What we've learned from history is this: there can come a point in the career of any Doctor Who producer when the years spent hanging around with minor celebrities and Cybermen begin to take their toll, and he finds himself either lost in space or lost in showbiz. In 1986, John Nathan-Turner went berserk simply because nobody really liked Doctor Who any more, hence his decision to retreat from the world by pretending to be famous and hanging around with as many People From Telly as possible. In the case of Russell T. Davies, renowned scriptwriter turned championship-level shark-jumper, the problem is that everybody likes Doctor Who and nobody's capable of slamming on the brakes. But the end result is the same: the tendency to pick a well-known ginger personality from the world of Light Entertainment to play the Lead Human, rather than a proper actor. And it's easy to make a connection between the two, because the casting of Catherine Tate in 2007 has provoked a very similar response to the casting of Bonnie Langford in 1986… which is to say, a very similar response amongst actual viewers, not amongst coke-happy BBC3-addled media types who still believe Catherine Tate to be the Hip New Thing in Television and probably think The Friday Night Project is funny. (This morning, a relative of mine greeted me with the words: 'Shame about Doctor Who, isn't it?' This is interesting, not because he thought that Tate was a cripplingly bad choice - everybody outside the BBC thinks that - but because he automatically assumed I'd agree with him, suggesting that everybody knows everybody outside the BBC thinks that. The official announcement was much like a news report about an earthquake in India, something to unite the nation in a response of 'tt'.)
Clearly, the key difference between Langford and Tate is that hardly anyone saw the episodes featuring Langford, whereas these days Doctor Who actually has an audience. The end result of this situation is, of course, international terrorism. There's a logic here. Britain is currently reeling from a wave of deeply rubbish terrorist attacks, apparently organised by Islamic extremists who don't really have any ideas about using terrorism to elicit political change, but who - faced with the nation's failure to pray five times a day and cover up Katie Price - feel so impotent that their only release is to drive cars into airports. Ineffectually. Doctor Who fans will already be familiar with this feeling of helplessness: consider the notorious postings on Outpost Gallifrey after Christopher Eccleston's early retirement, by emotionally-retarded monomaniacs who wanted to launch an organised campaign of harassment against him for the heinous crime of "being knackered". Leaving aside the obvious ethical problems with wanting to give a punishment beating to an actor… what, precisely, did they want to achieve? As with the Rubbish Bombers in London and Glasgow, their purpose wasn't really to change anything but to provide an outlet for frustrated rage. At around the time that Bonnie Langford became the new companion, one Doctor Who fanzine ran the headline "John Nathan-Turner Must Die". And since Langford only handicapped the programme rather than making it a completely unworkable proposition, the offices of BBC Wales must surely be a greater area of risk than Heathrow. We should also beware of people dressing up in Tetrap costumes and setting themselves on fire.
So which is really worse, Langford or Tate? In order to draw a line under this whole hideous issue, the evidence has been broken down scientifically, and we'll be comparing their performances - and their potential for damage - in five key areas…
1. Ability to Be Unpopular. This is nowhere near as cut-and-dried as it may seem. In 1986, Bonnie Langford was universally loathed amongst the general population, known throughout the land as a B-list game-show filler who'd once been a shrieky child star and who apparently hadn't changed much. Comedy shows of the day treated her as an all-purpose object of hatred, much like Jade Goody or Ann Widdecombe today. On the other hand, Catherine Tate is supposedly popular, supposedly because it's hard to find anyone outside the media who actually likes her. Her sketch show gets reasonable-but-not-great viewing figures, yet this seems to be a result of the BBC's drive to push every new "catchphrase comedy" series as the Next Big Thing rather than a result of audience enthusiasm. More crucially, though, there's the problem that catchphrase comedy - let's not call it "character comedy", we don't want to overstate things - irritates a lot more people than it attracts. Hire an actor from a sitcom, and most people will be ambivalent. Hire someone who makes a living by shouting the same joke over and over again, only with increasingly unlikely co-stars (up to and including jovial war criminal Tony Blair), and… well, for every viewer who likes it, there'll be nine who say "Christ, I can't stand her". It is, if you will, like installing Crazy Frog on the TARDIS computer. Nonetheless, we're forced to conclude that some real people actually like Tate, which certainly wasn't true of Langford in the mid-'80s. Langford 9/10, Tate 7/10.
2. Ability to Completely Distort the Nature of the Series. Bonnie Langford is, beyond the surface layer of mewling '80s showbizness, not actually a bad actor. Mediocre, possibly, but not bad. Whereas Catherine Tate is… not an actor at all. Like Peter Sellers before her, she specialises in a kind of performance which is more interested in getting the audience's attention than in making any part seem credible. She gets one single, straightforward scene in Bleak House, and she utterly destroys it, responding to every line of dialogue as if she's doing a "comic reaction" and therefore warping everything around her. Her comedy-drama vehicle for ITV was much the same, although thankfully, nobody can even remember what it was called. The point is that this isn't acting, it's what old-school comedians used to call schtick. In "The Runaway Bride", there are moments when she looks as if she's desperately trying not to look straight into the camera while she's doing her "surprised face" mugging; she gets away with it, almost, because this is the one-off Christmas Special and we know we're not going to have to put up with it for long. The idea of living with this for thirteen weeks, however, is much like the idea of watching Ali Bongo do the same water-in-the-newspaper trick for nine hours on end. The problem worsens when you realise that a lot of writers on Doctor Who just don't like the companions very much. In the gap between "Smith and Jones" and "The Shakespeare Code", Martha Jones goes from being acute, intelligent and inquisitive to being an ignorant she-parrot who makes cock-obvious statements and then says either 'yeah?' or 'you are kidding me' at the end of the sentence, basically a grotesque 2-D parody of a Modern Woman Circa 2007. Given a character like Donna Noble, who already is a grotesque 2-D parody of a Modern Woman Circa 2007, what are the odds of Tate even trying to play the part properly? Langford 4/10, Tate 9/10.
3. Ability to Play a Character Who Makes No Sense in This Context. We thankfully never get to see the moment when Melanie Bush joins the TARDIS, despite the attempts of various fan-fic writers to provide us with an Origin Story. As all good fanboys will know, she turns up in chronologically-confusing circumstances between the story that's probably called "Mindwarp" and the story that's not really called "Terror of the Vervoids", and perhaps this was a deliberate damage-limitation strategy on the part of the script editor: in much the same way that George Lucas couldn't possibly kill Jar Jar Binks at the end of Revenge of the Sith (because the audience would just cheer), the programme couldn't possibly show us the moment when the Doctor turns to Mel and says 'would you like to come with me…?' (because the audience would throw things at the screen). Mel is the woman with no personality, no background, no reason for being there and - ultimately - no reason for leaving, apart from the obvious "universal hatred" one. But while she is there, her presence on the TARDIS at least makes a form of sense. Mel is an all-purpose roll-on roll-off companion, who does all the things companions are supposed to do and squeals like a child when she gets overexcited. And it's Bonnie Langford, so being overexcited covers most of her existence. By contrast, Donna Noble is a petty, self-obsessed reject from Footballer's Wives who believes the fate of the cosmos to be Somebody Else's Problem. Not a single thing about her in "The Runaway Bride" is remotely likeable - or feasible, but that didn't seem so bad, when we thought she was just meant to be a joke - yet at the end of it all, the Doctor asks her to stay with him. This puzzled many viewers, although it makes sense when you realise that Russell T. Davies has actually come to like his creation, and can't understand that nobody else does. The comparison with Jar Jar Binks is a good one, because even he served a specific function, i.e. to make small children laugh. Donna can't even do that. Langford 6/10, Tate 7/10. Which brings us to…
4. Ability to Alienate a Large Portion of the Audience. If Doctor Who chased the ratings then it wouldn't be worth watching, but there's a sizeable gulf between "trying something controversial" and "just pissing everyone off". A lot of people hated Peter Kay as a big green bogeyman, and others couldn't understand why "Gridlock" was full of people talking when the whole thing could have been about giant CGI space-crabs, but no individual episode can wreck the set-up of the whole series. Nor could Mel, who may have been a non-person but who still performed her companionly duties to the best of her ability. When she has to say things like 'how utterly evil!' and (most astonishing of all) 'a megabyte modem!!!', we can at least tell ourselves that we might get something completely different next week. But Donna as TARDIS-fodder destroys the programme's entire dynamic. We need a point-of-view character, however exotic or annoying, in order to make sense of both the Doctor and his universe. Even if we could feel any sense of compassion for Donna at all, she'd still seem less believable than any of the monsters, and she'd still change the shape of the series from "young explorer and lonely god" to "a couple of grown-ups bickering". For once, you really have to feel sorry for the people at BBC Books, who are actually going to have to provide novels for ten-year-olds which use her as the central character. Given Bonnie Langford's perpetual childishness, an opening line like "Melanie Bush stood in the TARDIS console room, on the way to another exciting adventure in time and space" would at least be conceivable, whereas the words "Donna Noble stood in the TARDIS console room" can only really be followed by something like "wondering whether a promotion to head of the HR department would require shoes with bigger heels". For this reason alone, the casting of a 39-year-old should have raised questions in the BBC hierarchy - a companion who's older than the actor playing the Doctor could work, but only if the non-middle-aged parts of the audience were given something else to hold on to - yet if she's playing the same character who got on our tits so much in "The Runaway Bride", then it's hard to understand why even Big Russell was allowed to get away it without someone slapping him round the chops and telling him to wake up. Langford 5/10, Tate 8/10.
5. Ability to Generally Irritate. A tough one, this, although… with hindsight, it's difficult to say exactly how Bonnie Langford's debut looked to us in 1986. Yes, the whole world seemed to hate her, and those who still bothered tuning into Doctor Who had difficulty believing it was really happening. But watching it back on video, you realise how little difference there was between Langford's "character" and her public image at the time. Was this supposed to be ironic? Is there an element of self-referential angst in the fact that when we see the Doctor and Mel in the TARDIS console room for the first time, she's going out of her way to irritate him, her never-ending sparkiness making him feel the same way we feel? Were we supposed to laugh along with the programme-makers, and if so, then did we? Much of the irritation she caused while on-screen has to be put down to the writers rather than Langford herself, who might have been able to make a proper go of it if (say) she'd been told to play a murderous Victorian prostitute who turns out to be the daughter of Jack the Ripper. Or anything, in fact, other than TV's Bonnie Langford. This "potential irony" issue returns to haunt us in 2007, since Catherine Tate's character is also supposed to be annoying, to an extent. She's not playing TV's Catherine Tate, though, she's playing… the kind of character who might typically be played by TV's Catherine Tate. We don't see Donna as a person, we see her as a comedy persona with a known celebrity behind it, and that's definitely the sort of thing John Nathan-Turner would have gone for. The upshot is that as with Langford, Tate's ability to irritate might possibly be kept in check by the scripts, as long as they don't give her any opportunity to do her "surprised" schtick or her "shouting at the end of sentences" schtick. The chances are slim, but we'll give the programme-makers the benefit of the doubt, because otherwise her horrible miscasting would be too depressing to even think about. Langford 7/10, Tate 7/10.
