LUV & HAT

LUV - Look, I don’t mean to be a dick about this, but disliking Doctor Who is kind of unpatriotic.

Calling him “Dr Who” and not “Doctor Who” is unpatriotic. Filtering out all Doctor Who-related tweets on a Saturday night is so unpatriotic that you might as well give up and just become a French tabloid photographer. And the HAT section of this post is basically Stuart Heritage shitting and pissing all over the Union Jack*.

Because, no matter how you actually feel about Doctor who - despite the fact that the dialogue is hokey; you can’t shake the feeling that child Amelia Pond would make a better companion than adult Amy Pond; only sweaty-palmed Forbidden Planet loyalty card holders really like Daleks or Cybermen; it seemed unlikely that Rose, in love with Doctor Who, was happy to waltz off with just David Tennant; apparently every distant corner of spacetime looks like the toilets in John Lewis; and you inevitably find yourself shouting YOU COULD JUST GET IN YOUR FUCKING TARDIS, GO BACK IN TIME AND FIX THIS, YOU TWEEDY BRIXTON HAIRCUT PONCE during every episode - it is your DUTY AS A BRITON to love and endure Doctor Who.

Doctor Who, you see, is the closest thing we have in this country to Superman - and he measures up pretty well:

1. Both Superman and Doctor Who are from dead planets.

2. They both go on and on and fucking on about how they’re the last of their kind. Then people like Zod or John Simm turn up and it gets a bit awkward.

3. Superman has been played by a series of strapping, virtuous-looking actors. Doctor Who has been played by old men, mad men, scarves, Scottish Hamlet, and now a social media intern. 

4. Neither has a catchphrase, although Superman’s could be “Mind how you go”; Doctor Who’s could be something about tea and equations.

5. They both love humans just the way we are.

And Britain needs a Superman. Our Olympic glory is already fading, leaving us with a monarch who has to be pushed out of a helicopter before she cracks a smile, and a prime minister who a) looks and acts like a potato and b) walks around with a simpering potato-apologist attached to his hip.

What terrible role models for the British yoot. I suppose there’s always Tinie Tempah and Stephen Fry, but they won’t be around forever, and Doctor Who - thanks to his handy regeneration shtick - will. So here’s my list of preferred future Doctor Whos:

1. Stefan Gates from Incredible Edibles

2. Helen Mirren (feminism)

3. Johnson from Peep Show

4. Brendan Brady from Hollyoaks

5. Bane 

So, to sum up, if you love your country you must watch a kidult with attention-deficit disorder dick about with three Welsh aliens every Saturday and at Christmas, and you must love it. And maybe make shitty gags on Twitter when it’s on. It’s your duty.

Unless of course you’re American. Talking of which, hey, Americans jizzing themselves with glee over Doctor Who. What’s that about? You don’t even have to watch it. You’ve got Community.

*Although to be fair, he does this every Thursday.
- Robyn Wilder

HAT - Right, bloody hell, look. I know I’ve already lost this argument. This is the internet - worse, this is Tumblr - so slagging off Doctor Who is obviously a huge crime up there with slagging off Sherlock, or slagging off Tom Hiddleston’s face, or slagging off shit fan art of Harry and Niall from One Direction kissing with tongues in the rain. But you know what? Fuck it. If you like Doctor Who, you’re wrong. Doctor Who is a massive puddle of animal bollocks.

There’s a reason why the TARDIS is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside, you know. It’s because if you ever found yourself trapped inside an actual police box with Doctor Who for any length of time, you’d end up bouncing his head off the walls as hard as you possibly could until he’d smashed through all his remaining regenerations and was dead - properly, forever dead - just so that you could have some peace and quiet for a fucking second.

Because Doctor Who is basically a gap-year student, isn’t he? A gap year student with a fucking Qype account. All he sodding does is drone on and on and on about all the amazing things he’s ever seen, and all the places he’s ever been that are, like, totally inspiring and shit? At any given moment, Doctor Who is a nanosecond away from showing you a picture of some poverty-stricken aliens and saying “These people have nothing, but they look so happy. It was almost, like, spiritual?” which obviously makes him a colossal shitbag of the highest order.

And, you know, he’s WAY too old to spend his life like this. By rights, Doctor Who should be working in an office now. An office where everyone hates him because he’s the wacky prick who wears a bowtie to work and shouts ‘Geronimo’ at everything and keeps singing the Ghostbusters theme-tune in a Scooby-Doo voice and probably sends out company-wide emails containing nothing but links to photos of cats wearing sunglasses. No wonder Amy and Rory are his assistants - they’re the only two people alive too busy being such self-consciously zany dickpieces themselves to notice what a twonk they’re hanging around with.

But you can see why Doctor Who is such an insufferable attention-seeking git. He knows one day the BBC will realise that his only enemies are bobbly sex-toys, Iron Man’s paste-eating nephews and some garden gnomes - and that he can beat them all in three seconds because he’s got a sonic screwdriver that magically solves everything anyway - and they’ll stop giving him money.

So instead he’s doomed to wander the galaxy dressed up like the presenter of the Open University’s Shoreditch module, getting into tedious scrapes that you can’t hear anyway because the incidental music has been turned up far too high. Truly, Doctor Who is the second biggest arsehole who ever lived, after anyone who gets upset when people call him ‘Doctor Who’ and not ‘The Doctor’. So he’s the second-biggest arsehole after you, basically.
- Stuart Heritage