Eruditorum Press

Discontent creators

In The Wild And The Wind (Sometime Never…)

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Thanks to everyone again on the Kickstarter. This has… been humbling.

It is entirely possible that Sometime Never… contains the single dumbest retcon in all of Doctor Who. Given the competition for the title, this is no mean feat. But Justin Richards is up to the task, answering for all of the negative four people who were really interested in what the Doctor’s origins were in the new post-Time Lord universe. We’ll get to the particulars of this revelation in a few paragraphs and deal with the sort of awe-inspiringly pathetic flop that it makes when it arrives, but for now let’s take a step back and look at the score, as it were.

This is technically not a Time Can Be Rewritten post. Actually, we’ve been suspended oddly in limbo since The Creed of the Kromon in that regard, having done an extended jaunt through the Big Finish audios and their Eighth Doctor endgame and then wandered over to do the comics and some Pop Between Realities. So we’re still in the same month of The Creed of the Kromon. Why did we wait so long before circling back to the exact same month? Mainly because the finale of the Eighth Doctor Adventures, which we’ll do on Monday, actually is a Time Can Be Rewritten, as it came out after Rose, and so I decided to anchor the tail end of the Eighth Doctor Adventures there. (Of course, we’ve still another full week of entries between The Gallifrey Chronicles and Rose, but that’s mainly me on a “form follows content” kick of wanting the wilderness years to end not with a bang but with a weirdly extended whimper.)

So this is very much the Eighth Doctor Adventures in the same position Zagreus was in – doing a big story about their own mythology that was designed when that mythology was still a credible contender for “proper Doctor Who” and then released into a world where all hope of legitimacy that it had was already gone. In this regard there’s almost nothing Sometime Never… could possibly have done that would have been adequate. There’s just no way to do a big revelatory story about the nature of the Eighth Doctor Adventures and have it matter anymore as of January 2004.

And so we should have some sympathy in reading Sometime Never…, as it’s a book that doesn’t have an era. This is always a problem with the wilderness years, given how much they were pre-empted by the new series, but as with Zagreus we here have a work that never enjoyed any time in which it wasn’t pre-empted by the future. There was never a period where its revelations could have worked, and thus discussing them is almost tragic.

On the other hand, even if there had been an era where the basic conceit of this book could have worked, it’s difficult to see how this particular iteration of that conceit could have. So, OK. Here’s the score. It turns out that all this time Sabbath has been an agent of the Council of Eight, who want to become Lords of Time and the like.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 59 (Harry Potter)

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Let’s start with a quick update on the Kickstarter for the second edition of the Hartnell book. Short form: it’s doing amazingly. We’re well over goal, and working our way through stretch goals at a pleasant clip. Right now the stretch goals are commentary tracks for specific episodes. So let’s talk about that.

I’ve been musing off and on about whether there’s a sequel to be had in terms of TARDIS Eruditorum. And in terms of the blog, no, there isn’t. I’m not going to have much more to write on Doctor Who when I’m done. I mean, I’ll come back at the end of every season or so and do a catch-up, but it’s not like I’ve developed bold new interpretations of The Web Planet since 2011. But there’s always been a dimension the blog hasn’t been great at doing: the visuals and storytelling of episodes. Simply put, that’s stuff that’s easiest to talk about when you have clips in front of you. And while I’ve occasionally done video blogs (Here’s a random example) that talk about this, it’s just not what the blog is best at. It’s the wrong medium.

And so I want to at least experiment with another way to go through the series: commentary tracks that can be played alongside episodes such that I can talk about the stories in terms of how they’re put together and what their storytelling says. And right now the Kickstarter has moved on to funding some experiments with that.

So far we’ve unlocked commentary tracks for The Rescue, The Ark in Space, Paradise Towers, and The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang. Next on deck are Kinda, The Mind Robber, and The Three Doctors. All told I have ten stories up for grabs. And what I’ll do is record commentaries on them over the next few months and post them for free.

If the commentaries are good and people like them we’ll continue in this vein, going out of order and posting commentaries on episodes. Eventually it’ll switch to a model where the latest one is free and the archive costs $.99 a story or so, bur that’s in the future.

