Eruditorum Press

Discontent creators

A Fragment

1

The man leans over his pad.  He makes scribbling motions with his pen above the first blank line.  He looks up at the Doctor, who is sat on the other side of the desk, smiling guilelessly.
“Name,” says the man.
“Signifier,” responds the Doctor immediately.
The man looks up, puzzled.
“What?” he asks.
“Determiner,” says the Doctor.
“Pardon?”
“French.”
The man hesitates.  He narrows his eyes in a way that entirely fails to make him look shrewd.
“Look…” he begins.
“Learn,” interrupts the Doctor.
The man hesitates again.  
“What are you doing?” he asks, quickly so as not to give the Doctor a chance to jump in.
“What do you mean?” enquires the Doctor, innocently.
“Why are you answering me with gibberish?”
The Doctor looks crestfallen.
“Oh,” he says, “sorry… I thought you wanted to play Word Association.  I didn’t realise you were asking me questions.”
…

Continue Reading

Thalira, or The Two Planets

, , , , , 2

From the late, great Paul Foot’s book The Vote: How it was Won and How it was Undermined:

…Benjamin Disraeli wrote a novel about Chartists.  It was called Sybil, or the Two Nations (1845), a deeply sympathetic and beautifully written account of the rise of Chartism and of its appeal to the suffering masses.  The central theme of the novel is the distinction between ‘moral force’ Chartism, espoused by the unblemished heroine, Sybil, and ‘physical force’ Chartism, described with obvious distaste.  The theme of the novel was that the conflict between the good on the ‘moral force’ side and the evil on the ‘physical force’ side became so bitter that it could not be solved by working people.  The solution had to come from outside, from on high, from a brilliant, sensitive and eloquent Tory MP, Charles Egremont.  Sybil’s disillusionment with her rougher supporters, who include her beloved father, begins when she reads an account of an emotional speech in Parliament by Egremont, who then conveniently arrives in the middle of ‘physical force’ chaos to carry off his beloved and make a lady of her.

It occurs to me that, if you take out the romantic ending, this pretty much describes the basic plotline of ‘The Monster of Peladon’.

Tory scum.
…

Continue Reading

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 24 (Quatermass, Day of the Triffids, Blake’s 7, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Alien, Sapphire and Steel)

, 74

Or, as I’ve been thinking of it all week, “the entry from hell.” Normally it’s fairly easy to pick what goes into a Pop Between Realities entry. I mean, I tend to put them in whenever the series goes on any sort of break, and I just grab two, sometimes three pieces of relevant media or history from the time period. They’ve all been very natural.

And then we come to this infuriating gap. Part of it is that the next two Pop Between Realities are no-brainer single-item entries for me, and as a result anything science fiction television from now to the start of 1982 or so is booked. I mean, the end-of-Doctor chaos of side entries is already worse than usual for the Baker/Davison transition. But also, good LORD there are a lot of sci-fi things going around on television in here that require coverage. And this isn’t even all of it! I’m not redoing Hitchhiker’s as a television series and I’m punting The Adventure Game down until Janet Fielding appears on it.

Still, in some ways this is also the perfect entry here. John Nathan-Turner and Christopher Bidmead are about to determinately reshape what Doctor Who is in order to make it work better as proper science fiction television. In which case the obvious question is… what does science fiction look like around this point in time?

Well, it looks like…

Quatermass (1979)

In late 1979 ITV ran a four part Quatermass serial produced by Verity Lambert simply called Quatermass. The film version for the export market went instead with the title The Quatermass Conclusion. The production was the very definition of problematic. Kneale wrote his scripts in 1973 for a BBC production that got abandoned. Following the success of Star Wars and everyone becoming re-obsessed with science fiction, however, Euston Films snapped up the rights to the scripts, having them rewritten to work both as a 200 minute serial and as a 100 minute film.

The results were frankly unfortunate. Lambert’s production values were impeccable, and the film (which is the version I got my hands on) looks quite solid. The problem here really is one of an unfixable underlying concept. Verity Lambert’s defense of the project – that there are problems inherent in any effort to update an old concept like this – isn’t entirely fair. After all, plenty of other science fiction revivals have worked. But on the other hand it’s not as though there were a long line of successful television revivals to begin with. This is probably about as good a version of Quatermass as could have been made in 1979.

