…So shrieks the headline on the Daily Mail site. Journalists! Where would we be without them to tell us stuff we’ve already known for years? In any case, this “scary plot” the article is going on about apparently happened during the Seventh Doctor era, when Sylvester McCoy was (miscast as, some said) the Doctor, and the scripts and production values were basically shit — which is saying something considering “classic” Who was always a ramshackle affair. But I think by that time — the late 80s — viewership of the show had gone down to about forty very dedicated fans who had not been out of their basements since Patrick Troughton played the Doctor. In any case, the scheme was a big old fail, as we all know, and the only thing to get deposed was the show itself, which was put “on hiatus” for over fifteen years (except for that movie in 1996, which I suppose does count).

But don’t think that the NuWho people didn’t play that game too. The rise and fall of Prime Minister Harriet Brown (yesweknowwhoyouare) had elements of Thatcher-slamming wish fulfilment, and I’m pretty sure there was an open snark against Thatcher in one of the episodes, though I can’t remember which. I’ll leave the misogynistic undertone that permeated the Russell T. Davies least as regards middle-aged women unremarked upon and just say that Margaret Thatcher seems to have become Britain’s Richard M. Nixon, at least as far as its artistic community is concerned. I certainly hope that they drop this theme for the upcoming series. Matt Smith is surely too young to even remember Thatcher; and the constant Nixon-fear was something that made The X-Files so tiresome.

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