Eruditorum Press

We stared into the untempered schism and all we saw was this dodgy CSO effect

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:

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 61 (Big Brother)

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I could never have written this post as well as Richard Jones, and so I asked them to step in for a guest post. This is one of the best decisions I have made in the course of this project.

 
In 2009 everyone was hard at work writing blog articles in anticipation of ‘The End of Time’, the grand finale to Doctor Who’s Davies era. io9’s contribution took an interesting approach, offering a list of the errors the production ran the risk of making.
“Though there’s absolutely no denying Davies has successfully forged a massive popular (and, to a slightly lesser extent, critical) success with his revival of Doctor Who,” wrote Alasdair Wilkins, “I’m sorry to say that I’m still not entirely convinced he’s all that good at writing episodes of Doctor Who.” Yet hope remained. Perhaps Davies could learn from the mistakes the article identified and seize this last chance to convince? A key point on this syllabus of errors was the way Davies’ Big Climactic Epics interacted with pop culture. The article made it clear that it didn’t “have anything against Richard Dawkins having a cameo on Doctor Who” but that it’s “kind of a shame that Christopher Eccleston’s final appearance will forever be linked to Big Brother.”
For Wilkins, timelessness and obtrusiveness were what made Dawkins okay and Davina not, but for some who find Big Brother’s role in the 2005 finale to be a thing of shame there may be a few more cultural value judgements weighing down. Many fans have a lot invested in the idea that Doctor Who is one sort of television and Big Brother is another. For them to be occupying the same space so brazenly is a challenge. This is the Ninth Doctor’s regeneration story. This will be in lists. This grants “a Dalek plot involving Big Brother” the same eternally iconic status as “falling off a big telescope.” What are we supposed to do with this?
The BBC have on three occasions obtained the rights to broadcast shows using the Big Brother format. Two of them made it very clear how they felt about it. Extras was tediously and hypocritically anti, while Celebrity Big Brother was so uncritical that it found itself reabsorbed as an enduring stand of Big Brother, the fact that it was once a strand of Comic Relief quietly forgotten. If the very thought of Big Brother makes you angry then you’re going to get on fine with Extras and have no truck with Celebrity Big Brother. But what are you supposed to make of ‘Bad Wolf’?
It feels like it should be a showdown. The ratings demolition of ITV’s Celebrity Wrestling is such a part of the 2005 season’s industry mythology that it almost feels like that’s the arc here. Scripted Family Drama returns to a broadcasting landscape dominated by Reality TV! Scripted Family Drama casts down the Wrestley Champion sent by Reality TV to oppose it! Scripted Family Drama arrives at the Castle of Reality TV to do final battle with Big Brother, UNHOLY SIRE OF THE DARK POWER THAT HOLDS THE LAND IN THRALL!
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Shockingly, The Daily Mail Is Evil

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Some of you may have had the “luck” of seeing the media shitstorm whipped up around Intellect Books’s forthcoming anthology Doctor Who and Race, edited by Lindy Orthia. If not, it’s exactly what you’d expect; the Daily Mail got a copy and decided to run a typical Daily Mail article in which the bizarre leftist intellectual attack on an upstanding British tradition is exposed to reveal the menace of the… whatever, really. (Obviously the Daily Mail likes Doctor Who today, since attacking academics is more important than making the BBC look bad. They can always go back to hating Doctor Who later, after all.)

I was one of the peer reviewers for the anthology, and while it would be inappropriate for me to offer a full review of the book, not least because I saw an older draft of it, I am in a position that virtually nobody else commenting on this kerfuffle is in that I’ve actually read the thing, as opposed to just the Daily Mail article. So after checking with Ms. Orthia that opening my mouth would be OK, I figured I’d weigh in.

First of all, absolutely every story on this is a retread of the original Daily Mail story, which if you really want to read you can find here, but be sure to swab your monitor down after. To be fair, pissing off the Daily Mail is the very definition of picking the right enemies, and I’m frankly jealous of Ms. Orthia for pulling it off. So the bulk of this should surprise exactly nobody. Still, let’s make a few observations. First of all, let’s note that the two essays singled out in the Daily Mail article are, in fact, the first two in the book. It’s not even clear the Mail received the entire book – the first ten percent of it would be sufficient to write the takedown they mustered. So actually, maybe I actually am the only person in this kerfuffle who’s read the book.

