New Adventures: Draft List For Discussion
The big document in which I keep the schedule for upcoming stretches of the blog is rapidly getting short (by which I really just mean that it only goes out to the end of July, but by the standards of the document that is, in fact, short). And since we’re in the midst of a big section of not-television anyway, it seemed like a good time to have the talk about what novels I cover in the Virgin era. I’ve got a draft list below. But I want to get input from the rather delightful community that’s sprung up on this blog as well.
The Also People
Time Can Be Rewritten 22 (The Song of Megaptera)
Among the many services Big Finish provides for Doctor Who at large is a helpful testing of various pieces of fanlore regarding unmade stories. There are, for instance, people who wonder whether Prison in Space would really have been as unbearably terrible as it sounds. And as it happens (and we’ll cover this in the Troughton book this fall), yes, yes it would have been. But there is perhaps nowhere this service is more valuable than in the Saward era. One of the less resolvable debates surrounding the Saward era, and one that will play into the next two entries heavily as well, is the nature of the writers. Simply put, there’s some solid evidence of some very good writers having scripts rejected during this period while people like Glen McCoy and Anthony Steven had scripts made. It’s one thing when Pip and Jane Baker, two writers who are at least fast and reliable, get repeated commissions. It’s quite another when they’re actively commissioned over Christopher Bidmead and PJ Hammond, as, in Season 23, they were.
Of what I’d consider the big three of baffling rejections – the twin rejection of Christopher Priest’s Sealed Orders and The Enemy Within, PJ Hammond’s Paradise Five, and Pat Mills’s Song of the Space Whale, two – Hammond’s and Mills’s – have subsequently been recorded by Big Finish. Since the fan lore has Hammond’s rejection being down to Nathan-Turner and not Saward, whose influence I am more interested in tracking at the moment, let’s opt for Mills’s script, now renamed Song of Megaptera.
For those who don’t obsessively memorize every detail I cover on this blog, Mills, along with John Wagner (who was a co-author on earlier drafts of this script) co-created Judge Dredd with artist Carlos Ezquerra, and co-wrote the earliest Doctor Who Weekly comic strips. Song of Megaptera was, originally, a story for a Tom Baker comic strip, but Mills was persuaded that it was too good for that and instead sent it to the production office where it was, at various times, considered for Tom Baker, Peter Davison, and, finally, Colin Baker before finally being abandoned. In discussing its scrapping Pat Mills has stated that one of the reasons Saward gave for objecting to it was that Saward didn’t like Mills’s decision to portray the ship’s captain as working class, preferring the idea of a classless future.
Let’s get one thing out of the way first – in a litany of poor creative decisions that can be laid directly at Eric Saward’s feet, making Timelash over this is one of the most inexcusable. It is flat-out inconceivable how any remotely sane or reasonable script editor could look at Timelash next to this script and conclude that Timelash was going to work better. The Twin Dilemma was an aggregate of brain-searingly bad decisions, but I’m not convinced that any given decision, and particularly any given one of Saward’s decisions about The Twin Dilemma was prima facie worse than this.
It is not that Song of Megaptera is a flawless story.…
Skulltopus 11: Changing States
Before the Skulltopus series moves on to the Baker years (and beyond), I feel the need to settle accounts with the Pertwee era, particularly with Peladon. Also, I need to clarify something about the way capitalism is portrayed and perceived in – and by – Doctor Who.
The maggots in ‘The Green Death‘ are the Pertwee era’s last gasp of the Weirdesque. ‘Green Death’ is also the last Pertwee story to properly notice capitalism.
Admittedly, there is some riffing on ‘greed’ in ‘Invasion of the Dinosaurs’; and ‘Monster of Peladon’ regurgitates (in a reduced form) the political semiotics of its parent story. However, in these stories, while class is in evidence… class struggle even!… there is no tracing it back to anything recognisable as capitalist social relations.
