Fifty year old dreams…

There are two big fiftieth anniversaries today and I’m struggling to decide which one had more of an impact on the world. The first is the assassination of John F. Kennedy in that motorcade in the heat of a Dallas afternoon by a lone or multiple gunman/men.

The second is that today is exactly fifty years to the day since the first episode of Dr Who was broadcast and small boys all over Britain were changed forever... I am a Dalek... Exterminate!

There’s no doubt that the world lost a great politician in Kennedy, but so often the promise and sparkle of politicians turns to disillusionment and lackluster. I think that it’s pretty likely - given what we now know about Kennedy’s private life and business dealings - that he may well have turned out to be just another disgraced president if he had lived. It seems that none of them can really outrun their election campaign propaganda without falling over.

Dr Who on the other hand, apart from a brief fall from grace in the eighties, has not only lived up to our expectation but gone on to inspire generation after generation. We learned to make Daleks from egg boxes and washing up bottles as a result of Dr Who and many young physicists and scientists have become what they are as a result of watching the time travelling doctor.

One day one of these Dr Who inspired brain-boxes will crack time travel and we will have the opportunity to travel back in time and try to save Kennedy. It probably won’t change anything – apparently time is like that – but it does we will probably all be disappointed by another politician’s inability to deliver on the dream.

Perhaps time travelers and politicians are one and the same after all - not really able to change much of anything.