pop between realities

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. Today we look at two classics of British spy fiction from 1967, the James Bond film You Only Live Twice and the ITV television series The Prisoner.

Well this is certainly a bit of an awkward pairing. I mean, never before has “Well, do both of the espionage things you need to do in one entry” seemed like quite so staggering a task. They may both feature secret agents, be British, and be from 1967, but that’s about where the similarities between James Bond in You Only Live Twice and The Prisoner end.

Let’s start with Bond, since that’s the one that’s kind of long overdue in this blog. The thing to note regarding You Only Live Twice is that it is a movie that expects nothing out of its audience. It would be easy to describe this as having a sort of cynical contempt for its audience, but it’s more complex than that. It is not as though the movie thinks little of its audience and thus concludes that it can be lazy. No, the movie thinks little of its audience and then goes out of its way to please them.

There’s something almost giddily entertaining about the movie’s complete lack of irony. Later James Bond movies would begin to poke fun at the series’ tropes, using things like Bond’s refined tastes for comedic scenes. But this movie is caught in a bizarre midpoint in the franchise. It’s well established enough that everybody knows that Bond likes vodka martinis (though here he seems quite pleased to get one stirred) and is a rakish womanizer. But it’s not well enough established to play Bond complimenting his host on the choice of vodka or describing at some length the proper temperature for sake to be served at for laughs. Instead these scenes are presented with a sort of earnest conviction that the audience really just wants to see Sean Connery explaining the proper presentation of sake. And apparently, given how the movie did, they were right.

But perhaps the most astonishing thing about You Only Live Twice is its structure. When some of the production documents for the first Indiana Jones movie leaked onto the Internet a few years back, one of the things people excitedly pointed at was the fact that Spielberg and Lucas talked explicitly about using the structure of a serial and putting a cliffhanger in at regular intervals. This is indeed a clever trick, but for some reason people seemed to think that Lucas and Spielberg were the first people to think of it, as opposed to the first people to have their discussion about it leaked onto the Internet. Because once you’re past the opening credits sequence of You Only Live Twice, with very few exceptions, the movie is structured as a serial comprised of five minute episodes.…

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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. Today we look at various and sundry objects from the summer of 1967, the so-called Summer of Love.


We have to start, I suppose, with Sergeant Pepper. There’s a monolithically long essay in About Time, after all, called “Did Sergeant Pepper Know the Doctor” that tackles this directly, although if we’re being honest it mentions both Sergeant Pepper and the Doctor somewhat less than its title might suggest. So let’s start with the album itself. The first thing to point out about it is that it is ostensibly the first ever “concept album.” In practice, hardly any concept albums are, and it’s difficult to quite figure out what the concept of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is or how it impacts most of the songs.

So when we call it a concept album, what do we mean? Generally what we mean is this – past Beatles albums were simply collections of songs with no unifying factor beyond having all been written and recorded around the same time and in the same set of sessions. Indeed, past albums from most bands were like this. What the Beatles did with Sergeant Pepper was add a continual soundscape between the songs so that they flowed into each other and the album basically never faded to silence from start to finish. Indeed, in the original UK vinyl pressings, it never faded to silence at all, the record being manufactured so that it would just play a continual noise loop at the end.

What was so significant about this was that it made the album one coherent experience instead of a set of short separate experiences. Even though there wasn’t really a unifying concept to the album, the album without question felt different from albums before it – bigger and stranger. Listening to it meant spending time in a weird new place – real, substantial time.

In other words, the album was a forty minute training wheels drug trip. This is the big connection between the album and psychedelia. Not the fact that “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” was obviously about LSD, but rather the fact that the album was a concentrated effort to create a strange and different mental space. Which is what psychedelia is actually supposed to be all about.

This is the thing that’s lost under the debauched patina of the Summer of Love. The description of it all as “sex, drugs, and rock and roll” turns the experience into an unchecked hedonism. Which, to be fair, in the classic Summer of Love – the Haight-Ashbury scene of San Francisco – it was. San Francisco in 1967 managed to be positioned, partially through actual events and partially through a gigantic self-feeding media story, as the place to be. And so San Francisco filled to the choking point with youth on break from school looking for what they were told was the cool place to be.…

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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 the TV movie Cathy Come Home.

