(Blogger's gone and changed the format, hasn't it...? Hell, I'll sort it out later.)
1. However scary and harrowing it's supposed to be, any sense of fear that's implicit in the story will be undermined by Murray Gold going "rrrmmmm WOOOOOO eeeee-AHHHHHH" during every sequence that's meant to give us the willies. Particularly ominous moments will be marked with a drum going "bom-BOM", followed by a short silence, followed by another "bom-BOM".
2. On seeing the astronaut-spurting-water-from-every-orifice sequence, our first thought won't be to wonder what's causing this or what the consequences will be for the Doctor and company, but to imagine the inevitable scene from Doctor Who Confidential in which the technical personnel demonstrate how they cleverly rigged up a spacesuit full of hoses. (A sure sign that something's gone badly wrong: our expectations of Doctor Who are now guided by what we see in Confidential more than what we see in the episodes. We might hope that the 2010 series will ditch its BBC3 runt-sister for good, but frankly, we shouldn't expect Steven Moffat to turn down the opportunity to get his mush on telly as often as possible.)
3. On a related note… the Radio Times will continue the annual tradition of hyping up one episode per year as "The Scariest Doctor Who Ever?" (although without the obvious "episode four of "The Massacre" double-meaning from this week's cover), especially when Moffat wants to grab extra attention with his usual trick of putting a gun to the heads of the nation's children and shouting "run and hide, you little bastards, run and hide!". It's next scheduled to happen in late May / early June 2010, when the viewing-figures of Season M1 start to slump and the promise of pant-wetting becomes a major selling-point again. David Tennant himself will, in future years, feel as embarrassed about the googly-eyed cover photo as Elton John now feels about wearing a Donald Duck costume in the 1970s.
4. Someone - quite possibly Harry Hill - will take the clip of water gushing out of the spacesuit, and suggest that the astronaut is coming home from the pub but can't get to a public convenience in time. Hilarity will ensue. Indeed, 32% of the nation's parents will snigger childishly when the title "Waters of Mars" appears on the screen; while very old viewers will wonder if "Waters" is the name of a great imperial explorer who conquers the Red Planet. Like "Sanders of the River" or "Clive of India".
5. Cosima Shaw will play an attractive, single-minded German woman so icy that we'll wonder why they can't defeat the water-sucking monster just by letting it attack her and watching it freeze over. Actually, this barely even qualifies as a prediction: according to the RT, her character's name is "Steffi Ehrlich". She'll die. Meanwhile, Lyndsay Duncan's performance will be so over-earnest that we'll just want to slap her. She'll die as well, but the background music will be more cloyingly tragic in her case. (Oh, or will Adelaide Brooke be the one token character whom the Doctor agrees to save from the Martian holocaust, as a sop to those who still want him to retain some human compassion…? Depends how you want to imagine the final scene. Arguably, One Sole Survivor is as great a cliché as the Doctor standing on his own in the console room with barely-concealed tears in his eyes.)
6. And there'll be a montage of decent, loveable characters and nasty, selfish (but ultimately just human and scared) characters dying in the final few minutes. No sound-effects will accompany this, but Murray will be on hand to make sure that a single female chorister goes "ooooh-aaaahh-aaah-ahhhhhhhh" to underline the sorrow. (Some would argue that hiring the Wurzels to go "ooooh-aaaahh-aaah-ahhhhhhhh" during this sequence would at least be original.)
7. It'll be better than "Planet of the Dead", but not as good as anyone might have hoped, and all modern Doctor Who geeks will find themselves disappointed that the BBC's "the beginning of the end" strapline is a way of cashing in on public doom-and-gloom about the Death of Tennant rather than an IOU for an apocalyptic story-arc. Yet paradoxically, when they come to watch it again in a year's time, fans will perform a massive about-face and realise that it actually seemed a lot spookier when seen in the shadow of the forthcoming regeneration. More crucially, though… its rational mind may know better, yet fandom will be secretly hoping for Ice Warriors even as the opening credits roll, and the Inner Clock of All Nerds won't allow this hope to go away until roughly two-thirds of the way through the story.
8. David Tennant will spend the whole affair intensing it up, to the point where you'll want to reach into the screen and shove his eyeballs back in.
Friday, November 13, 2009
Z-Bomb Casualty
My "talking to strangers" thing has rather unexpected consequences.
5th of September, 2009. I've just attended an event so geeky that I can barely bring myself to speak of it, but it's enough to say that very few women were in attendance, and that it was held in the basement of London's Hilton Metropol. The Hilton Metropol, as the name suggests, is one of the capital's chicest and most modern hotels-cum-conference-centres; the basement, as the name suggests, indicates that the management doesn't see Our Sort of Person as being a desirable customer. We can be there, if we pay. But we probably shouldn't hang around on the upper floors, in much the same way that Mutts shouldn't try to enter Skybases.
But it's eleven o'clock at night, and I'm on my way home, and I'm slightly tipsy. And I'm standing on the pavement outside the main entrance to the Metropol, finding my bearings in the night air, or at least trying to remember which way the nearest tube station is. I've just about figured it out when I realise that a second individual is hovering a couple of yards away from me. He, too, is standing quite still. But whereas I'm turning my head from side to side, considering the "this way might be quickest" and "this way is slightly longer but leads to savaloys and chips" option, this other man is… really still. So I have to admit, it's rather impressive. He's young, black, well-dressed (leather coat over a suit, which is a little obvious for my tastes, but so easy to pull off that you can tell he's thought this through), with a close-shaved head and dark glasses. He remains still as I notice him: so still, in fact, that it looks as if he's been superimposed onto the background. Admittedly, I've spent the day amongst nerds, but even so… even so, he looks as if he doesn't quite belong in this picture. In earlier times, I would've sworn that he'd been CSO'd onto London, a bit like a puppet dinosaur.
And I'm rather drunk.
'Excuse me,' I find myself saying to him. 'Are you real?'
He tilts his head towards me, puzzled, but doesn't speak a word. I find myself staring into the blackness of designer shades. At night? Who the Hell wears designer shades at night…?
Suddenly, it clicks. Or I think it does.
'Oh!' I say, rather too enthusiastically. 'Are you a bodyguard?' This would explain so much: very rich people stay in the upper reaches of this hotel, and his absolute calm gives him the air of a Beefeater gone "urban". I'm convinced that this is a reasonable explanation.
'No,' he tells me, flatly. 'I'm Jay-Z.'
Hmm. Instinctively, I find myself squinting, because that's what I do when I try to access my long-term memory (yeah, it's an affectation, because that's what we used to imagine future-androids doing when they were calculating things). Now, I gave up on pop music in 2001, and I've only skimmed its surface since: those who ever read the Top Forty Countdown will know that it was the work of someone who just saw bits rather than involving himself. All I remember of Jay-Z is a record that sampled the "Hard-Knock Life" song from Annie in the early 2000s, yet I've seen his name reported in so many "entertainment news bulletins" since then that I know he must be a big player these days. (Since this encounter, I've realised how big. Alan Yentob's documentary about him was broadcast a week later.) What can I say, though?
The answer is, as ever, to slip into hyper-English.
'Ahhh,' I tell him. 'You're that rap fellah I've been hearing about.' (N.B. Yes, I'm afraid I actually say "fellah".) 'Well… I'm afraid I don't know much about your kind of music. But I've heard good things. So… I hope you enjoy our country.' And I bow politely, like a German prince in a Technicolor adventure-movie about Old Ruritania.
Jay-Z is obviously not familiar with this genre, and remains puzzled-looking, although a slight furrowing of his brow suggests that he's wondering if some bizarre British custom requires him to bow back. I hurriedly turn around and huffle off, instinctively choosing the "savaloy and chips" route.
I'm halfway along the street, towards the corner around which pasties lie, when I hear an angry shout of 'HEY!' from behind me.
I turn. Storming towards me, alone but taking up the full width of the pavement, is a man with none of the still superiority of Mr Z. Also black, also with hewn follicles, but middle-aged and with the sense that he makes up for in width what he lacks in height. He pumps his muscular arms back and forth as he approaches my frozen mass. This doesn't look like a bodygaurd; it looks like the kind of person who might be a shady friend of a bodyguard, but who specialises in dumping things in the river. In concrete boots.
Actually, I'm wrong here. He's a member of the hotel's security staff, who wastes no time in charging up to me and informing me that the police will be called if I "harass" the hotel's clientele again. Under his suit, his muscles twitch in such a way as to suggest that "police" is a euphemism.
There are many things I could - maybe should - have said at this juncture. I could have pointed out that I'd been talking to complete strangers in his previous hotel all day; that I'd met a man in the lift who'd been so harried while coming down from the "posh" levels that I'd helped him to carry his luggage to his car in the basement; that I'd had a long and interesting conversation with two female patrons of the Metropol in the hotel bar, about the effect of cinema on 1930s European art; that on at least two occasions that day, I'd pointed guests to either the toilets or the lifts in a generally altruistic way. Alternatively, I could have questioned the idea that he might call the police to deal with someone who was walking away from the hotel and clearly going home. I could have asked whether all the hotel's guests - including, to an extent, myself - were protected by this over-zealous security service, or just the famous ones. And yet, confused by the last few minutes' worth of information, what I actually say to him is: 'Flaaah baah-baah fuff. Naaah… ruh bububububuh buhhh.'
The security guard informs me that this doesn't matter (implying that he understood what I was saying, which is more than I did). He repeats his warning. I let my mouth open and close for a while, then decide to go 'pwuuuuh' and turn away.
At the corner, the stupidity of all this finally dawns on me. I pause in mid-step. Did that just happen?
I look over my shoulder. I'm now some distance from the security guard, who's schlomping his way back to the hotel, presumably to tell Jay-Z how good he is at scaring off stalkers (especially if they're already moving in the right direction). Yet through either chance or paranoia, I turn around at exactly the moment that the guard looks over his shoulder. Seeing that I've stopped, he swivels on his foot, and begins following me up the road again. This time, he's swinging his arms in deliberate mimicry of a bipedal rhino, making it clear that he'll bloody thump me if I don't stop bothering the paving-stones where his celebrity charge happens to be.
I look down, and shake my head incredulously. Partly because this is how I actually feel, but mainly because I sense that he'll get less of a kick out of beating up a sad-looking intellectual.
Around the corner, once the guardian has left me alone, I find a shop that sells food. Not actually savaloys, but things that can be heated up in an on-site microwave, plus the Lucozade I'm going to need quite soon. The proprietor of the shop seems rather hip, in terms of modern pop-culture: I judge this from the fact that when I walk in, he's doing that friendly knuckle-knock with a local Hoodie.
After the Hoodie leaves, I take my foodstuffs to the counter. While the shopkeeper's entering them into the till, I say to him: 'You know that Jay-Z?'
'Oh, yeah,' he says.
'Is he actually… any good?'
He looks non-committal, even as he's running the Lucozade over the digi-gizmo that reads barcodes. 'Yeah,' he says, not quite sounding convinced. 'Yeah, he's okay. He's married to that Beyonce, isn't he?'
Is he? I didn't know that, but there's a special irony here. You may recall that I said I gave up on pop music in 2001, and one of the key reasons for this retreat was that the mode of the age turned out to be the hideous squawking noise made by Destiny's Child. The first time I heard "Single Ladies" (which, I've been informed, is the most 2009 thing made in 2009… this is why I'm insisting on living in the past), I was at the rear part of a department store, and I literally ran a hundred yards to the exit in order to get away from it. No, I'm not exaggerating. It's like having nanites build cheese-graters inside your inner ear.
I share this overall sentiment with the hip shopkeeper.
'Hah,' he says. 'Good job you didn't say that to Jay-Z. Then the security guy would've really done you over.'
Which, I suppose, is true.
I can at least find a certain satisfaction in the thought that I was the one who asked Jay-Z whether he was real; furthermore, I might claim bonus points for talking to the man as if I were Jon Pertwee. But on getting home that night, I rang my ex-girlfriend, thinking that this would be a grade-A ;pop-culture anecdote. It turned out that on this particular evening, she was in her flat with another of her ex-boyfriends (one with whom I went to college, although the Venn diagram is too complex to bother with here), and both of them seemed rather unimpressed. Why…? Because, as he wasted no time in informing me, the ex-boyfriend in question is going to be an extra in the remake of Clash of the Titans. I didn't even know there was going to be a remake of Clash of the Titans, but my rapper-irritating antics are surely less impressive than this. We nerds know our priorities.
So I'll just say this. I spent the next few days in a colossal sulk, not because of Jay-Z or because of the Clash of the Titans thing, but because I couldn't stop thinking of that poxy security guard. If you read this blog-site quite often, then you may remember how insulted I felt after I was given the brush-off by Ian Levine: again, not because I desperately wanted to know such a person, but because of a level of rudeness I find unconscionable. He simply refused to speak to me, apparently because he thought I wanted something from him, when in fact I was just going to say "we're completely mismatched, but hi". Likewise, the security guard shoved a spike through a certain delicate part of my dignity, not only because of the stupidest threat ever issued - "you're walking away, so I'm going to call you back and say that you should walk away or I'll call the police to make you walk away" - but because h genuinely thought I knew and cared who Jay-Z was. What, do I look like I've got too much testosterone and a barely-concealed misogynist streak…?
Plus, I've been singing "It's a Hard-Knock Life" ever since. But the hook is technically from a musical, so he can't claim any credit.
Yep, I was right all the time. People with power are hideous, but worse still are the people who hang around near people with power: once again, I remember Paul Cornell haranguing me because of the way my "followers" were behaving on the internet (this was before I even had access to the internet, you understand), and his sheer lack of comprehension when I told him that I didn't want to have any followers. We can all learn lessons here, not least because some of the silliest behaviour amongst Doctor Who tribes over the last twenty years has been a result of acting like an offensive security guard. Paul? This isn't a feudal state where you have to "bend the knee" to the most popular writers, so stop it. Moffat? You're not going to make any interesting TV by sucking up to a big gay producer or by supplying fangirls with things that might make them go squidgey for you, so stop it. Jon Blum? You're not going to get hired by the TV series by defending every single thing BBC Wales does, so stop it. No, really, stop it. You sound like an arse, and everybody's laughing at you behind your back. And me in 1999…? You're not going to get into telly by lying to people who write terrible fiction, so stop it. Oh, you did. Good. You don't have to positively insult them, mind you, but… no, whatever you like. All power is rubbish.
In Doctor Who, of course, all security guards are idiots (except for the one in "Dragonfire", who's deliberately ironic). Yet that doesn't stop us being more like them then the "nice" characters. Elsewhile, Jay-Z himself appeared at a 9/11 Memorial Concert less than a week after our encounter, during which he encouraged the crowd to 'make some noise' for the dead of the terrorist attacks. Jesus, what a twat! Now I wish I had harassed him.
I don't think you're ready for this jelly.
5th of September, 2009. I've just attended an event so geeky that I can barely bring myself to speak of it, but it's enough to say that very few women were in attendance, and that it was held in the basement of London's Hilton Metropol. The Hilton Metropol, as the name suggests, is one of the capital's chicest and most modern hotels-cum-conference-centres; the basement, as the name suggests, indicates that the management doesn't see Our Sort of Person as being a desirable customer. We can be there, if we pay. But we probably shouldn't hang around on the upper floors, in much the same way that Mutts shouldn't try to enter Skybases.
But it's eleven o'clock at night, and I'm on my way home, and I'm slightly tipsy. And I'm standing on the pavement outside the main entrance to the Metropol, finding my bearings in the night air, or at least trying to remember which way the nearest tube station is. I've just about figured it out when I realise that a second individual is hovering a couple of yards away from me. He, too, is standing quite still. But whereas I'm turning my head from side to side, considering the "this way might be quickest" and "this way is slightly longer but leads to savaloys and chips" option, this other man is… really still. So I have to admit, it's rather impressive. He's young, black, well-dressed (leather coat over a suit, which is a little obvious for my tastes, but so easy to pull off that you can tell he's thought this through), with a close-shaved head and dark glasses. He remains still as I notice him: so still, in fact, that it looks as if he's been superimposed onto the background. Admittedly, I've spent the day amongst nerds, but even so… even so, he looks as if he doesn't quite belong in this picture. In earlier times, I would've sworn that he'd been CSO'd onto London, a bit like a puppet dinosaur.
And I'm rather drunk.
'Excuse me,' I find myself saying to him. 'Are you real?'
He tilts his head towards me, puzzled, but doesn't speak a word. I find myself staring into the blackness of designer shades. At night? Who the Hell wears designer shades at night…?
Suddenly, it clicks. Or I think it does.
'Oh!' I say, rather too enthusiastically. 'Are you a bodyguard?' This would explain so much: very rich people stay in the upper reaches of this hotel, and his absolute calm gives him the air of a Beefeater gone "urban". I'm convinced that this is a reasonable explanation.
'No,' he tells me, flatly. 'I'm Jay-Z.'
Hmm. Instinctively, I find myself squinting, because that's what I do when I try to access my long-term memory (yeah, it's an affectation, because that's what we used to imagine future-androids doing when they were calculating things). Now, I gave up on pop music in 2001, and I've only skimmed its surface since: those who ever read the Top Forty Countdown will know that it was the work of someone who just saw bits rather than involving himself. All I remember of Jay-Z is a record that sampled the "Hard-Knock Life" song from Annie in the early 2000s, yet I've seen his name reported in so many "entertainment news bulletins" since then that I know he must be a big player these days. (Since this encounter, I've realised how big. Alan Yentob's documentary about him was broadcast a week later.) What can I say, though?
The answer is, as ever, to slip into hyper-English.
'Ahhh,' I tell him. 'You're that rap fellah I've been hearing about.' (N.B. Yes, I'm afraid I actually say "fellah".) 'Well… I'm afraid I don't know much about your kind of music. But I've heard good things. So… I hope you enjoy our country.' And I bow politely, like a German prince in a Technicolor adventure-movie about Old Ruritania.
Jay-Z is obviously not familiar with this genre, and remains puzzled-looking, although a slight furrowing of his brow suggests that he's wondering if some bizarre British custom requires him to bow back. I hurriedly turn around and huffle off, instinctively choosing the "savaloy and chips" route.
I'm halfway along the street, towards the corner around which pasties lie, when I hear an angry shout of 'HEY!' from behind me.
I turn. Storming towards me, alone but taking up the full width of the pavement, is a man with none of the still superiority of Mr Z. Also black, also with hewn follicles, but middle-aged and with the sense that he makes up for in width what he lacks in height. He pumps his muscular arms back and forth as he approaches my frozen mass. This doesn't look like a bodygaurd; it looks like the kind of person who might be a shady friend of a bodyguard, but who specialises in dumping things in the river. In concrete boots.
Actually, I'm wrong here. He's a member of the hotel's security staff, who wastes no time in charging up to me and informing me that the police will be called if I "harass" the hotel's clientele again. Under his suit, his muscles twitch in such a way as to suggest that "police" is a euphemism.
There are many things I could - maybe should - have said at this juncture. I could have pointed out that I'd been talking to complete strangers in his previous hotel all day; that I'd met a man in the lift who'd been so harried while coming down from the "posh" levels that I'd helped him to carry his luggage to his car in the basement; that I'd had a long and interesting conversation with two female patrons of the Metropol in the hotel bar, about the effect of cinema on 1930s European art; that on at least two occasions that day, I'd pointed guests to either the toilets or the lifts in a generally altruistic way. Alternatively, I could have questioned the idea that he might call the police to deal with someone who was walking away from the hotel and clearly going home. I could have asked whether all the hotel's guests - including, to an extent, myself - were protected by this over-zealous security service, or just the famous ones. And yet, confused by the last few minutes' worth of information, what I actually say to him is: 'Flaaah baah-baah fuff. Naaah… ruh bububububuh buhhh.'
The security guard informs me that this doesn't matter (implying that he understood what I was saying, which is more than I did). He repeats his warning. I let my mouth open and close for a while, then decide to go 'pwuuuuh' and turn away.
At the corner, the stupidity of all this finally dawns on me. I pause in mid-step. Did that just happen?
I look over my shoulder. I'm now some distance from the security guard, who's schlomping his way back to the hotel, presumably to tell Jay-Z how good he is at scaring off stalkers (especially if they're already moving in the right direction). Yet through either chance or paranoia, I turn around at exactly the moment that the guard looks over his shoulder. Seeing that I've stopped, he swivels on his foot, and begins following me up the road again. This time, he's swinging his arms in deliberate mimicry of a bipedal rhino, making it clear that he'll bloody thump me if I don't stop bothering the paving-stones where his celebrity charge happens to be.
I look down, and shake my head incredulously. Partly because this is how I actually feel, but mainly because I sense that he'll get less of a kick out of beating up a sad-looking intellectual.
Around the corner, once the guardian has left me alone, I find a shop that sells food. Not actually savaloys, but things that can be heated up in an on-site microwave, plus the Lucozade I'm going to need quite soon. The proprietor of the shop seems rather hip, in terms of modern pop-culture: I judge this from the fact that when I walk in, he's doing that friendly knuckle-knock with a local Hoodie.
After the Hoodie leaves, I take my foodstuffs to the counter. While the shopkeeper's entering them into the till, I say to him: 'You know that Jay-Z?'
'Oh, yeah,' he says.
'Is he actually… any good?'
He looks non-committal, even as he's running the Lucozade over the digi-gizmo that reads barcodes. 'Yeah,' he says, not quite sounding convinced. 'Yeah, he's okay. He's married to that Beyonce, isn't he?'
Is he? I didn't know that, but there's a special irony here. You may recall that I said I gave up on pop music in 2001, and one of the key reasons for this retreat was that the mode of the age turned out to be the hideous squawking noise made by Destiny's Child. The first time I heard "Single Ladies" (which, I've been informed, is the most 2009 thing made in 2009… this is why I'm insisting on living in the past), I was at the rear part of a department store, and I literally ran a hundred yards to the exit in order to get away from it. No, I'm not exaggerating. It's like having nanites build cheese-graters inside your inner ear.
I share this overall sentiment with the hip shopkeeper.
'Hah,' he says. 'Good job you didn't say that to Jay-Z. Then the security guy would've really done you over.'
Which, I suppose, is true.
I can at least find a certain satisfaction in the thought that I was the one who asked Jay-Z whether he was real; furthermore, I might claim bonus points for talking to the man as if I were Jon Pertwee. But on getting home that night, I rang my ex-girlfriend, thinking that this would be a grade-A ;pop-culture anecdote. It turned out that on this particular evening, she was in her flat with another of her ex-boyfriends (one with whom I went to college, although the Venn diagram is too complex to bother with here), and both of them seemed rather unimpressed. Why…? Because, as he wasted no time in informing me, the ex-boyfriend in question is going to be an extra in the remake of Clash of the Titans. I didn't even know there was going to be a remake of Clash of the Titans, but my rapper-irritating antics are surely less impressive than this. We nerds know our priorities.
So I'll just say this. I spent the next few days in a colossal sulk, not because of Jay-Z or because of the Clash of the Titans thing, but because I couldn't stop thinking of that poxy security guard. If you read this blog-site quite often, then you may remember how insulted I felt after I was given the brush-off by Ian Levine: again, not because I desperately wanted to know such a person, but because of a level of rudeness I find unconscionable. He simply refused to speak to me, apparently because he thought I wanted something from him, when in fact I was just going to say "we're completely mismatched, but hi". Likewise, the security guard shoved a spike through a certain delicate part of my dignity, not only because of the stupidest threat ever issued - "you're walking away, so I'm going to call you back and say that you should walk away or I'll call the police to make you walk away" - but because h genuinely thought I knew and cared who Jay-Z was. What, do I look like I've got too much testosterone and a barely-concealed misogynist streak…?
Plus, I've been singing "It's a Hard-Knock Life" ever since. But the hook is technically from a musical, so he can't claim any credit.
Yep, I was right all the time. People with power are hideous, but worse still are the people who hang around near people with power: once again, I remember Paul Cornell haranguing me because of the way my "followers" were behaving on the internet (this was before I even had access to the internet, you understand), and his sheer lack of comprehension when I told him that I didn't want to have any followers. We can all learn lessons here, not least because some of the silliest behaviour amongst Doctor Who tribes over the last twenty years has been a result of acting like an offensive security guard. Paul? This isn't a feudal state where you have to "bend the knee" to the most popular writers, so stop it. Moffat? You're not going to make any interesting TV by sucking up to a big gay producer or by supplying fangirls with things that might make them go squidgey for you, so stop it. Jon Blum? You're not going to get hired by the TV series by defending every single thing BBC Wales does, so stop it. No, really, stop it. You sound like an arse, and everybody's laughing at you behind your back. And me in 1999…? You're not going to get into telly by lying to people who write terrible fiction, so stop it. Oh, you did. Good. You don't have to positively insult them, mind you, but… no, whatever you like. All power is rubbish.
In Doctor Who, of course, all security guards are idiots (except for the one in "Dragonfire", who's deliberately ironic). Yet that doesn't stop us being more like them then the "nice" characters. Elsewhile, Jay-Z himself appeared at a 9/11 Memorial Concert less than a week after our encounter, during which he encouraged the crowd to 'make some noise' for the dead of the terrorist attacks. Jesus, what a twat! Now I wish I had harassed him.
The Noble Peace Prize
However harsh I may have been to Catherine Tate, it turns out that the real world is always a more incisive critic.
This is going to need an awful lot of explanation for anyone who's never been able to watch BBC3. It's going to need a fair amount of explanation even for people who do watch BBC3. To be honest, it's going to need - at the very least - a kind of apology for people who watched the specific programme on BBC3 that I'm going to talk about.
To explain, for those who live outside of the UK and for those who have better things to do. BBC3 may have an importance in our corner of the world for repeating Doctor Who non-stop and for screening Confidential, but it also has a reputation for wallowing in the kind of ugliness that's made Channel 4, Channel 5, and virtually every other Digibox channel above number 09 what it is today. BBC3's remit was to provide entertainment for the 18-35 demographic, which essentially means that it looks like the posh kid at college who doesn't really fit in anywhere, but who hangs around with the loudest, drunkest, most-likely-to-get-their-nads-out-for-a-laugh boys in the sixth-form. Its sitcoms are famous for having attractive young women talk about hand-jobs, and its "reality" programmes have titles like Help! My Dog is as Fat as Me and Bizarre ER. The latter of which involves Freema Agyeman explaining how surgeons have managed to remove the offending articles from men who've inserted DIY equipment into their recta. That's not a joke, by the way, that's an accurate description.
So it surprised everyone when, in early 2009, BBC3 served us with a series called Blood, Sweat and T-Shirts. The format in a nutshell: spoiled young Chavs from the UK, of the type whom one might expect to complain about an infringement of their civil liberties if their mobile 'phone connections go down for more than three minutes, are shipped off to sweat-shops in Africa or Asia and told to deal with it. Faced with the sight of eight-year-olds working in factories, or forced to join the inhumanly-run production lines of fast foods they took for granted in their natural enviro1nments, most of these teenage wastes of biomass broke down into tears. Typically, they gave a piece to camera at the end of the programme in which they blubbed that they'd never take Primark clothing for granted ever again. Then went back to their former lives.
Except, that is, for Stacey Dooley. By her own admission, Stacey Dooley was a self-absorbed shop-obsessed wastrel before the BBC got to her. But faced with the abomination of child labour in India, and a culture of abuse which doesn't just use the sprogs as factory-fuel but beats them half to death when they fail to perform, she went a step beyond "feeling, like, really bad about the life I live, y'know?". Seeing the real foundations of consumer society, some moral-cum-maternal switch flipped in her head. And Stacey Dooley became a crusader, damn it.
This is what she looks like, when forced into a group photo.
