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Feels Different This Time (The Time Meddler)

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No matter how much she points at the naked lady
with the Dalek, Steven’s attention will not be swayed
from the burly Vikings.

It’s July 3, 1965. The number one single is going to trade back and forth between Elvis and the Hollies before The Byrds storm in and take #1 with their cover of Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Although the Byrds are American, this still seems like the completion of a deal that started back in The Reign of Terror, when Bob Dylan introduced the Beatles to drugs. In turn, the Beatles, indirectly through The Byrds, introduce Bob Dylan’s sort of music to rock, creating folk rock. The day after the last episode of The Time Meddler, Bob Dylan plays his infamous electric concert at the Newport Folk Festival.

The comparisons to The Reign of Terror are apt, as this is the second time Dennis Spooner has been tapped to write a season finale. I was none too fond of his first story, and his second did not particularly endear itself to me either. The flip side of that, however, is that he’s been the script editor since The Rescue, which means he’s presided over an era that has, on the whole, been of more consistent quality than David Whitaker’s run of the first season. (Here we get the first script edited by Donald Tosh, who has no solo scripts on Doctor Who and is thus hard to judge in comparison with Whitaker and Spooner. But more on Tosh’s reign when we get to the end of it.)

With very few exceptions, it’s hard to draw clear lines of “eras” in Doctor Who. Doctor changes provide some sense of it, but, ignoring the 8th and 9th Doctors for obvious reasons, with only two exceptions these changes do not correspond with companion changes (The 3rd and 11th Doctors both started off with brand new companions), and only twice has the creative team shifted at the same time (The 4th and 11th, although the 4th was technically completed over two stories. To be fair, the 3rd and 7th Doctors had partial creative shifts as well, but only the 4th and 11th did full overhauls of the creative team). In many ways producers work better, but that’s not a perfect measure either. Seasons might work, except in the early days of the program stories were routinely produced at the end of one season to carry over into the next, requiring a distinction between production seasons and transmission seasons.

I say all of this because, muddy as it is, there’s a clear era shift going on here that is worth remarking on. The first season of Doctor Who was largely defined by its inconsistency. Significant chunks of it were not very good – The Keys of Marinus being the most uncontroversial example, though as I’ve said, I was no fan of The Reign of Terror (though I’m in the minority on that) or Marco Polo (I seem to be the only person to think that was a horrifically overlong mess of a story).…

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Anybody Remotely Interesting is Mad (The Chase)

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The Daleks realize the difficulty of fighting a monster
who does not so much roll natural 20s as is a natural 20.

Hello. There’s a lot of you reading this post right now, and I can’t figure out where you’re all coming from. Would anyone mind letting me know? I’m just curious. Thanks. Hope you enjoy.

It’s May 22, 1965. Number one is going to pass among four artists for the next six weeks – Jackie Trent, Sandie Shaw, The Hollies, and Elvis. So, basically, a melange of pop acts. Which is once again fitting for Doctor Who, which airs The Chase, a story that is, basically, a melange of set pieces punctuated by occasional Dalek attacks.

Let’s start by being honest here. There are, two my mind, two ways to read this story. Either it’s a flawed but mostly edgily brilliant piece of early post-modernism, or it’s a complete crap-fest.

I won’t lie and pretend the latter case is not, on paper, stronger. Terry Nation is, in many ways, a tough writer to love. He parlayed his brief description of some robotic monsters into copyright on one of Doctor Who’s two most iconic images, managing to run roughshod over Ray Cusick, who was the one who changed Nation’s description into an iconic design. Nation is credited whenever the Daleks appear on screen. Cusick… isn’t. On top of that, of Nation’s many Doctor Who scripts, it’s a braver man than I who can argue that several do not feel phoned in. Not the least of them this story’s most obvious antecedent, The Keys of Marinus.

On the other hand, Nation was able to put together Genesis of the Daleks, rightly considered one of the best Doctor Who stories ever. And it’s basically impossible to argue that he is anything less than one of the most influential creative figures in Doctor Who history. Looking even at his three stories prior to this, we can see that it was Nation who introduced the capture/escape sci-fi model, the Doctor’s love of pioneers, genre juxtaposition, and, of course, monsters. And that’s the root problem with Terry Nation. He’s a genius who is perfectly willing to be a hack instead.

