Eruditorum Press

If you want an image of the future as we desire it, imagine a boot stamping on Jonathan Jones’ face… forever

TARDIS Eruditorum

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time For Tea 20 (Mary Whitehouse)

, 72

Photoshopped? Oh, probably.
It is, above all else, a profoundly stupid way to go down. Philip Hinchcliffe, after three years of making an enormously compelling case for why he is the best producer of Doctor Who since Verity Lambert, is given the sack in order to appease Mary Whitehouse. Three years of dark fairytale postmodernism with a flare for the cynically epic come to a close because of the incessant complaints of a crazy woman. Not with a bang but a whimper.
There’s an odd justice to it, though. If the one aesthetic crime we can firmly get to stick to the Hinchcliffe era is hubris, there becomes a poetic justice to the era being taken down by a deluded fool with the visual literacy of a donut. It’s oddly fitting that a show that is at times so cavalier about the material consequences of what it does should go down to a hack that should have been trivial to refute. Doubly so for it to happen under Robert Holmes, who isn’t sacked here, but whose hatred for the banal evils of the world makes the show getting brought down by Whitehouse on his watch a particularly savage irony.
Let’s discuss some facts then. One of those people who spent almost her entire working life as an old lady, Whitehouse, starting in 1964, was a high profile campaigner in the UK on the issue of excessive sex, violence, and moral depravity on television. An outspoken and evangelical Christian, her initial battle of choice was with Hugh Greene, the Director General of the BBC when Doctor Who was created. It was under Greene that the BBC took its most concrete and visible steps to be a channel not about imposing the ideology and worldview of “establishment” Britain but about creating programming that appealed to all of Britain. Most concretely, this manifested in the production of things like Z-Cars or Cathy Come Home. And Whitehouse hated it. She believed that Greene was “responsible for the moral collapse” of the UK, that he spread “the propaganda of disbelief, doubt, and dirt… promiscuity, infidelity, and drinking,” and that the correct role of the BBC was to “encourage and sustain faith in God and bring Him back to the hearts of our family and national life.” 
It is possible, and many have done this, to look at the nature of this argument as an art versus commerce debate. This does not even involve ignoring the obvious theocratic implications – the UK is, after all, technically a theocracy, though it manages its condition well through a longterm regimen of secular democracy and keeps acute attacks to a minimum. 
(Because someone is going to comment, the titular head of state is also the titular head of the church. The line between it and destructive theocracy is, in the case of the UK, one of active and continual choice not to do anything unseemly with the fact that they are ruled by a monarch who is also the head of the church.
…

Continue Reading

The Lion Catches Up (The Talons of Weng-Chiang)

62

i has a dragon
It’s February 26, 1977. Leo Sayer is at number one with “When I Need You.” Two weeks later The Manhattan Transfer take over with “Chanson D’Amour.” It lasts for three weeks before ABBA play us out with “Knowing Me, Knowing You.” ABBA, ELO, Elvis, Bryan Ferry, and David Bowie also chart. Bowie with “Sound and Vision,” off of Low, the first album of his Berlin trilogy, recorded, predictably, in France. This trilogy, in many ways, amounts to a sort of public rehab stint after the excesses of the Thin White Duke era, especially with Low, which is basically Bowie’s “quitting cocaine” album.
There is a weary familiarity suffusing this album. Its title is suggestive enough. The ever-fantastic Chris O’Leary tracks this album over at his blog, and reading it, as I am for the first time in writing this entry, there is an immediate sense that one is reading a grim and cratering inversion of the themes of the Hinchcliffe era. O’Leary describes one song in terms of “the idea of Bowie’s LA life as having been a time of samsara, a cyclic period of endless suffering and no advancement; a pointless life, one equivalent to getting into a different auto accident every day (but in the same car, of course, so even that variety is lessened).” There is, in this, a grim flip side to our old concept of reiterated history. No pattern captures the idea of history repeating itself quite like that of the addict, perpetually in recovery, fighting the continual downward progression of their cravings. The materialism of reiterated history indeed.
An earthquake in Bucharest kills 1500. Queen Elizabeth opens the New Zealand and Australian parliaments. The rings of Uranus are discovered. Focus on the Family is founded. Hay-on-Wye, an odd sort of success story in the depressed coal mining economies of Wales, declares independence from the UK. This is, of course, a publicity stunt, but it is a brilliant one. Devised by Richard Booth, the self-proclaimed King of Hay. Booth, a Hay native who went on to Oxford, wanted to try to find a way to save failing towns like the one he had grown up in, and toured America with strapping young Welshmen to obtain scads of books from closing libraries, shipping them to Hay to open a wealth of bookstores. His proclamation of independence was another step towards this revival – a deft pastiche of the comedic stereotypes of rural Wales.
The calmness masks a transition seeping along in the background – one we remarked upon a little over two months ago. I suggested then that we had, for most practical purposes, exited the Long 1960s, and were beginning to approach the Long 1980s. Here, at last, we enter them. For Doctor Who purposes, at least, this story is the transition point. It’s an odd sort of transition – one expects to see the Long 80s begin with the start of something. But for the purposes of Doctor Who, I think there’s a strong reason to set it here, at the end of the Hinchcliffe era.
…

