Elizabeth Sandifer

The sole thing that Wayne Rooney and Professor Chronotis have in common.

Somewhere out of time, in a space between mean and while, in the gap of the conditional, the Graham Williams era does not conclude.

If we were to pretend that this aired after The Horns of Nimon we would discover that The Pretenders were at number one with “Brass in Pocket.” Two weeks later The Specials would take the top slot with “Too Much Too Young,” which would yield after another two weeks to Kenny Rogers with “Coward of the Country.” Styx, The Boomtown Rats, Joe Jackson, The Ramones, Blondie, and Elvis Costello would also have charted. Lower in the charts would have lurked Peter Gabriel’s divinely good “Games Without Frontiers,” which probably would have been in the top ten when this story would actually have aired. (The scrapping of Shada is, I would guess, why there was no Christmas break in Season Seventeen. The only reason Sixteen didn’t have one was that it was a continual story arc. Season Eighteen had one again. This also rubbishes the idea that The Horns of Nimon was supposed to be a Christmas panto or whatever. In all likelihood the season was supposed to break after Nightmare of Eden, with The Horns of Nimon being planned for a January start.)

Again assuming a Key to Time sort of scheduling, the London Gold Fixing would have hit its highest price ever, while the same day the Greek ship the MS Athina B (previously the Japanese MS Kojima Maru) beached in Brighton and became a temporary tourist attraction. Israel and Egypt would have established diplomatic relations, and six US diplomats would have escaped Iran by pretending to be Canadian. (A fun fact – did you know that “Canadian” is actually a racist slur in some parts of the US? Apparently people use it in place of “blacks,” as in “the neighborhood has gone downhill since all the Canadians moved in.”) The Winter Olympics would have opened in Lake Placid, and the famed Miracle on Ice would have happened. A coup in Suriname would place, the Voyager 1 probe would confirm the existence of the Saturnian moon Janus, and Robert Mugabe would be elected Prime Minister of Zimbabwe, bringing an end to the whole Rhodesia problem and beginning a whole new problem.

While on television there is… not Shada. There is something else. Shada, like the eponymous Time Lord prison, remains a half-constructed phantom. Or perhaps more accurately, an over-constructed phantom. There are a wealth of versions of Shada floating around now: the Paul McGann audio/animated version, the John Nathan-Turner-produced video, the forthcoming Gareth Roberts novelisation, the Ian Levine-produced animation, the actual original script, the fan-produced novelization, Dirk Gently, and, of course most importantly, the version that we imagine. Like the legendary lost epics of Hartnell and Troughton there is a version of this story that exists only as the wish of what might have been.

This last version is, of course, the most problematic.…

Continue Reading

Steve Dahl eats horn lasers.

It’s December 22nd, 1979. Pink Floyd are at number one with “Another Brick in the Wall.” This lasts for three more weeks before The Pretenders, the most British band ever to have a vocalist from Akron, Ohio, take number one with “Brass in Pocket.” ABBA, KC and the Sunshine Band, and Paul McCartney also chart. The latter, it should be noted, charts with “Wonderful Christmastime,” which is one of the single worst Christmas songs ever written – a piece of mawkish offal that makes me long for dogs barking Jingle Bells within seconds of it coming on. It is a song so bad that it was held off from the Christmas #1 by six separate songs including The Sugarhill Gang “Rapper’s Delight.” A song, in other words, so bad that the Brits preferred rap music to it in 1979 for Christmas. And yet Paul McCartney gets half a million dollars a year from royalties on it. Thatcher wasn’t the worst thing to happen in 1979. Just saying.

In real news, a ceasefire is signed for Rhodesia. The Soviet Union invades Afghanistan, which makes a lot of people angry and causes no end of problems, many of them for the United States. Speaking of the United States, they give Chrysler a $1.5 billion bailout, because that’s just how we roll. And the GPS epoch begins. Shortly thereafter, the President of Sicily is killed by the Mafia. Coincidence? Well, it’s tough to figure out how it wouldn’t be.