Tuesday, 10 July 2007
Sunday, 1 July 2007
The Doctor Who Thing: An Apology
In last week's review of "The Sound of Drums", the author of this journal commented: 'I also have a terrible feeling, more a nightmare than a rational response, that "The Last of the Time Lords" will feature a shock ending in which David Tennant regenerates into Matt Lucas. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it'd be somehow typical of the kind of mistake this series is starting to make.' The suggestion in this article was that if Doctor Who were to hire a media-friendly yet grotesquely overrated comedy performer, whose talents only extend as far as Doing Silly Voices and whose attempts at drama tend to distort the rest of the production so badly that the "real" actors look as if they're in a completely different programme, then casting Matt Lucas as the Doctor would be as bad as it could possibly get. In light of today's announcement by the BBC, we now accept that this is not the case.
The review of "The Sound of Drums" also criticised Russell T. Davies' belief that the audience can only "accept" regular characters from a contemporary suburban background, describing it as "insulting" and pointing out that the programme's obsession with all things present-day is becoming both repetitive and embarrassing. This paragraph should, of course, have ended with the words: 'The result is that the ideal companion is now a one-dimensional caricature of Someone Typically 2007 who wouldn't even be acceptable in an episode of Footballers' Wives, an individual whom the programme-makers believe to be "modern" despite the fact that there isn't a single section of the audience which is capable of relating to her, even if she weren't played by a comedian whose idea of "acting" is to put on a generic surprised-looking face and start shouting when she thinks it might get a laugh.'
The review went on to suggest that Mr Davies is now so well-insulated in the Doctor Who bunker that he's no longer capable of seeing things from the audience's point of view. This was clearly written before we learned that the new regular on board the TARDIS will be a forty-year-old woman with relationship issues and a job in an HR department, a character who will simply be bewildering to any children watching, and whose presence will inevitably cause life with the Doctor to become a BBC3 sitcom about bickering grown-ups who occasionally get interrupted by annoying things like "having adventures" while they're trying to agonise about their biological clocks. We therefore freely acknowledge that we underestimated the scale of the problem, and that "we couldn't possibly have expected them to do anything this rubbish" is not an adequate excuse.
We apologise for any inconvenience caused. As, indeed, should BBC Wales.
We'd also like to ask whether we can have Bonnie Langford back.
The review of "The Sound of Drums" also criticised Russell T. Davies' belief that the audience can only "accept" regular characters from a contemporary suburban background, describing it as "insulting" and pointing out that the programme's obsession with all things present-day is becoming both repetitive and embarrassing. This paragraph should, of course, have ended with the words: 'The result is that the ideal companion is now a one-dimensional caricature of Someone Typically 2007 who wouldn't even be acceptable in an episode of Footballers' Wives, an individual whom the programme-makers believe to be "modern" despite the fact that there isn't a single section of the audience which is capable of relating to her, even if she weren't played by a comedian whose idea of "acting" is to put on a generic surprised-looking face and start shouting when she thinks it might get a laugh.'
The review went on to suggest that Mr Davies is now so well-insulated in the Doctor Who bunker that he's no longer capable of seeing things from the audience's point of view. This was clearly written before we learned that the new regular on board the TARDIS will be a forty-year-old woman with relationship issues and a job in an HR department, a character who will simply be bewildering to any children watching, and whose presence will inevitably cause life with the Doctor to become a BBC3 sitcom about bickering grown-ups who occasionally get interrupted by annoying things like "having adventures" while they're trying to agonise about their biological clocks. We therefore freely acknowledge that we underestimated the scale of the problem, and that "we couldn't possibly have expected them to do anything this rubbish" is not an adequate excuse.
We apologise for any inconvenience caused. As, indeed, should BBC Wales.
We'd also like to ask whether we can have Bonnie Langford back.
Sunday, 24 June 2007
The Doctor Who Thing, Week 12.3 (Now Reassembled into a Single Coherent Chain of Thought)
God, that was boring.
It seems strange to use the word "boring" when describing something which ends
with the sky being ripped open and six-billion machine-creatures pouring onto the
Earth to destroy one-tenth of the human population, but therein lies the problem. If
nothing else, then "The Sound of Drums" marks the point at which modern Doctor
Who enters its self-parody phase: the point at which you can positively, definitively
say that there's such a thing as a "typical" Davies-era story, and you positively,
definitively know what all the set-pieces are going to be like in advance. It's always
been taken as read that the series will return to the same tourist-friendly, politicallysuspect
version of the early twenty-first century for at least one "big" story per year,
but now there's also the assumption that modern London is obviously going to be
the venue for the season finale, because attacking the capital is a way of making
things seem important. Yet as we've already seen, the idea that the audience
"needs" a constant return to Earth circa 2007 - like the idea that it can only "accept"
regular characters from the present day - is not only wrong, but rather insulting. And
the sight of Big Russell constantly trying to trump himself, by making the alien
hordes and the human body-counts bigger every time, is getting embarrassing.
And even if you can accept that it's made up of bits from other two-part stories,
nothing in "The Sound of Drums" has the gravity it needs. It certainly doesn't have
the gravity it thinks it's got. We're supposed to believe that the Doctor / Master faceoff
is an iconic, world-changing battle, but we don't, because John Simm just isn't
interesting enough. We're supposed to be impressed by the epic political scale of
the story, but we're not, because this sort of thing happens every year. We're
supposed to be shocked by the Toclafane (literally) decimating the population, but
we're not, because to us it looks no different to what the Cybermen did twelve
months ago. We're supposed to be appalled by the Doctor becoming an old man,
but we're not, because... well, it looks silly. (The obvious fan-comment is to point out
that this happened in "The Leisure Hive", but the most important thing to notice is
that it made sense there: "The Leisure Hive" was a story about age and renewal.
Here, it's simply gratuitous.) Since this is That Difficult Third Season of Doctor Who,
we might draw a comparison with The Godfather Part Three, which failed - quite
notoriously - because the writer and director were so obsessed with the details of
their own creation that they didn't bother looking at things from the audience's point
of view. Only a film-maker with too much power could seriously believe that
Michael Corleone's relationship with his ex-wife deserves more screen-time than
the Calvi Affair, and likewise, only a writer-producer with nobody to rein him in
would think that putting Martha's family in peril is a good way of generating tension.
To Russell, these are essential human characters at the heart of an epic drama. To
the rest of us, they might as well be glove-puppets. And who's going to tell him
that? Are you going to? 'Cos nobody in the production office will, and I'm fairly sure
he's not going to listen to a word I say.
On the plus side... in an episode which puts so much store in its special effects, the
special effects are at least remarkable. "Remarkable" in the truest sense of the
word, because this is about artistry rather than proficiency. CGI is now so everyday
that effects work has become a matter of one-upmanship, and we're asked to be
impressed by computer-generated set-pieces because they're "big" or "technically
advanced" instead of being meaningful in themselves. The result of this has been
bloated, artless garbage like The Lord of the Rings and "The Satan Pit", and a
sense that it'll soon be impossible to tell the difference between movies and their XBox
tie-ins. But used properly, CGI can produce something genuinely beautiful
rather than simply oversized. The Lazarus Horror aside, this year's stories have
seen the crew at The Mill graduate from technicians to aesthetes, making New New
York look like a place you'd actually want to live and giving "42" a sense of menace
even while we're being bored gutless by the script. Now "The Sound of Drums"
gives us the most beautiful apocalypse we're ever likely to see, and a flying aircraftcarrier
that makes us go "ooh" because it looks like a great work of engineering
rather than because we want to give a round of applause to the software that
generated it. We even have a vision of the Doctor's homeworld which lives up to
forty-four years of expectation, at least until the script turns Gallifrey into Hogwart's.
It's not enough to save the story, of course. Perhaps the saddest thing is that this
pathological need to raise the stakes every year, this pattern of putting more and
more people in jeopardy from more and more elaborate CGI sequences, plays
against the author's strengths. Less accomplished writers generally seem to feel
that since Doctor Who is either fantasy or (God forbid) sci-fi, any sort of depth or
credibility is to be avoided, and that "drama" means bashing goodie-stereotypes
and baddie-sterotypes against each other until something "dramatic" happens (the
most egregious example of this in modern-day Doctor Who is probably "The Idiot's
Lantern", in which even the members of the POV character's family only exist so
that they can make loud, grating comments about beating homosexuals, but the old
series is full of this sort of clunking stupidity). Russell T. Davies' greatest strength
has always been his ability to let characters exist on their own terms, even when
they're only on-screen for thirty seconds: this is, for example, why even the doomed
hospital consultant in "Smith and Jones" has more of a personality and a backstory
than anybody in "The Shakespeare Code". Even Shakespeare, weirdly. Yet this
kind of detail is bound to suffer, under the crashing weight of six-billion Toclafane.
Suddenly, humanity is represented by two-dimensional grotesques like Jean Rook
and President Winters, not to mention Sharon Osbourne. Faced with this, it's hard
not to be on the Master's side... especially since the only genuinely human human
character around here is his wife, a woman who can't even stop herself dancing to
the end of the world. When the brainwashed villainess who gets an obvious sexkick
out of genocide turns out to be more likeable than the companion's family,
something's gone mightily wrong.
So we're left with cop-outs, with routine explanations for routine events. The worst
of these is the set-up which lies at the heart of "The Sound of Drums", and which
therefore hamstrings the entire episode: the Master has only been on Earth for
eighteen months, yet he's brainwashed everyone into believing that he's been here
all the time. Why, for Christ's sake? Why not just say that he's been around for the
last twenty years, revelling in his false identity and setting up his uber-plan? If
you're going to write a story in which the Master infiltrates the British political
system and turns the entire country against the Doctor, then it only carries weight -
both dramatically and as a work of satire, assuming that the word "satire" really
means anything here - if he becomes the Prime Minister "properly". Captain Jack
even points out how easy this would be, and it makes perfect sense. But, no... the
Doctor immediately pooh-poohs the idea, paving the way for endless, turgid
exposition scenes about co-ordinate lock-offs, mind-controlling mobile 'phone
networks (what, again?) and perceptual filters. This is the greatest single cop-out of
the series so far, basically a way of saying "don't worry, he's not really the Prime
Minister, it's all just a horrible dream" while simultaneously weighing us down with
technobabble. If this had been done well, then the sight of the Doctor going on the
run from the whole of British society would have been genuinely scary. As it is, it
just looks as if everybody's gone temporarily mad, so we're killing time until he finds
a way of sabotaging the Archangel Network and putting everything back to normal.