October saw BBC3 present us with Stacy Dooley Investigates, a series (oh, all right… two programmes) in which Ms Dooley went to the countries which provide us with Our Stuff and questioned how the Stuff in question gets to us. A cynic would say that these investigations did very little good, and that's true: rescuing a few indentured kids in Asia, then setting up a school in Africa in order to get children away from the distressingly dangerous work of cocoa-farming (after raising the funds herself, we might add), is less than a drop in the ocean of global exploitation. But nobody with a conscience who actually watched these programmes could argue that she at least did some good, nor that… well, this almost sounds silly in an era when media-monsters like Bono believe they're morally superior just because they click their fingers on national TV, but… she clearly, blatantly cared. Any telly-trained celebrity, faced with a scenario in which children accidentally remove their own limbs with machetes on a daily basis, would shake their head sadly and use the proximity of suffering foreign infants to boost their credibility. Yet watching Ms Dooley go about her work, attempting to dodge the various bodyguard-censors provided by the Ivory Coast government while trying to learn the native tongues, there wasn't even a single moment when you could believe she was doing it for PR reasons. Indeed, she made no attempt to capitalise on these mini-moral exercises, and has utterly failed to try to forge a career as a TV presenter.
She cried when she was genuinely happy, she cried when she was genuinely sad. She borrowed money from the camera crew in order to lay the foundations for the school, and visibly panicked when she suspected that her charity events back in Britain weren't going to cover the damage. She spoke in the tainted working-class English that middle-class English people (like myself) associate with Hoodies who want to stab you, then tried to make chocolate exporters feel ashamed of themselves. When she contracted Malaria in West Africa, she headed back into the danger-zone mere days after recovering, sneaking into the parts of the cocoa-farming belt that neither the regional government nor Cadbury's would like you to see. In short, she made most of us do-gooders feel rather silly and inadequate.
You'll probably gather that I really do like the woman, even if she is dead common and can't speak proper. And I do, but there's a specific point here that makes her a subject for this particular blog-site at this particular time. Consider what I've just told you. Here we have an energetic working-class redhead who's been happy in a fairly dead-end, no-mark job (selling crap trinkets at Luton Airport, as it happens), yet who suddenly becomes a moral dynamo when exposed to the sheer screaming injustice of the rest of the world. This is the best blueprint for a modern-day TARDIS companion you could ever hope for. We know that, because Russell T. Davies tried to do it, and got it tragically wrong.
All right, let's just come out and say it: Stacey Dooley is Donna Noble, but from a parallel world - our world - in which Donna Noble is likeable, convincing, and genuinely driven, rather than a flesh-puppet pushed around by writers who have no empathy with the character and played by an actress whose idea of becoming a contemporary office-girl is to speak with a comedy voice that Dick Van Dyke might have balked at. I hate to be the class-warrior here (my former associate Tat Wood has attacked me for this on many occasions, not least because he grew up in struggling New Towns and thinks I was raised in a magical Surrey garden full of ponies), but this much is inescapable: Donna Noble is the result of mediacentric TV folk saying "ooh, look, commoners can be decent folk too" even though they haven't really met anyone like that for years. Just look at the Shadow Proclamation scene in "The Stolen Earth", in which Donna has to storm forward and remind everyone that she's a person, and the Doctor has to point out how brilliant she is. Can you imagine this happening if she'd spoken RP Romana-English and been university educated…? No: this isn't really about the Doctor saying "I'm a Time Lord, but this human is just as important as me", it's about an Oxbridge Mockney saying "I know I'm right, but just remember that these working-class types have to be treated decently too". See also the hideous "we know we're not important, but…" scene in "Father's Day".
Yet in a single hour-long documentary, Stacey Dooley does everything that Catherine Tate's "character" is supposed to do, and more. You actually like her, rather than treating her as convenient comic relief. You can actually believe in her wish to stop people suffering, rather than waiting for her to drop her jaw and start an unconvincing rant against interplanetary slave-traders. Had she been in that Shadow Proclamation scene, she would've barged her way to the front and demanded action, without giving the Doctor any time for idiotic apologies.
And you know the really, really, really, really ironic thing? When the Doctor - as I've said at least twice before - asks the question 'who makes your clothes?' in "Planet of the Ood", thus requiring Donna to face up to the hypocrisy and exploitation in her own era, the writer makes sure that Donna shoots him down in flames. Well, of course: if the question were left hanging, let alone answered properly, then our consumer audience might actually feel uncomfortable. It's the biggest single cop-out in the programme's history, and yes, that includes the one at the end of "The Daemons". But Stacey Dooley became one of the most decent, believable, passionate individuals on modern television by asking that question, not by ducking it. Her consciousness opened up to the could-do-better truth of the human world after seeing things that Doctor Who would rather avoid, not by helping a space-time traveller defeat a crap spider-woman. In Donna Noble, Big Russell and friends wanted to defy high-falootin' fan-expectation by showing that a Chav-girl could be heroic, yet their "comedy" approximation is less heroic than the genuine article. Even if Ms Dooley has a voice that some of us might use to strip wallpaper, she still claims the moral high-ground.
Public figure of the year, ladies and gentlemen. Yes, she only did a tiny, tiny thing for a tiny, tiny number of people, yet she was motivated by the best of intentions. Intentions far more noble than Noble's, and far greater than yours, or mine, or Big Russell's, or Moffat's. She just wanted to give some kids a big hug. She wins.
This is going to need an awful lot of explanation for anyone who's never been able to watch BBC3. It's going to need a fair amount of explanation even for people who do watch BBC3. To be honest, it's going to need - at the very least - a kind of apology for people who watched the specific programme on BBC3 that I'm going to talk about.
To explain, for those who live outside of the UK and for those who have better things to do. BBC3 may have an importance in our corner of the world for repeating Doctor Who non-stop and for screening Confidential, but it also has a reputation for wallowing in the kind of ugliness that's made Channel 4, Channel 5, and virtually every other Digibox channel above number 09 what it is today. BBC3's remit was to provide entertainment for the 18-35 demographic, which essentially means that it looks like the posh kid at college who doesn't really fit in anywhere, but who hangs around with the loudest, drunkest, most-likely-to-get-their-nads-out-for-a-laugh boys in the sixth-form. Its sitcoms are famous for having attractive young women talk about hand-jobs, and its "reality" programmes have titles like Help! My Dog is as Fat as Me and Bizarre ER. The latter of which involves Freema Agyeman explaining how surgeons have managed to remove the offending articles from men who've inserted DIY equipment into their recta. That's not a joke, by the way, that's an accurate description.
So it surprised everyone when, in early 2009, BBC3 served us with a series called Blood, Sweat and T-Shirts. The format in a nutshell: spoiled young Chavs from the UK, of the type whom one might expect to complain about an infringement of their civil liberties if their mobile 'phone connections go down for more than three minutes, are shipped off to sweat-shops in Africa or Asia and told to deal with it. Faced with the sight of eight-year-olds working in factories, or forced to join the inhumanly-run production lines of fast foods they took for granted in their natural enviro1nments, most of these teenage wastes of biomass broke down into tears. Typically, they gave a piece to camera at the end of the programme in which they blubbed that they'd never take Primark clothing for granted ever again. Then went back to their former lives.
Except, that is, for Stacey Dooley. By her own admission, Stacey Dooley was a self-absorbed shop-obsessed wastrel before the BBC got to her. But faced with the abomination of child labour in India, and a culture of abuse which doesn't just use the sprogs as factory-fuel but beats them half to death when they fail to perform, she went a step beyond "feeling, like, really bad about the life I live, y'know?". Seeing the real foundations of consumer society, some moral-cum-maternal switch flipped in her head. And Stacey Dooley became a crusader, damn it.
This is what she looks like, when forced into a group photo.
October saw BBC3 present us with Stacy Dooley Investigates, a series (oh, all right… two programmes) in which Ms Dooley went to the countries which provide us with Our Stuff and questioned how the Stuff in question gets to us. A cynic would say that these investigations did very little good, and that's true: rescuing a few indentured kids in Asia, then setting up a school in Africa in order to get children away from the distressingly dangerous work of cocoa-farming (after raising the funds herself, we might add), is less than a drop in the ocean of global exploitation. But nobody with a conscience who actually watched these programmes could argue that she at least did some good, nor that… well, this almost sounds silly in an era when media-monsters like Bono believe they're morally superior just because they click their fingers on national TV, but… she clearly, blatantly cared. Any telly-trained celebrity, faced with a scenario in which children accidentally remove their own limbs with machetes on a daily basis, would shake their head sadly and use the proximity of suffering foreign infants to boost their credibility. Yet watching Ms Dooley go about her work, attempting to dodge the various bodyguard-censors provided by the Ivory Coast government while trying to learn the native tongues, there wasn't even a single moment when you could believe she was doing it for PR reasons. Indeed, she made no attempt to capitalise on these mini-moral exercises, and has utterly failed to try to forge a career as a TV presenter.
She cried when she was genuinely happy, she cried when she was genuinely sad. She borrowed money from the camera crew in order to lay the foundations for the school, and visibly panicked when she suspected that her charity events back in Britain weren't going to cover the damage. She spoke in the tainted working-class English that middle-class English people (like myself) associate with Hoodies who want to stab you, then tried to make chocolate exporters feel ashamed of themselves. When she contracted Malaria in West Africa, she headed back into the danger-zone mere days after recovering, sneaking into the parts of the cocoa-farming belt that neither the regional government nor Cadbury's would like you to see. In short, she made most of us do-gooders feel rather silly and inadequate.
You'll probably gather that I really do like the woman, even if she is dead common and can't speak proper. And I do, but there's a specific point here that makes her a subject for this particular blog-site at this particular time. Consider what I've just told you. Here we have an energetic working-class redhead who's been happy in a fairly dead-end, no-mark job (selling crap trinkets at Luton Airport, as it happens), yet who suddenly becomes a moral dynamo when exposed to the sheer screaming injustice of the rest of the world. This is the best blueprint for a modern-day TARDIS companion you could ever hope for. We know that, because Russell T. Davies tried to do it, and got it tragically wrong.
All right, let's just come out and say it: Stacey Dooley is Donna Noble, but from a parallel world - our world - in which Donna Noble is likeable, convincing, and genuinely driven, rather than a flesh-puppet pushed around by writers who have no empathy with the character and played by an actress whose idea of becoming a contemporary office-girl is to speak with a comedy voice that Dick Van Dyke might have balked at. I hate to be the class-warrior here (my former associate Tat Wood has attacked me for this on many occasions, not least because he grew up in struggling New Towns and thinks I was raised in a magical Surrey garden full of ponies), but this much is inescapable: Donna Noble is the result of mediacentric TV folk saying "ooh, look, commoners can be decent folk too" even though they haven't really met anyone like that for years. Just look at the Shadow Proclamation scene in "The Stolen Earth", in which Donna has to storm forward and remind everyone that she's a person, and the Doctor has to point out how brilliant she is. Can you imagine this happening if she'd spoken RP Romana-English and been university educated…? No: this isn't really about the Doctor saying "I'm a Time Lord, but this human is just as important as me", it's about an Oxbridge Mockney saying "I know I'm right, but just remember that these working-class types have to be treated decently too". See also the hideous "we know we're not important, but…" scene in "Father's Day".
Yet in a single hour-long documentary, Stacey Dooley does everything that Catherine Tate's "character" is supposed to do, and more. You actually like her, rather than treating her as convenient comic relief. You can actually believe in her wish to stop people suffering, rather than waiting for her to drop her jaw and start an unconvincing rant against interplanetary slave-traders. Had she been in that Shadow Proclamation scene, she would've barged her way to the front and demanded action, without giving the Doctor any time for idiotic apologies.
And you know the really, really, really, really ironic thing? When the Doctor - as I've said at least twice before - asks the question 'who makes your clothes?' in "Planet of the Ood", thus requiring Donna to face up to the hypocrisy and exploitation in her own era, the writer makes sure that Donna shoots him down in flames. Well, of course: if the question were left hanging, let alone answered properly, then our consumer audience might actually feel uncomfortable. It's the biggest single cop-out in the programme's history, and yes, that includes the one at the end of "The Daemons". But Stacey Dooley became one of the most decent, believable, passionate individuals on modern television by asking that question, not by ducking it. Her consciousness opened up to the could-do-better truth of the human world after seeing things that Doctor Who would rather avoid, not by helping a space-time traveller defeat a crap spider-woman. In Donna Noble, Big Russell and friends wanted to defy high-falootin' fan-expectation by showing that a Chav-girl could be heroic, yet their "comedy" approximation is less heroic than the genuine article. Even if Ms Dooley has a voice that some of us might use to strip wallpaper, she still claims the moral high-ground.
Public figure of the year, ladies and gentlemen. Yes, she only did a tiny, tiny thing for a tiny, tiny number of people, yet she was motivated by the best of intentions. Intentions far more noble than Noble's, and far greater than yours, or mine, or Big Russell's, or Moffat's. She just wanted to give some kids a big hug. She wins.
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Captain Jack's Guts
In which Lawrence Miles responds to the letters about Torchwood: Children of Earth in last week's Radio Times, and uses their entrails to divine the past and future of Doctor Who.
Let's begin with the RT's letter of the week (which, as we all know, wins a charming BBC-endorsed digital radio with 1950s moulding).
_________________________________________________________
Dear Radio Times,
I've been a Torchwood fan from the start...
_________________________________________________________
Then your opinion can be of no intellectual value. Next!
_________________________________________________________
…how can a drama be gripping for a week, then throw it all away? It was heartbreaking to see a good premise and fine acting wasted on an "in one bound they were free" solution.
_________________________________________________________
Dear God, man, where have you been for the last four years? Anyone would think you'd never seen a drama by Russell T. Davies before. Were you not paying attention when the last-ever Dalek army was disintegrated by Billie Piper's time-space orgasm (arguably what the conclusion of "The Parting of the Ways" was really all about, if you interpret the whole of Season One as an unrequited love affair… call it "The Fire in the Girly-Place", if you will)? Or when the other last-ever Dalek army was sucked out of the universe by background radiation from a place where nothing exists, not even radiation? Or when the other other last-ever Dalek army was defeated by Catherine Tate fiddling about with some wires? And that's without even mentioning the climax of "Last of the Time Lords", in which the Doctor rewinds time by flying around the planet very very fast, or something.
As we should all have gathered by now, Russell T. isn't primarily a science-fiction writer, at least not in the most pedantic sense. SF is hung up on the details of how the machinery works, but he only cares about the people. Therefore, it's reasonable to hit the reset button as long as there's a human cost, whether it's the death of the Best Ever Doctor or an almost Biblical child-murder. Which brings us to the real nub of things…
_________________________________________________________
I seriously wonder whether the harrowing ending, in which a child died horribly, should have been broadcast. For the first time ever I was reduced to tears watching a TV programme.
_________________________________________________________
Whooooah Nellie. Let's pause to consider what this correspondent is actually saying. He's complaining that a drama programme - and, furthermore, a tragedy - actually provoked an emotional reaction. I'm sure you can see the oddity. Isn't a few minutes' blubbing just a sign that the programme worked…?
Let's not be in any doubt, the controversy about the child-exploding finale (if there really was any controversy) had nothing to do with "violence on television": the slaughter of Jack's firstborn grandson was too far from any real-world agony to leave a bad taste in the mouth, and a long way from graphic, unless you seriously believe that nosebleeds shouldn't be shown on TV. But modern drama, or pretend-drama, is about making the audience feel comfortable rather than affected. This has always been true of the commercial channels, yet now even the BBC's mandate is to provide the viewer with "cosy" rather than "challenging". It's a truth of modern television that despite the liberalisation which has allowed men to kiss each other in prime-time and characters from The Wire to mumble "fuck" every twelve seconds for absolutely no reason, the cod-drama programmes made circa 2009 are far more limited / limiting in their content than those of the 1970s. You know the bit in I, Claudius where Caligula does that thing with his sister? Yeah, you know. That thing. Could that be shown - or, rather, suggested - on BBC TV today? Almost certainly not. It isn't comfortable viewing. And for a Corporation that's increasingly made to feel aware of both the ratings and government (dis)approval, an uncomfortable audience makes an uncomfortable drama department. Ergo, programmes are designed to engender a sense of warming numbness, like a plate of chips at the end of a cold day. To the point where viewers actually start complaining when they feel something.
I've occasionally noted my approval of Waking the Dead on this blog-page, particularly those episodes written by Declan Croghan, whose ability to bring a kind of nightmarish magic-realism to a standard prime-time format should surely put him on any producer's list of Writers to Try Out on Doctor Who (consider the episode "Wren Boys", which is a bit like CSI in the style of The Wicker Man, and features the fit one from "Blink" as an additional bonus). The reason is that Waking the Dead is one of the few dramas still prepared to take the viewer out of his or her coddling-space. As I've mentioned before, the episode "In the Sight of the Lord" involves a murder case that stretches all the way back to the 1940s, and attacks our sentimentalised version of the Great British War Years by focusing on the atrocities carried out by English soldiers in the field. We're told, for example, about a group of squaddies cutting the genitals off a German soldier and forcing him to put them in his mouth. The repugnant Chibnall-era version of Torchwood often brought this to mind, and not just because of the sensation of gagging on bollocks. Torchwood tried to sell itself as a "grown-up" sci-fi show, and yet despite a superficially similar format to Waking the Dead (just try imagining Trevor Eve as Captain Jack…), it never would've dared risk audience disapproval in this way. The supposed point of science fiction is that it's meant to go further than conventional drama, but Mark One Torchwood never had the - excuse me - balls to even go as far as a mainstream detective programme on BBC1.
Hardly surprising: after all, Torchwood was deliberately contrived as a "Cult TV" series, not a drama series. This is why a guest appearance by James Marsters was thought to be more important than consistent characterisation, and why horribly misjudged story-arcs were thought to be more important than the actual stories. The gulf between Cult TV and Proper Drama is a vast one, and it's worth remembering this now that the Radio Times has given us our first official preview of Doctor Who 2010. I've already suggested that Moffat's role in the casting of Matt Smith was a colossal act of cowardice, a way of keeping the audience on his side by giving them Tennant Junior rather than anyone more controversial / unexpected / interesting. Likewise, the decision to dress him up in what the RT rather desperately calls "geography teacher chic" smacks of the same play-it-safe, Doctor-by-numbers strategy that brought us the TV movie, in which the Doctor's "character" was defined purely by stuffing a pretty-faced English actor into an Edwardian jacket. But more worrying is the reappearance of Professor River Song, the most cynically-engineered love-interest since… well, since Moffat's last one, to be honest. It's worrying because she's been foisted on the viewer as a Major Character in exactly the same way that Lwaxana Troi was foisted on Star Trek fans, or that Joxer was foisted on viewers of Xena: Warrior Princess for more than a year after he stopped being funny. See also the entire last season of Buffy.
This is a sure sign of Cult TV, and it's something that Russell T. Davies largely avoided, at least until the interdimensional wank-fest of "The Stolen Earth". One of the reasons Doctor Who went off the rails in the mid-'80s was that John Nathan-Turner stopped making a television programme per se, and started making a continuity-package to satisfy the kind of people he met at conventions (this way lies madness and "Attack of the Cybermen"). Why did he do this…? Because he just wanted to be liked. And Moffat, as we’ve already learned, desires nothing more or less than to be adored by his audience. Alienating them is simply beyond him. Especially if they're redheads.
And as if to underline this question of "comfort", the next letter reads…
_________________________________________________________
…I was shocked, even betrayed. Russell T. Davies transformed our hero Jack into a monster… I wonder how a writer can do this to a character both adults and children adore.
_________________________________________________________
We'll skip over the weapons-grade-obvious point that Jack has always been a dodgy geezer, not only because of his criminal tendencies in "The Empty Child", but because he was introduced to us as someone who can casually treat a mass-death like the eruption of Pompeii as a business opportunity. The bigger point here is that a large section of the audience, the section which Doctor Who is now so concerned about offending, wants to be able to see its central characters as definite hero-figures. Even though we know there's nothing more tedious.
At this point, let's side-step into the old faux-moral debate about the conclusion of "Remembrance of the Daleks". It's been argued - for example, by my Magic Bullet employer Alan Stevens, in those rare moments when he's not 'phoning people up and engaging them in two-hour conversations about Blake's 7 - that the Doctor's cheerful blowing-up of Skaro is a moral aberration which contradicts the ethical grounding of most of the rest of the series. The trouble is that this Doctor = Absolute Decency argument only holds water if you seriously believe the drivel that Gerry Davis puts into the leading man's mouth during "The Moonbase", which portrays the Doctor as a well-disguised superhero who believes that evil communists 'must be fought'. (All right, he's technically talking about Cybermen at the time. But Davis saw Doctor Who as an internationally-exportable adventure series, little more than a spy show with SF elements, so the monsters on his watch become indistinguishable from commie thugs in The Man from UNCLE or The Champions.) Davis widdled all over the heterodox, xenophiliac version of the Doctor promoted by Lambert, Wiles, Tosh, et al, i.e. the interesting version. In the script of "Remembrance", Ben Aaronovitch goes out of his way to establish that Skaro is the Daleks' 'ancestral seat', so its destruction is meant to be like blowing up the Fuhrerbunker rather than dropping the A-Bomb on Japan. But even if that weren't true, even if the Doctor is crossing a terrible moral line, it still wouldn't bother me much. Why? Because I don't necessarily want the central character's values to be the same as my own.
Indeed, one of the most alarming things about the Tennant era is the way the voice of the Doctor has become the voice of the liberal-minded early-twenty-first-century viewer. The ideals he represents are the ideals of those in the audience who believe themselves to be generally "good" human beings, on the grounds that they occasionally recycle and don't use the n-word. This explains his ludicrous, self-contradictory arguments against the American death-nerd in "The Sontaran Stratagem" (which leave us with the impression that it's nice to care about the environment, as long as you don't seriously do anything about it), and why "Planet of the Ood" sees him apologise to Donna for taking 'cheap shots' when he asks her the only sensible question in Season Four (because slavery is wrong, but it's apparently even more wrong to make the viewers feel anxious by pointing out that they're supporting child labour whenever they shop at Primark). If, like me, you feel that the prime mover in Doctor Who isn't good-versus-evil but the ability to see things from an alien point of view - a theme that's been there ever since the beginning, even before "The Sensorites" set the pattern for humans-meet-alien-culture stories - then it's surely quite right that the leading man shouldn't have exactly the same moral stance as ourselves. Actually, he should probably be going out of his way to challenge it. So what went wrong?
Once again, what went wrong is the desperate urge to keep the audience squirm-free. Beyond the confines of Doctor Who, this has led to a culture of drama in which all goodies are good as we see it, while all baddies oppose the basic freedom to choose the colour of your iPod. By default, protagonists now have "issues" which might occasionally make them behave in out-of-character ways, but we're never in doubt that they share our world-view. They can never be racist, sexist, or homophobic (that's the baddies' job), yet nor should they ever rock the boat. They should never make us doubt ourselves or our consumer society, because even if it isn't perfect - hey! - at least we're living in a democracy, right? Right…? Inevitably, this turns every drama series into a sequence of contrived confrontations between insipid non-characters, and Cult TV programmes are more prone to this tendency than any genre other than cop shows. Fans of Heroes-generation sci-fi honestly believe it's revelatory when a baddie turns out to have "layers", but in fact, it's what Proper Drama is meant to do all the time. Again, we go back to I, Claudius for the perfect test-case. The Emperor Tiberius, supposedly a sadistic pervert who might best be described as "syphilis with a face", reacts in different ways to different characters: at no point does he only have "villain" traits, and from his very first scene, the monster on the throne has characteristics ranging from an honest and touching love for his brother to periods of what we'd now call paranoid depression. Almost nobody writes characters this way any more. Today's audience has been brought up to believe in its own moral supremacy, and thus prefers things to be rather more absolute. Just look at the atrocity of Rome.
A personal sidelight here. If you're one of the 4,000-odd people who kept buying the BBC's Eighth Doctor novels after their sell-by date, then you may recall that I once invented a semi-antagonist called Sabbath, for a book called The Adventuress of Henrietta Street. The editor of the range was keen on using him as a recurring character, and asked me to write up a detailed description, which I did. Now, the idea here was to present Sabbath as the Doctor's (morally dubious) replacement in a hostile new universe, or at least in a hostile new form of history. Gallifrey had been destroyed; the laws of time were in flux; and the Doctor's powers were distinctly limited, not least by a period of amnesia. As a result, Sabbath was a figure who knew more about the universe than the Doctor did. This was his environment, while the Doctor was rooted in a version of history that no longer existed. Which, as I saw it, meant that the overwhelming smugness of some of the weakest Doctor Who stories would be removed from the formula. The central character would no longer have all the answers. He wouldn't be able to pull solutions out of a magic pocket. He'd have to learn from experience, and figure out each new situation from scratch, just like Sydney Newman intended. In short, he'd be able to make mistakes.
What actually happened was the other writers turned out a series of novels in which stupid, arrogant, evil Mr Sabbath would perform some reckless experiment which imperilled the entire universe, so that the good, noble, and all-wise Doctor would have an opportunity to set things right again. This reached its nadir when Lloyd Rose stated that she couldn't see any difference between Sabbath and the Master, as if I'd written a three-page document describing an out-and-out villain who wanted to take over the galaxy and finished every sentence with "nyah-hah-hah". (In her novel Camera Obscura, AKA The Twelve-Year-Old Anne Rice Fan's Guide to Victorian Clichés, she underlines this by having the Doctor put a whoopee cushion on Sabbath's Throne of Evil. It's meant to demonstrate how silly and pathetic anyone who dares to argue with the Doctor must be, because apparently, villains don't have a sense of humour. Here I'd just like to point out that the first thing Sabbath ever says to the Doctor in The Adventuress of Henrietta Street is a joke, and an anachronistic one to boot.)
Why, then, did this happen? How did a character whose whole function was to give the Doctor some real competition end up being used as a Hooded Claw substitute? The answer seems to be that we've come to fetishise the very notion of the Doctor, to the point where we believe he's simply incapable of doing anything wrong. The nature of Cult TV makes him "our hero" in ways that extend far beyond the narrative. We feel uneasy if he goes astray, either morally or intellectually, and now we're beginning to feel the same way about Doctor-surrogates like Captain Jack. Of course, the fact that we feel uneasy probably indicates that it's good storytelling, yet we've been too swaddled in FilmLook slickness to accept this. On top of which… oh, dare I really say it? I think I have to. Unquestionably, this fetishisation is doubled if the Doctor's cute. No fangirl would be bothered by the thought of William Hartnell, or even troll-faced Chris Eccleston, committing space-age genocide. This sort of behaviour is harder to accept from Paul McGann or David Tennant, whose boyish good looks™ have been thoroughly mined for romance, firstly by the Yanks who factory-assembled the TV movie and more lately by a sneery-faced Scots cynic. Mentioning no names. It comes as no surprise to find that the "you bastards, you've made Jack evil!" letter in the Radio Times was written by a woman, just as it comes as no surprise to find that the "I'm furious because the machinery they used to kill the 456 doesn't make sense!" letter came from a man.
Yet the most curious thing is that as Doctor Who heads further and further into the stagnancy of Cult TV, Torchwood has suddenly veered in the opposite direction. "Children of Earth" is, against all expectations, a work of Proper Drama. Nobody here scores points for being 100% Goodie, and the only 100% Baddie seems to be the Prime Minister. Even the 456, who exist solely to make us poo ourselves, have enough depth to point out the humans' hypocrisy. Bucking the trend of all the other programmes that look, sound, and market themselves like it, characters with whom we sympathise do things we don't necessarily like, not in order to make a big song-and-dance about major issues (yeah, you're right, I'm thinking of Battlestar Galactica again) but just because that's who they are. The most obvious example isn't Captain Jack's kiddie-killing, it's the fact that Clem - a man who's pure victim to the core, pitiable-yet-quite-frightening in exactly the way that mentally-damaged people really are - treats Ianto with disgust while calling him 'queer'.
In any other show, that alone would be enough to mark him out as a baddie, like the bigot-thugs who occupy most corners of the CSI world. Here, it's simply treated as the kind of thing you'd expect from someone who's been messed up since the 1960s. The Doctor Who universe has always had leftist intentions (Gerry Davis notwithstanding), but there's a difference between "left-wing" and "liberal". To be a liberal means to believe that tolerance is good and global warming is bad, but also to believe that you can save the world simply by not using the word "poof". S/he may have good intentions, but doesn't seem to appreciate that all the things s/he considers to be civilised - democracy, universal suffrage, the right to exist without having the shit kicked out of you for having long hair or skin that's a bit on the dark side - were achieved through the effort of rather more pro-active people, who fought and occasionally died in order to create a less appalling version of humanity. To be a liberal means to shield yourself from the full horror of your society, to have a veneer of civic responsibility while still approving of a system that's wholly founded on exploitation. Tennant-era Doctor Who is liberal. Most of the New Adventures are very, very liberal indeed, hilariously so in some cases. Whereas "Children of Earth", in facing up to our hypocrisies and refusing to make things simple, actually seems… leftist. Who saw that coming?
