Goodbye. My Sarah Jane. (Lis Sladen)
I shouldn’t be writing this. Today’s supposed to be a day I update Nintendo Project. It’s that blog Tuesday and Thursday, this one Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. That’s how it works. But I’m staring at a half-written entry there – about monsters, no less – and all I can think about is this. And this is my blog, and I’ll cry if I want to. I shouldn’t be writing this. I shouldn’t have to be writing this. I mean, really? As if Sarah Jane Smith could ever die.
I have the thing pretty plotted out, you know. I mean, there’s a lot of episodes I haven’t seen in a long time and things I know I’ll discover. But on the other hand, I know my Doctor Who well enough to know some of the major beats and points. I know what’s going to be in some of the entries. There are parts I could write right now, today, without rewatching the episodes. One thing that will eventually happen with the blog, as you can probably imagine, is that as the show develops, multiple senses of what it is are going to come into play. And eventually, one of those senses…
Well, let me show you. Let me just quickly write one of the bits I know how goes. This is going to be the start of the entry on Planet of Spiders:
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.
And I figured that, a few months after that, in one of those standard wrap-up entries where we say goodbye to a regular, I’d get to talk about all of this. That at that point, when one of the things the blog is about is my experiences of Doctor Who, and how one of the things it is – not the most important at all, but one of them, is how it is the story of one little boy growing up and realizing who it was he wanted to be.…
You Were Expecting Someone Else III (Daleks – Invasion Earth: 2150 AD)
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| Note how the Doctor is mentioned prominently in the advertising this time. |
You Were Expecting Someone Else is a recurring feature covering non-televised Doctor Who from classic eras, generally more or less in the period where they came out. Today we look at the 1966 film Daleks – Invasion Earth: 2150 AD, starring Peter Cushing as Doctor Who, Roberta Tovey as Susan Who, and Bernard Cribbins as Not-Ian-Chesterton.
It’s August 5, 1966. The Troggs are at #1 with “With A Girl Like You,” a nice, proper, crunchy record. The rest of the top ten, however, is mostly pretty unambitious pop, with The Kinks chillaxing at #9. Since we last saw Doctor Who, the news has been a standard mixture of war, mass murder, military coup, and the like. Beyond that, as mentioned last entry, England won the World Cup. Also, The House of Lords issued the Practice Statement a somewhat important milestone in political liberalism in the UK in that it freed the House of Lords up to be more progressive, and August 3rd, 1966 happened, which is interesting only if you’re a Simon and Garfunkel fan. Also, Revolver came out. And, as it’s the summer break in Doctor Who, it’s time for another Dalek film!
It’s strange how different a position this film is in compared to the last one. I mean, first of all, this film flopped and killed plans for a third one (which would have been an adaptation of The Chase, a prospect that is mind-bogglingly weird). Second of all, the show is in a very different place. At the end of season 2, the show was as strong as it had ever been, coming off an inventive season of hits. At the end of season 3, the ratings were in the toilet, the star was being fired, and there was an increasing consensus that the TARDIS had landed everywhere worth landing. As a result, the last movie was in a position to remind us how wonderful Doctor Who could be, and show us things bigger and grander than before. And it basically did that.
But what, exactly, is this film for? Most obviously, it seems to be an occasion for Doctor Who to make a case for its continued relevance – to say “This is what the show can do.” It’s taking a season 2 episode – i.e. from the program’s heyday – and doing it bigger and better. And ironically, given that it failed at the box office, the film is frankly a rousing success in that department.
I suppose we should deal with the film’s flop status. Why did it flop? The argument that Doctor Who was also flopping at that time is certainly compelling, but it’s worth noting that the film was not advertised as a Doctor Who film, it was advertised as a Dalek film. Admittedly the two were not entirely distinct in people’s minds, and the Dalek craze was past its immediate prime, but Doctor Who’s decline has been compellingly argued to mostly be down to the fact that ITV was aggressively counter-programming it with the Adam West Batman series, not due to actual problems with the snow. No,
…
Pop Between Realities, Home In Time For Tea 3 (International Times, Oz, Kenneth Grant, FIFA World Cup)
Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea is a recurring feature in which things that are not Doctor Who are looked at in terms of their relation to Doctor Who. This time, we engage in the frankly insane task of looking at 1960s counterculture, extremist occultism, and the FIFA World Cup.There is a 60s that we all know originated in San Francisco, and through the haze of marijuana we can still just about make out that there was some sort of revolution lurking underneath that tie-dye. Some aspects – sexual freedom, the de facto legalization of marijuana (which is, let’s face it, not so much illegal to smoke as it is illegal to be caught smoking, with virtually no police forces in European or European-descended cultures actually bothering to seek out individual users), and certain hazy new age concepts have stuck around. But the hippie movement is, by and large, a dessicated corpse of a rebellion now seen as defined primarily through its failure – i.e. as a symbol of a failed revolution whose proponents are too naive to realize that they have long since failed.
