Friday 30 January 2009

My Childhood Role Model

What can I say? I had just turned 10.


And as it turned out, I think my life has been even more interesting.

4 comments:

Andrea said...

I didn't see Doctor Who until Tom Baker was playing the part, but I've made up the gap as I could via Netflix and the internet, and it surprised me how proactive many of the female parts were in the early series. Then again, I don't know why I was surprised -- a lot of television and movies in the early to mid-Sixties that was directed at the "family audience" had plenty of feisty, smart parts for women.

Anonymous said...

Yay! Zoe!

Lux Mentis said...

Wow. I had just had the thought while watching some UNIT/Lethbridge-Stewart videos today on YouTube that Doctor Who was portraying tough, capable women long before any other series I can think of except maybe the one with Patrick MacNee and Diana Rigg.

Tom Baker was my second Doctor, but for me will always be 'The Doctor' and I think the combination of that Doctor, Leela of the Seva (Survey) Team, and K-9 was the best trio of heroes in SciFi.

Leela might not have been the brains of the operation, but she was smart enough, cunning, relentless, and brave. And many of the other Who heroines have had similar great qualities.

Why it took American TV so long to pick up on the capability of women is beyond me - I knew it from my childhood, having a mother with 4 university degrees and who at one point filled CEO, CFO, and Director of Nursing slots (at least for a time) at a 75 bed hospital. And before that, she'd been a flight nurse in the RCAF.

Unknown said...

Oh, yeah--The Avengers. Diana Rigg as Emma Peel was my childhood role model--as you say, one of the very few strong, capable female characters on American TV circa 1970. (They broadcast that series in the US a few years after it originally aired in the UK.)

I stopped watching in disappointment when they replaced Emma Peel with Tara King. She was just a wet dishrag by comparison.