Elizabeth Sandifer

It’s really the fact that the cape vaguely resembles a condom that makes it.

It’s January 29th, 1972. The New Seekers, with no trace of irony whatsoever, would like to teach the world to sing, and are going to have to insist that the harmonies be perfect. T. Rex mercifully puts this out of its misery quickly with “Telegram Sam,” which, as with most glam acts, really needs to be seen as well as heard. This spares us for two weeks before Chicory Tip have their one hit with “Son of My Father,” a song that comes far closer to capturing some of the basic themes of this entry than it has any right to. America (with “Horse with No Name,” of course), Cat Stevens, Melanie (with “Brand New Key”), Sonny and Cher, and Don McLean (with “American Pie”) all also exist in the top ten.

While in news without power chords, the famed Bloody Sunday massacre of U2 (and absolutely brilliant Saul Williams cover) fame takes place as the British army opens fire on unarmed civil rights protesters in Northern Ireland. So OK, still power chords, but given that since I wrote the Day of the Daleks entry nearly a week ago, I should perhaps briefly talk about something I didn’t talk about there. See, I’m writing entries in six-entry chunks over the course of a week, then taking a week off for other projects these days – so this was written on 8/9/11, and I’ll be writing up through the entry for Monday the 22nd over the next five days. But had I written the Day of the Daleks entry yesterday, I’d have mentioned the dystopian urban jungles of Day of the Daleks and their eerie parallels to the photos of a burnt out and looted London. (Although what I would have said would largely involve the fact that the wasteland was all overgrown parking garages and things – a return to nature, not a nightmarish terror of rubble, and how there’s been a shift since 1972 in what we imagine society’s collapse will look like.)

But one of the things that really is worth stressing is that Northern Ireland is part of the UK. So when I say that the British army shot and killed fourteen unarmed protesters, what needs to be stressed is that this is a military deployment inside the UK shooting its own citizens. Reports exist of soldiers prior to the massacre actively declaring that “we want some kills” going into the day, and the overwhelming reports from anyone other than the military itself is that those shot were unarmed and fleeing for their lives. It is, in short, a dark and genuinely horrific atrocity. So when, in a few paragraphs, we get to talking about a sci-fi show with an accidental giant green penis alien, remember the context is that this story is going out in times of egregious, serious unrest in the country. Perhaps flip back and forth between this blog and The Guardian’s coverage of the riots every few paragraphs to get the proper impact.…

Continue Reading

“No, really, the fish was this big.”

It’s January 1st, 1972. Little Jimmy Osmond is at number one with “Long Haired Lover From Liverpool,” for which the UK continues to seek a formal apology. Alarmingly The Osmonds at large and Donny Osmond are also in the top ten. We regret to inform you that the number one does not change over the time this story is running. Also in the charts, however, are David Bowie, Slade, Elton John, The Sweet and T. Rex, along with Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain.”

Since The Daemons, the UK has begun negotiations to join the EEC now that Charles de Gaulle isn’t there to block them, continuing a process you may remember from way back here. Jim Morrison has died. The UK abandons its Black Arrow space program, formally consigning The Ambassadors of Death to a future that never happened. Tensions in Northern Ireland ratchet up, with the UK sending more troops and with UK security forces beginning Operation Demetrius, i.e. the long-term internment without trial of suspected paramilitary rebels. To say that this went over poorly with large numbers of people would be an understatement. Richard Nixon formally takes the Bretton-Woods economic system out back and shoots it by decoupling the dollar from the gold standard. The result, termed Nixon Shock, is a great way to make obsessive Tea Party/Ayn Rand devotees rant for a long time. The UN swaps the People’s Republic of China in for Taiwan, which we’ll unpack a little in the paragraph after next, Ian Paisley founds the Democratic Unionist Party in Northern Ireland, India and Pakistan have another quick spot of war, and both Qatar and the United Arab Emirates are formed.

While during this story, Kurt Waldheim becomes Secretary General of the UN, while Nixon begins development on the Space Shuttle, a decision that will turn out to be a death blow to the space age. The planned Libertarian utopia Minerva declares independence before being annexed and successfully invaded by Tonga, which has to go down as one of Libertarianism’s more hilariously ignoble defeats.