But in 1966, as mod culture is about to suffer a fatal capitalism hemorrhage and psychedelia is about to take the center stage, we have the opposite problem. Just as in The War Machines we were caught between the context that led us there and our knowledge of what was to come, 1966 is an impossible year to grasp. We cannot understand it without peeking at the future. Which is the point of this entry – a loose assortment of tendencies in British culture, revolutionary and mainstream, in the 1960s so that we know what to keep track of as Doctor Who begins to change everything about itself.
The point here is not so much to identify styles as ideologies. If the hippies were a flamed out failure of a revolution, they were also practically on the other side of the world from London. What did the fringes of British culture in the 1960s think, want, and do? As a result, this entry isn’t going to talk about Doctor Who all that much. On the other hand, the next eight years of Doctor Who are going to talk about this entry a lot.
The best place to start is probably the International Times and Oz Magazine – two of the leading counterculture zines of the 1960s. IT debuted in 1966, Oz in 1967, so we’re looking here more at what is emerging out of the culture right now than what was strictly mainstream. IT’s debut in October of 1966 is distinct most immediately because of its sheer practicality. Its opening editorial, entitled YOU (except that the word is printed upside-down) gives a good sense of its attitude. Speaking of a boondoggle of a project to create a London poetry centre, the magazine writes:
…No-one seems to have realized that a basement and a few notebooks, plus the necessary poets, could be a suitable starting base for a poetry centre.
Very Sophisticated Idiots (The War Machines)
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| We’re functioning automatic, and we are dancing mechanic. |
It’s June 25, 1966. The Beatles are at number one with “Paperback Writer,” and will trade it to The Kinks in two week’s time. The remainder of the charts display a fairly standard blend of irritating traditionalism and pleasant edginess as it proceeds towards a more contemporary style. In the news, not a lot happens – some shuffles of foreign leaders, France leaving NATO, and the Vietnam war gets worse and worse. Oh, and the 1966 World Cup started five days before the finale of this story. But it’s not like that had any influence on British culture of the time.
Meanwhile, on television, the Doctor fights a renegade computer that’s controlling people’s minds out of Post Office Tower. So I guess the odds were fairly high after all, and we’re going to have to talk more about Quatermass.
Much of the point of taking The Quatermass Excursion on Monday was to make sure it was clear just how bizarre this story is in the context. As much as Doctor Who has felt a bit all over the map since Verity Lambert left (but never with the supreme confidence with which Lambert’s Doctor Who simply assumed it could get away with whatever it tried – since then it’s been desperately trying to find what it’s good at, lacking as it does now Lambert’s capacity to make it good at anything), the amount which it has changed in a year is staggering. More or less exactly a year ago today, the show was wrapping up The Chase and saying goodbye to Ian and Barbara. To get from there to The Daleks’ Master Plan is staggering enough. To get from there through that, through The Massacre, through The Celestial Toymaker, and out to this… I mean, however bizarre the jump from The Sensorites to The Chase is, it’s nothing compared to the gap from The Chase to this.
But what, exactly, is different? Hartnell has changed, certainly, with his acting painfully deteriorating over the course of the season. The bigger change can be seen in the companions. A year ago, we had Ian and Barbara – the two ordinary humans – and Vicki, who, while not an ordinary human, fulfilled the promise of the first episode better than Susan ever did – she was very much An Unearthly Child, visibly from our world, but clearly an avatar of its future. The rapid shedding of this entire companion team in favor of Steven, the featureless chameleon and Dodo, the one where they forgot to have a concept for the character, marks a major change. With Ian and Barbara we could see mundane life in extraordinary people. With Vicki we could see a clear vision of the future. With Steven we have an effective character for plot resolution, and with Dodo we have… well… something very good at being kidnapped. We’ve gone from companions that set the tone of the show to companions that advance the plot well.…
Pop Between Realities, Home In Time for Tea 2 (Quatermass)
Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea is a recurring feature in which things that are not Doctor Who are looked at in terms of their relation to Doctor Who. This time, we look at Nigel Kneale’s classic science fiction serials, the Quatermass series.
