The BBC is now approaching its darkest hour, and - faced with what it believes to be stiff commercial competition - would like to prove itself with television programmes that are inventive, dynamic, and of-the-moment. NO, NOT LIKE THAT! INVENTIVE, DYNAMIC, OF-THE-MOMENT, AND LIKE ALL THEIR OTHER ONES! IDIOT! So they've taken a DNA swab from the corpse of the Davies era, and realised that the best way to mass-produce new product is by using an anagram of Doctor Who, just like Torchwood did. Ergo, here are the fifteen (yes, fifteen!) scrambled versions of those nine letters which might just make saleable telly...
1. Th' Cow Door
SF anthology series, produced in conjunction with America's YUKYUKYUKTV, known for supplying entertainment to those who live in the farmbelt and (according to the station's website) don't have any "haah-brow" ideas about TV drama. The press release from BBC Worldwide explains: "Why should science fiction, in this modern and democractic age, simply be for people who know what 'science' or 'fiction' mean? Or who can read? After all, Doctor Who itself is controlled by a man who considers sci-fi to be for complete saddoes, and who hasn't read an original SF novel written in the last thirty years because he thinks it might make him look bad in front of girls. Why not give yokels the same treatment as the British public?" In this series, the titular Cow Door is a gigantic udder-portal which allows the rural American audience to glimpse any number of terrifying nighmare-worlds, including a world where a black man is president and a world where things somehow changed after 1945.
2.Hot Crow Do
Another co-production, this time with Channel 5: a documentary series that takes a morbidly intimate look at "swinging" within the UK's voodoo community. Seemingly respectable middle-class couples gather for Activia cocktails and talk about the schools in their area, before one of their number rips the head off a carrion-bird with his teeth. The ensuing spatter of blood and polite self-hatred forms the "wallpaper" of the orgy, though the programme is most memorable for its catchphrase, "LET THE VOICE OF BARON SAMEDI BE HEARD but on leaving, please remember that this is a residential area".
3. How Cod Rot
Also a documentary series, this one starring Jeremy Clarkson, who goes on a license-fee-funded holiday to point at decaying fish in Europe's ports and pretend it's all the fault of Brussels. Given the tenuous Doctor Who link, he argues that it's demonstrably okay to hate everything that's not exactly like you, because anyone who tries to make friends with you is bound to be a stinking piece of extra-terrestrial garlic-munching Dago-shagging filth disguised as a human being. Mark Gatiss and the entire writing team of The Sarah-Jane Adventures applaud wildly as he crushes an Uzbekistani shepherd-boy's head beneath the wheels of his SUV. Because it's a pre-emptive strike. Somehow.
4. Howdo t'Orc
Remake of The Lord of the Rings set entirely in the North of England. "Eee, in't Golden Age of dwarves, we worked eighteen hours down't Mines of Moria and were glad to thank Balrog of't privelege."
5. Ood C. Worth
Older viewers of British television can't fail to remember Harry Worth, the '60s comedian best known for gitting around with his mirror-image in a shop window. The BBC now takes the opportunity to combine the nostalgia factor of the original Worth with the merchandising appeal of the Ood, by digging up his corpse, forcing an octopus onto his face, and dangling him in front of a reflective surface as part of a sit-com described by critics as "marginally less offensive than My Family". It may seem cruel, but it's no worse than what Brian Cox had to do.
6. Coo! RTD Who?
A poignant reminder of Doctor Who past, this docu-drama follows the hulking, tramp-like figure of Russell T. Davies as he mindlessly shambles from production company to production company. He flashes a childlike smile at passers-by on the way, and they instinctively smile back, before realising that they can't remember who he is or what he did that was any good. Ultimately, this worn-out sop of a man has to face the fact that however much he may have cared in his early years, he allowed his one true love to become a version of Merlin that's too scared to go up against X Factor. The consequences are tragic. Especially for the viewers, who are still living through them.
7. Rood Wotch
When an attempt was made to resurrect Doomwatch in 1999, it failed horribly, despite its best efforts to lever cyberpunk aesthetics and a fucking great black hole into the format. Why the problem? Head of BBC3 Marcus Shobgite explains: "It didn't speak to the now, the moment, the modern generation. With our new remake, we'll be talking about things that really affect the youth of 2010. Especially if they're a bit dirty, you know? Hence the title. The first episode's about breast implants, and raises the question... are these things justifiable, simply because they make women much more attractive? Or do they expand monstrously, turning girls into incredibly sexy she-demons with 56HH chests that suck the life - note, that's "life", clever metaphor there - out of the lead male characters? Plus, everyone carries mobile 'phones in this version." When asked about the eccentric spelling of the title, Marcus replies: "It's deliberate. It says everything about the gap between the so-called establishment and today's urban, hypertext-age kids. Besides, this show's mainly aimed at Chav-scum. And you know what they're like with spelling."
8. "Och!" to Word
A one-off Christmas ghost story in which a dour Scotsman refuses to use any software provided by Microsoft, on the grounds that "when I were a bairn, we used the Apple Mac of the Clan MacApple". In the haunting conclusion, Word comes to eat out his heart, as it does to us all. David Tennant provides a near-perfect rendition of the young John Laurie, whose life inevitably ends in an old empty barn. 2-1 says it'll have at least one member of The League of Gentlemen in it, and that it'll be followed on BBC4 by a documentary in which Kim Newman gets the author's history completely wrong.
9. Two-Ho Cord
The American production company refuses to reveal what this project will entail, although it's known to be a game show, and insiders believe it involves a pair of prostitutes and a piece of string.
10. Wot Roc? Oh!
Following the Chibnall-awful remake of Clash of the Titans, the embarrassing skeleton-fight in the aforementioned Merlin, and every half-arsed CGI Doctor Who monster of recent years, the modern world decides to piss on Ray Harryhausen's face one last time by remaking Seventh Voyage of Sinbad in the style of Hole in the Wall and/or that thing with Richard Hammond nobody watches. Contestants make their way across a landscape of hilarious obstacles, while avoiding the ever-present threats of falling in some water or being ripped to mince by a giant two-headed bird. The celebrity version might actually be entertaining.
11. O, Trod Chow
When dealing with any Doctor Who spin-off, the BBC's biggest problem is that it doesn't own the Daleks. The solution? Bring back the Trods, those suspiciously Dalek-like machine-creatures that turned up in the late-'60s TV Comic Doctor Who strip when they couldn't afford the Daleks. And what better way to introduce them to the twenty-first century than their own cookery show? Script ediotr Gareth Roberts tells the press: "I've been 'ironically' ripping off ideas from TV Comic for years, as a way of juxtaposing the optimistic future of the 1960s with a modern age in which people will swallow any old shit if it's got a CGI wasp in it. So as you can imagine, I find this weirdly hilarious!" For his brave stand in pretending that recycled comic-book arse is in some way creative, Roberts is later hailed as "the new Lichtenstein".
12. "Woot" Chord
Oh, you know. The one that kicks in two-thirds of the way through the full version of the original Doctor Who theme. What, you think the "woot" chord doesn't at least deserve a BBC4 documentary of its own? Then the ghost of Delia Derbyshire spits on you. (No, all right, it doesn't. Her ghost is nice. But my ghost won't be, I'm telling you that right now.)
13. Whor'd Coot
"Hey. You wanna sleep with my sister? Yeah, she's a Jacondan bird-person, like in 'Twin Dilemma'. Yeah, she's of the genus Fulica. What, you wanna get technical now? Huh? Huh?"
14. Hoot Crowd
Like an audience of African football fans with vuvuzelas, but more Silurian-y. Yeah, you're right, this whole concept is clearly winding down.
15. Octo Dr. Who
The BBC brings together all eight surviving Doctor Who actors, in a desperate effort to prove that Matt Smith isn't the worst one ever. This backfires when it turns out that even Colin Baker has some kind of soul.
Thursday, November 25, 2010
Saturday, June 26, 2010
The Squee Doctors
S'okay, I didn't actually bother watching the second half. So this will be largely hypothetical. However...
...five days ago, I was standing in front of the window of the local newsagent's. There was a poster advertising "Archaeological Adventures: Dinosaurs" (I've mentioned this on Twitter, but if you don't already know, then it's the perfect thing for an intelligent child or autistic adult who wants to whittle while watching an unfulfilling World Cup match or BBC drama), and also a poster advertising Doctor Who stickers. I ignored the latter, because I'm really not joking when I say that I can't even look at the gormless foetus-face of Matt Smith without wanting to slap it. That thing with Van Gogh looked like the most interesting episode this year, but as soon as he did the "could you breathe a little more quietly?" schtick in the trailer, I literally made an effort to be out on Saturday.
(Sidestep One. ITV did a remake of The Prisoner which, by all precedent and reason, should've been unbearable. It was quite good. Jesus! ITV is doing a "cult" reboot, but uses proper actors - Ian McKellen and Ruth Wilson, the latter of whom steals the "Most Attractive Woman in the UK Who Looks Like a Fish" crown from Miranda Sawyer - while Doctor Who does a piss-poor Harry Potter impression with a footballer and a blow-up doll? Gutted.)
So I'm in front of the window. And then a little girl, of the kind that Moffat pretends to like when he's stuck in a narrative corner, pulled her mum up to the glass and pointed at the poster.
'I saw that Doctor Who on Shannon's widescreen!' she said. 'It was scary. The Girl One had to run loads...'
(Sidestep Two. To anyone who's read my Twitter-log: yes, that's why I've started using the phrase "the Girl One".)
'...but the Boy One had to save... something.'
The narrative slip is, of course, acceptable from a seven-year-old. However: the Boy One? And, yes, I did indeed turn eyes-left to make sure she was pointing at the photo of Matt Smith. Then I turned eyes-right, sharpish, beacuse I was scared of looking like a paedophile.
The Boy One?
About a week and a half ago, Stephen Fry (defined by a sometimes-wise critic as "a stupid person's idea of what a clever person is like") attracted venom by critising Doctor Who in the era of Steven Moffat (defined by me as "oh, what a complete arse"). Yet in this epic cage-fighting battle between drivelling self-involved pretend-intellectuals, the most important point seemed to be missed. Fry talked about programmes "like" Merlin and Doctor Who.
If you can use those two titles in the same sentence, then something's gone terribly wrong.
But then, this is what I've been saying for a loooooong time: Moffat stated that he didn't want to be remembered as "the man who killed Doctor Who", and yet he already did kill it. He killed it in "The Girl in the Fireplace", a rather good episode if you concentrate on what the author genuinely likes - robots and temporal screwing-around - but an abysmal and emotionally-extorting one when you understand that he's trying to redefine the Doctor as a Sexy Immortal and himself as the Sexy Immortal's Agent. I wasn't kidding when I said the the series in 2010 is competing with Twilight, y'know. Doctor Who at its best has been awkward, experimental, and unpredictable. Moffat's version, as laid out in "Silence in the Library", is slick, conservative, and entirely founded on things that have been proven to work. In short... it's like Merlin. Only even stupider.
Here's the grand irony, though -
(Sidestep Three. How many times have I used the phrase "here's the grand irony"?)
- by attempting to squee-up the Doctor, Moffat has destroyed him as a meaningful figure. In "Forest of the Dead" (the Doctor defeats the shadow-nasties by saying "do you know who I am?", thus removing any possible dramatic tension and making him look like the petulant celebrity he's bltantly becoming) and "The Pandorica Opens" (the monsters have spent ages planning this, yet a version of the Doctor of whom even I wouldn't be scared gives himself breathing-space by telling them that he made their mums wee themselves), we're shown a Doctor who can do anything he likes because he's... well... famous. He never proves he's clever, or brave, or moral, or indeed, anything at all. We're just told that he always wins, and we're expected to swallow it without question. His fandom-strength makes him the weakest hero in history.
That's what I meant by "irony": Moffat tries to make the Doctor a fetish-object, because that's how we think of him as long-term Doctor Who viewers, and because we're the ones to whom he's pandering. (Well, not me. But you know what I mean.) What the author's actually doing is ensuring the Doctor's worthlessness. If you make someone all-powerful, then power's worth nothing at all, especially if you do it just to reinforce fan-opinion of the safe and clean-cut Boy One.
And of course, the really horrible thing is that this might - I stress "might" - be my fault. Over the last week, I've been informed by numerous people that "The Pandorica Opens" was a lot like "Alien Bodies". This never occurred to me while watching it, but then, I never saw the link between "Honey to the B" and "Never Ever". However -
(Sidestep Four. For the sake of those unfamiliar with late-'90s British pop music: "Honey to the B" was an entirely negligible single by Billie, AKA Billie Piper, engineered as a clone of the glorious "Never Ever" by All Saints. Unfortunately for the future Surprisingly Good Companion, it was such an artless, lumpen, misshapen parody that nobody who actually liked "Never Even" even realised it was supposed to sound like that. It went Top Ten in the UK charts, but at that point, B*Witched would've got to number one by breaking wind into a microphone for three minutes. I'm stating all this from memory, so the details may be faulty.)
- I don't think it's true. At least, not in the way they meant: technically, "Pandorica" is a lot closer to "Dimensions in Time" than "Alien Bodies". No, screw technically, "Pandorica" is like "Dimenions in Time". Only on a big budget. And without Big Ron.
Still... I remember what Moffat said he liked about "Alien Bodies". He specifically drew attention to the end of Chapter Five, claiming that it was the best cliffhanger he'd ever read. Since he was still capable of wit in those days, I remember the exact way he put it: "And that includes 'Mr Holmes, it was the footprint of a gigantic hound'."
Now, that's a compliment and a half, and I felt duly chuffed. Yet I can't help wondering about the consequences. In "Alien Bodies" (and on the off-chance that anyone reading this doesn't know what happens in it, I'll be vague regarding the end of Chapter Five), the Doctor becomes the subject of Doctor Who rather than its medium. I wrote it that way for a specific reason: a lot of very silly people, mentioning no Jon Blums, were trying to "redefine" the Doctor's past after the "half-human on my mother's side" blather of the TV movie. Like the editor of the books at that stage, I didn't give a rat's minge about his past, and thus wrote something about the future. Not just his future, either.
But in doing that, I... sort of... turned the Doctor into a fetish object. Literally, in fact, according the the dictionary definition of "fetish".
And Moffat read it. And liked the end of Chapter Five.
And now he runs a version of the series in which the Doctor is a living fetish object.
Even though it completely destroys the series' (pardon me) Prime Directive, by making it about an all-powerful all-male hero-figure rather than a traveller who's just interested in things.
And to an extent, I admit it: "Alien Bodies" was stupidly popular because it made the Doctor the subject rather than the medium.
Especially because of the end of Chapter Five.
And Moffat knew that.
And his Prime Directive is to be liked.
And the crucial thing to realise about the "Pandorica" arse-fest isn't the plot (if you've found one), but that it puts the Doctor at the very centre of the universe: there's a box, and you're primed to think that he's going to be in it, but it's actually a trap so that he will be in it. It's pitched not as a prison for the Doctor as a character, but for the Doctor as an icon of modern-day telly.
So I find myself asking. Did Moffat get that from me? Despite what's been said elsewhere, "Pandorica" isn't structurally similar to "Alien Bodies" at all. Yet his vision seems... uncomfortably close, if for all the wrong reasons. Oh, you know: like Neil Gaimain ripping off Alan Moore, then wearing sunglasses and pretending to be a rock star in LA.
This is the question that's bothering me. If you like the eejit but don't like me, then please feel free to say no, I'd honestly like the reassurance. If the reverse, then please lie and say no anyway.
Otherwise, I'm going to apologise, just on the off-chance that I'm right. Doctor Who is now more awful than at any point in its prior history, not because the chief-writer-stroke-producer is vastly more inept than any of his predecessors (he clearly isn't), but because he's vastly more cynical. I, for one, would rather have a bad programme that's attempting something - anything - than a programme designed specifically for BAFTA judges and fans of superhero movies [see previous blog-entries]. And if there's even a 1% chance that I laid 1% of the groundwork for this, then I'm so, so sorry.
Also, "Alien Bodies" isn't even that good. Well, the prologue's good. I'm proud of the prologue. Could do Chapter Five about eight times better these days, though.
...five days ago, I was standing in front of the window of the local newsagent's. There was a poster advertising "Archaeological Adventures: Dinosaurs" (I've mentioned this on Twitter, but if you don't already know, then it's the perfect thing for an intelligent child or autistic adult who wants to whittle while watching an unfulfilling World Cup match or BBC drama), and also a poster advertising Doctor Who stickers. I ignored the latter, because I'm really not joking when I say that I can't even look at the gormless foetus-face of Matt Smith without wanting to slap it. That thing with Van Gogh looked like the most interesting episode this year, but as soon as he did the "could you breathe a little more quietly?" schtick in the trailer, I literally made an effort to be out on Saturday.
(Sidestep One. ITV did a remake of The Prisoner which, by all precedent and reason, should've been unbearable. It was quite good. Jesus! ITV is doing a "cult" reboot, but uses proper actors - Ian McKellen and Ruth Wilson, the latter of whom steals the "Most Attractive Woman in the UK Who Looks Like a Fish" crown from Miranda Sawyer - while Doctor Who does a piss-poor Harry Potter impression with a footballer and a blow-up doll? Gutted.)
So I'm in front of the window. And then a little girl, of the kind that Moffat pretends to like when he's stuck in a narrative corner, pulled her mum up to the glass and pointed at the poster.
'I saw that Doctor Who on Shannon's widescreen!' she said. 'It was scary. The Girl One had to run loads...'
(Sidestep Two. To anyone who's read my Twitter-log: yes, that's why I've started using the phrase "the Girl One".)
'...but the Boy One had to save... something.'
The narrative slip is, of course, acceptable from a seven-year-old. However: the Boy One? And, yes, I did indeed turn eyes-left to make sure she was pointing at the photo of Matt Smith. Then I turned eyes-right, sharpish, beacuse I was scared of looking like a paedophile.
The Boy One?
About a week and a half ago, Stephen Fry (defined by a sometimes-wise critic as "a stupid person's idea of what a clever person is like") attracted venom by critising Doctor Who in the era of Steven Moffat (defined by me as "oh, what a complete arse"). Yet in this epic cage-fighting battle between drivelling self-involved pretend-intellectuals, the most important point seemed to be missed. Fry talked about programmes "like" Merlin and Doctor Who.
If you can use those two titles in the same sentence, then something's gone terribly wrong.
But then, this is what I've been saying for a loooooong time: Moffat stated that he didn't want to be remembered as "the man who killed Doctor Who", and yet he already did kill it. He killed it in "The Girl in the Fireplace", a rather good episode if you concentrate on what the author genuinely likes - robots and temporal screwing-around - but an abysmal and emotionally-extorting one when you understand that he's trying to redefine the Doctor as a Sexy Immortal and himself as the Sexy Immortal's Agent. I wasn't kidding when I said the the series in 2010 is competing with Twilight, y'know. Doctor Who at its best has been awkward, experimental, and unpredictable. Moffat's version, as laid out in "Silence in the Library", is slick, conservative, and entirely founded on things that have been proven to work. In short... it's like Merlin. Only even stupider.
Here's the grand irony, though -
(Sidestep Three. How many times have I used the phrase "here's the grand irony"?)
- by attempting to squee-up the Doctor, Moffat has destroyed him as a meaningful figure. In "Forest of the Dead" (the Doctor defeats the shadow-nasties by saying "do you know who I am?", thus removing any possible dramatic tension and making him look like the petulant celebrity he's bltantly becoming) and "The Pandorica Opens" (the monsters have spent ages planning this, yet a version of the Doctor of whom even I wouldn't be scared gives himself breathing-space by telling them that he made their mums wee themselves), we're shown a Doctor who can do anything he likes because he's... well... famous. He never proves he's clever, or brave, or moral, or indeed, anything at all. We're just told that he always wins, and we're expected to swallow it without question. His fandom-strength makes him the weakest hero in history.
That's what I meant by "irony": Moffat tries to make the Doctor a fetish-object, because that's how we think of him as long-term Doctor Who viewers, and because we're the ones to whom he's pandering. (Well, not me. But you know what I mean.) What the author's actually doing is ensuring the Doctor's worthlessness. If you make someone all-powerful, then power's worth nothing at all, especially if you do it just to reinforce fan-opinion of the safe and clean-cut Boy One.
And of course, the really horrible thing is that this might - I stress "might" - be my fault. Over the last week, I've been informed by numerous people that "The Pandorica Opens" was a lot like "Alien Bodies". This never occurred to me while watching it, but then, I never saw the link between "Honey to the B" and "Never Ever". However -
(Sidestep Four. For the sake of those unfamiliar with late-'90s British pop music: "Honey to the B" was an entirely negligible single by Billie, AKA Billie Piper, engineered as a clone of the glorious "Never Ever" by All Saints. Unfortunately for the future Surprisingly Good Companion, it was such an artless, lumpen, misshapen parody that nobody who actually liked "Never Even" even realised it was supposed to sound like that. It went Top Ten in the UK charts, but at that point, B*Witched would've got to number one by breaking wind into a microphone for three minutes. I'm stating all this from memory, so the details may be faulty.)
- I don't think it's true. At least, not in the way they meant: technically, "Pandorica" is a lot closer to "Dimensions in Time" than "Alien Bodies". No, screw technically, "Pandorica" is like "Dimenions in Time". Only on a big budget. And without Big Ron.
Still... I remember what Moffat said he liked about "Alien Bodies". He specifically drew attention to the end of Chapter Five, claiming that it was the best cliffhanger he'd ever read. Since he was still capable of wit in those days, I remember the exact way he put it: "And that includes 'Mr Holmes, it was the footprint of a gigantic hound'."
Now, that's a compliment and a half, and I felt duly chuffed. Yet I can't help wondering about the consequences. In "Alien Bodies" (and on the off-chance that anyone reading this doesn't know what happens in it, I'll be vague regarding the end of Chapter Five), the Doctor becomes the subject of Doctor Who rather than its medium. I wrote it that way for a specific reason: a lot of very silly people, mentioning no Jon Blums, were trying to "redefine" the Doctor's past after the "half-human on my mother's side" blather of the TV movie. Like the editor of the books at that stage, I didn't give a rat's minge about his past, and thus wrote something about the future. Not just his future, either.
But in doing that, I... sort of... turned the Doctor into a fetish object. Literally, in fact, according the the dictionary definition of "fetish".
And Moffat read it. And liked the end of Chapter Five.
And now he runs a version of the series in which the Doctor is a living fetish object.
Even though it completely destroys the series' (pardon me) Prime Directive, by making it about an all-powerful all-male hero-figure rather than a traveller who's just interested in things.
And to an extent, I admit it: "Alien Bodies" was stupidly popular because it made the Doctor the subject rather than the medium.
Especially because of the end of Chapter Five.
And Moffat knew that.
And his Prime Directive is to be liked.
And the crucial thing to realise about the "Pandorica" arse-fest isn't the plot (if you've found one), but that it puts the Doctor at the very centre of the universe: there's a box, and you're primed to think that he's going to be in it, but it's actually a trap so that he will be in it. It's pitched not as a prison for the Doctor as a character, but for the Doctor as an icon of modern-day telly.
So I find myself asking. Did Moffat get that from me? Despite what's been said elsewhere, "Pandorica" isn't structurally similar to "Alien Bodies" at all. Yet his vision seems... uncomfortably close, if for all the wrong reasons. Oh, you know: like Neil Gaimain ripping off Alan Moore, then wearing sunglasses and pretending to be a rock star in LA.
This is the question that's bothering me. If you like the eejit but don't like me, then please feel free to say no, I'd honestly like the reassurance. If the reverse, then please lie and say no anyway.
