Can I Sell You A Policy?
I’m in the middle of watching the commentary on The Christmas Invasion DVD. Incidentally, what is the point of an in-vision commentary, aside from making everyone look like the walkmen from Silver Nemesis? Anyway, I'm getting slightly bored and my mind wanders over the implications of the images on screen…
Just how does Jackie Tyler insure her flat?
We know from Rose that she’s part of the ‘compensation culture.’ Over the course of two years or so, she must have claimed for furniture broken by a shop window dummy’s arm; damage caused by a monster disguised as a policeman (although Mickey’s flat saw the most damage then); and wholesale destruction caused by a killer Christmas tree. And that’s before all her windows shatter, along with all the others in London (except for all those houses we see in the location shots…). Someone at the insurance company must be getting suspicious long before she ends up in a parallel universe.
Actually, once you start thinking about it, the topic of contemporary Doctor Who stories and insurance has rather interesting ramifications. No, really! The cost of living in the capital must be even greater than in real life, with expensive insurance to cover all the glass that gets smashed during each alien invasion (about once every six months at the moment). Cardiff probably has a similar ‘rift premium,’ for all the cosmic flotsam and jetsam that comes through there. That could spark an inflationary spiral throughout the economy.
And then there’s the cost of insuring big events, like the coronation and the Olympics. With every newsworthy occasion from the middle of the twentieth century onwards a target not just for terrorists and publicity-hungry maniacs, but all manner of aliens wanting to feed on the crowds or just show off, ticket sales would have to be put up to pay for the extra security necessary to even have a chance of getting insured.
At the other end of the scale, what happens to all those soldiers drafted to UNIT who discover their life insurance premiums have gone up in inverse proportion to their falling life expectancies? Can you claim for being aged into an old man or regressed back to being a baby? Can you claim a relative’s life insurance if the corpse is now the size of a doll? And just how do you arrange in funeral in such a case?
Pity those people who work in the insurance industry, surely the unsung heroes of the Whoniverse, who attempting to keep the economy function. Imagine being an underwriter and trying to work out the odds of the latest Mars Probe being hijacked by aliens, or the chances of a top secret energy project awakening a reptilian civilization from millions of years ago. Most of all, pity the loss adjustors. Imagine coming in to work on a Monday morning to find your in-tray overflowing with claims forms to assess regarding a government-owned stately home destroyed by a terrorist from the future; a nerve gas missile hijacked by an alien master criminal; a nuclear power station sent critical by an alien parasite; and a church destroyed by the suicide of an alien scientist who looked like the Devil. The theological implications of trying to argue that the latter was an Act of God are complicated enough by themselves.
So, what I want to know is, when are we going to get a spin-off series about the insurance industry in the Whoniverse? It could tell the stories of a bunch of young, attractive insurance agents handling the after-effects of alien invasions, perhaps working for the top secret Paperwork organisation. It’s Torchwood for BBC4!