Eruditorum Press

None more Chancellor Goth.

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:

I Do Tend To Get Involved (Spearhead From Space)

11

It’s genuinely funny to imagine “Space Adventure” playing
over any of the Auton scenes, by the way. If you were
wondering.

It’s January 3, 1970. Rolf Harris is at number one with “Two Little Boys,”a version of 1902 song about the American Civil War, which is exactly what you’d expect to be at number one in the UK, yes? Other artists in the top ten include Kenny Rogers, Glen Campbell, and Elvis Presley. Rolf Harris holds number one for all four weeks this story is going on for. It’s not that there aren’t other things bubbling under the surface – there are. But apparently January in 1970 was a time for everyone to be mildly obsessed with the idea of American country music.

One aspect of the change to color that happens with this story is that the show cuts itself down to roughly 26 episode seasons, as opposed to the 40+ episode seasons it did for its first six years. This means in turn that the show has much longer summer breaks, having been off the air for six months now. In those six months, the Stonewall riots took place, kicking off the gay rights movement. The moon landing actually happens. Ted Kennedy drives his girlfriend off a bridge. That whole Woodstock thing happens, along with the beginning of prosecution for the My Lai massacre. . The Days of Rage take place in Chicago in a backlash against the trial of demonstrators from the 1968 Democratic Convention. Richard Nixon begins winding down the Vietnam War. Altamont also happens, seemingly trying to split the difference between Woodstock and My Lai. And, for the tech geeks, the UNIX epoch begins, just three days prior to the UNIT one.

And that’s just the setup before the Doctor crashes into the world. In the four weeks over which this story airs, Biafra finally capitulates, ending the Nigerian Civil War, and the Greater London Council announces the construction of the Thames Barrier to prevent flood damage to London.

While on television… see, the last time we did one of these, it was a story with the notable advantage that nobody could see. The Power of the Daleks is a story we peer at, trying to understand this mysterious transition. Being as it’s episodes 2-7 of the joint longest streak of missing episodes running, the transition to Troughton is something we try to figure out in hindsight.

Spearhead From Space, on the other hand, everybody knows – especially since its central iconography was reshaped into the launch of the 2005 series. This is one of the most iconic and classic Doctor Who stories in existence. Normally this means we have to do a lot of reconstruction to undo the glare of fandom, but in this case, watching the story in sequence right after The War Games, much of what is important about this story is extremely obvious, if not exactly the everyday reaction.

Of course, we’ve delayed a week instead of doing that here, but then, the show delayed six months.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 10 (Monty Python’s Flying Circus)

, 15

Well we couldn’t not cover Monty Python, now could we? All the same, if you want to find yourself mildly taken aback by the nature of British culture in the early 1970s, consider that the first season of Monty Python’s Flying Circus aired its twelfth episode, The Naked Ant, the day after the first episode of Spearhead From Space aired. Seriously. The first two episodes of the Jon Pertwee era were followed just over 24 hours later with the last two episodes of the first season of Flying Circus, both on BBC1. Superficially, it’s tough to wrap one’s head, in 2011, around the enormity of this – the degree to which those two weeks of January 1970 crackled with what we now recognize as real cultural fire. Upper Class Twit of the Year and the story that brought one of the most iconic images ever from Doctor Who are literally from the same week (although the iconic shop dummies attack sequence was, to be fair, in episode four of Spearhead).

The question is whether this is simply a nifty coincidence or whether there’s actually some fundamental understanding about Britain at the dawn of the 70s to be gained from knowing this strange factoid. As it happens, the answer is the former, but to understand why we’re going to have to answer a different question first – why the heck is Monty Python such a big deal?

Put on your sweeping generalization hat, because we’re about to do a very whirlwind tour of the history of British comedy after World War II. If we leave Monty Python out of the equation for the moment, there are essentially two crucial things to know about British comedy from 1945-1970: Spike Milligan and Carry On. Among comedy snobs, there is no ambiguity over which one of these is superior. Spike Milligan is one of the most famed and accomplished comedians in history, and the Carry On films have a reputation round about the Friedberg/Seltzer comedies of the 2000s (Scary Movie, Date Movie, and the like).