Russell T. Davies' biggest problem - and I've said this before, but it's never been
more relevent - is that he doesn't understand what "war" means. We were promised
a "war on Earth" in "Army of Ghosts", but what we actually got were a couple of
pitched battles and then a whacking great reset switch. Fortunately, the rest of the
story was good enough to distract us from this, and the same could be said for "The
Parting of the Ways". But wars don't end with the push of a button. Now we've got
the biggest catastrophe so far, and I have a terrible feeling that all the twaddle
about the Archangel Network is only there so that the Doctor's team can use it as
this year's spurious doomsday weapon.
I also have a terrible feeling, more a nightmare than a rational response, that "The
Last of the Time Lords" will feature a shock ending in which David Tennant
regenerates into Matt Lucas. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it'd be somehow
typical of the kind of mistake this series is starting to make.
Good! Now I've written a review I'm happy with, I can formally delete it.
It seems strange to use the word "boring" when describing something which ends
with the sky being ripped open and six-billion machine-creatures pouring onto the
Earth to destroy one-tenth of the human population, but therein lies the problem. If
nothing else, then "The Sound of Drums" marks the point at which modern Doctor
Who enters its self-parody phase: the point at which you can positively, definitively
say that there's such a thing as a "typical" Davies-era story, and you positively,
definitively know what all the set-pieces are going to be like in advance. It's always
been taken as read that the series will return to the same tourist-friendly, politicallysuspect
version of the early twenty-first century for at least one "big" story per year,
but now there's also the assumption that modern London is obviously going to be
the venue for the season finale, because attacking the capital is a way of making
things seem important. Yet as we've already seen, the idea that the audience
"needs" a constant return to Earth circa 2007 - like the idea that it can only "accept"
regular characters from the present day - is not only wrong, but rather insulting. And
the sight of Big Russell constantly trying to trump himself, by making the alien
hordes and the human body-counts bigger every time, is getting embarrassing.
And even if you can accept that it's made up of bits from other two-part stories,
nothing in "The Sound of Drums" has the gravity it needs. It certainly doesn't have
the gravity it thinks it's got. We're supposed to believe that the Doctor / Master faceoff
is an iconic, world-changing battle, but we don't, because John Simm just isn't
interesting enough. We're supposed to be impressed by the epic political scale of
the story, but we're not, because this sort of thing happens every year. We're
supposed to be shocked by the Toclafane (literally) decimating the population, but
we're not, because to us it looks no different to what the Cybermen did twelve
months ago. We're supposed to be appalled by the Doctor becoming an old man,
but we're not, because... well, it looks silly. (The obvious fan-comment is to point out
that this happened in "The Leisure Hive", but the most important thing to notice is
that it made sense there: "The Leisure Hive" was a story about age and renewal.
Here, it's simply gratuitous.) Since this is That Difficult Third Season of Doctor Who,
we might draw a comparison with The Godfather Part Three, which failed - quite
notoriously - because the writer and director were so obsessed with the details of
their own creation that they didn't bother looking at things from the audience's point
of view. Only a film-maker with too much power could seriously believe that
Michael Corleone's relationship with his ex-wife deserves more screen-time than
the Calvi Affair, and likewise, only a writer-producer with nobody to rein him in
would think that putting Martha's family in peril is a good way of generating tension.
To Russell, these are essential human characters at the heart of an epic drama. To
the rest of us, they might as well be glove-puppets. And who's going to tell him
that? Are you going to? 'Cos nobody in the production office will, and I'm fairly sure
he's not going to listen to a word I say.
On the plus side... in an episode which puts so much store in its special effects, the
special effects are at least remarkable. "Remarkable" in the truest sense of the
word, because this is about artistry rather than proficiency. CGI is now so everyday
that effects work has become a matter of one-upmanship, and we're asked to be
impressed by computer-generated set-pieces because they're "big" or "technically
advanced" instead of being meaningful in themselves. The result of this has been
bloated, artless garbage like The Lord of the Rings and "The Satan Pit", and a
sense that it'll soon be impossible to tell the difference between movies and their XBox
tie-ins. But used properly, CGI can produce something genuinely beautiful
rather than simply oversized. The Lazarus Horror aside, this year's stories have
seen the crew at The Mill graduate from technicians to aesthetes, making New New
York look like a place you'd actually want to live and giving "42" a sense of menace
even while we're being bored gutless by the script. Now "The Sound of Drums"
gives us the most beautiful apocalypse we're ever likely to see, and a flying aircraftcarrier
that makes us go "ooh" because it looks like a great work of engineering
rather than because we want to give a round of applause to the software that
generated it. We even have a vision of the Doctor's homeworld which lives up to
forty-four years of expectation, at least until the script turns Gallifrey into Hogwart's.
It's not enough to save the story, of course. Perhaps the saddest thing is that this
pathological need to raise the stakes every year, this pattern of putting more and
more people in jeopardy from more and more elaborate CGI sequences, plays
against the author's strengths. Less accomplished writers generally seem to feel
that since Doctor Who is either fantasy or (God forbid) sci-fi, any sort of depth or
credibility is to be avoided, and that "drama" means bashing goodie-stereotypes
and baddie-sterotypes against each other until something "dramatic" happens (the
most egregious example of this in modern-day Doctor Who is probably "The Idiot's
Lantern", in which even the members of the POV character's family only exist so
that they can make loud, grating comments about beating homosexuals, but the old
series is full of this sort of clunking stupidity). Russell T. Davies' greatest strength
has always been his ability to let characters exist on their own terms, even when
they're only on-screen for thirty seconds: this is, for example, why even the doomed
hospital consultant in "Smith and Jones" has more of a personality and a backstory
than anybody in "The Shakespeare Code". Even Shakespeare, weirdly. Yet this
kind of detail is bound to suffer, under the crashing weight of six-billion Toclafane.
Suddenly, humanity is represented by two-dimensional grotesques like Jean Rook
and President Winters, not to mention Sharon Osbourne. Faced with this, it's hard
not to be on the Master's side... especially since the only genuinely human human
character around here is his wife, a woman who can't even stop herself dancing to
the end of the world. When the brainwashed villainess who gets an obvious sexkick
out of genocide turns out to be more likeable than the companion's family,
something's gone mightily wrong.
So we're left with cop-outs, with routine explanations for routine events. The worst
of these is the set-up which lies at the heart of "The Sound of Drums", and which
therefore hamstrings the entire episode: the Master has only been on Earth for
eighteen months, yet he's brainwashed everyone into believing that he's been here
all the time. Why, for Christ's sake? Why not just say that he's been around for the
last twenty years, revelling in his false identity and setting up his uber-plan? If
you're going to write a story in which the Master infiltrates the British political
system and turns the entire country against the Doctor, then it only carries weight -
both dramatically and as a work of satire, assuming that the word "satire" really
means anything here - if he becomes the Prime Minister "properly". Captain Jack
even points out how easy this would be, and it makes perfect sense. But, no... the
Doctor immediately pooh-poohs the idea, paving the way for endless, turgid
exposition scenes about co-ordinate lock-offs, mind-controlling mobile 'phone
networks (what, again?) and perceptual filters. This is the greatest single cop-out of
the series so far, basically a way of saying "don't worry, he's not really the Prime
Minister, it's all just a horrible dream" while simultaneously weighing us down with
technobabble. If this had been done well, then the sight of the Doctor going on the
run from the whole of British society would have been genuinely scary. As it is, it
just looks as if everybody's gone temporarily mad, so we're killing time until he finds
a way of sabotaging the Archangel Network and putting everything back to normal.
Russell T. Davies' biggest problem - and I've said this before, but it's never been
more relevent - is that he doesn't understand what "war" means. We were promised
a "war on Earth" in "Army of Ghosts", but what we actually got were a couple of
pitched battles and then a whacking great reset switch. Fortunately, the rest of the
story was good enough to distract us from this, and the same could be said for "The
Parting of the Ways". But wars don't end with the push of a button. Now we've got
the biggest catastrophe so far, and I have a terrible feeling that all the twaddle
about the Archangel Network is only there so that the Doctor's team can use it as
this year's spurious doomsday weapon.
I also have a terrible feeling, more a nightmare than a rational response, that "The
Last of the Time Lords" will feature a shock ending in which David Tennant
regenerates into Matt Lucas. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it'd be somehow
typical of the kind of mistake this series is starting to make.
Good! Now I've written a review I'm happy with, I can formally delete it.
The Doctor Who Thing (Week 12.2)
To recap, then. On first viewing:
* * * * *
Boring.
Boring.
Boring.
God, "The Sound of Drums" is boring.
* * * * *
On second viewing:
* * * * *
Actually... it's not that boring. But if nothing else, then it marks the point at which
modern Doctor Who enters its self-parody phase: the point at which you can
positively, definitively say that there's such a thing as a "typical" Davies-era story,
and you positively, definitively know what all the set-pieces are going to be like. A
problem which might easily be cured by going back to 1963-basics rather than
1970-basics, and by making sure that the TARDIS never lands in the sodding
early-twenty-first century ever again (or at least, by making sure there are no
comical politicians around if it does end up there). Because as we've already seen,
the idea that the audience "needs" a constant return to Earth circa 2007 - like the
idea that it can only "accept" regular characters from the present day - is not only
wrong, but rather insulting. And the sight of Big Russell constantly trying to trump
himself, by making the alien hordes and the human body-counts bigger every time,
is getting embarrassing.
But the biggest problem here, even if you can accept that it's made up of bits from
other two-part stories, is that nothing in "The Sound of Drums" has the gravity it
needs. It certainly doesn't have the gravity it thinks it's got. We're supposed to
believe that the Doctor / Master face-off is an iconic, world-changing battle, but we
don't, because John Simm just isn't interesting enough. We're supposed to be
impressed by the epic political scale of the story, but we're not, because this sort of
thing happens every year. We're supposed to be shocked by the Toclafane
(literally) decimating the population, but we're not, because to us it looks no
different to what the Cybermen did twelve months ago. We're supposed to be
appalled by the Doctor becoming an old man, but we're not, because... well, it looks
silly. (The obvious fan-comment is to point out that this happened in "The Leisure
Hive", but the most important thing to notice is that it made sense there: "The
Leisure Hive" was a story about age and renewal. Here, it's simply gratuitous.)