Continue Reading

Oh, It’s a Robot! (The Robots of Death)

20

Have you noticed how every
robot story I do a Kraftwerk joke
in the caption? Because I have,
and it’s giving me terrible
writer’s block on this one.

It’s January 29th, 1977. David Soul continues to implore you not to give up on us. After two weeks, Julie Covington takes over number one with “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina.” As it happens, the truth is that Covington, who declined the title role in Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Evita, had never left Argentina, though this is largely because she had also never been there. One week later it goes to Leo Sayer’s “When I Need You.” Also in the charts are Elvis and… things I have honestly never heard of. Let’s try Heatwave, Barry Biggs, Rose Royce, and Harry Melvin and the Bluenotes.

While in real news, between the last episode of Face of Evil and the first episode of this the Massacre of Atocha took place in Madrid. Spain was still in the fragile period of transition between Franco’s military dictatorship and a meaningful democracy, and this was basically the darkest day of that process. Neofascists, failing to find the communist leaders they were looking for, simply opened fire, killing five and injuring four more. The gunmen, believing the government would protect them, did not even attempt to flee Madrid. In cheerier news, 2000 AD, arguably the most important of the British comics magazines, publishes its first issue or “prog.”

While on television we have one of the big classics – The Robots of Death. First off, this is a story that requires me to situate myself a little bit. I have not read any of Boucher’s Past Doctor Adventures or listened to any of the Kaldor City audios. Those who guessed that I would be doing one of the Boucher novels are incorrect, although I’ll do one for the book version. But for now we’re going to stick to the televised story.

Robots of Death is widely cited as one of the greatest Doctor Who stories of all time. Certainly the video release supports that – another early story that every Doctor Who fan of a certain age has seen. But like the next story, which is also widely beloved, there is a bit of an asterisk next to that title. It’s a much less severe asterisk than Talons of Weng-Chiang gets, but it’s still there, and seemingly every discussion of the story these days begins with it: it’s a shameless rip-off of Isaac Asimov’s novels The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun.

The first and most obvious response to this is that anybody who is just now waking up to the Hinchcliffe era’s tendency to do lifts of existing works of fiction should probably have a look at, oh, say, Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb, The Quatermass Experiment, Frankenstein, or The Manchurian Candidate. And yet those stories seem to get less stick for their relationship to source material than Robots of Death does. This is a bit unusual, and it’s worth looking at why.…

Continue Reading

And He Is Me (The Face of Evil)

12

The Doctor is the only person even
remotely connected to this cover
not to stare at Leela.

It’s January 1, 1977. Johnny Mathis is at number one with “When a Child is Born,” because apparently Christmas songs don’t fall from the charts when you’d expect them to. It’s not until the 15th that David Soul’s “Don’t Give Up On Us” knocks Mathis down to #2. Soul holds number one for the fourth week of the story as well. Stevie Wonder, Mike Oldfield, ABBA, Queen, and ELO also chart. Album charts also show that The Eagles have Hotel California out, Genesis has Wind and Wuthering out, and Queen has A Day at the Races out. The Sex Pistols have their first charting song, “Anarchy in the UK,” fall out of the charts in here as well.