While on television, it’s The Horns of Nimon! Here even the staunchest defenders of the Williams era are given pause. This is not a story that anybody tries to defend the production of as such. The defense of the story, such as it is, amounts to “well it’s supposed to be funny.”

Fair enough, it often is. Certainly someone took an active decision here to just let Tom Baker have comedy larking for the entire story while turning the actual “Doctor” role of the story over to Lalla Ward. And certainly Graham Crowden is far too good an actor to treat his performance as anything other than deliberate. The erstwhile WGPJosh suggested that the story is a “Ham Singularity,” and if I am to disagree it is only because I think that it may simply seize the entire world’s cured meat supply in general. Crowden’s performance has a sufficient amount of ham involved that it borders on the anti-semitic. The design of the Nimon, on the other hand, may be inadvertent, but if so it’s an accident that at least fits seamlessly with the rest of the episode. (Also apparently inadvertent is the degree to which the opening TARDIS scene almost exactly parallels The Time of Angels. The Doctor knows less about flying the TARDIS than his female companion, instead of materializing on the ship the TARDIS materializes alongside and creates a corridor to the ship… even the switches that get hit to keep the TARDIS from exploding are blue.)…

Continue Reading

So. How was your weekend?

It’s November 24, 1979. Dr. Hook’s beautiful woman obsession continues for two more weeks before the Police break up the party with “Walking On the Moon.” That lasts for a week before Pink Floyd take the top slot with “Another Brick in the Wall.” Kool and the Gang, Donna Summer and Barbara Streisand, Gary Numan, and the Sugarhill Gang also chart, making this, I think, a strong contender for the most utterly screwed up set of musical options ever.

In real news, Air New Zealand Flight 901 crashes into Mount Erebus in Antarctica. Bruce George Peter Lee sets fire to a house in Hull, killing three and setting off a large manhunt. Jack Lynch resigns as Taoiseach of Ireland, which is by far the best name for a major political office ever, and the whole Rhodesia thing continues with the short-lived and unrecognized state of Zimbabwe Rhodesia returning to British control as Southern Rhodesia. Smallpox is formally eliminated, there’s a coup d’etat in South Korea, and the first Star Trek movie debuts.

While on television we once again have a story that gives us an opportunity to practice our “defending the Graham Williams era” skills. As usual, a curate’s egg. Somewhat surprisingly, the biggest problem isn’t the writing, given that this is a Bob Baker solo script. Apparently Dave Martin was the weak link there. I mean, the writing isn’t award winning genius. But it’s serviceable enough. The real flaws… let’s see. The Mandrels are, of course, a disaster, although at least with them, unlike several other recent monsters, you can see why people thought they could have worked. They’re firmly a case of just missing scary and landing on ridiculous (and the two are often a hair’s breadth apart) as opposed to a misconceived disaster. The acting is often poor, though nobody stands out as a particular disaster. The sets are… generic 70s space ship at its most generic, although some points are on offer for a relative lack of white.

But the biggest problem, if we’re being honest, is the basic concept. The number of series that have had good days with anti-drug stories is very, very small. It’s not a great topic, largely because one can’t deviate from the proscribed moral position that drugs are super-duper bad. Lacking in any ability to say or do anything interesting with the material they become little more than a race to see how ludicrously anti-drug you can end up being. So for Bob Baker to falter here is hardly surprising. Heck, even Steven Moffat has trouble with this theme, with “How to Make a Killing,” his anti-drug episode of Press Gang, being by far one of the weakest episodes of the series. Still, the fact that a vraxoin high consists of emotional apathy followed by death means that this has to be said to be something of an impressive entry in the ludicrously excessive anti-drug story sweepstakes. And given that vraxoin is one of the story’s big ideas and that another one of its big ideas is nothing more than a less interesting lift of Carnival of Monsters it’s easy to see why this story is a bit underwhelming.…

Continue Reading

We call it… green.

