Mary Whitehouse vs the SJWs

Of the two moralizing pressure groups the series has had to contend with, and ultimately did buckle to (Mary Whitehouse in the Hinchcliffe era, the Feminists/SJWs in the Moffat/Chibnall era), which one was worse for the show?

SJWs in the age of social media have been far more effective than Mary ever was.

I can't seem to remember any TV bosses or writers being pro Whitehouse.

Yeah the SJWs have killed the show. Whitehouse never did that (regardless of what some people think).

I'm probably going to be alone in voting for Whitehouse.

To be honest I do find the SJWs more morally reprehensible. I don't think Whitehouse would ever have behaved as thuggishly or vitriolically as the SJWs, and her cult of moralists certainly never seemed to birth a more mindless violent fringe like the sick punks in Antifa.

Also a part of me thinks Whitehouse deserves a *little* compassion for being a product of her upbringing in more conservative times and that she probably just held to what she was taught from an early age never to question, whereas the SJWs who grew up spoilt in a more liberal society really should know better.

But speaking strictly of the effect of Doctor Who, I have to go with her, simply because she did the damage first and everything else that went wrong with the show after was a chain reaction to that derailing. And the thing is, I don't actually think Whitehouse was always necessarily wrong. There are some moments in Terror of the Autons, and Deadly Assassin that I do think verge on the needlessly cruel and sadistic (and my opinions on Season 21 are well-known). But the fact the BBC were so heavy-handed about dealing with Hinchcliffe, and the chilling effect she had on the show's creativity cost the show much of the essential fabric of its universe. And ironically under Saward, there would later be ugly backlashes to her backlash.

The show was doing extraordinarily well under Hinchcliffe until he got booted (and decided to do a scorched Earth with the budget), then things got a bit chaotic and confused for Season 15, Tom got out of control, and from thenon script-editors, companions, producers seemed to become in a hurry to escape the show as soon as they could (either because things could get tense and ugly on set when Tom was in a mood, or because the more censorious BBC oversight was making the writing job a lot more joyless)...... until we were left quickly with the wrongest pairing of JNT-Saward (whether you think either individually was the problem or the combination and pairing of them together itself was), the careless decision to let a bigmouth myopic fan like Ian Levine have a say (who perhaps only became so prominent because of what the frustrations of the Williams years did to fan politics), and the eventual nasty cracks and myopic onscreen pettiness that showed from that mismatch.

Then cancellation and disgrace, and then the show's only hope of revival seemed to lie in the determination of the kind of high-profile fanboys who clearly inherited a lot of shame and neuroses about the old show from that dark crisis period (especially if like Moffat, they worked in the BBC and inherited a lot of the corporation's institutionalized contempt for the show).

All stuff that might not have happened if the Hinchcliffe success formula had continued and then given way to a smooth transition to a well-chosen successor (potentially David Maloney), and the thrills and budget had been there to keep the audience hooked rather than drifting. If the show had been able to compete still with the zeitgeist.

Which leads to the other point, which is that what the SJW's ruined of the show around the time of Series 8, hadn't been all that good for a while anyway. I feel that so much was going wrong with Moffat's showrunning at the time, that the damage from his capitulations to the SJWs too was almost incidental to the wider problem, whereas Whitehouse genuinely ruined something that was good right at the point where the show was never better. I used to think Moffat was a promising good writer, only ruined by the backlash of both feminists and fandom's cult of Russell demanding he do what they wanted. But I'm at a point now where I no longer do, and I see the hollow soullessness and flippancy that was always there in his work.

So yeah, a sole vote for Whitehouse from me.