Eruditorum Press

Less concerned with who’s first up against the wall than with how to decorate it

A Mineral Slime (The Krotons)

10

At least this time the monster design successfully
hit “iconic,” albeit more like a car hitting a pedestrian
than like an arrow hitting its target.

It’s December 28, 1968. The Scaffold still have number one with “Lilly the Pink,” with The Foundations in number two with “Build Me Up Buttercup.” Just that kind of week, I suppose. A week later Marmalade, the first Scottish group ever to hit #1, does so with a cover of the Beatles “Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da.” They proceed to trade back and forth with The Scaffold for the rest of the story.

Out of the charts, the first photos of the far side of the moon are taken by Apollo 8, Rupert Murdoch makes his entry into the British press by buying News of the World, The Troubles get more troublesome, and the Waverly Line is abandoned for good. So really, not a great month for Britain, with continued echoes of 1968 richoeting through the culture. Though again, as awful as Rupert Murdoch is, it’s tough, in historical terms, to view his entry into the British press as anything other than a pale echo of Richard Nixon’s re-entry into American politics. As I’ve said previously, Britain had a pretty good 1968 as 1968s go.

So The Krotons, then. This story has an odd reputation not helped by the fact that it was the Patrick Troughton story picked for the 1981 Five Faces of Doctor Who string of reruns. The importance of these reruns can’t be overstated – in 1981, a whole generation of Doctor Who fans existed who had either never seen Troughton or only seen him in The Three Doctors. Not that they were unaware of Troughton – the existence of the Target novelizations and a genuine working memory of the show ensured that. But there were simply no opportunities for people to see him. The thing is, The Krotons is not what people expected. A story that would have left most viewers saying “the whats?”, it was picked, if we’re being honest, because in 1981 it was the only four-part Troughton story that existed.

So the initial reaction to this one – and we’ve discussed enough times how initial reactions from the 80s and 90s colored fan reaction for decades to come – was puzzlement, and, predictably, that has endured with the general reaction to the Krotons still being puzzlement in 2011. Miles and Wood suggest that the root problem is that it doesn’t quite fit with anyone’s memory of what the Troughton era should be. If we’re being honest, what this means is that it’s not a base under siege. But having endured the classic “monster” season and found it somewhat wanting, one struggles to, watching it in sequence, get particularly upset about the fact that it’s not the bog-standard monster runaround everyone expects a Troughton story to be.

In truth, nobody would think this a strange season four story, and if it were a missing story its reputation would probably be right around that of The Savages, The Faceless Ones, or The Macra Terror.…

Continue Reading

Gonzo Marx

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 0

Ruminations on alienation, commodity fetishism, myth, etc.  Don’t mind me.

Battle for the Planet of the Apes

Human beings have always made stuff.  Broadly, that’s what humans are: the apes that make stuff.  Even before Darwin, Benjamin Franklin called man “the tool-making animal”, a description apparently vindicated by our discoveries about early humanity, which seem to show the rise of the ‘big brain’ driven by the needs of the hand.

The flint tools and decorative beads of the hunter-gatherers.  The pyramids and ziggurats of the great slave empires.  The water wheels and ploughs of medieval Europe.

But the rise of capitalism brought the factory system.  The division of labour.  Specialisation without expertise.  Organisation of time.  The creation of new kinds of cities that worked as battery farms for thousands of corralled workers.  Mass production.  Heavy industry.  Conveyor belts.  Fordism.  Mechanisation.  Computer-run facilities. 

The ape that makes things started to make things faster than ever before, in greater numbers than ever before. And the things started to confront the thingmaker as alien, autonomous, controlling, dominating.  When you have to watch a clock to make sure you clock in and clock out at the right time, it’s hard not to feel like you are answerable to the clocks, even if you work in a clock factory making clocks.

The rise of science and technology.  This was also part of the rise of capitalism.  Galileo, who pretty much invented what we would call modern science during the Renaissance (or the ‘Early Modern Period’, the period during which feudalism began to give way to the rise of mercantile trade, finance, private industry, markets, etc.), sold his inventions, made in his own workshop, to the Venetians who protected him.  His first telescope, based on Flemish spyglasses, were made to be sold to the traders on the Rialto (the Venetian stock market: centre and powerhouse of the thrusting, ultra-modern city republic), so that they could identify at long range which merchant’s ships were returning safely, laden with goods.  Only later did it occur to Galileo that he could train his telescopes upon the moon and the stars and the planets.  When he did so, he published his explosive findings on the market and had a bestseller on his hands.

