'Doctor Who has a strong track record of diverse casting': BBC hits back at accusations the sci-fi series is 'thunderingly racist'
By Chris Hastings and Emily Sheridan
PUBLISHED: 10:54 EST, 28 May 2013 | UPDATED: 10:54 EST, 28 May 2013
The BBC has hit back at accusations that Doctor Who is 'thunderingly racist', insisting the sci-fi show has a 'strong track record of diverse casting'.
Following claims by a group of academics in a new book Doctor Who And Race, fans have rushed to dismiss the criticisms as ‘groundless’ and ‘ridiculous’.
The BBC pointed out the casting of Freema Agyeman as the Time Lord's first black assistant in 2006 and Noel Clarke, who played Mickey Smith for five years.
The Beeb's reply came as critics alleged the Doctor's apparent dismissive attitude towards black companions, his contempt for 'primitive' people, and his passion for cricket as proof of a reactionary ‘whiteness’ pervading his adventures.
The BBC said: 'Doctor Who has a strong track record of diverse casting among both regular and guest cast. Freema Agyeman became the first black companion and Noel Clarke starred in a major role for five years [Mickey Smith].
'Reflecting the diversity of the UK is a duty of the BBC, and casting on Doctor Who is colour-blind. It is always about the best actors for the roles.'
Sebastian Clark, editor of Doctor Who Online, added the show 'embraced rather than divided'. He added: ‘I think the suggestion the show is racist is ridiculous.
'Doctor treated Martha Jones no differently from the way he treated any other character.'
One of the more bizarre theories is offered by Amit Gupta, an American professor, who argues that Peter Davison’s cricket-loving incarnation of the character in the Eighties was thinly disguised nostalgia for the British Empire. He wrote: ‘[He] portrayed the amateur English cricketer of the late 19th Century when the game was characterised by both racial and class distinctions.
‘Cricket also had a role in maintaining the status of British imperialism through the exercise of soft power as it was successfully inculcated by the colonial elites. Davison’s cricketing Doctor once again saw the BBC using Who to promote a racial and class nostalgia that had already outlived its validity.’
Several of the 23 contributors to the book lament the failure to cast a black or Asian actor as the Doctor. And in earlier series, white actors were cast as other ethnicities.
Singled out for criticism is a 1977 storyline, The Talons Of Weng- Chiang, set in Victorian times and featuring the white actor John Bennett as a Chinese villain.
There is also an attack on the ‘second-class’ treatment of black characters such as Martha Jones in more recent episodes. A feminist contributor with the pen name Fire Fly, says the Doctor’s relationship with Martha, who was played by Freema Agyeman, is proof of the ‘white perspective’ of the series.
She singles out a 2007 episode set in Elizabethan London when Martha voices her fears that she might be sold into slavery, only to be told by David Tennant’s Doctor that she should 'walk about like you own the place. It works for me'.
Fire Fly wonders why the Doctor will depose tyrannical alien regimes but will not challenge human slavery. And she claims the exchange 'betrays the ignorance of writers about historical racial violence and contemporary white privilege'.
There is further criticism of the introduction and Adolf Hitler as a character last year, which was condemned as ‘comic-book’ and ‘slapstick’, and did nothing to increase understanding of the Holocaust.
The Doctor also dismisses as primitive any civilisation that doesn’t share his belief in scientific progress – which the academic critics say is a very ‘West European’ attitude. In the show’s very first story, William Hartnell’s Doctor compares the disbelief of his new companions when they first enter the Tardis with the Red Indian ‘whose savage mind disbelieved steam trains’.
And the introduction of the ‘savage’ – and scantily-clad – companion Leela in the 1970s is offered as further proof of the Time Lord’s inherent racism since she was treated as being ‘more primitive than us’.
Australian academic Lindy Orthia, who compiled the anthology, concluded: ‘The biggest elephant in the room is the problem privately nursed by many fans of loving a TV show when it is thunderingly racist.’
Poster Comment:
Told ya so many moons ago. A black Doctor there must and will be. It's not enough that the latest incarnation of the series started with a white female sidekick with a dark boyfriend. A later white female sidekick had a white boyfriend, but of course he had to be ball-less.
