Eruditorum Press

That is not dead which can eternally hit the snooze button

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 45 (Babylon 5)

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There is a moment familiar to everyone who has ever enjoyed Babylon 5 in which they make the cataclysmically dumb mistake of trying to get someone else to watch it. It goes like this: “It’s a huge five-season story arc that was planned out from the start. The first season is mostly crap, but the second one has some really good stuff in it. And the third and fourth are quite good…” and then somewhere around admitting that the fifth season is also a trainwreck you realize that the case for Babylon 5’s quality is actually enormously strained.

And it’s true. It’s much, much easier to list the things that are very wrong about Babylon 5 than it is to articulate the case for it. I mean, the case isn’t that hard: the show’s basic conceit, a five year novel in television form, plotted from the beginning to lead towards a pre-defined endpoint that would pay all of its threads off, is impressive. Yes, the use of television for a multi-episode story arc had precedent, but J. Michael Stracyznski was the first person to really try plotting an entire multi-season arc out and executing it. It’s a sprawlingly hubristic little number, but it’s also the first stab at the sort of thing that is these days taken for granted: of the things that Vince Gilligan is praised for in Breaking Bad, the fact that he had a coherent plot for the whole thing barely makes the list. It’s expected these days. Even if you don’t have one (*cough* Lost *cough*), you’re supposed to pretend that you do. (The zenith of this is the almost completely [and rightly so] forgotten Fox series Reunion, which featured a murder mystery as part of its central premise. When the show was cancelled the producers promised they’d reveal who did it before, a few months later, admitting that they hadn’t actually worked that out by the time the show was cancelled.)

Which, actually, is largely what Straczynski did. The original five-year-arc was reprinted in one of the volumes of the Babylon 5 scriptbooks, and basically completely diverges from what happened in the series somewhere in the rage of season four. Some of this, at least, was caused by Michael O’Hare departing at the end of the first season and a new lead character being created, but only some of it. The larger arc that Straczynski mapped out could well have played out with Bruce Boxleitner’s replacement character. Furthermore, whole major story arcs are missing. In the original outline the plot about the war with the Shadows (then still called the Shadowmen) spilled out past the five year mark and into the sequel series. In practice Straczynski wrapped it up towards the beginning of Season Four. This is partially down to the fact that it looked like there wasn’t going to be a fifth season and thus that Straczynski had to accelerate his plotting, but the compression isn’t quite as dramatic as people say – Straczynski has said that if he’d known for sure there was a fifth season then the eighteenth episode of the fourth season would have been the finale, involving only four episodes of compression.…

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Overwhelming Presence

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Just been reading the lovely Colin Baker’s (less than warm) remarks about his encounter with Jimmy Savile on the… umm… Daily Mail website.  Bleurgch.  I won’t link.

Found this delightful comment below.  As ever, click to enlarge.

It may be trolling, of course… but I doubt it.  It has the ring of genuine idiocy about it.

It restores a little bit of one’s faith in humanity to see that even the Daily Mail readers downvoted this icky little splat of blinkered, slavering, buttmunching cockwitttery.

Just shows.  It’s a jungle out there.…

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Let Your Mind Wander When You’re Handing It Over (SLEEPY)

72

I’ll Explain Later

Kate Orman’s SLEEPY is the book that actually kicks off the Psi-Powers series in any meaningful sense. Which is still not all that meaningful, as the Psi-Powers arc is infamous for its loose connections and lack of general coherence. SLEEPY tells the story of an Earth colony plagued by a mysterious outbreak of psychic powers and the various conspiracies that led to this state of affairs. These latter conspiracies dovetail out beyond the book and take us through almost to the end of the line. Being a Kate Orman book, everyone loves it. Dave Owen called it “one of the most memorable New Adventures to date.” Lars Pearson says it “has Orman at her prime, carving characters and sub-plots with the finesse of a sculptor.” And yet it’s the weak point in Orman’s oeuvre from the Shannon Sullivan poll, coming in at “only” 26th with a 71.8% rating. Of course, another way to put that is that Orman is one of four writers (Cornell, Lane, and Parkin are the others) to have put out multiple New Adventures and had them all in the top half of the charts. DWRG summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide entry.