[A footnote, before you ask: it's true, much of the previous paragraph was informed by various encounters with Doctor Who authors over the years. Most particularly, an argument with Paul Cornell - Grand Poobah of Liberals and unapologetic Blairite, who genuinely believes that everything in the world will be all right as long as you don't vote Conservative - in which he derided me for being 'like one of those '60s idealists'. Hmmm. Does he mean, like one of those '60s idealists whose determination to change Western values created the kind of lifestyle that Paul and his friends now enjoy…? No, he probably didn't intend it to be a compliment. Oh, and I chose "poof" as a Word You Mustn't Say after a conversation with Moffat in which I jokingly exclaimed 'are you calling me a poof?' when he challenged my masculinity, 'are you calling me a poof?' being the catchphrase of the boorish he-men whom anyone of my age will remember from the '70s. Moffat responded by looking nervously around the pub and informing me under his breath that I shouldn't say that out loud. I'm amused by several things here: (a) the thought that Moffat believed I needed his wisdom and experience in social situations, (b) the thought that any gay fanboy at the Tavern might seriously be offended by the retro use of the p-word, (c) the thought that I was being criticised for using it by the world's most heterosexual man when I've at least enjoyed the occasional gay flirtation, and (d) the thought that Moffat was terrified of offending Doctor Who fans even then. I really, really digress.]
Of course, the aliens are still basically evil, because no series can be xenophiliac all the time. Especially not when there's the potential for great big monsters. The notion of a morally-questioning, see-the-other-man's-POV universe may run all the way from "An Unearthly Child" to the superfly guys in "Planet of the Dead", yet a programme in which the outsiders are always potentially-friendly would be dull. Morally uplifting, but dull. Fortunately, most Doctor Who writers through the ages have managed to use horrible alien menaces without suggesting that anything foreign wants to hurt us by default, the pro-Vietnam hectoring of "The Dominators" being a nauseating exception. The problem comes not when the aliens start invading, but when the scripts are written by people who think it's a good idea to present us with a universe which is intrinsically hostile and in which EVERYTHING UNFAMILIAR WANTS TO EAT US. As I've had to explain over and over again, my tragic rant about "The Unquiet Dead" wasn't driven by a disgust of actual racism (although I still hold that it was chronically misjudged in the run-up to the Asylum Seeker Election of 2005), but because the episode betrayed the entire ethos of Doctor Who. The Doctor comes up with the most brilliantly in-your-face, air-punchingly great salvation plan in the programme's history. "Yeah, let the aliens have the corpses… you got a problem with that?" But then… hahahahahah, fooled you, they're aliens and therefore just want to kill everybody.
So it's apt that another "Children of Earth" missive to the RT reads…
_________________________________________________________
It was entertaining and thrilling: like experiencing The Quatermass Experiment or the BBC production of 1984 for the first time.
_________________________________________________________
…since both of those programmes were, as you know, written by stodgy old conservative Nigel Kneale. If you haven't already seen it, then I wrote an entire article about Kneale's influence on the modern SF generation (see "SF Iconoclasty 101", some way down this page), but the key point is this: however revolutionary The Quatermass Experiment may have seemed in 1953, Kneale himself was a grumpy misanthropic sod who distrusted anything that wasn't middle-aged and middle class, which is why his scripts depict hippies as murderous death-cultists and seem to believe that rock music heralds the end of human civilisation. To Kneale, anything new or unfamiliar was a threat, and he expressed this intolerance with a variety of over-the-top SF metaphors. And as anyone who watches BBC4 documentaries will know, Mark Gatiss idolises him. The grand irony is that Gatiss believes his work to be "traditional" Doctor Who, yet when Doctor Who began overtly copying the Quatermass set-up during the Pertwee years, its writers specifically went out of their way to reverse Kneale's vision and create a universe in which the alien isn't automatically evil. Again, look at "The Silurians". Or look at "The Ambassadors of Death", in which Knealish paranoia is what causes all the trouble. Gatiss seriously believes Quatermass and Doctor Who to come from the same tradition, even though they're ethical and philosophical opposites. The Wire in "The Idiot's Lantern" is a typical Gatiss villain, i.e. a big hungry alien force that has no purpose other than to eat people. Malcolm Hulke isn't exactly spinning in his grave, but he would find it unbearably childish.
Actually, now I come to think of it, there's an even grander irony: Nigel Kneale himself described Doctor Who as 'a stupid idea for a programme'. M'lud, the prosecution rests.
In effect, then, the 456 are the Wire done properly. Because this isn't really about a threat from the unknown, it's about us, and about the way we react to it. Fear of the alien is at least as horrifying as the alien, something that Gatiss has never quite grasped: once again, we should remember that this is a man who established the evilness of the villain in St Antony's Fire by having the character stab a kitten through the throat, just for a laugh. So he's clearly not one for the subtleties of human psychology. Like all good monsters, the 456's inhumanity makes us inhuman ourselves, which is what Nigel Kneale nearly realised when he wrote Quatermass and the Pit (although his questionable view of world events rather brought it down). So is it ironic or appropriate that "Children of Earth" should resurrect the Quatermass format, and shun the Cult TV model of Torchwood's first two hideous years? Either way, it's hard to believe that BBC Wales would have risked it if American television hadn't rediscovered the joy of the epic serial, so treating this as a late victory for the Knealites is rather missing the point.
Whichever way we turn, we keep coming back to this struggle between Cult TV and Proper Drama. We may be tempted to ask whether it really matters, since even Cult TV might feasibly be watchable, if regularly groomed and wormed for fan-wank. The trouble is that the very notion of "cult" leads to a certain… shall we call it territoriality? It's been said that gay culture isn't a festering pit of bitchiness and backstabbing because gay men are genetically inclined to scratch each others' eyes out, but because any subculture in which you're bound to keep running into the same people over and over again is inevitably going to end up that way. This was certainly the case with Doctor Who between the late '80s and the early '00s, when it wasn't popular, populist, or even noticed by most of the population. We may recall that during the '90s, the big movers in fandom often found themselves acting like feudal overlords. On a personal level, I still recall Keith Topping attacking me for breaking the "unspoken code" which forbids New Adventures writers from publicly criticising each others' work (it sounded berserk to me at the time, and it still does), while the afore-dissed Paul Cornell once demanded to know whether I was prepared to "bow the knee" to anybody else in fan-society. He also kept talking about my "followers", which I found rather puzzling, but we'll come back to that in a moment.
It'd be nice to think that the cosmic popularity of Doctor Who circa 2009 would prevent this sort of silliness, but our perception of the series as a Cult concern guarantees that we keep making the same mistakes. Fans still have a loyalty to their feudal chieftains which seems to ignore events in the outside world. I still get flak about my "Pissing Blink" comment, as if Steven Moffat - a highly-regarded, award-winning writer who now receives a huge chunk of licence-fee money for doing the best job on Earth, whose work is watched by millions all over the world and whose every opinion is instantly reported in the mass-media - needs to be defended against a former author of low-selling genre novels who writes a blog that only a few dozen people read anyway. It's a bit like attacking a Big Issue seller for trying to put W. H. Smith's out of business. Certainly, there wouldn't have been even one-tenth as much fuss about the GatissGate comments if there hadn't been a sense that modern-day Doctor Who scriptwriters are part of a ruling class, and that savaging their work on the internet is therefore a crime against the natural order. If I'd criticised George Lucas, or Danny Boyle, or even the producer of Casualty, then nobody would even have flinched. But Doctor Who… that's us.
This seems doubly peculiar when you realise that it contradicts the nature of the programme itself. We could spend days arguing about the "true" morality of Doctor Who, but Gerry Davis, "The Dominators", and bad Quatermass pastiches aside, we wouldn't be going too far wrong if we described its view of the universe as exploratory, experimental, and egalitarian: in brief, outward-looking. Yet there's a specific breed of ruling-class fanboy whose influence over this Cult TV phenomenon has made him petty, retrogressive, and obsessed with his own importance: in brief, utterly inward-looking. Apart from anything else, you have to wonder what the Hell these people learned from watching the programme as kids. Did they learn anything? Did they even realise that learning was the point, or did they just get off on all the space-age hardware and reach the conclusion that it was in the same oeuvre as Battlestar Galactica (the '70s one, with the proper Cylons)? At the risk of becoming overly personal, I particularly wonder about Gary Russell, who's obsessed with the programme's minutiae and yet writes things which seem to owe more to the Star Trek: The Next Generation school of Cult TV (Divided Loyalties is the funniest example of this, and it even shares a title with a Babylon-5 episode). And Gary Russell is the epitome of Cult Man. In Doctor Who itself, of course, the accumulation of power for trivial purposes is always the preserve of the villain.
Well, all right. Maybe Gary isn't quite the epitome of Cult Man. About a year ago, I found myself at the Tavern at the same time as Ian Levine. As we all know, we've got Ian Levine to thank for the survival and/or recovery of a huge number of ancient Doctor Who stories, even if he has got a private stash of "lost" episodes that he won't share with the rest of us. (Yes he has. Don't even think about trying to deny it.) Since I'd never met him, I thought I'd go over and introduce myself, if only because it seemed like such a peculiar meeting of sub-sub-subcultures. It'd be both crude and hypocritical for me to describe him as looking like a bloated potato-emperor holding court in the presence of his skinny minions, especially given the size of my own man-tits, but it is true that he took up one whole side of the table while his friends sat on the opposite side.
'Hullo,' I said, as I walked up to the table and outstretched my hand.
He eyed me suspiciously.
'I'm Lawrence Miles,' I explained. 'I just thought -'
'No,' he said, physically drawing back on a cushion of rump. 'No. No. No. No.'
I found myself reminded of Ben Kingsley in Sexy Beast.
'Wh-' I began.
'No,' he repeated. 'I read your…' He didn't seem to know how to finish, so he just looked disgusted instead. 'I don't know what it was. But it was so off the case. So off the case. No.'
With that, he turned his head away, and there was an awkward silence while he carefully pretended that I wasn't there. His friends looked rather embarrassed, although whether they were embarrassed for me or for him, I'm not at all sure.
I finally lowered my hand and walked off. But I remember thinking, even as I left the presence of this Huttesque fan-lord: I could never do that. I simply wouldn't be capable of it. If you presented me with a man who had the most ridiculous opinions on the planet, if I'd read an article he'd written which tried to turn all human sense on its head, then I'd still be prepared to at least say hello. I'd chew the fat with a Nazi, if he thought he had a good reason to speak to me. I'd even consider the possibility of discourse with Chris Chibnall. And perhaps what's most disturbing about Ian Levine's behaviour, far beyond the fact that it was very, very rude, is that we know he's dedicated a large slice of his life to a programme which positively detests this sort of thing. If Doctor Who celebrates the outward-looking, and has an underlying philosophy of listening to the outsider's point of view, then how did someone on the top level of its aristocracy become so insular? How can a man with his grounding in the classics think of blanking someone for writing a piece he simply didn't agree with (I have no idea which piece, although I'd put a small wager on the one about "Love & Monsters")?
Later, on the way home, it suddenly hit me.
He thought I wanted something from him. He believes his friendship is valuable. And, to an extent, I suppose it is: Ian Levine is said to be a multimillionaire, so for all we know, he holds orgiastic Doctor Who parties in an opulent mansion where guests can watch the two missing episodes of "The Invasion" while being serviced by prostitutes in Nimon masks. But being part of a cult means being part of a hierarchy, and it's inevitable that those at the top of any hierarchy will end up behaving like gigantic arses. It's one of the reasons that I've alienated any "followers" I might accidentally have picked up over the years.
No, fair enough, that's a lie. I alienate them because I just can't bloody help myself. It is true, however, that the nature of Doctor Who defies the very notion of hierarchy. Let's be honest, the series taught you that you should be able to walk into the throneroom of any ruling monarch and be sarcastic to them without getting your head cut off. Didn't it?
In the end, the super-hyper-mega-ultra-irony is that I agree with Alan Stevens: the least Doctor Who thing in Doctor Who really is in "Remembrance of the Daleks", but it's not the trivial matter of planetary destruction. It's much earlier in the story, when the spooky little girl runs away from the Doctor, and the Doctor muses to himself: 'She doesn't talk to strangers… very wise.' Of course, it's not surprising that this line should have been jemmied into the script, any more than it's surprising that Ben Aaronovitch removed it for the novelisation. As I've said in the dear departed Randomness Times, the '80s was the decade in which the concept of "paedophile" entered the British consciousness, and the don't-get-into-cars-with-people-you-don't-know message was pushed harder than ever. (In the '70s, we grew up believing that people who abducted children wanted to hold them hostage, like in an episode of The Professionals. It wasn't until the '80s that our parents felt comfortable talking about kiddie-fiddling. This is why nobody found Darth Vader's 'I have felt him' comment remotely funny when Return of the Jedi was released in 1983, even though nobody can take it seriously now. Worse, the Emperor's reply is 'strange that I have not,' as if they're both part of the same paedophile ring.)
Yet for anyone grown-up enough to make their own decisions, this advice goes against everything Doctor Who seems to stand for. From the moment that Ian and Barbara enter the Doctor's world, understanding the alien - embracing the alien, even - becomes the baseline of all wisdom. Even the Tribe of Gum finds a sort of redemption this way, when Ian exposes Kal to a concept from another philosophy, if not actual democracy ('Kal is not stronger than the whole tribe') then at least the notion of duty to society. And even when the Doctor's involved in something morally dubious, refusing to communicate with the unknown simply isn't part of his world-view. Or worlds-view.
So if I have one final pronouncement to make, before Doctor Who descends into a Cult TV Hell of squee, self-congratulation, and Alex Kingston, then it's this. Always talk to strangers. They know things you don't.
Another thing to notice about this edition of the Radio Times is that the target time for the Enigma puzzle was 26 minutes, and I did it in nine. I just had to tell someone that.
_________________________________________________________
Lawrence Miles would like to point out that he was going to call this article "Believing the Strangest Things", but thought it'd be too obvious.
Let's begin with the RT's letter of the week (which, as we all know, wins a charming BBC-endorsed digital radio with 1950s moulding).
_________________________________________________________
Dear Radio Times,
I've been a Torchwood fan from the start...
_________________________________________________________
Then your opinion can be of no intellectual value. Next!
_________________________________________________________
…how can a drama be gripping for a week, then throw it all away? It was heartbreaking to see a good premise and fine acting wasted on an "in one bound they were free" solution.
_________________________________________________________
Dear God, man, where have you been for the last four years? Anyone would think you'd never seen a drama by Russell T. Davies before. Were you not paying attention when the last-ever Dalek army was disintegrated by Billie Piper's time-space orgasm (arguably what the conclusion of "The Parting of the Ways" was really all about, if you interpret the whole of Season One as an unrequited love affair… call it "The Fire in the Girly-Place", if you will)? Or when the other last-ever Dalek army was sucked out of the universe by background radiation from a place where nothing exists, not even radiation? Or when the other other last-ever Dalek army was defeated by Catherine Tate fiddling about with some wires? And that's without even mentioning the climax of "Last of the Time Lords", in which the Doctor rewinds time by flying around the planet very very fast, or something.
As we should all have gathered by now, Russell T. isn't primarily a science-fiction writer, at least not in the most pedantic sense. SF is hung up on the details of how the machinery works, but he only cares about the people. Therefore, it's reasonable to hit the reset button as long as there's a human cost, whether it's the death of the Best Ever Doctor or an almost Biblical child-murder. Which brings us to the real nub of things…
_________________________________________________________
I seriously wonder whether the harrowing ending, in which a child died horribly, should have been broadcast. For the first time ever I was reduced to tears watching a TV programme.
_________________________________________________________
Whooooah Nellie. Let's pause to consider what this correspondent is actually saying. He's complaining that a drama programme - and, furthermore, a tragedy - actually provoked an emotional reaction. I'm sure you can see the oddity. Isn't a few minutes' blubbing just a sign that the programme worked…?
Let's not be in any doubt, the controversy about the child-exploding finale (if there really was any controversy) had nothing to do with "violence on television": the slaughter of Jack's firstborn grandson was too far from any real-world agony to leave a bad taste in the mouth, and a long way from graphic, unless you seriously believe that nosebleeds shouldn't be shown on TV. But modern drama, or pretend-drama, is about making the audience feel comfortable rather than affected. This has always been true of the commercial channels, yet now even the BBC's mandate is to provide the viewer with "cosy" rather than "challenging". It's a truth of modern television that despite the liberalisation which has allowed men to kiss each other in prime-time and characters from The Wire to mumble "fuck" every twelve seconds for absolutely no reason, the cod-drama programmes made circa 2009 are far more limited / limiting in their content than those of the 1970s. You know the bit in I, Claudius where Caligula does that thing with his sister? Yeah, you know. That thing. Could that be shown - or, rather, suggested - on BBC TV today? Almost certainly not. It isn't comfortable viewing. And for a Corporation that's increasingly made to feel aware of both the ratings and government (dis)approval, an uncomfortable audience makes an uncomfortable drama department. Ergo, programmes are designed to engender a sense of warming numbness, like a plate of chips at the end of a cold day. To the point where viewers actually start complaining when they feel something.
I've occasionally noted my approval of Waking the Dead on this blog-page, particularly those episodes written by Declan Croghan, whose ability to bring a kind of nightmarish magic-realism to a standard prime-time format should surely put him on any producer's list of Writers to Try Out on Doctor Who (consider the episode "Wren Boys", which is a bit like CSI in the style of The Wicker Man, and features the fit one from "Blink" as an additional bonus). The reason is that Waking the Dead is one of the few dramas still prepared to take the viewer out of his or her coddling-space. As I've mentioned before, the episode "In the Sight of the Lord" involves a murder case that stretches all the way back to the 1940s, and attacks our sentimentalised version of the Great British War Years by focusing on the atrocities carried out by English soldiers in the field. We're told, for example, about a group of squaddies cutting the genitals off a German soldier and forcing him to put them in his mouth. The repugnant Chibnall-era version of Torchwood often brought this to mind, and not just because of the sensation of gagging on bollocks. Torchwood tried to sell itself as a "grown-up" sci-fi show, and yet despite a superficially similar format to Waking the Dead (just try imagining Trevor Eve as Captain Jack…), it never would've dared risk audience disapproval in this way. The supposed point of science fiction is that it's meant to go further than conventional drama, but Mark One Torchwood never had the - excuse me - balls to even go as far as a mainstream detective programme on BBC1.
Hardly surprising: after all, Torchwood was deliberately contrived as a "Cult TV" series, not a drama series. This is why a guest appearance by James Marsters was thought to be more important than consistent characterisation, and why horribly misjudged story-arcs were thought to be more important than the actual stories. The gulf between Cult TV and Proper Drama is a vast one, and it's worth remembering this now that the Radio Times has given us our first official preview of Doctor Who 2010. I've already suggested that Moffat's role in the casting of Matt Smith was a colossal act of cowardice, a way of keeping the audience on his side by giving them Tennant Junior rather than anyone more controversial / unexpected / interesting. Likewise, the decision to dress him up in what the RT rather desperately calls "geography teacher chic" smacks of the same play-it-safe, Doctor-by-numbers strategy that brought us the TV movie, in which the Doctor's "character" was defined purely by stuffing a pretty-faced English actor into an Edwardian jacket. But more worrying is the reappearance of Professor River Song, the most cynically-engineered love-interest since… well, since Moffat's last one, to be honest. It's worrying because she's been foisted on the viewer as a Major Character in exactly the same way that Lwaxana Troi was foisted on Star Trek fans, or that Joxer was foisted on viewers of Xena: Warrior Princess for more than a year after he stopped being funny. See also the entire last season of Buffy.
This is a sure sign of Cult TV, and it's something that Russell T. Davies largely avoided, at least until the interdimensional wank-fest of "The Stolen Earth". One of the reasons Doctor Who went off the rails in the mid-'80s was that John Nathan-Turner stopped making a television programme per se, and started making a continuity-package to satisfy the kind of people he met at conventions (this way lies madness and "Attack of the Cybermen"). Why did he do this…? Because he just wanted to be liked. And Moffat, as we’ve already learned, desires nothing more or less than to be adored by his audience. Alienating them is simply beyond him. Especially if they're redheads.
And as if to underline this question of "comfort", the next letter reads…
_________________________________________________________
…I was shocked, even betrayed. Russell T. Davies transformed our hero Jack into a monster… I wonder how a writer can do this to a character both adults and children adore.
_________________________________________________________
We'll skip over the weapons-grade-obvious point that Jack has always been a dodgy geezer, not only because of his criminal tendencies in "The Empty Child", but because he was introduced to us as someone who can casually treat a mass-death like the eruption of Pompeii as a business opportunity. The bigger point here is that a large section of the audience, the section which Doctor Who is now so concerned about offending, wants to be able to see its central characters as definite hero-figures. Even though we know there's nothing more tedious.
At this point, let's side-step into the old faux-moral debate about the conclusion of "Remembrance of the Daleks". It's been argued - for example, by my Magic Bullet employer Alan Stevens, in those rare moments when he's not 'phoning people up and engaging them in two-hour conversations about Blake's 7 - that the Doctor's cheerful blowing-up of Skaro is a moral aberration which contradicts the ethical grounding of most of the rest of the series. The trouble is that this Doctor = Absolute Decency argument only holds water if you seriously believe the drivel that Gerry Davis puts into the leading man's mouth during "The Moonbase", which portrays the Doctor as a well-disguised superhero who believes that evil communists 'must be fought'. (All right, he's technically talking about Cybermen at the time. But Davis saw Doctor Who as an internationally-exportable adventure series, little more than a spy show with SF elements, so the monsters on his watch become indistinguishable from commie thugs in The Man from UNCLE or The Champions.) Davis widdled all over the heterodox, xenophiliac version of the Doctor promoted by Lambert, Wiles, Tosh, et al, i.e. the interesting version. In the script of "Remembrance", Ben Aaronovitch goes out of his way to establish that Skaro is the Daleks' 'ancestral seat', so its destruction is meant to be like blowing up the Fuhrerbunker rather than dropping the A-Bomb on Japan. But even if that weren't true, even if the Doctor is crossing a terrible moral line, it still wouldn't bother me much. Why? Because I don't necessarily want the central character's values to be the same as my own.
Indeed, one of the most alarming things about the Tennant era is the way the voice of the Doctor has become the voice of the liberal-minded early-twenty-first-century viewer. The ideals he represents are the ideals of those in the audience who believe themselves to be generally "good" human beings, on the grounds that they occasionally recycle and don't use the n-word. This explains his ludicrous, self-contradictory arguments against the American death-nerd in "The Sontaran Stratagem" (which leave us with the impression that it's nice to care about the environment, as long as you don't seriously do anything about it), and why "Planet of the Ood" sees him apologise to Donna for taking 'cheap shots' when he asks her the only sensible question in Season Four (because slavery is wrong, but it's apparently even more wrong to make the viewers feel anxious by pointing out that they're supporting child labour whenever they shop at Primark). If, like me, you feel that the prime mover in Doctor Who isn't good-versus-evil but the ability to see things from an alien point of view - a theme that's been there ever since the beginning, even before "The Sensorites" set the pattern for humans-meet-alien-culture stories - then it's surely quite right that the leading man shouldn't have exactly the same moral stance as ourselves. Actually, he should probably be going out of his way to challenge it. So what went wrong?
Once again, what went wrong is the desperate urge to keep the audience squirm-free. Beyond the confines of Doctor Who, this has led to a culture of drama in which all goodies are good as we see it, while all baddies oppose the basic freedom to choose the colour of your iPod. By default, protagonists now have "issues" which might occasionally make them behave in out-of-character ways, but we're never in doubt that they share our world-view. They can never be racist, sexist, or homophobic (that's the baddies' job), yet nor should they ever rock the boat. They should never make us doubt ourselves or our consumer society, because even if it isn't perfect - hey! - at least we're living in a democracy, right? Right…? Inevitably, this turns every drama series into a sequence of contrived confrontations between insipid non-characters, and Cult TV programmes are more prone to this tendency than any genre other than cop shows. Fans of Heroes-generation sci-fi honestly believe it's revelatory when a baddie turns out to have "layers", but in fact, it's what Proper Drama is meant to do all the time. Again, we go back to I, Claudius for the perfect test-case. The Emperor Tiberius, supposedly a sadistic pervert who might best be described as "syphilis with a face", reacts in different ways to different characters: at no point does he only have "villain" traits, and from his very first scene, the monster on the throne has characteristics ranging from an honest and touching love for his brother to periods of what we'd now call paranoid depression. Almost nobody writes characters this way any more. Today's audience has been brought up to believe in its own moral supremacy, and thus prefers things to be rather more absolute. Just look at the atrocity of Rome.
A personal sidelight here. If you're one of the 4,000-odd people who kept buying the BBC's Eighth Doctor novels after their sell-by date, then you may recall that I once invented a semi-antagonist called Sabbath, for a book called The Adventuress of Henrietta Street. The editor of the range was keen on using him as a recurring character, and asked me to write up a detailed description, which I did. Now, the idea here was to present Sabbath as the Doctor's (morally dubious) replacement in a hostile new universe, or at least in a hostile new form of history. Gallifrey had been destroyed; the laws of time were in flux; and the Doctor's powers were distinctly limited, not least by a period of amnesia. As a result, Sabbath was a figure who knew more about the universe than the Doctor did. This was his environment, while the Doctor was rooted in a version of history that no longer existed. Which, as I saw it, meant that the overwhelming smugness of some of the weakest Doctor Who stories would be removed from the formula. The central character would no longer have all the answers. He wouldn't be able to pull solutions out of a magic pocket. He'd have to learn from experience, and figure out each new situation from scratch, just like Sydney Newman intended. In short, he'd be able to make mistakes.
What actually happened was the other writers turned out a series of novels in which stupid, arrogant, evil Mr Sabbath would perform some reckless experiment which imperilled the entire universe, so that the good, noble, and all-wise Doctor would have an opportunity to set things right again. This reached its nadir when Lloyd Rose stated that she couldn't see any difference between Sabbath and the Master, as if I'd written a three-page document describing an out-and-out villain who wanted to take over the galaxy and finished every sentence with "nyah-hah-hah". (In her novel Camera Obscura, AKA The Twelve-Year-Old Anne Rice Fan's Guide to Victorian Clichés, she underlines this by having the Doctor put a whoopee cushion on Sabbath's Throne of Evil. It's meant to demonstrate how silly and pathetic anyone who dares to argue with the Doctor must be, because apparently, villains don't have a sense of humour. Here I'd just like to point out that the first thing Sabbath ever says to the Doctor in The Adventuress of Henrietta Street is a joke, and an anachronistic one to boot.)
Why, then, did this happen? How did a character whose whole function was to give the Doctor some real competition end up being used as a Hooded Claw substitute? The answer seems to be that we've come to fetishise the very notion of the Doctor, to the point where we believe he's simply incapable of doing anything wrong. The nature of Cult TV makes him "our hero" in ways that extend far beyond the narrative. We feel uneasy if he goes astray, either morally or intellectually, and now we're beginning to feel the same way about Doctor-surrogates like Captain Jack. Of course, the fact that we feel uneasy probably indicates that it's good storytelling, yet we've been too swaddled in FilmLook slickness to accept this. On top of which… oh, dare I really say it? I think I have to. Unquestionably, this fetishisation is doubled if the Doctor's cute. No fangirl would be bothered by the thought of William Hartnell, or even troll-faced Chris Eccleston, committing space-age genocide. This sort of behaviour is harder to accept from Paul McGann or David Tennant, whose boyish good looks™ have been thoroughly mined for romance, firstly by the Yanks who factory-assembled the TV movie and more lately by a sneery-faced Scots cynic. Mentioning no names. It comes as no surprise to find that the "you bastards, you've made Jack evil!" letter in the Radio Times was written by a woman, just as it comes as no surprise to find that the "I'm furious because the machinery they used to kill the 456 doesn't make sense!" letter came from a man.
