Doctor Who, Pyramid of Mars and those Darn Egyptians

Doctor Who's racial politics often keeps me up late at night and Pyramid of Mars is no exception. A fourth doctor story, it is an exceptional tale involving mummy robots, ancient Egyptian gods, ancient astronauts, and the obligatory superstitious savages. The main savage in question, Namin, is a servant of the "one true god" Sutekh and gets killed off at the end of the first episode. I'm not sure, however, that the episode is being deliberately anti-Arabic, because the references in the episode seem to point directly at Egyptians specifically. Hinchcliffe era stories weren't afraid of stepping on people's toes . . . this is the era that brought us Talons of Weng-Chiang . . . but in this case, I think the offense while there, is probably unintentional. Still, Doctor Who usually does a better job of sending up British racial politics when its being ironic, as in Giant Robot or Day of the Daleks, than in its modern politically sanitized vision of the future.