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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 79: Downton Abbey

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For all that the story of the Moffat era is (as we’ll see over the next season’s entries) one of the series breaking out as an international hit, it is hardly the only, or even the biggest international export in British television. Indeed, even domestically, it’s worth noting that Doctor Who’s status as “the biggest hit on television” was emphatically usurped not long after the fifth season wrapped. As of the end of 2010, it was Downton Abbey’s world.
This is not a surprise, of course. Nothing’s the biggest thing in culture forever. Even Downton Abbey has been unseated by Call the Midwife by now, and something’s sure to unseat that any day now. The massive status that Doctor Who had at the end of the Davies era was always going to falter, and there’s nothing to conclude from that in and of itself. What is interesting, however, is the nature of the transition. Yes, Doctor Who was always going to be unseated, but by what?
It is easy to point out that Downton Abbey is a conservative show. Indeed, it is literally a Conservative show – its creator and sole writer, Julian Fellowes, was made a Baron Fellowes of West Stafford not two months after the first season of Downton Abbey wrapped, and he now sits in the House of Lords as a Tory. But tempting and in many ways justifiable as it is to simply demonize the show on those grounds alone, it is frustratingly unfair. The nature of writing and language, after all, is that texts routinely subvert and distort authorial intent. Given that he wrote a TV story grousing about his tax bill less than two years before the 1979 general election it would hardly be surprising to discover that Robert Holmes supported Thatcher, and yet, as Jack Graham has repeatedly demonstrated, there’s practically no writer in the classic series whose work better supports Marxist readings, and that includes at least one actual Marxist. Meanwhile, Mark Gatiss is demonstrably and committedly a leftist and yet seems chronically unable to avoid writing stories with awkwardly right wing leanings. It is, in other words, cheap and beneath this blog to criticize Downton Abbey just because it happens to be written by a Tory peer.
Instead, let’s criticize it for being exactly the sort of television show you’d expect a Tory peer to write. It is not, to be clear, that Baron Fellowes is a bad writer. Downton Abbey is, in almost every technical sense, very, very good. It’s got an astonishingly strong cast, the writing does a solid job of revealing and unwinding characterization at a satisfying pace, it’s lush and beautiful, and is well-directed and shot. It’s not even a little bit hard to understand why people like this show: it’s really, really good. It’s one of those nice examples of a piece of television succeeding through good old-fashioned quality.
But it is hopelessly ethically bankrupt. If one takes the 2010 election as signifying a shift in the national mood beyond “Labour’s been in power for a long time and Gordon Brown is a complete wanker,” and the truth is that at this point we’re too close to the history to really narrativize it that emphatically, then this essay would straightforwardly argue that Downton Abbey’s ascent reflected a national mood – a shift back towards a culturally conservative vision of Britain based on the nationalistic valuation of past glories.
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Sensor Scan: Cosmos

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There are, in the history of television, extremely few moments like this one, where the heart and soul of an entire generation is swept up in the rapture of a shared experience that becomes the defining memory of an era.

Cosmos, which opens declaring itself to be standing “On The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean”, is on its own a watershed. This is the series that not only made PBS, but codified the documentary as at least I remember it and changed the face of not only the popularization of science, but of science itself. It really is astonishing to look back and see how so much of the discourse we now associate with science can be linked directly to Carl Sagan’s ethos and positionality. Because this is what makes Cosmos so special and why it remains relevant and valid over thirty years later when the world it came into and spoke to now belongs to some long-distant and half-forgotten mnemolic time-spacescape: And even though his perspective has been frequently misunderstood and his name invoked in vain by the many, many people to come in his wake, the fundamental and provocative radicalism of his voice still resonates, and is what allows Cosmos to remain so powerful.

Carl Sagan is a fascinatingly marginal figure, and in retrospect it’s sort of odd that he was the one to break out in the way he did. Famously too speculative, imaginative and spiritual for the scientific establishment, yet too grounded in hard science for UFOlogists and true believers, Sagan occupies a curious, and unenviable, no-man’s land in scientific discourse. But yet in many ways it’s this nomadic isolationism that helped him reach such a staggeringly huge audience: Sagan wrote and spoke with the voice of a poet and a mystic, yet fiercely committed to the scientific method, he was in many ways the only personality positioned to take science education in this direction. He’s of course far from the first to fuse science and mysticism: John Muir did it, and J. Allen Hynek, Jacques Vallée and Steven Spielberg accomplished it masterfully quite recently with things like Passport to Magonia and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Going all the way back, what were the ancient navigators if not science mystics?

