I’m supposed to be on an (indefinite?) Notes break, but this is a topic I’m interested in. Not Little House on the Prairie (I haven’t read the books or seen either TV adaptation), but television as a marker of cultural change. (NB This Note got very out of hand as I went into the autistic special interests zone.)

I watch very little modern TV (we don’t have a TV, although to be pedantic, we have a TV set, but it’s not plugged in to an aerial to get TV signals, as we don’t want to have to pay the British Blood libel Corporation for their antisemitic slander, but we can still watch DVDs), but I watch a fair bit of old (twentieth century) TV, mostly comedy and the science fiction/horror and adjacent series that British fans used to refer to as ‘telefantasy.’

The advantage of long-running franchises (‘universes’ as we’re now supposed to refer to them) like Doctor Who, Star Trek, Batman, James Bond, etc. is that you can map changing social attitudes over time. It’s not a perfect method, as one writer, director, producer or script editor with strong views can warp things a bit, but it gives an idea. It’s a kind of archaeology, where any single data point doesn’t necessarily prove anything, but clusters of data points indicate a trend.

Focusing on the thing Holly talks about, the imposition of contemporary values on pre-twenty-first century characters, I find that this is both common in contemporary historical TV drama and hugely annoying.

The original run of Doctor Who started by alternating science fiction stories with stories set in history, but with no science fiction elements other than the Doctor and his companions. They tend to divide between those that deliberately explore differing values between the historical characters and the modern Doctor Who characters with a minority of stories that deliberately and anachronistically impose contemporary attitudes on historical (or legendary) characters for comic effect (the story The Myth Makers (1965) in particular is very similar in this way to the 1980s historical sitcom Blackadder).

in The Aztecs (1964), perhaps the best example of the ‘differing values’ stories and, fortunately, one that completely survives in the BBC archives, twentieth century history teacher Barbara tries to change Aztec society by ending human sacrifice. From a twenty-first century point of view, a story like this could play out in one of two ways: either Barbara is right to be angry at human sacrifice, or she’s wrong to critique a foreign culture. Interestingly, the story doesn’t do any of these things. Two reasons are given as to why she won’t succeed: the Doctor gives the science fiction one (you can’t change time), but fellow companion Ian gives a historical one: Aztec society is built on human sacrifice and one individual can’t change that. We share Barbara’s disgust at human sacrifice (and later teenager Susan’s at forced marriage), but are made to accept it as historically unchangeable because integral to Aztec society. Barbara can only “save” one priest by making him question it, not the whole society. Our viewpoint is not shared by many of those in the past, and they aren’t stupid for not sharing it. Their society makes sense to them. Two stories later, in The Reign of Terror,Ian and Barbara would end up (briefly) on opposite sides of the French Revolution, both for understandable reasons.

(Remember that Doctor Who was originally supposed to be a partly educational series that would teach children about history and science.)

Compare with twenty-first century Doctor Who, which has espoused a presentism in which The Good Guys thought The Right Thoughts all along and in which prejudice was much more likely in the social elite than elsewhere. Historical figures like Winston Churchill, Queen Victoria and Agatha Christie were “flattened,” their real-life socially conservative or otherwise “problematic” views ignored (NB these stories were written before 2015; I don’t think these characters would have appeared subsequently).

Once Chris Chibnall took over as showrunner, the programme started primarily showcasing historical figures who could be seen as crossing boundaries of race or sex in a way that would appeal to modern audiences primed to see breaking these barriers as historically important (Rosa Parks, Ada Lovelace, Mary Shelley, Noor Inayat Khan). The main exception was Nikolai Tesla, who apparently got in as a sort-of anticapitalist for not profiting from his inventions.

King James I and VI of England and Scotland appears as a quasi-villain, in a story about witch-hunting (The Witchfinders) that’s full of serious inaccuracies (and which is one of two Chibnall-era stories to have a throwaway woke antisemitic bit). Witches are oppressed poor women and therefore good, unlike their privileged persecutors. Real witch hunting was more complicated.

The one time we see a historical setting that is terrifyingly alien from a modern viewpoint, it’s one that’s obviously wrong to anyone in the audience, Segregation-era Alabama. There’s little attempt to wrestle with something different, but not wholly offensive to modern sensibilities.

Perhaps the most significant historical Chibnall episode is Demons of the Punjab, because it’s the only real attempt to do anything like a non-SF historical story after 1967 (1982’s Black Orchid is a pastiche Golden Age Detective Story, not a real historical), with the science fiction element dropping out well before the end of the story, which is primarily about the partition of India in 1947.

Here, Islam and Hinduism are presented as ‘traditions’ that suggest life-cycle customs to adherents, not civilisations that have entirely different histories, world-views, religious obligations, and, in the case of Islam, imperialist ambitions. If Yaz’s Muslim grandmother and her Hindu first husband could get married, it’s suggested, India could have stayed united.

It says a lot about the contemporary BBC that the villain is a Hindu nationalist and not a Muslim Pakistani one. We don’t really learn anything about Islam or Hinduism, or much of anything other than that people with strong religious or nationalist beliefs are Violent, Bad and the Cause of Wars (in the next season, the production team would apparently try to subliminally suggest that Israel is one of the main causes of the world’s problems, but I seemed to be the only person who noticed).

I stopped watching new Doctor Who soon after Russell T Davies returned as showrunner. From what I here, he went further along this path, with a Bridgerton-esque multiracial Regency gay romance episode.

Despite being self-consciously focused on “diversity,” contemporary television creators (and audiences?) are not interested in the full diversity of historical opinions and societies. Rather, they are intent on showing a past that is either exactly like our own, or at least where the “Good Guys” share our values, or one that is so obviously Evil and opposed to our won society that it tacitly reinforces our values.

The result is an ahistorical conception of history, but not playful in the manner of The Myth Makers (1965 Doctor Who story mentioned above) or TV series like Blackadder or The Flintstones, but a sort of fantasy that reinforces the views of the left-technocratic TV industry types by suggesting that their values are not just correct, but historically inevitable.

NB I would love to write more of this ‘historically-informed cultural commentary,’ but I have no idea if anyone would like to read it (I think people prefer cultural commentary on the culture they actually live in…), so, if you got this far, let me know!