State of Emergency: the Way We Were by Dominic Sandbrook

Author:Dominic Sandbrook [Sandbrook, Dominic]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241956915
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2011-04-03T16:00:00+00:00

10

Who Needs Men?

The writer in residence spoke. ‘Look, are you trying to tell us … Is – what? – is Mr Richardson trying to tell us he believes that? About women being equal to men? Does he believe it?’ He looked around the room as if pleading for enlightenment. ‘I mean, you know, like really believe it?’

– Kingsley Amis, Jake’s Thing (1978)

But they’re like chaps, these days, like fellas, like blokes.

– Martin Amis, Success (1978)

In December 1973, with the headlines full of industrial unrest, economic meltdown and international terrorism, the youthful viewers of Doctor Who were introduced to the time traveller’s latest female companion. For ten years the Doctor’s companions had tended to be pretty young girls who spent most of their time screaming, falling over and asking the Time Lord to explain the plot. Now, however, Jon Pertwee’s Doctor seemed to have met his match. In the opening episode of ‘The Time Warrior’, he arrives at a secret research establishment to investigate the disappearance of Britain’s most eminent scientists, only to find that a plucky young investigative journalist, Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen), has got there first. From the moment she walks in, her hair cut fashionably short, her trim figure enclosed in a brown flared trouser-suit, it is clear that Sarah Jane is a distinctly modern woman. And when the Doctor gently suggests that she make him a cup of coffee – as her bubbly predecessor, Jo Grant, had done countless times – her anger is immediate: ‘If you think I’m going to spend my time making cups of coffee for you …!’

Undeterred, the Doctor continues to talk down to her, but Sarah is having none of it. ‘Kindly don’t be so patronising,’ she snaps a few moments later, and then: ‘Stop treating me like a child.’ Even when, having stowed away aboard the TARDIS, she finds herself imprisoned in the Middle Ages, her feminist passion burns as brightly as ever. ‘She spits fire,’ one of her medieval captors says ruefully. And although Sarah Jane and the Doctor soon become fast friends, she remains a champion of what she calls ‘women’s lib’. ‘Harry, call me “old girl” again,’ she warns a fellow companion, a bluff naval surgeon, ‘and I’ll spit in your eye.’ In fact, not even the shock of travelling to distant worlds in the far future can dent Sarah Jane’s feminist ardour. Trapped in the middle of a miners’ strike on the planet Peladon, she is distressed to discover that the locals have decidedly unreconstructed attitudes to women in politics. ‘It would be different if I was a man,’ sighs Queen Thalira. ‘But I’m only a girl.’ ‘Now just a minute!’ Sarah exclaims. ‘There’s nothing “only” about being a girl!’1

When Doctor Who began, the notion of a young female companion standing up to the Doctor, demanding to be taken seriously and insisting that a woman was just as good as a man, would have been almost inconceivable. Back in 1963, the Doctor’s first female companions had

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