But Carl Sagan was the first to take this approach and apply it to science education, at least on such a grand scale. Carl Sagan wasn’t just a science popularizer or even the greatest science popularizer-He was the science popularizer, all stop. Nobody who has tried to follow in his footsteps has come remotely close to emulating what Carl Sagan did. In some ways Robert Burnham, Jr. is Sagan’s anticipation in this regard, but, let’s face it, try as he might (and he did, mightily) Burnham’s Celestial Handbook was never going to be embraced outside of an extremely small subset of amateur astronomers. No, what Sagan understood was the power of television as not just a forum for teaching and learning, but as a medium where communal images could be experienced together.…

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Mega Man 3

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I am out of persuasive reasons why people who have not donated to the Kickstarter might want to change their minds, so today I offer an unpersuasive one: you might gain psychic powers.

Long-time readers may remember when I wrote about video games on a blog called The Nintendo Project. It turned out, however, that there was such a thing as a project too mad for me to complete. It also turned out, however, that there is such a thing as someone madder than me, as a gentleman named Frezno asked if he could take up the torch and continue the project, which he’s been doing at The Nintendo Project, Resumed.

A while ago, Frezno asked if I would mind doing a guest post for his blog on Mega Man 3. Since Mega Man 3 is a fantastic game that I find really interesting and have things to say about, I was very much willing. That guest post went up yesterday, and you can read it here.…

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Outside the Government: Goodbye, Sarah Jane Smith

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It’s November 15th, 2010. Rihanna is at number one with “Only Girl (In the World),” with Adele, Take That, and McFly also charting. In news, there’s a G-20 summit in Seoul and Aung San Suu Kyi is released from house arrest in either Burma or Myanmar, depending on your preference in country names. And on the day the second part of this airs, the engagement of Prince William and Catherine Middleton is announced. 
While on television, the fourth and final full season of The Sarah Jane Adventures concludes with Goodbye, Sarah Jane Smith. There exists a sense in which this is almost unbearable to watch. It’s the last television appearance of Lis Sladen before she died, after all. And it’s an episode whose plot is largely concerned with Sarah Jane falling ill and nearly dying, with lots of talk about whether she’s too old and whether it wouldn’t be better to just hand the job of protecting the Earth to someone else. It is in no way easy to watch in the context of hindsight. 
And yet.
Let’s read this in light of the larger themes of the late Davies era, since we are by this point in what we might call the late for its own funeral Davies era. Specifically, let’s bring up the theme of Children of Earth, a critique, of reproductive futurism. For those just tuning in, reproductive futurism is a term coined by the queer theorist Lee Edelman to describe the ideological practice of justifying things in the name of an idealized vision of “the children” with no material investment in actual childhood, with childhood being defined specifically as the absence of any political engagement. It’s not a good thing, and generally speaking people who produce children’s media that embraces reproductive futurism should be shot in the face.
So here’s a reality of the world instead. There are children who grew up on The Sarah Jane Adventures. Children for whom the hastily assembled “My Sarah Jane” tribute was an absolutely essential piece of mourning because the star of their favorite television show unexpectedly died. Children who still went back and watched the show after she died, because they had DVD sets, and who engaged with this story in exactly the same way that we all do now: as a story that’s about death and abandonment and the fact that people grow old, centered on a character played by an actress who, at the time of transmission, was five months from death. 
Surely this is a good thing. What, after all, is the point of children’s entertainment if not to help mediate learning about exactly these things. We’ve long asserted here that the value of children’s television and literature is inexorably linked to its capacity to scar children for life and thus to stick in the memory as something fascinating and impossible to quite process. This, surely, is why. Because people die and awful things happen in the world. There are crocodiles, as one children’s show put it once.
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Advent of the Angels: Japanese Professional Wrestling in the 1980s

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Rikidōzan, seen as the pioneer of Japanese wrestling.