Since this is That Difficult Third Season of Doctor Who, we might draw a
comparison with The Godfather Part Three, which failed - quite notoriously -
because the writer and director were so obsessed with the details of their own
creation that they didn't bother looking at things from the audience's point of view.
Only a film-maker with too much power could seriously believe that Michael
Corleone's relationship with his ex-wife deserves more screen-time than the Calvi
Affair, and likewise, only a writer-producer with nobody to rein him in would think
that putting Martha's family in peril is a good way of generating tension. To Russell,
these are essential human characters at the heart of an epic drama. To the rest of
us, they might as well be glove-puppets. And who's going to tell him that? Are you
going to? 'Cos nobody in the production office will, and I'm fairly sure he's not going
to listen to a word I say.
* * * * *
Now, on third viewing (and at this point, anyone might think I've got too much time
on my hands):
* * * * *
Perhaps the worst part is that this pathological need to raise the stakes every year,
this pattern of putting more and more people in jeopardy from more and more
elaborate CGI sequences, plays against the author's strengths. Less accomplished
writers generally seem to feel that since Doctor Who is either fantasy or (God
forbid) sci-fi, any sort of depth or credibility is to be avoided, and that "drama"
means bashing goodie-stereotypes and baddie-sterotypes against each other until
something "dramatic" happens (the most egregious example of this in modern-day
Doctor Who is probably "The Idiot's Lantern", in which even the members of the
POV character's family only exist so that they can make loud, grating comments
about beating homosexuals, but the old series is full of this sort of clunking
stupidity). Russell T. Davies' greatest strength has always been his ability to let
characters exist on their own terms, even when they're only on-screen for thirty
seconds: this is, for example, why even the doomed hospital consultant in "Smith
and Jones" has more of a personality and a backstory than anybody in "The
Shakespeare Code". Even Shakespeare, weirdly. Yet this kind of detail is bound to
suffer, under the crashing weight of six-billion Toclafane. Suddenly, humanity is
represented by two-dimensional grotesques like Jean Rook and President Winters,
not to mention Sharon Osbourne. Faced with this, it's hard not to be on the Master's
side... especially since the only genuinely human human character around here is
his wife, a woman who can't even stop herself dancing to the end of the world.
When the brainwashed villainess who gets an obvious sex-kick out of genocide
turns out to be more likeable than the companion's family, something's gone
mightily wrong.
So we're left with cop-outs, with routine explanations for routine events. The worst
of these is the set-up which lies at the heart of "The Sound of Drums", and which
therefore hamstrings the entire episode: the Master has only been on Earth for
eighteen months, yet he's brainwashed everyone into believing that he's been here
all the time. Why, for Christ's sake? Why not just say that he's been around for the
last twenty years, revelling in his false identity and setting up his uber-plan? If
you're going to write a story in which the Master infiltrates the British political
system and turns the entire country against the Doctor, then it only carries weight -
both dramatically and as a work of satire, assuming that the word "satire" really
means anything here - if he becomes the Prime Minister "properly". Captain Jack
even points out how easy this would be, and it makes perfect sense. But, no... the
Doctor immediately pooh-poohs the idea, paving the way for endless, turgid
exposition scenes about co-ordinate lock-offs, mind-controlling mobile 'phone
networks (what, again?) and perceptual filters. This is the greatest single cop-out of
the series so far, basically a way of saying "don't worry, he's not really the Prime
Minister, it's all just a horrible dream" while simultaneously weighing us down with
technobabble. If this had been done well, then the sight of the Doctor going on the
run from the whole of British society would have been genuinely scary. As it is, it
just looks as if everybody's gone temporarily mad, so we're killing time until he finds
a way of sabotaging the Archangel Network and putting everything back to normal.
Russell T. Davies' biggest problem - and I've said this before, but it's never been
more relevent - is that he doesn't understand what "war" means. We were promised
a "war on Earth" in "Army of Ghosts", but what we actually got were a couple of
pitched battles and then a whacking great reset switch. Fortunately, the rest of the
story was good enough to distract us from this, and the same could be said for "The
Parting of the Ways". But wars don't end with the push of a button. Now we've got
the biggest catastrophe so far, and I have a terrible feeling that all the twaddle
about the Archangel Network is only there so that the Doctor's team can use it as
this year's spurious doomsday weapon.
I also have a terrible feeling, more a nightmare than a rational response, that "The
Last of the Time Lords" will feature a shock ending in which David Tennant
regenerates into Matt Lucas. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it'd be somehow
typical of the kind of mistake this series is starting to make.
And: "Paradox Machine"? Dear God, even I never sank that low. It's like The
Ancestor Cell all over again.
* * * * *
Boring.
Boring.
Boring.
God, "The Sound of Drums" is boring.
* * * * *
On second viewing:
* * * * *
Actually... it's not that boring. But if nothing else, then it marks the point at which
modern Doctor Who enters its self-parody phase: the point at which you can
positively, definitively say that there's such a thing as a "typical" Davies-era story,
and you positively, definitively know what all the set-pieces are going to be like. A
problem which might easily be cured by going back to 1963-basics rather than
1970-basics, and by making sure that the TARDIS never lands in the sodding
early-twenty-first century ever again (or at least, by making sure there are no
comical politicians around if it does end up there). Because as we've already seen,
the idea that the audience "needs" a constant return to Earth circa 2007 - like the
idea that it can only "accept" regular characters from the present day - is not only
wrong, but rather insulting. And the sight of Big Russell constantly trying to trump
himself, by making the alien hordes and the human body-counts bigger every time,
is getting embarrassing.
But the biggest problem here, even if you can accept that it's made up of bits from
other two-part stories, is that nothing in "The Sound of Drums" has the gravity it
needs. It certainly doesn't have the gravity it thinks it's got. We're supposed to
believe that the Doctor / Master face-off is an iconic, world-changing battle, but we
don't, because John Simm just isn't interesting enough. We're supposed to be
impressed by the epic political scale of the story, but we're not, because this sort of
thing happens every year. We're supposed to be shocked by the Toclafane
(literally) decimating the population, but we're not, because to us it looks no
different to what the Cybermen did twelve months ago. We're supposed to be
appalled by the Doctor becoming an old man, but we're not, because... well, it looks
silly. (The obvious fan-comment is to point out that this happened in "The Leisure
Hive", but the most important thing to notice is that it made sense there: "The
Leisure Hive" was a story about age and renewal. Here, it's simply gratuitous.)
Since this is That Difficult Third Season of Doctor Who, we might draw a
comparison with The Godfather Part Three, which failed - quite notoriously -
because the writer and director were so obsessed with the details of their own
creation that they didn't bother looking at things from the audience's point of view.
Only a film-maker with too much power could seriously believe that Michael
Corleone's relationship with his ex-wife deserves more screen-time than the Calvi
Affair, and likewise, only a writer-producer with nobody to rein him in would think
that putting Martha's family in peril is a good way of generating tension. To Russell,
these are essential human characters at the heart of an epic drama. To the rest of
us, they might as well be glove-puppets. And who's going to tell him that? Are you
going to? 'Cos nobody in the production office will, and I'm fairly sure he's not going
to listen to a word I say.
* * * * *
Now, on third viewing (and at this point, anyone might think I've got too much time
on my hands):
* * * * *
Perhaps the worst part is that this pathological need to raise the stakes every year,
this pattern of putting more and more people in jeopardy from more and more
elaborate CGI sequences, plays against the author's strengths. Less accomplished
writers generally seem to feel that since Doctor Who is either fantasy or (God
forbid) sci-fi, any sort of depth or credibility is to be avoided, and that "drama"
means bashing goodie-stereotypes and baddie-sterotypes against each other until
something "dramatic" happens (the most egregious example of this in modern-day
Doctor Who is probably "The Idiot's Lantern", in which even the members of the
POV character's family only exist so that they can make loud, grating comments
about beating homosexuals, but the old series is full of this sort of clunking
stupidity). Russell T. Davies' greatest strength has always been his ability to let
characters exist on their own terms, even when they're only on-screen for thirty
seconds: this is, for example, why even the doomed hospital consultant in "Smith
and Jones" has more of a personality and a backstory than anybody in "The
Shakespeare Code". Even Shakespeare, weirdly. Yet this kind of detail is bound to
suffer, under the crashing weight of six-billion Toclafane. Suddenly, humanity is
represented by two-dimensional grotesques like Jean Rook and President Winters,
not to mention Sharon Osbourne. Faced with this, it's hard not to be on the Master's
side... especially since the only genuinely human human character around here is
his wife, a woman who can't even stop herself dancing to the end of the world.
When the brainwashed villainess who gets an obvious sex-kick out of genocide
turns out to be more likeable than the companion's family, something's gone
mightily wrong.
So we're left with cop-outs, with routine explanations for routine events. The worst
of these is the set-up which lies at the heart of "The Sound of Drums", and which
therefore hamstrings the entire episode: the Master has only been on Earth for
eighteen months, yet he's brainwashed everyone into believing that he's been here
all the time. Why, for Christ's sake? Why not just say that he's been around for the
last twenty years, revelling in his false identity and setting up his uber-plan? If
you're going to write a story in which the Master infiltrates the British political
system and turns the entire country against the Doctor, then it only carries weight -
both dramatically and as a work of satire, assuming that the word "satire" really
means anything here - if he becomes the Prime Minister "properly". Captain Jack
even points out how easy this would be, and it makes perfect sense. But, no... the
Doctor immediately pooh-poohs the idea, paving the way for endless, turgid
exposition scenes about co-ordinate lock-offs, mind-controlling mobile 'phone
networks (what, again?) and perceptual filters. This is the greatest single cop-out of
the series so far, basically a way of saying "don't worry, he's not really the Prime
Minister, it's all just a horrible dream" while simultaneously weighing us down with
technobabble. If this had been done well, then the sight of the Doctor going on the
run from the whole of British society would have been genuinely scary. As it is, it
just looks as if everybody's gone temporarily mad, so we're killing time until he finds
a way of sabotaging the Archangel Network and putting everything back to normal.
Russell T. Davies' biggest problem - and I've said this before, but it's never been
more relevent - is that he doesn't understand what "war" means. We were promised
a "war on Earth" in "Army of Ghosts", but what we actually got were a couple of
pitched battles and then a whacking great reset switch. Fortunately, the rest of the
story was good enough to distract us from this, and the same could be said for "The
Parting of the Ways". But wars don't end with the push of a button. Now we've got
the biggest catastrophe so far, and I have a terrible feeling that all the twaddle
about the Archangel Network is only there so that the Doctor's team can use it as
this year's spurious doomsday weapon.
