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Guest Post: Torchwood and Cardiff

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Steffan Alun writes on the subject of Torchwood and Cardiff…

It’s October 22nd, 2006.  I’ve been back in university for a few weeks, and I’ve just come back from a choir trip.  Some music is in the charts, but I don’t have to listen to it, because I’ve finally acquired a DAB radio, allowing me to listen to Radio 4 despite Aberystwyth’s unacceptable inability to find it on FM.

On television, meanwhile, Torchwood debuts, and I am extremely interested in the portrayal of Cardiff in this show.  Most of my old school friends went to Cardiff for uni, but the city is still reasonably unfamiliar to me.  I spend most of my visits in their rented accommodation, talking about Doctor Who.

Fast-foward to the present day, and I now spend most of my time on public transport thinking about comedy.  I am a standup comedian, a job which takes me all over the UK.  I’ve performed hundreds of gigs, but nearly a quarter of them have been in Cardiff.  It is, by now, a city I know incredibly well.  Thanks to the particular eccentricities of standup comedy, I can even tell you how high the ceilings are in over thirty venues.

Let’s quickly cover the history of Cardiff and Doctor Who so far.  Russell T Davies (like me, he’s from Swansea – in fact, we grew up on the same street, decades apart) has revived the show and made it a BBC superbrand.  That’s their word, not mine, but I quite like it.  Superbrand.  It’s fun to say.  The show is filmed in Cardiff, as part of the offer made to get Julie Gardner on board.  Julie Gardner is also from a part of Wales.  My parents never thought to tell me where she grew up, so let’s Occam’s Razor the question of where she’s from and assume that she, like Russell T Davies and Steffan H Alun, grew up on Lôn Cae Banc.  Anyway, the first new series of Doctor Who features two episodes set in Cardiff, one of which was filmed in Swansea.  Following so far?  Good.

What we have in Everything Changes, the first episode of Torchwood, is something that starts off looking like tedious Joseph Campbell nonsense, but ends up as a wonderful subversion.  A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder … until the reality of the supernatural turns out to be so horrific that a woman whose job it is to research the supernatural takes her own life.  “The hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man?”  No, the hero joins a team who research alien powers without the slightest intention to share these powers with anyone else.

I’m telling you this for two reasons.  You only need to know one of those reasons – specifically, that while Gwen slowly learns about Torchwood, the audience is slowly learning about Cardiff.  Most of the audience is familiar with the idea for Torchwood – I’d be amazed if many of the 2.8m viewers hadn’t seen any of the first two series of Doctor Who, and even more so if “secret organisation fighting aliens” was new to them.…

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“…’till fire purge all things new”: Year Four # 1

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It is, if you’ll pardon the phrase, eminently logical that one of IDW’s first projects upon acquiring the license would be Star Trek: Year Four, a miniseries set in the uncertain missing period between “Turnabout Intruder” and Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Fans have always found the Original Series to be irritatingly unfinished, what with Captain Kirk declaring that the Enterprise is on a “five-year mission” and all, and only three seasons of actual, extent television to watch. It’s also a particular itch that’s been with Star Trek for quite some time: It was certainly present as comparatively far back as 1992, as we saw with Star Trek: 25th Anniversary and Star Trek: Judgment Rights. Arguably, we can trace it back even as far as the late-1970s and the New Voyages series, though, as we mentioned back then, that was a slightly different scenario.

But really this is predominantly a concern for now, in 2007. For a thing like Star Trek: Year Four from IDW to exist, a number of things had to happen. We first needed to see Star Trek become once again a mainstream phenomenon and aggressively court its cultish, proto-Nerd Culture fanbase, swiftly ensuring that Star Trek was once again very much no longer a mainstream phenomenon. Then we had to let the franchise lie fallow for a few years before reviving the tie-in comic side of it as we kill time before that oft-rumoured new movie will hopefully make our franchise great again. And IDW, a company essentially built around catering towards Nerd Culture interests, or things that, through neglect, have become exclusively Nerd Culture interests (it’s very telling one of their marquee titles is a Transformers book), was really the only publisher that could have picked up Star Trek at this point.

