thatcherism

August 1, 2015

Viva Hate (Shabcast 9)

Jack Graham criticism, Doctor Who, hatred, holly b, jane, movies, pex lives podcast, podcasting, police, shabcast, thatcherism, too many tags? 3

This month, the Shabogan Graffiti Podcast sinks happily into a morass of bile and spleen.

I’m joined by the wonderful Holly B – star of the City of the Dead podcast, Pex Lives guest appearances and her own blog – for a gargantuan complaining session, an epic voyage into annoyance that goes on for so long I had to split it into two parts. Hate is fertile ground.

Download or listen to Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

In Part 1 we cover Doctor Who that we detest. We both choose victims from both classic and new Who.

In Part 2 we move on to non-Who hates and lambast and villify a movie each (two of the most popular, lauded and loved movies of recent years as it happens – ha!). We round things off by indulging in rants about pet hates. I go for a soft target, Holly for a tougher one.

No clues. You have to listen.

Proud of this one. Lots of fun to record and (I hope) listen to. And much credit must go to Holly who not only came up with the idea for the episode but also the structure of the discussion.

PS – This episode also features a cameo return appearance by a popular Shabcast star of the past. But again, no clues.

PPS – Very excited about forthcoming Shabcasts. Returning guests and new ones. Great topics.

As always, thanks for listening. You’re peaches, all of you.

(Except you. Yes, you. You know who you are.)…

February 7, 2015

Red Kangs Are Best

Jack Graham 80s, class, criticism, dialectical materialism, dialectics, jane, josh marsfelder, land of fiction, marxism, Me Elsewhere, middle classes, neoliberalism, paradise towers, pex lives podcast, philosophy, police, post-industrialism, postmodernism, reductionism, stalinism, state capitalism, thatcherism, time monster, too many tags? 2

I very much enjoyed the latest episode of the Pex Lives? Podcast, which looks at ‘Paradise Towers’. During it, Kevin and James’ guest Jane (of achairforjane? and many fascinating comments – and an amazing guest post on Lost – at Phil Sandifer’s blog) suggests a Marxist reading of the story in which the Rezzies are the consumerist bourgeois who ascend a few levels via the system which later consumes them. Totally valid and satisfying reading. (And I’m grateful for the lovely shout-out, as always.)

I think, however, that it illuminates a certain interesting ambiguity about what constitutes a ‘Marxist reading’ or a ‘Marxist analysis’. I know Jane and the Pex Lives boys already know this, so this isn’t in any way meant as a criticism of any of them, but I think a ‘Marxist analysis’ would really have to constitute more than finding some way in which aspects of the narrative function as an allegory of some aspect of the class struggle. I hold my hands up: that’s often what I do here, and it doesn’t really cut the mustard.

To do that is to bring Marxist categories to a text, but still to treat a text as something that exists somehow outside its own origins and function within the forces of production. A more proper sense of the term ‘Marxist analysis’ would be to critically evaluate the story in the light of the circumstances of its production – in individual terms, in terms of material/technical circumstances, in terms of the overall system of capitalist cultural production, and then also in terms of broader Marxist categories like ‘the culture industries’ or ‘ideology’ or ‘hegemony’ (with different Marxists probably stressing this or that aspect over another). I personally would want to argue that a proper Marxist analysis of a text, or any artifact of cultural production, would also focus at least as much upon the social circumstances of its consumption, circulation, distribution, exchange, commodification and financialisation. For my money, too many Marxist critics (of lots of things including – but also beyond – texts) have overstressed the node of production, which is only one node in the circuit of capital.

I’m often said (by people who kindly link to me on social media, for instance) to have written a ‘Marxist reading’ or ‘Marxist analysis’ of this or that. This makes me more than a little uneasy, to be honest, because I’m not usually anything like as rigorous and scholarly as I would need to be to meet even my own standards for such a thing. Generally I just react to texts in a very individual way, with my Marxist views inevitably forming the backbone of my response.

