Elizabeth Sandifer

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.…

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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.)…

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Duplicates! I haven’t seen duplicates in years!

It’s November 21, 1978. The Boomtown Rats are still at number one with “Rat Trap,” which should probably get at least some serious mention as, at least in Wikipedia’s unquestionably correct worldview, it is the first punk/new wave song to hit #1. In any case, my life gets simpler a week later when Rod Stewart hits number one with “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy,” a song that is really pretty unambiguous in all regards. A week later it’s Boney M with a version of “Mary’s Boy Child,” which stays in place through the end of the story. Blondie, The Cars, Sarah Brightman, The Bee Gees,  Barbara Streisand and Neil Diamond, and the Village People (with YMCA) all also get into the top ten. In the lower reaches of the chart are The Buzzcocks, The Clash, Elvis Costello, and for our purposes (and nobody else’s) most interestingly, Mankind with “Dr Who,” a version of the Doctor Who theme song, which makes it as high as 25.

In real news, Harvey Milk is murdered by Dan White. The Times halts publication for nearly a year due to labor problems, which is the sort of thing you’d normally like to mock Rupert Murdoch for, except he buys the paper in the fallout from these problems so still has nothing to do with it. Next time, Mr. Murdoch, I will not be so lenient. Also, the Spanish Constitution is established, officially restoring democracy to the country.

While on television we have one of those things that puzzles one about Doctor Who fandom. I’m not one to treat the Doctor Who Magazine surveys as the definitive gauge of fan opinion, and certainly not as some doctrinaire statement about aesthetics. On the other hand, I’m not going to pretend the Mighty 200 survey has nothing to tell us about Doctor Who. Obviously it does. There’s some type of fan that the survey is broadly representative of the taste of. We admittedly know little about this type of fan beyond “they answer Doctor Who Magazine” surveys, but they exist.

Where I’m going with all of this is that, not for the first time in recent memory, we’re looking at a story that has a puzzling reputation. According to the big DWM poll, this is the second best story of this season, behind Stones of Blood. Whereas I am unable to come up with an even remotely sincere argument for how to consider either of these stories better than the first two of the season. And that presents an interesting problem.

First, let’s quickly deal with what this story is. It’s fairly simple – it’s a parody of The Prisoner of Zenda. Tara is a planet with androids and advance technology that has, for no particularly discernible reason, taken on a social structure that almost exactly matches that of a Ruritanian Romance. All of this sounds cynical, and it is a bit. Certainly it’s tough not to see moving from a trio of complex multi-layered narratives to a straight pastiche as a bit of a move down, at least in some sense.…

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No, Doctor, Iain Cuthbertson was two stories ago.

It’s October 28, 1978. John Travolta and Olivia Newton John continue to do unspeakable things on Summer Nights and are thus left to sing about them instead. This lasts for three weeks before The Boomtown Rats make it to number one with “Rat Trap,” which, given that it’s now hit number one, makes me kind of regret that crack implying they were a one hit wonder with “I Don’t Like Mondays.” The Grease orgy continues lower in the charts with Olivia Newton-John making a solo appearance in the charts. The Jacksons, The Cars, and Public Image Ltd also chart. That said, when crafting the “also chart” sentence I usually limit myself to the top ten, and as we’re getting into the period where I actually love huge swaths of stuff going on lower in the charts, I think it’s time to inaugurate a sentence about the lower reaches of the charts so I have an excuse to mention The Buzzcocks, The Jam, Blondie, and Elvis Costello, if only to reassure anyone who wasn’t convinced by The Cars and Public Image Ltd that these are actually pretty good times for music. Having thusly reassured everyone, Donna Summer also charts with “MacArthur Park,” proving that there’s no hope at all and that we might as well just elect Margaret Thatcher or something.

In real news, we manage to avoid electing Margaret Thatcher for a bit longer. Instead Dominica gains independence from the UK. Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin win the Nobel Peace Prize, an event that is in part notable because Jimmy Carter does not win it despite brokering that peace, setting up a rare case of an “oops, sorry we forgot about you” Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. (Not that Carter’s post-Presidency work was not meritorious, but let’s face it – that prize was 1/3 about Carter’s post-Presidency, 1/3 about a rebuke to Bush, and 1/3 about the fact that in hindsight he obviously deserved to split the 1978 prize.) Rioters sack the British embassy in Tehran, California voters defeat an initiative to ban gay schoolteachers, and, the day after the final episode of this story airs, the first Take Back the Night march happens in San Francisco. But the big news story happens the day the final episode of this story airs as the Jonestown Massacre happens, resulting in the murder/suicide (we’ll leave it ambiguous which victims were which) of a staggering 918 people.

While on television, we should probably go back and note the one thing we didn’t mention in the Pirate Planet post (and which I bet someone has already commented on, but I’m writing this before the Pirate Planet post goes up, so who knows) that ITV’s failed attempt to poach top BBC talent and compete on Saturdays has been going on. The key event of that is their poaching of Bruce Forsyth, previously host of the BBC’s Generation Game, now host of ITV’s rather more disastrous Bruce Forsyth’s Big Night.…

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Well, I can poke at it for a bit, but eventually we’re just going to have to give in and invent some technobabble.

