Excellent article — and you’ve hit the nail on the head. Storytelling needs to be focussed on the stories, not on the audience. If you story is crafted well then your audience will have a strong reaction to it. Whether they like it or not is another matter. When you let your audience shape your character, and society in all its traditional inclusive contradictory glory has a hand in storytelling — that’s when you get problems.

In short, once you start playing the game of identity politics, you can’t stop — and Chibnall has been hampered by an inability to develop any of the characters, possibly for fear of being called out. What right does a male showrunner have to write the first female doctor and say XYZ etc. And so the characters, including the doctor, must remain facile, hollow and if not inoffensive, then suitably beige and non threatening to an audience prone to weaponised offence.

Collectivism and fiction have never played nicely. Great article. Incredibly insightful.