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you were expecting someone else

You Were Expecting Someone Else 11 (Slipback)

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With Doctor Who off the air for eighteen months everyone involved was, for obvious reasons, interested in finding some way to get some new Doctor Who out. And so they ended up doing a radio series of six ten minute episodes written by Eric Saward. The end home of this series was part of a BBC Radio 4 children’s magazine show entitled Pirate Radio 4. Since he was writing for an overtly children’s audience Saward, to his credit, recognized that his usual space marine action approach was a no go. Accordingly, he channelled Douglas Adams.

Wait, what?

Let’s not forget that one of the foundational myths of the Nathan-Turner era is that the show was irrevocably broken by the Graham Williams era and that it was “silly.” Eric Saward was among the pilers-on, accusing the Williams era of insulting the audience. Now, suddenly, he’s trying to mimic the approach of Williams’s script editor?

The problem is that between the time when that myth was laid down – 1980 or so – and 1985 – there’d been a necessary reevaluation of things. In 1980 Douglas Adams was a comedy writer who’d had a decent success with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, with the novel coming out towards the end of his time on the show. Accordingly, he could be dismissed as having made the show silly. But 1985 he’d gotten to book four of the trilogy and was a reliably best-selling author. And suddenly he was a major point of legitimacy for Doctor Who – someone the program wanted to boast about its association with instead of boasting about moving past.

But more than that, there is something odd about the spectacle of Eric Saward writing light comedy. I mean, he attempted dark comedy on a regular basis – there’s a great moment in the infamous Starburst interview when, pressed on the idea that Doctor Who isn’t funny anymore, he pointed out that Vengeance on Varos, The Two Doctors, and Revelation of the Daleks are all comedies. Which, I mean, they technically are, but… this is clearly not what those critics meant. This, though, is the only real instance of him doing an extended piece of straightforward comedy in Doctor Who on his own initiative (as opposed to in the course of a salvage job).

It’s not very good, but it’s not very good in the same ways that The Visitation is not very good – a case of the whole being markedly less than the sum of its recycled parts. Many, if not most, of the ideas are genuinely funny, but the story is in many ways wholly encapsulated by the drunk ditz computer, a funny idea that overstays its welcome by a considerable margin. Still, it’s nowhere near as bad as its reputation. Doctor Who has always faltered when people attempt explicitly “for children” versions of it. This is no worse than The Pescatons before it or The Infinite Quest after it, if we’re being honest. Indeed, it’s probably better than either.…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else 10 (FASA)

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The 1984 Doctor Who roleplaying game published by FASA is, as roleplaying games go, not hugely exciting or interesting. As Doctor Who merchandise it’s slightly more exciting – and inadvertently hilarious at times, such as when it provides a character sheet for Peri that reveals her to be wildly less competent than a newly created player character would be. (So far as I can tell from a perusal of the rules she’s spent exactly eight attribute points and three skill points. A new character should have 74-84 skill points and 38-48 attribute points. I assure you that if you knew what any of this meant it would be hilarious.)

But what’s interesting about it, and why it gets more than a footnote in the blog is that it allows for an interesting look at the rather nebulous process of “identification” and its slightly saner cousin “empathy.” It should come as no surprise, given the rather hardline anti-realist and anti-escapist position of this blog, that I am no fan of “identification” as a concept. In almost all cases I strongly favor models of reading/viewing/whatevering that openly and consistently acknowledge the fact that fiction is fiction, feeling that even if the resulting theories are a bit more complex at first glance they avoid the sorts of absurd contortions that are needed the moment you start digging into a model based around the idea of immersion, escapism, realism, or, yes, identification. Readings based on some flavor of “suspension of disbelief” require the reader to continually moderate between a knowingly false premise (“this is real”) and a true one (“this is not real”). In practice this is always going to be more complex than a system that sticks to one set of true premises.

