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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time For Tea 18 (Space: 1999, I Clavdivs)

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Yes, I really am tackling Space: 1999 and I, Claudius (or, as I insist on referring to it for no other reason than “it makes me happy,” I Clavdivs.) in one entry. It even makes sense to do so. Because one thing that we’re going to have to deal with over the remainder of the series is the fact that the nature of television is shifting rapidly. And the beginnings of that shift are starting to happen around what we’re watching now. One of the easiest lenses to look at that through, at least for our purposes, is the way in which British television is made for the export market. In other words, shows designed to make money by being sold to other countries.

The BBC, of course, had done this to some extent for years. In terms of Doctor Who, this has been tracked extensively by the folks at BroaDWcast. But notably, these sales were mostly to Commonwealth countries, with Hartnell and Troughton stories often airing well into the 1970s. Despite Innes Lloyd eying the possibility in the 1960s (hence the conscious reintroduction to the premise of the show at the start of Tomb of the Cybermen), no successful effort to show Doctor Who in the US happens until 1972, when Time Life, who bought the distribution rights, sells a package of Pertwee episodes to a PBS station in Philadelphia. (In a moment of explaining things to a different side of the Atlantic than usual, PBS is basically what the BBC would be if Rupert Murdoch got his way – an underfunded and stitched together coalition of local stations with an extreme lack of money for producing new content outside the children’s market. They market to the sorts of people who in the UK watch a lot of BBC4 and read The Guardian. But more on them in a few paragraphs.) But it’s not really until the late 70s/early 80s when Doctor Who manages to take off in a meaningful sense in the US, so we’ll mostly drop that strand until… oh, The Five Doctors sounds like a pretty good place to pick it up next, no?

The logic behind this is fairly straightforward: there are a whole lot of English speakers in the US, so it’s a really obvious market to sell in. But right around now there’s an odd transition going on in the nature of what a typical UK to US export looks like. In the 1960s, had we done a piece on exports, we’d have talked mostly about ITC – Lew Grade’s production company that made, of the things we’ve talked about so far, The Prisoner. In the UK, Grade’s shows went to ITV, whereas in the US they usually ended up in CBS.

Several things characterize the ITC approach. First of all, they were generally budgeted with the export market in mind. This gave them the budgets to do glitzy action set pieces that BBC productions couldn’t touch. Second, they were generally put together so that episode order didn’t matter that much.…

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A Bad Rep

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“They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented.”
– Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852).

I like it when people rip this quote from Marx out of context to prove he was an authoritarian who thought the little people had to be ruled from above… because in so doing they demonstrate their own ignorance and/or dishonesty (I give Edward Said a pass, for various reasons).

Marx is talking about a specific group of people: French ‘small holding’ peasants in the mid-19th century.  He’s not saying they’re too inherently dumb.  He’s saying that their way of living (small, self-sufficient, private agricultural property) makes it hard for them to be a unified class, to assert united interests, etc.  He’s saying they’ve had revolutionary demands beaten or bribed out of them by the bourgeoisie.  Consequently, they end up ready to be represented by an Emperor.

It’s a sound analysis that inherently recognises the ability of ordinary people to represent themselves under conditions other than the ones Marx is describing, and which puts those conditions in historical context rather than attributing them to any unavoidable destiny.

As usual, Marx is accused of doing and saying the exact opposite of what he actually did and said.…

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A Bit Dodgy, This Process (The Android Invasion)

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Frankly, this image is just here so that my heart doesn’t
sink whenever I scroll past this entry and remember the
story.

It’s November 22, 1975. Billy Connoly is at number one with “DIVORCE,” a novelty parody about dogs and, well, divorce. The remaining three weeks of this story, on the other hand, belong to “Bohemian Rhapsody,” one of the most epically successful singles ever. It is worth pausing and discussing what “Bohemian Rhapsody” does that is so significant. First, it’s a high profile case of a band performing a successful end-run around their label. EMI had no faith in the single for its length and lack of traditional song structure, and it was instead deliberately leaked via DJs. Second, it’s aggressively not poppy. It’s telling that there’s a lengthy period here where the number one song goes from a six year old piece of protoglam to a novelty record to this that provides a useful context for why postmodernist horror was proving to be adequate teatime entertainment. Third, it marks some of the initial stirrings of New Romanticism, which will eventually be one of the dominant aesthetics of the series. Also charting are Bowie, The Bay City Rollers, Rod Stewart, and Steeleye Span. 

