The Telegraph reports that Doctor Who had an explicitly anti-Thatcher agenda back in the 1980s:
[Sylvester] McCoy, who played the seventh doctor from 1987 to 1989, and Andrew Cartmel, the script editor at the time, both admitted the conspiracy, saying that it “seemed the right thing to do”.However, the secret messages remained a secret to all but Doctor Who insiders. Meanwhile the show’s popularity went into freefall and it was taken off air in 1989.
McCoy, now 66, who took over as the Doctor three months after Thatcher’s third election victory in 1987, said they brought politics into the show “deliberately” but “very quietly”.
He said: “We were a group of politically motivated people and it seemed the right thing to do.
“Our feeling was that Margaret Thatcher was far more terrifying than any monster the Doctor had encountered,” he told the Sunday Times.
Cartmel said it was almost a job requirement to detest Thatcher.
When asked by John Nathan-Turner, the producer, what he hoped to achieve in being the show’s script editor, he recalled: “My exact words were: I’d like to overthrow the government.
“I was a young firebrand and I wanted to answer honestly. I was very angry about the social injustice in Britain under Thatcher and I’m delighted that came into the show.”
His script writing team included Ben Aaronovitch, son of the late Marxist intellectual Sam Aaronovitch, and Rona Munro, who later became a scriptwriter for Ken Loach, the left-wing film director.
Sophie Aldred, who played the Doctor’s feminist assistant Ace, said the crew “weren’t very happy” with Thatcher being the prime minister at the time, which she described as “a real bonding process”.
One three-part programme, The Happiness Patrol, featured a transparent caricature of Thatcher.
Sheila Hancock played Helen A, a big-haired despotic ruler of a human colony on the planet Terra Alpha, whose subjects — called “drones” — worked in factories.
The Doctor calls on the drones to down their tools and revolt, an obvious reference to industrial disputes like the miners’ strike.
A year later Catrmel wrote a speech for the Doctor about the perils of nuclear weapons, which was based on material from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND).
A spin-off children’s novel called Turlough and the Earthlink Dilemma, published under licence by the BBC in 1987, also featured a villain called Rehctaht — Thatcher backwards.
Cartmel lamented that such satire never reached its intended audience.
“Critics, media pundits and politicians certainly didn’t pick up on what we were doing. If we had generated controversy and become a cause célèbre we would have got a few more viewers but, sadly, nobody really noticed or cared.”He said nobody further up in the BBC such as Jonathan Powell, then controller of BBC One, knew about their plan.
A spokesman for the BBC said it was “baffled” by the claims.
I’ve never seen the late-80s Doctor Who, but it sounds like anyone who was watching would have immediately picked up on the ham-handed satire. So, why is this news now?