Otherwise, I'm going to apologise, just on the off-chance that I'm right. Doctor Who is now more awful than at any point in its prior history, not because the chief-writer-stroke-producer is vastly more inept than any of his predecessors (he clearly isn't), but because he's vastly more cynical. I, for one, would rather have a bad programme that's attempting something - anything - than a programme designed specifically for BAFTA judges and fans of superhero movies [see previous blog-entries]. And if there's even a 1% chance that I laid 1% of the groundwork for this, then I'm so, so sorry.
Also, "Alien Bodies" isn't even that good. Well, the prologue's good. I'm proud of the prologue. Could do Chapter Five about eight times better these days, though.
Monday, June 14, 2010
Now I Can Sleep Again
Twitter's #lesserdoctorwho strand has spent the last few weeks speculating on the stories that were changed at the last minute, when the producers decided that they weren't quite exciting enough for television. But this newly-leaked episode list reveals the whole truth about Doctor Who at its most repressed. Here are the titles of all the first drafts, before the monsters, cliffhangers, and random acts of mild fantasy violence were added...
"An Unearthly Chive", "The Ordinary and Nearby Things in Serbo-Croat", "The Hegde of Destruction", "Volkswagen Polo", "The Keith of Marinus", "The ASBOs", "The Censored Rites", "The Rain of Telford", "Planet of Gnats", "The Harlech Invasion of Earth", "The Cress Queue", "The Mormons", "The Pleb Planet", "The Fourth Crusade" (ooh, subtle), "The Spaced Museum" (involves Simon Pegg being stuffed and put in a cabinet), "The Kiss-Chase", "The Time Mid-Fielder", "Galaxy Cookie Crumble", "Mission to My Uncle's", "The Urban Myth Makers", "The Daleks' Mastercard", "The Moussaka", "The Arse", "The Comestible Toymaker", "The Bunfighters", "The Chaffinches", "The Warm Machines", "The Snugglers", "The Clenched Planet", "Power of the Horlicks", "The High Pandas", "Underwater Tennis", "The Spoonface", "The Macrame Terror", "The Chinless Ones", "Weevil of the Daleks", "Room of the Cybermen", "The Easily-Meltable Snowmen", "The Nice Warriors", "Enema of the World", "The Web of Ears", "Curry from the Deep", "The Wheel in Spain", "The Dick-and-Dominators", "The Mind Rabbi", "The Insertion", "The Scrotums", "The Smell of Meths", "The Space Pierrots", "The Fwoar Games", "Nobhead from Space", "Doctor Who and the Silly Urinals", "The Ambassadors are Deaf", "Infirm... Oh", "Terror of Joe Orton", "The Milder Evil", "The Corrs of Axos", "Colostomy in Space", "The Lehmans", "Day of the Dahl Ex" (it's about Stan Collymore), "The Curse of Pele's Dong" (you know his personal problems), "The Sea Brevilles", "The Mucus", "The Tie Monster", "The Knee Doctors", "Bar-Nibbles and Monsters", "Jeux Sans Frontieres in Space", "Gannet of the Daleks", "The Green Douche", "The Time Woggler", "Invasion of the Dinah Shores", "Bollocks to the Daleks", "The Monstrous Pele's Dong" (after the treatment), "Planet of Spyware", "Rowboat", "The Parking Space", "The Sultana Experiment", "Genitals of the Daleks", "Revenge of the Sideburn Men", "Terrier of the Zygons", "Planet of Eejits", "Invalids of Mars", "The Adenoid Invasion", "The Brain of Mo Mowlam" (now even I've hit my good taste barrier), "The Spuds of Doom", "The False Nose of Mandragora", "The Thing That Dangles from the Back of the Cat's Throat and That the Mouse Uses as a Punchbag in 'Tom and Jerry' Cartoons of Fear", "The Shit Assassin", "The Face of Weebles", "The Roberts of Death", "The Nipples of Weng Chiang", "The Horror of Gla... Oh, Wait, Paul Magrs Has Already Done It", "The Wish-It-Had-Stayed-Invisible Enemy", "Imagining a Fondle", "The Sunbed Makers", "Underpants", "The Invasion of Rosemary and Thyme", "The Reebok Operation", "The Pyrex Planet", "The Scones of Blood", "The Handjobs of Tara", "The Power of Krill", "The Armageddon Factsheet", "Density of the Daleks", "Settee of Death", "Retcher from the Pit", "The Nightmare of Ewoks", "The Horns of Michael Nyman", "The Letcher Hive", "Dead Loss", "Full English Breakfast", "State of Decaf", "Warriors' Gateaux", "The Rob Green of Traken", "Legopolis", "Cats Revolt Her", "Four to Dounreay", "Kinda" (pronounced the other way), "The Vivisection" (my brother-in-law actually thought it was called that), "Bloke Orchid", "Earthchops", "Cancelled Due to Volcanic Ash in the Eighteenth Century", "Arc of Banality", "Cowdance", "Mawdryn Unplugged", "Dermititus", "Hen-Night in Kent", "The King's Detox", "The Three Doctors, a Dodgy Impression, and a Waxwork of Tom Baker", "Warriors on the Cheap" (trad), "The Awankening", the next one's too rude to print, "Rusty Ret-Con of the Daleks", "Planet of Ire", "Chavs of Androzani", "The Twin Dialysis", "Tacky Old Cybermen", "Vengaboys on Varos", "Skidmark of the Rani", "The Too-Little-Too-Late Doctors", "It Doesn't Actually Get Any Lesser Than This", "Revelation of the Diabetics", "Thighs of a Time Lord", "Time and Jim Varney", "Paradise Towels", "Delta and John Barrowman", "Dog on Fire", "Remembrance of the Dulux", "The Sloppy Mess Patrol", "Sylvia's Nemesis", "The Greatest Blow in the Galaxy" (wrong in at least two ways), "Cattle Field", "'Oh F***, It's Fenric'", "Goat Light", "Some Trifle".
That is all.
"An Unearthly Chive", "The Ordinary and Nearby Things in Serbo-Croat", "The Hegde of Destruction", "Volkswagen Polo", "The Keith of Marinus", "The ASBOs", "The Censored Rites", "The Rain of Telford", "Planet of Gnats", "The Harlech Invasion of Earth", "The Cress Queue", "The Mormons", "The Pleb Planet", "The Fourth Crusade" (ooh, subtle), "The Spaced Museum" (involves Simon Pegg being stuffed and put in a cabinet), "The Kiss-Chase", "The Time Mid-Fielder", "Galaxy Cookie Crumble", "Mission to My Uncle's", "The Urban Myth Makers", "The Daleks' Mastercard", "The Moussaka", "The Arse", "The Comestible Toymaker", "The Bunfighters", "The Chaffinches", "The Warm Machines", "The Snugglers", "The Clenched Planet", "Power of the Horlicks", "The High Pandas", "Underwater Tennis", "The Spoonface", "The Macrame Terror", "The Chinless Ones", "Weevil of the Daleks", "Room of the Cybermen", "The Easily-Meltable Snowmen", "The Nice Warriors", "Enema of the World", "The Web of Ears", "Curry from the Deep", "The Wheel in Spain", "The Dick-and-Dominators", "The Mind Rabbi", "The Insertion", "The Scrotums", "The Smell of Meths", "The Space Pierrots", "The Fwoar Games", "Nobhead from Space", "Doctor Who and the Silly Urinals", "The Ambassadors are Deaf", "Infirm... Oh", "Terror of Joe Orton", "The Milder Evil", "The Corrs of Axos", "Colostomy in Space", "The Lehmans", "Day of the Dahl Ex" (it's about Stan Collymore), "The Curse of Pele's Dong" (you know his personal problems), "The Sea Brevilles", "The Mucus", "The Tie Monster", "The Knee Doctors", "Bar-Nibbles and Monsters", "Jeux Sans Frontieres in Space", "Gannet of the Daleks", "The Green Douche", "The Time Woggler", "Invasion of the Dinah Shores", "Bollocks to the Daleks", "The Monstrous Pele's Dong" (after the treatment), "Planet of Spyware", "Rowboat", "The Parking Space", "The Sultana Experiment", "Genitals of the Daleks", "Revenge of the Sideburn Men", "Terrier of the Zygons", "Planet of Eejits", "Invalids of Mars", "The Adenoid Invasion", "The Brain of Mo Mowlam" (now even I've hit my good taste barrier), "The Spuds of Doom", "The False Nose of Mandragora", "The Thing That Dangles from the Back of the Cat's Throat and That the Mouse Uses as a Punchbag in 'Tom and Jerry' Cartoons of Fear", "The Shit Assassin", "The Face of Weebles", "The Roberts of Death", "The Nipples of Weng Chiang", "The Horror of Gla... Oh, Wait, Paul Magrs Has Already Done It", "The Wish-It-Had-Stayed-Invisible Enemy", "Imagining a Fondle", "The Sunbed Makers", "Underpants", "The Invasion of Rosemary and Thyme", "The Reebok Operation", "The Pyrex Planet", "The Scones of Blood", "The Handjobs of Tara", "The Power of Krill", "The Armageddon Factsheet", "Density of the Daleks", "Settee of Death", "Retcher from the Pit", "The Nightmare of Ewoks", "The Horns of Michael Nyman", "The Letcher Hive", "Dead Loss", "Full English Breakfast", "State of Decaf", "Warriors' Gateaux", "The Rob Green of Traken", "Legopolis", "Cats Revolt Her", "Four to Dounreay", "Kinda" (pronounced the other way), "The Vivisection" (my brother-in-law actually thought it was called that), "Bloke Orchid", "Earthchops", "Cancelled Due to Volcanic Ash in the Eighteenth Century", "Arc of Banality", "Cowdance", "Mawdryn Unplugged", "Dermititus", "Hen-Night in Kent", "The King's Detox", "The Three Doctors, a Dodgy Impression, and a Waxwork of Tom Baker", "Warriors on the Cheap" (trad), "The Awankening", the next one's too rude to print, "Rusty Ret-Con of the Daleks", "Planet of Ire", "Chavs of Androzani", "The Twin Dialysis", "Tacky Old Cybermen", "Vengaboys on Varos", "Skidmark of the Rani", "The Too-Little-Too-Late Doctors", "It Doesn't Actually Get Any Lesser Than This", "Revelation of the Diabetics", "Thighs of a Time Lord", "Time and Jim Varney", "Paradise Towels", "Delta and John Barrowman", "Dog on Fire", "Remembrance of the Dulux", "The Sloppy Mess Patrol", "Sylvia's Nemesis", "The Greatest Blow in the Galaxy" (wrong in at least two ways), "Cattle Field", "'Oh F***, It's Fenric'", "Goat Light", "Some Trifle".
That is all.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
In-Between Days
"We will pan it, we will scan it / We will render it byte by byte / We will digitise, mass-produce and sterilise / We will turn it to shite, shite, shite." - Song of the Computer-Generated Mice on the Mouse Organ.
I think you should all know that I've finally worked out why I'm so at odds with the rest of modern culture. Or at least, why I don't seem to be down wit' da hip kids, and why I don't see Today's Stuff - particularly Today's Doctor Who Stuff - in quite the same way as other people in my own mildly dysfunctional peer group. Actually, working it out was quite easy: I just watched Spider-Man 3 on Channel 5.
Now, I loathe superhero movies. To be honest, I loathe anything CGI-driven that's indistinguishable from its X-Box tie-in. I loathe the artless techno-pettiness which believes the latest piece of industrial code from James Cameron or Peter Jackson to somehow qualify as cinema, even though the directors can't tell graphic realism from characterisation or a Tomb Raider end-of-level monster from a proper Balrog. But I double-loathe superhero movies, with extra bogies on. Not just because they're wholly founded on their "roll up, roll up, and see what we can make a digitally-generated humanoid do this year" faux-showmanship, but because they're so sodding banal. I crept into the cinema during the first Spider-Man in 2002 (I was leaving the cineplex after watching something else, there was no guard in the passage between screens, and the film was just starting… well, I wasn't going to pay), and ended up sitting through two hours of constipated narrative before a final showdown that looked for all the world like a massively overbudgeted episode of Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers. The fact that the jizz-awful Green Goblin mask was designed by the same man who wrangled everything from Zygon nodules to the Bespoke Time Lord Collar just made the experience more painful.
But I watched Spider-Man 3 on its terrestrial premiere, simply because… no, I don't mind admitting it. I used to read the comics when I was fourteen, and I'd gathered that this was the film in which Movie Spider-Man met Movie Venom. And in a moment of High Geekery, I wanted to see how the epic saga I'd read as a young 'un - a half-decade story-arc in which Spider-Man acquired a telepathic bodysuit from a bio-tech-happy uber-civilisation, then ditched it when he figured out that it was a parasite rather than a symbiote, then watched as it transmogrified its next victim into his Evil Twin - would be squeezed into a two-hour movie. In fact, the script managed this quite simply: it turned the alien git-costume into a meteorite full of goo, which conveniently happened to crash into a field right next to Peter Parker. The ineptitude of this was probably inevitable, but tragically I kept watching, and it's what else I learned from the movie that's been troubling me.
In Spider-Man 3, and all its bastard kin, there's a simple pattern. There are Big Events. You can tell the Big Events, because they're denoted by computer-generated action sequences. In this case, these include a skyscraper-chase between Spidey and Green Goblin Junior, a duke-out between Spidey and the Sandman (i.e. a man made of sand, because the Marvel universe is terribly literal), a "symbolic" passing-on of the meteor parasite from Spidey to Venom… punctuated, and I really do mean punctuated, by in-between scenes.
It's the in-between scenes which interest me. Nobody involved with the film seems in any doubt that the Big Events are the point of the exercise, yet spacing these out are the "slow" moments in which - ooh, let's say - Peter Parker talks to his Aunt May about something sentimental that no-one will ever remember, or goes through Relationship Problems with Mary-Jane that look exactly like the Relationship Problems you might get in an episode of Dawson's Creek, or goes all broody and starts to ask himself what he's doing with his life. Scenes which don't exist because any viewer might be capable of caring, but which instead act as a sort of Pavlovian buffer. I find myself remembering the extended schedules in early '70s porn cinemas, when audiences were required to sit through several hours of slightly pervy "documentaries" before the main feature, partly because it allowed the cinema-owners to appear legitimate and partly to make sure the punters were salivating by the time they got to see the first nipple.
The news that FX-based movies are stuffed with filler comes as no surprise, natch. Yet without understanding the way this kind of storytelling works, the modern form of Doctor Who makes absolutely no sense. I've been hugely critical of the last few years' worth of That Series I Grew Up With, but because I deliberately haven't been going to see arsecock like Fantastic Four 2: Rise of the Silver Surfer (which I tried to watch on Channel 4 two weeks ago, just to make sure I wasn't imagining things… no, I obviously wasn't), I didn't realise why I seemed to be witnessing a different programme to an awful lot of other viewers. Simply, modern Doctor Who is made for an audience weened on superhero movies. That's not just the… excuse me… core demographic, it's what the programme is fundamentally aiming for. Over the last few years, whenever people I know have engaged each other in protracted conversations about the quality of the effects work on Dr Octopus' robot arms, I've had a tendency to leave the room. If I'd stayed, I might have clicked sooner.
My problem is that I don't believe in in-betweens. The very idea seems anathema to what might be called Proper Drama, but I'll stick close to home, and say that no Doctor Who story I ever considered half-decent was about the Big Event: the in-between moments were the story, not a way of marking time between special effects. The monster at the end of episode two isn't the main attraction of "The Caves of Androzani". Quite the reverse. Likewise, neither the Drashigs nor (most pertinently) the Top of the Pops-style psychedelia-gun in episode one are the reason "Carnival of Monsters" exists. And the giant clam certainly isn't the star of "Genesis of the Daleks", although now I've said that, I'm starting to wish that it were. By contrast, there's nothing really in "The Lazarus Experiment" except the ridiculous Mill-spawn (an apt example, given that Russell T. Davies explicitly described the story as being inspired by Marvel Comics), and BBC Wales is currently trying to sell us Matt Smith with the Sam Raimi-style shot of the Doctor dangling from a flying TARDIS. Rather than, for example, by getting him to do any acting. Let's not deny it, there were many, many, many filler scenes in the programme of old. But that's because it was made on the fly, on a minimal budget, under extreme stress. Whereas the modern programme has an insultingly large slice of the License Fee at its disposal, yet treats non-FX, non-stunt-based sequences as if they're dramatic pauses. Or, up until now, as excuses for David Tennant to do his "sad" face and make everyone go "awww, look, he's tortured".
You may, of course, recall that I keep insisting on seeing Doctor Who as a work of all-round BBC goodness rather than a "cult" sci-fi series. So I'll just point out that I, Claudius (yes, it is the best drama serial ever made, shut up) is nothing but in-between moments. In-between moments are good, if they're done properly. They're human. They give meaning to the parts where monsters or armies of legionnaires turn up, and should be treated as an art in themselves. Whereas we now have a culture which sees dialogue and characterisation as bubblewrap, except without the satisfaction of being able to pop the bubbles. Oh, and another telltale point: note that the Doctor is now being pitched to us with almost-macho displays of his power and invincibility ('there's one thing you never, ever put in a trap… me!!!' being both the latest and the stupidest), diluted forms of the "I'll be back" sloganeering you'd expect from America action heroes. When you can imagine Clint Eastwood delivering the Doctor's lines, but not Tom Baker, something's definitely gone awry. Actually, try imagining this kind of waffle being recited over a soundtrack by Dudley Simpson rather than Murray (spit) Gold, and it seems even dafter.
I could keep listing examples of the way this tendency has skew-wiffed recent Doctor Who, and I'm sure you'll be able to think of your own. But it's me, and I'm planning my exit strategy here, so I'll go for the big one. Yeah, I'm a-heading back to "Blink".
Now, here's the thing. When "Blink" was first broadcast, I got bored within the first twenty minutes, and assumed (as most of us do, in these "is it just me?" situations) that everyone else would feel the same way. You could've knocked me down with a Krolltacle when it was deemed to be the paragon of all things shiny, and for the last few years, I've been rather puzzled by the success of what seems to me like a rather dribbly script. After Spider-Man 3, however, I suddenly see it. What do people remember about "Blink"? The scary bits with the Weeping Angels, and the sexy bits with David Tennant talking to you - yes, you, straight female or gay male fan-person - out of a TV screen. Between those Big Events…?
Nobody much cares about those bits, and there's no reason that anybody really should. Sally's future-boyfriend (a geek called Lawrence, and I'm still not sure whether that was Moffat's idea of a joke) is introduced to us when he walks naked into a kitchen in front of the female lead and does the usual "ooh, hang on, am I naked?" schtick that sitcom writers use as filler when they don't have any better ways of getting the 18-30 demographic to keep watching. His nerdy personality is further underlined with the standard "all your friends are on the internet" bumf that even EastEnders had turned into cliché by 2007, while Sally spends much of the episode delivering the kind of dialogue that ageing heterosexual authors would like to imagine dynamic twentysomething women delivering in the real world, at least as long as they can imagine her saying "oh, yes, you big, rugged man who works in the media, yes, yes, yes" afterwards. Ah, but wait! This is supposed to be a scary story, yet the Weeping Angels don't actually do anything bad to anybody. So let's contrive a wholly negligible scene in which the Token Black Character snuffs it on his deathbed, just so Sally can say 'people have died', even though he's apparently had a pretty good life and we've spent more time watching him die as an old man than we spent getting to know him as a young one. Whoo, pathos.
This is terrible writing, and terrible characterisation. If you're a fan of "Blink", though, then… what do you remember? Do you remember anything at all about these puppet-people? Puppet-people on more than one level, in this case, since the plot of the episode is pretty much a denial of free will in the Doctor Who universe. Or do you just remember the creepy statues and the Easter Eggs? Plus some arse about timey-wimey paradoxes that the author's been constantly recycling since the 1990s, although that goes without saying in a Moffat script. (Jesus! I used to edit a thing called "Faction Paradox", but even I didn't resort to the old "we've seen evidence of this in the future, so it must be destined to happen" routine. Even once. Let alone five times. Yes, five! Count 'em.)
So, to summarise. I care about the in-between bits, because that's what I think "drama" is. The monsters are the moment of shock, they're not the story. Then again… if anything, does this just prove that I shouldn't be here at all? Interviews have cited Moffat as saying that he doesn't want to be remembered as the man who broke Doctor Who, but some of us would argue that he already did break it, even if we didn't notice it at the time. The moment of doom was "The Girl in the Fireplace", a story which - while quite good in itself, at least when the author's concentrating on robots, time-travel, and other things he pretends not to care about when there are women looking - changed our expectations of what the series is meant to be by playing to much the same audience as Twilight. From that point on, the Doctor was damned to a life of fetishism and well-groomed heroics. From that point on, he had to be young, cute, athletic, and godlike. Oh, and tragic. However unconvincing or repetitive the tragedy may be, he positively has to be tragic.
Looking at the revised, superhero-friendly version we've got in 2010, I find myself remembering two things about Moffat that I've previously suppressed. One is the conversation I had with him in late 2005, just after the title of his first Tennant-age story had been announced in the press. I said to him:
'Oh, I see a pattern forming here. First "The Empty Child", now "The Girl in the Fireplace". It's -'
And before I could say any more, he snarled into my face (in a fashion which, with hindsight, more than slightly resembled Rik in The Young Ones): 'Oh, what? Because they've both got the word "The" in the title?'
'Erm,' I said. 'Erm, no. Because they're both weird juxtapositions. You don't expect to get a child that's empty, and you don't expect to get a girl in a fireplace. It's like early surrealism. It's a bit… sort of… Magritte?'
He looked away. Stared at the pavement, as if annoyed by this outbreak of reasonable discussion. Then stomped off without answering.
But the most telling moment was this. I bought a video of The Complete Bagpuss (i.e. a video containing all thirteen episodes of Bagpuss, in case "Complete Bagpuss" sounds like one of the more obscure insults of Frank Butcher), and had it with me at the Tavern. I was showing it to a female acquaintance, when Moffat swooped past and looked down at it.
'That's just saaad,' he said.
'But… but it's Bagpuss,' said my acquaintance.
And Moffat twisted his face into a revolted sneer before leaving us.
Ergo. Having understood the nature of "state-of-the-art" narrative in the early twenty-first century, I can accept that this really is the Moffat Era, after all: an age of moments that could exist with equal comfort inside trailers or stories, movies or clips shows. But now I'm thinking of that scene from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead in which - as in Hamlet - the Prince's family ask R&G to figure out why Hamlet's so unhappy. Their conclusions: well, your dad's been unaccountably poisoned, your uncle's probably the murderer, and he's taken your throne while simultaneously marrying your mum. No, we can't imagine why you'd be unhappy. So for all those who've written badly-thought-out rants about this column over the last few years, and who genuinely can't tell the difference between "man who wants a war" and "man who's just disappointed and sarcastic", I'd like to say this…
Doctor Who taught me to be interested, xenophiliac, and prepared for strangeness of all magnitudes. Throughout its history - and this even applies to the best of the twenty-first-century episodes, before Big Russell started writing it for the BAFTA awards panel rather than intelligent children - it's been closer to Oliver Postgate than The Matrix. Yet now it's in the hands of a producer who's as arrogant as I've occasionally pretended to be and as cynical as I could never be, who deliberately overruled his own instincts and cast the silliest possible actor as the leading man, purely so he could continue his own mad campaign of pretend-populist squee. He sneers at Bagpuss, which is at least as bad as jesting at scars. Matt Smith has been given a demographically-tailored Quirky-Yet-Somehow-English costume, to make sure everyone feels comfortable accepting this as the same mass-produced product we got in the Tennant years, while the 2010 series has (it seems) been carefully stripped of any new or peculiar features and involves episodes written by the authors of "Exit Wounds", "The Idiot's Lantern", and Love Actually.