The problem is just that Quatermass didn’t fit 1979 at all. And the blame here really goes to Nigel Kneale. That Kneale is a conservative writer is hardly a revelation. But by 1979 that had tipped into an unfortunate overdrive. Quatermass is so appallingly reactionary as to occasionally tip over into comedy. Its central premise involves mind-controlling aliens whose mind control doesn’t affect old people.…

Continue Reading

Time Can Be Rewritten 16 (The Well-Mannered War, Virgin Books, 1997)

, 81

Sorry this is late – not sure why it didn’t post when it was supposed to. Speaking of books, if you’ve bought mine from Amazon or elsewhere, please consider leaving a review. Even if you hated it. Though, I mean, I’d rather you do it if you liked it.

But not, we should stress, too clever for anyone to enjoy. It’s not accurate either to treat the Williams era as some failed experiment before its time. As we saw before, its ratings were solid even without ITV just collapsing. The AI figures show that people genuinely enjoyed it. And perhaps most importantly, Gareth Roberts exists.

Gareth Roberts has, if we are being honest, done more than anyone to rehabilitate the Williams era. I do not merely refer to his quite lovely “Tom the Second” essay discussed back in the Horns of Nimon entry (and before that in the Armageddon Factor entry), although it is a masterpiece of fan writing and its thesis, which can roughly be summarized as “shut up, it’s really fun” ought be, I think, the thesis of far more arguments both scholarly and popular. But his real contribution to Williams-era rehabilitation are his three novels for the Missing Adventures range, all of them set within Season Seventeen.

There are two ways of looking at these novels. On the one hand, Gareth Roberts, who had already put out The Highest Science and Tragedy Day when the Missing Adventures line started and had firmly nailed down his role as “the funny one.” Given that the New Adventures as a whole were pretty strikingly far from the “funny” brief when the Missing Adventures started up Gareth Roberts, who clearly was a great writer in the wrong era with the New Adventures, was a searingly obvious choice to write for them. And this era was a searingly obvious choice for him to write in. In this regard his first Missing Adventure, The Romance of Crime, was almost inevitable – the sort of thing that just followed instinctively from the premise that the Missing Adventures existed. (Less expected was that one of other things that everyone would naturally assume would exist in the Missing Adventures – a Hartnell historical – also came from Roberts and took until The Plotters)

The other perspective, and the one I prefer just because it involves casting Roberts as a sort of Robert Holmes villain cackling away in a cellar and shrieking about how he’ll show them all and how SOON they will RECOGNIZE the POWER of GRAHAM! WILL! IAMS!, is, well, about what I just described. These novels are unabashedly and gloriously Gareth Roberts with a chip on his shoulder hell-bent on showing the world that they’re wrong about his favorite era of Doctor Who. In this regard The Romance of Crime, which was written with such a sense of traditionalism as to adhere to what could plausibly have been made in 1979, is the most obvious. It is unabashedly an attempt to show not what the Williams era could have been but rather to show what it was, in point of fact, when written competently.…

Continue Reading

No Coordinates, No Dimensional Stabilisers (Shada)

34

The sole thing that Wayne Rooney and Professor Chronotis
have in common.

Somewhere out of time, in a space between mean and while, in the gap of the conditional, the Graham Williams era does not conclude.

If we were to pretend that this aired after The Horns of Nimon we would discover that The Pretenders were at number one with “Brass in Pocket.” Two weeks later The Specials would take the top slot with “Too Much Too Young,” which would yield after another two weeks to Kenny Rogers with “Coward of the Country.” Styx, The Boomtown Rats, Joe Jackson, The Ramones, Blondie, and Elvis Costello would also have charted. Lower in the charts would have lurked Peter Gabriel’s divinely good “Games Without Frontiers,” which probably would have been in the top ten when this story would actually have aired. (The scrapping of Shada is, I would guess, why there was no Christmas break in Season Seventeen. The only reason Sixteen didn’t have one was that it was a continual story arc. Season Eighteen had one again. This also rubbishes the idea that The Horns of Nimon was supposed to be a Christmas panto or whatever. In all likelihood the season was supposed to break after Nightmare of Eden, with The Horns of Nimon being planned for a January start.)

Again assuming a Key to Time sort of scheduling, the London Gold Fixing would have hit its highest price ever, while the same day the Greek ship the MS Athina B (previously the Japanese MS Kojima Maru) beached in Brighton and became a temporary tourist attraction. Israel and Egypt would have established diplomatic relations, and six US diplomats would have escaped Iran by pretending to be Canadian. (A fun fact – did you know that “Canadian” is actually a racist slur in some parts of the US? Apparently people use it in place of “blacks,” as in “the neighborhood has gone downhill since all the Canadians moved in.”) The Winter Olympics would have opened in Lake Placid, and the famed Miracle on Ice would have happened. A coup in Suriname would place, the Voyager 1 probe would confirm the existence of the Saturnian moon Janus, and Robert Mugabe would be elected Prime Minister of Zimbabwe, bringing an end to the whole Rhodesia problem and beginning a whole new problem.