So with this story, it’s genuinely tough. Because I do think there’s a reading to be had that mostly makes this story work and work quite well. I’m also very much uncertain that this reading has anything to do with anything that Nation or anyone else involved with this story had in mind at the time.

Still, this blog is not about reviewing stories in the context of their time (there’s been enough quality writing on Doctor Who that does that, most notably Miles and Wood’s sublime About Time sextet). It’s about understanding a story of Doctor Who that continues to this day. And the version of The Chase that I can bring myself to quite enjoy is a version that seems to me to have been tremendously influential on, say, The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End. And even if, on paper, it seems more probable that this is a warmed over piece of hackery from Nation that got maimed by Richard Martin when it was directed… maybe they were just ahead of their time.…

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Abide With Me 2.0

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This is an edited and partly-rewritten version of something I posted at the old site.

In a world in which 99% of all TV is 99% predictable 99% of the time, ‘Gridlock’ seems like an impertinent rejoinder to everything else on the screen, as though the Doctor Who production team are blowing contemptuous raspberries at the people who churn out all the beige wallpaper that constitutes most modern telly. ‘Gridlock’ hammers every bit of mass-produced, by-the-numbers, formulaic drama that clogs up the channels. Then, just for good measure, it laughingly refuses to play by the rules of Doctor Who, old or new.

There is no invasion and no tyranny to topple; there are no corridors and no captures (well, there’s one… sort of) and no escapes; there are no fascist guards, no rebels, no evil masterminds; there is no ticking time-bomb, no race against time, no evil plot for the Doctor to foil. Other writers might have made the story about the Doctor trying to stop everyone dying because of the BLISS patches. In ‘Gridlock’, RTD has the Doctor arrive when this is all over and almost everyone is long dead. Imagine what ‘The Ark in Space’ would’ve been like if the Doctor had arrived years after the Wirrn had already eaten almost the whole of the human race… mind you, even then there could’ve been a Doctor-and-rebels-fight-monsters tale. In ‘Gridlock’, there are no monsters in the proper sense. The cat people are both nice, the Face of Boe is without malice. Even the Macra are not allowed to take over the script or be this week’s baddies. Their fate is not even alluded to at the end. The Doctor’s priority is to clear the gridlock. The death of the Macra that feed on the exhaust fumes is a by-product of his main aim (one assumes that some of the unscrupulous entrepreneurs of the undercity are going to get rich selling lots of crab meat). Some fans have criticised what they perceive as the way the Macra were underused… but really, did we need another story about the Macra running a colony of slaves? I know the original Macra tale is sadly missing, but a story that was all about CGI Macra being naughty wouldn’t have brought it back. Besides, ‘The Macra Terror’ is a tale of its time, expressing the anxieties of the 60s generation about brainwashing, conformity and consumer culture. Putting the Macra at the centre of ‘Gridlock’ would’ve made ‘Gridlock’ a story about the Macra, yet another bad old monster stomping about.

‘Gridlock’ is almost unrelentingly surprising, even to people me who, let’s face it, watch far too much telly. Not only is ‘Gridlock’ unpredictable, it’s tricky too. It deliberately leads you down blind alleys and then presents you with a basket of kittens. Just when you think it’s going to be about urban guerrillas kidnapping Martha, the urban guerrillas turn out to be a nice guy and his pregnant girlfriend who just needed an extra passenger.…

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Sound and Fury

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The comedian Ed Byrne says that the only ironic thing about the Alanis Morrisette song ‘Ironic’ is that it contains no irony. Well, one of the many ironic things about ‘The Shakespeare Code’ is that it contains no code, and little that meaningfully refers to Shakespeare… and yet its title is rather apt. Really, the episode might just as well have been called ‘Billy Shakespeare and the Goblet of Fire’, yet the very arbitrariness of the title, and the fact that it tries to make the audience smile at a modern cultural reference, makes the title perversely appropriate for the story… because the story itself throws lots of modern cultural references at us but fails to engage with Shakespeare as a man or an artist.

A TELEVISED THEATRE

When it was shown, ‘The Shakespeare Code’ was probably the most visually spectacular episode of Doctor Who yet made. It still looks absolutely marvellous. But there is a complex of ironies here.