Now, why on Earth would I feel betrayed?
Look him in the eye and tell me I'm wrong.
I think you should all know that I've finally worked out why I'm so at odds with the rest of modern culture. Or at least, why I don't seem to be down wit' da hip kids, and why I don't see Today's Stuff - particularly Today's Doctor Who Stuff - in quite the same way as other people in my own mildly dysfunctional peer group. Actually, working it out was quite easy: I just watched Spider-Man 3 on Channel 5.
Now, I loathe superhero movies. To be honest, I loathe anything CGI-driven that's indistinguishable from its X-Box tie-in. I loathe the artless techno-pettiness which believes the latest piece of industrial code from James Cameron or Peter Jackson to somehow qualify as cinema, even though the directors can't tell graphic realism from characterisation or a Tomb Raider end-of-level monster from a proper Balrog. But I double-loathe superhero movies, with extra bogies on. Not just because they're wholly founded on their "roll up, roll up, and see what we can make a digitally-generated humanoid do this year" faux-showmanship, but because they're so sodding banal. I crept into the cinema during the first Spider-Man in 2002 (I was leaving the cineplex after watching something else, there was no guard in the passage between screens, and the film was just starting… well, I wasn't going to pay), and ended up sitting through two hours of constipated narrative before a final showdown that looked for all the world like a massively overbudgeted episode of Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers. The fact that the jizz-awful Green Goblin mask was designed by the same man who wrangled everything from Zygon nodules to the Bespoke Time Lord Collar just made the experience more painful.
But I watched Spider-Man 3 on its terrestrial premiere, simply because… no, I don't mind admitting it. I used to read the comics when I was fourteen, and I'd gathered that this was the film in which Movie Spider-Man met Movie Venom. And in a moment of High Geekery, I wanted to see how the epic saga I'd read as a young 'un - a half-decade story-arc in which Spider-Man acquired a telepathic bodysuit from a bio-tech-happy uber-civilisation, then ditched it when he figured out that it was a parasite rather than a symbiote, then watched as it transmogrified its next victim into his Evil Twin - would be squeezed into a two-hour movie. In fact, the script managed this quite simply: it turned the alien git-costume into a meteorite full of goo, which conveniently happened to crash into a field right next to Peter Parker. The ineptitude of this was probably inevitable, but tragically I kept watching, and it's what else I learned from the movie that's been troubling me.
In Spider-Man 3, and all its bastard kin, there's a simple pattern. There are Big Events. You can tell the Big Events, because they're denoted by computer-generated action sequences. In this case, these include a skyscraper-chase between Spidey and Green Goblin Junior, a duke-out between Spidey and the Sandman (i.e. a man made of sand, because the Marvel universe is terribly literal), a "symbolic" passing-on of the meteor parasite from Spidey to Venom… punctuated, and I really do mean punctuated, by in-between scenes.
It's the in-between scenes which interest me. Nobody involved with the film seems in any doubt that the Big Events are the point of the exercise, yet spacing these out are the "slow" moments in which - ooh, let's say - Peter Parker talks to his Aunt May about something sentimental that no-one will ever remember, or goes through Relationship Problems with Mary-Jane that look exactly like the Relationship Problems you might get in an episode of Dawson's Creek, or goes all broody and starts to ask himself what he's doing with his life. Scenes which don't exist because any viewer might be capable of caring, but which instead act as a sort of Pavlovian buffer. I find myself remembering the extended schedules in early '70s porn cinemas, when audiences were required to sit through several hours of slightly pervy "documentaries" before the main feature, partly because it allowed the cinema-owners to appear legitimate and partly to make sure the punters were salivating by the time they got to see the first nipple.
The news that FX-based movies are stuffed with filler comes as no surprise, natch. Yet without understanding the way this kind of storytelling works, the modern form of Doctor Who makes absolutely no sense. I've been hugely critical of the last few years' worth of That Series I Grew Up With, but because I deliberately haven't been going to see arsecock like Fantastic Four 2: Rise of the Silver Surfer (which I tried to watch on Channel 4 two weeks ago, just to make sure I wasn't imagining things… no, I obviously wasn't), I didn't realise why I seemed to be witnessing a different programme to an awful lot of other viewers. Simply, modern Doctor Who is made for an audience weened on superhero movies. That's not just the… excuse me… core demographic, it's what the programme is fundamentally aiming for. Over the last few years, whenever people I know have engaged each other in protracted conversations about the quality of the effects work on Dr Octopus' robot arms, I've had a tendency to leave the room. If I'd stayed, I might have clicked sooner.
My problem is that I don't believe in in-betweens. The very idea seems anathema to what might be called Proper Drama, but I'll stick close to home, and say that no Doctor Who story I ever considered half-decent was about the Big Event: the in-between moments were the story, not a way of marking time between special effects. The monster at the end of episode two isn't the main attraction of "The Caves of Androzani". Quite the reverse. Likewise, neither the Drashigs nor (most pertinently) the Top of the Pops-style psychedelia-gun in episode one are the reason "Carnival of Monsters" exists. And the giant clam certainly isn't the star of "Genesis of the Daleks", although now I've said that, I'm starting to wish that it were. By contrast, there's nothing really in "The Lazarus Experiment" except the ridiculous Mill-spawn (an apt example, given that Russell T. Davies explicitly described the story as being inspired by Marvel Comics), and BBC Wales is currently trying to sell us Matt Smith with the Sam Raimi-style shot of the Doctor dangling from a flying TARDIS. Rather than, for example, by getting him to do any acting. Let's not deny it, there were many, many, many filler scenes in the programme of old. But that's because it was made on the fly, on a minimal budget, under extreme stress. Whereas the modern programme has an insultingly large slice of the License Fee at its disposal, yet treats non-FX, non-stunt-based sequences as if they're dramatic pauses. Or, up until now, as excuses for David Tennant to do his "sad" face and make everyone go "awww, look, he's tortured".
You may, of course, recall that I keep insisting on seeing Doctor Who as a work of all-round BBC goodness rather than a "cult" sci-fi series. So I'll just point out that I, Claudius (yes, it is the best drama serial ever made, shut up) is nothing but in-between moments. In-between moments are good, if they're done properly. They're human. They give meaning to the parts where monsters or armies of legionnaires turn up, and should be treated as an art in themselves. Whereas we now have a culture which sees dialogue and characterisation as bubblewrap, except without the satisfaction of being able to pop the bubbles. Oh, and another telltale point: note that the Doctor is now being pitched to us with almost-macho displays of his power and invincibility ('there's one thing you never, ever put in a trap… me!!!' being both the latest and the stupidest), diluted forms of the "I'll be back" sloganeering you'd expect from America action heroes. When you can imagine Clint Eastwood delivering the Doctor's lines, but not Tom Baker, something's definitely gone awry. Actually, try imagining this kind of waffle being recited over a soundtrack by Dudley Simpson rather than Murray (spit) Gold, and it seems even dafter.
I could keep listing examples of the way this tendency has skew-wiffed recent Doctor Who, and I'm sure you'll be able to think of your own. But it's me, and I'm planning my exit strategy here, so I'll go for the big one. Yeah, I'm a-heading back to "Blink".
Now, here's the thing. When "Blink" was first broadcast, I got bored within the first twenty minutes, and assumed (as most of us do, in these "is it just me?" situations) that everyone else would feel the same way. You could've knocked me down with a Krolltacle when it was deemed to be the paragon of all things shiny, and for the last few years, I've been rather puzzled by the success of what seems to me like a rather dribbly script. After Spider-Man 3, however, I suddenly see it. What do people remember about "Blink"? The scary bits with the Weeping Angels, and the sexy bits with David Tennant talking to you - yes, you, straight female or gay male fan-person - out of a TV screen. Between those Big Events…?
Nobody much cares about those bits, and there's no reason that anybody really should. Sally's future-boyfriend (a geek called Lawrence, and I'm still not sure whether that was Moffat's idea of a joke) is introduced to us when he walks naked into a kitchen in front of the female lead and does the usual "ooh, hang on, am I naked?" schtick that sitcom writers use as filler when they don't have any better ways of getting the 18-30 demographic to keep watching. His nerdy personality is further underlined with the standard "all your friends are on the internet" bumf that even EastEnders had turned into cliché by 2007, while Sally spends much of the episode delivering the kind of dialogue that ageing heterosexual authors would like to imagine dynamic twentysomething women delivering in the real world, at least as long as they can imagine her saying "oh, yes, you big, rugged man who works in the media, yes, yes, yes" afterwards. Ah, but wait! This is supposed to be a scary story, yet the Weeping Angels don't actually do anything bad to anybody. So let's contrive a wholly negligible scene in which the Token Black Character snuffs it on his deathbed, just so Sally can say 'people have died', even though he's apparently had a pretty good life and we've spent more time watching him die as an old man than we spent getting to know him as a young one. Whoo, pathos.
This is terrible writing, and terrible characterisation. If you're a fan of "Blink", though, then… what do you remember? Do you remember anything at all about these puppet-people? Puppet-people on more than one level, in this case, since the plot of the episode is pretty much a denial of free will in the Doctor Who universe. Or do you just remember the creepy statues and the Easter Eggs? Plus some arse about timey-wimey paradoxes that the author's been constantly recycling since the 1990s, although that goes without saying in a Moffat script. (Jesus! I used to edit a thing called "Faction Paradox", but even I didn't resort to the old "we've seen evidence of this in the future, so it must be destined to happen" routine. Even once. Let alone five times. Yes, five! Count 'em.)
So, to summarise. I care about the in-between bits, because that's what I think "drama" is. The monsters are the moment of shock, they're not the story. Then again… if anything, does this just prove that I shouldn't be here at all? Interviews have cited Moffat as saying that he doesn't want to be remembered as the man who broke Doctor Who, but some of us would argue that he already did break it, even if we didn't notice it at the time. The moment of doom was "The Girl in the Fireplace", a story which - while quite good in itself, at least when the author's concentrating on robots, time-travel, and other things he pretends not to care about when there are women looking - changed our expectations of what the series is meant to be by playing to much the same audience as Twilight. From that point on, the Doctor was damned to a life of fetishism and well-groomed heroics. From that point on, he had to be young, cute, athletic, and godlike. Oh, and tragic. However unconvincing or repetitive the tragedy may be, he positively has to be tragic.
Looking at the revised, superhero-friendly version we've got in 2010, I find myself remembering two things about Moffat that I've previously suppressed. One is the conversation I had with him in late 2005, just after the title of his first Tennant-age story had been announced in the press. I said to him:
'Oh, I see a pattern forming here. First "The Empty Child", now "The Girl in the Fireplace". It's -'
And before I could say any more, he snarled into my face (in a fashion which, with hindsight, more than slightly resembled Rik in The Young Ones): 'Oh, what? Because they've both got the word "The" in the title?'
'Erm,' I said. 'Erm, no. Because they're both weird juxtapositions. You don't expect to get a child that's empty, and you don't expect to get a girl in a fireplace. It's like early surrealism. It's a bit… sort of… Magritte?'
He looked away. Stared at the pavement, as if annoyed by this outbreak of reasonable discussion. Then stomped off without answering.
But the most telling moment was this. I bought a video of The Complete Bagpuss (i.e. a video containing all thirteen episodes of Bagpuss, in case "Complete Bagpuss" sounds like one of the more obscure insults of Frank Butcher), and had it with me at the Tavern. I was showing it to a female acquaintance, when Moffat swooped past and looked down at it.
'That's just saaad,' he said.
'But… but it's Bagpuss,' said my acquaintance.
And Moffat twisted his face into a revolted sneer before leaving us.
Ergo. Having understood the nature of "state-of-the-art" narrative in the early twenty-first century, I can accept that this really is the Moffat Era, after all: an age of moments that could exist with equal comfort inside trailers or stories, movies or clips shows. But now I'm thinking of that scene from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead in which - as in Hamlet - the Prince's family ask R&G to figure out why Hamlet's so unhappy. Their conclusions: well, your dad's been unaccountably poisoned, your uncle's probably the murderer, and he's taken your throne while simultaneously marrying your mum. No, we can't imagine why you'd be unhappy. So for all those who've written badly-thought-out rants about this column over the last few years, and who genuinely can't tell the difference between "man who wants a war" and "man who's just disappointed and sarcastic", I'd like to say this…
Doctor Who taught me to be interested, xenophiliac, and prepared for strangeness of all magnitudes. Throughout its history - and this even applies to the best of the twenty-first-century episodes, before Big Russell started writing it for the BAFTA awards panel rather than intelligent children - it's been closer to Oliver Postgate than The Matrix. Yet now it's in the hands of a producer who's as arrogant as I've occasionally pretended to be and as cynical as I could never be, who deliberately overruled his own instincts and cast the silliest possible actor as the leading man, purely so he could continue his own mad campaign of pretend-populist squee. He sneers at Bagpuss, which is at least as bad as jesting at scars. Matt Smith has been given a demographically-tailored Quirky-Yet-Somehow-English costume, to make sure everyone feels comfortable accepting this as the same mass-produced product we got in the Tennant years, while the 2010 series has (it seems) been carefully stripped of any new or peculiar features and involves episodes written by the authors of "Exit Wounds", "The Idiot's Lantern", and Love Actually.
Now, why on Earth would I feel betrayed?
Friday, November 13, 2009
Z-Bomb Casualty
My "talking to strangers" thing has rather unexpected consequences.
5th of September, 2009. I've just attended an event so geeky that I can barely bring myself to speak of it, but it's enough to say that very few women were in attendance, and that it was held in the basement of London's Hilton Metropol. The Hilton Metropol, as the name suggests, is one of the capital's chicest and most modern hotels-cum-conference-centres; the basement, as the name suggests, indicates that the management doesn't see Our Sort of Person as being a desirable customer. We can be there, if we pay. But we probably shouldn't hang around on the upper floors, in much the same way that Mutts shouldn't try to enter Skybases.
But it's eleven o'clock at night, and I'm on my way home, and I'm slightly tipsy. And I'm standing on the pavement outside the main entrance to the Metropol, finding my bearings in the night air, or at least trying to remember which way the nearest tube station is. I've just about figured it out when I realise that a second individual is hovering a couple of yards away from me. He, too, is standing quite still. But whereas I'm turning my head from side to side, considering the "this way might be quickest" and "this way is slightly longer but leads to savaloys and chips" option, this other man is… really still. So I have to admit, it's rather impressive. He's young, black, well-dressed (leather coat over a suit, which is a little obvious for my tastes, but so easy to pull off that you can tell he's thought this through), with a close-shaved head and dark glasses. He remains still as I notice him: so still, in fact, that it looks as if he's been superimposed onto the background. Admittedly, I've spent the day amongst nerds, but even so… even so, he looks as if he doesn't quite belong in this picture. In earlier times, I would've sworn that he'd been CSO'd onto London, a bit like a puppet dinosaur.
And I'm rather drunk.
'Excuse me,' I find myself saying to him. 'Are you real?'
He tilts his head towards me, puzzled, but doesn't speak a word. I find myself staring into the blackness of designer shades. At night? Who the Hell wears designer shades at night…?
Suddenly, it clicks. Or I think it does.
'Oh!' I say, rather too enthusiastically. 'Are you a bodyguard?' This would explain so much: very rich people stay in the upper reaches of this hotel, and his absolute calm gives him the air of a Beefeater gone "urban". I'm convinced that this is a reasonable explanation.
'No,' he tells me, flatly. 'I'm Jay-Z.'
Hmm. Instinctively, I find myself squinting, because that's what I do when I try to access my long-term memory (yeah, it's an affectation, because that's what we used to imagine future-androids doing when they were calculating things). Now, I gave up on pop music in 2001, and I've only skimmed its surface since: those who ever read the Top Forty Countdown will know that it was the work of someone who just saw bits rather than involving himself. All I remember of Jay-Z is a record that sampled the "Hard-Knock Life" song from Annie in the early 2000s, yet I've seen his name reported in so many "entertainment news bulletins" since then that I know he must be a big player these days. (Since this encounter, I've realised how big. Alan Yentob's documentary about him was broadcast a week later.) What can I say, though?
The answer is, as ever, to slip into hyper-English.
'Ahhh,' I tell him. 'You're that rap fellah I've been hearing about.' (N.B. Yes, I'm afraid I actually say "fellah".) 'Well… I'm afraid I don't know much about your kind of music. But I've heard good things. So… I hope you enjoy our country.' And I bow politely, like a German prince in a Technicolor adventure-movie about Old Ruritania.
Jay-Z is obviously not familiar with this genre, and remains puzzled-looking, although a slight furrowing of his brow suggests that he's wondering if some bizarre British custom requires him to bow back. I hurriedly turn around and huffle off, instinctively choosing the "savaloy and chips" route.
I'm halfway along the street, towards the corner around which pasties lie, when I hear an angry shout of 'HEY!' from behind me.
I turn. Storming towards me, alone but taking up the full width of the pavement, is a man with none of the still superiority of Mr Z. Also black, also with hewn follicles, but middle-aged and with the sense that he makes up for in width what he lacks in height. He pumps his muscular arms back and forth as he approaches my frozen mass. This doesn't look like a bodygaurd; it looks like the kind of person who might be a shady friend of a bodyguard, but who specialises in dumping things in the river. In concrete boots.
Actually, I'm wrong here. He's a member of the hotel's security staff, who wastes no time in charging up to me and informing me that the police will be called if I "harass" the hotel's clientele again. Under his suit, his muscles twitch in such a way as to suggest that "police" is a euphemism.
There are many things I could - maybe should - have said at this juncture. I could have pointed out that I'd been talking to complete strangers in his previous hotel all day; that I'd met a man in the lift who'd been so harried while coming down from the "posh" levels that I'd helped him to carry his luggage to his car in the basement; that I'd had a long and interesting conversation with two female patrons of the Metropol in the hotel bar, about the effect of cinema on 1930s European art; that on at least two occasions that day, I'd pointed guests to either the toilets or the lifts in a generally altruistic way. Alternatively, I could have questioned the idea that he might call the police to deal with someone who was walking away from the hotel and clearly going home. I could have asked whether all the hotel's guests - including, to an extent, myself - were protected by this over-zealous security service, or just the famous ones. And yet, confused by the last few minutes' worth of information, what I actually say to him is: 'Flaaah baah-baah fuff. Naaah… ruh bububububuh buhhh.'
The security guard informs me that this doesn't matter (implying that he understood what I was saying, which is more than I did). He repeats his warning. I let my mouth open and close for a while, then decide to go 'pwuuuuh' and turn away.
At the corner, the stupidity of all this finally dawns on me. I pause in mid-step. Did that just happen?
I look over my shoulder. I'm now some distance from the security guard, who's schlomping his way back to the hotel, presumably to tell Jay-Z how good he is at scaring off stalkers (especially if they're already moving in the right direction). Yet through either chance or paranoia, I turn around at exactly the moment that the guard looks over his shoulder. Seeing that I've stopped, he swivels on his foot, and begins following me up the road again. This time, he's swinging his arms in deliberate mimicry of a bipedal rhino, making it clear that he'll bloody thump me if I don't stop bothering the paving-stones where his celebrity charge happens to be.
I look down, and shake my head incredulously. Partly because this is how I actually feel, but mainly because I sense that he'll get less of a kick out of beating up a sad-looking intellectual.
Around the corner, once the guardian has left me alone, I find a shop that sells food. Not actually savaloys, but things that can be heated up in an on-site microwave, plus the Lucozade I'm going to need quite soon. The proprietor of the shop seems rather hip, in terms of modern pop-culture: I judge this from the fact that when I walk in, he's doing that friendly knuckle-knock with a local Hoodie.
After the Hoodie leaves, I take my foodstuffs to the counter. While the shopkeeper's entering them into the till, I say to him: 'You know that Jay-Z?'
'Oh, yeah,' he says.
'Is he actually… any good?'
He looks non-committal, even as he's running the Lucozade over the digi-gizmo that reads barcodes. 'Yeah,' he says, not quite sounding convinced. 'Yeah, he's okay. He's married to that Beyonce, isn't he?'
Is he? I didn't know that, but there's a special irony here. You may recall that I said I gave up on pop music in 2001, and one of the key reasons for this retreat was that the mode of the age turned out to be the hideous squawking noise made by Destiny's Child. The first time I heard "Single Ladies" (which, I've been informed, is the most 2009 thing made in 2009… this is why I'm insisting on living in the past), I was at the rear part of a department store, and I literally ran a hundred yards to the exit in order to get away from it. No, I'm not exaggerating. It's like having nanites build cheese-graters inside your inner ear.
I share this overall sentiment with the hip shopkeeper.
'Hah,' he says. 'Good job you didn't say that to Jay-Z. Then the security guy would've really done you over.'
Which, I suppose, is true.
I can at least find a certain satisfaction in the thought that I was the one who asked Jay-Z whether he was real; furthermore, I might claim bonus points for talking to the man as if I were Jon Pertwee. But on getting home that night, I rang my ex-girlfriend, thinking that this would be a grade-A ;pop-culture anecdote. It turned out that on this particular evening, she was in her flat with another of her ex-boyfriends (one with whom I went to college, although the Venn diagram is too complex to bother with here), and both of them seemed rather unimpressed. Why…? Because, as he wasted no time in informing me, the ex-boyfriend in question is going to be an extra in the remake of Clash of the Titans. I didn't even know there was going to be a remake of Clash of the Titans, but my rapper-irritating antics are surely less impressive than this. We nerds know our priorities.
So I'll just say this. I spent the next few days in a colossal sulk, not because of Jay-Z or because of the Clash of the Titans thing, but because I couldn't stop thinking of that poxy security guard. If you read this blog-site quite often, then you may remember how insulted I felt after I was given the brush-off by Ian Levine: again, not because I desperately wanted to know such a person, but because of a level of rudeness I find unconscionable. He simply refused to speak to me, apparently because he thought I wanted something from him, when in fact I was just going to say "we're completely mismatched, but hi". Likewise, the security guard shoved a spike through a certain delicate part of my dignity, not only because of the stupidest threat ever issued - "you're walking away, so I'm going to call you back and say that you should walk away or I'll call the police to make you walk away" - but because h genuinely thought I knew and cared who Jay-Z was. What, do I look like I've got too much testosterone and a barely-concealed misogynist streak…?
Plus, I've been singing "It's a Hard-Knock Life" ever since. But the hook is technically from a musical, so he can't claim any credit.
Yep, I was right all the time. People with power are hideous, but worse still are the people who hang around near people with power: once again, I remember Paul Cornell haranguing me because of the way my "followers" were behaving on the internet (this was before I even had access to the internet, you understand), and his sheer lack of comprehension when I told him that I didn't want to have any followers. We can all learn lessons here, not least because some of the silliest behaviour amongst Doctor Who tribes over the last twenty years has been a result of acting like an offensive security guard. Paul? This isn't a feudal state where you have to "bend the knee" to the most popular writers, so stop it. Moffat? You're not going to make any interesting TV by sucking up to a big gay producer or by supplying fangirls with things that might make them go squidgey for you, so stop it. Jon Blum? You're not going to get hired by the TV series by defending every single thing BBC Wales does, so stop it. No, really, stop it. You sound like an arse, and everybody's laughing at you behind your back. And me in 1999…? You're not going to get into telly by lying to people who write terrible fiction, so stop it. Oh, you did. Good. You don't have to positively insult them, mind you, but… no, whatever you like. All power is rubbish.
