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Pop Between Realities, Home In Time for Tea (Dixon of Dock Green and Z-Cars)

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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 two pre-Doctor Who police serials, Dixon of Dock Green and Z-Cars.


The thing you have to understand is that in the mid-60s, Doctor Who was one of three extremely important shows on the BBC to feature police prominently. The other two being Dixon of Dock Green, which aired on the same days as Doctor Who, and Z-Cars, which aired on Tuesdays. (A quick side-note for unfortunate Americans. There is nothing more embarrassing in life than making an erudite, informed point about mid-century British television only to be corrected on the fact that the show is pronounced Zed-Cars, not Zee-Cars. Trust me.) Admittedly, Doctor Who is the only one of these three shows to be a science fiction show. The other two were good old fashioned cop shows.

Still, the fact of the matter is that if you talk about early Doctor Who for long enough with people, one or both of these shows will come up. Usually as follows – Dixon of Dock Green is, typically, cited in terms of the prominence of the Police Box, being as it’s the other show to feature them at all regularly. Z-Cars is cited more broadly – often in terms of how badly other shows fared in the Old Episode Demolition Derby years of the BBC, though occasionally more esoterically. (Steven Moffat has a hilarious bit on the commentary track for Forest of the Dead in which he notes that anybody complaining about the effects on Doctor Who should look at Z-Cars, where they couldn’t even get cars to look realistic despite driving them to work every day.)

For our purposes, I want to talk about the two shows in terms of realism.

Let me back up and say that I hate realism. Passionately. I consider it to be ethically bankrupt as an aesthetic and think that texts that claim to be realist are perpetuating active fraud upon the reader.

Now, to be fair, there are a lot of things called realism, and only some of them should be shooting offenses. I’m not saying that all fiction should be sci-fi or anything. There is such a thing as realistic sci-fi, and there is such a thing as a non-realistic cop show. So let’s make some distinctions. In fact, let’s ask this – what’s more realistic? Dixon of Dock Green, or Z-Cars?

On paper, you’d say Z-Cars. After all, Dixon of Dock Green is a bizarrely slow-paced drama that presents a ridiculous and idyllic view of what London police officers do. It exists purely to reinforce the social order and teach people that police officers are kind, good people who should be respected, adored, and trusted. Episodes begin with the whistling George Dixon strolling up to the camera, delivering a rambling monologue, and then treating us to half an hour of characters standing in various rooms talking before George Dixon sums up the moral of the story and sends us on our way.…

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Substitute for a Sound Character (The Crusade)

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Richard the Lionheart really wishes the Doctor wouldn’t
bother him while he’s in the loo.

It’s March 27, 1965. The Rolling Stones still hold number one, although that weird tendency for totally rubbish pop trash to take over whenever the show goes into historical mode promptly rears its head with Unit 4+2 and Cliff Richards ready to pounce. If The Web Planet felt like it was going out into a world of bracing and sudden change, The Crusade feels like it’s going out into a world that’s a bit dull.

The most interesting thing to happen during the four weeks it’s airing, in fact, is Mary Poppins winning a bunch of Oscars. Mary Poppins is interesting for presenting a ridiculously nostalgic look at British culture that, effectively, was a love letter to Victorian children’s literature that was so effusive that its major effect was to make everybody think that Victorian children’s literature was actually anything like that.

I mention this because The Crusade is Doctor Who’s pseudo-Shakespearean story – quite distinctly, with bits of the script written in iambic pentameter. There’s something odd on the face of it here – the possibility of saying “the X story” for Doctor Who suggests an oddly definitive power for the show. Miles and Wood (who, if it’s not obvious, I have the sort of tremendous respect for that it is only possible to have for people with whom you disagree almost completely) point this out explicitly – the odd thing about the historical stories, in specific contrast to the monster stories, is their unrepeatability. If the Doctor faces the Daleks or the Zarbi, it’s an attempt at creating a popular and marketable monster. These monsters are supposed to happen multiple times. But the Doctor is not supposed to return to a historical location – especially not those like the French Revolution or the court of Kublai Khan where he meets historical figures.

And so for Doctor Who to do the pseudo-Shakespearean story is definitive. This is meant to be the one story of this type. Which poses something of a problem when, as is the case with this story, half of it is missing. Indeed, the bulk of it was missing for years until a series of unlikely events caused the first episode to surface in New Zealand. (Short form of the story – the TV station that had been airing Doctor Who in New Zealand was destroying film it no longer had the rights to. A collector bribed a huge lot of it out of the dumpster blind, and then this print bounced around collectors in New Zealand for years without anybody realizing it was the last surviving copy of the episode)

This means that its release came in 1999 – which, you may remember, were some dark days for the program. The sort of floundering that was going on is actually visible on the quickly released VHS copy of the two surviving episodes, for which William Russell provided in-character linking narration that makes an oblique reference to one of the BBC Books novels in a sort of bizarre attempt at cross-promotion.…

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A Place Where Nothing Is Impossible (The Web Planet)

4

Astonishingly, some people look at this photo and
think that they’re looking at something that
has something to do with realism.

