Festive period episodes of Doctor Who and population mortality

Doctor Who is a quintessentially British story. Although often thought of as science fiction, it is better understood as a genre defying spectacle that displays the victory of good over evil, with magic and mystery at its heart. The programme was born in the first flush of television, but it has lived on as film, animated stories, audio plays, theatre shows, and immersive experiences. A phenomenon raised by a woman (Verity Lambert, the first producer) and a gay man of Asian ethnicity (Waris Hussein, the first director) facing all the prejudices of postwar Britain, it became 60 years old on 23 November 2023 and has never looked better.1