night terrors

December 31, 2012

Shabby Efforts

Jack Graham eight doctors, fans, night terrors, philip sandifer, shabgraff, shabogans, steven moffat, terrance dicks 4

I’m sometimes rather startled to realise just how much Doctor Who I’ve missed.

I mean, chronologially, the last actual TV episode I saw was ‘Night Terrors’. I watched that ages after transmission, as part of a foolhardy attempt to catch up with the series (which I finally gave up watching upon transmission roundabout the time of ‘A Christmas Carol’, which I liked about as much as I like Ian Duncan Smith). I was hoping that I’d either get my mind changed by the catch-up session – i.e. become persuaded that Who under Moffat isn’t just empty, bombastic, cynical, reactionary, sexist, culty drivel – or, alternatively, that my justified hatred of what I was seeing would give me something to furiously blog about.

As it turns out, my undignified little scrape with ‘Night Terrors’ (see here) put me off the project again. Initially inclined to be soft on it, despite some nitpicks, I was soon convinced by commenters that it’s actually the story where the Doctor becomes David Cameron, lecturing the clueless working schlubs on how to solve their problems by being better parents. Dispirited, I quit again. So, I’ve not seen anything after ‘Night Terrors’. And I feel just peachy about this, to be honest with you.

Besides having been driven away from the TV show, I was surprised to realise, as I was following Sandifer’s analysis of the Virgin New Adventures at his blog, how many of those I’d missed back in the day. I always thought of myself as a follower of the line, but it seems I neglected to read a fair few of them. Still, I was going through college and university at the time. I had other things to read. The menus of pizza restaurants, for example, and loan forms, and letters about my overdraft.

It’s the same with Big Finish. I’ve heard, I suppose, about a fifth of their Who output – at most. I guess I just haven’t tried hard enough.

And as for the late-90s BBC novels line… well, I think I’ve read all the Lawrence Miles ones and all the Chris Boucher ones, but beyond that… I think I tried reading one by Justin Richards once. It was called ‘The Burning’, as I recall. It’s possible that my copy (with the first 12 pages lightly thumbed) may still be being used as a wedge under a table leg in a rather seedy set of student digs on the South coast. I wouldn’t be surprised.

I actually suspect there are a lot of fans like me. In this respect, anyway. But the point I’m limping towards is this: there are lots of things that a sizeable number of Who fans know about that I simply don’t. I don’t know what’s so bad about those John Peel Dalek novels, for instance. Never read ’em. Never will. I also don’t know (not from personal experience anyway) what’s so bad about ‘The Eight Doctors’ by Terrance Dicks, though I know that it is generally considered to be absolutely awful.…

September 23, 2012

Playing with Dolls

Jack Graham bbc, cult tv, genetic determinism, mark gatiss, night terrors, sexism, star trek, stereotypes, steven moffat, working class 15

UPDATE, 25/09/12: If you read this post, please read on through the comments too. Some astute readers used the comments section to set me straight on some issues both of fact and interpretation. As a result, my attitude towards ‘Night Terrors’ is now considerably more negative than my initial reaction (which you can read in the main review below). In fairness to myself, I do spend most of the piece saying what I don’t like about ‘Night Terrors’, including identifying some of what I call the “latent hostility” towards working-class people… but I failed to notice the wider context of the episode and so also the scale of the problem. I don’t mind admitting when I’m wrong (of course, I do really) but I hate that I blogged before giving myself sufficient time to think.

Okay, my foolhardy project of catching up with all the Doctor Who I’ve not seen in order to re-synch with the new stuff (and hopefully provide myself with blogging material) continues.

Last night I finally watched ‘Night Terrors’. Much to my astonishment, I didn’t absolutely hate it. I mean, it wasn’t particularly good… but it wasn’t actively offensive most of the time either. Which is fairly good going for Moffat-era Who written by Gatiss.

I was horrified by the idea that the Doctor now hears and answers prayers like God, with the pleas of a little boy travelling up to him through the heavens, but that was somewhat neutralised later by some technobabble explanation that made it sound very much like a special case. In the end, I liked that the Doctor actually seemed comparatively less full of himself, and more like a guy making it up and thinking it out as he went along. Matt Smith should be encouraged to slow down a bit more often. He had some nice, quiet moments (inbetween all the usual frenetic gibbering) that were very likeable. He does ‘kindly’ rather well.

There were cliches galore, of course. An old lady complains about her knees. A yobbo guy with a pitbull. Hoodies, etc.

Where would any mainstream BBC drama be nowadays if it had to try and depict a housing estate without the employment of hostile cliches? I think the latter stages of RTD’s depiction of Rose’s estate are the last example of such places being sketched without such latent hostility.

But… there was an interesting visual stress on the uniformity and blandness of the housing estate, bathed in that sickly yellow night-time street-light aura.

And this made the opulent but fake interior of the ‘mansion house’ into a fairly interesting visual counterpoint.

Of course, it was entirely predictable that the mansion would turn out to be a dolls house. But even that was kind of covered when the Doctor immediately realises it when he ends up there, treating the conclusion as though it’s self-evident. It looks like evidence of two tracks of thought at work in the story. We’re more on the Doctor’s wavelength than the other characters… which is not self-evidently the wrong way to do it. …