Lawrence Miles' Doctor Who Thing

Now Showing: "The Bestiary of Sherlock Holmes"

2011-12-23T15:24:00.002Z

If you've enjoyed this blog, then why not try...

http://holmesbestiary.blogspot.com/

Dr Watson's original tales, before Sir Arthur Conan Doyle took the monsters out.

Everyone's a Destroyer of Worlds These Days

2011-09-18T18:16:00.010Z

Great minds think alike, and so does Chris Chibnall, sometimes.

At the dog-end of last year, I posted my comments on Tat Wood's redux version of About Time 3. If you didn't read it, or don't know what most of those words mean, then I shouldn't worry if I were you. (If you know what I'm talking about, and weren't here at the time, then you can find it some way down this blog.) The upshot is that I made some notes on "Planet of the Spiders", particularly the essay on regeneration, and whether it means immortality or just immortality-barring-accidents.

Here's the very last paragraph of my About Time 3 notes. It's taken on an extra significance over the last ten weeks.

"Meanwhile, the ruminations on the nature of Captain Jack's immortality make me remember Pinter's poem about a cancer being 'a cell that's forgotten how to die'. This raises the possibility that if Jack's own wrongness is a threat to the health of space-time, as both the Doctor and the TARDIS seem to believe, then it may be capable of spreading. Sure enough, one of Jack's gang in Torchwood (Owen) "coincidentally" becomes almost-immortal after spending time in his presence, as a result of the most thoroughly pointless story-arc in television history. Therefore, the events of "Exit Wounds" can be thought of as a form of chemotherapy, only less entertaining. And if that's true, then it might be necessary for Time Lords to change - which is to say, to take on a new biological identity when they regenerate rather than rebuilding their bodies according to the old pattern (something which seems to be possible, if we're forced to believe "Journey's End") - in order to avoid having a carcinogenic effect on the universe. Which makes more sense of the 'cheating death' comment."

In light of "Miracle Day", can we believe that this was the plan all along, and that I cleverly pre-empted it...? Bollocks, can we. But what three people have individually picked up - Big Russell, Horrid Chibnall, and myself - is something that's been happening all across modern fiction, and fantasy in particular. The assumption is, remarkable powers aren't just for heroes any more.

Careful, now. We're told, in our good-vee-evil world, that everything is about "heroes and villains". This is a post-monotheist way of seeing the world, though: not only were other cultures less inclined to be one-or-the-other, they never would've used "hero" and "villain" so carelessly. "Hero", in the Greek sense, is one who goes to extremes rather than a goodie. Anyone reading the Iliad, expecting to find good and evil, might be surprised to discover that even the losing side - y'know, the one Homer wasn't on - is described in glowing terms. The baddies in classical myth tend to be monsters, representations of nature at its most vicious, not people with dodgy morals. "Villain" is a medieval term that suggests "peasant", i.e. it's about class, our modern use of the word as "evil" being another product of posh people re-writing histories. I've never believed in good and evil, in heroes and villains. Fiction survived without that face-off for thousands of years. Even Doctor Who was typically more about thought versus thoughtlessness, learning versus beasthood.

Extraordinary powers, whether they be granted by the gods (conventional mythology), by science (SF, including those cases where the powers are innate in aliens), or by something-in-between (comic-books, hence Spider-Man falling between "radiation" and "totem magic" as an explanation), are traditionally granted to heroes. "Heroes" meaning "extremists", which includes villains, as we now understand the term. No, let's put it like this: the chosen few. You're always given these abilities by the divine, or by science-posing-as-divine, or by history-posing-as-divine if it's Rushdie's Midnight's Children. The Doctor has always been presented as a mythic Messenger of the Gods, Hermes going on Lucifer. You can argue amongst yourselves whether you prefer him as Hartnellish Advisor, Smithfreak action-hero, or Bakeresque science-adventurer. The point remains that throughout most forms of human culture, and in most of human history, superhuman powers have been reserved for those who were specifically Touched...

...until now. It'd be glib to say that in the twenty-first century, we no longer believe in heroes. But it is true, if you take it not to mean "we don't believe in good people" (we clearly do, and rightly so) but "we no longer believe in extremists". "Extremists" is a word we've come to associate with terrorism - in itself, a term that's lost all meaning - and yet, most of the people we've come to respect were extremists. Beethoven was an extremist; Gandhi was an extremist; Luther was an extremist; the Doctor, in any phase of his existence before c. 2008, was an extremist.

Yet now, in fiction, power has become democratised. It hasn't in reality, of course. It'd be absurd to claim that real-world power is somehow more sterile and corruptive than ever, but it is more sterile and corruptive than many of us ever expected to see in our lifetimes. We no longer believe in heroes because we no longer believe in extremes. Whether this is a blessing or a curse, you can judge for yourselves. What it does mean is that we no longer believe in Special Powers for Special People. Aren't we all entitled...?

Comic-books have, as ever, been ahead of the game. Super-powers have been "leaking" into the mainstream for some time: whereas old-school superheroes tended to be individuals chosen (by grace or some intelligent god-force) to be champions of the world, there's now a tendency for large-scale world-shaping events to guarantee everyone a metahuman party trick. The obvious starting-point for the new era of mass superhumanage was Alan Moore's Top Ten, although the capstone has probably been Marvel's "Spider Island", in which the entirity of Manhattan gains Spider-Man's abilities. As ever, though, the real test is what the comic-book parodies in the filmed media do. Heroes told you where this was going. And now, depending on what programme you watch and which home-cinema channel you subscribe to, anyone can turn out to be a superhero. The hapless guy who makes vacuous comments about his ex-girlfriend while defeating an extra-terrestrial enemy... the family next door, each of whom has a different power... Will Smith dressed as a tramp...

And us, all of us. "Miracle Day" makes us all immortal. There's always been something intrinsically wrong with Captain Jack, even beyond the usual wrongness of those with fantastic natures, and it doesn't just stem from the arbitrary ending of "The Parting of the Ways". For an immortal, he's not prone to act much like an immortal. For someone who's been alive for millennia, he doesn't know much that we don't know. The description of him as a "fixed point" works: he's a singularity of smiling smugness. The description of him suffering for thousands upon thousands of years (consider what his brother does to him in "Exit Wounds") doesn't work at all: he's too full of anger to have learned the zen of aeons, too happy-go-lucky to fear endless imprisonment. With "Miracle Day", the world turns inside-out, but - even if this was never part of the original design - it always had to. We don't believe in this man as a hero. We don't believe in him as a chosen of the gods, even if those gods are a weird combination of Billie Piper and an ambiguous Bad Wolf. Not just because he's indistinguishable from the Saturday-night game-show host with John Barrowman's face, not just because anyone who watches Animals at Work might expect the devious mind behind the Three Families to be Cheeky Monkey. But because we can't believe in that power any more. Especially not in him.

And not in the one who currently claims to be the Doctor, either. As Tat Wood pointed out in About Time, the Doctor is perennially "passing": since 1963, he's been a Thing From Somewhere Else pretending to be human, and getting it slightly wrong. Scripts for the modern version try to play this up (sometimes absurdly so, particularly in the case of stories like "The Lodger", where he gets it so wrong that he seems to have no memory of twenty-first-century Earth whatsoever), yet the impression we get of the Smith version is a young man being wacky in order to look alien. It's the inverse of the previous ten sub-lives. At the same time, Moffat's vision is of the Doctor as an absolute legend, as that wonderful, superhuman being who will make monsters scared and shake the universe.

In other words, he's being presented to us as a definite hero, in a sense that the Greeks would have understood perfectly... when everyone else in the world is starting to grow out of the definite. However many other sins Torchwood has committed in its Espenson phase, Russell T. Davies got that much absolutely right.

We're all getting ready to be godlike now.

Our World

2011-09-17T15:56:00.004Z

(Click to enlarge.)

Remember...

2011-09-05T18:39:00.005Z

(Click to enlarge.)

Public Information Message

2011-06-16T22:41:00.004Z

(Click to enlarge.)

Doctor Who Re-Launch: Action-Figure Exclusive

2011-06-03T17:41:00.020Z

For years, the Doctor has confronted the irregularities of space and time with nothing more than his sonic screwdriver. This was all very well when stories depended on scientific inquiry and believable characterisation, but it leaves him ill-equipped to deal with the modern, action-driven, high-octane version of the series. No surprise, then, that BBC Wales has announced plans to "re-launch" the character. As a spokesperson put it: 'If he knows he's going to be fighting a giant CGI mutant or an army of heavily-armed assassins in an explosive set-piece, then what kind of idiot just carries a screwdriver? Duh! Besides, 78% of our core audience demographic consists of punters who are likely to see an X-Men movie in its first week of release or queue up to buy Tomb Raider 3-D when it comes out.'

Scripts are still being kept under wraps. But for marketing reasons, preliminary designs have already been passed on to Character, allowing them to launch their action-figure range at the same time as the debut of the Ultimate Doctor (TM). And thanks to a leak from this world of merchandising, we can present a sneak preview of things to come...

1. 4-D Visor. Internal head-up display automatically identifies any being, artefact, or exotic form of energy the Doctor may encounter, removing the need for tedious investigation or mystery. So as to "subvert" any head-up displays you might see in movies, this one is programmed to say something vaguely witty and English-sounding every one-in-six times the Doctor looks through it, like "a nice cup of tea" instead of "hyperdironic output at 84%". The other notable feature of the visor is that 'IT'S COOL!', as the Doctor will loudly exclaim when he puts it on for the first time.

2. Who-erang. The bow-tie is edged with a unique Time Lord alloy of iron, silver (in case of werewolf attack), and timeywimeyum. Can be thrown to disarm villains, but not kill them, except when it becomes necessary to kill them every other week. In the season finale, it transpires that the timeywimeyum element allows the Doctor to throw the Who-erang through time: in the first half of a two-parter, he randomly hurls it into a corner and sees it vanish, but it appears in exactly the same place at the end of part two when the arch-villain's standing there with the doomsday trigger in his hand. Because the Doctor saw that coming, somehow. Or did he...? He denies it, so yes.

3. Geography-Teacher-Chic Body Armour. All the protection of bulletproof neo-plastic and adolescent machismo, with a hint of eccentric Englishness that's apparently meant to justify its existence. Acts as a metaphor for the entire series. As an additional element of irony, jacket has elbow-patches made from the same indestructible material.

4. UltraTARDIS Control. Finally, the TARDIS comes into its own as a truly chameleonic piece of hardware. By activating his belt-buckle mechanism, the Doctor can transform his mode of transport into a four-dimensional warship, able to hover over battlefields like an All-Destroying Harbinger of Doom (but still inlaid with blue panels, for branding reasons). He can then activate the TARDIS weapons arrays with mere will-power, via the telepathic circuits.

5. Mark III HyperSize Sonic Screwdriver. Eight times as large as the previous version, and capable of firing a bazooka-width band of energy to rip apart the molecular bonds of opponents. (Note: definitely not a gun. Can only be used against targets whose molecular bonds are traditionally weak, like aliens or Nazis.)

6. HyperSize screwdriver is also double-ended, allowing "it goes both ways" and "two at a time" innuendo when necessary.

7. Evil Hand. Spoiler alert. At the end of the preceding season, the Doctor comes into contact with "anti-being", a perverted version of Time Lord biomass which infects our newly-resurrected hero with "the force of Absolute Dark". Throughout the new-look Doctor's first season, the contaminated hand becomes increasingly powerful, a story-arc which eventually results in what fans are already calling "The Darkest Doctor". (Darkest Doctor action-figure available Christmas.)

8. Hypno-Whip. From the beginning, this production team's idea of visual storytelling has largely been based on the Indiana Jones movies. And now the Doctor can look even cooler than Harrison Ford, not only using the whip to bring down enemies who seem more or less human (and therefore can't be killed with the screwdriver), but also to engage them in a hypnotic mind-meld when it's convenient to the narrative. Like in "The Girl in the Fireplace", only probably less sexy.

9. Adamantium Claws. (Optional.)

10. Cyber-Boots. As part of the "darkening" of the Doctor (see point 7), the new-look Doctor will employ cyber-technology in the next season. Though he considers the Cybermen to be a moral horror beyond almost any other, he's still prepared to adapt their footwear into something that can literally "walk through dimensions", as long as there's angst or a long-term sinister consequence involved. Cyber-boots will also allow him to stamp on the throats of inferior beings, or anyone who tries to point out the difference between "drama" and "things happening very quickly".

Public Health Campaign

2011-05-21T16:56:00.001Z

Secs Sell 2: "The Deadly Art of Doctor Who"

2011-05-17T20:53:00.012Z

After all these years, the Magnedon finally has something to tell us.

Three and a half years ago - three and a half ruddy years ago, when I still had a fully-functioning liver, when Paul Cornell had just provided the Doctor with a love-interest who didn't come with a special patch in case she got a puncture, and when Life on Mars had given the BBC a time-travel double-whammy which briefly convinced someone, somewhere, that John Simm would make a better Master than Derek Jacobi - I wrote an article called "Secs Sells". It was, for the most part, about toys.

If you recall, this sort of thing made sense in 2007. It was the year when Doctor Who seemed to swallow the world of consumer plastics like a great big Sumo Auton, when every sensible child's Christmas list proved that we had definitely won. Dalek Sec masks were being advertised on TV. You know, properly advertised. In the ad-breaks. Not just in black-and-white photocopied catalogues that made the action figures look like highly specialised marital aids, the way Dapol models used to be.

And yet... even then, even in the Winter of the Voice-Changer, there was something happening in Tesco's toy department that made us wonder if this wasn't still Dapol's World. The Character range was going pleasantly berserk, producing things that not even the world's least rational foetus would seriously play with rather than just collect. The Faceless Old Woman toy was my personal favourite, although the Burst Cassandra has since become legendary in its absolute uselessness, unless you're thinking of setting it on fire and making K-9 jump through it. Let's be honest, in a series which so routinely turns conventional items into potential threats, even monsters that work conceptually - which is to say, monsters that make perfect sense if you've seen the episode - become bizarre when moulded in plastic. A Weeping Angel figurine, out of context, is a very poor garden ornament. A little boy in a gas-mask would've seemed a perverse sort of plaything to our grandparents. A poseable Auton would've been pushing it even in Pertwee's day.

There were other oddities, like the 9" David Tennant in "Impossible Planet" space-gear, such a lost-looking throwback to Action Man's space-exploration phase that you had to wonder why he didn't have a voice-recorder in his backpack. Of the kind, O my Best Beloved, that you must particularly never take into the bath. Even though you may feel morally obliged to do so when there's a water-planet to explore. Remember, though, how New-School Doctor Who was itself undergoing a rather stressful adolescence at this point. I still maintain that "The Sound of Drums" was the point at which the programme Formally Jumped the Shark, not because it was singularly awful (we'd already had much worse), but because it was the point at which Russell T. Davies started writing scripts for the BAFTA audience rather than the general public. We ended up with an episode, and ultimately a series, in which television itself was the only reality.

So I said, at the time, that the best way of monitoring the series' impact on the Cultural Mass was to watch what happened to the toys. This seems like a good moment to come back to that idea. And not, as you may think, because we're now due for an action figure of Matt Smith in a f***ing Stetson. Instead, I'd like to go off a tangent that explores another way in which Doctor Who has traditionally interacted with the real world... especially at Play Time.

But to do that, I'm going to have to remind you all of Totally Doctor Who.

Now, I'm not a great supporter of (or, since around 2008, even a viewer of) Doctor Who Confidential. It made sense when the Great Journey of Life began again in 2005, but there's only so much to say behind-the-scenes before it becomes a celebration of... the idea that Doctor Who needs to be celebrated. Like DVDs that give you two hours of special features for every hour of movie, it's a work of fetishism above all else. Totally Doctor Who, now, that was remarkable. Simply by existing, perhaps even more unlikely than the victory of the Dalek Sec masks. Sorry? No, well, you weren't the target audience. Not even with someone as eminently capable as Kirsten "Yoghurt-Pants" O'Brien in front of the camera. It had to end, though, as soon as Catherine Tate became a regular fixture. If the emotional hook of a series involves someone who talks about temp work all the time, then no side-show is ever going to appeal to a schoolgoing audience. Nonetheless, the fact that Totally ran for two seasons has to be considered something of a triumph.

This is interesting, when you consider what's happening on CBBC in 2011. I may have to do some explaining here, because I sense that you're not as familiar with it as I might be, nor capable of joining in with most of the songs from Horrible Histories (incidentally, if you want to study the way anachronism has become the collage form of the twenty-first century, then this is at least as important as Doctor Who... plus, Viking rock ballad). Here I'm thinking particularly of Deadly 60. No? Very well. This is essentially the Extreme Sports version of natural history, in which Steve Backshall - mildly irritating at first, until you realise that he's genuinely excited about getting bitten by giant ants - goes in search of the sixty deadliest life-forms on the planet. Even as a method of presenting wildlife to children (ohhh yes, especially boys), this might be unbearable, if it weren't for the fact that Backshall doesn't do things by halves. We're exposed to hideous parasites and hugely unlikely species of squid-thing, not simply the Big Name Predators, and most of them make at least a token effort to savage the presenter. That said, the Big Name Predator footage is something special: David Attenborough's cameraman never came within two feet of getting his arms ripped off by a tiger, and it's genuinely terrifying to watch.

But Deadly 60 has its own pilot-fish programme, Deadly Art. This is the latest and most carnivorous offshoot of the Take Hart format (or Art Attack, if you're dead common), and you can probably see how it all fits together. We get a precis of the accompaying Deadly 60, and then two artists in the studio - usually young women, y'know, like with Tony Hart - make A GIGANTIC SODDING PRAYING MANTIS WITH GLOWING EYES OUT OF SCRAP METAL. Only pausing to run off a smaller version out of the sort of thing you might find, ooh, in your bins.

By now, you should be thinking: Wait a minute. Deadly 60 gets that as a spin-off, and we only get Doctor Who Confidential...? If you aren't, then you have no soul and I pity you, but I'll continue anyway.

The problem is, this comes closer to the nature of the way Doctor Who has traditionally functioned (and here "traditionally" goes at least up until 2007, possibly further) than any spin-off the programme has actually managed to create. Doctor Who was always a tactile thing, even when it came as close as the budget would allow to high-concept. Experiment is in its nature, and that rubs off on you. Yes, we did use wasteground to simulate quarries, either the kind which themselves simulated other planets or the kind where one might reasonably be expected to find a fossilised alien hand. I know for a fact, and from personal observation which under certain other circumstances might lead to a restraining order, that children in the Tennant era used cardboard boxes to reconstruct both monsters and architectures from the modern episodes ("YOU CAN'T TOUCH ME, I'M INSIDE THE TARDIS!"). Even the "Blink" game only works properly if you can play it in the presence of actual, definite statues.

Let me clarify this: if we imagine a theoretical Doctor Who Art, then we're not considering insipid "makes" a la Blue Peter. That would put Character out of business, and besides, you can probably tell from the awful bonus feature on "Talons of Weng-Chiang" that teeny-tiny reconstructions of Doctor Who stories were never popular even in the '70s (while the part about using your sister's violin-oil makes even me feel working-class). What's notable about Deadly 60's spin-off is how the materials of Termite Art, art made from accumulated bits and pieces, fit the subject matter so precisely. It'd be glib to suggest that Termite Art is good for making termites, but you can easily see how household detritus would resemble claws, scales, and pirranha-teeth rather than anything in classical sculpture.

As it was, so it should also be. Doctor Who has always been a creature of Found Parts, for reasons far beyond the BBC's make-do-and-mend requirements. We can trace this all the way back to 1963. The Magnedon, sharp-edged and slack-jawed in its petrified jungle, is a Hell of a lot like the kind of thing the Deadly Artists produce on a weekly basis. The idea of a Magnedon being a backyard project is... more than tempting, from an eight-year-old's perspective. "The Keys of Marinus" is even more obviously made of left-overs, and yes, I would like to build myself a statue that I can put my own arms through. Fine, we can keep "The Sensorites" for the inevitable model spaceship episode (yawn). But "The Aztecs"? "The Aztecs"...! I'm thinking, Barbara's headpiece. Maybe even an Aztec sacrificial mask. Okay, anyone who doesn't think that making an Aztec sacrificial mask would be cooler than an action figure of Matt Smith in a Stetson can now officially naff off and go back to watching Stargate.

The reason I'm examining this purely theoretical hybrid spin-off is really quite simple. I've argued that something along these lines is in Doctor Who's most primal nature, on-screen and off: for a programme that thrives on the palpable, that does wonders with men in big chunky monster costumes and goes belly-up when it tries to look like a CGI horror movie, this sense of stuff chimes with everything from the Very First Monster We Ever Saw to the Radio Times ad from 2006. (You may recall that when the RT first advertised on ITV, it began in the week of the "Rise of the Cybermen" cover. It involved a small boy making himself Cyber-armour out of tinfoil. See, I told you it wasn't entirely a twentieth-century thing.) But...? Yes, you knew there'd be a but. But at a time when a programme of this kind actually exists in a BBC children's slot, weirdly related to the real world rather than a haunted forest on a planet full of Daleks, Doctor Who itself... couldn't do it.

This lack of getting-your-hands-dirty-ness tells us a lot about what's changed, even more than we might have expected the toys to. It felt perfectly natural for the 2006 series to segue into something as DIY as Totally, and it would've felt almost as natural for it to link into a session of Termite Art (not in the case of every episode, although some awareness of the child-viewer's urge to create might have caused more people working on "Fear Her" to do their jobs properly). For the Smith Era... not so natural. Given Moffat's technique of making Doctor Who as much like a surrogate action-movie as budget allows, "Day of the Moon" was never going to resemble anything you can make out of packing material. "Curse of the Black Spot" is more likely to have an impact on real-world behaviour, if only in terms of shouting "arrr!", yet its strangeness comes from a lighting effect imposed on a supermodel. Rather annoyingly, "The Doctor's Wife" gives us a whole junkyard world - no, better than that, a TARDIS junkyard world - but then uses it as background. Even the moment of actual salvage is a plot convenience rather than a celebration of Found Parts.

Here we'll assume that playing in a skip is, at least symbolically, a good thing. (Symbolically, it's what virtually every pioneer in both the televisual arts and radiophonics did, so this is a safe assertion as long as you've got some iodine handy in case of scrapes.) On any level, this isn't the sort of thing Doctor Who encourages in the current phase. There are many niggling reasons for that, but it comes down to one key point: Doctor Who is now a brand. It says so on the back of the Michael Moorcock novel, in big letters, so it must be true. "One of the biggest brands in sci-fi," no less. But then, it's not as if we weren't forewarned. First we got the company logo, then we got the range of excitingly-coloured Daleks.

This isn't the first time it's been pitched this way. Just as Russell T. Davies became so bound up in his role as Toast of the Showbiz World that he started making a programme explicitly for people who work in TV, John Nathan-Turner became so bound up in his role as Toast of Fandom (this was in his early period, you understand, before fanzines started announcing fatwahs) that his version of programme-making became divorced from anything outside Doctor Who itself. He'd spend more and more time at conventions, where people would hang on his every word, and cheer whenever he'd say anything like "well, of course, the Ice Warriors might be back next year". The ultimate result, beyond "Attack of the Cybermen" and stories which treated the Rani meeting the Autons as a major selling-point, was to turn the Series Concept into something which largely existed to be sold and oversold to those who already believed in it. Personally, I can forgive the merchandising. The Doctor Who Cookbook at least wanted us to know it was ridiculous, or they wouldn't have put a Yeti in an apron on the cover; and despite Tat Wood's insistence, I've yet to see definite proof that Knit a TARDIS ever existed. No, the issue wasn't the bumf, it was the crippling sense of self-involvement.

Yet Doctor Who in the '80s at least retained one advantage: it was genuinely unique. Season Eighteen may have been in competition with Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, but nobody ever really thought they were meant to have anything in common. And when ITV finally won its great victory circa 1985, with a version of Robin Hood that was demonstrably better (certainly more of-its-time) than "Timelash", you could at least truthfully say they weren't on the same turf. Now, though, Doctor Who isn't the only game in town. It does high-visibility, high-maintenance fantasy... and so does everybody else, from Hollywood downwards, if that's an accurate use of "downwards". The reason the series has to be branded is that it can't retain an identity any other way. We can see a difference, mainly because we're the kind of gits who remember the past too well, but the general audience no longer perceives a gulf between this and the Next Effects Series Along. Many excuses have been made for the relatively feeble viewing figures in 2011, although the most important point has been politely coughed over. The last series of Merlin got higher viewing figures while being threatened by X Factor than this does against pretty-much-nothing-at-all.

As in the '80s, the shift towards branding Doctor Who means appealing to the existing fan-base, if in a slightly different way. Whereas Nathan-Turner tried to do it by overloading episodes with Old Favourites...

(...sorry, I'd honestly forgotten "The Pandorica Opens" until that moment, and it took me a few moments to stop chuckling...)

...we note that all the factors used to keep the series solvent in the 20-teens are favourites of the modern sci-fi fan. You know the ones I mean, you can count 'em off yourselves. Ratings are always a treacherous guide, but is anyone really surprised that viewing figures went back up for "Curse of the Black Spot"? Doctor Who vs Pirates vs Mermaids isn't terribly original, yet at least it puts the programme in a different space from anything else on TV. Well, until the Johnny Depp movie a few days later. An Angel-age storyline about a time-baby pregnancy, or snatches of future events that aren't designed to be comprehensible even to the dedicated viewer, are of no interest to anyone except - ironically, given recent controversies - the kind of people who care about spoilers. If the Termite Art version of television provokes the viewer into going outside and poking around to see what's there (and I still hold that this is what most good telly does, especially children's telly), then this is more like siege conditions. Branding always closes the gates. This is your product, you don't need anything else.

Which brings us back to that other sort of product, the "real" toys and games that don't seem real at all. I was right about this, at the very least: you can tell the programme's status from whatever's in the shops. What we have in May 2011, heavily-pitched on commercial TV (and tellingly, often late at night), is the trading-card game that promises "awesome alien beatdowns". Wholly insular, and almost unplayable as a game unless you're already hooked on Yu-Gi-Oh, it exists to flog trading-cards to boys who've already been sold on the idea of buying trading-cards. While we could at least laugh at Tom Baker underpants, and while Dalek Sec seemed like a triumph even though we didn't necessarily like "Evolution of the Daleks" very much, this is... all right. Let's call it a different sort of phenomenon, and leave it at that.

You can't even make a shark out of it.

Thirty Books from Interrupted Worlds

2011-05-11T23:00:00.000Z

Inspired by Philip Purser-Hallard's @trapphic Twitter-stream (a series of 140-character micro-stories, entirely original in his case). The following are all classic works of literature by well-remembered authors, abridged to exactly 140 characters for easy dissemination among the puny humans, but taken from those universes where events have been influenced by multiple timelines, anachronistic technologies, or Things That Should Not Be.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was an age of wisdom, it was an age of Roman legionnaires riding about on dinosaurs.
- Charles Dickens

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a time machine must be in need of a wife who's really his own nan.
- Jane Austen

It was only when she saw the tendril attached to the rabbit's back that Alice realised how the Xithraxi went "fishing" for psychic children.
- Lewis Carroll

After driving out the animals, the MetaTermites wrote on the side of the barn: FOUR LEGS GOOD. SIX LEGS BEST. Then the UltraSpiders arrived.
- George Orwell

"It is not only the Heights that seem so curiously disposed," Heathcliff warned, "but the Widths, Lengths, and... perhaps other dimensions."
- Emily Brontë

Disguised as a washer-woman, Mr Toad found it easy to slip past the jailer. The bizarre inconsistency in scale had destroyed the man's mind.
- Kenneth Grahame

"You mean I can't get out of this unless I kill my own grandfather, but if I kill my own grandfather, I won't be around to get out of this?"
- Joseph Heller

24 hours later, Fogg returned with Hitler's crown and the Grail of Saladin. His friends claimed he'd definitely said *one* world, 80 *days*.
- Jules Verne

It was chaos: when the boys on the island learned they were being killed by public vote, they tore off Davina's head and stuck it on a pole.
- William Golding

Now Mary understood the secret of Jamaica Inn. Its eerie mystique was a beacon, allowing the locals to kill and rob any curious Time Agents.
- Daphne du Maurier

"Why, you're a Son of Adam!" said Mr Beaver, delighted. "Our race has been interbreeding with yours for millennia. How are our death-spawn?"
- C. S. Lewis

On winter evenings, Beth would sit by the fire and sew Higgs-Bosons onto subatomic quilts, while Amy would carp about modern-day relativism.
- Louisa May Alcott

"Lolita, fire of my loins, light of my life. And apparently it isn't legal even if you use a tachyonic accelerator to make them look older."
- Vladimir Nabokov

"Oh bother!" said Pooh. "It's bad enough that my back half is stuck in Rabbit's kitchen, but my front half is in the universe of Nazi bees."
- A. A. Milne

"The warpship wreck had inverted space and time, marooning me on a single day, far from the present. Still, at least I had my Man Sideways."
- Daniel Defoe

I'M TRANSMITTING THIS FROM YOUR FUTURE. STOP RIGHT NOW, ALL RIGHT? YOU DON'T WANT TO CARRY ON WITH THIS. TRUST ME, IT'S REALLY NOT WORTH IT.
- Salman Rushdie

"Its back shines like quicksilver," said Ahab, "and in its gut, Hell's own wrath. Aye, a uranium coin for the first to spy the Red October!"
- Herman Melville

riverrun, in stream of conscientiousness, wilfitfully scarding sense to halve the Horror from 'Cross Eternity and its rrravaging of rrreason
- James Joyce

Once she'd dug a well for the villagers, adding her own DNA drones to the water was simple. Oh yes: this town would be *exactly* like Alice.
- Nevil Shute

D'Artagnon's faith in "one for all, and all for one" was only tested when he felt the Musketeer Gestalt surreptitiously borrowing his liver.
- Alexander Dumas

"Yet on some whim, I Judas' nipple brushed / That cold tomb swung aside, and there revealed / A lower level still, that's like the Batcave."
- Dante

"You fool," growled his anti-world counterpart, as its claws tore through his duffelcoat. "Did you really think yours was the Darkest Peru?"
- Michael Bond

"Nanocure Kurtz-G318 has gone native inside the Congolese ambassador. We think it's arranged the cancer cells into its own personal empire."
- Joseph Conrad

Among those at the Paris barricade was Les Miserables, a '70s club comic who'd become unstuck in time. France remembered him subconsciously.
- Victor Hugo

The golden age ended in 1963, when a study found that not every tank-engine required AI to be efficient, especially on island branch-lines.
- The Reverend W. Awdry

Mina accepted her fate after realising that Dracula means "Son of the Dragon", and that he could give her rides "like in Neverending Story".
- Bram Stoker

"Reader: I married him. This was considered daringly metatextual, yet it was a preferable narrative device to the Fourth-Wall Siege Engine."
- Charlotte Brontë

Its four arms became helicopter blades; its turret, a great cannon. But Rotatron, leader of the Windmillcons, was about to meet its nemesis.
- Cervantes

El-Ahrairah gazed beyond the portal, at all the worlds his people would infest. From this day, he'd be the Prince with Nine-Billion Enemies.
- Richard Adams

"Long before becoming Emperor, I visited the Sybil at Cunae. She revealed to me a monstrous prophecy about a place called the Night Garden."
- Robert Graves

Invader Debrief

2011-04-30T22:00:00.015Z

Later, back at Silence HQ...

"Jesus, Barry. For someone who calls himself 'Silent', you've got a f***ing mouth on you."

"Er... what?"

"You should kill us all on sight? You actually said you should kill us all on sight? Into a mobile 'phone? It doesn't even make sense within the context of the dialogue, you twat!"

"Look, I'm sorry, all right? I was just... y'know... trying to sound hard. I wanted them to know we were going all the way with this. It's not like I meant to RUIN ALL OUR PLANS FOR WORLD CONQUEST."

"You're doing it again, Barry."

"I... oh yeah."

"Unbelievable. We've been working on this since the Stone Age, somehow. Jagaroth, Fendahl, Last of the Daemons... we've seen 'em all off. Millions of years spent on a foolproof masterplan. But ohhhh, no. It can't withstand Big-Mouth Barry, can it?"

"Okay, fine. You're upset. I'm upset too, yeah? You know I'd never deliberately do anything to SABOTAGE A SCHEME THAT'S BEEN AEONS IN THE MAKING."

"Barry!"

"Crap. All right, if you've really got to know. It's my Tourette's, it always gets worse when I'm stressed. There's no need to BITE MY BALLS... ow."

"GO AND WATCH MISFITS...! Bugger."

About About Time Time

2010-12-13T22:25:00.016Z

It's been a year, so I've Wikileaked it.

About Time was originally pitched as the definitive guide to Old School Doctor Who. No, it's all right, we knew it was silly even when we started. So did Lars, our publisher, hence his wise addition of the word "ambitiously" in the strapline. The trouble is that after a while, we (by which I mean, myself and Tat Wood, who were meant to co-navigate through all 26 seasons) started to take the mandate terribly seriously. Why...? Because we hate each other's opinions, that's why.

About Time began with Volume III, since we felt the Pertwee-Faced Era to be the easiest ground for both the writers and the readers. Ooh, that book was thin: basically a Discontinuity Guide with grander things in mind, and yet towards the end of it, we started to realise what we were meant to be doing. We also started to realise that we were going to end up punching each other if we spent too long in each others' company. What we didn't immediately realise was that the two were interrelated. Volumes IV and V are substantially chunkier and better than III, because we were both so determined to make our case for What Doctor Who in This Particular Era Means that we went into sometimes-interesting, sometimes-abominable detail.

In my view, Volumes I and II got it exactly right. In Tat's view, Volumes I and II are atrocities that should be buried in salt and Mandrels' wee. This is why he ended up working alone on Volume VI, and why the second edition of Volume III was his own monstrously bloated geek-baby.

Actually, the new Volume III is rather good, certainly closer to the mass (and I do mean mass) of About Time than its first printing. Its main flaw is that Tat and I both took off our muzzles, so when one of us backed down, the other went further than was strictly speaking necessary. Volume III Redux weighs in at over 500 maxi-sized pages, and if you've held it, then you'll know that it's the ideal material with which to line your spaceship when transporting Tharils. It'd work brilliantly on hypertext, and one day - when paper finally admits defeat - perhaps Tat and I can clash again for t'internet version. But all that aside, and just focusing on what we call the facts... there are still a few flaws, oversights, and assumptions that trouble me. Plus paragraphs clearly written to get on my tits.

Last December, I sent Tat a book report on his new version, concentrating on the things that wouldn't have resulted in fist-fights if we'd been in the same room. I'm now making it public. There's nothing remotely scandalous here, but those of you who have a copy of Volume III Redux might want to think of it as an unofficial appendix. The rest of you might enjoy reading my responses and trying to guess what on Earth made us start hacking each other to bits like this. Basically, the mood here is "two Professor Yaffles, locked in a basement, then told about Fight Club".

This commentry is divided by story (and by the essays attached to each story) rather than by page number, so take a deep and cleansing breath, and let the goodness of Barry Letts sustain your karma as we begin...

"DOCTOR WHO AND THE AUTON INVASION"
(Yes, that's what it's called.)

- Could the new Doctor have survived a decapitation in his first fifteen hours, though? If we take "regeneration" to be in some way similar to what starfish do rather than what urban centres in the North of England do, then growing a new limb is one thing, but severing the brain from the… er… starfishy version of the spinal cord may be another matter. However, I'm going to take the gothic Low Road while you take the scientific High Road, and say: if we had rules on "How to Kill a Time Lord" in much the same way that Hammer movies have given us rules on "How to Kill a Vampire" (there must be fifty ways… "Just cut off his head, Ned / Stake through the heart, Art / Blessed H2O, Joe / And set his soul free"), then beheading would undoubtedly be on the list. Here we recall the speculation in early issues of DWM that the Time Lord method of cheating death suggests something either vampiric or lycanthropic, and Cornell's later hints (beginning with Goth Opera, inevitably) that Rassilon nicked Great Vampire techniques to supply his people with partial im-mm-mortality. Part of me admittedly likes the idea of Tennant proclaiming 'this head is a non-Cockernee head!', but it's unsettling in the context of a guidebook about the Gummidge Doctor.

