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:

July 13, 2012

Put Life Into Anything Made of Plastic (The Happiness Patrol)

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You have to understand, the World Wide Web had only existed for a year. Even for an early adopter household like mine, with two parents both of whom had their own computers with modems and ability to dial in to the campus network and use the VAX, the fact of the matter is that the availability of information in the fall of 1992 was thin in ways that it’s difficult to really comprehend today. And my house, in terms of Doctor Who, was stuck in 1985. The Colin Baker era definitely existed, but my parents had, as I’ve mentioned before, hated it and stopped watching. I had Doctor Who: A Celebration as my only major reference source on the series.

I didn’t know, in other words, that the series had been cancelled, or how many post-Colin Baker Doctors there were, if any. And when, on the bookshelf of Target novelizations, I happened upon The Happiness Patrol, I had little context for it beyond the knowledge that the man in the white hat was not a Doctor I had seen before, nor was the logo familiar to me. For the first time since approaching the series without any context, in other words, I found myself approaching a Doctor Who story without the benefit of historicization. The book was, after all, just two-and-a-half years old. The McCoy era was only three years past.

I have maintained myself as an incidental character in this story since the late Pertwee era. This is, in part, why. Because here we get, as David Tennant puts it, my Doctor. The first one I learned about through experience, watching stories I hadn’t read summaries of. The one I grew up with. And Happiness Patrol, or at least its novel, was my first look into that era. We’re not long from catching up, chronologically, with my own experience of the show. I’ve long said I’d stop this blog when I lose the benefit of history. Here, though, I lose the benefit of double history, exiting the realm of things I’ve only known as historicized events and entering the realm of things I lived once. I myself am history. Or, in terms from Wednesday’s post, I myself am a fixed and certain part of the narrative. To excavate Doctor Who past this point is to excavate myself.

Personal archeology is always a dodgy process. There’s no way around it – at the age of ten I missed large swaths of The Happiness Patrol. I didn’t even have a solid idea who Ace was, little yet that Helen A was a Margaret Thatcher parody. For the most part it looked like standard and unambitious dystopia: a world where everyone is forced to be happy turning out to be an evil place seemed a relatively heavy-handed idea meant to teach me some sort of moral lesson. And yet there was something about it that crackled with the forbidden. Something about it that I was missing, but could tell that I was missing.…

July 11, 2012

I Won’t Explain Its Secrets To You, And Its Philosophy of Movement (Remembrance of the Daleks)

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You… cheater!

It’s October 5th, 1988. U2 are at number one with “Desire,” unseated a week later by Whitney Houston with “One Moment in Time.” This lasts for two weeks before Enya takes over with “Orinoco Flow,” a song that holds Kylie Minogue out of #1. Erasure, Bobby McFerrin, Milli Vanilli, Rick Astley, Phil Collins, and Pet Shop Boys also chart. Since Dragonfire The KLF has also charted, under the name The Timelords, with “Doctorin’ the TARDIS,” but we’ll deal with it next Pop Between Realities entry.

In real news, first to catch up, Perl was created by Larry Wall, perestroika began in the USSR, and Canadian Celine Dion won the Eurovision contest for Switzerland. And the Local Government Act became law, including Section 28, more about which on Friday. While during this story, Ian Paisley denounces Pope John Paul II as the antichrist while he addresses the European Parliament, bits of Spycatcher are finally published in the media, Michael Dukakis spectacularly flubs a question about capital punishment in a US Presidential debate, and the UK government bans interviews with IRA members, which the BBC deals with by hiring actors to play IRA members and read actual IRA members’ interview quotes.

While on television, at long last, it’s Remembrance of the Daleks. The first unambiguous, widely recognized classic of Doctor Who since Caves of Androzani. A tentpole of Doctor Who history. And in all likelihood, the Doctor Who story I’ve seen the most times – although The Curse of Fenric is quite a contender as well. I won’t pretend that I have anything resembling impartiality here. I love Remembrance of the Daleks. It’s one of the stories that is simply and straightforwardly why I am a Doctor Who fan.