The Daily Mail’s screed objects to two essays, both in the first four of the book. The first, by the blogger Fire Fly, is admittedly problematic. In fact, at least in the version I read, I found it a terribly weak essay that systematically overstated its claims. It’s a reworking of a blog post, and it reads like one – a polemical screed of the sort that’s perfectly sensible as a discussion-starting bomb lobbing on the Internet. As the opening chapter in a pop-academic anthology presumably aimed in part at Doctor Who fans, it’s a… poor choice, and one that absolutely everybody should have expected to cause exactly this reaction.

But crucially, it’s one essay, and the only one that’s anywhere near so polemical. The other essay criticized, Amit Gupta’s look at the use of cricket as a signifier in the Davison era, is utterly tame, and it’s almost funny to see the Daily Mail lay into it. It is, in effect, a primer on the status of cricket as a cultural signifier in the early Thatcher years, and something it is nearly impossible to work up any meaningful objection to.…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else 23 (Only Human)

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When the writers for the first series of Doctor Who were announced, they were a fairly sensible lot. It was, by and large, a particular social circle of Doctor Who fans who entered television writing in the years immediately following the series’ cancellation. All had written either for Virgin or Big Finish, and they were all only one or two degrees of separation from each other in terms of being close friends or colleagues. They reflected, in other words, a particular generation of Doctor Who creators. For the most part they were of the Virgin generation, although, as noted, all but Moffat and Davies himself had written for Big Finish as well (and Moffat had been invited to write for Big Finish, but declined because he didn’t want to write past Doctors). But for the most part they represented the writers on the good half of the Wilderness Years, and their departure as the major creative figures in Doctor Who coincided with the post-TV Movie decline.

Given all of this, there was a name whose absence from the first series writing credits stuck out a bit: Gareth Roberts. He was, after all, one of the acclaimed figures of the Virgin years, had a number of high profile Big Finish audios, many with regular co-conspirator Clayton Hickman, and, more to the point, had worked with Davies previously on Springhill and had scads of television credits to his name. But for whatever reason he wasn’t. He’s said in interviews that this saddened him, and that he took on writing Only Human for the New Series Adventures line in part to show that he should have been asked to contribute.

The first thing we should say, then, is that it worked. Roberts wrote a raft of auxiliary material for the second season, including the interactive Attack of the Graske and the prequel TARDISodes, before managing the feat of getting tapped for a script in five consecutive production years of Doctor Who – a streak only equalled (not surpassed) by Russell T Davies himself. If Only Human was his audition piece, it was massively, phenomenally successful.

The second thing we should say is that this is tragically unusual. Gareth Roberts is the only person to have written for both the New Series Adventures line and the television series. This fact means that the New Series Adventures are not able to function in one of the most obvious ways that they could function, which is as a sort of minor league where new talent can be cultivated. We talked with The Monsters Inside about the relative purposelessness of this line, and how it existed seemingly without an audience, for the relatively cynical reason of selling stuff to young Doctor Who fans, or, more accurately, their parents.

One thing that could alleviate that – and not just in the sense of “giving the line a non-cynical reason to exist” but in the sense of making it a line that people write non-cynically for – would be if it were meaningfully possible to go from writing for it to writing for the television series.…

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Farewell to Academia

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At the end of my last class of the semester, one of my best students – one who, out of some tragically misguided instinct, actually took a class with me a second time because he enjoyed it – came up to tell me that he’d had a good semester but didn’t think he was going to re-enroll next semester. I asked why, and he explained that he had a job lined up in the family business and just couldn’t justify the loans.

Years of defending academia and the value of a college education reared up inside of me, ready to make an impassioned speech. I wanted to tell him not to. And… I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. Because he was right. I could not in good conscience tell one of my best students that it was worth the loans. And in hindsight, that was the moment I decided I was well and truly done with academia.