Since The Deadly Assassin aired, The Band disbanded, nearly 4000 people died in an earthquake in Turkey, and Patrick Hellery was elected President of Ireland. Bob Marley is shot in an assassination attempt in Jamaica. Two days after, Marley performed at the Smile Jamaica Concert, originally saying he would perform one song, but then giving a 90 minute performance in which he displayed his bullet wounds to the crowd. He then withdrew to the UK for two years, where he would record the album Exodus. Also of major note is the Sex Pistols catapulting to notoriety after appearing on Thames Television’s Today program with Bill Grundy and engaging in a profanity-ridden interview. This set off a good old-fashioned moral panic of the sort we’ll talk about next Wednesday.

While during this story, Commodore demonstrates the first all-in-one computer, the PET, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago. EMI sacks the Sex Pistols to what can only be described as their delight. Gary Gilmore is executed in Utah, the first execution in the US since the return of the death penalty. And Jimmy Carter takes office and immediately pardons Vietnam draft dodgers.

While on the bookshelf…

I mean, on television as well. But let’s begin with the bookshelf. For me, it was in the center alcove of my parents’ library, left-hand side, third shelf down. That was where their substantial collection of Target books, spanning highlights of the 1st-5th Doctors, resided. These books have moved on – the 1st-3rd Doctor books live in my office, while 4th-5th are MIA in a box somewhere. Currently the shelf consists of: four books by Dorothy Gilman in the Mrs. Pollifax series, nine Dick Francis novels, five John-Gardner penned James Bond novels, Linda Barnes’s Lie Down with the Devil, Robert Parker’s Rough Weather, Kathy Reichs’s Devil Bones, Jerry Seinfeld’s Sein Language, Jeanne DuPrau’s The People of Sparks, George Will’s Men at Work, Scott Adams’s The Dilbert Future, and Who on Earth is Tom Baker. Only the latter of these is mine.

I say all of this for two reasons. The first is that The Face of Evil is one of several stories from this period that I know I experienced first as a Terrance Dicks novelization.…

Continue Reading

Time Can Be Rewritten 14 (Asylum, BBC Books, 2001)

, 47

One more post of dotting ts, crossing is, and playing with some of the concepts from the Deadly Assassin Megapost, then we’ll do Face of Evil on Wednesday. Here I want to look again at the ways in which having an understanding of history and of the world more complex than the ones I critiqued in the Deadly Assassin entry – or for that matter in the Masque of Mandragora essay – makes for better writing than those of Big-Ass Science or the limited views of the nature of time and history espoused by mainstream fandom. And for that we have Peter Darvill-Evan’s almost but not-quite excellent book Asylum.

The first thing that should be said about Asylum is that Darvill-Evans is a much better writer than he is a historian. It’s actually a relatively minor point within the book, but he goes out of his way to have the Doctor endorse a particular historical view of Roger Bacon in which he is not actually a meaningful figure in the history of science on the grounds that his overall worldview was insufficiently empiricist. I am not a medieval/renaissance scholar, and I am not going to wade too far into this debate, but Darvill-Evans’s view amounts to a variation on the idea that the rise of science was a light switch that got thrown somewhere in human history in which everybody became an empiricist.

The argument Darvill-Evans gives the Doctor – that “his main objective is to prepare the Christian world for the coming of the Antichrist, which he believes is imminent” and that “he believes the universe is governed by the idea of the self-generation of likenesses.” The problem is that this argument would rule out Isaac Newton just as well, who was, after all, an alchemist who blew a lot of time predicting the date of the Apocalypse. And anyone who wants to rule Newton out as a scientist is a braver man than I am. 
The thing is, the rise of science wasn’t just a sudden thing. Science came out of an intellectual stew that included theology, what we now classify as occultism, philosophy, and a wealth of other disciplines. Empiricism – whether in soft or Big-Ass forms – ultimately traces its roots back to forms of thought that we now consider deeply unscientific. There’s really not a way around this, and drawing a fence around the development of science that rules Roger Bacon out is just not a good understanding of what science and human development are.

And this is very clearly what Darvill-Evans does. He has the Doctor say that Nyssa’s thesis is inaccurate. Her thesis is explicitly that Bacon is a proto-scientist and that an understanding of the “dawning of the technological age” should extend back at least as far as him, as opposed to merely to the twentieth century or the Industrial Revolution. To say that is flatly untrue is, well, flatly untrue. Whether or not Bacon ought be called a “scientist” proper is beyond my expertise, but he clearly has an important place in the history of science.