Professional wrestling has existed in Japan at least since the late 1880s when sumo wrestler Sorakichi Matsuda travelled to the United States and competed alongside the Greco-Roman and catch wrestlers of the day. However, the sport didn’t become firmly established in the country until 1951 when the great Rikidōzan became a breakout celebrity and national icon. Rikidōzan was an emigrant from Korea who came to Japan to train as a sumo wrestler, but eventually quit and picked up professional wrestling instead.

Rikidōzan quickly established himself as a hero to the Japanese when he consistently defeated a string of opponents from the United States (who helped hum out by always playing heel), giving Japan someone to root for and cheer on in the aftermath of World War II and the invasive Western sanctions and presence that came in its wake. In fact, it was Rikidōzan who gave us the ubiquitous “karate chop” which, despite its name, has nothing to do with actual karate and is in fact a wrestling move descended from the sumo practice of harite and is more properly called a knifehand strike. With Rikidōzan’s rise to celebrity status, professional wrestling became a staple of Japanese culture and social life.

Rikidōzan’s legacy is felt elsewhere in Japanese professional wrestling as well, namely in its unique blend of different fighting styles. Though pro wrestling remains by and large choreographed in Japan just as it does in other regions, there’s less of an emphasis on the scripted drama aspect and it’s portrayed as far more of an actual competitive sport than it is in, say, the United States. What story there is has less to do with the grudges and angles that define wrestling outside of Japan, and more to do with each individual wrestler’s fighting spirit, honour and strength of will. Furthermore, the additions of holds and techniques from other combat sports mean the Japanese professional wrestling is far more of a contact-oriented experience, and resembles in some ways what we might think of today as mixed martial arts, with which pro wrestling outfits in Japan have a very close relationship with to this day.

So, much like in the United States, Japanese wrestlers, especially of this period, were celebrity entertainers. However, because of the fierce loyalty and local fervor that characterizes wrestling in Japan, as well as the fact this kind of professional wrestling is viewed far more as a kind of sport, there’s a sense of communal eventfulness that accompanies wrestling in Japan that wrestling in the United States lacks. While Vince McMahon was busy turning the WWF into a national brand and a form of mass consumerist entertainment, Japanese wrestling fans continued to view their local performers as a source of cultural pride and would attend matches to socialize. This all culminated in the early part of the 1980s, when Japan experienced its own kind of pro wrestling boom, albeit one that was manifestly different than the one Vince McMahon ushered in.…

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Saturday Waffling (May 24th, 2014)

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Happy Saturday, everybody. If you missed the announcement yesterday, the Last War in Albion Kickstarter has been updated with newly lowered stretch goals, such that we’re only $600 away both from Volume 5 and from thrice weekly posting for Miracle Day. There’s still a quartet of of custom essays available, as well as James Taylor’s art for the Grant Morrison portrait used in the banner and, of course, loads of ebooks, print books, and other fun goodies. For a variety of reasons, I could really use to see this get up above $8000 and into the $9-10k range, so if you’re on the fence, please consider what might tip you off of it and let me know.

So, we could discuss the flickering image of Peter Capaldi in orange silhouette, but I think that might be a short thread. Instead, it occurs to me, I don’t think I’ve ever done a basic old introductions thread here. So, dear readers, who are you? What do you do, whether for fun or money? How long have you been reading the blog for? Where did you find out about it?…

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UKIP SURGE AHEAD ON SHABOGAN GRAFFITI

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The main headlines today.

THE BBC NEWS DIVISION HAS TAKEN OVER OWNERSHIP OF OBSCURE DOCTOR WHO BLOG SHABOGAN GRAFFITI

“The blog will now be run according to proper BBC guidelines of impartiality,” said that lying Zionist shitsack James Harding, head of BBC News.

In other news…

UKIP SURGE FORWARD AND ONWARDS TO CERTAIN FORWARD MARCHING MARCH OF ONWARD SURGING SURGENESS AHEAD ON SHABOGAN GRAFFITI.

The BBC Newsroom is reporting that despite there being no sentiments ever expressed on Shabogan Graffiti that a Ukipper would ever find acceptable, UKIP have broken through with a breakthrough on Shabogan Graffiti and are now surging forward and ahead to breakthroughs and surges on the unpopular blog.

“Apparently the vast majority of the British electorate do not read Shabogan Graffiti,” said a hairdo on top of a suit behind a desk, “but even so, the fact that UKIP have now broken through and surged across the blog shows clearly that the British public think UKIP are a force to be reckoned with and a reckon to be forced with and surging and breaking through and getting the mainstream establishment parties running scared.”

