Is it Sexist?

With the hugely increased emphasis in the media on diversity, BAME casting and roles for women, it seems that the only group of actors not represented by Equity divisions or movements are White British males. The casting of Jodie Whittaker as our hero, or rather heroine, perhaps represents the apotheosis of this modern obsession.

Alison Graham in the Radio Times:

"...isn’t it simply marvellous that a woman will be heading a drama that won’t involve her looking sad in the rain as she investigates murders and grapples with a complicated personal life (see In the Dark and every crime drama of recent years). Nor is she a body discovered in a shallow grave in woodland or stuffed into bin bags or tortured (again, pretty much every crime drama of recent years)..."

This quotation feels, in this moment, extremely disingenuous. In recent months, the big shows across television have been the aforementioned In the Dark, The Loch, Broken, Top of the Lake: China Girl, Fearless, Victoria, Happy Valley and Broadchurch. Only Broken can be said to be truly led by a male actor and the character lives up to the name of the series entirely in that he has been utterly damaged. Broadchurch essentially has two leads, one a mature, virtuous and strong woman, the other a man who can’t get on with most people, especially women and his own daughter. Fearless features an incredibly strong female lead in Helen McCrory, Happy Valley boasts the unassailable Sarah Lancashire, Top of the Lake stars Elizabeth Moss as a fiercely independent woman, Victoria speaks for itself.

To take The Loch as a microcosm of what is actually going on here: Laura Fraser’s Annie Redford is a strong police officer. She may be facing issues with a problematic daughter but she works through them professionally and is nothing short of absolutely honourable. Siobhan Finneran plays her boss, DCI Lauren Quigley who is cast in the role traditionally played by a male. Like Redford, Quigley is utterly professional and nothing short of absolutely honourable. Let’s think about the male characters: The Radio Times review asked, “Wait a minute – the jogger guy... is he the teacher guy too? Who was in the pub with Annie? Are we meant to remember? Baffling.” Not one of the male guest stars is remotely memorable. In fact, they are all, to a man, insipid. John Sessions plays a deficient DCI Frank Smilie who makes a whole host of policing mistakes. Don Gilet plays a psychoanalyst with women problems. The male students all seem to need counselling and are either bullies, mentally ill, fawning over the “plucky” Shona McHugh’s Evie Redford or psycho-killers. One male character is bedbound with no lines, another is a twice-murderer on the mend and another is a husband whose biggest sin, and source of self-destructive guilt, is lying about seeing the Loch Ness Monster.

I am absolutely all for strong roles for women. What I am aggressively opposed to is the sidelining of strong male characters for this to happen. Why can’t we write strong parts for all characters, whatever the gender? Are we as a nation, feeling guilty after all the years of female emancipation and making up for it by making our male leads weak? If The Loch is anything to go by that is exactly what seems to be happening.

This female uprising has been present in Doctor Who since its new inception in 2005. Fans bemoaned the fact the Doctor never saved the day in Series One. Instead, Rose was our leading character and the Doctor someone who helped her and others grow. Under Steven Moffat, the show arguably became more about the Doctor, with more and more episodes even named after him. The Doctor, The Widow and The Wardrobe; Vincent and the Doctor, The Doctor’s Wife, The Doctor Falls, even The Return of Doctor Mysterio! Of course, the Doctor saves the day many, many times and is more prone to rabble-rousing speeches about himself: See The Pandorica Opens, A Good Man Goes to War, The Rings of Akhaten, Death in Heaven and The Doctor Falls. What is perhaps problematic however, is the way in which as the Doctor has become older, he has paradoxically become increasingly immature and emasculated. He cannot read relationships, is insulting to Clara’s boyfriends, struggles to admit to his own anxieties and fallibilities (his impending destinies on Lake Silencio and Trenzalore, his inability to locate Gallifrey; his blindness; the summoning from Davros) and by every turn needs a female character to show him how to behave. It is Clara who is ultimately responsible for the saving of Gallifrey and indeed, the saviour of the Doctor in millions of aspects of his life, even if he doesn’t know it. The fact he needs cue cards in Under The Lake and gentle prodding from Clara throughout their time together is not because the Doctor is an alien but because he is a man. It is almost as if Moffat, a writer bafflingly criticised for his inability to write strong women (River Song, Missy, Amy Pond, Clara Oswald: Hello?!) feels the need to not just write strong women but rubbish men too, perhaps as a result of his own characteristic good-natured self-deprecation.

The male emancipation doesn’t end with the Doctor. Rory is continually the butt of a joke. When Steven Moffat introduced the character on Doctor Who Confidential, he said, “He’s the guy who wanted to be a doctor but ended up being a nurse.” Admittedly, he could have worded that better. But to put such a drip of a character next to the bloody-minded Amy ends up making him look even more like a doormat and her to seem even more irritating. The recurrent character Craig is allowed an entire episode devoted to proving to himself that he can look after his own baby. That season is full of stories of ineffectual dads too. The Curse of the Black Spot, with no female characters outside the siren, features a particularly loathsome band of male characters. Perhaps Listen is the strongest example of the Doctor being afraid of his own shadow and Clara sorting it all out for him. Whilst this is an extremely trite way of describing the episode and by no means does it justice, it can’t really be argued that the story doesn’t illustrate a particularly childish Doctor, who interrupts Clara’s evening to sort out a personal problem. Whilst this makes him utterly charming and Doctor-y, it can’t be denied that it is yet another tale which takes great glee in emasculating our hero.

