Abstract
The theory of post-democracy expounded by Colin Crouch usefully ties together many of the strands in this book. Crouch argues that the growing sway of the firm has led to politics regressing to the elite control of the pre-democratic era. Instancing three stories from new-series Doctor Who, the chapter argues that the contemporary programme engages many of post-democracy’s key features. These include the establishment of a new, dominant combined economic and political class, a presidentialisation of politics, the rise of populism and the growing divergence between democratic form and democratic substance. The chapter considers whether Doctor Who constitutes a “hidden transcript”, whereby the dominated complain of their subordination, and how this contrasts with the BBC’s more conformist general role.
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Notes
- 1.
James C. Scott , Domination and the Arts of Resistance (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1992), 18.
- 2.
Scott, Domination, 9.
- 3.
Scott, Domination, 166.
- 4.
Daily Telegraph, December 16, 2016.
- 5.
Scott, Domination, 138–139.
- 6.
Scott, Domination, 166.
- 7.
Scott, Domination, 191.
- 8.
Colin Crouch , Post-Democracy (Cambridge: Polity, 2004).
- 9.
Crouch, Post-Democracy, 13.
- 10.
Peter Oborne , The Rise of Political Lying (London: Free Press, 2005); Peter Oborne , The Triumph of the Political Class (London: Simon and Schuster, 2007).
- 11.
Graham Murdock, “Authorship and Organisation”, Screen Education, 35 (Summer 1980): 28.
- 12.
Crouch, Post-Democracy, 44.
- 13.
Crouch, Post-Democracy, 52.
- 14.
Crouch, Post-Democracy , 64–73.
- 15.
See Paul Webb and Thomas Poguntke, “The Presidentialization of Contemporary Democratic Politics: Evidence, Causes, and Consequences”, in The Presidentialization of Politics , eds. Thomas Poguntke and Paul Webb (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
- 16.
Peter Mair, “Partyless Democracy”, New Left Review, 2 (Mar–Apr 2000): 21–35.
- 17.
The trend towards MPs cross-voting is well covered by Philip Cowley, The Rebels : How Blair Mislaid his Majority (London: Politicos, 2005).
- 18.
Mark Fisher , Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester: Zero Books 2009), 8–9.
- 19.
In making these designations, I am treating Englishness as an ethnicity: some black people choose to treat Englishness as a nationality and describe themselves as English rather than British.
- 20.
Crouch, Post-Democracy , 59–60.
- 21.
Crouch, Post-Democracy , 106.
- 22.
Brian McNair , News and Journalism in the UK, 4th ed. (London: Routledge, 2004), 150.
- 23.
Ralph Miliband , The State in Capitalist Society (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969), 223–224.
- 24.
Tom Mills, The BBC: Myth of a Public Service (London: Verso, 2016), 9.
- 25.
Mills, The BBC, 28.
- 26.
Mills, The BBC, 2.
- 27.
Mills, The BBC, 4.
- 28.
Mills, The BBC, 140–166.
- 29.
Mills, The BBC, 167–205.
- 30.
Georgina Born, Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC (London: Secker & Warburg, 2004), 57–60.
- 31.
Philip Knightley, The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), xii.
- 32.
Mills, The BBC, 214.
- 33.
Chrys Ingraham , White Weddings: Romancing Heterosexuality in Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 2008), 174.
- 34.
Jim McGuigan , Cool Capitalism (London: Pluto Press, 2009), 149.
- 35.
Matt Hills , Triumph of a Time Lord: Regenerating Doctor Who in the Twenty-first Century (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 18, n. 14.
- 36.
James Chapman , Inside the TARDIS : The Worlds of Doctor Who, 2nd ed. (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013), 167.
- 37.
John Street , Politics and Popular Culture (London: Polity, 1997), 16.
- 38.
P.A. Chow-White, D. Deveau and P. Adams, “Media Encoding in Science Fiction Television: Battlestar Galactica as a Site of Critical Cultural Production”, Media Culture and Society, 37(8) (2015): 1210–1225.
- 39.
Vanessa de Kauwe and Lindy Orthia , “Knowledge, Power and the Ethics Illusion in Classic Era Doctor Who”, Journal of Popular Television, 6(2) (2018).
- 40.
David Yuratich , “‘The Beast Below’: Doctor Who and the Popular Negotiation of Constitutional Values”, Journal of Popular Television, 6(2) (2018).
- 41.
Consider, in a similar vein, the independence of thought of human-Dalek hybrids in “Evolution of the Daleks” (2007) and “The Evil of the Daleks” (1967); contrast this to the Doctor’s criticism of human passivity in “The Long Game” (2005), perhaps connoting that corporate capitalism brainwashes more durably than the state fascism associated with the Daleks.
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Nicol, D. (2018). Conclusion: Doctor Who’s Post-Democratic Britain. In: Doctor Who: A British Alien?. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65834-6_7
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