It’s November 21^st, 2021. Adele and Ed Sheeran remain, but they’re joined this week by Taylor Swift’s ten minute expansion of “All Too Well” along with Sam Fender and Switchotr featuring A1 and J1. In news, Russia nearly fucks up the International Space Station by blowing up a satellite, the UK government ditches large swaths of its high speed rail plans in the north, and the US government passes the Build Back Better Act, a massive post-pandemic spending bill. Alex Jones is found liable for defamation against the parents of Sandy Hook children, while Kyle Rittenhouse is found not liable for murdering people in Wisconsin. Two days later, as this airs, another right-wing terrorist drives an SUV through a Christmas parade in Wisconsin, killing six.

On television, meanwhile, Village of the Angels, which, as the saying goes, if I had a nickel for every time in 2021 the BBC aired a program about Doctor Who and psychic messages sent across time via analog media I’d have two nickels, which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice. The other time came back in May, when BBC Four aired Delia Derbyshire: The Myths and the Legendary Tapes. This is a strange film—a hybrid of an older short film by director Caroline Catz (who portrays Derbyshire) that has been expanded with a swath of talking heads footage (David Vorhaus, Peter Zinovieff, Madelon Hooykaas, and, most notably for Doctor Who nerds, Brian Hodgson) and a separate thread tracing Throbbing Gristle alumn Cosey Fanni Tutti’s creation of the film’s soundtrack via manipulation of the eponymous legendary tapes—a collection of 267 found in Derbyshire’s attic following her death in 2001 and subsequently housed at the John Ryland library in Manchester. The result is strange, surreal, and ghostlike, which is to say utterly appropriate for a study of Derbyshire.

Catz’s Derbyshire is a sort of frustrated visionary, seeking only, as she explains in her job interview for the Radiophonic Workshop, to “create sounds that have never existed in the world before.” Which, of course, she did, and spectacularly, most obviously with Doctor Who theme, which the film devotes a sizeable chunk of time to.  It starts from Ron Grainer’s scant account of the tune—the film depicts it as a hastily scribbled score and a set of adjectives like “wind bubbles” and directions that it should sound “familiar but different,” and be comparable to the well-funded twenty piece French ensemble Les Structures Sonores. The BBC Radiophonic Workshop, to be clear, is a bunch of low paid weirdos in a basement with a bunch of aging radio equipment. Derbyshire volunteers for this plainly nightmarish job, and, of course, absolutely crushes it.

But what the film does a remarkable job of highlighting is the scale of how she accomplished this, creating individual pieces of tape for each of the notes she wants to use, at times calculating both the setting for her oscillator to produce the note she wants and the amount of tape needed for the duration.…

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It’s November 14th, 2021. Adele ain’t going anywhere on the charts. Neither is Ed Sheeran, but there’s also CKay, Glass Animals, and Arrdee. In news, Britney Spears is released from her conservatorship, a man detonates an IED outside the Liverpool Women’s Hospital, and Dominion Voting Systems sues Fox News for defamation around Donald Trump’s attempted coup.

On television, meanwhile, we have “Once, Upon Time,” an episode Chibnall’s co-executive producer Matt Strevens hyped to Doctor Who Magazine as “very ambitious” saying that “it credits the audience with sophistication and intelligence” whilst comparing it to the output of noted indie film studio A24. No, sorry, I’m kidding, he compares it to Marvel. That’s his actual example of ambitious storytelling—not even the competently upper middle brow stylings of A24, but the fucking Marvel Cinematic Universe. That’s intelligence and sophistication now—cynical IP farms that operate on the premise that everyone is basically just a fifteen year old boy.

Strevens was likely talking about WandaVision, the first show in this particular iteration of the “MCU on television” concept following Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. on generic broadcast television and the Defenders suite on Netflix, both of which were memory-holed in favor of creating headliner content for Disney+, a streaming service we’ll have plenty of time to discuss later in life. That show opened with a trio of episodes dropped over two weeks that presented events in the form of cracked mirror historical sitcoms, starting with a 1950s I Love Lucy pastiche (complete with live studio audience) and moving up through the 1970s before finally revealing its proper conceit. This isn’t that far from “Once, Upon Time,” which sees Whittaker, Gill, and Bishop playing out an adventure that is eventually revealed to have really happened to the Jo Martin Doctor. That flutter of formalist play is neither especially ambitious nor anything like the norm for Marvel, but that’s neither here nor there, and while mocking Strevens for this is both easy and fun, it’s not especially revealing.

The more obvious point of comparison between Doctor Who and Marvel is Loki, which aired its first season just a few months prior to Flux. It’s not entirely fair to say that Loki is “Marvel tries to do Doctor Who,” but the inaccuracy is a matter of degree as opposed to a critique of the underlying association. Certainly Loki is Marvel doing a story about time travel with a mercurial lead who’s played by a British guy who can accurately be described as both “hot” and “a weird little guy.” Which, obviously, Doctor Who isn’t doing that last one in this period, but the point stands. Production on the first season was even disrupted by the pandemic, though Loki was filming in Atlanta under appreciably looser restrictions than a BBC production.

