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.
Sunday, May 11, 2008
Sunday, May 04, 2008
Doctor Who 2008, Week Five: "Surpriii-iiise!"
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.
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.
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Doctor Who 2008, Week Four: The Time That the Land Forgot
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.
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.
Sunday, April 20, 2008
Week Three: The Complete History of Doctor Who (Director's Cut)
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?
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?
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Doctor Who 2008, Week Two: The Past is Another Country… It's Full of Bloody Tourists
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!"
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!"
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