Vampires in the Stories are Just Pale Imitations of the Real Thing (Blood Harvest)
You Were Expecting Someone Else
Blood Harvest, by Terrance Dicks, is the other portion of the two book cycle that kicks off the Missing Adventures line, the other being the already-talked-about Goth Opera by Paul Cornell. It’s a sequel to State of Decay and practically every story ever on Gallifrey, with Al Capone thrown in to boot. At the time Craig Hinton wasn’t thrilled with the ending, but claimed his “overall impression was of an exciting, compelling book.” Lars Pearson says almost the exact same thing, but says that “Blood Harvest succeeds despite these flaws.” The overall consensus is average – twenty-eighth on Shannon Sullivan’s rankings. DWRG Summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide entry.
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It’s July of 1994. Wet Wet Wet remain at number one with “Love is All Around,” and remain there all month. Both Reel 2 Real and All-4-One also chart, as do the BC-52s, and, less numerically, Take That and Erasure. Andres Escobar is shot and killed in Medellin, an incident widely believed to be revenge for his scoring an own goal in the 1994 World Cup, which Brazil wins later in the month. Fourteen firefighters die in a wildefire on Storm King Mountain in Colorado. Fragments of Shoemaker-Levy begin hitting Jupiter. Israel and Jordan sign a peace treaty, and a bomb explodes outside the Israeli Embassy in London. And Tony Blair wins the leadership election for the Labour Party, so he gets to start being a character in these things I suppose.
While on bookshelves, Blood Harvest. I realized, as I thought about this post, that I am fairly sure this is the third-to-last time we’re actually going to cover a Terrance Dicks story. We’ve got The Eight Doctors, we’ll do one of his two New Series “Quickreads” books, but those are actually the last of the Terrance Dicks material we’re going to look at. And so it’s perhaps time to knuckle down and deal with one of those oft-punted topics that I’ve gestured at broadly, namely Terrane Dicks’s politics.
Let’s first set this up in terms of All-Consuming Fire, a book witch which Blood Harvest shares more than a passing resemblance. Both are Doctor Who stories in the classic “mash up some genres” mode, with Blood Harvest combining Doctor Who, vampires, and gangster noir. Both take their relatively mental premises and have a great deal of fun with them. All-Consuming Fire is in several ways better put together – the seams between the Chicago gangster bits with the Doctor and Ace and the E-Space vampire bits with Romana and Benny are weak, and the two settings barely manage to converge at the end. Still, the book is firmly in the range of “great fun,” and is yet another Doctor Who book that clearly has a sense of glee at the fact that it’s Doctor Who, and thus can casually do vampire gangster noir.
Dicks also does a better job than anyone gives him credit for in writing McCoy’s Doctor. This is still McCoy the chessmaster, with an elaborate plan he’s not telling anyone, and Dicks captures that while keeping it comfortably on the same spectrum as other versions of the Doctor. He manages a Doctor who is elaborately pulling the strings, but who also is charming and fun. The bits with Benny and Romana are also consistently entertaining, and Dicks does well with multiple characters capable of anchoring a narrative. (Not for the first time, splitting Bernice into her own plotline works well) He doesn’t do quite as well hiding his disdain for Ace in her current incarnation, and he gets his first real opportunity to flirt with the threat of rape as an all-purpose “adult” danger by having Ace stripped to her underwear in preparation for being raped, then bursts into tears and kisses her hard-boiled PI rescuer. It is difficult not to be completely repulsed by this.
And so we get to the problem that’s long lurked around Dicks, which is that for all that he’s a fantastic storyteller, he’s got some really problematic moments. He’s prone to casual sexism. Worse than that, he has an intolerable “boy’s club” attitude towards it. He casually talks in interviews about how he replaced Liz Shaw with Jo Grant because the real role of the companion is to get in trouble and ask for the plot to be explained. He’ll put in references to women’s liberation and women’s rights, but they’re inevitably condescending in the way that The Monster of Peladon (which he did a near-full rewrite on) was. And he’s also the sort of person who says, seemingly not entirely jokingly, that he’s not entirely opposed to colonialism and thinks that lots of places in the world would be better if only the British came and sorted them out. (On the documentary about making The Mutants, for those wondering.) And at some point we have to ask whether or not we should just give up on Dicks, declaring him to be a good storyteller with ethics so botched that they simply cannot be taken seriously anymore. And yet despite all of this, given the choice between the “empire is horrible, let’s celebrate its popular fiction” approach of All-Consuming Fire and the quagmire of Terrance Dicks and, oddly enough, I would find myself picking the latter.
