Eruditorum Press

If you want an image of the future as we desire it, imagine a boot stamping on Jonathan Jones’ face… forever

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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“Yes, I’ve read a poem. Try not to faint.”: Albatross

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“‘The Star Trek fan who hasn’t discovered the Animated Series is really missing out”, Wise declares.”

In their unauthorized Star Trek episode guide Beyond the Final Frontier, Lance Parkin and Mark Jones said that the story for this episode would have been a great concept to explore on one of the live-action series and bemoaned the fact it was done on a cartoon show.

So naturally the first thing I’m going to do is continue to complain about how undervalued animation is as a form of creative expression. Because Parkin and Jones’ argument makes zero sense to me. There is nothing about “Albatross” that could have been done better on the Original Series. The emotional core of the episode hinges on Spock and McCoy, and while both Leonard Nimoy and DeForest Kelley can be visual actors at times, especially Nimoy, visual acting skills are not expressly needed for the kind of story this is. Actually, this episode serves as a great reminder of how multitalented and versatile this cast really is: Nimoy and Kelley convey all the emotion they need to through their voices alone, evidence they’re just as strong in the recording booth as they are on stage. Furthermore, neither Kelley nor Nimoy are anywhere near as visual as William Shatner, who delivers yet another memorable marquee performance here. If William Shatner of all people can make the transition to animation effortlessly and painlessly, really all arguments about animation as an inferior medium are invalid.

Furthermore, declaring that it’s a shame an episode like this wasn’t done on the Original Series does a major disservice to D.C. Fontana, the Animated Series creative team and all the good work they’ve done over the past two years. This is flatly a tighter, stronger and more thematically and ethically coherent show now than it was in the 1960s. In fact, far from being the mini-classic Parkin and Jones seem to think it is, I’m of the mind “Albatross” is another of this season’s mediocre outings. But the fact this, a character piece about the crew’s loyalty to McCoy and righteous anger at a mishandling of justice, can now be called middling should be seen as incredibly telling. On the Original Series, we were regularly getting fed absolute garbage like “Mudd’s Women”, “The Apple”, “Who Mourns for Adonais?”, “The Omega Glory”, “Elaan of Troyius”, “The Enemy Within” and “The Savage Curtain”. On the Animated Series, we haven’t seen anything come remotely close to those cratering lows with the exception of Margaret Armen’s stuff, which is a special case and frankly to be expected. The fact this episode even exists is testament alone to what the Animated Series has been able to accomplish.

I suppose it’d help if I explained a bit about what “Albatross” is about. Basically, on a diplomatic mission to the planet Dramia, the Enterprise crew is shocked to see Doctor McCoy arrested on charges of committing mass genocide via a plague he allegedly brought to the second planet in the system nineteen years ago.…

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Createspace

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Consider this an entry into the “blogger details treatment by a company on their blog” genre – the one that’s usually done in order to gin up outrage at some customer service nightmare. Except for the bit about the customer service nightmare, because instead we have the opposite – a case where the company takes care of a problem really well and mildly saves my ass, and I decide to say nice things about them.

So, I use Createspace for my print books. It’s a print on demand service, which is key because it means I don’t have to worry about inventory. It’s got its disadvantages – it basically means I have no distribution to bricks and mortar bookstores or retailers that aren’t Amazon (you can technically buy my books in bricks and mortar stores, but I get functionally zero royalty when you do and so I don’t really advertise the option). And it’s owned by Amazon, a company that anyone involved in writing (or any other creative pursuit) ought have, at the very least, reservations about.

They can also be a pain in the ass – James and I have a variety of entertaining war stories about beating their submission requirements into, well, submission. We still speak of the Week of the Evil Bar Code Sticker in hushed and haunted tones.

Nevertheless, they make pretty books and are on the whole easy to work with. Your books get automatically sent to most Amazon stores, they print very fast, and they pay quickly. (This last point is key – I get my print royalties the month after the book sells, whereas digital royalties pay two months after. I like print royalties.)

But more to the point, they’re helpful. As evidenced when I managed to screw up to the tune of several hundred dollars last week and they bailed me out. Long story short, I was ordering books for Kickstarter rewards, shipping direct from CreateSpace because it’s largely cheaper, and, a couple hundred dollars of orders into it, realized I had read the list of titles wrong and had been ordering the first Tom Baker book instead of the Hartnell book.

