pop between realities

There are, of course, many ways in which British culture has jumped over and influenced American culture. But the British Invasion in the comics industry remains one that it’s easy to miss the significance of, in part because its three leading lights – Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, and Neil Gaiman – have largely sucked the oxygen from the event, obscuring the fact that for a significant period of time the overwhelming majority of significant comics writers and artists in the US were, in fact, British. Consider the following list: Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Neil Gaiman, Garth Ennis, Peter Milligan, Jamie Delano, Andy Diggle, Mike Carey, Andrew Cartmel, Paul Cornell, Mark Millar, Lawrence Miles, Warren Ellis, Tony Lee, Alan Davis, Barry Kitson, Dave Gibbons, Glen Fabry, Kevin O’Neil, Bryan Talbot, Gary Erskine, Frank Quitely, Trevor Hairsine, Sam Kieth, John McRea, Frazer Irvine, Brian Bolland, Garry Leach, Steve Yeowell, Steve Dillon, John Ridgway, Carlos Ezquerra, Pat Mills, John Wagner, Jock,  John Bolton, Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning, and Mark Buckingham. Aside from one or two Doctor Who names I threw in there because this is a Doctor Who blog after all, these are some of the biggest names in comics, whether because they are or at some point were superstars or because they were on one or two massively famous projects. But more significantly, everyone on that list has published at least one thing in either 2000 AD or its spinoff Judge Dredd Megazine. And for the majority of them that was some of their earliest work.

So if you want to suggest that 2000 AD is one of the most important British science fiction publications ever, period, you’re not exactly short on ammunition for your case. On the other hand, generally speaking, if you want to argue that it was one of the best… well, now you’re in a bit of a harder situation. Because as vital as 2000 AD was and at times still is, it’s not exactly… good.

First some background. In late 1975 an editor at IPC Magazines got an inkling that science fiction might hit it big soon and hired Pat Mills to develop it. Pat Mills had overseen two previous comics aimed at the same age group – Battle Picture Weekly and the infamous Action, which was sufficiently violent and blood-soaked to as to piss off Mary Whitehouse. 2000 AD was a stunning example in the same vein. There were five strips in its first issue – sorry, prog –  Invasion, Dan Dare, Harlem Heroes, Flesh, and M.A.C.H. 1. Almost all of them are gloriously and tastelessly violent – only Dan Dare, reimagined as a more properly “futuristic” strip, displays even a glimmer of basic taste. Harlem Heroes is about a sport that combines “football, boxing, kung fu, and basketball,” while M.A.C.H. 1 was an ultraviolent Six Million Dollar Man ripoff. Invasion was about working class British men violently resisting Soviet… sorry, Volgan occupation. And Flesh, perhaps the greatest of all of them, was about time traveling dinosaur farmers and a particularly murderous T-Rex.…

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Or, as I’ve been thinking of it all week, “the entry from hell.” Normally it’s fairly easy to pick what goes into a Pop Between Realities entry. I mean, I tend to put them in whenever the series goes on any sort of break, and I just grab two, sometimes three pieces of relevant media or history from the time period. They’ve all been very natural.

And then we come to this infuriating gap. Part of it is that the next two Pop Between Realities are no-brainer single-item entries for me, and as a result anything science fiction television from now to the start of 1982 or so is booked. I mean, the end-of-Doctor chaos of side entries is already worse than usual for the Baker/Davison transition. But also, good LORD there are a lot of sci-fi things going around on television in here that require coverage. And this isn’t even all of it! I’m not redoing Hitchhiker’s as a television series and I’m punting The Adventure Game down until Janet Fielding appears on it.

Still, in some ways this is also the perfect entry here. John Nathan-Turner and Christopher Bidmead are about to determinately reshape what Doctor Who is in order to make it work better as proper science fiction television. In which case the obvious question is… what does science fiction look like around this point in time?

Well, it looks like…

Quatermass (1979)

In late 1979 ITV ran a four part Quatermass serial produced by Verity Lambert simply called Quatermass. The film version for the export market went instead with the title The Quatermass Conclusion. The production was the very definition of problematic. Kneale wrote his scripts in 1973 for a BBC production that got abandoned. Following the success of Star Wars and everyone becoming re-obsessed with science fiction, however, Euston Films snapped up the rights to the scripts, having them rewritten to work both as a 200 minute serial and as a 100 minute film.