In Doctor Who, of course, all security guards are idiots (except for the one in "Dragonfire", who's deliberately ironic). Yet that doesn't stop us being more like them then the "nice" characters. Elsewhile, Jay-Z himself appeared at a 9/11 Memorial Concert less than a week after our encounter, during which he encouraged the crowd to 'make some noise' for the dead of the terrorist attacks. Jesus, what a twat! Now I wish I had harassed him.
I don't think you're ready for this jelly.
5th of September, 2009. I've just attended an event so geeky that I can barely bring myself to speak of it, but it's enough to say that very few women were in attendance, and that it was held in the basement of London's Hilton Metropol. The Hilton Metropol, as the name suggests, is one of the capital's chicest and most modern hotels-cum-conference-centres; the basement, as the name suggests, indicates that the management doesn't see Our Sort of Person as being a desirable customer. We can be there, if we pay. But we probably shouldn't hang around on the upper floors, in much the same way that Mutts shouldn't try to enter Skybases.
But it's eleven o'clock at night, and I'm on my way home, and I'm slightly tipsy. And I'm standing on the pavement outside the main entrance to the Metropol, finding my bearings in the night air, or at least trying to remember which way the nearest tube station is. I've just about figured it out when I realise that a second individual is hovering a couple of yards away from me. He, too, is standing quite still. But whereas I'm turning my head from side to side, considering the "this way might be quickest" and "this way is slightly longer but leads to savaloys and chips" option, this other man is… really still. So I have to admit, it's rather impressive. He's young, black, well-dressed (leather coat over a suit, which is a little obvious for my tastes, but so easy to pull off that you can tell he's thought this through), with a close-shaved head and dark glasses. He remains still as I notice him: so still, in fact, that it looks as if he's been superimposed onto the background. Admittedly, I've spent the day amongst nerds, but even so… even so, he looks as if he doesn't quite belong in this picture. In earlier times, I would've sworn that he'd been CSO'd onto London, a bit like a puppet dinosaur.
And I'm rather drunk.
'Excuse me,' I find myself saying to him. 'Are you real?'
He tilts his head towards me, puzzled, but doesn't speak a word. I find myself staring into the blackness of designer shades. At night? Who the Hell wears designer shades at night…?
Suddenly, it clicks. Or I think it does.
'Oh!' I say, rather too enthusiastically. 'Are you a bodyguard?' This would explain so much: very rich people stay in the upper reaches of this hotel, and his absolute calm gives him the air of a Beefeater gone "urban". I'm convinced that this is a reasonable explanation.
'No,' he tells me, flatly. 'I'm Jay-Z.'
Hmm. Instinctively, I find myself squinting, because that's what I do when I try to access my long-term memory (yeah, it's an affectation, because that's what we used to imagine future-androids doing when they were calculating things). Now, I gave up on pop music in 2001, and I've only skimmed its surface since: those who ever read the Top Forty Countdown will know that it was the work of someone who just saw bits rather than involving himself. All I remember of Jay-Z is a record that sampled the "Hard-Knock Life" song from Annie in the early 2000s, yet I've seen his name reported in so many "entertainment news bulletins" since then that I know he must be a big player these days. (Since this encounter, I've realised how big. Alan Yentob's documentary about him was broadcast a week later.) What can I say, though?
The answer is, as ever, to slip into hyper-English.
'Ahhh,' I tell him. 'You're that rap fellah I've been hearing about.' (N.B. Yes, I'm afraid I actually say "fellah".) 'Well… I'm afraid I don't know much about your kind of music. But I've heard good things. So… I hope you enjoy our country.' And I bow politely, like a German prince in a Technicolor adventure-movie about Old Ruritania.
Jay-Z is obviously not familiar with this genre, and remains puzzled-looking, although a slight furrowing of his brow suggests that he's wondering if some bizarre British custom requires him to bow back. I hurriedly turn around and huffle off, instinctively choosing the "savaloy and chips" route.
I'm halfway along the street, towards the corner around which pasties lie, when I hear an angry shout of 'HEY!' from behind me.
I turn. Storming towards me, alone but taking up the full width of the pavement, is a man with none of the still superiority of Mr Z. Also black, also with hewn follicles, but middle-aged and with the sense that he makes up for in width what he lacks in height. He pumps his muscular arms back and forth as he approaches my frozen mass. This doesn't look like a bodygaurd; it looks like the kind of person who might be a shady friend of a bodyguard, but who specialises in dumping things in the river. In concrete boots.
Actually, I'm wrong here. He's a member of the hotel's security staff, who wastes no time in charging up to me and informing me that the police will be called if I "harass" the hotel's clientele again. Under his suit, his muscles twitch in such a way as to suggest that "police" is a euphemism.
There are many things I could - maybe should - have said at this juncture. I could have pointed out that I'd been talking to complete strangers in his previous hotel all day; that I'd met a man in the lift who'd been so harried while coming down from the "posh" levels that I'd helped him to carry his luggage to his car in the basement; that I'd had a long and interesting conversation with two female patrons of the Metropol in the hotel bar, about the effect of cinema on 1930s European art; that on at least two occasions that day, I'd pointed guests to either the toilets or the lifts in a generally altruistic way. Alternatively, I could have questioned the idea that he might call the police to deal with someone who was walking away from the hotel and clearly going home. I could have asked whether all the hotel's guests - including, to an extent, myself - were protected by this over-zealous security service, or just the famous ones. And yet, confused by the last few minutes' worth of information, what I actually say to him is: 'Flaaah baah-baah fuff. Naaah… ruh bububububuh buhhh.'
The security guard informs me that this doesn't matter (implying that he understood what I was saying, which is more than I did). He repeats his warning. I let my mouth open and close for a while, then decide to go 'pwuuuuh' and turn away.
At the corner, the stupidity of all this finally dawns on me. I pause in mid-step. Did that just happen?
I look over my shoulder. I'm now some distance from the security guard, who's schlomping his way back to the hotel, presumably to tell Jay-Z how good he is at scaring off stalkers (especially if they're already moving in the right direction). Yet through either chance or paranoia, I turn around at exactly the moment that the guard looks over his shoulder. Seeing that I've stopped, he swivels on his foot, and begins following me up the road again. This time, he's swinging his arms in deliberate mimicry of a bipedal rhino, making it clear that he'll bloody thump me if I don't stop bothering the paving-stones where his celebrity charge happens to be.
I look down, and shake my head incredulously. Partly because this is how I actually feel, but mainly because I sense that he'll get less of a kick out of beating up a sad-looking intellectual.
Around the corner, once the guardian has left me alone, I find a shop that sells food. Not actually savaloys, but things that can be heated up in an on-site microwave, plus the Lucozade I'm going to need quite soon. The proprietor of the shop seems rather hip, in terms of modern pop-culture: I judge this from the fact that when I walk in, he's doing that friendly knuckle-knock with a local Hoodie.
After the Hoodie leaves, I take my foodstuffs to the counter. While the shopkeeper's entering them into the till, I say to him: 'You know that Jay-Z?'
'Oh, yeah,' he says.
'Is he actually… any good?'
He looks non-committal, even as he's running the Lucozade over the digi-gizmo that reads barcodes. 'Yeah,' he says, not quite sounding convinced. 'Yeah, he's okay. He's married to that Beyonce, isn't he?'
Is he? I didn't know that, but there's a special irony here. You may recall that I said I gave up on pop music in 2001, and one of the key reasons for this retreat was that the mode of the age turned out to be the hideous squawking noise made by Destiny's Child. The first time I heard "Single Ladies" (which, I've been informed, is the most 2009 thing made in 2009… this is why I'm insisting on living in the past), I was at the rear part of a department store, and I literally ran a hundred yards to the exit in order to get away from it. No, I'm not exaggerating. It's like having nanites build cheese-graters inside your inner ear.
I share this overall sentiment with the hip shopkeeper.
'Hah,' he says. 'Good job you didn't say that to Jay-Z. Then the security guy would've really done you over.'
Which, I suppose, is true.
I can at least find a certain satisfaction in the thought that I was the one who asked Jay-Z whether he was real; furthermore, I might claim bonus points for talking to the man as if I were Jon Pertwee. But on getting home that night, I rang my ex-girlfriend, thinking that this would be a grade-A ;pop-culture anecdote. It turned out that on this particular evening, she was in her flat with another of her ex-boyfriends (one with whom I went to college, although the Venn diagram is too complex to bother with here), and both of them seemed rather unimpressed. Why…? Because, as he wasted no time in informing me, the ex-boyfriend in question is going to be an extra in the remake of Clash of the Titans. I didn't even know there was going to be a remake of Clash of the Titans, but my rapper-irritating antics are surely less impressive than this. We nerds know our priorities.
So I'll just say this. I spent the next few days in a colossal sulk, not because of Jay-Z or because of the Clash of the Titans thing, but because I couldn't stop thinking of that poxy security guard. If you read this blog-site quite often, then you may remember how insulted I felt after I was given the brush-off by Ian Levine: again, not because I desperately wanted to know such a person, but because of a level of rudeness I find unconscionable. He simply refused to speak to me, apparently because he thought I wanted something from him, when in fact I was just going to say "we're completely mismatched, but hi". Likewise, the security guard shoved a spike through a certain delicate part of my dignity, not only because of the stupidest threat ever issued - "you're walking away, so I'm going to call you back and say that you should walk away or I'll call the police to make you walk away" - but because h genuinely thought I knew and cared who Jay-Z was. What, do I look like I've got too much testosterone and a barely-concealed misogynist streak…?
Plus, I've been singing "It's a Hard-Knock Life" ever since. But the hook is technically from a musical, so he can't claim any credit.
Yep, I was right all the time. People with power are hideous, but worse still are the people who hang around near people with power: once again, I remember Paul Cornell haranguing me because of the way my "followers" were behaving on the internet (this was before I even had access to the internet, you understand), and his sheer lack of comprehension when I told him that I didn't want to have any followers. We can all learn lessons here, not least because some of the silliest behaviour amongst Doctor Who tribes over the last twenty years has been a result of acting like an offensive security guard. Paul? This isn't a feudal state where you have to "bend the knee" to the most popular writers, so stop it. Moffat? You're not going to make any interesting TV by sucking up to a big gay producer or by supplying fangirls with things that might make them go squidgey for you, so stop it. Jon Blum? You're not going to get hired by the TV series by defending every single thing BBC Wales does, so stop it. No, really, stop it. You sound like an arse, and everybody's laughing at you behind your back. And me in 1999…? You're not going to get into telly by lying to people who write terrible fiction, so stop it. Oh, you did. Good. You don't have to positively insult them, mind you, but… no, whatever you like. All power is rubbish.
In Doctor Who, of course, all security guards are idiots (except for the one in "Dragonfire", who's deliberately ironic). Yet that doesn't stop us being more like them then the "nice" characters. Elsewhile, Jay-Z himself appeared at a 9/11 Memorial Concert less than a week after our encounter, during which he encouraged the crowd to 'make some noise' for the dead of the terrorist attacks. Jesus, what a twat! Now I wish I had harassed him.
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Captain Jack's Guts
In which Lawrence Miles responds to the letters about Torchwood: Children of Earth in last week's Radio Times, and uses their entrails to divine the past and future of Doctor Who.
Let's begin with the RT's letter of the week (which, as we all know, wins a charming BBC-endorsed digital radio with 1950s moulding).
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Dear Radio Times,
I've been a Torchwood fan from the start...
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Then your opinion can be of no intellectual value. Next!
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…how can a drama be gripping for a week, then throw it all away? It was heartbreaking to see a good premise and fine acting wasted on an "in one bound they were free" solution.
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Dear God, man, where have you been for the last four years? Anyone would think you'd never seen a drama by Russell T. Davies before. Were you not paying attention when the last-ever Dalek army was disintegrated by Billie Piper's time-space orgasm (arguably what the conclusion of "The Parting of the Ways" was really all about, if you interpret the whole of Season One as an unrequited love affair… call it "The Fire in the Girly-Place", if you will)? Or when the other last-ever Dalek army was sucked out of the universe by background radiation from a place where nothing exists, not even radiation? Or when the other other last-ever Dalek army was defeated by Catherine Tate fiddling about with some wires? And that's without even mentioning the climax of "Last of the Time Lords", in which the Doctor rewinds time by flying around the planet very very fast, or something.
As we should all have gathered by now, Russell T. isn't primarily a science-fiction writer, at least not in the most pedantic sense. SF is hung up on the details of how the machinery works, but he only cares about the people. Therefore, it's reasonable to hit the reset button as long as there's a human cost, whether it's the death of the Best Ever Doctor or an almost Biblical child-murder. Which brings us to the real nub of things…
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I seriously wonder whether the harrowing ending, in which a child died horribly, should have been broadcast. For the first time ever I was reduced to tears watching a TV programme.
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Whooooah Nellie. Let's pause to consider what this correspondent is actually saying. He's complaining that a drama programme - and, furthermore, a tragedy - actually provoked an emotional reaction. I'm sure you can see the oddity. Isn't a few minutes' blubbing just a sign that the programme worked…?
Let's not be in any doubt, the controversy about the child-exploding finale (if there really was any controversy) had nothing to do with "violence on television": the slaughter of Jack's firstborn grandson was too far from any real-world agony to leave a bad taste in the mouth, and a long way from graphic, unless you seriously believe that nosebleeds shouldn't be shown on TV. But modern drama, or pretend-drama, is about making the audience feel comfortable rather than affected. This has always been true of the commercial channels, yet now even the BBC's mandate is to provide the viewer with "cosy" rather than "challenging". It's a truth of modern television that despite the liberalisation which has allowed men to kiss each other in prime-time and characters from The Wire to mumble "fuck" every twelve seconds for absolutely no reason, the cod-drama programmes made circa 2009 are far more limited / limiting in their content than those of the 1970s. You know the bit in I, Claudius where Caligula does that thing with his sister? Yeah, you know. That thing. Could that be shown - or, rather, suggested - on BBC TV today? Almost certainly not. It isn't comfortable viewing. And for a Corporation that's increasingly made to feel aware of both the ratings and government (dis)approval, an uncomfortable audience makes an uncomfortable drama department. Ergo, programmes are designed to engender a sense of warming numbness, like a plate of chips at the end of a cold day. To the point where viewers actually start complaining when they feel something.
I've occasionally noted my approval of Waking the Dead on this blog-page, particularly those episodes written by Declan Croghan, whose ability to bring a kind of nightmarish magic-realism to a standard prime-time format should surely put him on any producer's list of Writers to Try Out on Doctor Who (consider the episode "Wren Boys", which is a bit like CSI in the style of The Wicker Man, and features the fit one from "Blink" as an additional bonus). The reason is that Waking the Dead is one of the few dramas still prepared to take the viewer out of his or her coddling-space. As I've mentioned before, the episode "In the Sight of the Lord" involves a murder case that stretches all the way back to the 1940s, and attacks our sentimentalised version of the Great British War Years by focusing on the atrocities carried out by English soldiers in the field. We're told, for example, about a group of squaddies cutting the genitals off a German soldier and forcing him to put them in his mouth. The repugnant Chibnall-era version of Torchwood often brought this to mind, and not just because of the sensation of gagging on bollocks. Torchwood tried to sell itself as a "grown-up" sci-fi show, and yet despite a superficially similar format to Waking the Dead (just try imagining Trevor Eve as Captain Jack…), it never would've dared risk audience disapproval in this way. The supposed point of science fiction is that it's meant to go further than conventional drama, but Mark One Torchwood never had the - excuse me - balls to even go as far as a mainstream detective programme on BBC1.
Hardly surprising: after all, Torchwood was deliberately contrived as a "Cult TV" series, not a drama series. This is why a guest appearance by James Marsters was thought to be more important than consistent characterisation, and why horribly misjudged story-arcs were thought to be more important than the actual stories. The gulf between Cult TV and Proper Drama is a vast one, and it's worth remembering this now that the Radio Times has given us our first official preview of Doctor Who 2010. I've already suggested that Moffat's role in the casting of Matt Smith was a colossal act of cowardice, a way of keeping the audience on his side by giving them Tennant Junior rather than anyone more controversial / unexpected / interesting. Likewise, the decision to dress him up in what the RT rather desperately calls "geography teacher chic" smacks of the same play-it-safe, Doctor-by-numbers strategy that brought us the TV movie, in which the Doctor's "character" was defined purely by stuffing a pretty-faced English actor into an Edwardian jacket. But more worrying is the reappearance of Professor River Song, the most cynically-engineered love-interest since… well, since Moffat's last one, to be honest. It's worrying because she's been foisted on the viewer as a Major Character in exactly the same way that Lwaxana Troi was foisted on Star Trek fans, or that Joxer was foisted on viewers of Xena: Warrior Princess for more than a year after he stopped being funny. See also the entire last season of Buffy.
This is a sure sign of Cult TV, and it's something that Russell T. Davies largely avoided, at least until the interdimensional wank-fest of "The Stolen Earth". One of the reasons Doctor Who went off the rails in the mid-'80s was that John Nathan-Turner stopped making a television programme per se, and started making a continuity-package to satisfy the kind of people he met at conventions (this way lies madness and "Attack of the Cybermen"). Why did he do this…? Because he just wanted to be liked. And Moffat, as we’ve already learned, desires nothing more or less than to be adored by his audience. Alienating them is simply beyond him. Especially if they're redheads.
And as if to underline this question of "comfort", the next letter reads…
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…I was shocked, even betrayed. Russell T. Davies transformed our hero Jack into a monster… I wonder how a writer can do this to a character both adults and children adore.
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We'll skip over the weapons-grade-obvious point that Jack has always been a dodgy geezer, not only because of his criminal tendencies in "The Empty Child", but because he was introduced to us as someone who can casually treat a mass-death like the eruption of Pompeii as a business opportunity. The bigger point here is that a large section of the audience, the section which Doctor Who is now so concerned about offending, wants to be able to see its central characters as definite hero-figures. Even though we know there's nothing more tedious.
At this point, let's side-step into the old faux-moral debate about the conclusion of "Remembrance of the Daleks". It's been argued - for example, by my Magic Bullet employer Alan Stevens, in those rare moments when he's not 'phoning people up and engaging them in two-hour conversations about Blake's 7 - that the Doctor's cheerful blowing-up of Skaro is a moral aberration which contradicts the ethical grounding of most of the rest of the series. The trouble is that this Doctor = Absolute Decency argument only holds water if you seriously believe the drivel that Gerry Davis puts into the leading man's mouth during "The Moonbase", which portrays the Doctor as a well-disguised superhero who believes that evil communists 'must be fought'. (All right, he's technically talking about Cybermen at the time. But Davis saw Doctor Who as an internationally-exportable adventure series, little more than a spy show with SF elements, so the monsters on his watch become indistinguishable from commie thugs in The Man from UNCLE or The Champions.) Davis widdled all over the heterodox, xenophiliac version of the Doctor promoted by Lambert, Wiles, Tosh, et al, i.e. the interesting version. In the script of "Remembrance", Ben Aaronovitch goes out of his way to establish that Skaro is the Daleks' 'ancestral seat', so its destruction is meant to be like blowing up the Fuhrerbunker rather than dropping the A-Bomb on Japan. But even if that weren't true, even if the Doctor is crossing a terrible moral line, it still wouldn't bother me much. Why? Because I don't necessarily want the central character's values to be the same as my own.
Indeed, one of the most alarming things about the Tennant era is the way the voice of the Doctor has become the voice of the liberal-minded early-twenty-first-century viewer. The ideals he represents are the ideals of those in the audience who believe themselves to be generally "good" human beings, on the grounds that they occasionally recycle and don't use the n-word. This explains his ludicrous, self-contradictory arguments against the American death-nerd in "The Sontaran Stratagem" (which leave us with the impression that it's nice to care about the environment, as long as you don't seriously do anything about it), and why "Planet of the Ood" sees him apologise to Donna for taking 'cheap shots' when he asks her the only sensible question in Season Four (because slavery is wrong, but it's apparently even more wrong to make the viewers feel anxious by pointing out that they're supporting child labour whenever they shop at Primark). If, like me, you feel that the prime mover in Doctor Who isn't good-versus-evil but the ability to see things from an alien point of view - a theme that's been there ever since the beginning, even before "The Sensorites" set the pattern for humans-meet-alien-culture stories - then it's surely quite right that the leading man shouldn't have exactly the same moral stance as ourselves. Actually, he should probably be going out of his way to challenge it. So what went wrong?
Once again, what went wrong is the desperate urge to keep the audience squirm-free. Beyond the confines of Doctor Who, this has led to a culture of drama in which all goodies are good as we see it, while all baddies oppose the basic freedom to choose the colour of your iPod. By default, protagonists now have "issues" which might occasionally make them behave in out-of-character ways, but we're never in doubt that they share our world-view. They can never be racist, sexist, or homophobic (that's the baddies' job), yet nor should they ever rock the boat. They should never make us doubt ourselves or our consumer society, because even if it isn't perfect - hey! - at least we're living in a democracy, right? Right…? Inevitably, this turns every drama series into a sequence of contrived confrontations between insipid non-characters, and Cult TV programmes are more prone to this tendency than any genre other than cop shows. Fans of Heroes-generation sci-fi honestly believe it's revelatory when a baddie turns out to have "layers", but in fact, it's what Proper Drama is meant to do all the time. Again, we go back to I, Claudius for the perfect test-case. The Emperor Tiberius, supposedly a sadistic pervert who might best be described as "syphilis with a face", reacts in different ways to different characters: at no point does he only have "villain" traits, and from his very first scene, the monster on the throne has characteristics ranging from an honest and touching love for his brother to periods of what we'd now call paranoid depression. Almost nobody writes characters this way any more. Today's audience has been brought up to believe in its own moral supremacy, and thus prefers things to be rather more absolute. Just look at the atrocity of Rome.
A personal sidelight here. If you're one of the 4,000-odd people who kept buying the BBC's Eighth Doctor novels after their sell-by date, then you may recall that I once invented a semi-antagonist called Sabbath, for a book called The Adventuress of Henrietta Street. The editor of the range was keen on using him as a recurring character, and asked me to write up a detailed description, which I did. Now, the idea here was to present Sabbath as the Doctor's (morally dubious) replacement in a hostile new universe, or at least in a hostile new form of history. Gallifrey had been destroyed; the laws of time were in flux; and the Doctor's powers were distinctly limited, not least by a period of amnesia. As a result, Sabbath was a figure who knew more about the universe than the Doctor did. This was his environment, while the Doctor was rooted in a version of history that no longer existed. Which, as I saw it, meant that the overwhelming smugness of some of the weakest Doctor Who stories would be removed from the formula. The central character would no longer have all the answers. He wouldn't be able to pull solutions out of a magic pocket. He'd have to learn from experience, and figure out each new situation from scratch, just like Sydney Newman intended. In short, he'd be able to make mistakes.
What actually happened was the other writers turned out a series of novels in which stupid, arrogant, evil Mr Sabbath would perform some reckless experiment which imperilled the entire universe, so that the good, noble, and all-wise Doctor would have an opportunity to set things right again. This reached its nadir when Lloyd Rose stated that she couldn't see any difference between Sabbath and the Master, as if I'd written a three-page document describing an out-and-out villain who wanted to take over the galaxy and finished every sentence with "nyah-hah-hah". (In her novel Camera Obscura, AKA The Twelve-Year-Old Anne Rice Fan's Guide to Victorian Clichés, she underlines this by having the Doctor put a whoopee cushion on Sabbath's Throne of Evil. It's meant to demonstrate how silly and pathetic anyone who dares to argue with the Doctor must be, because apparently, villains don't have a sense of humour. Here I'd just like to point out that the first thing Sabbath ever says to the Doctor in The Adventuress of Henrietta Street is a joke, and an anachronistic one to boot.)
