As it’s come up a few times and I’ve thus far only said it on Twitter, I figured I should make a quick statement on the site. Short form: I have decided going forward that I will no longer be covering Big Finish material on the site or in my books. There are a handful of existing obligations I’ll still fulfill. I’ve promised Andrew Hickey I’ll cover Doctor Who and the Pirates in the revised Volume 6, and while I’m going to swap out one or two of the mooted 7th Doctor Big Finish essays for things on other topics, there’ll still be a few of those. And I’m not going to go around deleting already written Big Finish essays. But starting with Volume 8, none of the new essays added to any of the book collections are going to be on Big Finish material.

There are a lot of reasons why I’ve taken this decision. Many of them are outlined in my post on their UNIT Assembled box set, but I’ll sum up a few quickly.

• The general low quality of their offerings.
• The preposterous size of their line, which both contributes to the lack of quality and shows a callous lack of concern for fans’ budgets.
• Their egregious failiure, especially given the size of their line, to break in new talent, instead relying on the same pool of often mediocre writers to produce the overwhelming majority of their titles.
• The resultant lack of diversity, and specifically their abject failure to hire more women.
• The degree to which they have, creatively, failed to utilize the specific strengths (or accomodate the specific weaknesses) of audio as a medium, even as audio drama undergoes a phenomenal renaissance in the hands of the podcast industry. (Which would be an obivous place to go looking for writers that aren’t white dudes.)
• My distaste for their general attitude towards continuity and traditionalism, and the deep aesthetic conservatism they bring to Doctor Who.
• Their continued willingness to work with people accused of rape and sexual assault.
• Their serial queerphobia, including going out of their way to straightwash Clara’s relationship with Jane Austen and removing leaving out the trans character when introducing the supporting cast from Russell T Davies’ novelization of Rose.

This is not, to be clear, some sort of protest on my part whereby if Big Finish makes some definable changes I intend to reconsider my position. Although I reserve the right to someday change my mind, I’m not doing this as a symbolic or material pressure tactic on Big Finish. I’m doing it because, frankly, the issues outlined above overwhelm any other considerations that might come up when writing about Big Finish’s output, and I’ve run out of new things to say about them. I do not think that further essays on Big Finish would be good or interesting. They would be unpleasant to write and not much good to read. I can write better and more compelling essays than dragging the same shitty spin-off company for making the same tedious errors over and over again, and I intend to do so.…

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The TARDIS Data Core has never been a great site. This ranges from its extraordinarily dubious content decisions such as individually listing every floor of the spaceship in World Enough and TIme to be mentioned in the episode to its outright pernicious decisions like having pages for “rape” and for individual racial slurs that exist to document every single case across all of Doctor Who where they have come up. And this badness has been known to take an overtly queerphobic tinge, such as the decision to jettison categories listing LGBTQ characters in Doctor Who because, and I quote, “We write articles in the past tense from an ‘end of the universe’ POV. The Category:LGBT individuals, makes no sense for me as it’s a very 20th to early 21st century view point” and “If the concept of LGBT existed in the DW universe we’d have a page for it, and we don’t, cause it’s really not something that’s given a lot of thought as a defined concept.” (It’s not clear why categories such as “human secretaries,” “victims of the bubonic plague,” and of course “gamers” are more relevant at the end of the universe.)  And of course there’s the incredible epic saga of the Zygon penis.

Nevertheless, recent events are bad even by their standards. An editor has recently been doing the very good and useful work of cleaning up mentions of trans people’s deadnames across the project. Although there are a handful of cases where it is necessary to disclose a trans person’s deadname, it’s an exceptionally short list. Deadnames are both deeply inessential information and information that it does harm to disclose. This is even true, to be clear, for cases where the deadname is widely and publicly known. I’m under no illusions that mine is remotely a secret; it’s still distressing to hear it. There re a few cases where the information might be necessary. But even in those, slowing down and applying some creative thinking can usually find an adequate alternative. (For instance, in the most justifiable case—an academic citation to something published under a deadname—one can easily just use the correct name and append a parenthetical note “published under a different name,” indicating that whoever wants to go looking for this article might want to search by title instead of author.)

Anyway. Because there is absolutely no reason for a public wiki to be using people’s deadnames, an editor went through and did the sensible thing, namely removing them all. These edits got reverted, and then, for good measure, the editor who reverted them, Shambala108, blocked the editor who made the changes for a stunningly long six months, despite the fact that the feud had not yet risen to the definition of an edit war and the fact that Shambala108 had been involved in the feud. Then, for good measure, all of their edits were reverted and all pages involving trans people were locked so that nobody could remove the deadnames anywhere on the wiki.

When another editor attempted to follow up on this decision, they got the reply shown to the right here.…

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Scares Me Silly

Throughout her career, Kate Bush has retained an unusual level of creative security. Outside of her demo era, there’s not a large number of Bush bootlegs in circulation. There’s no empire of lost Bush songs like there are lost Bob Dylan or Beatles tracks. Fans are mostly left to speculate on tidbits of information one gets about lost Bush songs, such as the Cathy demos’ “Go Now While You Can” and the title track of Never for Ever. Following the arc of Bush’s career entails sticking almost entirely to her studio work.

Bush retains a huge amount of creative control over her work. One of the reasons she releases music so slowly is her need to hone her work to be exactly how she wants it. Losing control over her circumstances certainly hasn’t led to her finest albums being created. Perhaps setting her own parameters is an active terror to Bush.

The Kick Inside sessions seem to only have one outtake: “Scares Me Silly,” a bootleg rather than a bonus track from some official release. Listening to it in 2019, it’s not hard to understand why it was never released. “Scares Me Silly” is loopy, particularly in its calypso-esque It’s a ridiculous track, something Elton John might have cut on a drunk night at the Château d’Hérouville. “Scares Me Silly” is loopy, beginning with frantic up-tempo glam rock, moving into a wordy calypso of a pre-chorus (“they try to put me on the tapes begin to spin/I feel a little sick and hope my notes are in”), and slowing down for a poppy chorus, repeatedly declaring “it scares me silly, but it gets me gooooiiiiin’!” There’s no sense Bush is disciplining herself, and the result is firmly outtakes material.

Curiously, the lyrics of “Scares Me Silly” are a pretty straightforward reflection of what kind of song it is. Bush describes a character working in a recording studio for the first time, feeling the anxiety that comes with pop music and how it separates the artist from themselves (“I lick my lips to start the first line/how can this girl be me?”). The prevailing mood is one of giddiness and dizzy nausea, with Bush singing energetically of “vertigo, the need to lose.” Music is a force which carries her away — “I feel a little sick and I hope my notes are in” — to some other place. In “Scares Me Silly” the journey is the focus, and it’s more of a speed trip than an odyssey. Terror and exhilaration often go hand-in-hand for Kate Bush — go back and read my favorite post “Hammer Horror” to see more of that on display. Bush’s melodic experiments, off-beat songwriting, and idiosyncratic vocals all unite to create one major statement: that pushing your limits is fun and worthwhile.

Yet “Scares Me Silly” feels incomplete as an iteration of this thesis. It makes a lot of noise, but it’s not particularly clever, fun, or interesting. It’s too rock ‘n’ roll: all about making the biggest ruckus in the studio, which Bush was never going to do.…

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