The bulk of Dicks’s ethical quagmire comes from his equation of the status quo with political neutrality. This is a problem in a lot of cases – closely related, for instance, to the way in which support for the two-party system in American politics is considered a universal consensus position, thus completely marginalizing dissent regarding any of the myriad of issues on which the two parties agree (for instance, the absolute and unquestioning dominion of a surveillance-based security state – not that the UK manages to do much better with that given an extra political party). But Dicks elevates it to an art form simply because he’s so repeatedly drawn to tackle political issues such that his “neutrality” becomes readily apparent. Which leads to bizarre moments such as the one in Blood Harvest in which Benny solves the political squabbles between the upper class lords and working class peasants of the vampire planet by suggesting they form a House of Lords and House of Commons, because, of course, the British government is the best possible government that can ever be created under any circumstances.
This is, of course, the logic of intrinsic superiority that underlies imperialism. It’s not that British government is a bad system. It’s not even that the House of Lords is bad – I mean, it’s obviously undemocratic in appalling ways, but, you know, the system basically works. And anyway, given that most of the theories on how to reform it involve making it more like the Unite States Senate, it’s difficult not to burst out laughing at them. It’s the sort of blithe nationalism implicit in setting up the British Government as the solution to all the universe’s woes. (Actually, wait, we’re in E-Space, so it’s even more hubristic.) That this is mixed in with a deeply offensive bit in which the idea of the peasants ruling on their own is rubbished because of how they’ve, in the past, formed themselves into “revolutionary councils” that end up being despotic. So basically, the real value of the House of Lords is apparently to stave off Marxism. Oh, and the only reason it’s important to let the peasants have any power is that they’ve had a taste of it and won’t go back, and you can’t roll back history. So yes, this is all horrifying. And yet.
Here we get to part of why I’ve swerved around this topic a bit so far – because there’s no good way to tackle this without it turning into the post where I psychoanalyze British politics a bit. Which, as a non-Brit, I have some reluctance about. But since we have here a book where Terrance Dicks unapologetically analyzes and judges Prohibition-era America, it seems wrong not to return the favor. One of the defining differences between British and American political identity is that the United Kingdom has had the experience of declining in power. The consequences of this are most easily seen in American politics, where any position other than the belief that America is the greatest nation in the world and can do no wrong is treated as absolutely toxic (case in point, Obama’s being slammed for even acknowledging that other countries have their own forms of exceptionalism). Whereas in the UK it would frankly be stranger to see a politician unambiguously declaring that the country was the greatest on the planet.
Instead the UK is characterized by a measure of ambivalence. On a good day it might consider itself one of the greatest countries in the world. More often it trends towards a somewhat more ambiguous position. A reasonable case in point is the Olympic Opening Ceremony, which seemed to have a message roughly of “we’re a bit of a weird island, but we have a lot of history, have made some good music, and our health care system is fantastic, so it all works out.” Compare that to the last opening ceremony in the US, the 2002 Winter Games, which was a jingoistic mess of post-9/11 chest-thumping. (Lowlights included hoisting an American flag recovered from the wreckage of the World Trade Center and NBC cutting frequently to US troops in from Afghanistan chanting “USA! USA!”) This is not to say that the London opening ceremony was anything other than nationalistic, but a nationalism based not so much on “we’re the best in the world” as “we have a motley and idiosyncratic collection of cool stuff, and here’s Mary Poppins fighting Voldemort in defense of universal health care” is an altogether more pleasant form of the phenomenon.
This ambivalence – a tendency to shy away from the definitive – is in some cases Dicks’s biggest weakness. It’s what leads to the “everybody is right and everybody is wrong” mealy-mouthed crap of The Monster of Peladon or Benny settling the dispute between the lords and peasants. But it’s equally one of his greatest strengths. Given Dicks’s intense suspicion of definitive and unyielding positions, when it comes time for Dicks to craft an idealized hero he ends up with one who is perpetually flexible, hedging, and ambivalent. The Doctor’s open disdain for prohibition and explicit admission that as long as it lasts “there will always be bootleggers. The appetite of the people for drink and gambling and – other diversions has to be satisfied… but it must be satisfied discreetly in quiet, well-run establishments.” Yes, this comes in the context of the Doctor manipulating and conning someone, but given that the Doctor spends the story running a speakeasy of his own it seems sincere enough. And yes, there is something more than a little unsettling about the Doctor seeming to be sympathetic to Al Capone. But the nature of the approach is more interesting here than the particulars – the Doctor is displaying a pragmatism that reacts to changing circumstances, and this is what Dicks finds heroic.
