Eruditorum Press

The struggle in terms of the strange

Elizabeth Sandifer

About Elizabeth Sandifer

http://www.eruditorumpress.com

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.

Posts by Elizabeth Sandifer:

To Leap From One Universe To Another, Unafraid! That’s Sorcerer’s Work! (The Last War in Albion Part 1: Near Myths, Gideon Stargrave)

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“To leap from one universe to another, unafraid! That’s sorcerer’s work!” – Grant Morrison, Zatanna #1, 2005
Figure 5: A particular story from the slush pile, from
Watchmen #12, 1987
[previously] The remaining nature of the war will be revealed in the telling. All that remains is the task of selecting a beginning point and commencing the narrative proper. By virtue of one of the major figures being extremely invested in it, that beginning point will be the publication of Grant Morrison’s first paid comics work, a five-page story entitled “Time is a Four Letter Word.” This is a decision with consequences. The nature of the war, as previously stated, is that its effects span much of history. “Time is a Four Letter Word” is akin to an outcrop of rock. In truth it stands upon tens of miles of buried rock – a geologic strata spanning in every direction. The visible layer is a mere fraction of the whole, apparent only due to chance events: the scouring of a glacier, the cleaving of a river valley, the picking of a particular story from the slush pile. These fleeting circumstances determine how the underlying tectonics of history and ideology are transmuted into surface terrain and material culture, defining the very world itself. 
This is not the beginning so much as the first visible stone. Still, there is a level of arbitrariness to it. Both Morrison and Moore had previous publications that were not paid jobs. Either could go first. However, starting with Morrison has two advantages. First, it is something Morrison is passionate about. In his extended commentary on Pádraig Ó Méalóid’s “Alan Moore and Superfolks Part 3: The Strange Case of Grant Morrison and Alan Moore,” Grant Morrison insists, “In October 1978, Alan Moore had sold one illustration – a drawing of Elvis Costello to NME – and had not yet achieved any recognition in the comics business. In 1979, he was doing unpaid humour cartoons for the underground paper The Back Street Bugle. I didn’t read his name in a byline until 1982, by which time I’d been a professional writer for almost five years. Using the miracle of computer technology, you can verify any of these dates right now, if you choose to.” This all being true, it would be unduly partisan to start the story anywhere else.
Second, however, any alternate ordering would remove Grant Morrison from the story for too long. While Morrison is correct to note that his first professional comic sale predated Moore’s, the truth is that Morrison’s early comics work consists of four short stories in an Edinburgh-based anthology that only lasted five issues before folding, a four year run of a newspaper strip in local Scottish papers, and five issues in DC Thomson’s Starblazer. Other than that, Morrison has no professional comics credits prior to 1985, and it’s not until 1986 that he began producing comics work at anything resembling a high volume, by which time Moore was writing Watchmen.
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I’ll Bite Your Nose (Tooth and Claw)

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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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This is Not a Dream (The Last War in Albion: Introduction)

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“This is not a dream.” – Alan Moore, “Shadowplay,” in Brought to Light, 1988.

Figure 1: The Great Bearded Wizard of Northampton

The Last War in Albion is a history of British comics. More specifically, it is a history of the magical war between Grant Morrison and Alan Moore, a war that is on the one hand entirely of its own invention and on the other a war fought in the realm of the fictional, rendering its actual existence almost but not entirely irrelevant. The war in question is not the scant material residue of their verbal feud in various interviews over the years. This exists and will be picked over, but it is not the meat of the discussion.

Rather it is a more fundamental issue: how is it that two comics writers of nearly the same generation, with such a clear overlap in interests, who grew up a mere three-hundred-and-forty miles apart – no greater than the distance from New York to DC – a mere seven years in age difference (no larger than the age difference between J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis) are not friends and have not a hint of warmth in their relationship? This is almost as improbable as Morrissey and Robert Smith hating each other’s guts.
And yet it is the case. Underneath this fact is a story: one of how the British comics industry unexpectedly produced a small generation of some of the most important writers of the 1980s and 90s, and in turn had a huge cultural legacy in both the US and UK. So much so that the number three grossing movie of all time, Joss Whedon’s The Avengers is massively and documentably indebted to what was, prior to the arrival of people like Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Warren Ellis, Neil Gaiman, and a constellation of significant (and at times better) but less influential writers, the minor backwater of the lowest order of the British comics industry.
Figure 2: The Thrice-Named Warrior Monk of Glasgow

Within that story there are two figures that appear almost identical to an even casual observer. One, Alan Moore, is a heavily bearded self-proclaimed magician who made his name with DC Comics in 1984 writing Swamp Thing, an envrionmental-themed superhero-horror comic. The other, Grant Morrison, is a bald self-proclaimed magician who made his name with DC Comics in 1988 writing Animal Man, an environmental-themed superhero-horror comic. These two men are not friends. There are sensible reasons for this. Despite their intense similarities, there are fundamental aesthetic differences between Grant Morrison and Alan Moore that place them at diametric opposites of a host of issues with profound social, political, historical, and magical implications. 

