Whovians will be saddened by the announcement that Peter Capaldi is to retire from his police box at the end of this year. For the rest of us, the story is merely a cue for the reopening of an eternal debate in British pop culture. Soon, long lists of possible candidates for the next Doctor Who will be dredged from BBC2 costume drama leads. Here is a list of nine other questions that crop up again and again in pop culture.
Will the next Bond be black?
What about Idris Elba? He’s British. He looks good in a suit. Those are the only two qualifiers you should need for anything. If the Old Vic could do Lear with Glenda Jackson, then it’s high time a billion-dollar luxury watch-sales franchise upended its arch-conservative branding.
Should we have a performing hologram of Tupac?
Should Kurt Cobain be in Guitar Hero? What does it mean when the digital and the real collide in the form of a jiggling avatar-making bank for Capcom or Sony BMG? Clearly, deep metaphysical questions are being asked here – it’s like Blade Runner, but with Stephen Gately joining Boyzone onstage to sing Love Me for a Reason.
Is there a double standard involving Taylor Swift’s dating?
Taylor Swift has a new boyfriend – lithe heartthrob with strong Instagram following Boybot X – but already, it seems, tongues are wagging. Could it be because the gossip pages are read solely by rich white men who have trapped this poor recluse into an unfair patriarchal dating paradigm?
Will there be a Friends reunion?
Or is it better to leave it having “ended well”? Above all, let’s never discuss why we would want to see Matthew Perry and Matt LeBlanc reprising their houseshare days as though they were an illustration of Einstein’s ideas about how people could arrive back at the same point having aged a bunch of years more than each other.
Is Girls racist?
She says she is in favour of things. Yet Lena Dunham is also just a rich Manhattanite who was in analysis by the time she was nine. How can these two things coexist? How can someone drenched in luxury write about their own life without referencing the Chicano gangs of Harlem?
Is it still possible to enjoy the work of Chris Brown, Bill Cosby, Woody Allen and Roman Polanski?
Opening our first-year philosophy textbooks and thumbing to page 19, we learn about The Death of the Author. It’s no new thing: Wagner, Dostoevsky, Ezra Pound, bad dudes. Yet still, we can’t shake the feeling that history is telling us we should pile all their works in the town square and burn them.
Is The X Factor on its way out?
It has been going a long time, the charts are dead, and who can even recall the last grinning marmoset who won? Sure, they tried to reboot it by bringing back Sharon/Louis/Cheryl/Gary/Pussycat Doll/Reginald Maudling, but Simon Cowell needs to face facts: I no longer have young kids in desperate need of Saturday-night entertainment.
Is The Grand Tour better than Top Gear?
He is paid several million pounds per minute to offend Latvians, but ultimately it’s a show about middle-aged friendships.
Should we repeal the Corn laws?
The Duke of Wellington says “no”. That hasn’t stopped Richard Cobden banging on about it. And where will Sir Robert Peel come down? Some say we need to change our relationship with Europe by trading more; others that we should stuff ’em. In truth, the question is impossibly granular.
- This article was amended on 7 February 2016. Glenda Jackson performed as Lear with the Old Vic, not the RSC as originally stated.