Unfortunately, when I say that Createspace prints very fast, I mean that they print very fast. As in, orders from ten minutes before I realized the problem were already in production and couldn’t be cancelled. Which meant that there was a massive error I couldn’t do anything about. Which is, in turn, where Createspace’s customer service stepped in and saved my ass by managing to, while not cancelling the orders, change their shipping so that all the books would send to me, thus giving me my necessary stock of Tom Baker books to fulfill orders and letting me get on with other orders. This was no small task, and involved a day of calls back and forth to Createspace, but getting it done saved me from a several hundred dollar screwup that I really couldn’t have afforded that week.

So, yes.…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else 27 (The Eyeless)

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It is not as though there are not writers from the Wilderness Years who carried on writing tie-in material for the new series. Several have, from both the Virgin and BBC Books eras. And, of course, there are the handful of Wilderness Years contributors who have contributed the odd television story or two like Mark Gatiss, Paul Cornell, and Russell T Davies. Nevertheless, to anyone who’s been with the series for the long haul so to speak, the return of Lance Parkin seems significant. Parkin was a middle-to-late comer to the Virgin line, but ended up writing one of the novels that dealt most heavily with the Virgin line’s Gallifreyan mythology, and also ended up wrapping up the line with their one Eighth Doctor novel. And then for BBC Books he wrote a bevy of major books, including the single biggest piece of “let’s play with Gallifreyan mythology” ever, The Infinity Doctors, and, once again, the final book of the line, The Gallifrey Chronicles. 
It’s not that Parkin is the defining author of the Wilderness Years or anything so much as that he’s one who is deeply associated not just with them, but with playing with their implications. His novels repeatedly play games with continuity and mythology, and, more broadly, with the importance and centrality of the tie-in media, carefully laying out the rules for his “it’s all true, and that’s the game” vision of what Doctor Who allows. He is not the defining writer of the Wilderness Years so much as the writer most defined by them and their possibilities – the one whose work is most bound up in the Wilderness Years.
Interestingly, he’s also the piece of the Wilderness Years that bled into the new series. As we observed at the time, the final novel of the Eighth Doctor Adventures, The Gallifrey Chronicles, came out around the same time as Boom Town aired, which is to say, well after the new series had established itself as a massive cultural object. Lance Parkin’s end to the Wilderness Years, in other words, is not actually a part of them, but a postscript – a letter from a point where the future was ensured, even if that is not quite the point from which it was written.
On a more basic level, of course, Parkin’s books tend to be games of structure. In several of them, he adopts a seemingly impossible premise just to demonstrate how it can be accomplished – a sort of Doctor Who novel as Mort Weisinger-era Superman comic, only with fewer malevolent toads. His books are ruthlessly high concept, though with the focus often as much on exploring the nature of the concept as on delivering it as such. This, at least, provides something of a contrast with the New Series Adventures, which are carefully and consciously positioned as secondary to the new series itself. The New Series Adventures are not there to rock the fundamental premises of Doctor Who. That’s not to say that they are unambitious, but they are expressly and by design not where major issues about the nature of the series get worked out.
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“National Tapioca Pudding Day”: The Practical Joker

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And this would be the point you should run away screaming.

“The Practical Joker” was the Animated Series episode I most dreaded having to watch, even before knowing about Margaret Armen’s submissions. And, while the actual episode isn’t anywhere near as dreadful as I feared it was going to be, it’s still concerning as it marks the point where The Animated Series treads the closest to becoming the one thing that would simply torpedo its legacy: Children’s television.

Now, there’s nothing inherently wrong with children’s television. When it’s working properly, there’s an elegance to children’s television that can make it fundamentally more sophisticated and effective than “adult” fiction because it doesn’t shy away from being idealistic or taking a stand. Indeed, my very favourite television shows were, in fact, designed with children predominantly in mind or at least operated according to a logic that children would find recognisable. But this…is not the kind of children’s television I’m talking about here.

Before I go any further I should probably get the plot synopsis out of the way. While taking a break from a geological survey mission, the Enterprise is randomly attacked by a fleet of Romulan battlecruisers. After seeking refuge in an electrically-charged space cloud, a series of strange occurrences starts to befall the crew. All the cups and silverware are replaced with trick ones, Spock’s science station scanner is replaced with one that has black ink on the eyepieces and the replicators start shooting food out at anyone who tries to use them. Finally, in a woefully iconic moment, Kirk storms onto the bridge and fumes about how someone stole his uniform from the laundry chute and replaced it with one that has “Kirk is a Jerk” emblazoned on the back in bold lettering. After taking turns blaming each other, the crew soon realizes that their practical joker is the Enterprise computer itself, which is suffering from an electronic nervous breakdown as a result of the charged storm the ship passed through. The crew must now work against the clock to interpret and outmanoeuvre the ship’s erratic behaviour before it outwits everyone by plunging them into the Neutral Zone.