But where to start with it? The beginning, one imagines – that is, after all, where it starts. One of the most obvious things about Remembrance of the Daleks is the way in which it returns to the iconography of An Unearthly Child to tell its story. On paper, of course, this sounds like unbearable fanwank. But this obscures the way in which the story works. Yes, it’s packed to the gills with references to the past. But they’re just that – references. There are no real ways in which this story relies on knowledge of An Unearthly Child beyond the twin facts that it’s the first Doctor Who story and it’s being referenced repeatedly by this story. Having seen An Unearthly Child is helpful only in catching the specific references.

But equally, this isn’t the sort of empty wink of Attack of the Cybermen either. There the references to An Unearthly Child were wholly extraneous – little more than an easter egg that the show was inexplicably self-congratulatory over. Here, however, it’s crucial that An Unearthly Child is being referenced, but only inasmuch as it is a major part of Doctor Who’s mythology. What matters here is that we have returned to the beginning of the series. The important thing is the symbolism of this return, not the plot mechanics as such.…

July 9, 2012

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 33 (Marvelman)

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I always knew there would be an Alan Moore entry around here. I wasn’t completely certain where – it could have gone at the start of the Cartmel era, but it was always probably going to go right here, before the “canonical” Cartmel era begins. No, the hard question was what I was going to pick. I mean, one of these years I’m going to get around to doing the book I want to write on Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. Which means I really don’t want to do a general “Alan Moore” post here. Which left me having to choose among The Ballad of Halo Jones (which Cartmel apparently handed to anyone coming on to write for Doctor Who), V for Vendetta (for the anarchism), Swamp Thing, or perhaps Watchmen (for their revampings of past characters). All would be perfectly reasonable choices for the time period. But Halo Jones felt too close to the 2000 AD post I’d already done. V for Vendetta felt too oversignified and not quite relevant enough to Doctor Who. Swamp Thing and Watchmen felt too American.

No, the one I had to pick, in the end, was Marvelman. Or Miracleman, if you must – that was, admittedly, how the tail end of the comic was published due to some rights issues. But really, the heck with those rights issues, especially since they’re all anyone ever talks about – both the renaming from Marvelman to Miracleman and, more substantively, the legal cases that have surrounded the character for twenty years now preventing anyone from finishing the series.

But that’s not what’s interesting about the series for our purposes. For our purposes it’s more interesting to note that both Alan Moore’s Marvelman run and Doctor Who wrapped up the same month in 1989. That while Moore’s Marvelman run began earlier – he came onto the character in 1982 years – this is, nevertheless, the closest equivalent to Cartmel-era Doctor Who in Alan Moore’s oeuvre. Both are cases of taking a largely discredited sci-fi institution of the past and getting it to work in the 1980s. Marvelman is a bit older – his original run was 1954-63 – but both come out of post-war utopianism of one sort or another.

But more than that, and here I’ll briefly delve into the rights issue I suppose, there’s an obscurity to it. Alan Moore and Doctor Who are both, in 2012, recognized as grand British institutions, albeit strange ones. But the Cartmel era, well-regarded as it is, remains an obscure stretch of Doctor Who in many ways. I’ve not perused detailed figures, but between home releases on VHS and DVD and platforms like Netflix it would not surprise me if something like Curse of Fenric had been seen by more people looking to understand Doctor Who’s past than who saw it on first transmission – something that is tremendously unlikely to be true of the hits of the Pertwee or Tom Baker years, for instance.

Marvelman, meanwhile, is the most obscure of the consensus Alan Moore 1980s masterpieces.…

July 6, 2012

1987’s Just the Isle of Wight (Dragonfire)

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Yes, Mel. You’re going to go to a farm. Where you can run.

It’s November 23rd, 1987. T’Pau’s “China In Your Hand” is at number one for the whole of this story, with The Proclaimers, Rick Astley, Whitesnake, Michael Jackson, Pet Shop Boys, and Paul McCartney also charting. Lower charts also include REM, ABC, Run DMC, The Bee Gees (with ESP), Sinitta (with GTO), and GOSH, with the wrong number of letters, but with both Bonnie Langford and Sylvester McCoy among the celebrities on the chorus.