I also have a terrible feeling, more a nightmare than a rational response, that "The
Last of the Time Lords" will feature a shock ending in which David Tennant
regenerates into Matt Lucas. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it'd be somehow
typical of the kind of mistake this series is starting to make.
And: "Paradox Machine"? Dear God, even I never sank that low. It's like The
Ancestor Cell all over again.
Saturday, 23 June 2007
The Doctor Who Thing (Week Twelve)
Boring.
Boring.
Boring.
Christ, "The Sound of Drums" was boring.
Ten minutes in, I was bored, but looked at the clock and said "Hell, there's thirty-five
minutes left, it can still be good". Twenty minutes in, I was bored, but looked at the
clock and said "Hell, there's twenty-five minutes left, it can still be good". Thirty
minutes in…
…you get the idea.
Boring.
Boring.
Boring.
Pointless.
Self-indulgent.
Boring.
Arse.
Not one single redeeming feature. Nothing interesting in the whole episode.
Nothing worth watching in the entire 45 minutes.
Just… boring.
Boring, and based on the media-happy conceit that presenting John Simm as a
Time Lord will excuse everything. Sorry, but no, it doesn't work that way: John
Simm just isn't very good. He's flat, dull, humourless (which is to say, he attempts
humour, but it doesn't come off), and as drab as everything else in the episode.
Setting him up as the anti-Tennant would only work if he were as sparkly as
Tennant. He patently isn't. He's… boring.
Boring.
Boring.
Pointless.
Self-indulgent…
…like "Aliens of London", but without the surprise value…
…arse.
Russell… ? You've lost it. Sorry, but you've just lost it. It's boring. You're trying to
pull off exactly the same trick you used two years ago, and no trick works twice. So
stop it.
Boring.
Boring.
Really, really boring. No-point-even-watching-the-second-half boring. "Doctor Who
has jumped the shark" boring.
I mean, we did the "Evil Tony Blair" idea in 2005. Bit late to go through the same
shit now, don't you think?
Boring.
Boring.
Boring.
Christ, "The Sound of Drums" was boring.
Ten minutes in, I was bored, but looked at the clock and said "Hell, there's thirty-five
minutes left, it can still be good". Twenty minutes in, I was bored, but looked at the
clock and said "Hell, there's twenty-five minutes left, it can still be good". Thirty
minutes in…
…you get the idea.
Boring.
Boring.
Boring.
Pointless.
Self-indulgent.
Boring.
Arse.
Not one single redeeming feature. Nothing interesting in the whole episode.
Nothing worth watching in the entire 45 minutes.
Just… boring.
Boring, and based on the media-happy conceit that presenting John Simm as a
Time Lord will excuse everything. Sorry, but no, it doesn't work that way: John
Simm just isn't very good. He's flat, dull, humourless (which is to say, he attempts
humour, but it doesn't come off), and as drab as everything else in the episode.
Setting him up as the anti-Tennant would only work if he were as sparkly as
Tennant. He patently isn't. He's… boring.
Boring.
Boring.
Pointless.
Self-indulgent…
…like "Aliens of London", but without the surprise value…
…arse.
Russell… ? You've lost it. Sorry, but you've just lost it. It's boring. You're trying to
pull off exactly the same trick you used two years ago, and no trick works twice. So
stop it.
Boring.
Boring.
Really, really boring. No-point-even-watching-the-second-half boring. "Doctor Who
has jumped the shark" boring.
I mean, we did the "Evil Tony Blair" idea in 2005. Bit late to go through the same
shit now, don't you think?
Boring.
Saturday, 2 June 2007
The Family of Blood
This week I'd like to ignore the complex issues of mortality and social responsibility raised by "The Family of Blood", and talk about monsters. Old monsters. Dirty old stinking monsters.
Once, many years ago - or at least, more than ten, which qualifies as "many" because I'm attempting to sound wise while still retaining a facade of youthful enthusiasm - I read a Doctor Who book in which the villain was a malignant bodiless intelligence who could control the minds of human beings. On the whole, this was no more interesting than any of the other malignant bodiless intelligences we've seen over the years, yet I still found myself wondering about the similarities between this spurious new aether-monster and the Great Intelligence from "The Abominable Snowmen" (1967, although you probably knew that). And, weirdly assuming that this was "continuity" rather than a desperate lack of imagination, I heard myself think: 'Wow, the Great Intelligence! This might be its first appearance in the series for nearly thirty years!'
Looking back on it, this was clearly a moment of epiphany. The moment when I was hit by the sudden, shocking realisation that… if it did turn out to be the Great Intelligence, then it wouldn't actually make the story any more interesting.
This revelation was less obvious than it might now seem. Bear in mind that I entered fandom (of a kind) via Doctor Who Weekly, and learned most of what I knew about the history of the series from chunky "anniversary" volumes like Peter Haining's Doctor Who: A Celebration, now clogging up the shelves of Oxfam shops nationwide. Most of these books were hugely inaccurate, but that's beside the point. In the years before cheap video, the fans were obsessed with the series' past - a past we never thought we'd actually see, not even the bits that hadn't been taped over by the BBC - leading to intense debates about whether the Daleks or the Master were the Doctor's greatest enemy, depending on whether you counted their appearances in terms of stories or individual episodes. I was part of the generation which thought about Doctor Who in much the same way that American sports fans think about baseball, with scorecards and statistics for every occasion: part of me still "knows" that there are nine-and-a-half Cybermen adventures, even though this information is clearly out-of-date as well as completely useless. In the 1980s, the return of any "old" monster was greeted with a great whooping and cheering, because (in effect) it improved that monster's batting average. Even the producer came to think this way after a while, which is why he kept bringing back the Master even when everyone was sick of the bastard. So, a brand-new story featuring an arch-enemy not seen since 1967…? Even if it only happened in print rather than on TV, it still scored points. As if attaching the name of something from the before-I-was-born era of Doctor Who was in some way an excuse for the wretched banality of it all.
I've been thinking about this a lot, in the wake of "Human Nature". For all its highs, there are parts of the episode which just seem slow, but… not in the ways we might expect. The slow bits aren't the "talky" bits: in fact, the three-and-a-half-sided love-triangle between the Doctor, the New Girl, the Semi-Doctor and This Year's Love Interest are a pleasant reminder of what things were like in the days of "proper" telly, when characters were allowed to have quiet conversations and not everything had to be rapid-cut or filmed with a shaky hand-camera. No, the slow bits are the "monstery" bits. Aliens disguised as human beings are never interesting, and in the case of "Human Nature", they spend the whole episode establishing themselves as generic body-snatchers. In a series that treats spaceships and bodily possessions as an everyday occurrence, it really shouldn't take four minutes of screen-time for Baines to find a UFO and then demonstrate that he's been taken over. We've seen all of this before, many, many times, so it's not as if we need to be told every little detail. Nor do we need all those scenes of possessed people acting out-of-character and plotting amongst themselves, when we know they're going to say exactly the same things that alien plotters always say in these situations. Because while the Family of Blood is indulging in all this routine villainy, the regulars are doing something much more involving, and even the fourteen-year-old boy on the games field is going all Twelve Monkeys on us.
But: a-hah, I thought. A-hah. The Doctor describes these aliens as hunters. They track their prey by smell. They have a strong sense of family. They insert themselves into human bodies, they've got a thing for strange gases, and they clearly prefer fat victims. Even Rebekah Staton looks like a younger, cuter Annette Badland. Is the message not clear, I asked myself? After all, the villains in the original novel of Human Nature were far less generic, and why would any writer make his own creations less interesting unless he were planning to turn them into some other form of monster? In short: are these not the Slitheen, or at least some other Raxicoricofallapatorian family? Is this not likely to be the big twist in the second half of the story? True, they seem more reliant on other people's flesh than the Slitheen we used to know, and their mother is so degenerate that she's become a vapour who lives inside a novelty paperweight (unless, of course, she's a Slitheen guff who's somehow acquired the power of speech). But they have so much else in common, even more so than the Bane from the Sarah-Jane pilot, who might be considered Slitheen wannabes anyway. Then there's the curious fact that although we don't see any Slitheen when Smith flips through his Journal of Impossible Things, there's a later scene in which Nurse Redfern specifically points to a portrait of one, just so we get a close-up of its smug Raxicoricofallapatorian face. As if we're being gently prodded to remember something. Oh, yes: ah-hah is very much the word.
I thought.
The Slitheen turned out to be like all other gas-men, though: I waited for them all day, and they never turned up. Now I feel a sense of disappointment that's wholly of my own making. But the question remains… even if the School Bully and the Scary Little Girl had unzipped their heads and revealed themselves to have big green baby-faces, would that have made any difference? Because whatever their true nature had turned out to be (and it's got to be said, their status as vaguely-defined near-immortals seems to have served the plot rather well in the end), it wouldn't have changed the fact that the first half of the story is still a bit slow when the bad guys are on the screen, or that the Family is still made up of generic body-snatchers. The Slitheen in "Aliens of London" work because they avoid the usual gamut of "possession" clichés: putting big flabby monsters inside politicians isn't an attempt to generate hokey sci-fi suspense, it's a way of turning them into Hogarth-style grotesques. They don't waste time creeping about the place with mad staring eyes, the way the Family of Blood does. Whatever you call the villains in "Human Nature", hokey sci-fi suspense is their stock-in trade, and it's the one whacking great flaw in the story. Although admittedly, they automatically become more interesting once they're dumped in collapsing galaxies or trapped in mirrors.
I've never believed that a single line of dialogue, or even a single name, is enough to change the basis of an entire script. Generations of fanboys have (for example) tried to claim that "Image of the Fendahl" raises the stakes of the whole series, because it pits the Doctor against an enemy which "is" death, and yet… we only know it's supposed to "be" death because the Doctor says so, once, in a single line of a single scene. Watch the rest of the story, and the Fendahl just looks like any other poxy life-sucking monster we've seen over the years. And clearly, a generic disembodied intelligence doesn't become any more worthwhile if it's a generic disembodied intelligence from 1967, although it took me a distressingly long time to break the '80s fan-conditioning and notice this. Likewise, only Mark Braxton would be a big enough arse to believe that if the Doctor refers to some giant CGI crabs as "Macra" - rather than as "Crabulons", or "Clawrentulas", or "Sniptrodines", or any other spurious sci-fi name - then it changes the nature of an episode to such a degree that it's even worthy of a mention in the Radio Times. Yet somehow, I find myself disappointed that a bunch of family-obsessed hunting-monsters in 2007 don't have the same name as a bunch of near-identical family-obsessed hunting-monsters from 2005. Even by my standards, this is irrational.
