Eruditorum Press

Our business actually is to reason and compare

The Late 50s! The Time Before Burgers. (Delta and the Bannermen)

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The idea of a Doctor who looks comfortable riding a
motorcycle is a major transition for the show, and one I
hope to someday see.

It’s November 2nd, 1987. The Bee Gees are at number one with “You Win Again,” but are unseated only a week later by T’Pau with “China In Your Hand,” which remains for the rest of this story. George Harrison, Rick Astley, George Michael, Fleetwood Mac, and Whitney Houston also chart, as do Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes with “(I’ve Had) The Time Of My Life.) This being spectacularly unpromising, we ought peruse the lower charts where The Smiths, Boy George, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Public Enemy, Suzanne Vega, and The Sisters of Mercy all appear.

In spoken-word news, eleven people are killed by an IRA bomb in Enniskillen. A worker revolt in Bra?ov, Romania takes place, another crack in the facade of Soviet Eastern Europe. London City Airport opens, and customs officers in Southamption seize over £50 million in cocaine. Also, the government announces that the Community Charge will be taking effect in 1990. This can only end well for Thatcher. Finally, a fire in the London Underground kills thirty-one two days after the story ends.

While on television, Delta and the Bannermen. But let’s pause for a moment here and jump forward a quarter-century. In October of 2011 the American sitcom Community, beloved by American Doctor Who fans for an ongoing parody of Doctor Who within the show entitled Inspector Spacetime, aired an episode titled “Epidemology.” The conceit of the episode was that a Halloween party at the community college where the series takes place is infected with a disease caused by tainted army surplus rations that leads to a zombie epidemic. The episode is, in effect, a half-hour zombie film. In which the soundtrack – the iPod playlist that the Dean had been playing at the party – consists entirely of ABBA songs. The episode was enormously popular among fans of the show and critics, and is generally seen as one of the show’s finest hours. And rightly so – it’s clever, it’s funny, and it creates a coherent fusion of an unlikely and frankly completely mad set of ingredients.

Why, then, is Delta and the Bannermen, created a quarter century earlier, largely despised? It is, after all, a gritty action movie featuring a bunch of Kurosawa-homage mercenaries attempting an alien genocide that’s set in a Welsh holiday camp in the 1950s, features a bunch of aliens disguised as rockabillies, and features a soundtrack consisting of Keff McCulloch covers and pastiches of 50s rock music. And its title is a parody of a goth rock band for good measure. This is, on the face of it, the same basic concept of “Epidemology.”

The usual brief against this story, as with all of Season 24, is that it is “silly.” Doctor Who, apparently, is not comedy. This is a line of thought that plagued the Graham Williams era as well, and it was patently ridiculous then, based as it is on the false nostalgia for the past that willfully ignores the fact that Doctor Who was doing comedies in its first season.…

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That’s It, I’ve Been Renewed (Paradise Towers)

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We call it… the drink machine.

It’s October 5th, 1987. M/A/R/R/S are at number one with “Pump Up The Volume/Antina (The First Time I See She Dance). A week later The Bee Gees unseat them with “You Win Again,”  Erasure, Billy Idol, Bananarama, George Michael, and Pet Shop Boys also chart. As do The Sisters of Mercy, with “This Corrosion,” so, you know, welcome to the glory days of goth.

In real news, the south of England gets whacked with what is functionally a hurricane, killing 23 people and knocking out power across the region. The New York Stock Exchange jumps off a cliff to the tune of 22.61%, leading to similar fun on the London Stock Exchange. And Robert Bork is rejected from the US Supreme Court.

While on television, we have Paradise Towers, the supposed 8th worst Doctor Who story of all time. It is, by the way, absolutely brilliant. i say this to make clear, this is not one of my redemptive readings, that phrase implying as it does that there is something about the story requiring redemption. The only thing about this story to maybe require a spot of redemption is the acting, and we’ll get there. But since everybody, when talking about this story, wants to go on about Richard Briers, let’s leave the acting for as long as possible and talk about everything else first.

Because if you set the acting aside Paradise Towers fits very smoothly into a lengthy tradition of literature and thought about housing. If we were to sketch a quick history of this, it would go something like this. In the 1950s-70s there was a bizarre little fad in architecture called Brutalism. You know the type of building – those horrific piles of angular concrete that scream out the era of their production like the muted eyesores they are.