…

Continue Reading

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time For Tea 19 (Children of the Stones)

, 8

The Deadly Assassin entry is, of course, a bit of a tome. This results in an odd paradox. As the old joke goes, “I apologize for writing such a long letter – I did not have time to write a short one.” Length, to some extent, begets length – the nature of a nearly 13,000 word entry is that it raises further points that require following up. To this end, because Season 14 of Doctor Who had an unusually long Christmas break that ran from late November to January, this entry and the next (A Time Can Be Rewritten entry) will be cleanup crew – some expansions and tidying up on points raised in that entry before we dive back into the wreckage for the coda to the Hinchcliffe era.

In some ways, however, this is the coda to the Hinchcliffe era. Children of the Stones – which ran roughly concurrently with The Face of Evil and The Robots of Death, airing on Mondays, just after sunset, at a quarter to five – feels in a number of ways like a sort of lost story of the Hinchcliffe era. It is a natural extension of and response to many of the ideas animating Doctor Who in this period. Its tone, mood, and iconography are deeply compatible with that of Doctor Who. More, really, than any Pop Between Realities we’ve done, this feels like a case of making sure we cover something that is inextricable from Doctor Who.

There are two basic ways to make very good British television. The first is to try to make very good British television and succeed. This is the way of the prestige project – the stuff that forms the meat of the British television export. I, Claudius is the archetypal example, with later examples being things like Prime Suspect, Our Friends in the North, Downton Abbey, and, since 2005, Doctor Who. These projects work by getting multiple leading lights of the British television industry together on one project and giving them enough money to do it well. It’s a very good system and it makes very good television. HBO reinvented American television, basically, by pinching the system and using it in the US.

The second approach is the approach that characterizes the classic series of Doctor Who. In this approach, you slap together something to fill a timeslot on the schedule and shoot for nothing more than “sufficiently entertaining as to get people to watch it.” Then you miss horribly and accidentally hit “brilliant” instead. Children of the Stones is a perfect example of this approach – ITV Children’s entertainment, a style of television generally expected to produce things like Ace of Wands and The Tomorrow People, inadvertently turn out seven episodes of creepy supernatural horror of such quality that it frankly forces us to reevaluate our expectations of what television is.

By all accounts, Children of the Stones was a landmark piece of television – one children of the relevant generation were thoroughly spooked by.…

Continue Reading

Far More Than Just (The Deadly Assassin)

54

Fair warning – this entry is, er…
12,716 words long. 

It’s tough to pin down, but it’s probably somewhere in 1994 – I’ve got myself around 6th grade for this one. I’ve still got the VHS tape on my shelf. Well, by my hand now. Because my shelves are cluttered, I had to move two objects to get to it. The first of these was a DAPOL action figure of K-9 – the inexplicable green one. The second was a bottle of Yankee Candle branded Balsam and Cedar oil for use in an oil diffuser. For personal reasons of what I want to focus on in my meditation and thought these days, I am burning things with cedar in them of late. It was in my bedroom, near the table where I put candles and incense. I’m writing this in an armchair maybe two yards from it, which is also where I have been watching the episodes for the blog to this point – though I am moving in the next week or two.

The cover is exactly what I remember – Tom Baker in Prydonian robes staring straight out of the tape. He’s looking straight at me, right now, an eery reconstitution of Patrick Troughton’s screen-peering for a no-longer new media age. The tape was on the third shelf of books. This is a fact that will be lost on anyone who does not know me well. In the first year of my PhD program, I had started class before I had finished unpacking. Or, rather, I had done a very hurried unpacking in which I shoved books on shelves out of boxes however they were packed, vowing to organize my library later.

In one of my classes, we were reading Henry Petroski’s The Book on the Bookshelf. It’s a history of the bookshelf. Which is to say, it’s a history of how we store and organize our knowledge. It ends with an amusing essay proposing various ways in which one could organize one’s books in the modern world – ways beyond the obvious ones like alphabetically or by subject. And Petroski shares amusing anecdotes or comments on the pros and cons of various methods. He talks of one friend who had a room that was, among everyone he knew, considered a marvel of interior design because she had orchestrated a complex color scheme for her library where various regions of the room, from paint to decor to the books themselves, were organized by color – reds fading through oranges to yellows across a wall of the room.

