Eruditorum Press

Temporarily embarrassed proletarians

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:

Very Sophisticated Idiots (The War Machines)

5

We’re functioning automatic, and we are dancing mechanic.

It’s June 25, 1966. The Beatles are at number one with “Paperback Writer,” and will trade it to The Kinks in two week’s time. The remainder of the charts display a fairly standard blend of irritating traditionalism and pleasant edginess as it proceeds towards a more contemporary style. In the news, not a lot happens – some shuffles of foreign leaders, France leaving NATO, and the Vietnam war gets worse and worse. Oh, and the 1966 World Cup started five days before the finale of this story. But it’s not like that had any influence on British culture of the time.

Meanwhile, on television, the Doctor fights a renegade computer that’s controlling people’s minds out of Post Office Tower. So I guess the odds were fairly high after all, and we’re going to have to talk more about Quatermass.

Much of the point of taking The Quatermass Excursion on Monday was to make sure it was clear just how bizarre this story is in the context. As much as Doctor Who has felt a bit all over the map since Verity Lambert left (but never with the supreme confidence with which Lambert’s Doctor Who simply assumed it could get away with whatever it tried – since then it’s been desperately trying to find what it’s good at, lacking as it does now Lambert’s capacity to make it good at anything), the amount which it has changed in a year is staggering. More or less exactly a year ago today, the show was wrapping up The Chase and saying goodbye to Ian and Barbara. To get from there to The Daleks’ Master Plan is staggering enough. To get from there through that, through The Massacre, through The Celestial Toymaker, and out to this… I mean, however bizarre the jump from The Sensorites to The Chase is, it’s nothing compared to the gap from The Chase to this.

But what, exactly, is different? Hartnell has changed, certainly, with his acting painfully deteriorating over the course of the season. The bigger change can be seen in the companions. A year ago, we had Ian and Barbara – the two ordinary humans – and Vicki, who, while not an ordinary human, fulfilled the promise of the first episode better than Susan ever did – she was very much An Unearthly Child, visibly from our world, but clearly an avatar of its future. The rapid shedding of this entire companion team in favor of Steven, the featureless chameleon and Dodo, the one where they forgot to have a concept for the character, marks a major change. With Ian and Barbara we could see mundane life in extraordinary people. With Vicki we could see a clear vision of the future. With Steven we have an effective character for plot resolution, and with Dodo we have… well… something very good at being kidnapped. We’ve gone from companions that set the tone of the show to companions that advance the plot well.…

Continue Reading

Pop Between Realities, Home In Time for Tea 2 (Quatermass)

, 7

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea is a recurring feature in which things that are not Doctor Who are looked at in terms of their relation to Doctor Who. This time, we look at Nigel Kneale’s classic science fiction serials, the Quatermass series.

If you kidnapped somebody from November 24th, 1963, and asked them about British televised science fiction, it would be self-evident that the most important thing to talk about is Nigel Kneale’s set of three serials in the 1950s, The Quatermass Experiment, Quatermass II, and Quatermass and the Pit. Still influential well into the 1960s due to the adaptations by Hammer Films into The Quatermass Xperiment (1955, The X refers to the film rating they were going for), Quatermass 2 (1957), and, in 1967, their version of Quatermass and the Pit, everybody knows that the Quatermass serials were major influences on Doctor Who, which is why Kneale refused to write for the program, viewing it as just a ripoff of his ideas.

And really, with even a cursory glance at the first three seasons of Doctor Who, you can see just how much the show relied on Quatermass. Just look at all the stories featuring intense paranoia about space, a government that is evil and untrustworthy out of misguided virtue, and broad global terrors of alien invasions that threaten to consume the Earth. It’s a wonder Kneale didn’t sue over the rip-offs, really.

Hopefully you see what I did there. If not, suffice it to say that up to this point, it’s far easier to discuss the ways in which Doctor Who is a decisive break with the Quatermass tradition than it is to discuss the similarities. That won’t always be true, of course – in particular when we hit the Pertwee era and Season 7, the show actually will start to (arguably) act like a Quatermass clone. Even then, Lance Parkin, in an essay reprinted in the first volume of Mad Norwegian Press’s fantastic Time Unincorporated series, makes a fairly compelling argument that the influence of Quatermass on Doctor Who is egregiously overstated.