Later, but still as part of the same process of the rise of the new system, the concept of entropy, and with it pretty much the whole of modern applied physics, came from the need to better understand (and thus improve) how engines work, engines that powered the industrial revolution.

The things that the thing-making-ape made became increasingly wondrous.  The engines became bigger, faster, more powerful.  They took us all across the world (usually to pillage and enslave).  They created wars that devastated vast swathes of the globe.  They ferried people to industrial murder factories.  They allowed man to fly.  To drop bombs that killed hundreds of thousands in seconds.  They put apes on the moon. 

And they transformed inner space too.  “You’ve discovered television, haven’t you?”  And here we are, on the glorious interweb.…

Continue Reading

An Outrageous Amount of Running Involved (The Invasion)

17

The Doctor and Tobias Vaughan make their way through
imagined streets.

It’s November 2, 1968. Mary Hopkin is at number one with “Those Were The Days,” with Joe Cocker in number two. He overtakes her one week later, and is in turn overtaken by the theme to The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. It lasts until the last two weeks of this story, at which point “Lily the Pink” by The Scaffold, a comedy band featuring Paul McCartney’s brother, takes over. Elsewhere in the top ten over these eight weeks one can find Jose Felicano’s cover of “Light My Fire” and Hendrix’s version of “All Along The Watchtower.” Elsewhere in music, Elvis makes his comeback and the Beatles release the White Album.

In other news, Richard Nixon is elected President of the United States, bringing, in effect, all hope the left might have ever had over the 1960s to a crashing end, as we talked about last Friday. In more subtle news, Douglas Engelbert demos the NLS, or oN-Line System, in an event called the “mother of all demos.” Although at the time known only to a small core of technical users, this is one of the most important events in the history of computers, and the technology Engelbert shows off here ends up being the basic underpinning of the modern desktop computer. Among the concepts debuting here are the mouse and the idea of “windows” within a computer system, and the first major debut of word processing on the computer.

While on television we have The Invasion. Essentially a backdoor pilot for the Pertwee era of Doctor Who, this story exists primarily to try out a new format whereby the Doctor is the assistant of a military organization called UNIT who battles alien threats on Earth. Here, to kick things off in a big way, the Doctor reteams with Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart from The Web of Fear – now given his more famous rank of Brigadier-General – to fight the Cybermen in London.

This is not, of course, the first time that the series has been set in London. In fact, it’s the sixth major instance. First of all, An Unearthly Child opens there. From there contemporary London is avoided until the end of the third season, but futuristic London is attacked by Daleks in The Dalek Invasion of Earth. Contemporary London finally gets its day in the sun in The War Machines, where it gets attacked by evil computers. From there we nip off to Gatwick Airport for The Faceless Ones and the start of Evil of the Daleks, before returning to the Underground (and brief aboveground shots) in the aforementioned Web of Fear.

But something is different this time. For the first time in a story set in a more or less contemporary London (the “more or less” aspect of it will be dealt with later), we have a focus on the idea that London – the very home of the program – is under real attack, with the sixth episode culminating in one of the great money shot cliffhangers of Doctor Who as the Cybermen burst from the sewers and storm down the steps of St.…

Continue Reading

We’re All Stories In The End (The Mind Robber)

29

You mean I could leave Jamie and Zoe behind and just
take you two? As I’ll say in about 37 years, fantastic!

It’s September 14, 1968. In our traditional sign of some sort of restoration of order, The Beatles are at number one with Hey Jude. They are unseated two weeks later by a signing to their own record label, Mary Hopkin, a British folk singer, who holds the number one slot with “Those Were the Days” for the remainder of this story.

In news that doesn’t sing, the Apollo missions get closer and closer to the moon with their first manned launch, Apollo 7. The merger between General Electric Company (no relation to the American company General Electric) and English Electric is the biggest merger in UK history. There’s a lovely revolution in Panama. And, most significantly, in the one major bit of 1968 catastrophe to hit the UK, rioting breaks out following a civil rights march in Derry, leading to the twenty years of tension and terrorism between the UK and Ireland known as The Troubles.