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It’s March of 1996. Oasis are at number one with “Don’t Look Back in Anger.” That lasts a week before Take That enter with “How Deep is Your Love.” That lasts until the end of the month when Prodigy take the number one spot with “Firestarter.” Celine Dion, Boyzone, Bon Jovi, Garbage, and, actually, The Beatles, or, rather, their creepy zombie “record over John Lennon’s old demos” version all also chart. As does the X-Files theme.

In news, John Howard wins election as Prime Minister in Australia. The Dunblane massacre takes place where you’d expect it to as Thomas Hamilton kills sixteen people, fifteen schoolchildren aged five to six. The mad cow disease furor properly breaks out as the British government admits that BSE has likely been transmitted to people, resulting in a ban on the export of British beef. And three British soldiers are sent to prison for life in Cyprus over the death of Louise Jensen.

While in books we get SLEEPY, which, as mentioned, properly kicks off the extremely loosely connected Psi-Powers arc. Perhaps the first question to ask is why there’s such a thing as a Psi-Powers arc in the New Adventures. They’d gone since 1994 without an arc, after all, and it was hardly like people were clamoring. On top of that, there seems like a bit of a letdown in the concept. I remember this being tangible at the time, although it’s difficult to disentangle that from the general sense of limbo that the New Adventures were, by early 1996, firmly in. They were pre-emptively superceded by the TV Movie, which, by the time SLEEPY came out, was only two months away. But there’s something more fundamental than just the fact that this was a plot arc that made its debut under a certain measure of erasure.…

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People Like Us

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Lawrence Miles on ‘nice-but-then‘ syndrome:

Re-writing the whole world in order to prop up a specifically late-twentieth-century agenda is bad enough, but WALKING TO BABYLON sets about re-writing the whole of history. Lady Ninan is supposedly a resident of ancient Babylon, but speaks and acts like a twentieth- century post-feminist liberal, thus “proving” that “people like us” have been making the world a lovely place in which to live throughout history; despite living in a city under constant threat of foreign attack, the Lady lets Bernice, a complete stranger and obvious alien, stay in her house without any form of introduction simply on the pretext that “people like us” have to stick together; Bernice has a relationship with a (Victorian, or early Edwardian?) traveller- cum-archaeologist who, despite the Victorian era’s notoriety for male violence, bigotry and misogeny [sic] turns out to be such a “new man” that he becomes a stereotypical perfect gentleman from a Barbara Cartland novel; the two of them embark on a relationship which has every possible jagged edge systematically smoothed away by the text, almost as a demonstration of how nice, kind, polite and utterly unthreatening men can be picked up in any historical period; he’s even completely unaware of the existence of male prostitution (!) – despite being well-schooled in history and hailing from an era in which most of the major scandals of the day involved public figures being found in homosexual brothels – in order to sledgehammer home the fact that he’s so non-existant as a sexual presence that he can’t possibly cause Bernice any harm or heartache, and as all good twentieth-century liberals know that’s what good relationships are made of. 

It’s not just the fact that any historical context is thrown straight out of the window. It’s the fact that it’s been done to facilitate such a false, banal, “consensus-approved” romance. The uber-politics of WALKING TO BABYLON are presented as an ideal, but to put it bluntly if I lived in an “ideal” world this sterile then I’d kill myself in a week. It’d be going too far to compare the novel to the kind of disinfected, state-endorsed culture described in books like 1984, but I’m going to anyway because that’s how it made me feel. 

Yet WALKING TO BABYLON went straight to the top of the New Adventure polls when it was released, and in a sense it’s not surprising. It tells the audience exactly what that audience wants to hear. Act in the “proper” manner and you, too, can live in a lovely soft- edged universe where everybody believes in exactly the same principles, regardless of their background or century, and you might even get to have sex with – according to your preference – either (a) Bernice or (b) a pretty, blushing young man who might as well have been lobotomized for all the personality he’s got. This isn’t a romance, this is Newspeak- culture, and like all Newspeak-culture it works because it’s essentially reassuring.