There’s always been a kind of affinity between Shakespeare (as a category of play) and Doctor Who. Like Shakespeare, Who is a sort of genre of its own, which comprises many different types of story, some of which are of dubious canonicity and some of which are hard to categorise. Doctor Who is highly theatrical. Doctor Who, like Shakespeare productions, can be very camp. Doctor Who often presents highly implausible plot developments. People who criticise RTD for sloppy endings should check out Cymbeline in which the god Jupiter turns up (in a real deus ex machina!) to sort out the plot. Doctor Who, like Shakespeare, tends to buy into the ‘King list’ theory of history. Many of the early historicals are clearly indebted to Shakespeare, or to various writers’ idea of him. And Doctor Who, like Shakespeare, often presents us with fictional social worlds (shown in microcosm) in order to explore political themes. Both Shakespeare and Doctor Who create little worlds representing great societies which exist ‘offstage’, as it were.

Moreover, Doctor Who grew in a BBC culture that considered TV drama to be like ‘televised theatre’. Who always strained against this… what with Sydney and Verity both being grounded in commercial telly… but most of the classic series looks much more like a televised play, with occasional inserts filmed on location… highly reminiscent, in fact, of the early seasons of the BBC Shakespeare series.

In many ways, Doctor Who‘s development over the years is a perfect example of the way that TV drama has gradually shifted away from this ‘televised theatre’ tradition, towards the prevalent style now, which is to make TV dramas look as much as possible like little films. ‘The Shakespeare Code’ may be the ultimate example of this trend in fruition… yet the irony is that it looks cinematic mostly because of its huge, impressive central set… which isn’t a film set at all but an actual theatre! What’s more, this theatre was built as a recreation of a place where Shakespeare and his company put on his intensely political plays, plays that built fictional worlds in order to examine politcal ideas and themes, plays that confronted their audience with unusually strong depictions of women, plays that had no choice but to summon up huge armies and black nights using only words, there being little in the way of special effects available… though the theatre of the English Renaissance certainly did attempt spectacle (with opulent costumery being a particular draw). …

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Time Can Be Rewritten 3: The Plotters (Gareth Roberts, Virgin Books, 1996)

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Here’s one, Fact Fans! If you lay the
Missing Adventures next to
each other in chronological order,
then Vicki is staring with alarm at
Jo Grant in a necktie. Probably
thinking “Oh, she’s the one who got
naked and humped a Dalek, isn’t
she?” Yes, Vicki, she is. Jealous?

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 Gareth Roberts 1996 novel The Plotters.


So here’s the thing about Doctor Who that we may not have talked about quite enough yet. It has fans. Exactly when it acquired this potential affliction is hard to pin down, but the answer probably has something to do with 1980. And it’s been a solidly mixed blessing. If it weren’t for fandom we wouldn’t have, well, Doctor Who from 2005 on. But, on the other hand, if it weren’t for fandom, we wouldn’t have had Doctor Who from 1985 to early 1987. Which might have been nice.


But Doctor Who has fans. It has fandom. And it’s had it for a really long time – indeed, at this point for a majority of its existence. In fact, given that Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffat are two of the biggest anoraks on the planet, as is David Tennant. Seriously, track down the old Podcast commentary for Forest of the Dead with Davies, Moffat, and Tennant just geeking out over Doctor Who in general and basically ignoring the actual episode. Aside from the fact that it is in no way a commentary track, it’s the best commentary track ever. 


So the fact of the matter is that we’re now at 21 years in which fans have been running the asylum, versus at most 26 where they weren’t. We’re nearing the point where fans have run Doctor Who more than normal people have. (In fact, due to events we’ll cover when we get to season 20, arguably we’ve already crossed that point.) And one consequence of an extreme and chronic case of fandom is that tastes have changed.


Which is why things like the Missing Adventures are so interesting. Because this is a book written in 1996 that is about the pleasures of a TV show from 31 years earlier. By a writer who was 28 at the time. So the one thing we can safely conclude about Gareth Roberts’ take on late second season Doctor Who is that it is not in any way based on the experience of actually watching late second season Doctor Who in 1965. Further making this interesting is that Gareth Roberts is one of the writers of the new series, having contributed four episodes thus far with a fifth on the way. So this novel is actually, ignoring some stray comics and short stories, the earliest-set piece of Doctor Who by a writer to have written for the new series. Giving Gareth Roberts the interesting distinction of having the widest span of Doctor Who writing – 195 televised stories take place between this novel and his season five episode The Lodger.…

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Decadent, Degenerate, and Rotten to the Core (The Space Museum)

2

The first appearance of the hideous mutant creatures
inside the Daleks.