Many years ago a professor expressed the problems of identification with the following example, which I don’t know if was his originally or not. Imagine a horror movie with a female protagonist walking up a hill towards what the audience knows to be a haunted house, but that she does not. The girl is not afraid in this circumstance, but the audience is. Then, at the end of the movie, imagine her battered, injured, but having finally killed whatever monster lives in the house. At this moment the audience feels triumphant, but the girl feels traumatized, hurt, and terrified. Not only is the audience clearly not identifying with the protagonist here, were the audience to identify with the protagonist the story wouldn’t work at all. In order to function that plot has to have the audience and the protagonist feeling almost the exact opposite.

To my mind, at least, everything one wants to get out of the concept of identification can be accomplished with far more sensible concepts like “investment” and “empathy.” What’s at issue in the hypothetical horror movie is not that we feel the same things as the protagonist but that we both understand what she feels and have an emotional investment in it that is rooted in similarities between her and her situation and things we recognize in our own lives.…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else 9 (Longleat, Doctor Who Monthly, the Peter Davison Comics)

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Longleat, by any measure, is an archeology project. Certainly I have nothing that could accurately be called a memory of it, having been one and not there. But grasping about for equivalencies proves oddly unsatisfying. It was a major convention in 1983, yes. In this regard, it was a known quantity. But analogy is terribly unhelpful here. To compare it to the 2012 “official convention” in Cardiff – an event I just escaped from a few hours ago at time of writing – is pointless. The Cardiff convention was a slickly professional affair and, more to the point, was executed by a BBC that had full mastery of the concept of fandom and its relationship with Doctor Who. Its slickness was in most regards cover for the real key fact, which is that it was an official convention in every sense of the word – a convention that actively promoted an official narrative of what the series was and how it was loved.

Longleat, by and large, was the opposite. If anything it marked the point where it became possible to talk about alternatives to the official narrative in a meaningful sense. But to understand this we need to move over and look at Doctor Who Magazine, at this stage called Doctor Who Monthly. We talked a bit about the rise of the fan industrial complex towards the end of the Graham Williams era, but by late 1983 it was in full effect. Starting with Season Nineteen the magazine offered a thoroughly familiar and reliable structure. First it would leak scattered tidbits of information about a story in its Gallifrey Guardian column, which offered a smattering of Doctor Who news items. Then, in the last issue that would hit the stands prior to a story’s transmission, a one page preview spelling out much of the premise would be released. Finally, usually about two issues later, the magazine would run a review of the story, typically positive and never flamingly negative. Some months thereafter would come things like the end of season poll and the periodic John Nathan-Turner interview that would further cement the official “end consensus” on a story.

What’s important to stress about this structure, though, is that the information was carefully tuned to regulate and shape how the stories were watched and remembered. This is most obvious with a story like Earthshock, where, of course, Nathan-Turner’s insistence on keeping the return of the Cybermen a secret required that the story be previewed in a manner almost but not entirely unrelated to what the story was actually about.

In other words, Doctor Who Magazine had become a major part of formulating a paratext of Doctor Who that resulted in a highly complex structure for interaction with the series. This contextualizing of the current series was reinforced by an active effort to historicize the past of the series, with features not only covering the plots of long-lost Hrtnell and Troughton stories but also including interviews with writers and directors of past stories that served to educate the reader about the material reality of television production.…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else 8 (Alan Moore’s Doctor Who Work)

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Let us first stipulate that there is relatively little reason to care about these particular comics on their merits in either Alan Moore’s ouvre or the Doctor Who canon. Bits of them – particularly “Black Death,” may have credible cases for placing in any given top ten list of Doctor Who comics, but they’re not self-evidently the best Doctor Who comics ever or anything, as one might hope from the combination of Alan Moore and Doctor Who.

