barry letts

March 2, 2012

Cottage Industry vs. the Spectacular Tentacular Draculas

Jack Graham 70s, alienation, barry letts, capitalism, ecology, edward goldsmith, environmentalism, george monbiot, gothic, green death, miles and wood, monopoly, neoliberalism, post-industrialism, robert sloman, vampires, weird 0

According to Miles and Wood, Barry Letts’ eco views were very much influnced (as were many people’s) by a text called Blueprint for Survival, co-written by Edward Goldsmith (now deceased) and published in the magazine he founded, The Ecologist, in 1972. It was supported by many scientists and was subsequently released in book form to became a best-seller. Miles and Wood identify it as the real-world model for Sir Charles Grover’s Last Chance for Man in ‘Invasion of the Dinosaurs’. There is indeed something of Goldsmith’s politics (small-c conservative; anti-industrial society) in the fictional Grover, who is simultaneously an eco-radical and an establishment elitist who wishes to turn the clock back (literally) to a kind of enlightened feudalism. George Monbiot has described Goldsmith’s politics as “a curious mixture of radical and reactionary”, saying that he “has advocated the enforced separation of Tutsis and Hutus in Rwanda and Protestants and Catholics in Ulster, on the grounds that they constitute ‘distinct ethnic groups’ and are thus culturally incapable of co-habitation”. According to Monbiot, Goldsmith

assumes that culture is a rigid, immutable thing: that different communities can live only within the boxes nature has assigned to them. Confusing, for example, Protestantism and unionism, he fails to understand the political forces which cause splits within communities and associations between them. He fails too to see the external manipulation which first defines ethnicity inflexibly, then drives the newly separated peoples to fight.

Now, I’m not attributing similar views to Barry Letts or Robert Sloman. However, there is something of Goldsmith’s hankerings for the regional and the anti-industrial in ‘The Green Death’. The very separateness of Wales and the Welsh tells us something. The resolutely English characters – even the Doctor is English really, and this has never been plainer than in ‘Green Death’ – become strangers in a strange land.

Making the workers Welsh seems like a way of quaintifying them, since quaintness was the deadly stigma that mainstream British (i.e. metropolitan English) media culture foisted upon Wales… at least before substituting constant nasty jokes about shagging sheep and Splott (i.e. standard jokes based on stereotypes about rural people and working class communities). Welshness is a way of ‘othering’ them, of segregating them, of making them a separate community. The Welsh working class is depicted as a subculture within British society, rather than, say, one of the most significant layers of the majority class in the country… which Welsh mineworkers certainly were at the time.

There’s no reason for ‘The Green Death’ to take place in Wales but that Letts and Sloman want the story to centre on a mine (and going to Wales is cheaper than going further north). But why do they want the story to centre on a mine? They’re not interested in miners. It seems as though they feel the need to situate industry and industrial disputes somewhere regional, somewhere definitely apart from the ‘middle England’ that aliens are always invading in the Letts version of the late 20th century… but why give the story a backdrop of industry and industrial disputes anyway? …

February 29, 2012

Skulltopus 10: How Green Was My Death?

Jack Graham 70s, barry letts, capitalism, china mieville, ghosts, green death, hauntology, m r james, robert sloman, skulltopus, tentacles, weird 0

‘The Green Death’ is a ghost story. Doctor Who itself may actually be best described, from one standpoint, as an anthology of ghost stories.

Okay, let’s go back a bit.

Firstly, let me defend my notion about 70s Doctor Who sprouting Weird tentacles when it notices (and thus needs to evade and/or signify) capitalism. ‘The Green Death’ is clearly aware of capitalism and, sure enough, shows signs of Weird inflection. (I’m aware, by the way, that I keep talking about the show as though its alive… a form of commodity fetishism that I’ll address some day.)

Apart from anything else, there’s a dirty great tentacle in ‘The Green Death’. It’s only in it for a few seconds, during the Doctor’s abortive trip to Metebelis III, but still…

As in ‘Curse of Peladon‘, this is the tentacular riding in on past associations… however, it can’t be said to work quite the same way as previous tentacles in the Pertwee era. This tentacle is clearly not obscuring any potential thematic convergence upon the subject of capitalism, as in ‘Spearhead from Space‘ and ‘Claws of Axos‘. Nor is it standing in for implied capitalism, as in ‘Curse of Peladon’. Capitalism is something that ‘The Green Death’ is aware of openly. It doesn’t need to be either obscured or implied… especially since the ‘critique’ of capitalism the story offers is actually quite diffident, to the extent of dehumanizing the working class. And this tentacle is only a momentarily glimpsed feature of a side-trip, taking place literally light years away from Global Chemicals. However, it’s in ‘The Green Death’ rather than, say, ‘The Time Warrior’. It’s in a story about an evil corporation rather than one about a feudal warlord. So, the association is still evident and active.

There is also a distinct Weird inflection to the maggots. Their multiplicitous tubular wriggliness is hardly a million miles from being tentacular. They have some of that quintessentially Weird incoherence.

However, like ‘Spearhead from Space’, ‘The Claws of Axos’ and ‘Curse of Peladon’ before it, ‘Green Death’ retains a hauntological charge.