I had been going to take one last stab at the job market this fall. With the Flood book done and maybe one or two more articles in process, and maybe even a book deal on an edited version of my dissertation. Just to answer the question, one last time, of whether I could make it in academia.

Which is, as it happens, terribly silly. Academia is not a meritocracy. It’s a lottery, in which the grand prize – a tenure track position – is dangled over the heads of everybody so that we agree to work for the appalling wages that adjunct faculty get. I’ll use numbers from the University of Akron, since I have them ready to hand: adjuncts make up 70% of the Univeristy of Akron faculty, and teach 62% of freshman and sophomore classes. They make up 15% of the faculty budget. The annual income for a lecturer teaching a 4/3 load – i.e. the equivalent of full time – is $20,038, which isn’t even $2000 more than the median income for fast food workers in Ohio.

Meanwhile, the odds on tenure track appointments are astonishingly grim. It’s not unusual for a job to get five hundred applicants. There were, last year, maybe two dozen jobs in my field. This is, to be clear, a change. Academia was not always dominated by part time labor. There has been an active decision at multiple universities to move away from full-time tenured faculty and towards cheaper adjuncts. There has been an active decision to expand PhD programs because PhD students provide extremely cheap labor. There has been an active decision to allow skyrocketing administrative salaries and increased bloat of administration while refusing to expand faculty. There’s been an active decision to favor MOOCs and other such solutions, often prepared by for-profit companies, for the sheer cheapness of them.

This creates a difficult dualism. On the one hand, the only way to describe the overall labor conditions of universities is “sickeningly abusive and corrupt.” On the other, the fact of the matter is that most faculty are pretty decent folks.…

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A Galactic Yo-Yo (Boom Town)

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So my choice is “or death?”

It’s June 4th, 2005. Crazy Frog is at number one with “Axel F.” Coldplay, Akon, Gorillaz, Oasis, and Gwen Stefani also chart, the latter with “Hollaback Girl,” one of the most wonderfully awful things ever recorded. In news, Vanity Fair reveals the identity of Deep Throat, Bob Geldof announces the Live 8 concert to coincide with July’s G8 summit, and Scottish Gaelic is given formal recognition in Scotland.

The recognition of Scottish Gaelic was part of a general trend under Blair’s New Labour government towards devolution of powers towards Scotland, Northern Ireland, and, most importantly for our purposes here, Wales. The creation of devolved legislatures and a new push for use of their native languages were only facets of a larger tendency towards national pride in the countries.

In Wales, at least, another facet was the expansion of the existent BBC Cymru Wales. The BBC always had a Wales-specific arm that offered regional programming, including Welsh-language programming, and did in-house drama productions like the BBC’s longest-running soap opera Pobol y Cwm. But with the rise of the Welsh National Assembly it became terribly politic to bolster drama production at regional facilities (in no small part because doing so gave the BBC a wider base of political support). And so BBC Cymru Wales was used to produce an increasing variety of English-language programming for broadcast outside of Wales.

This process coincided neatly with Julie Gardner getting headhunted from London Weekend Television in 2003 to become Head of Drama at BBC Wales. Gardner brought with her Russell T Davies’s Casanova project, which had been kicking around at LWT. Julie Gardner was the Verity Lambert of her day – a tremendously skilled television producer who combined a knack for getting along with just about everybody ever with an absolutely obsessive love of the medium. In particular she was a devoted fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a fact that gets put in every description like this out of the not entirely mistaken belief that Buffy was the model for the new series version of Doctor Who. (A statement that is certainly part of the story, but as we’ve seen over the past month, only part.)

Meanwhile, over at BBC One, Controller Lorraine Heggessey finally clawed the internal rights on Doctor Who back from BBC Worldwide, which was continuing to be spectacularly inept at making a film. She and BBC Head of Drama Jane Tranter approached Julie Gardner, seemingly out of a combination of a desire to put a high-profile drama in Cardiff and the knowledge that Gardner was already working with Russell T Davies on Casanova. Gardner was a tremendously hands-on Head of Drama on Doctor Who, serving as an executive producer and working closely with Davies. The two of them had tremendously shared taste in many things, Buffy included, and the result was that they largely adopted the US showrunner model where a head writer is also in the thick of day-to-day production and served as a primary auteur on the television series.…

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Saturday Waffling (May 25th, 2013)

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Whatever shall we do with no new episode to discuss? I’ve no idea, actually, but here’s the discussion thread for it.