I’ll get to this, but first I want to loop back to address something about ‘Carnival of Monsters’ that I should’ve mentioned previously: Vorg as an entrepreneur and how this relates to the society in which he finds himself. Firstly, Inter-Minor isn’t recognisably capitalist. The latent revolution in ‘Carnival’ – the imminent revolt of the Functionaries that President Zarb (the panicky social democrat) is trying to placate and Kalik (the fascist) wants to crush – tracks back to race (the story does some heavy riffing on race) but stops there. It comes close… at one point mentioning a strike… but we get no sense of particularly capitalist relations. There are no wages, no profits, no recognisable industrial workplaces and only the barest suggestion of a market at the very end. Vorg, like other Robert Holmes creations, can be read as an embodiment of a more likeable version of free enterprise. Like Milo Clancy or Garron, Vorg is a private operator, a colourful chancer, an individualist, a guy on the make who seems vital and amusing when stood next to grey statist authoritarians. But Vorg’s polari version of laissez faire is ultimately judged harmless, or even constructive. He gets some stick for keeping “livestock” in the scope… and it’s possible to read the scope itself as a metaphor for commodity fetishism, displaying how commodification of living people involves their compartmentalisation and alienation from proper awareness of the endless rut in which they circle. However, I think this is far more about race as an artificial construct than it is about commodification (I’ll try to address this in another post some time). And, ultimately, Vorg’s carny capitalism seems to be a potential force for change, progress and reform in the insular, ultra-statist backwater of Inter-Minor. He ends the story fleecing Pletrac… but the tone the story takes with this implies that a dose of Vorg is just what the Inter-Minorans need. To the extent that capitalism appears in ‘Carnival’, it does so through the rosy lens of Vorg.
Now, back to the post-‘Green Death’ Pertwee era.
‘Invasion of the Dinosaurs’ is a densely political text, hugely ambivalent and needing a great deal of unpacking. There is, as I say, some harping on about the evils of ‘greed’ and an implied anxiety about industrial pollution… but, ultimately, the story essentializes the social dystrophies of capitalism into malformations in human nature, which are (it is implied) exacerbated when people go around believing things.…
Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 30 (Doctor In Distress)
I have for the most part avoided significant discussion of Ian Levine, typically gesturing to the fact that eventually I’d do this post. So let’s take the bull by the horns here and lay this question out in its most damningly blunt form: can Ian Levine be blamed for Doctor Who’s cancellation?
This is, of course, terribly unfair. Although no Gareth Jenkins, there’s something that leaves a bad taste in my mouth about a sustained attack on Ian Levine’s role in the series’ history. At the end of the day, Levine in 1985 was a 30-year-old geek and acted the part. He was a poor spokesman for Doctor Who in the public eye, yes. But more than anything one feels bad for him for being put there in the first place. His biggest problem, in many ways, was that he played the role that the cancellation crisis cast him in – slightly maladapted uberfan – too well.
I’d also be lying if I said that, as a 29-year-old socially maladapted Doctor Who fan, I didn’t have at least some visceral understanding of where Levine was coming from. Being an angry geek in 2012 is easy. There’s a whole Internet for hard-headedly arguing on. And adamant as I am that one argues on the Internet for the entertainment of the lurkers, I’m not nearly daft enough to pretend that I don’t like getting to vent obsessively on forums. Where do you think I learned to write 2000 words a day? I’ve been drawn inexorably into being a hard-nosed tit in Internet arguments too many times not to understand Levine. Time warp me into 1985 with no Internet to argue on and give me an in with the production office of Doctor Who and I’d probably smash a television as a publicity stunt too. At least Levine holds down steady employment, which is, let’s face it, more than we can say for my overeducated ass.
And so to some extent one is left wanting to let sleeping dogs lie. 1985 was a long time ago. Ian Levine is nearly 60 now. At some point one has to stop blaming someone for dumb shit they did in their early 30s. And if nothing else, the 1985 crisis is a footnote in the history of a wildly successful show. Perhaps lingering axes to grind exist among those who were making the show – or at least those who are still with us – but it’s tough to say that we the chattering public still have anything at stake in this fight. We’re not so much beating a dead horse as beating the empty space where once a horse carcass lay. These days Levine is mostly just another bloke with a Twitter who says stupid things about Doctor Who or DC Comics occasionally. So really, I’m one to talk.