Let’s get them over with first, then. Since it’s the Carry On film to directly mention Doctor Who, let’s look specifically at 1966’s Carry On Screaming – a parody of the Hammer Horror film line that we’ve also mostly ignored before now, but will have to get a post out on some time before Philip Hinchcliffe shows up. Carry On Screaming also has, for the discriminating Doctor Who fan, appearances from Peter Butterworth and Jon Pertwee.

The essential premise of a Carry On film is delightfully formulaic. You take a popular genre and do a story in that genre in which every single character is replaced with a blundering idiot. So, for instance, in Carry On Screaming you have a situation that is a familiar horror movie setup – a monster is kidnapping women, and the police investigate. All fairly straightforward. Then you take all the figures this story requires – girl to kidnap, boyfriend looking for his missing girlfriend, police, mad scientist, etc – and have them all be incompetent.…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 8: The Two Doctors

, 11

At last, the Doctor is confronted with the horror of
a wardrobe choice worse than plaid pants.

It’s February 16, 1985, which is, if we are being honest, yet another odd time for it to be on the road from June of 1969 to January of 1970, but hey, there was still an awful lot of acid going around in 1969, and who are we to question it. Perhaps Doctor Who just nipped off to Woodstock and lost track of things like everyone else. We’ll be here again later, so we may as well skip the music and news and get on to the meat of things, namely the latest adventure of Patrick Troughton, a story called The Two Doctors.

Starting off, it’s shocking how much has changed in this six month gap between seasons six and seven. I mean, look at the new opening credits. The starfield opening is certainly lush, and it’s hard to imagine how it was done with 1970s theme music, but what the heck is with this awful theme music? This isn’t going to stay around for the whole decade, is it? Still, things pick up immediately after. And you get to see the switch to color live! They turn the switch right in the middle of the episode, with the opening scene fading from black and white to color! That’s cool!

Hm. Much as it’s tempting to just continue to review this trying to maintain the conceit that it is a Patrick Troughton story, I think we have to admit, this approach is not even remotely maintainable through the full two and a half hours of The Two Doctors. So let’s back up and take this more honestly. Monday we looked at the slightly bewildering Season 6B idea on its own, as a follow-up to the Troughton era, and found it wanting. Today, in the second and final part of our tour of a fictional season of Doctor Who, we look at the story most responsible for this idea. It’s fair, before we get too deep into this, to ask why we’re even monkeying around here in the first place instead of being into the Pertwee era already.

The answer, roughly, is that this whole idea is too self-evidently ludicrous to take seriously. It is obvious watching The War Games that there is no Season 6B. Or, actually, no. It’s not obvious, because The War Games is so far from supporting a Season 6B that in and of itself, nobody would have come up with such a silly idea. (OK, not quite nobody) Season 6B, in terms of The War Games, isn’t even wrong. It has no relationship whatsoever with The War Games. And yet multiple writers have opted to set stories in this obvious anachronism. It’s a paradox within Doctor Who – something that clearly does exist from one perspective, and clearly doesn’t from another.

I should also, I suppose, briefly disclaim regarding the Colin Baker era, given that it is possibly the most contentious era of Doctor Who there is, save possibly the Sylvester McCoy era.…

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Two Small Orders of Business

16

1) I’m a little under halfway done with the revisions and expansions to the Hartnell entries to make a shiny book version you can all buy (it’s looking like about 13,000 words worth of new entries and the existing entries getting expanded by about 500-1000 words each). The one thing I’m lacking is cover art. Do you make art things? We should probably talk. This would be a (modestly but at least not insultingly low) paying gig that I’d expect to continue over all of the book volumes of the blog. E-mail me at snowsDALEKpinner at gmail dot com, minus the capitalized indigenous species of Skaro and we can see if we can sort something out. If you have an online portfolio I can flip through, a link would be a good place to start.