Mind you… given that the Family wants to be the Doctor, it's tempting to imagine that each member of the group is a distorted aspect of the Doctor himself, especially since this is the only twenty-first century story in which we see the (hurriedly-sketched) faces of his previous selves. We might suppose that the Fat Bloke is Colin Baker, or that the One Who Looks Much Too Young is Peter Davison, and they've even got an army of Jon Pertwees circa Worzel Gummidge.
Once, many years ago - or at least, more than ten, which qualifies as "many" because I'm attempting to sound wise while still retaining a facade of youthful enthusiasm - I read a Doctor Who book in which the villain was a malignant bodiless intelligence who could control the minds of human beings. On the whole, this was no more interesting than any of the other malignant bodiless intelligences we've seen over the years, yet I still found myself wondering about the similarities between this spurious new aether-monster and the Great Intelligence from "The Abominable Snowmen" (1967, although you probably knew that). And, weirdly assuming that this was "continuity" rather than a desperate lack of imagination, I heard myself think: 'Wow, the Great Intelligence! This might be its first appearance in the series for nearly thirty years!'
Looking back on it, this was clearly a moment of epiphany. The moment when I was hit by the sudden, shocking realisation that… if it did turn out to be the Great Intelligence, then it wouldn't actually make the story any more interesting.
This revelation was less obvious than it might now seem. Bear in mind that I entered fandom (of a kind) via Doctor Who Weekly, and learned most of what I knew about the history of the series from chunky "anniversary" volumes like Peter Haining's Doctor Who: A Celebration, now clogging up the shelves of Oxfam shops nationwide. Most of these books were hugely inaccurate, but that's beside the point. In the years before cheap video, the fans were obsessed with the series' past - a past we never thought we'd actually see, not even the bits that hadn't been taped over by the BBC - leading to intense debates about whether the Daleks or the Master were the Doctor's greatest enemy, depending on whether you counted their appearances in terms of stories or individual episodes. I was part of the generation which thought about Doctor Who in much the same way that American sports fans think about baseball, with scorecards and statistics for every occasion: part of me still "knows" that there are nine-and-a-half Cybermen adventures, even though this information is clearly out-of-date as well as completely useless. In the 1980s, the return of any "old" monster was greeted with a great whooping and cheering, because (in effect) it improved that monster's batting average. Even the producer came to think this way after a while, which is why he kept bringing back the Master even when everyone was sick of the bastard. So, a brand-new story featuring an arch-enemy not seen since 1967…? Even if it only happened in print rather than on TV, it still scored points. As if attaching the name of something from the before-I-was-born era of Doctor Who was in some way an excuse for the wretched banality of it all.
I've been thinking about this a lot, in the wake of "Human Nature". For all its highs, there are parts of the episode which just seem slow, but… not in the ways we might expect. The slow bits aren't the "talky" bits: in fact, the three-and-a-half-sided love-triangle between the Doctor, the New Girl, the Semi-Doctor and This Year's Love Interest are a pleasant reminder of what things were like in the days of "proper" telly, when characters were allowed to have quiet conversations and not everything had to be rapid-cut or filmed with a shaky hand-camera. No, the slow bits are the "monstery" bits. Aliens disguised as human beings are never interesting, and in the case of "Human Nature", they spend the whole episode establishing themselves as generic body-snatchers. In a series that treats spaceships and bodily possessions as an everyday occurrence, it really shouldn't take four minutes of screen-time for Baines to find a UFO and then demonstrate that he's been taken over. We've seen all of this before, many, many times, so it's not as if we need to be told every little detail. Nor do we need all those scenes of possessed people acting out-of-character and plotting amongst themselves, when we know they're going to say exactly the same things that alien plotters always say in these situations. Because while the Family of Blood is indulging in all this routine villainy, the regulars are doing something much more involving, and even the fourteen-year-old boy on the games field is going all Twelve Monkeys on us.
But: a-hah, I thought. A-hah. The Doctor describes these aliens as hunters. They track their prey by smell. They have a strong sense of family. They insert themselves into human bodies, they've got a thing for strange gases, and they clearly prefer fat victims. Even Rebekah Staton looks like a younger, cuter Annette Badland. Is the message not clear, I asked myself? After all, the villains in the original novel of Human Nature were far less generic, and why would any writer make his own creations less interesting unless he were planning to turn them into some other form of monster? In short: are these not the Slitheen, or at least some other Raxicoricofallapatorian family? Is this not likely to be the big twist in the second half of the story? True, they seem more reliant on other people's flesh than the Slitheen we used to know, and their mother is so degenerate that she's become a vapour who lives inside a novelty paperweight (unless, of course, she's a Slitheen guff who's somehow acquired the power of speech). But they have so much else in common, even more so than the Bane from the Sarah-Jane pilot, who might be considered Slitheen wannabes anyway. Then there's the curious fact that although we don't see any Slitheen when Smith flips through his Journal of Impossible Things, there's a later scene in which Nurse Redfern specifically points to a portrait of one, just so we get a close-up of its smug Raxicoricofallapatorian face. As if we're being gently prodded to remember something. Oh, yes: ah-hah is very much the word.
I thought.
The Slitheen turned out to be like all other gas-men, though: I waited for them all day, and they never turned up. Now I feel a sense of disappointment that's wholly of my own making. But the question remains… even if the School Bully and the Scary Little Girl had unzipped their heads and revealed themselves to have big green baby-faces, would that have made any difference? Because whatever their true nature had turned out to be (and it's got to be said, their status as vaguely-defined near-immortals seems to have served the plot rather well in the end), it wouldn't have changed the fact that the first half of the story is still a bit slow when the bad guys are on the screen, or that the Family is still made up of generic body-snatchers. The Slitheen in "Aliens of London" work because they avoid the usual gamut of "possession" clichés: putting big flabby monsters inside politicians isn't an attempt to generate hokey sci-fi suspense, it's a way of turning them into Hogarth-style grotesques. They don't waste time creeping about the place with mad staring eyes, the way the Family of Blood does. Whatever you call the villains in "Human Nature", hokey sci-fi suspense is their stock-in trade, and it's the one whacking great flaw in the story. Although admittedly, they automatically become more interesting once they're dumped in collapsing galaxies or trapped in mirrors.
I've never believed that a single line of dialogue, or even a single name, is enough to change the basis of an entire script. Generations of fanboys have (for example) tried to claim that "Image of the Fendahl" raises the stakes of the whole series, because it pits the Doctor against an enemy which "is" death, and yet… we only know it's supposed to "be" death because the Doctor says so, once, in a single line of a single scene. Watch the rest of the story, and the Fendahl just looks like any other poxy life-sucking monster we've seen over the years. And clearly, a generic disembodied intelligence doesn't become any more worthwhile if it's a generic disembodied intelligence from 1967, although it took me a distressingly long time to break the '80s fan-conditioning and notice this. Likewise, only Mark Braxton would be a big enough arse to believe that if the Doctor refers to some giant CGI crabs as "Macra" - rather than as "Crabulons", or "Clawrentulas", or "Sniptrodines", or any other spurious sci-fi name - then it changes the nature of an episode to such a degree that it's even worthy of a mention in the Radio Times. Yet somehow, I find myself disappointed that a bunch of family-obsessed hunting-monsters in 2007 don't have the same name as a bunch of near-identical family-obsessed hunting-monsters from 2005. Even by my standards, this is irrational.
Mind you… given that the Family wants to be the Doctor, it's tempting to imagine that each member of the group is a distorted aspect of the Doctor himself, especially since this is the only twenty-first century story in which we see the (hurriedly-sketched) faces of his previous selves. We might suppose that the Fat Bloke is Colin Baker, or that the One Who Looks Much Too Young is Peter Davison, and they've even got an army of Jon Pertwees circa Worzel Gummidge.
Saturday, 19 May 2007
42
Did I mention how much I hate sci-fi…? I'm fairly sure I did, but what bothers me is how often I have to say it. For the most part, this is because it's much easier to be irritated by sci-fi fans than it used to be. There was a time when these people would (quite rightly) be routinely dismissed as the petty, insular, self-obsessed tedium-engines they really are, but now they've somehow managed to acquire a media-voice of their own. Just five years ago, it would have been unthinkable for anyone who believed that Babylon 5 was the height of dramatic sophistication - or, in modern-day terms, anyone who actually thinks that Heroes is a serious television programme - to have made themselves heard beyond the pages of SFX, yet now these people are somehow managing to get their point across as if… well, as if they had intelligent opinions of some description. Perhaps what I find most objectionable about this is that they keep trying to drag Doctor Who into things, although on the plus side, at least geek-scum only like the really rubbish episodes of Doctor Who which are "dark" and "cult" instead of the interesting funny ones. The most obvious living symptom of this trend is Mark Braxton, nerd-in-residence at the Radio Times, who doesn't seem to acknowledge anything as watchable unless it involves a bloated story-arc about interstellar warfare (his review of "Gridlock", which completely ignored the story and seemed to believe that the cock-obvious "revelations" about the Time Lords were the whole point of the episode, would have been hilarious if it hadn't been so depressing).
In terms of modern-day Doctor Who, the obvious acid test is "Love & Monsters". We could have predicted that nerd-bores of all descriptions would hate it, partly because of its complete lack of po-faced angst and partly because it's actually a competent piece of television. No, "competent" does it a disservice: "Love & Monsters" is driven by such a well-timed, well-executed dynamic that you can see the structure of the story even if you turn the sound down [here we pause, briefly, to allow any geek-scum reading this article to say "well, that would certainly improve the episode, hahahahahahahah… oh, God, I'm so lonely"], and the editing alone should be enough to win awards in a sane world. But even though it's clearly not going to be a hit with sci-fi fans, what I find most striking is the fact that the division is so binary. As far as I'm aware, every single sci-fi bore in the country hates it. And, connected with this but just as odd, everyone I'd consider "interesting" seems to like it. This puzzled me, at first, simply because nothing else I know of has ever caused such a clean division. I've even met interesting Tories in my time, but "Love & Monsters"…? Nope, it's straight down the middle. Bores hate it, non-bores don't. (N.B. Here I'm only talking about grown-ups, naturally. Like "Kinda" before it, "Love & Monsters" fails in at least one of its Doctor Who duties, since it'd obviously be dull and bewildering for children. Even I wouldn't have liked it, as a ten-year-old. We live and learn.)
