Eruditorum Press

Our business actually is to reason and compare

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:

Time Can Be Rewritten 36 (A Death in the Family)

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Lungbarrow at least attempted to feed directly into the TV Movie. It didn’t last. There’s about three dozen stories, mostly from Big Finish (whether audio or their Short Trips series), that feature an “older” version of the Seventh Doctor. Arguably the first one of these actually comes just three months after Lungbarrow in the form of Terrance Dicks’s The Eight Doctors, but claiming that would involve trying to reconcile The Eight Doctors with the Virgin line, or, for that matter, with anything at all. But I’m two weeks ahead of myself.

A Death in the Family, ironically, only minimally features the post-Lungbarrow Doctor, focusing primarily on what is normally taken as a pre-Virgin Doctor situated between Survival and Timewyrm: Genesys. (Though even that’s difficult to square away, as we’ll see.) The post-Lungbarrow Doctor appears, and is indeed absolutely central to the story, but as a peripheral character lurking in the background. But despite the relative briefness of his appearance he’s central to affairs. A Death in the Family is at its heart a story in the vein of Battlefield in which the infamously manipulative Seventh Doctor falls into the schemes of the one person who can out-manipulate him: his own future self.

But where Battlefield played Merlin as something that put the Doctor off his game, A Death in the Family has the two Doctors in relative lockstep. Indeed, they are sufficiently compatible in their goals that it borders on a plot hole: the older Doctor’s scheme relies on the younger Doctor making specific decisions requiring knowledge of the overall plan, but on the other hand the younger Doctor is clearly unaware of the older Doctor’s plans. This can be explained as the Doctor faking surprise at various moments, but it’s not an entirely satisfying explanation.

But then again, there’s a fundamental difference between McCoy’s Doctor falling into the schemes of some future incarnation and him falling into the schemes of McCoy’s Doctor only down the line. In this regard it’s telling that A Death in the Family straddles the Virgin era as it does. Because much of the story’s theme is right out of the Virgin playbook: an extended meditation on the nature of the Doctor’s manipulations. And it’s telling, then, that there are no particular differences highlighted between the two Doctors. Their manipulations are wholly compatible, such that the younger Doctor can smoothly slot in and finish a plan he hasn’t actually come up with yet.

But this poses a bit of a tension with the Virgin era, which does ultimately posit an arc for the Doctor’s character from beginning to end. This arc is actually for the most part opposite what people claim for the Virgin era, as we’ve noted: the Doctor’s vastly manipulative schemes increasingly fade to the background as more and more writers favor actually chucking the Doctor into unfamiliar situations. Notably, Paul Cornell, who took the manipulative Doctor as far as it could go with the idea of the Doctor leaving notes to himself from the future, actually stopped doing books where the Doctor has a plan going in after Love and War.…

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The Leaves on the Trees are Bright Silver (Lungbarrow)

71

I’ll Explain Later

Lungbarrow is the final New Adventure featuring the Seventh Doctor, and ostensibly leads straight into the TV Movie. It dusts off the script that Marc Platt had to revise into Ghost Light, which was originally a bevy of revelations about the Doctor’s past and the nature of Gallifrey. As a book it becomes even more sprawling, finally rendering explicit the whole of the not-actually-Cartmel Masterplan, establishing at long last the relationship between the Doctor and the mysterious Other. The Doctor is the Other reincarnated. So that’s a thrilling shock. At the time Dave Owen wasn’t thrilled, calling it “rather more frustrating than rewarding” and saying that “it’s weird and wunderful – but, unfortunately, never simultaneously.” Lars Pearson, more recently, went with calling it “one of the most ambitious ‘Who’ novels ever, worthy of considerable praise.” Pearson’s view carries the day: it comes in fourth in Sullivan’s rankings with an 83.6%, which is good for a tie with fifth place. DWRG Summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide entry.

——

It’s March of 1997. No Doubt remain silent at the top of the charts. After two weeks the Spice Girls have a single out – “Mama/Who Do You Think You Are.” That’s not one that charted in the US, but it goes straight to number one and stays there for the rest of the month. The Bee Gees, En Vogue, Bush, Ant & Dec, Boyzone, the Fugees, R. Kelly, the Backstreet Boys, Madonna, and the Pet Shop Boys also chart.