2) As I start working through the Pertwee era, I realize that I’m a spot short on Time Can Be Rewritten entries. See, for each Doctor I try to do at least one BBC Books novel and at least one Virgin novel, with more allowed if there are multiple ones that catch my fancy. But for Pertwee, I have no Virgin novel jumping out at me as an obvious candidate based on descriptions and casual research. So, faithful readers – in comments, please tell me which Virgin Books Pertwee novel I should read and why. (For those with slightly hazy memories, the Virgin Pertwees are The Ghosts of N-Space, Dancing the Code, Eye of the Giant, The Scales of Injustice, and Speed of Flight.) No need for suggestions for BBC Books, where I have three picked already.…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 7: World Game (Terrance Dicks, BBC Books, 2005)

, 16

Perhaps the image of Patrick
Troughton as Napoleon is actually
all that needs to be said about this
book.

It’s October of 2005. This means, in practice, that we’re between the Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant years. We’ve already talked about this time period a bit with The Time Travelers, so I’ll just refer you there for the general time, but suffice it to say that these are the dying embers of the BBC Books line, coming out after the series has conclusively moved on to other things.

What are we doing here? I don’t just mean reading BBC Books from a zombie phase when the line had ceased to have any possible relevance – after all, The Time Travelers firmly established that there was gold in the dying days of BBC Books. I mean doing a Second Doctor story written nearly 20 years after Troughton’s death and set after The War Games.

Well, see, it turns out that for plot related reasons, some 1980s reunion stories that featured Patrick Troughton (and to a lesser extent a 1973 one) opened up some seemingly massive continuity errors, mostly in the form of having Troughton’s Doctor interacting with the Time Lords and knowing about the outcome of his trial. This bothered people for a while, until the fine folks of The Discontinuity Guide proposed something called “Season 6B,” the consequence of which make up this novel.

I’d explain the idea of Season 6B, but it’s one of those absolutely ludicrous moments of Doctor Who that is probably best approached experientially instead of from a distance. And anyway, the point of doing this as a Time Can Be Rewritten entry is that we’re approaching Season 6B in part as if it were actually meant to slot into 1960s Doctor Who. Never mind what it explains and why from 1980s Doctor Who. After all, why should the 1980s get to come and unambiguously muck up our 1960s when the 1960s don’t get the right to sneak into the 1980s and wreck havoc with them?

Of course, this approach acquires an interesting relationship with the rails that is not entirely based on contact more or less at the first page. Dicks’s novel begins with “the genuine and original summary record of the trial of the Doctor,” noting that the version “with which we were, until now, familiar was substantially re-edited for the public record.” We then get a differing version of the trial from the one we saw on television in 1969. One in which the Doctor’s plea about fighting evil is not, as in the original, “accepted,” but is merely said to be “not without merit,” after which the Doctor is sentenced to death.

There’s a couple of things to note here, but let’s start with the fact that this fails spectacularly to fit with what we saw on screen. Dicks is making a very bizarre claim here – one that is not merely a retcon, but something with far wider-reaching implications. It’s not just that what we saw on television is here said to be wrong (which is already a bit of a strange claim for the novels to make, given that in almost every fan’s assessment they are given a less privileged place in Doctor Who than the televised stories), it’s that it’s said to be wrong because the Time Lords have been censoring material that could be viewed as damaging to them.…

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Tied To One Planet (The War Games)

17

Oh no, Jamie! World War I! This is almost as bad as
watching The Dominators!

It’s April 19, 1969. Desmond Dekker and the Aces are at number one with “The Israelites,” the first reggae song to hit number one in the UK. One week later The Beatles take number one with “Get Back,” their second to last number one single in the UK. It stays at number one for six weeks. Also in the charts over this time are The Who, Fleetwood Mac, Herman’s Hermits, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, The Isley Brothers, Simon and Garfunkel, Tom Jones, and The Fifth Dimension. Of these luminaries, it is of course Tommy Roe who unseats The Beatles with “Dizzy,” before he himself is unseated by “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” the last time The Beatles ever hit number one. This happens the same week that episode nine of The War Games airs, and remains through the rest of Patrick Troughton’s tenure as the Doctor.