The results were frankly unfortunate. Lambert’s production values were impeccable, and the film (which is the version I got my hands on) looks quite solid. The problem here really is one of an unfixable underlying concept. Verity Lambert’s defense of the project – that there are problems inherent in any effort to update an old concept like this – isn’t entirely fair. After all, plenty of other science fiction revivals have worked. But on the other hand it’s not as though there were a long line of successful television revivals to begin with. This is probably about as good a version of Quatermass as could have been made in 1979.

The problem is just that Quatermass didn’t fit 1979 at all. And the blame here really goes to Nigel Kneale. That Kneale is a conservative writer is hardly a revelation. But by 1979 that had tipped into an unfortunate overdrive. Quatermass is so appallingly reactionary as to occasionally tip over into comedy. Its central premise involves mind-controlling aliens whose mind control doesn’t affect old people.…

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“Jack always said it was difficult for us Americans to understand what it was really like here in the darkest parts of the eighties. We had a doddery old President who talked about the end of the world a little too often and was being run by the wrong people. But they had a Prime Minister who was genuinely mad. You know there were even feminists and women’s studies theorists who denied she was even really a woman anymore, she was so far out of her tree? She wanted concentration camps for AIDS victims, wanted to eradicate homosexuality even as an abstract concept, made poor people choose between eating and keeping their vote, ran the most shameless vote-grabbing artificial war scam in fifty years… England was a scary place. No wonder it produced a scary culture.” – Warren Ellis, Planetary #7

In general I attempt to maintain some vague illusion of critical balance on this blog. Even in political matters, where my overt progressivism is unmistakably a thing, I try very hard to acknowledge the points where leftist politics have failed and to find concrete lessons, both rhetorical and substantive, for their failures. But here we reach a new sort of problem of balance – one we’ve been circling about since the Three Day Week entry back in the late Pertwee era. (In this regard it’s fitting that we come to this right off of a story where the biggest flaw is that it’s not the glam rock era anymore.) And that problem is, in a nutshell, Margaret Thatcher.

First of all, however much I’ve been willing to shoot my own side of the debate when it’s being stupid, I’ve never been one to give much quarter to the right. The idea of starting with Thatcher is hardly inspiring. The fact of the matter is, I fiercely disagree with virtually everything Thatcher stood for and everything Thatcher did. There’s little margin around that to formulate some sort of balance. There’s no way to hold the ideals and values I hold and thus that this blog holds and like Margaret Thatcher. There’s not even really a way to hold them and avoid hating Margaret Thatcher.

But there is something about Thatcher that goes beyond mere political reason. I commented in the Dad’s Army entry, to some controversy and consternation, that Thatcher was “basically the raw embodiment of all evil.” The line was intended at least partially as one of those moments of excessively deadpan humor that I favor – an instance of willfully overplaying my hand and taking the most extremist position available so that all future statements on the subject are pleasantly moderate.

But there’s almost no such thing as overstatement on the subject of Margaret Thatcher, as the Ellis quote I started us off with demonstrates. None of it is strictly speaking untrue (although technically the concentration camps for AIDS victims were Lord Christopher Monckton, of whom Herman Cain is a poor American remake), and it doesn’t even scratch the surface of the horrors of Thatcherism.…

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You know those days where I blow a topic that I should have saved for an academic essay on a blog post for the sole reason that adding the citations and thorough review of existing scholarship would take weeks whereas I can bash this out in a couple of hours and say the word “fuck” more? Yeah. It’s one of those days. If you like when this blog kicks back and idly sketches out some big cultural connections, this is going to be one of those entries you love. If you prefer when I just talk sensibly about Doctor Who, well, The Ribos Operation comes Friday.

There is a strain of British popular culture – one perhaps more visible to Americans than it is in Britain itself – that is oddly focused on Cambridge. This is not in and of itself surprising, given the size and prestige of Cambridge as a university, but it’s still worth remarking on the sheer quantity of Cambridge-educated people among the pool of British people Americans like: Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry, Graham Chapman, Eric Idle, John Cleese, Sacha Baron Cohen, John Oliver, and, most important for our purposes today, Douglas Adams. And those are just the ones who were members of the Footlights club there. The list is practically a who’s who of British comedians to have hit it big in the US. (Oxford’s equivalent organization, on the other hand, has Michael Palin, Terry Jones, Rowan Atkinson, and Richard Curtis.)