While on television we have, thankfully, the exact story we needed after the grotesque train wreck that was The Dominators. The Mind Robber is a thing of absolute beauty. If The Dominators was the complete breakdown of all heart, soul, and ethics in the series, The Mind Robber is, more even than Power of the Daleks, a story that is about establishing Doctor Who as an unending story.

The basic idea is that following a TARDIS malfunction the Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe get caught in the Land of Fiction, a realm in which stories are real. The title, which is admittedly intensely marginal, refers to the Master of the Land of Fiction, who has apparently lured the Doctor here in order to get him to run things in the Land of Fiction.

Much has been made of many of the obvious aspects of this story. The intertextuality, the degree to which this represents Doctor Who acknowledging a longstanding debt to a tradition of British children’s literature, the pleasant and inventive surrealism – all of these are well worn topics that you can see covered in almost any book on the series. Even if you go for criticism from third generation fandom – things like Running Through Corridors or About Time (Those links are UK links. American links are available on the pretty spinny wheel on the right of the site) most of what you get are acknowledgments of how brilliant this story is. And it is absolutely brilliant – a story with more creativity, and more of a sense of joy than anything else in the Troughton era.

So let’s move beyond that, as we try to do here, and try to find two new things to say about The Mind Robber. First, I want to talk about a particular approach to Doctor Who that The Mind Robber is a particularly key moment in. Let’s start by looking at how this story is less of a departure from past stories than one might think.…

Continue Reading

Trouble & Strife

, , , , , , , 1

Just brought myself to watch the Neil Gaiman one. 

Shit. 

Bunch of tricks.  Everything, from the mail-cube to the supposedly scary goings-on in the TARDIS corridors turned out to be a trick of some kind.

In line with Gaiman’s usual style, it was a load of cynical and calculated pandering to his market’s baser instincts (fanwank) while also patronising them. 

The makeshift lashup junk-TARDIS was like the writer was patting the old show on the head and going “awww, bless”. 

Such condescension would be obnoxious but justifiable if Gaiman’s episode had expanded and fulfilled and outclassed the best of the old show.  But it didn’t.  It was meaningless and equivocal as a compliment.  It was like someone who claimed to love me giving me a Jeffrey Archer paperback as a birthday gift. However warm the inscription, it’d be obvious that the gift-giver didn’t really know or care about me at all.

It was vacuous and superficial, which was all the worse because it toyed listlessly and disinterestedly with concepts (rejectamenta, reclamation, reconstruction) which are potentially oneiric, semiotically rich and thematically charged.  Gaiman used them as nothing but a self-consciously grungey backdrop for a story about… umm… er…

Well, it wasn’t about the junkyard people at any rate.  They were all briefly employed for cutesy weirdness and then callously dispatched without the narrative bothering to register that they were even people, rather than collections of mannerisms. 

Even Idris was killed without anyone seemingly noticing, simply because she was a vehicle for… well, for a vehicle… a vehicle which was alive… which we already knew. 

In other words, rather than bothering with any concepts or characterisation, we got a story in which the Doctor essentially concentrates on how fond he is of his car.

The present-day show to a tee.  Worship and fondle and mist-up over the kit and the stuff.  Announce banalities like “oooh, ‘alive’ is a complex concept” with blaring musical cues but never bother to actually make any of the onscreen life complex at all.  Spice with ersatz characters, pad with tricksy narrative effects and drizzle with arbitrary fanwank.  

Still… probably the best episiode of the series.…

Continue Reading

Why Are Earth People So Parochial (The Dominators)

27

You know, looking at them, I can’t think of any witty jokes
to make that the picture doesn’t do for me.