And so we get a Star Trek series with a very Nerd Culture agenda: Tie off those annoying loose ends from that bit of the franchise that was canceled so it gets a proper ending and observes proper Aristotelian narrative structure and also ensuring no new stories can ever be told in that series again, because if its one thing Nerds hate more than their favourite show getting canceled prematurely, it’s having their favourite show continue, but without their explicit approval and permission.

But I’m jumping ahead of myself. IDW’s Nerd Culture inklings most certainly do catch up with it, but this is most obvious in this miniseries’ sequel series (how apropos) Star Trek: Final Mission. What we have with Year Four at first is really an attempt to revive a specific storytelling structure and formula, because while we’ve had twenty-five seasons of Star Trek since it, we’ve never really had an overt revival or reconstruction of the Original Series (despite how hard Rick Berman and Jeri Taylor may have tried at times with Star Trek Voyager and Enterprise). And I will give the creative team on this series credit, that’s precisely what “Year Four, Issue Number 1” (which obnoxiously doesn’t have any other title) feels like.…

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Pete Seeger (1919-2014)

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When I realized that my Wonder Woman book needed to be called something other than Paradise Dungeons, the title that sprang to mind first was A Golden Thread, which on the one hand refers sensibly to Wonder Woman’s lasso and to the sort of historical approach I take to her, tracing a single strand of feminist utopian culture through decades of history, and on the other refers to a Pete Seeger song, “Had I a Golden Thread,” about utopianism in general. I spent weeks seeing if I could come up with other good titles, but it was a mug’s game. The book was obviously called that, and I use two verses of it as an inscription before the first chapter.

I saw Pete Seeger play once, in 2000. He was 82, and already the elder statesman of folk music. He was playing a festival he basically ran, the Clearwater festival, which was an environmentalist benefit for the Hudson River valley. I wasn’t there for him. I mean, I’d heard of him – he was Pete Seeger, after all. He’d written “If I Had a Hammer” and “Little Boxes.” But I was eighteen and eighteen-year-olds don’t think “you know, Pete Seeger’s 82 years old and the number of occasions I’ll have to see him live are dwindling rapidly,” they think “oh, awesome, these two bands I love are at the same festival, and there’s some other cool stuff I’ve heard of too.”
Seeger didn’t play a full set – just a couple of appearances across the festival. He did a number on a Phil Ochs tribute panel (“Draft Dodger’s Rag,” of course), and a little half hour set where he sat under a tree and noodled around on his banjo being charming. I remember one song he did – a fairly standard bit of hippie protest folk – where, before the final verse, he paused and explained that he noted some children in the audience, and that this final verse actually contained a word that the children had probably been told not to say in the house. He then pointed out that they were not in the house, and plowed on cheerily, because Pete Seeger had the moral authority to overrule your parents and everyone knew it.
Later in the set, it started to rain just a bit. Only a few drops – nothing major. But a couple people had umbrellas and popped them open, at which point Seeger stopped playing and calmly explained that he would not be continuing until the people who were under the tree and thus still dry passed their umbrellas to the people not under the tree so that everybody could be dry.
It remains the only time I am aware of in which an artist has actually created, however momentarily, a socialist utopia.
…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 76 (The Thick of It)

