I know there’s a lot of hate about Steven Moffat, and from what I can tell, a lot of it’s justified, but I haven’t really weighed in much on it, because I am incredibly conflicted.

Why?

Because I was a girl in the late ‘80s and early ’90s, and like a lot of girls my age, I found Press Gang. It was such an important, unique, groundbreaking show in so many ways, and it gave me a role model who I still hold in my echelon of favourite female characters. Lynda Day.

She was strong willed.
She was ruthless.
She didn’t care about fashion.
She had ambition.
She advocated for herself and her profession with all her might.
She wasn’t perfect, and at times, she was just plain wrong and unlikable.
She was never punished for her sexuality.
She was willing to use that sexuality if it got her what she wanted, but she was never a slave to it.
She was hard and even cruel to people around her on a daily basis, but she would fight for their job security and for their freedom to tell the truth in their articles.

As a girl who’d spent her life abused, manipulated and shamed into conforming, Lynda Day showed me that you didn’t have to make nice, you didn’t have to play by the rules, and you could carve your own path. And without Steven Moffat, she never would have existed.

I’m not saying that everything I’ve changed about my life and become since is owing to him. It’s not. It’s down to me. I did all that, myself, and I earned all the kudos. I’m not that scared, shamed, traumatised little girl any more because of a lot of reasons. But one of the first female characters I latched onto, that set my feet on the path to being something better, was Lynda. And I can’t wish for a world where she didn’t exist.