By the time you’re reading this the brilliant Anna Wiggins, who’s contributed guest essays to both blog and book, will be visiting us for the weekend. So that will be fun. I think she, my wife, and I are going to do a demo podcast commentary, just to see how bad we are at it to start and how many things we need to learn to do or not to do. I’ve also just sent out the first set of Kickstarter rewards (the ebook starter kit), so that’s satisfying too. Especially since those rewards cost me nothing to fulfill.

And I’ve got the Hinchcliffe-era revisions mainly done – at the time of writing (probably a bit obsolete by the time you read this) I’m in the midst of The Hand of Fear, which means the next one is a bit of a hill to climb, but a fun one. This doesn’t mean the book is imminent – I’ve written no extra essays and it has to all be copyedited – but it means it’s at a nice clip. I’ll move on to Hartnell after this, where I expect far fewer changes. Let’s see if I’m right and don’t just start getting terribly annoyed with my old arguments and decide that it’s time to rewatch and rewrite The Crusade in its entirety.

Speaking of which, are there any things either in the first Hartnell book or the Hinchcliffe era Tom Baker stuff where people think there’s room for improvement? I’m already going to rephrase the infamous “trust nobody who lists Hartnell or McGann as their favorite Doctor” line and have rewritten the Masque of Mandragora post heavily, but if there’s anything else you’re unsatisfied by, please do let me know. (I’m talking bits where you think my argument is wonky or where I miss something huge – not typos, which will get fixed in copyediting.)

Actually, while we’re doing self-critique, how’s the new six-times-a-week blogging working for you? Are the off-day posts on topics to your liking? Are there things you’d like to see more of? Less of?

And finally, extra essays for the Baker book. I’m currently thinking Managra, Corpse Marker, one of the Baker/Leela Big Finish audios (which one’s good?) and… I dunno. Something else obvious and big I should deal with? No guarantees I’ll go with a suggestion, but I’m always open to them.

And, of course, how’s your weekend?…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else 22 (Eccleston Comics, the 2006 Annual, Doctor Who Magazine)

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Let us pause for a moment to consider the survivors of the Wilderness Years in the general case. Big Finish, of course, was relatively untouched. We covered much of their future at the tail end of the Wilderness Years, and will check in on them a few times more (off the top of my head I can think of at least six Big Finish essays on post-2005 material that I intend to write, some as book-exclusives, some here), but the basic arc is sensible enough: they got their license renewed fairly soon after the new series started, largely through the personal intervention of Davies, who actively kept the issue from crossing Mal Young’s desk. They were forbidden from making any new series references, and in fact occasionally had characters taken away from them when the TV series wanted them, but they quickly developed their niche of the classic series.

The book line, as we’ve seen, fared rather more poorly, a final victim of the decision to take the license away from Virgin. Under a third party license they could well have survived in the same way that Big Finish did, particularly if, like Big Finish, they had a bunch of respectable and upstanding people involved with them. (e.g. Rebecca Levene) But having been taken in house they were a victim of the BBC’s Great Leap Forward, cut off as part of a sensible but nevertheless painful decision to thoroughly rebrand Doctor Who as a show of the present instead of the past. It’s the worst sort of decision. On the one hand, it’s next to impossible to argue with as any sort of a business move – only the most blinkered fan would seriously suggest that the new series would have been more successful if it had played up the forty-two years of prior continuity more. On the other, for anyone who loves that history it’s a body blow.