Yet the most curious thing is that as Doctor Who heads further and further into the stagnancy of Cult TV, Torchwood has suddenly veered in the opposite direction. "Children of Earth" is, against all expectations, a work of Proper Drama. Nobody here scores points for being 100% Goodie, and the only 100% Baddie seems to be the Prime Minister. Even the 456, who exist solely to make us poo ourselves, have enough depth to point out the humans' hypocrisy. Bucking the trend of all the other programmes that look, sound, and market themselves like it, characters with whom we sympathise do things we don't necessarily like, not in order to make a big song-and-dance about major issues (yeah, you're right, I'm thinking of Battlestar Galactica again) but just because that's who they are. The most obvious example isn't Captain Jack's kiddie-killing, it's the fact that Clem - a man who's pure victim to the core, pitiable-yet-quite-frightening in exactly the way that mentally-damaged people really are - treats Ianto with disgust while calling him 'queer'.
In any other show, that alone would be enough to mark him out as a baddie, like the bigot-thugs who occupy most corners of the CSI world. Here, it's simply treated as the kind of thing you'd expect from someone who's been messed up since the 1960s. The Doctor Who universe has always had leftist intentions (Gerry Davis notwithstanding), but there's a difference between "left-wing" and "liberal". To be a liberal means to believe that tolerance is good and global warming is bad, but also to believe that you can save the world simply by not using the word "poof". S/he may have good intentions, but doesn't seem to appreciate that all the things s/he considers to be civilised - democracy, universal suffrage, the right to exist without having the shit kicked out of you for having long hair or skin that's a bit on the dark side - were achieved through the effort of rather more pro-active people, who fought and occasionally died in order to create a less appalling version of humanity. To be a liberal means to shield yourself from the full horror of your society, to have a veneer of civic responsibility while still approving of a system that's wholly founded on exploitation. Tennant-era Doctor Who is liberal. Most of the New Adventures are very, very liberal indeed, hilariously so in some cases. Whereas "Children of Earth", in facing up to our hypocrisies and refusing to make things simple, actually seems… leftist. Who saw that coming?
[A footnote, before you ask: it's true, much of the previous paragraph was informed by various encounters with Doctor Who authors over the years. Most particularly, an argument with Paul Cornell - Grand Poobah of Liberals and unapologetic Blairite, who genuinely believes that everything in the world will be all right as long as you don't vote Conservative - in which he derided me for being 'like one of those '60s idealists'. Hmmm. Does he mean, like one of those '60s idealists whose determination to change Western values created the kind of lifestyle that Paul and his friends now enjoy…? No, he probably didn't intend it to be a compliment. Oh, and I chose "poof" as a Word You Mustn't Say after a conversation with Moffat in which I jokingly exclaimed 'are you calling me a poof?' when he challenged my masculinity, 'are you calling me a poof?' being the catchphrase of the boorish he-men whom anyone of my age will remember from the '70s. Moffat responded by looking nervously around the pub and informing me under his breath that I shouldn't say that out loud. I'm amused by several things here: (a) the thought that Moffat believed I needed his wisdom and experience in social situations, (b) the thought that any gay fanboy at the Tavern might seriously be offended by the retro use of the p-word, (c) the thought that I was being criticised for using it by the world's most heterosexual man when I've at least enjoyed the occasional gay flirtation, and (d) the thought that Moffat was terrified of offending Doctor Who fans even then. I really, really digress.]
Of course, the aliens are still basically evil, because no series can be xenophiliac all the time. Especially not when there's the potential for great big monsters. The notion of a morally-questioning, see-the-other-man's-POV universe may run all the way from "An Unearthly Child" to the superfly guys in "Planet of the Dead", yet a programme in which the outsiders are always potentially-friendly would be dull. Morally uplifting, but dull. Fortunately, most Doctor Who writers through the ages have managed to use horrible alien menaces without suggesting that anything foreign wants to hurt us by default, the pro-Vietnam hectoring of "The Dominators" being a nauseating exception. The problem comes not when the aliens start invading, but when the scripts are written by people who think it's a good idea to present us with a universe which is intrinsically hostile and in which EVERYTHING UNFAMILIAR WANTS TO EAT US. As I've had to explain over and over again, my tragic rant about "The Unquiet Dead" wasn't driven by a disgust of actual racism (although I still hold that it was chronically misjudged in the run-up to the Asylum Seeker Election of 2005), but because the episode betrayed the entire ethos of Doctor Who. The Doctor comes up with the most brilliantly in-your-face, air-punchingly great salvation plan in the programme's history. "Yeah, let the aliens have the corpses… you got a problem with that?" But then… hahahahahah, fooled you, they're aliens and therefore just want to kill everybody.
So it's apt that another "Children of Earth" missive to the RT reads…
_________________________________________________________
It was entertaining and thrilling: like experiencing The Quatermass Experiment or the BBC production of 1984 for the first time.
_________________________________________________________
…since both of those programmes were, as you know, written by stodgy old conservative Nigel Kneale. If you haven't already seen it, then I wrote an entire article about Kneale's influence on the modern SF generation (see "SF Iconoclasty 101", some way down this page), but the key point is this: however revolutionary The Quatermass Experiment may have seemed in 1953, Kneale himself was a grumpy misanthropic sod who distrusted anything that wasn't middle-aged and middle class, which is why his scripts depict hippies as murderous death-cultists and seem to believe that rock music heralds the end of human civilisation. To Kneale, anything new or unfamiliar was a threat, and he expressed this intolerance with a variety of over-the-top SF metaphors. And as anyone who watches BBC4 documentaries will know, Mark Gatiss idolises him. The grand irony is that Gatiss believes his work to be "traditional" Doctor Who, yet when Doctor Who began overtly copying the Quatermass set-up during the Pertwee years, its writers specifically went out of their way to reverse Kneale's vision and create a universe in which the alien isn't automatically evil. Again, look at "The Silurians". Or look at "The Ambassadors of Death", in which Knealish paranoia is what causes all the trouble. Gatiss seriously believes Quatermass and Doctor Who to come from the same tradition, even though they're ethical and philosophical opposites. The Wire in "The Idiot's Lantern" is a typical Gatiss villain, i.e. a big hungry alien force that has no purpose other than to eat people. Malcolm Hulke isn't exactly spinning in his grave, but he would find it unbearably childish.
Actually, now I come to think of it, there's an even grander irony: Nigel Kneale himself described Doctor Who as 'a stupid idea for a programme'. M'lud, the prosecution rests.
In effect, then, the 456 are the Wire done properly. Because this isn't really about a threat from the unknown, it's about us, and about the way we react to it. Fear of the alien is at least as horrifying as the alien, something that Gatiss has never quite grasped: once again, we should remember that this is a man who established the evilness of the villain in St Antony's Fire by having the character stab a kitten through the throat, just for a laugh. So he's clearly not one for the subtleties of human psychology. Like all good monsters, the 456's inhumanity makes us inhuman ourselves, which is what Nigel Kneale nearly realised when he wrote Quatermass and the Pit (although his questionable view of world events rather brought it down). So is it ironic or appropriate that "Children of Earth" should resurrect the Quatermass format, and shun the Cult TV model of Torchwood's first two hideous years? Either way, it's hard to believe that BBC Wales would have risked it if American television hadn't rediscovered the joy of the epic serial, so treating this as a late victory for the Knealites is rather missing the point.
Whichever way we turn, we keep coming back to this struggle between Cult TV and Proper Drama. We may be tempted to ask whether it really matters, since even Cult TV might feasibly be watchable, if regularly groomed and wormed for fan-wank. The trouble is that the very notion of "cult" leads to a certain… shall we call it territoriality? It's been said that gay culture isn't a festering pit of bitchiness and backstabbing because gay men are genetically inclined to scratch each others' eyes out, but because any subculture in which you're bound to keep running into the same people over and over again is inevitably going to end up that way. This was certainly the case with Doctor Who between the late '80s and the early '00s, when it wasn't popular, populist, or even noticed by most of the population. We may recall that during the '90s, the big movers in fandom often found themselves acting like feudal overlords. On a personal level, I still recall Keith Topping attacking me for breaking the "unspoken code" which forbids New Adventures writers from publicly criticising each others' work (it sounded berserk to me at the time, and it still does), while the afore-dissed Paul Cornell once demanded to know whether I was prepared to "bow the knee" to anybody else in fan-society. He also kept talking about my "followers", which I found rather puzzling, but we'll come back to that in a moment.
It'd be nice to think that the cosmic popularity of Doctor Who circa 2009 would prevent this sort of silliness, but our perception of the series as a Cult concern guarantees that we keep making the same mistakes. Fans still have a loyalty to their feudal chieftains which seems to ignore events in the outside world. I still get flak about my "Pissing Blink" comment, as if Steven Moffat - a highly-regarded, award-winning writer who now receives a huge chunk of licence-fee money for doing the best job on Earth, whose work is watched by millions all over the world and whose every opinion is instantly reported in the mass-media - needs to be defended against a former author of low-selling genre novels who writes a blog that only a few dozen people read anyway. It's a bit like attacking a Big Issue seller for trying to put W. H. Smith's out of business. Certainly, there wouldn't have been even one-tenth as much fuss about the GatissGate comments if there hadn't been a sense that modern-day Doctor Who scriptwriters are part of a ruling class, and that savaging their work on the internet is therefore a crime against the natural order. If I'd criticised George Lucas, or Danny Boyle, or even the producer of Casualty, then nobody would even have flinched. But Doctor Who… that's us.
This seems doubly peculiar when you realise that it contradicts the nature of the programme itself. We could spend days arguing about the "true" morality of Doctor Who, but Gerry Davis, "The Dominators", and bad Quatermass pastiches aside, we wouldn't be going too far wrong if we described its view of the universe as exploratory, experimental, and egalitarian: in brief, outward-looking. Yet there's a specific breed of ruling-class fanboy whose influence over this Cult TV phenomenon has made him petty, retrogressive, and obsessed with his own importance: in brief, utterly inward-looking. Apart from anything else, you have to wonder what the Hell these people learned from watching the programme as kids. Did they learn anything? Did they even realise that learning was the point, or did they just get off on all the space-age hardware and reach the conclusion that it was in the same oeuvre as Battlestar Galactica (the '70s one, with the proper Cylons)? At the risk of becoming overly personal, I particularly wonder about Gary Russell, who's obsessed with the programme's minutiae and yet writes things which seem to owe more to the Star Trek: The Next Generation school of Cult TV (Divided Loyalties is the funniest example of this, and it even shares a title with a Babylon-5 episode). And Gary Russell is the epitome of Cult Man. In Doctor Who itself, of course, the accumulation of power for trivial purposes is always the preserve of the villain.
Well, all right. Maybe Gary isn't quite the epitome of Cult Man. About a year ago, I found myself at the Tavern at the same time as Ian Levine. As we all know, we've got Ian Levine to thank for the survival and/or recovery of a huge number of ancient Doctor Who stories, even if he has got a private stash of "lost" episodes that he won't share with the rest of us. (Yes he has. Don't even think about trying to deny it.) Since I'd never met him, I thought I'd go over and introduce myself, if only because it seemed like such a peculiar meeting of sub-sub-subcultures. It'd be both crude and hypocritical for me to describe him as looking like a bloated potato-emperor holding court in the presence of his skinny minions, especially given the size of my own man-tits, but it is true that he took up one whole side of the table while his friends sat on the opposite side.
'Hullo,' I said, as I walked up to the table and outstretched my hand.
He eyed me suspiciously.
'I'm Lawrence Miles,' I explained. 'I just thought -'
'No,' he said, physically drawing back on a cushion of rump. 'No. No. No. No.'
I found myself reminded of Ben Kingsley in Sexy Beast.
'Wh-' I began.
'No,' he repeated. 'I read your…' He didn't seem to know how to finish, so he just looked disgusted instead. 'I don't know what it was. But it was so off the case. So off the case. No.'
With that, he turned his head away, and there was an awkward silence while he carefully pretended that I wasn't there. His friends looked rather embarrassed, although whether they were embarrassed for me or for him, I'm not at all sure.
I finally lowered my hand and walked off. But I remember thinking, even as I left the presence of this Huttesque fan-lord: I could never do that. I simply wouldn't be capable of it. If you presented me with a man who had the most ridiculous opinions on the planet, if I'd read an article he'd written which tried to turn all human sense on its head, then I'd still be prepared to at least say hello. I'd chew the fat with a Nazi, if he thought he had a good reason to speak to me. I'd even consider the possibility of discourse with Chris Chibnall. And perhaps what's most disturbing about Ian Levine's behaviour, far beyond the fact that it was very, very rude, is that we know he's dedicated a large slice of his life to a programme which positively detests this sort of thing. If Doctor Who celebrates the outward-looking, and has an underlying philosophy of listening to the outsider's point of view, then how did someone on the top level of its aristocracy become so insular? How can a man with his grounding in the classics think of blanking someone for writing a piece he simply didn't agree with (I have no idea which piece, although I'd put a small wager on the one about "Love & Monsters")?
Later, on the way home, it suddenly hit me.
He thought I wanted something from him. He believes his friendship is valuable. And, to an extent, I suppose it is: Ian Levine is said to be a multimillionaire, so for all we know, he holds orgiastic Doctor Who parties in an opulent mansion where guests can watch the two missing episodes of "The Invasion" while being serviced by prostitutes in Nimon masks. But being part of a cult means being part of a hierarchy, and it's inevitable that those at the top of any hierarchy will end up behaving like gigantic arses. It's one of the reasons that I've alienated any "followers" I might accidentally have picked up over the years.
No, fair enough, that's a lie. I alienate them because I just can't bloody help myself. It is true, however, that the nature of Doctor Who defies the very notion of hierarchy. Let's be honest, the series taught you that you should be able to walk into the throneroom of any ruling monarch and be sarcastic to them without getting your head cut off. Didn't it?
In the end, the super-hyper-mega-ultra-irony is that I agree with Alan Stevens: the least Doctor Who thing in Doctor Who really is in "Remembrance of the Daleks", but it's not the trivial matter of planetary destruction. It's much earlier in the story, when the spooky little girl runs away from the Doctor, and the Doctor muses to himself: 'She doesn't talk to strangers… very wise.' Of course, it's not surprising that this line should have been jemmied into the script, any more than it's surprising that Ben Aaronovitch removed it for the novelisation. As I've said in the dear departed Randomness Times, the '80s was the decade in which the concept of "paedophile" entered the British consciousness, and the don't-get-into-cars-with-people-you-don't-know message was pushed harder than ever. (In the '70s, we grew up believing that people who abducted children wanted to hold them hostage, like in an episode of The Professionals. It wasn't until the '80s that our parents felt comfortable talking about kiddie-fiddling. This is why nobody found Darth Vader's 'I have felt him' comment remotely funny when Return of the Jedi was released in 1983, even though nobody can take it seriously now. Worse, the Emperor's reply is 'strange that I have not,' as if they're both part of the same paedophile ring.)
Yet for anyone grown-up enough to make their own decisions, this advice goes against everything Doctor Who seems to stand for. From the moment that Ian and Barbara enter the Doctor's world, understanding the alien - embracing the alien, even - becomes the baseline of all wisdom. Even the Tribe of Gum finds a sort of redemption this way, when Ian exposes Kal to a concept from another philosophy, if not actual democracy ('Kal is not stronger than the whole tribe') then at least the notion of duty to society. And even when the Doctor's involved in something morally dubious, refusing to communicate with the unknown simply isn't part of his world-view. Or worlds-view.
So if I have one final pronouncement to make, before Doctor Who descends into a Cult TV Hell of squee, self-congratulation, and Alex Kingston, then it's this. Always talk to strangers. They know things you don't.
Another thing to notice about this edition of the Radio Times is that the target time for the Enigma puzzle was 26 minutes, and I did it in nine. I just had to tell someone that.
_________________________________________________________
Lawrence Miles would like to point out that he was going to call this article "Believing the Strangest Things", but thought it'd be too obvious.
Monday, November 03, 2008
Doctor Who: A Gambler's Guide
"A pony says it's a bird."
For the modern generation, the next few months are going to be a wholly new experience: those who don't remember the Old Time have never known the gut-level angst of waiting for the focus of the entire universe to change, or the righteous fury of someone who has to inform his or her parents that Les Dennis would not make a good replacement, or the smack of fear that the New Man might be the most hideous human being on Earth. (When I was eight, a communications breakdown in the schoolroom led me to believe that the next Doctor was going to be Jim Davidson rather than Peter Davison, and the emotional scarring still hasn't healed.) In fact, even those of us who've been here for decades might have trouble recalling the sensation. We knew who Eccleston's successor was going to be within 24 hours of his resignation; McGann ambushed us while we were looking the other way; and nobody really cared who was going to take over from Colin Baker. David Tennant's departure is the uneasiest moment in Doctor Who history since 1984, and the results are likely to be just as catastrophic.
Or perhaps that's unfair. But if I'm permitted to repeat myself - and given that I wrote over 50,000 words on the last series alone, I'm bound to use up all the adjectives sooner or later - then this is the point where we find out whether the series can drag itself out of its showbiz offal-pit and become a programme about Adventures in Space and Time again. After the 2007 series, I foresaw a nightmare future-world in which Matt Lucas had become the new Doctor, yet this seemed the lesser of two evils when Catherine Tate was announced as the TARDIS's official silly-face-puller in residence. And now David Walliams is one of the bookies' favourites to fill the Tennant-shaped hole at the heart of the world. Admittedly, I'm running out of new ways to say "surrounded by media back-slappers on all sides, the production team has forgotten the difference between a drama programme and a BAFTA awards ceremony", yet the fact remains that nobody's likely to tell them if - when - they let celeb-culture cloud their judgement. For a while, it looked as if Tate might steal the Best Performance trophy from her co-star at the ITV awards: from the point of view of Big Russell and friends, sitting in the audience of superstars while guzzling drinks made from champagne and little children's tears, it must have looked like a vindication. It probably never occurred to them that it was largely a result of block-voting by geek-loyalists, or that if you gave them a straight choice, ITV viewers would choose Ant and Dec to be the new Doctor.
Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before, Number Two. I said, towards the end of this year's season, that it was time for Tennant to make his excuses. Not because there's anything wrong with him as an actor (indeed, he's the only Doctor who's managed to develop his performance with every passing year, rather than giving a knowing wink to the camera and expecting small children to be impressed by his very presence), but simply because he's become so successful that his image has distorted the nature of the programme. Writers are among the laziest people on God's Clean Earth, and even those who should know better relied on Tennant-standards during the 2008 series. The latter half of "Forest of the Dead" is very nearly a checklist of "Things David Does Well", and his performance alone is enough to stop "The Doctor's Daughter" being as awful as its script. It's apt that he's the first actor to have his Doctor-number in his surname, because he's also the first to treat the role as if it's something like a sacred trust [footnote 1]. Yet he's given us a Doctor who's clever and dynamic and popular and sexy, so his companion would've ended up standing around with her mouth hanging open even if they hadn't hired an actress who specialises in that sort of thing.
In short, we may have passed the point where Tennant has become irreplaceable, which brings us to the nub of the issue. As you've no doubt heard, the bookmakers at Paddy Power have drawn up a long, long list of actors, and are now inviting us to have a flutter on the identity of the next-in-line. I can't say for sure whether it's the first time this has happened (we can be fairly sure that it didn't happen in 1987), but it's certainly the first time it's happened since I've been of gambling age. I speak as someone who made a profit on the 2002 World Cup, then lost it all on Euro 2004, and I still haven't forgiven the referee for the England-Portugal match. So here's a rundown of the favourites, for any of you who might be tempted. Because even if the bookies research every possible angle before they announce the odds, this is the one area in which we have the advantage. Do they know how Steven Moffat or Phil Collinson think…? No they don't. But we do [footnote 2].
Patterson Joseph (4-1 favourite). Here's an experiment you can all try. If you're in the company of non-fans, and someone brings up the topic of the Next Doctor Who, tell them that the current favourite is Patterson Joseph. When they say "who?", just tell them: "He's black." I guarantee that at least 85% of them will just say "oh", as if that tells them everything they need to know. And in a sense, it does. Modern-day Doctor Who has a reputation for being a "Liberal" programme: "Liberal" is used in its modern sense here, to mean something that's politely pro-tolerance and anti-bigotry, but doesn't have the nerve to be properly left-wing. The media has latched onto this, so it's inevitable that a black actor is going to be the bookmaker's choice, regardless of what he actually does. And there is a certain appeal in the thought of hearing your slightly-racist uncle mutter "not as good as it was in the old days" under his breath whenever anyone mentions Doctor Who, but on the other hand… well, let's be frank. There's a reason that Joseph specialises in harsh, aggressive, alienating characters, and it's simply that he has no capacity for making the audience like him. Which is, after all, why he was cast as the self-obsessed Dalek-denier in "Bad Wolf". Turning him into the Doctor, especially after the audience has grown accustomed to the shining and beatific countenance of the Boy David, would result in the series collapsing after a single year of Moffathood and Joseph himself being remembered in years to come as "The One Nobody Likes to Talk About". Don Warrington, now, that's my idea of a black Doctor [footnote 3].
David Morrisey (5-1). There's a potentially interesting legal case here. Thanks to the October spoiler-glut, I've just discovered the title of this year's Christmas special, and David Morrisey's role in it. Ergo, we know for a fact that he's "The Next Doctor", even if he isn't the Next Doctor. So what happens if you put a bet on him at 5-1, then take your slip back to Paddy Power after Christmas Day, claiming that you've technically won? Bookies are used to "solid" results, even if those results involve a photo-finish or a stewards' inquiry. They're not used to taking bets on something that might involve regenerative ambiguity or non-contemporaneous timelines. It seems unlikely, though, that Morrisey's Next Doctor will turn out to be a permanent appointment… unless the whole Christmas Special is a devious test-run (see also the 50-1 shot). Ah! On closer inspection, I see that the Paddy Power People have been careful to specify "David Tennant's Replacement" rather than "The Next Doctor Who". They're smarter than I thought.
James Nesbitt (6-1). Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before, Number Three. Some years ago, Steven Moffat told me about an extra-special project he'd written for BBC1, which had been temporarily delayed because the "perfect actor" was busy with other work. This sounded terribly exciting (any series which needs a specific actor has got to be a masterpiece, surely…?), so imagine my disappointment when it turned out to be Jekyll, and the "perfect actor" turned out to be that git from the Yellow Pages adverts. And this brings us once again to the back-slappy world of showbiz. If you work in the media, where programmes of the Cold Feet oeuvre are regarded as the height of sophistication, then James Nesbitt is an A-Grade celebrity. However, for those who don't habitually watch ITV pseudo-dramas that involve successful middle-class people whining about their lack of serious problems - and that's the majority of the British population, myself included - he's just an annoyance in the ad-breaks. His furniture-chewing performance in Jekyll, complete with token attempts at "scary and maniacal" which seemed roughly as intimidating as a twelve-year-old telling you that his dad is a ninja, were so ludicrous that even the Radio Times was forced to treat it as a form of kitsch. And this is a magazine that thinks Heroes is a serious drama. But despite Nesbitt's prior association with Moffat, we can safely assume that he's out of the running, if only because his casting would result in parents across the nation having to answer awkward questions like "mummy, why is that ugly bald man pretending to be the Doctor?".
John Simm (8-1). In the right context, there's nothing wrong with Simm. His cheeky-faced integrity was one of the key reasons that viewers of Life on Mars didn't notice the piss-poor quality of the scripts, although perhaps his greatest role was as the ersatz Barney Sumner in Twenty-Four Hour Party People. (If you haven't seen it, then it's worth a look next time it's on Film Four, if only for the obvious drinking game: take a shot every time you see an actor who's been in modern-day Doctor Who. Christopher Eccleston has a cameo part as a homeless wino who quotes Roman philosophy at Tony Wilson, and that's entertaining even as a sentence.) Yet the hideous miscasting of Simm as the Master was another example of the production team jamming a well-known, well-liked media "face" into the series, whether he belongs there or not. There's no clearer sign of this than the way he's introduced at the end of "Utopia". You'd think, wouldn't you, that we'd get at least one close-up of the newly-regenerated arch-villain in order to establish his identity…? But, no. All we get are waist-up shots as he dashes around the TARDIS console, because the assumption is that this man is a Big TV Star, and therefore needs no introduction. When even Graeme Harper is so celebrity-dazzled that he can't direct properly, something's gone badly wrong.
Chiwetel Ejiofor (8-1). Middle England might just about accept a black Doctor, but they certainly won't accept one they can't pronounce. Hartnell! Troughton! Pertwee! Baker! Davison! Baker! McCoy! McGann! Eccleston! Tennant! Eji… Ejoili… Ej… oh, **** it, let's just hire Matt Smith instead.
Russell Tovey (10-1). Tovey's inclusion on this list is a direct result of Big Russell "coming out" and describing him as one of the nation's greatest rising talents (he was in The History Boys, of course, so he's probably used to being a fat-camp-man magnet). And there are numerous precedents for bit-part players becoming regulars in the Doctor Who universe, although hard-core fans might find it harder to swallow the Doctor's transformation into Alanzo the Helmsman than to accept that the Sixth Doctor was based on Commander Maxil's body-print, or that Martha was related to the girl with the Cyber-lubricant in her ear at Canary Wharf, or that the cute gap-toothed Welsh girl from Torchwood was somehow based on the cute gap-toothed Welsh girl who gave her poor little working-class life to save Victorian Cardiff [footnote 4]. As a leading man, however, Tovey has a problem: he's twelve. Or at least, he appears to have been strategically punched in the face until he looks twelve. The Doctors may be getting younger, and Davies may have insisted that the character needs youthful jumping-around abilities these days (isn't that what the companions are supposed to be for…?), but an incarnation who looks as if he might cry when you take his jelly away is pushing things a little.
David Walliams (10-1). Currently being mistaken for a serious actor by retarded television executives across the UK, plus Stephen Poliakoff. In fact, the lower reaches of the Paddy Power list are riddled with comedians who believe they can Do Drama (including both Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, the latter appearing semi-feasible after House, although I still can't watch it without expecting him to shout "dammit, John!" at any moment). One of these represents the ultimate nightmare scenario: Ricky Gervais at 80-1. This may sound like a long shot, but scarily, Greece were given odds of exactly 80-1 to win Euro 2004. And what happened there? I lost everything, that's what. Now we're all in that position.
Anthony Head (10-1). The major objection to Head being the Doctor is that it's just too obvious, but then, there are an awful lot of people at BBC Wales who've got even less imagination than the bookmakers: those who see Doctor Who as a "cult sci-fi" show seem convinced that the best way to keep the fans happy is to cast lots of people from other "cult sci-fi" shows, hence the hilarious attempt to parachute James Marsters into Torchwood. Nonetheless, it's true that the casting of Head would be welcomed by the kind of degenerate nerd-scum who described the embarrassing swimming-pool scene in "School Reunion" as "iconic". As with John Simm, there's absolutely nothing wrong with Head in himself, but casting him as the Doctor would be final, crippling proof that the series has given up any chance of having its own identity. Did I mention that I saw him in The Rocky Horror Show, in the days when he was only known for the Gold Blend adverts…? He had great legs.
Richard Coyle (14-1). If I had to look down the list of candidates and choose one based on nothing more than his name, then this would be the winner. The polar opposite of Chiwetel Ejiofor, it just looks right on the page: Eccleston… Tennant… Coyle. Sadly, he's the drippy one out of Coupling (read: "the geeky side of Moffat that he tries to keep hidden, or at least tries to be ironic about"), who then became some sort of Celtic warrior in a film about King Arthur that even fantasy buffs have managed to forget. Again, the association with Moffat guarantees him a place in this list, and puts Coyle in the "chillingly possible" category. But no matter how much they try to re-style him, he still comes across as a bad perm looking for somewhere to happen.
