Doctor Who in war with Planet Maggie (Times Online)13 February 2010, 5:36 pmSylvester 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.
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“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.
more at
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/tv_and_radio/article7026314.ece