It’s October 27, 1979. Lena Martell are at number one with “One Day at a Time,” which is described as gospel-tinged country music. So that’s exactly the sort of thing that a Scottish singer is probably good at. After three weeks its unseated by Dr. Hook’s “When You’re In Love With A Beautiful Woman.” Fleetwood Mac, Sad Cafe, Queen, and The Jam also chart.

While in proper news, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines becomes independent from the UK. The Carl Bridgewater murder trial ends with all four of the accused being found guilty, though their convictions are overturned in 1997. NORAD computers in the US detect a massive Soviet nuclear strike, but it turns out to be a false alarm because someone put a training tape in the wrong slot and fooled the computer. Oops. Ted Kennedy declares that he’ll offer a primary challenge to Jimmy Carter. Also, the Iran hostage crisis begins with a mob of 3000 Iranians seizing the US embassy and holding 90 people, 53 of whom are American, hostage. Carter responds by freezing all Iranian assets in the US, and it all goes very well for him.

While on television we have The Creature From The Pit, one of the most tragically misunderstood stories in Doctor Who’s history. Some people, it seems, just don’t understand a proper anti-capitalist screed when they see one. Tragically, among them is the director of this story, Christopher Barry. Or, at least, that’s Tat Wood’s assessment, and on this point at least I’m inclined to agree.

Much like Terry Nation on Monday, I’m hardly inclined to slag Barry too hard. He directed the bulk of The Daleks, including the first appearance of the Dalek itself, he directed Power of the Daleks, he directed The Brain of Morbius, and he directed some lesser but still quite nice efforts like The Rescue and The Mutants. His sole problem here is one of the passage of time. In the normal course of things someone who was a solid television director in 1963 probably shouldn’t still be one in 1979. Virtually the entire medium changed over those 16 years. One of the things John Nathan-Turner does do a relatively admirable job of, even if he overdoes it a bit, is clearing out large swaths of the past that had stayed on past their prime and getting new blood onto the program. But to be honest, a lot of the problem the program is facing now is an inevitable part of being on season seventeen. It has to figure out which parts of its heritage are part of what the show is and what parts are things tit it should let go of. There wasn’t a rulebook on how to handle a show that had evolved continually over that kind of timespan. Science fiction had never done something like “Season Seventeen” before. It was hard.

And here Barry proved to be a poor choice. He makes two crushing mistakes, both of which Tat Wood is exactly on target about.…

Continue Reading

City of Death is made exactly 23% better if you assume Richard I was one of Scaroth’s incarnations.

It’s September 29th, 1979. The Police are sending out an SOS to the world. By the sales figures it appears that rather a lot of people got their message in a bottle. So, mission accomplished then. Still, they send it out for three weeks before The Buggles notice that they are radio stars and kill them. Blondie, The Commodores, Michael Jackson, and Kate Bush also make the top ten. XTC and The Damned sit lower in the charts.

In real news, the Hong Kong MTR opens, Nigeria brings an end to military rule, and Pope John Paul II, fresh from getting the ball rolling on the eventual collapse of the autocratic government of his native Poland, goes to the United States. Tragically, he’s less successful there, though barely a week after his departure a massive gay rights march takes place in Washington DC. A tsunami hits in Nice, a tornado in Windsor Locks, Connecticut, and a mob of pro-government thugs hits a newspaper and the home of the opposition leader in Malta.

While on television, we have a terribly unpopular story that no reputable fan enjoyed. No less an authority than John Peel, who later went on to helpfully fix the continuity errors introduced by Destiny of the Daleks, explains that the story is “pure farce,” that “the acting was once more appalling,” that characters were “so stupid as to be unbelievable,” that he “couldn’t believe that this was Doctor Who” and that it was “getting completely on [his] nerves.” So there you go. And to think, Miles and Wood spend two pages asking whether we should take one of his books seriously.

Speaking of Miles and Wood, this is the story in which their dueling style of review finally leaps into hilarious self-parody. Miles (quite correctly) proclaims that “it is, of course, one of the best things ever” before engaging in a review that consists almost entirely of explanations of why nothing else in the Williams era works as well as this. Wood, on the other hand, spends most of his critique explaining why Miles is wrong and the rest of the Williams era is as good as this. All well and good except for the rather massive lacunae in the middle of it whereby they both fail to talk about this story. (On the other hand, Miles, in describing how sitcoms work, does inadvertently pin down the central appeal of this section of About Time – “two people who don’t like each other, trapped in a room.”)

