Fetch the sonic screwdriver, start up the Tardis and prepare for power. The Labour Party has unveiled its latest recruit as Doctor Who.
Or, to be strictly accurate, the actor David Tennant, who played the Tenth Doctor, before he had to regenerate and become a younger, fresher, edgier version of his old self (not a trick that Gordon Brown has mastered yet, but there are a few weeks to go).
In the first election broadcast of the campaign, seen on television last night, Tennant provided the voiceover for a broadcast featuring the actor Sean Pertwee, the son of Jon Pertwee, who played the Third Doctor.
In the 2½-minute film, which is notably devoid of Daleks or any other power-crazy aliens intent on destroying the planet (unless of course there is a subliminal message about the Conservative Party we have missed), Pertwee trudges across a bleak moor as he talks about the tough choices facing people on “the road ahead”. Tennant provides the message at the end: “We have been through tough times, but by staying on the right road, we can make Britain the country we all want it to be, to build a future that is fair for all of us.”
It is filmed in the North York Moors National Park, which in the old days of Doctor Who could have passed muster for some distant planet in the 43rd century.
Tennant has already made plain his view on the Tories: worse than the Slitheen, it seems, possibly even as bad as the Jagaroth. “I think David Cameron is a terrifying prospect,” he said earlier this year. “I get quite panicked at the notion that people are buying his rhetoric.”
One does not, however, live for 900 years, and survive encounters with Ice Warriors and Sea Devils, by having a simplistic attitude to these things.
“Clearly, the Labour Party is not without some issues right now and I do get frustrated,” he said. “They need to sort some stuff out but they are still a better bet than the Tories.”