Why, then, did this happen? How did a character whose whole function was to give the Doctor some real competition end up being used as a Hooded Claw substitute? The answer seems to be that we've come to fetishise the very notion of the Doctor, to the point where we believe he's simply incapable of doing anything wrong. The nature of Cult TV makes him "our hero" in ways that extend far beyond the narrative. We feel uneasy if he goes astray, either morally or intellectually, and now we're beginning to feel the same way about Doctor-surrogates like Captain Jack. Of course, the fact that we feel uneasy probably indicates that it's good storytelling, yet we've been too swaddled in FilmLook slickness to accept this. On top of which… oh, dare I really say it? I think I have to. Unquestionably, this fetishisation is doubled if the Doctor's cute. No fangirl would be bothered by the thought of William Hartnell, or even troll-faced Chris Eccleston, committing space-age genocide. This sort of behaviour is harder to accept from Paul McGann or David Tennant, whose boyish good looks™ have been thoroughly mined for romance, firstly by the Yanks who factory-assembled the TV movie and more lately by a sneery-faced Scots cynic. Mentioning no names. It comes as no surprise to find that the "you bastards, you've made Jack evil!" letter in the Radio Times was written by a woman, just as it comes as no surprise to find that the "I'm furious because the machinery they used to kill the 456 doesn't make sense!" letter came from a man.
Yet the most curious thing is that as Doctor Who heads further and further into the stagnancy of Cult TV, Torchwood has suddenly veered in the opposite direction. "Children of Earth" is, against all expectations, a work of Proper Drama. Nobody here scores points for being 100% Goodie, and the only 100% Baddie seems to be the Prime Minister. Even the 456, who exist solely to make us poo ourselves, have enough depth to point out the humans' hypocrisy. Bucking the trend of all the other programmes that look, sound, and market themselves like it, characters with whom we sympathise do things we don't necessarily like, not in order to make a big song-and-dance about major issues (yeah, you're right, I'm thinking of Battlestar Galactica again) but just because that's who they are. The most obvious example isn't Captain Jack's kiddie-killing, it's the fact that Clem - a man who's pure victim to the core, pitiable-yet-quite-frightening in exactly the way that mentally-damaged people really are - treats Ianto with disgust while calling him 'queer'.
In any other show, that alone would be enough to mark him out as a baddie, like the bigot-thugs who occupy most corners of the CSI world. Here, it's simply treated as the kind of thing you'd expect from someone who's been messed up since the 1960s. The Doctor Who universe has always had leftist intentions (Gerry Davis notwithstanding), but there's a difference between "left-wing" and "liberal". To be a liberal means to believe that tolerance is good and global warming is bad, but also to believe that you can save the world simply by not using the word "poof". S/he may have good intentions, but doesn't seem to appreciate that all the things s/he considers to be civilised - democracy, universal suffrage, the right to exist without having the shit kicked out of you for having long hair or skin that's a bit on the dark side - were achieved through the effort of rather more pro-active people, who fought and occasionally died in order to create a less appalling version of humanity. To be a liberal means to shield yourself from the full horror of your society, to have a veneer of civic responsibility while still approving of a system that's wholly founded on exploitation. Tennant-era Doctor Who is liberal. Most of the New Adventures are very, very liberal indeed, hilariously so in some cases. Whereas "Children of Earth", in facing up to our hypocrisies and refusing to make things simple, actually seems… leftist. Who saw that coming?
[A footnote, before you ask: it's true, much of the previous paragraph was informed by various encounters with Doctor Who authors over the years. Most particularly, an argument with Paul Cornell - Grand Poobah of Liberals and unapologetic Blairite, who genuinely believes that everything in the world will be all right as long as you don't vote Conservative - in which he derided me for being 'like one of those '60s idealists'. Hmmm. Does he mean, like one of those '60s idealists whose determination to change Western values created the kind of lifestyle that Paul and his friends now enjoy…? No, he probably didn't intend it to be a compliment. Oh, and I chose "poof" as a Word You Mustn't Say after a conversation with Moffat in which I jokingly exclaimed 'are you calling me a poof?' when he challenged my masculinity, 'are you calling me a poof?' being the catchphrase of the boorish he-men whom anyone of my age will remember from the '70s. Moffat responded by looking nervously around the pub and informing me under his breath that I shouldn't say that out loud. I'm amused by several things here: (a) the thought that Moffat believed I needed his wisdom and experience in social situations, (b) the thought that any gay fanboy at the Tavern might seriously be offended by the retro use of the p-word, (c) the thought that I was being criticised for using it by the world's most heterosexual man when I've at least enjoyed the occasional gay flirtation, and (d) the thought that Moffat was terrified of offending Doctor Who fans even then. I really, really digress.]
Of course, the aliens are still basically evil, because no series can be xenophiliac all the time. Especially not when there's the potential for great big monsters. The notion of a morally-questioning, see-the-other-man's-POV universe may run all the way from "An Unearthly Child" to the superfly guys in "Planet of the Dead", yet a programme in which the outsiders are always potentially-friendly would be dull. Morally uplifting, but dull. Fortunately, most Doctor Who writers through the ages have managed to use horrible alien menaces without suggesting that anything foreign wants to hurt us by default, the pro-Vietnam hectoring of "The Dominators" being a nauseating exception. The problem comes not when the aliens start invading, but when the scripts are written by people who think it's a good idea to present us with a universe which is intrinsically hostile and in which EVERYTHING UNFAMILIAR WANTS TO EAT US. As I've had to explain over and over again, my tragic rant about "The Unquiet Dead" wasn't driven by a disgust of actual racism (although I still hold that it was chronically misjudged in the run-up to the Asylum Seeker Election of 2005), but because the episode betrayed the entire ethos of Doctor Who. The Doctor comes up with the most brilliantly in-your-face, air-punchingly great salvation plan in the programme's history. "Yeah, let the aliens have the corpses… you got a problem with that?" But then… hahahahahah, fooled you, they're aliens and therefore just want to kill everybody.
So it's apt that another "Children of Earth" missive to the RT reads…
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It was entertaining and thrilling: like experiencing The Quatermass Experiment or the BBC production of 1984 for the first time.
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…since both of those programmes were, as you know, written by stodgy old conservative Nigel Kneale. If you haven't already seen it, then I wrote an entire article about Kneale's influence on the modern SF generation (see "SF Iconoclasty 101", some way down this page), but the key point is this: however revolutionary The Quatermass Experiment may have seemed in 1953, Kneale himself was a grumpy misanthropic sod who distrusted anything that wasn't middle-aged and middle class, which is why his scripts depict hippies as murderous death-cultists and seem to believe that rock music heralds the end of human civilisation. To Kneale, anything new or unfamiliar was a threat, and he expressed this intolerance with a variety of over-the-top SF metaphors. And as anyone who watches BBC4 documentaries will know, Mark Gatiss idolises him. The grand irony is that Gatiss believes his work to be "traditional" Doctor Who, yet when Doctor Who began overtly copying the Quatermass set-up during the Pertwee years, its writers specifically went out of their way to reverse Kneale's vision and create a universe in which the alien isn't automatically evil. Again, look at "The Silurians". Or look at "The Ambassadors of Death", in which Knealish paranoia is what causes all the trouble. Gatiss seriously believes Quatermass and Doctor Who to come from the same tradition, even though they're ethical and philosophical opposites. The Wire in "The Idiot's Lantern" is a typical Gatiss villain, i.e. a big hungry alien force that has no purpose other than to eat people. Malcolm Hulke isn't exactly spinning in his grave, but he would find it unbearably childish.
Actually, now I come to think of it, there's an even grander irony: Nigel Kneale himself described Doctor Who as 'a stupid idea for a programme'. M'lud, the prosecution rests.
In effect, then, the 456 are the Wire done properly. Because this isn't really about a threat from the unknown, it's about us, and about the way we react to it. Fear of the alien is at least as horrifying as the alien, something that Gatiss has never quite grasped: once again, we should remember that this is a man who established the evilness of the villain in St Antony's Fire by having the character stab a kitten through the throat, just for a laugh. So he's clearly not one for the subtleties of human psychology. Like all good monsters, the 456's inhumanity makes us inhuman ourselves, which is what Nigel Kneale nearly realised when he wrote Quatermass and the Pit (although his questionable view of world events rather brought it down). So is it ironic or appropriate that "Children of Earth" should resurrect the Quatermass format, and shun the Cult TV model of Torchwood's first two hideous years? Either way, it's hard to believe that BBC Wales would have risked it if American television hadn't rediscovered the joy of the epic serial, so treating this as a late victory for the Knealites is rather missing the point.
Whichever way we turn, we keep coming back to this struggle between Cult TV and Proper Drama. We may be tempted to ask whether it really matters, since even Cult TV might feasibly be watchable, if regularly groomed and wormed for fan-wank. The trouble is that the very notion of "cult" leads to a certain… shall we call it territoriality? It's been said that gay culture isn't a festering pit of bitchiness and backstabbing because gay men are genetically inclined to scratch each others' eyes out, but because any subculture in which you're bound to keep running into the same people over and over again is inevitably going to end up that way. This was certainly the case with Doctor Who between the late '80s and the early '00s, when it wasn't popular, populist, or even noticed by most of the population. We may recall that during the '90s, the big movers in fandom often found themselves acting like feudal overlords. On a personal level, I still recall Keith Topping attacking me for breaking the "unspoken code" which forbids New Adventures writers from publicly criticising each others' work (it sounded berserk to me at the time, and it still does), while the afore-dissed Paul Cornell once demanded to know whether I was prepared to "bow the knee" to anybody else in fan-society. He also kept talking about my "followers", which I found rather puzzling, but we'll come back to that in a moment.
It'd be nice to think that the cosmic popularity of Doctor Who circa 2009 would prevent this sort of silliness, but our perception of the series as a Cult concern guarantees that we keep making the same mistakes. Fans still have a loyalty to their feudal chieftains which seems to ignore events in the outside world. I still get flak about my "Pissing Blink" comment, as if Steven Moffat - a highly-regarded, award-winning writer who now receives a huge chunk of licence-fee money for doing the best job on Earth, whose work is watched by millions all over the world and whose every opinion is instantly reported in the mass-media - needs to be defended against a former author of low-selling genre novels who writes a blog that only a few dozen people read anyway. It's a bit like attacking a Big Issue seller for trying to put W. H. Smith's out of business. Certainly, there wouldn't have been even one-tenth as much fuss about the GatissGate comments if there hadn't been a sense that modern-day Doctor Who scriptwriters are part of a ruling class, and that savaging their work on the internet is therefore a crime against the natural order. If I'd criticised George Lucas, or Danny Boyle, or even the producer of Casualty, then nobody would even have flinched. But Doctor Who… that's us.
This seems doubly peculiar when you realise that it contradicts the nature of the programme itself. We could spend days arguing about the "true" morality of Doctor Who, but Gerry Davis, "The Dominators", and bad Quatermass pastiches aside, we wouldn't be going too far wrong if we described its view of the universe as exploratory, experimental, and egalitarian: in brief, outward-looking. Yet there's a specific breed of ruling-class fanboy whose influence over this Cult TV phenomenon has made him petty, retrogressive, and obsessed with his own importance: in brief, utterly inward-looking. Apart from anything else, you have to wonder what the Hell these people learned from watching the programme as kids. Did they learn anything? Did they even realise that learning was the point, or did they just get off on all the space-age hardware and reach the conclusion that it was in the same oeuvre as Battlestar Galactica (the '70s one, with the proper Cylons)? At the risk of becoming overly personal, I particularly wonder about Gary Russell, who's obsessed with the programme's minutiae and yet writes things which seem to owe more to the Star Trek: The Next Generation school of Cult TV (Divided Loyalties is the funniest example of this, and it even shares a title with a Babylon-5 episode). And Gary Russell is the epitome of Cult Man. In Doctor Who itself, of course, the accumulation of power for trivial purposes is always the preserve of the villain.
Well, all right. Maybe Gary isn't quite the epitome of Cult Man. About a year ago, I found myself at the Tavern at the same time as Ian Levine. As we all know, we've got Ian Levine to thank for the survival and/or recovery of a huge number of ancient Doctor Who stories, even if he has got a private stash of "lost" episodes that he won't share with the rest of us. (Yes he has. Don't even think about trying to deny it.) Since I'd never met him, I thought I'd go over and introduce myself, if only because it seemed like such a peculiar meeting of sub-sub-subcultures. It'd be both crude and hypocritical for me to describe him as looking like a bloated potato-emperor holding court in the presence of his skinny minions, especially given the size of my own man-tits, but it is true that he took up one whole side of the table while his friends sat on the opposite side.
'Hullo,' I said, as I walked up to the table and outstretched my hand.
He eyed me suspiciously.
'I'm Lawrence Miles,' I explained. 'I just thought -'
'No,' he said, physically drawing back on a cushion of rump. 'No. No. No. No.'
I found myself reminded of Ben Kingsley in Sexy Beast.
'Wh-' I began.
'No,' he repeated. 'I read your…' He didn't seem to know how to finish, so he just looked disgusted instead. 'I don't know what it was. But it was so off the case. So off the case. No.'
With that, he turned his head away, and there was an awkward silence while he carefully pretended that I wasn't there. His friends looked rather embarrassed, although whether they were embarrassed for me or for him, I'm not at all sure.
I finally lowered my hand and walked off. But I remember thinking, even as I left the presence of this Huttesque fan-lord: I could never do that. I simply wouldn't be capable of it. If you presented me with a man who had the most ridiculous opinions on the planet, if I'd read an article he'd written which tried to turn all human sense on its head, then I'd still be prepared to at least say hello. I'd chew the fat with a Nazi, if he thought he had a good reason to speak to me. I'd even consider the possibility of discourse with Chris Chibnall. And perhaps what's most disturbing about Ian Levine's behaviour, far beyond the fact that it was very, very rude, is that we know he's dedicated a large slice of his life to a programme which positively detests this sort of thing. If Doctor Who celebrates the outward-looking, and has an underlying philosophy of listening to the outsider's point of view, then how did someone on the top level of its aristocracy become so insular? How can a man with his grounding in the classics think of blanking someone for writing a piece he simply didn't agree with (I have no idea which piece, although I'd put a small wager on the one about "Love & Monsters")?
Later, on the way home, it suddenly hit me.
He thought I wanted something from him. He believes his friendship is valuable. And, to an extent, I suppose it is: Ian Levine is said to be a multimillionaire, so for all we know, he holds orgiastic Doctor Who parties in an opulent mansion where guests can watch the two missing episodes of "The Invasion" while being serviced by prostitutes in Nimon masks. But being part of a cult means being part of a hierarchy, and it's inevitable that those at the top of any hierarchy will end up behaving like gigantic arses. It's one of the reasons that I've alienated any "followers" I might accidentally have picked up over the years.
No, fair enough, that's a lie. I alienate them because I just can't bloody help myself. It is true, however, that the nature of Doctor Who defies the very notion of hierarchy. Let's be honest, the series taught you that you should be able to walk into the throneroom of any ruling monarch and be sarcastic to them without getting your head cut off. Didn't it?
In the end, the super-hyper-mega-ultra-irony is that I agree with Alan Stevens: the least Doctor Who thing in Doctor Who really is in "Remembrance of the Daleks", but it's not the trivial matter of planetary destruction. It's much earlier in the story, when the spooky little girl runs away from the Doctor, and the Doctor muses to himself: 'She doesn't talk to strangers… very wise.' Of course, it's not surprising that this line should have been jemmied into the script, any more than it's surprising that Ben Aaronovitch removed it for the novelisation. As I've said in the dear departed Randomness Times, the '80s was the decade in which the concept of "paedophile" entered the British consciousness, and the don't-get-into-cars-with-people-you-don't-know message was pushed harder than ever. (In the '70s, we grew up believing that people who abducted children wanted to hold them hostage, like in an episode of The Professionals. It wasn't until the '80s that our parents felt comfortable talking about kiddie-fiddling. This is why nobody found Darth Vader's 'I have felt him' comment remotely funny when Return of the Jedi was released in 1983, even though nobody can take it seriously now. Worse, the Emperor's reply is 'strange that I have not,' as if they're both part of the same paedophile ring.)
Yet for anyone grown-up enough to make their own decisions, this advice goes against everything Doctor Who seems to stand for. From the moment that Ian and Barbara enter the Doctor's world, understanding the alien - embracing the alien, even - becomes the baseline of all wisdom. Even the Tribe of Gum finds a sort of redemption this way, when Ian exposes Kal to a concept from another philosophy, if not actual democracy ('Kal is not stronger than the whole tribe') then at least the notion of duty to society. And even when the Doctor's involved in something morally dubious, refusing to communicate with the unknown simply isn't part of his world-view. Or worlds-view.
So if I have one final pronouncement to make, before Doctor Who descends into a Cult TV Hell of squee, self-congratulation, and Alex Kingston, then it's this. Always talk to strangers. They know things you don't.
Another thing to notice about this edition of the Radio Times is that the target time for the Enigma puzzle was 26 minutes, and I did it in nine. I just had to tell someone that.
Let's begin with the RT's letter of the week (which, as we all know, wins a charming BBC-endorsed digital radio with 1950s moulding).
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Dear Radio Times,
I've been a Torchwood fan from the start...
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Then your opinion can be of no intellectual value. Next!
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…how can a drama be gripping for a week, then throw it all away? It was heartbreaking to see a good premise and fine acting wasted on an "in one bound they were free" solution.
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Dear God, man, where have you been for the last four years? Anyone would think you'd never seen a drama by Russell T. Davies before. Were you not paying attention when the last-ever Dalek army was disintegrated by Billie Piper's time-space orgasm (arguably what the conclusion of "The Parting of the Ways" was really all about, if you interpret the whole of Season One as an unrequited love affair… call it "The Fire in the Girly-Place", if you will)? Or when the other last-ever Dalek army was sucked out of the universe by background radiation from a place where nothing exists, not even radiation? Or when the other other last-ever Dalek army was defeated by Catherine Tate fiddling about with some wires? And that's without even mentioning the climax of "Last of the Time Lords", in which the Doctor rewinds time by flying around the planet very very fast, or something.
As we should all have gathered by now, Russell T. isn't primarily a science-fiction writer, at least not in the most pedantic sense. SF is hung up on the details of how the machinery works, but he only cares about the people. Therefore, it's reasonable to hit the reset button as long as there's a human cost, whether it's the death of the Best Ever Doctor or an almost Biblical child-murder. Which brings us to the real nub of things…
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I seriously wonder whether the harrowing ending, in which a child died horribly, should have been broadcast. For the first time ever I was reduced to tears watching a TV programme.
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Whooooah Nellie. Let's pause to consider what this correspondent is actually saying. He's complaining that a drama programme - and, furthermore, a tragedy - actually provoked an emotional reaction. I'm sure you can see the oddity. Isn't a few minutes' blubbing just a sign that the programme worked…?
Let's not be in any doubt, the controversy about the child-exploding finale (if there really was any controversy) had nothing to do with "violence on television": the slaughter of Jack's firstborn grandson was too far from any real-world agony to leave a bad taste in the mouth, and a long way from graphic, unless you seriously believe that nosebleeds shouldn't be shown on TV. But modern drama, or pretend-drama, is about making the audience feel comfortable rather than affected. This has always been true of the commercial channels, yet now even the BBC's mandate is to provide the viewer with "cosy" rather than "challenging". It's a truth of modern television that despite the liberalisation which has allowed men to kiss each other in prime-time and characters from The Wire to mumble "fuck" every twelve seconds for absolutely no reason, the cod-drama programmes made circa 2009 are far more limited / limiting in their content than those of the 1970s. You know the bit in I, Claudius where Caligula does that thing with his sister? Yeah, you know. That thing. Could that be shown - or, rather, suggested - on BBC TV today? Almost certainly not. It isn't comfortable viewing. And for a Corporation that's increasingly made to feel aware of both the ratings and government (dis)approval, an uncomfortable audience makes an uncomfortable drama department. Ergo, programmes are designed to engender a sense of warming numbness, like a plate of chips at the end of a cold day. To the point where viewers actually start complaining when they feel something.
I've occasionally noted my approval of Waking the Dead on this blog-page, particularly those episodes written by Declan Croghan, whose ability to bring a kind of nightmarish magic-realism to a standard prime-time format should surely put him on any producer's list of Writers to Try Out on Doctor Who (consider the episode "Wren Boys", which is a bit like CSI in the style of The Wicker Man, and features the fit one from "Blink" as an additional bonus). The reason is that Waking the Dead is one of the few dramas still prepared to take the viewer out of his or her coddling-space. As I've mentioned before, the episode "In the Sight of the Lord" involves a murder case that stretches all the way back to the 1940s, and attacks our sentimentalised version of the Great British War Years by focusing on the atrocities carried out by English soldiers in the field. We're told, for example, about a group of squaddies cutting the genitals off a German soldier and forcing him to put them in his mouth. The repugnant Chibnall-era version of Torchwood often brought this to mind, and not just because of the sensation of gagging on bollocks. Torchwood tried to sell itself as a "grown-up" sci-fi show, and yet despite a superficially similar format to Waking the Dead (just try imagining Trevor Eve as Captain Jack…), it never would've dared risk audience disapproval in this way. The supposed point of science fiction is that it's meant to go further than conventional drama, but Mark One Torchwood never had the - excuse me - balls to even go as far as a mainstream detective programme on BBC1.
Hardly surprising: after all, Torchwood was deliberately contrived as a "Cult TV" series, not a drama series. This is why a guest appearance by James Marsters was thought to be more important than consistent characterisation, and why horribly misjudged story-arcs were thought to be more important than the actual stories. The gulf between Cult TV and Proper Drama is a vast one, and it's worth remembering this now that the Radio Times has given us our first official preview of Doctor Who 2010. I've already suggested that Moffat's role in the casting of Matt Smith was a colossal act of cowardice, a way of keeping the audience on his side by giving them Tennant Junior rather than anyone more controversial / unexpected / interesting. Likewise, the decision to dress him up in what the RT rather desperately calls "geography teacher chic" smacks of the same play-it-safe, Doctor-by-numbers strategy that brought us the TV movie, in which the Doctor's "character" was defined purely by stuffing a pretty-faced English actor into an Edwardian jacket. But more worrying is the reappearance of Professor River Song, the most cynically-engineered love-interest since… well, since Moffat's last one, to be honest. It's worrying because she's been foisted on the viewer as a Major Character in exactly the same way that Lwaxana Troi was foisted on Star Trek fans, or that Joxer was foisted on viewers of Xena: Warrior Princess for more than a year after he stopped being funny. See also the entire last season of Buffy.
This is a sure sign of Cult TV, and it's something that Russell T. Davies largely avoided, at least until the interdimensional wank-fest of "The Stolen Earth". One of the reasons Doctor Who went off the rails in the mid-'80s was that John Nathan-Turner stopped making a television programme per se, and started making a continuity-package to satisfy the kind of people he met at conventions (this way lies madness and "Attack of the Cybermen"). Why did he do this…? Because he just wanted to be liked. And Moffat, as we’ve already learned, desires nothing more or less than to be adored by his audience. Alienating them is simply beyond him. Especially if they're redheads.
And as if to underline this question of "comfort", the next letter reads…
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…I was shocked, even betrayed. Russell T. Davies transformed our hero Jack into a monster… I wonder how a writer can do this to a character both adults and children adore.
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We'll skip over the weapons-grade-obvious point that Jack has always been a dodgy geezer, not only because of his criminal tendencies in "The Empty Child", but because he was introduced to us as someone who can casually treat a mass-death like the eruption of Pompeii as a business opportunity. The bigger point here is that a large section of the audience, the section which Doctor Who is now so concerned about offending, wants to be able to see its central characters as definite hero-figures. Even though we know there's nothing more tedious.