So it’s dumb, but inoffensively so. In fact, it’s actually somewhat clever as it starts out leading us to believe it’s going to be a rote and banal children’s television story about a practical joker who will eventually get their comeuppance and learn a lesson about playing hurtful jokes on people before turning into a basic Star Trek techno-puzzle about a computer going out of control. In essence, the episode has played a practical joke on us through subverting expectations, but it’s not really an especially good one as neither type of story is something terribly easy to get excited about. Now, the basic concept of the back half of the episode, that of the Enterprise gaining sentience and leaving clues for its crew to figure out, is actually pretty interesting and it’s a testament to their shared skill as writers that Brannon Braga and Joe Menosky eventually do this story for Star Trek: The Next Generation and manage to make it something other than an unwatchably cringe-worthy disaster.…

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Saturday Waffling (January 25th, 2014)

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Right – finally placed the physical book orders for the Kickstarter. Which means there are something like three hundred books on their way to me, and many more whizzing about the globe to various other places. It’s very exciting, except for the part where all that great Kickstarter money I had suddenly stopped being quite so much Kickstarter money because I spent nearly $4000 on copies of my own books. Whoops.

Which transitions us to this weekend’s topic, which is “future of the blog.” Due to reasons having mainly to do with the peculiar academic politics of the school at which I was teaching, my classes for this semester were abruptly taken away a week before Christmas. (Short form – some upper division classes taught by senior faculty were underenrolled and got cancelled, and so mine got taken away to give to them because I’m an adjunct and thus can have all my classes cut without warning or notice and there’s not even a problem.) This is not a massive crisis, but it means that finances grow a little tighter, especially with the whole big thing with the Wonder Woman money, and, long and short of it, I need to do some thinking about how to increase the amount of money my writing makes me in the short-to-medium term.

Right now I’m considering two plans, which I’d like to lay out in their broad strokes and let people chime in on what they think is the better idea.

Plan One: Kick More Starts

In this plan, I’d run, probably in March, a Kickstarter for The Last War in Albion, likely with a target of about $3000. This would fund it through the start of coverage of Watchmen, which will begin with Chapter Twelve. (Or possibly thirteen – Swamp Thing might need more than one chapter because frankly, I don’t want them to be much longer than ten parts) I’d collect that into a first volume as a book, and then decide whether book two (The Battle of Watchmen) needs a Kickstarter to fund it as well. (In all likelihood the answer would be yes, and my goal would be to raise a couple of thousand dollars via Kickstarter roughly every calendar year.)

This is, broadly speaking, the “big projects” model, in which I would maintain a bunch of high profile projects. It has its obvious plusses and minuses, but is certainly a sound and plausible model for a writer to support himself over time.

Plan Two: Patreon

Recently coming to prominence, however, is another crowdfunding platform called Patreon. The model of Patreon is based not on fundraising for big projects, but on small payments for content created on a regular basis. It’s designed more for webcomics artists, musicians, and, oh hey, bloggers. Basically, people would be able to set a recurring charge up where, whenever I make new content, they pay some small amount – $.50, $1, $5, whatever. You can set a monthly cap, and so there’s all the safeguards you’d expect.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 75 (Hamlet)