- There are other reasons that the Brigadier might have hired Liz. One is that she had prior experience of the "outré" - possibly getting mixed up in one of the earlier alien invasion attempts, or a Gary Russellesque one that we've never heard about - and kept her head during the crisis. She doesn't believe in aliens when she arrives at UNIT, so she may not have understood what she was really up against, or (more credibly in the late-'60s, post-WOTAN Doctor Who world) the threat in question may have been man-made. Alternatively, if we don't want to turn her into Liz the War-Machine Slayer, then Dr Shaw might have written a paper on "That Stuff They Found in the London Underground, and Possible Medical Treatments in Case It Turns Up Again". We can probably assume that the events of "The Web of Fear" were explained away as some sort of Cold War murkiness, and anyone publishing an analysis of alien / foreign bio-weapons would attract the attention of the intelligence services even if UNIT didn't exist.

- The other option, of course, is that somebody made her look like the ideal candidate in order to infiltrate UNIT. "Did Liz Work for Torchwood?", now, there's an essay for the third edition.

- Having said that, though... I note that you mention Torchwood more often in the first eight pages of this book than I would've done in the entire volume. ("Cyberwoman" used to be the only object - I won't say "story" - in the Doctor Who universe that I'd never managed to watch all the way through, until the coming of Phil Ford.) Although from the weary "All Right, Then" at the start of the "Sea Devils" essay, I'm assuming you were under duress from the publisher.

- Things That Don't Make Sense: I always assumed that the workers in the plastics factory were Autons, like the shiny-faced secretary. At least it'd avoid union problems. In which case, the "fully-automated" line is a gaffe rather than a mistake. "As you can see, our production-line is fully-automated." "But… there are people working on it." "Errrrr…"

- "We pick that story up in Volume VII." Volume VII's definitely "on", then? This may be the first time in geek-history that a guidebook to a series has been written by someone who doesn't like the stories, thinks the format is a mistake, and has nothing good to say about the lead cast. (Or is it? Given that you've never had any patience with the Pertwee era, have no truck with Innes Lloyd, and loathe almost everything on Nathan-Turner's "watch", you presumably like less than one-third of twentieth-century Doctor Who. Yet you still find yourself in control of About Time, and we're probably over the million-word mark by now. We're a bit like those Christians who justify their belief in the Love and Goodness of God by completely disregarding both the Old Testament and the last thousand years of global history.)

- "It may not have mattered that the person driving Bessie in 'Robot' didn't resemble her owner." Then again, perhaps the Doctor's driving license is slightly psychic. No, you're right, that's cheap.

"DOCTOR WHO AND THE CAVE MONSTERS"
(Yes, that's what it's called.)

- I freely admit to liking the score of "The Silurians". Especially the Silurian Sting (you know the one), which sounds exactly like the kind of musical instrument that might be played by something with a mouth like a squashed doughnut. If Doctor Who monsters really did gather together in Star Wars-style canteenas - as various New Adventures authors seemed to believe - then the Silurians would be the ones with the elaborate wind instruments. Even their lips make them look like jazz musicians from racially-insensitive '40s cartoons. (More on Silurian mouths later.)

- Ruddy Hell, you're the last person I would've expected to find using the word "telegenic". Unless you're suggesting that Eric Laithwaite actually reproduced over long distances, like a hardcore version of Mr Tickle. Now, if you'd said "tellygenic"…

- Oh, Gawd, he's started on George Lucas already. In this case, however, the error's quite straightforward. "The Force" isn't supposed to represent a Vril-like "life energy" (this is why Lucas was so heavy-handed in pushing the "symbiosis" angle in The Phantom Menace); it's supposed to be a metaphor for the-things-that-bind-us-together, the power that connects people rather than the power that's inside people. Ergo, you can't boil individual people down to make Sith Bovril, and we note that the draft scripts of Star Wars described it as "the Force of Others", until Brian De Palma started taking the mirth by referring to it as "the Farts of Others". Mind you, I don't know why I'm bothering to argue with a man who can't even spell "Cthulhu". Did you even go to Evil School?

- Things That Don't Make Sense: why do you have a problem with the idea that only certain humans suffer from Silurian race-memories? If we assume that the memories are somehow encoded in DNA (which is strictly speaking impossible, but still more satisfying than the Sheldrakian alternative, and no dafter than what we're told in "Image of the Fendahl"), then simple genetic difference should guarantee that some people are going to be more prone than others. A personal parallel: like approximately 5% of the population, I've got the gene that makes us sneeze when we look into the sun, a throwback to the days when there was a closer connection between the eyes and the Eustachian canal. In evolutionary terms, this is a disadvantage, but only nineteen-twentieths of humanity has managed to rid itself of the problem. So why shouldn't a tendency to gibber at prehistoric monsters work the same way? We might further assume that those who suffer from this acute Jungian malady are the same people who didn't get really, really excited when we went on school day-trips to the Natural History Museum. And who actually think Jurassic Park is scary.

- Are you absolutely sure that ITV's Timeslip was broadcast on Sunday evenings? Because in October 1970, it was being shown in an after-school slot on a weekday, certainly in the London area. (How do I know this? Funny you should ask. When I wrote Dead Romance, I looked at all the TV guides for the days on which there are protracted characters-sitting-at-home scenes. It turns out that the Horror manifests itself on Earth during an episode of Timeslip: this was pure coincidence, but I didn't mention it in the text in case anyone thought I was trying to be "cult".) And while it's true that different ITV areas showed programmes on different days, I find it odd that a series so obviously designed for the half-past-four audience would find its way into a weekend evening slot.

- Regarding the essay: on the other hand, we could take what the Doctor says at face value (since he's got rather more knowledge of this subject than either ourselves or the Silurians, and knew about the wandering-off of Mondas in "The Tenth Planet") and just accept that the object which threatened the whole of reptilekind was the Moon. After all, part of the mission-statement in other volumes of About Time was to come up with solutions that fit the obsessions of the era, at least wherever possible. As you've pointed out, the idea of the Moon being a wandering planet was hip in the early '70s, and soon found its way into the Von Daniken mythos. There's an obvious connection between the Spaceships of Ezekiel in the epilogue of Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion and Don Wilson's Our Mysterious Spaceship Moon, which not only claimed that the Moon was… well… a mysterious spaceship, but even suggested that footage of Neil Armstrong discovering alien artefacts on the surface was cut out of the "live" TV broadcasts. The fact that the same idea occurs in "Eternity Weeps" is no coincidence: both of Jim Mortimore's Silurian-y novels were meant to follow on from the '70s Target view of the cosmos, which is why he refers to the Young Silurian by name, and why "Eternity" features a subplot about the hunt for Noah's Ark.

Yes, all right, the Moon may have been vital to the development of life in our universe. But our universe doesn't have Mondas or the Fendahl or the Jagaroth in it, as far as we know. Given the nature of Doctor Who - especially in this period - it strikes me that "the Moon-spaceship came along and frightened all the reptile-men away" is actually the simplest and most efficient explanation, without any of this voodoo-science "extinction events happen at regular intervals" business you seem to be suggesting.

- Also, I always took it as read that the Silurian third-eye was an artificial feature, especially considering its ability to burn holes in things. Which is a bit of an evolutionary no-no, really. (Let's not even get into its ability to rebuild walls at a glance. If the Doctor had managed to get Silurians to co-exist with us, then by now they would've filled the same cultural niche as the Polish. "I mean, I don't mind them as long as they pay their taxes. They're such good workers, aren't they? It only took them a couple of hours to do my kitchen extension.") So the "seeing in red" argument doesn't hold water: for all we know, that rose-tinted third-eye effect is a crude visual representation of infra-red vision, or one of those charming alternatives to infra-red that keep popping up in '70s SF series. I swear, the next time I write anything vaguely skiffy, I'm going to include something called "infra-black". If only as a counterpoint to the "ultra-white" we're always being promised in toothpaste ads.

- "Anyway, look at those mouths." Y'know, right up until I saw the video in the early '90s, I thought the Silurian mouth was actually a nose. Hell, maybe it's both. It's not as if we've ever seen them chewing toffees or snorting coke.

"THE AMBASSADORS OF DEATH"
(My favourite thrash-metal band.)

- Regarding the Many Deaths of Private Wyatt (two here, one in the next story): UNIT always recruits identical siblings, so that the Brigadier can file the obituaries in triplicate.

- Things That Don't Make Sense: but does the TARDIS have a panel that squirts people a few seconds into the future? Surely, the Doctor's just programmed the controls to do that in order to test the time-travel function? And I think we can conclude that the Ship is aware enough of its passengers to stop them materialising inside each other, given that it's capable of playing Pictionary with them in "The Edge of Destruction". Nor do I see why the footie match experienced by the astronauts can't be a shared hallucination just because it's got an unexpected result. Unless you're suggesting that you can't be surprised by your own subconscious, in which case I'm assuming you never dream. Or maybe it works like table-turning.

- "Much of this volume only makes sense, in fact, if there's a Torchwood agent going around posing as a char-lady." Actually, I think you'll find that the tea-making duties at UNIT HQ are performed by a nice old widow who's the butt of many jokes among the staff for her rubbery-looking face and comical accent. Nobody can remember her real name, but she calls herself "Mrs Tea".

- Reading the essay, it becomes obvious that the single biggest problem with Volume III Redux is… the amount of material written by me. This whole shebang was originally commissioned by Lars as "Discontinuity Guide Plus" rather than the masterwork it eventually became, and an awful lot of material in the original essays was there to lay down the rules for those who still perceived Doctor Who as an evolutionary step on the way to Stargate. Which meant stating the obvious, quite a lot. But in a version of the About Time project which permits a discussion on cognitive dissonance during a story about space-crabs, this all seems rather unnecessary. "Why Did the 'Sting' Matter?" is a prime example, in which a fascinating history of radiophonic sound is occasionally interrupted by paragraphs in which I shout cock-obvious things like "you see, it's nothing like Star Trek!!!". And if this is bad, then the "Chauvinism" essay is excruciating. Dear God, man, couldn't you have done more editing? What, were you trying to spare my feelings or something?

"INFERNO"
(Add an exclamation mark, and imagine it as a musical.)

- A story in which a drilling expert called "Sutton" (where the coal comes from) penetrates the tough exterior of a woman called "Petra" (Greek for "rock"... nice Freudian imagery, thanks Don Houghton), while a baddie called Stahlman (German for "Man of Steel") is overruled by a goodie called Gold (who's got a heart of... oh, you get the idea). This script has many layers, although most of them seem to be geological.

- I'm amused by the fact that you've tried to describe what a scotch egg is, just so you can use it as an analogue of the Earth's core. You haven't quite grasped this "simile" idea, have you? Next week: Dr Science explains the quantum substrata of the universe by describing exactly what was so good about the Cresta adverts.

- If the Doctor's calculations have been 'invaluable' to the Inferno project (as Sir Keith says), and there's no Evil Doctor on Evil Earth, then doesn't that explain why the ultra-efficient fascist version is only six hours ahead...?

- I find myself surprised that when asking why the green goo causes the "primitive" Primords to pump up the reactor, you don't mention the obvious possibility: that the force at the centre of the Earth is in some way intelligent, and wilfully guiding their actions. This seemed so instinctive to me that I never even questioned it. It makes sense of the Doctor's 'a planet screaming out its rage' comment (i.e. some Gaean power is so appalled by the crust-rape that it decides to wipe out the pesky humans... do I really have to add a caveat of "look, this was written in 1969"?), and the high-pitched whine that makes the Primords sit up and pay attention looks like the standard adventure-telly way of suggesting mind control rather than psychosis. The irony is that however much you may pooh-pooh the Rassilon's Band-Aid theory, it makes sense of this whole peculiar shebang. Quite simply, something inside the planet wants to get out, and it's mutating the humans on purpose. Which is the idea I was following in "Interference", natch, and what Aaronovitch would've done if he'd actually finished "So Vile a Sin". From my point of view, the really irritating part is that "The Runaway Bride" starts to go down that route - with the core of the planet being a leftover from an era when all the rules were different - then cops out and gives us a spaceship with big spiders in it.

- I see you're still misusing the word "MacGuffin", and this time you haven't even spelt it properly. To reiterate: as Hitchcock defined it, "MacGuffin" doesn't just mean "gimmick", it means "gimmick which draws the audience into a story, but isn't actually important to that story". The black hole in the reanimated Doomwatch, being at the core of the plot, is in no way a MacGuffin. The dinosaur in "Doctor Who and the Silurians", that's a MacGuffin. (Right, that settles it. From now on, let it officially be known as a MacGuffinosaurus.)

- So, do we now know anything else about the conclusions of the real-life Mohole project?

- I think I see the logic of Evil Earth using phonetic spellings in Houghton's original script. We should remember that, as you've already suggested, anyone asked to create a totalitarian dystopia for the BBC would have taken their lead from 1984. And as you'll recall, the degradation of language in Orwell's vision was a much bigger issue for the post-War readership than it seems now (my generation was brought up to believe that Stalinism was bad because it was an affront to consumer choice, so we rather missed the significance of Newspeak). On top of which, those who remembered the War might have seen the gulf between the "psychic health" theory of literacy and the Nazi book-bonfires as a key moral issue. So it's not a big leap between the simplified English of the Outer Party and the notion of spelling wurdz egzakly az thair pronownst. Those who worried about such things must have considered Slade to be a portent of the apocalypse.

- I'm pleased to see that Mungo Jerry was in the charts while this was on air. With sideburns like those, it must have given audiences the impression that one of the Primords had escaped into the Top of the Pops studio.

"TERROR OF THE AUTONS"
("The only one who could ever reach me / Was the son of the Untempered Schism.")

- And what, pray, is so ridiculous about a climax that involves soldiers shooting at a bus? Think of it as UNIT practising for what happened at the Munich Olympics. Now allow me to take a deep breath, as I say…

- Many commentators (and by this I generally mean "gits on the internet", although we'll be generous) have tried to claim that Buffy the Vampire Slayer has been Russell T's model for Doctor Who, especially since we know he's got the complete DVD boxed set. But like Pigbin Josh, it doesn't wash. Given that a twenty-first century version of Doctor Who was unavoidably going to come in 45-minute chunks, and that modern scriptwriting demands a more - ahem - "character-driven" approach than adventure TV in the '60s and '70s, it was inevitable that we were going to see much of the story from the girl assistant's point of view… not that this would have been radical even in 1963. Critically, Davies uses Rose as the character-core of the series, but doesn't make it "about" her: the entire point of Buffy is that everything the characters experience is a reflection of their own teen-angst, whereas Davies is interested in bizarre environments for their own sake. A story like "The End of the World" or "Gridlock" would be unthinkable in Mutant Enemy's scheme of things. But most telling of all, the way Buffy uses its regulars (a constant re-jiggling of relationships between the lead cast, absurdly so in the later years, when it seems that everybody's had sex with everybody else) is wholly different from the way Davies uses the Earthbound supporting cast. With the various Smiths, Joneses and Tylers being employed as either comic relief or hooks for individual stories - not unlike Tegan's family, at times - modern Doctor Who simply isn't aimed in the same direction.

What isn't there may be more significant than what is, though. If Davies had wanted to be deliberately Whedonish, then the 2005 series would have (a) featured a "Mickey episode" and a "Jackie episode", and (b) focused every story on either Rose or the Doctor instead of employing them as a team (only "Rose" and "Father's Day" actually do this, and in the case of "Rose" it's pure expedience). It's notable that the one Davies-penned episode that looks as if it might take the Buffy route, "Boom Town", is the one nobody likes much. In fact, if Davies had seriously wanted to sell it to us that way, then Mickey would inevitably have gone on board the TARDIS as a Xander-substitute instead of staying at home in episode one. In short... those who seriously claim that Davies wanted to make "Billie the Dalek Slayer" are comparable to those who believe that any reference to menstruation in modern fiction has to be inspired by Carrie. (In that case, the assumption is that women never had periods before Stephen King. In this case, the assumption is that teenage heroines didn't exist before Sarah Michelle Gellar.) Buffy influenced neo-Who in much the same way that it's influenced everything from Spooks to Dorian Grey, but it's on the same level as the other 800 nerd-sources that Davies keeps rattling on about. And as the "Countdown to TV Action" essay suggests (see below), he seems to be more influenced by comic-books than any single TV series.

Chris Chibnall, on the other hand, just wants to make a version of Angel where the sex is even more embarrassing.

- "Where Does This Come From?": So, exactly when does Fu Manchu menace Victorian London? Other than in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, obviously. He was invented in the twentieth century, remember...? He didn't even draw in the crowds until after World War One.

- "The Lore": That's unfair. Of course Terrance Dicks doesn't believe that girls are only there to be tied to railway tracks. As you'll know if you've read any of his recent novels, they're also there to be raped by mercenaries.

- "Pertwee had bumped into Manning once before and thought she had the 'right stuff'." I think he actually said that she was an all right bit of stuff. Is Lars still on Libel Alert, then? I mean, who's going to object? Pertwee's dead, and Ms Manning's happy to talk her mouth off about it, sometimes even when sober. Although I'm entertained by the factette on page 111 which claims that the memory of Katie being "whisked off" was preying on Barry Letts' mind.

- The essay: personally, I've never understood what's so wrong about using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. If you don't happen to have a specialised tool available (i.e. nutcrackers), then what better household implement is there? And don't tell me that you're meant to use a door-jamb, 'cos it ruins the paintwork. Oh, and I could run before I could walk, as well.

"THE MIND OF EVIL"
(Known to a generation of fans as "Doctor Who and the Which One Was That, Again?".)

- Thing to Notice, Number 4: yes, all the Pertwee seasons have a clumsy rubber lizard in the second story... assuming you rearrange them into production order instead of broadcast order, then strategically forget where the recording blocks begin and end. Ahhh, your wacky fan-astrology.

- "The tie-in novels have perpetrated many irksome sentimental theories about the Master's true relationship with the Doctor." First time I've heard anyone describe David A. McIntee as "sentimental". However, I'm obliged to make you justify the word "many" by naming more than two.

- "A 'Chinese Dragon', as opposed to the 'Russian Bear' or something representing Cuba." The Cuban Heel of Oppression? The alternative is a giant cigar that goes "raah", which just makes me think of that scene in Father Ted.

- Things That Don't Make Sense: sorry, why should the authorities ask what happens when the Keller Machine gets full? They presumably just expect the Professor to build another one, since they don't know it's really an alien mind-parasite (and that it's much harder getting parts for these foreign models). "Oh yes, Mr Biro, you may think your disposable pen is terribly clever. But let me ask you this… what happens when the ink runs out, hmm?"

- Strangely, while I have no memories associated with Doctor Who that involve your archetypal tea-time of sausage and mash, baked beans on toast, or lamb cutlets (even if "Day of the Daleks" still gives me the sense of ennui associated with having one's hair cut by one's mother), mention of Take the High Road immediately puts the taste of disinfectant in my mouth. When I was home sick from school - specifically with a sore throat - I was compelled to gargle with TCP, and attempted to liven up the process by gargling along with the theme-tune. I still find myself doing this when infected, although in recent years, chesty coughs make me pretend to be General Grievous. (More of whom later.)

"THE CLAWS OF AXOS"
(Point that thing at me again and I'll snap it off.)

- Something so obvious that neither of us pointed it out in either edition: we didn't explain that an "axon" is the part of the nerve cell which conducts the electrical impulses, and that the name is almost certainly a leftover from the original Troughton submission. Actually, Axos makes a lot more (conceptual) sense if it's meant to be a giant floating brain rather than an unwieldy collection of genitals. (Note from Lawrence in 2010: Yes, it was a great big flying head in the first story outline, written when things were still black-and-white.)

- Things That Don't Make Sense: there are, naturally, about six-gonquillion explanations as to why variable mass isn't impossible in the Doctor Who universe. But as we're talking about a seemingly amorphous giant polyp that can shift itself through time when threatened, the most obvious - and the most consistent with what we see on screen - is that Axos extends into the fourth dimension, and thus transfers portions of its mass / energy backwards and forwards as required. Which would explain why it displays occasional signs of prescience, why it only needs a little push from a reactor to shunt its whole sweaty bulk into the future, and how it manages to snare the Master's TARDIS. Which is what it seems to have done, at least if we take the Master's comments literally, and certainly if we want to see it as the natural heir to other TARDIS-snaggers like the Great Intelligence.

- Hooray, we've got a brand new game to keep us occupied while watching UNIT episodes. It's called "Guess Which Supporting Character in Each Story is Working for Torchwood". As you suggest under "The Sea Devils", I'm thinking it's Chinn rather than Bill Filer here: Torchwood already has Axos in its sights, and could destroy it at any time with one of those handy salvaged death-rays, but the Institute wants to make things difficult in order to test how UNIT and/or the Doctor deal with the situation. This one scenario makes more sense of the Pertwee epoch than the concentrated extract of a hundred Missing Adventures.

- As for the essay... with hindsight, I regret that I didn't take the opportunity to write more about the importance of Doctor Who Weekly in the earlier volumes. Your piece in Volume V only dealt with the consequences of DWM on fandom, but speaking as someone who was seven when WE ACTUALLY GOT A PROPER DOCTOR WHO COMIC IN THE NEWSAGENTS - a comic that was read by my playground peer-group because it was a comic, not because they were fans, put together by the finest up-and-coming writers and artists rather than whatever gits do it now - the early strips had a far greater impact on what happened later, as you've indicated here. 1979 brought us "The Horns of Nimon" and "The Iron Legion". Only one of these stories gave us something exciting, funny, mythic, inventive, and entirely in tune with what the children of the age thought Doctor Who was supposed to be... although obviously, you and I differ on which of those stories it was. As a result, I still have a tendency to use the phrase "my purple light is on" when I want people to know that I'm not busy. More remarkably, some of them actually know what I'm talking about. (Significantly, I gave up on DWM circa 1984, by which point it had become a small-time fanzine on a big-time budget. Everyone else I knew gave up on it when it went monthly, because seven-year-olds just don't think in terms of months.)

We should also note that if you get rid of the '70s-sitcom stereotypes and give the kids iPods, then "Star Beast" is the ideal model for modern-day Earthbound Doctor Who. We might pay special attention to the scene in which Mrs Mopp serves tea and sandwiches to a bunch of hideous police-monsters, which is not only one of the most Doctor Who-ish things ever, but also a cut above what both Williams and Nathan-Turner were doing on the telly. Nothing else made circa 1980 is so successful in putting the fantastical inside the domestic. If only "The Sontaran Stratagem" had been built this way.

- Incidentally, did you ever hear the Nebulous episode "The Lovely Invasion"? Sort of worth mentioning in the notes for this story, I thought. Lead actor notwithstanding.

"COLOSTOMY IN SPACE"
(The BBC's way of suggesting menace: a walnut squints at some felt-tip drawings.)

- Gigantic stock-footage lizards in '30s Flash Gordon serials...? I think you mean '60s productions by Irwin Allen, whose work must surely have been an inspiration here, or at least the reason they thought they could get away with it. The scary thing to consider at this point is that if Lloyd and Davis had stayed on through the late '60s and into the colour era, then Allen's output is exactly what Doctor Who would have been like by 1970.

- Regarding the question of why the Master waited so long before seeking out the Doomsday Weapon (yes, that's what it's called)... it makes sense if we assume he's browsing through the Time Lord files in much the same way that children go through the toy section of the Argos catalogue, and if everything he's tried so far has been the result of an "ooh, that looks good, let's order one and use it against the Doctor" moment. Indeed, if we want to stretch the point and assume that Gallifrey - or just the Master himself - uses English, then the files may even be in alphabetical order. "Autons... Autonomous Evil... Axos... Axxarius...(look, it's as good as any other spelling)... Azal." He gets choosier after he's captured, and cherry-picks the big names like Kronos and the Daleks (and Traken when he's looking for a way to de-omelette himself), but he may be using the same database even in the '80s stories. He probably opened the "X" files - no, don't say anything - just to see whether anything actually started with that letter, hence "Time Flight".

- I think we've established that if the TARDIS lands in the same space as a Thing, then the Thing ends up inside the TARDIS, not the other way around. Consider what happens to the police box in "Logopolis", or the Dalek intruder in "The Parting of the Cheeks".

- Re: Caldwell being apparently irreplaceable as an IMC employee, when there are eleventy-zillion people on Earth. I'm reminded of The Fifth Element, which is keen to establish that the future is overpopulated enough for a "small business" to hire tens of millions of employees, but then presents us with a plot in which people keep accidentally bumping into each other. Since he's the one who's meant to find mineral seams for the IMC, maybe Caldwell's the only member of the team with the mystical "instinct" that Voc robots don't have. And the question of why the IMC thinks it's perfectly reasonable for a twenty-foot lizard to fit through a human-sized door? It makes sense when you remember that Earth has diplomatic relations with the Foamasi during the early imperial era. They're used to reptiles that can squeeze into ludicrously small spaces.

- All right, I'm going to have to swallow hard and speak up in defence of "Colony in Space" (just as I will for "The Time Monster" later). My proposition: in spite of what you've said in the Critique, there's absolutely no reason at all that this story shouldn't work. In theory, it might even be described as a good idea. Grubby space-western, so soon after the heyday of Sergio Leone? Brilliant! Alien planet used as social parable about capitalism and ecology? Groovy! Collapsed civilisation with three different castes of monster instead of Injuns? Top one, sorted! Look at the other scripts Mac Hulke wrote for the series, as well as the things he did in-between, and you realise that he genuinely loves this kind of underground-empire scenario. If it had come off, then all (okay, both) of the good things you've got to say about "Death to the Daleks" would apply here, three years early.

The problem - and it's a single, overriding problem, which haunts almost every scene - is that Hulke hasn't thought how any of this is going to fill a BBC studio or an English quarry. The colony requires a great big central set so that people can have gunfights in it... but then he has characters standing around in the middle of the empty space, holding meandering conversations, so there's no chance of any intimacy between the actors (if I can use the phrase "intimacy between the actors" when discussing the story which allowed two of them to do that in the TARDIS). The natives have a subterranean city, full of Chariots of the Gods pictograms... but cavernous alien ruins need glass-shots instead of physical props (even Star Trek got this right), so we get the Doctor and Jo staring at magic-marker drawings. And the shrivelly little puppet-god might work brilliantly if it were shot on film and lit properly... but Hulke puts it in a control room rather than a cave. This time, it's not even a question of budget, and a single Exxilon-style model-shot of the Uxarean ruins would have given us a different idea of what this story's meant to be. Yet while Hulke's going for claustrophobia (indoors) and epic scale (outdoors), he's written a script that can't possibly deliver either. Even the crassest pieces of dialogue would've been forgivable if he'd thought it through. Can we be surprised that it was so popular with people who'd only read the book?

Oh, and the lack of colour (in the first colour outer-space story) isn't a problem either. Let's not forget, nobody in 1971 knew that "The Curse of Peladon" would soon become this programme's answer to Kirk's Green Woman. Again, think of those spaghetti westerns: nothing but browns, beiges, and other desert tones, yet Once Upon a Time in the West simply wouldn't function in monochrome, just as this story would've been unthinkable in the Troughton years. "Colony in Space" uses colour sensibly rather than gaudily, but... yes, the environment looks all wrong. I still blame the writer rather than Briant.

"THE DAEMONS"
("When Wurzels Attack.")

- Just in case there's any confusion on this point... yeah, the opening scene of episode one is also a MacGuffin.

- Anal Azal alphabetical action aside, I remain unconvinced that the Master's looking at Time Lord files which specifically relate to '70s Earth. Of all the things he's allied himself with, only the Nestene Consciousness actually had a presence in the Doctor's place of exile, the rest having been shipped here by the ACME Psychic Parasite Company. (The whole of Season Eight makes more sense if you imagine it as a Chuck Jones cartoon. All five stories involve the Wile E. Master finding a shiny new alien weapon to use against the Roadster Runner, then having it rebound on him.) Given that the Doctor wasn't expecting the barrow to be opened circa 1973, I assumed that the whole dig was the Master's idea, or at least that Professor Horner received unexpected funding from an ex-army gentleman named Major Sam (Ret). In which case, the D-for-Daemons file only relates to Earth, not Earth at this specific time. Likewise, the Sea Devils probably wouldn't have woken up if the Master hadn't come along and defrosted them. And all of a sudden, I have a craving for fish fingers.

- "…the industrial revolution, which is potentially the country's greatest contribution to global history, at least to date." Yeah, you just keep on dreamin' that dream.

- I don't understand how, in what purports to be a comprehensive guide to Doctor Who lore, you can mention Blood on Satan's Claw without reference to Wendy Padbury's nipples. And why have you even seen the Nicolas Cage version of The Wicker Man? Nobody's knowledge needs to be that comprehensive.

- Ahhh, yes... the easy option of mocking "The Daemons" for being "the definitive story where science triumphs over magic", even though it comes together in a big mash-up of non-science. You may recall that I had a similar problem with "The Masque of Mandragora", but since you like "The Masque of Mandragora", you insisted that I just didn't understand what it's supposed to be about. To me, however, it looks like this…

EVIL SUPERSTITIOUS ASTROLOGER: Mock not the forces which have wrought this destruction. For Mars is in the House of the Serpent, and the doom of San Martino is written in the stars.

ENLIGHTENED PRINCE: No! No, that can't be true! There must be some rational explanation!

THE DOCTOR: Quite right. In fact, it's a sentient form of counter-magnetising energy wave that manipulates psychic force-fields of sub-thermal ionised plasma.

ENLIGHTENED PRINCE: I instinctively believe you, despite not knowing what any of those words mean.

THE DOCTOR: Now help me to kill it by putting some wires around an altar.

ENLIGHTENED PRINCE: How does that work?

THE DOCTOR: Don't ask questions. It's science.

(Note from Lawrence in 2010: Every single word of technobabble spoken by the Doctor here really is in "Mandragora". Sometimes you don't need satirical exaggeration.)

- Regarding the summing-up in the Critique: it might be worth mentioning that when "The Daemons" was repeated in the early '90s, my friends at the time (most of them at either sixth-form or university, none of them specifically Doctor Who types) rather liked it. They didn't get a nostalgia kick out of it, because they were too young to remember the Glam Years; they didn't have any expectations of it, because they'd never read The Making of Doctor Who. They liked it because it represented a kind of television which they somehow felt should have existed in the early '70s, even if they'd never seen any actual examples of it. And while it was unanimously agreed that the ending was duff, they seemed curiously at ease with it, apparently feeling that it was exactly the sort of duffness you'd expect from a fantasy programme in those days. I find myself remembering that Prisoner episode "The General", and very nearly understanding what they meant. Perhaps the safest conclusion we can draw is that to a modern audience, "The Daemons" is a form of period drama.

- Oh yeah, and the ending of "Mandragora" really isn't any better, by the way. "I'm self-destructing because I'm confused" may be deplorable, but at least it's comprehensible, in a way that "a case of energy squared" simply isn't. You might as well just have the Doctor say "it's all right, I've done something clever". You know. Like Douglas Adams used to.

- Re: What Was in the Charts. Really, "He's Gonna Step on You Again" is far more apt for this story than "Devil's Answer". I don't suppose they re-released it in time for "Robot", did they?

"DAY OF THE DALEKS"
(Guaranteeing that children get "gorillas" and "guerrillas" mixed up for the rest of their lives.)

- Footnote 60. Was Charlie the one who unexpectedly developed telekinetic powers? For my generation (and I've heard this said numerous times by numerous people from numerous parts of the South, so it's not just me), Sons and Daughters only existed for one reason: no matter how far you happened to live from your school, it was a personal challenge to get home before it started. You never actually watched it, of course. You just had to get home before it started.

- Oh yes, Sticky-Backed-Plastic-gate. Now listen here you. It may well be true that the term was originally coined to describe Fabion, I wouldn't know. But what's demonstrably true is that by the mid-'80s, the term was being used by the Blue Peter presenters of the day to describe Sellotape, and it was still going on in the early '90s. Which is, in itself, worth noting. Consider: the '80s was the age in which those who'd grown up watching (or who'd even been involved in) Doctor Who began to mythologise and misremember its history. It may follow that exactly the same thing happened to Blue Peter, and that those who fronted the programme in the largely Fabion-free Thatcher years insisted on using the phrase out of a sense of tradition. Blue Peter fan-fic, if you will. Certainly, the memory of disappointment shared by many of my age - growing up with the belief that Sticky-Backed Plastic was a substance with semi-mystical powers, and then finding out that it was just ordinary tape - is also shared by Mark Curry. Who may safely be considered the Blue Peter equivalent of Colin Baker.

- Oh, get thee behind me! The 1977 Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show certainly isn't "the only one" people remember. Let's begin the counter-assault by pointing out that the sketch you yourself mention elsewhere in this volume, involving Angela Rippon's legs, was from the '76 edition...

"THE CURSE OF PELADON"
(Actually 30% less purple than you remember.)

- Perhaps what you've written here should be a rite-of-passage into fandom for the next generation: having to say "the events of 'The Curse of Peladon' were a pre-emptive strike in the Time War" while keeping a straight face. Then you'll be a man, my son. Still, you and I are both old enough to interpret Alpha Centaurii's outfit as a shower curtain, whereas the youth of today would be more likely to find themselves thinking of a split condom.

- Hmm. From the notes on page 218, is it fair to say that you've never actually studied Keynesian economics...? It's true that Maynard Keynes championed the concept of a World Bank; it's not true that he believed in the "complete restructuring of an entire nation's economy in order to meet loan repayments" (that was the Americans' hobby-horse, and JMK himself thought it was a terrible idea). It's irksome that his name's still associated in the public mind with the IMF, which is on the same level of historical wrongness as "Hitler was a vegetarian" or "Oasis were the archetypal BritPop band".

- Re: The Magic Roundabout. I once again can't help feeling that you'd be more contented in life if, rather than ranting at inferior remakes, you just didn't waste time and money watching inferior remakes. (Note from Lawrence in 2010: Yeah, okay, Clash of the Titans got me. It won't happen twice.)

- Simple proof that Ssorg isn't female, as you suggest: he has no official title. Ergo, he's not royalty. Ergo, had he been a woman, he wouldn't have been allowed into the throneroom of King Peladon. QED.

- Incidentally, my favourite thing about "The Curse of Peladon" is that the strong-arm Ice Warrior is played by someone called Sonny Caldinez, who may well have arrived on Mars via The Sopranos. If I were the sort of person who likes posting things on YouTube, then I'd re-dub this story with dialogue from Goodfellas. I imagine Alpha Centauri saying: 'What, you think I'm here to amuse you...?'

- I wonder whether Russell T. Davies will bother to buy / read this new edition, and if so, then what he's going to make of his work being described as "lachrymose". Which, perhaps appropriately, makes it sound like an artificial sweetener. Regarding footnote 64, though: "The Welsh Series" is rather too reminiscent of "The Scottish Play" for my liking. Besides, it's not as satisfying a brand-name as "Doctor Who Cymru", especially considering the new BBC Wales logo. I generally refer to it as "the twenty-first-century series", but that probably sounds too dynamic and progressive for your liking.

Hang on, I didn't mean it like that. I meant, it makes the series sound more dynamic and progressive than... no, never mind.

- One of my favourite changes to the original text of this book is the description of Barry Letts and his chanting chums as "weekend Buddhists" rather than just "Buddhists". It suggests that although Christianity got the religion franchise for the South of England, the Dalai Lama's London Weekend Buddhism took over at six o'clock every Friday evening.

- "Manning developed a huge crush on him (David Troughton, that is, not Colin Baker)." The most comically misguided attempt at tact I've ever read. Well done! Although you lose marks for footnote 65, which just makes the unfortunate anagram of your name more obvious, and makes anything negative you may have to say about "The Impossible Planet" look like a grudge killing.

- Which brings us to the essay. When it comes to christening people from invented worlds, I'd suggest a fourth (or at least, a third-and-a-halfth) method: devising names according to an aesthetic that suits the form of the story. This isn't as straightforward as it sounds, so I'll give you the most extreme (personal) example I can think of, which ties in with your observation about New Adventures authors using excessive punctuation. When I was writing "Christmas on a Rational Planet", I read an awful lot of eighteenth-century documents, particularly those penned by American movers-'n'-shakers like Jefferson. And as Gore Vidal pointed out in Burr, Jefferson used a ridiculous number of dashes. I therefore found myself - yes - it's true - it must be said - I can't deny it - using an above-average number of dashes in the novel. (It was the first substantial thing I'd ever written, so this habit has stayed with me, which isn't how I planned things.) But a side-effect of this was that when I needed to off-handedly mention an alien deity towards the end of the book, I forsook the then-fashionable Babylon 5 method of using apostrophes and ended up with the name "Trama-Tayn-Ku-Ku-Ro". The syllables have a fairly pleasing shape in themselves, but the bigger point is that this kind of name looks right when it's printed on a page in a book full of two-hundred-year-old punctuation. Is it a reasonable alien name...? We don't know, because we never meet the culture that supposedly came up with it. Realism, however, was never the purpose. Feasibility, yes. But not a sensible sort of feasibility.

