Eruditorum Press

January 2, 2012

The Thing it Does Most Efficiently (Destiny of the Daleks)

Elizabeth Sandifer TARDIS Eruditorum tom baker 24

As a child, this cover made me think
of this story primarily as “the one
with the better part of a sheep’s
fleece on the cover.” It wasn’t
until I looked at the cover again
a few months ago that I realized
it was smoke

It’s September 1, 1979. Cliff Richard are at the top of the charts with “We Don’t Talk Anymore,” a title that seems almost tautological as song titles go. After three weeks it’s unseated by Gary Numan’s “Cars,” a song that poses something of a fundamental philosophical problem. I mean, it was one thing to try to pretend that we were facing down business as usual when we were airing the Williams era while “Wuthering Heights” was at number one or when Siouxie and the Banshees were charting. But now we’re basically just kicking down the door for New Wave. Lower in the charts are the Boomtown Rats with “I Don’t Like Mondays,” and The Police with “Message in a Bottle,” as well as ELO, Roxy Music, and Earth, Wind, and Fire, the first two of which at least heighten the sense that there’s something off here – that the 80s have well and truly started without remembering to invite Doctor Who along for the ride.

Since The Armageddon Factor wrapped, most obviously, we’ve had Margaret Thatcher’s election. But we dealt with that last entry. The compact disc got its first public demo, two workers died in the collapse of the Penmanshiel Tunnel in Scotland, and then ten more in a methane explosion in a coal mine near Wigan. The Three Mile Island disaster happens, killing/injuring exactly nobody. Airey Neave, a Conservative MP, is assassinated by the IRA. A hundred children in the Central African Empire (previously and shortly thereafter the Central African Republic) are massacred for protesting against school uniforms with the active support (and indeed, by some accounts, participation) of the emperor, whose picture was emblazoned on the uniforms. The emperor, Jean-Bédel Bokassa, had previously blown 20% of the country’s GDP on his coronation.

Stil before this story, however, anti-Nazi demonstrator Blair Peach is killed by the police during a protest in London. Gay men riot in San Francisco after Harvey Milk’s killer manages a light sentence on the back of the infamous Twinkie Defense. American Airlines Flight 191 crashes in Chicago, marking the deadliest aviation accident in US history prior to 2001. (And that’s not the obvious 2001 event, by the way) John Paul II visits Poland in what ends up being a tremendously influential and important trip. Skylab crashes into Australia, the famed Disco Demolition Night takes place in Chicago, Saddam Hussein takes power, and Lord Mountbatten of Burma is assassinated by the IRA on the same day as the Warrenpoint Ambush. Oh, and Jimmy Carter is attacked by a non-IRA affiliated rabbit.

While during this story ESPN and For Better or For Worse debut. Emperor Bokassa, due to being, to borrow a phrase from Eddie Izzard, a mass-murdering fuckhead, is forcibly deposed by the French.…

January 1, 2012

Panic on the Streets of London…

Jack Graham 60s, fanzine, invasion of the dinosaurs, macra terror, panic moon, war games 0

The January 2012 issue of the extremely good, fetchingly illustrated, conveniently pocket-sized and infeasibly cheap print fanzine Panic Moon will be released soon and is now available for pre-order. Click here.

This month the Editor has taken the existence of the publication very much into his hands and granted me even more space than usual. I have no less than three pieces in this forthcoming issue, looking at ‘The Macra Terror’, ‘The War Games’ and ‘Invasion of the Dinosaurs’.

I see all these stories as milestones in Doctor Who‘s engagement with the radical movements and ideas of the 60s. ‘The Macra Terror’ is a much-misunderstood starting point which came just before the protest movements peaked, ‘The War Games’ a subversive high point which came just after the ferment of 1968 and ‘Invasion of the Dinosaurs’ marks the ambivalence and disillusion brought by the subsequent downturn in struggle.

There’s loads of other stuff in the fanzine besides me, so don’t be put off.…

December 31, 2011

Down to the Deeps to Die

Jack Graham capitalism, caves of androzani, steven moffat, the doctor the widow and the awwrgh fuck off... 4

The recent Christmas special (which I haven’t watched) apparently referenced ‘The Caves of Androzani’.