If you kidnapped somebody from November 24th, 1963, and asked them about British televised science fiction, it would be self-evident that the most important thing to talk about is Nigel Kneale’s set of three serials in the 1950s, The Quatermass Experiment, Quatermass II, and Quatermass and the Pit. Still influential well into the 1960s due to the adaptations by Hammer Films into The Quatermass Xperiment (1955, The X refers to the film rating they were going for), Quatermass 2 (1957), and, in 1967, their version of Quatermass and the Pit, everybody knows that the Quatermass serials were major influences on Doctor Who, which is why Kneale refused to write for the program, viewing it as just a ripoff of his ideas.
And really, with even a cursory glance at the first three seasons of Doctor Who, you can see just how much the show relied on Quatermass. Just look at all the stories featuring intense paranoia about space, a government that is evil and untrustworthy out of misguided virtue, and broad global terrors of alien invasions that threaten to consume the Earth. It’s a wonder Kneale didn’t sue over the rip-offs, really.
Hopefully you see what I did there. If not, suffice it to say that up to this point, it’s far easier to discuss the ways in which Doctor Who is a decisive break with the Quatermass tradition than it is to discuss the similarities. That won’t always be true, of course – in particular when we hit the Pertwee era and Season 7, the show actually will start to (arguably) act like a Quatermass clone. Even then, Lance Parkin, in an essay reprinted in the first volume of Mad Norwegian Press’s fantastic Time Unincorporated series, makes a fairly compelling argument that the influence of Quatermass on Doctor Who is egregiously overstated.
Let’s look at the actual series. The three 50s Quatermass serials belonged to the classic live transmission school of television – with only a few exceptions of inserted scenes in the later two, all of Quatermass was shot live. The original Quatermass Experiment, in fact, only has its first two episodes in existence not because the BBC wiped the tapes a la Doctor Who, but because there were no tapes in the firstplace – nobody actually tried to record it for posterity. (The first two only exist because of an aborted plan to sell the show to Canada) Watching them now is… an interesting experience. As with most serials, they transplant somewhat poorly to the modern era, or at least, to the modern practice of watching them as a movie that occasionally runs the credits in the middle of the feature.
But one thing that does come across is an amazing sense of tone.…
The Dark Half
I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: ‘Tomb of the Cybermen’ is really very racist.
The only black guy in the cast of characters is a huge, musclebound, grunting, largely-mute, henchman/thug who is shown apparently delighting in his ability to inflict violence. His speech – when it occurs – is monosyllabic, stilted and semi-coherent, with tenses that veer all over the place. He refers to himself in the third person: “they shall never pass Toberman!”. Apparently, he was originally supposed to be deaf (with a visible hearing aid). Some people say that this would have contextualised his behaviour. I say it would just have made this story offensive about deaf people as well as black people. Toberman’s main positive personality trait seems to be unquestioning, doglike loyalty to his ‘mistress’.
His ‘mistress’ is a woman called Kaftan. This really can’t be said enough. Her name is ‘Kaftan’.
I mean… fuck.
She’s evil. The actress playing Kaftan – Shirley Cooklin – gives her a nice line in insolent sneering, ruthlessness and fanatical, unblinking stares. The actress has been darked up. Common practice in 60s (and 70s) TV productions. Of course, there’s no reason why this character had to be dark skinned. She just is.
Astonishingly, some people will defend this story on exactly those lines: Kaftan and Toberman don’t need to be ethnic minorities, they just are. But the question is why? If it isn’t necessary to the plot that the baddies should be explicitly and/or implicitly non-WASPy then why are they so characterised? And would it actually be any better if the plot demanded it?
