Doctor Who has always been an inclusive, left-wing show - a female doctor is the logical next step

Hussein, although a product of the British public school system and a Cambridge graduate, was, as a gay Indian man, far removed from the stuffed-shirt brigade with their Savile Row accounts and cricketing metaphors. Lambert, a mini-skirted 25-year-old at the time, was the BBC’s only female producer. The third person involved in Doctor Who’s inception was Sydney Newman, a tough Canadian Jew whose brashly articulated love of populism must have been at odds with a corporation still anxious to uphold the values of Lord Reith.

That the three of them got together and concocted the story of a 900-year-old alien travelling around time and space in an earthly police box is deeply charming. That their chosen star player, William Hartnell, was a washed-up B movie actor known for playing tough sergeants was an act of imaginative audacity. That Doctor Who ever got commissioned is nothing short of a miracle.

If you watch those early episodes, there is a strong educational (Reithian) bent, but there is also something overwhelmingly gentle about them. The Doctor is a pacifist whose job seems to consist of conflict resolution in places of acute historical importance and on far-away planets. He never raises his fists and his jut-jawed assistant Ian, a cardigan-wearing science teacher at an inner-city secondary modern and almost certainly a lefty, only does so in extremis.

Throughout those early years we see parable after parable which make a plea for tolerance. In Galaxy 4 (1965), it turns out that the beautiful fembot Drahvins are evil, while their hideously deformed rivals, the Rills, are actually gentle, peace-loving souls. Do not, we are told, make judgments based on appearances.

Nazism also cast a shadow in those early years. Less than 20 years after the end of the Second World War, The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1964), widely regarded as one of the best serials in the show’s history, acted as a sort of metaphor for the promulgation of a master race – in this case the screeching, maniacal daleks. Eventually, in 1975, Doctor Who got its own Hitler in the form of Dalek creator Davros. The story in which he first appeared, Genesis of the Daleks, also featured the most famous moral dilemma in the show’s history. As Tom Baker’s Doctor was faced with the possibility of destroying the Daleks, he argued, in a piece of utilitarian reasoning that good things might come out of the killer robots whose only emotion is hate, that “many future worlds would become allies”.

In the early Seventies, Doctor Who offered a left-liberal subtext to the older viewer. The Mutants (1972) concerned the idea of apartheid on an alien planet (remember that racial separatism was not so unsavoury an idea to the mainstream right at the time), while The Green Death (1973) dealt with the idea of corporate chemical malpractice, set in a Welsh mining village. That the story also featured giant green maggots that were about as menacing as cling film, did not diminish its greed-is-bad agenda.

All of this seems strange given that Jon Pertwee’s Time Lord, an Edwardian gent with a love of jiu-jitsu, was probably the most conservative incarnation. There again, he was not averse to a bit of moralising on the subject of intergalactic peace. In the 1970 story Dr Who and the Silurians, he was horrified when Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, acting on the command of his superiors, blew up the Silurian base in an act of genocide. It’s one of the most downbeat endings to a story that I can think of.

Occasionally, there have been blips in the Doctor’s liberal legacy. In 1988, Sylvester McCoy’s Doctor obliterated the Daleks’ home planet of Skaro without much compunction. And this in an era when the series was raging, in its own quiet way, about the free-market economy and the sale of council housing. Paradise Towers (1987), a story with shades of JG Ballard’s High-Rise, warned of the dangers of isolationism promoted by tower-block living. The Happiness Patrol (1988) even featured a Thatcher-like leader known as Helen A (played by Sheila Hancock).

When Doctor Who was revamped in 2005, its liberalism remained in tact, although this time the emphasis was more on the personal than the political. The fact that the man responsible for bringing the series back, Russell T Davies, had created the masterly Queer as Folk prompted some vile comments from the tabloids (“Ducky Who”, “Ex-foliate, ex-foliate”), although it’s true that a certain sexual permissiveness did prevail. This was manifested particularly in the character of Captain Jack (John Barrowman), an omnisexual flirt with his own spaceship and later his own spinoff (the sporadically raunchy Torchwood). More recently, there has even been a human/alien same-sex relationship (Jenny and Madame Vastra) who were able to live in a sort of Boston marriage in a Steampunk Victorian England. This year, Doctor Who unveiled its first gay companion, Bill Potts (Pearl Mackie). Her sexuality is discussed, sometimes with candour, but it never defines her.

And so to have a female Doctor seems to be the next logical step in a show which has been defying limited notions of the norm for over 50 years. In fact, I reckon that gender will become an irrelevance after a few episodes. We will begin to think of Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor in the way that we have thought of the previous 12 – a Renaissance figure, a moral crusader and, above all, a force for good.