Let’s just ponder ‘The Caves of Androzani’ for a moment.

What’s it about? It’s about a commodity that, though it promises eternal life, kills everyone it touches. It’s about a commodity that, though it promises beauty, transforms the world into an ugly hellhole of war, competition, disfigurement, hatred, betrayal and murder. It’s about a commodity that, though it promises eternal youth, brings on the decline and fall of an entire society. The commodity’s hollow promises are echoed in the vanity and narcissism of the people who compete for it – especially in the tragic story of a man who, though not essentially evil, is driven to do vile things by his own wounded vanity. It’s about capitalism as a catastrophic moral, intellectual and social failure… one which we will be lucky to escape from alive.

So… let me ask those who have watched the recent special… did those ‘Androzani’ references seem thematically appropriate?

I won’t insult you by pretending that this isn’t a rhetorical question. You may say the assumptions underlying it are based on prejudice. I’d prefer to call it precedent.…

December 30, 2011

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time For Tea 23 (The Winter of Discontent)

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“Jack always said it was difficult for us Americans to understand what it was really like here in the darkest parts of the eighties. We had a doddery old President who talked about the end of the world a little too often and was being run by the wrong people. But they had a Prime Minister who was genuinely mad. You know there were even feminists and women’s studies theorists who denied she was even really a woman anymore, she was so far out of her tree? She wanted concentration camps for AIDS victims, wanted to eradicate homosexuality even as an abstract concept, made poor people choose between eating and keeping their vote, ran the most shameless vote-grabbing artificial war scam in fifty years… England was a scary place. No wonder it produced a scary culture.” – Warren Ellis, Planetary #7

In general I attempt to maintain some vague illusion of critical balance on this blog. Even in political matters, where my overt progressivism is unmistakably a thing, I try very hard to acknowledge the points where leftist politics have failed and to find concrete lessons, both rhetorical and substantive, for their failures. But here we reach a new sort of problem of balance – one we’ve been circling about since the Three Day Week entry back in the late Pertwee era. (In this regard it’s fitting that we come to this right off of a story where the biggest flaw is that it’s not the glam rock era anymore.) And that problem is, in a nutshell, Margaret Thatcher.

First of all, however much I’ve been willing to shoot my own side of the debate when it’s being stupid, I’ve never been one to give much quarter to the right. The idea of starting with Thatcher is hardly inspiring. The fact of the matter is, I fiercely disagree with virtually everything Thatcher stood for and everything Thatcher did. There’s little margin around that to formulate some sort of balance. There’s no way to hold the ideals and values I hold and thus that this blog holds and like Margaret Thatcher. There’s not even really a way to hold them and avoid hating Margaret Thatcher.

But there is something about Thatcher that goes beyond mere political reason. I commented in the Dad’s Army entry, to some controversy and consternation, that Thatcher was “basically the raw embodiment of all evil.” The line was intended at least partially as one of those moments of excessively deadpan humor that I favor – an instance of willfully overplaying my hand and taking the most extremist position available so that all future statements on the subject are pleasantly moderate.

But there’s almost no such thing as overstatement on the subject of Margaret Thatcher, as the Ellis quote I started us off with demonstrates. None of it is strictly speaking untrue (although technically the concentration camps for AIDS victims were Lord Christopher Monckton, of whom Herman Cain is a poor American remake), and it doesn’t even scratch the surface of the horrors of Thatcherism.…

December 28, 2011

Errata to the Book Version

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Somehow, through means that completely escape me, the print version of the Hartnell book is missing the chapter on The Massacre.

That chapter is, of course, already up on the blog, but since the book features revised and expanded versions I have replaced the blog version with the revised book version. I will also be including the essay in the Troughton book this spring (or maybe summer) as an errata so those who are buying the books at least have all the essays.

The chapter is present in the ebook versions, for what it’s worth.

My sincere apologies for the oversight.…

December 28, 2011

Only Ashes (The Armageddon Factor)

Elizabeth Sandifer TARDIS Eruditorum tom baker 31

This is how it ends. Voratrelundar flirting with herself.
True love at last.