– Lawrence Miles, interview, 2001. 

…

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Some Planet Called America (Warchild)

16

I’ll Explain Later

We’ve skipped Shakedown, Terrance Dicks’s novelization of his direct-to-video project with added framing story featuring the Doctor, and Just War, which is absolutely phenomenal and will get covered in the book version.

Andrew Cartmel’s Warchild completes the trilogy began with Warhead, and features the final fate of Vincent and Justine, who were introduced in that book. It also ostensibly kicks off the Psi-Powers Series, an infamously loose series of books that runs over the final year or so of the New Adventures, but as it has next to nothing to do with any of the other books in that series we can largely leave that alone until Monday. Like all of Cartmel’s books it is neither loved nor hated, slotted at thirty-sixth in the Sullivan rankings with a rating of 65.8%. At the time Dave Owen gave a more or less positive review that largely declines to provide anything like a good pull quote. “The writing style is mature and restrained,” perhaps. Or “Warchild holds the readers interest.” Lars Pearson gushes more usefully: “An incredibly mature, humanistic book.” DWRG Summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide Entry.

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It’s February of 1996. Babylon Zoo are at number one with “Spaceman.” They remain there for the entire month. Blur, Bjork, Joan Osborne, Mariah Carey, Cher, George Michael, and Radiohead also make the top ten, while popular albums include Oasis’s (What’s the Story) Morning Glory, Alanis Morrissette’s Jagged Little Pill, Tori Amos’s Boys for Pele, Radiohead’s The Bends, and Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds’ Murder Ballads, which is on average an astonishingly lovely month for albums. I’d give you the lower chart data, but the absurd fact that it is possible to control the publishing of factual data means that the website I use to get chart data just got a takedown notice from the Official Charts Company, and the Official Charts Company’s own site doesn’t offer data past the top ten. Not, mind you, it doesn’t offer data past the top ten for free. No, it doesn’t offer it at all. Period. Bastards.

Wikipedia, meanwhile, still happily offers a summary of the news. What we’ve missed: The Dayton Agreement, which brought an end to the Bosnian war, was signed in Paris, which is a very poor definition of Dayton, Ohio. The European Court of Justice made a big, important rule that football players who have reached the end of their contracts may transfer for free to another club. And Calvin and Hobbes ended. Whereas in the month this book came out, Deep Blue defeats Gary Kasparov for the first time. The IRA ceasefire ends as the IRA bombs Canary Wharf. Prince Charles and Princess Diana agree to divorce. The Conservative Party manages to fall to a two-seat majority. And Pokemon Green came out in Japan, beginning that whole thing.

While in books, Andrew Cartmel’s Warchild. This is one of those properly strange moments in writing the blog: the last time we deal with Andrew Cartmel. This is strange in several regards.…

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Children in Need

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The BBC’s failure to protect kids from Jimmy Savile is revolting, but it’s hardly the beginning or the end of their disinterest in violence against children.  Certain children, anyway.  The keepers of Pudsey are strangely uninterested in the child victims of powerful and influential people… be they depraved DJs or depraved states that happen to be Western allies.

For instance, as I write this, the state of Israel – a brutal, aggressive, nuclear armed, apartheid state which is mysteriously supposed to be less of a threat to world peace than Iran – is murdering Gazan children.  (It does no good, by the way, to trot out that old chestnut about them not deliberately aiming at the kids… if you get a machine gun and spray bullets blindly into a school, it’s no good later claiming you were only trying to hit the cigar-smoking TV personality lurking in the corner.)

This is nothing new, nor is the BBC response, which is as routine as it is pusilanimous.  Indeed, cowardice in the face of the powerful Israeli lobby (not to mention the backing Israel gets from the USA and our government) is the most charitable interpretation.  A less charitable – and probably more accurate – interpretation would be that those BBC content providers covering the ‘conflict’ in Gaza are unaware of the way they are loading and slanting their words.

