pop between realities

Let’s change the camera angle slightly, however, and look at Russell T Davies’s career in general as of the mid-90s. He was, at the time, undoubtedly a successful television writer. He was not, however, the Russell T Davies of legend. He was a working writer, making a living entirely off of his writing, and with rising acclaim. But he was not a superstar of television yet. And perhaps more importantly, his work just isn’t up to the standard of what his later work is like. I pointed Monday to the dividing line seems to be the overdose that Davies cites as what got him working on Queer as Folk. We will, of course, do a Pop Between Realities on that show when we get to its appropriate time period in late January and look at where Davies’s work really started to feel like Russell T Davies.

What is perhaps most striking about his projects immediately prior to Queer as Folk is that they are aggressively, unrelentingly dark. Which may sound familiar, because it’s exactly what we were saying about Damaged Goods on Monday. Indeed, let’s go one further. If Damaged Goods does not read like the Doctor Who novel you’d expect the writer of Rose to write, it reads exactly like the novel you’d expect the writer of Springhill, The Grand, and a small bit of Touching Evil to write.

Let’s start with Touching Evil. The show is actually created and mostly written by Paul Abbott, who is another one of the absolute superstars of British television (and who we’re not done with either). Davies only wrote one episode of it, the first half of the first season’s finale. Mark Aldridge and Andy Murray’s T Is For Television, which has been an indispensable reference for both this and the previous entry, suggests that the episode is evidence of how well Davies could write to the specifications of someone else’s show. Aldridge and Murray suggest that the script is unrecognizable as Davies’s work, but this isn’t quite fair. If Davies is writing to spec, after all, the spec is Paul Abbott’s, one of his closest friends and collaborators. It’s not accurate to say that Davies and Abbott are indistinguishable – they’re certainly not. Abbott is more inclined towards a structure of set pieces to generate scenes of intense drama. Davies, left to his own devices, prefers to give characters sparks of intense drama in amongst otherwise low key scenes. It’s not that he eschews the set piece – quite the contrary, he loves a good set piece. But he builds to his set pieces out of character interactions. Davies’ trademark move is to give a character a soaring and triumphant monologue stemming out of relatively ordinary action. Abbott likes to crank the action up to eleven and watch the characters respond.

You can see this difference clearly enough across the two episodes of Touching Evil. Davies’s episode ends with a character confessing to another that he’s committed a vigilante murder. Abbott’s episode continues along this line of plot.…

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We’ve alluded a couple of times to the changing nature of the BBC in the late 1980s and early 1990s. If you start from 1984, when Michael Grade took over at BBC1, and go to 1995 there are only two instances in which a BBC1 or BBC2 program wins the BAFTA for Drama Serial or the nearest equivalent award. Obviously Grade was only in charge of BBC1, but let’s use his ascent to mark a particular attitude about what the BBC was. There were two more instances where BBC Scotland won, but let’s for the moment also treat them as a separate thing. Then, from 1996 to 1999 BBC1 and BBC2 had a straight sweep of the category for four years, and won seven of the twelve from 1996 to 2007. And inaugurating that sweep was Our Friends in the North.

Clearly something changed. And yet it’s difficult to straightforwardly identify what, exactly, it could have been. John Birt made a major reorganization of the corporation in 1996, but it’s difficult for a variety of reasons to just hand him credit for a revitalization of the BBC’s drama efforts. And after all, the BBC remained top notch in the world of comedy. Nor is it even accurate to say that Our Friends in the North marks the point where the BBC returned to the top of its game in producing prestige dramas: that’s clearly 1995 and Pride and Prejudice.

It is tempting to allude to a nebulous idea of a broader cultural swing. The Labour Party was, at this point, seemingly all but certain to regain power whenever the next election happened. There certainly was, in the broad sense, a swing towards a more leftist vision of the country, although the question of how leftist New Labour was is vexed to say the least. The swing back to a more confident and prestigious BBC coincides thematically with that even if the actual causality is borked. And that causality works well, in particular, with Our Friends in the North, a story largely about the material arc of leftist politics in Britain over a stretch of time that coincides almost perfectly with that covered by this blog.

But there are some fundamental issues in play here, and ones that we’ve only ever touched on in passing, so let’s slow down and look at the component parts of this. First is the BBC itself. One of the fundamental mantras of this blog has been that it is a terrible mistake to treat the BBC as though it resembles a commercial television station of the sort that produces virtually all of American television and most of the rest of British television. This is due to the fact that the BBC is not only a public service broadcaster as opposed to a for-profit channel, but also to the fact that there are decades of history of the BBC that have given it an entrenched vision of its role in Britain that stubbornly fails to be completely erased.…

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There is a moment familiar to everyone who has ever enjoyed Babylon 5 in which they make the cataclysmically dumb mistake of trying to get someone else to watch it. It goes like this: “It’s a huge five-season story arc that was planned out from the start. The first season is mostly crap, but the second one has some really good stuff in it. And the third and fourth are quite good…” and then somewhere around admitting that the fifth season is also a trainwreck you realize that the case for Babylon 5’s quality is actually enormously strained.