Continuing in my designated role as the unwanted third wheel to that particular odd couple, then, let’s look at what’s actually going on here. First of all, let’s concede a core point to Lawrence Miles. Regardless of what one thinks of the rest of the Williams era, and for my part that changes every few sentences, this is head and shoulders above not only the remainder of the era but frankly above virtually everything to have aired in the series previously.…

Continue Reading

As a child, this cover made me think of this story primarily as “the one with the better part of a sheep’s fleece on the cover.” It wasn’t until I looked at the cover again a few months ago that I realized it was smoke

It’s September 1, 1979. Cliff Richard are at the top of the charts with “We Don’t Talk Anymore,” a title that seems almost tautological as song titles go. After three weeks it’s unseated by Gary Numan’s “Cars,” a song that poses something of a fundamental philosophical problem. I mean, it was one thing to try to pretend that we were facing down business as usual when we were airing the Williams era while “Wuthering Heights” was at number one or when Siouxie and the Banshees were charting. But now we’re basically just kicking down the door for New Wave. Lower in the charts are the Boomtown Rats with “I Don’t Like Mondays,” and The Police with “Message in a Bottle,” as well as ELO, Roxy Music, and Earth, Wind, and Fire, the first two of which at least heighten the sense that there’s something off here – that the 80s have well and truly started without remembering to invite Doctor Who along for the ride.

Since The Armageddon Factor wrapped, most obviously, we’ve had Margaret Thatcher’s election. But we dealt with that last entry. The compact disc got its first public demo, two workers died in the collapse of the Penmanshiel Tunnel in Scotland, and then ten more in a methane explosion in a coal mine near Wigan. The Three Mile Island disaster happens, killing/injuring exactly nobody. Airey Neave, a Conservative MP, is assassinated by the IRA. A hundred children in the Central African Empire (previously and shortly thereafter the Central African Republic) are massacred for protesting against school uniforms with the active support (and indeed, by some accounts, participation) of the emperor, whose picture was emblazoned on the uniforms. The emperor, Jean-Bédel Bokassa, had previously blown 20% of the country’s GDP on his coronation.

Stil before this story, however, anti-Nazi demonstrator Blair Peach is killed by the police during a protest in London. Gay men riot in San Francisco after Harvey Milk’s killer manages a light sentence on the back of the infamous Twinkie Defense. American Airlines Flight 191 crashes in Chicago, marking the deadliest aviation accident in US history prior to 2001. (And that’s not the obvious 2001 event, by the way) John Paul II visits Poland in what ends up being a tremendously influential and important trip. Skylab crashes into Australia, the famed Disco Demolition Night takes place in Chicago, Saddam Hussein takes power, and Lord Mountbatten of Burma is assassinated by the IRA on the same day as the Warrenpoint Ambush. Oh, and Jimmy Carter is attacked by a non-IRA affiliated rabbit.

While during this story ESPN and For Better or For Worse debut. Emperor Bokassa, due to being, to borrow a phrase from Eddie Izzard, a mass-murdering fuckhead, is forcibly deposed by the French.…

Continue Reading

This is how it ends. Voratrelundar flirting with herself. True love at last.

It’s January 20th, 1979. The Village People remain at #1 with “YMCA.” One week later they’re unseated by Ian and the Blockheads’ “Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick,” which I assume, especially based on what else is popular, is sort of like Lady Gaga’s Disco Stick. That’s all over in a week as Blondie hits number one with “Heart of Glass,” which, I mean, good for Blondie, but it’s one of the most brazen selling outs of any talented musician ever. But it still sees out the season. Oliva Newton-John, Funkadelic, Chaka Khan, ABBA, Leif Garrett, The Bee Gees, Elvis Costello, and Gloria Gaynor all also chart.