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We’ve talked about comedy a few times before, and The Thick of It, in many ways, extends from those discussions. It is of course ridiculous to talk about British comedy as a monolithic entity, but if one were to try to one could be substantially more wrong than suggesting that the heart of British comedy is exposing the absurd foolishness of structures of authority. The most straightforward, standard issue joke in a piece of British comedy is, in essence, that the inmates are running the asylum – that how the world works is, in fact, determined by idiots who are immune to reason. Far from the comforting fiction that there’s actually some nefarious asshole running the show and screwing everyone, British comedy at its best suggests that the reason everything is completely fucked is that the world is run by blithering fools who aren’t malicious so much as they are wholly and entirely incompetent.
The previous classic of British political comedy was, of course, Yes (Prime) Minister, a sitcom in which the functioning of government is revealed to be inept because of the backbiting between elected officials and the civil service, and the bureaucratic nonsense each side engages in to establish power over the other. Principles and the actual issue of what would be best for the country are wholly extraneous concerns, and it is really the cold war between two groups who are ostensibly on the same side that drives government. 
In that regard, at least, The Thick of It is a simpler program – a reversion to the more classical British comedy trope of everyone being an idiot. Yes Minister is ultimately a story about systemic breaks in the structures of power – about the idea that the divide between elected representatives and permanent government employees created fundamentally perverse incentives that rendered government dysfunctional. The Thick of It, on the other hand, is largely about a bunch of incompetent buffoons who cause trouble because they’re fundamentally bad at what they do. 
There are, of course, stylistic things to note. The Thick of It is shot in a handheld style with lots of authentic-seeming conversation that puts it as a British cousin to the American mumblecore movement (added to by the partially improvised nature of the final performance). It’s of the style of modern British comedy that goes with long, extended discomfort as a mood, and that doesn’t bother with the unnaturalist structures of comic timing. There are handfuls of scenes that are done as straight-up, typically structured humor, but for the most part it’s a sitcom that isn’t hugely concerned with selecting the moments when the audience is or is not going to laugh. 
But under the hood, in its attitudes, there’s something classical about The Thick of It that puts it firmly in the BlackAdder/Jeeves and Wooster/Monty Python’s Flying Circus/The Goon Show tradition of being about stupid people in charge of things. And yet in its own way this paints a bleaker picture of politics than Yes Minister ever could.
…

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“Forget…”: The Counter-Clock Incident

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“Turning back time, Fred Bronson recalls his service to Starfleet.”

“We’re all dead men walking, Agent, and it doesn’t please me any more than it does you. Look in a mirror sometime if you don’t believe me. I have. Nevertheless, you are more correct then you think. Everywhere is here and now in a Time War. This brutal fighting will come to an end, just not on your terms. No matter which way our gamble plays off, we still want to go forward. You’d take the entire galaxy backwards as you retreat into your own obsolescence. We will prevail. And when we do, it will be the most terrible calamity this galaxy has ever seen. Of that I am as certain as it is possible for a person to be about anything, because I’ve already foreseen it come to pass. This battle was only the beginning.”

“If your soldiers die, they will die for nothing. We’re not going to let you commit suicide. Whether they die or not, you’ll still stand trial for your crimes against the timeline. Your war is over. This ends here and now.”

“And when is that ever the case with time travel? You’re making a pointless argument. The actions I take in service of my cause may later be determined to be just and they may not, but right now I’m doing what my instinct tells me is right, and I’m convinced this cause is a righteous one. I’m not too keen on the part fate has given me, but it’s my role to play and I’ll give the best performance I can. None of us are destined to come out the other side of this war alive, Agent. That much I know.”

“And yet you would take the lives of countless people into your hands, depriving them of their agency as you singlehandedly rewrite centuries of history! Your actions are not in keeping with the ideals you espouse.”

“This isn’t about ensuring the future will be better for us personally, not entirely. It’s about giving everyone a second chance. A second life. A good life under a despotic Empire is neither truly good, nor truly living, no matter how much enlightenment rhetoric the Imperial Overlords happen to use. You used to feel the same way. I know, I’ve seen it.”

“And, naturally, you of course have the best vision of the future…”

“At least we acknowledge we *can* change. We believe a utopia that doesn’t allow for people to learn and grow is no utopia, especially if it means obligatory subservience.”

“It’s childish to go back and try to change your mistakes instead of learning from them.”

