Excerpts from a speech and interview given by Mark Strickson, who played companion Vislor Turlough in the '80s:

The problem with Doctor Who is that it isn’t real acting. It does get very boring actually, because by necessity it is two-dimensional acting. You can’t have a depth of character because it’s a comic strip. […]

When American science fiction fans watch it, they roar with laughter. I suppose it is a comedy. If you try to look logically at Doctor Who you have to look very hard.

I pick these parts out because they line up pretty well (although superficially) with the most recent episode where the Doctor is actually turned into an animated character, but particularly the last sentence feels like a harder jab at the mindset of Who fandom than the depiction of fans in “Lux”.

To be fair, Strickson offers suggestions to add more character depth, following the first quoted paragraph:

You think, why can’t Turlough and Tegan, or Turlough and Nyssa have a relationship of some kind? Indeed, why can’t Turlough have a proper relationship with the Doctor? Why can’t they talk? Why can’t they sit down in the TARDIS to talk about what they’re going to eat that day. I think in a sense it would be an improvement to Doctor Who if you saw a bit of their domestic life on the TARDIS. It might be a bit less action, more humour, and a bit more personal human interest.

Surely, turning Who into a kitchen sink drama in the mid-'80s would have put an end to the show sooner than actually happened 😄 But it is worth noting that a similar sort of base level interaction did sneak into the show in the form of soapier drama from 2005 onward…

Read the transcript, there are loads of entertaining anecdotes from Doctor Who production in the early 1980s!