Or, a more recent example… I wrote a Bernice audio about pterodactyl-folk struggling to survive after the K/T event ("Bernice Summerfield and the Sky Silurians", essentially). I never used the word in the dialogue, but the script named the starring reptiles as the Chixulub, after the location of the crater that's now thought to be Dinosaur Ground Zero. Since there's a proud Doctor Who tradition of attaching spurious human aesthetics to prehistoric races, I went further down this path by using character-names which suggested a Central American background. As it happens, a name like "Tektekachuan" makes exactly the kind of clacking (or K-KLAK!ing?) sound you'd expect to hear from a pterodactyl's beak, but the starting-point for this - the notion that prehistoric reptiles might have the same sort of language as the human culture which coincidentally develops on the site of the impact crater - is utterly berserk. If Lucas is "haphazard", Tolkien is "linguistic", and le Guin is "poetic", then this approach might be called "resonant".

Come to think of it, though... Lucas' choice of familiar "mythic" names for key characters, as derided by your good self on page 215, is perfectly fitting for a fantasy world that's made up of bits from everybody else's fantasy worlds. That's going for the "resonant" idea as well, although admittedly, the names for the non-humanoid classes sound as if they've all been spoken in tongues by Bjork. On a related matter...

- Yeah, "General Grievous" is such a ludicrous name, isn't it? 'Cos no
warmongering military leader in the real world would ever change his name to make himself sound macho. That would be as silly as... ooh, I don't know... the dictator of an industrially-obsessed one-party state calling himself after the Russian word for "Steel" or something. It'd never happen.

Granted, even I'm not going to attempt a justification of "Yarael Poof".

- You honestly think "Flidor Gold" is a good piece of name-wrangling...? Then again, Nation came up with it before the 1970s, when any name beginning with "flid" would have caused all boys of middle-school age to wee themselves laughing. Likewise any name beginning with "mong", which is yet another reason that the early '80s Flash Gordon seemed rather misjudged. And though it's logical to posit Nation's Welshness as the source of the word "Dalek", the best evidence is surely that the only thing which rhymes with it is "Harlech". "Men in Daleks, play your part in / '60s telly with op-art in / Or just follow John Scott Martin / In a gravel pit."

- Regarding Rambling Sid Rumpo: it's interesting to note that at least one word in his repertoire is now genuinely used to mean something very rude... unless, of course, Barry Took and Marty Feldman used a brand-new, hot-off-the-streets obscenity in the knowledge that the BBC wouldn't notice. My dictionary of slang informs me that "felch" originated in the 1960s, which could either suggest that the latest gay practice was snuck into Kenneth Williams' script (this wouldn't be untypical, of course), or that gay men started using the word because they all listened to Round the Horne and thought it was funny. Which way d'you want it, bottom up or top down? (Pause for audience laughter and arch silence from the straight-man / presenter.)

- "Spunk, Snog, or Shag": one of the most popular shows on Ice Warrior BBC3. Somehow, though, a Martian called "Ibrox" still isn't as hilarious as Shi'ite Muslims. And I can't believe you went through a whole essay about ill-chosen alien names without mentioning the Lead Sea Devil from "Warriors of the Deep", who sounds like a nasty rash in a delicate place. Alternatively, is he just called that because he's got the longest neck of all the Sea Devils (considering the original meaning of the word)? Oh, speak of the Devils…

"THE SEA DEVILS"
("Hey, whatcha doin', Kui-Xing?" "Oh, nothin'. Just passin' the day, sittin' on a turtle's head, overseein' some exams.")

- Right, let's get the "Where Was Torchwood?" essay out of the way first, because extended contemplation of the Welsh Series may rob me of the will to articulate. Aside from the theories mentioned here, there's always the possibility that Torchwood - having become less inclined to hunt down and destroy the Doctor, thanks to prolonged exposure to Captain Jack (yes, all right, "exposure" and "Captain Jack" shouldn't be in the same sentence any more than "intimacy" and "Pertwee") - has decided to let the local Time Lord deal with all the crises facing Southern England and concentrate on matters elsewhere. In effect, Torchwood during the Cold War may be more like MI6 than the Men in Black or the Scooby-Doo gang. We can probably assume that numerous other nations have managed to capture and "re-purpose" alien gadgetry, and it's within the Institute's remit to make sure nobody gets attacked by Autons with "Made in China" stamped on their buttocks. By the same token, Britain doesn't rule the world by the end of the century because our experiments with Silurian radiophonics are sabotaged by Communists, or Bill Filer, or both. We already know that Captain Jack isn't prepared to mess about with the timelines by interfering with Rose before he actually meets her, so he wouldn't go near Pertwee even if the possibilities weren't too hideous for human consideration. On the other hand, he probably cops off with Jo when she isn't anywhere near UNIT HQ. He may even have given her Slightly Telepathic Knickers as a present, which change colour according to what the viewer most wants to see.

- We might also dwell on the possibility that certain things in twentieth-century Doctor Who are directly caused by Torchwood experiments (never mind WOTAN and the British space programme, their backing would even help to explain the 1911 Marconiscope project). You've hinted at this, although if it's true, then their lack of interest in Jewishstereotypegold's Yeti is understandable: without the mojo of the control sphere, it's just a robot in a duffelcoat, and they've already got that kind of technology. We can, at the very least, assume they're watching what Travers does with the brain-ball.

In fact, the only really big question is why they don't take an interest in the Master. But again, Jack may have warned them that getting involved in Time Lord business before 2006 is a bad move, and that the Doctor can safely be left to tie up the loose ends. Since Jack knows all about the Time War from "Bad Wolf" onwards, he must have some idea how high the stakes are. This could also explain why the authorities listen to the Doctor's counsel on what to do with the captured Master after "The Daemons": Torchwood has tipped off the government that this is outside the (pardon me) human league. Note that even though they must have been able to find him before the twenty-first century, the Institute doesn't make a direct move against the Doctor until "Army of Ghosts", almost immediately after Jack's intelligence runs out... and at a time when Torchwood's management finally believes it's time to enter the cosmic First Division by blowing holes in the universe.

- And it's not a pterodactyl. It's a pteranodon, as well you know.

- "Sonic the Hedgehog"? Get with it, grandpa! That's, like, so 1992. The Kids today are into "Bloodsnatch the Smack-Bandit 3: Wetmetal Holocaust".

- As it happens, I read Thomas More's Utopia recently. I was amused to find that he spends the first six pages saying: "Belgians... what a great bunch of blokes!"

- "Manning pushed the wrong button... causing a dozen sailors to fall on top of her." At least, that was her story when the other cast-members walked in. Or is "pushed the wrong button" some kind of groovy euphemism, like the original usage of "turning you on"? (Note from Lawrence in 2010: "Manning pushed the wrong button... causing a dozen sailors to fall on top of her." Regardless of the context, please treasure that as a sentence.)

"THE MUTANTS"
("The one that's best-remembered as the cover of a Target novelisation.")

- I should just mention that when I was a child, I'd watch literally anything with a laughter track (seriously... I've seen every episode of Jim Davidson's Up the Elephant and Round the Castle, though fortunately it's become a sort of serialised repressed memory), as well as anything which involved spaceships. And yet at the age of seven-ish, even I gave up on Come Back Mrs Noah after a single episode. Nonetheless, no understanding of late-'70s "Star Wars in Disco-Wigs" culture can be complete unless you've compared its title sequence with "The Leisure Hive".

- You know that shot where the laboratory suddenly squashes sideways for no reason? These days, there's a simple way of explaining it to anyone who hasn't seen the episode: without warning, Professor Sondergaard turns into Stewie from Family Guy.

- That's really not what the Satanic Verses passage on "The Mutants" is about, y'know. Perhaps surprisingly, it's not a comment on xenophobia, but on the human desire to abnegate the flesh. It turns up during a meditation on the prospect of becoming a machine, since Rushdie thought the Mutts were supposed to be cyborgs. What, he couldn't have referenced "Day of the Daleks" instead? (Mind you, I have to feel satisfied that advisors to the Ayatollah - possibly even Khomeini himself - were exposed to the work of Bob Baker and Dave Martin in this way.)

- "Shots of Pertwee and Manning getting friendly with a donkey and a llama." Respectively, or was it a swingin' '70s free-for-all?

- The key problem with Murray Gold isn't exactly that he can only write soundtracks for war movies, but that he can only write "anthems". I stand with the majority when it comes to the climax of "Doomsday", but it's one of those moments when we're supposed to be concentrating on the music, and the decision to turn Rose's riff into a slinky bass theme was more inspired than we might like to admit. Ask him to underscore a scene in which people are actually doing peopleish things, however, and he just makes an ugly mess. I still blame the failure of "Fear Her" on Gold more than any other single individual, while the racket that accompanies Rose 'n' Adam's flirting in "Dalek" would be unlistenable even if it weren't mixed so badly that those with stereo speakers literally can't make out the dialogue. (This isn't a small point, either. The breakdown of this scene is the prime reason we never feel we know Adam as a character, however much Davies may blame himself for "The Long Game".)

- Oh look! In the same section, you've found yet another reason to blame George Lucas for everything that went wrong with your teenage years. I could spend hours explaining what's wrong with the claim that the use of Williams' score was "safe" and
"unchallenging", even though nothing else made in the '70s sounds like it, but I'll just pause to chuckle at the magnificent double standard. In the risibly inaccurate "The Nathan-Turner Era: What Went Wrong?" essay from Volume V, you claimed that the decision to use synthesisers instead of Dudley Simpson was a penny-pinching misfire, since everyone was sick of synthesisers by that stage (in itself a statement for the "Hitler was a vegetarian" file, given that Season Nineteen began at a time when the Human League were at number one for a month and only got knocked off by Kraftwerk) and most SF movies had stopped using electronic soundtracks. They'd largely chucked in the synths because of Star Wars, yet now you tell us that the Star Wars music was "backward-looking" and created for audiences "too dumb to know what's going on". So which world are you living in this week? The world where nobody liked synthesiser music in the age of Gary Numan, and Star Wars got it right; the age in which synthesisers were a good idea, and '80s Doctor Who got it right; or the world that everyone alive in the '80s actually remembers, where we felt perfectly capable of picking and choosing from both? It's a bit like your claim that nobody really liked football until the 1980s, even though you keep mentioning its impact on '60s and '70s Britain. You really will say any old codswallop if it gives you a chance for a cheap shot, won't you?

"THE TIME MONSTER"
(Glam Rock and Cretan Jazz.)

- Maybe the Doctor's backwards speech is gibberish when played forwards because it's in his native tongue. The TARDIS is ready to translate for Jo's benefit if there's a chance of her understanding it, but simply can't be bothered when the Master's unkind and rewinds. On the other hand, this might indicate that the Ship also stops translating whenever anyone gets too bored to listen, in which case episodes five and six should be all Greek to us.

- Regarding the first paragraph of the Critique... I'm reminded of Brenda Russell's 1987 single "Kiss Me With Wind". Somebody, possibly Russell herself, wrote that song and passed it on to her producer. The producer hired a vanload of musicians to play on the track, and an arranger to handle the orchestration. The record company knew in advance that Russell was going into the studio to record it, while numerous technical personnel sat in the booth to check the levels and so forth. Yet at no point in this process did anybody say: "Erm… kiss me with what?"

- To buggery with you: I still say that if I'd been born a decade earlier, then this probably would've been my favourite story of the Pertwee years, if only on first broadcast. Because ten-year-olds aren't great at noticing terrible dialogue. Or terrible acting. And see no reason that someone shouldn't be cleaning the windows during a scientific experiment designed to rip open time. Look, in spite of your belief that there's nothing to applaud here, just consider the one thing you haven't mentioned in the summary: the opening sequence of episode one. How bloody great would that have seemed, in 1972? No, don't answer, I won't believe you anyway. My point is that "The Time Monster" attempts to do something with the Doctor which we of the Cymru Age take for granted, something that's not only super-mythic (according to the programme's own mythology, that is, not the Greek version) but directly emotive. And perhaps the later Davies years have proved that this sort of thing isn't a good idea, but even so, I can still award Barry Letts a few bonus points for trying it before it was obvious.

- Footnote 93: and that one isn't even amusing. But then, we've already heard Bill Bailey do the same joke properly.

- I mentioned, I think, that I used to live in the block of flats from which the Hell's Angel falls in Psychomania (right across the road from the Walton Hop, where Jonathan King used to stalk his semi-pubescent prey). So I, more than anyone, find great entertainment value in a film which sees a necromantically-reanimated biker-gang create a living Hell in the suburbs of England by knocking over some bread. That was my local shopping centre, you undead Hovis-rustlers.

- Footnote 95: I concede this one. Although I'd like to ask who "Philip MacDonald" is, or rather, why you've put his name in sarcastic-looking inverted commas. (We really should have a snappier name for inverted commas by now. It's like a pre-War psychiatric term for gay socialists.)

- Meanwhile, "the Spanish Doctor" has the same ring as "the Siberian steppes": it sounds like the world's worst tribute band. And the description of Miss Winters as "a Nazi and a lesbian" just invites a chorus of "Love Lifts Us Up Where We Belong".

- And, why the Hell is that second-to-last paragraph (originally by me) still in the "Chauvinism" essay? You've just said all of that! In the previous four pages! Several times!

"THE THREE DOCTORS"
(The one that didn't start with "Doctor Who and…" even in the 1970s.)

- Footnote 98: the most galling thing about Bonekickers was the slogan used to publicise it in the trailers, "the search for the truth is beneath us". After programmes of the Rome oeuvre had conspired to stab historical drama to death on the steps of Broadcasting House, it was almost as if the programme-makers were telling us: "We're pissing on yesterday, and you can't do anything about it. Nyaaah."

- "Enough to blow up New York, but not a whole dimension." And what makes you think that Omega's dimension is bigger than New York? If he's happy to sit in a hole and surround himself with jelly, like a kid who's decided to sulk in the back garden during his own birthday party, then we've got no reason to think he's created anything bigger than a quarry. "Check out my graaavel-piiit…"

- From the essay: ''…which states that everything will eventually become the most probable state, tepid and inert - see 18.7, 'Logopolis'." The double-meaning here (or the back-handed slight, if it was yet another deliberate assault on Chris Bidmead) reminds me of that old Yellow Pages entry: "Boring - see Civil Engineers."

- I could just about have accepted the appearance of the black hole in "The Impossible Planet" - if nothing else in the episode - if the crew had all put on special Black Hole Glasses before looking at it. (Maybe the "windows" on the Sanctuary base have a CGI feature that outlines gravitational anomalies in swirly colours. "The event horizon's bright... the event horizon's orange.") Tragically, the same X-ray-specs idea turns up four episodes too late, at a point where there's absolutely no excuse for it.

- Also, you forgot to cover the black hole in "The Horns of Nimon". Possibly because it's the most tedious example of the phenomenon in all of '70s television, and bear in mind, I've seen the repeats of Space: 1999 on ITV4.

"CARNIVAL OF MONSTERS"
(Or stick with the original title of "Peepshow", and imagine the whole story done with shaky camerawork to suggest the Drashig's point of view, with David Mitchell narrating its thoughts. "Oh, God, this is so embarrassing. I've been following their outward scent, haven't I? They must think I'm a complete idiot. I know... I'll go "graaaaiiiiiii", that'll scare them.")

- Despite your claims to understand child psychology through the ages, I've yet to find anyone of my own age who honestly thought there were little people inside the television when they were young. Actually, I remember a teacher at junior school reading us a "humorous" poem on the subject: she said 'because I'm sure you all thought televisions had little people inside them when you were younger, didn't you?', and the response from the class was even less enthusiastic than when Geoffrey Archer tries to get a round of applause on Question Time. I'd once again like to state that my second-earliest memory is of watching "The Sontaran Experiment" at the age of two; of my granddad saying 'oh look, it's Humpty-Dumpty'; and of thinking, "don't be stupid, it's obviously a spaceman of some kind". If I was aware of (1) the fictional nature of television and (2) the fantastical nature of the programme's content before my third birthday, then I'd like to know when I might have had both the motive and the opportunity to shove Weetabix down the back of the set in order to feed the characters.

- With hindsight, the biggest problem with the Drashigs is the way they move their heads around while keeping their mouths wide open. "With our very special guest star, Mr Jon Pertwee! Yaaaaaaay!"

- And what's so ironic about Stuart Hood describing the BBC as 'too bloody middle class'...? It's no worse than (say) my belief that Chris Moyles is too bloody fat, or your own apparent belief that fandom is too bloody petty.

- The Critique: an awful lot of things "speak volumes" in this volume. I'd watch that tendency if I were you, it's like me and the hyphens.

- The title of the essay, especially in conjunction with your (rightfully) elegiac review of this story, brings to mind Homer Simpson's comment that rock music also achieved perfection at around this time. However, I can see how Everyone's Dad might have reacted to Top of the Pops and Doctor Who in similar ways. I particularly like to imagine him watching Alpha Centauri and saying, "is that a boy or a girl?". Oh, and your argument about the de-Glamming of Doctor Who after 1973 neglects to mention the most obvious evidence... when the Doctor returns to Peladon in 1974, the whole planet is going brown. Two years earlier, the miners would've been wearing silver lamé anti-radiation leotards.

- Personally, I'd hold that Doctor Who remained mainstream until around 1983-84, once again using the schoolroom as a research facility. Even if "The Five Doctors" lost out to The A-Team, there was still a sense that you were either going to watch "The Five Doctors" or The A-Team. (I vividly remember a conversation about "The Five Doctors" in the school canteen, on the day of broadcast. One boy tried to tell me that there'd been six Doctor Whos, and that it was only called "The Five Doctors" because one of them hadn't turned up. When I argued with this, he refused to back down, and it was only then that I realised: I HAVE NO WAY OF EXPRESSING TO HIM THAT MY KNOWLEDGE IS OBVIOUSLY SUPERIOR IN THIS FIELD. Perhaps it was this shock of alienation which caused the wretched and the damned of my generation to invent the whole "Cult" concept, since at that point in time, nobody would've thought to put the word "fan" after Doctor Who. "...is my favourite programme" after Doctor Who, fine. But only pop bands and football clubs had fans.)

"Resurrection of the Daleks" was the last time anybody really seemed to care, and the final Middle School conversation I had about the series was with a girl who'd watched the first episode in a chip shop. After that, nobody even mentioned it until 1987, when everyone agreed how crap "Delta and the Bannermen" was and how much better Doctor Who had been in the old days. In their bizarre chronology, "the old days" turned out to be circa 1980, and it took me a while to realise that the "things coming out of the water" they described was actually "Full Circle". Because THEY HAD NO CONCEPT OF SEA DEVILS.

(Comments are going to get bloodier from now on, but it serves you right for putting mad rants where they don't belong.)

"DOCTOR WHO AND THE TRICK ONIONS"
(Somehow, even this sounds more compelling than "Doctor Who and the Space War". And the note from Lawrence in 2010 says that you'd have to read the book to get it.)

- Do you say "breedmare"? I say "broodmare". No wonder we called the whole thing off.

- Ahem, excuse me? The weapons you find so objectionable in Attack of the Clones are called "seismic charges", not "sonic grenades". They're only ever seen to be deployed in an asteroid field, and work by shattering the rock like an earthquake, thereby sending huge chunks of matter towards the enemy. "Seismic", see? (Incidentally, I have a theory that there's space-sound in Star Wars because we're perceiving the story as a Jedi would, and that those with midichlorian mother's-little-helpers can sense explosions in a way we can only interpret as noise. Likewise, the soundtrack you find so inexcusable is analogous to the way Jedi Knights sense the emotional ebb and flow of any given event. What? No, really, what? If you've heard a funny joke, then maybe you'd like to share it with the rest of the class.)

As for the Master's fear-bleeper working in a vacuum, though... you didn't think to compare this with the is-it-live-or-is-it-telepathy sound in the early episodes of "The Sensorites"?

- Things That Don't Make Sense: did people really "write in" with explanations for the oddities in the first edition of this book, or do you still have a Blue Peter complex after failing to win any design-a-monster competitions, and thus like to imagine a literal postbag?

- Footnote 108: ah, I see you're still going on about Napoleon Dynamite as if we've seen it. More Scotch Egg Geology? On the other hand, footnote 109 is so aimless that it makes me wonder if you're telling the truth when you say you never drink. "You know who I hate? Chas 'n' Dave. Chas 'n' bloody Dave. D'you remember that Cockerel Chorus? Well, that was like Chas 'n'' Dave. What, you don't know Chas 'n' Dave...? Doesn't matter. Let's talk about '70s pop music some more. You're my best mate, you are."

- The comment about Robert Clive made me go back and read the prologue of Doctor Who and the Crusaders, and my conclusion is this: Martian Chess sounds sodding great, even better than Hangman's Cricket in Drowning by Numbers. (I may actually design the whole game, based on the hints Whitaker gives us here. This is the sort of thing that keeps me safe indoors.) However, I'm puzzled as to why the talking stones of Tyron in the Seventeenth Galaxy don't have the same fan-following as venom grubs.

- Splendid essay, though, even if the misplaced "tag" for footnote 114 makes it seem as if jingoism means driving on the wrong side of the road. Well... in a sense, I suppose it does.

"PLANET OF THE DALEKS"
(An allotrope of "The Daleks".)

- (To the tune of "Fascinating Rhythm".) "Ejaculatin' toadstools, you got me on the go, why you're always wanking, I'm all a-quiver." Considering the oddness of life on Spirodon, it's perfectly feasible for big fuzzy purple animals to be at large without anybody noticing. We know that the natives have a tendency to become visible when they die. Therefore, the big fuzzy purple animals might be lumbering around in front of us throughout the whole story, only ending up as (visible) fur coats once they snuff it. This would, if nothing else, explain the nearby humping noises while Taron and Rebec are declaring their love for each other. As you point out in Things That Don't Make Sense, it shouldn't be possible for invisible beings to see unless their retinae remain visible. And what's the only sign of animal life we witness on Spirodon, during the night-time scene at the ring of boulders...? Eyes, that's what. So if we're going to assume that invisibility is a physical process, then perhaps the Purpleoids (look, it's a Terry Nation world, they might actually be called that) are invisible apart from their eyes, which are too reflective to be noticeable in broad daylight. All of which brings us to your Bad Science Countdown…

- First off, you're explaining the problems with invisibility while taking a purely physics-driven view. You don't consider the possibility that the invisible creatures we... um... see in Doctor Who aren't literally bending light, and don't have this magical ability worked into their biomass, but possess some way of causing people not to perceive them. Leaving aside a small amount of Nation technobabble about 'light-ray sickness', the most obvious way for a living being to vanish itself is related to consciousness, either through an inherent mental ability (perhaps full-blown telepathy, perhaps just an instinctive version of the mesmerism practised by the Master) or for quantum reasons (which seems a lot more feasible after "Blink"). This is even semi-credible in evolutionary terms, especially if we assume that the same process can dampen sensory awareness beyond the visual, allowing the Spirodons to hide themselves from the eyes and noses of the native wildlife. The fact that Wester knows something about fungoid relief suggests that the spurt-flowers, lacking complex brains, can detect the natives and will occasionally shoot at them. Like the original Invisible Man, Wester becomes visible only once he's dead, as if the lack of consciousness has caused his talent to switch off. But nooooo, you always have to go for the "molecular" option, don't you?

- Bad Science Countdown, part two. The simplest explanation for the Z-bomb's ability to create a supernova is... oh, what a pleasant surprise... in "Interference": it was a product of the hyper-macho British arms industry, which got a big boost from the Thatcher government in the supposed era of "The Tenth Planet", and which frequently made out-of-proportion claims for its products. In much the same way that the British government of the '50s pretended to have an H-bomb (whereas in fact, it had a very big A-bomb that looked a bit like an H-bomb), the brochure for the Z-bomb made the "supernova" claim in order to impress people who didn't know much about space-science. Like... er... the commander of the Snowcap Tracking Base. Basically, it's the humans in this story that are improbable, not the hardware.

- Bad Science Countdown, part three. The question of how anyone discovered the effects of snorting dead Mandrel seems no more puzzling to me than the question of how anyone started putting weeds into their mouths and setting light to them. And I don't think I have to mention Hoffman's magic bicycle ride. A more interesting line of inquiry, though, is how vraxoin might have been treated by the subculture of the age. In the world of 2116, do badly-informed junkies start breaking into zoos and grinding up the mandrills?

- Bad Science Countdown, part four. "We've looked at the daft idea that the Time Lords somehow 'dented' reality and made all advanced species look like humans." Well, f*** you too. Look, you're just going to have to accept that some of us (to be honest, virtually everyone who's had any creative input into Doctor Who from the mid-'80s onwards... Gareth is probably an exception) would rather like the Time Lords to be the scary ultrapower from the centre of history that we've always been promised, not the tedious, self-indulgently Oxbridge versions we got from 1976 onwards. Even if you do want to see "The Deadly Assassin" as a deliberate undermining of legends, it's a joke that only works once, then renders all their subsequent appearances worthless. And let's face it, you only think the mythicised version is "daft" because - somewhat remarkably, from my perspective - your idea of how to do Time Lords properly is "The Invasion of Time". In which nothing about them makes sense, at all, on any level. Allowing this version to prevail is like letting Ian Hislop run Narnia.

(Note from Lawrence in 2010. I have absolutely no idea what I meant by that. And even if I did, it's still a peculiar way to end an argument. Mind you, I was right about everything else. Ah-hah! Here comes the bit where I get stroppy about minotaurs.)

- Oh, and behold! In the very same paragraph, there's a cheap shot about "computer nerds" hijacking the series in 1980, preceded by an echo of the most ludicrous parts of Volumes IV and V which claims that the makers of Tat's Favourite Era thought everything through properly. I hate to use coarse sarcasm, but since you're already scraping the bottom of the dialectic barrel, I should point out that the sentence "the Nimon is a credible life-form" can only really be spoken in a sing-song voice and followed by a "suuuure". The fact that it was originally conceived as a less-scary sort of alien in a bull-mask is hardly an excuse, partly because what we see on-screen still fires energy-beams from its horns (oh, for...), and partly because the last-minute change saved us from an ending that would've been more like Scooby Doo than anything in Buffy. And even more of an insult to Greek mythology than the banality we eventually got. "Gee, you mean the scary bull-headed monster was really just a Mr Jenkinsoid, a caretaker-race from Fairgroundus 6? He would've gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for some facile shite about a gravitic anomaliser."

Now, It's not unusual for your selective memory to attribute the worst vices of the late '70s to the early '80s, hence your claim that Chris Bidmead was the one who caused the series to get technobabble'd-up instead of quasi-science-gadget-freak Douglas Adams. Yet here there's a particular irony: although "Full Circle" may not have got evolution "right" (although we'll come back to this later), it did at least provoke children to think about the concept of biological change, whereas the Williams era treated alien biots - and, worse, alien cultures - as if they'd been sculpted out of Play-Doh purely in order for Tom Baker to have something to sneer at. And I do mean Tom Baker, not the Doctor. The Virus of the Swarm, the Vardans, the Ogri (the Ogri…!), Kroll, the Movellans (employed as a Monster Race, if not strictly biological), the Mandrels, and the Nimon are all at least as silly as an invisible species on a jungle planet; the Fendahl works aesthetically and conceptually, but certainly not biologically; and Erato, the only monster of the period that really was thought through properly, is let down (how apt) by the fact that David Fisher forgot to put any of his exhaustive background detail into the actual script.

Just to round off the hilarity, you end the essay by blaming Bidmead for everything that's wrong with a left-over Williams-era story, and by positing him as science's Anti-Pope for dressing up the bizarre plot-points with scientific-sounding terminology. Of course, the programme had been doing exactly the same thing for the previous three years... except that whenever Adams, the '70s version of David Fisher, or the Baker-Martin push-me-pull-you do it, you praise them for at least trying. I could go on, but I'll merely point out that perhaps the worst-ever add-scientific-sounding-words-and-people-will-swallow-this-garbage offender isn't from the late '70s or the early '80s, but from the Hinchliffe period. However, we've already dealt with "The Masque of Mandragora". Which does something far less excusable than shoving tachyons into an early-'80s SF script, by betraying the very ideal of scientific investigation.

- And on a point of accuracy rather than interpretation... what we're actually told in "Full Circle" isn't what you've claimed here. True, it's difficult to understand how the Marshmen and the Stop Borises are supposed to fit together, but - in a break from the Terry Nation version of biological development, and despite your best attempts to misreport it - the natives aren't in any way "destined" to become human. The Marshmen who broke into the Starliner evolved into humanoids because they found themselves living in an environment made for humanoids. In accord with the conventions of skiffy TV, there's a given reason for this happening faster than it would on most worlds (the local life is somehow super-adaptive, as the Doctor points out), yet the real peculiarity is that this is the story which gets the most basic principle of evolution right: it's a case of creatures adapting to their surroundings over generations, not a case of them having a built-in design for the future. The word "adaptation" is specifically used in this regard, so not only is your "the Marshmen evolved into humanoids because everything eventually does so" claim 180-degrees wrong, but you've missed the point of the entire story. I could've understood this if you'd been eight on first broadcast and I'd been seventeen, but honestly.

If there's a problem here, then it's the whiff of Lamarckianism in the Alzarians' super-healing abilities, with no solid line between "adaptation by evolution" and "adaptation of an individual". But with the Doctor stressing that an awful lot of time has to pass for Thing A to become Thing B, and Little Andrew Smith even providing us with a credible reason for Mistfall rather than resorting to the "alien planets just have funny seasons" malarkey of "The Mutants", this is a damn sight closer to proper bio-science than anything made in the '70s. (Q.v. an absolute howler like "Image of the Fendahl", in which evil turns out to be a genetic quantity that was somehow encoded into human DNA by an alien skull which itself looks human for no explicable reason. That's not just badly-thought-out, it's nicked from the pig-ignorant science-hating curmudgeon who wrote Quatermass.) Surely you could have read our notes on the story in Volume V before starting the rant? I mean, the whole point of About Time is that you can check these things without having to watch the episodes all the way through, which I'm sure would be a mercy from your point of view.

Okay, I'll boil this whole lump of congealed silliness down to a simple formula. "Mandragora" claims to be in favour of big-e Enlightenment, yet the "science" it employs is unmitigated bollocks from start to finish. The "science" in "Full Circle" is undisputedly flawed, yet it still provokes the more quizzical members of the audience to ask how things actually work. You were old enough in 1980 to be beyond this sort of prompting, which is why I keep imploring you to shut yer gutter about "computer nerds" (by which you seem to mean "inquisitive children from the generation after mine", myself included). But I still can't help feeling that when you were five years older and experiencing Hinchcliffe's finest hour, Doctor Who taught you a lesson that now seems incredibly banal. When I were an eight-year-old (and it were all fields round 'ere), I found out about adaptation to environment. Whereas when you were a thirteen-year-old (t'appen), you found out that superstitious people are stupid.

And, it seems that "Mandragora" is yet another interesting dictionary-sanctioned word which Microsoft's spell-checker refuses to acknowledge.

- "You want to know the really stupid thing about this? The idea wasn't even Terry Nation's." Now, there's a novelty. On which subject... as I write this, ITV4 is screening a Terry Nation episode of "The Saint". I've just witnessed a scene in which one of the villainous kidnappers (who've abducted the attractive daughter of a thick-headed multimillionaire, as per) complains about some milk being sour, and his partner tells him: 'Who needs milk, when we're about to get hold of a million dollars?' In itself, this is nearly on a level with 'I'm qualified in space medicine' or 'you've been infected by the fungoids', but the funny part is that this isn't an incidental part of the dialogue: the Milk Cutaway is a stand-alone scene, designed to remind us how greedy and one-dimensional the kidnappers are. Incredibly, Alan Stevens is still claiming that people only hate the author because he wouldn't let us play with Daleks.

(Note from Lawrence in 2010: Hi, Alan! As you can see, you've made your point, and it's been noted. You can stop pretending that Terry Nation's any good now. Please don't send me another discourse. No, really. Please don't.)

- Also, Microsoft thinks that the plural of "retina" is "retinas". Gitbastards.

"THE GREEN DEATH"
(Seepage from the chemical pipes makes this the archetypal Welsh story: everything comes down to leaks. Oggy oggy oggy!)

- You always insist on mentioning Sunny Delight when you're dealing with poisonous chemicals and giant insects, don't you (q.v. "Planet of Giants")? On a similarly childish note, my own first experience of Fuzzy Logic in the 1970s was a book owned by my cousin entitled Fuzzy Reasoning and Its Applications. To me, this sounded rather appealingly like Jungle Ted and the Lazy Button-Poppers.

- Since you've mentioned Gerry Davis' Doomwatch episode "The Web of Fear"... last month, the worryingly oft-mentioned ITV4 exposed me to an episode of UFO entitled "Timelash". I was amazed to find that it was even more off its face than "ours", and involved Ed Bishop machine-gunning a villain in a time-travelling go-kart. But you probably knew that. (Note from Lawrence in 2010: The person who's machine-gunned to death in a time-travelling go-kart is Voice-Over Man from The X-Factor. No, really!)

- Reading your notes on the use of the words "middle class", it strikes me that Russell T. Davies has missed a trick here. Given the current obsession with Daily Mail self-absorption in TV comedy, we might reasonably have expected him to give us an invasion story in which the first words spoken by the aliens are: "So, what are the schools like in this galaxy?" As things turned out, the closest we came was the Cabinet meeting in "Torchwood: Slow, Children Exploding".

"THE TIME WARRIOR"
(Robert Holmes gets medieval on yo ass. Praise the Lord, and pass the Sontaran fragmentation grenades.)

- "…the first use of time-travel for humour, Mark Twain's 'A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court'." No, I think you'll find that Johan Wessel beat him to it by 108 years. Although I'll try not to dwell on the knowledge that the idea was first employed by a Norwegian.

- Regarding the alleged appearance of medieval potatoes... given the overuse of the "spud" gag in recent Sontaran outings, we might theorise that if there really are any potato-like growths in Irongron's kitchen, then they may have budded from Lynx himself. Or they may be aborted embryos from his pod's damaged gene-banks, which he surely wouldn't allow to go to waste. For similar reasons, I'd rather date this story to the late 1200s than the 1100s, just so we can do the obvious joke. "Do these potatoes belong to the Sontarans?" "No, they're King Edward's."

- "…the modern-sounding family in 'The Fires of Pompeii' have to be treated as a Flintstones-style joke that backfired." Personally, the thing I find most irritating about "I, Capaldius" is the contrived use of 'ants in honey' to suggest something unthinkable that's no more bizarre to the natives than Crunchy Nut Corn Flakes are to us. Now, when I was growing up in the fabled town of Walton-upon-Thames (we moved away when I was five, in 1977, so I instinctively associate the town with the Hinchcliffe era as well as Psychomania), there was a specialist Age of Aquarius-y food shop down the road which sold chocolate-covered ants as trendy confectionery. That was the '70s. Thirty-odd years ago. And candied insects is the modern Doctor Who author's idea of hilariously unlikely period detail...?

- A point not mentioned in the revised "What Caused the Sontaran-Rutan War?" essay, possibly because it was just too irritating, is that the Sontaran point of origin is specifically identified as the planet Sontar in The Sarah Jane Adventures. Which implies, but doesn't prove, a biological origin of some description. Then again, they might just have given that name to their wartime base of operations. The FASA Role-Playing Game, known for its immense quantities of made-up source material and its influence on at least three New Adventures authors, boldly / baldly stated that "Sontar" was the name of the general who led a military coup on his homeworld and began replacing the population with clones of himself. Despite supplying the Doctor Who continuum with yet another Mad Creator origin story, it's perhaps more consistent with Sontaran thinking for a planet to be named after a historical figure than for the species to be named after a planet. At least if you interpret "Sontaran thinking" to involve Maori war-dances and appellations that even Robert E. Howard would have found distressing.

"INVASION OF THE DINOSAURS"
("Lifeless and stinky.")

- Reading your notes on this story's origin, it occurs to me that the entire project would have worked beautifully if someone had walked into an early production meeting and said: "Right. Malcolm? Do the story with the mad environmentalists, but team them up with the Silurians. Barry? You can have one dinosaur in London, and that's it." If you imagine the affair as "Doctor Who and the Cave-Monster Invasion", then you not only replace all those car chases and government conspiracies with a much more complex moral theme (the Silurians want their Golden Age at least as much as the Tom-and-Barbara eco-terrorists, and would have a proper justification for bringing back the Eocene while messing up humanity), but also supply a decent reason for the Madness of Mike Yates (we're led to believe that he was hanging around with UNIT even during Season Seven, so Wenley Moor may have been eating at his conscience). Besides, it would've been the perfect way to lower the curtain on the UNIT era. God! Just thinking about it makes me want to write the story as an ersatz Target novelisation... no, that way lies darkness.