Some examples?  Try these from the BBC website today.  Click on them to make them bigger.

Note that the ‘Key Points’ are all to do with the so-called ‘targeted assassination’ of a Hamas leader.  Note the phrase “militant groups”, presumably including Hamas, a democratically elected party.  Note the prominence given to Israeli officials, who are allowed to frame the Israeli operation as being aimed at “terror targets” in response to “days of on going rocket attacks on Israeli civilians”, the aim being to “protect Israeli civilians” (the only civilians who matter, or even exist, apparently).

No mention of the Gazan civilians, including young children, slaughtered.  Can you imagine how differently the page might read if the Palestinian rockets had caused any comparable damage to Israel, or if Iran had bombed somebody and caused as much suffering?

This one from today too:

Here’s the headline.  Note the relative sizes (and thus importance) given to Israeli and Palestinian deaths… bearing in mind the ratios and the fact that Israel is immensely better armed.  Notice the decontextualised way the attack becomes “cross-border violence” in line with the BBC’s usual way of depicting Israel/Palestine as a two-tribes-squabble issue, rather than the brutal domination of a subjugated captive minority by a powerful state.

Yesterday, the blog Electronic Intifada published a “statement from international academics who recently particpated in a conference on linguistics at the Islamic University of Gaza which decries major media outlets’ failure to report on recent killings of Palestinian civilians by Israeli forces in Gaza.”  The statement spells out the issue far better than I could, and takes in the BBC’s role as peddling the unbalanced and dishonest message. …

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The 1917 Zone – Part 1: Tim Nice-But-Then and the Curse of Downton Abbey

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The first in a new series of posts looking at the way Doctor Who has tackled World War One.

Looked at from a certain viewpoint, ‘Human Nature’ / ‘The Family of Blood’ makes all the right noises.  All the proper sounds issue from it when it is tapped.  It notices social hypocrisy about war, perhaps even moralising about it.  For instance, while the young boys at the school are taught how to be good little soldiers, a veteran of the Crimean war is to be found begging outside the town hall.

There is also an acknowledgement that war is unpleasant.  The boys tremble and cry when forced to actually point weapons at an approaching enemy, with even the odious Hutchinson is seemingly relieved at the realization that they’ve been shooting at empty scarecrows.  Joan lost her husband at Spion Kop (a battle of the Second Boer War, which would’ve been a British victory but for the farcical incompetence of the British generals).  The Headmaster has his speech in which he describes using his dead mates as sandbags.

There is an attempt at balance, at the dramatic demonstration of values rather than the elaboration of a didactic authorial point-of-view.  Yet, the characters’ values are not allowed to go uninterrogated.  Irony is much used.  So the Headmaster rounds up his boys to fight, responds with angry self-righteousness to the taunting of Baines/Son, and so on… but also evinces sincere horror at the idea of allowing what he thinks of as a little girl to be caught in the crossfire.  Of course, there’s another irony there because he’s prepared for male children to be sent into the line of fire.  Females, especially working class females, are to keep silent (presumably unless cheering you on your way to the carnage).

There’s an awareness of open sexism and racism in the episodes, issues that other forays into the past – ‘Daleks in Manhattan’ for instance – have almost entirely ignored and effaced.  Baines and Hutchinson look down on Martha and Jenny and make their nasty little racist joke.  John Smith assumes that Martha’s talk of aliens is a case of “cultural misunderstanding”; a primitive failing to comprehend the difference between fiction and reality.  Joan scoffs at the idea of a black maid training to be a doctor, apparently finding this concept even more immediately and self-evidently ridiculous than time travel or aliens.