“It’s only self-interest inasmuch as it’s an interest shared with a large portion of the affected multiverse.”

“Regardless of the size and scope of your particular outfit, your crimes are the most severe. So far, you’ve succeeded in ways many others haven’t come close to. History has been significantly altered as a direct result of your actions, perhaps irreparably so.…

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Saturday Waffling (February 1st, 2014)

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Hello all. Just got back from taking the quite lovely wife out to a birthday dinner, and am rather exhausted, so going to keep this brief. And. Um. I suppose I should come up with a conversation topic.

No. Screw it. I’m tired. You tell me what we’re going to talk about. Then talk about it. Excellent. This is a fine plan.

Good night. Or morning. Bugger.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 32.5: Star Cops

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Iain Coleman offered me a guest post on Star Cops ever so slightly too late to make it in for the holiday run of them I did, so I held it for later. Since running one this week massages my schedule such that all the Children of Earth entries fall into the same writing week, here it is.

It is 6 July 1987. The Pet Shop Boys are at number one with “It’s a Sin”, having knocked The Firm’s “Star Trekkin’” off the top spot a week earlier. The European Community has passed the Single European Act, a key step towards the European Union as we know it today, and a court in Lyon has sentenced the city’s former Gestapo leader Klaus Barbie to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity. And at 8:30 pm on BBC 2, the first episode of Star Cops is broadcast.

Star Cops was created by Chris Boucher, who wrote five of the nine broadcast episodes. By this time, Boucher was an old hand at TV SF, having written three well-received Doctor Who serials before moving to Blake’s 7, where he was script editor on all four seasons as well as writing that show’s best episodes. After killing off Blake and his crew he had moved on to script editing established BBC police dramas Juliet Bravo and Bergerac.

As a cop show set in outer space, Star Cops combined both major strands of Boucher’s career. With its blending of genres, it was intended to appeal to a cross-over audience. Unfortunately, it never achieved high ratings and met with limited critical acclaim. Its initial nine-episode run was never repeated, and there was no second series.

To understand what went wrong, we have to understand spaceflight in the 1980s, and the toxic influence of Cold War military thinking upon the US space programme.

Space has been militarised for as long as there has been space travel. The early successes of space flight were as much public demonstrations of intercontinental ballistic missile capability as they were forays into extraterrestrial exploration. The R-7 Semyorka rocket that launched Sputnik 1 and kicked off the Space Age was the world’s first ICBM, and by putting a beeping ball into space the Soviet Union was demonstrating that it could put a hydrogen bomb over Manhattan. More advanced missiles were similarly pressed into service to launch larger spacecraft, manned and unmanned, over the following decade.

And not all these payloads were as innocent as Sputnik. Low Earth orbit became the ultimate observation post for military reconnaissance, with spy satellites capturing the movements of military forces on the Earth below, and eventually the US would launch a constellation of signalling spacecraft to allow its troops to pinpoint their positions anywhere on the globe. (You have a deliberately degraded civilian version on your phone.)

But in the 1980s this militarisation became suddenly threatening, with the Reagan administration’s Strategic Defense Initiative. Immediately nicknamed “Star Wars”, this merrily gung-ho idea was to station armed spacecraft in orbit that would be able to destroy Soviet ICBMs in flight, whether with interceptor missiles or with powerful X-ray lasers, the latter being advocated by Dr Strangelove himself, Edward Teller.…

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“Only the beginning”: How Sharper Than a Serpent’s Tooth

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“”How Sharper’ was a dream piece of work, we had artistic integrity all the way through,’ Wise notes. ‘All experiences should be so good.'”

Although there’s one more episode to go according to the official episode list, “How Sharper Than a Serpent’s Tooth” can in some ways be seen as the series finale of Star Trek: The Animated Series, and really, the first phase of the Star Trek franchise. It’s a return one last time to the realm of the magickal, a conscious and deliberate claim that Star Trek is an extension of indigenous spirituality (or at least should be), and, somewhat incredibly, is “Who Mourns for Adonais?” done properly, written as a tribute to and eulogy of Gene Coon. It’s also the solitary Emmy Award win of the entire Star Trek franchise.

