Eruditorum Press

Gaze not into the abyss lest you accidentally write a book

Be Childish Sometimes (Planet of the Spiders)

9

You mean not only is this not Metebelis Three, it’s not
even a planet? And I’m on after Being Human? Crap.

It’s mid-September, 1992. The Shamen are at number one with “Ebeneezer Goode.” At least, in the UK. In the US, somewhat less fortunately, “End of the Road” by Boyz II Men is at number one. As it was for three months that year. Perhaps more importantly, at least for our purposes, in a small town in Western Connecticut, a newly minted ten year old flips through a book he just got from a family friend a week or so after his birthday. By a man he’s never heard of called John Nathan-Turner, about a television show he’s vaguely heard of called Doctor Who, the book is called The Companions. After the friend leaves, and it is no longer rude to do so, he asks his mother what this Doctor Who thing is. She looks around in a drawer, and hands him a VHS tape, which he goes to the basement to watch. The Delia Derbyshire theme, familiar to so many people, plays, and something called Planet of Spiders comes on. And so, in the wrong country, in the wrong decade, but every inch at the right time, I became a Doctor Who fan.

Oh. Um. Hi. I mean, not that I haven’t been obviously skulking about these blog entries for some time now, though I’ve tried not to make a nuisance of myself. But here I am forced to make a somewhat more formal and more permanent entrance. I have talked before about moments in Doctor Who that fans can’t quite see past – the introduction of the Time Lords, or the legendarily (though not actually) bad The Gunfighters. But past that, there’s another horizon that it’s impossible for anyone steeped in Doctor Who to quite see past, and that’s our own growing up with the show. As the slogan emblazoned on countless different t-shirts goes, you never forget your first Doctor.

And mine was Pertwee, with Planet of the Spiders. And I’ve always known this entry would mark a turning point in the blog, not just because it’s an era-divider, but because this is where I enter the story. This is the earliest Doctor Who story that I just cannot talk about or think about without my own childhood memories bleeding into the mix. I mean, he’s not the earliest Doctor I saw as a kid. It’s just that I’d not seen a lot of Hartnell or Troughton  prior to starting this project – I believe just The Dalek Invasion of Earth, The Rescue, The Romans, The Web Planet, and The Chase for Hartnell. I’d seen about as much Troughton, but it formed a much higher percentage of the existing episodes – Tomb of the Cybermen, The Mind Robber, The Invasion, The Seeds of Death, and The War Games. As a child, I found Hartnell mean and boring, and Troughton delightful. But both were Doctors I came to late, on bought VHS tapes imported and played on a multi-region VCR.…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 12 (Interference, BBC Books, 1996)

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It’s August, 1999. Doctor Who is as dead as dead can be. These are the heady early days of New Labor, two years after Tony Blair managed to end an 18-year stretch of Conservative rule. In the main stretch of the blog, we are a few years from the dawn of the Long 1980s. Here we are a few years past that, in a murky transition into an era that it’s not quite clear we’ve seen the end of yet – something alarmingly resembling the present. The clock ticks closer towards a millennial change stained deep with eschatology. Musically we are in a wasteland of Ricky Martin, Westlife, and Geri Halliwell doing Latin-inspired numbers. These are not days that anyone claims as the glory days of anything, least of all Doctor Who, which is off the air and seemingly never coming back.

In these transitional moments it is sometimes helpful to mine the past for ideas and directions. The shift between historical eras is a vague phenomenon existing more in the realm of ideas than in the realm of material objects after all – one reason that it is easier to track through psychochronography, which allows us the ability to walk and tour the realm of ideas. These dead spaces between eras mark the periods where old ideologies begin to stagger under their weight and break down, and where new ideologies find themselves pushed in from the fringes. In these moments, one turns to the past, looking at approaches that have run aground and sizing up the repair job needed to get them running again.

Enter Interference. On one level, as we’ll talk about when we come back around to it in 1999, this is a desperate (and failed) throw of the dice – a last attempt to get the unmitigated catastrophe that was the Paul McGann era to act like a functional era of Doctor Who instead of a graveyard. And it’s a clever one. The Past Doctor Adventures line took August off, and instead the Eighth Doctor Adventures line released a two-volume novel featuring interconnected Eighth and Third Doctor stories.

