Not as bad as I suspected, but then I had been primed for the worst. Fun and Games looks an interesting variation on the film we know, it might even be better with Christopher Lee. The idea of Kubrik fleeing to Britian to avoid censors is hilarious, but I suppose if you have the same politics as the censor then you would struggle to see the problems.
I suppose everyone is just censoring different things, so you have to figure out who is going to let you say what you want to say at that moment. In the US, Kubrick (and this is true btw) was scared stiff of being called a Communist for making an anti-war film – which is ridiculous, because he wasn't pink at all, and possibly something of the opposite. But yeah, so long as you're not making anything pro-fash, anti-socialist or, say, overtly pornographic, you have a lot of latitude in Britain now. What's gone are the controls about artistic merit, so the Commonwealth won't have a Tarkovsky situation where otherwise sympathetic people get caught up battling the Domestic Bureau on creative grounds.
The alt Doctor Who perhaps worse, certainly it sounds a lot less subtle and lot more preachy.
I tried to balance it, but on reflection I think I was a bit unsubtle in describing it just to hammer home how and where the politicisation differs. On a scale of preachiness it's probably somewhere around
Quartermass (which is maybe a good reference generally). I don't picture it quite as obvious in its intentions as latter-day Chibnall-era
Doctor Who. One thing it does back off on, I would say, is the history education aspect. It's more of a thriller here.
Certainly I can imagine a lot of discussion in side CBC trying to work out what the current regime view on technology is and making sure the shows fits within the allowed limits, Clarke's comments about the space programme and Bevan's lack of interest are relevant here. I can absolutely see Bevan as rejecting the 'wrong sort' of technology and being spitefully, vindictively petty about anyone with the wrong views so a difficult line for CBC to walk.
I'm sort of trying to work this out myself, truth be told. The CBC of my imagination does have some latitude to needle the government now, but like much of the Bevan era this is superficial rather than fundamental. So it's probably free to question the lack of a space programme, but not, say, to call for a renewed mass build up of nuclear weapons – the latter being a central pillar of Britain's high-stage Cold War diplomacy (which we'll see in a couple of weeks), and the former being a slightly passé fascination from the Mosley days.
In a slightly ironic way, given how much effort I've gone to to portray Mosley as a technophilic Futurist, Bevan I think has more of a 'practical' attitude towards STEM than Mosley did. For all of the former Chairman's enthusiasm, much of what British engineering did between 1945–61 was more or less directed according to whatever Mosley was interested in at the time. So planes, trains and automobiles, and also computing technology. Bevan meanwhile I imagine as being much more concerned with being 'the right pair of hands', so to speak; he'll be trying to direct R&D in stuff like mining, heavy industry, medical science etc. All very useful stuff, of course, but there's definitely room for a sort of 'techno-puritanism' to emerge.
There's also the related question of Britain's industrial base, which given your various areas of expertise Pip I would be quite interested to talk to you about properly at some point. But in typical style, the Bevanite reaction likely extends towards putting the dampers on Mosley's desperate last-minute attempts to go all in on sparking a consumer boom to keep exports up. In which case (a bit of foreshadowing here) his economic team are currently grappling with the vexed question of how to maintain British manufacturing by the second half of the Twentieth century.