And it’s true. It’s much, much easier to list the things that are very wrong about Babylon 5 than it is to articulate the case for it. I mean, the case isn’t that hard: the show’s basic conceit, a five year novel in television form, plotted from the beginning to lead towards a pre-defined endpoint that would pay all of its threads off, is impressive. Yes, the use of television for a multi-episode story arc had precedent, but J. Michael Stracyznski was the first person to really try plotting an entire multi-season arc out and executing it. It’s a sprawlingly hubristic little number, but it’s also the first stab at the sort of thing that is these days taken for granted: of the things that Vince Gilligan is praised for in Breaking Bad, the fact that he had a coherent plot for the whole thing barely makes the list. It’s expected these days. Even if you don’t have one (*cough* Lost *cough*), you’re supposed to pretend that you do. (The zenith of this is the almost completely [and rightly so] forgotten Fox series Reunion, which featured a murder mystery as part of its central premise. When the show was cancelled the producers promised they’d reveal who did it before, a few months later, admitting that they hadn’t actually worked that out by the time the show was cancelled.)

Which, actually, is largely what Straczynski did. The original five-year-arc was reprinted in one of the volumes of the Babylon 5 scriptbooks, and basically completely diverges from what happened in the series somewhere in the rage of season four. Some of this, at least, was caused by Michael O’Hare departing at the end of the first season and a new lead character being created, but only some of it. The larger arc that Straczynski mapped out could well have played out with Bruce Boxleitner’s replacement character. Furthermore, whole major story arcs are missing. In the original outline the plot about the war with the Shadows (then still called the Shadowmen) spilled out past the five year mark and into the sequel series. In practice Straczynski wrapped it up towards the beginning of Season Four. This is partially down to the fact that it looked like there wasn’t going to be a fifth season and thus that Straczynski had to accelerate his plotting, but the compression isn’t quite as dramatic as people say – Straczynski has said that if he’d known for sure there was a fifth season then the eighteenth episode of the fourth season would have been the finale, involving only four episodes of compression.…

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Oh, come now, did you all really think I wasn’t going to cover these two? What’s next, being surprised by the Queer as Folk post? It was just a matter of timing. And with Sky Pirates! Coming on Wednesday, this seems to be the time to finally deal with the strain of British comedy devoted to sci-fi/fantasy. It’s worth noting, first of all, just how important this subgenre was in the mid-90s, simply because it’s easy to overlook, especially for American readers for whom the works are not part of their basic cultural context. Red Dwarf was never huge as such, but it was the BBC sci-fi show that was still running in the mid-90s, which, at least for Doctor Who fans, put it in a position of considerable envy. Terry Pratchett, on the other hand, was and is absolutely massive: he was basically Britain’s best-selling author until J.K. Rowling came along. Given this, it was basically all but inevitable that Doctor Who, then a novel series with lingering resentment about being recognized by anyone other than a die-hard fan as a cancelled television series instead, was going to do at least one story in this mode. Between it being by miles the most popular sort of genre novel in Britain and the one BBC sci-fi show left (a position that no amount of people trying to be clever and declare that Doctor Who was now really a novel series and didn’t need to return to television would ever keep anyone from believing made Doctor Who fans apoplectically jealous) it was as inevitable that the New Adventures would do a comedy novel as it was that they’d do a cyberpunk one. So let’s understand this sci-fi/fantasy-comedy subgenre, or, at least, its two biggest examples.

Red Dwarf was just recently written up by Lawrence Miles on his blog, and let me tell you, you don’t realize how much you like a critic until you spend some time working with stuff they haven’t commented on. His observations on the basic arc of Red Dwarf are spot on. To begin with, at least, the series is a straightforward sitcom that happens to be set in outer space, using the potential eradication of humanity as little more than a premise to justify a classic “two people who hate each other stuck in a room together” setup. Rimmer and Lister are as straightforward a chalk and cheese duo as has ever existed in a sitcom. Like any chalk and cheese duo, their similarities are actually far more important than their differences: both are borderline incompetent at their jobs and of painfully low social status, but where Rimmer aspires to better himself (but only ends up being a rules obsessed and hated jerk), Lister is perfectly happy to coast along at the bottom of the social hierarchy and to get by on the standard sort of idiot’s guile that is common in comedies.