So if you haven’t contributed to the Kickstarter yet and are interested in exploring possible futures for the blog and my Doctor Who criticism, please head on over and pledge. I’ve just added some new rewards, and there are plenty of shiny things to be had among the low-price rewards as well. Every bit helps. You can donate over here.

Meanwhile, today’s entry: Harry Potter.

Another crucial piece of the puzzle, so to speak. What almost everybody who comments on Harry Potter gets out of the way very early on is that there is not actually very much in it that is original. They’re straightforward instances of classic British children’s literature. The closest thing to innovation they can be said to have is that they perform a genre collision of the school story genre with fantasy, but this isn’t even new: off the top of my head Jill Murphy did basically the same setup in 1974 with The Worst Witch, and Mary Stewart had something along the same lines in 1969 with The Little Broomstick.…

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Kickstarter Stretch Goals

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Update #3:

So. Um. This Kickstarter has gone a bit better than I was planning on. So much so that I’ve already made it into some advanced stretch goals I was planning on debuting later this week. More about this on Wednesday with the next post, including the sorts of things I expect I’ll talk about, but the short form is this: I’m considering that one of the post-Eruditorum projects I might take on will be recording DVD-style commentaries on episodes where I can talk about the camerawork and visual storytelling and other stuff that doesn’t work as well in blog form. And if the Kickstarter keeps going, that’ll be what I look at.

The previous post, most of it quasi-osbolete in that we already hit all of the stretch goals discussed, is below.

And here’s the Kickstarter if you want to join the fun.

Original post:

First off, today’s regular post is below. That said:

Holy crap, you guys.

So, um, I wasn’t exactly planning on waking up to a funded project. So I didn’t have stretch goals entirely worked out. So, um, here was my vague plan – for the first bit of stretch I was thinking of adding extra essays into the book. More books, audios, or Pop Between Realities. I’m thinking a total of five – one at each $200 tier up to $2000.

But I need suggestions. So, to recap, in the existing book are: Kim Newman’s Time and Relative, Steve Lyons’s The Witch Hunters, Andy Lane’s Empire of Glass, and Simon Guerrier’s Guardian of the Solar System. Plus, of course, the ones we did on the blog: Campaign, The Time Travellers, The Plotters, and The Man in the Velvet Mask.

In the new edition we’ll add Marc Platt’s Auld Mortality, the John and Gillian comics, the first Destiny of the Doctor audio, and A Big Hand for the Doctor. But now I need more things to add. So, make nominations in comments please – good audios and books to discuss, and why you think they’d make good inclusions. I’ll update this post throughout the day with leading candidates, and get a set of stretch goals up this evening.

When and if we chew through these I have a second wave of stretch goals in mind. But I don’t think I want to tip my hand on that quite yet. Suffice it to say that they’re something completely new for this project, and if they go well could spin off into an entire sequel to the project.

The Kickstarter is over here if you want to contribute. And thank you all, very much, for what you already have contributed.

Update #1: The current front-running posts are:

  • A Pop Between Realities on Dan Dare
  • A Pop Between Realities on It Happened Here
  • Rob Shearman’s Deadline
  • Masters of Luxor
Other possibilities, none of which are yet likely to unseat one of those four, but any of which could become number five are Birth of a Renegade, Whatever Happened to Susan Foreman, and The Meeting.
…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else 18 (The Eighth Doctor Comics)

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First off, an announcement: I’m funding the second edition of the William Hartnell book via Kickstarter. The link is here. Please, contribute, spread the word, et cetera. There are some lovely perks available – most of the tiers amount to “pre-order the book,” but if you’re interested in signed copies, that’s up there too. Also, for all the people who have ever requested that I cover something in one of the future volumes, here is your chance to make me. Plus there’s a Kickstarter-exclusive essay to be had at any donation level.

You might fairly ask why I’m funding the project this way. The answer is pretty simple: I know the financials on a new book. I know how much a book makes in its first month and how to balance production costs against that. But I have no idea how to budget an updated edition, and I don’t want to put out a bunch of money on production and then have the book take six months to earn out. So I’m trying to fund it via presales. If the Kickstarter falls through it doesn’t mean the book won’t happen, but it’ll mean some… reevaluating.

