Thinking Allowed

Wednesdays edition of Radio Four's Thinking Allowed included a discussion on Doctor Who with US academic Marc Edward DiPaolo, who talked about his Journal of Popular Culture article "Political Satire and British-American Relations in Five Decades of Doctor Who."

DiPaolo has analysed the political content of five decades of Doctor Who and concluded the Daleks are obsessed with racial purity and dedicated to a policy of genocide and represent the Nazis and the Jagrafess is a loathsome alien purveying useless information - which he has censored, rewritten and controlled and represents a modern day media mogul. He finds that the Time Lord is a liberal, bohemian, pacifist environmentalist, and definitely anti-American So is Doctor Who a closet radical?

The programme is available worlwide on the BBC iPlayer for the next week. The discussion starts around 13 minutes into the show.