Kaftan is the partner-in-crime of the story’s main villain: Klieg. Another non-specific name. Sounds German. Possibly derived from the German surname ‘Kliegl’. The character, however, is played by George Pastell, a Greek Cypriot who spent his career playing fanatical Egyptian Mummy-wranglers, Thugee High Priests, Russian spies and other generic foreigners in British /American film and TV.
In some ways, it is this very generic foreignness that is most offensive. Toberman is a black man… and that’s it. Klieg and Kaftan have no clear ethnic identity of any kind. The name ‘Kaftan’ might suggest (by very broad association) that the character is Turkish or Moroccan… or possibly from somewhere in the Persian Gulf. Or Russia. The vague, generic ‘foreigner’ accent helps as little as the fake swarthy skin. Klieg, meanwhile, probably most resembles a fiendish stereotypical German in the script (the Germanic name, the arrogant manner, the desire to be master of the world and impose his viewpoint on everyone) but is played by a man with an Eastern Mediterrenean accent.
There is no detail and no consistency in the way they are presented. The implication is as clear as the effect. It doesn’t matter where they’re from or who they are, what their nationalities or backgrounds might be… such things may be as garbled as they are indistinct. They are just foreign, in the most unspecific way imaginable. This seems to be more than good enough as a context for their villainy.…
Victory of the Icon
In the course of preparing myself [to play Churchill in a biopic]… I realized afresh that I hate Churchill and all of his kind. I hate them virulently. They have stalked down the corridors of endless power all through history…. What man of sanity would say on hearing of the atrocities committed by the Japanese against British and Anzac prisoners of war, ‘We shall wipe them out, every one of them, men, women, and children. There shall not be a Japanese left on the face of the earth’? Such simple-minded cravings for revenge leave me with a horrified but reluctant awe for such single-minded and merciless ferocity.
– Richard Burton. (He got banned from the BBC for writing that. Which must’ve really burned him as he lounged around in Hollywood with Elisabeth Taylor’s head in his lap.)
In ‘Victory of the Daleks’ by Mark Gatiss, Winston Churchill is depicted as a wiley and cantankerous old fox, as a twinkly-eyed yet determined fighter against the Nazi menace, as a moral force, as an impish and roguish but unequivocally good man. This is very much the mainstream view of Churchill, in both ‘pop culture’ and in much of the trash that masquerades as history in our society.
Moreover, Churchill is an old mate of the Doctor’s. They go way back. In other words, he gets the endorsement of Our Hero, the narrative and moral locus of the series. Here is Gatiss’ reasoning:
I think in the end it came down to sort of printing the Churchill of legend, because Doctor Who is not the place, really, to examine those sorts of things, except wherever possible, as it were, in the gaps, in the shadows, you can suggest his pragmatism. So in this episode when the Doctor, despite the fact that the Doctor’s telling him that the Daleks are the worst thing in the entire universe, he thinks ‘I can end the war quicker, I can save lives’. So that sort of thing was interesting to play with. But I did, you know, it just isn’t the place to try and have those conversations, because it’s an adventure series.
This reminds me of a page at the BBC website about whether Churchill was “as good as we think?”. As ever, “we” is left undefined. The page lists Pros and Cons. The best Cons they can come up with are a couple of military blunders, the return to the gold standard and Yalta. In other words: was he as marvelous as “we” apparently all believe or did he sometimes make mistakes? The big one on the list is Yalta, so the worst thing he can be accused of is handing much of Europe over to the real evildoers. Pravda would have been proud of such framing.
(The Yalta thing seems especially unfair to Churchill. He assumed that Russia would renege on the agreed post-war frontiers of Europe and advocated ‘Operation Unthinkable’, a lunatic plan to launch an unprovoked attack upon Russia as early as July 1945, thus starting a new war against one of his own allies.)…
Time Can Be Rewritten 4: The Man in the Velvet Mask (Daniel O’Mahoney, Virgin Books, 1996)
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| Dodo stares dubiously at the plot of this novel. Or maybe that’s just her “come hither” look. |
So this one ought to be fun. Daniel O’Mahony’s The Man in the Velvet Mask is pure Marmite. Ostensibly one of the most hated Doctor Who books, it apparently came in dead last in Doctor Who Magazine’s poll about the novels. But that claim carries a metric ton of assumptions with it. I don’t want to do a whole post like The Gunfighters about the various factions of fandom during the interregnum, mostly because I intend to do a whole series of posts when we actually get to that time period. So suffice it to say that this book also has passionate defenders. (I suppose I should, as part of my continued commitment to helping Americans work through their stages of grief at discovering that there are actually entire facets of foreign cultures that have nothing to do with them, mention that Marmite is a savory, salty, yeast-based spread used in the UK on sandwiches, toast, crackers, and other such things. Its use is somewhere between that of peanut butter and mayonnaise, neither of which it tastes remotely like. Among those for whom it is part of their culture there are exactly two opinions available – passionate love or utter hatred. Thus “Marmite” is, in the vernacular, an adjective describing something that produces extremely polarized views with minimal middle ground.)