Sean Pertwee (14-1). Let's be honest, he wouldn't be here at all if he weren't called Pertwee. And if we're talking about the ability to engage a family audience, then he isn't even the most qualified of the Doctor-spawn. (I don't mean David Troughton, either. Think eyelashes and a functional womb.) Pertwee Jr's vulturine, granite-cast features suggest that his father mated with Darkseid from The New Gods, and even if you could somehow chisel a smile across it with a diamond-tipped drill, he'd still give you the impression that he'd rather be stamping on baby rabbits than fighting cosmic evil. This makes him ideal for television's "criminal psychopath" and "ruthless drug-lord" parts, which is why it seems so bizarre that he's the country's most sought-after voice-over artist. His numerous TV ads sound like the kind of thing you'd expect to hear in a near-future fascist dystopia, promising unlimited power for the masses with a creeping undercurrent of "…once all the defectives have been eradicated". Not perfect for this role.
Robert Carlyse (14-1). Oh, God, yes. Please, yes. Apart from anything else, Carlyse's casting would force the programme to climb out from under the mountain of rotting celeb-flesh and become something like a drama series again (albeit a drama with nods toward light entertainment, which is how it seems to work best). Donna Noble would be as unthinkable under Carlyse as she would've been under Eccleston, and his presence might even compel could-be-good-if-they-tried writers like Gareth Roberts to come up with proper scripts instead of collections of in-jokes. Carlyse's name has been mooted in connection with Doctor Who since the Eccleston mini-epoch, partly because both actors came from the same batch of Rising British Talent in the early '90s, and partly because they've been locked together in our mass-consciousness ever since Carlyse stabbed Eccleston to death in Cracker: this is why some of us half-expected the Doctor to regenerate into Ricky Tomlinson at the end of "The Parting of the Ways", and why Carlyse seemed the obvious choice to be the new Master. But nooooo, they had to go for This Year's Mr Popular, didn't they? Hearteningly, a recent Radio Times interview suggested that he'd be willing to consider a major part in Doctor Who, but that he simply hadn't been asked [footnote 5]. The question is, though… would the general public be able to accept anyone this intense, after four years of Tennant's "Mickeeeey!!!" approach? We can only hope.
Richard E. Grant (14-1). What, again?
Jack Davenport (16-1). Another actor well-versed in playing a manifestation of Moffat's psyche, having spent several years as "Steve", the hero of Coupling who walks a neurotic line between geekdom and self-confidence while treating his barely-concealed misogyny as a form of post-modernism. Davenport's case is strengthened by his Hollywood credentials, if you can ignore the fact that the makers of Pirates of the Caribbean cast him because of his lack of charm and charisma (I forget the name of his character, but Lead Snotty Englishman just about covers it). We should also remember that he's already had a shot at being the star of a "cult sci-fi" series, and that he utterly botched it. Ultraviolet was meant to do for fantasy what Cracker did for the detective series, but whereas the anti-hero of Cracker was a pathologically unpredictable spit-ball of rage and obsession, the lead character of Ultraviolet was a mumbling bore who instantly alienated the audience. Mind you, Simon Pegg killed the otherwise-promising Hippies in exactly the same way, and he somehow got a second chance.
Alan Davies (16-1). I'm not even going to dignify this with a response.
Adrian Lester (18-1). What's amusing is that just in this rundown of Twenty People Who Might Be the Next Doctor Who, there are more black actors than there were in the entire Hartnell era. But whereas Patterson Joseph is far, far too vicious for the role, Adrian Lester is merely bland. Much more interesting is what his appearance on this list says about the way Doctor Who is perceived by the Not-We. Lester is best known for the BBC's Hustle, literally the most predictable television series ever made, usually described by the Radio Times with the obvious euphemism "glossy". But these days, this is how both the bookies and the media-in-general see the Doctor's world: the series is no longer an ever-growing experiment in High Strangeness and relative moral values, it's quite distinctly a "format", related to the Tony Jordan school of License-Fee-draining, guest-star-heavy pseudo-drama. When you remember that the same people responsible for the vacuity of Hustle also devised Life on Mars (which is just as vacuous, but better-camouflaged), the last two years of Doctor Who make a lot more sense.
Adien Gillen (18-1). Aiden Gillen…? Oh, of course: the press still believes in the "Gay Mafia" theory of television, so Gillen is a potential candidate simply because he was seen committing various acts of fleshy man-lust in Queer as Folk. But in itself, this proves that he's not in the running. If Big Russell [footnote 6] were still Best Gay Friends with him, then Gillen would've had a major guest-star part in Doctor Who three years ago. For Davies to insist on casting an old acquaintance now, just as he's about to leave the series, would be bizarre behaviour even for the man who thought "Journey's End" made sense.
Alexander Armstrong (18-1). Back in 2003-2004, when we were still obsessing over the question of who the first twenty-first-century Doctor might be, one reader of the RT suggested that they should cast a new Doctor every week and call it Have I Got Whos for You. At around the same time, Russell T. Davies was expressing his disgust at the tabloid speculation that Jamie Oliver could get the part instead of a "serious" actor. And, hooray! He cast Christopher Eccleston. Yet after five years of separation from the world of mortal men, Davies has brought the programme to a point where the papers are once again more likely to suggest "celebs" than "thesps", which is why the list of candidates to be the Doctor looks frighteningly like a list of candidates to be the nation's leading game-show host: Alexander Armstrong is not only a regular chairman on Have I Got News, but has also been mooted as Des O'Connor's replacement on Countdown. To be fair to Armstrong, he's by far the least offensive of the comedians on this list, and nobody could take issue with his performance as the Modern K-9 in The Sarah-Jane Adventures. But this tells you almost as much about the state of the programme as the Adrian Lester option.
Jason Statham (18-1). Do me a ***ing favour.
Harry Lloyd (18-1). Honestly, it's hard not to like the man. If, indeed, "man" is the word: he looks as if he's still being used as a human toast-rack by the older boys at Eton. After his appearance as Son of Mine in "Human Nature", his interviews for Confidential proved him to be in the well-adjusted middle-ground between relaxed professionalism and boyish enthusiasm, although that's perhaps not surprising for someone who looks as if he should be in the Doctor Who version of Muppet Babies alongside Russell Tovey. I just about managed to accept a Doctor who's roughly my age, but a public-school Doctor born in the 1980s? It's hard to imagine him commanding the authority to save the universe, unless he's going to challenge Davros to a round of the Biscuit Game. (Which Davros would lose, obviously. Because... well, y'know... he doesn't have a spare hand to hold the biscuit.)
And, way down the list of contenders…
Alex Kingston (50-1). Every time it looks as if a new Doctor's going to be required, some idiot suggests that it might be a woman. This year, that idiot was me, although there was a logic behind it. If Tennant has become so popular that he's virtually irreplaceable - far more so than Tom Baker ever was, since people in those days only expected an actor, not a major celebrity and national sex-symbol as well [footnote 7] - then the only option is to introduce a Doctor so shockingly different that the question of "better" or "worse" ceases to be an issue. If there's ever going to be a full-time female Doctor, then it's going to be now, especially when we consider the new producer's preference for hanging around with sexy actresses [footnote 8]. So there's a terrible credibility in Alex Kingston, the only woman on the Paddy Power list, being a candidate. If the programme-makers earmarked her as a potential She-Doctor some time ago, then the banality of the contrived-love-interest scenes in "Silence in the Library" makes a lot more sense: it's the set-up rather than the punchline, the twist being that she's not the Doctor's future wife at all, but someone who's destined to carry his "essence" around after the death of his current body. There are any number of precedents for this in SF television, and besides, the casting of an actress from ER would be seen as a coup by those bottom-feeding telly-whores who believe American TV to be the paragon of all human culture. In other words, exactly the kind of people whom the members of the Doctor Who production team are likely to meet every day.
However, if we're talking about the possibility of a bluestocking Doctor, then… I'd like to propose a rank outsider of my own.
Billie Piper. At the moment, she's happily squirming in her own afterbirth (she's named her newborn "Winston", which shows that she's lost none of her taste or good judgement since she declared "The Satan Pit" to be her favourite episode of 2006). But she wouldn't have to start shooting the 2010 series for another few months, and by then, the glow of celebrity motherhood would almost certainly have been replaced by a professional nanny. A few months after that, the papers would be full of speculation about her husband knocking off the nanny while Ms Piper's in Cardiff, but that's none of our concern. The thing to remember here is that the bigger Doctor Who gets, the more terrified its creators become, and the more they rely on past successes to win audience approval. Reuniting all the recent companions in "The Stolen Earth" might be regarded as a "celebration" of the programme so far, but it could equally be seen as a work of cowardice, especially since the story ends with a thoroughly pointless reprise of "Doomsday". Billie Piper is a proven ratings-winner, and associated with a Golden Age of Doctor Who that's scheduled to end with the departure of Tennant, at least unless they can keep it going by replacing him with someone just as recognisable. For the Doctor to take on Rose's form is no more ridiculous than any other regeneration (old-school geeks may quibble with this, but you can shut them up just by mentioning "Destiny of the Daleks", without even having to resort to "Journey's End"). Two years ago, it would've seemed silly, but then… two years ago, so would this entire list. With one exception, anyway.
Of course, since newfangled Doctor Who was designed to revolve around the companion until Catherine Tate made it impossible, we know that the nature of the new sidekick will be almost as crucial as the casting of the lead. For obvious reasons, Paddy Power isn't running a book on that, but we can make guesses based on Steven Moffat's known tendencies. Assuming that the Doctor's still male, the New Executive won't break with tradition, so it'll be another girl. She's unlikely to come from 2008 again - that'd be too obvious - but at the same time, Moffat won't want to risk alienating the audience by making her too far removed from home. He also wants to push the public's "nostalgia" button, as well as keeping the fans on his side, so the clever money says she'll come from 1963. In which case, she'll probably be an orphan, to avoid the necessity of return-trips to her own period. And since Moffat will want to curry favour with everyone else in Cardiff (q.v. "The Doctor Dances", in which he attempts to flatter to his Big Gay Boss by inventing a version of 1940s England in which none of the men are heterosexual), she'll obviously be inclined towards Welshness.
And, as pop-fate would have it, there's a model for this character. The last twelve months have already given the UK a vulnerable-yet-spunky Welsh girl who's got all the retro-glamour and heart-rending angst of Dusty Springfield, which is why I'm predicting that the 2010 series will be - in a nutshell - Duffy the Vampire Slayer.
Footnote 1. Eccleston came close, by treating the cultural well-being of younger viewers as a sacred trust. It's hard to imagine Tom Baker putting his ego aside in quite the same way, just as it's hard to imagine Eccleston making an arse of himself on a BBC1 panel-game show in twenty years' time.
Footnote 2. One of them wants to impress girls, and the other wants to smash giant spaceships into volcanoes.
Footnote 3. But even Warrington, like anyone over the age of forty-five, would be unacceptable after Tennant. Actually, I suggested him as a possible Doctor in a "Round Table" interview for I, Who 2, circa 2001. Gary Russell was also part of that Round Table, and shortly thereafter, Big Finish cast Warrington as Rassilon. Coincidence…? Yeah, probably. (The same interview saw Gary Russell describing Alien Bodies as one of the best Doctor Who books ever written, shortly before he blacklisted me from Big Finish for being mildly impolite about one of his own efforts. How do these people sleep?)
Footnote 4. There's also the issue of Morton Dill being one of Steven Taylor's ancestors. But let's not be too anal, there might be civilians reading this.
Footnote 5. Unlike, say, such luminaries as Roger Lloyd Pack or Michelle Collins. That's a bit like asking Chris Chibnall to write an episode, but not asking me.
Footnote 6. By now, you're probably sick of my insistence on calling him "Big Russell". But anyone who saw him on-stage at the ITV awards, dwarfing his minions in all three dimensions, will realise how apt it is.
Footnote 7. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: even if they were all still around and all still in their prime, none of the actors who've played the Doctor so far would possibly stand a chance of being Tennant's replacement. Not even Eccleston, whose leering, ogre-like demeanour would make far too many teenagers shout "eww, minger!" after the Boy David.
Footnote 8. Yeah, like I'm any different. Oh, that reminds me: why haven't I been commissioned to write another Bernice audio this year? I want another chance to flirt with Lisa Bowerman.
For the modern generation, the next few months are going to be a wholly new experience: those who don't remember the Old Time have never known the gut-level angst of waiting for the focus of the entire universe to change, or the righteous fury of someone who has to inform his or her parents that Les Dennis would not make a good replacement, or the smack of fear that the New Man might be the most hideous human being on Earth. (When I was eight, a communications breakdown in the schoolroom led me to believe that the next Doctor was going to be Jim Davidson rather than Peter Davison, and the emotional scarring still hasn't healed.) In fact, even those of us who've been here for decades might have trouble recalling the sensation. We knew who Eccleston's successor was going to be within 24 hours of his resignation; McGann ambushed us while we were looking the other way; and nobody really cared who was going to take over from Colin Baker. David Tennant's departure is the uneasiest moment in Doctor Who history since 1984, and the results are likely to be just as catastrophic.
Or perhaps that's unfair. But if I'm permitted to repeat myself - and given that I wrote over 50,000 words on the last series alone, I'm bound to use up all the adjectives sooner or later - then this is the point where we find out whether the series can drag itself out of its showbiz offal-pit and become a programme about Adventures in Space and Time again. After the 2007 series, I foresaw a nightmare future-world in which Matt Lucas had become the new Doctor, yet this seemed the lesser of two evils when Catherine Tate was announced as the TARDIS's official silly-face-puller in residence. And now David Walliams is one of the bookies' favourites to fill the Tennant-shaped hole at the heart of the world. Admittedly, I'm running out of new ways to say "surrounded by media back-slappers on all sides, the production team has forgotten the difference between a drama programme and a BAFTA awards ceremony", yet the fact remains that nobody's likely to tell them if - when - they let celeb-culture cloud their judgement. For a while, it looked as if Tate might steal the Best Performance trophy from her co-star at the ITV awards: from the point of view of Big Russell and friends, sitting in the audience of superstars while guzzling drinks made from champagne and little children's tears, it must have looked like a vindication. It probably never occurred to them that it was largely a result of block-voting by geek-loyalists, or that if you gave them a straight choice, ITV viewers would choose Ant and Dec to be the new Doctor.
Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before, Number Two. I said, towards the end of this year's season, that it was time for Tennant to make his excuses. Not because there's anything wrong with him as an actor (indeed, he's the only Doctor who's managed to develop his performance with every passing year, rather than giving a knowing wink to the camera and expecting small children to be impressed by his very presence), but simply because he's become so successful that his image has distorted the nature of the programme. Writers are among the laziest people on God's Clean Earth, and even those who should know better relied on Tennant-standards during the 2008 series. The latter half of "Forest of the Dead" is very nearly a checklist of "Things David Does Well", and his performance alone is enough to stop "The Doctor's Daughter" being as awful as its script. It's apt that he's the first actor to have his Doctor-number in his surname, because he's also the first to treat the role as if it's something like a sacred trust [footnote 1]. Yet he's given us a Doctor who's clever and dynamic and popular and sexy, so his companion would've ended up standing around with her mouth hanging open even if they hadn't hired an actress who specialises in that sort of thing.
In short, we may have passed the point where Tennant has become irreplaceable, which brings us to the nub of the issue. As you've no doubt heard, the bookmakers at Paddy Power have drawn up a long, long list of actors, and are now inviting us to have a flutter on the identity of the next-in-line. I can't say for sure whether it's the first time this has happened (we can be fairly sure that it didn't happen in 1987), but it's certainly the first time it's happened since I've been of gambling age. I speak as someone who made a profit on the 2002 World Cup, then lost it all on Euro 2004, and I still haven't forgiven the referee for the England-Portugal match. So here's a rundown of the favourites, for any of you who might be tempted. Because even if the bookies research every possible angle before they announce the odds, this is the one area in which we have the advantage. Do they know how Steven Moffat or Phil Collinson think…? No they don't. But we do [footnote 2].
Patterson Joseph (4-1 favourite). Here's an experiment you can all try. If you're in the company of non-fans, and someone brings up the topic of the Next Doctor Who, tell them that the current favourite is Patterson Joseph. When they say "who?", just tell them: "He's black." I guarantee that at least 85% of them will just say "oh", as if that tells them everything they need to know. And in a sense, it does. Modern-day Doctor Who has a reputation for being a "Liberal" programme: "Liberal" is used in its modern sense here, to mean something that's politely pro-tolerance and anti-bigotry, but doesn't have the nerve to be properly left-wing. The media has latched onto this, so it's inevitable that a black actor is going to be the bookmaker's choice, regardless of what he actually does. And there is a certain appeal in the thought of hearing your slightly-racist uncle mutter "not as good as it was in the old days" under his breath whenever anyone mentions Doctor Who, but on the other hand… well, let's be frank. There's a reason that Joseph specialises in harsh, aggressive, alienating characters, and it's simply that he has no capacity for making the audience like him. Which is, after all, why he was cast as the self-obsessed Dalek-denier in "Bad Wolf". Turning him into the Doctor, especially after the audience has grown accustomed to the shining and beatific countenance of the Boy David, would result in the series collapsing after a single year of Moffathood and Joseph himself being remembered in years to come as "The One Nobody Likes to Talk About". Don Warrington, now, that's my idea of a black Doctor [footnote 3].
David Morrisey (5-1). There's a potentially interesting legal case here. Thanks to the October spoiler-glut, I've just discovered the title of this year's Christmas special, and David Morrisey's role in it. Ergo, we know for a fact that he's "The Next Doctor", even if he isn't the Next Doctor. So what happens if you put a bet on him at 5-1, then take your slip back to Paddy Power after Christmas Day, claiming that you've technically won? Bookies are used to "solid" results, even if those results involve a photo-finish or a stewards' inquiry. They're not used to taking bets on something that might involve regenerative ambiguity or non-contemporaneous timelines. It seems unlikely, though, that Morrisey's Next Doctor will turn out to be a permanent appointment… unless the whole Christmas Special is a devious test-run (see also the 50-1 shot). Ah! On closer inspection, I see that the Paddy Power People have been careful to specify "David Tennant's Replacement" rather than "The Next Doctor Who". They're smarter than I thought.
James Nesbitt (6-1). Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before, Number Three. Some years ago, Steven Moffat told me about an extra-special project he'd written for BBC1, which had been temporarily delayed because the "perfect actor" was busy with other work. This sounded terribly exciting (any series which needs a specific actor has got to be a masterpiece, surely…?), so imagine my disappointment when it turned out to be Jekyll, and the "perfect actor" turned out to be that git from the Yellow Pages adverts. And this brings us once again to the back-slappy world of showbiz. If you work in the media, where programmes of the Cold Feet oeuvre are regarded as the height of sophistication, then James Nesbitt is an A-Grade celebrity. However, for those who don't habitually watch ITV pseudo-dramas that involve successful middle-class people whining about their lack of serious problems - and that's the majority of the British population, myself included - he's just an annoyance in the ad-breaks. His furniture-chewing performance in Jekyll, complete with token attempts at "scary and maniacal" which seemed roughly as intimidating as a twelve-year-old telling you that his dad is a ninja, were so ludicrous that even the Radio Times was forced to treat it as a form of kitsch. And this is a magazine that thinks Heroes is a serious drama. But despite Nesbitt's prior association with Moffat, we can safely assume that he's out of the running, if only because his casting would result in parents across the nation having to answer awkward questions like "mummy, why is that ugly bald man pretending to be the Doctor?".
John Simm (8-1). In the right context, there's nothing wrong with Simm. His cheeky-faced integrity was one of the key reasons that viewers of Life on Mars didn't notice the piss-poor quality of the scripts, although perhaps his greatest role was as the ersatz Barney Sumner in Twenty-Four Hour Party People. (If you haven't seen it, then it's worth a look next time it's on Film Four, if only for the obvious drinking game: take a shot every time you see an actor who's been in modern-day Doctor Who. Christopher Eccleston has a cameo part as a homeless wino who quotes Roman philosophy at Tony Wilson, and that's entertaining even as a sentence.) Yet the hideous miscasting of Simm as the Master was another example of the production team jamming a well-known, well-liked media "face" into the series, whether he belongs there or not. There's no clearer sign of this than the way he's introduced at the end of "Utopia". You'd think, wouldn't you, that we'd get at least one close-up of the newly-regenerated arch-villain in order to establish his identity…? But, no. All we get are waist-up shots as he dashes around the TARDIS console, because the assumption is that this man is a Big TV Star, and therefore needs no introduction. When even Graeme Harper is so celebrity-dazzled that he can't direct properly, something's gone badly wrong.
Chiwetel Ejiofor (8-1). Middle England might just about accept a black Doctor, but they certainly won't accept one they can't pronounce. Hartnell! Troughton! Pertwee! Baker! Davison! Baker! McCoy! McGann! Eccleston! Tennant! Eji… Ejoili… Ej… oh, **** it, let's just hire Matt Smith instead.
Russell Tovey (10-1). Tovey's inclusion on this list is a direct result of Big Russell "coming out" and describing him as one of the nation's greatest rising talents (he was in The History Boys, of course, so he's probably used to being a fat-camp-man magnet). And there are numerous precedents for bit-part players becoming regulars in the Doctor Who universe, although hard-core fans might find it harder to swallow the Doctor's transformation into Alanzo the Helmsman than to accept that the Sixth Doctor was based on Commander Maxil's body-print, or that Martha was related to the girl with the Cyber-lubricant in her ear at Canary Wharf, or that the cute gap-toothed Welsh girl from Torchwood was somehow based on the cute gap-toothed Welsh girl who gave her poor little working-class life to save Victorian Cardiff [footnote 4]. As a leading man, however, Tovey has a problem: he's twelve. Or at least, he appears to have been strategically punched in the face until he looks twelve. The Doctors may be getting younger, and Davies may have insisted that the character needs youthful jumping-around abilities these days (isn't that what the companions are supposed to be for…?), but an incarnation who looks as if he might cry when you take his jelly away is pushing things a little.
David Walliams (10-1). Currently being mistaken for a serious actor by retarded television executives across the UK, plus Stephen Poliakoff. In fact, the lower reaches of the Paddy Power list are riddled with comedians who believe they can Do Drama (including both Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, the latter appearing semi-feasible after House, although I still can't watch it without expecting him to shout "dammit, John!" at any moment). One of these represents the ultimate nightmare scenario: Ricky Gervais at 80-1. This may sound like a long shot, but scarily, Greece were given odds of exactly 80-1 to win Euro 2004. And what happened there? I lost everything, that's what. Now we're all in that position.
Anthony Head (10-1). The major objection to Head being the Doctor is that it's just too obvious, but then, there are an awful lot of people at BBC Wales who've got even less imagination than the bookmakers: those who see Doctor Who as a "cult sci-fi" show seem convinced that the best way to keep the fans happy is to cast lots of people from other "cult sci-fi" shows, hence the hilarious attempt to parachute James Marsters into Torchwood. Nonetheless, it's true that the casting of Head would be welcomed by the kind of degenerate nerd-scum who described the embarrassing swimming-pool scene in "School Reunion" as "iconic". As with John Simm, there's absolutely nothing wrong with Head in himself, but casting him as the Doctor would be final, crippling proof that the series has given up any chance of having its own identity. Did I mention that I saw him in The Rocky Horror Show, in the days when he was only known for the Gold Blend adverts…? He had great legs.
Richard Coyle (14-1). If I had to look down the list of candidates and choose one based on nothing more than his name, then this would be the winner. The polar opposite of Chiwetel Ejiofor, it just looks right on the page: Eccleston… Tennant… Coyle. Sadly, he's the drippy one out of Coupling (read: "the geeky side of Moffat that he tries to keep hidden, or at least tries to be ironic about"), who then became some sort of Celtic warrior in a film about King Arthur that even fantasy buffs have managed to forget. Again, the association with Moffat guarantees him a place in this list, and puts Coyle in the "chillingly possible" category. But no matter how much they try to re-style him, he still comes across as a bad perm looking for somewhere to happen.
Sean Pertwee (14-1). Let's be honest, he wouldn't be here at all if he weren't called Pertwee. And if we're talking about the ability to engage a family audience, then he isn't even the most qualified of the Doctor-spawn. (I don't mean David Troughton, either. Think eyelashes and a functional womb.) Pertwee Jr's vulturine, granite-cast features suggest that his father mated with Darkseid from The New Gods, and even if you could somehow chisel a smile across it with a diamond-tipped drill, he'd still give you the impression that he'd rather be stamping on baby rabbits than fighting cosmic evil. This makes him ideal for television's "criminal psychopath" and "ruthless drug-lord" parts, which is why it seems so bizarre that he's the country's most sought-after voice-over artist. His numerous TV ads sound like the kind of thing you'd expect to hear in a near-future fascist dystopia, promising unlimited power for the masses with a creeping undercurrent of "…once all the defectives have been eradicated". Not perfect for this role.
Robert Carlyse (14-1). Oh, God, yes. Please, yes. Apart from anything else, Carlyse's casting would force the programme to climb out from under the mountain of rotting celeb-flesh and become something like a drama series again (albeit a drama with nods toward light entertainment, which is how it seems to work best). Donna Noble would be as unthinkable under Carlyse as she would've been under Eccleston, and his presence might even compel could-be-good-if-they-tried writers like Gareth Roberts to come up with proper scripts instead of collections of in-jokes. Carlyse's name has been mooted in connection with Doctor Who since the Eccleston mini-epoch, partly because both actors came from the same batch of Rising British Talent in the early '90s, and partly because they've been locked together in our mass-consciousness ever since Carlyse stabbed Eccleston to death in Cracker: this is why some of us half-expected the Doctor to regenerate into Ricky Tomlinson at the end of "The Parting of the Ways", and why Carlyse seemed the obvious choice to be the new Master. But nooooo, they had to go for This Year's Mr Popular, didn't they? Hearteningly, a recent Radio Times interview suggested that he'd be willing to consider a major part in Doctor Who, but that he simply hadn't been asked [footnote 5]. The question is, though… would the general public be able to accept anyone this intense, after four years of Tennant's "Mickeeeey!!!" approach? We can only hope.
Richard E. Grant (14-1). What, again?
Jack Davenport (16-1). Another actor well-versed in playing a manifestation of Moffat's psyche, having spent several years as "Steve", the hero of Coupling who walks a neurotic line between geekdom and self-confidence while treating his barely-concealed misogyny as a form of post-modernism. Davenport's case is strengthened by his Hollywood credentials, if you can ignore the fact that the makers of Pirates of the Caribbean cast him because of his lack of charm and charisma (I forget the name of his character, but Lead Snotty Englishman just about covers it). We should also remember that he's already had a shot at being the star of a "cult sci-fi" series, and that he utterly botched it. Ultraviolet was meant to do for fantasy what Cracker did for the detective series, but whereas the anti-hero of Cracker was a pathologically unpredictable spit-ball of rage and obsession, the lead character of Ultraviolet was a mumbling bore who instantly alienated the audience. Mind you, Simon Pegg killed the otherwise-promising Hippies in exactly the same way, and he somehow got a second chance.
Alan Davies (16-1). I'm not even going to dignify this with a response.
Adrian Lester (18-1). What's amusing is that just in this rundown of Twenty People Who Might Be the Next Doctor Who, there are more black actors than there were in the entire Hartnell era. But whereas Patterson Joseph is far, far too vicious for the role, Adrian Lester is merely bland. Much more interesting is what his appearance on this list says about the way Doctor Who is perceived by the Not-We. Lester is best known for the BBC's Hustle, literally the most predictable television series ever made, usually described by the Radio Times with the obvious euphemism "glossy". But these days, this is how both the bookies and the media-in-general see the Doctor's world: the series is no longer an ever-growing experiment in High Strangeness and relative moral values, it's quite distinctly a "format", related to the Tony Jordan school of License-Fee-draining, guest-star-heavy pseudo-drama. When you remember that the same people responsible for the vacuity of Hustle also devised Life on Mars (which is just as vacuous, but better-camouflaged), the last two years of Doctor Who make a lot more sense.
Adien Gillen (18-1). Aiden Gillen…? Oh, of course: the press still believes in the "Gay Mafia" theory of television, so Gillen is a potential candidate simply because he was seen committing various acts of fleshy man-lust in Queer as Folk. But in itself, this proves that he's not in the running. If Big Russell [footnote 6] were still Best Gay Friends with him, then Gillen would've had a major guest-star part in Doctor Who three years ago. For Davies to insist on casting an old acquaintance now, just as he's about to leave the series, would be bizarre behaviour even for the man who thought "Journey's End" made sense.