And this pragmatism seems inexorably linked to the British identity that Dicks so clearly invests in. (It’s also part and parcel of what Cornell has the Brigadier describe the Doctor as embodying in No Future: “eccentricity, the creative amateur, and civilization.”) It’s one full of ambivalence and irony. Dicks’s troubling statement that he thinks much of the world would be better off if British people came by to sort them out must, at the end of the day, be taken in context with moments like his joke in Robot about how only Great Britain could be trusted with the world’s nuclear codes, as the rest of the world were all foreigners. Or the moment in The Horror of Fang Rock where the Doctor, asked if he’s in charge, grins and says “No, but I’m full of ideas.” Which is, in Dicks’s world, perhaps the more important qualification: the ability to keep coming up with new stuff. It is also the view that underlies the modest and unassuming heroism of the Brigadier, who may or may not be humanity’s great defender, but who is nevertheless doing the best he can.
And so, oddly, I find it easier to be redemptive towards Dicks than I do towards Lane. Take the most cringeworthy moment of Blood Harvest, the section in which Dicks has Ace encounter “a tall bald-headed old negro scrubbing at the sidewalk,” who makes folksy and dialect-laden comments like “blood don’t shift easy, missy.” He is, of course, a horrible stereotype, and it is difficult to figure out how the hell “negro” got past an editor in 1994. And yet this is still a better job of representing the oppressed and marginalized within a period setting than Andy Lane managed in all of his blood and thunder about imperialism. Yes, it’s grotesquely paternalistic. Yes, the kind-hearted and honest black man in a menial job is just another flavor of the noble savage. But in the end I still prefer it to Lane’s dangerous mix of self-righteous anger and complete erasure for the basic reason that a viewpoint based on ambivalence, even a patronizing, colonialist, and at times outright racist and sexist one, is more capable of changing. The pragmatic ambivalence of Dicks may blind him to genuinely ethically righteous points at times, but it also lets him change his mind and move forward.
And if we’re being honest this is reflected in Dicks’s career. When I finish the book versions, Dicks is going to get at least one entry focusing on his work in every book from Hartnell on up through Tennant. For all his conservative tendencies, Dicks is a writer who did adapt with the times – and his take on McCoy’s Doctor in this book shows that he could keep adapting. But more broadly, his politics are ones that seem more likely to adapt. Lane may have accurately prefigured the Moffat-era entanglement of Doctor Who and Sherlock Holmes, but it remains Dicks’s take on the Doctor that is more fundamental to who the character is and what the show is. You cannot remove Terrance Dicks from what Doctor Who is. And in the end this makes sense. Is he frustratingly conservative, imperialistic, and paternalistic? Yes. But at the end of the day it is easier to have faith in the future of his viewpoints than in the troubling practice of burying large numbers of problems in the past while uncritically mining that past as if a layer of detachment and self-criticism is sufficient inoculation against its poisons.
And if Terrance Dicks’s ideology is a bit too slanted towards a British nationalism that led in the past to empire, well, fine. If I’m to be honest, I must admit to having more faith in the British attitude than in most others, my own culture included, precisely because it has the decency to temper its faith in itself. Dicks, like any other writer, is not the teleological endpoint of Doctor Who. As I am endlessly fond of pointing out, more is required. But unlike some writers, including some whose politics I favor far more, Dicks doesn’t want to be the final word on the subject. Whatever his flaws, Dicks is a master at getting the audience to keep reading. And as long as that’s true, there’s always space for redemption.
October 12, 2012 @ 1:31 am
'This is not to say that the London opening ceremony was anything other than nationalistic, but a nationalism based not so much on “we’re the best in the world” as “we have a motley and idiosyncratic collection of cool stuff, and here’s Mary Poppins fighting Voldemort in defense of universal health care” is an altogether more pleasant form of the phenomenon.'
Yes! And further to that – the national reaction (as essayed in various news media the following week) was one of, yes pride, but also a self effacing and genuine 'Aw shucks, Really, us?' Like no-one had ever given us permission to celebrate that side of our national character. Usually at these kind of events (especially sporting ones) we get also get the Union Flag waving jingoistic imperialism which, post WWI and II, we've really felt a bit queasy about. Not quite on the level of 'USA USA!' but as you point out we're an empire on the decline. This though, with its detournment of the Queen as icon with the Bond helicopter stunt and its fetishising of working class iconography (Jarrow, suffragettes, miners, nurses etc.)came close to suggesting a funky post-modern imperialism which anyone could share. For a brief moment we really felt like One Nation Under A Groove.