After a mysterious probe visited the founding homeworlds of the Federation and attempted to contact them before randomly exploding, the Enterprise is following its trail back to what it hopes will be its source, where it discovers a gigantic starship that suddenly, before everyone’s eyes adopts the visage of a ferocious-looking feathered lizard. Helmsman Dawson Walking Bear, a student of indigenous cultures, in particular Native American and Mesoamerican, immediately recognises the creature before them as Kukulkan: An ancient Mayan deity associated with the Vision Serpent, the symbolic embodiment of the gateway to the spirit world, and the intermediary between mortals and their ancestors and gods (serpents being very important in Mayan spirituality anyway, oftentimes seen as the vessels the moon and stars use to travel across the heavens). Kukulkan is saddened that humanity seems to have forgotten him, but, because Walking Bear remembered, he wonders if the Enterprise crew can do what he claims their ancestors failed to, and transports him, Kirk, McCoy and Scotty to his ship.

The crewmembers materialize in a large, empty room that morphs into a gigantic city modeled off of Maya, Aztec and ancient Chinese design. Walking Bear points out that Kukulkan is said to have asked his followers to build him a city and that, once they had, he would return (a trait which, according to my cursory research, is actually more similar to the tales of the K’iche Mayan feathered serpent Q’uq’umatz). Kirk figures the city must be a kind of signal, that Kukulkan must have appeared to many different peoples, and, since each culture only focused on one piece of the iconography, none of them built the city exactly right. However, they might be able to figure it out now together. Naturally, they succeed and Kukulkan appears before the landing party. Kukulkan claims that he’s upset by the ceaseless violence of human history and fears all the work he’s done to to help humanity has been for naught. It now falls to Kirk, McCoy, Scotty and Walking Bear to convince the serpent god that humanity’s capacity for self-improvement demonstrate that his faith was not ill-placed, but also that the time has come for humans to learn their own lessons by themselves, because a parent cannot keep a child forever.…

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The Sentinels Lied About All Them Space Wars (The Last War in Albion Part 29: Alan Moore’s First Future Shocks)

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This is the fifth of ten parts of Chapter Five of The Last War in Albion, covering Alan Moore’s work on Future Shocks for 2000 AD from 1980 to 1983. An ebook omnibus of all ten parts, sans images, is available in ebook form from Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords for $2.99. If you enjoy the project, please consider buying a copy of the omnibus to help ensure its continuation

Most of the comics discussed in this chapter are collected in The Complete Alan Moore Future Shocks.
PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: Alan Moore’s first few short stories for 2000 AD focused mainly on robots, but gave him his first opportunity to work with Dave Gibbons…
You’re saying the Sentinels lied about all them space wars? Well what have they been doin’ all these years? – Alan Moore, Top Ten #12
Figure 218: Dave Gibbons manages to work the
Saturnian Singing Orchids into the page with
entertaining frequency. (“The Dating Game,”
written by Alan Moore, art by Dave Gibbons,
2000 AD #176, 1980. Click to enlarge.)
These strips culminate in “The Wild Frontier,” a story that demonstrates straightforwardly how Gibbons’s art style lends itself to Moore’s style of comedy. Moore describes the strip as “one of those stupid things you do when you hear that Dave Gibbons will be drawing a job.” “The Wild Frontier” is a two-page bit of larking about on the premise of a space-western, complete with jokes about “the octobanndits led by that cephalopod sidewinder… Billy the Squid!” and the Clone Ranger, a vast stampede of identical masked men with their catchphrase of “Hiyoo, Chromium! Hawaay!”  All of this is depicted by Gibbons in comically ludicrous detail that not only emphasizes the ridiculousness of the concept but wallows in its glorious excess, encouraging readers to dwell on panels to catch all of the sight gags Gibbons has managed to cram in. But even as early as “The Dating Game” Gibbons was showing his propensity for detail, making sure to put the bouquet of Saturnian Singing Orchids that the computer gives Myron in as many panels as possible (and allowing Moore to create more deliciously awful plant rhymes such as “Who cares if the greenfly bite? / I’ve got you to hold me tight. / You’re my man, I don’t mean maybe… / You’re my fertilizer baby.”) and, of course, depicting the sublime lunacy of Myron’s homicidal toothbrush.
Figure 219: Alan Moore has admitted that
he designed Snazz’s visual appearance in
part because it was unnerving and slightly
headache-inducing to look at.
Unfortunately, for all that Moore was clearly better at them than other writers, there simply weren’t a ton of slots for short stories at this period in the magazine’s history. Tharg’s Future Shocks hadn’t appeared since Prog 135 in late 1979, and wouldn’t make a return until March of 1981, at which point Moore began getting published in 2000 AD with considerably more regularity. If his earliest 1980 shorts were merely competent, his 1981 work must be recognized as an extraordinary run of stories.
…