While on television there is… not Shada. There is something else. Shada, like the eponymous Time Lord prison, remains a half-constructed phantom. Or perhaps more accurately, an over-constructed phantom. There are a wealth of versions of Shada floating around now: the Paul McGann audio/animated version, the John Nathan-Turner-produced video, the forthcoming Gareth Roberts novelisation, the Ian Levine-produced animation, the actual original script, the fan-produced novelization, Dirk Gently, and, of course most importantly, the version that we imagine. Like the legendary lost epics of Hartnell and Troughton there is a version of this story that exists only as the wish of what might have been.

This last version is, of course, the most problematic.…

Continue Reading

Through An Endless Shifting Maze (The Horns of Nimon)

86

Steve Dahl eats horn lasers.

It’s December 22nd, 1979. Pink Floyd are at number one with “Another Brick in the Wall.” This lasts for three more weeks before The Pretenders, the most British band ever to have a vocalist from Akron, Ohio, take number one with “Brass in Pocket.” ABBA, KC and the Sunshine Band, and Paul McCartney also chart. The latter, it should be noted, charts with “Wonderful Christmastime,” which is one of the single worst Christmas songs ever written – a piece of mawkish offal that makes me long for dogs barking Jingle Bells within seconds of it coming on. It is a song so bad that it was held off from the Christmas #1 by six separate songs including The Sugarhill Gang “Rapper’s Delight.” A song, in other words, so bad that the Brits preferred rap music to it in 1979 for Christmas. And yet Paul McCartney gets half a million dollars a year from royalties on it. Thatcher wasn’t the worst thing to happen in 1979. Just saying.

In real news, a ceasefire is signed for Rhodesia. The Soviet Union invades Afghanistan, which makes a lot of people angry and causes no end of problems, many of them for the United States. Speaking of the United States, they give Chrysler a $1.5 billion bailout, because that’s just how we roll. And the GPS epoch begins. Shortly thereafter, the President of Sicily is killed by the Mafia. Coincidence? Well, it’s tough to figure out how it wouldn’t be.

While on television, it’s The Horns of Nimon! Here even the staunchest defenders of the Williams era are given pause. This is not a story that anybody tries to defend the production of as such. The defense of the story, such as it is, amounts to “well it’s supposed to be funny.”

Fair enough, it often is. Certainly someone took an active decision here to just let Tom Baker have comedy larking for the entire story while turning the actual “Doctor” role of the story over to Lalla Ward. And certainly Graham Crowden is far too good an actor to treat his performance as anything other than deliberate. The erstwhile WGPJosh suggested that the story is a “Ham Singularity,” and if I am to disagree it is only because I think that it may simply seize the entire world’s cured meat supply in general. Crowden’s performance has a sufficient amount of ham involved that it borders on the anti-semitic. The design of the Nimon, on the other hand, may be inadvertent, but if so it’s an accident that at least fits seamlessly with the rest of the episode. (Also apparently inadvertent is the degree to which the opening TARDIS scene almost exactly parallels The Time of Angels. The Doctor knows less about flying the TARDIS than his female companion, instead of materializing on the ship the TARDIS materializes alongside and creates a corridor to the ship… even the switches that get hit to keep the TARDIS from exploding are blue.)…

Continue Reading

Strange Matters

, , , , , , , 0

There is something very gothic about Doctor Who, in the hauntological sense.  I mean that the show keeps on doing monsters that represent, in various ways, ‘the return of the repressed’, monsters that represent buried anxieties, or anxieties that we have attempted to bury.  But the monsters tend to be steadfastly material in quite straightforward ways… and to embody material, social, historical nightmares (fascism is a big one that immediately suggests itself).

It’s important to stress that this isn’t a contradiction, as such.  Indeed, in many ways, it’s ‘business as usual’ for the gothic.  You can’t get more hauntological than vampires, but they tend to be interpreted as representing deeply materialist concerns, from veneral disease to monopoly capitalism (and, these days, teen romance… which is about as materialist as anything gets).  However, while they may represent material, social, historical anxieties, vampires are not straightforwardly material.  They are, like most classic gothic/hauntological monsters, profoundly spectral – or at least ab-physical.  They dissolve in sunlight, cast no reflection, can appear and disappear at will, can physically transform into bats or wolves, can reverse physical time by becoming young again after feasting, can defy gravity by crawling down sheer walls, etc.  And vampires are at the more solid end of the hauntological spectrum.