In real news, Typhoon Nina strikes the Philippines, killing over a thousand. South African Airways flight 295 crashes the day before Korean Air Flight 858 is blown up by North Korean, each killing over a hundred. Thatcher’s government abandons free eye tests. And apparently acid house begins in the UK, beginning the so-called Second Summer of Love.

While on television, Dragonfire. On paper the elements here look as promising as the last two stories: a planet where all the characters are named after film theorists, a story that amounts to “con man versus vampire,” and the introduction of Ace. In theory we ought to have a belter. Instead we have a story that exemplifies “the whole is less than the sum of the parts.”

The crux of the problem is that the parts here simply don’t quite cohere. There’s a great idea lurking around under the surface of this one, but unlike in Paradise Towers and Delta and the Bannermen (where the brilliance is actually right there, just so unlike anything we’d seen from Doctor Who recently that it was easy to fail to look for it), it stays under the surface and never breaks out into a moment of sublimity.

The horde of film theorists is a good starting point. Yes, indeed, it’s terribly clever. But there’s not really a reason for it except to go with the large number of film references lurking about elsewhere in this story. But why are they here? What is the point beyond a demonstration of the author’s erudition? I have nothing against erudition our ostentatious displays thereof, but there seems to be a contingent that wants to praise this story simply because Ian Briggs had an Intro to Film text handy.

What there isn’t is any reason why a given film theorist should perform the role in the story they do. So we’re left with a pile of film theorists in general, unable to carve out much more than the observation that Kane’s guards are all film theorists. But this is oddly supported by the story itself when the Doctor attempts to distract a guard with a discussion of philosophy and ends up getting pulled into a detailed conversation when the guard asks him about “the assertion that the semiotic thickness of a performed text varies according to the redundancy of the auxiliary performance codes.”

So you have a vampire with an army of film theorists sending the Doctor and Glitz on a wild goose chase of generic adventure story cliches.…

July 5, 2012

Have a Bonus Post (Alif the Unseen)

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You will, of course, forgive me for a digression. I’ve not done one in a while. But as this is the biggest and loudest platform I have, it seems the best one to do a meandering review. And since I’m being almost totally ineffectual at thinking (or more to the point writing) about things that aren’t this right now, I figure I may as well just write it, post it here, and call it a bonus post.

So, there’s a book that just came out: G. Willow Wilson’s Alif the Unseen. And it’s the first book I’ve read in a while that has required a substantive reordering of my thoughts – one of those books that requires me, after reading it, to live in a slightly but substantively different world than the one I was previously living in.

The pithy description is “this is the book Neil Gaiman would write if he were an American-born convert to Islam who split her time between the US and Egypt.” And if you’re sold on it with that, you may want to just go buy it, read it, and come back, because the rest of this is a spoilerish discussion of why I think it’s a terribly important book. If you’re not sold, well, here’s a spoilerish discussion of why I think it’s a terribly important book, and maybe that will convince you.

So, obviously a big fascination for me is the interplay between the world of metaphors and material social reality. The secret of alchemy is material social progress and all. Wilson has been mining this vein for some time, and quite well. One of her starting premises – a solid enough one, I should think – is the standard post-colonial perspective that the Middle East has had its self-identity eaten by the west.

In some ways, then, it’s odd that she’s using her “western convert” status to write a western-style contemporary fantasy novel about these problems. Contemporary fantasy is a thoroughly straightforward genre these days. All neatly Campbell-structured and shop-worn. Create some clever juxtapositions of recognizable myths and contemporary tropes and you’re good to go. Play your cards right and you can get a decent movie or HBO series out of it. It’s not done to death, but it’s a very well-developed, well-defined western genre. And nobody is going to mistake Alif the Unseen as being anything other than an example of that genre.

But it’s not a straightforward one. At virtually every turn it finds ways of resisting itself. Rescuing the princess proves not so much pointless as facile. Using the magical powers gained by understanding of the hidden world is both impossible and disastrous. There’s even an absolutely hilarious embedding of Twilight within the book as an obvious author surrogate marries a vampire and has his half-jinn baby. But even here the book ducks and weaves around the cliche – the character quietly drops out of the narrative just before the climax.