- But as things stand, Whitaker's sorcerous time-reversal process is the best possible candidate for "captured alien technology" during the UNIT years. I'll stop short of suggesting that they really did defrost some Sea Devil temporal specialists, but we might still speculate that the powers-that-be (you know who I'm talking about, I refuse to speak their name again) have been quietly making notes on the activities of both the Doctor and the Master, and that Whitaker's allies have used their government connections to feed him the data. In which case, this whole story is the Doctor's fault after all, just like General Finch claimed.

- Is the 'we looked into this very carefully… I sold my house' line really deserving of a place in the Things That Don't Make Sense section? Surely, the Home Counties pettiness of this (with humanity facing a mass unbirthing and all) is what Hulke was drawing our attention to? In short, the People are the textbook models of Nauseatingly Middle-Class. "So, what are the schools like in this epoch?" I'd also question whether the secret entrances in Whitehall and Moorgate actually necessitate a complex as big as a village, or whether they just indicate a very long tunnel. Which, as I'm sure you know, can be built under London without anybody asking difficult questions. Pleasantly, though, the presence of queer-looking tyrannosaurs in Britain (rather than, say, North America) is a little more convincing after last month's non-hadron-related science headlines.

- It's worth remembering that although non-virtual skills have been somewhat overshadowed by CGI in recent years, the art-cum-science of complex model-building has come on by leaps and bounds in the last three decades. So... since a makeover from The Mill is thankfully out of the question, has the Restoration Team thought of replacing the abysmal dinosaur puppets in this story with good dinosaur puppets? Which wouldn't clash with the half-decent Sleeping Rex footage.

NEWSFLASH: My contact at a well-known supplier of movie props has just informed me that since remote-controlled armatures are twenty times cheaper and more efficient than they were in 1974, they could quite easily build a full-length tyrannosaurus puppet that actually resembles Cliff Culley's close-up model. Gosh, that would be exciting!

- I've also got 1,724 words to say about your incredibly daft arguments in the "Special Effects" essay, but I've laid into you enough already, so I'll leave it for now. If you ever want someone to tell you how your loathing for the twenty-first century is interfering with your logical faculties, then you know where I am.

- Oh, and don't dis At the Earth's Core, or I'll pop a cap in yo Galu ass.

"DEATH TO THE DALEKS"
(An allotrope of shite.)

- Dunno if I've mentioned this before, but: whenever I'm writing a first draft, if I need to leave a space for extra research or an obvious rewrite, I always mark the passage with "xx". Virtually no English words contain these letters in a pair, so it's easy to find the paragraphs that need work using the "search" function. Which was fine... until I had to write about a race called the Exxilons, who live in the City of the Exxilons, on a planet called Exxilon. In story XXX.

- Re: Florana. So what's wrong with floating in fizzy warm milk? Now I'm picturing a version of "The Time Meddler" in which the Monk travels back to ancient Egypt and provides Cleopatra with a Sodastream. On a similar note, "Old Mother Shipton will fossilise your teddy-bear in under a year" reads like a highly specialised advert in a newsagent's window.

- Things That Don't Make Sense: hang on, why do we have to assume that Daleks should be able to float, just because they're powered by psychokinesis this week? Even a complete David Whitaker might instinctively suppose that it takes a greater amount of energy to defy gravity than to roll. I use my hands (rather than my mind) to shift furniture, but the ability to do this doesn't mean that I can throw a sofa two-hundred feet in the air. At best, you'd only expect a Dalek to be able to hop a bit.

- The most entertaining thing about the essay is that without realising it, you've suggested the possibility that Daleks have hereditary mathematicians. The second most entertaining thing is the suggestion that there were actually rewrites for "Journey's End". A possibility you've almost-but-not-quite considered, though: when asking whether Daleks might compete among themselves for status, you're assuming that all Dalek mutants end up in shells. If we take it as read that Davros has a "survival of the fittest" mentality, then it'd make more sense for him to put all the newborns into a big tank and let them rip each other to pieces until there's a suitable number of natural-born killers left alive. This would be an effective way of finding the best candidate for Dalek Supreme, and would explain everything from the superiority complex of Big Red to the species' peculiar liking for both The Weakest Link and Big Brother. (Possibly even What Not to Wear. "Red's back in a big way... it's exciting, it's sexy, and best of all, it makes you invisible to your own subordinates. They can't overthrow you if they can't find you.") We might also note that Davros seems to have used an awful lot of his own cells to produce his army in "The Stolen Earth", as if it isn't quite a one-cell-per-finished-product deal.

"THE MONSTER OF PELADON"
(Altogether now: "YYY, Thaliria… Vega Nexos in the Weetabix.")

- Things That Don't Make Sense: "Eckersley expects a Martian to know what 'argy-bargy' means." And, indeed, hundreds of other English words. But we might simply conclude that Martians, unlike Norwegians, know how to contextualise. And…

- "Equally puzzling is how the Doctor figured out that Aggedor can follow a scent." What, with a schnozz like that? (Aggedor, not Pertwee.) The only surprising thing is that it leads him straight to Eckersley, rather than the nearest supply of truffles.

- Footnote 139: I think you'll find that the hamster's female. And now I'm tempted to put these notes on the internet, just to intrigue and frustrate those people who don't have the book. (Note from Lawrence in 2010: Past-Me is so wise.)

- Interesting fact about the Face of Boe toys you mention in the essay: due to an unprecedented mix-up at Character Options, every single one of them has the features of Julian Glover. For the last time in this volume, though, I have to correct you on your cultural interpretation of Star Wars. As any boy who was six in 1978 will tell you, the cornerstone of the merchandising was the action-figure collection, which genuinely did break new ground by being within pocket-money range. My diabetes resulted in the largest Star Wars army in South London, purely because a Stormtrooper cost less than some kids spent on sugar mice in a single week. Whereas before that point, all "make-an-adventure" toys - including those associated with Planet of the Apes, if you recall - were on the Action Man scale, and could therefore only turn up at Christmas. I won't try to claim that Star Wars democratised space-age merchandising, but it did make a big difference to the way my generation saw toys. And, more interestingly, the way we used those toys to tell stories...

"PLANET OF THE SPIDERS"
(The Great One keeps giving it the Big I Am.)

- "Seeing the Doctor frightened is way more disturbing than watching him die." Oh, riiiiight. But when I make the same broad point about the first two cliffhangers of "The Leisure Hive", suddenly I'm the mad one.

- Look, I've got to ask... have you ever tried to build a Hieronymus Device? Because if you can supposedly make it work with a drawing instead of a proper circuit, then I'm thinking it's hardly going to be a big-budget exercise. (On a slightly grander scale, I've always had a hankering to construct my own orgone chamber according to Reich's blueprints, just to test whether the AMA knew what it was talking about.)

- Where Does This Come From?: I'd just like to mention that when The Prisoner was repeated on Channel 4 in the early '80s, it was one of the first things I regularly taped on the family VCR, and I eventually showed some of the recordings to my bestest friend at school. He was twelve years old and had no background in either telefantasy or pop-Buddhism, yet even he guessed the identity of Number One after the first half-dozen episodes. I mean, who else would it be? Mr Kipling?

- Something I can't believe you didn't point out: when Lupton and friends use their Evil Zen to try to stop Sarah, the "demon" which manifests itself in front of her takes the form of a tractor on a country road. See "The Temptation of Sarah Jane" to find out why this is her idea of the worst thing imaginable (and yes, I know it's been back-engineered that way by Gareth, but even so)...

- Also, an extra Thing That Doesn't Make Sense. Who on Metabelis 3 gives their child a name like "Arak"? At best, it's going to result in a good kicking from all the other kids. At worst, it's going to be seen as presumptuous by the Eight-Legs and get him eaten before his first birthday.

- "Angry Buddhists - if such a thing can be imagined." You may recall the schism in Buddhism at the turn of this century, and the subsequent demonstrations which saw breakaway Buddhists carrying placards that bore slogans like: "Dalai Lama! Stop Oppressing Us, Please." (Note from Lawrence in 2010: Really, that was a genuine placard.)

- Onto the essay. If you saw Russell T. Deus being interviewed on breakfast TV, then you'll know that the "thirteen strikes and you're dead" rule does still apply, but that he believes they can always come up with a 'magic wand' to extend the Doctor's life once the regenerations run out. Given the nature of all four of his Season Finalés, hearing him explicitly use the words 'magic wand' was rather disquieting.

- Meanwhile, the ruminations on the nature of Captain Jack's immortality make me remember Pinter's poem about a cancer being "a cell that's forgotten how to die". This raises the possibility that if Jack's own wrongness is a threat to the health of space-time, as both the Doctor and the TARDIS seem to believe, then it may be capable of spreading. Sure enough, one of Jack's gang in Torchwood "coincidentally" becomes almost-immortal after spending time in his presence, as a result of the most thoroughly pointless story-arc in television history. Therefore, the events of "Exit Wounds" can be thought of as a form of chemotherapy, only less entertaining. And if that's true, then it might be necessary for Time Lords to change - which is to say, to take on a new biological identity when they regenerate rather than rebuilding their bodies according to the old pattern (something which seems to be possible, if we're forced to believe "Journey's End") - in order to avoid having a carcinogenic effect on the universe. Which makes more sense of the 'cheating death' comment, as well as implying that David Tennant has become a liability even in story terms.

With thanks to Lindsay for helping me move this text from a very old computer to t'internet.

It's Got Cows, Rocs, and Trods, Stop Complaining

2010-11-25T23:06:00.026Z

The BBC is now approaching its darkest hour, and - faced with what it believes to be stiff commercial competition - would like to prove itself with television programmes that are inventive, dynamic, and of-the-moment. NO, NOT LIKE THAT! INVENTIVE, DYNAMIC, OF-THE-MOMENT, AND LIKE ALL THEIR OTHER ONES! IDIOT! So they've taken a DNA swab from the corpse of the Davies era, and realised that the best way to mass-produce new product is by using an anagram of Doctor Who, just like Torchwood did. Ergo, here are the fifteen (yes, fifteen!) scrambled versions of those nine letters which might just make saleable telly...

1. Th' Cow Door
SF anthology series, produced in conjunction with America's YUKYUKYUKTV, known for supplying entertainment to those who live in the farmbelt and (according to the station's website) don't have any "haah-brow" ideas about TV drama. The press release from BBC Worldwide explains: "Why should science fiction, in this modern and democractic age, simply be for people who know what 'science' or 'fiction' mean? Or who can read? After all, Doctor Who itself is controlled by a man who considers sci-fi to be for complete saddoes, and who hasn't read an original SF novel written in the last thirty years because he thinks it might make him look bad in front of girls. Why not give yokels the same treatment as the British public?" In this series, the titular Cow Door is a gigantic udder-portal which allows the rural American audience to glimpse any number of terrifying nighmare-worlds, including a world where a black man is president and a world where things somehow changed after 1945.

2.Hot Crow Do
Another co-production, this time with Channel 5: a documentary series that takes a morbidly intimate look at "swinging" within the UK's voodoo community. Seemingly respectable middle-class couples gather for Activia cocktails and talk about the schools in their area, before one of their number rips the head off a carrion-bird with his teeth. The ensuing spatter of blood and polite self-hatred forms the "wallpaper" of the orgy, though the programme is most memorable for its catchphrase, "LET THE VOICE OF BARON SAMEDI BE HEARD but on leaving, please remember that this is a residential area".

3. How Cod Rot
Also a documentary series, this one starring Jeremy Clarkson, who goes on a license-fee-funded holiday to point at decaying fish in Europe's ports and pretend it's all the fault of Brussels. Given the tenuous Doctor Who link, he argues that it's demonstrably okay to hate everything that's not exactly like you, because anyone who tries to make friends with you is bound to be a stinking piece of extra-terrestrial garlic-munching Dago-shagging filth disguised as a human being. Mark Gatiss and the entire writing team of The Sarah-Jane Adventures applaud wildly as he crushes an Uzbekistani shepherd-boy's head beneath the wheels of his SUV. Because it's a pre-emptive strike. Somehow.

4. Howdo t'Orc
Remake of The Lord of the Rings set entirely in the North of England. "Eee, in't Golden Age of dwarves, we worked eighteen hours down't Mines of Moria and were glad to thank Balrog of't privelege."

5. Ood C. Worth
Older viewers of British television can't fail to remember Harry Worth, the '60s comedian best known for gitting around with his mirror-image in a shop window. The BBC now takes the opportunity to combine the nostalgia factor of the original Worth with the merchandising appeal of the Ood, by digging up his corpse, forcing an octopus onto his face, and dangling him in front of a reflective surface as part of a sit-com described by critics as "marginally less offensive than My Family". It may seem cruel, but it's no worse than what Brian Cox had to do.

6. Coo! RTD Who?
A poignant reminder of Doctor Who past, this docu-drama follows the hulking, tramp-like figure of Russell T. Davies as he mindlessly shambles from production company to production company. He flashes a childlike smile at passers-by on the way, and they instinctively smile back, before realising that they can't remember who he is or what he did that was any good. Ultimately, this worn-out sop of a man has to face the fact that however much he may have cared in his early years, he allowed his one true love to become a version of Merlin that's too scared to go up against X Factor. The consequences are tragic. Especially for the viewers, who are still living through them.

7. Rood Wotch
When an attempt was made to resurrect Doomwatch in 1999, it failed horribly, despite its best efforts to lever cyberpunk aesthetics and a fucking great black hole into the format. Why the problem? Head of BBC3 Marcus Shobgite explains: "It didn't speak to the now, the moment, the modern generation. With our new remake, we'll be talking about things that really affect the youth of 2010. Especially if they're a bit dirty, you know? Hence the title. The first episode's about breast implants, and raises the question... are these things justifiable, simply because they make women much more attractive? Or do they expand monstrously, turning girls into incredibly sexy she-demons with 56HH chests that suck the life - note, that's "life", clever metaphor there - out of the lead male characters? Plus, everyone carries mobile 'phones in this version." When asked about the eccentric spelling of the title, Marcus replies: "It's deliberate. It says everything about the gap between the so-called establishment and today's urban, hypertext-age kids. Besides, this show's mainly aimed at Chav-scum. And you know what they're like with spelling."

8. "Och!" to Word
A one-off Christmas ghost story in which a dour Scotsman refuses to use any software provided by Microsoft, on the grounds that "when I were a bairn, we used the Apple Mac of the Clan MacApple". In the haunting conclusion, Word comes to eat out his heart, as it does to us all. David Tennant provides a near-perfect rendition of the young John Laurie, whose life inevitably ends in an old empty barn. 2-1 says it'll have at least one member of The League of Gentlemen in it, and that it'll be followed on BBC4 by a documentary in which Kim Newman gets the author's history completely wrong.

9. Two-Ho Cord
The American production company refuses to reveal what this project will entail, although it's known to be a game show, and insiders believe it involves a pair of prostitutes and a piece of string.

10. Wot Roc? Oh!
Following the Chibnall-awful remake of Clash of the Titans, the embarrassing skeleton-fight in the aforementioned Merlin, and every half-arsed CGI Doctor Who monster of recent years, the modern world decides to piss on Ray Harryhausen's face one last time by remaking Seventh Voyage of Sinbad in the style of Hole in the Wall and/or that thing with Richard Hammond nobody watches. Contestants make their way across a landscape of hilarious obstacles, while avoiding the ever-present threats of falling in some water or being ripped to mince by a giant two-headed bird. The celebrity version might actually be entertaining.

11. O, Trod Chow
When dealing with any Doctor Who spin-off, the BBC's biggest problem is that it doesn't own the Daleks. The solution? Bring back the Trods, those suspiciously Dalek-like machine-creatures that turned up in the late-'60s TV Comic Doctor Who strip when they couldn't afford the Daleks. And what better way to introduce them to the twenty-first century than their own cookery show? Script ediotr Gareth Roberts tells the press: "I've been 'ironically' ripping off ideas from TV Comic for years, as a way of juxtaposing the optimistic future of the 1960s with a modern age in which people will swallow any old shit if it's got a CGI wasp in it. So as you can imagine, I find this weirdly hilarious!" For his brave stand in pretending that recycled comic-book arse is in some way creative, Roberts is later hailed as "the new Lichtenstein".

12. "Woot" Chord
Oh, you know. The one that kicks in two-thirds of the way through the full version of the original Doctor Who theme. What, you think the "woot" chord doesn't at least deserve a BBC4 documentary of its own? Then the ghost of Delia Derbyshire spits on you. (No, all right, it doesn't. Her ghost is nice. But my ghost won't be, I'm telling you that right now.)

13. Whor'd Coot
"Hey. You wanna sleep with my sister? Yeah, she's a Jacondan bird-person, like in 'Twin Dilemma'. Yeah, she's of the genus Fulica. What, you wanna get technical now? Huh? Huh?"

14. Hoot Crowd
Like an audience of African football fans with vuvuzelas, but more Silurian-y. Yeah, you're right, this whole concept is clearly winding down.

15. Octo Dr. Who
The BBC brings together all eight surviving Doctor Who actors, in a desperate effort to prove that Matt Smith isn't the worst one ever. This backfires when it turns out that even Colin Baker has some kind of soul.

The Squee Doctors

2010-06-26T20:28:00.014Z

S'okay, I didn't actually bother watching the second half. So this will be largely hypothetical. However...

...five days ago, I was standing in front of the window of the local newsagent's. There was a poster advertising "Archaeological Adventures: Dinosaurs" (I've mentioned this on Twitter, but if you don't already know, then it's the perfect thing for an intelligent child or autistic adult who wants to whittle while watching an unfulfilling World Cup match or BBC drama), and also a poster advertising Doctor Who stickers. I ignored the latter, because I'm really not joking when I say that I can't even look at the gormless foetus-face of Matt Smith without wanting to slap it. That thing with Van Gogh looked like the most interesting episode this year, but as soon as he did the "could you breathe a little more quietly?" schtick in the trailer, I literally made an effort to be out on Saturday.

(Sidestep One. ITV did a remake of The Prisoner which, by all precedent and reason, should've been unbearable. It was quite good. Jesus! ITV is doing a "cult" reboot, but uses proper actors - Ian McKellen and Ruth Wilson, the latter of whom steals the "Most Attractive Woman in the UK Who Looks Like a Fish" crown from Miranda Sawyer - while Doctor Who does a piss-poor Harry Potter impression with a footballer and a blow-up doll? Gutted.)

So I'm in front of the window. And then a little girl, of the kind that Moffat pretends to like when he's stuck in a narrative corner, pulled her mum up to the glass and pointed at the poster.

'I saw that Doctor Who on Shannon's widescreen!' she said. 'It was scary. The Girl One had to run loads...'

(Sidestep Two. To anyone who's read my Twitter-log: yes, that's why I've started using the phrase "the Girl One".)

'...but the Boy One had to save... something.'

The narrative slip is, of course, acceptable from a seven-year-old. However: the Boy One? And, yes, I did indeed turn eyes-left to make sure she was pointing at the photo of Matt Smith. Then I turned eyes-right, sharpish, beacuse I was scared of looking like a paedophile.

The Boy One?

About a week and a half ago, Stephen Fry (defined by a sometimes-wise critic as "a stupid person's idea of what a clever person is like") attracted venom by critising Doctor Who in the era of Steven Moffat (defined by me as "oh, what a complete arse"). Yet in this epic cage-fighting battle between drivelling self-involved pretend-intellectuals, the most important point seemed to be missed. Fry talked about programmes "like" Merlin and Doctor Who.

If you can use those two titles in the same sentence, then something's gone terribly wrong.

But then, this is what I've been saying for a loooooong time: Moffat stated that he didn't want to be remembered as "the man who killed Doctor Who", and yet he already did kill it. He killed it in "The Girl in the Fireplace", a rather good episode if you concentrate on what the author genuinely likes - robots and temporal screwing-around - but an abysmal and emotionally-extorting one when you understand that he's trying to redefine the Doctor as a Sexy Immortal and himself as the Sexy Immortal's Agent. I wasn't kidding when I said the the series in 2010 is competing with Twilight, y'know. Doctor Who at its best has been awkward, experimental, and unpredictable. Moffat's version, as laid out in "Silence in the Library", is slick, conservative, and entirely founded on things that have been proven to work. In short... it's like Merlin. Only even stupider.

Here's the grand irony, though -

(Sidestep Three. How many times have I used the phrase "here's the grand irony"?)

- by attempting to squee-up the Doctor, Moffat has destroyed him as a meaningful figure. In "Forest of the Dead" (the Doctor defeats the shadow-nasties by saying "do you know who I am?", thus removing any possible dramatic tension and making him look like the petulant celebrity he's bltantly becoming) and "The Pandorica Opens" (the monsters have spent ages planning this, yet a version of the Doctor of whom even I wouldn't be scared gives himself breathing-space by telling them that he made their mums wee themselves), we're shown a Doctor who can do anything he likes because he's... well... famous. He never proves he's clever, or brave, or moral, or indeed, anything at all. We're just told that he always wins, and we're expected to swallow it without question. His fandom-strength makes him the weakest hero in history.

That's what I meant by "irony": Moffat tries to make the Doctor a fetish-object, because that's how we think of him as long-term Doctor Who viewers, and because we're the ones to whom he's pandering. (Well, not me. But you know what I mean.) What the author's actually doing is ensuring the Doctor's worthlessness. If you make someone all-powerful, then power's worth nothing at all, especially if you do it just to reinforce fan-opinion of the safe and clean-cut Boy One.

And of course, the really horrible thing is that this might - I stress "might" - be my fault. Over the last week, I've been informed by numerous people that "The Pandorica Opens" was a lot like "Alien Bodies". This never occurred to me while watching it, but then, I never saw the link between "Honey to the B" and "Never Ever". However -

(Sidestep Four. For the sake of those unfamiliar with late-'90s British pop music: "Honey to the B" was an entirely negligible single by Billie, AKA Billie Piper, engineered as a clone of the glorious "Never Ever" by All Saints. Unfortunately for the future Surprisingly Good Companion, it was such an artless, lumpen, misshapen parody that nobody who actually liked "Never Even" even realised it was supposed to sound like that. It went Top Ten in the UK charts, but at that point, B*Witched would've got to number one by breaking wind into a microphone for three minutes. I'm stating all this from memory, so the details may be faulty.)

- I don't think it's true. At least, not in the way they meant: technically, "Pandorica" is a lot closer to "Dimensions in Time" than "Alien Bodies". No, screw technically, "Pandorica" is like "Dimenions in Time". Only on a big budget. And without Big Ron.

Still... I remember what Moffat said he liked about "Alien Bodies". He specifically drew attention to the end of Chapter Five, claiming that it was the best cliffhanger he'd ever read. Since he was still capable of wit in those days, I remember the exact way he put it: "And that includes 'Mr Holmes, it was the footprint of a gigantic hound'."

Now, that's a compliment and a half, and I felt duly chuffed. Yet I can't help wondering about the consequences. In "Alien Bodies" (and on the off-chance that anyone reading this doesn't know what happens in it, I'll be vague regarding the end of Chapter Five), the Doctor becomes the subject of Doctor Who rather than its medium. I wrote it that way for a specific reason: a lot of very silly people, mentioning no Jon Blums, were trying to "redefine" the Doctor's past after the "half-human on my mother's side" blather of the TV movie. Like the editor of the books at that stage, I didn't give a rat's minge about his past, and thus wrote something about the future. Not just his future, either.

But in doing that, I... sort of... turned the Doctor into a fetish object. Literally, in fact, according the the dictionary definition of "fetish".

And Moffat read it. And liked the end of Chapter Five.

And now he runs a version of the series in which the Doctor is a living fetish object.

Even though it completely destroys the series' (pardon me) Prime Directive, by making it about an all-powerful all-male hero-figure rather than a traveller who's just interested in things.

And to an extent, I admit it: "Alien Bodies" was stupidly popular because it made the Doctor the subject rather than the medium.

Especially because of the end of Chapter Five.

And Moffat knew that.

And his Prime Directive is to be liked.

And the crucial thing to realise about the "Pandorica" arse-fest isn't the plot (if you've found one), but that it puts the Doctor at the very centre of the universe: there's a box, and you're primed to think that he's going to be in it, but it's actually a trap so that he will be in it. It's pitched not as a prison for the Doctor as a character, but for the Doctor as an icon of modern-day telly.

So I find myself asking. Did Moffat get that from me? Despite what's been said elsewhere, "Pandorica" isn't structurally similar to "Alien Bodies" at all. Yet his vision seems... uncomfortably close, if for all the wrong reasons. Oh, you know: like Neil Gaimain ripping off Alan Moore, then wearing sunglasses and pretending to be a rock star in LA.

This is the question that's bothering me. If you like the eejit but don't like me, then please feel free to say no, I'd honestly like the reassurance. If the reverse, then please lie and say no anyway.

Otherwise, I'm going to apologise, just on the off-chance that I'm right. Doctor Who is now more awful than at any point in its prior history, not because the chief-writer-stroke-producer is vastly more inept than any of his predecessors (he clearly isn't), but because he's vastly more cynical. I, for one, would rather have a bad programme that's attempting something - anything - than a programme designed specifically for BAFTA judges and fans of superhero movies [see previous blog-entries]. And if there's even a 1% chance that I laid 1% of the groundwork for this, then I'm so, so sorry.

Also, "Alien Bodies" isn't even that good. Well, the prologue's good. I'm proud of the prologue. Could do Chapter Five about eight times better these days, though.

Now I Can Sleep Again

2010-06-14T19:01:00.006Z

Twitter's #lesserdoctorwho strand has spent the last few weeks speculating on the stories that were changed at the last minute, when the producers decided that they weren't quite exciting enough for television. But this newly-leaked episode list reveals the whole truth about Doctor Who at its most repressed. Here are the titles of all the first drafts, before the monsters, cliffhangers, and random acts of mild fantasy violence were added...

"An Unearthly Chive", "The Ordinary and Nearby Things in Serbo-Croat", "The Hegde of Destruction", "Volkswagen Polo", "The Keith of Marinus", "The ASBOs", "The Censored Rites", "The Rain of Telford", "Planet of Gnats", "The Harlech Invasion of Earth", "The Cress Queue", "The Mormons", "The Pleb Planet", "The Fourth Crusade" (ooh, subtle), "The Spaced Museum" (involves Simon Pegg being stuffed and put in a cabinet), "The Kiss-Chase", "The Time Mid-Fielder", "Galaxy Cookie Crumble", "Mission to My Uncle's", "The Urban Myth Makers", "The Daleks' Mastercard", "The Mascara", "The Arse", "The Comestible Toymaker", "The Bunfighters", "The Chaffinches", "The Warm Machines", "The Snugglers", "The Clenched Planet", "Power of the Horlicks", "The High Pandas", "Underwater Tennis", "The Spoonface", "The Macrame Terror", "The Chinless Ones", "Weevil of the Daleks", "Room of the Cybermen", "The Easily-Meltable Snowmen", "The Nice Warriors", "Enema of the World", "The Web of Ears", "Curry from the Deep", "The Wheel in Spain", "The Dick-and-Dominators", "The Mind Rabbi", "The Insertion", "The Scrotums", "The Smell of Meths", "The Space Pierrots", "The Fwoar Games", "Nobhead from Space", "Doctor Who and the Silly Urinals", "The Ambassadors are Deaf", "Infirm... Oh", "Terror of Joe Orton", "The Milder Evil", "The Corrs of Axos", "Colostomy in Space", "The Lehmans", "Day of the Dahl Ex" (it's about Stan Collymore), "The Curse of Pele's Dong" (you know his personal problems), "The Sea Brevilles", "The Mucus", "The Tie Monster", "The Knee Doctors", "Bar-Nibbles and Monsters", "Jeux Sans Frontieres in Space", "Gannet of the Daleks", "The Green Douche", "The Time Woggler", "Invasion of the Dinah Shores", "Bollocks to the Daleks", "The Monstrous Pele's Dong" (after the treatment), "Planet of Spyware", "Rowboat", "The Parking Space", "The Sultana Experiment", "Genitals of the Daleks", "Revenge of the Sideburn Men", "Terrier of the Zygons", "Planet of Eejits", "Invalids of Mars", "The Adenoid Invasion", "The Brain of Mo Mowlam" (now even I've hit my good taste barrier), "The Spuds of Doom", "The False Nose of Mandragora", "The Thing That Dangles from the Back of the Cat's Throat and That the Mouse Uses as a Punchbag in 'Tom and Jerry' Cartoons of Fear", "The Shit Assassin", "The Face of Weebles", "The Roberts of Death", "The Nipples of Weng Chiang", "The Horror of Gla... Oh, Wait, Paul Magrs Has Already Done It", "The Wish-It-Had-Stayed-Invisible Enemy", "Imagining a Fondle", "The Sunbed Makers", "Underpants", "The Invasion of Rosemary and Thyme", "The Reebok Operation", "The Pyrex Planet", "The Scones of Blood", "The Handjobs of Tara", "The Power of Krill", "The Armageddon Factsheet", "Density of the Daleks", "Settee of Death", "Retcher from the Pit", "The Nightmare of Ewoks", "The Horns of Michael Nyman", "The Letcher Hive", "Dead Loss", "Full English Breakfast", "State of Decaf", "Warriors' Gateaux", "The Rob Green of Traken", "Legopolis", "Cats Revolt Her", "Four to Dounreay", "Kinda" (pronounced the other way), "The Vivisection" (my brother-in-law actually thought it was called that), "Bloke Orchid", "Earthchops", "Cancelled Due to Volcanic Ash in the Eighteenth Century", "Arc of Banality", "Cowdance", "Mawdryn Unplugged", "Dermititus", "Hen-Night in Kent", "The King's Detox", "The Three Doctors, a Dodgy Impression, and a Waxwork of Tom Baker", "Warriors on the Cheap" (trad), "The Awankening", the next one's too rude to print, "Rusty Ret-Con of the Daleks", "Planet of Ire", "Chavs of Androzani", "The Twin Dialysis", "Tacky Old Cybermen", "Vengaboys on Varos", "Skidmark of the Rani", "The Too-Little-Too-Late Doctors", "It Doesn't Actually Get Any Lesser Than This", "Revelation of the Diabetics", "Thighs of a Time Lord", "Time and Jim Varney", "Paradise Towels", "Delta and John Barrowman", "Dog on Fire", "Remembrance of the Dulux", "The Sloppy Mess Patrol", "Sylvia's Nemesis", "The Greatest Blow in the Galaxy" (wrong in at least two ways), "Cattle Field", "'Oh F***, It's Fenric'", "Goat Light", "Some Trifle".

That is all.

(Edit 26/06/10. Story W is actually called "The Moussaka".)

In-Between Days

2010-03-30T03:04:00.007Z

"We will pan it, we will scan it / We will render it byte by byte / We will digitise, mass-produce and sterilise / We will turn it to shite, shite, shite." - Song of the Computer-Generated Mice on the Mouse Organ.

I think you should all know that I've finally worked out why I'm so at odds with the rest of modern culture. Or at least, why I don't seem to be down wit' da hip kids, and why I don't see Today's Stuff - particularly Today's Doctor Who Stuff - in quite the same way as other people in my own mildly dysfunctional peer group. Actually, working it out was quite easy: I just watched Spider-Man 3 on Channel 5.

Now, I loathe superhero movies. To be honest, I loathe anything CGI-driven that's indistinguishable from its X-Box tie-in. I loathe the artless techno-pettiness which believes the latest piece of industrial code from James Cameron or Peter Jackson to somehow qualify as cinema, even though the directors can't tell graphic realism from characterisation or a Tomb Raider end-of-level monster from a proper Balrog. But I double-loathe superhero movies, with extra bogies on. Not just because they're wholly founded on their "roll up, roll up, and see what we can make a digitally-generated humanoid do this year" faux-showmanship, but because they're so sodding banal. I crept into the cinema during the first Spider-Man in 2002 (I was leaving the cineplex after watching something else, there was no guard in the passage between screens, and the film was just starting… well, I wasn't going to pay), and ended up sitting through two hours of constipated narrative before a final showdown that looked for all the world like a massively overbudgeted episode of Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers. The fact that the jizz-awful Green Goblin mask was designed by the same man who wrangled everything from Zygon nodules to the Bespoke Time Lord Collar just made the experience more painful.

But I watched Spider-Man 3 on its terrestrial premiere, simply because… no, I don't mind admitting it. I used to read the comics when I was fourteen, and I'd gathered that this was the film in which Movie Spider-Man met Movie Venom. And in a moment of High Geekery, I wanted to see how the epic saga I'd read as a young 'un - a half-decade story-arc in which Spider-Man acquired a telepathic bodysuit from a bio-tech-happy uber-civilisation, then ditched it when he figured out that it was a parasite rather than a symbiote, then watched as it transmogrified its next victim into his Evil Twin - would be squeezed into a two-hour movie. In fact, the script managed this quite simply: it turned the alien git-costume into a meteorite full of goo, which conveniently happened to crash into a field right next to Peter Parker. The ineptitude of this was probably inevitable, but tragically I kept watching, and it's what else I learned from the movie that's been troubling me.

In Spider-Man 3, and all its bastard kin, there's a simple pattern. There are Big Events. You can tell the Big Events, because they're denoted by computer-generated action sequences. In this case, these include a skyscraper-chase between Spidey and Green Goblin Junior, a duke-out between Spidey and the Sandman (i.e. a man made of sand, because the Marvel universe is terribly literal), a "symbolic" passing-on of the meteor parasite from Spidey to Venom… punctuated, and I really do mean punctuated, by in-between scenes.

It's the in-between scenes which interest me. Nobody involved with the film seems in any doubt that the Big Events are the point of the exercise, yet spacing these out are the "slow" moments in which - ooh, let's say - Peter Parker talks to his Aunt May about something sentimental that no-one will ever remember, or goes through Relationship Problems with Mary-Jane that look exactly like the Relationship Problems you might get in an episode of Dawson's Creek, or goes all broody and starts to ask himself what he's doing with his life. Scenes which don't exist because any viewer might be capable of caring, but which instead act as a sort of Pavlovian buffer. I find myself remembering the extended schedules in early '70s porn cinemas, when audiences were required to sit through several hours of slightly pervy "documentaries" before the main feature, partly because it allowed the cinema-owners to appear legitimate and partly to make sure the punters were salivating by the time they got to see the first nipple.

The news that FX-based movies are stuffed with filler comes as no surprise, natch. Yet without understanding the way this kind of storytelling works, the modern form of Doctor Who makes absolutely no sense. I've been hugely critical of the last few years' worth of That Series I Grew Up With, but because I deliberately haven't been going to see arsecock like Fantastic Four 2: Rise of the Silver Surfer (which I tried to watch on Channel 4 two weeks ago, just to make sure I wasn't imagining things… no, I obviously wasn't), I didn't realise why I seemed to be witnessing a different programme to an awful lot of other viewers. Simply, modern Doctor Who is made for an audience weened on superhero movies. That's not just the… excuse me… core demographic, it's what the programme is fundamentally aiming for. Over the last few years, whenever people I know have engaged each other in protracted conversations about the quality of the effects work on Dr Octopus' robot arms, I've had a tendency to leave the room. If I'd stayed, I might have clicked sooner.

My problem is that I don't believe in in-betweens. The very idea seems anathema to what might be called Proper Drama, but I'll stick close to home, and say that no Doctor Who story I ever considered half-decent was about the Big Event: the in-between moments were the story, not a way of marking time between special effects. The monster at the end of episode two isn't the main attraction of "The Caves of Androzani". Quite the reverse. Likewise, neither the Drashigs nor (most pertinently) the Top of the Pops-style psychedelia-gun in episode one are the reason "Carnival of Monsters" exists. And the giant clam certainly isn't the star of "Genesis of the Daleks", although now I've said that, I'm starting to wish that it were. By contrast, there's nothing really in "The Lazarus Experiment" except the ridiculous Mill-spawn (an apt example, given that Russell T. Davies explicitly described the story as being inspired by Marvel Comics), and BBC Wales is currently trying to sell us Matt Smith with the Sam Raimi-style shot of the Doctor dangling from a flying TARDIS. Rather than, for example, by getting him to do any acting. Let's not deny it, there were many, many, many filler scenes in the programme of old. But that's because it was made on the fly, on a minimal budget, under extreme stress. Whereas the modern programme has an insultingly large slice of the License Fee at its disposal, yet treats non-FX, non-stunt-based sequences as if they're dramatic pauses. Or, up until now, as excuses for David Tennant to do his "sad" face and make everyone go "awww, look, he's tortured".