One method he proposes is by strict order of acquisition. That is to say, he proposes that whenever you get a new book, you shelve it immediately to the right of the previous newest. And I realized that, for reasons relating purely to my own idiosyncrasies, I could actually remember to a usable degree of detail the order in which I had gotten my books back to about 5th grade. Since then I’ve stretched it back further, though only with about five or six books from childhood.…

Continue Reading

I Don’t Look Back. I Can’t. (The Hand of Fear)

38

Eldrad must live. Eldrad must jive. Having the time of
her life. 

It’s October 2nd, 1976. ABBA remains at number one with “Dancing Queen.” After two weeks, Pussycat  unseat them with “Mississippi,” which sounds innocuous until you realize that Pussycat is a Dutch country music band, and that this is one of those moments where the British charts do what sane and rational people never would. Rod Stewart, Manfred Mann, and Chicago also chart.

In other news, the InterCity 125, a high speed train, begins service in the west of Britain. The Cultural Revolution formally ends in China. Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh resigns as President of Ireland after being loudly denounced by the Minister of Defense. As for Fords, Motors begins production of the Fiesta, and Gerald flubs badly in a debate against Jimmy Carter.

While on television, it is the end of an era. And not the obvious one. Yes, this is the story where Lis Sladen departs the series. But in terms of screen time, she’s only actually 2/3 of the way done with her tenure in Doctor Who and related shows. This is, for her, a sort of midpoint pause in her Doctor Who career. Those who want to reflect in polite sadness can read the eulogy I wrote when Sladen passed away in April. But this is not the end for Sarah Jane.

That is not, of course, to say that the apparent end to her involvement with the show is anything less than vital to this story. But in this case, we shouldn’t focus on the sentiment of Sladen’s departure, because doing so loses sight of a far bigger fact – this story marks a fundamental shift in the relationship between Doctor Who and contemporary Britain. More specifically, this is the story where Doctor Who gives up on  the idea that it is by default grounded in the real world of the viewer.

The easiest way to show this is with some raw facts. So here they are. The Hand of Fear is the last story until Terror of the Vervoids to feature a companion from contemporary Britain – a run of over a decade. The last time that was true was The War Games. And even in the Troughton era, at least one companion was from Britain at all times, albeit from its history. The last time there were no regulars who were overtly from Britain – the only time, in fact, in the series’ history before this point – was The Daleks’ Masterplan. From The Deadly Assassin through The Keeper of Traken, the Doctor does not even travel with anyone who is from Earth at all.

More telling, however, is this: from The War Machines (the first story in which the straightforwardly arrives in contemporary Britain) to The Hand of Fear, 28 of the 60 stories feature a threat to contemporary Britain – a rate of about 47%. From The Deadly Assassin through Survival only 11 of 72 do – a mere 15%. (You can move the numbers around a bit depending on what you do and don’t count, but the gulf remains.)…

Continue Reading

How Easy it Is to Be a Magician (Masque of Mandragora)

38

Close your eyes, give me your hand, darling.

It’s September 4, 1976. ABBA are at number one with “Dancing Queen,” a fact that says more about the zeitgeist than anything else I can hope to say. But for the sake of completism, it stays at #1 for all four weeks of this story. Wings, Bryan Ferry, Rod Stewart, The Bee Gees, and Elton John and Kiki Dee also chart. And The Ramones release their first album, which is the sort of thing that means we can start talking about punk when the mood strikes us.

Since The Seeds of Doom, the most obvious thing to say happened is that Harold Wilson unexpectedly resigned as Prime Minister on March 16th, and the Labour Party voted James Callaghan in as his successor. This is, as it happens, not going to end well. In other news, Apple Computer was formed, the UK actually wins Eurovision, the Soweto riots begin in South Africa, Viking 1 lands on Mars, the Son of Sam killings begin, and Big Ben breaks down for nine months.