It only started to make sense when a former acquaintance of mine - a man who bears a closer resemblance to the Comic-Book Guy from The Simpsons than any other human being I've ever met, and who has complete video collections of every iteration of Star Trek - expressed his own personal disgust at "Love & Monsters" by saying that in order to demonstrate his contempt, he was thinking of sending a Hawaiian shirt to Russell T. Davies. What he meant, of course, was that he saw a similarity between "Love & Monsters" and the most ludicrous excesses of the John Nathan-Turner producership. As the early JN-T years were "dark" and "gothic" and "serious", and all the other things that sci-fans like (although to be fair, this was the early '80s, in the days when Blade Runner was new and those things still seemed interesting), he was specifically referring to the latter part of the Nathan-Turner epoch. The age which gave us the still-unspeakable horror of Season 24.
Now, at first, this comparison shocked and appalled me. Granted, I can see how a creation like the Abzorbaloff might not go down well with someone who thinks that Star Trek: Enterprise is "bad television" because it contradicts the continuity of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and I can see how such a man might consider both the Abzorbaloff and (say) the Kandyman to be much of a muchness. I can even see how he might consider both to be "silly" while considering shape-changing robots whose spines glow when they have sex to be "serious", and indeed, I might even expect him to feel that way. But the grotesque, cack-handed ineptitude of "Time and the Rani", compared to a script so super-aware of the conventions of Doctor Who (and, more importantly, of the way we perceive those conventions) that the red bucket / blue bucket sequence seems to make sense even though there's no earthly rational explanation for it...? I'm sorry, I have to object.
Wait, though. Wait, because here we're on the verge of understanding something critical about Doctor Who, both then and now. Before we try to see things through the drab, let's-pretend-that-liking-spaceships-and-aliens-make-us-"imaginative" viewpoint of the average sci-fi fan, let's ask ourselves one question. What, fundamentally, did John Nathan-Turner think he was doing? Because in 1987, the year of "Time and the Rani", "Delta and the Bannermen", and two others which are almost as bad but not quite, the producer simply didn't see himself as making a sci-fi show in any sense. Lost in showbiz and obsessed with TV as an entity in itself, Nathan-Turner saw Doctor Who as - to sum it up in a single phrase - The Morecambe and Wise Show with monsters. The idea of it being a "cult" programme, in the '90s sense of the word, was of no interest to him at all. He saw it as part of a long tradition of BBC variety programming, with laughs, frolics, guest stars, big impressive sets, and even the odd musical number if possible. Let's keep that thought in our minds for a while: The Morecambe and Wise Show with monsters. If you're a sci-fi fan, then such a thing is an abomination. Even if you like Doctor Who but feel ambivalent-at-best towards programmes about office-like starships and people with prosthetic foreheads, then it sounds like a kind of heresy. But…
…but just for a moment, try taking it out of context. Forget that we're talking about Doctor Who, a programme which means something slightly different to every single one of us, a programme so varied in its format and its history that it sparks more arguments about what it "should be" than any other series ever made. Just suppose that the Radio Times advertised a brand new programme which described itself as "The Morecambe and Wise Show with monsters". Would you watch it? Because I bloody well would. In fact, I'd positively go out of my way to see it, whereas - for example - I've never felt remotely compelled to find someone with Sky and get them to show me a video of Firefly. Fair enough, I'd probably watch Firefly if it were on terrestrial, but "sort of like Star Trek although everyone says it's better" just isn't going to enthuse me. The Morecambe and Wise Show with monsters? Now, that sounds like proper television.
So, the problem with the later Nathan-Turner epoch isn't that there was anything wrong with his mission statement. Nor is it that Doctor Who "shouldn't be like that", since it's been so many things in its time that a few more mutations couldn't hurt. The problem is that he wasn't competent enough to get away with it. If we refine the Morecambe-and-Wise-Show-with-monsters idea, and interpret it as a hybrid of light entertainment and gonzo adventure, then… in order to be successful, the resultant programme would need to involve a genuinely contemporary sense of what "light entertainment" means and a genuinely contemporary sense of what "adventure" means. Yet "Delta and the Bannermen" is so far from either of those things that it's an obvious embarrassment to anyone who comes within ten yards of the final broadcast. Nobody in 1987 would have found it lightly entertaining or remotely adventurous, and even at the time, it just looked old, crap and inane. Imagine if someone did it right, though. Imagine they made a version of Doctor Who in which the jokes, the guest stars, the showbiz spectacle and the whacking great set-pieces were more important that the gloomy sci-fi posturing. Imagine they made a version of Doctor Who which was fast, funny, family-friendly, and perfectly in tune with the tastes of the age, a version which could get away with songs, sketches and blatant parodies of other TV programmes without the audience finding it weird.
Do I even need to say it…? We don't have to imagine, because that's what we've got. My geek-acquaintance was right all the time, though what he saw as an insult is a compliment in most normal people's eyes: modern-day Doctor Who is like The Morecambe and Wise Show with monsters. The difference between the Nathan-Turner version of the programme and the Russell T. Davies version is simply that Davies is competent. "Love & Monsters" may be the most blatant example of this, not least because of the Abzorbaloff - the thing which sci-fi bores hate most of all, since they positively demand that all monsters should be "serious" (these are, remember, the kind of people who believe that "intelligent conversation" means talking about how good the CGI is on Gollum) - but really, it works to the same pattern as all of Davies' other episodes. If you take it as read that this is a hybrid of fantasy drama and laugh-a-minute-Christmas special (and let's face it, David Tennant meeting Queen Victoria has more in common with Eric Morecambe meeting Cleopatra than with Commander Seriousface meeting the Ambassador from Mangooska Six), then you start to realise that we're living in John Nathan-Turner's dream… whereas John Nathan-Turner himself just forced us to live in his nightmare. So far we've had aliens who give away their alienness by breaking wind rather than by having glowing eyes or stiff little fingers, we've had robots with the voices of twenty-first-century TV presenters, and we've had two Christmas editions full of murderous festive decorations. All of these things have worked perfectly, and only a "serious" sci-fi fan would be insipid enough to think that Peter Kay in a giant green potato outfit is in some way an aberration. Yes, if you actually believe that "Aliens of London" is meant to be serious speculative drama rather than just great television, then you're not going to enjoy it very much. But Davies' own description of it as "like Spitting Image" is telling. Babylon 5 it ain't, thank Christ.
(A side-issue here: in the eyes sci-fi fans, Doctor Who is hamstrung in a way that no other programme ever has been. As I've said, we all have our own ideas of what the programme "should be" like, and we all have our own expectations of what any given episode is supposed to show us. This means that as far as geeks are concerned, Doctor Who is actually allowed to do less than most sci-fi / fantasy series, even though it's got a mandate to do an awful lot more. If a "serious" sci-fi series did an off-the-wall comedy episode in which someone investigates the central characters from an outsider's point of view, then it'd be considered witty and cutting-edge. In fact, The X-Files did exactly that, yet somehow "Jose Chung's From Outer Space" is considered a masterpiece while "Love & Monsters" is considered an abomination. And if a "serious" sci-fi series took a week out from epic story-arcs about interdimensional warfare to tell a small, low-key story about an emotionally-damaged family in suburbia being haunted by a small, low-key monster, then it'd be seen as a breakthrough, yet old-school Doctor Who fans refuse to embrace "Fear Her" because it's nothing like "The Talons of Weng-Chiang". Note that even "Rose" and "The End of the World" were slated by dull people on first broadcast, for being "too fast" and "too comical"… the nay-sayers weren't happy until "The Unquiet Dead" gave them a self-consciously "cult" episode, effectively an instalment of Star Trek: The Next Generation with Charles Dickens instead of Mark Twain, with lots of dark spaces and no scary bright colours that might attract teenage girls.)
From my point of view, the trouble with current Doctor Who is that not everybody shares Davies' vision. Here I don't just mean Mark Braxton, Comic-Boy Guy, or any other "cult" dullard, but the other writers. Because the truth is that if you start out with the notion that Doctor Who is a sci-fi series, then you'll become trapped in a universe where only sci-fi things can happen. People have seriously tried to claim that both "The Impossible Planet" and "The Lazarus Experiment" are "traditional" Doctor Who stories, presumably because they both involve lots of pointless running-away-from-things, but this is clearly bunk: no Doctor Who story of the twentieth century was remotely like either of them. In fact, both are effectively straight-to-video sci-fi-horror movies, with all the horror taken out. Yet once again, the perception of Doctor Who as sci-fi leads people to connect it with that kind of sci-fi, as if "traditional" takes in everything from William Hartnell shouting at Aztecs to Vin Diesel hitting an alien in the face with a flamethrower. If you start with (ooh, let's say) a routine story about predictable space-explorers facing predictable enemies in a predictable environment, then it's not going to get any more interesting just because you put David Tennant in the middle of things and get him to talk faster than everyone else. The current belief seems to be that if you've got a po-faced action-adventure about spaceships, then forcing the characters to do something "quirky" every five minutes somehow changes its nature. But it didn't work in "The Impossible Planet" (in which the Doctor hugs the captain before becoming just as dull as all the other crew-fodder), and it doesn't work in "42" (in which questions about Elvis vs. the Beatles are apparently supposed to distract us from the overall twaddle-quotient).
If you seriously believe that this series is meant to be sci-fi, then you can probably put up with the banality of it. If you're the kind of person who enjoys droning on about how great the effects in the new Spider-Man movie are, then you might even enjoy it. If you believe that this is The Morecambe and Wise Show with monsters, on the other hand, then… you can't help remembering that this is the series which, on a good day, considers an Irish cat-person played by Ardal O'Hanlan in a Biggles hat to be the baseline of normality. Michelle Collins in a sweaty t-shirt, like the weird belief that adding a 24-style ticking-clock somehow stops the whole thing being a third-rate Aliens knock-off, is very nearly an insult.
Yes, we all have our own ideas about what this programme "should be" and "shouldn't be". Frankly, my only strong opinion is that it shouldn't be the kind of programme that sci-fi fans like, because they're the scum of the Earth and they're always wrong about everything. Aside from that, I don't really care what it's like, as long as it's not precisely like anything else. And now the series has successfully set the tone - now we've established that it's comfortable doing everything from sit-com to Broadway musical numbers - its chief problem is that it simply isn't mental enough. As I've said before, in a world where there are giant dinosaurs and shape-changing robots on every ad-break, a huge mutated scorpion-beast a la "The Lazarus Experiment" is simply ordinary… whereas, for example, armies of gasmask-people saying 'are you my mummy?' simply isn't. Bog-standard Starfleet-people "possessed" by sun-energy isn't merely ordinary, it's positively useless. This is never going to be a "serious" sci-fi programme, so isn't it time to go even further the other way? Because once you've turned Trinny and Suzannah into Playmobil androids with face-removing weaponry, there really isn't any turning back.