In practice brutalism marks the death throes of modernism. Modernism is a term that is perhaps even more devalued than postmodernism, which is an impressive feat when one stops to think about it. But for our purposes the two most important things to note about modernism is that it aggressively rejected tradition while still putting an enormous premium on notions of form and structure. This caused it to eventually fall awkwardly between both the right and the left. The right hated it because it was too non-traditional and because Hitler hated painters who were better than him, which is to say, virtually everybody. The left, on the other hand, noticed that an alarming number of modernists turned into fascists who were, after all, equally fond of throwing out the established order of things and replacing it with a rigidly designed new system.

After World War II, however, modernism broke out in architecture in a big way. The post-war fascination with technocracy and the sudden availability of lots of modernist architects who had fled the Nazis meant that everybody wanted to do big urban renewal projects with grand designs and visions. Hence the rise of brutalism.…

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The Evidence Was Not As I Remembered (Time and the Rani)

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Well, clearly something has changed about the program.

It’s September 7th, 1987. The number one song has to be linked to, I fear. It remains there for three weeks before being unseated by M/A/R/R/S with “Pump Up The Volume/Anitina (The First Time I See She Dance).” Also in the charts are Michael Jackson with Bad, Madonna with Causing a Commotion, U2 with “Where The Streets Have No Name,” and The Pet Shop Boys and Dusty Springfield with “What Have I Done To Deserve This.”

In real news, recapping since Colin Baker went down in a hail of carrot juice, British Gas and British Airways both go public. The highest ever audience for a British television drama tunes in for the grimly depressing EastEnders Christmas episode. Kurt Waldheim is barred from the United States, Klaus Barbie goes on trial in Lyon, and Rudolf Hess dies. Thatcher wins election to a third term, and the Docklands Light Railway opens in London. And the entire Spycatcher affair rumbles on, with The Daily Telegraph being sued in an attempt to block them from publishing details from the book. And Jeffrey Archer wins a libel trial against the Daily Star. He will go on to lose a perjury trial over his actions in the libel trial. Oh well.

While during this story, Pat Robertson announces that he’s running for President, Spycatcher gets published in Australia, and Star Trek: The Next Generation premieres.

Speaking of television, we have here Time and the Rani. Time and the Rani, obviously, is not very good. We might, if we wanted to, suggest that this was some sort of major problem that damaged the series and screwed over the rest of the Sylvester McCoy era, but let’s face it, it wasn’t. Ratings dropped after the first episode, but recovered healthily over the remainder of the season such that it’s difficult to blame Time and the Rani for any long term damage.

This is oddly liberating. For five seasons – arguably for nine – every bad story has required some larger contextualization in terms of the failings of the production team and some exploration into what specific role the offending story played in the downfall of Doctor Who. But here we’re free from that! It had nothing to do with the downfall of Doctor Who. There’s nothing left to explain here – we’re on a twelve story run of bonus stories. The show is doomed, nothing save maybe for realizing that they could have promoted Remembrance of the Daleks as a stunning rebirth of the franchise could possibly have saved it, and we’re free to simply enjoy the steady improvement the show undergoes and the fact that it very quickly becomes better than it’s ever been before.

So, yes, Time and the Rani is rubbish for all the reasons you expect it to be rubbish, most of which are Pip and Jane Baker, but really, who cares? Not only does it not matter for once, what’s bad about this story isn’t even one of the most interesting things about it.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 32 (Knights of God)

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There’s a shift between the early and late 1980s that is difficult to articulate, but nevertheless clear. The cultural moment of the late 80s – one that, in practice, extends a few years into the 90s – is clearly a vibrant one. Swaths of really good bands release career high albums in this period, the much-feted British Inavsion of Comics hits high gear, you’ve got the Second Summer of Love, and, for good measure, Doctor Who has a creative renaissance.

Knights of God, which ran in 1987, airing the day before the episodes of Season 24 of Doctor Who, is clearly a part of this era. Which is interesting, as it was held back by two years and actually belongs to 1985, a very different era of television. And yet the delay is in many ways absolutely perfect – a case of something that would have been a few years ahead of its time instead ending up being an iconic example of its time.

Throughout the Baker era one of the running defenses we could fine was that it’s not entirely clear what Doctor Who should have been in the context of television of that period. Starting, well, not quite next story, but definitely the one after, Doctor Who starts to figure this out. And the solution it comes up with is very similar to the one that Knights of God turned out to have come up with two years previously.

