With just 12 years left to tackle climate change, perhaps it’s time the Doctor made an intervention
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| Illustration by David Foldvari |
And I couldn’t be happier that the Time Lady’s new companions include a black teenager with mild learning difficulties and a female Asian police officer. Predictably, The Chase’s Bradley Walsh let the side down by being a straight white man. Though I understand that in tonight’s episode Bradley Walsh reveals that, as a result of unpredictable side-effects from his character’s chemotherapy treatment, he now has both male and female genitalia, while a cloaca on his left thigh also enables him to reproduce parthenogenetically, although not without some discomfort.
Like the Zuni berdache, Bradley Walsh will become an intergender priest-princess, an ambassador between different dimensional realities, his engagements unencumbered by a traditional sexual identity. Typical BBC! It’s political correctness gone mad!! Nonetheless, the genitalia of fictional time travellers wasn’t the week’s big story.
On Monday, scientists revealed that we have only 12 years to put in place real strategies to combat climate change before the future of all life on Earth is doomed. It has taken our government more than two years to fail to agree that Brexit is more difficult than David Davis’s proposed easiest thing in the world. In the light of the progress of these negotiations, I don’t hold out much hope for the survival of the Melton Mowbray pork pie, let alone the continued existence of all the life on Earth.
But while climate change experts were once derided as cranks, a kind of environmental Flat Earth Society, finally their message is believed. And now the cranks are oil industry cheerleaders such as Nigel Lawson, ranting outside the window like a Hogarth etching of some bawling fictional aristocrat; Lord Entitlement Demands His Buttermilk Ramekin.
A further story, that the Dutch are developing robot bees to pollinate the crops we need to survive after the now inevitable insect apocalypse, ran on page 14, being five pages less important that the textile display. I immediately began to worry that intelligent robot bees would realise the best way to ensure the survival of the crops they were programmed to nurture was to destroy the human race who were poisoning the Earth. I wondered how me and my family would best survive attack by millions of Dutch nano-bees. I began learning the phrase “Robot bee, I am your friend” in as many Dutch dialects as I could master: West Frisian, Papiamento, Low Saxon and Limburgish.
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| If the Doctor really cared, wouldn’t she go back in time and save us? Photograph: Sophie Mutevilian/BBC |
The imminent extinction of all life on Earth exposes a logical hole in the Doctor Who mythos. The Doctor loves to help humanity but as a time traveller she must know that within a decade or so our whole race will be doomed. If she really cared, wouldn’t she go back in time and save us all from ourselves? But by doing what exactly? Preventing Trump from weakening the Paris accord last June? Exposing the 1970s oil companies that sat on climate change data they knew would make their brands toxic in the short term? Or going back to the dawn of time and preventing the clever troglodyte, Keith Flintsparker, the first fire-starter, from dipping a dry twig into a puddle of tar and flint-sparking it into fuel.
The 1975 Tom Baker Doctor Who story Genesis of the Hateweed explores this conundrum. In it, the Doctor finds himself in the laboratory where his future nemesis, the Hateweed, is being genetically engineered into existence. He holds the spores over a nearby toilet and eventually decides that flushing them down the bowl and destroying them would constitute too great an intervention in the timeline. Nicholas Parsons, in a rare serious role as the Hateweed’s creator, Anglias the Weedseeder, watches him while eating a blue space pie, in an act of defiant indifference.
In 1992, I worked with Baker on the BBC radio comedy series The Inexplicable Worlds of Patrick Nimmo and I loved pumping Baker for behind-the-scenes Who stash. Baker told me he had been professionally jealous of the popularity of the Hateweed with female Doctor Who fans and had intended to change the scene while filming by “throwing the fucking seeds into the toilet and doing a massive, fast wee on them and shouting, ‘That’s pissed in their chips!’ But Nicholas Parsons said, ‘You, Thomas Stewart Baker, are drunk,’ and he said he would throw the space pie at me if I did a wee. I said, ‘I may be drunk, but you are Nicholas Parsons and in the morning I will be sober.’ We had a jolly good laugh and it was all forgotten over a few jars.”
I share a personal trainer with Bradley Walsh and so I went to meet him in Doctor Who’s Cardiff studios on Thursday and asked him if he thought the new Doctor should intervene in the climate change catastrophe. Bradley Walsh, who was patiently being fitted for multiple prosthetic genitals, both male and female, and those of a bird, said he didn’t know.
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