It’s February 13, 1965. The Kinks, The Righteous Brothers, The Seekers, and The Rolling Stones are going to be our #1 singles for the next six weeks. The album charts are mostly The Rolling Stones, with The Beatles taking the top spot for fun one week.

What you have to realize about these times is that, looking at what was popular, it is very clear that the world was changing. That things that had previously bubbled under the mainstream have, at this point, broken through in a big way. The Rolling Stones and The Beatles are visible part of what it is increasingly clear is a 90% obscured iceberg. In America, the Civil Rights movement is at its boiling point. White supremacists are beating demonstrators to death. Malcolm X is assassinated. 1965 is not the present day by any stretch of the imagination. But it is also impossible to argue that 1965 is in any way more normal or understandable than the present day. The world of 1965 is staggeringly complex and weird.

I bring this up because for these six weeks, Doctor Who is showing The Web Planet. Which is easily the weirdest Doctor Who to date, and a strong contender for weirdest ever. It is also among the most popular, in terms of viewers, ever. And it is among the most misunderstood episodes of Doctor Who ever.

The word used in almost every review of The Web Planet is “ambitious.” It’s easy to see why. Every character save for the TARDIS crew in this story is non-human. You’ve got the Zarbi – bipedal ants who make a constant beeping sound. You’ve got the Menoptra – butterfly people, and the Optera – sort of grub creatures. And you’ve got the Animus – a giant tentacle monster. The episode is a special effects bonanza as a result.

And here’s where people misunderstand it. Much is made of Doctor Who’s wobbly sets and poor effects. And it’s true – the effects on Doctor Who are often cheap. Where this becomes inexplicable is when people criticize the effects for being unbelievable, unrealistic, or unconvincing. And so when The Web Planet is discussed, it’s usually exhibit A for those who want to talk about how the old series had lousy effects and was unconvincing and silly.

Here’s the thing. Everybody who complains about the unrealistic effects in this episode is being a complete idiot.

There’s a moment on the DVD commentary for a Russell T. Davies-penned Doctor Who episode where the show briefly appears to have killed off Rose. And Davies and one of the other producers are talking about whether children would believe that they really did kill of Rose. The other producer suggests that he hopes children would not be so cynical as to say “Oh, they wouldn’t really do that.” And Russell T. Davies, in what is, to my mind, the most revealing thing he has ever said on a DVD commentary, says “That’s not cynical.…

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Like You Do When You’re Young (The Romans)

2

Ian realizes that the only thing more alarming than
plaid pants is where they might have gone.

It’s January 16, 1965. It’s Georgie Fame, The Moody Blues, and The Righteous Brothers on the charts for the next four weeks, while at the tail end of the four weeks the Rolling Stones take over the album sales with their imaginatively titled The Rolling Stones No. 2.

The most significant thing to happen in these four weeks, however, occurred on January 24th, when Sir Winston Churchill, twice former Prime Minister, dies. His state funeral on January 30th coincides with the third episode of The Romans, the Doctor Who story du jour for the month.

Production wise, The Romans sees the return of Dennis Spooner, which, if you recall my views of his previous story, should give you a sense of where this is going. In addition to writing the story, Spooner has also just assumed the position of script editor for the series. Script editor, for the original run of Doctor Who, was the closest position to the current role of head writer/executive producer. The biggest difference is that rules prohibited script editors from commissioning themselves to write scripts in most circumstances. Instead, generally speaking, they did revisions and rewrites to other scripts. But with some frequency the situation got complicated and various pen names and other schemes arose to cover the fact that the script editor had written a script themselves.

In this case, David Whitaker, the outgoing script editor, hired Dennis Spooner to write The Romans, then quit, and his replacement, Dennis Spooner, hired him to write The Rescue. Oh, and for accounting purposes, The Romans is actually The Rescue Parts 3-6.

It’s fitting, given all of this, that The Romans is the first Doctor Who story to be explicitly devised as a comedic farce. (Indeed, it’s also basically the last one until Partners in Crime in 2008.) So, a comedic historical tale. Exactly what one imagines the nation wanted as their great wartime hero of a former prime minister is buried.