Last time we focused on children’s television we noted that there was an awkward gulf confronting Doctor Who between its children’s television tradition and the considerably darker and edgier tradition that serious-minded science fiction was taking. The question left hanging was how to mix the aggressive and dark weirdness of something like Max Headroom with the traditional structure of children’s television.

It’s worth reflecting, though, on what the nature of this tension is. It’s not, obviously, that children’s television can’t be dark. Indeed, for the most part good children’s television is defined by an aggressive darkness. Rather, it’s that in the end children’s television tends to be about making the bewildering understandable, which means that while estrangement might be a tool along the way – indeed, a very important tool – it’s rarely the endpoint.

The troubling bit is that so much of the energy of this cultural moment comes from estrangement. It’s a cultural moment based on new, often more cynical takes on the epics of the past, and on disillusionment and alienation. The ostentatious and gaudy approaches of the earlier 1980s gave way to an angry depression – a situation that only increased come Thatcher’s third election in 1987. So children’s television’s had a real problem at this point, especially children’s television that wanted to deal with science fiction at all.

Enter Knights of God. On the one hand, it’s a searing, angry dystopia positing a fascist futuristic Britain in which the north and Wales have been brutally subjugated by the eponymous Knights of God. It’s not the sort of actively weird  estrangement of, say, Max Headroom, but it’s a vividly unsettling milieu.…

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Reimagined Moments #2

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“Why don’t you just call me Doctor?”

“Zat ist not a name.  I vant your full name.”

“Oh very well.  Dr. John Smith.”

“Goot.  Now ve are gettink somevhere.”

“I realise our presence behind you lines must seem rather strange.  And suspicious?”

“No.”

“No?  Oh, I was rather expecting you to accuse us of being spies.  Everyone else does.”

“I know you’re not spies.  Ze vun sink you definitely can’t be is spies.  After all, if ze British had sent spies to infiltrate our lines, zey vouldn’t send two officers in British Army uniforms in a British Red Cross ambulance vith sree people in civilian clothes, all speaking English.  Zey’d send people in German uniforms in a German vehicle, all speaking German vizout an accent and all claiming to be German.  Zat’s how spyink vurks, you see.”

“It could be a double bluff?”

“No, zat is just stupid.”

“Well, if you’ll just put down your gun, I’ll prove that I’m from the future by dismantling it.”

“No.”…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 28 (Time’s Champion)

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Time’s Champion – probably the single least findable thing I’ll cover on this blog – is an unlicensed novel by Craig Hinton and Chris McKeon published as a charity endeavor in 2008. The provenance of it is interesting – Hinton pitched the novel to BBC Books, but it was rejected – instead they published Gary Russell’s Spiral Scratch to fill basically the same purpose of giving Colin Baker a regeneration story. Separately the American writer Chris McKeon pitched a story to Big Finish about the Valeyard which was also rejected. McKeon and Hinton got in touch, and Hinton gave McKeon permission to turn his outline of Time’s Champion into a full novel, which, following Hinton’s death, McKeon did.

Let’s get one thing out of the way- this is not a good book. McKeon, who is by far the more involved writer, is a weak prosesmith at best. On top of that, the plot elevates fanwank to a profound art, relying heavily not only on Hinton’s previous novels Millennial Rites and The Quantum Archangel but with heavy references to scads of other stuff. This is not in and of itself a problem, except that it seems to be the entire point of this book –  to try to fit absolutely as many existing pieces of Doctor Who together as is possible.

I’ll attempt something resembling a summary of the plot. The Doctor visits Sergeant Benton’s 70th birthday party, which is also visited by some characters from The Quantum Archangel including the human component of Kronos from the Time Monster and his pregnant wife. Meanwhile, in 1908 a writer is attempting to write a book called Time’s Champion that turns out to be written in quantum mnemonics, the magical language from Millennial Rites. And in 9908 another man with the same name as the 1908 writer is writing a computer virus called Abbadon. Eventually it turns out that both are being manipulated by Morbius’s children to launch an attack on Gallifrey, which coincides with the birth of Kronos’s child.