On the other hand, there’s something fundamentally irresistible here. I mean, obviously there is – I wouldn’t do a post like this if there weren’t. But I’m also hardly the only one. Russell T. Davies himself namechecks Alan Moore’s Deathsmiths of Goth in a text piece published about the Time War. Miles and Wood argue that it was Moore’s take on Time Lord history in “Star Death” that shifted the consensus view of the relationship between Rassilon and Omega. And more generally speaking, starting from 1987 and continuing to the present day, Alan Moore has been a massive influence on the show whether directly or indirectly. (For the purposes of this statement remember that Neil Gaiman is in many ways the quasi-authorized successor to Alan Moore) Much like Douglas Adams before him and Neil Gaiman after him, Alan Moore carries a massive fanbase that is separate from Doctor Who, and thus the intersections between the two of them carry odd and peculiar resonances.
This doesn’t change the fact, however, that we are talking about a mere 28 pages of comics here, all drawn with David Lloyd, later to be Moore’s artist on V For Vendetta. His first two stories consist of four two-page installments, and then he did a set of three interconnected one-parters at four pages each. That is it. We are necessarily not talking about a huge contribution to Doctor Who here. Furthermore, all of these were published in 1980 and 1981. These predate anything that it would be fair to call a major work of Moore’s. This is Alan Moore, in other words, before he was even one of the very goods, little yet before he was one of the greats. 
It shows, most particularly in his second offering, “Business as Usual.” He’s reliant on clunky and awkward thought bubbles to convey exposition, for instance, having a character explore an industrial plant and think “This must be the warehouse section. It seems to be full of kids’ toys. I suppose it figures… after all, our reports say that toys are Galaxy Plastic’s main product…” It’s a case of poor mechanics – simply put, Moore isn’t using the medium well enough to get the exposition out organically. The pacing, similarly, is badly flawed. This is one of Moore’s first multi-part stories, and he hasn’t yet figured out how to make each two-page installment a distinct experience. It’s really an eight page story with four cliffhangers as opposed to a story comprised of four two-part installments. 
But although Moore’s mechanics are still clunky at this phase, even in this – by far the weakest of his Doctor Who efforts – there’s quite a bit that’s sharp.
…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else 7 (Doctor Who Weekly Comics)

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When talking about the British comics industry in the 1980s it is key to note that despite the vast number of important creators coming out of it there were only a handful of actual significant British comics magazines. IPC had other publications beside 2000 AD, but most could be counted on to fold after a few issues and be folded into 2000 AD. Humor publications like The Beano and The Dandy existed, but in their own almost wholly parallel dimension. Dez Skinn had 26 issues of Warrior out that were hugely influential and high-quality but that were, after all, only 26 issues. And Marvel UK had a motley of titles that combined repackaged US comics with original UK-market material. But that was about it. It was a very small industry into which a very large amount of talent was packed.

As a result, when Dez Skinn created Doctor Who Weekly for Marvel UK it was almost inevitable that it would attract some A-list creators. And so it is that Doctor Who comics have been created by Pat Mills and John Wagner (creators of Judge Dredd), Steve Moore, Steve Dillon, Grant Morrison, Bryan Hitch, John Ridgway, David Lloyd, Dave Gibbons, and Alan Moore. We’ll deal with the latter of these on Wednesday in his very own feature because, well, duh. And those that didn’t work on the Fourth Doctor strips will obviously wait as well. But that still leaves us plenty to look at here.

The story that gets most of the attention is the first one, The Iron Legion, and the third, The Star Beast. Both are penned by Wagner and Mills, with art by Dave Gibbons (who handled the overwhelming majority of the Fourth Doctor strips). This is actually a bit unfortunate. Neither is actually very good. I mean, they’re fine comic stories – Wagner and Mills are competent plotters, and Gibbons is obviously a fantastic artist. But the tone is all wrong. Wagner and Mills are action writers who belong on 2000 AD and their attempts to fuse Doctor Who to a straightforward sci-fi action sort of space militarism make Eric Saward’s efforts of the mid-80s look positively coherent by comparison.