It would, in other words, have been wholly unremarkable if not for the fact that it was also a sci-fi show.…

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I’ve been batting around the phrase “cult television” for a while, but have managed so far to avoid talking about it in any depth or detail. I mean, we did Star Trek: The Next Generation, but the whole point of that was that it wasn’t cult. We did The X-Files, but had too much fun with paranoia to do its cult aspects. So we should probably slip one more in that deals with cult television. And, perhaps, for good measure, what it’s not. Actually, let’s start with that, simply because “actually successful science fiction of a sort” is probably a more useful baseline to have. So let’s go with Independence Day.

Improbably, and in addition to being an extremely successful movie, Independence Day is absolutely ridiculously fun. And a lot of this comes down to the fact that it is a movie that does not make the slightest effort to be taken seriously. It is not a movie that lends itself to any reading based on its supposed sincerity. Yes, it’s an overtly jingoistic film about how America is the greatest country in the world and Macs are compatible with anything up to and including alien death ships. But that’s not the point. The point is the scene where Will Smith’s dog survives.

The thing about this rather incredible scene is that it’s so spectacularly unsubtle in what it does. So, for those poor souls who haven’t seen the film, the aliens attack with their giant death explosion beam thingy. And Will Smith’s wife, played by Vivica A. Fox, is in her car in a tunnel, and is thus about to explode. So she takes off, with her kids, and runs down the tunnel to find a little nook to hide in and, you know, not explode. Which she does. And to be clear, at this point all of the significant human characters are out of danger. At that point Vivica Fox’s character whistles for their dog, which had been left in the car.

Let us pause for a moment and consider the dramatic implications of this sequence. All danger to the main characters has, at this point, been resolved. Absolutely nobody is in any danger except for the dog, who has been deliberately put into danger. At this point we must pause to consider the tastes of the average American moviegoer who has selected Independence Day for their evening’s entertainment over such options as Phenomenon, The Nutty Professor, and Striptease. These are not people who are going to stand for the death of a dog. The idea that the dog might die is actually slightly more implausible than the idea that Will Smith might bite it. (Will Smith, of course, is the lone black man who is allowed to survive action films.) Which means that this entire sequence has, in effect, been set up to tease the audience with the fact that the dog might die. Needless to say the dog instead runs down the tunnel and scampers into the hiding space just as the shockwave of the explosion rides past.…

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We have already discussed in passing the rise of conspiracy theories and a fascination with UFOs in the 1990s. Since the next book we want to deal with is David McIntee’s First Frontier, the New Adventures’ big stab at a 1950s UFO story, it is, I suppose, time to deal with that more thoroughly. The obvious text to look at here is, of course, The X-Files, though we’ll circle back and find a larger pool of things in a bit. 

Unfortunately, if you’re tracking the influence of The X-Files on Doctor Who it is difficult not to have the bulk of it be overwhelmingly negative. The story goes roughly like this: the success of The X-Files, which became Fox’s most successful show among its desired advertising demographic, let to Fox doubling down on “cult” television. This is a phenomenon we’ve talked about in passing a few times, but as we’re finally on the big watershed show in terms of it, we may as well deal with it. The basic idea of cult television is that it has a smaller audience than standard-issue “hit” television, but that its audience is exceedingly loyal. From a studio perspective the advantages of this are twofold. First, loyal audiences buy tie-in merchandise. Second, even though the audiences of cult programs are smaller, they are disproportionately young males with disposable income, a demographic that emits pheromones known to drive advertisers into a lusty stupor. And with The X-Files Fox discovered, or at least thought it had discovered, a reliable formula for this. And so one of the first things they did was agree to fund a TV Movie of an existing cult sci-fi property, specifically a cancelled British television series, which they did straight-up in The X-Files style, right down to filming it in Vancouver. But that’s another post.

Here I am more interested in The X-Files from a cultural perspective, and specifically as an artifact reflecting the role of paranoia in the 1990s and in sci-fi fandom. That The X-Files is a paranoid show ought go without saying. Its entire ordering principle is based around the mythology of government conspiracies to hide the existence of extra-terrestrial life. In this regard it is not alone – in the UK there was, not too long before The X-Files made its debut, the one-off drama Ghostwatch, in which the illusion of a spectral invasion of the BBC was assembled to considerable outcry as popular hosts, including a former Blue Peter presenter, are possessed, murdered, and other such fun. And also in the US is Twin Peaks, David Lynch’s surrealist triumph of a television series.

