My auntie suggested recently that
I watch Killing Eve on the grounds
that it boasted “two strong female roles.” I cannot believe that anybody in the
world watches a programme on the grounds that there are “two strong female roles.” The world has already grown up and it’s the media playing catch-up with
this sort of newly entrenched phraseology now seemingly seeping into ordinary
conversation. When I, Claudius
marched majestically across TV screens in 1976, Robert Graves didn’t create a
world in which there were “strong female roles”; he created a world in which
every part was a corker. Surely that should be the standard? Alongside the
astoundingly good Sian Philips there was the astoundingly good Derek Jacobi.
You see in 1976, writers could do this sort of thing without differentiation,
without the need to make the world know they were thinking of female actors.
The writing and characters could speak for themselves. I watched Killing Eve in the end. It’s fucking
brilliant: that’s all I really needed to know.
When Jodie Whittaker was
announced as the Doctor, there came the ubiquitous press statements from Piers
Wenger, Charlotte Moore and Chris Chibnall. Wenger in particular handled the
business badly, praising Whittaker’s “powerful female life force” whatever that
might be. To his eternal credit, I’m not sure at all what difference there is between the Doctor that
Chris Chibnall has written and those of his writing predecessors, apart from
the fact that she is by far the least well explored. He has indeed proven
though that the Doctor is a gender fluid character, as much as I hate that sort
of identifying jargon. (It smacks of the need to be recognised or offended.) If
a character, however, has a fluidity of gender, it renders their nebulous “female
life force” fairly irrelevant. Later, Wenger would suggest that “gone is the
daffiness and idiosyncrasy of her predecessors in favour of a Doctor with
energy, spark and relatability.” As well as dismissing the previous Doctors in
a single sentence, Wenger has chosen a word that ought to be forbidden when discussing
television: relatability. Does he mean she’s got a Northern accent? Does he
mean she sounds like someone’s mum? I’m not sure how much I do relate or want
to relate to a character from another planet without a name whose friends never
ask any questions of. This was an under-written Doctor, a tool to get the
characters from one place to another. I could - at a pinch - relate to
Eccleston’s Doctor: he was a man doomed forever to be lonely after destroying
his own people. I couldn’t relate to Tennant’s lonely God, Matt Smith’s raggedy
man or Peter Capaldi’s 2000-year-old storm, but the show isn’t really about
relating to the Doctor, is it? I want to wonder
at them; not feel on a level. It's the companions I need to relate to and there are plenty of tremendously powerful "strong female roles" when it comes to companions, for the record. Whittaker’s Doctor is similarly unrelatable but
due to the fact we know absolutely nothing about her. I applaud the idea of
stripping everything back, a return to adventure-of-the-week anthology, with no
ties to continuity. But no one asks Whittaker’s Doctor who she really is. It’s
as if the TARDIS “fam” have watched Doctor Who before so they don’t need to ask
those questions. We’re expected to accept this Doctor at face value and that
has never been asked of an audience before, at least not since 2005.
Perhaps most insultingly of all,
Whittaker wanted to tell the fans “not to be scared by [her] gender.” Now, as a
teenager I may have been scared of girls but as an adult the idea of being
scared of a person because they are a woman is frankly embarrassing. Just who
did Whittaker think she was addressing? What precisely was it about her gender
that she thought fans might be scared of? That’s the issue here. There wasn’t
one before statements like this started to appear. Recently she’s talked about
the show for the last 55 years being made from the perspective of a “white male
gaze.” But it’s still written by a white male and if she’s talking about her perspective somehow being
transmitted to us, I can’t help but feel it’s been detrimental. The Doctor is a
less rich, less affecting, less funny, less wonderful presence than ever
before. I’d have Colin Baker and his endless, incessant Valeyard puns over
Jodie’s apologetic bantz any day. Most strikingly of all though is that the
gender has done nothing whatsoever to the show apart from gifting us the
negligible talent of Whittaker herself. The Doctor remains the Doctor, despite
a lack of exploration and the adventures still rollick along in the old-fashioned,
even over-simplified traditional structures of the “white male gaze”, as
ridiculous as that sounds. What was this mammoth change we needed to be so unafraid
of? Perhaps it would have been better and more progressive to simply announce
Jodie’s casting and not be drawn on the gender change whatsoever; just treat
her as the next actor to play the part as opposed to the first woman. Now that
really would have been progress. When a future Doctor is announced, I so hope
we’re not drilled with press statements along the lines of, “Unforgivably, never
has an actor of colour / homosexuality / transsexuality played the Doctor.”
Because most people have moved on from BAME casting too, and the historic casting of the hugely talented actors to have played the Doctor should never be apologised for. Their heritage shouldn’t even be
worthy of comment. In future, it should simply be the best actor for the job who gets it.
When Steven Moffat was put on the
spot and asked why he never cast a woman in the leading role in a programme
which has always had a male leading role, he came up with the best reply in the
universe: “Because I cast Peter Capaldi.” He continued: “I didn’t not cast a woman; I cast Peter Capaldi.”
And in doing so cast perhaps the greatest actor ever to inhabit the role. I don’t
give a monkey’s toss that he’s a skinny, white Glaswegian bloke as opposed to any other
woman. Because those things are utterly unimportant. How many divisions of
humanity do we need to break the diversity bracket down into before we start
seeing each other and indeed actors for what they are, rather than what they represent?
People.
JH
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