Mark Gatiss: “Doctor Who Shines A Beacon In Dark Times”

Simon Mills is a writer at Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews - All the latest Doctor Who news and reviews with our weekly podKast, features and interviews, and a long-running forum.

This is a subject that I, for one, am passionate about. In the face of adversity and in response to the recent and on-going terror attacks, we should keep on keeping on. We should go about our daily lives in as normal a manner as we can – as soon as we give in to our fears then the peddlers of terror and hate have won. It with this in mind that the Radio Times interviewed Mark Gatiss and asked him why carry on with Doctor Who when the real monsters are very much present in our real world? This interview took place at the Doctor Who Festival in London on Saturday – in the aftermath of those shocking events in Paris and Beirut…

His answer, of course, is that Doctor Who shows us the way to deal with these situations – to not let the monsters in, to stay positive. Doctor Who is all about healthy scares for children and about optimism, that everything will work out OK. Naturally, he cites the very recent Zygon story as an example of how Doctor Who holds a mirror up to the world with its very obvious parallels to ISIS and the refugee crisis and shows us that there’s always a way out of the direst of situations. I don’t think I need to remind you how powerful the Doctor’s anti-war speech was at the end, do I? Gatiss says:

“The world is in a terrible state. It’s always in a terrible state, but it’s in a particularly terrible state at the moment. If you let it all into your head, you would go crazy. You are actually benefitting everybody by trying to create something that will entertain them, distract them for a bit, take them out of themselves, and also to broaden their minds. It’s a way for people to cope. It’s lovely to see everybody here today, in such a mood of optimism, and that’s what the show has always done. They win if they terrorise us into stopping. They win if we cower.”

It’s the show’s ability to inform, educate, and entertain, as Gatiss points out, that kept me coming back as a child and an adult and the role model of the Doctor that helped to mold the person that I am today. I just wish that more people around the world watched this little show of ours and were similarly inspired.

It’s this positive, fun approach to sometimes dark subjects that leads Gatiss to utter this lovely quote, “Fundamentally this show is incredibly optimistic, and in incredibly dark times it shines a beacon.”

Hear! Hear!

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