It was a shame then that in the Olympic ceremony the much anticipated nod to Doctor Who as British icon didn't materialise except as a blink (wish I'd intended that as a pun)and you'll miss it audio sting. And how in retrospect the denoument of 'Fear Her' got the mood so embarrasingly wrong.
October 12, 2012 @ 6:03 am
I think I can forgive "Fear Her" getting 2012 wrong in the light of "The Tenth Planet" getting 1986 far wronger.
October 12, 2012 @ 7:15 am
Well I for one agree with Terrance Dicks.
I think the British political system is the best one on the planet.
Here in Britain we have a stable parliamentary government and the rule of law. We have free and fair elections and you can speak your mind and not get locked up. And we have a constitutional monarchy to hold it all together.
Yes, there were things that were rotten about the British Empire, but it had it's good points too. We imported British values of decency, fair play and justice.
I don't know why you left-wing people have to always knock it all down.
October 12, 2012 @ 7:38 am
If I wrote my reply to Matthew on a T-shirt, I'd be locked up.
October 12, 2012 @ 7:59 am
Well, first of all, as a left-wing person who just wrote a blog post in which I very pointedly did not knock it all down, I'm a bit puzzled by your comment.
That said, I am inherently suspicious of the confirmation bias implicit in anyone who thinks that what they are familiar with corresponds to the best in the world. I think that the number of people who are qualified to speak meaningfully about comparative world governments is pretty small, and as far as I know doesn't include anyone who posts regularly here. For my part, I know next to nothing about the government of, say, Norway. But it seems a pretty good place. Perhaps it's a better government than the US or UK. I honestly don't know.
It's the certainty on the basis of little evidence that disturbs me about most nationalism. In my country this is openly terrifying – people who have next to no experience outside of the US, or even their own region of the US casually declare America to be the greatest country in the world, and it's deeply, deeply disturbing and bad. I am sure your perspective is more cosmopolitan than that – it's difficult for it not to be in Europe – but all the same, I think it's tough for anyone to say with authority that their system of government or way of life is the model for the whole world. And I think the temptation and tendency to do that is the exact horror behind the British Empire – the blind belief that British culture was more decent and just, and surely more decent and just than cultures that the British didn't even understand.
I think the British government is a wonderful system of government. I even think it's better than the US. And, as I've said, I am in fact a royalist. Surely that's sufficient love for the country. Surely I don't have to denigrate every other country in the world as inferior in the process of loving one.
October 12, 2012 @ 8:06 am
"We have free and fair elections" — hardly fair. The first past the post system plus the frankly bizarre way constituency boundaries are drawn up means that millions of people's votes don't matter at all.
"and you can speak your mind and not get locked up." — Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Have you read the newspapers this week? People are getting locked up under 'anti-terror' legislation brought in by Labour, for things like wearing a T-shirt or posting a Facebook status.
"We imported British values of decency, fair play and justice."
Because no other country in the world had ever thought of those things?
October 12, 2012 @ 8:09 am
Fair enough- your not knocking it down.
Sorry to go all ranting Daily Mail type all of a sudden.
When I read left-leaning stuff, my Tory soul seems to come out.
But then when I meet Daily Mail readers, the easy-going Guardian-reading side of me comes out.
October 12, 2012 @ 8:14 am
Andrew, this country is not perfect. You get the police arresting people for odd things sometimes, but free speech usually prevails.
Anti-terror legislation is a tricky one. We are dealing with an international terrorist menace. That means balancing out the interests of freedom with security. Our government has to make difficult decisions about how to get that balance right.
October 12, 2012 @ 8:21 am
Comparing other countries' systems of government is very like looking at your neighbours' lawns through high-powered binoculars. Even with the added perspective and attention to detail they give, you still won't see what the people who actually live there see.
You only have to look at any political discussion within a particular country (well, US & UK since we're all speaking English here) to see how much everyone hates the current Goverment, the previous Government, and all political parties.
Phil has already made plain his envy of our National Health Service, and yet you'd wonder if he was talking about the same NHS when you see how people in the UK moan about it.
We also have to remember that when Phil talks about the UK and US Political Systems, he doesn't mean the current UK Coalition Government or the Obama Administration. He means the system that has produced them. And I have to say that I think he's correct in many respects. There are faults with the UK system, yes. But would you rather live under the German system, or the US system, or God Forbid any of the Middle-Eastern systems?
October 12, 2012 @ 8:28 am
I don't see how it could conceivably be possible that the best government for Britain could also be the best government for somewhere with a wildly different culture, history, and resources, say (to pick a nation entirely at random) Thailand. Or, for that matter, that the best system for modern Britain could possibly also be the best system for first-century Britain.