In real news, one of the most famous UFO sightings ever, the Phoenix Lights, takes place. Yes, The X-Files was tremendously popular around now, why do you ask? Hale-Bopp makes its closest approach to Earth, the Tamil Tigers kill over two hundred people in Sri Lanka, and the mass suicide of the Heaven’s Gate cultists takes place in San Diego. While in the UK, John Major calls his doomed election, and The Sun promptly endorses Blair. And Teletubbies debuts!

While in fine literature, Marc Platt’s Lungbarrow. The book’s existence is an oddity. On the one hand, it was inevitable. The simple reality of Doctor Who fandom was that all of Virgin’s playing around with the Cartmel Masterplan had to be paid off. Never mind that there wasn’t actually all that much playing around with it – the Death/Time/Pain set of Eternals feature far more heavily than the mythology of the Other. It had to be done. Whatever one might think of Lungbarrow, the idea that the Virgin line could end without doing this story is unthinkable.

Which is largely a pity, because it’s rubbish. Every revelation in this book is complete rubbish. Neil Gaiman relates the story of how in an early draft of The Doctor’s Wife he had a line about how the Corsair was an inspiration for the Doctor leaving Gallifrey, and Moffat told him to take it out because the Doctor “does what he does for reasons too vast and terrible to relate.” Which is pretty much the problem – a problem we first noticed way back around Season Twenty and Longleat.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 48 (Alan Moore’s Spoken Word Pieces)

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People who like this blog and in particular this entry are essentially certain to enjoy JMR Higgs’s new book KLF: Chaos Magic Music Money, which is, by his description, “a story about The KLF, Robert Anton Wilson, Dada, Alan Moore, punk, Discordianism, Carl Jung, magic, Ken Campbell, rave, Situationism and the alchemical properties of Doctor Who.” See? Right up your alley if you’re reading this. The book is announced here, with links to where you can buy it in the US or UK.

The Cartmel-Virgin era began with overt and self-conscious parallels to the work of Alan Moore. Actually, that might be a little strong. Let’s try this: Andrew Cartmel was a comics fan, and he stole from the best. Sylvester McCoy’s audition piece, itself spun into the bulk of Mel’s departure scene in Dragonfire, was directly inspired by Dr. Manhattan in Watchmen. And much of Cartmel’s tenure as script editor can be read straightforwardly as an attempt to do Alan Moore’s Doctor Who. Given this, it’s a surprisingly honest one that understood what Moore was actually doing on a level beyond “he was adding lots of sex and violence to what were ostensibly children’s stories.” But in most accounts that’s where Alan Moore drops out of the Doctor Who story, replaced by Neil Gaiman, whose Sandman ran more or less concurrently with the New Adventures and was an overt influence.

This is, for the most part, because Alan Moore’s career took a bit of a strange turn in the late 1980s. Following a dispute over payment and rights to Watchmen Moore stopped accepting new work for DC Comics, simply seeing out his existing contract to finish V for Vendetta, which he did in 1989. Instead he began working independently, starting with the publication of AARGH! in 1988 under his own Mad Love imprint. That was also the imprint under which he published Big Numbers in 1990, an aborted magnum opus about a shopping center in Northampton and fractals. This was, unfortunately, characteristic of his work in the period – although some shorter and self-contained pieces such as “Brought to Light” and A Small Killing made it out, his other two big works from the period had what can only be described as convoluted publication histories. Lost Girls, his pornographic work with future-wife Melinda Gebbie, saw some issues published in 1991-92 before vanishing for fifteen years. From Hell had an only slightly smoother ride, managing to get all ten chapters out over the course of five years and three publishers.

The latter of these is, to say the least, a transitional work for Moore. From Hell’s memorable fourth chapter, published in 1991, was inspired in part by the psychogeographic work of Iain Sinclair, with whom Moore struck up a friendship that is almost certainly the most important creative influence of his later career. It is also in that chapter that Moore wrote that “the only place gods inarguably exist is in our minds where they are real beyond refute, in all their grandeur and monstrosity.”…

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You’ve Got Some Battle Scars There (The Room With No Doors)

11

I’ll Explain Later

We’ve actually legitimately skipped Bad Therapy, which tries to fix up the whole Peri thing, and Eternity Weeps, which casually kills off Liz Shaw and less casually divorces Jason and Benny. It’s not well liked.