Of course, Churchill’s legacy in the UK is somewhat more complex than one might assume. In the election immediately following the war, the Tories were hammered and he was replaced by Clement Atlee, who, in historical hindsight, is actually about as much of a lion as Churchill. Then, in 1951, an aging Churchill was returned to power for a frankly lackluster second spell that did no favors for his reputation. Churchill, in his second term, fought hard to keep the British Empire together. By 1965, the empire was all but gone.

In other words, Churchill, though unmistakably a national hero and national treasure, was also part of the fading old Britain. Watched through that lens, The Romans does not necessarily seem like less of a mismatch for the national mood, but it at least becomes somewhat more interesting.

On the one hand, The Romans, despite being a comedy, is fundamentally a conservative story, miles from the oddly post-anarchistic youth revolution of the last two stories.…

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Send More Beams That Kill

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Hey guys… you know how, in my last post, I was connecting ‘Mindwarp’ (in which the slimey Mentors of Thoros Beta are selling hideous weapons to Thordon) to the matter of British weapons sales to savage dictatorships like Suharto’s Indonesia, etc?

Well, have a look at this delightful report from Al Jazeera about what riot police have been up to in Bahrain (I warn you: the report linked to features images of wounded people and others in great distress).

Bahrain was memorably described by David Mellor on the Today Programme (shouldn’t it be anagrammatically renamed the Toady Programme when he’s on it?) as a “quasi-democracy”.

It would appear that five people have been killed in this last attack.  (Before we get too locally self-righteous, we should remember what Alfie Meadows went through at the hands of the British police recently.)  The attack on the protestors in Bahrain was launched using weapons of exactly the types sold to the Bahraini authorities by British, i.e. guns, rubber bullets, teargas and grenades.  Apparently we also sell Bahrain machine guns and ammunition.  Everything, in other words, that a “quasi-democracy” needs for quasi-violent quasi-suppression of protestors exercising their quasi-democratic quasi-freedom.

This morning, the Guardian has this and this to say about British Government policy in the wake of the savage attack on protestors.  A sample:

Britain announced a review of licences granted for arms exports to Bahrain which it would “urgently revoke” if the sales criteria had been breached in their use, after it emerged that types of crowd-control weapons similar to those used in the crackdown were supplied by British companies. Despite concerns among activists over Bahrain’s rights record, British firms were last year granted licences, entirely unopposed, to export crowd-control weapons that can lead to fatalities in use.

Oh, thank God!  A “review” (that’s all right then!) after it “emerged” that Bahrain’s government have been using weapons to attack and hurt and kill people!  One wonders what we imagine they were going to use these weapons for… decorating their office walls?

The Guardian also says:

According to the Foreign Office’s own records and the Campaign Against the Arms Trade, the UK has also supplied Libya – which has warned in an SMS message that it will use live ammunition against protesters – with similar weapons and ammunition. Sales to both Bahrain and Libya were actively promoted by the UK government’s arms promotion unit, the UK Trade & Investment Defence & Security Organisation.

Despite the widespread unrest throughout the Middle East and North Africa, British arms manufacturers this weekend will be attending IDEX, a major arms fair in Abu Dhabi, to promote sales throughout the Middle East region.

And:

Despite the warnings from HRW and other organisations of a worsening rights situation in Bahrain, the Foreign Office’s own statistics reveal that the number of arms exports licences continued to increase in 2010 from 34 to 42 with no licences being refused. Arms exports to Libya, where lethal force has already been used against demonstrators, appear to have followed a similar pattern with exports last year including tear gas, and £3.2 million worth of ammunition including for crowd control..

…

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A Rather Special Model (The Rescue)

4

Boo.

It’s 1965. January 2, 1965, to be precise. Life is good. The Beatles are at number one on both the album and singles charts with Beatles For Sale and Day Tripper. Doctor Who, having plowed through Christmas with its epic of Daleks in London, settles in for a two-parter that, while lacking somewhat in raw glamour, is at least of significant historical merit in that it is the first time since the show appeared that a new regular cast member is debuted.

Watching it, it is clear from the start that it is a different sort of story – fully 10% of the story has already passed when the TARDIS crew makes its first appearance. Instead, it starts by focusing on Vicki – the new girl. The result is arguably the first modern Doctor Who story.

See, eventually Doctor Who changes to be predominantly 45 minute single-episode stories instead of the original mode of 25 minute stories of varying episode counts, and the mode for most of the series of four-episode stories with occasional 2, 3, or 6 parters, depending on what the style was. Of these, the two-parter is in some ways the most interesting – there are only 7 of them in the history of the series. (Admittedly, there are also only 7 three-parters, but stay with me) The first was The Edge of Destruction, which was an early story that was made under such a massive pile of constraints as to be difficult to compare it to anything at all.