And so I’ve avoided going too far into Ian Levine. But he can’t be avoided entirely. For one thing, he presents himself as a central player in this time period to this day.…
Beyond Redemption
I think there is something inherently dodgy about the notion of ‘redemptive readings’. It seems to imply a determination to look at a text in a positive way that is at odds with what could be called ‘proper scepticism’. This objection is itself open to the objection that it’s silly to approach a piece of entertainment product with ‘scepticism’, especially when it is part of a series of which one is supposedly a fan. But, this loses sight of context and agency. There are various ways of choosing to watch the same thing. When you sit down to enjoy an episode of a show you like, for fun, you’re a bit odd if you’re not expecting, hoping and trying to like it. When you’re watching it with the express intention of analysing it and then writing about what it means, proper scepticism becomes appropriate. Trying to like what you’re watching becomes a somewhat iffy strategy in that context. Besides, doesn’t the necessity of trying to find ways of praising what you’re analysing tell us something in itself? This muddle also loses sight of the distinctions that are always to be found within the concept of enjoyment, distinctions that are all too often spuriously aggregated. You don’t have to think something is politically or morally correct in order to like it (though, in practice…). No more do you need to think that something is aesthetically sophisticated or beautiful in order to relish its aesthetic. Conversely, you may dislike a beautifully made piece of art which offers praiseworthy political or moral analyses. Or you may take enjoyment from the act of hostile reading itself. I, for instance, very much enjoy hating and criticising certain things, and I don’t see anything wrong with this.
This is by way of a preamble to talking about ‘The Two Doctors’, which has been subject to an attempted rehabilitation from the charge of being reactionary on the issue of race. The re-evaluation of the story has been pioneered and best expressed by Robert Shearman in About Time 6. The essence of his argument is that the Androgums are a comment on the concept of the monster as employed by Doctor Who. They are characterised as generic monsters but it is disarming when people treat them as such because they do not look like monsters. They are treated the same way as the Sontarans – all of them racially evil and hateful – but, because they do not have potato-heads or eye-stalks, this poses a problem. We notice the inappropriateness, even tastelessness, of generalising about the evil of an entire race when they look like us. We don’t blink when the Doctor describes the entire Jagaroth race as vicious and callous but it bothers us when the same racial villainy is implied about aliens who look human. Philip Sandifer recently summarized and expanded the case admirably, here.
I’m enormously tempted by this reading… and, maybe, if I’d approached ‘The Two Doctors’ with the express intention of finding a ‘redemptive reading’, I would’ve happily seized upon it.…
X Marks the Shit
?”You need to see X-Men First Class Jack, you’ll love it, I promise!”
Nope. Sorry.
Fassbender spends the movie auditioning to take over from Daniel Craig. Kevin Bacon excepted, none of the others can act at all.
The Cuban Missile Crisis is fidgeted with to the point of incomprehensibility. The Russians send missiles to Cuba despite a full US Naval blockade… because one general has been threatened… and this makes the entire politburo accede to nuclear suicide? Well, I guess that’s why their culture produces mutants that look like Satan.
It’s the usual reactionary farrago of lies.
The standard crap about how homo sapiens wiped out the Neanderthals is repeated yet again. It’s an obsession of pseudo-thoughtful pop-culture and it’s a lie. Nobody knows how homo sapiens and Neanderthal man interacted. There is no data. That the null hypothesis of capitalist culture is that homo sapiens went on a genocidal killing rampage tells you more about capitalism than about homo sapiens.
And the Nazi war criminal goes to work for the Russians, which is another lie. The ex-Nazis all went to work for the West. West Germany was run by ex-Nazis, a couple of cosmetic dissidents aside.
And, once again, evolution is depicted as teleological and going in ‘stages’ and quantum jumps, which is barely-disguised social darwinism. What makes this all the more revolting is the moralising about Magneto’s supposed evil… for doing something so scandalous as to defend himself when attacked! Oh, what a twisted bastard!
And what exactly is Raven/Mystique’s problem? So, her default setting is blue and scaly… so what? I’d have that as a default setting if I could make myself look however I wanted the rest of the time!