What is it that links this set together, exactly? The presence of secrets, first and foremost. All three are concerned with the prospect that there is a hidden truth behind things, waiting to bubble up. What is remarkable about Ghostwatch is not so much its existence or style as the way in which it provided a modern day version of the Orson Wells War of the Worlds panic.…

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So there’s this thing called the Internet, and it’s kind of a big deal, so I suppose we should talk about it. I mean, it’s been lurking about in the background for a while, but it became a genuinely important thing in what Doctor Who was around this time, to say nothing of a somewhat important thing in my life. Because something we haven’t really talked about in the context of the Virgin era is the nature of Doctor Who fandom.

We’ve talked broadly about the way in which computers became standard consumer technology in this time period. The early 1990s were the period where everybody finally got around to agreeing that computers were the future. And so a sleepy bit of high-end technology called the Internet started trickling into mass consciousness. For those who are young enough to have always known an Internet based on the World Wide Web, it may be worth pausing to explain what this meant.

The World Wide Web was publicly launched in August of 1991. But it didn’t really hit breakout “everybody is using this thing” status for a few years. Major bits of the Web like Amazon didn’t even go online until 1995, and it isn’t until the latter half of the decade that “online presence” became a standard feature of practically everything. Up until the mid 90s the Internet was fragmented among a large number of services, not all of them meaningfully interoperable. You had a wide variety of services like (in the US) Compuserve, Prodigy, and AOL that offered their own closed-off e-mail systems, chat networks, discussion boards, games, and all sorts of other things. Prodigy, in 1994, was the first of these to offer any sort of interoperability with the Internet at large. Then there were little things like local BBSes – often just computers with modems that you could dial into via a phone number and access online services aimed at the local market.

You also had what we might call the Big Internet, which consisted not only of the World Wide Web but of e-mail and Usenet. For one thing, it’s the chunk that eventually came to eat all of the BBSes and independent services. For another, it had Usenet, a sizable collection of discussion forums and file-sharing services (which were distributed, essentially, by converting files into text). And one of those discussion forums was rec.arts.drwho. Which was about what you’d expect.

The idea that there was an online discussion forum about Doctor Who sounds like the most spectacularly unremarkable thing imaginable in 2012, but you have to realize that in 1993 Usenet was somewhat obscure. Commercial Internet Service Providers existed, but were rare and often charged by the minute. The bulk of Internet users were those who had access provided due to having an account on a system that provided larger services. In practice, this usually meant people affiliated with universities.

Which, in the early-to-mid 90s, actually meant me. With two parents at universities it was relatively easy for me to get such an account on a semesterly basis, and once I started taking actual classes there on the side it became downright easy.…

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If you want to date your argument from Press Gang then the story of Doctor Who’s return begins a few months before its final season. But Steven Moffat didn’t bring Doctor Who back, and indeed has said in interviews that he could never have done what Russell T Davies did with the series without having seen Davies do it first. In that case, then, the return of Doctor Who begins about two years after its cancellation, in November of 1991, with the debut of Russell T Davies’s first created television series Dark Season.

Dark Season is a straightforward show – a bit of a nostalgic throwback. It features a trio of schoolchildren investigating sci-fi mysteries going on around their school. The plot is split into two three-episode runs, with the fifth episode cliffhanger suddenly revealing that the villain of the second story is in league with the villain of the first story. Our main character is Marcie, whose conceit is that she more or less recognizes that she’s in a sci-fi television show and so plays for the right set of conventions instead of bumbling about trying to figure out things that the audience had ages ago. Aside from being entertaining, this also means that Davies can pick up the pace nicely. Finally, it’s obligatory to mention that Dark Season features a very early role for Kate Winslet, who is famous for stuff.

The fashion these days appears to be to suggest that Dark Season is not, as it initially appears, a direct heir to Doctor Who. This is absolute rubbish. Dark Season is as flagrant a Doctor Who descendent as has ever been descended, so much so that it’s tempting, albeit inaccurate, to call it a clone. The script could be trivially adapted into a Doctor Who story to fit into Season Twenty-Five or Twenty-Six. Marcie, the lead protagonist, is channeling Sylvester McCoy throughout her performance to a degree that is downright creepy given that she’s playing a pre-teen girl, prone to cryptic mutterings mixed with solid humor. You’d barely need to change her dialogue to have her work as the Doctor. Combining the roles of Reet and Tom into a single companion would have been somewhat trickier, but even there you’re not looking at much – spin one off into Ace, and keep the other as a temporary companion to give the Doctor and Ace a way into the events at the school and you have a pair of linked three-parters.