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It’s a time-honored strategy. A skilled actor defined by one major role does some “challenging” work on a serious project to show that they’re flexible in anticipation of moving to a more serious and major level of their career. In the UK, the practice often involves a run in theater. For David Tennant, who had extensive theater experience anyway, it was the natural move – use the gap year opened in the production to do some high profile bit of theater.
Meanwhile, the Royal Shakespeare Company was in a position that could only be described as “in dire need of a hit.” The decision to terminate its relationship with the Barbican Centre in 2002 had left it with a vastly diminished presence in London, which, as it turned out, was not necessarily a great thing for a theater company, especially given that its Stratford-upon-Avon facilities were, at the same time, undergoing a lengthy renovation. The result was several years where the Company hemorrhaged money.
The two were natural partners, in other words. Tennant allowed them to have a high-profile production with a celebrity actor that would amount to a license to print money, and Tennant had a nice, high profile “respectable” role to use as he attempted to transform his post-Doctor Who career into, ideally, something American. And so we got the 2008 production of Hamlet in which Tennant pairs with Patrick Stewart, mostly running in Stratford. Adding respectability to the affair (on Tennant’s end) was him being a good RSC citizen and taking up a production of Love’s Labour Lost alongside Hamlet that, for a variety of reasons, was not treated as nearly as big a deal. 
For all that this makes perfect sense on paper, it was in some ways an awkward marriage. The RSC was in many ways unprepared to handle the sheer popularity that it had, and found itself trying to avoid looking too much like a populist circus, grumpily banning audience members from asking for anything other than RSC memorabilia to be signed and generally acting as though they were a bit annoyed that a bunch of sci-fi fans were giving them piles of money for what rapidly became the summer’s hottest theater ticket. And things got decidedly awkward towards the end of 2008/beginning of 2009 when Tennant suffered a back injury requiring surgery and ruling him out of the bulk of the London run of the play. 
But that this was such a controversy as to get repeated news coverage, and that a theater ticket in Stratford would be the hottest ticket of the summer speaks volumes about just how popular Doctor Who was at the end of 2008/beginning of 2009. Not only is Stratford a hundred miles and a two-hour train ride outside of London, it’s simply not a very big town – its population of 25,000 is smaller than that of Newtown, Connecticut, meaning that anyone wanting to see the production had to travel to a town with little else to do but tour a few museums and churches specifically for it.
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“Is green, yes.”: Bem

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This out-of-context screencap is more entertaining than the whole episode.

“Bem” is the final “official” contribution to Star Trek by Dave Gerrold, though his presence and influence is going to be felt on the franchise for years to come (most notably during the first third of Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s first season, when he was on staff). From what I gather, it seems to have the reputation for being one of the better remembered and most admired episodes of The Animated Series, although Gerrold and D.C. Fontana do seem to go back and forth a bit on what their actual takeaway on it was.

So naturally I don’t think it works in the slightest.

The story concerns the Enterprise taking on an attache by the name of Ari bn Bem, representing the planet Pandro. Bem is acting as an independent observer judging the Enterprise crew to determine whether or not the Federation is worthy of establishing formal diplomatic relations with his people. Though he sat out the previous six missions, Bem insists on being allowed to accompany the landing party on a dangerous reconnaissance mission to investigate uncontacted aboriginal people on Delta Theta III. Beaming down, it soon becomes apparent that Bem has ulterior motives, as he clandestinely replaces Kirk and Spock’s phasers and communicators with forgeries and then runs off, getting captured by the natives in the process. Pursuing Bem, Kirk and Spock end up captured themselves, where Bem reveals to them that, as a colony organism, he could have divided into discrete parts and escaped at any time, but allowed himself to be captured to firstly study the native population from within, but also to see how Kirk and Spock would respond, disapproving of their repeated attempts to resolve the situation with force.

OK. I have quite a few issues with this setup already, and that’s the briefest summary I could manage. First of all, as someone with a background in anthropology this entire premise rankles me. The ethics of “uncontacted” cultures is a sticky proposition to begin with, and the ever-present headache that is Star Trek’s Prime Directive makes it worse. There’s always a kind of paternalism (and, frankly, racism) present in the assumption that indigenous peoples, especially indigenous peoples who are “uncontacted”, are some kind of living time capsule from humanity’s prehistory. You can’t tell anything objectively about human history (well, you can’t really tell anything objectively, but that’s another matter entirely), and certainly not through ethnography. All that gets you is a not-always-clear outsider’s perspective of how a culture operates *in the present day*. Furthermore, it’s more than a little patronizing and naive to assume that all so-called “uncontacted” people are too childlike and stupid to at least guess some kind of an outside world exists.

None of this is helped by every single person in the episode acting like a complete idiot. Kirk and Spock are in full-on colonialist mode here again, stressing the importance of this mission to “classify” the aboriginal people of Delta Theta III, like the good Lamarckists they are.…

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The Comedian Is Dead (The Last War in Albion Part 28: Alan Moore’s Earliest 2000 AD Work)

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This is the fourth 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: 2000 AD built its reputation on the back of popular series like Judge Dredd, Ro-Busters, Rogue Trooper, and ABC Warriors. In his time working on the magazine, Alan Moore wrote for these properties only occasionally…

“Jeez, y’know, that felt good. There don’t seem to be so many laughs around these days.”
“Well, what do you expect? The Comedian is dead.” – Alan Moore, Watchmen #1

Moore’s Rogue Trooper work is altogether more somber affair. The first, “Pray for War,” tells of Gunnar having to kill another soldier who calls himself “Pray for War” because, as he says,“war is the best thing that ever happened to me” and “combat is what makes me happy,” ending with Rogue reassuring Gunnar that “you only killed part of him – the ugly part. The war killed any humanity left in him long ago.” The second, “First of the Few,” involves Rogue finding one of the abandoned prototypes of the Genetic Infrantrymen, who he allows the mercy of death, actively declining to lead his consciousness into his gun or helmet. Both are straightforward anti-war stories; “First of the Few” describes the hellish world of Nu Earth, “the ultimate monument to war. The land is scorched bare and the air is a poisonous soup,” Moore writes with obvious relish, crafting a dour and pleasureless war story that subverts the genre. 

