On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

Watch this entire presentation: Gender Diversity in the Who-niverse: Paving the Way for a Lady Doctor with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (36:58)

For her 5th Doctor Who lecture to the CPP community, Dr. Rosanne Welch discusses how society – and the show’s writing staff – prepared the audience for a major change in this 50-year franchise – the creation of the first Lady Doctor!

Transcript:

So I think that’s pretty cool. Then we had Danny Pink, a guy who’d been in the wars who’s now a math teacher right? He’s Clara’s boyfriend. So we have him as a soldier but we really see him as a man who protects children because he worked with middle school children. We don’t have a lot of middle school teachers who are male right? Because we don’t pay them enough and that’s bad because young men need to see that teaching is an excellent career — that caregiving and that nurturing the younger generation is a valuable thing to do with your life. So Danny Pink is really important in that respect and of course in the same way sadly Danny becomes a Cyberman and he makes this ultimate choice. The Doctor has one chance that you can come back alive from that and it gives it to Danny and instead of taking it for himself so he can come back and be with his girlfriend, he gives it to the little Afghan child that he accidentally shot when he was in the wars. He gives away his chance to live to a boy that was you know accidentally shot by him and I’m like what a powerful thing for a male character to choose to do. I think that makes Danny super super sensitive right and super strong!

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Rosanne Welch, PhD

Rosanne Welch PhD teaches the History of Screenwriting and One-Hour Drama for the Stephens College MFA in Screenwriting.

Writing/producing credits include Beverly Hills 90210, Picket Fences, ABCNEWS: Nightline and Touched by an Angel. In 2016 she published the book Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop; co-edited Women in American History: A Social, Political, and Cultural Encyclopedia; and placed “Transmitting Culture Transnationally Via the Characterization of Parents in Police Procedurals” in the New Review of Film and Television Studies. Essays appear in Torchwood Declassified: Investigating Mainstream Cult Television and Doctor Who and Race: An Anthology. Welch serves as Book Reviews editor for Journal of Screenwriting and on the Editorial Advisory Board for Written By magazine, the magazine of the Writers Guild.

Watch Dr. Welch’s talk “The Importance of Having a Female Voice in the Room” at the 2016 TEDxCPP.

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