Finally…

BBC ANNOUNCES NEW SERIES OF POSTS ON SHABOGAN GRAFFITI, TO BE ENTITLED ‘IMMIGRATION: ASKING THE DIFFICULT QUESTIONS THAT MOST WHITE WORKING CLASS PEOPLE WANT ANSWERED BUT WHICH THE POLITICAL CORRECTNESS NAZIS REFUSE ANY OF US TO TALK ABOUT’.

Andrew Marr is 412 years old.…

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Past Legislation’s Newgate Reach (The Last War in Albion Part 45: Captain Britain in Marvel Super-Heroes, William Blake)

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In an effort to keep momentum in the final week of the Kickstarter, I have compressed the stretch goal schedule. Volume 4, on Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, is now unlocked at $7000, which, at the time of writing this, we’re only $53 away from. Volume 5 is now at $8000, Volume 6 at $9000, and so on. Thrice weekly posting of Torchwood: Miracle Day is still at $8000. Also, there are two new rewards offering James Taylor’s the original art from the Kickstarter banner. 

This is the fifth of ten parts of Chapter Seven of The Last War in Albion, focusing on Alan Moore’s work on Captain Britain for Marvel UK. An omnibus of the entire is available for the ereader of your choice here. You can also get an omnibus of all seven existent chapters of the project here or on Amazon (UK).

The stories discussed in this chapter are currently out of print in the US with this being the most affordable collection. For UK audiences, they are still in print in these two collections. 

Previously in The Last War in Albion: After a short-lived run by Dave Thorpe that ended when editor Bernie Jaye and artist Alan Davis balked at a planned story about the Irish Troubles, Alan Moore was given the opportunity to write Captain Britain. 
“Uncharted pantheons, past legislation’s Newgate reach, in cryptic masks to sing his teeming mind behind.” – Alan Moore, Angel Passage

Figure 334: Alan Davis’s first page
of Marvelman art featured a reworking
of Garry Leach’s iconic panel. (See Figure
326. Written by Alan Moore. From “The
Yesterday Gambit,” in Warrior Summer
Special, 1982)
Some ambiguity exists over how exactly Alan Moore was hired. Jaye suggests that Paul Neary and Alan Davis each independently vouched for Moore, but in Davis’s telling he only “had met Alan a week or so earlier, when Des [sic] Skinn asked me to help Garry Leach on the Marvelman art.” Dez Skinn remembers things in the exact opposite order, claiming that Moore suggested Davis as Leach’s replacement on Marvelman, much to Skinn’s consternation, as he thought that “there are only two super-heroes strips in one country of 55 million people. You can’t have the same pair of guys doing both.” Moore, for his part, openly admits to not remembering the order of events. Any of these orders are possible, ultimately – Davis’s first Marvelman art appeared in the Warrior Summer Special for 1982, and he took over the art full time in October. Moore’s first Captain Britain came out in between the two, in July. 
Regardless of how he got the job, however, it’s important to note that Moore’s work on Marvelman predates his Captain Britain work. His basic approach in both comics is, after all, the same – a swift reconceptualization of the character created by examining and cherry picking aspects from a chaotic and only hazily remembered past. With Marvelman, however, Moore had the marked advantage of starting his story with a more or less blank slate.
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Advent of the Angels: The Golden Age of Professional Wrestling in the United States

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I’ve never been a pro wrestling aficionado. There are certain things about my life and positionality that don’t match up with accepted cultural narratives, and professional wrestling is one of them. Along with Star Wars, superhero comics, G.I. Joe and Transformers, pro wrestling’s so-called Golden Age was one of the biggest shared cultural signifiers of the mid-period Long 1980s fondly remembered by anyone old enough to have lived through them, yet notably absent from my own lived experiences of the era.

I didn’t choose those topics at pure random: Those subjects are things I’ve noticed over the past decade or so trotted out as some of the most beloved and iconic pop culture memories and reference points from this period. I do think there’s a secondary story here though in that nostalgia for these particular things, above all others, is a recent innovation brought upon by the reification of a specific kind of retro discourse from a specific subset of a specific generation, namely Nerd Culture. But though its roots can arguably be traced back here, the rise and subsequent normalization of Nerd Culture and the Nerd Culture Agenda is not the real story of the Long 1980s, at least from my perspective, so we’re not going to be addressing that here. In terms of pro wrestling in particular, however, there’s a thread that leads directly into topics we’re going to be talking about imminently, so the Golden Age of Professional Wrestling is relevant to us in the here and now.