Whereas in real news, there are no major English serial killings with which I can make a point about media sensationalism that somehow gets misread as a swipe at the people of Yorkshire. But there are Juan Carlos formally becoming King of Spain with the death of Franco, the official outlawing of the IRA, and the Rocky Horror Picture Show being released. New York City received a massive bailout to handle its massive cash-flow problems.

While on television, we run into one of the fundamental weaknesses of the Hinchcliffe era, especially compared to the Letts era. I’ve discussed the idea that there are two approaches to take when trying to improve a television show: increasing quality and reducing badness. This may sound like an obvious point, but it’s significant, in part because it gets to the heart of an art/entertainment debate. Barry Letts improved Doctor Who by targeting weak episodes and trying to eliminate them. Hinchcliffe did it by targeting strong episodes and trying to make them masterpieces. And just as the Letts era was never so frustrating as in its Sloman/Letts Curate’s Egg scripts that could have been great and weren’t, the Hinchcliffe era is never more frustrating than it is when it’s obvious that Hinchcliffe and Holmes have decided that this just isn’t one of the stories they’re going to put much effort into.

So, for instance, when they decide to just hire a writer with a massive list of television credits and pair him with the previous producer as director, it’s pretty clear that the plan here is that they’re going to go pay attention to other stories and let this story play out however it plays out. And it plays out terribly. It’s boring, unambitious, and terribly plotted. It brings back UNIT characters for another round without having anything resembling a reason for them.

…

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Reithian Values Meet ‘The 60s’…

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The old show was frequently highly reactionary but it also did better than most shows when it came to challenging establishment, bourgeois ideology and/or imperialist assumptions.

This division is the ‘ethos’. Frequently reactionary but with a proportionately greater tendency to buck this trend.

The hero of the show is a white male with a professional title, a line in Edwardian clothing (which retains a formality despite veering between scruffy, dandified, bohemian, etc.) and who travels around in a symbol of the British state. The odd Jacobite aside, his companions are usually thoroughly respectable types.

So, even when he takes a moral line against exploitation, it can seem like the civilized Englishman taking it upon himself to explain ethics to the barbarians.

However, while it may be possible to characterise this as an “overall or originating ethos” (as a poster at Gallibase put it) it’s one that has also been challenged from within.

At the start of the classic series, the Doctor is adamant that he cannot and must not intervene in history… including the religious practices of the Aztecs, a people destroyed by imperialism.

Then again, in that very same story, we also get a dose of condescension towards the Aztecs, portraying them as generally backward (i.e. “Autloc is the extraordinary man here!”) and suggesting that their religious practices will shock Cortés into attacking them. ‘The Crusade’ attempts a very sincere portrayal of Arabs as human beings… but also includes orientalist stereotypes.

When the first Doctor intervenes in the future history of aliens, etc., he very often takes a stance that seems very anti-imperialist, i.e. in ‘The Sensorites’. But, again, in that same story, the aliens are presented as encoded Asian stereotypes, and the human infiltrators are driven mad by their exposure to an inscrutable alien culture… which is pure colonialist self-pity.

But you also have to consider that, in the kind of fiction from which Who springs, the scientist figure, the lone inventor, was an ambiguous and untrustworthy figure who could not always be relied upon to toe the line. In Wells’ The Time Machine, the Time Traveller (clearly a forerunner of the Doctor) is explaining time travel to a group of friends when one of them imagines jumping forward in time to collect massive interest on a long-term investment… “…to arrive in a society run on strictly communistic lines perhaps?” suggests the Time Traveller.

All the same, the Doctor often assumes the right to intervene, which can seem imperialistic… but, having said that, the Doctor’s right to intervene does itself become the subject of some uncertainty within the show itself, several times. The Doctor has to justify himself to the Time Lords, firstly by claiming that power must be used to help those in need (and this in a story that forecloses on an imperialistic interpretation of that remark by being a forthright condemnation of imperialism), then by claiming during his second trial that he usually waits for a request for help from a local authority figure!

