Effects and Representation of Doctor Who

Effects and Representation of

Doctor Who

Gender

In Doctor Who gender is used quite wisely to add interest to the story line and the character backgrounds. The main character is male and he always travels with a young female. A lot of the time the female companion appears to have romantic feelings for the Doctor. This could be seen as sexist since near enough every female companion has shown feelings for the Doctor. Women mainly would see this as sexist because it is stereotyping women. It could appear to be suggesting women are clingy or desperate. 

Also the topic of why the Doctor who is male always chooses young females as his companions has been discussed. Stephen Moffat (Doctor Who's head writer) said  "I think the function of a companion is pretty simple. I don’t think that’s very difficult. It’s just a question of who credibly is going to agree to go in the TARDIS? Who’s going to do it? Is it going to be a mother of 15 children? No. Is it going to be someone in their 60s? No. Is there going to be a particular age range? I mean … who’s going to have a crush on the Doctor? You know, come on! It’s more than a format. It’s evolved from good, dramatic reasons.” Here he basically says that the reason for the companions always being young females and always being in love with the Doctor is for good drama. This could put peoples minds at rest who were offended by the portrayal of women in Doctor Who since they know that it's only for drama or it could anger them more because the writer has admitted that he knows about the way women are portrayed on the show and he doesn't think it's wrong because it creates drama.

Disability

Disability is never really shown in Doctor Who. The show is an action/ adventure TV show so disability wouldn't naturally come into the story line. This means that the show doesn't have to tackle this issue because the issue of how to portray disability is never really present.

However there way one episode where one of the main characters from this episode has severe dyslexia and was shown having trouble with his reading and at some points in the show he couldn't do things that other characters asked of him because of his disability. The rest of the characters were shown to find solutions to the problems he faced with his disability. For example, listening to a story book instead of reading a book or drawing a map instead of writing a map. There was never any discriminative behaviour shown towards the child with dyslexia. The fact that the other characters were shown to be supportive and tolerant of the child's disabilities

Male and Female Role Models
Because Doctor Who is a action, fantasy, sci-fi show and not a drama, there are not really any bad role models. Everyone in Doctor Who that is portrayed as good, tends to be good. On the other hand in a drama there are characters that are not the perfect role model and they have imperfect morals yet the TV show portrays them as good or acceptable when sometimes its not. This could influence people watching drama's so because if something is portrayed as good, it may actually not be. 
This is one of the good things about people watching Doctor Who, they are all good role models and have good morals and the program makes it sure who the baddies are and makes it clear that what they are doing is wrong. Especially since this is one of the most talked about and most popular TV shows in England, it has the potential to make a big impact.