While during this story, Mao Zedong dies, which is a kind of definitive end to an era. A fatal air collision occurs in what is now Croatia between a British Airways flight and a Yugoslavian flight, killing 176. The 100 Club Punk Special, an iconic and formative punk concert that put The Damned, The Clash, The Buzzcocks, The Sex Pistols, and Siouxie and the Banshees all on one two-day long bill, takes place, which means we can really talk about punk just as soon as Doctor Who bothers to make that option relevant. In a less fortunate rejoinder, U2 forms.

While on television, we have the start of a new season of Doctor Who, and a return to the wide world of human history. Prior to my power/Internet exploding (and off and on since then), I found myself enjoying the great time-wasting distraction of the early 21st century, arguing with people on the Internet. Or, more specifically, I found myself arguing with people on the Internet over whether or not Doctor Who is best considered a science fiction show or a fantasy show. Mostly I find the distinction not particularly worth making, but there’s a flavor of the “Doctor Who is sci-fi” argument that I find sufficiently loathsome that I can be reliably dragged in on it, and that’s that Doctor Who in some way supports a rationalist/skeptical view of the universe.

This is an unfortunate disease within science fiction fandom in general. I mean, I’m obviously a fairly pro-science kind of guy, and I salute the people who devote time to taking down “alternative medicine” cranks that, in a real and literal sense, kill people. But there’s a second flavor of skepticism that amounts to an effort to eradicate non-scientific thinking in favor of the belief that science is the only meaningful form of truth. This is the sort of skepticism favored by evangelical atheists, anti-postmodernists of the Alan Sokal school, and other groups of people I am less than fond of (though, to be fair, most adherents to either perspective can be fairly easily brought around by encountering theists who are not theocratic lunatics or postmodernists who can speak reality when called upon to do so – most of the hardline skepticism crowd, much as they irritate me, are good folks).…

Continue Reading

Time Can Be Rewritten 13 (System Shock, Virgin Books, 1995)

, 11

Reasonable people, by which I’m pretty sure I mean Stephen, one of my wise and decorated commenters, expected me to go for Stephen Marley’s Managra, a metafictional romp through the history of British culture in the far future that even features Aleister Crowley. (I say pretty sure because Connecticut got slammed by the worst snowstorm I have seen in my life last weekend. Nearly a foot of heavy, wet snow falling on trees that still had leaves on them. This turned out to exceed their intelligent design parameters. The result is that 99% of my town is without power. The good news is, this time I am the 1%. The bad news is, I didn’t dodge the Internet outage, so doing things like actually checking past comments is beyond me. But I’m optimistic that I can at least keep a posting schedule.)

There are many good reasons why I would pick that book, and I see why probably-Stephen assumed I would cover it. The thing is, I’ve said an awful lot about metafiction and British culture already in the Hinchcliffe era, and while I’m sure I’ll do Managra when I take another pass in the book version, clearly I skipped it. Equally clearly, at least to those who read titles and look at pictures, is that I’m doing Justin Richards’s System Shock instead, a book which probably-Stephen expressed some surprise as to why I would do.

The answer, probably-Stephen, is that I am a sucker for 90s techno-thrillers about computers, and that I am completely powerless to resist any book that is set, quite literally, “when the information superhighway comes online” in 1998. So crack open a bottle of Zima and put on some Jewel. Because it’s 1995, and people are about to make some very, very embarrassing predictions.

That is of course, terribly unfair of me. But it’s very difficult to read System Shock in 2011 without laughing at its naiveté. The most obvious example is the one we’ve already discussed – the charmingly dated phrase “information superhighway.” This phrase rightly serves as a sort of memetic tombstone for a particular historical moment in digital technology – what we might call the last moment in which you could get away with being stupid about digital technology in public. (It is not, obviously, the end of public stupidity about digital technology in public – merely the end of where you can get away with it. Consider the degree to which, ten years after the date Richards pegs for the information superhighway coming online, the degree to which the ostensibly similar “series of tubes” metaphor proves to be a massive PR disaster for Ted Stevens)

The phrase does not have a clear inventor, although its prominence is due largely to Al Gore. Gore, who had been closely following digital issues as a Senator for decades before becoming Vice President, used the term with reasonable frequency, and so upon becoming Vice President, his newfound profile catapulted the term into the mainstream. But, equally crucially, Al Gore was a politician who liked giving money to the geeks.…

Continue Reading

«‹ 57 58 59 60 ›»