Rob's review of 2017 - let's start with a Good Thing

2017 is coming to an end despite it surely being set in the far future.

And it genuinely is starting to feel like the future. I went to get a burger the other day and was faced, not by a human, but by a massive touchscreen thing, onto which I had to signal all my food choices. Obviously there was a human as well - she had to tell everyone how to work to robot food choicey thing, because we were all totally confused by it - but in principle, it was very much like being in Demolition Man.

Anyway. Another year is wandering to its close, and so I'm compelled to list some of the good and bad things about it, as if I was Time's manager and had to give it an appraisal.


Let's get straight in with something good.

Here's a moment that utterly delighted me this year.

One Sunday, after they'd been showing some tennis thing happening, the BBC cut to a bit of woodland. And through that woodland walked a mysterious figure.

And we knew, because we'd been told in advance, that this figure was going to be the new Doctor Who. What we didn't know was this - who would be playing the best person on television ever?

I was very excited indeed. A new Doctor Who is a thrilling thing to a massive geek like me. And there was a growing feeling that this time the producers were going to take the jump, and cast a woman rather than another bloke.

On my screen, the figure reached out to take the TARDIS key. We saw a hand - female? - and a close up of an eye... yes, it looked like...

She pulled back her hood. Sure enough, there stood the first female Doctor Who, Jodie Whittaker.

It's hard to say quite why it excited me so much, but it really, really did. An amazing, bold, audacious decision from a massive organisation that might easily be forgiven for playing things safe.

It chimes wonderfully with one of the overall narratives of this year - a slow recognition that our culture is Masculine at a molecular level. Our language, our conventions and our attitudes all proceed from a base assumption that maleness = normal. Power is male. History is male. The people who make a difference are male, and that includes pretend people who travel through time in blue boxes.

Some rational opinions from people 

who have decided what's normal and what isn't.

It's a narrative that does none of us any favours. Certainly not the 50% of the human race who have been deemed 'non-normal' and have to cope with the inequality that brings. And not people like me, who find common notions of masculinity very uncomfortable indeed, and a poor fit for the complicated nonsense that goes on in my head and my heart.

We saw the narrative at play in the reaction to Whittaker's casting, as a small bunch of tiny minded people screamed their protest at how 'unrealistic' it was to imagine Doctor Who being a lady. Because he's heroic, isn't he, and a scientist, and a genius and all those things that, generally, men get on with while the ladies make tea and/or scream at the monsters.

We saw it again with the new Star Wars film - don't worry, no spoilers - and indeed in any cultural product where the dominance of white men was challenged by alternative ideas. It gets called 'forced equality' or 'agenda setting' or - all together now - 'political correctness gone mad'." Because we're so used to whiteness and maleness being 'normal' that any deviation from it seems unnatural and weird and forced.

Look at this! Women are literally dominating everything!

So this is my moment of the year. A mysterious figure takes down its hood, and there, where once stood a man, stands a woman. A moment that says, at heart, none of our personas are fixed. We have masculine traits and feminine traits. We're different on a Monday to how we are on a Tuesday and we're different with a group of friends to how we are at work or visiting our parents. We were different five years ago and we'll be different again.

The idea that we are fixed, static personalities, is nonsense. We are varied and complicated and contradictory. Most of all, we are free. We don't need be told how to be a man, or a woman. This wonderful, time travelling alien, standing in a wood and looking into our eyes, says that change is possible and wonderful and inevitable.

I love that. It moves me more than I can say. And the fact that my daft old TV series took a stand this year, on something so fundamentally important, makes me want to cry with pride