Right, so China. So, back in 1949 Mao Zedong and his forces successfully took over China. This was followed by some awkward moments like the Great Leap Forward, which proved fatal to 45 million people, and the Cultural Revolution, which went even worse on the whole. Initially, the USSR was more or less in favor of China, although each country viewed the other with some suspicion due as much to the fact that each of them was very big as to the fact that they had markedly different takes on Marxism. The US, meanwhile, was none too pleased with these developments, fighting the Korean War as a proxy war against Sino-Soviet influence. Then came the Cultural Revolution, and China and the USSR definitively split and discarded almost any pretext of getting along. In fact, they kinda started shooting each other, resulting in a situation where the US was stuck in a proxy war with China and the USSR in Vietnam while China and the USSR were themselves having a bit of a war.…

Continue Reading

The Master, at his most Aleister Crowley, faces down Sergeant Benton at his most Bruce Springsteen.

It’s May 22, 1971. Dawn are at number one with “Knock Three Times,” and hold it for four more weeks before giving way to Middle of the Road’s “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep,” which is just one of those things that happens on the British charts. See also Israeli novelty blues. What’s more interesting is the lower reaches of the chart, where we see… OK, well, here’s the thing. I have next to no idea who any of these bands are. Admittedly, I am not the world’s biggest 70s Music Buff, but I like to think that I’m not completely hopeless and that many of you will also be more or less mystified by the information that John Kongos, Tami Lynn, Blue Mink, East of Eden, R Dean Taylor, and the Elgins were also in the top ten.

In other news, a massive earthquake levels Bingol, Turkey. Neville Bonner becomes the first indigenous Australian to sit on the Australian parliament. But the big stories are the US dropping its trade embargo with China, which we’ll talk more about on Monday and the beginning of publication of the Pentagon Papers. (Though two days after this story ends, the British grant asylum to a Russian space scientist, which is kind of cool too.)

To recap, we’ve been playing of late with the idea that there are two completely distinct modes of thought operating in the Pertwee era at any given time. The first is what we’re calling glam Pertwee – a style based on the interplay and juxtaposition of images. The second is what we’re calling action Pertwee – a style based on telling tense techno-political thrillers. Thus far virtually every Pertwee story can be understood reasonably well as a combination of influences from the glam and action styles. Colony in Space started to challenge this, but only superficially by bringing in a more complex ethics than past action-style stories had displayed, not by breaking out of the paradigm.

The Daemons does not shatter that paradigm, but it does push it a little bit. And it is as a result an unusually complex story. So to some extent, we’re going to do it in two parts. First we’ll look at what the story does today. Then on Friday we’ll do a Pop Between Realities post in which we try to make sense of the larger cultural signifiers going on here.

The Daemons is, by any measure, one of the major Pertwee stories. It’s well-remembered both by everyone who worked on it and by audiences at the time. It also marks the introduction of one of the major writers of the Pertwee era as Barry Letts puts on his third hat, already being the producer and occasional director of Doctor Who. Here he and his friend Robert Sloman collaborate under the pseudonym Guy Leopold, but make no mistake – this team ends up doing the season finales for the next three years as well as this one, which means they get to write some landmark episodes.…

Continue Reading

Never before has standing around in the TARDIS seemed such a welcome change.

It’s April 10, 1971. T. Rex is still at number one, and remains so for three more weeks for a total of a six week run at the top. He’s finally unseated by Dave and Ansel Collins’s “Double Barrel,” a reggae track that survives for two weeks. The charts also see Ringo Starr follow his three former bandmates into the top ten, and The Rolling Stones hit number two with “Brown Sugar/Bitch/Let it Rock.” Andy Williams, Olivia Newton-John, and Waldo de los Rios also make the top ten, the latter with a recording of Mozart’s Symphony No. 40. And lower down, The Sweet are at number thirteen with “Funny Funny,” another visible sign of glam’s reign.

The news is mostly incremental progress on various fronts. Charles Manson and his followers are sentenced to death, Bangladesh formally comes into being, and, perhaps most significantly, several of the events that will eventually bring down the Bretton Woods system kick up as central banks in several European countries halt currency trading due to an excess of US dollars flooding their markets.