While in news of reality, British troops arrive in Northern Ireland to provide support for the Royal Ulster Constabulary, Robin Knox-Johnston completes a solo circumnavigation, and Charles de Gaulle steps down. In the US, the first death from AIDS occurs, although it will be years before what happened is understood. Apollo 10 launches. There’s a bit of trivia most people would get wrong – what happened first, the first American death from AIDS or the moon landing? And, to grab a quick bit of intercontinental spirit, John Lennon and Yoko Ono do their Bed-In in Montreal.

But let’s actually take one historical event in this time period and unpack it, because it was truly something special, and forms a vital metaphor for The War Games. In Berkeley California, People’s Park was opened. Those of you with particular love of grammar fascism will note my use of the passive voice there. It is deliberate. It is difficult to call something like People’s Park something that opened. That implies some degree of planning and design. In practice, People’s Park was a plot of land seized by Berkeley University via eminent domain and then abandoned when proper construction stalled. Community members, irritated at this, proposed developing a portion of the plot as a park. And then, in the classic California guerilla theater style that had been out of date since 1967, they occupied the area and developed it into a park.

Then things got amazing. Governor Ronald Reagan, who had run on a platform that included accusing California’s colleges of breeding “communist sympathizers, protesters, and sex deviants,” overrode the University’s promise not to begin developing the property without warning and consulting with the protesters, constructed an 8-foot fence around the unused lot to keep people from planting flowers there. A small riot erupted over this with protesters attempting to re-enter the park. Edwin Meese III, Reagan’s chief of staff and future attorney general, took charge of the response, authorizing police to use whatever means they wanted. Clad in riot gear with their badges obscured to prevent identification, the police stormed in, beating protesters and, in an egregious case, firing shotguns loaded with buckshot far more dangerous and lethal than normally accepted for crowd control.…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else 4 (TV Comic)

, 6

It’s been a while since we’ve been over on this end of the Doctor Who pool, and with the Troughton era coming to an end imminently, it seemed like a good time to pop back over and look. Especially because last time we were looking at the World Distributors annuals, and this time we’re looking at the Polystyle TV Comics strips.

What’s funny, though, is that despite being a completely different company and publication, it’s tough to make too much out of the differences between the two sets of comics. This might not seem surprising given that they are both telling Doctor Who stories, and thus presumably have some unifying influence. Except that both are so wildly different from the television series that it ends up being mildly surprising to watch them end up more or less on the same planet given how far afield they are from the target.

And yet somehow the comics end up with an odd consistency to them. It’s tempting to allude to some vague sense of a proper order of things in Doctor Who here – the occasional and uncanny sense we’ve had before that this ship is not as rudderless as it should be. But in this case, it seems to me there’s a much more prosaic option – given what British comics were, there was only one way the strip could have been, and both World Distributors and Polystyle did it that way.

For an American comic book fan, there is a lot about the British comics industry that is puzzling. But the thing that should be noted first is that virtually nobody talks about British comic books. It’s not that there aren’t any. It’s just that there aren’t very many, and fewer still that actually matter. Instead, the primary form for British comics is the anthology magazine. The most famous of these are probably, in terms of children’s comics, The Beano and The Dandy, and in terms of science fiction, Eagle and 2000 AD. (Though some would make a case for Eclipse, those people are inevitably Americans who forget that the British comics scene extended beyond Alan Moore. Or, more depressingly, Brits who forget that.) The format of these was generally simple – a couple strips of maybe 4-8 pages each, published weekly.

I could – and really should some day – write a book about how this format shaped British comics. But one of the big things is that it meant that comics often had a bit of a house style. A magazine still had to feel coherent, after all. Furthermore, there’s a fairly tight structure to these strips. With eight pages, fitting a cliffhanger, resolution of last week’s cliffhanger, advancement of the plot, and some exposition to catch people up who have forgotten since last week is a challenge. And so the pace of any action-based strip had to be fairly frenetic.