And then there’s Doctor Who Magazine. Russell T Davies was a huge fan of the magazine, and upon taking over Doctor Who promptly approached them to cement the relationship between show and magazine. We have, of course, seen this before in the period where John Nathan-Turner saw the transformation of Doctor Who Weekly, a glorified Doctor Who comic book, into Doctor Who Monthly, a paratext to the series that elicited continual fan engagement. The results were, to say the least, mixed, in no small part because Nathan-Turner’s skill at publicity outstripped his skill at making television.

Tied into the problems, however, was what I have in the past referred to as the fan-industrial complex – the often toxic interplay in which prominent fans were tacitly bribed with access in exchange for their endorsement of the party line. This process led to deeply unfortunate moments like the canonization of the “fact” that John Nathan-Turner saved the program from the “crap” version that Graham Williams made, which we’ve discussed previously. Actually, let’s pause here for a moment and offer something of an addendum to previous blog posts, since there are several spots where, shall we say, new information has come to light that alters past stories.…

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Queers Dig Time Lords (Sigrid Ellis and Michael Damian Thomas, eds)

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Sorry to throw two book reviews at you in a week, but, well, there were two books to review this week. Next week I’ll use the off-day posts for angry polemics or something.

Mad Norwegian was kind enough to offer me a review copy of their upcoming Queers Dig Time Lords. Which is lovely of them. Lovelier, however, is the fact that they actually made the book good.

I mean, it’s not like it was a huge risk. Mad Norwegian are probably the best publishers of Doctor Who-related material going right now. Their “As dig Bs” series is consistently and rightly acclaimed. I met several of the folks involved in the original book in the line, Chicks Dig Time Lords, at DePaul, and they were all wonderful. Perspectives on geek culture from people outside the normative band of what fans look like.

But this one is more important than that. I mean, I don’t normally want to go for what I’ve heard memorably described as the Oppression Olympics whereby we try to figure out which repressed group has it worse. And in this case, I still don’t want to. But nevertheless… well, let’s just look at a quick list, shall we?

John Nathan-Turner, Matthew Waterhouse, Ian Levine, Gary Downie, Peter Grimwade, Gareth Roberts, Russell T Davies, John Barrowman, Gary Russell, Paul Magrs, Mark Gatiss, Phil Collinson. It’s not a complete list by any stretch of the imagination. I’m 100% certain there are major figures not on it. It’s just a list of prominent Doctor Who figures who I know off the top of my head are gay. And that’s just off the top of my head.

Which is to say that there’s a particular reason this book matters. Because gay Doctor Who fandom was and is a real thing. The reasons for this are not simple, but are at least articulable. Paul Magrs has a fantastic essay leading off this volume that does it – basically, between the lack of overt sexual desire on the part of the Doctor and the high camp of the series, it became very, very easy to perform a queer reading of it in which the Doctor is closeted. And many did. But note also that there’s no coherent approach or vision of Doctor Who across that list: it’s next to impossible to imagine any opinion on Doctor Who shared by Ian Levine, Gareth Roberts, and Mark Gatiss. Gay fandom is not some monolithic bloc of approaches. It’s just very large, and has been around for decades now, albeit without any real acknowledgement from the series.

This is one of the very important things about The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances – it marks the point where that closet is finally detonated. And detonated in an explicitly queer way – the episode goes out of its way to confirm that the Doctor is not just a straight bloke. Whatever one might think about having a sexualized Doctor, it has to be understood: there’s a huge, huge group of fans who put a lot of effort into the program for whom the Doctor’s final “who with” is the cathartic endpoint of decades of marginalization.…

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The Impossible Dream of a Thousand Alchemists (The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances)

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Ouch.

It’s May 21st, 2005. Akon remains at number one for the week, though the next week Oasis takes it with “Lyla.” The Black Eyed Peas, The Gorillaz, Jennifer Lopez, and Kelly Osbourne also chart, the latter with the surprisingly non-awful “One Word.” Since the last story George Galloway, recently elected as an MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, testified in front of the US Senate over the Oil-for-Food program. On the 21st itself Arsenal celebrates the Glazer takeover of Manchester United by beating them on penalties in the FA Cup final, the first time that cup was determined by penalties.

