Elizabeth Sandifer

The sofa is, in fact, of reasonable comfort.

It’s May 13th, 2006. Yep. Gnarls Barkley. Whole story. Beatfreakz, with a cover of “Somebody’s Watching Me,” Red Hot Chili Peppers, Shayne Ward, Pet Shop Boys, and Snow Patrol also chart. In news, a bus driver in Dublin snaps and begins driving his bus through the streets in a rampage that kills one and injures thirteen more, including five police officers. Arsenal F.C. play their final game at Highbury, Apple Computer wins a trademark suit against Apple Corps, and Ruth Kelley, Minister for local Government and Opus Dei member, declines to elaborate on whether she considers homosexuality a sin. Sony unveils the PS3, the NSA is reported as operating a massive phone surveillance operation, the President talks about how he wants to close Guantanamo Bay and pursue immigration reform… wait, am I still in historical news?  Liverpool win something. (Yep. Still in historical news.) Oh! And Lordi win Eurovision!

This latter event is actually worth discussing. One of the primary themes of this blog has been the peculiarities of the relationship between the mainstream and the marginal in British culture. The Eurovision Song Contest illustrates a peculiar special feature of this, albeit on a scale larger than just the UK. Eurovision is aggressively mainstream. Yet somehow its embrace of the aggressive mainstream ends up being the weirdest thing imaginable. Or, at least, usually. Eurovision is infamously a bunch of terribly trashy and over the top performances bookended by a couple smaller ones in which a terribly earnest singer sings a terribly earnest song. And usually one of those wins. Usually.

But in 2006, somewhat improbably, a Finnish hard rock band that does all of their performances in elaborate monster makeup won with “Hard Rock Hallelujah,” their lead singer wearing a gloriously ill-advised cheap plastic hat with the Finnish flag on it. It was one of the most charmingly offbeat moments of mass popularity ever achieved – something that visibly comes from miles outside of anything that would conventionally be called the mainstream, and yet  winning a massive pan-European popular vote competition. The television of acceptance, as Richard put it back in the Big Brother post.

As we’ve noted, Doctor Who has itself become the television of acceptance, with the previously marginal backwater of anorak cult television becoming, very abruptly, the most popular thing on television – so abruptly, in fact, that it hadn’t even finished being anorak cult television by the time it had reinvented itself again. Its somewhat checkered past was almost instantly rehabilitated as the idiosyncratic history of a beloved cultural icon. And so a structure that everybody recognized implicitly was imposed on the series – so much so that it didn’t need to be announced as such. The Cybermen would return in Series Two, the Master in Series Three. Everyone knew in their bones this was how it played out, and the return of the Cybermen was announced in Doctor Who Magazine #357, the same issue that ran the previews for the last three episodes of Series One to no surprise whatsoever.…

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In this image, Clara is cleverly disguised as a candle.

It’s May 6th, 2006. Gnarls Barkley remains at number one, with Dirty Pretty Things, Snow Patrol, and Rihanna also charting. And that Mary J Blige/U2 thing is still about too. Albums include Bruce Springsteen’s album of Pete Seeger covers and a Massive Attack greatest hits. In the last week one of those remarkably half-assed steps to maybe sort of do something about the genocide in Darfur took place, accomplishing, as you’d expect, nothing. The government of China claimed to have perfected weather control and got into a row with the Catholic Church, though not about the weather. And the Labour Party under Tony Blair lost more than 200 council seats, coming in behind both the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats in local elections, resulting in a heavy cabinet reshuffle.

This latter thing is actually seemingly just a thing that happens when Moffat is around, as four years later he’ll see Gordon Brown brought down in the 2010 elections just weeks after his run on Doctor Who starts. So there’s a proper reason for everyone to hate Moffat: he makes Tories win things. Actually, hating Moffat for the future is a bit of an issue with this story, as so many tropes familiar from his later Doctor Who career make their first appearances here. What’s interesting, then, is that this once again doesn’t seem to have originally been conceived as a Moffat story in the sense that we now understand that phrase.

The brief given to Moffat was apparently one of Davies’s kitchen sink ones – he wanted clockwork aliens after reading about the mechanical Turk, and he wanted the Madame du Pompadour after encountering the character researching Casanova. So it went to Moffat. This makes sense – he’d had good luck with gas masks last time, so clocks seemed up his alley. And Madame du Pompadour was set up for more sex comedy, which was, after all, the brief he’d originally been given with The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances.

For the second time, however, Moffat defied expectations. Impressed with what Davies had done in the first season, Moffat apparently decided he wanted to do something like that and, instead of writing a sex comedy, wrote a fairy tale romance. Note how outside of the cold open the story is framed by the shot of the spaceship, winding silently in the night, the chimes of the music box whose key it physically resembles echoing through the silence as the final bit of the story’s riddle is revealed. Even the cold open starts with a variation of this shot – a matching shot of stars accompanied by a jaunty harpsichord  that pans down to Versailles instead of up to the space station, making the boxy palace of Versailles just another magic box in a story jam-packed with them.

This is in many ways the story’s most vaultedly ambitious aspect: the way in which the story is structured like a puzzle box and contains so many such structures within it, but how all of this puzzle box contains what is, at its heart, a fairy story.…

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Previously on TARDIS Eruditorum

No, no, darlings. I’m the tin dog.