Alexander Armstrong (18-1). Back in 2003-2004, when we were still obsessing over the question of who the first twenty-first-century Doctor might be, one reader of the RT suggested that they should cast a new Doctor every week and call it Have I Got Whos for You. At around the same time, Russell T. Davies was expressing his disgust at the tabloid speculation that Jamie Oliver could get the part instead of a "serious" actor. And, hooray! He cast Christopher Eccleston. Yet after five years of separation from the world of mortal men, Davies has brought the programme to a point where the papers are once again more likely to suggest "celebs" than "thesps", which is why the list of candidates to be the Doctor looks frighteningly like a list of candidates to be the nation's leading game-show host: Alexander Armstrong is not only a regular chairman on Have I Got News, but has also been mooted as Des O'Connor's replacement on Countdown. To be fair to Armstrong, he's by far the least offensive of the comedians on this list, and nobody could take issue with his performance as the Modern K-9 in The Sarah-Jane Adventures. But this tells you almost as much about the state of the programme as the Adrian Lester option.
Jason Statham (18-1). Do me a ***ing favour.
Harry Lloyd (18-1). Honestly, it's hard not to like the man. If, indeed, "man" is the word: he looks as if he's still being used as a human toast-rack by the older boys at Eton. After his appearance as Son of Mine in "Human Nature", his interviews for Confidential proved him to be in the well-adjusted middle-ground between relaxed professionalism and boyish enthusiasm, although that's perhaps not surprising for someone who looks as if he should be in the Doctor Who version of Muppet Babies alongside Russell Tovey. I just about managed to accept a Doctor who's roughly my age, but a public-school Doctor born in the 1980s? It's hard to imagine him commanding the authority to save the universe, unless he's going to challenge Davros to a round of the Biscuit Game. (Which Davros would lose, obviously. Because... well, y'know... he doesn't have a spare hand to hold the biscuit.)
And, way down the list of contenders…
Alex Kingston (50-1). Every time it looks as if a new Doctor's going to be required, some idiot suggests that it might be a woman. This year, that idiot was me, although there was a logic behind it. If Tennant has become so popular that he's virtually irreplaceable - far more so than Tom Baker ever was, since people in those days only expected an actor, not a major celebrity and national sex-symbol as well [footnote 7] - then the only option is to introduce a Doctor so shockingly different that the question of "better" or "worse" ceases to be an issue. If there's ever going to be a full-time female Doctor, then it's going to be now, especially when we consider the new producer's preference for hanging around with sexy actresses [footnote 8]. So there's a terrible credibility in Alex Kingston, the only woman on the Paddy Power list, being a candidate. If the programme-makers earmarked her as a potential She-Doctor some time ago, then the banality of the contrived-love-interest scenes in "Silence in the Library" makes a lot more sense: it's the set-up rather than the punchline, the twist being that she's not the Doctor's future wife at all, but someone who's destined to carry his "essence" around after the death of his current body. There are any number of precedents for this in SF television, and besides, the casting of an actress from ER would be seen as a coup by those bottom-feeding telly-whores who believe American TV to be the paragon of all human culture. In other words, exactly the kind of people whom the members of the Doctor Who production team are likely to meet every day.
However, if we're talking about the possibility of a bluestocking Doctor, then… I'd like to propose a rank outsider of my own.
Billie Piper. At the moment, she's happily squirming in her own afterbirth (she's named her newborn "Winston", which shows that she's lost none of her taste or good judgement since she declared "The Satan Pit" to be her favourite episode of 2006). But she wouldn't have to start shooting the 2010 series for another few months, and by then, the glow of celebrity motherhood would almost certainly have been replaced by a professional nanny. A few months after that, the papers would be full of speculation about her husband knocking off the nanny while Ms Piper's in Cardiff, but that's none of our concern. The thing to remember here is that the bigger Doctor Who gets, the more terrified its creators become, and the more they rely on past successes to win audience approval. Reuniting all the recent companions in "The Stolen Earth" might be regarded as a "celebration" of the programme so far, but it could equally be seen as a work of cowardice, especially since the story ends with a thoroughly pointless reprise of "Doomsday". Billie Piper is a proven ratings-winner, and associated with a Golden Age of Doctor Who that's scheduled to end with the departure of Tennant, at least unless they can keep it going by replacing him with someone just as recognisable. For the Doctor to take on Rose's form is no more ridiculous than any other regeneration (old-school geeks may quibble with this, but you can shut them up just by mentioning "Destiny of the Daleks", without even having to resort to "Journey's End"). Two years ago, it would've seemed silly, but then… two years ago, so would this entire list. With one exception, anyway.
Of course, since newfangled Doctor Who was designed to revolve around the companion until Catherine Tate made it impossible, we know that the nature of the new sidekick will be almost as crucial as the casting of the lead. For obvious reasons, Paddy Power isn't running a book on that, but we can make guesses based on Steven Moffat's known tendencies. Assuming that the Doctor's still male, the New Executive won't break with tradition, so it'll be another girl. She's unlikely to come from 2008 again - that'd be too obvious - but at the same time, Moffat won't want to risk alienating the audience by making her too far removed from home. He also wants to push the public's "nostalgia" button, as well as keeping the fans on his side, so the clever money says she'll come from 1963. In which case, she'll probably be an orphan, to avoid the necessity of return-trips to her own period. And since Moffat will want to curry favour with everyone else in Cardiff (q.v. "The Doctor Dances", in which he attempts to flatter to his Big Gay Boss by inventing a version of 1940s England in which none of the men are heterosexual), she'll obviously be inclined towards Welshness.
And, as pop-fate would have it, there's a model for this character. The last twelve months have already given the UK a vulnerable-yet-spunky Welsh girl who's got all the retro-glamour and heart-rending angst of Dusty Springfield, which is why I'm predicting that the 2010 series will be - in a nutshell - Duffy the Vampire Slayer.
Footnote 1. Eccleston came close, by treating the cultural well-being of younger viewers as a sacred trust. It's hard to imagine Tom Baker putting his ego aside in quite the same way, just as it's hard to imagine Eccleston making an arse of himself on a BBC1 panel-game show in twenty years' time.
Footnote 2. One of them wants to impress girls, and the other wants to smash giant spaceships into volcanoes.
Footnote 3. But even Warrington, like anyone over the age of forty-five, would be unacceptable after Tennant. Actually, I suggested him as a possible Doctor in a "Round Table" interview for I, Who 2, circa 2001. Gary Russell was also part of that Round Table, and shortly thereafter, Big Finish cast Warrington as Rassilon. Coincidence…? Yeah, probably. (The same interview saw Gary Russell describing Alien Bodies as one of the best Doctor Who books ever written, shortly before he blacklisted me from Big Finish for being mildly impolite about one of his own efforts. How do these people sleep?)
Footnote 4. There's also the issue of Morton Dill being one of Steven Taylor's ancestors. But let's not be too anal, there might be civilians reading this.
Footnote 5. Unlike, say, such luminaries as Roger Lloyd Pack or Michelle Collins. That's a bit like asking Chris Chibnall to write an episode, but not asking me.
Footnote 6. By now, you're probably sick of my insistence on calling him "Big Russell". But anyone who saw him on-stage at the ITV awards, dwarfing his minions in all three dimensions, will realise how apt it is.
Footnote 7. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: even if they were all still around and all still in their prime, none of the actors who've played the Doctor so far would possibly stand a chance of being Tennant's replacement. Not even Eccleston, whose leering, ogre-like demeanour would make far too many teenagers shout "eww, minger!" after the Boy David.
Footnote 8. Yeah, like I'm any different. Oh, that reminds me: why haven't I been commissioned to write another Bernice audio this year? I want another chance to flirt with Lisa Bowerman.
Sunday, March 23, 2008
...Of Death
As I write this, Film4 is showing Doctor in Clover. This is a '60s medical comedy starring Leslie Phillips, and not - as modern fandom might like to imagine - a movie about David Tennant being rolled in low-fat butter.
However, I don't want to talk about David Tennant being rolled in low-fat butter. I want to talk about something which isn't much more insightful, but which is morbidly obsessive in a very different sort of way. I want to talk about famous people dying.
Traditionally, there's always been a skulking, unspoken connection between Doctor Who and Celebrity Death. The reason for this is simple and obvious: one of the most important Big Facts we were told about the series, when we were learning its ancient history from the fanzines and guidebooks, was that the first episode was broadcast while the world was still recovering from the hangover of the Kennedy assassination. For those of us who started reading Doctor Who Monthly before we started thinking about girls, it may even have been the first time we heard of the Kennedy assassination. At first sight, it's hard to see any direct correlation between the "Camelot" Presidency (motorcades, mafia connections, power and glamour, Jackie Kennedy's early-'60s ultra-chic) and Hartnell-era Doctor Who (junkyards, police boxes, very small sets, Barbara Wright's cardigans), however desperately "Silver Nemesis" might try to link the two. More importantly, though, the hype and pizzazz of Lee Harvey Oswald's Grand Day Out has overwhelmed all the other legends and oddities surrounding Doctor Who's arrival in the world. Which is unfortunate, when you consider that the very same day - 22nd of November, 1963 - also saw the deaths of both Aldous Huxley and C. S. Lewis.
Even on its own, the death of Lewis is striking, far more so than what was going on in Dallas. Not that I want to heap any praise on the pompous, reactionary old bore (obviously I'm bound to be on Philip Pullman's side in this argument, although the Narnia books are actually far less offensive that Lewis' Perelandra trilogy, which is the SF equivalent of being shouted at by the angry man who stands outside the supermarket and tries to give you pamphlets about the Love of Jesus), but it is true to say that The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe gave us the most important single prototype of the TARDIS. Yes, even more important than the H. G. Wells model, since the Ship's "magic wardrobe" qualities have always been closer to the heart of the programme than its "time-travel" ability: q.v. the final scene of "Rose". We can go further, and suggest that Doctor Who was the post-War descendant of the same children-find-a-secret-world-down-the-back-of-a-sofa tradition, even if "An Unearthly Child" presents us with a version in which the grown-ups are the ones who discover Fairyland. Had Lewis lived just another twenty-four hours, then he would have been able to watch the first episode and say to himself: 'Haaaaang on a minute…'
But when you consider the three fatalities in combination, a more interesting picture emerges. (We're not the first ones to try this, incidentally. Peter Kreeft wrote a novel entitled Between Heaven and Hell, in which Kennedy, Huxley and Lewis meet each other in limbo on their way to the afterlife, and drone on about the nature of Christ for 120 pages. The justification for this is that all three men were Christians of varying philosophical breeds, but if it's acceptable for an author to use their deaths as an exercise in Catholic propaganda, then I'm fairly sure it's all right to use them to talk about Daleks.) Consider the following…
Early Doctor Who was never explicitly conceived as "sci-fi", and the parts that seem most "spacey" came from experiments in TV production rather than the Arthur C. Clarke school of rocket-ship fiction. But the '60s version of the programme did exploit all sorts of popular anxieties and aspirations about the future, specifically those parts of the future that most concerned the British, at a time when the country was still in the process of rebuilding itself after the Austerity years. The fact is that the people of 1963 considered Thinking About the Future to be an important pastime. Our twenty-first-century society, being wholly consumer-driven and largely run by Rupert Murdoch, fetishises the idea of having things now and discourages us from thinking about what-happens-next. To the '60s mind-set, what-happens-next was at the root of all modern culture. For the British, anything American was considered futuristic, and the Yanks seemed determined to build fully-functional space-colonies by the 1980s. Across the western world, questions of social order and population control were making us wonder whether the White Heat of Technology really could save humankind. And amidst all of this, the BBC was attempting to make reasonably cosy, reasonably highbrow family entertainment with its roots in popular literature rather than Hollywood razzle-dazzle.
This is the crucible in which Doctor Who was given shape, and in that light, can you think of any better combination of blood-sacrifices than the space-happy President of the US, the man who wrote Brave New World, and the country's best-known children's fantasist? The only name which might perhaps be better-suited to the list of casualties is John Wyndham, given that Susan Foreman can safely be considered a "nice" version of one of the Midwich Cuckoos (and certainly a product of the same post-War generation-gap angst), but Wyndham didn't pop his clogs until 1969. He may even have seen Doctor Who, although God knows what he thought of it if he did. Maybe he watched "An Unearthly Child", and found himself thinking 'oh good, it's not just me'; maybe he watched "The Dalek Invasion of Earth", and wondered if he was in some way responsible for either the vision of a post-apocalyptic Britain or the giant shambling plant-creature; maybe he watched "The Dominators" in his final months, and just thought it was a load of cobblers.
This raises another point about death and Doctor Who: a lot of people we now think of as "historical", or at least "recent-historical", lived long enough to watch it. The 1980s taught us that if a series about time-travel goes on for long enough, then it'll eventually overlap with its own predictions about the future ("Attack of the Cybermen" might be seen as a symptom of this problem more than an actual story, or at least, it's half-tolerable if you think of it that way). Now the 2000s are teaching us that if a series about time-travel goes on for long enough, then it'll start treating the early years of its run as if they were an era of antiquity, fit for the Doctor to revisit. "Remembrance of the Daleks" was the first sign of this, but it's a lot more noticeable if you live in an age which is so obsessed with the present that it even considers time-travel to the 1980s to be in some way exotic (Ashes to Ashes, for Christ's sake…). Kennedy, Huxley and Lewis all missed the Doctor Who epoch by twenty-four hours, and Wyndham could theoretically have watched Quarks at play, but they all died in the monochrome 1960s. To someone of my age, the difference between the black-and-white era and the colour era is like a geological boundary layer, separating the Ancient TV Past from the Recent TV Past. What about casualties of the 1970s, then?
When BBC7 interviewed Agatha Christie's biographer in 2007, they remembered that geeks might be listening - because BBC7 always remembers that geeks might be listening - and asked her what Dame Agatha would make of the fact that she's going to be the subject of a Doctor Who story this year. The biographer fielded the question politely enough, but interestingly, both interviewer and interviewee spoke as if Christie would be vaguely puzzled by the existence of this strange, futuristic programme about a man in a time-travelling police box. Except, of course, that… she died in 1976. Specifically, she died between episodes two and three of "The Brain of Morbius". Whereas it used to be taken for granted that the Doctor only ever met historical figures of the Marco Polo oeuvre, it's now perfectly reasonable for him to bump into people who might actually have seen Philip Madoc trying to cut Tom Baker's head off.
This raises odd questions about the future, assuming our civilisation has one. Modern-day Doctor Who is, as we've already established, so addicted to celeb culture and showbiz parties that the monsters in "Voyage of the Damned" even look like walking BAFTA awards. Many of the celebrities who come into contact with the series in our own decade will be historical figures, of a kind, thirty or forty or fifty years from now. A producer of Sky-TV-owned Doctor Who in 2050 may well decide that it'd be "cute" for the Doctor to go back in time and meet legendary late-twentieth-century starlet Kylie Minogue, oblivious the fact that she was actually in the programme. Or how about soon-to-be-mythical Lord Mayor of London Boris Johnson, who's surely guaranteed a cameo appearance in the show at some point in the next few years?
I mentioned a blood-sacrifice, and… I may not have been entirely serious. But human beings can still instinctively feel, even after centuries of evidence to the contrary, that no great work can succeed unless somebody's buried in the foundations for good luck (hence the creepy later verses of "London Bridge is Falling Down", and the more modern architectural tradition that a new bridge hasn't been "christened" until at least one suicide has jumped off it). It obviously worked for Doctor Who in 1963, given that the bridge is still standing, even if it was closed for repairs between 1989 and 2005. It's not always so successful, though. Jon Pertwee snuffed it just before the supposed "return" of the programme in 1996, which might have been interpreted as a symbolic laying-to-rest of the old before the ushering-in of the new, but all it seemed to get us was a "Planet of the Spiders"-style motorbike chase in the middle of the TV Movie. And the only notable person who died in the twenty-four hours before "Rose" was Jim Callaghan, which might be considered a bit of a damp squib on the Kennedy scale. Although it may be apt that Callaghan was Prime Minister during the late 1970s, the last time the series was a ratings-winning national institution.
Now Doctor in Clover has come to an end, and the TV ads are telling me that you can get free Doctor Who DVDs in this week's Sun. That settles it: the world is officially broken. Balance can clearly only be restored to the universe if, in the spirit of '63, Rupert Murdoch gets shot in the head twenty-four hours before the broadcast of "Partners in Crime". That might make even Catherine Tate seem bearable.
A Postscript. While we're feasting on the dead… these days, a lot of critics (rather unfairly) attack the film 2010 for being "dated", on the grounds that it depicts a world just two years in our future where the Cold War is still in progress. However, I'd point out that the movie also features a cameo by Arthur C. Clarke, who's seen reading a newspaper on a bench outside the White House. I'd tentatively suggest that Arthur C. Clarke reading a newspaper on a bench outside the White House is a lot less likely to happen in 2010 than a face-off between America and Russia, at least unless someone does something really weird with preserving fluid and animatronics.
However, I don't want to talk about David Tennant being rolled in low-fat butter. I want to talk about something which isn't much more insightful, but which is morbidly obsessive in a very different sort of way. I want to talk about famous people dying.
Traditionally, there's always been a skulking, unspoken connection between Doctor Who and Celebrity Death. The reason for this is simple and obvious: one of the most important Big Facts we were told about the series, when we were learning its ancient history from the fanzines and guidebooks, was that the first episode was broadcast while the world was still recovering from the hangover of the Kennedy assassination. For those of us who started reading Doctor Who Monthly before we started thinking about girls, it may even have been the first time we heard of the Kennedy assassination. At first sight, it's hard to see any direct correlation between the "Camelot" Presidency (motorcades, mafia connections, power and glamour, Jackie Kennedy's early-'60s ultra-chic) and Hartnell-era Doctor Who (junkyards, police boxes, very small sets, Barbara Wright's cardigans), however desperately "Silver Nemesis" might try to link the two. More importantly, though, the hype and pizzazz of Lee Harvey Oswald's Grand Day Out has overwhelmed all the other legends and oddities surrounding Doctor Who's arrival in the world. Which is unfortunate, when you consider that the very same day - 22nd of November, 1963 - also saw the deaths of both Aldous Huxley and C. S. Lewis.
Even on its own, the death of Lewis is striking, far more so than what was going on in Dallas. Not that I want to heap any praise on the pompous, reactionary old bore (obviously I'm bound to be on Philip Pullman's side in this argument, although the Narnia books are actually far less offensive that Lewis' Perelandra trilogy, which is the SF equivalent of being shouted at by the angry man who stands outside the supermarket and tries to give you pamphlets about the Love of Jesus), but it is true to say that The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe gave us the most important single prototype of the TARDIS. Yes, even more important than the H. G. Wells model, since the Ship's "magic wardrobe" qualities have always been closer to the heart of the programme than its "time-travel" ability: q.v. the final scene of "Rose". We can go further, and suggest that Doctor Who was the post-War descendant of the same children-find-a-secret-world-down-the-back-of-a-sofa tradition, even if "An Unearthly Child" presents us with a version in which the grown-ups are the ones who discover Fairyland. Had Lewis lived just another twenty-four hours, then he would have been able to watch the first episode and say to himself: 'Haaaaang on a minute…'
But when you consider the three fatalities in combination, a more interesting picture emerges. (We're not the first ones to try this, incidentally. Peter Kreeft wrote a novel entitled Between Heaven and Hell, in which Kennedy, Huxley and Lewis meet each other in limbo on their way to the afterlife, and drone on about the nature of Christ for 120 pages. The justification for this is that all three men were Christians of varying philosophical breeds, but if it's acceptable for an author to use their deaths as an exercise in Catholic propaganda, then I'm fairly sure it's all right to use them to talk about Daleks.) Consider the following…
Early Doctor Who was never explicitly conceived as "sci-fi", and the parts that seem most "spacey" came from experiments in TV production rather than the Arthur C. Clarke school of rocket-ship fiction. But the '60s version of the programme did exploit all sorts of popular anxieties and aspirations about the future, specifically those parts of the future that most concerned the British, at a time when the country was still in the process of rebuilding itself after the Austerity years. The fact is that the people of 1963 considered Thinking About the Future to be an important pastime. Our twenty-first-century society, being wholly consumer-driven and largely run by Rupert Murdoch, fetishises the idea of having things now and discourages us from thinking about what-happens-next. To the '60s mind-set, what-happens-next was at the root of all modern culture. For the British, anything American was considered futuristic, and the Yanks seemed determined to build fully-functional space-colonies by the 1980s. Across the western world, questions of social order and population control were making us wonder whether the White Heat of Technology really could save humankind. And amidst all of this, the BBC was attempting to make reasonably cosy, reasonably highbrow family entertainment with its roots in popular literature rather than Hollywood razzle-dazzle.
This is the crucible in which Doctor Who was given shape, and in that light, can you think of any better combination of blood-sacrifices than the space-happy President of the US, the man who wrote Brave New World, and the country's best-known children's fantasist? The only name which might perhaps be better-suited to the list of casualties is John Wyndham, given that Susan Foreman can safely be considered a "nice" version of one of the Midwich Cuckoos (and certainly a product of the same post-War generation-gap angst), but Wyndham didn't pop his clogs until 1969. He may even have seen Doctor Who, although God knows what he thought of it if he did. Maybe he watched "An Unearthly Child", and found himself thinking 'oh good, it's not just me'; maybe he watched "The Dalek Invasion of Earth", and wondered if he was in some way responsible for either the vision of a post-apocalyptic Britain or the giant shambling plant-creature; maybe he watched "The Dominators" in his final months, and just thought it was a load of cobblers.
This raises another point about death and Doctor Who: a lot of people we now think of as "historical", or at least "recent-historical", lived long enough to watch it. The 1980s taught us that if a series about time-travel goes on for long enough, then it'll eventually overlap with its own predictions about the future ("Attack of the Cybermen" might be seen as a symptom of this problem more than an actual story, or at least, it's half-tolerable if you think of it that way). Now the 2000s are teaching us that if a series about time-travel goes on for long enough, then it'll start treating the early years of its run as if they were an era of antiquity, fit for the Doctor to revisit. "Remembrance of the Daleks" was the first sign of this, but it's a lot more noticeable if you live in an age which is so obsessed with the present that it even considers time-travel to the 1980s to be in some way exotic (Ashes to Ashes, for Christ's sake…). Kennedy, Huxley and Lewis all missed the Doctor Who epoch by twenty-four hours, and Wyndham could theoretically have watched Quarks at play, but they all died in the monochrome 1960s. To someone of my age, the difference between the black-and-white era and the colour era is like a geological boundary layer, separating the Ancient TV Past from the Recent TV Past. What about casualties of the 1970s, then?
When BBC7 interviewed Agatha Christie's biographer in 2007, they remembered that geeks might be listening - because BBC7 always remembers that geeks might be listening - and asked her what Dame Agatha would make of the fact that she's going to be the subject of a Doctor Who story this year. The biographer fielded the question politely enough, but interestingly, both interviewer and interviewee spoke as if Christie would be vaguely puzzled by the existence of this strange, futuristic programme about a man in a time-travelling police box. Except, of course, that… she died in 1976. Specifically, she died between episodes two and three of "The Brain of Morbius". Whereas it used to be taken for granted that the Doctor only ever met historical figures of the Marco Polo oeuvre, it's now perfectly reasonable for him to bump into people who might actually have seen Philip Madoc trying to cut Tom Baker's head off.
This raises odd questions about the future, assuming our civilisation has one. Modern-day Doctor Who is, as we've already established, so addicted to celeb culture and showbiz parties that the monsters in "Voyage of the Damned" even look like walking BAFTA awards. Many of the celebrities who come into contact with the series in our own decade will be historical figures, of a kind, thirty or forty or fifty years from now. A producer of Sky-TV-owned Doctor Who in 2050 may well decide that it'd be "cute" for the Doctor to go back in time and meet legendary late-twentieth-century starlet Kylie Minogue, oblivious the fact that she was actually in the programme. Or how about soon-to-be-mythical Lord Mayor of London Boris Johnson, who's surely guaranteed a cameo appearance in the show at some point in the next few years?
I mentioned a blood-sacrifice, and… I may not have been entirely serious. But human beings can still instinctively feel, even after centuries of evidence to the contrary, that no great work can succeed unless somebody's buried in the foundations for good luck (hence the creepy later verses of "London Bridge is Falling Down", and the more modern architectural tradition that a new bridge hasn't been "christened" until at least one suicide has jumped off it). It obviously worked for Doctor Who in 1963, given that the bridge is still standing, even if it was closed for repairs between 1989 and 2005. It's not always so successful, though. Jon Pertwee snuffed it just before the supposed "return" of the programme in 1996, which might have been interpreted as a symbolic laying-to-rest of the old before the ushering-in of the new, but all it seemed to get us was a "Planet of the Spiders"-style motorbike chase in the middle of the TV Movie. And the only notable person who died in the twenty-four hours before "Rose" was Jim Callaghan, which might be considered a bit of a damp squib on the Kennedy scale. Although it may be apt that Callaghan was Prime Minister during the late 1970s, the last time the series was a ratings-winning national institution.
Now Doctor in Clover has come to an end, and the TV ads are telling me that you can get free Doctor Who DVDs in this week's Sun. That settles it: the world is officially broken. Balance can clearly only be restored to the universe if, in the spirit of '63, Rupert Murdoch gets shot in the head twenty-four hours before the broadcast of "Partners in Crime". That might make even Catherine Tate seem bearable.
A Postscript. While we're feasting on the dead… these days, a lot of critics (rather unfairly) attack the film 2010 for being "dated", on the grounds that it depicts a world just two years in our future where the Cold War is still in progress. However, I'd point out that the movie also features a cameo by Arthur C. Clarke, who's seen reading a newspaper on a bench outside the White House. I'd tentatively suggest that Arthur C. Clarke reading a newspaper on a bench outside the White House is a lot less likely to happen in 2010 than a face-off between America and Russia, at least unless someone does something really weird with preserving fluid and animatronics.
Sunday, March 09, 2008
SF Iconoclasty 101
(The following article was originally written for Death Ray magazine, but ended up being too long to fit anywhere. It's about the legacy of Nigel Kneale, although readers should note that it doesn't necessarily agree with the orthodox version of British SF history. You know. The version you get in BBC4 documentaries.)
Between the late 1950s and the early 1970s, a sizeable chunk of American society - brought up to believe that anything which hadn't been trimmed to regulation length was either a sign of moral degeneracy or the work of Commie infiltrators - looked around at the dissent, disorder and racial turbulence at large in the nation, and concluded that the whole of human civilisation was on the verge of collapse. With hindsight, this seems absurd: less than a generation after the trauma of World War Two, anyone half-rational should have realised that you've got to expect a few unsightly cultural trends and a modicum of rioting if your society's in the process of reinventing itself. But America likes to think in terms of catastrophes, so forty years on, the modern American right is founded on the belief that the '60s saw the world itself being brought to the edge of annihilation by left-wing agitators and people with loose morals. It's the neo-conservative version of the Story of the Flood.
Meanwhile, in Britain, Nigel Kneale also noticed the rumblings of the coming generation. His own response was to write Quatermass and the Pit, in which it turns out that humans are doomed from birth to hate, hunt and kill each other, because their genetic development was influenced by evil tribalist Martians. These three-legged space-grasshoppers have essentially given us Original Sin, and that's the real reason for the race-riots in Mississippi and Notting Hill. We're just born bad, so self-destruction is all we're good for.
We can probably assume that nobody on the planet has ever taken the "Martians" story at face value, but what's notable is that both these versions of human history come from the same core anxiety. In essence, both are panic-reactions to an aggressively unpredictable world, in which a few local flashpoints are treated as proof that the whole of humanity is about to wipe itself out. There are many, many precedents for this lack of perspective in literature, and SF writers are quite wonderfully prone to it (we might especially remember H. G. Wells' Mind at the End of Its Tether, in which the author took his own depression as evidence that the entire universe was being unravelled by a malevolent invisible force… amazingly, this was supposed to be a work of non-fiction). Of course, modern-day, liberal-minded SF fans would immediately question the notion of '60s America as a literal Gomorrah. On the other hand, it's de rigueur to regard Nigel Kneale as a visionary.