So what does the Doctor represent? What does he mean to us? Ultimately, it’s in Moffat’s latest, The Doctor Falls, that it becomes most apparent. He does what he does “because it’s right.” He is the cleverest person in the room, gives fun lectures at the drop of a hat, saves people he doesn’t know and does the right thing not with a gun but with a screwdriver and a smile. Now, of course, to cast a female in the role doesn’t mean she can’t be all of those things too. Of course, she could, and the rest! But with so many drippy male characters prevalent on television it feels sad that boys are about to lose one of their last remaining role models.

When I was a boy, the Doctor was my role model. My only role model aside from my Dad. I didn’t have many friends, I didn’t meet many people of great imagination, I didn’t see a great deal of intelligent thinking outside my living room, both in my Dad and the Doctor. Would I have been drawn to the Doctor had he been a she? I don’t know. What I do know is that he was utterly vital to me, in making me see the wonder outside the small mindedness of my school peers and the ability to win through flights of fancy and imagination rather than football and fighting. In short, as a boy growing up in Rochdale and Oldham, the Doctor showed me that there were other ways of thinking, other ways to live. And he was the only person on television who did that. Batman didn’t. Superman didn’t. In fact, no other hero was as interesting. Even Mulder, who I loved, would be quick to pull a gun or bust someone’s nose in his pursuit of the truth.

So it feels confusing, odd, discomforting and weird that the Doctor will now be played by a woman.  Is the last truly great male role model gone forever? Were my Dad to turn around after 54 years and pronounce himself a woman, I’d feel betrayed. Now the Doctor hasn’t done this; Chris Chibnall has. And it feels even more like a betrayal. In the end though, I’d love my Dad all the same, despite being angry, confused and irritated. Of course, we’ll love the Doctor too.

But I wonder where the need for a female Doctor has come from. Where were the huddled masses surrounding Parliament begging for this to happen? Or was it a small but vocal minority of people flying the diversity flag? A friend of mine who works in the media said to me that the backstage crew on television programmes was almost universally white as if that were a magnificent problem that needed to be overcome. Why and how?

During my school years, I was heavily involved with local amateur societies. We were putting on a production of Alan Bleasdale’s No More Sitting on the Old School Bench, a brilliant play tackling racism in comprehensive schools in the 80s. My school had a population of 80% Asian children, mainly from Pakistan and Bangladesh. There were also a notable percentage of the school taking drama. I put out an advert for teenagers wanting to get involved in the play to come along and audition. This was pushed by the drama teachers and department. The result: not one person wanted to get involved. The play was, in the end, unsuccessful as the community of diverse children it tried to depict was not represented. But the problem here wasn’t one of a failure to reach out but a lack of cultural interest. Whilst 80% of the children in the school were from Asian backgrounds, only 2 or 3 white kids wanted anything to do with theatrical societies. The problem still persists. A society in Shaw struggled to cast To Kill a Mockingbird. A company in Bury struggled to cast the black singer in The Full Monty. We cannot combat this problem simply by casting more BAME actors because the fact is, there aren’t as many. We are a country whose population and culture is, by quite a huge margin, white.

In writing this, I find myself becoming afraid of labels: racism, sexism. I wonder if that seems to be why it is so easy to actively promote diversity: the fear of being labelled racist or sexist? I also feel a guilt in that I am a white male wanting to see more white male role models. The BBC stated that they were on a mission to ensure that 1/7 of their TV hosts and hostesses were BAME. But why have such an arbitrary aim? Yes, their remit is to be representative but is 1/7 representative? Are 1/7 of the British public BAME? Where has this information come from and why is it so important? The token female in every BBC panel show often feels like just that, such is the merit they bring to the programme. I saw a production of Little Shop of Horrors at the Royal Exchange which was astonishingly good apart from the astonishingly poor performance of the black dentist. Surely we should employ the best actors and comedians, rather than reserving seats for inferior ones because of their lineage.

So in the casting of a female Doctor, I can’t help but think this is yet another example of an arbitrary decision based on the need to diversify. I’m not sure that diversifying for its own sake is particularly creative. If a writer wants to write about five working class bin men, because they have a history of being a white working class bin man, why should one of them be a woman or black? What’s perhaps worse is the thought of what comes next: A black Doctor because diversity? A disabled Doctor because diversity? A gay Doctor because diversity? It actually rules out more actors than it invites to the part and potentially misses the best Doctor we will never have? And if the next Doctor is a white male will that then be racist? Will it be seen as proof that a female Doctor doesn’t work? In an age of equality, it seems perverse that not one male actor was auditioned. Surely if the message is equality, the chances of getting the part should be equal? More disappointingly, it does make the casting of Jodie Whittaker look like a gimmick, a chance to get more bums on seats as Doctor Who stops being water cooler conversation in its antiquity?

In an age of Scott and Bailey, Silent Witness, Vera, Top of the Lake, In the Dark and The Loch, and their cavalcade of confused, cheating, emasculated men, do we really need one less male role model? Is this sexist? Is this racist? I don’t know. The more I think about it, the more confused and confusing, guilt-ridden and apologetic the argument for a male Doctor becomes. Perhaps that is, in the end, the point.

Hopefully, Jodie Whittaker will be a superlative Doctor because of her abilities as an actress, and not because she is a woman. But I fear, if she is successful, that the headlines will read: ABOUT TIME. A FEMALE DOCTOR WAS JUST WHAT WHO NEEDED. As if the very fact that Jodie is female makes the show better. When asked in The Doctor Falls if the future would be female, the Doctor answered, “We can only hope.” I’m not sure what the message is here. Is the show headed where it seems to have been for a while? In the direction of the “All men are rubbish” slogan? That’s not equality, feminism or diversity. That’s an irresponsible message and one that doesn’t allow those little boys like my 7 seven-year-old self anyone at all to look up to. Let’s hope the British public simply accept it without the need to fall on any side and without feeling the need to write an essay about it.

JH