The nature of this is worth discussing for two reasons. First, we’re about to enter the two year stretch of Doctor Who where Douglas Adams was a driving creative influence, and so we should probably square away what’s going on with him. Second, however, we’re entering the period where Doctor Who begins to get marketed aggressively in the United States. Although the first set of Tom Baker stories flogged cuts off at The Invasion of Time and thus didn’t have any Douglas Adams-penned material, the fact remains that Douglas Adams and Doctor Who broke out in the US more or less simultaneously.

Unlike Star Wars, there’s not a ground zero in the transition to this outbreak of Anglophilia. It is, after all, a less talked about moment of British influence in American culture than either the 1960s or 1980s musical waves, or even the 1980s wave of British comics creators. It’s tough to point out exactly when what we may as well call the Cambridge Invasion took place. Indeed, 1978 is a bit of an odd year to run this – in particular given that I ostensibly want to stop off at Fawlty Towers, which aired in 1975 and 1979, and that the “Doctor Who in America” moment is still a year or two off. But I think there’s a strong case to be made that Douglas Adams is the central figure in the Cambridge Invasion. Certainly it’s worth noting that his time on Doctor Who and his best-known creation coincided almost perfectly. But despite all of that, let’s start with Fawlty Towers, since it unambiguously comes out of the same Cambridge circle as Douglas Adams, is one of the most successful pieces of British comedy, but, notably, is miles from the science fiction end of the pool and thus works as a control experiment before the sci-fi geek stuff comes in.…

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I never drank the Kool-Aid here. I mean, Star Wars was fine. I enjoyed the movies when I watched them – probably third grade? But the fact that I have to ask the question shows pretty clearly the extent to which this was not a rabbit hole I fell down. I attentively rented the entire trilogy from my local grocery store (ah, the 90s), if only to finally suss out the difference between it and Star Trek, watched them, and was later very puzzled by people who fell in love with them. I still find them terribly overrated, and the continual grating of my ambivalence against people who do love Star Wars has pretty much worn me down to active dislike of the franchise. So, you know. We’re doing this because we have to, not because I’m jumping for joy at the entry. Or maybe because I’m secretly a bitter misanthrope who delights in the wave of comments that this will inevitably generate.

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Photoshopped? Oh, probably.

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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.…

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Yes, I really am tackling Space: 1999 and I, Claudius (or, as I insist on referring to it for no other reason than “it makes me happy,” I Clavdivs.) in one entry. It even makes sense to do so. Because one thing that we’re going to have to deal with over the remainder of the series is the fact that the nature of television is shifting rapidly. And the beginnings of that shift are starting to happen around what we’re watching now. One of the easiest lenses to look at that through, at least for our purposes, is the way in which British television is made for the export market. In other words, shows designed to make money by being sold to other countries.

The BBC, of course, had done this to some extent for years. In terms of Doctor Who, this has been tracked extensively by the folks at BroaDWcast. But notably, these sales were mostly to Commonwealth countries, with Hartnell and Troughton stories often airing well into the 1970s. Despite Innes Lloyd eying the possibility in the 1960s (hence the conscious reintroduction to the premise of the show at the start of Tomb of the Cybermen), no successful effort to show Doctor Who in the US happens until 1972, when Time Life, who bought the distribution rights, sells a package of Pertwee episodes to a PBS station in Philadelphia. (In a moment of explaining things to a different side of the Atlantic than usual, PBS is basically what the BBC would be if Rupert Murdoch got his way – an underfunded and stitched together coalition of local stations with an extreme lack of money for producing new content outside the children’s market. They market to the sorts of people who in the UK watch a lot of BBC4 and read The Guardian. But more on them in a few paragraphs.) But it’s not really until the late 70s/early 80s when Doctor Who manages to take off in a meaningful sense in the US, so we’ll mostly drop that strand until… oh, The Five Doctors sounds like a pretty good place to pick it up next, no?

The logic behind this is fairly straightforward: there are a whole lot of English speakers in the US, so it’s a really obvious market to sell in. But right around now there’s an odd transition going on in the nature of what a typical UK to US export looks like. In the 1960s, had we done a piece on exports, we’d have talked mostly about ITC – Lew Grade’s production company that made, of the things we’ve talked about so far, The Prisoner. In the UK, Grade’s shows went to ITV, whereas in the US they usually ended up in CBS.

Several things characterize the ITC approach. First of all, they were generally budgeted with the export market in mind. This gave them the budgets to do glitzy action set pieces that BBC productions couldn’t touch. Second, they were generally put together so that episode order didn’t matter that much.…

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