Was he ever really a visionary? These days, he's routinely portrayed as the Grand Old Man of SF television, and it's often said that the scripts he wrote in the first half of his TV career were scarily prescient of things to come. But with Kneale himself now among the departed, and his admirers making numerous improbable claims about his achievements, it may be time to re-evaluate his impact on British TV. Because far from accurately pre-empting the future, much of his work seems to have difficulty getting to grips with the present.
Perhaps the most telling case-study here is his script for the final Quatermass serial, made by ITV in 1979. Older readers may recall that in Britain, the 1970s was an age of strikes, fuel shortages, powercuts, and punk rockers scaring everyone's mum. Extending this into the near-future, Kneale gives us a dystopian society in which human civilisation is (go on, guess) on the verge of collapse, where thuggish working-class youngsters in leather jackets rule the cities, and - according to the astonishingly po-faced opening narration - a "primal disorder" has been let loose on the world. The thing to note here is that this seemed ridiculous when the story was broadcast, never mind 29 years later. The suggestion that petrol rationing and a ten o'clock TV blackout would lead to a New Dark Age was bizarre even before the election of Margaret Thatcher, but the real subtext of the 1979 Quatermass is that any world which involves Johnny Rotten swearing on television is obviously doomed to oblivion. Except…
…except that in this final Quatermass story, the villains are hippies. Which is to say, the hippies are the brutal, mindless cultists who assemble at stone circles in order to worship evil man-mincing aliens. The presence of malevolent flower-children makes more sense when we consider that the first draft of the script was written seven years before the final version reached the screens, but even in 1972, this would have been a dubious attempt at satire (anyone who's seen the Star Trek episode "The Way to Eden" will know why). The kind of hippy-kids who liked to paint their faces with yin-yangs and hang around ancient monuments had become positively quaint by this stage, yet their sporadic minor skirmishes with policemen are taken by Kneale as proof that Britain is a hair's-breadth away from civil war. Then again, the story doesn't really make a distinction between the hippies and the murderous urban terrorists. In Kneale's world, all latter-day cultural movements become indistinguishable, so the script can confidently inform us that there's no difference between hairy people gathering on Salisbury Plain and the Nuremberg Rallies.
The fact is that in the Quatermass continuum, only sensible middle-class people over the age of forty are allowed to be civilised. Anyone else is a walking demonstration that human beings are genetically stupid. The "funny" working-class couple whose home is demolished by a space-capsule at the beginning of The Quatermass Experiment are, sadly, the rule rather than the exception. In the same vein, we should be thankful that Kneale's script The Big, Big Giggle was never filmed. The tale of a teenage suicide craze, it was vetoed for fear that it might provoke copycat incidents, but its embarrassment factor would have been far worse than its body-count. This was the work of an author so dismissive of modern culture, and so ignorant of the real reasons behind These Young People Today taking drugs and starting riots, that he honestly thought teenagers were prepared to slit their own wrists just for a laugh. You might find yourself reminded of one of those '50s American "information" films, about schoolchildren turning into psychotic killers after smoking marijuana.
So as in Quatermass and the Pit, anyone who isn't a mouthpiece for the writer is an ignorant savage with an urge towards self-destruction. Because, far from being a forward-thinking visionary, Kneale's work suggests the SF equivalent of a Daily Mail columnist: an arch-conservative who considers anything new, alien or peculiar-looking to be untrustworthy and ultimately catastrophic. Why, then, is he considered such a revolutionary?
In recent years, there's been an attempt to interpret some of his scripts as prophetic, most particularly his 1968 teleplay The Year of the Sex Olympics. As this involves a futuristic "reality show" about a family trapped on an island with a goggle-eyed madman, it's said to predict the worst excesses of television in the twenty-first century, but few people who've actually watched it can take this claim seriously. In 1968, the idea of TV as a voyeuristic form of cruelty was already an old one, both in SF and in mainstream culture. And the death-game in Sex Olympics bears so little relation to Celebrity Love Island that it's hard to see the programme as a warning from history, even if you can get over the sight of Leonard Rossiter slouching around in a bacofoil kaftan.
No, the real reason for Kneale's reputation is a sentimental one. For the British geek, he's become a figurehead of "serious" science fiction drama, a sign that we were always so much more grown-up than the Americans. In particular, the original Quatermass Experiment (vintage 1953) is remembered as the BBC's first "serious" attempt at SF. The problem is that this folk-memory isn't supported by the programme's content. Take away the surface layer of middle-class smugness, and there's virtually nothing to differentiate it from a '50s American B-movie. It's certainly far less intelligent - and a great deal more reactionary - than Hollywood's It Came From Outer Space, made in the same year. When Hammer Films remade the serial as a feature film in 1955, they turned Professor Quatermass into an American, and the result doesn't even pretend to be anything other than low-budget sci-fi schlock. It's worth noting that the 1985 edition of the Science Fiction Film Sourcebook, published before Kneale was reinvented as a prophet, describes Brian Donlev's performance in the movie as "giving what was otherwise an undistinguished storyline a touch of authority": there is, quite rightly, no suggestion that this was anything other than a monster-movie runaround.
(A side-note here… the serial's one original feature, as Kneale himself liked to point out, is that the slimy tentacled space-fungus doesn't get blown up in the final episode. Instead, Quatermass appeals to its humanity and convinces it to commit suicide. This is apparently supposed to be a moral victory, yet it's blatantly just the standard "all aliens are evil and must die" schtick, dressed up in such a way that the central character doesn't get blood on his hands. Which is very middle-class indeed, as well as being a massive ethical cop-out.)
Beyond sentimentality, what do we have? The original Quatermass serials were the talk of the nation in the 1950s, it's true, yet their success lay in the context rather than the content. Look at it from the perspective of a viewer in 1953. You haven't had much time to get used to television as a physical presence, let alone the root of all Popular Culture. What's more, it's all been terribly polite so far, presenters talking in their best Reith-ese and doing absolutely nothing that might frighten the horses. Then, all of a sudden… one night, when nothing's protecting you from the darkness outside except for a pair of curtains and a wall of fog, there's a programme on the BBC that starts with the juddering DAAANNN DAAANN-DAAAAANN!!! of Holst's "Mars" and then shows you something nasty creeping around in Middle England. Now, you're used to seeing scary things at the cinema, and nothing about this killer-from-outer-space concept is particularly shocking. But in your own home…? Here, it's a kind of transgression. For the first time, monsters are being pumped straight into your living room in creepy 405-line black-and-white, rather than existing on the big screen and at a safe cultural distance.
This is why Quatermass worked: it turned fear of the unknown into something domestic, by its very nature rather than by its story. We shouldn't pretend, fifty years on, that the script was in any way revolutionary. As BBC3's wholly pointless remake proved in 2005, it… just wasn't. Take away the '50s viewing environment, and you're left with a big ugly lump of unlikely situations and bad dialogue.
What, then, has been the real legacy of Nigel Kneale's work? The answer is, tragically, that it's been almost entirely negative. The Quatermass serials have left us with a vague sense of superiority, without prompting us to question their meaning. And it's a poor sort of television that only inspires mistrust. Kneale's vision is an insular, mean-spirited one, in which everything unfamiliar is a threat; all human endeavour is worthless, if not actively dangerous; and anything which goes against the principles of old-school Britishness must be destroyed. It's significant that when Doctor Who explicitly began copying the Quatermass format in the 1970s, during one of the programme's more formulaic phases, the writers at least acknowledged the flaws in Kneale's design by raising the possibility that aliens aren't necessarily all man-eating predators and that progress isn't necessarily a dead end. After all, Doctor Who came from a more heterodox, outward-looking, big-R Romantic tradition of SF, which is why Kneale hated it. Morally and philosophically, these programmes are polar opposites.
But in the thirty years since, British SF writers have begun to copy Kneale's formula by rote, in the belief that anything in the Quatermass tradition is somehow "worthy". In truth, the scripts are no more insightful than the '50s notion that Alien Invaders = Filthy Communists, or any other kind of tabloid scaremongering. And if one message comes through in his work, again and again, then it isn't "think about the future" but "turn that radio down, you bloody kids".
Between the late 1950s and the early 1970s, a sizeable chunk of American society - brought up to believe that anything which hadn't been trimmed to regulation length was either a sign of moral degeneracy or the work of Commie infiltrators - looked around at the dissent, disorder and racial turbulence at large in the nation, and concluded that the whole of human civilisation was on the verge of collapse. With hindsight, this seems absurd: less than a generation after the trauma of World War Two, anyone half-rational should have realised that you've got to expect a few unsightly cultural trends and a modicum of rioting if your society's in the process of reinventing itself. But America likes to think in terms of catastrophes, so forty years on, the modern American right is founded on the belief that the '60s saw the world itself being brought to the edge of annihilation by left-wing agitators and people with loose morals. It's the neo-conservative version of the Story of the Flood.
Meanwhile, in Britain, Nigel Kneale also noticed the rumblings of the coming generation. His own response was to write Quatermass and the Pit, in which it turns out that humans are doomed from birth to hate, hunt and kill each other, because their genetic development was influenced by evil tribalist Martians. These three-legged space-grasshoppers have essentially given us Original Sin, and that's the real reason for the race-riots in Mississippi and Notting Hill. We're just born bad, so self-destruction is all we're good for.
We can probably assume that nobody on the planet has ever taken the "Martians" story at face value, but what's notable is that both these versions of human history come from the same core anxiety. In essence, both are panic-reactions to an aggressively unpredictable world, in which a few local flashpoints are treated as proof that the whole of humanity is about to wipe itself out. There are many, many precedents for this lack of perspective in literature, and SF writers are quite wonderfully prone to it (we might especially remember H. G. Wells' Mind at the End of Its Tether, in which the author took his own depression as evidence that the entire universe was being unravelled by a malevolent invisible force… amazingly, this was supposed to be a work of non-fiction). Of course, modern-day, liberal-minded SF fans would immediately question the notion of '60s America as a literal Gomorrah. On the other hand, it's de rigueur to regard Nigel Kneale as a visionary.
Was he ever really a visionary? These days, he's routinely portrayed as the Grand Old Man of SF television, and it's often said that the scripts he wrote in the first half of his TV career were scarily prescient of things to come. But with Kneale himself now among the departed, and his admirers making numerous improbable claims about his achievements, it may be time to re-evaluate his impact on British TV. Because far from accurately pre-empting the future, much of his work seems to have difficulty getting to grips with the present.
Perhaps the most telling case-study here is his script for the final Quatermass serial, made by ITV in 1979. Older readers may recall that in Britain, the 1970s was an age of strikes, fuel shortages, powercuts, and punk rockers scaring everyone's mum. Extending this into the near-future, Kneale gives us a dystopian society in which human civilisation is (go on, guess) on the verge of collapse, where thuggish working-class youngsters in leather jackets rule the cities, and - according to the astonishingly po-faced opening narration - a "primal disorder" has been let loose on the world. The thing to note here is that this seemed ridiculous when the story was broadcast, never mind 29 years later. The suggestion that petrol rationing and a ten o'clock TV blackout would lead to a New Dark Age was bizarre even before the election of Margaret Thatcher, but the real subtext of the 1979 Quatermass is that any world which involves Johnny Rotten swearing on television is obviously doomed to oblivion. Except…
…except that in this final Quatermass story, the villains are hippies. Which is to say, the hippies are the brutal, mindless cultists who assemble at stone circles in order to worship evil man-mincing aliens. The presence of malevolent flower-children makes more sense when we consider that the first draft of the script was written seven years before the final version reached the screens, but even in 1972, this would have been a dubious attempt at satire (anyone who's seen the Star Trek episode "The Way to Eden" will know why). The kind of hippy-kids who liked to paint their faces with yin-yangs and hang around ancient monuments had become positively quaint by this stage, yet their sporadic minor skirmishes with policemen are taken by Kneale as proof that Britain is a hair's-breadth away from civil war. Then again, the story doesn't really make a distinction between the hippies and the murderous urban terrorists. In Kneale's world, all latter-day cultural movements become indistinguishable, so the script can confidently inform us that there's no difference between hairy people gathering on Salisbury Plain and the Nuremberg Rallies.
The fact is that in the Quatermass continuum, only sensible middle-class people over the age of forty are allowed to be civilised. Anyone else is a walking demonstration that human beings are genetically stupid. The "funny" working-class couple whose home is demolished by a space-capsule at the beginning of The Quatermass Experiment are, sadly, the rule rather than the exception. In the same vein, we should be thankful that Kneale's script The Big, Big Giggle was never filmed. The tale of a teenage suicide craze, it was vetoed for fear that it might provoke copycat incidents, but its embarrassment factor would have been far worse than its body-count. This was the work of an author so dismissive of modern culture, and so ignorant of the real reasons behind These Young People Today taking drugs and starting riots, that he honestly thought teenagers were prepared to slit their own wrists just for a laugh. You might find yourself reminded of one of those '50s American "information" films, about schoolchildren turning into psychotic killers after smoking marijuana.
So as in Quatermass and the Pit, anyone who isn't a mouthpiece for the writer is an ignorant savage with an urge towards self-destruction. Because, far from being a forward-thinking visionary, Kneale's work suggests the SF equivalent of a Daily Mail columnist: an arch-conservative who considers anything new, alien or peculiar-looking to be untrustworthy and ultimately catastrophic. Why, then, is he considered such a revolutionary?
In recent years, there's been an attempt to interpret some of his scripts as prophetic, most particularly his 1968 teleplay The Year of the Sex Olympics. As this involves a futuristic "reality show" about a family trapped on an island with a goggle-eyed madman, it's said to predict the worst excesses of television in the twenty-first century, but few people who've actually watched it can take this claim seriously. In 1968, the idea of TV as a voyeuristic form of cruelty was already an old one, both in SF and in mainstream culture. And the death-game in Sex Olympics bears so little relation to Celebrity Love Island that it's hard to see the programme as a warning from history, even if you can get over the sight of Leonard Rossiter slouching around in a bacofoil kaftan.
No, the real reason for Kneale's reputation is a sentimental one. For the British geek, he's become a figurehead of "serious" science fiction drama, a sign that we were always so much more grown-up than the Americans. In particular, the original Quatermass Experiment (vintage 1953) is remembered as the BBC's first "serious" attempt at SF. The problem is that this folk-memory isn't supported by the programme's content. Take away the surface layer of middle-class smugness, and there's virtually nothing to differentiate it from a '50s American B-movie. It's certainly far less intelligent - and a great deal more reactionary - than Hollywood's It Came From Outer Space, made in the same year. When Hammer Films remade the serial as a feature film in 1955, they turned Professor Quatermass into an American, and the result doesn't even pretend to be anything other than low-budget sci-fi schlock. It's worth noting that the 1985 edition of the Science Fiction Film Sourcebook, published before Kneale was reinvented as a prophet, describes Brian Donlev's performance in the movie as "giving what was otherwise an undistinguished storyline a touch of authority": there is, quite rightly, no suggestion that this was anything other than a monster-movie runaround.
(A side-note here… the serial's one original feature, as Kneale himself liked to point out, is that the slimy tentacled space-fungus doesn't get blown up in the final episode. Instead, Quatermass appeals to its humanity and convinces it to commit suicide. This is apparently supposed to be a moral victory, yet it's blatantly just the standard "all aliens are evil and must die" schtick, dressed up in such a way that the central character doesn't get blood on his hands. Which is very middle-class indeed, as well as being a massive ethical cop-out.)
Beyond sentimentality, what do we have? The original Quatermass serials were the talk of the nation in the 1950s, it's true, yet their success lay in the context rather than the content. Look at it from the perspective of a viewer in 1953. You haven't had much time to get used to television as a physical presence, let alone the root of all Popular Culture. What's more, it's all been terribly polite so far, presenters talking in their best Reith-ese and doing absolutely nothing that might frighten the horses. Then, all of a sudden… one night, when nothing's protecting you from the darkness outside except for a pair of curtains and a wall of fog, there's a programme on the BBC that starts with the juddering DAAANNN DAAANN-DAAAAANN!!! of Holst's "Mars" and then shows you something nasty creeping around in Middle England. Now, you're used to seeing scary things at the cinema, and nothing about this killer-from-outer-space concept is particularly shocking. But in your own home…? Here, it's a kind of transgression. For the first time, monsters are being pumped straight into your living room in creepy 405-line black-and-white, rather than existing on the big screen and at a safe cultural distance.
This is why Quatermass worked: it turned fear of the unknown into something domestic, by its very nature rather than by its story. We shouldn't pretend, fifty years on, that the script was in any way revolutionary. As BBC3's wholly pointless remake proved in 2005, it… just wasn't. Take away the '50s viewing environment, and you're left with a big ugly lump of unlikely situations and bad dialogue.
What, then, has been the real legacy of Nigel Kneale's work? The answer is, tragically, that it's been almost entirely negative. The Quatermass serials have left us with a vague sense of superiority, without prompting us to question their meaning. And it's a poor sort of television that only inspires mistrust. Kneale's vision is an insular, mean-spirited one, in which everything unfamiliar is a threat; all human endeavour is worthless, if not actively dangerous; and anything which goes against the principles of old-school Britishness must be destroyed. It's significant that when Doctor Who explicitly began copying the Quatermass format in the 1970s, during one of the programme's more formulaic phases, the writers at least acknowledged the flaws in Kneale's design by raising the possibility that aliens aren't necessarily all man-eating predators and that progress isn't necessarily a dead end. After all, Doctor Who came from a more heterodox, outward-looking, big-R Romantic tradition of SF, which is why Kneale hated it. Morally and philosophically, these programmes are polar opposites.
But in the thirty years since, British SF writers have begun to copy Kneale's formula by rote, in the belief that anything in the Quatermass tradition is somehow "worthy". In truth, the scripts are no more insightful than the '50s notion that Alien Invaders = Filthy Communists, or any other kind of tabloid scaremongering. And if one message comes through in his work, again and again, then it isn't "think about the future" but "turn that radio down, you bloody kids".
Tuesday, December 25, 2007
The Christmas Doctor Who Thing
Twenty-four hours until Christmas Day. Thirty-two hours until I find out how badly my relatives have misjudged my personality while attempting to think of a suitable gift, thirty-six hours until I have to ask myself whether I really am going to bother roasting something for lunch rather than settling for a tube of Pringles with a picture of holly on the wrapper, forty hours until I find myself joining in with every single word of The Two Ronnies. Just under forty-three hours until "Voyage of the Damned", the BBC's new vehicle for Bernard Cribbins.
Oh, all right. Since we're on the subject… at 6:50 on Christmas Day, Film Four will be showing Time Bandits, which may literally be the worst piece of scheduling in television history. Time Bandits is a wonderful thing, but is there anybody that might want to watch an eccentric time-travel-based comedy-adventure who won't be otherwise engaged at 6:50 on Christmas Day? Even if a few Film Four viewers have somehow lost track of the time and forgotten to switch over to BBC1, surely they're going to find themselves thinking "hang on, I'm sure there was something I meant to do" during the sequence set on board the Titanic?
My great-grandfather was booked to travel on the Titanic, as part of a transatlantic business trip. He pulled out at the last minute. Our family history doesn't record why he pulled out, but if you're familiar with "Rose", then you'll understand why I find this amusing. Perhaps he was talked out of it by a big-eared Mancunian. And I see that in the weekend papers, one of the few still-living Titanic survivors has objected to the BBC's lack of Christmas Day tact, although she doesn't really seem to have captured the mood of the nation.
Given that the Christmas Doctor Who is the BBC's highest-yield warhead, it's interesting to note how the other channels have decided to deal with it. ITV has elected to show The African Queen, a film which could happily be screened on any Sunday afternoon without causing a fuss (thus wisely avoiding any attempt at a ratings war… it's like 1977 all over again). It works both ways, though: BBC3's Doctor Who Confidential, which is usually scheduled to immediately follow its parent-programme, begins half an hour after Doctor Who ends. And it's not as if BBC3 has anything better to do at eight o'clock, because it's showing a repeat of Football Gaffes Galore. But then you realise… at eight o'clock, ITV is presenting us with Harry Hill's Christmas TV Burp. Has the BBC noticed this, and delayed Confidential by half an hour, knowing that Doctor Who and Harry Hill share an awfully large chunk of the audience? This is, after all, a man who opened his very first show on Channel 4 by wrestling a giant maggot.
Like any good warhead, Doctor Who makes a big bang while covering the surrounding area with fallout, and this Christmas it's hard to look at any page of the (Haaaa-lle-lu-jah) Radio Times without seeing traces of its influence. We note that the BBC's other "big" programmes this season include The Catherine Tate Show and The Shadow in the North with Billie Piper, neither of which is technically supposed to be Doctor Who-related, but the RT has thoughtfully put the interviews on the same page anyway. We'll gloss over David Tennant's appearance in Extras - a programme which, in all other respects, has a cast list that could only be worse if it had more than one copy of Ricky Gervais in it (in much the same way that ITV is marking New Year's Eve with a comedy-drama starring James Dreyfus in two different roles, i.e. a programme that's twice as bad as you might possibly imagine) - and instead turn our attention to New Year's Day, when we get BBC1's new adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, written by leading-dramatist-turned-soft-core-hack Andrew Davies. We might expect plenty of period stripping-off, with no actual genitalia but lots of male buttocks thrusting in and out of multi-layered underwear. I mention this only because Mark Gatiss is in it. Surely, he isn't going to be doing any deflowering? His chat-up technique in "The Lazarus Experiment" was bad enough, but now I'm trying to imagine him seducing a nineteenth-century virgin, and all I can think of is Briss the Butcher. Licking his lips. In close-up.
And as the Doctor Who Christmas Special approaches, we simply have to acknowledge that Russell T. Davies not only has the best job in the world, but the best job that's ever existed in the whole of human history. Some people have criticised my occasional bitterness towards the series by claiming that I'm just jealous, to which I respond: well, duh. We should consider that Big Russell not only has executive control over Doctor Who as a concept, but access to a multi-squillion-pound budget with which to depict anything in the entire span of space and time, almost on a whim. Even Hollywood executives don't have this sort of reckless power. The only person in / on television who's in a similarly enviable position is Gok Wan, easily-anagrammed presenter of Channel 4's How to Look Good Naked, whose job description involves touching up the wobbly parts of overfed women while they nod seriously and listen to his sage council on what bras to wear. But since Wan is (presumably) gay, it's safe to assume that he has no conception of how lucky he is.
With great power comes great responsibility: this is what I was getting at during the "Unquiet Dead" farrago, and if it was true of Gatiss, then it's twentyfold-true of Big Russell. This man has more influence over the minds of the nation's youth than anybody else in contemporary British culture - go on, prove me wrong - and according to the interviews, he even has the ability to make Kylie wee herself. ITV fears him. Ant and Dec have known his wrath. He may not be as famous as David Beckham, but then, nobody actually listens to what David Beckham says. Fortunately he tends to use this power for good, or at least, to say things like "I know, let's put rhinos on the moon!". But this doesn't mean we should take our eyes off the bugger, because…
…because even if power doesn't always corrupt, then showbiz invariably does. I know I'm not alone in feeling that "The Sound of Drums" marks a very specific jumping of the shark, yet apart from the relative dullness of it, two things seem especially worrying. One is that although it continues the twenty-first-century Doctor Who obsession with stores set in something like "the real world", the programme's idea of what constitutes "the real world" is becoming increasingly slanted towards the point-of-view of people who work in television. In much the same way that Jennifer Saunders is no longer capable of doing anything other than making jokes about meeting minor celebrities at BBC TV centre, Doctor Who's two default methods of establishing a contemporary British setting are (a) guest appearances by famous people playing themselves, and (b) set-pieces involving any event where TV cameras might be present (note that apart from the regulars and semi-regulars we already know, there are no modern-day characters in "The Sound of Drums" other than media figures and Saxon's co-conspirators). In other words, the Doctor's natural environment these days is a BAFTA awards ceremony. No other Doctor would seriously have considered putting on a dinner jacket for "Rise of the Cybermen" or "The Lazarus Experiment", because no other Doctor belongs on the Red Carpet. Tom Baker in formalwear would have been unconscionable; David Tennant in formalwear seems perfectly normal.
Once you realise this, Tennant's appearance in Extras is rather unsettling, because you begin to see that the two programmes are converging on the same territory. "Real world" stories are supposed to draw in the viewers by giving the adventures-in-space-and-time concept some grounding in the world we recognise, but the Britain we see in "The Sound of Drums" just alienates us. Even if there are TV studios, press interviews and high-society get-togethers, there are very few actual people, so it's no more familiar to us than Mangooska Six in the ninety-eighth century. Using actual BBC presenters and perfect mock-ups of News 24 bulletins (starting with "Rose", but most notably in "Aliens of London") was clever, yet we've now reached the point where modern-day Britain doesn't seem to contain anything else, a version of the country in which TV is the only reality. We know that the Doctor, Martha and Captain Jack are in trouble, because their faces are on the television news; we know that the death of the President of the USA is a turning-point, because it's broadcast to the whole world; even the Master has started taunting the Doctor via the BBC, and just to rub it in, there's a bomb in the TV set.
If this were a story about television, a la "The Long Game", then this might make sense. But it isn't: the Master controls the population with a spurious hypno-satellite, not by manipulating the media, which blows a hole in the idea that this might be a satire. It's just how the programme-makers see the world these days. Similarly, even those who actually like Catherine Tate would have difficulty arguing that she can provide the voice of One of Us, which is theoretically what the companion is there for. She's been hired specifically because she's a Television Celebrity, so there's automatically a gulf between herself and the audience.
And if we're talking about a series that's rapidly becoming lost in showbiz, then this leads us on to the second problem with "The Sound of Drums": Ann Widdecombe is an evil Tory bigot, while Sharon Osbourne is a vicious parasitic brood-harpy who drinks the spinal fluid of little children. If only metaphorically. The point is, I'm having problems with the irony threshold here. These people are clearly - as it were - servants of the Jagrafess, people who might reasonably have been depicted as The Enemy during the Eccleston season. When did they become Friends of Doctor Who?
That's enough cynicism. On a lighter note, this is also the time of year when we play the two key Doctor Who guessing-games, the "Who's Going to Be Next Year's Big Historical Guest-Star?" game and the "Name a Contemporary Character Actor Who's Likely to Turn Up in a Minor Role" game. However, we already know that 2008's Historical Guest Star duties are going to be shared by Agatha Christie and a great big volcano. (I'm hoping the Pompeii story will be a historical farce a la "The Romans", in which the Doctor and a young Captain Jack run around the streets of the city on Volcano Day but somehow never meet. Please, God, any excuse for a historical that doesn't have sodding aliens in it. Surely, CGI lava is as big an audience-grabber as CGI monsters?) As for the Character Actor game… this takes some skill, and requires us to think about the kind of television-friendly performer who's likely to move in the same circles as the production team. After the 2005 season, my guess for 2006 was Louise Delamere; I was close, but she eventually ended up in Torchwood instead. Last year, my guess for 2007 was Lucy Montgomery; again, I was on the right lines, since Debbie Chazen (the other one from Tittybangbang) is in "Voyage of the Damned". For 2008… how about absolutely anybody who was in Oliver Twist? Although personally, I'm still amazed that Celia Imrie has managed to avoid the series for so long.
I will, of course, continue to act like the frustrated conscience of Doctor Who fandom throughout the coming year. Because some f***er's got to do it.
And a Merry Cribbins to all of you at home.
Oh, all right. Since we're on the subject… at 6:50 on Christmas Day, Film Four will be showing Time Bandits, which may literally be the worst piece of scheduling in television history. Time Bandits is a wonderful thing, but is there anybody that might want to watch an eccentric time-travel-based comedy-adventure who won't be otherwise engaged at 6:50 on Christmas Day? Even if a few Film Four viewers have somehow lost track of the time and forgotten to switch over to BBC1, surely they're going to find themselves thinking "hang on, I'm sure there was something I meant to do" during the sequence set on board the Titanic?