I'd say the claim that any system of government is the best "in the world" is pretty much meaningless; the most you can say is that it is the best for a particular time and place.
October 12, 2012 @ 11:33 am
While the political angle is interesting, I'm commenting just to say that I'm quite surprised to learn that you're not doing Shakedown, what with the tie-in to the direct-to-video movie and everything.
October 12, 2012 @ 12:09 pm
I'd been planning on doing the DVD, but changed plans to Downtime.
October 12, 2012 @ 12:27 pm
I guess you could also believe that (say) the British system is the best one on the planet, without necessarily imagining that it's the best there could ever possibly be. The former would be a bit blinkered and nationalist but ultimately understandable. The latter, which seems to be where Dicks is heading with this book (at least based on what's written here – I honestly can't remember if I've read the book or not), is just silly.
October 12, 2012 @ 12:47 pm
@Janjy: Well, but just the notion that there could be one best system of government, that is the best system of government for every culture, makes my skin crawl. The only way to make it work is to erase cultural differences; for example, the U.S. has plutocrats instead of nobles, and thus cannot have a House of Lords. The only way to make the British system of government work in the U.S. would be to replace USian culture with British culture, and that puts us smack in imperialist territory.
October 13, 2012 @ 1:27 am
I hadn't heard of Shakedown before. What are/were the considerations in favour of doing either?
October 13, 2012 @ 2:32 am
@Philip Sandifer: Why are you a royalist? I haven't heard you mention that before. 🙂
October 13, 2012 @ 3:42 am
Any government requires some sort of fetishized object upon which its legitimacy as a state is pinned. In the US we have the Constitution. For the UK, it's the monarch. The Constitution is a piece of paper that does not change or adapt over the course of centuries. Furthermore, it gives the unfortunate impression that, as a piece of writing, anyone can interpret it skillfully, giving fuel to things like the Tea Party, which inexplicably believes that it's interpreted the Constitution well.
The monarch, on the other hand, is a mortal human being. Any given one dies and is replaced as time goes on, preventing the sort of stasis that, in the US, leads to thinking along the lines of "well this was how we did it in the eighteenth century, so barring an elaborate amendment procedure this is how we'll do it today." Monarchs are also pleasantly inscrutable compared to prose. Which means, in essence, a more adaptable sort of government.
Given that both produce functional liberal democracies, I'll take the adaptability.
October 13, 2012 @ 5:36 am
I realize I'm probably in a minority on this, but I thought "SHAKEDOWN" was possibly the best WHO-related spin-off video I saw during the 90's. I'm sure Terrence Dicks was the reason for this. So many of the stories I'd seen (just about all of "THE STRANGER" videos, etc.) seemed written to be deliberately vague and confusing, more like "THE TWILIGHT ZONE" than anything else, trying to force viewers to watch over and over and wrack their brains to figure out what the HECK you're watching. "SHAKEDOWN" was, to me, a perfect example of "clear storytelling"– something, I feel, has become criminally under-rated.
Although The Doctor is not in it, , it felt MORE like "DOCTOR WHO" than anything else I got ahold of from that period (including the Paul McGann film– heh).
October 13, 2012 @ 5:49 am
Interesting. Personally for me the royal family doesn't provide the state with any legitimacy. The constitution at least attempted to base a state on a set of moral principles, which admittedly is a bit dodgy as over time moral outlooks can change. But what principles do the royals endorse? They're placed in a position of reverence just because they were born into a certain family, a position no one outside of that family can ever hope to rise to. Frankly that's prejudice and any state with a figurehead that represents prejudice doesn't get my endorsement. Sorry if I sound like I'm having a rant, I just really dislike having a royal family. 🙂
October 13, 2012 @ 10:30 am
@John.
I often hear this from anti-monarchists or people who just dislike the British Royal Family – the idea that they are placed in a position of reverence just because they come from a long pedigree. Oh and before I go any further, I'm absolutely fine with the idea that you don't like having a royal family. That's part & parcel of the free speech thing mentioned further up the comments. Just so long as you don't mind me liking them! 😀
Anyway, the point I'm making is that what I think people forget is that we're not forced to revere them. You don't have to worship the Queen, or even take a blind bit of notice of a thing she says. She has no effect on any laws that you have to obey, and you are free to totally ignore her existance (as much as you're able, with her face all over the stamps).
Unlike a Constitution of course the British Monarchy can't be interpreted differently by certain factions as (unlike a Constitution) they have the ability to speak.