This latter adjective is worth remarking upon, as it is central to their differences. Both men believe in a system by which the manipulation of symbols creates material change in the real world. Both explicitly use their creative work in multiple media as an attempt to cause such change. Their comics are magic spells hurled into the culture wars, trying in their own way to reshape reality.
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Nothing on Earth Changes Quite So Often As The Fashion (New Earth)

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Blue Steel, you say…

It’s April 15th, 2006. Gnarls Barkley is at number one with “Crazy.” The Black Eyed Peas, the Pussycat Dolls (with will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas), Pink, and Mary J Blige and U2 (collaborating on a version of the latter’s “One”) also chart.

The four months since the Sycorax were repelled seem long, not least because they were extended via a leap second. Ariel Sharon suffered a severe stroke that resulted in his formal removal from office the day before this story aired. (He remains in a coma.) The Winter Olympics took place in Turin, and the Hajj took place in Saudi Arabia, the latter resulting in the deaths of three hundred and sixty-two people during the stoning of the devil ritual. A swan with Avian Flu was discovered in Scotland, marking the first UK case of the disease. While in the vicinity of this story Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announces that Iran has successfully enriched uranium, and Proof, a member of the hip hop group D12 (which also features Eminem) is shot and killed in Detroit.

It is worth reflecting on the somewhat odd social conditions in which a season premiere exists. Doctor Who is, of course, terribly successful and popular, but it’s also been out of the popular consciousness for four months. It thus has to announce itself with a bang of some sort. But the bang is not, this time, “here is what Doctor Who is.” It is “Doctor Who is back.” This is a different sort of announcement. Rose had to introduce the idea of Doctor Who, charting out new ground. New Earth, on the other hand, has to remind people what Doctor Who is and that they like it.

On the other hand, New Earth does have an introduction to do. It’s just a very strange one. On the one hand New Earth was transmitted a day short of the one-year anniversary of Tennant being announced as the Tenth Doctor. On the other hand, despite having been culturally in the role for a year at that point (having been the rumored consensus since Eccleston’s departure was announced on March 30th), Tennant has only actually spent about twenty minutes on screen being the Doctor instead of being the guy who’s going to be the Doctor. So in that regard he does need to be introduced, albeit for something like the fifth time. (His press announcement, The Parting of the Ways, Pudsey Cutaway, The Christmas Invasion)

The result is a story that must introduce the Tenth Doctor by being as straightforwardly Doctor Who as it is possible to be. This is ultimately accomplished by, for the second story in a row, making Tennant work with his predecessor’s guest cast. But in The Christmas Invasion this was a guest cast he was legitimately inheriting – Mickey and Jackie would go on to appear in numerous other episodes in the Tennant era. This is more akin to Robot, Tom Baker’s debut story, in which he did one of two runarounds with Jon Pertwee’s UNIT guest cast.…

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Saturday Waffling (June 15th, 2013)

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Howdy all. I’m in New York this weekend visiting friends (Alex Reed, actually, and his equally fabulous wife Meredith), and also seeing Frankenstein Upstairs by Mac Rogers, the fine gentleman I did those Slate pieces with. So that will all be very fun.

Also, you may notice that there’s now a TARDIS Eruditorum page up top – that includes a live-updating table of contents, an explanation of the project, and a very half-assed stab at the oft-requested glossary of idiosyncratic terms. Thanks to Anna Wiggins, who is ostensibly hacked together in Perl, but is actually mostly written in Lisp.

Let’s chat.

Obviously there are rumors of a “massive” missing episode find. That’s interesting. But none of us know anything, and nobody who does know anything tells the likes of us anything, so there’s not much to talk about in terms of the mechanics of the missing episode hunt as a phenomenon.

Still, let’s think for a bit about the idea of the missing episodes. At this point we have audio releases and reconstructions of all of them. It is trivial to watch a missing story. No, you don’t get the original story, but you get something that tells you a lot about what happened in the original story and is perfectly fun to enjoy. It’s easy to have informed opinions about Enemy of the World without seeing more than the 25 minutes that exist. It’s perfectly reasonable to believe Power of the Daleks to be one of the great television stories of the 1960s, and deserves to be mentioned along with Cathy Come Home and The Prisoner.

