Apprehensions
of national identity and the Doctor by Matthew Kilburn
Doctor Who survived its end of history moment. The last three years of its
first run saw a refocusing on the postwar Britain of paternalist, class-led
social democracy not as the present or near future, but as the past just gone. The
pastiche of Paradise Towers is drawn
from the 1970s with its acknowledgements of J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise and Monty Python’s
Flying Circus’s architect sketch, but collides with a design aesthetic
which doesn’t know how to navigate the fashions of the 1980s let alone
reconcile them with the script, and consequently any statement on society which
Paradise Towers makes is stifled. The
first story to explicitly explore this new hinterland of the newly-lost present
with some success is Delta and the
Bannermen.