AND this film, which takes a moment here and there to jab at 60s-style sexism, takes every opportunity to get the female cast semi-naked! Fucking hypocrites.
Oh yeah, AND the only black character dies half way through the film – what a fucking shock! That hardly ever happens in movies!…
Outside the Government 3 (A Fix With Sontarans)
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| All right chums, time’s up. Let’s do this. |
This was written both before the Jimmy Saville scandal broke and before anything from Richard Marson’s book about John Nathan-Turner leaked. The former alone would have required a complete rewrite of the post. The latter would have required some discussion somewhere in the blog. In tandem, they render this post almost completely beside the point, and it will receive a full rewrite in the book version eventually. Until then, enjoy the most obsolete post on the blog.
Doctor Who fandom is spectacularly bitchy. Sometimes – even often – this is a virtue. Mind you, it’s an often misunderstood virtue. For one thing, the bitchiness is often mistaken as actual dislike, sometimes to puzzling effect. (The most obvious example here is people who take Moffat’s somewhat infamous interview comments about the classic series as actual dislike for the classic series) It’s not, and the central joke of almost all of fandom’s bitchy, snarky comments about bits of Doctor Who is that despite the obvious faults of the series we love it to pieces. Even with the really terrible episodes that we claim to actively hate there’s the underlying joke that we’ve watched them a dozen times and have a nearly encyclopedic knowledge of how crap they are. The fact that this involves being vicious to Doctor Who is almost incidental – after all, for most of the active history of fandom everybody thought Doctor Who was kind of crap. Doctor Who fandom, unusually for a fandom, has tended to favor ostentatiously loving the show in spite of it being crap over trying to defend Timelash, and really, who’s going to fault them for it.
But, and it’s a big but, there are times when the bitchiness of fandom tips into a bit of a dark side. And to be frank, this is one of them. A Fix With Sontarans is widely mocked and hated. And this is, if not inaccurate, more than a little unfair. Let’s start with the context. A Fix With Sontarans is a mini-episode shot for the show Jim’ll Fix It, in which the late Jimmy Saville extravagantly grants the wishes of people who write in. And in the case of A Fix With Sontarans, a kid named Gareth Jenkins wanted to be on Doctor Who, so Eric Saward lashed together a little TARDIS-set mini episode featuring the Sontarans, which they had around at the time for The Two Doctors. Nicola Bryant wasn’t available for filming it, so they roped in Janet Fielding. The plot is exactly the sort of thing that people do for something like this – the Sontarans and Gareth both get teleported onto the TARDIS, Gareth helps save the day, there’s a cute bit about how he’ll apparently someday be a great military leader against the Sontarans.
It’s crap, of course, but it’s crap in the exact ways you’d expect it to be. Gareth Jenkins can’t act at all and is utterly timid. Colin Baker got the script late enough that he was forced to scribble lines on the console.…
Am I Becoming One Of Your Angels (Revelation of the Daleks)
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| “Actually, come to think of it, Eric Saward has never written for vegetables. That does kind of make me jealous.” |
It’s March 23rd, 1985. Philip Barley and Phil Collins are at number one with “Easy Lover.” Madonna, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Sarah Brightman and Paul Miles-Kingston, David Cassidy, and Nik Kershaw all also chart. Lower in the charts, Billy Bragg, The Smiths, and The Damned chart. In real news, ummm… actually all I’ve got, and I regret that I am not making this up, is that production of the Sinclair C5 electric tricycle is suspended. That’s all we’ve got. Sorry. Let’s move to television and Revelation of the Daleks.
What is most interesting about Revelation of the Daleks is that, other than the fact that it’s rubbish, it’s one of the greatest Doctor Who stories ever. This is, to some extent, just a restatement of our theme for Season 22 – that every story in it is a brilliant story about how terrible a story it is. Consider, for instance, the sequence in the first episode that pulls back from the Doctor and Peri to the DJ watching the Doctor and Peri to Davros watching the DJ watch the Doctor and Peri. It’s a thing of absolute beauty – one of the most narratively complex sequences in the classic series. And it’s merely the most clever of a bunch of intense clevernesses. This whole story is about passing control of the narrative around and about who does and doesn’t have authority over what’s going on.