The Class Struggle in Trumpton

There’s quite a common fad nowadays in TV drama, perhaps best exemplified by Mad Men: setting a story in a past era allows lots of implied sneering at crass, blatant, old-style sexism, racism, etc… all underwritten by a kind of tacit, back-slapping awareness of how much better we are than the people back then, now that we’re all enlightened liberals, cured of such silly shibboleths.  In ‘Human Nature’ / ‘The Family of Blood’ there is at least an awareness of class as a factor, though ‘classism’ is depicted as just another category of prejudice alongside racism and sexism.…

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Outside the Government 5 (Downtime/The Airzone Solution)

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Part of the story of Doctor Who’s return is the story of a generation of fans steadily establishing themselves in the television industry and, to varying extents, remaking it in their own image. From a broad perspective, this shouldn’t be that big a surprise. Doctor Who declined artificially into cult television. Cult television’s audience is middle class white men. Middle class white nerds also double as the sorts of people who become professional television writers. And so it’s not a huge surprise that the up-and-coming writers of the 1990s and 2000s included a large number of Doctor Who fans in their ranks.

But the nature of fandom, with its strong DIY ethic, meant that a fair number of these up-and-coming television producers found themselves making delightfully amateurish direct-to-video projects for the Doctor Who fan market. A complex set of legal rules meant that, in effect, almost every part of Doctor Who other than the actual premise of Doctor Who was copyright by the writers who created them or their estates. This meant that as long as you were willing to never mention the Doctor or the TARDIS at all anywhere in your story you could, if you were willing to pay a bit of money to the relevant estates, do all manner of Doctor Who spinoffs. Thus stuff like Shakedown, written by Terrance Dicks and featuring the Sontarans along with Carole Ann Ford and Sophie Aldred playing parts other than Susan and Ace. Or Downtime, featuring Victoria, Sarah Jane Smith, the Brigadier, and the Yeti. Similarly, while you couldn’t do Doctor Who as such, you could readily, say, hire Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant to play “The Stranger” and “Miss Brown” respectively and pretend that you were doing something other than making Doctor Who. And people got real starts here – Mark Gatiss’s first writing for video wa s achain of videos for BBV featuring Liz Shaw and a host of Doctor Who actors in other parts, while Nicholas Briggs is a mainstay of these things. Big Finish are themselves the heir to this style of production, and basically what happened once everybody finally got enough practice that they could reliably make things that weren’t awful.

There was a torrent of these things in the 90s, and we’re spoiled for choice on what to take. So let’s do Downtime, from Reeltime Pictures, and The Airsone Solution from BBV, the big two of the companies doing these things. Neither, to be clear, quite manages “good.” The flaws are obvious, but they’re generally juxtaposed with moments of genuine quality. Downtime, being the one that’s actually tied into Doctor Who, is probably the best place to start.

The problems here are numerous. Marc Platt can, obviously, write well, and we’ve seen him do so twice already in this blog. But we’ve also seen him stumble with a continuity “clarifying” mess in Time’s Crucible, and unfortunately those are the tendencies that largely rule the day here. Downtime is, by necessity, an almost entirely backward looking piece, seeking to cash in on fan pseudo-nostalgia for The Web of Fear and The Abominable Snowmen.…

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The Greatest Specialist in Time-Space Exploration (The Also People)

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I’ll Explain Later

The Also People is Ben Aaronovitch’s second New Adventure, and features a murder mystery in a utopian technologically advanced society modeled on the works of Iain M. Banks. It also largely resolves the plotline of Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart, although she’ll make two more appearances in the books. It’s highly acclaimed. Dave Owen admitted at the time that he was “tempted to say that The Also People is flawless,” while Lars Pearson more recently enthuses that it’s “meaty and domestic” and “deserves every drop of the hype.” Good thing, as there’s quite a bit of it – The Also People is ranked third on Shannon Sullivan’s rankings, with an 86.7% rating. DWRG summary. Whoniverse Discontinuity Guide.

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It’s November of 1995. Coolio is still at number one with “Gangsta’s Paradise.” A week later he’s unseated by Robson and Jerome with “I Believe/Up on the Roof,” which sees out the month. The lower charts are far more interesting this time: Everything But the Girl, Oasis, Blur, Madonna, Enya, Bjork, Bon Jovi, Boyzone, Queen, Tina Turner, Meat Loaf, and Def Leppard all chart, almost none of them with anything close to one of their best songs.  (Actually, Oasis chart with “Wonderwall,” which is at least one of their best known songs. Amusingly, it doesn’t hit number one in the UK, but does in the US.