But what is most interesting about the two-parters is that, when credits and cliffhangers are taken into account, a two-part story comprised of 25 minute episodes comes out at about the same length as a 45-minute episode. One result of this is that this story has relatively modern pacing – certainly compared to the rest of the era, where stories are often structured with excruciating tedium.

On top of that, because the story consciously situates Vicki at its center, it is the first time since the very beginning of the series where we see the TARDIS heavily from the perspective of someone unused to it. This, keep in mind, is also the hallmark of the new series, with Rose, Martha, Donna (on her return), and to a lesser extent Amy all being introduced in that fashion.

One thing that’s been very clear in the stories already watched is that Doctor Who quickly became a show with real aspirations. The Aztecs, The Sensorites, and The Dalek Invasion of Earth are all stories that, conceptually, could be made today – their basic ideas are genuinely daring. Hell, plot-wise The Sensorites basically is the plot to The Doctor’s Daughter. But any of those stories would need massive replotting and reconceptualizing to actually work. The Rescue, while it would still need a good rewrite, would not necessarily need any drastic changes to its structure.

This is not entirely the consensus view of The Rescue. The major critique of the story is that its central mystery is obvious.

…

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They Always Survive, While I Lose Everything: The Dalek Invasion of Earth

20

The Daleks, like most creatures in the universe,
simply cannot abide plaid pants.

It is November 23rd, 1963. The Supremes “Baby Love” is at the top of the charts. Next up, the Rolling Stones take the charts for a week before that strangely perfect match for Doctor Who wanders through and The Beatles’ “I Feel Fine” rounds out the year.

During these six weeks, Wonderful Radio London, one of the offshore radio stations memorialized in Richard Curtis’s more or less execrable film The Boat That Rocked/Pirate Radio, debuted – a station that would have a huge role to play in the rising New Britain over the next few years.

And on television, Doctor Who premieres with its eleventh story. Hang on tight. Everything is going to change. Again.

See, there’s something about Doctor Who we haven’t talked much about yet. And that’s the Daleks. Who debuted about a year ago now, and are frighteningly popular. In June, way back when The Aztecs was airing, The Dalek Book was published. Concurrently with this story airing the Go-Gos (No, not those Go-Gos – the other ones) release the novelty single “I’m Gonna Spend My Christmas With a Dalek.” In other words, the Daleks were the show’s best claim to pop culture relevance.

And so of course they return, in what is basically the most important Doctor Who story to air yet with the possible exception of the first episode. I have not done an extensive study of primary source material here – there are plenty of overviews of Doctor Who that have, and I don’t have access to the archives that would be necessary to do it well – but my understanding is that the return of the Daleks was a known and promoted factor before the first episode of this story aired.

Which makes the pacing of the first episode somewhat odd. The entire episode is structured around its final scene – a Dalek emerging from the Thames to menace the Doctor and Ian. And rightly so – it’s an absolutely phenomenal cliffhanger. But to work, it has to be the first appearance of the Daleks in the story. The cliffhanger hinges on being a spectacular reveal and a culmination of deferred desire. It’s exciting not because you suspect the Doctor and Ian are in real danger – if you’ve watched the show before you know they’re not going out on a cliffhanger like this. It’s exciting because the Daleks are finally here, and this is the moment that pays off that desire.

Unfortunately, it means that the 22.5 minutes prior to that scene are horrifically dragged out attempts to hold off starting the story. Which requires such unfortunate setpieces as Ian being surprised to find out that a man who tumbled out of a cardboard box is dead. (Yep. I still hate Ian.)

But there are some key things in the first episode to look at. The first is the starkness of the setting – ruined landmarks and a silent London.…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 2: The Time Travellers (Simon Guerrier, BBC Books, 2005)

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I like traffic lights…

Time Can Be Rewritten is a recurring feature in which stories written in later years that were intended to be retconned into previous eras are analyzed in the context of their presumptive eras. Today we look at Simon Guerrier’s 2005 novel from BBC Books, The Time Travellers.


It is November of 2005. The number one singles for the month are Westlife’s “You Raise Me Up” and Madonna’s “Hung Up.” If 2000 was the absolute low point of Doctor Who, this is more or less the high point. On television, Christopher Eccleston regenerated into David Tennant five months ago, and in this month’s mini-episode for Children in Need, the world saw him for the first time.