Times change and there was a shift in political discourse between the eras of the old and new shows.…

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I Don’t Exist in Your World (Pyramids of Mars)

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No! Not the Mind Nightlight!

It’s October 25, 1975. So… next Tuesday, basically. Art Garfunkel, who only has eyes for you, is at number one. It lasts for two weeks at number one, and is improbably overtaken by David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” rereleased six years after its original release and providing Bowie with his first number one single in the UK. “Space Oddity” plays out the story. ABBA, The Four Seasons, Roxy Music, and John Lennon also chart, the latter with “Imagine.”

In real news, Peter Sutcliffe, the so-called Yorkshire Ripper, commits his first murder, killing Wilma McCann in Leeds. It is worth pausing here and commenting on the fundamental absurdity of the phrase “Yorkshire Ripper,” combining as it does the macabre celebrity killer glory of Jack the Ripper with Yorkshire, a thoroughly working class region generally lacking in glitz and generally associated with the imagery of its mining regions, or with a more idyllic, pastoral imagery of agriculture, or, more broadly, with a wide variety of non-London cultural touchstones. Yorkshire, in other words, is conceptually miles from the seedy glamor of Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper. “Yorkshire Ripper” is, in other words, a phrase that trades on the shocking contrast between the images evoked by each of its words. This is not to detract from the utter horror of Sutcliffe’s crimes – he’s one of the most brutal serial killers around – but rather to remark upon the sheer and callous skill with which he was transmuted into a media event, complete with a catchily incongruous brand-name that could be splashed across the red tops. (Just as a note for anyone who wades through the comment section, this paragraph has seen a good three revisions due to infelicities of phrasing)

Franco steps down in Spain, beginning to bring that dictatorship to an end shockingly long after everyone assumes a country like Spain was democratic. (By “everyone” I mean “Americans” here and not “people who read this blog.”) The first petroleum pipeline opens in Scotland, the Green March takes place in Morocco – a mass coordinated demonstration to try to take over Western Sahara, and, for fans of truly great bad music, it’s the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. (For proper effect, read that sentence with a Gordon Lightfoot-esque inflection so that “rald” is said about twice as loud and a solid octave higher than the prior syllable)

While on television, we have a story that is, from a critical perspective, somewhat weirder than normal. Two of the sort of standard issue angles to take on Doctor Who stories are, roughly speaking, “it’s got some problems but it does some really extraordinary things” and “it’s terribly unambitious, but executes a standard type of story very well.”It seems like these two things should be exact opposites, but somewhat incredibly, Pyramids of Mars manages to be a story that simultaneously does both.

In one very real sense, this is where the Hinchcliffe era comes together. It is not the best story to date, although it is very, very good.…

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Civilizations of Pure Thought (Planet of Evil)

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RARRRRR! I’m EEEEEVIL!

It’s September 27, 1975. Rod Stewart sails on at number one. He sinks, and David Essex arrives to demand, “Hold Me Close.” Pop music may be a fickle mistress, but the people of the United Kingdom obey and keep him at number one for the next three weeks. Art Garfunkel, Showaddywaddy, Leo Sayer, The Four Seasons, and ABBA all also chart.

In real news, The Spaghetti House siege, in which Marxist black nationalists hold up an Italian restaurant and end up staying for six days, takes place in London, an event that is mostly just a sensationalist news story to fill the space between episode one and two of Planet of Evil, but at least has an entertaining name and no fatalities. The Thrilla in Manilla happens, as does a bombing outside Green Park Tube Station, and the first episode of Saturday Night Live.

On television, for the first time since The Faceless Ones, the Doctor Who we’re talking about is actually intersecting with the point in the calendar I’m writing from. With The Faceless Ones, that was dead on – the final episode of that story aired on May 13th, which is also the day that entry posted on. Here it’s off by a day – the final episode aired on October 18th. Personally, since this is the last entry written in a six day stretch starting with The Sontaran Experiment, I’m writing from an unseasonably warm Sunday, October 9, 2011 in suburban Connecticut, having watched the final two episodes of this last night.

In the Pertwee era, Doctor Who intruded into its audience’s lives by using the familiar as its setting – unfolding dramas in real places, and creating allegories for current events. But the central turn of the Hinchcliffe era, as we’ve said, is that the Doctor fights ideas now. To use a word rendered meaningless by vague use in something approaching its literal sense, Doctor Who has taken a very cerebral turn. It’s not telling stories about the world around the viewer anymore. Instead it’s telling stories about the world inside the viewer.