The Room With No Doors properly begins the winding up of the New Adventures, and also ties Kate Orman with Paul Cornell for number of books in the range, with So Vile a Sin putting her over the top two months later. Note that the majority of her books came out in the last year. And they were all good to boot. 16th century Japan and a lot of angst on the part of the Doctor and Chris. Dave Owen deems it “a humorous book that is never dull, and frequently delightful,” which I’m not entirely sure is actually a description of this novel. Lars Pearson goes with “a much needed epilogue to the Virgin New Adventures,” which is notable as an actually plausible review. The Sullivan rankings put it at thirteenth, with a 78% rating, making it Orman’s second most liked book. DWRG Summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide Entry.

——

It’s February of 1997. Blur are at number one with “Beetlebum.” A week later it’s LL Cool J with “Ain’t Nobody,” then U2 with “Discotheque,” and finally No Doubt with “Don’t Speak.” George Michael, Placebo, Tori Amos, En Vogue, Depeche Mode, the Eels, and Daft Punk also chart, which is actually quite a good little list, if a preposterously late 80s/early 90s throwback chart.

In news, the Hubble Space Telescope begins repairs so that it actually works. Dolly the sheep is actually unveiled to the public, prompting Bill Clinton to ban federal funding for human cloning in a beautiful moment of crass pandering. And the Conservative Party actually becomes a minority government, actually for the second time, having previously gone four days without a majority in January.

While in books it’s The Room With No Doors. The New Adventures proper, as an era with a distinct viewpoint distinct from everything that had come before in Doctor Who, began with Timewyrm: Revelation. But more significant, in many ways, is the two book sequence that continues into Time’s Crucible. These two books, in hindsight, establish the bulk of the New Adventures’ mythology, with Cornell establishing the mythology of the Doctor’s interior landscape and Platt establishing the larger mythology of Gallifrey and the Time Lords. And so as the Seventh Doctor’s period in the New Adventures winds down we symbolically repeat this pair with one more novel dealing with the ideas of Timewyrm: Revelation followed by Platt’s other New Adventure, the final revelation of the “Cartmel” Masterplan.

As is usually the case with the New Adventures, the retrospective emphasis gets put in all the wrong places. Lungbarrow may be the book where all the big mythic revelations about the Doctor are made, but this is the novel where the actual meat of the New Adventures and their take on the Doctor is resolved. The central innovation of Timewyrm: Revelation, of course, was the decision to treat the Doctor’s mind and memories as a landscape such that the history and mythology of the program acquires its own mythos.…

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Turn Her Into a Weapon, Just to Bring You Down (So Vile a Sin)

10

I’ll Explain Later

Well, technically we’ve skipped the rest of the line.

So Vile a Sin, the fifty-sixth and final of the sixty-one New Adventures, concludes the Psi-Powers arc. The novel was infamously delayed when Aaronovitch suffered a hard drive crash and was unable to face the prospect of rewriting large swaths from scratch and in an ultra-compressed timeframe. Accordingly, Kate Orman stepped in to finish the job from what chapters remained and Aaronovitch’s outline, and the book was put out five months late, more or less the day that Virgin’s license to publish Doctor Who books expired. It has tons of big plot points, most notably the death of Roz Forrester. It’s once again quite acclaimed (noticing a pattern in the latter New Adventures?). Dave Owen says that “Ben Aaronovitch and Kate Orman utterly typify the very best of the New Adventures.” Lars Pearson praises how it “makes Roz one of the most determined and self-actualized companions ever.” Sullivan’s rankings lodge it in with the rest of the Kate Orman books at fifteenth, with a 77.5% rating. DWRG Summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide Entry.

——

It’s November of 1996. The Spice Girls are, unsurprisingly, still at number one with “Say You’ll Be There.” More surprisingly, they’re unseated after a week, giving them only a two week run, as Robson & Jerome take number one with “What Becomes of the Broken Hearted.” That lasts two weeks, then Prodigy come in with “Breathe,” which finishes out the month. Tony Braxton, Michael Jackson,  the Fugees, the Backstreet Boys, and Madonna also chart, the latter with Evita’s weird zombie bonus track composed by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber for the movie version.

In news, the Tories narrow the gap between them and Labour to a mere seventeen points. The Channel Tunnel catches a bit of fire, and the Stone of Scone is installed in Edinburgh Castle after seven hundred years of being in England, which is largely symbolic, but a very important symbol. Outside of the UK, President Clinton wins re-election and Benazir Bhutto is tossed out of power in Pakistan. And, because it’s fun to say, Tony Silva is sentenced to seven years in prison for an illegal parrot smuggling operation.