It’s not that they make any of the obvious mistakes. Their characterization of the Doctor is imperfect, certainly, but far from disastrous. He gets a couple of good moments throughout the strips. But for the most part he feels like a passenger in Mills/Wagner strips, generally tagging along with some anti-authoritarian rebels with lots of guns as they blow things up and have elaborate chase scenes. It’s obvious that the writers are enjoying their cyborgs, alien chariot races, and bizarre alien parasites more than they’re enjoying the actual star of the strips. Combined with a clear commitment to violent action (there’s a cheeky yet revealing panel in the first installment of The Iron Legion in which a shopkeeper is gunned down and several cans of baked beans are shown exploding in front of him in lieu of actual blood and gore) this just… is off tone for Doctor Who.…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else 6 (Doctor Who and the Pescatons)

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There is a thread that we should follow up on from Friday. We established that The Seeds of Doom was quite entertaining. But there is a serious ethical critique to be raised against it. And you’d kind of hope that there would be more people who would prioritize the ethical critique over the entertainment defense. There’s something terribly unfortunate about the fact that a story that is at best wholly amoral and at worst outright ethically bankrupt can be genuinely believed by fans to be the 16th best Doctor Who story ever.

Which brings us to Doctor Who and the Pescatons, about which it is far more easy to find things to criticize than it is to find things to praise. This in and of itself is hardly an unusual position for Doctor Who to be in. Nobody gets to active Doctor Who fandom without going through a few paragraphs that begin “In spite of…” There’s even a complex if unofficial set of rules to this sort of thing. It makes sense – loving Doctor Who necessarily involves a fair amount of taking green bubble wrap seriously. But there are also pathological elements to it.

Sometimes the pathology is harmless and, if you look at it the right way, even kind of endearing. There are people who factionalize hilariously within fandom, and come to love or hate a particular era with a verve that pushes them to absurdly indefensible positions. To use an example I mentioned in an earlier entry, say what one likes about “The Wedding of River Song,” but to complain that it’s a letdown in terms of how it resolves its plotlines while praising Pyramids of Mars as a classic when it pulls up lame as badly as it does in the fourth episode is to demonstrate a complete and utter disconnection from reality. 

But there are cases that go further than this. Fans want desperately to love Doctor Who, and sometimes are far too willing to excuse real problems in order to do so. This is not unique to Doctor Who fandom. Indeed, it’s not really unique to fans. People are defensive of the things they love. A normal person would look at The Celestial Toymaker and say “well that’s racist crap.” But a Doctor Who fan, if they can bring themselves to admit that it is racist, is going to be actively depressed by that fact. And so many opt not to admit it, pretending that it or Tomb of the Cybermen are just fine. And this is a more pathological and upsetting aspect of fandom, and one we see pretty clearly with The Seeds of Doom.

But this brings us back to The Pescatons. Because while fans are willing to blind themselves to the faults of television episodes, it’s rare to see them so willing to protect spin-off material. Few people are moved to defend the New Adventures or Big Finish Audios with the same passionate fervor as people will line up to explain why, despite the overwhelming pile of evidence, to explain why The Celestial Toymaker isn’t racist.…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else 5 (Countdown/TV Action)

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And once again, it’s time for the Doctorly engagement with the wide world of ancillary merchandising. When last we left this story, back in June, we were noting that the late 60s comics fit firmly in a specific tradition of British comics, and were as accurate a translation of Doctor Who to that medium as was meaningfully possible.

For both the beginning and end of the Pertwee years, the existing Doctor Who comic strip appeared in the same magazine it did in the Troughton years – TV Comic. At the onset, the comics were very much in the same mould as the late Troughton strips only with a grotesque representation of Jon Pertwee instead of one of Patrick Troughton. They shared the same mind-wrenchingly odd sense of plotting, and the same belonging to a different tradition. At the close they were something different. The manic energy of the Troughton years had faded, but it was replaced with a much more taut sense of how to handle action and suspense.

But the real difference can be spotted just by looking. Here – I’ve taken a page from both the early and late TV Comic Pertwee strips and put them below. Have a look:

