Where have our bees gone? Honey bees, bumble bees... you name it, they're disappearing faster than Pooh Bear's honey. Now, I thought maybe there were some fairly simple explanations for this worrying phenomenon, like the damaging effects of Pestilential Pesticides or the loss of wildflowers due to intensive agriculture.
But I was wrong. I now know that the bees have gone off to their mother planet out in space because the Earth is about to be stolen by Daleks and hidden one second in the future along with twenty-six other planets so that Davros and his band of tinpot baddies can take over the universe.
It's a much more satisfying explanation altogether, and it fits the general Dr Who approach to our current eco-woes. What? you may be thinking. Surely Dr Who is just a fanciful adventure series - no one really believes that the bees are from outer space, do they? Do they? I don't know. But Dr Who has always reflected the fears of the age, and in this series the images of apocalypse (the stars going out, unknown terrors coming from the sky) seem to mirror our very real anxieties about climate change and its effects.
Dr Who is great. It's scary and fantastic. But the thing about the bees is keeping me awake at night. The disappearance of bees isn't part of some grand conspiracy of aggressive oversized saltpots. It's much closer to home than that. It's our problem, and one we could maybe solve if we put in the sort of time and effort it takes to make a TV series.
The trouble is, we're not going to get ten million people glued to the sofa of a Saturday evening for bees. Are we?