Also, I have some really fun stretch goals if it funds, so, you know. There’s that. So, yes. On to today’s post.

As we said on Wednesday, there are six Eighth Doctor eras, abortive as some may be. And with this we come to the final one of them: the Doctor Who Magazine comic. It’s telling that of the eight Doctors to have had a comic in Doctor Who Magazine the only three where the comic is highlighted as a specific and important part of the era are the ones that coincided with what is widely, if not universally, considered a problematic era elsewhere. The Mills and Wagner Tom Baker strips provided a desired tonic to the controversial levity of Season Seventeen. The Parkhouse/Ridgway Sixth Doctor comics were valued in a large part because of how problematic the era itself was. And here we get the third era of Doctor Who Magazine comics that people are very invested in: the Eighth Doctor comics.

They’re not the salvation of the Paul McGann era. I mean, nobody expected me to say they were, right? They have some charming ones – most notably “Where Nobody Knows Your Name,” a one-off strip featuring the return of Frobisher. Several of the moments of high drama work quite well – when the Doctor’s main comic strip companion, Izzy, gets turned into a fish person there’s some lovely emotional beats. And a fake regeneration into Nicholas Briggs’s Audio-Visuals Doctor is delightfully cheeky, as plot twists go.

There are, in other words, lots of bits to love. But it’s still a Doctor Who Magazine comic strip, which means characterization is at a minimum. The Eighth Doctor is as featureless here as ever, running firmly as “generic Doctor” with occasional outbreaks of fight scenes. As with the previous two times there’s been a selection of people who think that the comics are the “real” version of the Doctor, it’s more a criticism of the rest of the era.…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 40 (Lucie Miller/To the Death)

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By the end of the Lucie Miller run, of course, things had changed somewhat. The audios were no longer being made for first transmission on BBC 7, although they still got around to being aired there eventually. The audios were instead transitioning to their current form, namely the Dark Eyes box set in which an entire short season of audios drops in one $60 box set ($35 for digital download) – in other words, to fan products supreme. But this transition didn’t rip out the existent DNA of the Lucie Miller run. These were still designed to be new series inspired stories for the modern era, as opposed to ones mimicking or following from the logic and structure of past eras.

But equally, now they were back to being aimed at the same fan audience of virtually everything else from Big Finish. And in the big conclusion to the Lucie Miller run, the two-part Lucie Miller/To the Death (another convention absorbed from the new series) we can see very clearly what the implications of this are. We’ve got Susan, her son Alex, Daleks, the plot of The Dalek Invasion of Earth, the Meddling Monk, and, for good measure, a plot thread picked up from one of the Sixth Doctor/Charley audios. This is as hardcore as continuity porn gets without namechecking the Borad.

But what’s interesting is that Big Finish have, by this point, figured out how to do both at once. They’ve got a character-based story – this is the old standard “the companion has to function without the Doctor” story that every Davies companion got at least one of. (The Christmas Invasion, Last of the Time Lords, Turn Left) It’s They’ve got payoff to things set up in previous stories. They’ve got a big tragedy for the Doctor that sends him off sulking. It’s all very successful season finale stuff of the sort nobody once got to work in the wilderness years. And it’s also absolutely swimming in Doctor Who continuity.

And as this is the last thing we’re going to look at that Paul McGann was actually involved with in some fashion, this is worth pausing and celebrating actively. I’ve argued previously that there’s a reasonable lens by which Doctor Who steadily improves in a technical sense. But one of the biggest holes in that is the Paul McGann era, which, if we’re being honest, never really managed the consistent quality of the New Adventures or the Cartmel iterations of the Sylvester McCoy era. And with this he finally gets something that feels like a precursor to the new series. It’s not, of course – it’s a post-new series attempt to do McGann adventures in that style. But it is the most successful fusion of the McGann era as it existed – dense continuity references for fans – and what the McGann era in practice led into.