It will of course surprise nobody that Loki is appreciably better than Chibnall-era Doctor Who. It is made by people who can broadly be described as “knowing what they’re doing,” and so possesses things like character arcs and storylines that can accurately be described as being “about” things.…

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It’s November 7th, 2021. Adele is at number one with “Easy On Me.” Ed Sheeran, Ed Sheeran, and Ed Sheeran also chart. In news, a crowd crush at a Travis Scott concert killed ten, the House of Representatives passes an infrastructure bill designed largely to kill off more progressive bills from passing, and Owen Paterson resigns from Parliament after a report finding that he broke lobbying rules, although not before the Tories consider simply abandoning lobbying rules instead. Also, the phenomenally named Nimblewill Nomad becomes the oldest person to hike the Appalachian Trail.

I probably do some stuff too before grudgingly settling in to watch War of the Sontarans. But you know who it’s really interesting to imagine watching this? Russell T Davies. Really, it’s less this—you assume that, with Power of the Doctor in the can for several weeks, he’d been given pre-air copies of these episodes. You never know though—maybe Chibnall was just that spoilerphobic. By this point, though, Davies was already at work, dreaming of Meeps and Goblins. No, what’s interesting to imagine is Davies sitting down and watching Series 11 and 12 as a fan with no more idea than the rest of us that he’s the next showrunner.

It’s been a while since we’ve talked about Davies—especially given that, despite calling it a Pop Between Realities post for the Capaldi era when I wrote it in 2015, I declined to actually run the essay I wrote on Cucumber/Banana/Tofu during the Capaldi Eruditorum, deeming it a bit too much of a review. But it’s notable that when the Chibnall era debuted that triptych of shows in 2015 and the three-episode A Very English Scandal earlier in 2018 were the only significant pieces of television writing Davies had done since the end of Torchwood.

The explanation for this is simple. In 2011, right in the midst of Miracle Day airing, his husband Andrew Smith was diagnosed with stage four brain cancer and given less than a year to live. Davies put all of his television work on hold and returned to Manchester to care for him. Cucumber was largely written—it had been developed as a BBC/Showtime co-production and was in the process of casting when Smith got sick and Davies pulled the plug. Piers Wegner got him to bring it to Channel 4, and it shot in Manchester.

At the end of September 2018, just over six years after his year to live, Smith passed. By this time Davies had already started his way back towards regular work—he’d made A Very English Scandal, and his next project, Years and Years, was on the brink of starting shooting. But before that, just over a week after Smith’s death, came The Woman Who Fell to Earth.

As I said, it’s worth imagining Davies watching these episodes. It’s implausible to imagine he didn’t recognize that Chibnall was fucking it up. This is a man who obsesses over how sets for people’s houses should have crap sitting on the staircases to look more lived in.…

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It’s October 31st, 2021. Adele is at number one with “Easy on Me.” Ed Sheeran, Elton John and Dua Lipa, Coldplay and BTS, and Lil Nas X also chart. In news, well, there’s ten fucking months of it. Failed coup in the US, successful one in Myanmar, the Ever Given running aground, Discovery acquiring Warner Brothers, Netanyahu briefly losing power in Israel, wildfires, heat waves, winter storms. The usual.

The real story, at least in terms of the qualia of being alive, is the slow lurching of the world towards approximated normality. COVID, of course, never goes away. It’s just a new illness we live with and that kills and disables people in large and horrifying quantities forever. But vaccination picks up speed and things start to reopen. Penn, Anna, and I take a trip to Chicago in September to go to nice restaurants for the first time in over a year. As is by now usual, my wife declines to join us. On the day that we’re heading home, my Twitter lights up with the news that Russell T Davies is returning to Doctor Who. I subsequently spend every rest stop along the twelve hour drive dealing with what is, effectively, being unexpectedly called into work.

One of the first decisions that I make based on the knowledge is that I’m going to write a Whittaker era Eruditorum. This had been largely up in the air—my stated position was that I’d only do it if some subsequent era made me want to write about the show in depth again. But the return of Davies was if nothing else sure to be interesting, and so I decided I’d do it.

I forget who watches this one with me. I think it might have been just Penn. (I eventually, writing these essays, just stopped telling him I was going to watch things so he’d stop doing this to himself.) Anticipating the fact that by this point in Eruditorum I would be struggling to find things to say, I only offered a capsule review on Patreon. I forget the exact text, and bothering to find it would probably take a solid 10-15% of the amount of time I spent on it in the first place, but the basic structure was that I described this as the “best Chibnall episode ever” because all it had to do was write checks that other episodes would fail to cash.

Which is to say that at this point, you just feel bad for the poor show. If The Timeless Children was Chris Chibnall being haunted by the vengeful spirits of Pip and Jane, here we see him pulling the same feat as John Nathan-Turner as he dragged Trial of a Time Lord through production despite the dramatic flouncing of the script editor, death of the writer mid-finale, and the fact that the show had literally just been cancelled. In both cases the result is a sort of heroic triumph of getting extremely bad television to air on BBC One and get coverage in mainstream newspapers.…

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