The maggots themselves are steeped in gothic, in associations to do with death. Real maggots breed in corpses or bad meat. They are of putrefaction. This suggests skulls and bones and graveyards, and it suggests them in the gothic mode: as signalling extremes and transgressions, and the haunting presence of that which has been denied and repressed. Biological corruption is here aesthetically linked with the corruption of the environment by big business. The maggots appear in the mine because they are generated by the toxic waste from the Stevens Process, which is secretly dumped underground. Eventually, they erupt out of the mine into the world above, like zombies out of graves. They make a typical gothic move. They do it almost too literally. They have been repressed and then they return. They have been buried out of sight but wriggle out of their subterranean hiding-place. Moreover, this is gothic very much in the Who mode.…

February 28, 2012

BBC Wales

Jack Graham 70s, arthur scargill, barry letts, capitalism, class, green death, pertwee era, robert sloman, strikes, thatcherism, trade unions, wales, workers, working class 1

The patronizing use of Welsh stereotypes in ‘The Green Death’ is evidence of the employment of centuries-old imperial condecenscion. However, Welshness alone does not straightforwardly equal idiocy in this story. Rather, it is the conjunction of Welshness with membership of the proletariat which produces characters who don’t really have a clue what’s going and need everything explained to them.

Clifford Jones and ‘Nancy’ (note how she doesn’t need a surname) are allowed to be efficient and useful only because their Welshness (which entails them using cute provincialisms galore) is offset by their educated, middle-class boffinity and right-onitude. Meanwhile, Jo marvels openly at her own foolishness in caring so much about the death of a “funny little Welshman” (who kept her alive). The difference between these Welsh characters – i.e. between the ones who qualify as people and those who don’t – is down to class.

The workers in this story are belittled, peripheral figures. They are profoundly out of touch and their Welshness is but a conduit by which they can be further quaintified. They miss the big picture, even when the hippy scientists try to explain everything to them. They side with Stevens when he tries to bribe them with promises of the trickle-down effect… indeed, the validity of Stevens’s claims that profits for Global will also mean prosperity for the workers is never challenged, only qualified by the criticism that pollution will be a side-effect. There is hardly a hint of class struggle here, besides the opening scene… and even here the struggle is portrayed as over. The mine is closed, the miners all but absent. Their status seems unclear… some of them seem to still have access to the mine despite its apparent closure. The mine itself seems not to be owned by the government but by Global Chemicals.

Now, in its haphazard and accidental way, some of this is actually prescient. The UNIT stories were supposed to be ‘five minutes into the future’ (we’re not getting into UNIT dating controversies – I couldn’t care less) and, of course, by the late-90s, British mining – together with so much manufacturing industry – had been deliberately destroyed by the Tories. Huge numbers of traditional working class jobs had been annihilated. Working class communities were wrecked in the process. In many ways, the sight of a crowd of workers, made redundant, closed out of their sold-off and shut-down workplace, listening to speeches about how coal is dead, being fraudulently told that their future lies in the trickle-down effect of private profit, is a sight that predicts the result of Thatcherism (which, of course, had already begun under Heath, albeit in a less aggressive form).

Thing is, viewed in the context of the times in which it was made, this is as puzzlingly skewiff as it is prescient. ‘Anachronistic’ is the only way to properly describe it.

You see… miners were powerful in 1973, having struck in 1972 for the first time since the 20s – and won! Miners all over the country came out over piffling proposed pay rises, proposed by the Tory government in the midst of declining living standards and working conditions.…

October 20, 2011

Reithian Values Meet ‘The 60s’…

Jack Graham 60s, barry letts, bertrand russell, colonialism, h g wells, imperialism, liberalism, mao, neoliberalism, oliver wake, progress, robert holmes, rtd, social democracy, steven moffat, thatcherism, vietnam 2

The old show was frequently highly reactionary but it also did better than most shows when it came to challenging establishment, bourgeois ideology and/or imperialist assumptions.

This division is the ‘ethos’. Frequently reactionary but with a proportionately greater tendency to buck this trend.

The hero of the show is a white male with a professional title, a line in Edwardian clothing (which retains a formality despite veering between scruffy, dandified, bohemian, etc.) and who travels around in a symbol of the British state. The odd Jacobite aside, his companions are usually thoroughly respectable types.

So, even when he takes a moral line against exploitation, it can seem like the civilized Englishman taking it upon himself to explain ethics to the barbarians.

However, while it may be possible to characterise this as an “overall or originating ethos” (as a poster at Gallibase put it) it’s one that has also been challenged from within.

At the start of the classic series, the Doctor is adamant that he cannot and must not intervene in history… including the religious practices of the Aztecs, a people destroyed by imperialism.

Then again, in that very same story, we also get a dose of condescension towards the Aztecs, portraying them as generally backward (i.e. “Autloc is the extraordinary man here!”) and suggesting that their religious practices will shock Cortés into attacking them. ‘The Crusade’ attempts a very sincere portrayal of Arabs as human beings… but also includes orientalist stereotypes.

When the first Doctor intervenes in the future history of aliens, etc., he very often takes a stance that seems very anti-imperialist, i.e. in ‘The Sensorites’. But, again, in that same story, the aliens are presented as encoded Asian stereotypes, and the human infiltrators are driven mad by their exposure to an inscrutable alien culture… which is pure colonialist self-pity.

But you also have to consider that, in the kind of fiction from which Who springs, the scientist figure, the lone inventor, was an ambiguous and untrustworthy figure who could not always be relied upon to toe the line. In Wells’ The Time Machine, the Time Traveller (clearly a forerunner of the Doctor) is explaining time travel to a group of friends when one of them imagines jumping forward in time to collect massive interest on a long-term investment… “…to arrive in a society run on strictly communistic lines perhaps?” suggests the Time Traveller.

All the same, the Doctor often assumes the right to intervene, which can seem imperialistic… but, having said that, the Doctor’s right to intervene does itself become the subject of some uncertainty within the show itself, several times. The Doctor has to justify himself to the Time Lords, firstly by claiming that power must be used to help those in need (and this in a story that forecloses on an imperialistic interpretation of that remark by being a forthright condemnation of imperialism), then by claiming during his second trial that he usually waits for a request for help from a local authority figure!

Times change and there was a shift in political discourse between the eras of the old and new shows.…