You may, of course, recall that I keep insisting on seeing Doctor Who as a work of all-round BBC goodness rather than a "cult" sci-fi series. So I'll just point out that I, Claudius (yes, it is the best drama serial ever made, shut up) is nothing but in-between moments. In-between moments are good, if they're done properly. They're human. They give meaning to the parts where monsters or armies of legionnaires turn up, and should be treated as an art in themselves. Whereas we now have a culture which sees dialogue and characterisation as bubblewrap, except without the satisfaction of being able to pop the bubbles. Oh, and another telltale point: note that the Doctor is now being pitched to us with almost-macho displays of his power and invincibility ('there's one thing you never, ever put in a trap… me!!!' being both the latest and the stupidest), diluted forms of the "I'll be back" sloganeering you'd expect from America action heroes. When you can imagine Clint Eastwood delivering the Doctor's lines, but not Tom Baker, something's definitely gone awry. Actually, try imagining this kind of waffle being recited over a soundtrack by Dudley Simpson rather than Murray (spit) Gold, and it seems even dafter.

I could keep listing examples of the way this tendency has skew-wiffed recent Doctor Who, and I'm sure you'll be able to think of your own. But it's me, and I'm planning my exit strategy here, so I'll go for the big one. Yeah, I'm a-heading back to "Blink".

Now, here's the thing. When "Blink" was first broadcast, I got bored within the first twenty minutes, and assumed (as most of us do, in these "is it just me?" situations) that everyone else would feel the same way. You could've knocked me down with a Krolltacle when it was deemed to be the paragon of all things shiny, and for the last few years, I've been rather puzzled by the success of what seems to me like a rather dribbly script. After Spider-Man 3, however, I suddenly see it. What do people remember about "Blink"? The scary bits with the Weeping Angels, and the sexy bits with David Tennant talking to you - yes, you, straight female or gay male fan-person - out of a TV screen. Between those Big Events…?

Nobody much cares about those bits, and there's no reason that anybody really should. Sally's future-boyfriend (a geek called Lawrence, and I'm still not sure whether that was Moffat's idea of a joke) is introduced to us when he walks naked into a kitchen in front of the female lead and does the usual "ooh, hang on, am I naked?" schtick that sitcom writers use as filler when they don't have any better ways of getting the 18-30 demographic to keep watching. His nerdy personality is further underlined with the standard "all your friends are on the internet" bumf that even EastEnders had turned into cliché by 2007, while Sally spends much of the episode delivering the kind of dialogue that ageing heterosexual authors would like to imagine dynamic twentysomething women delivering in the real world, at least as long as they can imagine her saying "oh, yes, you big, rugged man who works in the media, yes, yes, yes" afterwards. Ah, but wait! This is supposed to be a scary story, yet the Weeping Angels don't actually do anything bad to anybody. So let's contrive a wholly negligible scene in which the Token Black Character snuffs it on his deathbed, just so Sally can say 'people have died', even though he's apparently had a pretty good life and we've spent more time watching him die as an old man than we spent getting to know him as a young one. Whoo, pathos.

This is terrible writing, and terrible characterisation. If you're a fan of "Blink", though, then… what do you remember? Do you remember anything at all about these puppet-people? Puppet-people on more than one level, in this case, since the plot of the episode is pretty much a denial of free will in the Doctor Who universe. Or do you just remember the creepy statues and the Easter Eggs? Plus some arse about timey-wimey paradoxes that the author's been constantly recycling since the 1990s, although that goes without saying in a Moffat script. (Jesus! I used to edit a thing called "Faction Paradox", but even I didn't resort to the old "we've seen evidence of this in the future, so it must be destined to happen" routine. Even once. Let alone five times. Yes, five! Count 'em.)

So, to summarise. I care about the in-between bits, because that's what I think "drama" is. The monsters are the moment of shock, they're not the story. Then again… if anything, does this just prove that I shouldn't be here at all? Interviews have cited Moffat as saying that he doesn't want to be remembered as the man who broke Doctor Who, but some of us would argue that he already did break it, even if we didn't notice it at the time. The moment of doom was "The Girl in the Fireplace", a story which - while quite good in itself, at least when the author's concentrating on robots, time-travel, and other things he pretends not to care about when there are women looking - changed our expectations of what the series is meant to be by playing to much the same audience as Twilight. From that point on, the Doctor was damned to a life of fetishism and well-groomed heroics. From that point on, he had to be young, cute, athletic, and godlike. Oh, and tragic. However unconvincing or repetitive the tragedy may be, he positively has to be tragic.

Looking at the revised, superhero-friendly version we've got in 2010, I find myself remembering two things about Moffat that I've previously suppressed. One is the conversation I had with him in late 2005, just after the title of his first Tennant-age story had been announced in the press. I said to him:

'Oh, I see a pattern forming here. First "The Empty Child", now "The Girl in the Fireplace". It's -'

And before I could say any more, he snarled into my face (in a fashion which, with hindsight, more than slightly resembled Rik in The Young Ones): 'Oh, what? Because they've both got the word "The" in the title?'

'Erm,' I said. 'Erm, no. Because they're both weird juxtapositions. You don't expect to get a child that's empty, and you don't expect to get a girl in a fireplace. It's like early surrealism. It's a bit… sort of… Magritte?'

He looked away. Stared at the pavement, as if annoyed by this outbreak of reasonable discussion. Then stomped off without answering.

But the most telling moment was this. I bought a video of The Complete Bagpuss (i.e. a video containing all thirteen episodes of Bagpuss, in case "Complete Bagpuss" sounds like one of the more obscure insults of Frank Butcher), and had it with me at the Tavern. I was showing it to a female acquaintance, when Moffat swooped past and looked down at it.

'That's just saaad,' he said.

'But… but it's Bagpuss,' said my acquaintance.

And Moffat twisted his face into a revolted sneer before leaving us.

Ergo. Having understood the nature of "state-of-the-art" narrative in the early twenty-first century, I can accept that this really is the Moffat Era, after all: an age of moments that could exist with equal comfort inside trailers or stories, movies or clips shows. But now I'm thinking of that scene from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead in which - as in Hamlet - the Prince's family ask R&G to figure out why Hamlet's so unhappy. Their conclusions: well, your dad's been unaccountably poisoned, your uncle's probably the murderer, and he's taken your throne while simultaneously marrying your mum. No, we can't imagine why you'd be unhappy. So for all those who've written badly-thought-out rants about this column over the last few years, and who genuinely can't tell the difference between "man who wants a war" and "man who's just disappointed and sarcastic", I'd like to say this…

Doctor Who taught me to be interested, xenophiliac, and prepared for strangeness of all magnitudes. Throughout its history - and this even applies to the best of the twenty-first-century episodes, before Big Russell started writing it for the BAFTA awards panel rather than intelligent children - it's been closer to Oliver Postgate than The Matrix. Yet now it's in the hands of a producer who's as arrogant as I've occasionally pretended to be and as cynical as I could never be, who deliberately overruled his own instincts and cast the silliest possible actor as the leading man, purely so he could continue his own mad campaign of pretend-populist squee. He sneers at Bagpuss, which is at least as bad as jesting at scars. Matt Smith has been given a demographically-tailored Quirky-Yet-Somehow-English costume, to make sure everyone feels comfortable accepting this as the same mass-produced product we got in the Tennant years, while the 2010 series has (it seems) been carefully stripped of any new or peculiar features and involves episodes written by the authors of "Exit Wounds", "The Idiot's Lantern", and Love Actually.

Now, why on Earth would I feel betrayed?

Look him in the eye and tell me I'm wrong.

Z-Bomb Casualty

2009-11-13T20:26:00.006Z

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.

Captain Jack's Guts

2009-08-11T19:25:00.035Z

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.

Doctor Who: A Gambler's Guide

2008-11-03T02:28:00.005Z

"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.

Week Eight: "My Life with the New God-King"

2008-05-31T23:43:00.011Z

Steven Moffat: The Unauthorised Biography. The power! The passion…!

I can't remember, now, why I might have been staying home from sixth-form college that day. Nor can I remember why I might have been watching Children's ITV at half past four in the afternoon, and I certainly can't remember why I didn't even bother reaching for the remote control when the voice-over announced a programme called Press Gang. A series about a whoop of schoolchildren running a junior newspaper is not, under normal circumstances, the sort of thing that a seventeen-year-old geek-boy in 1990 would have found acceptable: for anyone who went through puberty in the 1980s, it has that horrible smack of Jossie's Giants about it. In fact, I'm not even sure why I sat through the whole twenty-five minutes, since the opening scenes didn't do anything so far-removed from the usual run of adolescent programming that it gave me a specific reason to keep watching. No Egyptian gods, no horses on space-stations. Still, by the time the end credits arrived, I'd found myself genuinely concerned over the question of whether the Male Lead and the Female Lead (who were entirely new to me then, but whom I later discovered had been suffering UST for all twelve episodes of the previous season) would end up getting it on. I made a note to watch this programme again, if ever I should be at home on a Thursday.

Three weeks later, I was, just in time to catch the episode which ended with the all-important "Spike and Lynda agree to go on their first date" cliffhanger. At this point, the programme crossed the line from "watch this if you're available" to "set the video", and the following episode - "At Last a Dragon", considered in Press Gang circles to be the centre-point around which the rest of the series revolves - convinced me that it was probably the best thing on television. However, this was something I had difficulty explaining to my peer group, especially the "better than Doctor Who" part of the argument. They assumed I was being ironic in some way. Bear in mind that 1990 was the start of the Irony Age, when near-adults would watch Byker Grove in the belief that they were being post-modern (even now, Ant and Dec's career seems to be built on the principle of the audience pretending they're good) and spliff-addled teenagers would tune into repeats of Dogtanian and the Three Muskahounds just to sing along with the theme tune. The notion that Press Gang was actually good good, rather than kitsch good, wasn't easy to get across.

So when Steve Lyons gave a nod to the series in the dedication to Conundrum, and the paperback, celebrity-free version of Human Nature went one better by giving a credit to the programme's sole scriptwriter, it was nice to know that I wasn't just imagining it. His ascension to emperor-elect seems almost inevitable now, but what's notable is that people were saying "if Doctor Who comes back, then they should get that Steven Moffat to write for it" as early as 1991. We might also note that Press Gang began in the same year that original-flavour Doctor Who ended, raising the question of what might have happened if John Nathan-Turner had managed to hold on for just a few more years, and Moffat had ended up writing for the pre-CGI, pre-mini-movie version. "Blink" on old-fashioned video-stock would, after all, look like the natural follow-up to "Survival".

"Moffat"! Somehow, I find it impossible to think of him as "Steven". I can comfortably refer to the man who dropped my manuscript down the back of a shelving-unit as "Gareth", or the man who gave us Donna Noble as "Big Russell", and yet… perhaps it's his snarling, predatory Scottishness, but Moffat's name is one that has to be snapped. I can't hear it without feeling as if someone should be waving their fist in the air at the same time, like a headmaster shouting at one of the Bash Street Kids… or, perhaps more appropriately, like a headmaster shouting at a wayward teacher in a '70s sitcom. I say "snarling", although if you watch it again now, then one of the key things to notice about Press Gang is that it's basically a work of idealism. It's not just that Moffat seems to have been on a mission to make children's TV that worked properly, but that the programme's entire philosophy comes across as an idealistic one. Bear this in mind, because it's going to be important later. The Press Gang universe is full of twisted, neurotic personalities, yet cynicism rarely wins out, and the fight usually turns out to be worth fighting.

(Well… up to a point. In the final series, something terrible happens to the makeup of this universe, and female characters who've previously been depicted as intelligent, principled and self-reliant suddenly become parasitic harpies with absolutely no taste in men. It's worth mentioning that Moffat's next project, Joking Apart, was a sitcom about a comedy writer who's going through a hideous divorce. I never asked him about this, but the conclusion seems obvious, in much the same way that you just knew Warlock had to be written by a man who'd recently been dumped by his girlfriend.)

I finally met Moffat on the 1st of April, 1998, the same day that I played an elaborate April Fool's joke on Stephen Cole by dumping 450 pages of Interference on his desk and saying "look, I just wrote a Doctor Who book!". The first time I saw him, he was in the middle of a loud and marginally drunken conversation with a female acquaintance. He was complaining about a kitten. Had his wife bought a kitten, or did one of his friends have a kitten that had annoyed him in some way, or…? It wasn't quite clear, even at the time. What I remember is that his acquaintance responded to this by protesting, 'but it's so cute!'. To which Moffat shouted: 'It'd look cute stuffed!'

I think I must have realised, right then and there, that I'd misread the situation entirely. I'd assumed that he'd be like one of the idealistic personalities from Press Gang. In fact, he was like one of the twisted, neurotic ones. With hindsight, it seems so obvious.

From a personal point of view, it's not difficult to understand why Moffat and I have never precisely seen eye-to-eye. Let's start with the Krays-style argument that men never really grow up, or at least, that they never manage to break out of the rules they set for themselves during adolescence. We'll take it as read, just for the time being, that every adult male has in some way become "stuck" during that long hormonal death-crawl from puberty to home-ownership. If true, then the difference between myself and Moffat is simple: I never quite stopped being seventeen (the age at which I first saw Press Gang, although I'm assuming there's no connection), whereas Moffat never quite stopped being nineteen. There's a whacking great gulf between the two. A seventeen-year-old, especially a bright seventeen-year-old, is fundamentally driven by angst. His mind will be open to whole new empires of experience, but he'll have no way of contextualising this in terms of the people around him. This will make him frustrated, and often socially clumsy, likely to be an idealist but with no clear idea of how to put his idealism into effect. He's inclined to be a poet, if only a bad one.

But this sort of thing doesn't trouble the nineteen-year-old, who will have worked out exactly how to deal with other people, even if it means doing everything possible to cover up any sign of emotional weakness. He'll have no time for angst, since he'll be too busy hanging around the university bar, trying to impress the girls. And, to be fair, often succeeding. If he has any neurosis, then it's the neurosis of a manchild who knows he can't ever be seen to lose any of his credibility. Idealism is fine, but only if you don't look too enthusiastic about it, and only if there's a chance to take the piss out of anyone who's less arch and impassive than yourself. (In Moffat's case, I've seen him deliberately sabotage geeky-sounding conversations that he obviously finds quite interesting, just because he can't allow himself to feel like a geek… q.v. what I said about his appearance on the Confidential accompanying "The Doctor Dances", pretending not to know what nanites are.) As a great writer once said, however: the most important thing to notice about someone who uses his sense of humour as a weapon isn't that he has a sense of humour, but that he needs a weapon.

I'll give you the short version, if you want. I like Star Wars because of its dynamism, its scope, its technique, its sheer artistry. Moffat likes Star Wars because Han Solo's dead cool and there's lots of sexy hardware. In that light, those who've read "The Book of the World" might want to take a moment to consider the difference between my idea of a great big cosmic library and the one we see in "Silence…". The "Book" version is designed to suggest the Big Picture, the sense of something huge and majestic waiting beyond the walls, ready to break open the story-universe. It's basically a world-building exercise, which is why the descriptions are so bloody long (it's not like "Blink" or "The Sontaran Stratagem", y'know… if you're creating a whole ecosystem from scratch, then you can't just say "right, now we're in a warehouse" and leave it at that). Whereas the "Silence in the Library" version is about the individual elements, not the environment. There's a conceptual monster that children can turn into a playground game at will, at least when it's sunny; there's an ensemble cast that covers all bases, with enough snappy one-liners for everyone; there's a framing sequence about a reality-shift between the normal world and the nightmare, one of Moffat's specialities ever since Press Gang; there's a chief supporting actress who's capable of slick backchat with the Doctor; there's this year's big character-gimmick, i.e. an apparent future companion; there's techno-chic for the hard SF fans, and an implied Horror from the Dawn of Time for the gothicists. In short, this episode's got everything it needs to be… well… cool.

So obviously I prefer "The Book of the World". Not purely because I wrote it, but because I'll go for "world-building" above "cool" any day. Moffat is built the other way around. Both of these approaches can be thought of as adolescent (and there's nothing intrinsically wrong with that), although they're very different stages of adolescence.

Moffat didn't pay much attention to me, the first few times we met. This seemed reasonable, since I didn't have XX chromosomes and big honkers, although things changed when - for whatever reason - he read Alien Bodies. The next time we found ourselves in the same pub-space, he bounded up to me and started telling me how good it was, while I stood there trying not to look alarmed. Ten years on, this sounds as if it should have been a meeting of two gargantuan talents (yes it should, shut up), and yet in a way, it guaranteed that we were never going to be close. When I say that we didn't see eye-to-eye, I mean it in a sense that's almost literal. Remember, you've got to think of this as a confrontation between an awkward seventeen-year-old (actually 26) and a socially-ambitious nineteen-year-old (actually 37). Anyone who's ever met me will know that I'm not very prepossessing at the best of times, and having decided that I was competent as a writer, Moffat immediately seemed to take it upon himself to… how can I put this? To treat me as if I were a promising young acolyte. He was always aware of his status as the high-ranking, award-winning member of the Doctor Who Gang, and used terms like "alpha male" rather a lot in conversation: again, this is going to be important later on, when we try to work out what he's likely to do now that he's the King of the World. I realise, looking back on it, that I was deferring to him all the time. I didn't realise it then, because I wasn't fluent in body language.

There's a thing called the "power-pat", and it's a way for the alpha male to demonstrate his dominance over the other males in such a way that it looks perfectly friendly. It's so primal that gorillas have been known to do it, and so powerful in its social impact that world leaders are now trained in its use by body-language specialists (George W. Bush did it to Tony Blair during every public meeting they ever had, as if we hadn't already worked out which of them was taking it like a bitch). I only found out about this circa 2000, which is why I didn't initially understand why Moffat kept putting his arm around me every time he saw me. When I did work it out, I felt rather annoyed, and told everyone I met at the Tavern that he had a gay crush on me. Sure enough, he'd invariably walk up to me, touch up my shoulders for a while, then walk off again, at which point everyone would start giggling. And, on one occasion, writing "SM4LM" graffiti on one of the tables. Eventually, after reading up on bonehead non-verbal communication, I decided to try putting the boot on the other foot. The next time Moffat approached me, I turned around, reared up to my full height, advanced on him like a wall of hairy man-flesh, and - for the first and only time - took the "offensive" role in the conversation, questioning his own life and career as if such things were obviously my business. He started to shrink back, and after a couple of minutes, I realised that he was actually deferring to me. And I remember thinking: dear God, is it really this simple?

You see what I mean about all men being conditioned by their adolescence. But if all this monkey-posturing sounds absurd, then let's put in the context of the late '90s / early 2000s. You may remember a time, in the days before "Doctor Who fans" meant thirteen-year-olds, when the Virgin / BBC novels actually seemed important. The authors certainly thought they were important, and pride was their most valued possession. After all, the reason I gained a reputation as an unhealthy influence was that I broke what Keith Topping called "the unspoken code", the Omerta-like law which held that New Adventures writers should all stick together in the face of fandom and not publicly criticise each others' work. I say "Omerta", but in practice, they behaved more like Medieval overlords than mafiosa: the elite have to form a united front, because otherwise, they'll be revealed as weak, flabby individuals and the peasants will get ideas above their station. Oh, and you're the peasants, by the way. When the new series began, those authors who were promoted to scriptwriter-level went from "overlords" to "royalty", which is why my heartless attack on Mark Gatiss was received with the same shock as if a small-time landowner in the Middle Ages had just referred to the Prince of the Realm as a big spaz.

You think I'm exaggerating…? Then consider this. When Paul Cornell took me to task for the social faux-pas of having opinions, he seemed appalled that I was incapable of respecting the natural hierarchy, and asked whether there was anybody I 'bent the knee' to. Bent the knee…? What is this, geek feudalism? When I told him that I had no interest in serving or reigning, he asked me: 'Do your followers know that?' I found it horrifying that anyone could even think that way, and I still do.

I digress, but only slightly. The upshot is that I have no interest in power, either my own or other people's. The adage that "power corrupts" misses the real issue, which is that the very definition of power is "the capacity for abuse". I managed to make Steven Moffat my bitch, just the once, by making the same moves that a gorilla might make while attempting to take control of the flange. I couldn't keep it up, of course. Being a pack-alpha is far too much like hard work. I'm an anarchist, for f***'s sake, seventeen-year-olds are allowed to be.

So, this is what we should bear in mind about the boss-to-be. He's a man who's painfully aware of his own status, to the point where he used to be known in certain circles as Steven "Did I Mention I've Got a BAFTA?" Moffat. But more ominously, he's a man who's spent an awful lot of time in the company of people who are even more status-obsessed than he is, and who've traditionally had difficulty telling the difference between "fandom" and "serfdom". It'd be unfair and inaccurate to say that he desperately wants to be liked at any cost, but it is reasonable to say that unlike Russell T. Davies, he's not naturally inclined to write anything which might risk alienating a large chunk of the audience. Those of you who don't like "Gridlock" or (the big one) "Love & Monsters" will no doubt be delighted to hear this, but some would argue that Doctor Who is in a better position to take interesting risks than anything else on television. Fortunately, Moffat is one of the few writers working in modern-day TV who's actually capable of writing rather than just storyboarding, so his episodes tend to be worth watching even when they're playing it safe. "Silence in the Library" is a good indicator: the scenes set on what-looks-like-Earth aren't really going out on a limb, since they just employ the author's favourite technique of setting one branch of the story in a "side-space" away from the main adventure (this started with Press Gang's "Going Back to Jasper Street", which Cornell unquestionably had in mind when he wrote the framing sequences of "Father's Day"), yet they're different enough from the "normal" run of this year's Doctor Who to be attractive to the viewer. If we're talking about his tendency to avoid big risks, though, then the real test-case is…

…oh, Christ, here we go again…

…then the real test-case is "Blink", which still seems unforgivably lazy to me. This is an episode that wants us to believe it's character-driven, but one of the problems with today's pretend-it's-just-like-the-movies approach to TV is that characterisation has very nearly become a lost art, and people who talk about "good characters" usually just mean "lots of snappy one-liners". Sure enough, "Blink" has lots of snappy one-liners. It's also got a standard-issue Spunky Young Female as a protagonist, a standard-issue female sidekick who makes post-modernish comments about the story being just like a TV show, and a standard-issue pet geek who becomes a foil for standard-issue comments about fanboys only having friends on the internet (again, Moffat appears terrified by the suggestion of nerdliness… I'll brush over the fact that the nerd in question is called "Lawrence" on this occasion). Add to that all the "timey-wimey" material - not exactly standard-issue, although it's been second-nature to Moffat ever since "Continuity Errors" - and the result may be the best-ever episode of Torchwood, but it still seems unduly cynical for a programme like Doctor Who. Any competent writer should be able to auto-produce this kind of thing without even thinking about it, even if he can't literally micturate it while semi-conscious. Beyond the central concept of monsters that can't move while you're looking at them, you don't have to invent anything. The fact that it won a British Academy award speaks volumes about the way our expectations of TV drama have changed over the last couple of decades. Just think: in 1986, The Singing Detective wasn't even nominated.

When you start to dwell on all of this - no, don't bother, I've done enough dwelling for all of us - certain elements in Moffat's scripts take on a new significance. To an extent, he's the Doctor Who version of Neil Gaiman, a writer who's prepared to contrive his storylines with near-clinical precision to make sure that (a) the right demographic groups are interested and (b) he gets to look like a rock star. This is probably the harshest thing I've said so far, since [I really, really, really don't like Neil Gaiman, but I've been informed that my original way of expressing this verges on libel], and even Moffat isn't that desperate. But unquestionably, there are things in his scripts which exist solely to get specific parts of the audience on his side. As I said at about this time last year, Mme de Pompadour doesn't even have a personality, and she's presented to us as a form of historical blow-up doll: "One of the most accomplished women who ever lived, now with three realistic holes!" Her purpose is simply to give the Doctor something to fall in love with, even though the two of them have nothing in common, and even though Moffat has to resort to a Vulcan mind-meld in order to get them together. What he really wants to write about are clockwork robots, spaceships that punch holes through time, and his trademark "temporal architectures", but a romance is needed in order to make the fangirls feel a bit moist, so therefore… a romance appears out of nowhere.

Something similar happens in "Blink". When the snappy one-liners and the scary statues have done their work, there still needs to be something more emotive at the heart of the story. Ta-daah! The time-shifted policeman gets to die in hospital. If you watch the clock, then you'll find that his death-scene is longer than all his previous scenes put together, which says it all: his purpose isn't to be a fully-functional character, it's to kick the bucket and make us feel sad. In the fifty-first century, Miss Evangelista has obviously inherited this "doomed and tragic" gene, and her death-scene is even more tortuous while managing to be even less moving. The lesson being that if you kill off a character who's flatter than the Nodes, then it's just not going to make us cry, no matter how long you try to draw it out for. And along the same lines, I bet there's an excuse for Professor River Song to break down sobbing and / or die tearfully in the second act.

Not only that, but "Silence in the Library" is quite ruthless in marketing itself to children, firstly by having the Doctor address them directly (whether it's by talking to the camera or actually communicating through a TV set) and then by presenting the little girl as the creator-messiah of this world. Even the McDonald's Corporation isn't this adept at manipulating the responses of the under-twelves. Yay, kids! This is your programme! Exactly why there's a subplot about a child talking to the Doctor via a TV, when this supposed to be a story about books and libraries, I'm not sure. Actually, I'm not even sure why it's set in a library at all, rather than a generic alien ruin. Shouldn't it be about reading in some way, instead of just making smug comments about Geoffrey Archer and Bridget Jones…? Still, we're only halfway through. Let's give it a chance.

Come to think of it, if we're contemplating Moffat as someone who's hyper-sensitive to his social environment, then even "The Empty Child" is worthy of close inspection. I'm sure I'm not alone in noticing that there's an awful lot of gayness in this story: Captain Jack having an affair with the army officer is fair enough, but when the man whose house is invaded by Nancy (Nancy…!) turns out to be slipping it to the local butcher, you start to wonder whether anyone heterosexual lives in 1941 at all. Now, on being recruited to write for the series, Moffat would obviously have deferred to Big Russell and - so to speak - been on the receiving end for once. Trying to please a gay producer during the making of the gayest-ever version of Doctor Who, he… fills the world with people who have unconventional and mildly anachronistic lifestyles, despite being unremittingly straight in himself. It's like Zelig.

This is, of course, massively unkind. In fact, Moffat's need to give the punters what they want - or something like what they want, with enough twists to make it seem worthwhile - cuts both ways, especially if we're trying to imagine him in his Big Cheese role. Supplying a little bit of what everyone fancies is a perfectly valid way of running the show, provided it's a strategy for the series as a whole rather than a formula for every individual episode. And some things which seem contrived in the short-term can pay off in the long-term. On paper, Sally Sparrow doesn't have much of a personality to speak of, and most of her human appeal comes from the performance (and, if we're going to be honest, the pouting) of the cute one out of Bleak House. But then, you can say exactly the same thing about Rose in the script for "Rose": it works because it gives Billie Piper the ideal platform to do what Billie Piper does best, not because it gives her any real depth. It's easy to believe that when he reboots the series in 2010, Moffat might give us a companion designed according to the Sally Sparrow principle. Indeed, since C*th*r*n* T*t* has set a precedent for one-shot supporting characters making a long-term comeback, it might as well be Sally Sparrow. It's not as if Carey Mulligan's got anything better to do. However straightforward she may have been in a single forty-five-minute instalment, it's not hard to imagine her being developed into something more complex over the course of a series. The best companions are launchpads for the actor, and that's not necessarily true of the supporting cast.

More importantly, though, the need to stay Leader of the Gang is a very different urge from any that's driven the series so far. Where Russell T. Davies has failed, he's failed because he's been drawn into the soft, velvety guts of showbiz, eventually reaching the point where he's come to think of other showbiz types as being his target audience. We know he's always had a camp streak as wide as his buttocks, and there have been times during his Confidential interviews when he's looked as if he wants to launch into a chorus of "That's Entertainment", so perhaps it's no surprise that he might now consider the presence of Kylie Minogue to be more important than the presence of a plot. Yet despite being surrounded by sexy actresses for the last two decades, and despite Coupling being rendered to the USA to be horrifically tortured by experts, Moffat remains surprisingly untouched by showbiz. True, he may recently have become a member of the sinister voodoo police-force known as the Tintin Macoute, but it doesn't seem to have spoiled him.

In fact, if anything's distorted his agenda, then it's been his reputation amongst Doctor Who-kind rather than the call of Hollywood. "The Empty Child" established him as The Scary One, and Big Russell has repeated this time and time again, which means that he's had to live up to it every year. Gasmasks… done that. Thing lurking under the bed… done that. Statues… done that. What else? Er… oh yeah, shadows. That'll work. Ah, of course, that explains it. Why a library? Because libraries are creepy, that's all. He can't keep this up, but nor should he have to: once he's in charge, we might assume that he'll have better things to do than keep ticking off items from his list of Stuff That Freaks Out Five-Year-Olds. In this week's Confidential, even David Tennant has pointed out that there's a "checklist" method in effect here. But the fact is that if Moffat wants to remain Top Gorilla while he's in charge of the entire programme, then he's not going to do it by dedicating himself to a "King of Terror" role that was never really his calling in the first place. He never seemed to have any aspirations to make children wet themselves before 2005, which is why his first attempt at a library-based story ("Continuity Errors") doesn't even suggest that libraries might be scary places.

And with hindsight, the gasmask-zombies look like a side-effect of "The Empty Child" rather than being the things he's most interested in. What are the things he's most interested in…? Sexy hardware and snappy one-liners, natch. Captain Jack is like Han Solo without the God-awful dialogue. Yet as things stand, the writer's spent three years believing the producer's hype. The cliffhanger-monster in "Silence", lumbering after the Doctor while repeating the same phrase over and over again, comes across as a last-ditch effort to repeat a winning formula. Sadly, 'who turned out the lights?' isn't really as catchy as 'are you my mummy?'.

Here's one more point about the Future According to Moffat, though. He hates sci-fi, probably even more than I do. Which is to say, the "toys" of science-fiction have an obvious appeal for him, but he couldn't even take Babylon-5 seriously the first time round. As we all know, his default setting is sitcom, not Star Trek. Ergo, we can assume that he has little or no interest in story-arcs, especially when we remember that most of his scripts are about intricate, self-contained structures rather than vast swathes of galactic history (this is what I meant about "temporal architectures", his insistence on getting characters to run up and down their own histories instead of corridors, hence "Continuity Errors", "The Curse of the Fatal Death", "The Girl in the Fireplace", "Blink", "Time Crash"…). Now, this raises questions about the shape of the 2010 series. You can just about imagine what he might come up with as a first-episode story, even though his strong suit is landing the TARDIS in the middle of a conceptual labyrinth rather than setting up a completely new vision for the series… and, potentially, introducing a new Doctor as well as a new companion. But the end-of-year two-parter?

No, "Doomsday" isn't what he does. A long run-up to an immense universe-threatening horror goes against his nature, because to Steven, the big finish isn't as important as the fiddly bits in the middle. It's hard to imagine him even caring what the nature of the catastrophe is. Then again, we don't know for a fact that he'll elect to write the season finale himself. We don't even know whether Russell T. Davies has left the series for good, or whether he might pop back from time to time, perhaps to write something suitably epic while the new boss is working on something more convoluted.

I just called him "Steven". Clearly, I'm starting to warm to the subject-matter. It's a bit like Stockholm Syndrome.

I haven't heard from Moffat in nearly a year now. The last time he e-mailed me, apart from his junk-mail message telling everyone in his address book to watch Jekyll, was on the day after I wrote my response to "Blink". One correspondent described this as an "evisceration", although I like to think that it was at least a nice evisceration. But he seemed to lose patience with me long before that, perhaps because I kept refusing to act according to my station, perhaps just because I got on his nerves. Though he'd occasionally compliment me on the quality of my comedic writing, I can only remember making him laugh once, and that was with an obscene comment about Julia Sawalha. So there was a definite point at which he stopped putting his arm around me and beginning every sentence with the word 'listen…' as if to give me fatherly advice, and instead started getting agitated at everything I tried to say and shouting 'WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?'. Of course, by that time, I'd been through the "Unquiet Dead" fiasco and become persona non grata as far as "official" Doctor Who was concerned. Was this what made him give up on me, then? My utter lack of Omerta?

If so, then there may be a final irony here. Moffat was present when I started drinking, and believe me when I say that there was a definite, specific occasion on which I can be said to have "started". Indeed, he plied me with alco-pops at every opportunity, and has suggested on more than one occasion that he feels vaguely responsible for my subsequent near-alcoholism. I have my own opinions about who's responsible for what, but what if he's right? What if it's true? Apart from anything else, it's got to be said that if I hadn't been boozed up on the night of "The Unquiet Dead", then I probably would've responded with a finely-honed 3,000-word essay rather than the angst-burst that eventually ended up on the internet. The same could be said for numerous other turning-points in my recent life, not all of them so public. And if you go back further, then Press Gang must surely have been a key influence on me as a writer, if not on my seventeen-year-old self as a human being. This would make Steven Moffat more responsible for my existence, or at least the existence of the Lawrence Miles that everybody in fandom knows about, than anyone else still living. Dear God, what kind of monster has this man created? I'll say what I like about "Blink", he's got nobody to blame but himself. I'm home, dad!

According to the Word on the Streets (which is to say, those theoretical streets which seem to be inhabited solely by Doctor Who fans dressed like Huggy Bear), Moffat's promotion to the executive level means that Rob Shearman is likely to be invited back in from the cold, after falling out with the production team in 2005. Rob - one of the few Doctor Who writers I've met who seems to find the power-game of pro-level fandom as ridiculous as I do, and therefore one of the few I genuinely like as a person - is an interesting case, because after the "Unquiet Dead" review, he positively demanded that I disembowel "Dalek" in the same way. I never did, but inviting criticism is probably the healthiest thing that someone in his position can do: any decent writer should know, instinctively, that he can't expect to inflict his work on hundreds / thousands / millions of people and keep his ego intact. Now Steven's about to become the most significant screenwriter in the UK, and not only that, but a highly-visible public figure who's going to be held accountable for an awfully large portion of our licence-fee money. I wonder whether he's prepared for the full horror of that, and whether he'll be able to acknowledge his mistakes. Assuming he's going to make any.

The trouble is, the ability to admit your own weaknesses isn't a typically nineteen-year-old trait. Especially not if the nineteen-year-old in question is trying to impress eight-million people at once.

Week Seven-and-a-Half: Commercial Break

2008-05-24T15:53:00.003Z

Smirnoff 1, Sontarans 0.

Perhaps the most striking thing about This Week's Big Doctor Who News - apart from making me wonder whether Steven Moffat actually read that thing I wrote about Mme de Pompadour and the blow-up doll [but see For One Week Only, below] - is that now the Emperor has named his successor, our focus has suddenly been shifted onto the future rather than the past. Which is to say…

One of the problems with Doctor Who having a single, visible God-King is that whenever the programme falters, it looks as if it's the result of an insane indulgence by a mad despotic ruler (here we might recall that Caligula wasn't assassinated because he was really a horse-shagging psychopath, but because he was making the Empire feel silly about itself). Of course, the actual reason that the 2008-season-so-far has been such a wash-out is that for the last five episodes, none of the writers have done any proper writing. "Planet of the Ood" barely even registers as a story; "The Sontaran Stratagem" no more qualifies as a script than that record by the Ting Tings qualifies as a "song"; the script of "The Doctor's Daughter" is abysmal, and the finished production only ends up being watchable through a combination of (a) the enthusiasm of all those involved and (b) Georgia Moffett's eyelashes; while "The Unicorn and the Wasp" is a collection of pork-scratchings from the corpse of Poirot, so much so that one of its main jokes / plot-twists is cut-and-pasted straight from "The Veiled Lady", although that's another issue.

Yet we have to believe that Big Russell is in some way singularly responsible, not least because he really, really wants us to. Which means that this may be the very last week in which any criticism we might make about the series will be rooted in what's gone before ("Jesus, this has jumped the shark") rather than what's likely to happen next ("still, at least it's bound to be completely different in 2010"). We can dwell on Moffat's potential impact next week, when he'll be presenting us with this year's BAFTA nominee. For now, this is our final chance to take stock of the story so far. And since this is the mid-season break, in an age when Doctor Who seriously believes itself to be a commercial concern, I'd like to do this by… talking about adverts.