For my part, and I apologize for intruding into the narrative before my time, I know little about it. Interference was the last Doctor Who book I actively remember coming out, but I was by then jaded on the 8th Doctor era and was never big enough on the Third to want to read it, so I never did. Actually, prior to this I’d never read a Lawrence Miles novel, though I’d read plenty about them. I suppose, strictly speaking, I still haven’t, since, given both that this post was so requested (though planned practically from day one – this is one of the books the Time Can Be Rewritten entries were created for) and that it seemed like an entertaining choice to make, I read only the Third Doctor and frame novel sections of the book. Again, I don’t pretend that I’m some uncorrupted Miles virgin. I know the basic ideas of the Faction Paradox plot, I read a summary of the other half to make sure I knew who the major shared characters were, and I know well the extremely complex and contested role Miles has in fandom.…

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Too Narrow, Too Crippled (The Monster of Peladon)

17

And of course the other reason Curse of Peladon was great
was the giant green penis. Which they redesigned to look
less obscene, so they even screwed that up. Monster of
Peladon: So bad it couldn’t get a giant green penis right.

It’s March 23, 1974. Paper Lace continue to hold the number one spot with the legendarily execrable “Billy Don’t Be a Hero,” a song imploring a lover going off to war to “not be a hero” and, in particular, to “keep your pretty head low.” It is basically one of the worst things ever. After two weeks it finally goes away to be replaced with “Seasons in the Sun,” one of the most upbeat and cheery songs about dying ever recorded, and at only 3:24, not so long that the listener actually wants to. Also in the charts are Paul McCartney and Wings, Ringo Starr, Gary Glitter, The Hollies, and Queen.

In real news, the OPEC oil embargo largely ends, bringing some stability to markets that had been lacking during the energy crisis. A major Palestinian terrorist attack in Israel – the Kiryat Shmona massacre – kills 18. And the Carnation Revolution takes place in Portugal, managing the amusing historical feat of being a military coup organized in part by using the Eurovision Song Contest as a pre-arranged signal to take action.

While on television, and speaking of the legendarily execrable, it’s The Monster of Peladon. Along with The Time Monster, this is generally considered to be the worst story of the Pertwee era (although, inexplicably, The Mutants slots in between them on the Doctor Who Magazine poll, while Death to the Daleks is somehow of at 128, just ahead of The Claws of Axos). And while there are cases where I will defend a hated story to the bitter end (Paradise Towers is excellent, dammit), or where I will opt to look at a story’s virtues in lieu of its flaws… this is not one of them.

The last few entries have involved a lot of pointing out some fundamental failings of the Pertwee era. Actually, most of the entries on the Pertwee era have dealt with this, due largely to my not liking the Pertwee era very much. But I’ve at least generally hedged those with appreciation of the good sides and of what the era was trying to do. Here, then, is where the good will runs out. I have next to nothing positive to say about this story. It is an ugly train wreck at virtually every level.

To start, let’s think about its source material. In particular, let’s consider what it was that made The Curse of Peladon interesting and striking. By and large, it was that the story was so strikingly weird. Peladon was not like what we were used to seeing in Doctor Who in 1972. More to the point, The Curse of Peladon is one of only three stories not to rely on a concept from a previous story in order to generate or justify the plot.…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else 5 (Countdown/TV Action)

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And once again, it’s time for the Doctorly engagement with the wide world of ancillary merchandising. When last we left this story, back in June, we were noting that the late 60s comics fit firmly in a specific tradition of British comics, and were as accurate a translation of Doctor Who to that medium as was meaningfully possible.

For both the beginning and end of the Pertwee years, the existing Doctor Who comic strip appeared in the same magazine it did in the Troughton years – TV Comic. At the onset, the comics were very much in the same mould as the late Troughton strips only with a grotesque representation of Jon Pertwee instead of one of Patrick Troughton. They shared the same mind-wrenchingly odd sense of plotting, and the same belonging to a different tradition. At the close they were something different. The manic energy of the Troughton years had faded, but it was replaced with a much more taut sense of how to handle action and suspense.