It’s also possible to watch and enjoy them. My wife and I watched Power of the Daleks. She loved it. It was a fun way to spend a few evenings. The reconstructions are perfectly enjoyable things to watch. They are lacking, yes, but they are not inadequate. And this is an important thing to realize about the status of the missing episodes.

All of which is to say that just about the least interesting thing about the missing episodes is that we can finally watch the stories, as though that is some magic and enjoyable event. If you want to watch Evil of the Daleks, go do it. It’s easy. Don’t wait until November. Yes, the publicity of a big release would get more eyes to the stories, and that’s neat, but the interesting thing about a missing episode find is not the release of new fun into the world.

It is instead the addition of information to the history. The fact of the matter is that the people these are of interest to right now are knowledgeable fans with research interests, whether professional or hobbyist. What we’re interested in are things like what the Rills looked like and which delegate is which, or the subtleties of Hartnell’s acting in The Massacre. Or seeing that Zaroff/Troughton scene in The Underwater Menace Part Two.

Which is to say, quite separate from the question of what Hartnell and Troughton-era stories you like or don’t like, and without speculation of whether we’re ever going to see any more missing episodes, what are your thoughts about the idea of a massive episode find?…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 63 (Life on Mars)

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Part of its success, of course, meant that Doctor Who by 2006 had acquired stablemates at the BBC. This is a prime example. One of the first acquisitions Julie Gardner made upon becoming Head of Drama for BBC Wales, featuring two writers who would be poached by Russell T Davies over the next two years, and, of course, featuring future Master John Simm playing Sam Tyler, the surname apparently picked by Matthew Graham’s Doctor Who fan of a daughter, Life on Mars is impossible to discuss Doctor Who without mentioning. Especially because it’s ostensibly a sci-fi show.

The word “ostensibly” is such trouble here, though. Life on Mars is in no way aimed straightforwardly at the normative cult audience. Yes, there’s something vaguely resembling a time travel plot. But it’s not a cult sci-fi show, as evidenced by the appalling ending cooked up by the American remake that postulates that the entire series has been a virtual reality simulation for the crew of the first manned mission to Mars. That this ending was so unsatisfying speaks volumes about how little this premise is actually a sci-fi show. Inasmuch as it is, really we’re in textbook Tzvetan Todorov territory where the suspense is whether there’s actually an element of the fantastic here or whether Sam Tyler is simply a cracked actor, if you will.

But even that struggles to quite account for the show. Yes, it has a straightforwardly Todorovian plot to string things together, but the bread and butter of any given episode is doing a cop show set in 1973. Its clever conceit is to do this in 2006 with a main character who is also from 2006, and who can thus provide self-aware meta-commentary on proceedings. But this is still just a light updating of the basic concept of the period piece. The entire Todorovian framework is really just there to jazz up a 1973 period piece with a hint of magical realism. Mind you, this isn’t a terrible idea. Magical realism makes most things better. But still, Life on Mars is a 1973 period piece first and a genre show second.

It’s actually worth remarking on that phrase briefly, as “1973 period piece” is not entirely obvious as a concept. It was, after all, relatively recent. And its existence points towards a larger trend worth pointing out. The first time that Doctor Who did a story that was both set in the past and set during a period where Doctor Who was transmitting was, of course, Mawdryn Undead. Since then it’s done it in Remembrance of the Daleks, Father’s Day, The Impossible Astronaut, Cold War, and Hide. If we want we can add “stories set in the past within living memory of Doctor Who” and scoop up the pair of 1950s stories (Delta and the Bannermen and The Idiot’s Lantern) and the three World War II ones (The Curse of Fenric, The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances, and Victory of the Daleks) and hammer the point home more clearly – the range of what can be done in period pieces has expanded to include periods whose iconography has never quite left us.…

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A Brief Rumination on Iain Banks

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I have not actually read any Iain Banks. I recognize that this is a problem. I just went and got the Culture books, and I’m hoping to squeeze some time in for them, but let’s be honest, there’s well over a dozen things trying to squeeze into a finite amount of media consumption time, and life’s too short to read everything. Still, The Also People was marvelous, and I really do want to look at the truck it was bought off the back of, no questions asked.