This is, actually, instructive for a way in.…

July 4, 2012

Time Can Be Rewritten 29 (The Fires of Vulcan)

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My Google Analytics indicate that despite my being American a narrow majority of my readers these days are British, and so I’d like to wish you all a happy anniversary of the day you got rid of us idiots and got on with your lives.

That said, on to the meat of things. Of the several genres of Time Can Be Rewritten posts, this is, unfortunately, a member of my least favorite. It’s one of those posts where I take a much praised piece of Doctor Who that I put on the schedule largely on the recommendations of fandom at large, then sigh and ask fandom at large why it hates me and wants me to suffer. In this case it was some Gallifrey Base thread or another in which this was praised as a latter day classic of the pure historical and as being far better than Fires of Pompeii. Then, listening to it in the car on a long drive a week or so back, I paused it and asked my girlfriend if she wouldn’t mind looking on her phone to see who wrote it, as I’d not bothered to look closely at that when putting it on my iPod.

“Steve Lyons,” came the reply, and I sighed dejectedly.

Those who bought the Hartnell volume (and by the time this goes up the Troughton book should be in the hands of my copyeditor) may remember a rather scathing account of Lyons’s The Witch Hunters in that book. There my objection was largely to the book’s appalling tone deafness, particularly the final sequence in which the Doctor essentially defends the Salem Witch Trials on the grounds that it all worked out and is thus in some sense worth the price.

To some extent, then, The Fires of Vulcan marks an improvement in this. McCoy’s Doctor, at least, is one who is consistently portrayed with a ruthless detachment such that seeing him calmly accept that some unknown number of the people he and Mel have been interacting to died in the eruption of Pompeii. For all the famous weight of “you can’t rewrite history, not one line,” Hartnell’s Doctor only comes near this in The Massacre, and that seems to be framed with the Doctor as the unsympathetic one. But McCoy offers a Doctor capable of remaining sympathetic even as he’s chillingly alien in his morality. As a result, he can carry the emotional and moral heft of this story in a way that Hartnell’s Doctor can’t carry a similar one.

But wait a moment. What have we seen in McCoy so far that supports any of this? I mean, it’s one thing to apply these notions to McCoy’s Doctor down the road, but in a story ostensibly set immediately after Delta and the Bannermen there’s something more jarring about it. This isn’t the Doctor as he existed in Season 24. Obviously it’s an extension of him – McCoy’s Doctor does develop in this direction. But he’s not there in Season 24.…

July 2, 2012

The Late 50s! The Time Before Burgers. (Delta and the Bannermen)

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The idea of a Doctor who looks comfortable riding a
motorcycle is a major transition for the show, and one I
hope to someday see.

It’s November 2nd, 1987. The Bee Gees are at number one with “You Win Again,” but are unseated only a week later by T’Pau with “China In Your Hand,” which remains for the rest of this story. George Harrison, Rick Astley, George Michael, Fleetwood Mac, and Whitney Houston also chart, as do Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes with “(I’ve Had) The Time Of My Life.) This being spectacularly unpromising, we ought peruse the lower charts where The Smiths, Boy George, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Public Enemy, Suzanne Vega, and The Sisters of Mercy all appear.

In spoken-word news, eleven people are killed by an IRA bomb in Enniskillen. A worker revolt in Bra?ov, Romania takes place, another crack in the facade of Soviet Eastern Europe. London City Airport opens, and customs officers in Southamption seize over £50 million in cocaine. Also, the government announces that the Community Charge will be taking effect in 1990. This can only end well for Thatcher. Finally, a fire in the London Underground kills thirty-one two days after the story ends.

While on television, Delta and the Bannermen. But let’s pause for a moment here and jump forward a quarter-century. In October of 2011 the American sitcom Community, beloved by American Doctor Who fans for an ongoing parody of Doctor Who within the show entitled Inspector Spacetime, aired an episode titled “Epidemology.” The conceit of the episode was that a Halloween party at the community college where the series takes place is infected with a disease caused by tainted army surplus rations that leads to a zombie epidemic. The episode is, in effect, a half-hour zombie film. In which the soundtrack – the iPod playlist that the Dean had been playing at the party – consists entirely of ABBA songs. The episode was enormously popular among fans of the show and critics, and is generally seen as one of the show’s finest hours. And rightly so – it’s clever, it’s funny, and it creates a coherent fusion of an unlikely and frankly completely mad set of ingredients.