And so instead of allegories and allusions to the real world, it embeds itself in the viewer’s world according to an altogether subtler logic. The move to an autumn/winter schedule for Doctor Who moves it into darker and colder evenings. Planet of Evil went out just as the sun was setting in most of England, and later in the season stories will start going out firmly after dark. But the change involved here is about far more than light levels.

Living in New England, the last week or two has been marked by that sensation  of cold the moment you set outside. Not the frigid and despairing cold of winter, although that is worth discussing in its own right, but an altogether more pleasant cold. It is a cold that causes the body to draw inward, to huddle inside of itself slightly. One becomes more aware of one’s self, of the crunching of leaves underfoot and the swirl of scents and spices that seem to waft continuously through the air.…

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Anxiety Satellite

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The indefatigable Mr. Oliver Wake has put together and released the latest issue of the print fanzine Panic Moon.  It can be ordered here.

It contains (amongst other things) a judicious appraisal of the ‘Day of the Daleks’ Special Edition, a look at the way Hartnell’s shade has taken to haunting the recent series, a clever thing about the way Daleks always seem to get some new physical ability in first episodes, an interesting look at the pre-Who 60s Pathfinders serials which are now out on DVD and an excellent analysis of ‘The Sun Makers’ which identifies some of its roots, going beyond the usual stuff about Bob Holmes being annoyed by a tax bill.

Once again, I’ve contributed two articles.  In one, I identify a blind spot in the lefty-liberal creds of ‘Colony in Space’ and try to tease out some of implications of this, leading me to briefly consider something badly amiss with liberalism itself.  In another article, I have a good old ramble about the various ways Doctor Who has creatively misrepresented evolution, often using it was a way of re-encoding mythic themes or addressing political concerns… though there is, I argue, one story that really is about evolution itself.

It’s good, so… umm… buy it.  Please?

(No career in advertising awaits me, I know.)…

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Forms Into Other Patterns (Terror of the Zygons)

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So complete is Terror of the Zygons’s appropriation of
the Pertwee era that it even includes a dodgy giant lizard
in honor of Malcolm Hulke.

It’s August 30, 1975. The Stylistics are at number one with “Can’t Give You Anything (But My Love),” one of the many Philadelphia soul songs to chart in the UK and not the US. They are unseated by Rod Stewart with “Sailing,” which is not the more famous bad Christopher Cross song, but really, it’s not like that justifies anything. It still lasts the remaining three weeks of this story. KC and the Sunshine Band, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Roger Whittaker, and Mike Batt with New Edition all also chart.

In the only two months since Doctor Who was last on our screens, there’s been a bit of a kerfuffle between the US and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the deadliest motorway accident in UK history, a referendum resulting in the UK staying in the European Community, and the release of the Rockefeller Commission’s report that concluded and made public at least some of just how evil the CIA had been being lately. This was the first of three major studies into the CIA in about a two year period that began to scratch the surface of how upsettingly bad things were with the CIA. Most of these revelations were strenuously opposed by officials in the Ford administration, most notably some guy named Donald Rumsfeld, whose political career was surely brought to an end by such a brazen attempt to cover up staggering abuses of power. There’s also the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation shoot-out, the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa, and the sentencing of the Birmingham Six.
While during this story’s transmission, the IRA bombs the London Hilton, Rembrandt’s Night Watch is slashed up by a vandal, and, though the second attempt happens two days after this story’s finale, the two and a half weeks in which everybody tries to kill Gerald Ford take place.
It has, you may notice, been a short break since Revenge of the Cybermen. This is where Doctor Who moves to the third of its five major transmission schedules. Originally the show ran basically from the end of summer to the beginning of summer, occupying 40 weeks of the schedule. Then, when the episode count got cut to 26 with the switch to color, it became a roughly Christmas to summer run. Now, in order to deal with what everyone at the BBC is assuming is going to be the juggernaut of Gerry Anderson’s Space: 1999, Doctor Who is moving to a Fall through Spring run with a break for Christmas – a run, I should note, that is widely tipped as what Moffat’s era is going to switch over to starting in 2012.
But since this was a move done to compete with an ITV show, this move is the only time Doctor Who has jumped around the calendar by shortening the gap between seasons instead of by lengthening it.
…

