(Doctor) Who’s Afraid of Cilla Black?

Last week, two of the most watched television shows were about voting. One provided an in depth, contemporary and perhaps profound analysis of current democracy. The other was a shallow piece of entertainment, easily forgettable and void of conflict. The first was Doctor Who, the other was a game show.

In ‘The Beast Below‘, the Doctor and his companion found themselves on a spaceship UK, a post-apocalyptic vision of the country floating in space, marooned for eternity. The dark past of how this came to be is kept a secret from the citizens on board, until the age of 16. At this point, each teenager is allowed an opportunity to learn of their spaceship’s history, as the Doctor’s companion Amelia finds out, when she is allowed to enter the small room of this initiation ritual. In the room is a screen and three buttons, labeled ‘Protest’, ‘Record’ and ‘Forget’. (If you want to follow this, it’s at 14.30 minutes in).

Amelia Pond sends an electoral message to her future self

The rules are explained by a man on the screen: all of earth’s dark history will be revealed through the television. Then the citizen has a choice: to protest or forget. In almost all cases, the sequence is as it occurs to Amelia: she sees the history, and chooses to forget. (The protest button leads to expulsion: a trap door opens up and the victim is consumed in the ship’s engines.) However, when Amelia ‘wakes up’ in the room after her memory loss, there is a video playing on screen of her past self, telling her current self to leave the spaceship and not return to the room. Evidently, Amelia pressed the ‘Record’ button before the ‘forget’, in order to leave herself this message.

We as the viewer do not see her press ‘Record’, and of course she doesn’t remember doing so. This is the key to the politics of the scene. Not only is forgetting the only way forward – if the citizen were to remember the truth, the whole political system would come crashing down; but the part that we don’t see, the moment between the consideration of symbolic protest and the moment of forgetting, is the ‘record’ button. And of course, the knowledge of the moment of recording is lost: in other words, the processes of ideological construction are hidden from view.

The other voting-themed show was an extraordinary ‘Fascist Special’ of Blind Date. If you don’t know what I mean, here’s a Cilla classic from 1991. The comparisons get startling from half a minute in; in this episode we even have a Scot, a Tory boy and some young guy in the middle. Guess who she picks…