votes for somebody, then people like me who don't like him very much have to sit on our hands a bit. I'm not so in love with my own opinion that I denigrate anyone for not sharing it."
He sounds, dare I say it, hopeful for the future.
"What period of history do you want to live in? The things that we live through and the terrors we endure are peanuts compared to the Cold War, the Blitz. How about the millions of human beings who just died of starvation? Come on. Optimistic? Why not?"
Doctor Who: Joy to the World is on Christmas Day on BBC1 at 5.10pm
Caption: Ncuti Gatwa and Nicola Coughlan in the Doctor Who Christmas special. Left: Steven Moffat
Disclaimer: These citations are created on-the-fly using primitive parsing techniques. You should double-check all citations. Send feedback to whovian@cuttingsarchive.org
- APA 6th ed.: Dowell, Ben (2024-12-21). The Doctor isn't woke - he's a classic liberal. The Times p. Saturday Review, p. 6.
- MLA 7th ed.: Dowell, Ben. "The Doctor isn't woke - he's a classic liberal." The Times [add city] 2024-12-21, Saturday Review, p. 6. Print.
- Chicago 15th ed.: Dowell, Ben. "The Doctor isn't woke - he's a classic liberal." The Times, edition, sec., 2024-12-21
- Turabian: Dowell, Ben. "The Doctor isn't woke - he's a classic liberal." The Times, 2024-12-21, section, Saturday Review, p. 6 edition.
- Wikipedia (this article): <ref>{{cite news| title=The Doctor isn't woke - he's a classic liberal | url=http://cuttingsarchive.org/index.php/The_Doctor_isn%27t_woke_-_he%27s_a_classic_liberal | work=The Times | pages=Saturday Review, p. 6 | date=2024-12-21 | via=Doctor Who Cuttings Archive | accessdate=20 January 2026 }}</ref>
- Wikipedia (this page): <ref>{{cite web | title=The Doctor isn't woke - he's a classic liberal | url=http://cuttingsarchive.org/index.php/The_Doctor_isn%27t_woke_-_he%27s_a_classic_liberal | work=Doctor Who Cuttings Archive | accessdate=20 January 2026}}</ref>