Vince McMahon, who transformed the face of pro wrestling.

The story of professional wrestling in the 1980s begins, predictably, with television. With the advent of cable and pay-per-view and a desire to find ways to take advantage of the new medium, it would make sense one of the first places the new media climate would turn to would be wrestling, an old standby of ready-made TV spectacle. The rise of the so-called Golden Age is in many ways a sequence of events extremely suited to the 1980s: Just as the medium of television was beginning to shift, the wrestling business was in the process of being rapidly consolidated by two wildly successful and powerful promoters with lofty ambitions: Vince McMahon and Ted Turner. It’s McMahon who is, of course, the most storied and influential figure here. Before taking over the World Wrestling Federation, also known as the WWF, from his father, the company, like all wrestling promotions in the United States, was a regional outfit strictly limited to the Northeast. McMahon was the first promoter to syndicate wresting matches on national television, with which he heavily promoted his recent acquisition of three rising superstar performers: Hulk Hogan, Rowdy Roddy Piper and Jesse Ventura.

McMahon’s expansion incensed his colleagues and competitors, who viewed it as a betrayal of the basic fundamental structure of the wrestling community and an overt attempt to muscle in on their territory. It didn’t help when McMahon used the proceeds of his pay-per-view events, advertising and video sales to recruit talent from rival promoters, essentially using the streamlined privatization of the WWF to attack other promotions.When…

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Outside the Government: Lost in Time

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Last War in Albion will run on Friday this week.
It’s November 8th, 2010. Rihanna is at number one with “Only Girl (In the World),” with Katy Perry, Nelly, Cheryl Cole, and Duck Sauce also charting. While in news… I’m at an honest loss to find anything interesting. The US Federal Reserve is apparently going to buy $600 billion in bonds, there’s a kerfuffle about a contrail in California that people think is a missile, and Nigel Farage is re-elected as the leader of UKIP. 
While on television, it’s similarly boring as The Sarah Jane Adventures airs  Lost in Time, which is, unfortunately, an absolute mess. Even more unfortunately, the reasons for this aren’t particularly interesting. Its central conceit – sending Rani, Clyde, and Sarah Jane to different time periods where they each have to recover an object made of unobtainium – turns out to be a damp squib. Instead of, as with The Empty Planet, focusing things on the quality of the dynamic among its main characters, this means that everyone spends the story with one or two guest characters. With only fifty minutes of story to deal with, this means that nothing gets fleshed out in any detail, and the whole thing feels rushed.
As with Laight’s previous story, it’s difficult to work up much of a reason to blame him, in other words. The story seems misbegotten from the start – to be fundamentally ill-suited to the series and episode structure it’s written for. It’s The Great Game done for The Sarah Jane Adventures. Only The Great Game relied, ultimately, on its sense of a countdown and inevitable reveal of Moriarty. The individual mini-adventures work precisely because they’re not the point of the exercise. Lost in Time has no such end reveal. Its climax centers around a magical black man who never really gets explained, with a final resolution that’s cribbed from Blink as blatantly as Sarah Jane’s entire plot in the episode is cribbed from the first episode of the 70s horror anthology Shadows.
The result is that the episode becomes three not particularly engaging mini-episodes. Clyde gets to fight against Nazis and tell them how racist they are, which, while certainly true, feels like a shockingly lazy attempt to give Clyde a racism plot of the sort that the series has quite sensibly avoided for the preceding twenty-one stories featuring him, and doubly so when the story is based around a racially caricatured magical black man. Sarah Jane hunts ghosts from the future in a story that mostly involves her explaining the plot repeatedly to a poorly acted guest star. And Rani meets Lady Jane Grey and convinces her of the merits of having her head lopped off in a plot that oversimplifies history to the point where it long since stops making much in the way of sense. (The event instigating Jane Grey’s fall is now Mary showing up outside the Tower of London, as opposed to the Privy Council switching sides, which has the odd effect of removing all sense that the monarch requires any sort of broad base of power to rule.)
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