But the real difference can be spotted just by looking. Here – I’ve taken a page from both the early and late TV Comic Pertwee strips and put them below. Have a look:

The earlier page, on the left, is a very straightforward grid of individual images. But the later page, on the right, has a considerably more interesting visual style, with oddly shaped panels. You can see, even shrunk down and without knowing what the story is about, that the panel shape gets weird when the aliens show up. You can also see how the round panel is used as a focus, with the other panels forming a sort of starburst around them. You can also see in the panel of the Doctor’s face that things like light, shadow, and perspective are being used in the later comic in a way that they weren’t in the earlier. In other words, the comic had become considerably more visual. 
To understand how and why that happened, we’re going to have to pull back and look at the British comics industry in general again. We’ve already talked about how the British comics industry is historically based around the anthology magazine in a way that the American comics industry hasn’t been since the 1940s or so. What’s crucial to understand is that for the most part, this meant that people were following brands of comics more than individual stories. Major magazines would have flagships, certainly – 2000 AD has Judge Dredd, Eagle had Dan Dare, etc. But more important was their general tone. A given magazine couldn’t survive by having one good strip and a bunch of filler. Not every strip could be a classic, but any successful magazine had multiple good strips and a fairly consistent tone. 
The big two in the end of the British comics history pool that we care about are, as I’ve said, Eagle and 2000 AD. Eagle’s heyday came and went before Doctor Who, meaning that the deserved “Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea” entry on Dan Dare never really quite had a place to go.
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Poor, Pathetic Creatures (Death to the Daleks)

17

I got a bad desire.

It’s February 23, 1974. Suzi Quatro is at number one with “Devil Gate Drive.” A sort of post-glam piece of bubblegum, it holds the spot for two weeks before giving way to Alvin Stardust, another sort of sanitized glam cash-in. It lasts for one week before yielding the top spot to Paper Lace’s “Billy, Don’t Be a Hero,” widely recognized as one of the worst songs ever recorded. David Bowie, Ringo Starr, The Hollies, Paul McCartney and Wings, and the Bay City Rollers all also chart.

The most obvious piece of news to cite here is the fact that the election that returns Harold Wilson as Prime Minister takes place. Charles de Gaulle Airport opens in Paris. And seven major Nixon aides are indicted in the Watergate break-in and cover-up.

Far from all of this, on television, is Death to the Daleks. There are many Doctor Who stories from the 70s that are well-remembered because they are classics. There are also, however, several Doctor Who stories from the 70s that are well-remembered because they came out on VHS early. The 80s VHS releases were focused almost entirely on classic monsters and highlights from the early Tom Baker years, which meant that both Day of the Daleks and this were among the stories that were widely and universally available on VHS. The logic on this was understandable, if crass – the early releases strongly favored four-parters, which were cheaper (in the UK, six parters got released as two tapes. The US generally condensed them to one, but the result was that in the early days, four-parters were strongly preferred). Within the era favored by the releases – Pertwee and Hinchcliffe-era Baker – these were the two four-part stories featuring the Daleks, so they were shoo-ins for release. (This same logic is why Revenge of the Cybermen was improbably picked as the first release – it had the right Doctor and a monster the show had just brought back.) For American fans, this release seemed particularly common, frequently ending up as the only Doctor Who story that ended up at the local Blockbuster. And so for a generation of Doctor Who fans, this is one we’re intimately familiar with. (Not to impose myself overly on the narrative. Yet.)

As I’ve suggested, the level of familiarity here is oddly incommensurate with the level of quality. It is not that Death to the Daleks is a bad story – although it’s hard to argue with a straight face that it’s a particularly good one. Unfortunately, the weirdness inherent in the odd overwatching of this story tends to obscure the degree to which the story is screamingly weird on its own. Because coming after ten weeks of The Time Warrior and Invasion of the Dinosaurs, this story sticks out like a sore thumb.

I don’t inherently mean this as a bad thing. It’s just that for the past 16 episodes and nine months, Doctor Who has been, seemingly by choice, an earthbound show again.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time For Tea 15 (Moonbase 3)

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Sometimes the most valuable thing one can do to understand something is to take a step back from it. It should be no secret to anyone reading the blog that I am less fond of the Pertwee era than I am of many of the other eras of Doctor Who. (And it is firmly “less fond,” as opposed to “not fond”) I’ve expressed at least part of that frustration, but honestly, it wasn’t until I tried watching Moonbase 3 that I realized exactly what it is that seems to me so fundamentally flawed about much of the Pertwee era.