It’s September 30, 1978. John Travolta and Oliva Newton John are at the top of the charts with “Summer Nights,” one of the classic cuts from Grease, and I’m going to go wash my fingers out with soap for even typing that phrase. This situation lasts for four weeks, and at two separate points other songs from Grease (John Travolta’s solo “Sandy” and Frankie Valli’s title track) also chart. In addition, ABBA, The Commodores, Exile (with “Kiss You All Over,” a country song whose sales may owe more to the topless woman on the single cover than to the song itself), Electric Light Orchestra, and the Boomtown Rats also chart, the latter with something other than “I Don’t Like Mondays.”

People who do like Mondays include the New York Yankees, who defeat arch-rivals the Boston Red Sox to make it to the AL East title (having been 14 games out of place a mere two months earlier) on their way towards winning the World Series on Monday, October 2nd (they win it on Tuesday, October 17th), and Karol Józef Wojty?a, who becomes Pope John Paul II on Monday, October 16th. Other eventful days of the week include Sundays, as Tuvalu becomes independent from the UK and Vietnam attacks Cambodia; Fridays, as the first Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras takes place. Designed as protest march/commemoration of the Stonewall Riots, the event attains a permit which is then revoked, leading to numerous arrests and public outings of people for what had been legal activity; and Tuesdays, as a massive electrical fault brings down NASA’s SEASAT satellite after only 105 days of operation.

While on Saturdays, we have The Pirate Planet. By far the least loved of Douglas Adams’s three Doctor Who scripts and ranked a staggering fourth out of the six stories from this season in the Doctor Who Magazine poll, The Pirate Planet is, I think it’s safe to say, a deeply under-appreciated story. Somewhat unusually, the reasons to criticize this story haven’t changed much since 1978, with the major lines of critique closely paralleling the production difficulties the story had. These difficulties centered on two major concerns. First, Adams’s scripts required substantial revision. This fact is taken by some as evidence of Adams’s flaws as a writer, which would make total sense if the script editor hadn’t, at the end of the season, recommended Adams as his replacement. All reports in fact suggest that the problem with Adams’s scripts was excessive complexity. While I m not saying that this is prima facie not a problem, we ought be honest about the sort of problem it is. Writing above the level of complexity that Doctor Who ought go for is a heck of a lot easier to fix than being Bob Baker and David Martin is. That does not, of course, mean the script is good (though it is, as we’ll see), but at the very least there’s no strong reason to think it’s bad.…

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As we round to about a week away from what is, statistically speaking, probably a major gift-giving occasion for a lot of the readers of this blog, I wanted to take one more opportunity in 2011 to shamelessly beg for money.

I apologize for the raw crassness of this. So let me frame it another way. A lot of talk, in various spheres and contexts, goes on about supporting “independent” producers of things or about creating “new digital models” for creativity that get away from the normal models of publishing and the like. This blog is the sort of thing they mean.

I’m a barely employed PhD in English facing an economy that, realistically, means I will probably never see full-time employment in the field I spent a decade and went into crippling debt to train for. When you see stories about people staggering under the weight of their student loan debt, I am what they are talking about – if I devoted 100% of my paycheck to paying off my student loans then I would still be paying them off in twenty years. Full-time hires in my field barely exist. There were a dozen full-time academic jobs in the country that I was qualified for this year, and every one of them had 200+ applicants.

I think that’s bullshit. I think there’s way more demand for scholarship about popular culture and media, and way more people who want to learn about it than anyone gives credit for, but that academia as it stands is a noble profession badly corrupted by money and politics, and that publishing hasn’t come close to figuring out how to cater to people insane enough to want to read 10,000 words a week about postmodernism and 20th century British sci-fi television. I think there has to be another way. But I’m not a business guy, and the extent of what I can really do to find that other way is to spend a lot of my time writing the sort of stuff I wish existed in the world and trying to find fair ways to let people pay me for it.

I don’t want to get rich off of writing about Doctor Who. I do want to, off of the work I’ve spent my life training to be good at, eventually be able to afford my own place and support a family. Right now I can do neither. I mean, I’m not on the streets – I have a strong support system that will make sure I’m taken care of and a comfortable life. If you want to find someone to throw charity at, I’m not the guy. But on the other hand, if the issues I talk about in this blog are ones that matter to you, well, they’re ones that matter to me in a very real sense too. And if you think that independent scholarship on popular culture that’s aimed at a general audience instead of an insular academic one is something that should exist, well, you can help.…

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Wingardium Leviosa!