So all hell predictably breaks loose, the Doctor runs to Gallifrey where he meets up with President Romana, a character from another Hinton book, and several other named Time Lords, then goes into the Matrix where the Keeper turns out to be the Valeyard, who is later revealed to be the Doctor’s stolen regeneration energy caught in a time loop, created by the gods, Pain, Hope, Time, Life, Death, and Fate, as a substitute Doctor because Time wanted the Doctor as her champion but was denied by the other transcendent beings, thus creating the Valeyard as a compromise. Then there’s a bunch more stuff, but it ends with the Doctor taking complete control of the Matrix by temporarily becoming Lord President of Gallifrey, then letting the TARDIS get eaten by a sentient computer virus and using quantum mnemonics to blow up the computer virus outside of the universe, but only after unregenerating in order to trick the Valeyard and destroy him, and then has to become Death’s Champion to save Mel, but cheats and sacrifice himself using the powers of Time’s Champion to force a regeneration, and what is this I don’t even.…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 27 (Millennial Rites)

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More than anyone – even Gary Russell or Lance Parkin – the late Craig Hinton has a reputation for fanwank. But the fact that we’re dealing with that list in the first place is interesting. On one extreme we have Russell, who I confess to having relatively little regard for as a fiction writer. (Although there’s reason to rate him fairly highly as an editor or a writer of non-fiction material) On the other we have Parkin, one of the consensus best novel writers. So once again there’s clearly not a direct correlation between fanwank and quality.

It’s tempting to try to chart out some sort of principle based on the fact that Jubilee works and Business Unusual doesn’t. Jubilee deals with the past of the program in broad strokes, Business Unusual gets bogged down in tedious and pointless details. But I’m hard-pressed to buy that as a logic – there’s something desperately unsatisfying about the idea that the details not only don’t matter but necessarily cannot matter and are fundamentally opposed to good storytelling. (For one thing, it would pose an uncomfortable existential challenge to the logic of this blog.)

We’re at a point of transition in the arc of the blog, moving from the decade-long deflation of the series that stretched from The Horror of Fang Rock to Revelation of the Daleks to the invisible reinvention of the series once it moved out of the public eye. One of the things that’s going to happen over that period is, both within Doctor Who and outside of it, an evolution in how storytelling works in what we can broadly describe as genre fiction. We’ll watch this unfold over the next lengthy chunk of the blog, but one of the basic principles of the new way of doing things is that the high concept genre ideas are parallel structures to character-based storytelling. (When we get to the inevitable Buffy post in January or February we’ll deal with the details of this.)

And that’s the difference between Lance Parkin and Gary Russell – Parkin writes in a form that recognizably behaves like that while Russell writes more in the style of the Saward-era continuity writers. And the thing is, even though Craig Hinton’s level of fanwank exceeds both of them, at the heart of things he is a Parkin-style writer. And so we have Millenial Rites, a story that is on the one hand a massive celebration of minutiae and on the other is actually a reasonably functional piece of storytelling in its own right that has an actual point to it.

On its most basic level, Millennial Rites is a story about the Doctor’s fear of the Valeyard and what that does to him. All of its big dramatic beats come out of that – from the Doctor’s realization that his treatment of Mel is putting him on the road to that future to his temporary transformation into the Valeyard late in the novel. Even the smaller details work towards that, with Ashley Chapel and Anne Travers both serving as figures that in their own way grapple with obsessions, paranoias, and temptations, thus backing up the theme.…

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When Titans Clash

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Spoiler Warning

Prometheus tries to evoke the aesthetics of Alien in a way that is borderline obsessive. Even down to making sure there are cream-coloured leathery/cushiony pads on the spaceship corridor walls. Still greater attention is paid to replicating H.R. Giger’s design concepts for the derelict alien ship, cockpit and pilot from the original film. The really weird thing is that, even as Prometheus deliberately and slavishly tries to evoke and/or copy the aesthetics of Alien, it completely overlays them with an entirely different, clashing aesthetic sense.

Look, why is this image so powerful?

There are, I think, a number of reasons.

Most importantly, it’s because it is just explicable enough to make sense while also being inexplicable enough to unnerve.  We are plainly looking at a navigator or pilot in a cockpit.  We understand this.  We are also looking at something inhuman and estranged, something that evades any attempt on our part to relate to it directly.  The ‘Space Jockey’ (as it is sometimes called) is a pilot, evidently, but it is also a giant, a fossil, a mammoth, a skeleton, a statue, a cyborg, a petrified outgrowth of flesh embedded within a colossal machine.  We cannot separate the entity from the artifact.  The ribs of the creature flow outward into the cables of the chair.  The trunk of the face flows down into the workings of the mechanism.  We cannot disentangle organism from system, animal from engine.  They are fundamentally akin, interchangeable, interpenetrating, symbiotic.  This was always the intention: to suggest something that was inextricably both biological and technological.  The cockpit and the pilot are not discrete things but are conjoined to the point of identity.  They were one flesh, until the flesh peeled away.  It’s entropic in both an organic and mechanical way simultaneously.  It’s the ossified cadaver of a wrecked bio-machine.