I worry that people with, perhaps, no other exposure to Marxism than me, might take me as a meaningful representative. Ye gods, I hope not. I am an amateur and, despite having gone to University, I consider myself effectively an autodidact. One of my purposes here (beyond simply amusing myself and indulging my vanity) has been, via the conduit of a popular TV show, to maybe bring a bit of Marxism (or just critical leftiness generally) into the thinking and reading of people who might otherwise not encounter it in our barren age.…

November 21, 2013

6

Jack Graham 50th anniversary countdown, capitalism, conservatives, ghosts, gothic, green death, m r james, neoliberalism, post-industrialism, production, thatcherism, trade unions, workers 1

“I have in my hand a piece of paper,” says Mr Stevens, CEO of Global Chemicals, echoing Chamberlain in unconscious admission that his promises of a profitable truce in the class war will turn out to be worthless, “which will mean a great deal to all of you. Wealth in our time!”

The ex-miners, crowded around the gates of the closed pit, are unimpressed.

“When the National Coal Board were forced to close the pit last year…” Stevens begins.

“It were a shame, that was!” heckles one of the workers, in Ignorant Yokel Speak.

“No, my friends,” says Stevens chummily, presenting himself as one of them, “we must not be bitter. We must face the facts.”

Note the ‘we’; the most abused word in political discourse. As in ‘we’re all in this together’.

“Coal is a dying industry,” asserts Stevens.

The miners shout “Rubbish! Rubbish!”

When it happens in reality, the idea that the mines had to shut because they were unprofitable will be rubbish. Mining was always subsidised.

“Oil is our future now and the government agrees with me. They have not only given us the go-ahead for our plans, they have promised us money for future expansion!” So the state is now subsidising a private company instead of nationalised coal and people’s jobs. “I have it here in black and white!”

There is general cheering. This story represents the working class, via the conduit of Welshness, as idiots. The feckless, changeable, easily-swayed mob – a trope that goes back a long way.

“Money for all of us! More jobs, more housing, more cars!” The promise of returned prosperity in the depths of the 70s.

In terms of when it was made, this is an odd scene. Miners were powerful and militant in 1973. They were unionised and they were winning. They weren’t sacked, helpless, grumbling no-hopers, stuck on the sidelines.

In terms of the future, however, this scene is actually prescient. By the late-90s, British mining – together with so much manufacturing industry – had been deliberately destroyed by the Tories, partly from a pure ideological objection to the idea of powerful workers and unions, partly as revenge for the miners bringing down Heath in ’74 (the year after this story was broadcast). Huge numbers of traditional working class jobs were annihilated by the Conservatives. 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.

And when Stevens says “oil is the future” he’s only telling part of the truth. The future he really has in mind is one of the corporation as pure post-industrial power structure. Stevens is an administrator, a manipulator of executive practices, PR, lobbying, influence, delegated tasks, etc. This is, in its way, strangely prescient of the outward features of neoliberalism… which was, after all, just getting started roundabout 1973.…

November 20, 2013

7

Jack Graham 50th anniversary countdown, 80s, bourgeois ideology, class, commodification, Enlightenment, exploitation, hierarchy, history, thatcherism 0

The Doctor has refused Enlightenment. Turlough is nonchalantly (rather too nonchalantly) picking at his fingernails when the White Guardian offers him a share.

“It’s a diamond,” he says, staring at the massive, glowing crystal, “The size! It could buy a galaxy. I can have that?”

The White Guardian tells him he can.

“I would point out,” interjects the Black Guardian, “that under the terms of our agreement, it is mine… unless, of course, you wish to surrender something else in its place. The Doctor is in your debt for his life. Give me the Doctor, and you can have this,” he indicates the crystal, “the TARDIS, whatever you wish.”

Turlough is evidently extremely tempted. He has to struggle with himself. When he shoves it towards the Black Guardian, it couldn’t be more obvious that he is angry and disappointed with the choice he feels have has to make.

“Here,” he shouts petulantly, burying his face, “take it!”

Even so, he does make that choice.

The Black Guardian bursts into flames and vanishes, gurgling and screaming.