It’s August 10, 1968. Tommy James and the Shondells are at number one with “Mony Mony,” but if we really want to capture the spirit of this one we need to look at number two, or just jump a week ahead to where it hits number one and look at Crazy World of Arthur Brown’s “Fire,” which dethrones Mr. James for a single week. From there on out, it’s just the Beach Boys and the Bee Gees. So let’s go back to Arthur Brown. Personally, I advocate taking three minutes out of your day and just watching Mr. Brown perform this song on Top of the Pops. But if you cannot spare the time to watch a man with a hat whose most visible feature is the fact that it is a pair of horns that are constantly on fire scream “I AM THE GOD OF HELLFIRE” on BBC One, well, I pity you. It’s basically the greatest thing ever, and should really be recognized as the anthem of uniquely British psychedelic culture as discussed last Friday.
Speaking of last Friday, a fair chunk of the events of that post happen in the course of this story – all the DNC and Prague Spring stuff, for instance. So just read that post for the news section.
While on television we get our second entry into the ignoble rankings of the ten worst ever Doctor Who stories according to the most recent Doctor Who Magazine poll. The Dominators comes in 191st. The thing about the bottom ten in a poll like this is that they’re not the ten worst stories. They’re the ten most hated stories. To come at the bottom of a list like this, you can’t just be lousy. You have to be so lousy that there are people who hate you and will make that special effort to give you a zero out of ten.
For most of the ten, there are clear reasons why they’re hated. Of the three 1960s stories in the bottom ten, two are ones that have single surviving episodes. Those episodes are watched only by particularly dedicated fans, and if they’re dodgy, they are remembered for the constant mocking they elicited. So, for instance, The Underwater Menace is basically down there entirely on the basis of Joseph Furst shouting “Nothing in ze world can stop me now!” Further, there are five stories from John Nathan-Turner’s tenure that are slammed as part of a well-rehearsed (and largely, though not entirely, correct) critique of his tenure. Similarly, there’s one Graham Williams episode that is slammed because it’s the worst story of another era with a ton of detractors. But then you have two episodes that are down there despite having no obvious reason for the hatred – a lone turkey from the new series, and The Dominators. The Dominators, in other words, is one of the two most hated episodes of Doctor Who that has no credible explanation for the hatred other than being truly terrible.
…

Continue Reading

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 8 (’68)

, 2

And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply PREVAIL. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave… So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back. – Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas


The 60s ended.

This may seem like a very obvious thing to point out to anybody with a remote skill in calendar-reading. But when you’re immersing yourself in the raging heat of psychedelia and social justice, it’s as easy in 2011 to forget that its sense of inevitability was a fragile illusion as it was in ’68. As ever, reality stands ready to intrude.

However badly the Summer of Love ended, it was still a utopian moment, beautiful in its naiveté. Even in its most crassly commercial version, its iconography holds a strange power. I mentioned a few entries ago the cover of the 1910 Fruitgum Company’s single “Simon Says,” which you can gaze upon here (which also gives me the opportunity to hat-tip the fabulously good Chart Stats website, from which the first paragraph of almost every entry on this blog derives). What is most interesting about this cover is that despite the fact that it is the cover of an appallingly banal piece of bubblegum pop, the cover is still arrestingly psychedelic. Its b-side – “Reflections From the Looking Glass” – is unapologetically and unambiguously a piece of psychedelic utopianism. Even corporate commercialism proved unable to completely repress psychedelia.

Stunning, then, that less than a year later, on the other side of California, youth culture’s best hope for the future, Robert Francis Kennedy, was gunned down following his victory in the California Democratic Primary. Two months later the Democratic National Convention in Chicago turned into a festival of ugly riots as various left-wing groups such as the Yippies prepared to make a bold stand and deliver the psychedelic street theater of the Diggers (see the Summer of Love entry, linked above) to the masses, albeit without the utopian community building of the Diggers (which turns out, perhaps, to have been the more important part). From the perspective of anyone with an aesthetic appreciation of guerilla theater politics, this should have been a high water mark, with the threatened plan to dump LSD in the city’s water supply being a particular highlight.

Meanwhile, the increasingly fierce Vietnam protests, spurred on by moral obscenities like the Mai Lai massacre, descended on the convention as well in an effort to derail the candidacy of Hubert Humphrey, seen as too close to Lyndon Johnson’s war position.…

Continue Reading

That’s Just Wizard (The Wheel in Space)

9

In a scene not actually in the episode, the Cybermen
menace Zoe as she fiddles with the sexual air supply.
(The sexual air supply, I should note, is in the
episode.)

It’s April 27, 1968. Louis Armstrong is declaring how wonderful the world is, and is at #1 doing it. He continues proclaiming this for four weeks, before being unseated by one of the great anthems of pedophilia, Union Gap’s “Young Girl.” What a wonderful world indeed. So wonderful that nothing too terrible happens during these six weeks – just your usual nuclear tests, Vietnam war protests, deadly tornadoes, nuclear submarine sinkings, and Manchester United winning the European Cup. This last one I actually quite like, as a Manchester United fan, but I’d be lying if I said it was a hugely relevant point. Oh, and the May 1968 events in Paris. But those are for Friday.