While in literature… nothing. No New Adventure comes out. There was supposed to be one, but, well, you know the story. This book forms the single weirdest whorl of chronology the blog will ever cover. Not only does it form part of the tail end of the New Adventures where they were still publishing Seventh Doctor novels after the TV Movie, it was released out of sequence even within the Virgin line. The usual line about this is that this ordering blunted the book’s major moment, the death of Roz Forrester, which was, inevitably, revealed in Bad Therapy the month after So Vile a Sin was meant to come out. Two problems present themselves here. First, the idea that Roz was marked for death was going around fandom for months prior to it being officially revealed.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 47 (Touching Evil, The Grand, Springhill)

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Let’s change the camera angle slightly, however, and look at Russell T Davies’s career in general as of the mid-90s. He was, at the time, undoubtedly a successful television writer. He was not, however, the Russell T Davies of legend. He was a working writer, making a living entirely off of his writing, and with rising acclaim. But he was not a superstar of television yet. And perhaps more importantly, his work just isn’t up to the standard of what his later work is like. I pointed Monday to the dividing line seems to be the overdose that Davies cites as what got him working on Queer as Folk. We will, of course, do a Pop Between Realities on that show when we get to its appropriate time period in late January and look at where Davies’s work really started to feel like Russell T Davies.

What is perhaps most striking about his projects immediately prior to Queer as Folk is that they are aggressively, unrelentingly dark. Which may sound familiar, because it’s exactly what we were saying about Damaged Goods on Monday. Indeed, let’s go one further. If Damaged Goods does not read like the Doctor Who novel you’d expect the writer of Rose to write, it reads exactly like the novel you’d expect the writer of Springhill, The Grand, and a small bit of Touching Evil to write.

Let’s start with Touching Evil. The show is actually created and mostly written by Paul Abbott, who is another one of the absolute superstars of British television (and who we’re not done with either). Davies only wrote one episode of it, the first half of the first season’s finale. Mark Aldridge and Andy Murray’s T Is For Television, which has been an indispensable reference for both this and the previous entry, suggests that the episode is evidence of how well Davies could write to the specifications of someone else’s show. Aldridge and Murray suggest that the script is unrecognizable as Davies’s work, but this isn’t quite fair. If Davies is writing to spec, after all, the spec is Paul Abbott’s, one of his closest friends and collaborators. It’s not accurate to say that Davies and Abbott are indistinguishable – they’re certainly not. Abbott is more inclined towards a structure of set pieces to generate scenes of intense drama. Davies, left to his own devices, prefers to give characters sparks of intense drama in amongst otherwise low key scenes. It’s not that he eschews the set piece – quite the contrary, he loves a good set piece. But he builds to his set pieces out of character interactions. Davies’ trademark move is to give a character a soaring and triumphant monologue stemming out of relatively ordinary action. Abbott likes to crank the action up to eleven and watch the characters respond.

You can see this difference clearly enough across the two episodes of Touching Evil. Davies’s episode ends with a character confessing to another that he’s committed a vigilante murder. Abbott’s episode continues along this line of plot.…

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The Eighth Doctor Schedule

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Since we’re on the cusp of the Eighth Doctor era, I suppose we should lay out the schedule for the next four months for people who want to play along at home. As is typical of me, I’ve only listed  Eighth Doctor Adventures and Big Finish Audios here, with the various side trip entries remaining oblique for my amusement.

Where legal copies of things are available I have linked to them. I encourage you to buy them.

Also, we’ve got Lungbarrow coming up on December 14th. That’s also available as a free ebook via the Internet Wayback Machine – you can grab it here. And though it’s old news, I never actually linked Human Nature‘s free ebook either. Nor, I think, did I link to where you can buy Death in the Family, the Big Finish audio we’re covering on the 17th,

The people advocating for Seeing I will see that they are disappointed. For these things we have book versions.