It’s January 20th, 1979. The Village People remain at #1 with “YMCA.” One week later they’re unseated by Ian and the Blockheads’ “Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick,” which I assume, especially based on what else is popular, is sort of like Lady Gaga’s Disco Stick. That’s all over in a week as Blondie hits number one with “Heart of Glass,” which, I mean, good for Blondie, but it’s one of the most brazen selling outs of any talented musician ever. But it still sees out the season. Oliva Newton-John, Funkadelic, Chaka Khan, ABBA, Leif Garrett, The Bee Gees, Elvis Costello, and Gloria Gaynor all also chart.

In real news, now is the winter of our discontent, but we’ll do that on Friday. Lesser news includes Brenda Ann Spencer opening fire on a school in San Diego because of her dislike of Mondays. Patty Hearst is released from prison on the same day that Ayatollah Khomeini returns to Tehran from exile, which just about sums up the Carter administration. Ten days later Khomeini takes power in Iran, leading to nothing but sunshine and bunnies for decades to come. Pluto nips inside Neptune’s orbit to let Neptune become the outermost planet. This remains so until 1999, at which point Pluto becomes the outermost planet again. Neptune, of course, is horribly jealous about this and plots political moves to retake the position more permanently, but that’s more a Tennant-era story. It snows in the Sahara Desert for half an hour, China invades Vietnam, and St. Lucia becomes independent from the UK.

While on television, the Key to Time concludes with neither a bang nor a whimper. But before we look too far at that, let’s take a step back and look at the arc as a whole one more time, and more generally at the Williams era to date. The central critical dilemma with the Williams era is straightforward enough: is it a witty and lively postmodern rendition of the tropes of science fiction, or is it just a bunch of cynical hacks mocking the show they’re supposed to be making?

Both of these, of course, overstate their case. The former, admittedly, is not nearly as impishly brilliant as Gareth Roberts’ summary of that case as viewing the era as “an artefact of postmodern forces combining to produce works of semiotic thickness through usage of meta-textual signifiers.” The latter, on the other hand, might actually be too nice. The same Roberts piece provides a damning account of the practical origins of the anti-Williams camp.

Not to leaf too many pages ahead, but there are only five more transmitted stories in the Williams era after this one. After that begins the nine-season tenure of John Nathan-Turner as producer – a tenure that defies easy classification as a single era. Nathan-Turner’s contributions to the program are far too complex to square away in what amounts to an introductory note. But one of the more sickening aspects of the era is the way in which Nathan-Turner presented himself as providing a glorious rebirth for the show and unabashedly threw Williams – his previous employer, keep in mind – under the bus to do it.…

December 26, 2011

Harry Potter and the Labour Theory of Value

Jack Graham bourgeois ideology, capitalism, economic miracles, harry potter, j k rowling, labour theory of value, magic, marx, marxism, middle classes, petit bourgeoisie 7

Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.

– Marx & Engels, The Communist Manifesto

In this post, I noticed that Star Trek portrays the society of the future as essentially capitalist (in all but name) despite the fact that the people of the Federation have ‘Replicators’ that can summon material objects out of pure energy. Such a development of the forces of production ought to have banished scarcity of any description, thus also banishing any need for the exploitation of labour, the extraction of surplus and the existence of class, along with many other features of capitalism which persist (open or half-hidden) in the Roddenberry/Berman utopia. In short, given the technology it possesses, the Federation ought to look a lot more like ‘the Culture’ of Iain M. Banks’ (though, actually, the Culture is as much a liberal vision as it is socialist or anarchist… with its dependence upon the benevolent dictatorship of super-smart AIs and its liberal imperialism… but that’s a different essay).

There is a similar problem for the ‘wizarding world’ of Harry Potter, for all Rowling’s hasty and hamfisted improvisations about it being impossible to magic-up food. We know that magic allows wizards to transform goblets into rats. Why then do 11yr old wizards, preparing for their first year at Hogwarts, have to go to Diagon Alley and buy rats (or cats or toads or cutsey owls) from a shop? In a world where magic washes the dishes, there can be no need for labour.

If one can make things without labour, why labour? Why produce, distribute and exchange? Why teach? Why make or do anything?

Labour – making things, doing things, thus changing your environment – is perhaps the most essential aspect of human nature. In the wizarding world, this essential human quality is degraded and potentially denied. Maybe this is why so many of the inhabitants of the wizarding world seem to empty and sterile and dull… they are deprived of any real meaning and content to their activity as human beings.