However, Doctor Who has tended to (rather spuriously) consider itself a champion of an empiricist, scientific approach rather than one which has any truck with the supernatural, making vampires into alien races or mutations created by pollution, for example. (This is, as I say, rather spurious, partly because the writers of the show have usually been less interested in scientific accuracy and more interested in telling stories, often reiterations of myth – and quite right too.)  But the thing to notice here is that, despite the very gothic/hauntological method of many of the show’s monsters (haunting us with our repressed anxieties), the show does not usually represent them as spectral or phantasmic or undead in the full supernatural sense.  They may appear and disappear, but its because they’ve got transmats, not because they’re immaterial, undead things that flit in and out of tombs.

In other words, the show wants to have its cake and eat it.  It wants to have hauntological monsters that are alive, that are physical, that are hard and material things, that are organisms or robots.  This is not a denial of the hauntological-as-supernatural, but a recoding of it.  Like much SF, Doctor Who is immensely concerned with myth-reiteration, with retelling legends in the idioms of the age of science and technology and industrialisation.  I’m not here going to go into the various ways that Doctor Who‘s conception of reality is fundamentally magical.  What I’m trying to tease out is the way that, despite its repression of magical thinking, magical thinking keeps returning to the show and sneaking its way in.  It does this (if I may briefly anthropomorphise a concept) by disguising itself in a materialist form, and by inserting the hauntological method into narratives that are fundamentally about materialist concerns.…

Continue Reading

Maybe That Idea Came From Somewhere (The Nightmare of Eden)

15

So. How was your weekend?

It’s November 24, 1979. Dr. Hook’s beautiful woman obsession continues for two more weeks before the Police break up the party with “Walking On the Moon.” That lasts for a week before Pink Floyd take the top slot with “Another Brick in the Wall.” Kool and the Gang, Donna Summer and Barbara Streisand, Gary Numan, and the Sugarhill Gang also chart, making this, I think, a strong contender for the most utterly screwed up set of musical options ever.

In real news, Air New Zealand Flight 901 crashes into Mount Erebus in Antarctica. Bruce George Peter Lee sets fire to a house in Hull, killing three and setting off a large manhunt. Jack Lynch resigns as Taoiseach of Ireland, which is by far the best name for a major political office ever, and the whole Rhodesia thing continues with the short-lived and unrecognized state of Zimbabwe Rhodesia returning to British control as Southern Rhodesia. Smallpox is formally eliminated, there’s a coup d’etat in South Korea, and the first Star Trek movie debuts.

While on television we once again have a story that gives us an opportunity to practice our “defending the Graham Williams era” skills. As usual, a curate’s egg. Somewhat surprisingly, the biggest problem isn’t the writing, given that this is a Bob Baker solo script. Apparently Dave Martin was the weak link there. I mean, the writing isn’t award winning genius. But it’s serviceable enough. The real flaws… let’s see. The Mandrels are, of course, a disaster, although at least with them, unlike several other recent monsters, you can see why people thought they could have worked. They’re firmly a case of just missing scary and landing on ridiculous (and the two are often a hair’s breadth apart) as opposed to a misconceived disaster. The acting is often poor, though nobody stands out as a particular disaster. The sets are… generic 70s space ship at its most generic, although some points are on offer for a relative lack of white.

But the biggest problem, if we’re being honest, is the basic concept. The number of series that have had good days with anti-drug stories is very, very small. It’s not a great topic, largely because one can’t deviate from the proscribed moral position that drugs are super-duper bad. Lacking in any ability to say or do anything interesting with the material they become little more than a race to see how ludicrously anti-drug you can end up being. So for Bob Baker to falter here is hardly surprising. Heck, even Steven Moffat has trouble with this theme, with “How to Make a Killing,” his anti-drug episode of Press Gang, being by far one of the weakest episodes of the series. Still, the fact that a vraxoin high consists of emotional apathy followed by death means that this has to be said to be something of an impressive entry in the ludicrously excessive anti-drug story sweepstakes. And given that vraxoin is one of the story’s big ideas and that another one of its big ideas is nothing more than a less interesting lift of Carnival of Monsters it’s easy to see why this story is a bit underwhelming.…

Continue Reading

The Black & White Era

, , , , , , 2

Readers of this blog (all 12 of them… on a good day) might be forgiven for thinking I do nothing but obsess over the politics of Doctor Who.  Undoubtedly, I do do that, and far too much of it.  However, in my defence, I will say that most of what I post here is the product of long-term, off-and-on, occasional, when-I-get-the-chance pondering and tinkering.  My last post, for instance, had been loitering in the ‘Draft’ category for months, getting steadily longer and more tendentious, before I posted it.  I spend a lot of the rest of my time thinking about and doing other stuff.  However, my practice of letting my ‘essays’ (I hate calling them that, but what else can I call them?) percolate means that I’m very bad at reacting quickly.  However, there are some things to which I desperately want to react quickly because I care about them so much… usually because they make me so ANGRY.