Let’s look at the actual series. The three 50s Quatermass serials belonged to the classic live transmission school of television – with only a few exceptions of inserted scenes in the later two, all of Quatermass was shot live. The original Quatermass Experiment, in fact, only has its first two episodes in existence not because the BBC wiped the tapes a la Doctor Who, but because there were no tapes in the firstplace – nobody actually tried to record it for posterity. (The first two only exist because of an aborted plan to sell the show to Canada) Watching them now is… an interesting experience. As with most serials, they transplant somewhat poorly to the modern era, or at least, to the modern practice of watching them as a movie that occasionally runs the credits in the middle of the feature.

But one thing that does come across is an amazing sense of tone.…

Continue Reading

Time Can Be Rewritten 4: The Man in the Velvet Mask (Daniel O’Mahoney, Virgin Books, 1996)

, 9

Dodo stares dubiously at the plot
of this novel. Or maybe that’s
just her “come hither” look.

So this one ought to be fun. Daniel O’Mahony’s The Man in the Velvet Mask is pure Marmite. Ostensibly one of the most hated Doctor Who books, it apparently came in dead last in Doctor Who Magazine’s poll about the novels. But that claim carries a metric ton of assumptions with it. I don’t want to do a whole post like The Gunfighters about the various factions of fandom during the interregnum, mostly because I intend to do a whole series of posts when we actually get to that time period. So suffice it to say that this book also has passionate defenders. (I suppose I should, as part of my continued commitment to helping Americans work through their stages of grief at discovering that there are actually entire facets of foreign cultures that have nothing to do with them, mention that Marmite is a savory, salty, yeast-based spread used in the UK on sandwiches, toast, crackers, and other such things. Its use is somewhere between that of peanut butter and mayonnaise, neither of which it tastes remotely like. Among those for whom it is part of their culture there are exactly two opinions available – passionate love or utter hatred. Thus “Marmite” is, in the vernacular, an adjective describing something that produces extremely polarized views with minimal middle ground.)

Most of the dispute centers on whether or not the book simply goes too far to be a Doctor Who story, and, secondarily, whether it goes too far to be a Hartnell story. Which is to say, the objection is over the fact that Dodo spends an awful lot of this book naked, then also has sex and gets infected with an alien virus that slowly corrupts you. (There is some dispute over this, with some people claiming Dodo gets a fatal venereal disease or syphilis. She doesn’t. The description of the virus is that “Once infected, you cannot be sure whether your actions are of your own free will or directed by him.” By the end of the book the him in question is dead, But given that in the next story televised Dodo succumbs to mind control, the implication is that it leaves one susceptible to mental domination in general, and the virus is later described as “eating through her nervous system and her brain.”)

Back in The Celestial Toymaker, I called into question the idea that every story was a Doctor Who story. And as a friend of mine pointed out after that entry, there are more obvious problems with the claim – as she put it, “What about that story where the Doctor is a serial rapist.” Which captures at least one crux of the issue – that the notion of “Doctor Who story” is bounded on one side by the fact that the Doctor needs to act Doctor-like. But is there more than that? The problem with The Ark is not even that the Doctor does the wrong thing – the Monoids are, after all, portrayed as moustache-twirlers.…

Continue Reading

The Right To Experiment (The Savages)

6

The device the Doctor is holding is called the Reacting
Vibrator. I am not making this up. I swear.

It’s May 28th, 1966. The Rolling Stones have the number one single with “Paint It Black.” Also in the top ten are “Wild Thing” and “Rainy Day Women Nos. 12 and 35,” alongside conventional fare. Although Frank Sinatra takes over #1 after one week, holding it for the remaining three weeks of The Savages with “Strangers in the Night,” the remainder of the charts retains the increasingly hardening edge of music with The Animals and The Yardbirds both notching top ten hits.

