Apologies @ThetaSigmaEarChef because I read back my post and realised I’d completely messed up my point. Of course Doctor Who has shone a spotlight on real world issues - I never meant to deny that. It’s one of the things which annoys me when people criticise the modern show for being ‘woke’ and claiming the classic series wasn’t when it most demonstrably did highlight important themes like, as you say, the environment, facism, etc.
What I meant was that Doctor Who’s narrative ‘real world’ is slightly removed from the real world we live in. The UNIT era was deliberately supposed to be slightly in the future meaning that lots of the that ‘contemporary’ era is slightly at odds with what was actually happening in the real world.
I also meant that Doctor Who didn’t directly feature historical periods which were in living memory for a long time. There isn’t a WW2 story until the 1980s and it seems only one was ever on the cards before then - the lost story Operation Werewolf - which, tellingly, never made it to screen. The history visited in those early years is as alien as the weird planets they visit - the Aztecs, Paris of the 16th century, Ancient Rome, prehistoric times.
But I maintain that Chibnall not addressing Covid is not cowardly.
He used the show to address lots of other issues - often drawing overt criticism from some quarters because of it. Covid was like nothing we’d ever experienced before. It’s not a miner’s strike or Daleks as Nazis or environmental messaging. It was something which affected the whole world, but also affected people, oddly, in the same way and yet in very different ways.
I was lucky enough not to lose anyone but my friend lost her dad and she couldn’t visit him just like Joy. She gave birth to a daughter during that time and her dad never met his granddaughter. I don’t know what your personal experience was but there is not way Chibnall could have addressed Covid at that time without upsetting a lot of people and drawing a lot of backlash against the show. And let’s face it, Chibnall was already a punchbag for fandom as it was.
If you think he should have directly addressed Covid and was disappointed he didn’t, that’s absolutely your perogative. I completely disagree. But I do not think, whatever decision he made, makes him a coward. We don’t know what his personal experience was. He may have lost someone. It’s not for us to call him out on something like that.
And what should be noted here is that Moffat focussed his covid element - and it really was just an element and not what the whole story was about even slightly - was the partygate aspect which was something very few people would be divided in opinion on.
So I apologise for being unclear in my first post and hope this has cleared up my position a bit.
to me, the Doctor is anti-establishment and anti-capitalist, everything that the Tory party isn’t!
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