And this does matter. It’s strange that it does, but it does. The standard configuration of Doctor Who eras is, after all, based on the lead actor.…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 39 (Human Resources)

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Sorry I’m late. Was up late chasing a deadline on the Flood book and forgot to queue anything here. In any case, Human Resources. The cheekily-named Eighth Doctor Adventures line from Big Finish is an oddity. On the one hand it seems faintly ridiculous – yet another bite at the apple in terms of getting the fizzled McGann era to work right. On the other, with the exception of the TV Movie itself this is as high profile and mainstream as McGann ever got, in that the first season of these audios got their first airing on BBC Radio 7, with CD release following. Later seasons came out on CD first, but Human Resources is notable as one of only nine times Paul McGann appeared in a Doctor Who story that was designed for transmission to the general public instead of for sale to dedicated fans.

Like The Girl Who Never Was it’s doing so in the wake of the new series. Indeed, it’s almost certainly the new series that made the McGann audios on BBC Radio happen in the first place. Doctor Who was big business, so why wouldn’t Radio 7 try to get in on it? And given that there was no way the new series was going to spin off into audio unexpectedly the obvious thing to do was to use a past Doctor. And at that point since you’re basically recreating Big Finish’s schtick, you may as well just have Big Finish do it.

More significant in many ways is the fact that it was Paul McGann doing it. In many ways, he’s the only one who could have. Tom Baker might have done, but there’s a self-conscious retroness to that choice that Paul McGann doesn’t have. McGann is instead an oddly lost Doctor. He has name recognition, but his era, having mostly happened in the obscurity of fan-centric publications, for all practical purposes doesn’t exist in a larger cultural sense. As the Doctor who occupies the strange space immediately prior to 2005, he’s the one who can be reinvented for audio.

In practice, of course, it’s not a reinvention so much as a marginal refinement. By this point people finally had a sense of how to write for McGann specifically, and so we finally have audios that play to his strengths. He’s accordingly on form, and with good reason, as Human Resources basically gives him an unending flood of interesting things to react to, and so he gets to do what seems to be his favorite thing to do as the Doctor: react sardonically to various absurdities. The pace is accelerated a bit, there’s a decent amount of attention to character, and the whole thing feels refreshingly streamlined (in, oddly, a way that The Girl Who Never Was, recorded a year later, doesn’t).

Beyond that, the influence of the new series all but runs rampant. We’ve got forty-five minute episodes, with most of the season being self-contained stories. When we do a two-parter there’s a heft to it such that the story feels oversized (more about which in a minute).…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 58 (State of Play)

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As we’ve noted previously, Paul Abbott was one of Russell T Davies’ primary mentors in television. And State of Play remains his big prestige project, making it a useful thing to look at as we try to answer one of the most difficult questions about Doctor Who imaginable: what should we have expected Russell T Davies’s Doctor Who to look like. After all, we know the answer to this. We know it so well that it’s easier to look at Davies’ past career as a prelude to Doctor Who than it is to figure out what a reasonable set of expectations for his Doctor Who would have been. And so State of Play is interesting as a near-miss: a story by a writer Davies invited to work on the new series, written as a high-profile BBC One drama, but far enough away from Davies and Doctor Who that it doesn’t invite direct comparison. Instead it lets us ask the more important question: what does major BBC drama look like in the mid-aughts?

In many ways what’s most interesting is that we have major BBC drama again. The nineties were not good for the BBC, not least because of the consequences of John Birt’s management, itself a holdover from the Thatcher/Major era. But by 2003 Tony Blair’s Labour government was thoroughly established, life in Britain was seeming pretty peachy, and the swellings of something approximating national pride were underway – more on which next Wednesday. And the BBC was starting to get into a mood where it thought seriously about doing major productions again. It was getting a bit of Reithian spring in its step again and having executives unironically proclaim it a force for good and the like. And this changed the sorts of things it aired. Eventually it would lead to it having a daft idea to create family-friendly drama for a Saturday teatime slot in a mad bid to reclaim the time slot from ITV. But for now it’s somewhat simpler: the BBC starts making high profile event dramas again.

Or, perhaps more to the point, it starts making ones that aren’t costume dramas. Costume dramas, after all, were safe – endlessly exportable to America for flogging in the Masterpiece time slot. But something like State of Play? At six episodes it doesn’t easily and straightforwardly fit into anything except maybe the HBO/Showtime paradigm, and they hardly rush to buy random British programs. It wasn’t suitable for Masterpiece, nor for Mystery. So it was apparently going to have to live or die on its British qualities.