Figure 210: Hammerstein’s somber reflections over the grave
of a Martian animal (2000 AD Annual ’85, 1984)
Moore is even more somber in his ABC Warriors story, “Red Planet Blues,” which has Hammerstein investigating a problem on Mars. The problem turns out to be that the planet still has life on it, and the solution of the humans that hire Hammerstein is to simply burn the weeds in which the lifeforms live. Hammerstein reflects at the end that “we burned the whole undergrowth and we only found one dead Martian animal. I figure even that was a fluke.” Nevertheless, Hammerstein opts to bury the animal, admitting that he’s “getting old” and “getting soft.” The story ends as a haunting dirge about the nature of colonial genocide, as Hammerstein warns the dead alien that “the humans are coming, and soon all your tribe will lie as still as you. There’s nothing you can do about it. It’s their planet now.” 
Figure 211: A classic twist ending page from
the first installment of Tharg’s Future Shocks
(From “King of the World,” in 2000 AD #25,
written by Steve Moore, art by Blasquez, 1977)
But while Moore dabbled with these characters, the bulk of his 2000 AD work was either on the three strips he created – Skizz, D.R.
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The Wank Delusion

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Sexist image alert.

Dom Kelly brought this to my attention, with his pithier comment: “*vomits*”

Okay, let’s examine this in what some might say was far too much detail.

Reason is sexy because one conventionally ‘attractive’ woman reads books by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, et al, and throws away a Bible.  In the nude.

Right…

1.  It is assumed that this picture – i.e. the person in it – represents ‘sexiness’.  But the whole concept of what is sexy is subjective – far more so than is admitted by consumerist media culture, to which this image owes its entire idea of sexiness.  The image is catering for only one idea of what is sexually alluring: the idea of the straight, cis-het male.  He’s probably assumed to be white as well.  The image, including the person in it, is arranged for the gaze of this intensely privileged group.  This is ‘reason’?

2.  Because one sexy person is an atheist, that doesn’t make Atheism itself sexy.  Systems of thought, ideological doctrines, persuasions of belief, scientific theories and hypotheses… in short: ideas… are not open to judgement based on the perceived sexiness of the people that hold and/or espouse them.  Ideas are to be judged on their quality, consistency, persuasiveness, empirical backing etc.  Otherwise, there’s not much point separating them from purely aesthetic categories.

3.  Beliefs can be held by people of widely divergent levels of attractiveness.  China Mieville is a Marxist.  So was Diego Rivera.  Do a Google Image search if you don’t know what that means.*

4.  People’s level of attractiveness changes.  Engels was pretty dashing when he was a young man.  He became a crusty, wrinkly old fart with a straggly beard.  Was Marxism sexy when he was young and hot, but stop being sexy when he got a paunch and a big beard (assuming that you don’t think paunches and big beards are sexy – which would mean you’re not Ke$ha).

5.  What does it mean to call an idea ‘sexy’ anyway?  Even the idea ‘let’s have sex now! is only sexy when proposed at the appropriate time and place, by someone you’d like to have sex with. 

6.  It’s difficult to see how Atheism could be said to be sexy.  It might possibly be propounded and espoused by sexy people, but that still doesn’t make the ideas themselves sexy. I personally find Helen Mirren in Excalibur so sexy it almost hurts to look at the screen, but if she suddenly started reading the works of Robert Ingersoll, that wouldn’t make the works of Robert Ingersoll sexy.  At best, if the process were repeated often enough, I might develop a Pavlovian fetish for the works of Robert Ingersoll… but we have now long passed the breaking point of this analogy.

7.  God is Not Great and the other books of the ‘New Atheists’ were not, generally, written by conventionally sexy people.  Hitchens was a bloated, nicotine-stained, red-faced, bug-eyed blowhard with questionable personal hygiene.  Dawkins resembles a vicar from an Agatha Christie book, crossed with ageing bird of prey and a Gerald Scarfe caricature of Bernard Ingham. …

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