In other news, two days ago the South American colony of Guyana was granted independence from the UK. The rest of the news is fairly typical 60s stuff. The Space Race continues with the US doing its second spacewalk, American cop shows evolve suddenly when the Supreme Court rules in Miranda v. Arizona, and the Vatican finally gets rid of the Index Liborum Prohibitorum.

On television, we get one of the least heralded episodes of William Hartnell’s tenure on the show. Certainly it was one of the least watched, with this entire period of the show being the lowest sustained drop in ratings the series would experience until 1980, and the second least watched story of Hartnell’s era. And on top of that, it’s another missing story, this one with no episodes in existence and a post-1983 novelization (see The Gunfighters if you don’t know why 1983 matters here).

One of the harder things in writing these is marking the ends of things. Since in the classic series, a new creative team for the show always inherits some spare scripts from the previous team, the end of an era tends not to be an emphatic “out with a bang” in the style of The End of Time, but rather some faint whimper down the line that you don’t even realize was the end until you look at the next seven stories and notice that nothing like how it used to be is being done.

So it’s easy to miss that this is basically the last William Hartnell story. I mean, he sticks around for three more, but in terms of the tone and type of adventures that make up a normal Hartnell story, the historical checked out back with The Massacre (but more about that when the historical itself checks out) and science fiction checks out here.

Once upon a time, you see, Doctor Who didn’t always have monsters in it. Eventually that came to an end, and somewhere in season four or five we reach a point where the norm is for stories to have monsters. But up to now, the only properly monstery monsters we’ve had are the Daleks. The other attempts to create “the new Daleks” have been interesting visual designs, but not the sort of lurking Otherness of a proper monster. Look at something like the Chumblies or the Mechanoids and you get an alien, but the point is their strangeness.…

Continue Reading

Buy Something, Will Ya?

5

Hello faithful reader. I’ll be brief, as this is one of those annoying “You know what would be great? Money.” Posts.

I blog because I like to. You may ask yourself, though, how it is I post 2000+ word entries here three times a week as well as two substantial entries at The Nintendo Project a week as well. And the answer is that I am devastatingly under-employed right now, and the prospects of turning that around within the next 18 months are basically zero. So I’d sure like to find a way to make this blogging habit occasionally buy me a pizza or something.

I have some plans, including, in two months or so, the launch of a print-on-demand/ebook edition of the William Hartnell entries, edited, expanded, and with bonus entries that I hope you’ll consider buying when the time comes.

But for now, I’d like to introduce Amazon Affiliate links. So here’s how this works. I’m not going to hock an ungodly amount of stuff or do a bunch of product placement. If a story is out on DVD, I’ll link the DVD at the bottom of its post. Plus, here, I’m going to quickly go over some of the books that I’ve found invaluable in writing TARDIS Eruditorum. These are books I genuinely recommend, and are only the highest quality tip of the massive iceberg that is my Doctor Who collection. They’re things I’d say you should buy anyway. But if you buy them from the links below, I get a small kickback, so not only will I say you should buy them, I’ll say you should buy them from these links.

First off.

About Time


I mention this practically every entry. The series is that good. Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood have written a six volume behemoth overview of classic Doctor Who that covers the influences on each episode, the making-of, continuity, cultural impact, and basically everything else. I discovered these after I started TARDIS Eruditorum, and was immediately terrified into upping my game. I highly recommend them.

Running Through Corridors


Also frequently mentioned, Rob Shearman, author of the absolutely fabulous Dalek episode from the first season of the new series, and Toby Hadoke, author of the equally fabulous Moths Ate My Doctor Who Scarf marathon the entire series, and are thoroughly hilarious and insightful in the process. Thus far only the 1960s are covered, but the book is just fantastic.

The Discontinuity Guide


By today’s standards a bit short, yes, but an absolutely iconic book of criticism and nitpicking that I still check before every entry. Plus a handy collection of great (and terrible) quotes, including a gorgeous listing of double entendres from the series.


So yes. These eight books come highly recommended. I’d say buy them anyway. But in particular, buy them from these links. 🙂

(Also, feel free to, you know, click an ad now and again. It does help.)