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Pop Between Realities, Home In Time For Tea 17 (Survivors)

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In one corner, we have Doctor Who running, with considerable vigor, away from the legacy of the Pertwee era. Not just in the sense of moving into a postmodern aesthetic instead of a glam one, or in the sense of its massive and definitive breaks with its history. But in a broader sense, the transition we’re following is in part a turn away from the materialism of the Pertwee era. The series is turning from the immediate concerns of the world back towards a realm of ideas and stories. The first great era of social realism in Doctor Who, which began to spark roughly with The Macra Terror, here is flickering to a close, and we’re still more than a decade out from its next real rise.

With Survivors, then, Terry Nation walks pointedly in the other direction: a science fiction series that is based almost entirely on social realism. A series that is 100%, unabashedly about the ethical issues seemingly raised in The War Games, and for that matter about the ones raised by The Daleks, in which the Doctor pointedly declines to stick around for the business of rebuilding. This is the polar opposite – a series in which rebuilding is the entire focus.

It is, of course, a disaster. It’s tough to call this a surprise. I mean, looking at Terry Nation’s Doctor Who scripts, cutting social realism is not what you’d call his wheelhouse. He’s king of the tedious moralizers. Genesis of the Daleks is a great script, yes, but that’s because he successfully uses the twin mythic giants of the Daleks and Nazi Germany to cover up the fact that Kaled society is astonishingly lazily designed and that the centuries-long war on Skaro is between two domed cities within walking distance of one another that have hilariously lax security. Yes, it’s very good, but the thing that is good about it is very obviously not that it depicts a remotely sane or realistic view of society.

And now he’s tackling a series where the entire idea is probing and realistic views of society. I mean, the premise here is straightforward: an overwhelming majority of the world’s population drops dead of a pandemic, and the survivors have to try to preserve human society. It is, in other words, a sort of prototypical Deadwood – a story about how civilization establishes itself and deals with its most basic problems like providing food or security. In other words, a story that demands the exact opposite of what Nation has proven himself good at.

In light of this, it’s actually surprising how good the show is. Or, at least, it could be taken as surprising. Actually, for all Nation’s inadequacies in portraying civilization, there are things Nation is good at that turn out to be very useful here. Most obviously, Nation has always been one of the best Doctor Who writers at the job of crafting situations of physical and material danger. To my surprise when reading About Time, apparently the scene at the start of Genesis of the Daleks in which the Doctor steps on a landmine is widely hated.…

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It was such a massive task to establish the Roman race

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“The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre.

*

Colonial system, public debts, heavy taxes, protection, commercial wars, &c., these children of the true manufacturing period, increase gigantically during the infancy of Modem Industry. The birth of the latter is heralded by a great slaughter of the innocents. Like the royal navy, the factories were recruited by means of the press-gang.

*

With the development of capitalist production during the manufacturing period, the public opinion of Europe had lost the last remnant of shame and conscience. The nations bragged cynically of every infamy that served them as a means to capitalistic accumulation.  …[I]t is trumpeted forth as a triumph of English statecraft that at the Peace of Utrecht, England extorted from the Spaniards by the Asiento Treaty the privilege of being allowed to ply the negro trade, until then only carried on between Africa and the English West Indies, between Africa and Spanish America as well. England thereby acquired the right of supplying Spanish America until 1743 with 4,800 negroes yearly. This threw, at the same time, an official cloak over British smuggling. Liverpool waxed fat on the slave trade. This was its method of primitive accumulation.

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Whilst the cotton industry introduced child-slavery in England, it gave in the United States a stimulus to the transformation of the earlier, more or less patriarchal slavery, into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact, the veiled slavery of the wage workers in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the new world.

Tantae molis erat, to establish the ‘eternal laws of Nature’ of the capitalist mode of production, to complete the process of separation between labourers and conditions of labour, to transform, at one pole, the social means of production and subsistence into capital, at the opposite pole, the mass of the population into wage labourers, into ‘free labouring poor,’ that artificial product of modern society. If money, according to Augier, ‘comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,’ capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”

– Karl Marx, Capital vol.1, Chapter 31.  My favourite bit.…

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