Which begs the question of why the party line is that Dark Season isn’t a Doctor Who . To some extent the answer is one of saving Davies from a genuinely unwarranted reductive summary of his career. If his first show is a Doctor Who knockoff and his eventual crowning glory in television is bringing Doctor Who back then the rest of his career gets reduced to, well, the stuff he did when he wasn’t doing Doctor Who. Which is terribly unfair to a host of genuinely important and quality television that Davies wrote and created.…

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Prime Suspect, debuting in 1991, and Cracker, debuting in 1993, are two of the most iconic British television series of their eras. For the most part it is easier to list their similarities than their differences. Both are exceedingly dark detective series featuring psychologically and emotionally troubled police detectives. Both are award-winning and breakout roles for their lead actors (Helen Mirren and Robbie Coltrane respectively). And both are very, very good.

There are differences, to be sure. Prime Suspect goes for a structure of a single case per season (save one experiment in its fourth season with doing three cases over three episodes), while Cracker goes for a three-story arc over a longer season. Prime Suspect had more US success, getting aired on PBS and picking up Emmy awards, while Cracker got an unsatisfying US remake and less attention over here. (Prime Suspect eventually got its own mediocre American remake as well) More broadly, Prime Suspect is a straight-up police procedural, whereas Cracker focuses on a police psychologist and on that specific aspect of its cases. Prime Suspect thus has a bit more socially realist grit, where Cracker is a bit more over the top.

But for the most part these are two very good series to tackle an issue left hanging from last entry and heavily relevant to next issue, that of the antihero and its prevalence in the 1990s. My momentary focus on the blog, no doubt to soon be quickly replaced by some other fascination, is on the texture of the 1990s and on what Doctor Who should be at this moment in time. Not, for the moment, what it should do to come back to television, but the basic question of what it should be in 1993, given that it has no clear route to a television return and is, at this moment in time, bedding down for a long-term spell as a book series.

Much of this translates into a question of “what were the 1990s.” Which is a surprisingly tricky question. Maybe this is just because I actually remember large swaths of them, unlike the 1980s, where my memories are relatively fragmented, or any previous decade, which I know only through history. But the other post-War decades all have a relatively clear iconography. This iconography is absurdly reductive and heritage themepark, yes, but it’s at least there. Say “the 1970s” and you’re suddenly transplanted to disco, bell bottoms, and the mysterious fascination with the color orange. Say “the 1980s” and you have primitive obsession with the electronic and bad hair. Heck, do a Google image search on “I love the n0s” where n is between 6 and 9. For the 70s and 80s, of course, you’ll get the logos for the delightfully awful VH1 series of those names (VH1 – purveyors of the finest terrible television to watch at 3am on American cable). For the 60s, which VH1 never covered, you’ll still get homebrew logos that are instantly recognizable as “the 1960s,” albeit the scarequoted version of that more than the actual one.…

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BLACKADDER (1983-89)

It’s brilliant, of course. But let’s look carefully at what’s brilliant about it. On the one hand it’s taking a bit of an easy route to brilliance: it’s a massive team-up of comedic talent. The sheer volume of talent involved in making Blackadder is outright staggering. Not, of course, that everything that combines a large number of talented people works. Blackadder, however, works wonders, combining a traditional comedic structure with some particularly bitter teeth. It’s notable, then, for being at an interesting cusp between two modes of comedy – an export-friendly traditional sort and a more cynical and experimental one.

It’s the end of Blackadder Goes Forth that gets the most attention. The episode, by and large, is a straightforward comedy in which Blackadder tries to get out of a certain death charge through No Man’s Land during World War I, initially by feigning madness. He fails, of course. That much is inevitable. Blackadder, in all but the first series, is a scheming and clever character, which means in turn that he’s always going to be frustrated as events spiral out of his control. (See also Joking Apart further down)

But this is set over the backdrop of World War I. And so there’s a real and looming sense of death over it. The humor of most of the other characters is based on their complete failure to recognize that they’re in a horrible war and almost certain to die tomorrow morning, with Blackadder being the only one to realize how bad their situation is (other than Stephen Fry’s character, General Melchett, who, of course, doesn’t have to worry about the front lines).

And so the end of the episode, in which Blackadder finally fails and has to go over the top, is astonishingly bleak. One by one the characters admit to Blackadder that they’re scared. Baldrick, his long-suffering manservant from across the four series, announces that he has a clever plan – a claim that is almost certain not to be true. But before Baldrick can explain it they have to charge into battle, and we cut from slow motion of them being gunned down to a field of poppies as the credits roll. It’s brutal.

It is by far the high point of the series, which was not that savage in its preceding twenty-three episodes. But it’s at least an example of what Blackadder does that is so engaging, which is to mix a very classic comedic structure with a more aggressive flair.…

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