Haunt the Future

Skip to content

Elizabeth Sandifer

Elizabeth Sandifer created Eruditorum Press. She’s not really sure why she did that, and she apologizes for the inconvenience. She currently writes Last War in Albion, a history of the magical war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. She used to write TARDIS Eruditorum, a history of Britain told through the lens of a ropey sci-fi series. She also wrote Neoreaction a Basilisk, writes comics these days, and has ADHD so will probably just randomly write some other shit sooner or later. Support Elizabeth on Patreon.

9 Comments

  1. Paul Fisher Cockburn
    October 7, 2024 @ 5:35 am

    “… it exists in a context of refinement and variation, as opposed to one of transformative innovation.” That seems to be the way of things, whether you’re talking recording technologies or mobile phones. (I mean, compare the hardware differences between iPhones 15 and 16 with those between earlier smartphones and the original iPhone.) it just seems to happen more quickly these days.

    Reply

  2. Paul Fisher Cockburn
    October 7, 2024 @ 5:47 am

    Twenty years ago, I was fortunate to see a play about Delia Derbyshire, “Standing Wave”, performed at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow (and on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe the following year, I think). Though largely biographical, it understandably didn’t take a linear approach to her narrative, looping to and from the publicly recognisable “hook” of the Doctor Who theme to explore her personality, sometimes slowing down scenes or cutting them up. Whether it’s fair to call her “the missing link between the highbrow world of Stockhausen and the underground pop psychedelia of early Pink Floyd,” I’m no sure, but I do remember a very thought-provoking evening.

    More details here: https://wikidelia.net/wiki/Music_for_the_years_of_the_BBC_time_lords

    Reply

  3. Ross
    October 7, 2024 @ 8:34 am

    Every once in a while, I stop and find it remarkable how early the people working in film took an interest in the things you could do with film that couldn’t be done in other media. It took until the 60s for musicians to seriously get interested in how recording studios and technology could produce recorded music that was something other than just trying to capture a live performance (Or at least, until that sort of thing became mainstream; I don’t mean to imply that no one ever did that sort of thing), and television likewise took until what, the 90s? to stop primarily being oriented around beaming stageplays and vaudeville into houses (and even then, when TV started migrating en masse to doing something you couldn’t really do in other media, it was mostly “What if movies could be ten hours long?”). But movies doing things you couldn’t do on stage didn’t just start early, it was “respectable” early. It nailed “Let’s make the audience think they’re going to get run over by a train” before the turn of the century.

    (Went to a high school production of “Murder on the Orient Express” over the weekend, which is a complicated plot to ask teenagers to perform while putting on a variety of outrageous european accents. It did have a cool special effect when Poirot uses a spirit lamp to reconstruct the burned note, revealing that the killer had written “Press F11 To Exit Full-Screen”)

    Reply

  4. 3rd new ear's dreem
    October 7, 2024 @ 12:42 pm

    a Derbyshire Ono Joyce threesome is an AO3 just waiting to happen.

    Reply

  5. Coral Nulla
    October 9, 2024 @ 12:09 pm

    In my head only there is a version of Doctor Who where the theme tune is produced by SOPHIE rather than Murray Gold… But this piece might be the best summary of what it’s like to be an artist right now. The most cohesive expression of our era that we seem to have is to express all eras at once, hopping between periods and aesthetics as easily as a hyperlink, but it leaves the strange feeling that culture (as a realm with places left to explore) has ended and any attempts to make art are only attempts at reviving some piece of history, a sort of creative archival work. Recent Doctor Who reminds me of recent Sparks albums, curating snippets of past styles into an eclectic compilation, refined and updated but unable to commit to a whole new format. We can still go off and do things with tapes, but we will only be doing so looking backwards rather than forwards.

    But possibly this impression is the whole problem – it’s not as if Season 1 (1963-1964) wasn’t just as much a grab-bag of contemporary genres even if it was also literally inventing the concept of adding Doctor Who to them. We also live in a time where Originality and Creativity are pervasively promoted as the key defining traits of people who are allowed to make money. Apparently it wasn’t Rosa Parks’ (or whoever’s) involvement in political organising that made her important, it was her bravery, free spirit, and of course her commitment to serving as a plot device! So maybe we just have to be realistic, and fight for better arts funding… I don’t know. But it’s something I know I’m struggling with a lot: is there anything new left to say, or should the role of an artist now be to emphasise the best bits until everything actually changes?

    Reply

  6. Dave
    October 10, 2024 @ 11:00 am

    I’ll be honest, I don’t even think the theme tune aquits itself well in the Chibnall era. While I like it more than many of Murray Gold’s versions, Gold does at least DO something with it. This means while I subjectively think Gold’s current theme and the Capaldi and Smith ones are worse than Akinola’s, they are much less interesting. Akinola’s is a straightforward cover, but with percussion.

    What’s worse is that, being a straightforward cover, it is the theme tune of a mysterious, edgy, dark series that tonally the series goes nowhere near. A cheery bombastic Gold theme would suit the thirteenth Doctor’s era much better, whereas as it stands it just sounds weird and off-kilter. Like that leaked version of Rose where Derbyshire’s version plays.

    Reply

  7. Camaveron
    October 13, 2024 @ 9:47 am

    Don’t have much to comment but this is one of my favourite TE essays ever

    Reply

  8. Przemek
    October 15, 2024 @ 4:55 pm

    Nothing to add but a “thank you” for this great essay on Derbyshire and creativity.

    Reply

  9. Nicole
    October 22, 2024 @ 9:44 am

    I guess for this reason I will tip my needle for “i’m gonna do visual arts” and “i’ll go do architecture” over to the latter a little more. At least I won’t starve or be homeless, and those are really tough positions to be in. I don’t have the support to recover from that.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.