It’s November 16, 1966. We’ve been here before, actually, and so I’ll refer you there for the standard litany of pop songs and news events. But we’re going to need to flash back, because what we didn’t deal with in amongst everything else going on in Power of the Daleks was the fact that the BBC aired Cathy Come Home, a TV movie about homelessness that has been recognized, apparently, as the second best British TV program of all time. So since it’s one of apparently two things in the history of British television to be better than Doctor Who, I suppose we should talk about it.

At a glance, mind you, Cathy Come Home seems to be radically different from Doctor Who. One is a fairly theatrical science fiction show. The other is a pseudo-documentary about homelessness and urban poverty that makes heavy use of techniques from social realism. The similarities are in no way obvious. But as with Z Cars and Dixon of Dock Green, it’s instructive to look at other major pieces of television to understand what exactly is different about Doctor Who.

As I suggested, the main thing about Cathy Come Home is that it uses a pseudo-documentary style and hand held cameras to tell its story. This was certainly one of the big things noticed at the time, and Cathy Come Home became something of a flashpoint in a debate about the line between news and entertainment (a debate that has yet to resolve, but hey).

So in the (increasingly usual) spirit of my blowing a perfectly publishable academic paper topic on a few paragraphs of a blog (though to be fair, more people read this than will ever see one of my academic articles)…

The thing that the discussion over Cathy Come Home’s use of documentary techniques misses is the hindsight of it. Cathy Come Home works not because it attempts to fool the viewer into believing they are watching a documentary. It works because it trusts that the viewer has a sufficiently good intuitive understanding of televisual storytelling that it can import documentary narrative techniques into ordinary television.

I mean, the fact that Cathy Come Home went out as part of the Wednesday Play anthology series makes it pretty clear how the story was positioned at the time. A negligible number of viewers would have come to it thinking that they were getting a documentary, and the opening credits giving it a writer are a pretty unambiguous sign that it’s not a documentary. So the idea that its documentary techniques were ever deceptive requires that you assume camera movements are a bigger signifier of the genre of a piece of television than the opening credits and explicit presentation of the show.…

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Fun Fact #1 – Burt Ward, while playing Robin, frequently had to be given emasculating injections to keep his tights from being overly revealing.

Occasionally cultural history throws up a juxtaposition that is so brain-breakingly weird that it perfectly encapsulates an entire moment of history. For instance, nothing has ever clarified the nature and tone of Japanese narrative structures for me quite like knowing that My Neighbor Totoro and Grave of the Fireflies were originally released as a double feature. (Though I have yet to find a definitive statement on which film came first, which seems to me to be just about the most crucial fact in human history.)

I mention this because if you want to understand 1966 in Great Britain, it is possible that no fact is more immediately relevant than the fact that on Saturdays in 1966, at around 5:15 PM, the latter episodes of Season 3 of Doctor Who were airing opposite imports of Batman, the 1966 television series starring Adam West. If this fact does not sufficiently unsettle you, I highly recommend firing up, say, The Celestial Toymaker Part 4 or a random bit of The Ark and watching it back to back with a Season 1 episode of Batman.

What is most unsettling about this is the fact that with only three channels in existence at the time, that meant that ITV viewed Batman as the natural competitor to Doctor Who in that media environment. Because other than being adventure stories (and thus, it is worth remarking, “for boys” in a way that it never was before the dual roles of Barbara and the young female companion were collapsed into one female companion role, thus changing the show from being about a bunch of people in terrifying circumstances to being about a bunch of boys and their girl sidekick in terrifying adventures) there’s not a lot of obvious similarities.

Up to this point, one of the major characteristics of Doctor Who has been the essential joke of the TARDIS crew being completely the wrong people for this sort of story. In its original form, this is clearest – two schoolteachers, a teenager, and an old Victorian inventor walk into an alien planet. Even when the companions were Vicki and Steven – two capable future types who have something resembling a valid reason to be traipsing about Galaxy Four – there was still the Doctor, who was by and large the antithesis of a correct action hero. The whole concept still hinged on the incongruity of the old Victorian inventor and these harshly modern (and increasingly postmodern) settings.

So where we’ve left the TARDIS crew off, that’s still basically where we are. There’s nothing too unusual about Ben and Polly as action heroes – unlike Ian (essentially a middle aged ex-soldier) and Barbara (the charmingly mumsy type), attractive young people are never out of place having exciting adventures.…

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