October 13, 2012 @ 11:27 am
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October 13, 2012 @ 11:44 am
Not forced perhaps but there's no question that it is institutionalised in are society and we're certainly strongly encouraged to respect and admire them. We may not be forcibly made to respect them but they are placed in a 'position' of reverence, where it is expected of us to treat them differently. To me treating someone differently because of the family they were born into is just plain prejuidice, wether it be reverence or scorn. I personally don't think that's something that should be encouraged in our or any society. 🙂
October 13, 2012 @ 11:50 am
@ Spacewarp 'Unlike a Constitution of course the British Monarchy can't be interpreted differently by certain factions as (unlike a Constitution) they have the ability to speak.'
How are we to interpret the monarchy? 🙂
October 13, 2012 @ 2:18 pm
Interpret the monarchy in any way you want, but if you try to start a movement (e.g. the Tea Party) based on your interpretation, the actual members of the monarchy will put you right (if you're wrong).
As to the Royal Family and the Monarchy being placed in a position of reverence, well this is complex, as we're actually talking about two different things here. The first ("the Royals") are placed in that position by the current prevelent Cult of Celebrity that puts people from TOWIE and winners of Big Brother in the same place. In that sense it is the Media in response to public demand that puts them there. This aspect of the the British Royal Family I can take or leave, and I believe anyone else in this country should be free to do the same.
The second element – the Monarchy itself – is quite distinct from the "celebrities" that make up the current incarnation (the Windsors), and is a kind of historical backbone of the whole of the British Nation, stretching back to at least 1066 and arguably longer.
One of these – the "celebrity" royal family – does not demand our revererence, unless we allow it to. The other one – the 2000+ year old British Monarchy – well, I think we should be proud that it exists as a continual affirmation of the British Nation. If you're going to have a symbol of the longevity and rich history of your country, why not use the continued existance of your Monarchy?
October 13, 2012 @ 2:49 pm
What "2000+ year old British Monarchy" ?!
The British monarchy dates from the Act of Union in 1707. Even if you want to date it from James I and VI, and ignore the whole 'monarch of two independent countries' thing, and the rather more serious eleven-year period with no monarch at all, that only takes us back to 1603.
The first person even to be king of all England was Aethelstan, in the tenth century. And Wales didn't become ruled by the monarch of England until the late 13th century, before which it was a bunch of separate countries.
"the Monarchy itself – is quite distinct from the "celebrities" that make up the current incarnation (the Windsors), and is a kind of historical backbone of the whole of the British Nation, stretching back to at least 1066 and arguably longer"
Well, no. William I was a king of England, not of "the whole of the British Nation", because there was no British nation until 1707. It's pointless to single 1066 out when looking at the monarchy — William was just one in a long line of people with no claim to the throne who took over . He wasn't the first and certainly wasn't the last.
"If you're going to have a symbol of the longevity and rich history of your country, why not use the continued existance of your Monarchy?"
Because it hasn't had a continual existence, and for large parts of the time hasn't been the monarchy of the whole of the country as it stands now.
So why not use the continued existence of Parliament itself? Parliament has existed since the early 13th century, before the countries of England and Wales were joined, and unlike the monarchy has existed for the whole of that time.It represents the whole country, and for all its faults has done far more of which the country can be proud.
October 13, 2012 @ 3:13 pm
I wasn't really referring to the media, although they play their part, I was referring more to national anthems, parades, royal weddings and other special treatment not afforded to ordinary citizens. They're given this special treatment due merely to the family they were born into and I don't think there can be any denying that is prejudice. It just comes down to whether you think it's a prejudice worth living with due to its other possible benefits. Personally I don't think there's any excuse for prejudice however long lasting it's been. The continued existence of a system that endorses sexism [sons inherit before daughters], religious discrimination [no one outside of the church of England can marry into the royal family] and is wholly undemocratic [the people have no say on their continued existence or who is our monarch] is not an affirmation of any history or British attributes I can feel proud of. I'm proud of all human achievement but if we need to be specific to Britain, this country has produced artists and inventers whose achievements will last longer than any monarchy and I feel they should serve as a far greater source of pride. 🙂
P.S
Apologies for any previous spelling mistakes, spell checker was turned off. 🙂
October 13, 2012 @ 3:26 pm
@ Andrew Hickey
'So why not use the continued existence of Parliament itself? Parliament has existed since the early 13th century, before the countries of England and Wales were joined, and unlike the monarchy has existed for the whole of that time. It represents the whole country, and for all its faults has done far more of which the country can be proud.'