On the other hand the cast assembled for this is… impressive. A fair amount of it is “before they were famous” types, admittedly – David Yates wasn’t a film director yet, and James McAvoy was firmly up-and-coming. Nevertheless, this is a TV series that boasts James McAvoy, John Simm, David Morrissey, Kelly MacDonald, and Bill Nighy from the guy who went on to direct five Harry Potter films. You don’t assemble a cast like that unless you’re shooting for real quality, and you don’t attract them unless you have it in the script.…

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Book Launch From Space

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The Girl Who Never Was is discussed in the entry immediately below this. But I’m knocking that off the top of the post order because, well, this is more exciting. Slightly later than hoped for, but still miles better than last time, I am proud to announce the third book volume of TARDIS Eruditorum is now in print and ready for your purchasing pleasure.

Links follow:

US Print Edition ($14.99)
US Kindle Edition ($4.99)
UK Print Edition (£11.99 VAT excluded)
UK Kindle Edition (£3.49 VAT excluded)
Smashwords Edition ($4.99, for eReaders other than Kindle)

As ever the pricing is based on the model “Five bucks seems about right for the ebook, and I’ll make the print edition so that it gets me the same royalty.”

Over the next few weeks the book will appear on other major ebook sites like Barnes & Noble and iBooks, but for right now if you have a non-Kindle reader you’ll need to get it from Smashwords and upload it manually. (And this is frankly the best way to do it anyway – if you buy from Barnes & Noble or Apple you’re only buying the Smashwords edition but diluting my cut by giving it to Apple or B&N)

If you have a Doctor Who or sci-fi website, blog, or whatever and would like a review copy, drop me an e-mail and I’ll see to it.

Furthermore, if you’ve not picked up previous volumes, the Patrick Troughton (US, UK, Smashwords) and William Hartnell (US, UK, Smashwords) versions remain on sale. Though to be open, the Hartnell version is going to get replaced with a shiny new second edition that doesn’t have horrible typos later this year (more news on that in the next week or two), and so you may want to hold off on that. Equally, however, you can buy the first edition and then have a cool out of print book to show off. I’m certainly not going to tell you not to give me money twice.

Here’s what this one includes:

  • Revised and expanded editions of every essay on the Jon Pertwee era.
  • Three book-exclusive Time Can Be Rewritten entries on the Barry Letts-penned audio The Paradise of Death, the Paul Magrs Companion Chronicle Find and Replace, in which Jo Grant, played by Katy Manning, meets Iris Wildthyme, played by Katy Manning, and Virgin’s acclaimed Who Killed Kennedy?
  • Various book-exclusive short essays, including an attempt to reconcile the Pertwee era with Torchwood, an explanation of how the TARDIS works, and a guest essay by Anna Wiggins that attempts to explain the Blakean extravaganza that is my Three Doctors essay.
  • A phenomenally cool cover by James Taylor (no, not that James Taylor), who discusses his process here, in a very cool post that you should totally go read.
  • Excellent copyediting by Millie Hadziomerovic. 
  • A small but significant amount of money that goes in my pocket.
This last point is a big one. I spend what can charitably be called a lot of time on this blog and on these books.
…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 38 (The Girl Who Never Was)

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It’s a fair question why this exists. The continuing adventures of the Eighth Doctor and Charley Pollard, long after their quasi-era had ended. Really, the entire existence of Big Finish as the last man standing from the wilderness years is strange. As we’ve pointed out before, almost all of the creative debates of the wilderness years are settled. Russell T Davies, by making Doctor Who an unequivocal part of the mainstream again, settled them. The future of Doctor Who was secured. What use can we have for the calx of the wilderness years? And this is, of course, the hardest to understand one. Nostalgia for the Davison or McCoy eras makes sense. Even nostalgia for the Colin Baker years makes sense as a sort of redemption. But nostalgia for the culturally irrelevant speck that is the McGann era? Why would we miss it? Why would we want to sustain it?