Most of the dispute centers on whether or not the book simply goes too far to be a Doctor Who story, and, secondarily, whether it goes too far to be a Hartnell story. Which is to say, the objection is over the fact that Dodo spends an awful lot of this book naked, then also has sex and gets infected with an alien virus that slowly corrupts you. (There is some dispute over this, with some people claiming Dodo gets a fatal venereal disease or syphilis. She doesn’t. The description of the virus is that “Once infected, you cannot be sure whether your actions are of your own free will or directed by him.” By the end of the book the him in question is dead, But given that in the next story televised Dodo succumbs to mind control, the implication is that it leaves one susceptible to mental domination in general, and the virus is later described as “eating through her nervous system and her brain.”)
Back in The Celestial Toymaker, I called into question the idea that every story was a Doctor Who story. And as a friend of mine pointed out after that entry, there are more obvious problems with the claim – as she put it, “What about that story where the Doctor is a serial rapist.” Which captures at least one crux of the issue – that the notion of “Doctor Who story” is bounded on one side by the fact that the Doctor needs to act Doctor-like. But is there more than that? The problem with The Ark is not even that the Doctor does the wrong thing – the Monoids are, after all, portrayed as moustache-twirlers.…
The Right To Experiment (The Savages)
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| The device the Doctor is holding is called the Reacting Vibrator. I am not making this up. I swear. |
It’s May 28th, 1966. The Rolling Stones have the number one single with “Paint It Black.” Also in the top ten are “Wild Thing” and “Rainy Day Women Nos. 12 and 35,” alongside conventional fare. Although Frank Sinatra takes over #1 after one week, holding it for the remaining three weeks of The Savages with “Strangers in the Night,” the remainder of the charts retains the increasingly hardening edge of music with The Animals and The Yardbirds both notching top ten hits.
In other news, two days ago the South American colony of Guyana was granted independence from the UK. The rest of the news is fairly typical 60s stuff. The Space Race continues with the US doing its second spacewalk, American cop shows evolve suddenly when the Supreme Court rules in Miranda v. Arizona, and the Vatican finally gets rid of the Index Liborum Prohibitorum.
On television, we get one of the least heralded episodes of William Hartnell’s tenure on the show. Certainly it was one of the least watched, with this entire period of the show being the lowest sustained drop in ratings the series would experience until 1980, and the second least watched story of Hartnell’s era. And on top of that, it’s another missing story, this one with no episodes in existence and a post-1983 novelization (see The Gunfighters if you don’t know why 1983 matters here).
One of the harder things in writing these is marking the ends of things. Since in the classic series, a new creative team for the show always inherits some spare scripts from the previous team, the end of an era tends not to be an emphatic “out with a bang” in the style of The End of Time, but rather some faint whimper down the line that you don’t even realize was the end until you look at the next seven stories and notice that nothing like how it used to be is being done.
So it’s easy to miss that this is basically the last William Hartnell story. I mean, he sticks around for three more, but in terms of the tone and type of adventures that make up a normal Hartnell story, the historical checked out back with The Massacre (but more about that when the historical itself checks out) and science fiction checks out here.
Once upon a time, you see, Doctor Who didn’t always have monsters in it. Eventually that came to an end, and somewhere in season four or five we reach a point where the norm is for stories to have monsters. But up to now, the only properly monstery monsters we’ve had are the Daleks. The other attempts to create “the new Daleks” have been interesting visual designs, but not the sort of lurking Otherness of a proper monster. Look at something like the Chumblies or the Mechanoids and you get an alien, but the point is their strangeness.…