12/28 The Dying Days (Free! And legal!)
12/31 The Eight Doctors

1/4 Vampire Science
1/7 War of the Daleks
1/11 Alien Bodies
1/14 The Scarlet Empress
1/18 The Infinity Doctors (UK link)
1/21 Unnatural History
1/28 Dead Romance (UK link)

1/30 Interference
2/4 The Blue Angel
2/6 The Shadows of Avalon
2/11 The Ancestor Cell
2/13 The Burning
2/15 Father Time (UK link)
2/18 Storm Warning
2/20 Sword of Orion
2/22 Stones of Venice
2/25 Minuet in Hell

3/1 Earthworld
3/8 The Adventuress of Henrietta Street
3/11 Invaders from Mars
3/13 The Chimes of Midnight
3/15 Seasons of Fear
3/18 Embrace the Darkness
3/20 Time of the Daleks
3/22 Neverland
3/27 Camera Obscura

4/1 Zagreus
4/3 Scherzo
4/5 The Creed of the Kromon
4/8 The Girl Who Never Was
4/10 Human Resources (Part 2)
4/12 Lucie Miller/To the Death
4/19 Sometime Never
4/22 The Gallifrey Chronicles (UK link)
4/24 Scream of the Shalka
4/26 This Town Will Never Let Us Go (UK link)

Coverage of the new series will begin on May 1st.…

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What the Rest of Us Do (Damaged Goods)

9

I’ll Explain Later

We’ve skipped the largely panned but relatively plot-important The Death of Art.

Damaged Goods is by some chap named Russell T Davies, which by most accounts is the most important thing about it. Ancient Gallifreyan horrors on a 1980s council estate, with no shortage of gay culture, it would be exactly what you expected Russell T Davies in the Virgin era to be if it weren’t for all the cocaine. Very much liked, though. Dave Owen at the time declared it to be “currently [his] favorite New Adventure.” Lars Pearson, more recently, but still well before the new series was announced, said that like the definite article, it is “sometimes forgotten in Virgin New Adventures tidal wave,” although it is “one of the most mature” Doctor Who stories ever. Shannon Sullivan’s rankings, which it should be noted are mostly pre-new series, puts it as the seventh best New Adventure with an 80.7% rating. DWRG Summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide entry.

——

It’s October of 1996. Deep Blue Something are being one hit wonders with “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” That unsurprisingly doesn’t list as the Chemical Brothers take over with “Setting Sun.” That also doesn’t last, with Boyzone’s “Words” going to number one. Which, of course, can’t possibly hold up to the Spice Girls’ second single “Say You’ll Be There.” Celine Dion, Donna Lewis, Blackstreet, the Manic Street Preachers, the Fugees, Phil Collins, and LL Cool J also chart, so it’s exactly as bad a month as you think it is.

In news, the former prime minister of Bulgaria is assassinated. The second OJ Simpson trial begins, because once just wasn’t enough. New Zealand agrees to pay $130 million in compensation for the 150-year-old treatment of the Maori population. And Laurent Kabilia makes significant progress towards his eventual takeover of what is still Zaire at the time. And the Conservative government’s majority manages to fall to a single seat as Peter Thurnham defects to the Lib-Dems.

While in books, it’s Damaged Goods. Like Human Nature, the perspective on Damaged Goods has shifted fundamentally since its release. Upon release it was well-liked, but sandwiched in amongst the final year of New Adventures it was, if we’re being honest, forgettable. It didn’t brutally kill off Liz Shaw, come out months late and by a different author, have Benny schtupping the Eighth Doctor, reveal the secret origins of the Doctor, or add to Kate Orman’s terrifying tally of books in a relatively short period of time. It was just a very good novel by a moderately successful television writer. Russell T Davies was still years from Queer as Folk and from becoming Russell T Davies, and he was nearly a decade from being the one who brought Doctor Who back. It was still quite acclaimed – Sullivan’s rankings shut down not long after the series returned, due in part to a lack of people submitting ratings, so its high rating there can’t be entirely chalked up to a surge of new series fans – indeed, it has by some margin the fewest votes of any novel in the top ten, and the third lowest number of any New Adventure.…

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The Select Few, All With Their Stories of the Doctor (Return of the Living Dad)

63

I’ll Explain Later

Return of the Living Dad, Orman’s second novel in five months and one of a staggering three-and-a-half novels she releases in a one year period (with another half coming out four months later, and another full one coming eight after that), features the return of Bernice Summerfield to the New Adventures after a… three month absence. So not really that big a gap, actually. It squares away the old plotline of what happened to her father during the Dalek wars. The answer is that he got time warped to 1983. So that’s unexpected. It’s a Kate Orman book, so everyone loves it. With Paul Cornell providing plotting assistance to boot, so, you know, even better. Lars Pearson goes with “one of Orman’s masterpieces,” Dave Owen at the time said that Orman provides “many profound insights into the lives of her characters, and indeed, people in general.” It’s eighteenth on Sullivan’s rankings, squarely in the narrow range Orman’s books all occupy.