Why, then, is Delta and the Bannermen, created a quarter century earlier, largely despised? It is, after all, a gritty action movie featuring a bunch of Kurosawa-homage mercenaries attempting an alien genocide that’s set in a Welsh holiday camp in the 1950s, features a bunch of aliens disguised as rockabillies, and features a soundtrack consisting of Keff McCulloch covers and pastiches of 50s rock music. And its title is a parody of a goth rock band for good measure. This is, on the face of it, the same basic concept of “Epidemology.”

The usual brief against this story, as with all of Season 24, is that it is “silly.” Doctor Who, apparently, is not comedy. This is a line of thought that plagued the Graham Williams era as well, and it was patently ridiculous then, based as it is on the false nostalgia for the past that willfully ignores the fact that Doctor Who was doing comedies in its first season.…

June 29, 2012

That’s It, I’ve Been Renewed (Paradise Towers)

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We call it… the drink machine.

It’s October 5th, 1987. M/A/R/R/S are at number one with “Pump Up The Volume/Antina (The First Time I See She Dance). A week later The Bee Gees unseat them with “You Win Again,” Erasure, Billy Idol, Bananarama, George Michael, and Pet Shop Boys also chart. As do The Sisters of Mercy, with “This Corrosion,” so, you know, welcome to the glory days of goth.

In real news, the south of England gets whacked with what is functionally a hurricane, killing 23 people and knocking out power across the region. The New York Stock Exchange jumps off a cliff to the tune of 22.61%, leading to similar fun on the London Stock Exchange. And Robert Bork is rejected from the US Supreme Court.

While on television, we have Paradise Towers, the supposed 8th worst Doctor Who story of all time. It is, by the way, absolutely brilliant. i say this to make clear, this is not one of my redemptive readings, that phrase implying as it does that there is something about the story requiring redemption. The only thing about this story to maybe require a spot of redemption is the acting, and we’ll get there. But since everybody, when talking about this story, wants to go on about Richard Briers, let’s leave the acting for as long as possible and talk about everything else first.

Because if you set the acting aside Paradise Towers fits very smoothly into a lengthy tradition of literature and thought about housing. If we were to sketch a quick history of this, it would go something like this. In the 1950s-70s there was a bizarre little fad in architecture called Brutalism. You know the type of building – those horrific piles of angular concrete that scream out the era of their production like the muted eyesores they are.

In practice brutalism marks the death throes of modernism. Modernism is a term that is perhaps even more devalued than postmodernism, which is an impressive feat when one stops to think about it. But for our purposes the two most important things to note about modernism is that it aggressively rejected tradition while still putting an enormous premium on notions of form and structure. This caused it to eventually fall awkwardly between both the right and the left. The right hated it because it was too non-traditional and because Hitler hated painters who were better than him, which is to say, virtually everybody. The left, on the other hand, noticed that an alarming number of modernists turned into fascists who were, after all, equally fond of throwing out the established order of things and replacing it with a rigidly designed new system.

After World War II, however, modernism broke out in architecture in a big way. The post-war fascination with technocracy and the sudden availability of lots of modernist architects who had fled the Nazis meant that everybody wanted to do big urban renewal projects with grand designs and visions. Hence the rise of brutalism.…

June 27, 2012

The Evidence Was Not As I Remembered (Time and the Rani)

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Well, clearly something has changed about the program.

It’s September 7th, 1987. The number one song has to be linked to, I fear. It remains there for three weeks before being unseated by M/A/R/R/S with “Pump Up The Volume/Anitina (The First Time I See She Dance).” Also in the charts are Michael Jackson with Bad, Madonna with Causing a Commotion, U2 with “Where The Streets Have No Name,” and The Pet Shop Boys and Dusty Springfield with “What Have I Done To Deserve This.”