At this point, let's side-step into the old faux-moral debate about the conclusion of "Remembrance of the Daleks". It's been argued - for example, by my Magic Bullet employer Alan Stevens, in those rare moments when he's not 'phoning people up and engaging them in two-hour conversations about Blake's 7 - that the Doctor's cheerful blowing-up of Skaro is a moral aberration which contradicts the ethical grounding of most of the rest of the series. The trouble is that this Doctor = Absolute Decency argument only holds water if you seriously believe the drivel that Gerry Davis puts into the leading man's mouth during "The Moonbase", which portrays the Doctor as a well-disguised superhero who believes that evil communists 'must be fought'. (All right, he's technically talking about Cybermen at the time. But Davis saw Doctor Who as an internationally-exportable adventure series, little more than a spy show with SF elements, so the monsters on his watch become indistinguishable from commie thugs in The Man from UNCLE or The Champions.) Davis widdled all over the heterodox, xenophiliac version of the Doctor promoted by Lambert, Wiles, Tosh, et al, i.e. the interesting version. In the script of "Remembrance", Ben Aaronovitch goes out of his way to establish that Skaro is the Daleks' 'ancestral seat', so its destruction is meant to be like blowing up the Fuhrerbunker rather than dropping the A-Bomb on Japan. But even if that weren't true, even if the Doctor is crossing a terrible moral line, it still wouldn't bother me much. Why? Because I don't necessarily want the central character's values to be the same as my own.
Indeed, one of the most alarming things about the Tennant era is the way the voice of the Doctor has become the voice of the liberal-minded early-twenty-first-century viewer. The ideals he represents are the ideals of those in the audience who believe themselves to be generally "good" human beings, on the grounds that they occasionally recycle and don't use the n-word. This explains his ludicrous, self-contradictory arguments against the American death-nerd in "The Sontaran Stratagem" (which leave us with the impression that it's nice to care about the environment, as long as you don't seriously do anything about it), and why "Planet of the Ood" sees him apologise to Donna for taking 'cheap shots' when he asks her the only sensible question in Season Four (because slavery is wrong, but it's apparently even more wrong to make the viewers feel anxious by pointing out that they're supporting child labour whenever they shop at Primark). If, like me, you feel that the prime mover in Doctor Who isn't good-versus-evil but the ability to see things from an alien point of view - a theme that's been there ever since the beginning, even before "The Sensorites" set the pattern for humans-meet-alien-culture stories - then it's surely quite right that the leading man shouldn't have exactly the same moral stance as ourselves. Actually, he should probably be going out of his way to challenge it. So what went wrong?
Once again, what went wrong is the desperate urge to keep the audience squirm-free. Beyond the confines of Doctor Who, this has led to a culture of drama in which all goodies are good as we see it, while all baddies oppose the basic freedom to choose the colour of your iPod. By default, protagonists now have "issues" which might occasionally make them behave in out-of-character ways, but we're never in doubt that they share our world-view. They can never be racist, sexist, or homophobic (that's the baddies' job), yet nor should they ever rock the boat. They should never make us doubt ourselves or our consumer society, because even if it isn't perfect - hey! - at least we're living in a democracy, right? Right…? Inevitably, this turns every drama series into a sequence of contrived confrontations between insipid non-characters, and Cult TV programmes are more prone to this tendency than any genre other than cop shows. Fans of Heroes-generation sci-fi honestly believe it's revelatory when a baddie turns out to have "layers", but in fact, it's what Proper Drama is meant to do all the time. Again, we go back to I, Claudius for the perfect test-case. The Emperor Tiberius, supposedly a sadistic pervert who might best be described as "syphilis with a face", reacts in different ways to different characters: at no point does he only have "villain" traits, and from his very first scene, the monster on the throne has characteristics ranging from an honest and touching love for his brother to periods of what we'd now call paranoid depression. Almost nobody writes characters this way any more. Today's audience has been brought up to believe in its own moral supremacy, and thus prefers things to be rather more absolute. Just look at the atrocity of Rome.
A personal sidelight here. If you're one of the 4,000-odd people who kept buying the BBC's Eighth Doctor novels after their sell-by date, then you may recall that I once invented a semi-antagonist called Sabbath, for a book called The Adventuress of Henrietta Street. The editor of the range was keen on using him as a recurring character, and asked me to write up a detailed description, which I did. Now, the idea here was to present Sabbath as the Doctor's (morally dubious) replacement in a hostile new universe, or at least in a hostile new form of history. Gallifrey had been destroyed; the laws of time were in flux; and the Doctor's powers were distinctly limited, not least by a period of amnesia. As a result, Sabbath was a figure who knew more about the universe than the Doctor did. This was his environment, while the Doctor was rooted in a version of history that no longer existed. Which, as I saw it, meant that the overwhelming smugness of some of the weakest Doctor Who stories would be removed from the formula. The central character would no longer have all the answers. He wouldn't be able to pull solutions out of a magic pocket. He'd have to learn from experience, and figure out each new situation from scratch, just like Sydney Newman intended. In short, he'd be able to make mistakes.
What actually happened was the other writers turned out a series of novels in which stupid, arrogant, evil Mr Sabbath would perform some reckless experiment which imperilled the entire universe, so that the good, noble, and all-wise Doctor would have an opportunity to set things right again. This reached its nadir when Lloyd Rose stated that she couldn't see any difference between Sabbath and the Master, as if I'd written a three-page document describing an out-and-out villain who wanted to take over the galaxy and finished every sentence with "nyah-hah-hah". (In her novel Camera Obscura, AKA The Twelve-Year-Old Anne Rice Fan's Guide to Victorian Clichés, she underlines this by having the Doctor put a whoopee cushion on Sabbath's Throne of Evil. It's meant to demonstrate how silly and pathetic anyone who dares to argue with the Doctor must be, because apparently, villains don't have a sense of humour. Here I'd just like to point out that the first thing Sabbath ever says to the Doctor in The Adventuress of Henrietta Street is a joke, and an anachronistic one to boot.)
Why, then, did this happen? How did a character whose whole function was to give the Doctor some real competition end up being used as a Hooded Claw substitute? The answer seems to be that we've come to fetishise the very notion of the Doctor, to the point where we believe he's simply incapable of doing anything wrong. The nature of Cult TV makes him "our hero" in ways that extend far beyond the narrative. We feel uneasy if he goes astray, either morally or intellectually, and now we're beginning to feel the same way about Doctor-surrogates like Captain Jack. Of course, the fact that we feel uneasy probably indicates that it's good storytelling, yet we've been too swaddled in FilmLook slickness to accept this. On top of which… oh, dare I really say it? I think I have to. Unquestionably, this fetishisation is doubled if the Doctor's cute. No fangirl would be bothered by the thought of William Hartnell, or even troll-faced Chris Eccleston, committing space-age genocide. This sort of behaviour is harder to accept from Paul McGann or David Tennant, whose boyish good looks™ have been thoroughly mined for romance, firstly by the Yanks who factory-assembled the TV movie and more lately by a sneery-faced Scots cynic. Mentioning no names. It comes as no surprise to find that the "you bastards, you've made Jack evil!" letter in the Radio Times was written by a woman, just as it comes as no surprise to find that the "I'm furious because the machinery they used to kill the 456 doesn't make sense!" letter came from a man.
Yet the most curious thing is that as Doctor Who heads further and further into the stagnancy of Cult TV, Torchwood has suddenly veered in the opposite direction. "Children of Earth" is, against all expectations, a work of Proper Drama. Nobody here scores points for being 100% Goodie, and the only 100% Baddie seems to be the Prime Minister. Even the 456, who exist solely to make us poo ourselves, have enough depth to point out the humans' hypocrisy. Bucking the trend of all the other programmes that look, sound, and market themselves like it, characters with whom we sympathise do things we don't necessarily like, not in order to make a big song-and-dance about major issues (yeah, you're right, I'm thinking of Battlestar Galactica again) but just because that's who they are. The most obvious example isn't Captain Jack's kiddie-killing, it's the fact that Clem - a man who's pure victim to the core, pitiable-yet-quite-frightening in exactly the way that mentally-damaged people really are - treats Ianto with disgust while calling him 'queer'.
In any other show, that alone would be enough to mark him out as a baddie, like the bigot-thugs who occupy most corners of the CSI world. Here, it's simply treated as the kind of thing you'd expect from someone who's been messed up since the 1960s. The Doctor Who universe has always had leftist intentions (Gerry Davis notwithstanding), but there's a difference between "left-wing" and "liberal". To be a liberal means to believe that tolerance is good and global warming is bad, but also to believe that you can save the world simply by not using the word "poof". S/he may have good intentions, but doesn't seem to appreciate that all the things s/he considers to be civilised - democracy, universal suffrage, the right to exist without having the shit kicked out of you for having long hair or skin that's a bit on the dark side - were achieved through the effort of rather more pro-active people, who fought and occasionally died in order to create a less appalling version of humanity. To be a liberal means to shield yourself from the full horror of your society, to have a veneer of civic responsibility while still approving of a system that's wholly founded on exploitation. Tennant-era Doctor Who is liberal. Most of the New Adventures are very, very liberal indeed, hilariously so in some cases. Whereas "Children of Earth", in facing up to our hypocrisies and refusing to make things simple, actually seems… leftist. Who saw that coming?
[A footnote, before you ask: it's true, much of the previous paragraph was informed by various encounters with Doctor Who authors over the years. Most particularly, an argument with Paul Cornell - Grand Poobah of Liberals and unapologetic Blairite, who genuinely believes that everything in the world will be all right as long as you don't vote Conservative - in which he derided me for being 'like one of those '60s idealists'. Hmmm. Does he mean, like one of those '60s idealists whose determination to change Western values created the kind of lifestyle that Paul and his friends now enjoy…? No, he probably didn't intend it to be a compliment. Oh, and I chose "poof" as a Word You Mustn't Say after a conversation with Moffat in which I jokingly exclaimed 'are you calling me a poof?' when he challenged my masculinity, 'are you calling me a poof?' being the catchphrase of the boorish he-men whom anyone of my age will remember from the '70s. Moffat responded by looking nervously around the pub and informing me under his breath that I shouldn't say that out loud. I'm amused by several things here: (a) the thought that Moffat believed I needed his wisdom and experience in social situations, (b) the thought that any gay fanboy at the Tavern might seriously be offended by the retro use of the p-word, (c) the thought that I was being criticised for using it by the world's most heterosexual man when I've at least enjoyed the occasional gay flirtation, and (d) the thought that Moffat was terrified of offending Doctor Who fans even then. I really, really digress.]
Of course, the aliens are still basically evil, because no series can be xenophiliac all the time. Especially not when there's the potential for great big monsters. The notion of a morally-questioning, see-the-other-man's-POV universe may run all the way from "An Unearthly Child" to the superfly guys in "Planet of the Dead", yet a programme in which the outsiders are always potentially-friendly would be dull. Morally uplifting, but dull. Fortunately, most Doctor Who writers through the ages have managed to use horrible alien menaces without suggesting that anything foreign wants to hurt us by default, the pro-Vietnam hectoring of "The Dominators" being a nauseating exception. The problem comes not when the aliens start invading, but when the scripts are written by people who think it's a good idea to present us with a universe which is intrinsically hostile and in which EVERYTHING UNFAMILIAR WANTS TO EAT US. As I've had to explain over and over again, my tragic rant about "The Unquiet Dead" wasn't driven by a disgust of actual racism (although I still hold that it was chronically misjudged in the run-up to the Asylum Seeker Election of 2005), but because the episode betrayed the entire ethos of Doctor Who. The Doctor comes up with the most brilliantly in-your-face, air-punchingly great salvation plan in the programme's history. "Yeah, let the aliens have the corpses… you got a problem with that?" But then… hahahahahah, fooled you, they're aliens and therefore just want to kill everybody.
So it's apt that another "Children of Earth" missive to the RT reads…
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It was entertaining and thrilling: like experiencing The Quatermass Experiment or the BBC production of 1984 for the first time.
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…since both of those programmes were, as you know, written by stodgy old conservative Nigel Kneale. If you haven't already seen it, then I wrote an entire article about Kneale's influence on the modern SF generation (see "SF Iconoclasty 101", some way down this page), but the key point is this: however revolutionary The Quatermass Experiment may have seemed in 1953, Kneale himself was a grumpy misanthropic sod who distrusted anything that wasn't middle-aged and middle class, which is why his scripts depict hippies as murderous death-cultists and seem to believe that rock music heralds the end of human civilisation. To Kneale, anything new or unfamiliar was a threat, and he expressed this intolerance with a variety of over-the-top SF metaphors. And as anyone who watches BBC4 documentaries will know, Mark Gatiss idolises him. The grand irony is that Gatiss believes his work to be "traditional" Doctor Who, yet when Doctor Who began overtly copying the Quatermass set-up during the Pertwee years, its writers specifically went out of their way to reverse Kneale's vision and create a universe in which the alien isn't automatically evil. Again, look at "The Silurians". Or look at "The Ambassadors of Death", in which Knealish paranoia is what causes all the trouble. Gatiss seriously believes Quatermass and Doctor Who to come from the same tradition, even though they're ethical and philosophical opposites. The Wire in "The Idiot's Lantern" is a typical Gatiss villain, i.e. a big hungry alien force that has no purpose other than to eat people. Malcolm Hulke isn't exactly spinning in his grave, but he would find it unbearably childish.
Actually, now I come to think of it, there's an even grander irony: Nigel Kneale himself described Doctor Who as 'a stupid idea for a programme'. M'lud, the prosecution rests.
In effect, then, the 456 are the Wire done properly. Because this isn't really about a threat from the unknown, it's about us, and about the way we react to it. Fear of the alien is at least as horrifying as the alien, something that Gatiss has never quite grasped: once again, we should remember that this is a man who established the evilness of the villain in St Antony's Fire by having the character stab a kitten through the throat, just for a laugh. So he's clearly not one for the subtleties of human psychology. Like all good monsters, the 456's inhumanity makes us inhuman ourselves, which is what Nigel Kneale nearly realised when he wrote Quatermass and the Pit (although his questionable view of world events rather brought it down). So is it ironic or appropriate that "Children of Earth" should resurrect the Quatermass format, and shun the Cult TV model of Torchwood's first two hideous years? Either way, it's hard to believe that BBC Wales would have risked it if American television hadn't rediscovered the joy of the epic serial, so treating this as a late victory for the Knealites is rather missing the point.
Whichever way we turn, we keep coming back to this struggle between Cult TV and Proper Drama. We may be tempted to ask whether it really matters, since even Cult TV might feasibly be watchable, if regularly groomed and wormed for fan-wank. The trouble is that the very notion of "cult" leads to a certain… shall we call it territoriality? It's been said that gay culture isn't a festering pit of bitchiness and backstabbing because gay men are genetically inclined to scratch each others' eyes out, but because any subculture in which you're bound to keep running into the same people over and over again is inevitably going to end up that way. This was certainly the case with Doctor Who between the late '80s and the early '00s, when it wasn't popular, populist, or even noticed by most of the population. We may recall that during the '90s, the big movers in fandom often found themselves acting like feudal overlords. On a personal level, I still recall Keith Topping attacking me for breaking the "unspoken code" which forbids New Adventures writers from publicly criticising each others' work (it sounded berserk to me at the time, and it still does), while the afore-dissed Paul Cornell once demanded to know whether I was prepared to "bow the knee" to anybody else in fan-society. He also kept talking about my "followers", which I found rather puzzling, but we'll come back to that in a moment.
It'd be nice to think that the cosmic popularity of Doctor Who circa 2009 would prevent this sort of silliness, but our perception of the series as a Cult concern guarantees that we keep making the same mistakes. Fans still have a loyalty to their feudal chieftains which seems to ignore events in the outside world. I still get flak about my "Pissing Blink" comment, as if Steven Moffat - a highly-regarded, award-winning writer who now receives a huge chunk of licence-fee money for doing the best job on Earth, whose work is watched by millions all over the world and whose every opinion is instantly reported in the mass-media - needs to be defended against a former author of low-selling genre novels who writes a blog that only a few dozen people read anyway. It's a bit like attacking a Big Issue seller for trying to put W. H. Smith's out of business. Certainly, there wouldn't have been even one-tenth as much fuss about the GatissGate comments if there hadn't been a sense that modern-day Doctor Who scriptwriters are part of a ruling class, and that savaging their work on the internet is therefore a crime against the natural order. If I'd criticised George Lucas, or Danny Boyle, or even the producer of Casualty, then nobody would even have flinched. But Doctor Who… that's us.
This seems doubly peculiar when you realise that it contradicts the nature of the programme itself. We could spend days arguing about the "true" morality of Doctor Who, but Gerry Davis, "The Dominators", and bad Quatermass pastiches aside, we wouldn't be going too far wrong if we described its view of the universe as exploratory, experimental, and egalitarian: in brief, outward-looking. Yet there's a specific breed of ruling-class fanboy whose influence over this Cult TV phenomenon has made him petty, retrogressive, and obsessed with his own importance: in brief, utterly inward-looking. Apart from anything else, you have to wonder what the Hell these people learned from watching the programme as kids. Did they learn anything? Did they even realise that learning was the point, or did they just get off on all the space-age hardware and reach the conclusion that it was in the same oeuvre as Battlestar Galactica (the '70s one, with the proper Cylons)? At the risk of becoming overly personal, I particularly wonder about Gary Russell, who's obsessed with the programme's minutiae and yet writes things which seem to owe more to the Star Trek: The Next Generation school of Cult TV (Divided Loyalties is the funniest example of this, and it even shares a title with a Babylon-5 episode). And Gary Russell is the epitome of Cult Man. In Doctor Who itself, of course, the accumulation of power for trivial purposes is always the preserve of the villain.
Well, all right. Maybe Gary isn't quite the epitome of Cult Man. About a year ago, I found myself at the Tavern at the same time as Ian Levine. As we all know, we've got Ian Levine to thank for the survival and/or recovery of a huge number of ancient Doctor Who stories, even if he has got a private stash of "lost" episodes that he won't share with the rest of us. (Yes he has. Don't even think about trying to deny it.) Since I'd never met him, I thought I'd go over and introduce myself, if only because it seemed like such a peculiar meeting of sub-sub-subcultures. It'd be both crude and hypocritical for me to describe him as looking like a bloated potato-emperor holding court in the presence of his skinny minions, especially given the size of my own man-tits, but it is true that he took up one whole side of the table while his friends sat on the opposite side.
'Hullo,' I said, as I walked up to the table and outstretched my hand.
He eyed me suspiciously.
'I'm Lawrence Miles,' I explained. 'I just thought -'
'No,' he said, physically drawing back on a cushion of rump. 'No. No. No. No.'
I found myself reminded of Ben Kingsley in Sexy Beast.
'Wh-' I began.
'No,' he repeated. 'I read your…' He didn't seem to know how to finish, so he just looked disgusted instead. 'I don't know what it was. But it was so off the case. So off the case. No.'
With that, he turned his head away, and there was an awkward silence while he carefully pretended that I wasn't there. His friends looked rather embarrassed, although whether they were embarrassed for me or for him, I'm not at all sure.
I finally lowered my hand and walked off. But I remember thinking, even as I left the presence of this Huttesque fan-lord: I could never do that. I simply wouldn't be capable of it. If you presented me with a man who had the most ridiculous opinions on the planet, if I'd read an article he'd written which tried to turn all human sense on its head, then I'd still be prepared to at least say hello. I'd chew the fat with a Nazi, if he thought he had a good reason to speak to me. I'd even consider the possibility of discourse with Chris Chibnall. And perhaps what's most disturbing about Ian Levine's behaviour, far beyond the fact that it was very, very rude, is that we know he's dedicated a large slice of his life to a programme which positively detests this sort of thing. If Doctor Who celebrates the outward-looking, and has an underlying philosophy of listening to the outsider's point of view, then how did someone on the top level of its aristocracy become so insular? How can a man with his grounding in the classics think of blanking someone for writing a piece he simply didn't agree with (I have no idea which piece, although I'd put a small wager on the one about "Love & Monsters")?
Later, on the way home, it suddenly hit me.
He thought I wanted something from him. He believes his friendship is valuable. And, to an extent, I suppose it is: Ian Levine is said to be a multimillionaire, so for all we know, he holds orgiastic Doctor Who parties in an opulent mansion where guests can watch the two missing episodes of "The Invasion" while being serviced by prostitutes in Nimon masks. But being part of a cult means being part of a hierarchy, and it's inevitable that those at the top of any hierarchy will end up behaving like gigantic arses. It's one of the reasons that I've alienated any "followers" I might accidentally have picked up over the years.
No, fair enough, that's a lie. I alienate them because I just can't bloody help myself. It is true, however, that the nature of Doctor Who defies the very notion of hierarchy. Let's be honest, the series taught you that you should be able to walk into the throneroom of any ruling monarch and be sarcastic to them without getting your head cut off. Didn't it?
In the end, the super-hyper-mega-ultra-irony is that I agree with Alan Stevens: the least Doctor Who thing in Doctor Who really is in "Remembrance of the Daleks", but it's not the trivial matter of planetary destruction. It's much earlier in the story, when the spooky little girl runs away from the Doctor, and the Doctor muses to himself: 'She doesn't talk to strangers… very wise.' Of course, it's not surprising that this line should have been jemmied into the script, any more than it's surprising that Ben Aaronovitch removed it for the novelisation. As I've said in the dear departed Randomness Times, the '80s was the decade in which the concept of "paedophile" entered the British consciousness, and the don't-get-into-cars-with-people-you-don't-know message was pushed harder than ever. (In the '70s, we grew up believing that people who abducted children wanted to hold them hostage, like in an episode of The Professionals. It wasn't until the '80s that our parents felt comfortable talking about kiddie-fiddling. This is why nobody found Darth Vader's 'I have felt him' comment remotely funny when Return of the Jedi was released in 1983, even though nobody can take it seriously now. Worse, the Emperor's reply is 'strange that I have not,' as if they're both part of the same paedophile ring.)
Yet for anyone grown-up enough to make their own decisions, this advice goes against everything Doctor Who seems to stand for. From the moment that Ian and Barbara enter the Doctor's world, understanding the alien - embracing the alien, even - becomes the baseline of all wisdom. Even the Tribe of Gum finds a sort of redemption this way, when Ian exposes Kal to a concept from another philosophy, if not actual democracy ('Kal is not stronger than the whole tribe') then at least the notion of duty to society. And even when the Doctor's involved in something morally dubious, refusing to communicate with the unknown simply isn't part of his world-view. Or worlds-view.
So if I have one final pronouncement to make, before Doctor Who descends into a Cult TV Hell of squee, self-congratulation, and Alex Kingston, then it's this. Always talk to strangers. They know things you don't.
Another thing to notice about this edition of the Radio Times is that the target time for the Enigma puzzle was 26 minutes, and I did it in nine. I just had to tell someone that.
Monday, November 03, 2008
Doctor Who: A Gambler's Guide
"A pony says it's a bird."
For the modern generation, the next few months are going to be a wholly new experience: those who don't remember the Old Time have never known the gut-level angst of waiting for the focus of the entire universe to change, or the righteous fury of someone who has to inform his or her parents that Les Dennis would not make a good replacement, or the smack of fear that the New Man might be the most hideous human being on Earth. (When I was eight, a communications breakdown in the schoolroom led me to believe that the next Doctor was going to be Jim Davidson rather than Peter Davison, and the emotional scarring still hasn't healed.) In fact, even those of us who've been here for decades might have trouble recalling the sensation. We knew who Eccleston's successor was going to be within 24 hours of his resignation; McGann ambushed us while we were looking the other way; and nobody really cared who was going to take over from Colin Baker. David Tennant's departure is the uneasiest moment in Doctor Who history since 1984, and the results are likely to be just as catastrophic.