And so many of the familiar tics are present. The Cybermen on the cover make a “surprise” appearance at the end of the second episode. The first episode spends all of its effort setting up the surprise revelation of the story’s premise (also essentially emblazoned on the cover). These are small, niggling things, but nevertheless, eight years into the Big Finish era they’re still going on. There’s a stubbornness to this that borders on the sweet. Big Finish could have entirely thrown in the towel in the wake of the new series. Sure, they don’t have Eccleston or Tennant, but they could have turned overtly into new series clones. Instead here they are, cranking out 4×25 minute stories with the same pesky flaws they’ve always had. It’s almost romantic, in a way. Almost.
Elsewhere, however, the influence of the new series is more tangible. The structure of the episode is in effect a shell game, furiously moving the audience’s focus around in the hopes that they’ll lose sight of the foreknowledge that Charley is leaving this story and will thus be surprised by it in spite of themselves. This is standard practice for new series finales, but Big Finish had never really done it before. Of course, equally, by this point in Doctor Who “new series finale” and “departure of a major character” were essentially synonymous, especially when you consider that The Girl Who Never Was was, in practice, recorded in the wake of Doomsday. 
Indeed, it’s difficult not to see the two stories as causally related. Televised Doctor Who – by this point well established as legitimate and proper Doctor Who in a way that Big Finish never was nor could be – did a big companion departure in a story with Cybermen, so Big Finish followed suit, recording it almost exactly a year later. And it’s worth stresing that this is actually the first time Big Finish ever did a companion departure. They’d previously established how Evelyn parts company with the Sixth Doctor, but she didn’t actually get a departure story as such: the Doctor just shows up with Mel after Evelyn has departed and we find out why Evelyn departed. 
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That Isn’t Right

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It occurs to me that this post (in which I had a go at ‘The Reign of Terror’ for giving us a thoroughly reactionary and misleading picture of the French Revolution) should’ve been called ‘That Isn’t Right’. So I’ve given that title to this post instead, which is also about all manner of wrongness in the representation of history.

I wasn’t going out on much a limb dissing ‘The Reign of Terror’ (the acronym of which is TROT, amusingly enough); nobody is terribly attached to it.  ‘The Aztecs’, by contrast, is one of those stories that fan opinion tends to think of as irreducibly Good.  It isn’t that everybody likes it, but anyone trying to say that it’s Bad definitely has the burden of proof upon them.

I’m not actually going to say that it’s bad, as such.  On the whole, it’s very well made.  But….

Black and White and Red All Over

“Tell me, Aged Servant of Yetaxa…
do you approve of interracial marriage?”

Firstly, the Aztecs are played by white people.  It’s not easy to tell for sure, but it looks like at least some of the actors are ‘darked-up’ (what would you call it… bronzeface?).  It seems probable, from looking at colour photos of the actors on set, that they’ve been reddened.  But even if they weren’t actually made-up, they were still representing Aztecs one way or another.  Costume, ostensibly ‘native’ mannerisms and speech patterns, etc.  It amounts to the same thing, or at least something very similar.  Remember, not all blackface involves actual ‘darking-up’.  These days, many understand the word and its variants to connote any situation in which the dominant culture reveals its inbuilt privilges (i.e. racism, ableism) by having someone not in an oppressed group representing that oppressed group, whether in overtly parodic form or not.  As China Miéville has observed, the Armstrong & Miller RAF sketches (while funny, at least once upon a time) employ a deeply reactionary verbal “modern blackface” by putting speech idioms associated with young, urban kids (who, if they’re not black, have supposedly absorbed aspects of black culture and speech) into the mouths of ‘the Few’, thus implicitly comparing today’s supposedly self-obsessed, aimless, pampered, ‘entitled’ youngsters with the generation of the “finest hour”.  Miéville points out that such juxtapositions (old, white, middle/upper class guys ‘putting on’ verbal fancy dress such as “innit”) are the standard obsession of Radio 4 comedy panel shows.  The more overtly sinister version of these same assumptions was expressed with typically boorish reactionary truculence by Dr David Starkey on Newsnight after the riots in 2011.

While blackface and its variants were on the wane in America from the 50s onwards (even before the rise of the Civil Rights Movement, which of course sharpened such unease), the use of ‘darking-up’ was less likely to be seen as problematic in Europe when ‘The Aztecs’ (and other similar historical stories of the same era) got made.  Even so, it’s far too glib to say that there was no way anyone at the BBC could have questioned the practice. …

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