20 Things Doctor Who Wants You To Forget
3. Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Moe
It is a testament to the inclusivity at the heart of Doctor Who that charges of racism against it are few and far between – even retrospective ones. That’s not to say the show hasn’t courted controversy or mirrored the prejudices of its day. When the official soundtrack to the missing Hartnell episode The Celestial Toymaker was released, an exception was made to the meticulous efforts to remain as faithful to the original broadcast as possible. The use of the n-word by the Doctor when singing the children’s rhyme ‘Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Moe’ was sufficiently obscured to avoid offense.
It wasn’t quite so easy to cover up two other notorious incidents, and the rather weak attempts to soften the blow in both cases don’t really wash. In The Tomb of the Cybermen, the sole African on the multinational expedition to Telos, Toberman is characterised as a gentle, but simple giant. Apparently he was supposed to be deaf too, but this was cut from the shooting script, raising the suspicion that he was characterised as thick because he was black.
Fast forward to 1977 and having already got away with Louise Jameson’s make-up for the savage Leela, a white actor was cast as Li H’sen Chang. It was argued by some that a lack of oriental actors in the UK made this unavoidable, but even so the fact that the Doctor does not challenge the racism levelled at the Chinese immigrants in the story was enough for TVOntario not to broadcast the serial.