Because Parliament don't live in palaces, wear fetching coronets or have fairy tale weddings with pretty dresses. Although ‘Give Up the Funk (Tear the Roof off the Sucker)’ is a classic, definitely something to be proud of. 😛 [sorry now I'm just being childish]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aegs-CR8ZdM
October 13, 2012 @ 9:07 pm
That said, I am inherently suspicious of the confirmation bias implicit in anyone who thinks that what they are familiar with corresponds to the best in the world
There's also the pessimistic correlate of those who think what they're familiar with is the worst in the world. Last time I was in Edinburgh I talked to a protestor in front of the parliament building. She said that she used to think that Scotland had the most corrupt government in the world (yes, really: Scotland) but since she's been tabling in front of Holyrood and talking to tourists from many different countries, she'd discovered that governments seem to behave rather dreadfully all over the planet!
Any government requires some sort of fetishized object upon which its legitimacy as a state is pinned.
In that case I'd prefer a fetishized object I can firebomb without moral qualms. That seems to give constitutions an edge over kings.
October 14, 2012 @ 1:03 am
Blimey some of you lot are right killjoys aren't you? Replace the Monarchy with Parliament as representative of the great country of Great Britain? So instead of school children drawing pictures of kings and queens in crowns and waving flags at royal processions, we tell them to draw the Prime Minister surrounded by the Cabinet. The Monarchy and Royal Family in this country is all about fairy tale weddings and living in palaces. That's the wonder of childhood, being told stories about princesses and royal marriages, and then finding out that in your country they really happen.
I've had the same Queen since I was born 50 years ago and that's continuity for you. I've watched her grow old alongside me and deep in my heart I feel she's a representative of the country I live in. That's what I feel, and no Government can ever give me that, because no Government has been in power for 50 years (if it had, it would be a Dictatorship, and we wouldn't be having these discussions). The feeling I and my kids get when watching anything to do with the Monarchy on the TV is the same feeling that makes Americans stand up when they hear their National Anthem. It's pride. Pride in simply being here, and having something that reflects that. No more no less.
It's also telling that I've never seen anyone dislike the Monarchy without also disliking the Royal Family, and vice versa, using reasons for disliking one as justification for disliking the other.
Anyway (unusually, since this is an internet discussion) I feel no need to have the last word so I shall now go and cook a great British Fry-up of bacon, eggs, black pudding and sausage.
October 14, 2012 @ 2:02 am
"It's also telling that I've never seen anyone dislike the Monarchy without also disliking the Royal Family, and vice versa, using reasons for disliking one as justification for disliking the other."
Really? Well, I have nothing against the current Royal Family as a family, and actually think that most of the time they do a good job in the public role they've been assigned. But I don't believe that role should exist. Ideally no role should exist where people have to live their lives in the public eye simply because of an accident of birth – there should be some choice involved. This isn't completely achievable in our current society, but the monarchy is one aspect we could get rid of.
Oh, and I'm happy to have fairytale weddings and living in palaces just going on in fairytales. I don't need them in real life any more than I need dragons burning the fields and demanding princesses in tribute.
Having said that, I'm not going to demand that anyone act on my opinions!
Anyway (unusually, since this is an internet discussion) I feel no need to have the last word so I shall now go and cook a great British Fry-up of bacon, eggs, black pudding and sausage.
Mmmm, now you're making me hungry!
October 14, 2012 @ 2:58 am
I don't dislike the royals as people [I've never met them]. In fact Prince Charles seems lovely and admire his interest and support for ecology. I just think there's no escaping the fact that the monarchy is an inherently prejudice system. I think children will still draw pictures of kings and queens whether we have a monarchy or not and when they grow up and start living in the real world they should be happy to learn such prejudice systems no longer exist. They'll always be plenty of magic in this world to wonder at even without the the royal family. 🙂
P.S
Sorry I'm not a big enough person to not have the last word. :p
October 14, 2012 @ 5:15 am
The feeling I and my kids get when watching anything to do with the Monarchy on the TV is the same feeling that makes Americans stand up when they hear their National Anthem.
When I hear our National Anthem I feel like puking. FWIW.
October 14, 2012 @ 4:10 pm
I never get the time to add to these threads until the very end of the weekend when no one reads them. But being Canadian puts me in a weird position. We have the monarchy (and our Conservative government is the most monarchist we've had in a long time), but we also have a written constitution and charter of rights. But it exists in a limbo because the constitution was never ratified by all our provinces, as it legally has to be, technically, to function. Quebec never signed off on it — the separatist party who's been in charge there on and off since 1976 would never do that, and none of the other provincial parties would ever take the risk — but we all act as if it's legally binding anyway.