It’s October 23rd, 1976. Pussycat are at number one with “Mississippi,” with Rod Stewart, Chicago, ABBA, and Rick Dees and his Cast of Idiots also charting, the latter with, well, the only song they ever chart with, “Disco Duck (Part One).” In the week prior copyright is extended by twenty years in the United States and Cearball Ó Dálaigh resigns as President of Ireland because the Minister of Defense insulted him. And, the day in question, Lis Sladen makes her final appearance on Doctor Who.

The show almost immediately collapses. Three weeks later, in the very next story, a particularly violent cliffhanger attracts the rage of moral crusader Mary Whitehouse, whose rantings are deemed sufficiently inconvenient as to necessitate a bureaucratic change. Doctor Who producer Philip Hinchcliffe is moved over to produce Target, whereas Target’s intended producer Graham Williams is put on Doctor Who with a mandate to tone down the violence. The Williams era has its moments, but is largely a brutal step down from the highs that Doctor Who reached with Lis Sladen around, and the show methodically circles the drain for a decade before finally falling through.

Thirty Years Later…

K-9 must live!

It’s April 29th, 2006. Gnarls Barkley remains crazy, while Rihanna, Fall Out Boy, and the Black Eyed Peas also chart. In the last week, Benedict XVI was reported to have agreed to a relaxation of rules on condoms (which are, for the record, a wildly more fascinating and unusual theological issue than anyone gives them credit for being), Tony Snow became White House Press Secretary, several years too early to be the victim of image macros involving government lies and the phrase “You know nothing, Tony Snow,” and Silvio Berlusconi announces that he’ll resign as Prime Minister of Italy, like he does every few years.

On television, Lis Sladen returns to Doctor Who in Toby Whithouse’s School Reunion. A big episode by any measure, deserving of a big post. No fancy formatting – let’s just take a wander. The good old-fashioned way, like we used to do.

One line of criticism regarding this episode is the idea that Sarah Jane is somehow cheapened by being put into a “romance” plot – that her character is lessened somehow by becoming “the ex,” as Mickey puts it. But let’s be careful here. Yes, Sarah’s relationship with the Doctor is clearly one that plays a role in her life that for other people are filled by romantic partners. But there’s no suggestion that it was romantic as such. In fact, there’s an explicit hedge against it – what devastates Sarah Jane is explicitly the fact that nothing earthly, romance included, can possibly compare to adventures in the TARDIS.

On the other hand, one can’t deny that the question of romance is present in the episode. But what’s interesting is that there is a clear distinction here between the frame and the content, so to speak. Yes, the relationship among the Doctor, Rose, and Sarah Jane is presented in the televisual terms of a love triangle, but nothing whatsoever in the past of Doctor Who supports the idea that just because you present something in the frame of a genre it is entirely a part of that genre.…

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Awooooo! (Werewolves of Glasgow)

It’s April 22nd, 2006. Gnarls Barkley continues to hold the number one slot with “Crazy.” Rihanna also charts, along with holdovers from the previous week: the Black Eyed Peas, Pussycat Dolls, and Mary J Blige. Streets’ The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living tops the album charts, which also feature Massive Attack, Pink, and Morrissey, the latter with Ringleader of the Tormentors, which is at least an album I’m terribly sentimental about, since I saw him tour for it. In news, the first military parade through Dublin since 1970 commemorates the 1916 Easter Rising. Floods break out in Romania, Bulgaria, and Serbia along the Danube, and Queen Elizabeth II turns 80.

Speaking of old queens, we have Queen Victoria as our requisite “famous person from history in the first three episodes.” But perhaps more interestingly, we have Russell T Davies’s sixth consecutive episode of Doctor Who. In many ways it mirrors the first story of that run of six (which is, I am fairly certain, the longest single-writer block of consecutive minutes of Doctor Who ever), in that it is a script born of production crisis. Davies’s original brief for the story was famously “werewolves, kung fu monks, and Queen Victoria.” This setup was given to another writer (whose name hasn’t, to my knowledge, leaked) for development. The story came back without monks or a werewolf, and instead featured an alien living in Queen Victoria’s eye. The writer was apparently frustrated with the process and decided Doctor Who was not really for him, and thus Davies stepped in to write a script to his original brief.

But let’s pause to consider what his original brief was. After all, it’s a bewildering set of images with no inherent links. The werewolves and Queen Victoria are at least vaguely adjacent, but the kung fu monks really come out of nowhere, conceptually speaking. It resembles nothing so much as the kitchen sink approach that, in the 1980s, led to such inspiring ideas as “a Concorde, the Master, Tegan’s departure, and a cameo from dead Adric,” “the Master, Kamelion, a new companion, Turlough’s backstory, and Lanzarote,” and, of course, the memorable “the Second Doctor, Sontarans, and New Orleans, sorry, wait, we mean Seville.”

But underneath this is the fact that if there was one thing John Nathan-Turner really was fantastic at it was remembering that it was helpful to have Doctor Who generate excitement every week of its run. This is notably different from most shows, which are only capable of becoming event television for their premieres and finales, or, perhaps, if they do some major mid-season plot twist. Big Brother has a tough time generating anything like the impact of launch night or the finale, hence its needing to rely on an endless succession of format-breaking tricks in the middle to maintain the tone of reverential obsession the series trades on. But Doctor Who, when it’s functioning well, just generates an event unto itself every week.

There’s a general trend here that Doctor Who is a part of.…

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