Luckily, there are people out there who

a) broadly share my political perspective,

b) are much cleverer and better informed than me, and

c) can react quickly.

So, on the subject of the recent synth-controversy and twitterstorm about Diane Abbott, here are three reactions which, between them, pretty much say everything I want said.

Here‘s Richard Seymour at Lenin’s Tomb:

First of all, what Abbott said was, in a very loose sense, correct: ‘white people’ do indeed love to play divide and rule.  Not all of them, good lord no.  Not you or I.  Not the good whites (there are some good whites).  But I think we all know that there’s a troublesome minority in our midst, the ones who give us all a bad name, whom we must root out and expose, and hand over to the authorities.  That’s all I’m saying.  Second, I would rather have a politician who expresses things bluntly and occasionally blunders but is usually on the right side of the argument (Abbott, for all her flaws, is better than most Labour politicians in this respect), than a calculating mountebank who plays for position in the spectacle. 

Here‘s Michael Rosen at his new blog (which I fervently recommend, by the way):

As a broad statement about history, Diane Abbott is to my mind more or less right in that the elite that has ruled over the British Empire and continues to rule is of course 99.9 per cent white and one of the ways it has ruled was, say, to use black troops from one part of the empire to fight another, or to use ‘mulatto’ elites (as they were called) to rule over ‘pure’ black populations and so on. In terms of how Diane Abbott acts as a local MP – now an apologetic one – is for me less clear. I don’t feel as if I tried to rule over her, trying to set black people against each other in the matter of education. To tell the truth, I felt that she did that herself.

…

Continue Reading

They’ve Taken This Animal and Turned It Into a Joke (The Creature From the Pit)

56

We call it… green.

It’s October 27, 1979. Lena Martell are at number one with “One Day at a Time,” which is described as gospel-tinged country music. So that’s exactly the sort of thing that a Scottish singer is probably good at. After three weeks its unseated by Dr. Hook’s “When You’re In Love With A Beautiful Woman.” Fleetwood Mac, Sad Cafe, Queen, and The Jam also chart.

While in proper news, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines becomes independent from the UK. The Carl Bridgewater murder trial ends with all four of the accused being found guilty, though their convictions are overturned in 1997. NORAD computers in the US detect a massive Soviet nuclear strike, but it turns out to be a false alarm because someone put a training tape in the wrong slot and fooled the computer. Oops. Ted Kennedy declares that he’ll offer a primary challenge to Jimmy Carter. Also, the Iran hostage crisis begins with a mob of 3000 Iranians seizing the US embassy and holding 90 people, 53 of whom are American, hostage. Carter responds by freezing all Iranian assets in the US, and it all goes very well for him.

While on television we have The Creature From The Pit, one of the most tragically misunderstood stories in Doctor Who’s history. Some people, it seems, just don’t understand a proper anti-capitalist screed when they see one. Tragically, among them is the director of this story, Christopher Barry. Or, at least, that’s Tat Wood’s assessment, and on this point at least I’m inclined to agree.

Much like Terry Nation on Monday, I’m hardly inclined to slag Barry too hard. He directed the bulk of The Daleks, including the first appearance of the Dalek itself, he directed Power of the Daleks, he directed The Brain of Morbius, and he directed some lesser but still quite nice efforts like The Rescue and The Mutants. His sole problem here is one of the passage of time. In the normal course of things someone who was a solid television director in 1963 probably shouldn’t still be one in 1979. Virtually the entire medium changed over those 16 years. One of the things John Nathan-Turner does do a relatively admirable job of, even if he overdoes it a bit, is clearing out large swaths of the past that had stayed on past their prime and getting new blood onto the program. But to be honest, a lot of the problem the program is facing now is an inevitable part of being on season seventeen. It has to figure out which parts of its heritage are part of what the show is and what parts are things tit it should let go of. There wasn’t a rulebook on how to handle a show that had evolved continually over that kind of timespan. Science fiction had never done something like “Season Seventeen” before. It was hard.

And here Barry proved to be a poor choice. He makes two crushing mistakes, both of which Tat Wood is exactly on target about.…

Continue Reading

«‹ 311 312 313 314 ›»