It’s February 4th, 1978. “The Mull of Kintyre” has finally been unseated at the top of the charts by Althia and Donna’s “Uptown Top Ranking,” a nice little reggae number. It makes it a week before Brotherhood of Man unseat it with “Figaro,” a song widely accused of ripping off ABBA, who, coincidentally, knock it off a week later with “Take a Chance on Me,” which has a three week run before Kate Bush storms to number one with “Wuthering Heights,” which is, quite frankly, a fantastic song, doubly so for having been written in the space of a few hours by an eighteen-year-old, which is the sort of thing that makes those of us who are pushing 30 feel desperately old and like we have wasted our lives. This song is also worth pointing to on the grounds that the New Romanticism movement is generally dated as kicking off at least a year later, which makes this a bewilderingly massive hit a good year or two before the movement that it obviously belongs to actually existed. Bonnie Tyler, Bob Marley and the Wailers, Rod Stewart, Blondie Electric Light Orchestra, and the Bee Gees also chart, the latter with “Stayin’ Alive.”

While in real news, Ian Smith, prime minister of Rhodesia, agrees to transfer power to black majority rule, attempting to end a saga that we’ve been following since The Myth Makers. It doesn’t work. Electrical workers in Mexico City unexpectedly discover the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan in the middle of the city, which is the sort of thing that just doesn’t happen in most of our lives. Larry Flynt is shot and paralyzed in the US, a hijacking of a bus on Israel’s Coastal Highway by Palestinian terrorists leaves 38 civilians dead, and China lifts a ban on works by Dickens, Aristotle, and Shakespeare.

While on television, and speaking of Shakespeare, we have one of the most overtly Shakespeare-inspired Doctor Who stories in the entire run as the Doctor nicks Hamlet’s whole “acting mad to confuse everyone” plan. The result, like most of Season Fifteen, is a mixed bag. This is a tremendously rough, transitional season that saw a non-trivial number of viewers change the channel and not come back as long as ITV was actually on the air. Under Hinchcliffe the program reliably got viewers in the ten to twelve million range. Under Williams, barring a massive ITV strike, the show was solidly in the seven to nine million range – still fine ratings, but a visible drop.

And while we’ve been staying positive about this season, let’s be clear, it’s not hard to understand why the viewers gave up. The entire aesthetic apparatus of the show imploded on short notice, the level of basic competence that could be expected in the production plummeted, and the artistic goals of almost every story this season have not extended much beyond “oh God, let’s just get this made.” And this story is no exception in that department – a recurrence of the industrial disputes that happened almost annually at the BBC and the fact that the original script had bottomed out spectacularly (by legend it was abandoned after it was found to require a night shoot in a stadium full of cats) meant that this script was assembled under pressure and with lots of decisions being made because all of the sensible ways to accomplish something were off the table for whatever reason.…

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The Doctor enjoys the wonders of things he can’t arbitrarily walk through.

It’s January 7th, 1978. Wings remain at number one with “Mull of Kintyre,” and, as mentioned, stay there for the whole story. Bonnie Tyler, Donna Summer and The Bee Gees also chart. So that’s not entirely exciting.

Since Doctor Who went on its Christmas break, the Copyright Act of 1976 took effect in the United States, changing American copyright law to be based on the life of the author instead of the date of publication. A referendum in Chile supported Augusto Pinochet’s policies, which is a less impressive electoral feat than it sounds given Pinochet’s overt fondness for the mass slaughter of his political opponents. And the United States returned the Holy Crown of Hungary to Hungary, having been keeping it safe in Fort Knox since World War II.

While during this story, riots erupt in Nicaragua after the assassination of a leading critic of the government. Rose Dugdale and Eddie Gallagher become the first people to marry in prison in the Republic of Ireland. And speaking of Ireland, the European Court of Human Rights acquits the United Kingdom of torturing prisoners in Northern Ireland, but does find that they mistreated prisoners.

While on television, it’s one of the great punching bags of Doctor Who: Underworld. A story that I could simply and cavalierly lay into for a myriad of faults and get absolutely no comments from anybody suggesting that I was being too hard on the story or being unfair. This is the one Tom Baker story to slot in the bottom ten on the Doctor Who Magazine Mighty 200 poll. Lawrence Miles declares it the worst story of the 1970s. It’s crap. it’s garbage. I kinda liked it.

I mean, it wasn’t good by any measure, but it’s not even the worst Baker and Martin script of Season Fifteen, little yet the worst Doctor Who story of the 1970s. (I’m not through the 1970s yet, but I’m pretty sure The Monster of Peladon is the single worst.) For the most part, on this story at least, Tat Wood’s review in About Time is spot on – there’s nothing bad that you can say about this that can’t also be said about The Time Monster, and unlike The Time Monster there are at least some valid production reasons for why their backs were so up against the wall.

Star Wars was a mixed blessing for Doctor Who. This is an altogether more positive interpretation than most people would give you. The more common view would have to be that Star Wars was a disaster for Doctor Who because Doctor Who could never hope to match its effects and so looked cheap and silly after Star Wars. This, at least, is clearly nonsense – The Invisible Enemy looked cheap and silly just fine on its own.

All of which said… Underworld is horrendously cheap and silly. Amusingly, one aspect of the story manages to simultaneously be the most appallingly cheap looking and the part of the story that served as a road map for future stories, which is the CSO work.…

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