…

Continue Reading

Stetsons are Cool (The Gunfighters)

21

I have no need for a gun, my dear boy. One look
at my plaid pants will slay even the most vile
of outlaws.
It’s April 30, 1966. Dusty Springfield is politely disclaiming the necessity of us telling her we love her, and next week Manfred Mann is going to sing about a Pretty Flamingo, which certainly sounds exciting. Lower on the charts are your usual mix of mid-60s artists – forgettable pop groups and American imports aplenty, with occasional outbreaks of Cher, The Who, or The Beach Boys. The most interesting thing you get is the chart run of Wild Thing, which never hits number one, but at least does help illustrate the way in which a dirtier, rougher sound was entering mainstream pop music. (Did some blogger just find better UK chart data than he’d been using? Yes. Yes he did.) 
In other news, the first episode of today’s Doctor Who story aired on the same day that Anton LaVey formed the Church of Satan, which, as we’ll talk about, must be hilarious for a certain segment of fandom that considers this story to basically be the Devil itself. Other news over the next few weeks will include the launch of some pirate radio stations off the coast of Britain, the resolution of the Moors Murders we talked about way back when Donald Cotton was last writing for Doctor Who, more Rhodesia problems, and more Vietnam War protests. Oh, and Pet Sounds and Blonde on Blonde both come out on the same day, which is actually kind of awesome.
So there’s not exactly any thrills going on in the culture of Britain here. Things are boiling along. The stylized optimism of mod culture and Vicki are not gone, as such – if anything, they’re entering their most important era. But they’re counterbalanced by the fact that the world is as scary a place as it’s been since Hitler was busy taking it over. This is one of those periods that history seems ill-suited to. We know the ending, both the Summer of Love in America, the Underground in the UK, and the final collapse of it all in ’68. At the time, though, everything is up in the air, smoldering tensely. 
But that’s OK, because The Gunfighters is one of the few Doctor Who stories it is nearly impossible to take primarily as a product of its times. Because The Gunfighters is, more than any other Doctor Who story, and I include the fanwankiest depths of the John Nathan-Turner era in that, the story that symbolizes Doctor Who fandom.
Let’s have a bit of history, shall we? Up until the 1980s, Doctor Who fandom in the sense we know it today wasn’t really possible. With no Internet and no home video, Doctor Who fans were left mostly with the novelizations (more about which on… ooh, blimey, let me think through all the stuff I’m packing in the next few weeks… how’s April 20th looking for you?) and some hazy memories for the bulk of the show’s run.
…

Continue Reading

The Most Totally Closed Mind (The Celestial Toymaker)

71

Me Chinese. Me play joke. Me trap you in a nightmarish
shadow dimension and force you to play sadistic games
for all eternity.

Update 12/9/23: lol Davies explicitly agrees with me about the Toymaker being racist suck it haters 

It’s April 2nd, 1966. The sun continues not to shine. In two weeks, The Spencer David Group will require someone to save them. So the singles chart isn’t that interesting. Flipping to current events, then, we have… not a heck of a lot. Artificial heart installed in Texas. That’s a bit funny, actually, given that the story we’re talking about today was almost Harnell’s regeneration story, whereas his actual regeneration story features a villain based on paranoia about things like artificial heart.

So this story and the next one are a bit interesting. I mean, Doctor Who is always interesting. Even when it gives a complete turkey of a story, it’s still usually interesting. But these stories are interesting because they are a consecutive pair of stories that have both had dramatic and significant re-evaluations within fandom. We’ll talk about the actual process of re-evaluation on Monday with The Gunfighters, but for now, let’s note that this was, for a long time, considered one of the great lost classics of Doctor Who.

It’s understandable on paper. You’ve got an unusual setting, a first rate actor in Michael Gough, and a bizarre and terrifying villain. Everything looks like we’re set for a story that works well. So in the absence of anyone actually taking a look at the thing, of course everyone thought it was good. Episode 4 wasn’t found until 1984, which is after the cut-off for initial impressions, and didn’t get a mass release until 1991. Loose Cannon didn’t get to it until 1999. So there was plenty of time for everyone to make assumptions about the story before anyone saw it.