It’s also beautiful, but not in a straightforward way.  It’s not pretty.  It’s hideously, ominously, unnaturally, grotesquely beautiful.  It’s beautiful in the same way as a scorpion, or the bleached skull of an ox lying in a parched gulch, or a pile of rusted flywheels that was once a graceful machine.  It has the troubling, terrible beauty of wreckage, of the predator, of the insectile, the dead, the decayed, the destroyed, the deadly.

And it’s fucking scary.  It’s a great big skull-faced monster in a huge black room made out of what looks like loads of bones.

Now, look at this:

This is pretty.  It’s the cockpit from Alien… decorated with shimmering CGI lights and swirls and spirals and graphics and glowing planets. It’s like someone stuck gold stars all over one of Goya’s ‘black paintings’ or inserted some watercolour daffodils into a Max Ernst canvas. Well, why am I dancing around this? It’s like putting pretty, computer-generated patterns all over a picture by H.R. Giger. The design and CGI rendering is perfectly nice in and of itself, but in this context it looks like a tawdry, clashing embellishment. It neutralises the uncanny effect of the setting.…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 26 (Business Unusual)

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Last time we dealt with Gary Russell we found ourselves reflecting heavily on the notion of fanwank. Broadly speaking, at least, I’m hard-pressed to complain too heavily about fanwank in the novel lines, particularly the Missing Adventures and Past Doctor Adventures, both of which by their nature appeal virtually entirely to dedicated Doctor Who fans. When you’re dealing with an audience of dedicated fans the extent to which you can rely on existing work increases dramatically. There is a fundamental difference between writing novels for a fan audience and writing television for BBC1.

But having navigated the Saward era and its continuity fetishism there become some new issues around this. Or, put another way, the mere fact that there’s nothing wrong with fanwank is not equivalent to fanwank being inherently worthwhile. There are things that you can do when working in the margins of existing work that you can’t do any other way – a fact that is responsible for no small part of my interest in things like Doctor Who and superhero comics. But the margins aren’t interesting in and of themselves – a problem that plagues Gary Russell’s work, and that, in a few paragraphs, is going to prove the undoing of Business Unusual.

But let’s back up and look at the larger situation, since this is our outro to the Colin Baker era. At the heart of the problem is still the Seasonish and the way in which both Season 23s – the transmitted one and the erased one – create a tangible gap in the history of Doctor Who. Colin Baker is the first Doctor to lack a regeneration story, a fact that coincides with Mel being the first companion since Susan to lack an origin story, combined with the deeply unsatisfying nature of the Valeyard, an idea with far more and deeper implications than the series was willing to actually explore, with all of this slotting into the already confused gap introduced by the hiatus.

The result is a period that is the subject of a massive amount of fan theories. And so, having at least determined that the flaw is not inherently Colin Baker, let’s tie off the last issue – was there ever anything interesting to do here? Are the gaps of this era – gaps that we cannot, given the absurd turmoil behind the scenes, chalk up to any deliberate ambiguity – ones that can be interestingly filled? In other words, is the era we’ve just been witness to fatally and irrevocably flawed, or is there actual quality to be had here?

So that’s what this final triptych of entries is going to focus on – three books that fill the holes in and around the gap between Trial of a Time Lord and Time and the Rani. And first up we have Gary Russell with Business Unusual, a novel that proposes to introduce Mel. And give Colin Baker his “missing” Brigadier story. And serve as a sequel to The Scales of Injustice.…

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I Just Want You to Like Me

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Shabgraff now has a Facebook ‘fan page’, here.  At the moment, the number of ‘Likes’ it has garnered is 11.  And two of them are me.

Now, I don’t have very many regular readers, but I definitely have more than 9.

If you are a regular reader of this blog and have not yet ‘Liked’ its Facebook ‘fan page’ then please take a moment to do so.  Apparently when it gets 30 ‘Likes’, I get access to some kind of special information.  The credit card numbers of people who’ve ‘Liked’ it or something, I dunno.

Help me out here comrades.  You will be doing wonders for my barely-concealed narcissism fragile self-esteem.

Thanks.…

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