In any case, here’s the thing that struck me. And, I mean, I know why it struck me. Between having lived through an absolutely searing bereavement a few years ago after the fabled “worst 48 hours ever” in which my wife left me and my father had a massive stroke and being now married to an oncology nurse who previously worked at a hospice, the fact that death is a thing that happens is something I am largely speaking intimately aware of. Things have endings. Sometimes the ending is far away, and other times it’s close, but things end. Change happens. Mercury has its price.

And so what struck me about Banks was the way in which he announced his terminal cancer. The line in the announcement about asking his wife to do him the honor of being his widow. The bit in his last interview where he notes that he was 87,000 words into his last book, which features a main character dying of cancer, when he got his diagnosis, and remarked, “I’ve really got to stop doing my research too late. This is such a bad idea.”

My wife and I have, shall we say, similar senses of humor. A ways into our first date, realizing that things were going well, but also that she was a hospice nurse, I made one of the higher risk decisions of my single life. See, I really liked her. She was cute and funny and a Doctor Who fan and we were just hitting it off. But she was a hospice nurse. Which, I mean, what a job. But it struck me that there were two things that could mean. One was that she was going to be very… serious. And I have a love of dark humor that would put Robert Holmes to shame. The other was that she was the sort of person who had developed a similar sense of humor to deal with that life.

And I figured I was going to have to know, so I told her the absolutely grimmest and bleakest funny story in my family’s history; a story so massively and sickly wrong that it is not so much “told” within my family as whispered about in hushed and awe-struck tones. It is not one I can repeat here – even putting it in some future work of fiction would be too much. It is an honest story about death, and those are too revealing and too luridly and horribly true stories to actually tell.…

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Outside the Government 11 (Attack of the Graske)

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For only the second time ever, December 25th, 2005 featured the debut of two separate new episodes of Doctor Who. Immediately after The Christmas Invasion viewers were invited to press the red button and thus to watch Attack of the Graske, an interactive Doctor Who story in which viewers take on the role of the companion in stopping an alien invasion.

Attack of the Graske had no real prospect of being a conventionally good Doctor Who episode, nor of being a conventionally good piece of interactive fiction. This is less a factor of the people involved with it than it is a basic medial limit: the BBC Red Button service is not actually sophisticated enough, and the amount of footage they can actually afford to film with David Tennant for a throwaway like this is not actually high enough to make this work. And so what we get is about ten minutes of footage, virtually none of it actually involving Tennant (who does all his scenes from the TARDIS, meaning this was probably shot in about a lunch break), in which there’s not so much interaction as a series of tests you’re graded on. Only the final scene allows you to make a decision that affects the plot, and it divides squarely into a good ending and a bad ending.

All of which is seems a spectacularly churlish set of things to say about something with the sole purpose in life of allowing children to have their very own Doctor Who adventures. I mean, the point of this is being invited onto the TARDIS to be a companion, right? And the Doctor saying he might come back for you? And your remote getting linked with the sonic screwdriver? It’s pure fantastic glee, isn’t it?

Well, no. Probably not. I mean, children aren’t stupid. They get how the red button works. They understand the difference between fiction and reality. And they’ve played enough video games to tell a good one from a bad one. This is firmly within an aesthetic they’re familiar with. Admittedly being Doctor Who probably wins some substantive points from a fair number of kids, and it’s not as though Attack of the Graske is an outright bad game. Indeed, we should remember that as originally conceived it’s not a game at all but an interactive episode of television. This is more Silence in the Library than Call of Duty 2. It had a specific airtime in which it could be watched, and is controlled with a TV remote.

We should detour briefly here to explain the technology, as there are Americans around. The “red button” is more or less exactly what it sounds like, and launches a service that was then called BBC Red Button, but now goes with the marginally less intuitive name “BBCi,” the vowel standing for “interactive.” The service is the technological heir to the late, lamented Ceefax, a 1970s form of interactive television that gave news headlines and allowed several rudimentary games to be played.…

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The Victory of the Commenters

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All righty. Our contest winners, though first, some honorable mentions, all of which get good old fashioned Marvel Comics No Prizes. I decided to get a little soft and not disqualify people for dropping either definite article. This was brutal to judge. Well played to everyone.

First off, the Rulebreakers division, where the prize goes to Lewis Christian for Lett’s Kill Pertwee.

Next, the Rude division, where we have three contenders. The bronze No Prize goes to Matthew Blanchette’s impressively awful The Fapping of the Worm, itself a modification of Tony Macklin’s The Tapping of the Wire. The silver goes to overflowontology’s Feast of the Merkins after Matthew Blanchette’s The Terror of the Mirkins, itself a modification of overflowontology’s work. And the gold No Prize goes to IG’s modification of prandeamus’s suggestion, The Wind of the Slitheen. Excellent work, you sick bastards.