Even in a setting like the World Distributors Annuals, which don’t serialize stories, the structure this implies is prevalent simply because it’s the structure people expect action comics to be in.…

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If We Don’t Do Something Quickly (The Space Pirates)

15

One odd thing about The Space Pirates is that, with
Milo Clancy here, Doctor Who has another one of those
odd “it invented X many years too early” as it
inadvertently creates Firefly in 1969.

It’s March 8th, 1969. Peter Sarstedt is still at number one with “Where Do You Go To (My Lovely),” which I’m just now listening to, because apparently this is some grave flaw in my cultural upbringing. And… ummm… this is one of those you had to be there things, isn’t it? Not that the rest of the charts are any better – Cilla Black, Dean Martin, Engelbert Humperdinck, Glen Campbell… we’re not exactly dealing with pioneering music that advanced the art. I mean, all lovely stuff, and the Bee Gees and Marvin Gaye are nice touches, especially when “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” unseats Sarstedt. It’s almost enough not to notice the UK’s 1969 Eurovision entry in #2, Lulu’s “Boom Bang-a-Bang.” Almost. (And Lulu co-wins that year, I regret to inform you.)

While in real news, Apollo 9 returns safely to Earth. A small dustup in the colony of Anguilla results in British troops being quasi-peacably deployed there, and the TV mast at Emley Moore collapses due to ice buildup. In other countries’ news, former US President Dwight Eisenhower dies, Golda Meir becomes Prime Minister of Israel, and James Earl Ray pleads guilty to the Martin Luther King assassination, which, to give you an idea just how much was going on in 1968, I really missed covering in any detail because I was too busy doing Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech in that entry. Oh, and if you want to be technical about it, The Impossible Astronaut takes place between the transmission of episodes 5 and 6 of this story.

So this story. Another entry into the bottom ten of all time – in fact, this is apparently the worst Troughton story ever. It has a seriously bad reputation – largely due to the “one surviving episode” problem we’ve mentioned as afflicting The Underwater Menace. But this lets us segue into something else that’s really important about this story – it’s a missing story.

We’ve evaded talking about this phenomenon at any great length, and now we’re at the last missing episodes of Doctor Who (although some colorization gaps exist in the Pertwee era, everything from that era exists in some form), so I suppose we’d better. The idea of missing stories is a strange one to people. Inevitably a new fan of Doctor Who, high on the fumes of Matt Smith and Karen Gillan, will declare that they want to watch the whole classic series, and one of us old-timers will have to gently explain to a baffled 21st century television viewer that, actually, you can’t do that. This is very strange to them. And understandably – as Miles and Wood point out, it’s difficult to imagine 15% of Buffy the Vampire Slayer simply not existing in any form.

Historically, what happened basically comes down to “The BBC didn’t make preservation a priority.”…

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Skulking About The Galaxy In An Ancient Spaceship (The Seeds of Death)

14

The Doctor after an encounter with the
Seeds of Death. There is no
innuendo about this, right?

It’s January 25, 1969. Marmalade are still at number one with Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da, but after one week are overtaken by Fleetwood Mac, who are here seen in their early stage, i.e. not the one anyone recognizes as Fleetwood Mac, in that Christine McVie, Lindsey Buckingham, and Stevie Nicks were not yet in the band. From there it’s The Move with Blackberry Way, a bleak and dour song from a band previously known for cheery psychedelia. Welcome to 1969. From there it’s two weeks of Amen Corner’s (If Paradise Is) Half as Nice, then, for the last week of this story, Peter Sarstedt’s “Where Do You Go To (My Lovely),” which is apparently a big deal, but I confess I’ve never heard of the song.