Trust me, it's relevant.

What we've learned is that these days, TV ads aren't just the greatest competition that Doctor Who has, but the greatest competition that anything vaguely peculiar, fantastical, or outré can have. One of the reasons that avant-garde culture has had such a rough time over the last thirty years, even beyond the fact that various governments and Rupert Murdoch have done everything possible to bludgeon it to death, is that all the things we used to find remarkable - surrealism, shock tactics, and odd juxtapositions of all kinds - have now been co-opted by the corporate, commercial media. We live in an age of what a great man once called "the casually miraculous", and CGI has just compounded the problem. Consider, as a recent example, the case of Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding from The Mighty Boosh. After they'd finished shooting their second series, they seriously believed that they'd made a programme more bizarre than anything else on television. Yet as Fielding has pointed out, it was only when the series was broadcast that the truth became apparent: a thirty-minute show about a pink octopus on a flying carpet or a Mexican bandit made of videotape is all very well, but all you have to do is switch channels from BBC3 to ITV, and you can see half a dozen (much higher-budget) thirty-second ad-spots in which cars change into giant robot scorpions and people turn into walking jigsaw puzzles. In fact, the most successful episode of The Mighty Boosh that year was the cheap-rate one about two men going berserk on a desert island, in which the "monsters" were coconuts with faces painted on them.

As we all know, special effects are now so commonplace that we don't even notice them. I say "as we all know", but… does Doctor Who know it? Time and time and time and time and time and time again, we've seen this series make the same mistake of believing that big show-pieces are more interesting than the narrative. This goes all the way back to the Eccleston season, the mythical era when the lost wisdom of the ancients guaranteed that the programme was at least interesting. Look again at the Confidential that accompanied "The End of the World" (you probably videotaped it, because you didn't know how sick you'd get of Confidential in those days), and you'll see Russell T. Davies boasting about the amount of cash that was spent on the spaceship effects, before announcing that if people don't remember this in years to come then the production team might as well give up and go home. Even at the time, it was hard to understand how someone who'd done so much good could make such an obvious error. Three years on, nobody outside fandom remembers the spaceship effects from "The End of the World", because they're virtually indistinguishable from the spaceship effects in every other SF series, SF movie, and SF television ad for Carling Black Label. The viewers of 2005 certainly don't recall Platform One as well as they recall a bunch of men dressing up as killer shop-window dummies, a week earlier.

And as we've already established, the most memorable thing in that whole season - for the general public, at least - was the frighteningly low-budget spectacle of a little boy in a gasmask saying 'are you my mummy?'. The reason is obvious, of course: in the context of the narrative, it's vastly scarier than standard-issue CGI monstrosities like the Reapers or (Christ help us) the Krillitanes. On top of which, we have the problem that any CGI monster is by definition going to be regarded as a Special Effect rather than a natural part of the story. The advantage of a "real" monster, whether it's a Dalek, a gasmask-zombie, or even a Muppet, is that it stops being bizarre after the first couple of minutes. The audience begins to treat it as a normal element of the story-world, and accepts it as a given fact, which means that we find the programme much more engaging. Whereas the point of a computer sprite will always be to make the viewer say "gosh, wow, look!", and the result of this is usually a series of set-pieces in which the episode shows off the CGI as much as possible whether we care about it or not. The plot of "The Unicorn of the Wasp" is specifically engineered to show us some footage of a giant wasp every few minutes, but since it doesn't do anything except hover menacingly, none of these scenes are remotely interesting. Just to add insult to over-budgeted misery, the computer-generated insect isn't even as scary as the stop-motion one in Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger.

And it's barely even worth dwelling on "The Lazarus Experiment", which draws this insanity out to a whole episode, except to say that… in the 2007 season, our new God-King once again threw a spanner in the works by giving us a low-budget monster that everyone preferred to the flashy CGI one. But a less obvious example is "The Fires of Pompeii". As I mentioned in Week Two, at heart this is a little story, in which the citizens of Pompeii are given far more emphasis than the James Bond secret-volcano-base where the Pyroviles are massing their forces. It won critical acclaim for its '60s-ish subplot about the Doctor's impotence in the face of oncoming history. Yet BBC Wales is under the illusion that people won't watch "little" (you could argue that the existence of the soap opera is evidence against this), and according to Phil Collinson, the point of the whole episode is the enormous CGI eruption at the end. The trouble is that these days, every single TV documentary about natural disasters has effects that look exactly like that, even on Channel 5. This isn't something huge and remarkable, it's just TV-normal.

Bearing that in mind, let me ask this question. Was the eruption footage actually necessary? Imagine a version of "Pompeii" staged on a much smaller scale, with the catastrophe implied rather than on-screen, as in its better-groomed ancestor "The Massacre". Conventional wisdom is that the modern audience wouldn't "accept" an episode without a visible big bang, yet the actual audience reaction suggests that this is bunk. A more compact, character-driven "Pompeii" wouldn't just have been more satisfying, but would have seen the budget slashed by… well, I don't have all the relevant figures, but shall we say about a third? Remember, this is a BBC production, so we're allowed to get self-righteous about them squandering our licence-fee money. This goes double for "Voyage of the Damned", which is nothing but a series of effects set-pieces.

The obvious conclusion here is that narrative context is what makes Doctor Who work, not the scale of the show-pieces, but the wider point is that this is true of all TV drama in the modern world. Any given TV commercial will have effects at least as good as those provided by The Mill, probably better, since the CGI budget will be peanuts compared to the amount of cash the advertisers will spend in order to get the ads on television. But we barely even notice these thirty-second spectaculars, let alone remember them. Why? Because the narrative context is missing, and only drama can - should - provide that. It's not that CGI is intrinsically a bad thing, especially not if it's used for world-building purposes, or if it's executed with a genuine sense of beauty (q.v. the last few scenes of "Gridlock", or the catacombs in "The Impossible Planet", by far the most appealing thing in the episode). The problem is simply the misguided belief that CGI will, in itself, make us go "woo!".

With all of this in mind, it's time to present…

Five Recent TV Ads More Impressive Than Doctor Who

1. Car Tax. A young couple walk back to their car after closing-time, only to see the vehicle crush itself into a cube in front of their confused and gormless faces, while the sinister voice-over informs us that if you don't pay your car tax then "we" (ominous, that "we") have the power to clamp, tow away, or even crush your car. If something like that happened in the real world, then you'd never get into a four-wheeled vehicle ever again, yet this underlines something significant. Imagine a Doctor Who story in which some alien force tampers with the world's cars in such a way that on transmission of a certain signal, those cars will auto-compact themselves. It'd be one of the scariest things ever, and children across the country would insist on walking to school on Monday morning, in an echo of the "Terror of the Autons" incident. Not only would this do more to alleviate global warming and childhood obesity than anything the government's ever done, it'd make the Cribbins-in-peril cliffhanger of "The Sontaran Stratagem" seem genuinely terrifying. Instead, what the series gives us is a story in which the "evil" cars either drive into rivers or turn into smoke-machines. "Lame" isn't a word I enjoy using, but occasions like this seem to demand it.

2. Smirnoff Vodka. Out at sea, a swarthy-looking fisherman is understandably startled when various items from the ocean bed - anchors, gold dubloons, rotting Spitfires - haul themselves out of the deep and fling themselves into the sky. They're followed by other, larger, pieces of marine detritus: colossal Greek statues rise from the depths, wrecked ocean-liners are vomited onto the land, while a Viking longboat crash-lands next to a petrol station. All of this is supposed to be a metaphor for Smirnoff's "purity", but the remarkable thing is that this is a kind of catastrophe we've simply never seen on television before. As with the Car Tax ad, all it needs to be genuinely astonishing is a narrative, and yet most of the Earthbound catastrophes we've seen in Doctor Who have involved deathly-dull alien spaceships hovering over urban landmarks. More interesting than Viking longboats landing on petrol stations? I think not. What's most galling, though, is that this wins out over Doctor Who for reasons which have got nothing at all to do with the budget. Flying colossi are no more expensive to do in CGI than (ooh, let's say) a Sontaran warship, but they do require rather more thought.

3. Lynx 3. In this case, the advert is utterly hideous, and sees the "ironic" girls-are-gagging-for-it theme of previous Lynx ads develop into something that looks like all-out misogyny. As we all know by now, Lynx aftershave / deodorant / shower-gel makes any man irresistible to women. In this case, it can drive a woman to such a level of desire that she'll hurl herself at any human female who's standing closer to the man than she is. The result of this suicide-dive - and the thing which must, surely, get Lynx 3 classified as a biohazard - is that both women will instantly explode in a cloud of what looks like toxic dust, and standing in their place will be a single super-beautiful gestalt woman with the best features of both. This process continues throughout the ad, with the uber-girls becoming more and more alluring as more and more women give up their individual identities. All horrifying enough, but once again, a narrative would make this scary in a good way. Traditionally in telefantasy, monsters which absorb / clone / drain the life-essences of their victims are unutterably banal (the Abzorbaloff, like it or not, is a rare break from the norm). The current run of Doctor Who is slightly less hung up on parasites and body-thieves than the 2007 season [see the article The Immortality Nerve, at the bottom of this page, for more on this], but whenever the series decides to give us an alien changeling, we still end up with an Evil Twin in a bath full of gunge or a man slow-dissolving into a CGI monster. The Lynx Effect is shocking by comparison. There's another joke about Sontarans here somewhere, but let's skip it.

4. Sony: Colour… Like No Other. Worth mentioning here just because it doesn't overtly use CGI, and appears to involve nothing more sophisticated than old-fashioned stop-motion, like the few bits of Skarasen footage in "Terror of the Zygons" that aren't embarrassing. This is the ad in which the centre of a busy urban metropolis is invaded by a wave of shape-changing plasticine, which forms itself into psychedelic goo-fountains and multicoloured rabbits while the Rolling Stones perform the alarmingly-entitled "She Comes in Colours". This advert has turned heads and won plaudits across the world, although for our purposes, the most notable thing isn't just the lack of computer graphics (assuming that it really is all stop-motion, rather than CGI that's been rigged to look like stop-motion, which would frankly be an easier way of doing it) but the fact that the modern audience is more entranced by a giant-sized version of The Amazing Adventures of Morph than by an army of cybernetic death-machines. We recall that part of the original appeal of newfangled Doctor Who was the way it eschewed cyberpunk in favour of a slightly girly pink-and-blue universe, yet this My-Little-Time-Lord approach seems to have been lost along the way. However, we can now scientifically prove that people prefer balls of sentient Play-Doh to the Lazarus Horror. Now I come to think of it, even the gorilla from the Cadbury's ad is more of an attention-grabber than anything in "The Sound of Drums", which is ironic in a way. ("Cadbury's Gorillas… made from a glass and a half of monkeyspunk.")

5. Any Car Advert. No commercial interest is as eager to show off its big-budget potential as the motor industry, and the aforementioned car-that-turns-into-a-giant-robot-scorpion ad - I forget what the exact make of car is, but it hardly matters - is only one of many which make Doctor Who look rather… shall we say "sluggish"? In this case, it's because the Transformer-vehicle in question turns into a scorpion and a snake and some other macho-looking mechno-hybrid in the course of a single thirty-second clip. And you just know that if Doctor Who featured that kind of slinky morph-machine, then we'd get long, drawn-out close-ups of every aspect of the transformation, purely so the programme-makers could justify the immense effects budget: again, look at the way "The Unicorn and the Wasp" insists on showing us the monster from every angle. (Although we should perhaps be thankful that it wasn't a robot wasp. Then the car-chase at the end would be indistinguishable from the one in the Avengers movie.) But we've become so desensitised to unlikely CGI in car ads that if we're shown - say - a world where the roads are inhabited by giant floating fish instead of traffic, then we don't even remember it a week later… which is why you think I made that example up, whereas in fact, it was a genuine ad which ran on TV a couple of years ago and which you've now forgotten.

However, some of the most successful car campaigns of recent years have been those which deliberately try to prod at the consumer's childhood memories, especially the increasing number of commercials which depict the car speeding through a landscape of gigantic Lego bricks, overgrown puzzle-pieces, or scaled-up toy fire-engines. Since Doctor Who has a history of relying on childhood impressions of the world, albeit in the form of nightmares rather than nostalgia, this may be another sign that the series has rather fallen behind. In the same way that the giant Ferengi-spider of "The Runaway Bride" is nowhere near as endearing as the dinosaurs-at-the-Earth's-core scenario that's mentioned by Donna as a joke, it's hard to escape the feeling that a story about the Doctor visiting Toyland would actually be more interesting than meeting Agatha Christie. Imagine the modern-day equivalent of a tale like "The Celestial Toymaker" (only with a plot) or "The Mind Robber", and the possibilities of CGI in a world full of grotesque doll-people and murderous toy soldiers… if you've read Alan Moore's Black Dossier, then you'll know how well this sort of thing can work when a decent writer gets behind the wheel. Anything rather than another sodding alien invasion.

Oi, Moffat! You like freaking out kids. Giant Evil Toy Dimension, what d'you reckon?

Week Seven: Bad Charisma

2008-05-17T22:35:00.010Z

In which Doctor Who destroys history.

This week's question... who gets to be a genius?

The irony, from my point of view, is that this subject is raised by a script with Gareth Roberts' name at the top: as you'll know if you've ever seen the "What Some People Have Said" column on the right of this page, Gareth has publicly described me as "probably a genius". Or at least, this is what I've been told. He ostensibly says it in Big Finish's forthcoming Bernice Summerfield - The Inside Story, although this may well be his way of apologising for dropping my first submission to Virgin Publishing down the back of some shelves (where it stayed until he thought to fish it out, a year later). Nevertheless, I like the use of the word "probably" in this context. You're only definitely a genius if you create something of obvious, undeniable importance. Since I've never been able to do better than a couple of TV spin-off novels and a comic-book that folded after two issues, I'll have to remain "probably" a genius until I can prove myself one way or the other.

This takes on a new significance for me, however, when we discover that in the Doctor Who world - at least, the Doctor Who world according to Gareth - Agatha Christie is also a genius. We know this for a fact, because the Doctor and Donna spend much of the episode telling her / us how great she is, and there's even a gushing tag-scene in which we're told that she's going to be remembered five-billion years in the future. I should, presumably, be flattered. Except…

…was Christie a genius? We've touched on her corpse in this column once before [see …Of Death, below], but we should remind ourselves that her greatness is by no means accepted as a universal truth. Many critics have pointed out that she turned detective fiction into what one writer called "a series of arid crossword puzzles", and anyone who tries to read her prose in the twenty-first century might be forgiven for feeling that… well… that the Fenella Woolgar version knows what she's talking about when she describes her work as 'not great literature'. "Beauty of language" isn't a term that ever seems to have crossed her mind, and nor is she a close friend of Mr Characterisation: her books tend to supply characters with introductions along the lines of "he was the type of gentleman who could only have been a retired army colonel", which is effectively a writer's way of saying "this is an easy stereotype, but I know I can get away with it, so f*** you". You could argue that the characters in "The Unicorn and the Wasp" are deliberate pastiches of the kind of people you find in Christie's work, but you could just as well argue that this is exactly what Christie did all the sodding time.

Ah, but. Her real success was in the way she stripped down the murder-mystery until it was almost a form of engineering, and in the process, provided us with all the most basic Big Twists as if they were standardised machine-parts. Look away now if you don't want to know the results, but it was Christie who gave us the story in which the detective turns out to be the killer (The Mousetrap), the story in which all the suspects turn out to be the killer (Murder on the Orient Express), the story in which the only character who couldn't possibly have been the killer turns out to be the killer (Death on the Nile), the story in which the narrator turns out to be the killer (The Murder of Roger Ackroyd), the story in which the intended victim turns out to be the killer (Peril at End House… geek-trivia fans will note that like Murder in the Clouds, which the Doctor waves around in the final scene, this also features a wasp as a plot-point), and numerous variations thereof.

Consider this possibility, then: the people we remember as the all-time greats aren't the innovators, but the ones who boil things down to their simplest possible ingredients for mass consumption. You could make exactly the same argument about the Beatles. Nothing they did in their entire gestalt existence was genuinely new, certainly not the supposed "revolution" of Sergeant Pepper, yet they displayed an astonishing ability to take other people's music and make it so straightforward - you might even say banal - that everybody on Earth could understand it. No wonder they ended up bigger than Jesus. Ergo, we're happy to accept Christie's status as "the best-selling novelist in history" as proof that she was intrinsically great, even though we'd never dream of using the same logic to prove that Ronald McDonald is the world's most talented chef. The most obvious modern example of this phenomenon would be Harry Potter, and I was about to say "and you wouldn't seriously call J. K. Rowling a genius, would you?", but then I remembered "The Shakespeare Code".

Oh yes, "The Shakespeare Code". You may recall that in Week Two of this correspondent's course, we discussed the relationship between Doctor Who and big-H History. We reached the conclusion - well, I did, but you were watching - that the modern Doctor Who historical is a form of time-tourism, in which the past is nothing more than scenery for CGI aliens and dead celebrities. "Gee, honey, look! Doctor Who and William Shakespeare are fighting some monsters with a spell from Harry Potter. Have you got the camera?" And the most important thing to remember about tourism is that it never, ever shows you the actual territory, just your own preconceptions about what's supposed to be there. In modern Doctor Who, the Elizabethan era is "about" the Globe Theatre, so 1926 is obviously… "about" a murder mystery. We won't dwell on the thought that the series tried exactly the same schtick in 1982, because there's a more important issue here, and it's this: if history is now just tourism, then we're never going to be asked to question it. Agatha Christie is a genius. Why? Because we say so, that's why.

This seems a curious development, when you put it in the context of the (small-h) history of Doctor Who. Think about "The Crusade" for a moment. Generations of children were brought up to believe that Richard the Lionheart - a mass-murdering war criminal of the worst order, whose actions were repellent even by the standards of the twelfth century - was England's greatest and most majestic hero, however much he may have detested this country. Yet "The Crusade" doesn't quite play ball with this idea, and presents him as an intolerant, self-obsessed opportunist. In About Time, my former albatross Tat Wood reached the conclusion that although an audience raised on tales of the Great Man would never have accepted a TV version of Richard who was as thoroughly awful as the real Richard, it was "a bold move" to show a less pleasant side of his character in 1965. All true enough, but the interesting thing is that twenty years later, Robin of Sherwood (being the first ITV show which thoroughly, resoundingly defeated Doctor Who on a Saturday night, and which remains so superior to the BBC's twenty-first-century disembowling of Robin Hood that it's almost enough to make you demand a license-fee rebate) did exactly what David Whitaker couldn't. The Robin of Sherwood version of Richard is an out-and-out villain. By the '80s, we were allowed to poke at these sacred cows as much as we wanted, even on children's telly.

Can you see what's gone wrong here…? Mid-1960s: historical adventures can question things, a little. Mid-1980s: historical adventures can question anything. Mid-2000s: DO NOT ASK QUESTIONS NO MATTER WHAT. Charles Dickens was a genius: everybody knows it, don't argue. Shakespeare was a genius, and therefore in the same bracket as J. K. Rowling: this is common knowledge, don't argue. Agatha Christie was a genius, and therefore the Doctor will need her help to solve an alien murder mystery: this is obvious, don't argue. And, perhaps the worst offender of all… Mme de Pompadour was one of the most accomplished women who ever lived, but the episode isn't even going to tell you why: she just was, don't argue. Still, at least "The Girl in the Fireplace" gives us a cross-section of the subject's century, which is more than most neo-historicals have got to offer. And "neo-historical" seems the most appropriate term, since these stories demand the same ignorance of actual history as every other daft idea that begins with "neo" (neo-conservatism, neo-liberalism… neo-Nazism, obviously, although that's a rather harsh comparison to make if we're talking about BBC Wales). The Confidential accompanying "The Unicorn and the Wasp" goes out of its way to celebrate this kind of non-history, and proudly shows us archive footage of "The Crusade" back-to-back with clips from "The Shakespeare Code", without noticing any contradiction there at all. It's like putting I, Claudius next to Carry On Columbus, and thinking they're examples of the same thing.

This isn't Gareth's fault, of course. Consumerism, and the cult of now that's promoted by most of our society's media interests, has guaranteed that the younger generation is incapable of grasping any form of history unless it involves celebrities on some level. We recall that the winner of last year's Big Brother had never even heard of Shakespeare when he entered the house, and this is by no means a freak occurrence (whereas if he'd been watching BBC1 on Saturday nights, then he'd know that Shakespeare was a seventeenth-century rock star). The question is whether Doctor Who should be pandering to this world-view quite so much. It's not an issue of the series being "educational", because even in the early '60s, it never really ended up working that way. It's doubtful that any of the children who watched "Marco Polo" made notes en route to Peking, or took heed of Ian's TV-for-schools speech about the Hashishin, which is historically dubious anyway. But what the programme did do was prime its audience to think about the way other societies might work, and the way other people might think, rather than playing up to the viewers' expectations or claiming that the past is just like the present with different hats. The time-tourism model of the series can only reinforce and / or parody, never change our minds. Also in this week's Confidential, the sales-figures of Christie's books are presented as evidence that she's one of history's great figures, which is about as consumer-obsessive as this programme can get.

Is it too much to hope that Doctor Who might, if only in the broadest possible sense, still have a duty to make its audience ask questions? Or are we now so mired in the filth and ringtones of consumer non-culture that the very idea of television having a "duty" is alien to us, even when we're talking about a supposedly public-service institution like the BBC? Certainly, I seem to be one of an increasingly small number of people who think this way. And what do I know? My idealism is all too obvious. I'm peculiar enough to think that if an SF series is broadcast shortly before a general election in which race-baiting has become a key issue, and at a time when violence against immigrant communities is on the rise, then doing a story about evil alien asylum-seekers is a really bad idea. Clearly, I'm hopelessly naïve. (Oh, actually, on the subject of politics… despite writing her best-known works in the socially-charged climate of 1920s / 1930s Europe, Agatha Christie's novels are so dismissive of people with political opinions that she doesn't seem to be able to tell the difference between left-wing radicals and Nazis. I'm mentioning this not to start another fight, but because it demonstrates just how weak a grasp she had on anything beyond the purely abstract constructions of her own plots. Yet according to the Doctor, only her mind can unravel this mystery, as she 'understands' people. Because she's a genius. Riiight.)

And if you consult the copy of About Time Volume One that you should own by now if you want to pass this exam, then you'll see that Tat has also reminded us of the origin of the word "charisma". It dates from the seventeenth century, and it didn't mean what it means now. Its Greek root suggests "grace" or "divine favour", and in the beginning, that's exactly what charisma was: a God-given blessing which marked certain people as special, and which allowed these chosen individuals to alter fate or re-shape history. During the Enlightenment, this seemed like a decent enough idea. In modern times, it sounds like the kind of adolescent bunk that leads monomaniacs to commit acts of genocide. Good history should teach us that there's no such thing as grace, and that individuals become important through social circumstance rather than some Inner Light (unless you want to believe that John Lennon was created by divine intervention). Even David Whitaker, who took the "Web of Time" approach to Doctor Who, never claimed that the big figures of the past had some innate magical quality which made them greater than ordinary mortals. The historical stories made on his watch show us the world, not the individual. Marco Polo isn't the be-all and end-all of "Marco Polo".

By contrast, one of the side-effects of the Cult of Celebrity is that it leads the population to take the "charisma" idea literally. If you're brought up to believe that such-and-such a historical figure simply is a genius / hero / god amongst men, without any context and without any understanding of the world he or she inhabited, then history becomes a collection of star names who exist solely because God has decreed that they had to exist. There's no meaning, no comprehension, no sense of consequences. There's just a collection of familiar faces who all float around in a nebulous grey void called The Olden Days. Effectively, then, the modern generation's view of history sets our culture back by about three-hundred years. That isn't Gareth's fault either, but he doesn't have to encourage it, does he? If nothing else, then it'd be nice to see a Doctor Who historical that's actually about the era in which it's set. Oddly, "Human Nature" is the latter-day story which comes closest to this, "oddly" because it's ostensibly about the Doctor rather than his environment. But the fact that it's set in 1913 is actually important to the themes of the story, whereas the fact that "The Unicorn and the Wasp" is set in 1926 is irrelevant, apart from providing us with the ideal opportunity to meet someone famous.

The counter-argument here is that this isn't a "historical" at all, but a parody of a different form of television (and let's be under no illusions, this is modelled on the TV adaptations of Christie's work, not on the original texts). The trouble is that if you take this view, then "Wasp" slits its own throat even faster, because the net result of stuffing Doctor Who full of stereotypes from Poirot - a series which is now showing every weekday afternoon on ITV, as all-purpose filler - is an episode of Poirot with a dodgy CGI monster pasted into the middle of it. But as you'll know if you've bothered watching ITV's effort, only the two-part Poirot stories really work. Fifty minutes simply isn't long enough for a competent murder mystery, since our introduction to the characters will inevitably be so brief that we don't give a Belgian's goolies who did it. So it is here, and the rest is mainly in-jokes, leaving us with the impression that the whole thing is a massively expensive piece of fan-fic in which British Legend "A" meets British Legend "B". Sad to say, an awful lot of Poirot episodes are actually better than this. If anything, it's more like Midsomer Murders with special effects… although in all honesty, you could say that about most of Doctor Who in 2008.

Of course, the really big irony here is that although I'm probably a genius, I have absolutely no charisma.

Week Six: Response to "The Doctor's Daughter"... Minute by Minute

2008-05-11T19:31:00.013Z

What I was thinking at the time, even if I didn't write it down and add the long words until later.

Minute 0. I wish to protest in the strongest possible terms about the fact that this programme is introduced by the Girl Made Of Neon every week. In previous years, the BBC has thoughtfully put a different station ident at the start of each episode, so that anyone recording the series for posterity (and who prefers the personal touch to the DVD boxed set) will be able to look back on it in fifteen years' time and feel a nostalgic warmth for the quaint old idents that the BBC used to make in the days before it was taken over by Sky TV. This year, on the other hand, they've used the Girl Made Of Neon ident week after week after week. It's not just me who notices these things, is it? True, the announcer almost makes up for it by saying something like "coming up next, Graham Norton sends another one of the Nancies home" over the end credits of every episode, but… oh, it's starting.

Minute 1. If Donna's so concerned about swallowing hamsters, then she should try closing her mouth occasionally. They probably crawl in there while she's asleep.

Minute 2. Yes, I was wondering how long it'd be before someone from Skins turned up in this series. The most entertaining thing here, however, is the thought that the last shot of the pre-credits sequence has become a replacement for the first-episode cliffhanger. If Terry Nation had written this story, then the TARDIS crew would have spent twenty-five minutes creeping around in unoccupied tunnels and occasionally spraining their ankles, and Jenny - which is, after all, a very Terry Nation sort of name (q.v. "The Dalek Invasion of Earth") - would only have turned up at the end of Part One. As a surprise twist. Even though the story's called "The Doctor's Daughter".

Minute 3. It's no good, I still instinctively cheer when "David Tennant" comes up on the credits. But only so I can instinctively boo at "Catherine Tate".

Minute 4. Really, though, the title "The Doctor's Daughter" is telling in itself: the programme's determined to sell the audience on This Week's Big Wow Gimmick, and a title that's actually about the story-world we're seeing here (rather than the episode's novelty talking-point, who's a character on this occasion instead of a special effect) would be untenable. For a start, it might confuse the Radio Times reviewers. So, the next generation of monster-fighting hero after the Doctor is an ersatz Buffy the Vampire Slayer… is this a deliberate irony, or does Stephen Greenhorn just not have much imagination?

Minute 5. He wrote "The Lazarus Experiment", what am I thinking? Oh look, explosions.

Minute 6. Hath masks: a great way to ingest vodka at a fan-convention without anyone noticing how much you're drinking. A bit like a beer-hat for geeks. I like the idea that someone on the set had to say to Paul Kasey: "Do you think you can lumber sympathetically instead of menacingly this week?"

Minute 7. Yes, yes. Martha helps the funny-looking alien, all very nice. But - and as I ask myself this question, I find myself thinking of Dr Zoidberg from Futurama - how can she be so confident that her shoulder-popping procedure will work on a non-human patient? For all she knows, they might have prehensile reproductive systems, and she could just be twisting his nob off. Oh, Christ! She didn't actually just say 'I'm Dr Martha Jones, who the Hell are you?', did she? Just because the Doctor's offspring looks as if she'd be at home in an episode of Alias (note to self… there's an "Alias, Smith and Jones" gag here somewhere), that's no excuse for macho American face-off dialogue. The next thing you know, the companions are going to be fighting over the Doctor and calling each other 'bitch'.

Minute 8. Now I'm remembering the speakeasy in Bugsy Malone, where they press a switch and all the furnishings revolve, so that the place looks legal when the police turn up (many people of my generation still associate this idea with French Golden Delicious, thanks to an advertising campaign which… no, never mind that now). I'm remembering this because somewhere at BBC Wales, there must be a button that automatically transforms the nearest dilapidated building into a struggling colony world full of cargo-boxes and people in overalls. It'd save so much bother.

Minute 9. Yes, let's all stroke Martha! So, to summarise: all you have to do to earn the trust of the cyber-pilchards is fix the arm-joint of one of their soldiers? Even if you're a member of a species which has been attempting to commit genocide against them for as long as anyone can remember? If the Hath are so trusting, then have the humans on this planet really not thought of strolling into enemy territory, pretending to be nice by handing out Band-Aids, and then planting explosive charges when they're left to roam around the place unattended? I'm amazed the war's lasted this long. Unless, of course, Martha really did pull the injured one's nob and they all just want a piece of the action.

Minute 10. Oh, wait, I zoned out for a minute there. What did I miss? Erm, Nigel Terry's talking. Something something colony something… generations ago… war started… right, the usual. The Hath came with the humans, then? Were there no Monoids available?

Minute 11. The thing is… leaving aside the minor question of why we can't understand the Hath, this whole dialogue-light strand of the story (Martha gives us half of the conversation, and we can work out the rest for ourselves) works beautifully. Mute characters are, traditionally, more likeable than talky ones: this is why Newt in Aliens is bearable and Anakin in The Phantom Menace isn't. I'm just left with the terrible suspicion that if we could understand them, then these would be some of the most banal conversations in the programme's history. Why would a species that (apparently) breathes liquid want to colonise a dry old planet like this one, anyway? Even if they're planning on terraforming the place - land for humans, sea for Hath, according to the Doctor's old three-point Sea Devil peace-plan - you'd have thought that the Hath would have flooded their half of the colony, which wouldn't just give them a more comfortable environment but also stop the humans taking it over. Instead, they seem to have kept the place as dry as the human part of the complex, purely so they've got the pleasure of walking around with unwieldy survival apparatus strapped to their faces. To balance things out, maybe the humans should flood all of their tunnel-systems, so that they have to wear scuba suits all the time.

Minute 12. Is it really that easy to mass-produce Time Lords, then? Makes you wonder how the buggers lost the Time War. It also raises the question of why the Doctor hasn't already thought about restarting the Time Lord line, rather than moping around the universe and droning on about being the last of his kind every few weeks.

Minute 13. 'It'll give us the power to erase every stinking Hath from the face of this planet!' Why is it that bad SF dialogue is always so obsessed with smells? Much like the (tragically) unforgettable line from Torchwood about being trapped in the void with 'the darkness and the stench of fear'. It doesn't help that General Cobb keeps going on about 'the breath of God', which just makes me think of halitosis and unlevened bread.

Minute 14. Yes, let's stroke Martha some more! Well, so far, this episode is nowhere near as awful as it might have been: some of the dialogue is atrocious (especially Cobb's, although the casting of Nigel Terry turns the character into an escapee from A Fistful of Dynamite instead of a standard-issue military fanatic, even if Terry looks as if he can't figure out how he got here from the RSC), yet sheer enthusiasm seems to be keeping it all going. Looking at the clock, however, I notice that we're only a third of the way through. This is going to slow down soon, isn't it? Any moment now, the Doctor and Jenny are going to start agonising about the nature of war, I can just feel it.

Minute 15. Oh, God, here it comes.

Minute 16. On the plus side, Donna has a personality this week. The problem with a "down-to-Earth" companion, whether it's a Rose, a Martha or a Donna, is that most writers are middle-class white boys who know very little about living on a council estate or working as a temp. As a result, the companion can end up as an all-purpose prompt with a liking for vaguely modern-sounding catchphrases, whose purpose is to ask the Doctor all the pertinent questions while saying 'no way!' or 'you have got to be kidding me!' every few minutes: consider "The Shakespeare Code", written by Gareth Roberts, who unashamedly prefers the late-'70s approach of treating the Doctor as the core of the series rather than the Doctor-human relationship. But even Big Russell, who has an obvious affection for these characters, has a tendency to use their life-stories as a way of generating throwaway "common person" gags (so that a character can, for example, make a flip comment about her sister-in-law throwing up in Ibiza while the Doctor's trying to explore a hostile alien planet). Yet here, Donna's lines about the Doctor having the look of a Chav-dad suggest that's she's talking about the real real world. For the first time in this series, she's stopped being a sketch character. [Afternote: in the accompanying Confidential, Davies seems genuinely surprised that Donna's so believable here. But surely, that should be a minimum requirement for this season's scripts?]

Minute 17. And, oh! Just look at the Doctor's face when Jenny asks him about the Time War, that little disappointed smirk. I do believe that after doing the same schtick for over a year, David Tennant has just found a new expression.

Minute 18. Furthermore, Freema Agyeman seems to be far more convincing when she's dealing with burbling fish-creatures than when she's dealing with other human beings.

Minute 19. "What's that you say, Sooty? The surface is dangerously radioactive? But you want to come anyway? Oh, all right then."

Minute 20. Now, in my day, female companions would flirt their way out of trouble by having abstract conversations about moving faster than light. Two decades on, nothing less than a full-on tongue-spasm between the prison bars will do. I'm mostly dwelling on this so that I don't have to dwell on the other thing that's going on here, i.e. the suggestion that if the Doctor hadn't stepped in with the clockwork mouse, then we'd have to watch Donna doing "sexy" as well. This prospect has been preying on my mind all week, ever since an acquaintance of mine described her as "the first female Doctor Who companion I wouldn't have a go on". I sympathise with this view, although I felt I had to explain to him that Barbara Wright isn't the kind of woman you can just "have a go on": she's a classy lady, and must be slowly coaxed with fine wine and knitwear.

Minute 21. Another stretch of overwrought Torchwood-level dialogue ('you can stay down here and live your whole life in the shadows…') ends with Martha promising the Nice Hath that if he follows her up to the surface, then he'll be able to feel the wind on his face. Is that really something a bipedal guppy would want to feel? If these creatures aren't fully adapted for air, then it's a bit like trying to encourage someone by promising to blast them with a water-cannon. Of course, I'm assuming that Hath Peck is male, simply because of Martha's body-language towards him. Great big fish-flirt that she is.

Minute 22. Actually, I hope he's critically wounded at some point in this story. Given Martha's track-record last year, she'd probably try to give him mouth-to-mouth. If she gargled at him, then would he hear it as Welsh?

Minute 23. Donna Noble: Ace Cryptographer. Meanwhile, Jenny's doing her sort-of-like-the-Doctor-but-raised-as-a-soldier routine, as expected. I foresee an awful lot of people trying to spot the overlap between Jenny and Miranda (the Doctor's last surprise daughter, from Lance Parkin's Father Time), but if anything, she's a cute white version of Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart (from Ben Aaronovitch's Transit, among others). I've no idea why the Doctor keeps turning to Donna to explain why he isn't a soldier, because it's not exactly a hard one to field, philosophically speaking.

Minute 24. May I ask why the colonists have set up a game of laser-beam Ker-Plunk in this corridor? Surely, they could make a much more reliable and much more efficient anti-Hath barrier by arranging a small number of these lasers in a regular grid formation? Because this whole section only seems to exist as a pretext for high-risk limbo dancing. Sadly, the Doctor is obliged to fry the clockwork mouse at this point, probably because it's getting more laughs than his co-star.

Minute 25. Protracted gunfight. If I go out to the toilet now, will I miss anything? Sod it, I'll just do it in an empty Coke bottle, who's going to know. The gas-guns on show here are, if nothing else, the greatest step forward in Doctor Who arms technology since "Earthshock" (when the monsters learned how to shoot in straight lines, rather than sending the entire TV picture into negative).