“Light destroys the dark,” comments the White Guardian. “I think you will find your contract terminated,” he tells Turlough.

Turlough takes a smaller crystal from his trouser pocket. It’s the one the Black Guardian gave him to seal their bargain. It has turned back, charred by the same flames that consumed the Black Guardian. Turlough drops it.

“I never wanted the agreement in the first place,” he mutters.

Tegan is sceptical.

“You believe him because he gave up Enlightenment for your sake,” she tells the Doctor.

“You’re missing the point,” the Doctor says, “Enlightenment was not the diamond. Enlightenment was the choice.”

Well, isn’t that twee.

Except that it’s a bit more grounded that it sounds.

Listen to the words everyone’s been using. Diamond. Buy. Terms. Agreement. Contract. Mine. Debt. This is the language of trade, of commerce, of business, of employment, of property, of value and wealth and commodification. Turlough has been desperately trying to wriggle out of a contract, a job. He was basically coerced into it and given a misleading description of what it entailed. He responded by slacking off, dragging his feet, working to rule, fobbing off the boss with endless excuses. The boss got sick of this and tried to sack him. Then, Turlough was presented with an opportunity to take up an altogether more alluring contract. This time, it was a straightforward deal: a dirty great jewel of immense value (Turlough immediately conceives of it in monetary terms) in exchange for a crude hit. No illusions. No lies. Just kill this guy you know to be pretty decent in return for a big pay-off.

He started the story leaning over a chessboard, moving pieces around, deciding which pawn to sacrifice in the cause of winning the game. He ends the story leaning over a table, staring at a prize, given the option to pick it up in exchange for sacrificing one piece. And he can’t do it.

This refers to more than just Good vs.…

November 16, 2013

18

Jack Graham 50th anniversary countdown, capitalism, conservatives, creature from the pit, feudalism, marxism, money, neoliberalism, thatcherism 0

Everyone is down a mine.

(Incidentally, it’s funny how often Doctor Who in the 70s and 80s keeps coming back to mines. I’m sure it’s nothing to do with the fact that coal mining was a key industry in British economic life during these decades, miners were among the most powerful unionised workers in the 70s, and the 80s saw the calculated destruction of the miners’ unions and their industry by the Tory government. Oh ho no.)

Anyway. As I say, everyone – the Doctor, Romana, K9, Adrasta, Organon and a giant green blob called Erato – is down a mine. And things are coming to a head. (Head. Pit-head. Geddit? Never mind. It doesn’t really work anyway.)

Yes, so anyway… Erato is, as I say, a giant green blob.

“Erato came here fifteen years ago to propose a trading agreement,” says the Doctor, while everyone else still reels from the revelation that the blob has a name, a mind and the ability to talk. “Tythonus is a planet rich in metallic ores and minerals….”

There’s an interlude here where the Doctor and Adrasta have a little argument about the fact that the Doctor is checking his facts by asking an electric dog.

“…the Tythonions exist on ingesting chlorophyll,” the Doctor continues, “Large quantities of it, judging by their size. Now, there’s a superabundance of planet life on Chloris, so…”

“So Erato came here to offer you metal in return for chlorophyll!” finishes Romana.

“Right. But who was the first person he met?”

“The person who held the monopoly of metal here,” supplies Organon in response to the Doctor’s rhetorical question.

He means Adrasta, by the way.

“Right,” agrees the Doctor, “And did she put the welfare of her struggling people above her own petty power? No. She tipped the ambassador into a pit and threw astrologers at him.”

If you don’t know what that last bit means, well I’m sorry… I have limited space and no inclination to explain. What are you doing reading this blog anyway, if you’re not the sort of person who has already seen the DVD at least 412 times?

What Erato didn’t reckon on was the fact that he was a character in a story being written in Britain in the late 70s, when British society was laying to rest the last vestiges of the leftover radicalism of the 60s and just starting to be transformed by the crumbling of the post-war social democratic consensus and the rise of neoliberalism… By coming to a feudal society that existed in such a story, Erato was coming to a place where feudalism was a stand-in for protectionism and backwardness and all sorts of other Bad Things that hindered free trade. So Bad Things were likely to happen to him.