While on television, Doctor Who, the show we’ve been getting used to over the course of the last sixteen months or so, visibly wanders off to be replaced by some other show. The trappings we’ve become used to – UNIT, mainly – make a token appearance in the first episode in the form of the Brigadier, but the bulk of the start of this story is concerned seemingly with dismantling the premise of Doctor Who as the main character runs off in that Police Box he’s been fiddling with, which, improbably, turns out to be a time machine that can take him to other worlds.

This is, of course, being a bit facetious – the function of the TARDIS has, after all, been kept in play. The TARDIS played a major role in the resolution of both The Claws of Axos and Inferno. The idea that the Doctor would stay on Earth forever was looking increasingly strained. But on the other hand, it’s been two years almost exactly since the Doctor had a working TARDIS. The last alien world the Doctor visited was in The Krotons.

The result is a strange position. The show is not doing something unexpected in heading out into space. It’s an event, yes, but not as big of one as something like the revelation of the Doctor’s people or the introduction of his opposite number. But it’s still been so long since the show has done something like this that this is still, in a real sense, a relaunching of the series. Everyone knows Doctor Who is a show that can go to other worlds, but it’s been long enough that the exact mechanics of how that works are forgotten.

And in order to execute this relaunch the series turns to Malcolm Hulke, who, along with Robert Holmes, make up the veteran contingent of the series’ writers at this point.…

Continue Reading

I’d make a snarky comment here, but A, nobody ever even mentions the captions in the comments, and B, what is there to say about this picture that the picture doesn’t say itself?

Continue Reading

And the child prayed, “God, will you make it so The Mind of Evil is in black and white so we don’t have to look at Jon Pertwee’s horrible purple jacket?” And God said, “Yes, my child, but I must leave one photo behind as a warning to all.” And so it was done.

It’s January 30, 1971. George Harrison is at number one with “My Sweet Lord,” having unseated Mr. Dunn. He enjoys a five week run before Mungo Jerry’s “Baby Jump” unseats him. Lower on the charts, T. Rex still stalks about upon a White Swan. The Supremes are on the charts with “Stoned Love,” a song that is actually probably not about sex while smoking cannabis, not that that has any real relevance to its interpretation. Judy Collins, Paul McCartney, Neil Diamond, and Elton John also chart.

In other news, Idi Amin, or as he’ll eventually become known, His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular, deposes Milton Obote in Uganda. Charles Manson is convicted. The Apollo 14 mission takes place to rapidly diminishing interest. Rolls-Royce, one of the great symbols of luxury, goes bankrupt and is nationalized by the Heath government. The Seabed Treaty, outlawing nuclear weapons on the ocean floor, is signed by the major countries who should sign something like that. The Weather Underground, in a rare stab at effectiveness, manages to bomb a bathroom in the US Capitol building. The UN formally establishes Earth Day, signaling that the environmental movement has thoroughly gotten underway, and also manages the Convention on Psychotropic Substances, formalizing an international effort to crack down on psychedelics. But perhaps most importantly, it’s Decimalization Day! One of the things that most firmly sticks the UNIT era in the 1970s was the fact that back in Season 7, it visibly used pre-decimal currency. All that comes to an end and we finally learn that Susan was Right as, on February 15th, the UK adopts decimal currency.

While on television, it’s The Mind of Evil. One of the last “missing stories,” like chunks of The Ambassadors of Death, it exists only in black and white now despite having originally been transmitted in color. The result is a mixed bag for the story. On the one hand, the general consensus is that The Mind of Evil actually looks better in black and white than it did in color. On the other hand, being in black and white has left this one of the least remarked upon Pertwee stories (On the Doctor Who Ratings Guide, it has the fourth fewest reviews of any of the Pertwee stories).

Although it may not prove useful through to the end of the Pertwee era, at the moment it is useful to think of the Pertwee era as fundamentally schizoid. There are, if you will, the Two Pertwees.…

Continue Reading

The Doctor is so irritated at Mike and Jo that he’s begun voluntary conversion into a Cyberman just to stop feeling emotions about them.

Continue Reading