Sometimes this process masks a hidden gem. Nobody quite knew how good The Massacre was for a very long time, because on paper it didn’t look like much. Here, however, that process led us to assume that this story was brilliant. After all – a nightmarish realm of toys ruled over by an insane demigod that forces the Doctor and his companions to play a bunch of nefarious games with odd titles like the Trilogic Game. That sounds great. Clearly a departure for Doctor Who into something new and exciting, and an ambitious idea that introduced new kinds of threats for the Doctor.

Then people actually saw the thing. And that’s the problem. Because in practice, this story is a complete trainwreck. The pacing is excruciating. Even if you make the standard accommodations of remembering that it’s not supposed to be watched in one shot, it’s tough to get over the fact that there is no emotional content to this story. It’s just the Doctor playing the Trilogic Game for four episodes while Steven and Dodo meander through a series of arbitrary deadly challenges. The reason it’s four episodes long is… that’s how long it is.…

Continue Reading

Ready to Outsit Eternity (The Ark)

16

Oh, and to top it off, the Monoids are dark skinned. So we
have the dark-skinned savage of a monster kidnapping
the cute white girl. Nothing amiss here. No sir.
It’s March 5, 1966. Boots continue to be made for walking. The Walker Brothers will, come March 17th, discuss how the sun ain’t gonna shine no more. This seems flatly contradicted by the episode of Doctor Who that airs five days earlier, in which the sun expands and burns the Earth to cinders. Thankfully, that takes place in the far future. In 1966 itself, these weeks are fairly tame, presenting a nice tableau of what we might call stories about the British character. The Jules Rimet trophy for the World Cup is stolen, and dug up a week later by a dog named Pickles. The Archbishop of Canterbury courts controversy for having the gall to sit down and talk to the Pope. And Ronnie Kray, one of the two Kray Twins who basically run organized crime in London, commits the murder he’ll finally be sent away for when he walks into the Blind Beggar pub and shoots George Cornell in the head, causing a record of “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine No More” to skip endlessly on the word “anymore.” Kray would manage to get away with this for three years by virtue of the fact that nobody was actually stupid enough to testify against a man who walked into pubs and shot people dead, this being a sort of tautological behavior. If you have the insane confidence needed to shoot someone in the head in front of numerous witnesses because you believe yourself to be untouchable, you also have the insane confidence needed to actually be untouchable. At least for a while.
It’s not that these are dark days. They’re not. It’s that they’re deeply schizoid days, in which the sort of rampant corruption needed to have the Kray twins exists side by side with the charming nationalistic glee of Pickles the trophy-finding dog.
“Deeply schizoid” is an apt phrase, really, for talking about the end of John Wiles’s tenure producing Doctor Who, which happens with this episode. He was only on board for four stories, though of course, one of them was rather long, and yet it seems difficult to overstate his importance to the show. Even if, under him, the ludicrous failure to resolve The Massacre well (a problem that really is constrained entirely to the last ten minutes of the story, as the rest of it is phenomenal) and thus failed to quite resolve the ongoing plot arc of the Doctor’s inadequacy, the fact of the matter is that, on quality, The Myth Makers, The Daleks Master Plan, and The Massacre have been among the best Doctor Who stories we’ve seen. And now we have his finale, and the lone story of his tenure to be complete in the archives.
Oddly, though, The Ark is the first and only time under John Wiles that we’ll get something that feels more or less like a normal Doctor Who story.
…

Continue Reading

Not Always. I’m Sorry. (The Massacre)

8

Don’t worry, my dear boy. I leave women I sleep with
behind to die all the time. Some day, I’ll learn to dump
them in parallel universes, but for now bloody historical
tragedies will have to do for us both, hmmm?

It’s February 5, 1966. The number one single is The Overlanders with “Michelle,” which will be unseated by Nancy Sinatra with “These Boots Are Made For Walking,” which, actually, I’ll be able to make something out of later on in this blog post, so that’s nice. The Spencer Davis Group, Cilla Black, The Beatles, The Beach Boys, and The Rolling Stones all also chart.

