A Whoniverse of Welsh women

By Danny Nicol
University of Westminster

Acting in Doctor Who used to be fraught with danger.  Concern over being typecast deterred some actors from accepting roles (e.g. Peter Jeffrey declined to play the second Doctor) or shortened the duration of their stint in the programme (e.g. Anneke Wills' Polly made an earlier exit than the production team desired).   Nowadays the culture has quite changed and the threat has receded, as evidenced by some of the plum roles in which former Doctor Who actors have subsequently excelled.

Jenny in action, accompanied by the Doctor

In this regard two crime dramas may slip under the radar, being primarily aimed at a Welsh audience. Catrin Stewart, who played Jenny Flint, Victorian maid and wife of the reptilian Madame Vastra, in Doctor Who, played policewoman Gina in S4C's Bang last year (S4C being the public service Welsh language broadcaster).  Eve Myles - Gwen Cooper in Torchwood and Doctor Who - is presently playing Faith, a solicitor, in S4C's Keeping Faith.  What is remarkable about these two programmes is how easily they can be read as more feminist than Doctor Who itself.  

Catrin Stewart's Welshness would not be obvious to Doctor Who viewers given Jenny's impeccable Cockney accent.  Yet she is indeed Welsh, and Bang was a bilingual series, with part of the dialogue in English and part in Welsh.  Given her Welshness it is regrettable that Doctor Who did not allow Stewart to use her Welsh accent as Jenny.  After all by contrast with the Welsh, Londoners and London are not exactly under-represented in Doctor Who.   Eve Myles' Keeping Faith is bilingual in a different way, with viewers able to choose between watching a version entirely in English and a version entirely in Welsh.  

Gwen and Captain Jack investigate

In the Whoniverse neither Jenny nor Gwen were allowed to entirely fulfill their potential.  In "The Crimson Horror" (2013), possibly Jenny's finest hour, she rescues the Doctor in an intrepid investigation on her own, culminating in an Emma Peel style action sequence, but her performance is undercut by being forcibly kissed by the Doctor -  a sexual assault which Alyssa Franke rightly criticises in her Whovian Feminism blog.   As for Gwen, in Torchwood she comes to assume the role of second-in-command of Torchwood Cardiff next to Captain Jack Harkness, yet not even for a short period do we see her lead the organisation.  Lorna Jowett praises Gwen for producing many critiques of Jack, but notes that when she needs more depth her family tends to get wheeled out (Lorna Jowett, Dancing with the Doctor, London: IB Tauris, 2017: 26, 52).

Perhaps one should be grateful for small mercies.  "Classic" Doctor Who (1963-89) did not exactly distinguish itself in its depiction of Welsh women.  In "The Green Death" (1973), an adventure set in Wales, Welsh women are far from prominent.  A character called Nancy actually makes the fungi-health-cake which kills the story's giant maggots, but Nancy is marginalised.  Indeed the most memorable woman in the serial (other than English companion Jo Grant) is the Doctor's comic impersonation of a cleaning lady.  In "Delta and the Bannermen" (1987) - which also has a Welsh setting - Welsh character Ray (Rachel) is relegated to being the tale's spurned love-interest.  The most high-up Welsh woman in classic Who was probably Megan Jones, head of the nationalised energy company in "Fury from the Deep" (1968), though her main contribution is to let the Doctor get on with it.

Always a worry:
Gina and her brother

By contrast with Doctor Who new and old, Catrin Stewart's and Eve Myles' characters in their Welsh crime dramas strike a more feminist note.  Bang is a series about a brother-sister relationship.  The programme persistently contrasts Gina (Stewart) with her ne'er-do-well brother.  She is clever than him, more competent, with a keener sense of public duty.  He by contrast falls (albeit from the best of intentions) into criminal ways and ends up acquiring a gun, hence the show's title, leading to mayhem.  Keeping Faith concerns a marriage in which Faith's (Myles') husband vanishes.  This leaves Faith having to juggle investigating his disappearance with keeping their struggling law firm afloat, and looking after their three children.  She makes mistakes and is herself suspected by the police of doing away with him, yet her strength of character shines out.  What unites Bang and Keeping Faith is the pervasive theme of the women outshining the men.   This rather contrasts with Doctor Who where, as Lorna Jowett points out, women characters are too often defined by their relationships with men (Lorna Jowett, "The Girls Who Waited?  Female Companions and Gender in Doctor Who" Critical Studies in Television 9:1, 77-94)

Faith encounters a rather inadequate client

Yet it ought to be the other way round.  Doctor Who, after all, is the science fiction programme.  As such it has special dispensation to depart from the real world into the realms of the speculative, the imaginative, the uncanny.  It should be able to imagine and fashion relationships which depart far from the "dominant man, subordinate woman" template of the show's 1970s era.  As Jodie Whittaker takes command of the unruly console as thirteenth Doctor, the programme has much ground to make up.