It’s April 24, 1965. The Beatles have number one again, with Ticket to Ride. Those of you who are obsessive Doctor Who fans will glean the particular significance of tat. The more normal folks will want to remember this fact on Wednesday. (The really really obsessive fans now know exactly what book I’m talking about on Monday. If you are one of those fans, congratulations.) In the fourth week of the Space Museum it will be unseated by Roger Miller’s “King of the Road” in what is very possibly the single most jarring transition on the charts until “Do The Bartman” unseats The KLF in 1991. I will not say much about Roger Miller, because, well, he’s Roger Miller. I will, however, point out his future #1 hit in his native US, “England Swings.”

It is easy, at this point, to think that the world is coming unstuck. Protests in Yereven, Armenia begin to bring the horror of the Armenian Genocide to light. Protests in Berkeley, California involve torching draft cards. The ball that started rolling with the Kennedy assassination has gathered something like critical mass.   While the most powerful man in the world was a dashing young technocrat, there was something resembling stability. When the most powerful man in the world is a drawling Texan career politician, even though he’s probably a better champion of liberal causes than Kennedy, things come unstuck. The youth get uppity. They evolve. They rebel.

At the center of all of this, however, quite bizarrely, is London. Never mind that the UK has missed a rather epic series of beats and gone from world-spanning empire to fallen power in a generation. None of that matters. The UK has the Beatles. The UK has Carnaby Street. The UK has the miniskirt. The UK, in short, is mod. And the world is starting to recognize that. As the youth rebels and starts to change the world, the coolest place in the world is London.

This story is where Doctor Who picks a side. It should be no surprise, given the last four stories, what side it’s going to pick. Its newest character is a futuristic star-child with a scouse accent. Its old man lead has turned into a giggling anarchist. The show has adopted a wild theatrical style that lets it look and feel like nothing else on TV. Is it going to side with the mod youth or the entrenched establishment? Take a guess.

No. Whats surprising about The Space Museum is not it’s successful execution of a host of mod cliches. It’s that it’s doing it in what are still the early days of the mod fad. And, more to the point, it’s that its doing it well and more complexly than it has any right to, going beyond mod culture before mod culture even has a chance to arrive on the scene.

The usual brief on The Space Museum is this: The first episode is almost universally recognized as being completely brilliant.…

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Bombs for Peace (Again)

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So, Western imperialist powers (especially the US and UK) spend years trying to undermine, attack and destabilise Gaddafi… presumably because his regime engaged in some nationalisation and brought some economic independence, not to mention his support for various “anti-imperialist” groups. The West indulges in occasional homicidal bombing raids that achieve nothing but the slaughter of innocents (including Gaddafi’s own baby daughter). 

(Don’t get me wrong, by the way – I’m no fan of the evil old bastard… though, if we’re doing body counts, he’s probably less blood stained than most leaders of the “free world”.) 

Then Gaddafi starts making grovelling offers to deactivate his own WMD programme… which the Western powers repeatedly ignore until they can paint it as a victory for the Bush/Blair moral crusade… 

As part of his new chumminess with Blair & Co., Gaddafi opens Libya up to foreign banks, foreign corporations and the IMF. As per the usual script, along comes structural adjustment, i.e. privatisation, austerity, etc. Gaddafi is announced as a reformed character now that his regime is becoming integrated into neoliberal globalisation. 

Then the Middle East ignites. The people of Tunisia and Egypt rise up and topple their dictators. The Libyans follow suit and launch a revolution that staggers in its bravery and bloody costliness. But, of course, it’s only a more dramatic and intense demonstration of the cruelty and brutality of the regime that the West now considers an ally. 

So what is the response of the political/ideological system that has been snuggling up to Gaddafi for several years? Why, use the Libyan people’s revolution as an excuse to dig up the rotting corpse of “humanitarian intervention” (a corpse that I hoped these new revolutions might bury forever) as a way of crowbarring US imperial influence into a process that needs it like mice need cats. 

So… we bomb the Libyan people when we don’t like Gaddafi (because he’s an evil terrorist, etc.), sell him weapons when we like him again (because he’s gonna let the IMF in), and then start talking about bombing the Libyan people (again) when they rise up to topple Gaddafi after we’ve cuddled him to our bosoms.

Irony overload. And bloody typical. And absolutely fucking outrageous.…

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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)

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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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