The funny thing is… this story actually sort-of tallies with the Marxist view of history. Marxism thinks historical change happens for all sorts of reasons, but one fundamental reason is the moment when the developing forces of production (how societies reproduce themselves by making what they need) come into conflict with the social superstructure (how relationships in society are arranged).…

November 15, 2013

21

Jack Graham 50th anniversary countdown, 80s, advertising, alienation, capitalism, commodity fetishism, consumerism, happiness patrol, margaret thatcher, revolution, thatcherism, totalitarianism 0

Earl plays a C on his harmonica. It starts a sympathetic resonance in the pipes that stretch under and through the regime on Terra Alpha, like the arteries in a body. What flows in these arteries is sugarly gloop, the outpourings of the Kandy Kitchen. It fills the regime with the glucose it needs to survive. And the regime uses it to kill dissidents or refuseniks or men wearing pink triangles, drowning them in sweetness. Earl’s note causes the encrusted, crystallised, fossilised sugar coating the insides of the pipes to crack and fall. Tonnes of the stuff falls on top of Fifi, Helen A’s savage attack dog and beloved pet. She sent it into the pipes to kill the Doctor and the Pipe People, the surviving aboriginals on her colony.

“Happiness will prevail,” says the artificially fruity voice on the colony tannoy system, “Factory guards are joining forces with the drones to destroy the Nevani sugar beet plant here in sector six. We will keep broadcasting.”

This is a revolution. The killjoys are marching and demonstrating, and having their own melancholy parties in subversion of the rules. The factories are falling to strikers. Even the aboriginals are getting in on the act. And, as in ‘The Sun Makers’, you know the revolution is really happening when it even gets on the news.

“It’s only one factory, Daisy K,” says Helen A, dictator of Terra Alpha and obvious Thatcher analogue, “I’ve built over a thousand.” (Not that much like Thatcher then. She didn’t build up manufacturing industry; she calculatedly decimated it.)

“What about the reports of riots?,” asks Daisy K, “And public unhappiness?”

Oh for the days when things like the Poll Tax (which, like so many things, now looks like gnat’s piss by comparison) used to cause good, healthy, necessary riots.

Helen A wants to use her best, most fanatical enforcer… but it turns out that she’s already been detained in her own Waiting Zone (they don’t have ‘prisons’ on Terra Alpha, there being no need for unhappy places in the best of all possible worlds). So instead, Helen A asks Daisy K to…

“Get me the Kandyman.”

“You’re not unhappy about something?” asks Daisy K, noticing the cracks in Helen A’s ideological purity when her own self-interest is threatened… just as Thatcher cried for herself when someone subjected her to the strictures of the marketplace of ideas.

“GET ME THE KANDYMAN!”

The Kandyman answers his telephone.

“Kandyman,” he says. (This bit makes me gurgle with pleasure every time. It’s so arch.)

He’s an evil Bertie Basset. Bassett himself is a PR image, an advert, an avatar of a company, a promotor of consumption, the friendly face of capitalism who cheerily encourages kids to shovel sugary shite into their mouths so his puppetmasters can make a profit. The Kandyman is all this and an accretion of various manifestations of authority. He’s the state torturer of a dictator, a killer brand, a manifestation of the confected malnutritious psuedo-delights of consumer capitalism reconfigured as a psychopathic sadist… and he’s a tool, a machine, a commodity fetishised into life, alienated labour (he is the product of the labour of Gilbert M) that confronts his creator as hostile and alien power. …

November 12, 2013

29

Jack Graham 50th anniversary countdown, 80s, bourgeois ideology, capitalism, ideology, neoliberalism, reductionism, social darwinism, sociobiology, survival, thatcherism 2

Midge walks into the Gym. You get the sense that it’s not the sort of place the old Midge would’ve visited. The old Midge would’ve been scared of the self-defence crowd.

The new Midge is all swagger, in his shades and his shiny jacket.