My great-grandfather was booked to travel on the Titanic, as part of a transatlantic business trip. He pulled out at the last minute. Our family history doesn't record why he pulled out, but if you're familiar with "Rose", then you'll understand why I find this amusing. Perhaps he was talked out of it by a big-eared Mancunian. And I see that in the weekend papers, one of the few still-living Titanic survivors has objected to the BBC's lack of Christmas Day tact, although she doesn't really seem to have captured the mood of the nation.
Given that the Christmas Doctor Who is the BBC's highest-yield warhead, it's interesting to note how the other channels have decided to deal with it. ITV has elected to show The African Queen, a film which could happily be screened on any Sunday afternoon without causing a fuss (thus wisely avoiding any attempt at a ratings war… it's like 1977 all over again). It works both ways, though: BBC3's Doctor Who Confidential, which is usually scheduled to immediately follow its parent-programme, begins half an hour after Doctor Who ends. And it's not as if BBC3 has anything better to do at eight o'clock, because it's showing a repeat of Football Gaffes Galore. But then you realise… at eight o'clock, ITV is presenting us with Harry Hill's Christmas TV Burp. Has the BBC noticed this, and delayed Confidential by half an hour, knowing that Doctor Who and Harry Hill share an awfully large chunk of the audience? This is, after all, a man who opened his very first show on Channel 4 by wrestling a giant maggot.
Like any good warhead, Doctor Who makes a big bang while covering the surrounding area with fallout, and this Christmas it's hard to look at any page of the (Haaaa-lle-lu-jah) Radio Times without seeing traces of its influence. We note that the BBC's other "big" programmes this season include The Catherine Tate Show and The Shadow in the North with Billie Piper, neither of which is technically supposed to be Doctor Who-related, but the RT has thoughtfully put the interviews on the same page anyway. We'll gloss over David Tennant's appearance in Extras - a programme which, in all other respects, has a cast list that could only be worse if it had more than one copy of Ricky Gervais in it (in much the same way that ITV is marking New Year's Eve with a comedy-drama starring James Dreyfus in two different roles, i.e. a programme that's twice as bad as you might possibly imagine) - and instead turn our attention to New Year's Day, when we get BBC1's new adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, written by leading-dramatist-turned-soft-core-hack Andrew Davies. We might expect plenty of period stripping-off, with no actual genitalia but lots of male buttocks thrusting in and out of multi-layered underwear. I mention this only because Mark Gatiss is in it. Surely, he isn't going to be doing any deflowering? His chat-up technique in "The Lazarus Experiment" was bad enough, but now I'm trying to imagine him seducing a nineteenth-century virgin, and all I can think of is Briss the Butcher. Licking his lips. In close-up.
And as the Doctor Who Christmas Special approaches, we simply have to acknowledge that Russell T. Davies not only has the best job in the world, but the best job that's ever existed in the whole of human history. Some people have criticised my occasional bitterness towards the series by claiming that I'm just jealous, to which I respond: well, duh. We should consider that Big Russell not only has executive control over Doctor Who as a concept, but access to a multi-squillion-pound budget with which to depict anything in the entire span of space and time, almost on a whim. Even Hollywood executives don't have this sort of reckless power. The only person in / on television who's in a similarly enviable position is Gok Wan, easily-anagrammed presenter of Channel 4's How to Look Good Naked, whose job description involves touching up the wobbly parts of overfed women while they nod seriously and listen to his sage council on what bras to wear. But since Wan is (presumably) gay, it's safe to assume that he has no conception of how lucky he is.
With great power comes great responsibility: this is what I was getting at during the "Unquiet Dead" farrago, and if it was true of Gatiss, then it's twentyfold-true of Big Russell. This man has more influence over the minds of the nation's youth than anybody else in contemporary British culture - go on, prove me wrong - and according to the interviews, he even has the ability to make Kylie wee herself. ITV fears him. Ant and Dec have known his wrath. He may not be as famous as David Beckham, but then, nobody actually listens to what David Beckham says. Fortunately he tends to use this power for good, or at least, to say things like "I know, let's put rhinos on the moon!". But this doesn't mean we should take our eyes off the bugger, because…
…because even if power doesn't always corrupt, then showbiz invariably does. I know I'm not alone in feeling that "The Sound of Drums" marks a very specific jumping of the shark, yet apart from the relative dullness of it, two things seem especially worrying. One is that although it continues the twenty-first-century Doctor Who obsession with stores set in something like "the real world", the programme's idea of what constitutes "the real world" is becoming increasingly slanted towards the point-of-view of people who work in television. In much the same way that Jennifer Saunders is no longer capable of doing anything other than making jokes about meeting minor celebrities at BBC TV centre, Doctor Who's two default methods of establishing a contemporary British setting are (a) guest appearances by famous people playing themselves, and (b) set-pieces involving any event where TV cameras might be present (note that apart from the regulars and semi-regulars we already know, there are no modern-day characters in "The Sound of Drums" other than media figures and Saxon's co-conspirators). In other words, the Doctor's natural environment these days is a BAFTA awards ceremony. No other Doctor would seriously have considered putting on a dinner jacket for "Rise of the Cybermen" or "The Lazarus Experiment", because no other Doctor belongs on the Red Carpet. Tom Baker in formalwear would have been unconscionable; David Tennant in formalwear seems perfectly normal.
Once you realise this, Tennant's appearance in Extras is rather unsettling, because you begin to see that the two programmes are converging on the same territory. "Real world" stories are supposed to draw in the viewers by giving the adventures-in-space-and-time concept some grounding in the world we recognise, but the Britain we see in "The Sound of Drums" just alienates us. Even if there are TV studios, press interviews and high-society get-togethers, there are very few actual people, so it's no more familiar to us than Mangooska Six in the ninety-eighth century. Using actual BBC presenters and perfect mock-ups of News 24 bulletins (starting with "Rose", but most notably in "Aliens of London") was clever, yet we've now reached the point where modern-day Britain doesn't seem to contain anything else, a version of the country in which TV is the only reality. We know that the Doctor, Martha and Captain Jack are in trouble, because their faces are on the television news; we know that the death of the President of the USA is a turning-point, because it's broadcast to the whole world; even the Master has started taunting the Doctor via the BBC, and just to rub it in, there's a bomb in the TV set.
If this were a story about television, a la "The Long Game", then this might make sense. But it isn't: the Master controls the population with a spurious hypno-satellite, not by manipulating the media, which blows a hole in the idea that this might be a satire. It's just how the programme-makers see the world these days. Similarly, even those who actually like Catherine Tate would have difficulty arguing that she can provide the voice of One of Us, which is theoretically what the companion is there for. She's been hired specifically because she's a Television Celebrity, so there's automatically a gulf between herself and the audience.
And if we're talking about a series that's rapidly becoming lost in showbiz, then this leads us on to the second problem with "The Sound of Drums": Ann Widdecombe is an evil Tory bigot, while Sharon Osbourne is a vicious parasitic brood-harpy who drinks the spinal fluid of little children. If only metaphorically. The point is, I'm having problems with the irony threshold here. These people are clearly - as it were - servants of the Jagrafess, people who might reasonably have been depicted as The Enemy during the Eccleston season. When did they become Friends of Doctor Who?
That's enough cynicism. On a lighter note, this is also the time of year when we play the two key Doctor Who guessing-games, the "Who's Going to Be Next Year's Big Historical Guest-Star?" game and the "Name a Contemporary Character Actor Who's Likely to Turn Up in a Minor Role" game. However, we already know that 2008's Historical Guest Star duties are going to be shared by Agatha Christie and a great big volcano. (I'm hoping the Pompeii story will be a historical farce a la "The Romans", in which the Doctor and a young Captain Jack run around the streets of the city on Volcano Day but somehow never meet. Please, God, any excuse for a historical that doesn't have sodding aliens in it. Surely, CGI lava is as big an audience-grabber as CGI monsters?) As for the Character Actor game… this takes some skill, and requires us to think about the kind of television-friendly performer who's likely to move in the same circles as the production team. After the 2005 season, my guess for 2006 was Louise Delamere; I was close, but she eventually ended up in Torchwood instead. Last year, my guess for 2007 was Lucy Montgomery; again, I was on the right lines, since Debbie Chazen (the other one from Tittybangbang) is in "Voyage of the Damned". For 2008… how about absolutely anybody who was in Oliver Twist? Although personally, I'm still amazed that Celia Imrie has managed to avoid the series for so long.
I will, of course, continue to act like the frustrated conscience of Doctor Who fandom throughout the coming year. Because some f***er's got to do it.
And a Merry Cribbins to all of you at home.
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Secs Sell
A question I've already asked in my "proper" journal (there's a link on the left): what's the most excessive piece of merchandising in history? Anyone schooled in the important points of British cultural development will be familiar with artefacts like the Doctor Who underpants of the 1970s, designed in such a way that you could make Tom Baker's face look really, really Jewish by having impure thoughts. But this sort of thing seems almost reasonable, compared to the deluge of merchandising that followed the BBC radio show Bandwagon in the 1930s. Bandwagon was largely a vehicle for the young(ish) Arthur Askey, and the idea that shops began selling Arthur Askey "action-figures" seems remarkable in itself, especially if you grew up in the '80s and can only remember the aged, cancer-riddled version of Arthur Askey who had to have both his legs amputated. At the height of its success, however, Bandwagon even had its own brand of oven-cleaner. Star Wars just isn't in the same league.
Of course, to us, the mad glut of Doctor Who merchandising available for Christmas 2007 is definitive proof that We Win. Let's be quite clear on this point: here in the latter '00s, Doctor Who is more popular than at any time in its prior history. Naturally, the viewing figures were higher in the late '70s. This is partly because there was nothing else to do in those days, when the TV set was the only leisure accessory that ran on electricity, and when "getting boozed up on a Saturday night" wasn't seen as a fit pastime for all ages, classes and genders. But it's also because viewers in the 1970s saw themselves as belonging to a wilfully captive audience. Saturday-night viewing was part of a complete entertainment experience, the stay-at-home descendant of the Music Hall, and you sat through the entire BBC schedule - or the entire ITV schedule, if you were a bit common - whether you liked all the programmes or not. You wouldn't have switched channels, even if you'd had one of those newfangled remote controls. In those days, before geek-scum tried to claim that Doctor Who should be just like Babylon-5, the series was part of the World of Showbiz. And yet…
…and yet it wasn't what the BBC now likes to call its "jewel in the crown" show. Doctor Who was halfway down the bill of the entertainment line-up, it was never the star attraction. The ratings may have been higher in the supposedly golden year of 1979, but even then - even at a time when you could rely on one-third of the population to have seen Julian Glover rip his face off and become a one-eyed seaweed-man - the importance that's attached to the series now would have been unthinkable. In 1979, it was taken for granted that it'd always be there. In 2007 (if slightly less so than in 2006), it matters. It's a lodestone of British pop-culture rather than a reassuringly ever-present quantity, the Beatles rather than One Man and His Dog. "Popularity" is measured by impact rather than ratings, and for the people of the 1970s, it'd beggar belief that "Sontarans Return" would qualify as a news headline. In a world where Showbiz was a rare and precious commodity, it was always going to be overshadowed by The Generation Game. In a world where celebrity culture seems somehow more banal than fly-on-the-wall footage, something as strange and as (potentially) unpredictable as Doctor Who is bound to thrive. For a while, anyway.
So when Asda presents us with a national TV advertisement specifically to tell us how cheap its Dalek Sec masks are, we have to see it as our crowning moment. Consider what this means. At a point in time when consumerism is just about the only surviving philosophy, one of the largest retailers in the country has spent hundreds of thousands of pounds to focus on a toy based on a character from one single episode of Doctor Who (plus one cliffhanger). It wasn't even a very popular episode, at least not amongst "serious" fans [see footnote], but that's hardly relevant. At the very least, you can't help feeling that the ubiquity of the Sec mask would raise severe feelings of bitterness in Scaroth of the Jagaroth. This, not 1979, is the age of the one-eyed tentacle-faced monstrosity.
So just as Doctor Who has gone from "a thing that everyone watches because it's there" to "a thing that lots of people watch because they feel compelled to", Doctor Who merchandising has gone from "stuff you buy for children at Christmas because it might shut them up for a bit" to "stuff that has a cultural identity of its own". With the possible exception of the '60s Dalek playsuit - an item which achieved a certain cache just because it seemed so expensively exotic, and which became notorious in the 1990s when Toyah Wilcox appeared on Thirty Years in the TARDIS to describe it as if it were an item of rubber fetishwear - no piece of Doctor Who fodder has ever been this iconic, or this high-profile. And if anything, then the odd cultural side-effects of the new series are even more disquieting than the obvious cash-ins. When Kylie Minogue leads up to her Doctor Who appearance with a single called "Two Hearts", it's hard to tell whether it's a joke or a coincidence. It apparently comes from her new album X, which also includes the hits "Lungs of a Birastrop" and "Aspirin Might Kill Me".
But in the high street, not since Bandwagon have manufacturers believed they could get away with so much. Personally, I have a theory that someone at Character Options is seeing how far they can push the concept of "action-figure". Children are actually supposed to play with these things, remember, they're not just Dapolesque collectors' items. The "action-figure" of Lady Cassandra was hardly G. I. Joe (even Arthur Askey had two working limbs), but at least you could roll her around a bit, and at a pinch she could get into a Hot Wheels race with the Moxx of Balhoon. Recently, however, Character has become obsessed with releasing "action-figures" of geriatrics. I can accept the Carrionite witch, but now we've got poseable toys of Victor Meldrew, a dead grandmother, and an old woman with no face. "Gee, dad, an old woman with no face! Can I have one for Christmas? Can I?"
Now… I'm aware that children (boys especially) like toys which represent the grotesque and the misshapen, yet this usually means rotting zombie-creatures and monsters made of bogeys, not 5" representations of people who dribble when they eat and suffer periods of incontinence. This is why there's no such product as My Little Rest Home. A septuagenarian whose only "action" ability is to lose her visible features seems less than dynamic, the sort of fan-fodder collectible you expect to see in the "unsold stock" section of Forbidden Planet, not in a display at Tesco's. And as for the Weeping Angel… kids, you too can have a moulded plastic representation of the top of a war memorial. Yet nobody finds any of these things puzzling, as if Doctor Who has not only broken the rules of modern TV (by being a light entertainment show that isn't disposable, by being a drama that gets noticed by the rest of the media without recourse to nipples, by being an SF series that doesn't involve Americans whining on about their f***ing "issues"…) but the rules of consumerism as well.
Which would be fine, if we could be sure that the iconic status of the merchandising won't start to warp the series itself. The curious decision to bring the Sontarans out of retirement in 2008 - even though they're visually less impressive than (say) the Judoon, and conceptually no more interesting than any other bunch of stomping alien warmongers - might, at first, be taken as a sign that we can expect Sontaran egg-cups for Easter 2009. Then the publicity photo turns up in the papers, and we discover that the "controversial" new Sontaran outfit makes it look like a five-foot-tall action-figure. Can we believe that it's been deliberately designed with an eye to the merchandising? No, not really. But can we believe that because of the merchandising, a brightly-clad, fully-jointed, clearly-moulded monster is what the designers think a "typical" Doctor Who baddie should look like these days…?
Actually, that seems a lot more feasible. Those Character Options figures are now an important part of what Doctor Who "does", and it's inevitably going to have an effect on the way everyone perceives the programme, including its creators. If nothing else, then it's hard to hear a title like "Planet of the Ood" without imagining how an army of collectible Ood are going to look in the Argos catalogue. It may well be the first thing you think of, even before you get the image of Charlton Heston shouting "get your damn hands off me, you lousy, stinking Ood". (Mind you, take another glance at that publicity photo: the Kinder-surprise Sontaran still looks less plastic than Catherine Tate.)
There was a time, as many of you will remember, when the only items of Doctor Who merchandising that really mattered were the books. Many, many people have expressed the opinion that without Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters or Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion, they never would have bothered to read, to the point where even describing them as "merchandising" seems rather unfair: before video, the internet and BBC3, these were the only way that juvenile viewers of Doctor Who could keep in touch with the series when it wasn't on the air. They were a form of history, not filler material. The Plastic Age has made Doctor Who books rather redundant, and turned things upside-down. Thirty years ago, the books meant something, and the toys - which very few children actually wanted, and not just because the 12" Cyberman had a nose - seemed rather pointless. Today, the action-figures and the voice-changer masks are like badges of honour, while the books… well, they sell, but they seem somehow irrelevant. And this is hardly surprising, because I didn't write any of them, even though I was obviously qualified for God's sake.
I mentioned that the Dalek Sec mask is the ultimate sign of Doctor Who's victory, proof that the series has become even more noticeable than it was in the Showbiz Era. Of course, it can't last. Doctor Who Volume One survived for 26 years specifically because it was Just There. Like the Shipping Forecast, getting rid of it seemed counter-instinctual. Doctor Who Volume Two has thrived because it was born into an environment that had forgotten it was even possible, but the environment is already changing around it. When the Showbiz Era ended circa 1980, the series had to give up its position in the Saturday night line-up, and find its own specific audience rather than being part of the BBC's big night out. It managed this quite well, at first, by being the kind of show that appealed to kids who liked the Human League rather than by trying to draw in the whole family (wise, given that the Family Audience was simply drifting apart). But if Doctor Who Volume Two starts to wane, then it's far too big, important and expensive to "specialise" in this way. When it goes, it'll go completely.
Which means that the Christmas toy-flood isn't just a sign of glory, it's also like the thing on the side of the life-support machine that goes "beep" to tell us we're still alive. In 2007, we get the Dalek Invasion of Asda. But this time next year, if the supermarkets have difficulty shifting the action-figures of the old man in the wheelchair from the final scene of "The Family of Blood", then we'll know we have a problem.
Footnote. Well, of course fans didn't like "Daleks in Manhattan" much. Their idea of "ideal" modern-day Doctor Who is something that's as much like an American sci-fi show as possible, preferably with more story arcs than stories, so it's hardly surprising that they'd take against an adventure which owes more to old-fashioned Doctor Who than anything else in the BBC Wales era. Very old-fashioned, in this case: the Doctor's semi-educational stroll around Hooverville is as close as twenty-first-century television can get to the "Marco Polo" model of the series, while the Daleks themselves speak, act, and argue about the nature of humanity in exactly the same way they did when David Whitaker was writing them. This is a '60s Doctor Who story with added colour and explosions, which means that you could almost believe you were watching the third big-screen Dalek movie, with David Tennant replacing Peter Cushing (or possibly Bernard Cribbins). Though we've all been conditioned by nerds to believe that "traditional" Doctor Who means the aberrant aliens-take-over-contemporary-England stories of the 1970s, "Manhattan" is as traditional as the latter-day series gets. And Sec's cult status proves, if nothing else, that nobody cares what nerds think.
Of course, to us, the mad glut of Doctor Who merchandising available for Christmas 2007 is definitive proof that We Win. Let's be quite clear on this point: here in the latter '00s, Doctor Who is more popular than at any time in its prior history. Naturally, the viewing figures were higher in the late '70s. This is partly because there was nothing else to do in those days, when the TV set was the only leisure accessory that ran on electricity, and when "getting boozed up on a Saturday night" wasn't seen as a fit pastime for all ages, classes and genders. But it's also because viewers in the 1970s saw themselves as belonging to a wilfully captive audience. Saturday-night viewing was part of a complete entertainment experience, the stay-at-home descendant of the Music Hall, and you sat through the entire BBC schedule - or the entire ITV schedule, if you were a bit common - whether you liked all the programmes or not. You wouldn't have switched channels, even if you'd had one of those newfangled remote controls. In those days, before geek-scum tried to claim that Doctor Who should be just like Babylon-5, the series was part of the World of Showbiz. And yet…
…and yet it wasn't what the BBC now likes to call its "jewel in the crown" show. Doctor Who was halfway down the bill of the entertainment line-up, it was never the star attraction. The ratings may have been higher in the supposedly golden year of 1979, but even then - even at a time when you could rely on one-third of the population to have seen Julian Glover rip his face off and become a one-eyed seaweed-man - the importance that's attached to the series now would have been unthinkable. In 1979, it was taken for granted that it'd always be there. In 2007 (if slightly less so than in 2006), it matters. It's a lodestone of British pop-culture rather than a reassuringly ever-present quantity, the Beatles rather than One Man and His Dog. "Popularity" is measured by impact rather than ratings, and for the people of the 1970s, it'd beggar belief that "Sontarans Return" would qualify as a news headline. In a world where Showbiz was a rare and precious commodity, it was always going to be overshadowed by The Generation Game. In a world where celebrity culture seems somehow more banal than fly-on-the-wall footage, something as strange and as (potentially) unpredictable as Doctor Who is bound to thrive. For a while, anyway.
So when Asda presents us with a national TV advertisement specifically to tell us how cheap its Dalek Sec masks are, we have to see it as our crowning moment. Consider what this means. At a point in time when consumerism is just about the only surviving philosophy, one of the largest retailers in the country has spent hundreds of thousands of pounds to focus on a toy based on a character from one single episode of Doctor Who (plus one cliffhanger). It wasn't even a very popular episode, at least not amongst "serious" fans [see footnote], but that's hardly relevant. At the very least, you can't help feeling that the ubiquity of the Sec mask would raise severe feelings of bitterness in Scaroth of the Jagaroth. This, not 1979, is the age of the one-eyed tentacle-faced monstrosity.
So just as Doctor Who has gone from "a thing that everyone watches because it's there" to "a thing that lots of people watch because they feel compelled to", Doctor Who merchandising has gone from "stuff you buy for children at Christmas because it might shut them up for a bit" to "stuff that has a cultural identity of its own". With the possible exception of the '60s Dalek playsuit - an item which achieved a certain cache just because it seemed so expensively exotic, and which became notorious in the 1990s when Toyah Wilcox appeared on Thirty Years in the TARDIS to describe it as if it were an item of rubber fetishwear - no piece of Doctor Who fodder has ever been this iconic, or this high-profile. And if anything, then the odd cultural side-effects of the new series are even more disquieting than the obvious cash-ins. When Kylie Minogue leads up to her Doctor Who appearance with a single called "Two Hearts", it's hard to tell whether it's a joke or a coincidence. It apparently comes from her new album X, which also includes the hits "Lungs of a Birastrop" and "Aspirin Might Kill Me".
But in the high street, not since Bandwagon have manufacturers believed they could get away with so much. Personally, I have a theory that someone at Character Options is seeing how far they can push the concept of "action-figure". Children are actually supposed to play with these things, remember, they're not just Dapolesque collectors' items. The "action-figure" of Lady Cassandra was hardly G. I. Joe (even Arthur Askey had two working limbs), but at least you could roll her around a bit, and at a pinch she could get into a Hot Wheels race with the Moxx of Balhoon. Recently, however, Character has become obsessed with releasing "action-figures" of geriatrics. I can accept the Carrionite witch, but now we've got poseable toys of Victor Meldrew, a dead grandmother, and an old woman with no face. "Gee, dad, an old woman with no face! Can I have one for Christmas? Can I?"
Now… I'm aware that children (boys especially) like toys which represent the grotesque and the misshapen, yet this usually means rotting zombie-creatures and monsters made of bogeys, not 5" representations of people who dribble when they eat and suffer periods of incontinence. This is why there's no such product as My Little Rest Home. A septuagenarian whose only "action" ability is to lose her visible features seems less than dynamic, the sort of fan-fodder collectible you expect to see in the "unsold stock" section of Forbidden Planet, not in a display at Tesco's. And as for the Weeping Angel… kids, you too can have a moulded plastic representation of the top of a war memorial. Yet nobody finds any of these things puzzling, as if Doctor Who has not only broken the rules of modern TV (by being a light entertainment show that isn't disposable, by being a drama that gets noticed by the rest of the media without recourse to nipples, by being an SF series that doesn't involve Americans whining on about their f***ing "issues"…) but the rules of consumerism as well.
Which would be fine, if we could be sure that the iconic status of the merchandising won't start to warp the series itself. The curious decision to bring the Sontarans out of retirement in 2008 - even though they're visually less impressive than (say) the Judoon, and conceptually no more interesting than any other bunch of stomping alien warmongers - might, at first, be taken as a sign that we can expect Sontaran egg-cups for Easter 2009. Then the publicity photo turns up in the papers, and we discover that the "controversial" new Sontaran outfit makes it look like a five-foot-tall action-figure. Can we believe that it's been deliberately designed with an eye to the merchandising? No, not really. But can we believe that because of the merchandising, a brightly-clad, fully-jointed, clearly-moulded monster is what the designers think a "typical" Doctor Who baddie should look like these days…?
Actually, that seems a lot more feasible. Those Character Options figures are now an important part of what Doctor Who "does", and it's inevitably going to have an effect on the way everyone perceives the programme, including its creators. If nothing else, then it's hard to hear a title like "Planet of the Ood" without imagining how an army of collectible Ood are going to look in the Argos catalogue. It may well be the first thing you think of, even before you get the image of Charlton Heston shouting "get your damn hands off me, you lousy, stinking Ood". (Mind you, take another glance at that publicity photo: the Kinder-surprise Sontaran still looks less plastic than Catherine Tate.)
There was a time, as many of you will remember, when the only items of Doctor Who merchandising that really mattered were the books. Many, many people have expressed the opinion that without Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters or Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion, they never would have bothered to read, to the point where even describing them as "merchandising" seems rather unfair: before video, the internet and BBC3, these were the only way that juvenile viewers of Doctor Who could keep in touch with the series when it wasn't on the air. They were a form of history, not filler material. The Plastic Age has made Doctor Who books rather redundant, and turned things upside-down. Thirty years ago, the books meant something, and the toys - which very few children actually wanted, and not just because the 12" Cyberman had a nose - seemed rather pointless. Today, the action-figures and the voice-changer masks are like badges of honour, while the books… well, they sell, but they seem somehow irrelevant. And this is hardly surprising, because I didn't write any of them, even though I was obviously qualified for God's sake.
I mentioned that the Dalek Sec mask is the ultimate sign of Doctor Who's victory, proof that the series has become even more noticeable than it was in the Showbiz Era. Of course, it can't last. Doctor Who Volume One survived for 26 years specifically because it was Just There. Like the Shipping Forecast, getting rid of it seemed counter-instinctual. Doctor Who Volume Two has thrived because it was born into an environment that had forgotten it was even possible, but the environment is already changing around it. When the Showbiz Era ended circa 1980, the series had to give up its position in the Saturday night line-up, and find its own specific audience rather than being part of the BBC's big night out. It managed this quite well, at first, by being the kind of show that appealed to kids who liked the Human League rather than by trying to draw in the whole family (wise, given that the Family Audience was simply drifting apart). But if Doctor Who Volume Two starts to wane, then it's far too big, important and expensive to "specialise" in this way. When it goes, it'll go completely.
Which means that the Christmas toy-flood isn't just a sign of glory, it's also like the thing on the side of the life-support machine that goes "beep" to tell us we're still alive. In 2007, we get the Dalek Invasion of Asda. But this time next year, if the supermarkets have difficulty shifting the action-figures of the old man in the wheelchair from the final scene of "The Family of Blood", then we'll know we have a problem.
Footnote. Well, of course fans didn't like "Daleks in Manhattan" much. Their idea of "ideal" modern-day Doctor Who is something that's as much like an American sci-fi show as possible, preferably with more story arcs than stories, so it's hardly surprising that they'd take against an adventure which owes more to old-fashioned Doctor Who than anything else in the BBC Wales era. Very old-fashioned, in this case: the Doctor's semi-educational stroll around Hooverville is as close as twenty-first-century television can get to the "Marco Polo" model of the series, while the Daleks themselves speak, act, and argue about the nature of humanity in exactly the same way they did when David Whitaker was writing them. This is a '60s Doctor Who story with added colour and explosions, which means that you could almost believe you were watching the third big-screen Dalek movie, with David Tennant replacing Peter Cushing (or possibly Bernard Cribbins). Though we've all been conditioned by nerds to believe that "traditional" Doctor Who means the aberrant aliens-take-over-contemporary-England stories of the 1970s, "Manhattan" is as traditional as the latter-day series gets. And Sec's cult status proves, if nothing else, that nobody cares what nerds think.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
