Ratings for Doctor Who, the iconic British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) sci-fi show that has been running since 1963, have crashed following the introduction of the first “openly queer” black Doctor, played by Rwandan migrant Ncuti Gatwa.
Ratings have plummeted by around 50 percent since Gatwa’s debut episode and are near the all-time low viewing figures set in 2022. The BBC, funded by a television license fee all Britons are compelled to pay if they watch live programming — even if none of it is BBC content — insists this does not account for viewers who watch on streaming services. However, the new series has already thrown away much public goodwill, with Gatwa having told viewers unhappy with the show’s woke direction: “Don’t watch. Turn off the TV. Go and touch grass, please, for God’s sake.”
Showrunner Russel T. Davies, a gay man, has declared it is his “job to open doors and let the next people through and to let trans and queer stories through,” setting the tone for the direction of the publicly-funded series.
It is not an entirely new direction, however, with Davies having suggested that, in the future, straight people will not exist when he first revived the show in the 2000s. His successor and now predecessor, Steven Moffat, also said they had an agenda to insert ethnic minorities into British and European history during time-traveling stories to promote the narrative the West has always been diverse.
“We’ve kind of got to tell a lie. We’ll go back into history and there will be black people where, historically, there wouldn’t have been, and we won’t dwell on that,” Moffat explained.
“We’ll say, ‘To hell with it, this is the imaginary, better version of the world. By believing in it, we’ll summon it forth,'” he added.
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