Yes, I know it takes a lot of work to make a potion in Professor Snape’s class… but the question remains: why not just magic-up a potion from thin air? Or just magic-up the desired effect of the potion? Is this impossible? Okay… then the immediate next question is: why? The wizards can magic-up light from nowhere by just muttering “lumos”. Light is material, remember? Why is this material summonable ex nihilo while others are not?

The cynical answer is to do with J. K. Rowling being a lazy hack.

The cuddly answer is to do with it just being a bit of fun for kids (okay, fine… but somebody please remind Rowling, yes?)

The interesting answer is that there is no answer and cannot be. …

December 26, 2011

A Big Mining Thing (The Power of Kroll)

Elizabeth Sandifer TARDIS Eruditorum tom baker 36

It’s Christmas Adam, 1978. Boney M are still at number one with “Mary’s Boy Child.” Two weeks later they’re unseated by The Village People with YMCA, which stays for the last week of the story as well. All of this marks the clear ascendency of disco as a subculture. In the past, Doctor Who has tracked the tone of youth subculture uncannily. In which case this alone is reason for concern. In any case, Earth, Wind, and Fire, Elton John, and the Bee Gees also chart.

While in real news, Vietnam makes a major attack on the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Spain ratifies its new Constitution, an event that Wikipedia describes as officially ending military dictatorship, which is amusing given that six lines earlier in its timeline it describes an earlier stage in the Constitution’s development the exact same way. And there’s a big UN/UNICEF push for the “Year of the Child” featuring a big concert with ABBA, the Bee Gees, Donna Summer, and Rod Stewart. So that’s horrific.

While on television, it’s not a popular story at all. Let us be honest, for a moment, about the critical consensus regarding this story. Its weaknesses are evident, yes. It’s a bold fan who can defend the Swampies or the way in which Kroll is merged into shots. (The Kroll model itself is actually phenomenal, and it’s easy to see why his first appearance was an iconic moment for children of the time. On the other hand, the join between the two shots is an abomination.) But these in and of themselves don’t explain this story’s status as a punching bag, nor does the fact that it drags a bit.

No, the biggest problem this story has is that for a Robert Holmes script it’s complete and utter crap. It is, in fact, the second worst Robert Holmes script according to the DWM poll I’ve been oddly obsessing over through this story arc, coming in at 174th place. The one that’s lower is, of course, The Space Pirates, which is actually not a bad story to compare this one to.

Both, after all, have essentially the same origin. Holmes was called in to produce a script in a hurry to fill a gap. And in both cases he was given a thoroughly crappy set of instructions for his troubles. For The Space Pirates he was told to tack on two extra episodes and be sure to keep the science realistic. This time he got told to cut down on the humor and to insert the biggest monster in Doctor Who history. And in both cases the resulting script amounts to Robert Holmes writing a space Western. (Also, in a more esoteric coincidence, The Space Pirates was the first story on which John Nathan-Turner worked, then as a floor assistant. The Power of Kroll, on the other hand, was the first story produced by him, as Graham Williams, depending on your choice of sources, went on vacation or took ill, leaving him as the de facto producer.)…

December 23, 2011

And Incidentally, a Happy Christmas to All of You at Home (The Androids of Tara)

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Duplicates! I haven’t seen duplicates in years!

It’s November 21, 1978. The Boomtown Rats are still at number one with “Rat Trap,” which should probably get at least some serious mention as, at least in Wikipedia’s unquestionably correct worldview, it is the first punk/new wave song to hit #1. In any case, my life gets simpler a week later when Rod Stewart hits number one with “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy,” a song that is really pretty unambiguous in all regards. A week later it’s Boney M with a version of “Mary’s Boy Child,” which stays in place through the end of the story. Blondie, The Cars, Sarah Brightman, The Bee Gees, Barbara Streisand and Neil Diamond, and the Village People (with YMCA) all also get into the top ten. In the lower reaches of the chart are The Buzzcocks, The Clash, Elvis Costello, and for our purposes (and nobody else’s) most interestingly, Mankind with “Dr Who,” a version of the Doctor Who theme song, which makes it as high as 25.