Minute 26. "I'm addiiicted to you, don't you knooow that you're toxiiiiic…"

Minute 27. It's like The Hound of the Baskervilles, only with a giant fish-man instead of a mass-murderer. A fairly obvious point, which I'm sure will be crossing everyone's mind about now: are we sure that the Nice Hath can't survive under the quicksand? It's not as if he's a fish out of water, and even if the sludge isn't "breathable" for his species, his face-pack should surely keep him alive for a while. After Captain Kirk was killed off in that terrible Star Trek movie, William Shatner - determined to continue his relationship with the Star Trek universe, whether anyone wanted him to or not - wrote an equally terrible novel in which Kirk is resurrected under unlikely circumstances, and goes on to become the messiah (or something). Along similar lines, I can see an elderly Paul Kasey trying to extend his life on the convention circuit with his book Hath Peck: A Dark Undoing, in which the Nice Hath is rescued from his swampy grave and we get a glimpse into the more disturbing psychosexual side of his nature. David Banks got away with much worse.

Minute 28. Yeah, I cried when my first goldfish died.

Minute 29. The Doctor's just invited Jenny on board the TARDIS. She's going to die, isn't she? Or get flung off into time and space somehow, so that she can't come back until the end-of-season two-parter. Ironically, the idea of a three-girl-rumba on board the TARDIS would have really appealed to Peter Davison twenty-five years ago.

Minute 30. Jesus, is this conversation still going?

Minute 31. Well, I'm glad someone enjoys running up and down corridors.

Minute 32. Nothing to see here, move along.

Minute 33. And so, in yet another attempt to give Donna some kind of useful talent, temping skills become unexpectedly useful in a life-or-death situation (see also "The Sontaran Stratagem", and the subplot about the medically-suspect Polish workforce that never goes anywhere). I remain unconvinced that a woman who wasn't even clued-up enough to know about the Cyberman Invasion of Earth (in "The Runaway Bride") would (a) care about the meaning of serial-numbers on the walls of a spaceship or (b) bother to remember the exact workings of the Dewey decimal system, but what troubles me most is this: she had a job in Hounslow Library, and that used to be my local library. There was a deeply attractive redhead who worked behind the check-out desk, and it worries me to think that in the Doctor Who universe, her place was taken by Donna Noble. I feel strangely soiled.

Minute 34. However, the real problem here is that we've just spent two whole minutes of screen-time (plus all the "what are these numbers?" scenes beforehand) establishing that the war has only been going on for seven days, and yet… it turns out to be completely irrelevant to the story. Why does it matter how long they've been here? The Doctor doesn't even bother to share this information with the colonists, and it certainly doesn't change their situation. It's almost like a backwards version of "Full Circle", in which the twist is "this hasn't been going on for long" rather than "this has been going on for longer than we thought". And while we're on the subject of ye olde Doctore Whoe stories…

Minute 35. …we've got a gigantic hangar-cum-colony set, covered in foliage. See, I said they should've hired Monoids. Except that here, there's no sign of animal life apart from the humans and the aliens: the thing that made "The Ark" seem so remarkable in 1966, namely a bloody great elephant on a spaceship, is sadly absent from this latter-day space-jungle. Which means that the whole shebang seems less impressive than a (relatively) low-budget BBC show made forty years ago, and surely, that can't be right. Maybe they shouldn't have spent so much time and effort getting Georgia Moffett to jump over laser-beams [that one short stunt-sequence took two days, according to Confidential], and could have used any money left in the kitty to hire livestock instead.

Minute 36. Doctor Who has been brought to you this week by the word "generation".

Minute 37. Leaving aside his current romance with the World of Showbiz, one of Russell T. Davies' greatest flaws as Chief Writer is that he doesn't seem to understand what the word "war" means. In his world, it's something you can end with the flip of a switch, quite often a reset switch. "The Parting of the Ways" saw the last battle of the Time War (his words, not mine) concluded with a single burst of improbable logic, but if anything, "Doomsday" was even more of a disappointment on that score: the previews promised us that the Doctor and Rose would face a "war on Earth", yet what we actually got was half an hour of aliens shooting at each other, brought to an end by the activation of a spurious time-hoover. An actual war is complex, messy and protracted, and it'd be nice if we could see one in Doctor Who someday. Until then, we get the Doctor bringing a 140-generation conflict to an end by smashing this week's magic artefact and releasing some more of that all-purpose Deus Ex Machina energy. If the colonists have been hot-housed to believe in the Source as the holiest of holies, then why don't they all want to kill him as an obvious heretic? Or is General Cobb the only one who actually believes in the local religion? It's like standing in front of the Taliban and saying: "At last, here are the bones of Mohammed… and I'm going to smash them to bits in front of your stupid faces, for no reason you can possibly understand!"

Minute 38. Oh, dear. Cobb's looking at the Doctor in a menacing way. He's going to open fire, isn't he? And someone's going to throw herself in front of the bullet, isn't she…? We might have hoped that the series had got this love of gratuitous self-sacrifice out of its system with Luke Rattigan, but apparently not. [Rather sweetly, the accompanying Confidential reveals that Georgia Moffett believed Jenny's "death" to be a surprise twist. She clearly hasn't been paying much attention to this series.] Yep, there she goes. Why is Cobb the only one who's packing a conventional firearm instead of a nifty new pilot-lighter gun?

Minute 39. David Tennant is contractually obliged to cry at least once in every season, usually over someone we've been forced to care about at gunpoint. Here, the circumstances are so contrived that it's actually impossible to feel moved, or - indeed - to feel anything at all other than a sense of grinding inevitability. I bet he's going to sit there sobbing for about another forty seconds, then get angry and start shouting.

Minute 40. Look, we know you're not going to pull the trigger. You're not impressing anybody. Perhaps it's just that I was already thinking of William Shatner, but as Jenny's laid to rest while the planet terraforms itself around her, the Doctor's awkward 'she was too much like me…' speech seems perilously close to: "Of all the souls I've encountered in my travels, hers was the most… Time Lord."

Minute 41. Riiiiight. So, the TARDIS detected Jenny and took the Doctor into the future, but arrived too early and therefore caused an 'endless paradox' by allowing the Doctor to create her. Obvious question: why did it detect her at this point in time, both in terms of its own existence (i.e. after six-hundred years of slouching around the universe with the Doctor) and in terms of its relative surroundings (i.e. when it was securely parked on twenty-first-century Earth)? Martha's long-distance call to the Doctor in "The Sontaran Stratagem" makes a certain sense, if we assume that the TARDIS keeps things nice and linear, and that the 'phone rings in the console room after the same amount of time has passed for both the Doctor and his ex-companion on Earth. But this is just a nonsensical non-explanation, and it's the creator of Faction Paradox who's talking here.

Minute 42. Now Donna's insisting that she's going to travel with the Doctor forever. Is she going to die, then? Because it's got that ominous On Her Majesty's Secret Service ring to it. Big Russell has hinted that one of the regulars might finally snuff it at the end of this series, although as I've said before, I assumed that Donna was safe for the Jar Jar Binks reason (you knew he was going to make it to the end of Revenge of the Sith, because too many people in the audience would cheer at the moment of supreme tragedy). I find myself dwelling on the recent "Cyberman in a snowy graveyard" photos, and wondering if they really are from the next Christmas special, as we've been led to believe. Bit early to be filming the Christmas special, isn't it? And if the walls between parallel universes are collapsing - as Rose's presence would seem to suggest - then won't we get Cybermen in "Journey's End", along with Daleks, Davros, Jenny, an alternative-universe version of the Doctor, the laughing time-witch who filched the Master's ring at the end of "The Last of the Time Lords", and God knows what else? I'm just saying, that's all. The funeral could be anybody's.

Minute 43. Yeah, yeah. Companion debrief. Sad-yet-stirring music. We get the idea.

Minute 44. Wait a minute… is that terraforming energy coming out of her mouth, or nebulous Time Lord energy? Which is to say, has she been Spock'd, or Bad Wolf'd? It's slightly green and vegetable-like, so I'm assuming the former. Perhaps it'll escape the atmosphere and attract the attention of some "pilot fish" Robot Santas, if they want their five portions a day.

Minute 45. You know how I said she was a cute white version of Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart? Read the last scene of Transit again. Then watch the last scene of this episode. That's all.

Minute 46. "The Nancies are all warmed up," according to the announcer. Now I think about it, though… at the start of the episode, Donna uses the phrase 'like swallowing a hamster' as if she's actually tried it, which might explain why she's incapable of keeping her trap shut: she's like one of the rodent-eating reptile-people in '80s sci-fi mini-series V, and her detachable jaw has somehow got stuck in the "down" position.

Minute 47. Mission completed. Empty out the Coke bottle and turn to BBC3.

Doctor Who 2008, Week Five: "Surpriii-iiise!"

2008-05-04T20:04:00.007Z

In which Helen Raynor fails the Gadarene Test.

Look, I was only eight: however half-baked and unconvincingly-monstered it may seem now, the fact is that episode one of "The Leisure Hive" just freaked me out. It wasn't that the "wooooo!" title sequence I'd known all my life was suddenly replaced by a "phreeeeeow!" one, or that the sets suddenly involved actual colours (rather than late-'70s regulation spaceship grey) and the incidental music sounded like Brian Eno (rather than Tenko). It was the cliffhanger. The Doctor got his arms and legs ripped off, for God's sake. True, it wasn't The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but we still found ourselves staring down his screaming throat while an alien death-telly pulled his body into five easy pieces. The idea that he could scream was startling enough. Remember, for the previous three years we'd had a "comedy" version of the Doctor who was largely a vehicle for Tom Baker's endless showing-off, a version who never looked remotely threatened by the villains, who seemed to adopt new superpowers every week, and who probably wasn't even capable of feeling pain. We hadn't seen him break a sweat since Sutekh, and to an eight-year-old, 1976 might as well have been the late Renaissance. Now the Doctor was actually being tortured, or so it appeared. Surpriii-iiise!

And then, a week later, he got turned into a wrinkly old man. We didn't know the universe could do that to him, either.

If it seems unlikely now that a little thing like "the lead character grows old" could actually surprise us, then that's partly because we've been so over-exposed to the idea in the ten months since "The Family of Blood" did it properly (we consider its recent use in Torchwood, which wasn't just surplus to the plot but outside the realms of all discernible logic), but mostly because 28 years of advances in prosthetic makeup have made us think of it as exactly the kind of thing sci-fi does these days. Which sums up the problem in a nutshell: Doctor Who has always surprised us, yet fandom has the kind of hindsight which stops us remembering how bizarre it all was at the time. In the case of "The Leisure Hive", the important thing isn't what actually happened (or why), but the fact that this double-violation of the Doctor changed the tone of the whole series.

But just try to imagine the surprise of the original, first-generation audience. In 1963, there was nothing else on Earth like this programme. After the obvious "what the Hell is this?" value of "An Unearthly Child" and the "where the Hell are we?" impact of "The Daleks", early Doctor Who was seen by the viewers as uncharted territory, not just because they had no idea where they were going next - they didn't keep getting dragged back to present-day Earth, the jammy bastards - but because the programme itself was so often an unexplored landscape of alien shapes and radiophonic noises. This series surprised people by giving them things they'd never seen or heard on television, not by the nature of its plots. This was true even in the 1980s. The only surprising things in the script of "Earthshock" are the two Big Twist moments, yet the real shock wasn't the return of the Cybermen or the eventual sacrifice of the firstborn boy-child, but the fact that a TV programme was giving us this physically dark, quasi-gothic version of the future. In the age of Buck Rogers in the Twenty-Fifth Century, nobody else was attempting anything like it on the small screen. In fact, an argument could be made that the real reason Doctor Who went to pieces in the mid-1980s (and bear in mind that even in this column, we've heard numerous reasons more complex than "John Nathan-Turner went mental") was that it stopped even trying to surprise the audience, and instead settled into a pattern of pandering to the fans while delivering The Kind Of Things Doctor Who Does.

Which might be taken as a warning from history, but we'll come back to that later.

Flip forward to the 1990s, and a small war is raging in fandom, at least amongst those who regularly pick up the Doctor Who novels (and, yes, it already seems strange that there was a time when we needed this life-support system). By the end of the decade, there were supposedly two camps, "trad" and "rad". We'll skip over the question of whether the "rad" authors were genuinely "radical" or just trying to be interesting, and concentrate on the "trad" side of the argument. The theory holds that there are "traditional" types of Doctor Who story, and yet… if you examine the episodes from the original series, then it's hard to find more than a handful of them. Certainly, those stories which are most beloved of "trad" fans - or, at least, those which seem most iconic - weren't even remotely "trad" when they were broadcast. "The Talons of Weng-Chiang" was an oddity, not a template; "The Silurians" was unlike any Doctor Who story that had gone before it; "The Web of Fear" would have been unthinkable in William Hartnell's day. Occasionally, we find stories which seem to be made up of mass-produced parts from other stories of the same era ("Fury from the Deep" is easily the worst offender in this category), or stories which seem familiar because they remind Cult TV fans of other Cult TV programmes ("Terror of the Zygons" is an Avengers episode with monsters), but this isn't what "trad" really means.

Actually, "trad" didn't exist in the TV series until quite late in the day. It's been argued that "The Visitation" was the first genuinely "trad" story, the first to mimic a specific style of Doctor Who without even trying to add anything new to the mix. Which points up something rather important: those old-school Doctor Who stories that come closest to being "trad" aren't actually very good, and probably wouldn't even keep "trad" fans happy these days. No, what the "trad" camp of the 1990s wanted were books that were just like the Doctor Who stories they happened to like, however freakish those stories may have been on first broadcast. I've mentioned this before, but when an acquaintance lent me a copy of The Last of the Gadarene eight years ago, he made me tell him what it was about before I'd actually read it. He did this by asking me questions about the plot, and encouraging me to give the most predictable answers I could think of. 'It's a Third Doctor story, so where do you think it's set?' 'Erm… England in the 1970s?' 'And who do you think the villains are?' 'Well, I suppose… aliens who want to invade Earth.' 'Yes, but how?' 'By infiltrating an institution of some sort?' 'And?' 'Um, disguising themselves as something normal and then smothering people.' And so on, right up to the "twist" where it turns out that one of the characters is the Master in disguise.

At the time, one of the review magazines gave The Last of the Gadarene full marks for being a "perfect Pertwee", yet the irony here is that Barry Letts would never have commissioned a story this banal in the actual, bona fide 1970s. However formulaic the UNIT stories may seem now, there was always something new to see during his producership. Even "The Claws of Axos" - probably the drabbest of them all, and a story well worth contemplating this week, since we can think of it as a direct ancestor of "The Poison Sky" - showed us things that seemed slightly weird by the standards of the day. Letts' own 1990s attempt to recapture the Pertwee years, The Ghosts of N-Space, demonstrates that Yet Another Alien Invasion was the last thing he wanted: Ghosts may be hideously malformed in almost every detail, but as a story in which the Doctor visits a Hieronymus-Bosch-style spirit-realm while attempting to defeat a four-hundred-year-old Mafia boss who's also a necromancer, you can't call it staid. The truth is that like so many other '90s fan-phenomena, the "trad" novel didn't come from a genuine tradition of Doctor Who at all. It existed partly to give a career opportunity to writers with very little imagination, but mostly as a kind of security-blanket for people whose video of "The Three Doctors" was getting a bit worn out.

(Incidentally… since I've mentioned The Last of the Gadarene, I might as well head back to Gatissville. I've always argued that "The Unquiet Dead" isn't a "trad" Doctor Who story at all, but an episode of a generic '90s sci-fi show: try watching it back-to-back with Star Trek: The Next Generation's "Time's Arrow", and see what strikes you. But a few years on, even those who liked "The Unquiet Dead" have begun to admit that there isn't really much to the script at all, and that it works because everyone involved in the production is so good at doing random Victoriana. The sets are perfect, the performances are just like those you'd find in one of the BBC's Christmas adaptations of Dickens' novels, and the gas-monsters are visually beautiful even if they're conceptually ugly. Strip away these nineteenth-century crowd-pleasers, though, and you're left with… well, with something like "The Idiot's Lantern", which is also made of Cult TV standards but doesn't have the right visual "props" to keep the punters interested. Here we should bear in mind that Mark Gatiss is so confused about what the traditions of Doctor Who actually are that he thinks it's indistinguishable from Quatermass, even though the two programmes are philosophical opposites. See the article Sci-Fi Iconoclasty 101, about halfway down this page, if you really care about this sort of thing.)

Jump-cut to the present day, and "The Sontaran Stratagem" / "The Poison Sky". Last week I spent 3,000 words explaining exactly why this sort of Yeti-in-the-loo business is bound to wear thin after a while, with occasional diversions in the direction of the Earth's core, but it wasn't until the repeat of "Stratagem" that I realised I'd missed the most important point. It isn't just that the series is intent on flogging a formula we're already sick of, or that Doctor Who's capacity now appears to be more limited than at any point in its prior history, including the UNIT era. It isn't just the embarrassment factor of watching yet another TV newsreader announce the apocalypse while urgent-sounding music pumps away in the background, or the crushing banality of the "relationship" dialogue, or the way Helen Raynor keeps saying how nice it is that Doctor Who can combine "real world" with "alien" without noticing that the "real world" half of the programme is a spent force and that the "alien" half is rapidly becoming too routine to seem worthwhile. No, the real point is this:

The programme is now being made by people who don't even realise that "surprise" is meant to be part of the package.

There are no surprises in the Sontaran storyline, but it isn't just a problem with the plot. Remember what I said: it's in the mandate of Doctor Who to give us a kind of television we've never seen before, to use the medium in unique ways, to show us things that have never previously existed. What we have now is a version of the programme for people with no imagination, who want it to be as cosy and as familiar as Casualty (which would, at least, explain why Alison Graham actually prefers it this way). Surprise is no longer part of the agenda. In "The Sontaran Stratagem", we're given numerous questions to which we already know the answers, like The Last of the Gadarene for under-twelves. "Why are these cars killing people?" "Because of aliens." "What do these aliens want?" "To take over the world." In "The Poison Sky", we're faced with questions that are tougher, but no more interesting. "Why do the Sontarans want to change the atmosphere?" "For some reason to do with their war, but it doesn't really matter, to be honest." "How are they going to be defeated?" "The Doctor's going to rig up a spurious piece of technology, just like always." We're being shown something known, something safe. This is television specifically for an audience which doesn't feel the need to get involved, an audience which supposedly gets scared if you jump out at it and go "boo!". And this is unfortunate, because that's always been Doctor Who's job.

This surprise-free version of the series should come as no surprise. Looking back on it, the clue was there two whole years ago, in the Confidential that accompanied "The Girl in the Fireplace". You may recall an interview with Julie Gardner, in which she expressed her surprise that a script which begins with monsters on eighteenth-century Earth should then cut to a space-station in the fifty-first century, and said that this clearly wasn't business as usual. Now, this puzzled me at the time. Since Doctor Who is capable of going anywhere, anywhen and anyhow, and has the ability to change its methods with every episode, I'm sure I'm not alone in saying that I consider a time-shift between the 1700s and the 5000s to be pretty much par for the course. At the very least, it's no big deal. Yet as far as the programme-makers are concerned, standard practice is to (A) find a historical setting or a modern-day "topical" issue, (B) attach a monster to it, and (C) arrange the set-pieces around the result. To me, a script that stretches our attention between Mme de Pompadour and clockwork droids in the far future is surprising, but it's only a background-radiation level of surprise. To a producer who doesn't even realise that surprise is a minimum expectation, on the other hand… yes, it must seem spectacular.

This point became even more obvious when Russell T. Davies announced that he considers Steven Moffat to be a genius, and to have neural pathways made of gold (or something like that… I forget the exact quote). Well, Moffat is certainly competent, which is a novelty these days. Yet his work should, ideally, be the baseline for all modern Doctor Who rather than its pinnacle: "The Empty Child" and "The Girl in the Fireplace" should be the norm rather than the crème de la crème. If our standards hadn't been set so low by the (A), (B), (C) approach, then we'd be able to see this rather more clearly.

A big part of the problem here is that television in general, and (sad to say) Doctor Who in particular, is almost going out of its way to discourage any actual talent amongst new writers. As we saw in Week Three, a modern script is expected to be more like a storyboard than a teleplay. It's notable that Davies considers Moffat to be the best of the bunch, because Moffat is significantly older than most. He started working in television in the 1980s, and can therefore remember a time when writers were actually supposed to write, rather than being encouraged to churn out second-rate Hollywood action-movies for TV. I say "notable", because he's succeeded by actively defying what the producers have forced Doctor Who to become. Moffat has - if you will - the element of surprise, but that shouldn't be a sign of genius, it should just be a sign of adequacy. A quick glance at this year's Radio Times round-up of the 2008 season shows us that while Davies is patting his writers on the head for giving us by-the-book scripts like "Planet of the Ood" and "The Sontaran Stratagem", Moffat will be giving us a story involving…. Christ, I don't even know what it involves. There's something about a library, something about shadows, something about data-ghosts. This could go anywhere. I'm more interested in "Silence in the Library" than any other story on the menu, not because I believe Moffat to be the high-water-mark of all Doctor Who authorship, but purely because I have no idea what it's going to be like. As I said, this should be a normal part of the Doctor Who experience, not something exceptional.

Perhaps, just perhaps, all writers could be this unpredictable if the producers actually gave them some incentive for doing it. Instead, we get a two-parter that starts with a killer sat-nav device driving a car into a river (see, I told you that modern-day Doctor Who is just like Bugs) and then gives us an alien invasion that makes Independence Day look creative. It's not as if the modern series can't surprise us, just that… it can't be bothered. After all, the 2005 season was a long list of shocks to the system. "Rose" surprised us all - and horrified the Cult TV fans, pleasingly - by taking Doctor Who out of the realm of sci-fi and into the daylight, giving us a universe that was upbeat and bright pink instead of morbid and badly-lit like The X-Files. This was only the beginning. "The End of the World" showed us a future that was completely berserk instead of cyberpunk; "Aliens of London" reinvented the contemporary Doctor Who story as a wilfully grotesque parody; even "Father's Day", which really is much less interesting than the thirty-second trailer that gave away most of the plot, is a long way from routine. (Ironically, at times it's a lot like an episode of Casualty, with the key difference that the supporting characters are being threatened by Reapers rather than a crashed bus or a gas leak. However, Casualty with Reapers is far more surprising than "The Poison Sky", and therefore - on the grand scale - less Casualty-like. If you see what I'm getting at.)

But that was 2005, when the programme had to redefine what Doctor Who actually did. Now it can afford to be complacent, and so… it is. In less than three years, the series has reached the same point that fandom had reached in the 1990s: for the first time in the Doctor Who's thirty-year history (I'm not counting the big gap), there's now a surfeit of genuinely "trad" stories on television. And just as before, "trad" means "stories which try to be like other stories that weren't trad at the time", usually padded out with clichés that could have come from any Cult TV series ever made. In the case of the Sontaran story, you can turn "Spotting the Sci-Fi Standards" into a drinking game, although for now I'll simply mention the amusement value of the Evil Martha episode being shown on the same day that Channel 5 broadcast S Club: Seeing Double. This isn't "traditional", this is just banal. If there's any form of surprise here at all, then it's our sheer amazement when the script sinks to the lowest level of Cliché Hell by having the Cartoon Teenage Braniac heroically sacrifice himself in order to blow up the alien spaceship, at which point the drinking game became irrelevant and there's no option but to drain the rest of the bottle.

Of course, thanks to the US, our very idea of what "surprise" means has been altered. Babylon 5 led us to become obsessed with the Cult of the Story Arc, and this changes our expectations of what a fantasy programme is supposed to do. In a Story-Arc world, "surprise" means the big twist in episode fourteen that changes the nature of what happens in episodes seventeen and nineteen as a means of setting up the season finale in episodes twenty-one and twenty-two. Shows like Battlestar Galactica and Heroes are entirely driven by this sort of numbers game, and it rather distracts the viewer from the fact that the form of these programmes isn't surprising in the least. Back in the 1990s, I knew someone who mocked Babylon 5 for having "terrible scripts". This shocked and appalled the rest of us, since we were under the impression that it was the only thing on TV which did sci-fi "properly", and yet… watching the programme again now, as a fully-grown-up grown-up, I can't help noticing that he was right. The scripts are awful, but what kept us watching was the scale of the Story-Arc. Take away big questions like "what do Vorlons look like?" and "if he goes to Zha'ha'dum, will he really die?", and any individual episode just looks like po-faced, Voyager-level space opera. Nobody outside geekdom would be able to hear lines like 'I hear they still call you the Star-Killer' without needing Settlers.

Again, it has to be remembered that Doctor Who used to surprise us with the nature of the territory it covered, not with "revelations". As I've pointed out elsewhere, "Gridlock" may not be to everyone's liking (that's okay, this programme's always been an experiment), but it is one of the most surprising episodes made in the modern age: it has a narrative approach unlike anything else on modern TV, and finds a new way of integrating old-fashioned "small-scale" television drama into the twenty-first-century CGI epic. Yet as I've also pointed out elsewhere, Mark Braxton - the Radio Times' geek-in-residence, and a man who has all the critical faculties of kelp - dismissed it as being "slow", then claimed that it was excused by the Face of Boe's "revelation". Of course, this "revelation" was so bleeding obvious that we could easily have taken it for granted (in fact, many of us already had), but let's focus on the larger point here. Even if the producers of this show weren't encouraging writers to be as bland as possible, should Doctor Who really be pandering to this sort of idiocy?

Increasingly, the series is under the impression that it's okay to keep doing the same trick over and over again, as long as there are clues to the end-of-season two-parter buried in the mix. The big surprise of "Partners in Crime" was the second coming of Rose Tyler, yet many people would much rather have been surprised by an episode that wasn't set on modern-day Earth (again) and didn't involve alien consumer products (again). Likewise, I'm guessing that most of the internet-talk about "The Poison Sky" will revolve around the one-second-long glimpse of Rose on the TARDIS scanner rather than the actual story. Irony Number One is that this new, Americanised form of "surprise" was developed specifically because so many US shows couldn't go anywhere in space and time: if you're stuck on a single space-station week after week, with a finite number of sets, then you need ongoing plots and subplots just to keep the audience watching. The same goes for "small-town" fantasy, Buffy included. But Doctor Who is, demonstrably, meant to be above all of this. Irony Number Two is that the Cult of the Story-Arc demands constant clues about what's going to come next, and the entire essence of Doctor Who - at least when it's any good - is that we're not supposed to have the slightest idea what comes next.

But if it's physically impossible for the series to get any blander than "The Poison Sky", then the worst part is knowing that even now, the programme-makers seriously believe the laser-gun battles and the colossal CGI explosions to be exciting in some way. Whereas in fact, we've forgotten them by the time the episode's over. A scary kid in a gasmask saying 'are you my mummy?' is vastly more memorable than a standard-issue spaceship explosion, even for younger viewers: this week's episode has the Doctor make an in-joke about "The Empty Child" just as the Valiant arrives, but the script doesn't seem to realise that it's just underlining its own failure. We're here for the strangeness, not the big showpieces. And Doctor Who Confidential, in which the cast and crew analyse every detail of the scripts as if they're somehow more than just collections of action-movie set-pieces, are becoming harder and harder to sit through without squirming at the self-delusion of everyone involved. Hearing Helen Raynor trying to explain the motivation of Luke Rattigan is like hearing Chuck Jones trying to describe the psychosexual nuances of Wile E. Coyote, while hearing Russell T. Davies talk about the "importance" of the petty, vapid relationship-building scenes between the Doctor and Donna is like hearing Arnold Schwarzenegger tell us: "I think when the Terminator says 'I'll be back', he's expressing a profound and deep-felt longing to return to this place and time, which is essentially the only spiritual home he knows…"

But then, what do I know? I've just spent a total of 7,000 words criticising something which is, technically, too drab to be even worth discussing. All it really comes down to is that you can think of "The Poison Sky" as either (a) "The Christmas Invasion" with all the good bits taken out, or (b) a story about Sontarans meeting a child genius that's even less interesting than the one from Jim'll Fix It.

Doctor Who 2008, Week Four: The Time That the Land Forgot

2008-04-27T19:25:00.006Z

Riiiiiiiiight. Well, for now, let's not dwell on the seemingly-endless tedium of "The Sontaran Stratagem". Because as I write this, it's 6:45 on Saturday night: I've been out for a wee twice, I've put the dinner on, I've tried walking up and down and stroking the cat in an attempt to make time go faster, but the damned thing isn't even half-finished yet. The worst part is knowing that it's a two-parter, and that we're going to have to go through all of this again in seven days' time.

So, this week's article will largely revolve around dinosaurs living at the Earth's core. In fact, this directly relates to Doctor Who and the question of what's wrong with reinventing the Sontarans as an eco-hazard, although I admit that my use of the word "directly" isn't quite dictionary-standard.

I'm not picking this subject at random, by the way. Giant subterranean reptiles have presented themselves as a worthwhile topic this week, after last Friday's screening of At the Earth's Core on ITV. If you missed it, then it was broadcast at half past two in the morning, on the grounds that it's made the transition from "children's movie with monsters, good filler on a bank holiday" to "'70s retro, ideal for thirty-year-olds coming home pissed from a nightclub". Since a quick straw-poll has revealed that not everybody who watches Doctor Who has actually seen At the Earth's Core, it should be explained that this was one of a series of shockingly gaudy, unapologetically camp "pulp" adventure movies made in Britain during the 1970s, all of which feature (a) men in dinosaur suits blown up to immense proportions by the magic of back-projection and (b) Doug McClure as the two-fisted American hero amongst British character actors. It's been said that one of the many, many side-effects of Star Wars on our culture was to wipe this sort of film from the face of the Earth, and since the dinosaur Brit-flicks were also blatantly inspired by Saturday-morning serials of the Flash Gordon era, it's fair to say that both were trying to occupy the same ecological niche. Extinction was therefore inevitable, just as it was for Ray Harryhausen and his stop-motion skeleton-warriors.

Wait, though. I've called them "dinosaur Brit-flicks", and this is both unfair and misleading. It gives the impression that these films were just about men in lizard suits, examples of cheap, artless Godzillary-pokery. Cheap they may have been, but artless…? What's striking now, and what nobody would have admitted in 1976, is that At the Earth's Core is a triumph of lurid design. The words "pop art" spring to mind. Now that we live in a world where mindlessly easy CGI has made everything in sci-fi cinema look like a homogenised computer game, it's startling to see such a low-budget movie attempt something so odd. The underworld of Pellucidar is a realm of bulbous, throbbing vegetation under a pink "sky", inhabited not just by dinosaurs - which are themselves rather more striking than the man-in-a-monster-suit description might suggest, great snarling heaps of horns, claws and rhino-skin - but by pig-faced dwarf-soldiers whose language sounds more like a product of the Radiophonic Workshop than the all-purpose grunting we've come to expect from troglodytes. The heroes end up At the Earth's Core thanks to a gigantic Edwardian drilling machine, the sheer pomp of which is enough to make you remember why people were perfectly happy with model-work in those days. We just didn't need CGI.

One of these heroes is Doug McClure, as per usual. The other, playing the elderly scientist who acts as both universal boffin and kindly father-figure, is Peter Cushing. Here we should note that the screenplay was written by Milton Subotsky, the man responsible for the '60s Doctor Who movies, which sets alarm-bells ringing for fandom even if Daleks - Invasion Earth 2150 AD is (at the very least) no worse than what Terry Nation wrote. But if anything, what we end up with here is closer to Doctor Who than Doctor Who and the Daleks ever was. The love of improbable Victoriana, which has been a mainstay of the TV series since "Evil of the Daleks" and which is often seen as the default setting for "proper" Doctor Who thanks to "The Talons of Weng-Chiang", is at the core of At the Earth's Core. It's not just that the technology's got brass fittings, it's that the trog-world of oppressed cave-people is the most late-Victorian / early-Edwardian set-up you can imagine: consider The Time Machine, or The Coming Race. This a view of the pseudo-rational world that Doctor Who has never wanted to escape.

It's enough to say that I saw the film at the age of four, and that as a child, I just naturally assumed that the principles of Pellucidar and the principles of Doctor Who were identical. The aforementioned glut of British character-actors helped, since it gave the impression that even if this wasn't "televised theatre" (q.v. Week Three), it was at least closer to BBC TV Centre than Hollywood. Oh, and… the villains of the story are super-intelligent pterodactyls with psychic powers. They have an inner sanctum at the heart of Pellucidar, where they perch on rocky pedestals, sleeping until they're approached by their minions. Remember the Malevilus in "Doctor Who and the Iron Legion"…? The "sanctum" scenes are such a close match that it's hard to believe it was a coincidence. And bear in mind that for many fans of my age, the comic-strip in Doctor Who Weekly was what Doctor Who was all about, certainly a lot closer to our ideal vision of the series than most TV stories of the same era ("the Doctor takes on an entire a parallel universe where Rome never fell" vs. "The Horns of Nimon"… it's not really what you'd call a fair fight). In the movie, Cushing gets what may be the best moment of his entire career, when he stares into the eyes of a hypnotising pterosaur and exclaims: 'You can't mesmerise me, I'm British!'

MY GOD, "THE SONTARAN STRATAGEM" IS STILL ON TELEVISION. IT STILL HASN'T DONE ANYTHING INTERESTING. MAKE IT STOP. MAKE IT STOP!

So it's no surprise that for most of my conscious life, I've taken it as read that in the Doctor Who universe, there are dinosaurs at the Earth's core. After all, there's no reason to think otherwise. If the centre of the planet is filled with green goo that turns people into were-gorillas ("Inferno"), and Silurians might have been mining the interior for thousands of years before they went into hibernation, then other forms of prehistoric life would seem positively logical. True, the Daleks didn't seem to release any psychic pterodactyls when they mined Bedfordshire ("The Dalek Invasion of Earth"), but they might just have sterilised the cave-systems during construction. More than a decade ago now, I wrote a New Adventure called Down, in which Bernice Summerfield journeys to the centre of an alien world and finds sabre-tooth tigers there: this is generally regarded as the last thing I wrote before I became competent, but if you read it now (please don't), then you can just tell I was irritated that I had to set the story on / in / under a completely made-up planet instead of Earth.

Which means that I had even more reason to be disappointed by "The Runaway Bride" than everyone else. You know the scene I'm talking about. The Doctor discovers that the Empress of the Racnoss has been digging a hole to the planet's core, and wants to know why. Donna immediately suggests 'dinosaurs!', and the Doctor… looks at her as if she's stupid. No, worse, he looks at her as if we're supposed to think she's stupid as well.

The most obvious question, which must surely have crossed a lot of people's minds, is: what's so stupid about that? Let's leave aside the "old" continuity, and the fact that the Doctor already knows there are lizard-people with giant reptilian pets living in the depths of the Earth. Let's assume he's put the Myrka out of his mind, if only for reasons of taste. Even if you know nothing at all about the universe pre-2005, this is an individual who's spent the last couple of years fighting man-eating wheelie bins, alien Santas, the Abzorbaloff, and - going too far into the realms of stupidity even for my tastes, since the story in question actually believes it's serious - the Devil. Dinosaurs at the Earth's core seem almost scientific by comparison, yet as an audience, we're meant to be laughing at Donna for suggesting anything so absurd. Whereas in fact, it's the most imaginative thing she says in the entire episode.

That was my immediate reaction, anyway. But there was something else about this scene, something that niggled me on a less rational level. Only while watching the repeat on BBC3, nearly a year later, did I finally spot the problem. It's simply this: a story about dinosaurs at the Earth's core would be much more interesting than "The Runaway Bride".

Just think about it for a moment. "The Runaway Bride" got a general thumbs-up from the viewers, because it pitched itself as the Christmas episode of a sitcom rather than a family adventure movie, the Doctor Who equivalent of festive Only Fools and Horses rather than the Poseidon Adventure antics of "Voyage of the Damned". But what this actually entails is twenty minutes of the Doctor running around in modern-day Britain, followed by a face-off with a bog-standard slavering alien in a bog-standard "darkened lair" set, followed by a climax involving the Thames Flood Barrier. Is it any surprise that so many of us felt so disappointed? There's nothing excessively wrong with any of this, but we're watching Doctor Who on Christmas Day, for God's sake. We could go anywhere in the universe, into completely imaginary places full of completely unthinkable people. Instead, we're running up and down the high street and wasting our time on dreary London landmarks. Then Catherine Tate (of all people) reminds us about dinosaurs living at the Earth's core, and we're supposed to mock her for saying it…? We could actually be at the Earth's core, with a multi-squillion-pound BBC Wales budget to do it properly this time. We could be watching David Tennant riding woolly mammoths, we could be meeting nouveau-Silurians under a psychedelic sky, we could be hoping that the companion gets thrown into a volcano by psychic pterodactyls. Instead, we get flashbacks of Donna meeting her fiancée in an office. An office? It's the Doctor Who Christmas special, and they're giving us an office?!?