In news, the big one is Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination in Tel Aviv. Nine members of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People are executed in Nigeria more or less on the behalf of Shell Oil. The US government shut down for a few days. Both Toy Story and GoldenEye come out in theaters. And Princess Diana gives her famed interview to Martin Bashir, scoring all-time record ratings for a current affairs program in the UK. Thrilling.

In books, The Also People. The last three novel entries have all, to varying degrees, dealt with a certain level of inadequacy in the quality of writing in the New Adventures line. This is, as I have said, probably the biggest barrier between them and bringing Doctor Who back in the long term. If you compare Head Games to its nearest new series equivalent, which would probably be The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End, the biggest thing that jumps out is that the latter is, like everything to come out of the Davies or Moffat systems, a well-oiled machine in terms of the tightness of its storytelling. Even when the new series coughs up a complete turkey of an episode the basic mechanics of its storytelling are largely impeccable. Its worst episodes still hum with a unity of approach such that every detail is turned carefully towards the questions of storytelling and every beat of the narrative supports a thematic or emotional payoff.

On their good days the New Adventures can match that handily. But their good days are, if not quite few and far between, at least sporadic. The Also People is, however, one of their good days.…

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Cruel and Cowardly

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Trigger Warning.

So, Jimmy Savile and all that.  The hidden well of suppurating pus beneath the now-picked scab of BBC light entertainment.

It would seem that vast amounts of Doctor Who were made by an organisation that, in its widespread branches and ascending echelons, actively colluded in facilitating and covering-up the abuse and rape of children.  Lots of children.

By itself, this observation is irrelevant to the wider scandal, and to dwell on it from the fan standpoint would surely amount to morally myopic solipsism of the first degree.  What matters isn’t how we feel about it, or how it changes our viewing of contemporaneous episodes.  On the list of things that matter, that’s so far down that it’s in an appendix, in small print.  Yet it surely demands some thought from those of us steeped in the show, in the history of it and the watching of it.

Most of us fans have – via the videos and DVDs and toys and… ahem… websites – given unreasonable amounts of our time and loyalty and extra money to the BBC.  The same organisation that cosetted and enabled a man who, beyond being a routine right-wing shitsmear of a type all-too-common in the entertainment world, was also a known child rapist.  The BBC, the makers and marketers of the children’s own show that the adults adore, instititionally sat on the knowledge and did nothing.

We shouldn’t, of course, be shocked out of any illusions about the BBC being a beneveolent, lovable old auntie or any such mindless, sentimental bollocks.  I’m now past the point where I’d be happy to take part in any ‘Proud of the BBC’ campaigns.  I guess even Mitch Benn would probably not write the same lyrics, were he writing today.

No, no.  The BBC News helps naturalise and peddle and thus facilitate wars, invasions, corruption, hard-right government policies, police brutality, neo-liberal assumptions galore, and a thoroughly establishment view of reality.  This is it’s notion of balance and objectivity.  Andrew Marr and Jeremy Vine and other such clueless parrots of capitalist realism, spewing endless reiterations of hegemonic ideology.  BBC drama and comedy and entertainment shows – Doctor Who included – generally promulgate deference, hierarchy, cultural racism, heterodoxy and conformity, heteronormativity, contempt for the working class and bourgeois values.  The BBC, as a force in the culture industries, instinctively advocates respect for authority and royalty and capitalism and established power.

That it is loathed and hated poisonously by the Murdoch press and the rest of Britain’s reactionary print media is testament only to the fact that, being publically owned, it doesn’t earn profit for the capitalist class directly, and even cuts into a wedge of the market.  Being nominally accountable to the public, it is occasionally capable of mild deviations from the ideological ultra-lunacy of the press, red-top or ‘quality’.  From the standpoint of Melanie Phillips and persons of her loathsome ilk, it’s communism to even affect neutrality over, say, Israel/Palestine, even if the real effect of your coverage is to perpetuate all the reactionary lies peddled about the conflict. …

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