“Waiting on the Sarge?” he asks the room full of silent, watching, bemused, singlet-and-sweatpants-wearing blokes. “He’s been held up. He asked me to have a little chat with you.”

This is a lie.

“I learned a secret today. The secret of success. Thought I’d share it with you.”

Midge has been learning all sorts of things. He’s been quarry in a quarry, hunted through a rocky wilderness on another world, stalked by carnivorous beasts. He chose to survive at all costs. He killed… not just to survive but for fun, for revenge, for a feeling of power that – one senses – is entirely new to him, a new experience in a stunted and powerless dead-end life. Of course, in the process, he adopted the viewpoint of the beasts. The logic of tooth and claw. The logic of ‘fuck you, I’m all right’. The logic that makes you escape the lions by feeding them your friends.

“It’s common sense, right? It’s just the way of the world, right? Survival of the fittest.”

And he’s right, in a way. It is the way of the world. Everyone in his sleepy little home town, his pokey little corner of Thatcher’s Britain, is obsessed with the survival of the fittest. It has seeped all the way through society, into every nook and cranny. It’s in the shops, where Hale and Pace are scared of being driven out of business. It’s in the suburbs where the net curtains twitch. It’s in the Territorial Army training sessions where the Sarge says young men have to be taught to fight. It’s in the housing estate where Midge comes from.

It doesn’t matter that it’s one logic among many in nature, or that sometimes we see it in nature where it isn’t because we often mistake mirrors for windows, or that it may be fitting for the beasts but applying it to people is vacuous and specious and destructive. Truth is: for the purposes of the people who benefit from it, the more vacuous and specious and destructive it is, the better.

“Get rid of the deadwood, let the wasters go to the wall, and the strong will inherit the earth. You and me.”

Why do I suspect that some of the lads in this room used to bully Midge when they were at school with him?

“Do you hear what I’m saying?” he demands, furiously, enraged by their failure to respond to his glib soundbites, “Do you know what I’m talking about?”

He takes off his shades. Beneath them, his eyes are the yellow, mindless eyes of an animal. But that’s what he chose.

The Master is there. A stalking, diseased old man, seething with resentment and malice. Through Midge, his slavering pet, he casts his hypnotic spell over the young men in the room. …

April 26, 2012

Opposite Reaction

Jack Graham arthur scargill, labour, margaret thatcher, media, miners strike, NUM, paul foot, philip sandifer, progress, thatcherism, the sun, tories 4

The TARDIS Eruditorum blog recently took the opportunity to connect ‘The Caves of Androzani‘ with the 1984-85 Miner’s Strike. In the process, Philip Sandifer (the author of the blog) writes:

…Arthur Scargill, head of the NUM, made an egregious political miscalculation. Faced with an accelerated schedule for closing the pits and afraid that he’d lose the vote, Scargill declined to submit the strike to a national vote. This was against NUM rules and allowed Thatcher to delegitimize the strike, which she wasted no time doing, comparing striking miners to Argentina in the Falklands.

and…

The propaganda war, combined with Scargill’s inept politicking, kept the strike from gaining broad support with the public, and it ended in failure a year later, leaving the mining industry and union a shadow of its former self.

Sandifer mentions police savagery and also the wholesale media propaganda assault against the NUM (though he talks about the ‘redtops’, as though it was a purely tabloid phenomenon). Ultimately, however, he seems to imply a plague upon both Thatcher’s and Scargill’s houses.

In the various permutations that this view takes, the heroic resistance of 150,000 workers and their families over a year of struggle is always deemed to have been overshadowed by the lack of a formal vote on it. Here’s a vital corrective to such apparently reasonable ‘even-handedness’, courtesy of Paul Foot in The Vote: How It was Won and How it Was Undermined:

Scargill had failed to win three strike ballots because of the divisions among miners caused by the incentive agreements that had been pushed through by the employers in spite of a ballot vote against them. The ballot results left NUM leadership with the agonizing prospect that pits could be closed piecemeal, one by one, or two by two, and that the union would be prevented by hostile ballot results from responding. This was the background to the confrontation that was started by the closure, without consultation, and in defiance of all agreements, of Cottonwood colliery in Yorkshire. Encouraged by the executive, and by a wave of flying pickets from the threatened pits, strike after strike led very quickly to a massive national confrontation, in which pretty well all the pits in Yorkshire, Scotland, Wales and most of the Midlands were on strike, leaving only traditionally less militant areas, Nottinghamshire and Leicesterhsire, at work.