Penalties, of course, mean that the final ran long, which nearly led to it crashing into Doctor Who, which had been moved forward half an hour to accommodate Eurovision (it was Greece with “My Number One”), and the result led to The Empty Child getting pummelled in the ratings. Actually, the entire tail end of the first season slumped in the ratings, without even a bump for the season finale. But The Empty Child, though not the series low, bore the brunt of it, becoming the only Doctor Who episode of the first three seasons to fall out of the top twenty.

These days, of course, we know it as a classic and the high point of the first series. Everyone knows that. Even still, there’s something odd about its popularity. The watershed moment for it was probably its winning of the Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo Award, although its triumph in the Doctor Who Magazine season poll has to be taken as meaningful. But we should highlight how strange it is that the episodes won the Hugo given that they hadn’t even been screened in the US, which dominates the Hugos (which are presented at Worldcon, an international con that is nevertheless typically held in America). And there’s something indicatively weird about the nominations, where Doctor Who got three nominations, none of them for Russell T Davies’s episodes (which admittedly also, save for the finale, lined the bottom of the Doctor Who Magazine poll).

And, of course, we have the irksome problem of Moffat lurking. Because let’s be honest, this is Doctor Who by the current showrunner, and there’s no way that the gravity of “let’s analyze the series as it is now” can be avoided entirely, especially four days after a season finale. But what’s interesting is less comparing this to Moffat’s future time on the series and more to his past. Because this is in no way the pair of episodes that anyone expected Moffat to turn in. He may be known as the master of horror in Doctor Who, but that’s not at all what his past career pointed to. He was a sitcom writer who’d had a successful children’s show way back (and Press Gang played into him getting Doctor Who as much as Century Falls did for Davies).

More to the point, the reason Davies hired him for these two episodes wasn’t to do creepy horror.…

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S. Alexander Reed – Assimilate

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Let’s start with the disclosures. Alex is a dear friend and colleague – my coauthor on the upcoming book on Flood, in fact. I’ve known him for over a decade; he was in my wedding party. I’m in the acknowledgments of this book. My friendship with him is one of those that is more an ongoing serialized conversation. We see each other a couple times a year and the conversation calmly picks up with litanies of things we’ve each squirreled away in the corners of our brains with mental notes to tell each other.

Alex is appallingly tall and prone to exaggeration. He is one of those people who monopolizes the available talent pool. He’s a ferociously insightful and well-read critic, an adept rock star, a phenomenal conversationalist, and damnably handsome to boot. Working with him on the Flood book consisted of a workflow in which I banged out obscene amounts of verbiage in a short time and he painstakingly worked it over and added to it until it was actually a good book. 
Beyond that, my intellectual debt to him is so massive as to be impossible to fully account for. The list of things and ideas he introduced me to is simply massive. He is one of those influences so fundamental that to attempt to encapsulate it in some list of things he introduced me to feels desperately inadequate. And reading Assimilate is thus a terribly strange experience for me – a blur of past conversations where I realize these ideas were being worked out. I hit a passage on Guy Debord and remember vividly the conversation picking him up from the airport where I excitedly told him that he needed to read Society of the Spectacle. I nod along enthusiastically at his descriptions of 1970s England unable to begin to tell  what bits are where talking to him influenced me, what bits are the other way around, and what bits are just us conversing into separate Word documents. And there’s nothing like a way to tell.
Which is to say that this is in no way a detached critical book review. This is unapologetic fanboying of the highest order. Because if there is someone I most consider a fellow traveler in terms of critical approach, it is S. Alexander Reed. And with Assimilate there finally exists a proper monument demonstrating what I truly and unhesitatingly believe to be one of the greatest creative and critical minds in the world today. 
Oddly, if irrelevantly, the topic is not one I am by any measure passionate about. Like most people, the prospect of epically long songs consisting of little more than grinding machinery and featureless noise is not my idea of fun listening. On the other hand, there exist subjects that are somewhat more fun to read about than to experience, and industrial music, like the Pertwee era, is perhaps a prime example. It is as easy to not want to listen to Throbbing Gristle’s “Very Friendly,” which is eighteen minutes of grinding and narration about the Moors murders.
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