by Jonn Elledge

It’s five years now since Doctor Who returned to the BBC, as the latest project from Russell T Davies.

When news broke that the man bringing Doctor Who back was the bloke who wrote Queer as Folk, the tabloids were up in arms. A man who introduced explicit gay sex to prime time TV? In charge of a kids show?

It’d be nice to say that the show’s success in the intervening years has put an end to talk like that. But the more bigoted part of the audience have spent the five years since in a state of constant bitching about Davies and his “agenda”.

Why does he insist on populating the show with gay characters? they demand. Why rub his sexuality in impressionable kids faces? Why does he have to stick his big gay oar in?



More liberal fanboys defensively dismiss all this as nonsense. But on this issue, and this one alone, the liberals are wrong and the bigots are completely and utterly right.

There is an agenda at work in the new version of Doctor Who. It introduced a overtly bisexual space adventurer and started selling action figures of him. Its scripts are liberally peppered with references to minor characters’ gay marriages.

It even made the idea of casual sex between John Barrowman and Russell Tovey into a punch line, for heaven’s sake. This, I reckon, is more than enough evidence of some form of deliberate agenda.

And it’s brilliant.

Because the show isn’t promoting homosexuality, whatever that might mean. It’s normalizing it. Doctor Who is quietly teaching a generation of kids that there’s nothing weird about fancying, shagging or marrying someone who happens to have the same genitals as you. There’s nothing shameful about it. The universe is a big place. Takes all sorts, doesn’t it?

I’m not claiming that a kids show can stamp out homophobia. (I’m not sure anything can do that.) But it can implant the idea from an early age that being gay is okay. That all the best people are tolerant of diversity.

And, more to the point, that those who aren’t are almost certainly aliens who want to destroy the world.

Davies is gone now. This weekend sees the broadcast of the first episode of the new show without his fingerprints on.

The new producer is Steven Moffat, the writer of Coupling and about as noisily heterosexual as Who menks come. All the same, though, that agenda isn’t going anywhere. Moffat’s the one who wrote the joke about the Master’s beard.