Or perhaps that's unfair. But if I'm permitted to repeat myself - and given that I wrote over 50,000 words on the last series alone, I'm bound to use up all the adjectives sooner or later - then this is the point where we find out whether the series can drag itself out of its showbiz offal-pit and become a programme about Adventures in Space and Time again. After the 2007 series, I foresaw a nightmare future-world in which Matt Lucas had become the new Doctor, yet this seemed the lesser of two evils when Catherine Tate was announced as the TARDIS's official silly-face-puller in residence. And now David Walliams is one of the bookies' favourites to fill the Tennant-shaped hole at the heart of the world. Admittedly, I'm running out of new ways to say "surrounded by media back-slappers on all sides, the production team has forgotten the difference between a drama programme and a BAFTA awards ceremony", yet the fact remains that nobody's likely to tell them if - when - they let celeb-culture cloud their judgement. For a while, it looked as if Tate might steal the Best Performance trophy from her co-star at the ITV awards: from the point of view of Big Russell and friends, sitting in the audience of superstars while guzzling drinks made from champagne and little children's tears, it must have looked like a vindication. It probably never occurred to them that it was largely a result of block-voting by geek-loyalists, or that if you gave them a straight choice, ITV viewers would choose Ant and Dec to be the new Doctor.
Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before, Number Two. I said, towards the end of this year's season, that it was time for Tennant to make his excuses. Not because there's anything wrong with him as an actor (indeed, he's the only Doctor who's managed to develop his performance with every passing year, rather than giving a knowing wink to the camera and expecting small children to be impressed by his very presence), but simply because he's become so successful that his image has distorted the nature of the programme. Writers are among the laziest people on God's Clean Earth, and even those who should know better relied on Tennant-standards during the 2008 series. The latter half of "Forest of the Dead" is very nearly a checklist of "Things David Does Well", and his performance alone is enough to stop "The Doctor's Daughter" being as awful as its script. It's apt that he's the first actor to have his Doctor-number in his surname, because he's also the first to treat the role as if it's something like a sacred trust [footnote 1]. Yet he's given us a Doctor who's clever and dynamic and popular and sexy, so his companion would've ended up standing around with her mouth hanging open even if they hadn't hired an actress who specialises in that sort of thing.
In short, we may have passed the point where Tennant has become irreplaceable, which brings us to the nub of the issue. As you've no doubt heard, the bookmakers at Paddy Power have drawn up a long, long list of actors, and are now inviting us to have a flutter on the identity of the next-in-line. I can't say for sure whether it's the first time this has happened (we can be fairly sure that it didn't happen in 1987), but it's certainly the first time it's happened since I've been of gambling age. I speak as someone who made a profit on the 2002 World Cup, then lost it all on Euro 2004, and I still haven't forgiven the referee for the England-Portugal match. So here's a rundown of the favourites, for any of you who might be tempted. Because even if the bookies research every possible angle before they announce the odds, this is the one area in which we have the advantage. Do they know how Steven Moffat or Phil Collinson think…? No they don't. But we do [footnote 2].
Patterson Joseph (4-1 favourite). Here's an experiment you can all try. If you're in the company of non-fans, and someone brings up the topic of the Next Doctor Who, tell them that the current favourite is Patterson Joseph. When they say "who?", just tell them: "He's black." I guarantee that at least 85% of them will just say "oh", as if that tells them everything they need to know. And in a sense, it does. Modern-day Doctor Who has a reputation for being a "Liberal" programme: "Liberal" is used in its modern sense here, to mean something that's politely pro-tolerance and anti-bigotry, but doesn't have the nerve to be properly left-wing. The media has latched onto this, so it's inevitable that a black actor is going to be the bookmaker's choice, regardless of what he actually does. And there is a certain appeal in the thought of hearing your slightly-racist uncle mutter "not as good as it was in the old days" under his breath whenever anyone mentions Doctor Who, but on the other hand… well, let's be frank. There's a reason that Joseph specialises in harsh, aggressive, alienating characters, and it's simply that he has no capacity for making the audience like him. Which is, after all, why he was cast as the self-obsessed Dalek-denier in "Bad Wolf". Turning him into the Doctor, especially after the audience has grown accustomed to the shining and beatific countenance of the Boy David, would result in the series collapsing after a single year of Moffathood and Joseph himself being remembered in years to come as "The One Nobody Likes to Talk About". Don Warrington, now, that's my idea of a black Doctor [footnote 3].
David Morrisey (5-1). There's a potentially interesting legal case here. Thanks to the October spoiler-glut, I've just discovered the title of this year's Christmas special, and David Morrisey's role in it. Ergo, we know for a fact that he's "The Next Doctor", even if he isn't the Next Doctor. So what happens if you put a bet on him at 5-1, then take your slip back to Paddy Power after Christmas Day, claiming that you've technically won? Bookies are used to "solid" results, even if those results involve a photo-finish or a stewards' inquiry. They're not used to taking bets on something that might involve regenerative ambiguity or non-contemporaneous timelines. It seems unlikely, though, that Morrisey's Next Doctor will turn out to be a permanent appointment… unless the whole Christmas Special is a devious test-run (see also the 50-1 shot). Ah! On closer inspection, I see that the Paddy Power People have been careful to specify "David Tennant's Replacement" rather than "The Next Doctor Who". They're smarter than I thought.
James Nesbitt (6-1). Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before, Number Three. Some years ago, Steven Moffat told me about an extra-special project he'd written for BBC1, which had been temporarily delayed because the "perfect actor" was busy with other work. This sounded terribly exciting (any series which needs a specific actor has got to be a masterpiece, surely…?), so imagine my disappointment when it turned out to be Jekyll, and the "perfect actor" turned out to be that git from the Yellow Pages adverts. And this brings us once again to the back-slappy world of showbiz. If you work in the media, where programmes of the Cold Feet oeuvre are regarded as the height of sophistication, then James Nesbitt is an A-Grade celebrity. However, for those who don't habitually watch ITV pseudo-dramas that involve successful middle-class people whining about their lack of serious problems - and that's the majority of the British population, myself included - he's just an annoyance in the ad-breaks. His furniture-chewing performance in Jekyll, complete with token attempts at "scary and maniacal" which seemed roughly as intimidating as a twelve-year-old telling you that his dad is a ninja, were so ludicrous that even the Radio Times was forced to treat it as a form of kitsch. And this is a magazine that thinks Heroes is a serious drama. But despite Nesbitt's prior association with Moffat, we can safely assume that he's out of the running, if only because his casting would result in parents across the nation having to answer awkward questions like "mummy, why is that ugly bald man pretending to be the Doctor?".
John Simm (8-1). In the right context, there's nothing wrong with Simm. His cheeky-faced integrity was one of the key reasons that viewers of Life on Mars didn't notice the piss-poor quality of the scripts, although perhaps his greatest role was as the ersatz Barney Sumner in Twenty-Four Hour Party People. (If you haven't seen it, then it's worth a look next time it's on Film Four, if only for the obvious drinking game: take a shot every time you see an actor who's been in modern-day Doctor Who. Christopher Eccleston has a cameo part as a homeless wino who quotes Roman philosophy at Tony Wilson, and that's entertaining even as a sentence.) Yet the hideous miscasting of Simm as the Master was another example of the production team jamming a well-known, well-liked media "face" into the series, whether he belongs there or not. There's no clearer sign of this than the way he's introduced at the end of "Utopia". You'd think, wouldn't you, that we'd get at least one close-up of the newly-regenerated arch-villain in order to establish his identity…? But, no. All we get are waist-up shots as he dashes around the TARDIS console, because the assumption is that this man is a Big TV Star, and therefore needs no introduction. When even Graeme Harper is so celebrity-dazzled that he can't direct properly, something's gone badly wrong.
Chiwetel Ejiofor (8-1). Middle England might just about accept a black Doctor, but they certainly won't accept one they can't pronounce. Hartnell! Troughton! Pertwee! Baker! Davison! Baker! McCoy! McGann! Eccleston! Tennant! Eji… Ejoili… Ej… oh, **** it, let's just hire Matt Smith instead.
Russell Tovey (10-1). Tovey's inclusion on this list is a direct result of Big Russell "coming out" and describing him as one of the nation's greatest rising talents (he was in The History Boys, of course, so he's probably used to being a fat-camp-man magnet). And there are numerous precedents for bit-part players becoming regulars in the Doctor Who universe, although hard-core fans might find it harder to swallow the Doctor's transformation into Alanzo the Helmsman than to accept that the Sixth Doctor was based on Commander Maxil's body-print, or that Martha was related to the girl with the Cyber-lubricant in her ear at Canary Wharf, or that the cute gap-toothed Welsh girl from Torchwood was somehow based on the cute gap-toothed Welsh girl who gave her poor little working-class life to save Victorian Cardiff [footnote 4]. As a leading man, however, Tovey has a problem: he's twelve. Or at least, he appears to have been strategically punched in the face until he looks twelve. The Doctors may be getting younger, and Davies may have insisted that the character needs youthful jumping-around abilities these days (isn't that what the companions are supposed to be for…?), but an incarnation who looks as if he might cry when you take his jelly away is pushing things a little.
David Walliams (10-1). Currently being mistaken for a serious actor by retarded television executives across the UK, plus Stephen Poliakoff. In fact, the lower reaches of the Paddy Power list are riddled with comedians who believe they can Do Drama (including both Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, the latter appearing semi-feasible after House, although I still can't watch it without expecting him to shout "dammit, John!" at any moment). One of these represents the ultimate nightmare scenario: Ricky Gervais at 80-1. This may sound like a long shot, but scarily, Greece were given odds of exactly 80-1 to win Euro 2004. And what happened there? I lost everything, that's what. Now we're all in that position.
Anthony Head (10-1). The major objection to Head being the Doctor is that it's just too obvious, but then, there are an awful lot of people at BBC Wales who've got even less imagination than the bookmakers: those who see Doctor Who as a "cult sci-fi" show seem convinced that the best way to keep the fans happy is to cast lots of people from other "cult sci-fi" shows, hence the hilarious attempt to parachute James Marsters into Torchwood. Nonetheless, it's true that the casting of Head would be welcomed by the kind of degenerate nerd-scum who described the embarrassing swimming-pool scene in "School Reunion" as "iconic". As with John Simm, there's absolutely nothing wrong with Head in himself, but casting him as the Doctor would be final, crippling proof that the series has given up any chance of having its own identity. Did I mention that I saw him in The Rocky Horror Show, in the days when he was only known for the Gold Blend adverts…? He had great legs.
Richard Coyle (14-1). If I had to look down the list of candidates and choose one based on nothing more than his name, then this would be the winner. The polar opposite of Chiwetel Ejiofor, it just looks right on the page: Eccleston… Tennant… Coyle. Sadly, he's the drippy one out of Coupling (read: "the geeky side of Moffat that he tries to keep hidden, or at least tries to be ironic about"), who then became some sort of Celtic warrior in a film about King Arthur that even fantasy buffs have managed to forget. Again, the association with Moffat guarantees him a place in this list, and puts Coyle in the "chillingly possible" category. But no matter how much they try to re-style him, he still comes across as a bad perm looking for somewhere to happen.
Sean Pertwee (14-1). Let's be honest, he wouldn't be here at all if he weren't called Pertwee. And if we're talking about the ability to engage a family audience, then he isn't even the most qualified of the Doctor-spawn. (I don't mean David Troughton, either. Think eyelashes and a functional womb.) Pertwee Jr's vulturine, granite-cast features suggest that his father mated with Darkseid from The New Gods, and even if you could somehow chisel a smile across it with a diamond-tipped drill, he'd still give you the impression that he'd rather be stamping on baby rabbits than fighting cosmic evil. This makes him ideal for television's "criminal psychopath" and "ruthless drug-lord" parts, which is why it seems so bizarre that he's the country's most sought-after voice-over artist. His numerous TV ads sound like the kind of thing you'd expect to hear in a near-future fascist dystopia, promising unlimited power for the masses with a creeping undercurrent of "…once all the defectives have been eradicated". Not perfect for this role.
Robert Carlyse (14-1). Oh, God, yes. Please, yes. Apart from anything else, Carlyse's casting would force the programme to climb out from under the mountain of rotting celeb-flesh and become something like a drama series again (albeit a drama with nods toward light entertainment, which is how it seems to work best). Donna Noble would be as unthinkable under Carlyse as she would've been under Eccleston, and his presence might even compel could-be-good-if-they-tried writers like Gareth Roberts to come up with proper scripts instead of collections of in-jokes. Carlyse's name has been mooted in connection with Doctor Who since the Eccleston mini-epoch, partly because both actors came from the same batch of Rising British Talent in the early '90s, and partly because they've been locked together in our mass-consciousness ever since Carlyse stabbed Eccleston to death in Cracker: this is why some of us half-expected the Doctor to regenerate into Ricky Tomlinson at the end of "The Parting of the Ways", and why Carlyse seemed the obvious choice to be the new Master. But nooooo, they had to go for This Year's Mr Popular, didn't they? Hearteningly, a recent Radio Times interview suggested that he'd be willing to consider a major part in Doctor Who, but that he simply hadn't been asked [footnote 5]. The question is, though… would the general public be able to accept anyone this intense, after four years of Tennant's "Mickeeeey!!!" approach? We can only hope.
Richard E. Grant (14-1). What, again?
Jack Davenport (16-1). Another actor well-versed in playing a manifestation of Moffat's psyche, having spent several years as "Steve", the hero of Coupling who walks a neurotic line between geekdom and self-confidence while treating his barely-concealed misogyny as a form of post-modernism. Davenport's case is strengthened by his Hollywood credentials, if you can ignore the fact that the makers of Pirates of the Caribbean cast him because of his lack of charm and charisma (I forget the name of his character, but Lead Snotty Englishman just about covers it). We should also remember that he's already had a shot at being the star of a "cult sci-fi" series, and that he utterly botched it. Ultraviolet was meant to do for fantasy what Cracker did for the detective series, but whereas the anti-hero of Cracker was a pathologically unpredictable spit-ball of rage and obsession, the lead character of Ultraviolet was a mumbling bore who instantly alienated the audience. Mind you, Simon Pegg killed the otherwise-promising Hippies in exactly the same way, and he somehow got a second chance.
Alan Davies (16-1). I'm not even going to dignify this with a response.
Adrian Lester (18-1). What's amusing is that just in this rundown of Twenty People Who Might Be the Next Doctor Who, there are more black actors than there were in the entire Hartnell era. But whereas Patterson Joseph is far, far too vicious for the role, Adrian Lester is merely bland. Much more interesting is what his appearance on this list says about the way Doctor Who is perceived by the Not-We. Lester is best known for the BBC's Hustle, literally the most predictable television series ever made, usually described by the Radio Times with the obvious euphemism "glossy". But these days, this is how both the bookies and the media-in-general see the Doctor's world: the series is no longer an ever-growing experiment in High Strangeness and relative moral values, it's quite distinctly a "format", related to the Tony Jordan school of License-Fee-draining, guest-star-heavy pseudo-drama. When you remember that the same people responsible for the vacuity of Hustle also devised Life on Mars (which is just as vacuous, but better-camouflaged), the last two years of Doctor Who make a lot more sense.
Adien Gillen (18-1). Aiden Gillen…? Oh, of course: the press still believes in the "Gay Mafia" theory of television, so Gillen is a potential candidate simply because he was seen committing various acts of fleshy man-lust in Queer as Folk. But in itself, this proves that he's not in the running. If Big Russell [footnote 6] were still Best Gay Friends with him, then Gillen would've had a major guest-star part in Doctor Who three years ago. For Davies to insist on casting an old acquaintance now, just as he's about to leave the series, would be bizarre behaviour even for the man who thought "Journey's End" made sense.
Alexander Armstrong (18-1). Back in 2003-2004, when we were still obsessing over the question of who the first twenty-first-century Doctor might be, one reader of the RT suggested that they should cast a new Doctor every week and call it Have I Got Whos for You. At around the same time, Russell T. Davies was expressing his disgust at the tabloid speculation that Jamie Oliver could get the part instead of a "serious" actor. And, hooray! He cast Christopher Eccleston. Yet after five years of separation from the world of mortal men, Davies has brought the programme to a point where the papers are once again more likely to suggest "celebs" than "thesps", which is why the list of candidates to be the Doctor looks frighteningly like a list of candidates to be the nation's leading game-show host: Alexander Armstrong is not only a regular chairman on Have I Got News, but has also been mooted as Des O'Connor's replacement on Countdown. To be fair to Armstrong, he's by far the least offensive of the comedians on this list, and nobody could take issue with his performance as the Modern K-9 in The Sarah-Jane Adventures. But this tells you almost as much about the state of the programme as the Adrian Lester option.
Jason Statham (18-1). Do me a ***ing favour.
Harry Lloyd (18-1). Honestly, it's hard not to like the man. If, indeed, "man" is the word: he looks as if he's still being used as a human toast-rack by the older boys at Eton. After his appearance as Son of Mine in "Human Nature", his interviews for Confidential proved him to be in the well-adjusted middle-ground between relaxed professionalism and boyish enthusiasm, although that's perhaps not surprising for someone who looks as if he should be in the Doctor Who version of Muppet Babies alongside Russell Tovey. I just about managed to accept a Doctor who's roughly my age, but a public-school Doctor born in the 1980s? It's hard to imagine him commanding the authority to save the universe, unless he's going to challenge Davros to a round of the Biscuit Game. (Which Davros would lose, obviously. Because... well, y'know... he doesn't have a spare hand to hold the biscuit.)
And, way down the list of contenders…
Alex Kingston (50-1). Every time it looks as if a new Doctor's going to be required, some idiot suggests that it might be a woman. This year, that idiot was me, although there was a logic behind it. If Tennant has become so popular that he's virtually irreplaceable - far more so than Tom Baker ever was, since people in those days only expected an actor, not a major celebrity and national sex-symbol as well [footnote 7] - then the only option is to introduce a Doctor so shockingly different that the question of "better" or "worse" ceases to be an issue. If there's ever going to be a full-time female Doctor, then it's going to be now, especially when we consider the new producer's preference for hanging around with sexy actresses [footnote 8]. So there's a terrible credibility in Alex Kingston, the only woman on the Paddy Power list, being a candidate. If the programme-makers earmarked her as a potential She-Doctor some time ago, then the banality of the contrived-love-interest scenes in "Silence in the Library" makes a lot more sense: it's the set-up rather than the punchline, the twist being that she's not the Doctor's future wife at all, but someone who's destined to carry his "essence" around after the death of his current body. There are any number of precedents for this in SF television, and besides, the casting of an actress from ER would be seen as a coup by those bottom-feeding telly-whores who believe American TV to be the paragon of all human culture. In other words, exactly the kind of people whom the members of the Doctor Who production team are likely to meet every day.
However, if we're talking about the possibility of a bluestocking Doctor, then… I'd like to propose a rank outsider of my own.
Billie Piper. At the moment, she's happily squirming in her own afterbirth (she's named her newborn "Winston", which shows that she's lost none of her taste or good judgement since she declared "The Satan Pit" to be her favourite episode of 2006). But she wouldn't have to start shooting the 2010 series for another few months, and by then, the glow of celebrity motherhood would almost certainly have been replaced by a professional nanny. A few months after that, the papers would be full of speculation about her husband knocking off the nanny while Ms Piper's in Cardiff, but that's none of our concern. The thing to remember here is that the bigger Doctor Who gets, the more terrified its creators become, and the more they rely on past successes to win audience approval. Reuniting all the recent companions in "The Stolen Earth" might be regarded as a "celebration" of the programme so far, but it could equally be seen as a work of cowardice, especially since the story ends with a thoroughly pointless reprise of "Doomsday". Billie Piper is a proven ratings-winner, and associated with a Golden Age of Doctor Who that's scheduled to end with the departure of Tennant, at least unless they can keep it going by replacing him with someone just as recognisable. For the Doctor to take on Rose's form is no more ridiculous than any other regeneration (old-school geeks may quibble with this, but you can shut them up just by mentioning "Destiny of the Daleks", without even having to resort to "Journey's End"). Two years ago, it would've seemed silly, but then… two years ago, so would this entire list. With one exception, anyway.
Of course, since newfangled Doctor Who was designed to revolve around the companion until Catherine Tate made it impossible, we know that the nature of the new sidekick will be almost as crucial as the casting of the lead. For obvious reasons, Paddy Power isn't running a book on that, but we can make guesses based on Steven Moffat's known tendencies. Assuming that the Doctor's still male, the New Executive won't break with tradition, so it'll be another girl. She's unlikely to come from 2008 again - that'd be too obvious - but at the same time, Moffat won't want to risk alienating the audience by making her too far removed from home. He also wants to push the public's "nostalgia" button, as well as keeping the fans on his side, so the clever money says she'll come from 1963. In which case, she'll probably be an orphan, to avoid the necessity of return-trips to her own period. And since Moffat will want to curry favour with everyone else in Cardiff (q.v. "The Doctor Dances", in which he attempts to flatter to his Big Gay Boss by inventing a version of 1940s England in which none of the men are heterosexual), she'll obviously be inclined towards Welshness.
And, as pop-fate would have it, there's a model for this character. The last twelve months have already given the UK a vulnerable-yet-spunky Welsh girl who's got all the retro-glamour and heart-rending angst of Dusty Springfield, which is why I'm predicting that the 2010 series will be - in a nutshell - Duffy the Vampire Slayer.
Footnote 1. Eccleston came close, by treating the cultural well-being of younger viewers as a sacred trust. It's hard to imagine Tom Baker putting his ego aside in quite the same way, just as it's hard to imagine Eccleston making an arse of himself on a BBC1 panel-game show in twenty years' time.
Footnote 2. One of them wants to impress girls, and the other wants to smash giant spaceships into volcanoes.
Footnote 3. But even Warrington, like anyone over the age of forty-five, would be unacceptable after Tennant. Actually, I suggested him as a possible Doctor in a "Round Table" interview for I, Who 2, circa 2001. Gary Russell was also part of that Round Table, and shortly thereafter, Big Finish cast Warrington as Rassilon. Coincidence…? Yeah, probably. (The same interview saw Gary Russell describing Alien Bodies as one of the best Doctor Who books ever written, shortly before he blacklisted me from Big Finish for being mildly impolite about one of his own efforts. How do these people sleep?)
Footnote 4. There's also the issue of Morton Dill being one of Steven Taylor's ancestors. But let's not be too anal, there might be civilians reading this.
Footnote 5. Unlike, say, such luminaries as Roger Lloyd Pack or Michelle Collins. That's a bit like asking Chris Chibnall to write an episode, but not asking me.
Footnote 6. By now, you're probably sick of my insistence on calling him "Big Russell". But anyone who saw him on-stage at the ITV awards, dwarfing his minions in all three dimensions, will realise how apt it is.
Footnote 7. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: even if they were all still around and all still in their prime, none of the actors who've played the Doctor so far would possibly stand a chance of being Tennant's replacement. Not even Eccleston, whose leering, ogre-like demeanour would make far too many teenagers shout "eww, minger!" after the Boy David.
Footnote 8. Yeah, like I'm any different. Oh, that reminds me: why haven't I been commissioned to write another Bernice audio this year? I want another chance to flirt with Lisa Bowerman.