In other news, Ian Paisley is arrested for political demonstrations in Ireland and jailed for three months, one of the more radical moments in his long political career, there’s some vandalism of art at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, Yasser Arafat is elected leader of the PLO, and, ironically, St. Valentine is stricken from the Roman calendar of saints on Valentine’s Day. But perhaps most importantly, The Beatles give their last public performance, an impromptu rooftop concert broken up by the police.

The elegiac feel of this concert mirrors an elegiac feel to The Seeds of Death that has been remarked upon by more than one commentator. This makes sense – especially through the lens of history. This is the last time Troughton appeared in what was by and large his archetypal mode of story – the base under siege. It was the last time Troughton met one of the big monsters. And Troughton’s departure was announced during this story’s filming. The sense of an era coming to an end is unavoidable.

But there’s more that’s elegiac than that. The most elegiac aspect, in fact, seems audacious for the time: space travel is portrayed as an outdated and abandoned technology. Miles and Wood, quite cleverly, relate this to the common news story of the day of train lines running their last service. This is the central cleverness of The Seeds of Death – it takes the hottest and most advanced form of transportation technology of 1969 and treats it like the one that’s going obsolete.

From our post-space vantage, this seems oddly prescient. Even if space rockets were rendered obsolete not by teleporters but by, essentially, their own lack of relevance, the image of an old man in a museum full of rockets mourning the abandonment of space is a crushingly familiar one in 2011 as the US prepares to abandon the Space Shuttle program with no clear plan for a replacement emerging. (Yes, a replacement program exists, but nobody would be so absurd as to call it a certainty that it will ever happen.)

I suspect in many ways that my generation is the last one to really feel this.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 9 (2001, Star Trek, Neil Armstrong [Including Foot])

, 15

In the White Wolf roleplaying game Changeling: The Dreaming, the point in the 60s that is flagged as being the zenith of hope and dreams and beauty is the moon landing. I adore Changeling, and am actually writing this blog entry in between preparing to start running a new campaign of it, but really, what rubbish.

For one thing, as we’ve already seen, the idealistic aspects of 60s culture were inexorably tied to political liberalism, to an extent that Doctor Who, by embracing a psychedelic aesthetic, lodged a politically liberal approach at the heart of what it does. It is in no way the case that liberalism ended in 1968, but the fundamental shift described in this entry was that political liberalism shifted from being in the ascendency to being on the defensive.  Which means that the idea that any culminating event in the realm of hope and utopian ideology happening in 1969 is fundamentally ludicrous.

And indeed, the moon landing was no darling of the 1960s left-wing, with the usual refrain being some observation about throwing money away in space when there are so many problems here on Earth. Certainly nothing coming out of the Nixon administration had anything resembling a claim to 1960s utopianism.

So what was the moon landing, if not one of the high points of the utopian 60s? By and large, it was a dead end. The reality turned out to be that space is enormously expensive and lacking in all practical value. The moon wasn’t our first step into space – it was our last one, with no realistic plan in existence over forty years later to even return there, little yet to push on to Mars or elsewhere. Why? Mainly because there’s no visible point. No cost-efficient way of gathering any materials from foreign worlds exists or appears to exist. No life or habitability appears to exist. And after a point that’s right around Mars we rapidly reach a point where we are putting people in capsules for obscenely long amounts of time so that they can walk on rocks no more habitable than the last uninhabitable rock they walked on.

In other words, all visible evidence regarding any point in space that we can get to suggests that we are alone and would be spending massive amounts of money for nothing other than the sake of getting there. As long as this remains the case – and there’s no particular reason to think it’s changing at any point in the near future – space travel will never be a major priority of any organization with the money to accomplish it.

If we’re being honest, the moon landing is a military victory in the Cold War more than anything. We should rewind a bit, actually, and look at how we got to the moon. Mostly, it’s Hitler’s fault. In all seriousness, as Neal Stephenson points out, the use of rockets for space travel mostly comes down to the fact that Hitler was oddly obsessed with the things and happened to have (before he destroyed it by driving all the Jews out) more or less the best science program in the world.…

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