The best Dalek stories involve unleashing the Doctor and the Daleks into someone else’s story – a drama about a space colony, the Forsythe Saga, a World War II movie (I’m talking about Genesis, not Victory), or, more recently, a bunch of reality programs, The Invasion, or Torchwood, the Sarah Jane Adventures, and a sitcom starring Catherine Tate that Catherine Tate is taking a week off from. Superficially, at least, Revelation of the Daleks mirrors that structure. Indeed, it’s on the whole a very straightforward and competent execution of that structure, well-directed by Graham Harper. Episode one shows us the world of Necros, episode two shows us Daleks slaughtering everybody on the world of Nekros. But there’s something ever so slightly wrong about this, and for that we need to look deeper at the notion of control of television.
There’s an important technological shift to note in a discussion of control over television that happened over the course of the early 1980s, which was the mainstream adoption of the remote control. It’s easiest to compare this to earlier television technology. When, in 1971, Doctor Who did a story with a bunch of very fast cuts among things and called it The Claws of Axos, the effect was that of a strange assemblage of imagery. That is, the somewhat confusing, rapid cuts around the Axon spaceship had the effect of creating an overall collage. This is because a 1971 television wasn’t built to change channels quickly – you had to get up and change it.…
By No Means The Most Interesting (Timelash)
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| This shot is a redemptive reading all on its own. |
It’s March 9th, 1985. Dead or Alive are spinning right round. Like a record, baby. They continue to spin all story long, with Madonna, Prince, and Jermaine Jackson also charting. In news, Mikhail Gorbachev takes over in the Soviet Union, and Mohammed Al Fayed takes over Harrods. Riots break out at the FA Cup quaterfinal between Luton Town and Millwall, presaging ominously the Heysel Stadium disaster that summer.
While on television, Timelash.
Ah. Timelash. Apparently the second worst Doctor Who story ever. Indeed, its flaws are obvious – it’s in many ways The Horns of Nimon only with Paul Darrow instead of Graham Crowden, and while Darrow’s solution to the problem of the script is much the same as Crowden’s, he lacks the sheer mass of cured pork necessary to pull it off completely. For what it’s worth, this isn’t the second worst Doctor Who story by some margin – let’s put it at the very least behind both Warriors of the Deep and The Celestial Toymaker. But it’s tough to argue this works, even if it’s not quite as bad as its reputation. Never mind that, though. I remain not terribly interested in discussing the quality of Season 22 directly. Instead let’s talk about something that’s much odder than people tend to make it out to be about this story: Herbert.
It is worth observing that the model of “the Doctor teams up with a figure from history to fight aliens” was actually invented by Pip and Jane Baker for The Mark of the Rani, then reiterated in the next story filmed, namely Timelash. Yes, the historicals involved meetings between the Doctor and historical figures, but those were just that – historicals. Given that King John was a duplicate, George Stephenson is actually the first historical figure the Doctor encountered at all since 1966, and the first ever outside of a pure historical. Nowadays we’re used to this, with the historical figure team-up happening a minimum of once a season, but it’s remarkable that this model didn’t exist prior to 1985. Nobody remembers to put Mark of the Rani and Timelash on their list of Doctor Who stories that changed everything. (And both deserve credit, as there’s no way to seriously argue that one inspired the other.)
The relevance of George Stephenson as a choice can probably be put down to the quirks of Pip and Jane Baker as writers – it is consistent with their general aesthetic. More interesting, for my money, is H.G. Wells. Wells is lionized as a the father of modern science fiction, which is interesting given that almost nobody talks about any of his books following The First Men in the Moon in 1901. Indeed, Wells is an excessively sanitized character, the popular accounts of him largely treating him as a sort of pleasantly eccentric proto-steampunk figure instead of the aggressively socialist writer he actually was.
So what we have here is a defanged and largely pointless version of the father of science fiction appearing in a defanged and largely pointless imitation of scads of classic Doctor Who stories.…