Additional Q&A clips from the presentation “Doctor Who and Culture: with Dr. Rosanne Welch
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Transcript:
I think the reason we won’t is that any trend, any cult, has its peak and it will eventually fade. At some point, maybe 20 years from now, their won’t be a Doctor Who on television and I, I believe for 2 reasons. I believe the network is afraid that’s the thing that would pull audiences away. I believe the writers are afraid if they took that shot and it happened to accidentally coincide with the time when the show starte to fade, everyone would blame the girl. So, it’s almost too difficult. Now I remember learning — I used to teach high school American Lit years ago and I couldn’t figure out why all the novels we would give girls to read were boy protagonists. So I asked like the lady in charge — it was an all girls school, too, a Catholic school — it’s all girls. They were reading all boy coming-of-age stories. So, I asked the woman who ran — a nun actually — who ran the literature department and she said studies had proven that boy’s will not read or care about stories about young girls, but girls — because they are interested in obtaining boys — will read about boys and what they want and what they need and how they grow. So schools had just adapted to that by choosing these novels. (inaudible) Exactly! And so the institutions actually feed into that instead of trying to break it. And it really, really bugs me, so in many ways, I think they’re supposition at the network is that men who love Doctor Who would not watch if she– if he became a she and I think that’s not true, because I would say for y’alls generation — cause my kid’s sixteen — men are much more feminist these days. Thank goodness. We like that in you. All right. Believe me, chicks like that in a boy. But I don’t think — cause the network is run by — and I don’t mean to pick on guys — cause men are lovely, but its run by men in their late 50’s, early 60’s and they’re still thinking like people thought 40 years ago. So, I just don’t think they’re ready to take a chance and I think the smarter, younger guys, don’t want that to be the thing that is blamed because that will continually convince the network that nobody will watch a girl. It’s a big problem.
Dr. Rosanne Welch, Cal Poly Pomona Faculty from the Department of Interdisciplinary General Education discusses Doctor Who and how the show has changed television writing. Doctor Welch will further discuss how society looks at culture and gender roles with the use of the Doctor and his companions’ adventures.
“Natalie Lopez at the CalPoly University Library invited me to do a presentation for National Libraries Week on Doctor Who and Culture so that’s why a group of Whovians from both CalPoly and CSUF gathered in the Special Events room on April 16th. It was wonderful to look out over a sea of t-shirts and other Doctor paraphernalia present among the crowd as I pontificated about what makes Who great – mostly giving me a chance to present a case for the fact that writers make Doctor Who and therefore writers make culture.”