Noting another symptom of the moral decline that finally caused Margaret Thatcher to die of embarrassment, a pair of Doctor Who veterans have decried the way the show has increasingly featured an “element of sexuality,” abandoning the purity of platonic Time Lord-and-killer robot relationships that once sustained the British Empire. “Why bring in this element when in fact you needn’t have it there?” asked Waris Hussein, a director on Doctor Who’s first series, during an interview on BBC Radio 4. “The intriguing thing about the original person, was that you never quite knew about him and there was a mystery and an unavailability about him. Now we've just had a recent rebirth and another girl has joined us, a companion, she actually snogged him.”
Hussein’s critique was echoed by Peter Purves, who served as the Doctor’s companion during a more civilized era, when companionship was expressed with a firm handshake, and snogging was reserved for the syphilitic trollops and teddy boys down on the wharf. Purves said he agreed “totally” with the idea that Doctor Who has become far too sexy lately and, what’s more, much too complicated. “The original series was so simple. They were very straightforward, nice linear stories that one could follow,” Purves said of the show about an alien who can regenerate into different human forms while traversing the space-time continuum in a police box. Would that were only a similar box that could ferry Hussein and Purves back to a simpler age, but even then it would surely be occupied by someone getting it on.