Next, the Literary Theory division, which has two prizes. Like any good piece of literary theory, or, for that matter, good piece of Doctor Who, both are plagiarized. We’ll call it a tie between John Toon’s The Death of the Author and Anton B’s The Society of the Spectacle.

The Actually Sincere Attempt at a Story Title division has but one prize, AuntyJack’s pleasantly unnerving The Sigil of Xanthus. A round of applause to AuntyJack for being one of only a few entrants to actually attempt a title of that quality.

Next we have our Doctor Who In Jokes division. Bronzes goes to thingsiambotheredby’s proposal The Evil of the Chumblies, with an honorable mention for James V’s proposed modification Remembrance of the Chumblies. Ferret’s modification of Joel Phillips’s suggestion The Machine of the Gods, The ??/??? of the WiFi gets the silver. While the division winner is Jane’s The New Men of Sydney, a modification of Lewis Christian’s The H of Christopher Bidmead.

In a closely related award, the prize for “best use of the definite article” goes to IG’s The Catharsis of the Spurious Morality.

Which brings us to our general classification.

In third place, Tony Macklin’s The Heat of the Moment.

 In second, Matthew Blanchette’s The Passion of the Anoraks, a modification of EarBucket’s The Passion of the Christ.

And our winner. This posed a problem, because I, somewhat foolishly, intervened slightly in one post, noting that I could see a modification that would improve it. That post was prandeamus’s The Anagram of the Master, which HarlequiNQB realized would be improved with The Anagram of the Stream, or, actually, even better than my idea, The Stream of Anagrams. So free ebooks to prandeamus, HarlequiNQB, and, apparently, myself.

Which is, of course, terribly unfair, so I’ll just declare a second winning entry and give a set of ebooks to Ununnilium for the equally brilliant The Kyriarchy of the Daleks.

Congratulations to all three winners – send me an e-mail and I’ll get your ebooks to you.

I know several of you already have a set of ebooks.…

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I Become Part of Events (The Christmas Invasion)

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Tennant based his characterization on fellow Scotsman
Graham Crowden’s nuanced portrayal of Soldeed in The
Horns of Nimon

Blogger’s spam filter is being a bit frisky lately, and is catching a lot of legitimate comments by long term posters. If your posts don’t appear, that’s why. I’m cleaning it out several times a day, and all comments will appear eventually.

It’s December 25th, 2005. We are in the long winter of years in which the winner of The X Factor gets to be the Christmas number one every year, choking the life out of what had previously been a rather pleasant cultural oddity whereby a motley of novelty acts, trash pop, and hit bands would fight it out for the honor of going on a music anorak’s list of Christmas number ones instead gets supplanted by The X Factor winning everything. So for the record, it’s Shayne Ward with “That’s My Goal,” but in this case it’s everything that isn’t number one, which is to say, absolutely every other song in Britain, that matters.

News, then. Doctor Who has been off the air for six months. In those six months, London was awarded the 2012 Olympics the day before a series of terrorist attacks hit the London transportation system, killing fifty-two people, along with the four bombers. Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, revealing a staggeringly poor federal response system. Jyllands-Posten published their infamously controversial set of comics depicting the prophet Muhammad, and Saddam Hussein’s trial began. While in the month of December David Cameron becomes leader of the Conservative Party, Harold Pinter wins the Nobel Prize in Literature for his work on The Abominable Snowmen, and the law allowing same sex “civil partnerships” takes effect.

Let’s go back to the issue of music, however. As I noted, the domination of The X Factor over the Christmas charts brought to an unsatisfyingly corporate end to a quaint British ritual. This construction, of course, ignores the fact that the British charts are already corporate, and, more to the point, endlessly prone to manipulation, most famously with what is widely believed to be the deliberate fudging of numbers to prevent the Sex Pistols from reaching number one with “God Save the Queen” in 1977. Nor is it prima facie the case that The X Factor produces worse number one singles than, say, “Mr. Blobby,” which was in fact the number one in 1993. No, what’s depressing here is the loss of the game – the sense that something that once belonged to the British public now belongs to Simon Cowell.

Ah yes, Simon Cowell. Now there’s an interesting figure. What is notable about Cowell is his ability to combine an unsparing ruthlessness with an instinctive grasp of populism. The result is someone who is jaw-droppingly good at engineering hits, and who has absolutely no compunctions about acting like that’s what he’s doing. The result is something aggressively soulless – a sense not just of utter conformity, but of the most mean-spirited and cynical conformity imaginable.…

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