Moonbase 3 is interesting. It’s not the first time Doctor Who people went on to try something else – that’s basically Adam Adamant Lives! – nor is it the first spinoff of Doctor Who – that’s K-9 and Company. But it is the first time major production staff of Doctor Who used Doctor Who as a springboard for a new show. Basically, Moonbase 3 is six episodes of Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks trying desperately to quit Doctor Who for something else. 
In practical terms, it was a failure – low rated, and with a mixed critical consensus. Accounting for why is a tricky project. Terrance Dicks has largely suggested the show was too dark and lacked a sense of wonder. It certainly is serious-minded in the extreme, but no moreso than Doomwatch (from which its first 20 minutes are stolen wholesale) or than Terry Nation’s soon to be successful Survivors. And anyway, dark and cynical is a pretty good fit for when the show aired, at least plus or minus a couple of months.

Nor is it quite fair to say that the show failed because it was bad. It had serious flaws, certainly, but no more so than the first season of any number of successful shows. Occasionally the show manages to feel like Babylon 5 done twenty years early, which, given that Babylon 5 is, for all its flaws, one of the absolute landmark pieces of science fiction television, is a hell of impressive feat. No, the best case for why it failed, to my mind, is that doing a show about realistic space exploration in late 1973 is about two years later than the last day you could really do that. Interest in moon bases after the Apollo missions were over is a bit… well… low.

But ultimately, why it failed commercially isn’t even the most interesting question. One can just as easily ask why Doctor Who succeeded, and in real terms the answer is going to be a diffuse set of arbitrary and often seemingly small decisions that happened to successfully navigate a given crisis where others seem unlikely to have. The question of industry success is not an uninteresting one, but the answer turns out to be arbitrary and beyond the reach of what can be controlled.

No. Far more interesting is the question of why the show failed aesthetically. And that it did. Again, plenty of cancelled-after-one-season shows have had real impact.

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Books! The Best Weapons in the World! (Invasion of the Dinosaurs)

18

Sod captions! I’m just going to
say K-KLAK! from now on!
K-KLAK!

It’s January 12, 1974. Improbably, despite the fact that it has been two weeks since Christmas, Slade continues to hold the number one single, though after only one more week of this they give way to The New Seekers’ “You Won’t Find Another Fool Like Me,” which in turn gives way to Mud’s “Tiger Feet,” which has a four week run and is the number one single of the year. Andy Williams, The Sweet, Lulu, Diana Ross, David Bowie, and The Wombles all also chart.

While in real news, Patty Hearst is kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn is exiled from the USSR. Really, that’s about what I can scrape together here. Oh. On US television, both The Six Million Dollar Man and Happy Days debut. There. That’s truly major world events there.

While on good television… oh, wait, never mind, it’s Invasion of the Dinosaurs. A story that is not so much in the territory of “good” as it is “infamous,” with (likely spurious) rumors even existing that Barry Letts requested its destruction because he was embarrassed by the effects. I’ve usually foregone criticizing the effects of Doctor Who, generally stressing when they are adequate instead of when they’re not. But here we finally have to actually talk about special effects.

Let’s start with a brief typology of special effects. There are essentially two types, which we can call visible and invisible effects. An invisible effect is one that is meant to work in the background. When we see it, we are not meant to gawk at the effect, we’re meant to sail right over it, accepting it within the narrative. Invisible effects merely have to be good enough to not announce themselves. The sets are usually an example of invisible effects in Doctor Who. Very rarely is the point of a story or scene in Doctor Who up to 1974 to gawk at the studio scenery. So as long as nothing crashes into the scenery and makes the wall wobble, the scenery is usually more or less acceptable in Doctor Who. The horrible scene in The Green Death in which the Doctor sits in an unmoving Bessie while a CSO landscape scrolls by is jarring because it’s supposed to be a scene where we’re not thinking about the effects, but because they’re so obvious, we think about them anyway. (We’ll talk more about invisible effects when we get to The Ark in Space, which provides a fabulous limit case.)

Visible effects, on the other hand, are showpieces. The greatest visible effect in the history of cinema is, for my money, the scene in The Muppet Movie in which Kermit rides a bicycle. Nothing about this scene is meant to be realistic or believable. The audience is not meant to believe that Kermit is a real frog who happens to also be a cyclist. The only reason that effect is interesting is because the audience is consciously aware that Kermit is a piece of felt that cannot possibly ride a bicycle, and thus stare at the scene trying to figure out how the effect was done.…

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Why Not Make Some Coffee (The Time Warrior)

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roofle pwned feminist

It’s December 15, 1973. Slade is at number one with “Merry Xmas Everybody,” with Gary Glitter, Roxy Music, Wizzard and Mott the Hoople also lurking in the charts. Slade holds #1 through Christmas, and into the new year, in the last real flourishing of glam.