——

It’s August of 1996. The Spice Girls are at number one with “Wannabe.” Manic Street Preachers, the Fugees, Los Del Rio, Alanis Morissette, Robbie Williams, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, Underworld, Backstreet Boys, IMC, Pet Shop Boys, Jamiroquai, R.E.M., George Michael, Bryan Adams, and Ant & Dec all fail to unseat them despite making it into the top ten. Alanis Morissette at least manages to dominate the album chart for the entire month. In news, NASA tentatively answers David Bowie with “yes.” Bob Dole wins the Republican nomination for President. Prince Charles and Princess Diana are officially divorced. Osama bin Laden declares a jihad against the United States.

While in books, Return of the Living Dad. But let’s jump forward a bit. Let’s have a look at last month’s Doctor Who Magazine – issue #453 if you’re reading this from the future. In it is a four page feature commemorating the twentieth anniversary of Love and War and thus of the creation of Professor Bernice Summerfield. This is, to say the least, extraordinary. It is, of course, too soon to know for certain, but it is unlikely that Chris Cwej and Roz Forrester are going to get a four-page feature in a 2015 issue of Doctor Who Magazine. Even the Eighth Doctor Adventures’ major companion, Fitz, whose six-year tenure as a companion is second only to Ace in sheer length, is unlikely to be so honored. There is, in other words, something extraordinary about Benny.

Part of it is simply that she is an enduring character. From 1992 to 1996 she was a regular companion. Even after her “departure” in Happy Endings she made three  major appearances in the eleven subsequent books, plus a brief one in So Vile a Sin. Then came a two-and-a-half year run as the lead character in the Doctorless New Adventures line from 1997-1999. Concurrent with the tail end of these were Big Finish’s audio adaptations, which were where they proved their credentials and managed to get the Doctor Who license in 1999. The Bernice Summerfield audio line continues to this day.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 46 (Our Friends in the North)

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We’ve alluded a couple of times to the changing nature of the BBC in the late 1980s and early 1990s. If you start from 1984, when Michael Grade took over at BBC1, and go to 1995 there are only two instances in which a BBC1 or BBC2 program wins the BAFTA for Drama Serial or the nearest equivalent award. Obviously Grade was only in charge of BBC1, but let’s use his ascent to mark a particular attitude about what the BBC was. There were two more instances where BBC Scotland won, but let’s for the moment also treat them as a separate thing. Then, from 1996 to 1999 BBC1 and BBC2 had a straight sweep of the category for four years, and won seven of the twelve from 1996 to 2007. And inaugurating that sweep was Our Friends in the North.

Clearly something changed. And yet it’s difficult to straightforwardly identify what, exactly, it could have been. John Birt made a major reorganization of the corporation in 1996, but it’s difficult for a variety of reasons to just hand him credit for a revitalization of the BBC’s drama efforts. And after all, the BBC remained top notch in the world of comedy. Nor is it even accurate to say that Our Friends in the North marks the point where the BBC returned to the top of its game in producing prestige dramas: that’s clearly 1995 and Pride and Prejudice.

It is tempting to allude to a nebulous idea of a broader cultural swing. The Labour Party was, at this point, seemingly all but certain to regain power whenever the next election happened. There certainly was, in the broad sense, a swing towards a more leftist vision of the country, although the question of how leftist New Labour was is vexed to say the least. The swing back to a more confident and prestigious BBC coincides thematically with that even if the actual causality is borked. And that causality works well, in particular, with Our Friends in the North, a story largely about the material arc of leftist politics in Britain over a stretch of time that coincides almost perfectly with that covered by this blog.

But there are some fundamental issues in play here, and ones that we’ve only ever touched on in passing, so let’s slow down and look at the component parts of this. First is the BBC itself. One of the fundamental mantras of this blog has been that it is a terrible mistake to treat the BBC as though it resembles a commercial television station of the sort that produces virtually all of American television and most of the rest of British television. This is due to the fact that the BBC is not only a public service broadcaster as opposed to a for-profit channel, but also to the fact that there are decades of history of the BBC that have given it an entrenched vision of its role in Britain that stubbornly fails to be completely erased.…

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