The earlier page, on the left, is a very straightforward grid of individual images. But the later page, on the right, has a considerably more interesting visual style, with oddly shaped panels. You can see, even shrunk down and without knowing what the story is about, that the panel shape gets weird when the aliens show up. You can also see how the round panel is used as a focus, with the other panels forming a sort of starburst around them. You can also see in the panel of the Doctor’s face that things like light, shadow, and perspective are being used in the later comic in a way that they weren’t in the earlier. In other words, the comic had become considerably more visual. 
To understand how and why that happened, we’re going to have to pull back and look at the British comics industry in general again. We’ve already talked about how the British comics industry is historically based around the anthology magazine in a way that the American comics industry hasn’t been since the 1940s or so. What’s crucial to understand is that for the most part, this meant that people were following brands of comics more than individual stories. Major magazines would have flagships, certainly – 2000 AD has Judge Dredd, Eagle had Dan Dare, etc. But more important was their general tone. A given magazine couldn’t survive by having one good strip and a bunch of filler. Not every strip could be a classic, but any successful magazine had multiple good strips and a fairly consistent tone. 
The big two in the end of the British comics history pool that we care about are, as I’ve said, Eagle and 2000 AD. Eagle’s heyday came and went before Doctor Who, meaning that the deserved “Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea” entry on Dan Dare never really quite had a place to go.
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You Were Expecting Someone Else 4 (TV Comic)

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It’s been a while since we’ve been over on this end of the Doctor Who pool, and with the Troughton era coming to an end imminently, it seemed like a good time to pop back over and look. Especially because last time we were looking at the World Distributors annuals, and this time we’re looking at the Polystyle TV Comics strips.

What’s funny, though, is that despite being a completely different company and publication, it’s tough to make too much out of the differences between the two sets of comics. This might not seem surprising given that they are both telling Doctor Who stories, and thus presumably have some unifying influence. Except that both are so wildly different from the television series that it ends up being mildly surprising to watch them end up more or less on the same planet given how far afield they are from the target.

And yet somehow the comics end up with an odd consistency to them. It’s tempting to allude to some vague sense of a proper order of things in Doctor Who here – the occasional and uncanny sense we’ve had before that this ship is not as rudderless as it should be. But in this case, it seems to me there’s a much more prosaic option – given what British comics were, there was only one way the strip could have been, and both World Distributors and Polystyle did it that way.

For an American comic book fan, there is a lot about the British comics industry that is puzzling. But the thing that should be noted first is that virtually nobody talks about British comic books. It’s not that there aren’t any. It’s just that there aren’t very many, and fewer still that actually matter. Instead, the primary form for British comics is the anthology magazine. The most famous of these are probably, in terms of children’s comics, The Beano and The Dandy, and in terms of science fiction, Eagle and 2000 AD. (Though some would make a case for Eclipse, those people are inevitably Americans who forget that the British comics scene extended beyond Alan Moore. Or, more depressingly, Brits who forget that.) The format of these was generally simple – a couple strips of maybe 4-8 pages each, published weekly.

I could – and really should some day – write a book about how this format shaped British comics. But one of the big things is that it meant that comics often had a bit of a house style. A magazine still had to feel coherent, after all. Furthermore, there’s a fairly tight structure to these strips. With eight pages, fitting a cliffhanger, resolution of last week’s cliffhanger, advancement of the plot, and some exposition to catch people up who have forgotten since last week is a challenge. And so the pace of any action-based strip had to be fairly frenetic.

Even in a setting like the World Distributors Annuals, which don’t serialize stories, the structure this implies is prevalent simply because it’s the structure people expect action comics to be in.…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else III (Daleks – Invasion Earth: 2150 AD)

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Note how the Doctor is mentioned prominently in the
advertising this time.

You Were Expecting Someone Else is a recurring feature covering non-televised Doctor Who from classic eras, generally more or less in the period where they came out. Today we look at the 1966 film Daleks – Invasion Earth: 2150 AD, starring Peter Cushing as Doctor Who, Roberta Tovey as Susan Who, and Bernard Cribbins as Not-Ian-Chesterton.


It’s August 5, 1966. The Troggs are at #1 with “With A Girl Like You,” a nice, proper, crunchy record. The rest of the top ten, however, is mostly pretty unambitious pop, with The Kinks chillaxing at #9. Since we last saw Doctor Who, the news has been a standard mixture of war, mass murder, military coup, and the like. Beyond that, as mentioned last entry, England won the World Cup. Also, The House of Lords issued the Practice Statement a somewhat important milestone in political liberalism in the UK in that it freed the House of Lords up to be more progressive, and August 3rd, 1966 happened, which is interesting only if you’re a Simon and Garfunkel fan. Also, Revolver came out. And, as it’s the summer break in Doctor Who, it’s time for another Dalek film!