So we have a "foundational" document that's only 30 years old, but which is functionally flexible because its rights definitions are vague enough to add new groups and concerns to its protections. It's underwritten by the assent of a constitutional monarchy that only exists by proxy in our Governor General. A new Governor General is appointed every five/ten years by the government of the day, and always does as told by the Prime Minister's office anyway. And even then, the written constitution exists in a limbo state because it'll never be fully ratified. It's the ultimate pragmatist purgatory. And if our gay rights and disabled rights successes so far are any sign, that's the best kind of constitution to have.
I'm not a fan of the current government selling off most of the country to oil companies and the Chinese, but compared to the fights I see in the USA, we're doing pretty okay.
October 15, 2012 @ 1:59 am
Yeah, just to chime in: I felt a lot of personal sympathy for the Queen during her annus horribilis, and thought it was unfair that the high-point of anti-monarchist sentiments during the last twenty years was when they were going through some entirely standard-issue marital problems that really shouldn't have been anyone else's business. But it didn't stop me thinking there shouldn't be a Queen.
Personally, I like the Irish / German / Israeli approach of having an elected President who attempts to remain non-political. It gives visiting dignitaries someone to be nice to without having to imply that they endorse the state's current policies. And, to Phil's point about changeability, the institution can be used to symbolise flexibility while respecting continuity. Mary Robinson's election as President of Ireland was a huge deal, even though nothing actually changed.
For me, nothing about monarchy overcomes the "it's not what you do, it's who you were born to" problem that comes with it. I'm not that happy with inheritance of wealth, and I've got no time at all for inheritance of respect.
October 15, 2012 @ 2:06 am
The actual symbol of continuity in Britain is The Day Today's "It's All Right" film, which when I am king will be played at all ceremonial and other occasions: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T72TopWbXJg.
Phil — have you seen The Day Today? It's an important link in the chain from Monty Python to the Office (Monty Python's current affairs skits -> The Day Today -> I'm Alan Patridge -> David Brent) and a parallel to the X-files in its assumptions about the audience. The X-Files assumes an increasing density of knowledge and understanding in the audience, relative to the 60s-70s NBC demographic, of politics and conspiracy theories; The Day Today assumes an increasing density of understanding of media itself, and an increasing tendency to object anything that doesn't ring true. And it's funny! Space for it in an upcoming Pop Between Realities?
October 15, 2012 @ 6:01 am
Both are spin-off VHS tapes featuring Doctor Who characters that are not Doctor Who. Downtime is by Marc Platt, however, and I think it's more interesting to look at his attempt at what 90s Doctor Who television-esque stuff might be than at Terrance Dicks's, given that Platt was also one of the major architects of Virgin's mythos.
October 15, 2012 @ 6:07 am
The thing is, I think the fetishized object that serves as the anchor for government's legitimacy works well as something that's incongruous and a bit arbitrary. Parliament is dodgy because, you know, it actually does things and matters. I like the monarchy because it can be taken non-seriously as an obviously silly bit of myth and fiction. It lends itself, if you will, to a Dicksian pragmatism and ambivalence. Because the monarchy is so self-evidently a patched together piece of pageantry it's a much safer myth than one that risks waking up and actually trying to, god forbid, do something.
October 15, 2012 @ 2:18 pm
In defence of Benny only, when you need to create a political system for a group of lords and a group of commoners and do it quickly, creating a House of Lords and a House of Commons is pretty much the easiest thing you can do: you've got all the tools you need right there.
October 15, 2012 @ 2:32 pm
I don't really have a problem with the Doctor making nice with the likes of Al Capone. Presumably it's no different to him bumping into anyone else in his travels, be it you, me, Van Gough, Winston Churchill or the Ugandan President of 2056 – he doesn't actually know for sure how these people are going to behave or what actions they'll take.
The Doctor can't judge them on how our history books depict them unless we declare both that the history books are accurate and that every historical figure recorded are entirely fixed points in time (in which case the Doctor would probably be steering clear of them rather than interacting with them).
Being outside the narrative we have the advantage of knowing how these people will ultimately behave, that they will disappoint the Doctor – but if we declare these people as morally off-limits and their recorded history as unalterable, then we're constraining Doctor Who in very uninteresting ways. I don't think we've seen a story where the Doctor has significantly altered the course of our more famous pieces of known history (except frequent quietly forgotten in-the-open alien invasions) and the recorded lives of historical figures that would actually constitute an unabsorbable visible change, but it would be a shame to have a series about Time Travel that is forbidden to create alternate histories or dabble with the possibility.
October 22, 2012 @ 6:11 pm
Still, your trust in a fetishized object is the one thing about you that makes me giggle. 😛