To those who bleated, ‘I wish Scargill had had a ballot’, there was a prompt reply: ‘Suppose he had had a ballot and lost it – what then?’ Were the miners leaders expected to stand aside while the Government and its newly appointed Coal Board laid waste to the British coal industry? The truth was that actions spoke louder than ballots. The sheer size and breathtaking solidarity of the mass strike was the fact, and the suggestion that the action should have been put at risk by a ballot was an argument that could be sustained only by the enemies of the miners’ union. Very soon, moreover, the democratic potential of the miners’ strike was every bit as obvious as it had been in 1921 and 1926, if not more so.

…

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.…

January 23, 2012

Skulltopus 5: Fair Exchange, No Robbery

Jack Graham capitalism, creature from the pit, david fisher, free trade, graham williams, marx, philip sandifer, season 17, skulltopus, tentacles, tenuous thematic connections, thatcherism 3

Erato the Tythonian in ‘The Creature from the Pit’ doesn’t much resemble an octopus, but nevertheless he/it is a shapeless, amorphous creature that extends a probe which is (briefly) a bit tentacular… though this tends to be obscured by the fact that it also supposedly resembles a cock:

If this picture reminds you of your genitals,
seek immediate medical advice.

Neither seems to have been the writer’s intention. Indeed, in the novelisation, it is specifically stated that “you couldn’t call it a tentacle”. The probe is repeatedly described in terms of hands, fingers and fists. As the story progresses, it becomes clear that Erato is meant to be a kind of giant, disembodied brain.

However, the probe is a long, flexible, green, non-humanoid limb… so let’s not fear to call it a quasi-tentacle, whatever Fisher says.

In any case, the Tythonian is – at least until it starts talking – reminiscent of the Weird… if only via its unstable and amorphous blobbiness.

In this post, I suggested that ‘Spearhead from Space’ erupts into tentacles at the end partly as a way of obscuring something else that is going on in the story, namely a convergence of various themes towards a potential critique of modern British capitalism as a system of hierarchy, racism, imperialism, sexism and exploitation. (Click the link and read it if you think I’ve gone mad.)

I’m planning, in forthcoming posts, to suggest that Doctor Who in the 70s adopts the tentacular as a recurring way of simultaneously fleeing from and signifying capitalism. There is a prelude to this: the Weirdish ab-crabs in ‘The Macra Terror‘. There’s also a transitional story at the other end, just before the semiotic connection largely dies out in the 80s. This transitional story is the final story of the 70s to feature the tentacular even as a suggestion.

Transitional Form

Philip Sandifer, at his TARDIS Eruditorum blog, has described ‘The Creature from the Pit’ as “a proper anti-capitalist screed”. He describes Adrasta as “a selfish arch capitalist who is perfectly happy to thrive while everyone else suffers” and notes that Tat Wood and Lawrence Miles are wrong to write off as anachronistic the idea that Adrasta could’ve been intended as a Thatcher figure (the story was written during the election that she went on to win). However, his argument is considerably more sophisticated than this and rests more especially on something he identifies in the script: the subversion of the (by now) standard Doctor Who ‘evil ruling class vs. rebels’ trope. Sandifer identifies this story as coinciding with the great shift in the ‘centre ground’ of British politics that more-or-less coincided with the advent of Thatcherism.

The key thing is… the way in which both sides of an apparent political debate were in one sense indistinguishable because they both adhered to the same premise… [For example] the way in which the trade unions, Callaghan, and Thatcher all took for granted that maximizing profit was the right thing to do. The idea that they were opposing sides in many key ways serves more to cut other perspectives out of the debate entirely than it does to actually describe a fundamental philosophical difference between them.

…

1 2