In real news, Harvey Milk is murdered by Dan White. The Times halts publication for nearly a year due to labor problems, which is the sort of thing you’d normally like to mock Rupert Murdoch for, except he buys the paper in the fallout from these problems so still has nothing to do with it. Next time, Mr. Murdoch, I will not be so lenient. Also, the Spanish Constitution is established, officially restoring democracy to the country.

While on television we have one of those things that puzzles one about Doctor Who fandom. I’m not one to treat the Doctor Who Magazine surveys as the definitive gauge of fan opinion, and certainly not as some doctrinaire statement about aesthetics. On the other hand, I’m not going to pretend the Mighty 200 survey has nothing to tell us about Doctor Who. Obviously it does. There’s some type of fan that the survey is broadly representative of the taste of. We admittedly know little about this type of fan beyond “they answer Doctor Who Magazine” surveys, but they exist.

Where I’m going with all of this is that, not for the first time in recent memory, we’re looking at a story that has a puzzling reputation. According to the big DWM poll, this is the second best story of this season, behind Stones of Blood. Whereas I am unable to come up with an even remotely sincere argument for how to consider either of these stories better than the first two of the season. And that presents an interesting problem.

First, let’s quickly deal with what this story is. It’s fairly simple – it’s a parody of The Prisoner of Zenda. Tara is a planet with androids and advance technology that has, for no particularly discernible reason, taken on a social structure that almost exactly matches that of a Ruritanian Romance. All of this sounds cynical, and it is a bit. Certainly it’s tough not to see moving from a trio of complex multi-layered narratives to a straight pastiche as a bit of a move down, at least in some sense.…

December 21, 2011

Into Submission With My Charm (The Stones of Blood)

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No, Doctor, Iain Cuthbertson was two stories ago.

It’s October 28, 1978. John Travolta and Olivia Newton John continue to do unspeakable things on Summer Nights and are thus left to sing about them instead. This lasts for three weeks before The Boomtown Rats make it to number one with “Rat Trap,” which, given that it’s now hit number one, makes me kind of regret that crack implying they were a one hit wonder with “I Don’t Like Mondays.” The Grease orgy continues lower in the charts with Olivia Newton-John making a solo appearance in the charts. The Jacksons, The Cars, and Public Image Ltd also chart. That said, when crafting the “also chart” sentence I usually limit myself to the top ten, and as we’re getting into the period where I actually love huge swaths of stuff going on lower in the charts, I think it’s time to inaugurate a sentence about the lower reaches of the charts so I have an excuse to mention The Buzzcocks, The Jam, Blondie, and Elvis Costello, if only to reassure anyone who wasn’t convinced by The Cars and Public Image Ltd that these are actually pretty good times for music. Having thusly reassured everyone, Donna Summer also charts with “MacArthur Park,” proving that there’s no hope at all and that we might as well just elect Margaret Thatcher or something.

In real news, we manage to avoid electing Margaret Thatcher for a bit longer. Instead Dominica gains independence from the UK. Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin win the Nobel Peace Prize, an event that is in part notable because Jimmy Carter does not win it despite brokering that peace, setting up a rare case of an “oops, sorry we forgot about you” Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. (Not that Carter’s post-Presidency work was not meritorious, but let’s face it – that prize was 1/3 about Carter’s post-Presidency, 1/3 about a rebuke to Bush, and 1/3 about the fact that in hindsight he obviously deserved to split the 1978 prize.) Rioters sack the British embassy in Tehran, California voters defeat an initiative to ban gay schoolteachers, and, the day after the final episode of this story airs, the first Take Back the Night march happens in San Francisco. But the big news story happens the day the final episode of this story airs as the Jonestown Massacre happens, resulting in the murder/suicide (we’ll leave it ambiguous which victims were which) of a staggering 918 people.

While on television, we should probably go back and note the one thing we didn’t mention in the Pirate Planet post (and which I bet someone has already commented on, but I’m writing this before the Pirate Planet post goes up, so who knows) that ITV’s failed attempt to poach top BBC talent and compete on Saturdays has been going on. The key event of that is their poaching of Bruce Forsyth, previously host of the BBC’s Generation Game, now host of ITV’s rather more disastrous Bruce Forsyth’s Big Night.…

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