The point of all this isn't my own personal disappointment about the lack of dinosaurs at the Earth's core, since I dealt with that when I was six. The point is the way Doctor Who has come to fetishise the "real" world, or rather, the way it's come to fetishise its own insistence on putting the "real" world and the "alien" world side-by-side. As we've seen over and over and over again, Russell T. Davies has an obsession with the down-to-earth that's become the series' second-greatest liability. Perhaps he's still remembering the '80s and '90s, when we were all supposed to feel shame and embarrassment for liking bizarre, otherworldly things. He remains convinced that the audience will only accept companions from modern-day Britain (consider the late-'60s TARDIS crew… nobody had a problem with a series which featured a renegade alien, an eighteenth-century highlander and a girl from the future as its point-of-view characters, and the audience was supposedly less cosmopolitan in those days), and insists that we have to keep returning to Earth every three or four weeks (again, nobody seemed to feel this way in the first three years of the original programme, or when the show hit its ratings peak during the later Tom Baker epoch), even though we've established that his idea of "real" is increasingly "reality according to people who work in television". I've said all of this before, and yet…

…and yet as the last forty-five minutes have proved, there's now a definite "Doctor Who normal", a growing belief that This Is What The Programme Does. Putting an alien in the middle of a grey, ordinary-looking urban environment is what the series is "for", at least when it's not doing time-tourism (q.v. Week Two). Torchwood is at least partly responsible for this: it may not have a direct bearing on the mother-series, but for the staff of BBC Wales, it's reinforced the notion that this entire many-headed project is rooted in present-day Cardiff / Cardiff-as-London. In truth, modern-day Doctor Who got where it is today by using contemporary Britain as a gateway into something stranger ("Rose" set the pattern for this), yet now we've reached the point where contemporary Britain is treated as if it's meant to be part of the programme's appeal. The series has become obsessed with pointing at the familiar - high streets, call centres, sat-nav - and saying: "Look, something real! And look, there are aliens standing next to it! Isn't that great?" Whereas if we're going to be honest, it's significantly less great than taking us somewhere completely different.

IT'S OVER! IT'S OVER! THE EPISODE IS OVER! NOW WE DON'T HAVE TO THINK ABOUT IT AGAIN FOR A WHOLE WEEK!

There's no getting away from it: the simple fact is that grey, ordinary-looking urban environments aren't interesting. Yes, you can get a certain amount of mileage from presenting the audience with a familiar setting and then plonking a Yeti in the middle of it, attending to its toilette or otherwise. Yet this is a programme which is meant to be able to take us anywhere in the conceivable universe, not just to other planets or historical eras, but to places where wholly different rules apply (I could write whole paragraphs on this part of the programme's heritage, but for now I'll just say "Enlightenment" and let you work the rest out for yourselves). "The Runaway Bride" points up the problem better than any other episode. Even those who'd defend it - and again, it's not actually bad, just misjudged - would have difficulty claiming that on Christmas Day 2006, they wouldn't have preferred a story about Silurians at the Earth's core. But suggest that this is somehow less sensible than aliens in the basement of a London-based Torchwood research facility, and you get a withering look from the Doctor himself. At the very least, you'd hope that a series with Doctor Who's traditions would feel compelled to give us a great big Edwardian drilling machine. But no, there's just a big hole in the ground and some technobabble about huon energy. This programme's no fun any more.

And so we have "The Sontaran PLEASE GOD LET IT ALL END Stratagem". In the first three minutes, we know something's wrong: we have a story about Sat-Nav Turning Evil. Leaving aside the crassness of doing yet another [Thing in the Real World] Turning Evil story, this only makes an impression if sat-nav is a big part of your life. Call me a woolly-headed environmentalist if you will, but I don't even have a car. If shop-window dummies coming to life are universally creepy, then this is creepiness for a smug consumer culture, ironically disguised as a criticism of that culture. There's a warning about carbon emissions buried in here somewhere, but whereas "Third World War" quite rightly pitched the whole shebang as a grotesque parody rather than genuine satire, this script actually seems to believes it's got something meaningful to say. And if you're going to tell a story set in the modern world, then you should at least have the grace to try to show it in a new light, yet the following fortysomething minutes are entirely made up of set-pieces. We have This Week's Monster, of course. Technically it's a "resurrectee" monster, but since the Sontarans are just generic world-threatening military skinheads, they could look like giant badgers for all we care. We have an Evil Twin subplot that would've been a cliché in The Man from UNCLE forty years ago, and an Evil Nerd Genius who would've been a cliché in the 1980s. You could quite honestly get a computer to write this.

Yet it's all justified by the idea that this is what Doctor Who "does" these days. It bores the casual viewer, it annoys the fans (long-term or post-2005), it makes Doctor Who look like cheap-rate sci-fi filler. But it's set in the modern world, it's got aliens in it, and Kirstie Wark is going to be in the second half as the token newsreader who announces the potential end of the world. This in itself is enough to excuse the programme's existence in the eyes of the media. Ooh, look, some UNIT men have discovered a big vat-machine in the middle of the complex! What's going to be in it…? Well, we don't really care, because we know this is a bog-standard Alien Invasion story and we know it doesn't have any real consequences. It isn't going to surprise us, it's just part of what this programme "does". When it's opened, the vat is full of green slime and a clone. Yeah, thanks for that. Even "The Claws of Axos" wasn't this banal.

The upshot is that this week, the whole of modern-day Doctor Who seems to exist in the shadow of At the Earth's Core. And the irony is that the film isn't even particularly good: ideal for four-year-olds and drunk people, yes, but with a script that's barely any less rudimentary than… well… than the one we've just suffered. The difference is that on a budget rather smaller than that of a modern-day Doctor Who two-parter, Subtosaky and friends showed us something far more bizarre, ambitious and grandiose than anything BBC Wales has attempted, even if it does involve a giant toad-puppet breathing fire at Caroline Munro. What am I saying…? The giant toad-puppet breathing fire at Caroline Munro is a good thing, because at least the film-makers were trying, without the laziness of CGI or advanced prosthetics to back them up. I've seen Doug McClure and Peter Cushing lead an army of escaped slaves through a luminous subterranean jungle, after escaping the lava-mines of the pterodactyl overlords and their half-human followers. Next to that, the aimless wandering-up-and-down of this week's Doctor Who seems positively tawdry. If the series is going to use the techniques of cinema rather than traditional TV (and this is apparently all it can do), then it should at least try to be exciting. Shouldn't it?

NOW BIG RUSSELL IS ON CONFINDENTIAL, TRYING TO EXPLAIN WHY THIS EPISODE IS "IMPORTANT" IN TERMS OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE DOCTOR AND HIS COMPANIONS. WHAT'S WRONG WITH HIM? CAN HE REALLY NOT SEE THINGS AS OTHER HUMAN BEINGS SEE THEM? YOU'RE MAKING B-MOVIE SCI-FI FODDER, MAN! IT HAS NO DEPTH AND NO MEANING! LEARN TO LIVE WITH IT!

A few months ago, I sent a message to Nick Briggs in his capacity as Big Finish Big Cheese, and asked him whether I could write a Doctor Who audio involving Silurians at the Earth's core (I'm not blacklisted from writing for Big Finish any more, remember). More precisely, I told him: "It'll be so great that they'll remake it for television, like they almost did with Marc Platt's Cyberman story, and then you can do the Sea Devil voices. Everybody wins!" He hasn't responded to this, and I have the horrible feeling that he didn't realise I was joking, but… in the wake of "The Sontaran Stratagem", it doesn't seem quite so flippant. The programme has got into the rhythm of bringing back one Old Monster every year, ideally for the mid-season two-parter. When Doctor Who comes back from 2009's gap year - lean, tanned, and with lots of presents from abroad, we hope - a Silurian story would seem like a good proposition, assuming we can go down into their world rather than forcing them to come to the surface and lumber around in our boring old city streets. Because given this sort of brief, an actual adventure rather than a soap-opera with laser-gun fights, I can't help feeling that Helen Raynor might actually be able to write something good.

For now, though, I can boil the argument down into a single thought. If Hollywood were to remake At the Earth's Core in 2008, then it'd almost certainly be set in the present-day rather than the early 1900s, with a sleek, high-tech, government-funded drilling machine (a la The Core) rather than a home-made lash-up with wooden control panels and brass knobs. And as things stand right now, Doctor Who would make exactly the same mistake. "The Sontaran Stratagem" is the best possible example of that line of thinking, an insistence on giving people what's "now" even if "now" is the most mediocre thing imaginable. Enough of the modern world! Most of us are sick of it anyway.

Week Three: The Complete History of Doctor Who (Director's Cut)

2008-04-20T17:05:00.007Z

As an afterthought on Week Two… we note that in the commentary for "The Fires of Pompeii", James Moran states that the inclusion of an ordinary Roman family gives us some idea of the scale of the tragedy, since you can "multiply it in your head". Apparently not noticing that the family survives the eruption with a body-count of zero, and that if we scale this up, then there should be a final scene in which we see two-thousand people standing on the hills around Pompeii and saying (as one): "Phew, that was close!"

This week, however, we're going to talk about directors. We have to, really, because there's less and less to say about writers. Let's be quite clear on this point: there are no great television writers any more, certainly not in drama. No, that isn't clear enough, so let's try it another way: there are writers working in television who are great at what they do, but they're not necessarily great television writers, in the purest sense. Russell T. Davies can safely be thought of as one of these, because as we saw in Week One, this is a man who thinks like a director rather than a playwright.

Wait, this is going to get complicated. So let's start by going back to basic principles, as they stood in the days when Doctor Who was hand-cranked by burly stage-assistants, and even the TARDIS controls were written in felt-tip. The most important thing we have to remember about the Mark One series is that it came from a tradition of televised theatre, and this alone should be enough to disembowel the arguments of anyone who thinks it was in competition with / in the same field as Star Trek. American SF series are often described as "Westerns in space", which is a fair assessment, although the key point isn't the content (only Star Trek itself is a perfect match for this model, given that Rodenberry famously pitched it to the executives as Wagon Train with aliens) but the way these programmes have been influenced by American cinema. In the '60s, US adventure-TV wanted to be just like John Ford, even when there weren't actually any cowboys involved. Episodes were shot on film rather than videotape, to give everything that ersatz Hollywood look. Rapid-cut stunt sequences and sweeping orchestral scores were the ideal. Even series set in the twentieth century seemed to want to shout "let's head them off at the pass!" in every scene.

As late as the 1970s, programmes like Battlestar Galactica - the version with proper Cylons, natch - could get away with repackaging its two-part storylines as big-screen movies, at least for the consumption of easily-fooled foreign territories like Britain. For any American drama above the level of soap opera, there was no dividing line between TV and cinema, or at least no dividing line between TV and cheap cinema. Stick together two episodes of The Man from UNCLE and you've got a ready-made B-movie, but just try to imagine Doctor Who in that context. Try to imagine a story like "The Talons of Weng-Chiang", which is about as cinematic and as decently-budgeted as the pre-1980s series ever got, being transposed onto the big screen and passed off as a Hammer movie. Even if you beef up the rat, cut the filler in episodes five and six, and make the film-stock look like celluloid rather than video, it still doesn't work. It looks, for all the world, like a stage-play that's been recorded for posterity. Which is more or less what it is.

Budget aside, there are two main reasons why the BBC took the "televised theatre" approach to its drama series. One is that… well… it was the BBC. In the middle of the twentieth century, and most especially during World War Two, it was the BBC's job to maintain a certain level of High Culture for the good of the common man. Our modern, consumer-age society tends to pooh-pooh this idea as "elitist", but then, our modern, consumer-age society believes Desperate Housewives to be the height of sophistication. It's true that many of those in charge of the BBC were unrepentant snobs, yet the Corporation's principle was a sound one. Bringing Shakespeare to the masses was part of its mandate right from the start. Hardly surprising that it was more interested in recruiting playwrights than in staging car-chases, or that a supposedly SF show should end up caring more about stagecraft than spaceships.

The second reason for the "televised theatre" approach is the way Doctor Who was made. Needless to say, there's an unerringly useful article about this in About Time (Volume I… what, you still don't have a copy?), but the main point is that it was shot "as-if live": actors would perform entire scenes without any breaks, and the results would be transmitted without any edits. The tape was only paused when a major scene-change was required, and only rewound if something went catastrophically wrong. Videotape editing was such a palaver in 1963 that anything else would have been unthinkable, and with only a week to plan, rehearse and perform each episode, the many fluffs of William Hartnell seem a lot more forgivable. All of which meant that the actors needed the same kind of discipline they would've needed on the stage, and the writers had to take this into account. Editing became easier / cheaper / more daring as time went on, but even twenty years after Hartnell, in Doctor Who you can still see a programme with its roots in the theatrical tradition. If pigeons have lingering race-memories of being dinosaurs, then "Timelash" can't quite shake the feeling that its distant ancestor was Richard III.

Except that… new technology changed the nature of the programme in all sorts of ways. Everybody knows that something happened to the series between "The Horns of Nimon" and "The Leisure Hive", yet most fans flounder for an exact explanation, and end up saying things like "it got glossier" or "John Nathan-Turner wanted a show that was more… um… different". But the biggest single change was that starting with Season Eighteen, we got an influx of programme-makers who wanted to use the flexibility of modern TV to make something more film-like. Since this was at the end of the '70s, in that brief period when American cinema had gone through a renaissance and "Hollywood" wasn't a dirty word, this was no bad thing. The newer (though not always actually younger) directors had no interest in pointing a camera at a two-dimensional stage-set and letting the actors get on with it. Peter Grimwade tried to use the techniques of cinema to turn story-worlds into complex, three-dimensional environments, which is why "Earthshock" seems so much more dynamic than its '60s-style plot might suggest. At best, this brought a new energy to the programme. At worst, the obsession with unconventional camera-angles meant that we got lots of close-ups of Cybermen's arses. Given what we know about Grimwade's private life, some critics have rather unkindly tried to suggest that he had an ulterior motive for all these Cyber-cheeks, but in fact it was just a side-effect of a much bigger movement in television. No, really it was.

Which is all well and good, especially since it gave us "The Caves of Androzani" (more of which later). The trouble is that however much Doctor Who might have changed, the demands of the audience were changing faster. Many of the clichés we associate with the '80s are perfectly true, and blah blah Thatcherism blah blah materialistic society blah blah yuppies blah blah lingering resentment and social unrest, but one thing that's often overlooked is this: the '80s made Britain feel ashamed of its parochialism. Until the '80s, we'd liked the thought that everything in our culture was home-made and hand-crafted, we'd liked our sitcoms to be about stinking old men in junkyards, we'd liked our drama programmes to look like local theatre productions of King Lear, we'd liked the thought that the output of the BBC was a game of make-believe which asked us to play along (rather than expecting us to be a bunch of slack-jawed hicks, whose job was to sit there and say "gosh, wow" like suckers at a P. T. Barnum show). But now we were hit by a tsunami of glitzy, glossy, high-profile, high-budget American "culture", and with every pundit telling us that "cheap" was out and "slick" was in, we came to despise everything that the BBC did well.

Traditionally, a big part of the British psyche had been a love of the amateur and a distrust of the professional. Now "professional" was the buzzword of the age. This, far more than John Nathan-Turner or Bonnie Langford, is what killed Doctor Who. In the 1990s, many fans responded to this in the most appalling way imaginable, by re-envisioning the programme as "sci-fi" and claiming that it should be brought back as a "modern" series that could compete with Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (I still recall, with a horror greater than any other known sensation, the letter in Doctor Who Magazine which argued that the series should try to be more like the American model because it "hasn't won any Emmy awards"). It's fairly obvious to us now that these people were evil, degenerate vermin, but perhaps we should consider the mitigating circumstances. Old-style Doctor Who's greatest strength lay in its home-baked quality, yet Thatcher's children turned amateurishness into something to be ashamed of. What the fans really wanted was a programme they didn't have to feel embarrassed about. Ironically, what they got as a result was the Paul McGann TV movie.

Let's not pretend that this is all in the past, though, because the shame never went away. We still have trouble believing, as a culture, that anything shot on videotape can possibly be worth watching. For the last two decades, it's been universally taken for granted that television drama has to aspire to the level of a big-budget movie, if "aspire" is really the word we're looking for. "Ape" might be more apt. Thanks to the filmlook process, programmes can now be shot on cheap video and digitally treated to look as if they were made for the big screen, not because this does anything for the quality of the production (we all know it doesn't) but because it gives the appearance of something shot in Los Angeles. When Casualty announced a "new-look" series in 2007, we just knew it'd involve the leap from "raw" video to filmlook, even though Casualty viewers were in no way crying out for a version of the show that makes Charlie Fairhead look glossier.

What does this mean for the scripts, though? In effect, it means that they're more like storyboards than plays for television. Indeed, even the phrase "plays for television" has the smack of something old-fashioned and discredited about it, like "public duty" or "Marxism". Adventure-TV circa 2008, whether it's Spooks or Primeval, means a bastardised version of mainstream cinema: rapid-cut action sequences, shaky camera-work to make everything look fast-paced and urgent, and absolutely no long dialogue scenes unless they involve characters histrionically breaking down in tears at the end. Audience research has found that the public no longer sees drama as being what television is "for", and can we be surprised? If drama means "things blowing up", then you might as well just watch a Schwarzenegger movie on Channel 5.

It'd be nice to think that Doctor Who is the exception to this, wouldn't it? In fact, in some ways it's the worst offender of them all, particularly if you consider those episodes which are most explicitly based on Hollywood templates ("The Lazarus Experiment" and "42"... thank God there was a fortnight's break between them, or it would've felt like a "B-Movie of the Week" season). The reason Doctor Who gets away with it so often is the aforementioned fact that Russell T. Davies thinks like a director rather than a pure writer, and his scripts are written with an instinct for how things look and move on the screen rather than an instinct for stagecraft. Even "Gridlock" - the episode which comes closest to old-fashioned drama, since it's ultimately a piece about people trapped together in small spaces - exists in a universe of big cinematic gestures and show-stopping CGI, hence my description of it as "Harold Pinter remakes Attack of the Clones". Modern TV is a director's medium, not a writer's medium, and Davies treats it as such.

Hang on, though! In this light, let's look at "The Caves of Androzani" again. In 1984, this was the classic hybrid of theatrical Doctor Who and the pseudo-cinematic version. It does everything that Peter Grimwade was trying to do, only more so. We have a script by old-school old pro Robert Holmes, but more crucially, we have Graeme Harper at the controls: a director who uses the camera to give this story-world a genuine depth, who not only shows us a fully-formed environment but gives a genuine sense of weight and urgency to its collapse. For years, Harper was quite understandably regarded as the series' greatest director. Why, then, is he considered by many fans to be… well, we won't say "a spent talent", because nobody has any problems with the way he handled "Doomsday". He even got an award for it, albeit a Welsh one. But nor does fandom see him as head-and-shoulders above the competition any more, despite doing the best job that any director possibly could do with a rotting hog's-carcass of a script like "42" and a walking lobotomy like Michelle Collins as a guest star. Why is this?

The reason isn't that Harper has lost any of his nouse, it's just that the rest of the world has taken his version of TV drama and made it look ordinary. In 1984, he applied (good) cinematic techniques to a (good) television script, and the result stood out a mile. In 2008, television is made of nothing but cinematic techniques, used so haphazardly that even the best of them no longer make an impression. And as for the scripts… again, there are no television scripts these days. There are just faux-film scripts, strings of set-pieces with standard-issue dialogue attached (q.v. Robin Hood). This no more qualifies as "scriptwriting" than mixing the two halves of a Muller Fruit Corner qualifies as "cookery", yet Doctor Who is in no hurry to complain about it. As we saw in Week One, Russell T. Davies now seriously believes that the test of a true writer is to script a complex action sequence like the window-cleaner-box routine from "Partners in Crime".

Naturally, the argument in favour of the modern, depth-free, fast-cut version of television is that it's What People Want, and that it's therefore commercial suicide for any programme - even Doctor Who - to do anything else. Leaving aside the obvious fact that anybody who thinks this way should immediately be killed, and the equally-obvious fact that the whole point of the License Fee is to free the BBC from this sort of commercial concern… we're still left with the question of whether it really is What People Want. Of course, modern-day Doctor Who has been so keen to associate itself with the Big Spectacle that a dialogue-heavy episode (say, the mythical modern-day "Massacre" we talked about last week) would run the risk of leaving the audience confused and disappointed. On the other hand, the programme-makers' pathological urge to make things bigger isn't keeping the punters happy either. Just three years on, "Rose" seems a rather small affair by 2008 standards, yet the living mannequins and evil wheelie-bin made more of an impression on the audience than the immense snowscapes of "Planet of the Ood" will have done. In five or ten or twenty years' time, casual viewers who watched "Voyage of the Damned" will remember the episode only for Kylie Minogue, not for the hideously over-budgeted action scenes: those you can get anywhere, and the effects are largely indistinguishable from any other piece of sci-fi filler these days.

In fact, the feedback suggests that an awful lot of people would prefer Doctor Who to be more about the content and less about the light-show. It's notable that of all the writers who've worked on the series so far, the one who comes closest to being a "pure" television writer - at least when he's not being inexcusably lazy - is Steven Moffat, who also happens to be the popular one. As someone with a background in sitcom, it's perhaps no surprise that his scripts are wordier than most, yet what's striking is that people seem to like it this way. The cock-posturing between the Doctor and Captain Jack in "The Empty Child" is at least as memorable as Rose dangling off a barrage balloon; it's the explanation for the Clockwork Droids that makes "The Girl in the Fireplace" interesting, not the way they chase people up and down corridors ("The Lazarus Experiment", f*** off and die right now); and nobody seems to object to "Blink", except me, ironically. If nothing else, then the fact that children preferred the Weeping Angels to any of last year's CGI monsters says a lot about the gulf between Big Spectacle and public reaction. As we've seen again and again, special effects are only worth watching if there's a decent context for them. In context, polystyrene statues are better viewer-bait than planets blowing up.

In the case of "Planet of the Ood", the saddest thing is that seen from a distance, this is exactly what Doctor Who should be good at: an unapologetic SF fable, ending in a relatively blood-free revolution. Some might even want to interpret the Doctor's Ood-angst as an apology for everything that went wrong with "The Impossible Planet". What we actually end up with is a collection of action sequences and lots of people running around with guns, with the occasional moment of cloying sentimentality to make it all seem meaningful. Perhaps more than any other episode - even episodes which are much, much worse - this is the textbook "modern" TV script, in which everything revolves around the set-pieces and the dialogue is almost an afterthought. Some of those set-pieces are specific to Doctor Who rather than industry standards, so we naturally get a climax which involves people standing on a balcony and looking down at a big CGI thing, in this case a giant brain instead of a vat of living plastic or... well... the Devil. The accompanying Confidential seems rather self-deluded about all of this, with Big Russell seriously trying to tell us that this is the story in which the Doctor and Donna "bond", even though Donna appears to have less personality than ever before and is reduced to doing Generic Good Guy things like pointing out how bad slavery is (we'll try to put the 'you… murdered him!' line out of our minds altogether).

Given material this lightweight, Graeme Harper's never going to be able to deliver something with the urgency of "Androzani", and treats the whole affair like a skiing holiday. He seems to know that any attempt to turn this into a world-shaking epic is doomed to failure, and breezes casually through this week's life-or-death situations without asking us to break a sweat, which at least allows us to tell ourselves that it's just a filler episode before the two-parter with the Sontarans. In theory, there's no good reason that it shouldn't be great in its own right, but that's not the modern way of things. We should know, by now, that Doctor Who in 2008 is unlikely to deliver anything more complex than the old "evil businessman" schtick. That's the inevitable result of making a directors' programme rather than a writers' programme, although it'd be nice if we could be sure that the directors aren't getting bored as well.

But in terms of content - what there is of it - you can spot the exact moment when "Planet of the Ood" cops out. After Donna insists that there's no slavery in her world, the Doctor asks 'who made your clothes?', the most acute thing we've heard in this programme for a long, long time: suddenly we're forced to remember how twenty-first-century Earth actually works, and we no longer have the comfort of believing that we're morally superior to the Ood-wranglers. Yet Donna responds to this all-too-sensible question by criticising the Doctor for taking cheap shots, and… the Doctor apologises, thus allowing us to return to our normal level of smugness. Well, that's no surprise. This is a modern, consumer-age version of Doctor Who. And we can't ask a modern, consumer-age audience to feel uncomfortable about itself. Can we?

Doctor Who 2008, Week Two: The Past is Another Country… It's Full of Bloody Tourists

2008-04-13T19:05:00.006Z

Now I'm imagining Jon Pertwee shouting: "We're on Spiridon… and it's Icecano Day!"

However, on to this week's grand philosophical question: why do Doctor Who people have such a problem with big-H, fully-contextualised, Simon Schama-flavoured History? This has been an issue since the stone age, or at least since "The Tribe of Gum", but it's a problem that's taken various forms over the decades. The Hartnell-era outings with periwigs and lumbering henchmen are now thought of as "straight" historicals, in the sense that they don't involve history being molested by crashed spaceships or werewolves (or, indeed, anything more threatening than Barbara Wright in Aztecwear), yet they were nothing of the sort. When I said that early Doctor Who was the TV branch of children's literature, I meant something specific: most of the '60s historicals aren't based on bona fide history at all, but on the kind of historical adventure stories that children were expected to read in those days, or at least recognise.

Hence, "The Highlanders" has more to do with Robert Louis Stevenson than the actual events of Culloden; "The Smugglers" is Moonfleet with the novel inclusion of a heroine in a miniskirt; "The Reign of Terror" features characters straight from the pages of The Scarlet Pimpernel and A Tale of Two Cities, as if it's a test-run for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (and dear God, wouldn't that be a better model for the twenty-first-century historical than the one we're stuck with); "The Crusade" presents itself as a Shakespearean history play with extra flesh-eating ants, as if it's a prelude to King John; even "The Massacre", the supposedly serious one, hangs on an Identical Twin gimmick just like the one in The Prisoner of Zenda.

This is no bad thing, of course. We've got to remember that in the 1960s, literature was the second-best way of engaging with the furthest reaches of the planet: the best way, actually going there, was unthinkable for 90% of the population. More importantly, though, it was the only credible way of engaging with the past (it still is). "Marco Polo" may not actually tell you much about thirteenth-century China, especially now we know that the real Marco Polo made it all up, but it does encourage the sprogs in the audience to recognise and understand the written sources. This is why Tat Wood has wrongly-but-tellingly tried to argue that Doctor Who is, in its naked state, "about" literacy. Here in 2008, where literacy only stretches as far as Harry Potter and taking in interest in the furthest reaches of the planet is actively discouraged by most of the people who run the media, this doesn't just sound old-fashioned but actively antisocial. What, kids were expected to read in those days? Euuuurrrrr! What was the matter with them, didn't they have Sky Plus?

No, let's wind it back a little, because we should consider what happened in the 1980s. The deliberate blurring of the line between "history" and "classic fiction" in '60s Doctor Who was perfectly sound, and yet it had a rather odd effect on the minds of those who grew up in its wake. You can rely on the fact that Doctor Who fans of any era will know more about history (or at the very least, European history) than the average citizen, for obvious reasons, but they can have a certain… shall we call it a lack of perspective? We all rationally know that the Siege of Troy didn't really pan out that way, or even the way Homer claimed, yet if the baseline of your knowledge is "The Myth Makers" then it's bound to affect your view of the era. An interesting case-study here is Peter Haining's Doctor Who: A Celebration, the twentieth-anniversary volume that filled so many Christmas stockings in 1983, when fan-guides were still a rarity. It's interesting for two reasons. Reason One: the book details the history of Doctor Who itself, but gets it wrong in exactly the same way that Doctor Who stories get "real" history wrong, giving us a survey of the programme's past that's based more on mythology than fact. Many of the great misconceptions about the Mark One series originated with this volume, which is why we still have to remind ourselves that "An Unearthly Child" wasn't broadcast late because of the Kennedy assassination, that "The Gunfighters" wasn't the lowest-rated story ever… and so on.

But Reason Two is more interesting: Peter Haining went on to become a proper historian, or at least, that's what he thought. In the 1990s, he gave us Sweeney Todd: The Real Story of the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, in which he claimed that Todd was an honest-to-goodness historical figure rather than the legendary bogeyman we tend to assume. The book was reprinted shortly before Haining's death in 2007, to cash in on the Tim Burton movie, and yet it'[s got to be said… for a volume that sits in the "History" section of W. H. Smith's, it's only fractionally more believable than "The Gunfighters". Haining wilfully fudges the line between fiction and actuality by passing off nineteenth-century romances as if they were primary historical documents, then presents us with a complete biography of the "real" Sweeney Todd without bothering to tell us where he got the information from or how much of it he's making up for the sake of effect. And yet astonishingly, many people have managed to take this work seriously. The most obvious cheap-shot would be to say that Haining's standard of research didn't improve after 1983, although the bigger issue is that you really have to expect someone with a background in Doctor Who to do this. Sweeney Todd never actually existed, any more than Nero actually burned down Rome or Barrass actually planned the rise of Napoleon in the backroom of a French pub, but if you've seen the Great Fire of London being started by Tereleptils then anything goes.

Back to the present, a time in which the past is very much in the past. At its very worst, historical drama in the BBC's "Golden Age" meant period flouncing-around and character actors giving it their all. Now the best you can hope for is period flouncing-around with occasional bouts of shagging. The Tudors is the most obvious example of the modern style of antiquity, a version of the past that borders on the "Al Pacino is Arthur Scargill" Hollywood model, with token nipples every twelve minutes. (More amusingly, the same screenwriter gave us Elizabeth, in which the Virgin Queen gets a good seeing-to at least twice during the course of the movie. I look forward to a "controversial" new adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank, in which Anne is captured by the Nazis after they hear her banging in the attic [see footnote].) What's notable about recent Doctor Who is that it's basically following the same pattern, except with monsters instead of sex. However, without a proper context, monsters are only marginally more interesting.

We might have guessed that with the modern-day series giving so much of itself over to the Cult of Celebrity, "historical" stories would largely involve semi-famous people of today playing famous people of yesteryear. "The Unquiet Dead" laid the ground-rules for this, although the real test-case is obviously "The Shakespeare Code", just because its complete lack of interest in actual history is so utterly - dear Christ, I didn't spot the pun until it was too late - shameless. It's always tempting to point out the historical glitches in this kind of script, given how many there are (my favourite is the thought that although Shakespeare meets Martha after writing Love's Labours Lost and spends much of his time trying to get into her anachronistic pants, just one year later he publishes Much Ado About Nothing, in which Claudio's line about wanting to marry his betrothed "were she an Ethiope" demonstrates that Shakespeare considered black woman to be the ugliest creatures on Earth… does Martha go back to 1599 at some stage, and really, really piss him off?). But the nit-picking is pointless, because "Code" doesn't give a rat's codpiece about history. Clearly it doesn't care about historical fact, hence the depiction of Shakespeare as a member of Oasis, but nor do the story or its themes have anything to do with what was actually going on in Elizabethan England. History is there to be scenery for monsters. End of.

This borne in mind, the modern Doctor Who historical can be seen as a kind of time-tourism. History plays up all its regional clichés in order to attract the casual traveller, without doing anything that might scare the crowds away or - God forbid - tell them anything they didn't already know. The ending of "The Shakespeare Code" is quite gratuitous in this. You can almost hear the American tourists standing in the balcony, saying: "Gee, look, honey! Doctor Who and William Shakespeare are fighting some monsters, using a spell from Harry Potter. Have you got the camera?" Plus ca change: the more things change, the more we re-write the past in order to make it look as if they don't. Shakespeare is like a rock star (although, perhaps mercifully, there's no attempt to create a running gag by having him say "what the Chaucer was that?" at any stage), while the teenagers of ancient Pompeii act just like teenagers from a BT commercial.

Ah yes, "The Fires of Pompeii". Given its pedigree, we wouldn't have expected anything less rudimentary than the standard "period costume + alien invasion = enough to keep the Radio Times happy" formula: James Moran's episode of Torchwood may not have been the series' worst (I was about to say "Sweet Jesus, can you imagine an episode of Doctor Who written by the author of the worst episode of Torchwood?", but then I remembered that there already is one and that I've been trying to block it out of my consciousness), yet it is among the most pointless, and that's saying something. If we'd seen the Confidential before the actual episode, then we might have feared the worst, with Phil Collinson repeating the "Voyage of the Damned" mistake of assuming that Big Effects are enough to justify an episode's existence. What we actually get is therefore a surprise, not only because it's half-competent, but because - perhaps uniquely - it doesn't follow any one single model. Moran's Radio Times interview makes him sound as if he was in a state of borderline schizophrenia when he wrote it, aiming at something that would entertain his fan-self and his ten-year-old self and a modern audience of eight-million, which explains a lot. This is almost a Historical Doctor Who compilation tape, a demonstration of all the things that pretend-period-drama has tried to do over the years.

Ergo, we have a Roman nuclear family, halfway between the 1960s version of history ("everything before the present day was a test-run for the perfect consumer society", the thinking behind both The Flintstones and "The Time Meddler") and the 2000s version ("everything before the present day was a test-run for the perfect consumer society, except that the audience in the '60s knew it was a joke, whereas we're actually daft enough to believe it"). We have expensive-looking street-scenes featuring the creepy one out of Dead Ringers, like a cross between the Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum stylings of "The Romans" (vintage 1966) and the big-budget tele-gloss of Rome (vintage 2006, a very poor year). But we also get nods and apologies to the versions of history that only Doctor Who can do. The weakest, drabbest part of the affair is the standard-issue plot about This Week's Aliens trying to colonise Earth, complete with standard-issue drivelling rant about an "empire", and yet… the script treats this almost as an afterthought, so the scary priestesses become part of the scenery. Naturally, we also have the inevitable CGI footsoldier-beast, which at least has some elan this time around: if the Balrog in The Lord of the Rings looked like an end-of-level monster from Tomb Raider, then this looks more like Ray Harryhausen doing the effects for "Transformers: The Rock Years".

But most obviously, there's the same smack of tragedy that drove "The Massacre", with many of the same moral arguments being waved around in front of our noses. In fact, if anything, the greatest flaw in "The Fires of Pompeii" is that it doesn't go far enough in this direction. And "direction" may be the key word here, because there are moments when it seems as if Colin Teague is just trying to get the human horror out of the way as quickly and efficiently as possible, so he can focus on what he considers to be the real star of the show (i.e. the big exploding mountain). Even given Catherine Tate's grotesque attempts at tragedy, as she belts out lines about death, suffering and responsibility like a six-year-old having a strop, the scene in which Donna tries to tell the locals to run for the hills - and specifically, the moment when she realises it's pointless - should pack more of a punch than the eruption itself. Instead, Teague directs it as if it's an action sequence, part of the catastrophe montage rather than the point of the whole story. No wonder this all seems like such an odd mix. Even when the writer decides to do "serious", the programme thinks we'll feel cheated if we don't see people waving their arms around and panicking.

On balance, you'd have to say that it works more often than it doesn't, simply because there's so much going on in this 48-minute toga-party that it's bound to get something right every couple of scenes. It's not great, of course: historical Doctor Who won't be great until we see a story that's got the nerve to absolutely, unapologetically do one intelligent thing and do it well. Yet the consensus, at least among old-school fans who want to sound as if they know all about modern television, is that a historical has to be something like this; that there must be a CGI monster and a possessed villain in order to keep the punters watching; that any broader view of the programme is inconceivable in today's consumer-driven, showbiz-addled, idealism-free environment. All these things are quite untrue, but then, we should know that instinctively. It could be - should be - the pure human drama that drives an episode like this, and to assume we're only watching it because of the big bang at the end is rather insulting. Especially when you realise that if you take away the effects, then this is actually a rather small story, about the fate of a single family more than the grand scope of humanity.

The truth is that even if the audience is no longer capable of caring about big-H History, it is capable of caring about people, at least when the screen isn't clogged up with computer graphics. In a world where special effects are omnipresent and there are multi-million-pound spectaculars in every ad-break, even a monster-free remake of "The Massacre" would make more of an impression than the sight of several dozen screaming extras being showered with tissue-paper ash.

Footnote. There was a sketch about this "nipples and sexy assassins" version of historical drama on BBC7's Tilt this week. I mention this purely because I was the one responsible for it, although the version I wrote wasn't exactly the version they broadcast. The scripted line parodying The Tudors was: "Yes! Yes! Come on my tits and dissolve the monasteries!"