It’s strange how different a position this film is in compared to the last one. I mean, first of all, this film flopped and killed plans for a third one (which would have been an adaptation of The Chase, a prospect that is mind-bogglingly weird). Second of all, the show is in a very different place. At the end of season 2, the show was as strong as it had ever been, coming off an inventive season of hits. At the end of season 3, the ratings were in the toilet, the star was being fired, and there was an increasing consensus that the TARDIS had landed everywhere worth landing. As a result, the last movie was in a position to remind us how wonderful Doctor Who could be, and show us things bigger and grander than before. And it basically did that.

But what, exactly, is this film for? Most obviously, it seems to be an occasion for Doctor Who to make a case for its continued relevance – to say “This is what the show can do.” It’s taking a season 2 episode – i.e. from the program’s heyday – and doing it bigger and better. And ironically, given that it failed at the box office, the film is frankly a rousing success in that department. 

I suppose we should deal with the film’s flop status. Why did it flop? The argument that Doctor Who was also flopping at that time is certainly compelling, but it’s worth noting that the film was not advertised as a Doctor Who film, it was advertised as a Dalek film. Admittedly the two were not entirely distinct in people’s minds, and the Dalek craze was past its immediate prime, but Doctor Who’s decline has been compellingly argued to mostly be down to the fact that ITV was aggressively counter-programming it with the Adam West Batman series, not due to actual problems with the snow. No,
…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else II (1966 Annual, The Dalek Book, Dalek World)

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The thing in front is not David the
Gnome. It’s the Doctor. Or did you mean
the Sensorite?

You Were Expecting Someone Else is a recurring feature covering non-televised Doctor Who from classic eras, generally more or less in the period where they came out. Today we look at the 1966 Doctor Who Annual (published in late 1965), The Dalek Book, and The Dalek World, the three earliest examples of Doctor Who spin-off fiction.


So, I’m getting a late start to the blog entry today, kind of have a sinus/allergy headache, and am in a strangely bad mood. Let’s dive right in and tackle the question of canonicity and Doctor Who, shall we? (What? I mean, what do you do when you have a headache?)

I mean, it’s not actually that tough a topic. The sadly defunct blog Teatime Brutality sorted out all the possible issues in Doctor Who canon over here. The piece is as good a take on the matter as I could possibly do, and reveals the rather surprising truth that the single most important episode of Doctor Who in explaining its canon is Gareth Roberts’s The Unicorn and the Wasp. From this data, he works up the extremely handy map of Doctor Who continuity you see somewhere on the right side of your screen.

I’d love to give proper credit for this image, but Teatime
Brutality guy has long since left the Internet and wrote
anonymously before that. So it’s his, whoever he is. Hey
Teatime Brutality guy. If you happen to read this, drop a
line. I’d love to talk about your views on The Big
Bang.

But a broader question is what that means. I mean, it’s all well and good to do some hand waving and proclaim that Doctor Who has no canon and all works of fiction are equally valid in the Doctor Who mythos, but it comes awfully close to the literary criticism equivalent of technobabble. I mean, yes, it’s trivial to show that Doctor Who does not have a canon in the traditional Star Wars tiered sense of things. (Though it’s worth doing so, as Teatime Brutality demonstrates. If only so you can quote that hilarious line from the Transformers Wiki, “Indeed so little attention is paid to it that the franchise is riddled with countless irreconcilable continuity clashes despite being presented as a single continuous story, even in the TV movie and continuing television series that were made many years after the original series was cancelled.” If only for the hilarious implication that we poor Doctor Who fans are somehow living with a terrible affliction in this regard. Hey Transformers fans. We just have a lack of canon. You have two Michael Bay movies. We win.)


So let’s look at it with some historical perspective. Such as via these three books, the earliest instances of something that may or may not be Doctor Who canon. First off, what are they? Well, they’re three books, each about 100 pages.…

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