This book, then, is a holdover – the second to last book to emerge from BBC Books, which had been carrying the Doctor Who torch since 1997. The problem is that in April of 2005, Russell T. Davies’s Doctor Who established the Last Great Time War as a major plot thread. For a variety of reasons that we’ll deal with when we get to this era, this was a phenomenally massive diss to the BBC Books line, a diss that the series has basically made no effort whatsoever to apologize or make up for. So this book is, in many ways, a ghost – the last breath of an already dead strand of Doctor Who history.

Which is perhaps why, unshackled from any actual responsibilities to be good or carry on the tradition of the series or break new ground and ensure the series long term survival, Simon Guerrier was able to do something that had frankly been lacking in the bulk of the BBC Books output – write a really interesting story that filled a meaningful gap in the series history.

See, not to get too spoiler heavy, but in the televised story after Planet of Giants, Susan becomes the first regular character to depart Doctor Who. If, at the end of the third episode of Planet of Giants, you suspected this, you are, frankly, psychic, as the story gives no setup whatsoever for that development. So it makes sense to put something in the gap between the two stories – a decent gap, given that the only teaser at the end of Planet of Giants is that the Doctor has no idea where they are. Admittedly the next episode also begins with the Doctor having no idea where they are, but let’s be fair, that’s true of almost every episode of Doctor Who. (Oddly, Time Travellers is the only story in Doctor Who set in this gap, with other stories preferring the Reign of Terror-Planet of Giants gap despite the fact that, as pointed out by a commenter two entries ago, that gap is actually a bit dodgy, whereas this gap is pretty solid. Indeed, given that Ian and Barbara are visibly surprised that they might be in London at the start of the next story, moving a few more stories into this gap would not be an unreasonable decision on the part of those who are obsessive enough about Doctor Who chronology to care about this sort of thing.)…

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Order in Court

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Here’s my Timelash II stuff for ‘The Trial of a Time Lord’.  Some extra bits and some rejigging here and there.

‘The Mysterious Planet’

Bob Holmes redoes ‘The Krotons’… which looks more acceptable now that we have a showrunner and head writer who, essentially, just does the same story again and again and again.

The production design comes to a high standard but belongs in a different story. It’s clear that Marb Station is supposed to be dark but it gleams with light. Holmes has the underground dwellers talk about “the train”, which is clearly supposed to be something that runs on the old underground rails, etc.  Everything looks good but nothing looks right. The Tribe of the Free look like peasants in an authentic peasant village… but they should look like something out of Mad Max, with loads of decaying, retro-fitted, malfunctioning technology that they don’t understand and use for things like propping open doors. We need salvagepunk but we get re-enactment kitsch.  As Richard Pilbeam put it: “It’s like doing ‘Talons’ in the style of a Quality St. ad”.  Glitz and Dibber look… um, interesting… but they look as much like mercenary wideboys as Colonel Gaddafi looks like the lead singer of a boy band. The space station at the start is spectacular… but it hardly goes with the idea that the Doctor has been “taken out of time”. He should end up in a surreal nowhereplace, and the court room should look like Gallifreyan gothic or a grotty 19th century courtroom of the type that Mr Jaggers would’ve appeared in.  The whole trial should take place in the Matrix, or something like it.

The story itself is a perfectly functional and occasionally witty riff on order vs chaos, with Drathro vs Katryca as the personifications… but, interestingly, they’re not polar opposites in a dichotomy because neither are quite what they seem. Drathro’s underground survival camp is absurd, perpetuated because he blindly follows orders.  The society of the underground dwellers is built on the worship of texts whose original context and message is lost, on unnecessary rationing of water and on the ‘culling’, i.e. the ruthless and needless control of population numbers. Katryca, meanwhile, is a tyrant who rules idiotically over people she fatuously calls “the tribe of the free”. She’s a matriarch that rules a society which treats women as a social resource. So, it isn’t that Drathro is nasty old Order and Katryca is nice free Chaos… it’s that all rulers are useless and all social pyramids are nonsensical and backward. As I’ve said elsewhere, whether he knew it or not, Bob was an instinctive radical.

There are some great lines, some mythic resonances, an awareness of text and literature, and the script has plenty to say about the false opposition between ‘advanced’ and ‘primitive’, about social control through the control of resources and surplus, about hierarchy which becomes a false ideology of order hiding a reality of arbitrary, hidebound or chaotic rule.  This order vs chaos theme will be picked up again and again in this season…

One thing: somebody really needed to question why the Valeyard would enter into evidence the scene where Glitz and Dibber discuss the details of the Time Lords’ plot, even with some words bleeped out.…

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