In real news, now is the winter of our discontent, but we’ll do that on Friday. Lesser news includes Brenda Ann Spencer opening fire on a school in San Diego because of her dislike of Mondays. Patty Hearst is released from prison on the same day that Ayatollah Khomeini returns to Tehran from exile, which just about sums up the Carter administration. Ten days later Khomeini takes power in Iran, leading to nothing but sunshine and bunnies for decades to come. Pluto nips inside Neptune’s orbit to let Neptune become the outermost planet. This remains so until 1999, at which point Pluto becomes the outermost planet again. Neptune, of course, is horribly jealous about this and plots political moves to retake the position more permanently, but that’s more a Tennant-era story. It snows in the Sahara Desert for half an hour, China invades Vietnam, and St. Lucia becomes independent from the UK.

While on television, the Key to Time concludes with neither a bang nor a whimper. But before we look too far at that, let’s take a step back and look at the arc as a whole one more time, and more generally at the Williams era to date. The central critical dilemma with the Williams era is straightforward enough: is it a witty and lively postmodern rendition of the tropes of science fiction, or is it just a bunch of cynical hacks mocking the show they’re supposed to be making?

Both of these, of course, overstate their case. The former, admittedly, is not nearly as impishly brilliant as Gareth Roberts’ summary of that case as viewing the era as “an artefact of postmodern forces combining to produce works of semiotic thickness through usage of meta-textual signifiers.” The latter, on the other hand, might actually be too nice. The same Roberts piece provides a damning account of the practical origins of the anti-Williams camp.

Not to leaf too many pages ahead, but there are only five more transmitted stories in the Williams era after this one. After that begins the nine-season tenure of John Nathan-Turner as producer – a tenure that defies easy classification as a single era. Nathan-Turner’s contributions to the program are far too complex to square away in what amounts to an introductory note. But one of the more sickening aspects of the era is the way in which Nathan-Turner presented himself as providing a glorious rebirth for the show and unabashedly threw Williams – his previous employer, keep in mind – under the bus to do it.…

Continue Reading

While in real news, Vietnam makes a major attack on the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Spain ratifies its new Constitution, an event that Wikipedia describes as officially ending military dictatorship, which is amusing given that six lines earlier in its timeline it describes an earlier stage in the Constitution’s development the exact same way. And there’s a big UN/UNICEF push for the “Year of the Child” featuring a big concert with ABBA, the Bee Gees, Donna Summer, and Rod Stewart. So that’s horrific.

While on television, it’s not a popular story at all. Let us be honest, for a moment, about the critical consensus regarding this story. Its weaknesses are evident, yes. It’s a bold fan who can defend the Swampies or the way in which Kroll is merged into shots. (The Kroll model itself is actually phenomenal, and it’s easy to see why his first appearance was an iconic moment for children of the time. On the other hand, the join between the two shots is an abomination.) But these in and of themselves don’t explain this story’s status as a punching bag, nor does the fact that it drags a bit.

No, the biggest problem this story has is that for a Robert Holmes script it’s complete and utter crap. It is, in fact, the second worst Robert Holmes script according to the DWM poll I’ve been oddly obsessing over through this story arc, coming in at 174th place. The one that’s lower is, of course, The Space Pirates, which is actually not a bad story to compare this one to.

Both, after all, have essentially the same origin. Holmes was called in to produce a script in a hurry to fill a gap. And in both cases he was given a thoroughly crappy set of instructions for his troubles. For The Space Pirates he was told to tack on two extra episodes and be sure to keep the science realistic. This time he got told to cut down on the humor and to insert the biggest monster in Doctor Who history. And in both cases the resulting script amounts to Robert Holmes writing a space Western. (Also, in a more esoteric coincidence, The Space Pirates was the first story on which John Nathan-Turner worked, then as a floor assistant. The Power of Kroll, on the other hand, was the first story produced by him, as Graham Williams, depending on your choice of sources, went on vacation or took ill, leaving him as the de facto producer.)…

Continue Reading