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Another Look For My Recorder (Planet of the Dead)

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Roughly speaking, the tagline for Planet of the Dead was
“David Tennant and Michelle Ryan went to Dubai and stood
sexily in front of a London double decker bus we smashed.
It’s April 11th, 2009. Lady Gaga is at number one with “Poker Face,” with Flo Rida and Ke$ha, Beyonce, and Taylor Swift also charting. This feels like yesterday, as is fitting for an era of Doctor Who that is already colliding with the series’ onrushing present. Since the banalities of The Next Doctor, Israel announced a ceasefire in the Gaza War, quickly followed by Hamas doing the same. The President of Guinea-Bissau was assassinated, and the Icelandic economic crash happened. And, a few weeks ago there was a G-20 summit on the subject of the financial crisis in London. Protests during this summit resulted in Ian Tomlinson, a newspaper vendor who suffered a fatal heart attack after a severe police beating administered despite no evidence of wrongdoing. Meanwhile, at the summit a large financial stimulus was agreed upon, and the Queen scolded Silvio Berlusconi. 
While on TV is the much-maligned Planet of the Dead. It seems strange that such a slender and basically toothless little story has attracted such condemnation as one of the worst of the Davies era. Certainly, in the cold, harsh light of the Capaldi era it is difficult to argue seriously that this is the era’s nadir. It is a piece of fluff, certainly, but a basically well-structured bit of fluff that gets its desired jobs done. There’s one big critique, which is the decision to film in Dubai, a location with, to say the least, problematic laws and policies not least of which is the active criminalization of homosexuality. Certainly there’s something to sigh somewhat wearily about in that decision, although, on the other hand, it’s not as though one couldn’t imagine any number of great outraged critiques about the moral obscenities involved in filming in a country that’s formulated a massive surveillance state with cameras on every street corner, or one whose actively imperialistic tendencies are the ruin of hosts of developing economies. Which is to say that while the political regime of Dubai is undoubtedly a nasty piece of work, it’s also low-hanging fruit that encourages a myopic view about how bad foreign places are.
But that’s not the usual critique anyway. The usual critique is just some variation on the idea that the story is “dumb.” This seems positively bizarre, save for the context of its original presentation, as an Easter special and as the only island of Doctor Who between Christmas and the end of the year. What would have survived perfectly fine in the giddy second or third episode slot of The Fires of Pompeii, Tooth and Claw, or The Shakespeare Code instead ended up having to serve as exactly the sort of big, tentpole event it was never designed to be. The episode’s officially sanctioned description was as the last time Tennant’s Doctor got to have fun, but that sits in almost conscious opposition to the notion of “the only Doctor Who you get in an eleven month period.”
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