Doctor Who has put virtue signalling before plot and substance, and deserves to be shelved

With Doctor Who allegedly about to be exterminated by the BBC and Disney over its declining viewership, is there any explanation for its downfall beyond condemning "woke story lines"?

Well, one hero can help. Harry Flashman is the fictional character created by Thomas Hughes in the semi-autobiographical Tom Brown's School Days (1857). The bully of the book, Flashman, was rescued from obscurity and transformed into one of the finest, most magnificently written, ignominious bastards in fiction by Scots writer George Macdonald Fraser.

He is also one of the best characters in literature to splendidly skewer and satirise his era.

Fraser’s picaresque, titular series, collectively known as The Flashman Papers, covers the “illustrious Victorian soldier” who experienced many of the 19th-century wars and adventures of the British Empire and rose to high rank in the British Army. He was hailed as a renowned British lion while remaining “a scoundrel, a liar, a cheat, a thief, a coward – and, oh yes, a toady”.

Fraser’s genius is serving up actual events as faux memoirs in an enormously funny way. Of Prime Minister Gladstone, “Flashman” wrote: “I believe it was the sight of that old fool Gladstone, standing there in the pouring rain holding his special constable’s truncheon as though it were a bunch of lilies and looking even more like an undertaker’s mute than usual, that made me think seriously about going into politics." Across 12 books, it is hysterically witty, but not without intense irony.

When Queen Victoria ascended to the throne in 1837, her picture-perfect family life represented a shift from the Georgian era's debauchery and sexual libertinism.

Harold Perkin writes that, by 1850, the British “ceased to be one of the most aggressive, brutal, rowdy, outspoken, riotous, cruel and bloodthirsty nations in the world and became one of the most inhibited, polite, orderly, tender-minded, prudish and hypocritical”.

Fraser loathes the hypocrisy of Victorian Britain. That epochal shift still obscured child labour, disdainful attitudes toward the poor, stratified classism and jingoistic expansionist wars.

One read of the collected works of Charles Dickens put Victorian moral ambition at odds with the reality on the ground. Flashman is a hero despite his cowardice, lechery and unbecoming conduct, which are considered a bigger social shame than the global disgrace of slavery and repression of Indigenous peoples.

Flashman is a bully, a cad, a coward and a bounder. But what he's not is a liar, at least not in his memoirs. Like Flashy, Fraser would recognise Victorian morality’s pretence in today’s cancel culture.

The reaction to the rumoured cancellation of Doctor Who from some fan quarters shows why the show should be shelved. The same backdrop of critical immunity exists: any criticism the storylines have become message first and virtue signalling first, talent and plot second, are met with accusations of prejudice and bigotry. Criticism is no longer possible; meaning is inferred and not taken at face value.

That Doctor Who had long turned into garbage is beyond the point. That the James Bond franchise is imminently about to be “Amazonified” into a streaming box ticker is irrelevant.

New Star Trek puts diversity above plot; Star Wars puts optics above storytelling, and the new Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power puts visual splendour above writing capability.

Like our Victorian forebears, the late Elizabethan Age and The New Carolean Age put appearances before substance. Social media is replete with fans who attack and attack any critical response with an accusatory takedown of your motivation.

The counter criticism that these critiques are laced with nefarious, supercilious intolerance is nothing less than an affront to free speech. The irony, again, is the same stalwart fans positively cried foul when a female Doctor, Jodie Whittaker, was cast in 2017. The same people went positively doolally when a blonde, slightly diminutive James Bond was cast in 2005.

All those who purport to worship free speech while simultaneously condemning any objection to shows branded as “woke” miss the point. Nothing really has changed in the two centuries since the Victorian double standard – we are a Janus-stricken culture determined, once more, to grandstand and virtue signal while ignoring the basest duplicity that some do not care about the character and the quality of what lies beneath, as long as it looks right.

Some, over the years, have inevitably tried to take Fraser’s prose as somehow anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-British fables. They almost always miss the point that the thing that wound him up more than anything, like Flashman, is not amorality or indecency, but peacock virtual signalling used to disguise, even celebrate, superficiality.

Fraser, for example, doesn't miss his target in his final book, Flashman on the March (2005). The book charts the British Expedition to Abyssinia in 1868 sent for no better reason than to punish the Ethiopian Empire and rescue British hostages. Fraser wrote it as a deliberate juxtaposition to the Iraq War and Britain’s abysmal relegation to poorly informed American lackey. “For Flashman's story”, as Fraser lamented, “is about a British army sent out in a good and honest cause by a government who knew what honour meant”.

If “Kafkaesque” and “Orwellian” describe abuses of power, then “Fraserian” should mean calling out self-righteous grandstanding that attempts to deflect legitimate reviews. No one has better satirised moral double standards than Fraser in such a humorous, pugilistic and biting manner.

It has been a long time since we have confronted why production companies and their fanatical acolytes are obsessed with optics rather than meaningful change and representation. Answer that question, and you will one day be able to make the likes of Doctor Who match fit again.

Are we all hypocritical Victorians now? George MacDonald Fraser might agree.