In real news, recapping since Colin Baker went down in a hail of carrot juice, British Gas and British Airways both go public. The highest ever audience for a British television drama tunes in for the grimly depressing EastEnders Christmas episode. Kurt Waldheim is barred from the United States, Klaus Barbie goes on trial in Lyon, and Rudolf Hess dies. Thatcher wins election to a third term, and the Docklands Light Railway opens in London. And the entire Spycatcher affair rumbles on, with The Daily Telegraph being sued in an attempt to block them from publishing details from the book. And Jeffrey Archer wins a libel trial against the Daily Star. He will go on to lose a perjury trial over his actions in the libel trial. Oh well.

While during this story, Pat Robertson announces that he’s running for President, Spycatcher gets published in Australia, and Star Trek: The Next Generation premieres.

Speaking of television, we have here Time and the Rani. Time and the Rani, obviously, is not very good. We might, if we wanted to, suggest that this was some sort of major problem that damaged the series and screwed over the rest of the Sylvester McCoy era, but let’s face it, it wasn’t. Ratings dropped after the first episode, but recovered healthily over the remainder of the season such that it’s difficult to blame Time and the Rani for any long term damage.

This is oddly liberating. For five seasons – arguably for nine – every bad story has required some larger contextualization in terms of the failings of the production team and some exploration into what specific role the offending story played in the downfall of Doctor Who. But here we’re free from that! It had nothing to do with the downfall of Doctor Who. There’s nothing left to explain here – we’re on a twelve story run of bonus stories. The show is doomed, nothing save maybe for realizing that they could have promoted Remembrance of the Daleks as a stunning rebirth of the franchise could possibly have saved it, and we’re free to simply enjoy the steady improvement the show undergoes and the fact that it very quickly becomes better than it’s ever been before.

So, yes, Time and the Rani is rubbish for all the reasons you expect it to be rubbish, most of which are Pip and Jane Baker, but really, who cares? Not only does it not matter for once, what’s bad about this story isn’t even one of the most interesting things about it.…

June 25, 2012

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 32 (Knights of God)

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There’s a shift between the early and late 1980s that is difficult to articulate, but nevertheless clear. The cultural moment of the late 80s – one that, in practice, extends a few years into the 90s – is clearly a vibrant one. Swaths of really good bands release career high albums in this period, the much-feted British Inavsion of Comics hits high gear, you’ve got the Second Summer of Love, and, for good measure, Doctor Who has a creative renaissance.

Knights of God, which ran in 1987, airing the day before the episodes of Season 24 of Doctor Who, is clearly a part of this era. Which is interesting, as it was held back by two years and actually belongs to 1985, a very different era of television. And yet the delay is in many ways absolutely perfect – a case of something that would have been a few years ahead of its time instead ending up being an iconic example of its time.

Throughout the Baker era one of the running defenses we could fine was that it’s not entirely clear what Doctor Who should have been in the context of television of that period. Starting, well, not quite next story, but definitely the one after, Doctor Who starts to figure this out. And the solution it comes up with is very similar to the one that Knights of God turned out to have come up with two years previously.

Last time we focused on children’s television we noted that there was an awkward gulf confronting Doctor Who between its children’s television tradition and the considerably darker and edgier tradition that serious-minded science fiction was taking. The question left hanging was how to mix the aggressive and dark weirdness of something like Max Headroom with the traditional structure of children’s television.

It’s worth reflecting, though, on what the nature of this tension is. It’s not, obviously, that children’s television can’t be dark. Indeed, for the most part good children’s television is defined by an aggressive darkness. Rather, it’s that in the end children’s television tends to be about making the bewildering understandable, which means that while estrangement might be a tool along the way – indeed, a very important tool – it’s rarely the endpoint.

The troubling bit is that so much of the energy of this cultural moment comes from estrangement. It’s a cultural moment based on new, often more cynical takes on the epics of the past, and on disillusionment and alienation. The ostentatious and gaudy approaches of the earlier 1980s gave way to an angry depression – a situation that only increased come Thatcher’s third election in 1987. So children’s television’s had a real problem at this point, especially children’s television that wanted to deal with science fiction at all.

Enter Knights of God. On the one hand, it’s a searing, angry dystopia positing a fascist futuristic Britain in which the north and Wales have been brutally subjugated by the eponymous Knights of God. It’s not the sort of actively weird estrangement of, say, Max Headroom, but it’s a vividly unsettling milieu.…

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