Thanks to the glorious shovelling of Classic Who onto BBC IPlayer, I have been enjoying a glut of mid-80s classic Who.
It struck me how many of the CBaker-McCoy era stories are dystopian tales, reflecting the pro-establishment neo-captialist society that the writers felt was being inflicted on them.
Varos, Paradise Towers and Terra Alpha (of Happiness Patrol) are obvious examples; Necros (Revelation of the Daleks) and is a particularly nasty one. Even Trial of a Timelord was, at its heart, a tale of authoritarianism and narrative control.
Modern Britain is clearly in another phase like the 80s. If anything, the authoritarianism is more extreme, and the government’s avarice more naked.
So where are the writers’ reactions to that nowadays? Whenever the show has recently attempted to address societal issues, it has been either a direct sermon like Orphan 55 or an incompetent muddle like Kerblam.
Where are the dystopias?
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Are you talking about the new show in general or just the last few years? Because I can think of plenty dystopian stories from new who critical of the British government: Turn Left, The Long Game, The Beast Below. And I don’t remember all of Capaldi’s era but from what I do remember there was a lot of anti-war and anti-capitalist messaging in it.
I mean over the last few years, rather than the revived series in general.
Hopefully that’ll change now that Russell T Davies is back. The Chibnall era was depressingly centrist in everything besides hiring practices.
I think this is a good point. Stories seem to be stuck more or less in the present day.
Maybe modern writers aren’t interested in critiquing the system because the system is so objectively great now?
That’ll be it.
Its on the bbc, funded by the system. Its a bit of a conflict of interest.
That didn’t stop it before.