I’d do the usual new season politics roundup, but I feel like the last entry did most of it. You’ve got the Yom Kippur War, tons more bad stuff in Northern Ireland, Pinochet’s coup d’etat in Chile, Spiro Agnew’s resignation, and the mounting hilarity of Watergate. While during this story, OPEC doubles the price of oil, and the Three-Day Week itself comes into force.

So let’s get down to watching Doctor Who, since the nature of the blog as it gets to the end of an era is that I end up packing it with entries about things other than TV episodes. (There are, after this, four more Pertwee stories, but Robot is eight entries away.) And The Time Warrior, made at the end of the Season Ten block (i.e. a block where the show was, as I’ve said, on fire creatively), is, in a practical sense, the last Pertwee story that has a large number of people who unabashedly and unambiguously love it. Not that at least some of the four after this don’t have their fans (though some of them basically have nobody whatsoever who likes them), but that this is in one sense the Pertwee era’s last stab at outright greatness.

It’s also very much a passing of the torch. It’s Robert Holmes’s last story before he becomes script editor, a position he unofficially adopts for part of Season Eleven, and adopts in full for Season Twelve. And it’s the debut of Sarah Jane Smith, the iconic companion of the Holmes/Hinchcliffe era renaissance. So there’s  a lot to love here.

As with the last Holmes story we saw, the major highlight here is that Holmes is a wizard at creating epic stories out of low rent characters. This is perfectly in keeping with the “fallen power” feel of Britain that has been brewing for a while and really reaches a head with the wiping out of the Heath Prime Ministership. Here we get Irongron, whose name makes him sound like a strange reject from The Krotons. At the start of the story, Irongron is a pathetic loser of a warlord complaining about his bad food and bad wine, and talking of how he’s going to have to go do some conquest to get new stuff, but with the clear sense that he is pathetically all talk.

This is the essential Robert Holmes move – to make a villain out of a pathetic schlub instead of out of some terrifying and powerful figure. So Irongron is scary not because he’s inherently powerful, but for the far more interesting reason that he’s an easily manipulable loser who’s come under the influence of a powerful alien warrior. What Holmes does with this character – and with many of his other characters – is make him scarier by making him more low rent.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time For Tea 14 (Dad’s Army, Three-Day Week)

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The stereotype, of course, is “stiff upper lip.” Or as I put it last Christmas when my sister was stranded until December 23rd in Heathrow and she was baffled how a couple of inches of snow were something that took four days to clear, “why would the British fix something that they could just stoically endure?” It’s one of the classic national myths of self-identity in the world. Every nation has them. The US are ambitious cowboys, the French have better taste than everyone else, and the British have the ability to keep a level head through anything. “Keep Calm and Carry On,” as the idiom goes these days.

The origin of that idiom, of course, is World War II. The famous image was an unused propaganda poster in case of a German invasion of Britain, putting it squarely in the Battle of Britain mythology. And I should note, I use myth here not to suggest that the claims are untrue, but rather to suggest that they have an almost religious character to them. They’re important not because they are true – i.e. because you can make useful decisions based on them – but because they are so widely believed to be true that they have a real influence. In fact, the perception of their truth is probably one of the major reasons why they’re true. Case in point, the at least partially manufactured photo of people hoisting brooms in response to last month’s riots – a photo that depicted an event that never quite “happened” as such, but that is in its own sense true because it is seen to capture some essential truth about the event.

Which brings us around to Dad’s Army, which is one of those shows I’ve been meaning to get to in one of these entries and never quite had room for, and so now goes into the hopper with the rest of the glut of end-of-era entries. Partially because I don’t think I’ve done a sitcom yet, partially because it was extraordinarily popular, but mostly, and I admit that I kind of missed the best timing on this (I should have done it with Monty Python, though this entry works too), because it’s the other major show in the early 70s featuring a comedic version of the military.

On its most basic level, Dad’s Army bears a considerable similarity to the UNIT era. We’ve talked already about how the Brigadier was always conceived of as a character who worked more like a Monty Python sketch character than like a dramatic character in the traditional sense, and how understanding this and the implications it has on the narrative structure is essential to being able to see how something like The Claws of Axos, to pick a particularly vivid example, works. But saying this presents UNIT as if they were figures of pure postmodernism. And while they obviously work very well as postmodern figures, that’s not the only thing going on there. And Dad’s Army is what illustrates the other angle.

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