While on television…. Hooboy. This may be the most misunderstood story by Doctor Who fandom I’ve yet covered. I commented to the endlessly brilliant Anna of the lovely blog A Random String of Bits last night that The Wheel in Space has what are possibly the two least likely cowriters in Doctor Who: Kit Pedler and David Whitaker. Long time readers of this blog probably have some sense of how weird this is, but if you don’t, imagine Alan Moore rewriting Arthur C. Clarke and you’re at least in the general ballpark.

See, Kit Pedler is… OK, let’s be honest. He’s not much of a writer. I mean, this surely isn’t a huge revelation. Every writing credit he has on Doctor Who (and, so far as I can tell, every fiction writing credit he has period) is co-authored, which, while not an immediate sign of anything, is suggestive. (He does have solo credit on the first two episodes of The Tenth Planet, but from there on out it’s co-authoring flat out, so let’s face it, I bet Gerry Davis did a fair amount of work on those two as well.) One imagines that Pedler’s involvement in his scripts amounts, in most cases, to declaring a location where the Cybermen will show up (The moon! A tomb! Panama!) and… possibly nothing else, actually. I mean, we should give the man credit – the Cybermen were a brilliant idea, and apparently The War Machines was his as well, which… OK, well, The Cybermen were a brilliant idea.

But at the end of the day, Pedler is an optometrist with a flair for creating “hard SF” premises. Previously he was, seemingly, brought into the program mostly because Gerry Davis liked working with him. Since Gerry Davis walked away from the series for seven years after leaving as script editor, this left Pedler without a co-author for Cybermen stories. So clearly they had to find someone else to do it. Thankfully, the show has a lot of candidates – one can readily imagine Ian Stuart Black, Victor Pemberton, or Brian Hayles getting tapped for this role, for instance, or current story editor Derek Sherwin.…

Continue Reading

When You’re Living Your Life One Day After Another (Fury From the Deep)

17

OH MY GOD! I SAW UNDER JAMIE’S KILT!

Hi! So, how was A Good Man Goes to War? I hope it was good. I wrote this post a full week ago, and since I suspect that there are going to be things that it would make sense to point to in A Good Man Goes to War here, I figured I should remind you of that fact. 

It’s March 16, 1968, and Israeli novelty blues are still at the top of the charts. It is replaced by Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick, and Tich with “The Legend of Xanadu,” which sits oddly on the line between novelty and love song. In week three The Beatles ride in to save us with Lady Madonna, and in week five it’s Cliff Richard. Honestly, I’m at a loss – this is not music I’m terribly familiar with. Cliff Richard appears to veer in his career from young rock guy to evangelical Christian. I see lower in the charts things like 1910 Fruitgum Company, which I have never heard of. I look at the cover and think “Ooh, that looks like a nice bit of psychedelia.” And it turns out to be bubblegum pop. Let’s call that the defining image of these weeks.

In real news, the British Foreign Secretary resigned seemingly over a drunken row with the Prime Minister, the Mai Lai massacre took place, 91 people are injured in a London protest against the Vietnam War, 200 more are arrested. Aer Lingus flight 172 crashes, killing 61. Lyndon Johnson declares he will not seek re-election, which was probably a good idea on paper, though as it turns out, this upcoming US Presidential Election is going to go somewhat badly for the planet. (I am rather more a hippie than an archeologist). Martin Luther King is murdered. Political assassinations in Germany. And, just to wrap off these uneventful six weeks, on the day the final episode of Fury From the Deep is transmitted, Enoch Powell makes the famous Rivers of Blood speech in which he rails against excessive immigration into Great Britain, complains that the British way of life is being destroyed, and warns:

As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”. That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect. Indeed, it has all but come. In numerical terms, it will be of American proportions long before the end of the century. Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now. Whether there will be the public will to demand and obtain that action, I do not know. All I know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal.

In other words, this is the bit of history that we’re talking about when we talk about the turbulence of the 1960s.…

Continue Reading

«‹ 325 326 327 328 ›»