The politics of Doctor Who explained: From Nazi Daleks to lefty Time Lords and beyond

The Bunker

Podmasters

News, Politics, Society & Culture, Government

4.6 • 984 Ratings

🗓️ 23 November 2023

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Doctor Who: bold individualist, woke mouthpiece for wet BBC liberalism, interfering Galactic colonialist, sidekick to the Military Industrial Complex… or all and none of the above? For the show’s 60th birthday we discuss the politics of Who. Were the Daleks always Nazis? What’s the most politically dodgy story? Why do the Doctor’s politics keeping changing? And what can we expect from Ncuti Gatwa, the first black actor* to play the Doctor in an ongoing role? Our panel of dyed-in-the-scarf Time Lord experts: author and Who spin-off writer Jenny Colgan, the New Statesman and Paper Cuts regular Jonn Elledge, and Seth Thévoz of Oh God What Now? Support us on Patreon: www.patreon.com/bunkercast Written and presented by Andrew Harrison. Assistant producers Eliza Davis Beard, Chris Jones and Liam Tait. Art by James Parrett. Music by Kenny Dickinson. Audio production by Jade Bailey. Group Editor Andrew Harrison. THE BUNKER is a Podmasters Production * Yes we know about Jo Martin. She was great, wasn’t she? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	My name is Stan. I'm at. Nice to meet you. So you took up photography where? I've always loved
0:05.4	photography but I turn it into earning a living at 60. I enrolled on a day course.
0:11.8	Well college. I loved going to college. It's good you can retrain. I'm enrolled on the day course. But college?
0:13.0	I loved going to college.
0:14.0	It's good you can retrain and do something.
0:16.0	Yeah, yeah.
0:17.0	Let's talk about working, learning, saving and making the most of living longer.
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0:55.2	look after theirs with dental life. Pick up dental life in the pet food aisle. Hello and welcome to a special edition of the bunker, the podcast that's bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.
1:14.3	I'm your host emitting a strange wheezing groaning sound, Andrew Harrison.
1:18.3	Don't you think she's looking tired? Just by whispering these words into the ear of a special advisor, David Tenant's 10th Doctor Who brought
1:26.8	down Prime Minister Harriet Jones, MP for Fly Down North, and all she'd done was order the
1:31.4	destruction of a Sycamack spaceship as it was attempting to leave Earth orbit, all very Belgrano.
1:38.0	It's far from the only time that Dr. who has dabbled in real world politics, from environmentalism to
1:43.2	colonialism to fascism, to 80s villainesses who more than slightly
1:46.9	resembled Margaret Thatcher to stories in the 1970s about the primitive planet
	...

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