News-wise, the most interesting things going on are that the Russians landed a thingy on the moon and a bunch of governments go up in flames and military coups. Oh, and the Naval Minister of the UK resigns. Which I suppose is worth mentioning, if only because Christopher Mayhew holds the wonderful distinction of being (I think) the only major politician overseeing a military force to be filmed tripping balls on mescaline. Which, and this is the really good bit, has nothing whatsoever to do with why he resigned. He was just cranky about a change in military policy towards land-based aircraft launches instead of aircraft carriers.

Doctor Who is not going to get around to becoming a full-out drug trip for another 8 weeks, though, and it’s not even going to be a very good trip. Instead, well, let’s recap. Twelve week Dalek epic, massive death toll, Doctor at the lowest point we’ve ever seen him and completely frail and mortal, so things must be looking up this week, eh?

Well, OK, perhaps not if you read the title of the story. But as has been pointed out by others, this, more than any other story, is one that visibly loses something when you turn it into a movie with its own title. The official title – The Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Eve – is rubbish. For one thing, the massacre in question is on St. Bartholomew’s Day. The usual defense of this teensy problem – that the story ends the day before the massacre, and that the story is thus about the eve of the massacre – opens the far larger problem that the title of the story now turns the slaughter of thousands of people into a holiday. For comparison, this would be like setting a story in Nazi Germany on November 8, 1938, and calling it “Kristallnacht Eve.” (Oh boy, I hope Father Gestapo comes!)

The alternative title – The Massacre – does considerably better, but is still a deeply flawed title in that it gives away the end. It would be like renaming The Rescue “The Guy Who’s Disguised As A Monster.”

Because the thing is, this story hinges on the fact that it’s a historical that isn’t about a well-known historical event. As has been frequently pointed out, the audience, watching this, would not have a clear idea of how this is all going to play out.…

Continue Reading

Doesn’t It Just Burn When You Face Me (The Daleks’ Master Plan)

11

The Daleks stare incredulously at each other as the big blue
dude keeps talking. 

It’s November 13, 1965. The Rolling Stones are still on top. They’ll be replaced by The Seekers. The Beatles will take the Christmas number one, hold it for five weeks, then turn it over to The Spencer Davis Group, followed by, finally, on January 27, The Overlanders.

Those of you who like arithmetic may have noticed how we’ve covered twelve weeks there. That’s not a mistake. This is The Daleks’ Master Plan. In twelve parts, plus its prequel a month ago, it is by far the longest Doctor Who story ever, running nearly five and a half hours. And for not the first time, but thus far the most important time, we’re going to have to pause here and look at what this story means to Doctor Who as a whole. It’s the capstone experience for John Wiles’ tenure as Doctor Who producer, which admittedly only began last story and ends two stories hence. It is, in other words, absolutely epic, and everybody knew it. It said so in our handy 1980s books on the series that listed all the episodes. Really. I quote Peter Haining’s Doctor Who: A Celebration, which says that this story is “quite simply the longest-ever Doctor Who story and also one of the best.”
It’s also 75% missing. So for a long time, that description was what we got. The Daleks’ Master Plan was the big Hartnell epic that was really good and missing. And 75% gone is an improvement. Episode 2 was only found in 2004. Prior to its discovery, major characters from the story simply didn’t exist. It wasn’t novelized for years, because it was just too long. In other words, it was one of the great lost epics of Doctor Who. There are a couple of these scattered through Doctor Who history – stories that were allegedly among the greats of their era that are missing and can never be seen. In the 80s, Doctor Who got into the habit of remaking some of its old classics for new viewers. Mostly these were disasters. But the first instance of doing this was actually in 1973, when two six-parters were quietly welded together to form a twelve part epic that, after some misdirection in the first story, turned out to be a Dalek epic. That’s how good this story’s reputation was. It was so good that there was a desire to redo it eight years later.
Life’s been hard since the 1983 guide, though. In 1992, the two surviving episodes at the time, episodes 5 and 10, finally made it out for home viewing on a documentary called Daleks – The Early Years, sparking a bit of a rethink. The problem is that what we knew about the story before seeing those episodes was that it was a massive epic of Daleks in which tons of people died. The novelization had come out super-late in 1989, so hardly anyone had read it.
…

Continue Reading

«‹ 187 188 189 190 ›»