For the modern generation, the next few months are going to be a wholly new experience: those who don't remember the Old Time have never known the gut-level angst of waiting for the focus of the entire universe to change, or the righteous fury of someone who has to inform his or her parents that Les Dennis would not make a good replacement, or the smack of fear that the New Man might be the most hideous human being on Earth. (When I was eight, a communications breakdown in the schoolroom led me to believe that the next Doctor was going to be Jim Davidson rather than Peter Davison, and the emotional scarring still hasn't healed.) In fact, even those of us who've been here for decades might have trouble recalling the sensation. We knew who Eccleston's successor was going to be within 24 hours of his resignation; McGann ambushed us while we were looking the other way; and nobody really cared who was going to take over from Colin Baker. David Tennant's departure is the uneasiest moment in Doctor Who history since 1984, and the results are likely to be just as catastrophic.
Or perhaps that's unfair. But if I'm permitted to repeat myself - and given that I wrote over 50,000 words on the last series alone, I'm bound to use up all the adjectives sooner or later - then this is the point where we find out whether the series can drag itself out of its showbiz offal-pit and become a programme about Adventures in Space and Time again. After the 2007 series, I foresaw a nightmare future-world in which Matt Lucas had become the new Doctor, yet this seemed the lesser of two evils when Catherine Tate was announced as the TARDIS's official silly-face-puller in residence. And now David Walliams is one of the bookies' favourites to fill the Tennant-shaped hole at the heart of the world. Admittedly, I'm running out of new ways to say "surrounded by media back-slappers on all sides, the production team has forgotten the difference between a drama programme and a BAFTA awards ceremony", yet the fact remains that nobody's likely to tell them if - when - they let celeb-culture cloud their judgement. For a while, it looked as if Tate might steal the Best Performance trophy from her co-star at the ITV awards: from the point of view of Big Russell and friends, sitting in the audience of superstars while guzzling drinks made from champagne and little children's tears, it must have looked like a vindication. It probably never occurred to them that it was largely a result of block-voting by geek-loyalists, or that if you gave them a straight choice, ITV viewers would choose Ant and Dec to be the new Doctor.
Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before, Number Two. I said, towards the end of this year's season, that it was time for Tennant to make his excuses. Not because there's anything wrong with him as an actor (indeed, he's the only Doctor who's managed to develop his performance with every passing year, rather than giving a knowing wink to the camera and expecting small children to be impressed by his very presence), but simply because he's become so successful that his image has distorted the nature of the programme. Writers are among the laziest people on God's Clean Earth, and even those who should know better relied on Tennant-standards during the 2008 series. The latter half of "Forest of the Dead" is very nearly a checklist of "Things David Does Well", and his performance alone is enough to stop "The Doctor's Daughter" being as awful as its script. It's apt that he's the first actor to have his Doctor-number in his surname, because he's also the first to treat the role as if it's something like a sacred trust [footnote 1]. Yet he's given us a Doctor who's clever and dynamic and popular and sexy, so his companion would've ended up standing around with her mouth hanging open even if they hadn't hired an actress who specialises in that sort of thing.
In short, we may have passed the point where Tennant has become irreplaceable, which brings us to the nub of the issue. As you've no doubt heard, the bookmakers at Paddy Power have drawn up a long, long list of actors, and are now inviting us to have a flutter on the identity of the next-in-line. I can't say for sure whether it's the first time this has happened (we can be fairly sure that it didn't happen in 1987), but it's certainly the first time it's happened since I've been of gambling age. I speak as someone who made a profit on the 2002 World Cup, then lost it all on Euro 2004, and I still haven't forgiven the referee for the England-Portugal match. So here's a rundown of the favourites, for any of you who might be tempted. Because even if the bookies research every possible angle before they announce the odds, this is the one area in which we have the advantage. Do they know how Steven Moffat or Phil Collinson think…? No they don't. But we do [footnote 2].
Patterson Joseph (4-1 favourite). Here's an experiment you can all try. If you're in the company of non-fans, and someone brings up the topic of the Next Doctor Who, tell them that the current favourite is Patterson Joseph. When they say "who?", just tell them: "He's black." I guarantee that at least 85% of them will just say "oh", as if that tells them everything they need to know. And in a sense, it does. Modern-day Doctor Who has a reputation for being a "Liberal" programme: "Liberal" is used in its modern sense here, to mean something that's politely pro-tolerance and anti-bigotry, but doesn't have the nerve to be properly left-wing. The media has latched onto this, so it's inevitable that a black actor is going to be the bookmaker's choice, regardless of what he actually does. And there is a certain appeal in the thought of hearing your slightly-racist uncle mutter "not as good as it was in the old days" under his breath whenever anyone mentions Doctor Who, but on the other hand… well, let's be frank. There's a reason that Joseph specialises in harsh, aggressive, alienating characters, and it's simply that he has no capacity for making the audience like him. Which is, after all, why he was cast as the self-obsessed Dalek-denier in "Bad Wolf". Turning him into the Doctor, especially after the audience has grown accustomed to the shining and beatific countenance of the Boy David, would result in the series collapsing after a single year of Moffathood and Joseph himself being remembered in years to come as "The One Nobody Likes to Talk About". Don Warrington, now, that's my idea of a black Doctor [footnote 3].
David Morrisey (5-1). There's a potentially interesting legal case here. Thanks to the October spoiler-glut, I've just discovered the title of this year's Christmas special, and David Morrisey's role in it. Ergo, we know for a fact that he's "The Next Doctor", even if he isn't the Next Doctor. So what happens if you put a bet on him at 5-1, then take your slip back to Paddy Power after Christmas Day, claiming that you've technically won? Bookies are used to "solid" results, even if those results involve a photo-finish or a stewards' inquiry. They're not used to taking bets on something that might involve regenerative ambiguity or non-contemporaneous timelines. It seems unlikely, though, that Morrisey's Next Doctor will turn out to be a permanent appointment… unless the whole Christmas Special is a devious test-run (see also the 50-1 shot). Ah! On closer inspection, I see that the Paddy Power People have been careful to specify "David Tennant's Replacement" rather than "The Next Doctor Who". They're smarter than I thought.
James Nesbitt (6-1). Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before, Number Three. Some years ago, Steven Moffat told me about an extra-special project he'd written for BBC1, which had been temporarily delayed because the "perfect actor" was busy with other work. This sounded terribly exciting (any series which needs a specific actor has got to be a masterpiece, surely…?), so imagine my disappointment when it turned out to be Jekyll, and the "perfect actor" turned out to be that git from the Yellow Pages adverts. And this brings us once again to the back-slappy world of showbiz. If you work in the media, where programmes of the Cold Feet oeuvre are regarded as the height of sophistication, then James Nesbitt is an A-Grade celebrity. However, for those who don't habitually watch ITV pseudo-dramas that involve successful middle-class people whining about their lack of serious problems - and that's the majority of the British population, myself included - he's just an annoyance in the ad-breaks. His furniture-chewing performance in Jekyll, complete with token attempts at "scary and maniacal" which seemed roughly as intimidating as a twelve-year-old telling you that his dad is a ninja, were so ludicrous that even the Radio Times was forced to treat it as a form of kitsch. And this is a magazine that thinks Heroes is a serious drama. But despite Nesbitt's prior association with Moffat, we can safely assume that he's out of the running, if only because his casting would result in parents across the nation having to answer awkward questions like "mummy, why is that ugly bald man pretending to be the Doctor?".
John Simm (8-1). In the right context, there's nothing wrong with Simm. His cheeky-faced integrity was one of the key reasons that viewers of Life on Mars didn't notice the piss-poor quality of the scripts, although perhaps his greatest role was as the ersatz Barney Sumner in Twenty-Four Hour Party People. (If you haven't seen it, then it's worth a look next time it's on Film Four, if only for the obvious drinking game: take a shot every time you see an actor who's been in modern-day Doctor Who. Christopher Eccleston has a cameo part as a homeless wino who quotes Roman philosophy at Tony Wilson, and that's entertaining even as a sentence.) Yet the hideous miscasting of Simm as the Master was another example of the production team jamming a well-known, well-liked media "face" into the series, whether he belongs there or not. There's no clearer sign of this than the way he's introduced at the end of "Utopia". You'd think, wouldn't you, that we'd get at least one close-up of the newly-regenerated arch-villain in order to establish his identity…? But, no. All we get are waist-up shots as he dashes around the TARDIS console, because the assumption is that this man is a Big TV Star, and therefore needs no introduction. When even Graeme Harper is so celebrity-dazzled that he can't direct properly, something's gone badly wrong.
Chiwetel Ejiofor (8-1). Middle England might just about accept a black Doctor, but they certainly won't accept one they can't pronounce. Hartnell! Troughton! Pertwee! Baker! Davison! Baker! McCoy! McGann! Eccleston! Tennant! Eji… Ejoili… Ej… oh, **** it, let's just hire Matt Smith instead.
Russell Tovey (10-1). Tovey's inclusion on this list is a direct result of Big Russell "coming out" and describing him as one of the nation's greatest rising talents (he was in The History Boys, of course, so he's probably used to being a fat-camp-man magnet). And there are numerous precedents for bit-part players becoming regulars in the Doctor Who universe, although hard-core fans might find it harder to swallow the Doctor's transformation into Alanzo the Helmsman than to accept that the Sixth Doctor was based on Commander Maxil's body-print, or that Martha was related to the girl with the Cyber-lubricant in her ear at Canary Wharf, or that the cute gap-toothed Welsh girl from Torchwood was somehow based on the cute gap-toothed Welsh girl who gave her poor little working-class life to save Victorian Cardiff [footnote 4]. As a leading man, however, Tovey has a problem: he's twelve. Or at least, he appears to have been strategically punched in the face until he looks twelve. The Doctors may be getting younger, and Davies may have insisted that the character needs youthful jumping-around abilities these days (isn't that what the companions are supposed to be for…?), but an incarnation who looks as if he might cry when you take his jelly away is pushing things a little.
David Walliams (10-1). Currently being mistaken for a serious actor by retarded television executives across the UK, plus Stephen Poliakoff. In fact, the lower reaches of the Paddy Power list are riddled with comedians who believe they can Do Drama (including both Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, the latter appearing semi-feasible after House, although I still can't watch it without expecting him to shout "dammit, John!" at any moment). One of these represents the ultimate nightmare scenario: Ricky Gervais at 80-1. This may sound like a long shot, but scarily, Greece were given odds of exactly 80-1 to win Euro 2004. And what happened there? I lost everything, that's what. Now we're all in that position.
Anthony Head (10-1). The major objection to Head being the Doctor is that it's just too obvious, but then, there are an awful lot of people at BBC Wales who've got even less imagination than the bookmakers: those who see Doctor Who as a "cult sci-fi" show seem convinced that the best way to keep the fans happy is to cast lots of people from other "cult sci-fi" shows, hence the hilarious attempt to parachute James Marsters into Torchwood. Nonetheless, it's true that the casting of Head would be welcomed by the kind of degenerate nerd-scum who described the embarrassing swimming-pool scene in "School Reunion" as "iconic". As with John Simm, there's absolutely nothing wrong with Head in himself, but casting him as the Doctor would be final, crippling proof that the series has given up any chance of having its own identity. Did I mention that I saw him in The Rocky Horror Show, in the days when he was only known for the Gold Blend adverts…? He had great legs.
Richard Coyle (14-1). If I had to look down the list of candidates and choose one based on nothing more than his name, then this would be the winner. The polar opposite of Chiwetel Ejiofor, it just looks right on the page: Eccleston… Tennant… Coyle. Sadly, he's the drippy one out of Coupling (read: "the geeky side of Moffat that he tries to keep hidden, or at least tries to be ironic about"), who then became some sort of Celtic warrior in a film about King Arthur that even fantasy buffs have managed to forget. Again, the association with Moffat guarantees him a place in this list, and puts Coyle in the "chillingly possible" category. But no matter how much they try to re-style him, he still comes across as a bad perm looking for somewhere to happen.
Sean Pertwee (14-1). Let's be honest, he wouldn't be here at all if he weren't called Pertwee. And if we're talking about the ability to engage a family audience, then he isn't even the most qualified of the Doctor-spawn. (I don't mean David Troughton, either. Think eyelashes and a functional womb.) Pertwee Jr's vulturine, granite-cast features suggest that his father mated with Darkseid from The New Gods, and even if you could somehow chisel a smile across it with a diamond-tipped drill, he'd still give you the impression that he'd rather be stamping on baby rabbits than fighting cosmic evil. This makes him ideal for television's "criminal psychopath" and "ruthless drug-lord" parts, which is why it seems so bizarre that he's the country's most sought-after voice-over artist. His numerous TV ads sound like the kind of thing you'd expect to hear in a near-future fascist dystopia, promising unlimited power for the masses with a creeping undercurrent of "…once all the defectives have been eradicated". Not perfect for this role.
Robert Carlyse (14-1). Oh, God, yes. Please, yes. Apart from anything else, Carlyse's casting would force the programme to climb out from under the mountain of rotting celeb-flesh and become something like a drama series again (albeit a drama with nods toward light entertainment, which is how it seems to work best). Donna Noble would be as unthinkable under Carlyse as she would've been under Eccleston, and his presence might even compel could-be-good-if-they-tried writers like Gareth Roberts to come up with proper scripts instead of collections of in-jokes. Carlyse's name has been mooted in connection with Doctor Who since the Eccleston mini-epoch, partly because both actors came from the same batch of Rising British Talent in the early '90s, and partly because they've been locked together in our mass-consciousness ever since Carlyse stabbed Eccleston to death in Cracker: this is why some of us half-expected the Doctor to regenerate into Ricky Tomlinson at the end of "The Parting of the Ways", and why Carlyse seemed the obvious choice to be the new Master. But nooooo, they had to go for This Year's Mr Popular, didn't they? Hearteningly, a recent Radio Times interview suggested that he'd be willing to consider a major part in Doctor Who, but that he simply hadn't been asked [footnote 5]. The question is, though… would the general public be able to accept anyone this intense, after four years of Tennant's "Mickeeeey!!!" approach? We can only hope.
Richard E. Grant (14-1). What, again?
Jack Davenport (16-1). Another actor well-versed in playing a manifestation of Moffat's psyche, having spent several years as "Steve", the hero of Coupling who walks a neurotic line between geekdom and self-confidence while treating his barely-concealed misogyny as a form of post-modernism. Davenport's case is strengthened by his Hollywood credentials, if you can ignore the fact that the makers of Pirates of the Caribbean cast him because of his lack of charm and charisma (I forget the name of his character, but Lead Snotty Englishman just about covers it). We should also remember that he's already had a shot at being the star of a "cult sci-fi" series, and that he utterly botched it. Ultraviolet was meant to do for fantasy what Cracker did for the detective series, but whereas the anti-hero of Cracker was a pathologically unpredictable spit-ball of rage and obsession, the lead character of Ultraviolet was a mumbling bore who instantly alienated the audience. Mind you, Simon Pegg killed the otherwise-promising Hippies in exactly the same way, and he somehow got a second chance.
Alan Davies (16-1). I'm not even going to dignify this with a response.
Adrian Lester (18-1). What's amusing is that just in this rundown of Twenty People Who Might Be the Next Doctor Who, there are more black actors than there were in the entire Hartnell era. But whereas Patterson Joseph is far, far too vicious for the role, Adrian Lester is merely bland. Much more interesting is what his appearance on this list says about the way Doctor Who is perceived by the Not-We. Lester is best known for the BBC's Hustle, literally the most predictable television series ever made, usually described by the Radio Times with the obvious euphemism "glossy". But these days, this is how both the bookies and the media-in-general see the Doctor's world: the series is no longer an ever-growing experiment in High Strangeness and relative moral values, it's quite distinctly a "format", related to the Tony Jordan school of License-Fee-draining, guest-star-heavy pseudo-drama. When you remember that the same people responsible for the vacuity of Hustle also devised Life on Mars (which is just as vacuous, but better-camouflaged), the last two years of Doctor Who make a lot more sense.
Adien Gillen (18-1). Aiden Gillen…? Oh, of course: the press still believes in the "Gay Mafia" theory of television, so Gillen is a potential candidate simply because he was seen committing various acts of fleshy man-lust in Queer as Folk. But in itself, this proves that he's not in the running. If Big Russell [footnote 6] were still Best Gay Friends with him, then Gillen would've had a major guest-star part in Doctor Who three years ago. For Davies to insist on casting an old acquaintance now, just as he's about to leave the series, would be bizarre behaviour even for the man who thought "Journey's End" made sense.
Alexander Armstrong (18-1). Back in 2003-2004, when we were still obsessing over the question of who the first twenty-first-century Doctor might be, one reader of the RT suggested that they should cast a new Doctor every week and call it Have I Got Whos for You. At around the same time, Russell T. Davies was expressing his disgust at the tabloid speculation that Jamie Oliver could get the part instead of a "serious" actor. And, hooray! He cast Christopher Eccleston. Yet after five years of separation from the world of mortal men, Davies has brought the programme to a point where the papers are once again more likely to suggest "celebs" than "thesps", which is why the list of candidates to be the Doctor looks frighteningly like a list of candidates to be the nation's leading game-show host: Alexander Armstrong is not only a regular chairman on Have I Got News, but has also been mooted as Des O'Connor's replacement on Countdown. To be fair to Armstrong, he's by far the least offensive of the comedians on this list, and nobody could take issue with his performance as the Modern K-9 in The Sarah-Jane Adventures. But this tells you almost as much about the state of the programme as the Adrian Lester option.
Jason Statham (18-1). Do me a ***ing favour.
Harry Lloyd (18-1). Honestly, it's hard not to like the man. If, indeed, "man" is the word: he looks as if he's still being used as a human toast-rack by the older boys at Eton. After his appearance as Son of Mine in "Human Nature", his interviews for Confidential proved him to be in the well-adjusted middle-ground between relaxed professionalism and boyish enthusiasm, although that's perhaps not surprising for someone who looks as if he should be in the Doctor Who version of Muppet Babies alongside Russell Tovey. I just about managed to accept a Doctor who's roughly my age, but a public-school Doctor born in the 1980s? It's hard to imagine him commanding the authority to save the universe, unless he's going to challenge Davros to a round of the Biscuit Game. (Which Davros would lose, obviously. Because... well, y'know... he doesn't have a spare hand to hold the biscuit.)
And, way down the list of contenders…
Alex Kingston (50-1). Every time it looks as if a new Doctor's going to be required, some idiot suggests that it might be a woman. This year, that idiot was me, although there was a logic behind it. If Tennant has become so popular that he's virtually irreplaceable - far more so than Tom Baker ever was, since people in those days only expected an actor, not a major celebrity and national sex-symbol as well [footnote 7] - then the only option is to introduce a Doctor so shockingly different that the question of "better" or "worse" ceases to be an issue. If there's ever going to be a full-time female Doctor, then it's going to be now, especially when we consider the new producer's preference for hanging around with sexy actresses [footnote 8]. So there's a terrible credibility in Alex Kingston, the only woman on the Paddy Power list, being a candidate. If the programme-makers earmarked her as a potential She-Doctor some time ago, then the banality of the contrived-love-interest scenes in "Silence in the Library" makes a lot more sense: it's the set-up rather than the punchline, the twist being that she's not the Doctor's future wife at all, but someone who's destined to carry his "essence" around after the death of his current body. There are any number of precedents for this in SF television, and besides, the casting of an actress from ER would be seen as a coup by those bottom-feeding telly-whores who believe American TV to be the paragon of all human culture. In other words, exactly the kind of people whom the members of the Doctor Who production team are likely to meet every day.
However, if we're talking about the possibility of a bluestocking Doctor, then… I'd like to propose a rank outsider of my own.
Billie Piper. At the moment, she's happily squirming in her own afterbirth (she's named her newborn "Winston", which shows that she's lost none of her taste or good judgement since she declared "The Satan Pit" to be her favourite episode of 2006). But she wouldn't have to start shooting the 2010 series for another few months, and by then, the glow of celebrity motherhood would almost certainly have been replaced by a professional nanny. A few months after that, the papers would be full of speculation about her husband knocking off the nanny while Ms Piper's in Cardiff, but that's none of our concern. The thing to remember here is that the bigger Doctor Who gets, the more terrified its creators become, and the more they rely on past successes to win audience approval. Reuniting all the recent companions in "The Stolen Earth" might be regarded as a "celebration" of the programme so far, but it could equally be seen as a work of cowardice, especially since the story ends with a thoroughly pointless reprise of "Doomsday". Billie Piper is a proven ratings-winner, and associated with a Golden Age of Doctor Who that's scheduled to end with the departure of Tennant, at least unless they can keep it going by replacing him with someone just as recognisable. For the Doctor to take on Rose's form is no more ridiculous than any other regeneration (old-school geeks may quibble with this, but you can shut them up just by mentioning "Destiny of the Daleks", without even having to resort to "Journey's End"). Two years ago, it would've seemed silly, but then… two years ago, so would this entire list. With one exception, anyway.
Of course, since newfangled Doctor Who was designed to revolve around the companion until Catherine Tate made it impossible, we know that the nature of the new sidekick will be almost as crucial as the casting of the lead. For obvious reasons, Paddy Power isn't running a book on that, but we can make guesses based on Steven Moffat's known tendencies. Assuming that the Doctor's still male, the New Executive won't break with tradition, so it'll be another girl. She's unlikely to come from 2008 again - that'd be too obvious - but at the same time, Moffat won't want to risk alienating the audience by making her too far removed from home. He also wants to push the public's "nostalgia" button, as well as keeping the fans on his side, so the clever money says she'll come from 1963. In which case, she'll probably be an orphan, to avoid the necessity of return-trips to her own period. And since Moffat will want to curry favour with everyone else in Cardiff (q.v. "The Doctor Dances", in which he attempts to flatter to his Big Gay Boss by inventing a version of 1940s England in which none of the men are heterosexual), she'll obviously be inclined towards Welshness.
And, as pop-fate would have it, there's a model for this character. The last twelve months have already given the UK a vulnerable-yet-spunky Welsh girl who's got all the retro-glamour and heart-rending angst of Dusty Springfield, which is why I'm predicting that the 2010 series will be - in a nutshell - Duffy the Vampire Slayer.
Footnote 1. Eccleston came close, by treating the cultural well-being of younger viewers as a sacred trust. It's hard to imagine Tom Baker putting his ego aside in quite the same way, just as it's hard to imagine Eccleston making an arse of himself on a BBC1 panel-game show in twenty years' time.
Footnote 2. One of them wants to impress girls, and the other wants to smash giant spaceships into volcanoes.
Footnote 3. But even Warrington, like anyone over the age of forty-five, would be unacceptable after Tennant. Actually, I suggested him as a possible Doctor in a "Round Table" interview for I, Who 2, circa 2001. Gary Russell was also part of that Round Table, and shortly thereafter, Big Finish cast Warrington as Rassilon. Coincidence…? Yeah, probably. (The same interview saw Gary Russell describing Alien Bodies as one of the best Doctor Who books ever written, shortly before he blacklisted me from Big Finish for being mildly impolite about one of his own efforts. How do these people sleep?)
Footnote 4. There's also the issue of Morton Dill being one of Steven Taylor's ancestors. But let's not be too anal, there might be civilians reading this.
Footnote 5. Unlike, say, such luminaries as Roger Lloyd Pack or Michelle Collins. That's a bit like asking Chris Chibnall to write an episode, but not asking me.
Footnote 6. By now, you're probably sick of my insistence on calling him "Big Russell". But anyone who saw him on-stage at the ITV awards, dwarfing his minions in all three dimensions, will realise how apt it is.
Footnote 7. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: even if they were all still around and all still in their prime, none of the actors who've played the Doctor so far would possibly stand a chance of being Tennant's replacement. Not even Eccleston, whose leering, ogre-like demeanour would make far too many teenagers shout "eww, minger!" after the Boy David.
Footnote 8. Yeah, like I'm any different. Oh, that reminds me: why haven't I been commissioned to write another Bernice audio this year? I want another chance to flirt with Lisa Bowerman.
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