But if we're specifically talking about "42", then let's bear this in mind. The real-time clock marks it out as an obvious parody of 24 (even if it cheats and skips several minutes halfway through), yet three-quarters of the people who watched this episode on first broadcast will never have watched 24. "Love & Monsters" and "Kinda" may have left the children behind, but this is the first episode of Doctor Who which doesn't make any sense at all unless you're a smug, media-aware adult who's seen the specific source material. If you're unfamiliar with 24, then it just looks like a bunch of mediocre actors running up and down corridors. And that's exactly what it is. A 42-minute sci-fi in-joke, not a real story at all.
In terms of modern-day Doctor Who, the obvious acid test is "Love & Monsters". We could have predicted that nerd-bores of all descriptions would hate it, partly because of its complete lack of po-faced angst and partly because it's actually a competent piece of television. No, "competent" does it a disservice: "Love & Monsters" is driven by such a well-timed, well-executed dynamic that you can see the structure of the story even if you turn the sound down [here we pause, briefly, to allow any geek-scum reading this article to say "well, that would certainly improve the episode, hahahahahahahah… oh, God, I'm so lonely"], and the editing alone should be enough to win awards in a sane world. But even though it's clearly not going to be a hit with sci-fi fans, what I find most striking is the fact that the division is so binary. As far as I'm aware, every single sci-fi bore in the country hates it. And, connected with this but just as odd, everyone I'd consider "interesting" seems to like it. This puzzled me, at first, simply because nothing else I know of has ever caused such a clean division. I've even met interesting Tories in my time, but "Love & Monsters"…? Nope, it's straight down the middle. Bores hate it, non-bores don't. (N.B. Here I'm only talking about grown-ups, naturally. Like "Kinda" before it, "Love & Monsters" fails in at least one of its Doctor Who duties, since it'd obviously be dull and bewildering for children. Even I wouldn't have liked it, as a ten-year-old. We live and learn.)
It only started to make sense when a former acquaintance of mine - a man who bears a closer resemblance to the Comic-Book Guy from The Simpsons than any other human being I've ever met, and who has complete video collections of every iteration of Star Trek - expressed his own personal disgust at "Love & Monsters" by saying that in order to demonstrate his contempt, he was thinking of sending a Hawaiian shirt to Russell T. Davies. What he meant, of course, was that he saw a similarity between "Love & Monsters" and the most ludicrous excesses of the John Nathan-Turner producership. As the early JN-T years were "dark" and "gothic" and "serious", and all the other things that sci-fans like (although to be fair, this was the early '80s, in the days when Blade Runner was new and those things still seemed interesting), he was specifically referring to the latter part of the Nathan-Turner epoch. The age which gave us the still-unspeakable horror of Season 24.
Now, at first, this comparison shocked and appalled me. Granted, I can see how a creation like the Abzorbaloff might not go down well with someone who thinks that Star Trek: Enterprise is "bad television" because it contradicts the continuity of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and I can see how such a man might consider both the Abzorbaloff and (say) the Kandyman to be much of a muchness. I can even see how he might consider both to be "silly" while considering shape-changing robots whose spines glow when they have sex to be "serious", and indeed, I might even expect him to feel that way. But the grotesque, cack-handed ineptitude of "Time and the Rani", compared to a script so super-aware of the conventions of Doctor Who (and, more importantly, of the way we perceive those conventions) that the red bucket / blue bucket sequence seems to make sense even though there's no earthly rational explanation for it...? I'm sorry, I have to object.
Wait, though. Wait, because here we're on the verge of understanding something critical about Doctor Who, both then and now. Before we try to see things through the drab, let's-pretend-that-liking
…but just for a moment, try taking it out of context. Forget that we're talking about Doctor Who, a programme which means something slightly different to every single one of us, a programme so varied in its format and its history that it sparks more arguments about what it "should be" than any other series ever made. Just suppose that the Radio Times advertised a brand new programme which described itself as "The Morecambe and Wise Show with monsters". Would you watch it? Because I bloody well would. In fact, I'd positively go out of my way to see it, whereas - for example - I've never felt remotely compelled to find someone with Sky and get them to show me a video of Firefly. Fair enough, I'd probably watch Firefly if it were on terrestrial, but "sort of like Star Trek although everyone says it's better" just isn't going to enthuse me. The Morecambe and Wise Show with monsters? Now, that sounds like proper television.
So, the problem with the later Nathan-Turner epoch isn't that there was anything wrong with his mission statement. Nor is it that Doctor Who "shouldn't be like that", since it's been so many things in its time that a few more mutations couldn't hurt. The problem is that he wasn't competent enough to get away with it. If we refine the Morecambe-and-Wise-Show-with-monsters idea, and interpret it as a hybrid of light entertainment and gonzo adventure, then… in order to be successful, the resultant programme would need to involve a genuinely contemporary sense of what "light entertainment" means and a genuinely contemporary sense of what "adventure" means. Yet "Delta and the Bannermen" is so far from either of those things that it's an obvious embarrassment to anyone who comes within ten yards of the final broadcast. Nobody in 1987 would have found it lightly entertaining or remotely adventurous, and even at the time, it just looked old, crap and inane. Imagine if someone did it right, though. Imagine they made a version of Doctor Who in which the jokes, the guest stars, the showbiz spectacle and the whacking great set-pieces were more important that the gloomy sci-fi posturing. Imagine they made a version of Doctor Who which was fast, funny, family-friendly, and perfectly in tune with the tastes of the age, a version which could get away with songs, sketches and blatant parodies of other TV programmes without the audience finding it weird.
Do I even need to say it…? We don't have to imagine, because that's what we've got. My geek-acquaintance was right all the time, though what he saw as an insult is a compliment in most normal people's eyes: modern-day Doctor Who is like The Morecambe and Wise Show with monsters. The difference between the Nathan-Turner version of the programme and the Russell T. Davies version is simply that Davies is competent. "Love & Monsters" may be the most blatant example of this, not least because of the Abzorbaloff - the thing which sci-fi bores hate most of all, since they positively demand that all monsters should be "serious" (these are, remember, the kind of people who believe that "intelligent conversation" means talking about how good the CGI is on Gollum) - but really, it works to the same pattern as all of Davies' other episodes. If you take it as read that this is a hybrid of fantasy drama and laugh-a-minute-Christmas special (and let's face it, David Tennant meeting Queen Victoria has more in common with Eric Morecambe meeting Cleopatra than with Commander Seriousface meeting the Ambassador from Mangooska Six), then you start to realise that we're living in John Nathan-Turner's dream… whereas John Nathan-Turner himself just forced us to live in his nightmare. So far we've had aliens who give away their alienness by breaking wind rather than by having glowing eyes or stiff little fingers, we've had robots with the voices of twenty-first-century TV presenters, and we've had two Christmas editions full of murderous festive decorations. All of these things have worked perfectly, and only a "serious" sci-fi fan would be insipid enough to think that Peter Kay in a giant green potato outfit is in some way an aberration. Yes, if you actually believe that "Aliens of London" is meant to be serious speculative drama rather than just great television, then you're not going to enjoy it very much. But Davies' own description of it as "like Spitting Image" is telling. Babylon 5 it ain't, thank Christ.
(A side-issue here: in the eyes sci-fi fans, Doctor Who is hamstrung in a way that no other programme ever has been. As I've said, we all have our own ideas of what the programme "should be" like, and we all have our own expectations of what any given episode is supposed to show us. This means that as far as geeks are concerned, Doctor Who is actually allowed to do less than most sci-fi / fantasy series, even though it's got a mandate to do an awful lot more. If a "serious" sci-fi series did an off-the-wall comedy episode in which someone investigates the central characters from an outsider's point of view, then it'd be considered witty and cutting-edge. In fact, The X-Files did exactly that, yet somehow "Jose Chung's From Outer Space" is considered a masterpiece while "Love & Monsters" is considered an abomination. And if a "serious" sci-fi series took a week out from epic story-arcs about interdimensional warfare to tell a small, low-key story about an emotionally-damaged family in suburbia being haunted by a small, low-key monster, then it'd be seen as a breakthrough, yet old-school Doctor Who fans refuse to embrace "Fear Her" because it's nothing like "The Talons of Weng-Chiang". Note that even "Rose" and "The End of the World" were slated by dull people on first broadcast, for being "too fast" and "too comical"… the nay-sayers weren't happy until "The Unquiet Dead" gave them a self-consciously "cult" episode, effectively an instalment of Star Trek: The Next Generation with Charles Dickens instead of Mark Twain, with lots of dark spaces and no scary bright colours that might attract teenage girls.)
From my point of view, the trouble with current Doctor Who is that not everybody shares Davies' vision. Here I don't just mean Mark Braxton, Comic-Boy Guy, or any other "cult" dullard, but the other writers. Because the truth is that if you start out with the notion that Doctor Who is a sci-fi series, then you'll become trapped in a universe where only sci-fi things can happen. People have seriously tried to claim that both "The Impossible Planet" and "The Lazarus Experiment" are "traditional" Doctor Who stories, presumably because they both involve lots of pointless running-away-from-things, but this is clearly bunk: no Doctor Who story of the twentieth century was remotely like either of them. In fact, both are effectively straight-to-video sci-fi-horror movies, with all the horror taken out. Yet once again, the perception of Doctor Who as sci-fi leads people to connect it with that kind of sci-fi, as if "traditional" takes in everything from William Hartnell shouting at Aztecs to Vin Diesel hitting an alien in the face with a flamethrower. If you start with (ooh, let's say) a routine story about predictable space-explorers facing predictable enemies in a predictable environment, then it's not going to get any more interesting just because you put David Tennant in the middle of things and get him to talk faster than everyone else. The current belief seems to be that if you've got a po-faced action-adventure about spaceships, then forcing the characters to do something "quirky" every five minutes somehow changes its nature. But it didn't work in "The Impossible Planet" (in which the Doctor hugs the captain before becoming just as dull as all the other crew-fodder), and it doesn't work in "42" (in which questions about Elvis vs. the Beatles are apparently supposed to distract us from the overall twaddle-quotient).
If you seriously believe that this series is meant to be sci-fi, then you can probably put up with the banality of it. If you're the kind of person who enjoys droning on about how great the effects in the new Spider-Man movie are, then you might even enjoy it. If you believe that this is The Morecambe and Wise Show with monsters, on the other hand, then… you can't help remembering that this is the series which, on a good day, considers an Irish cat-person played by Ardal O'Hanlan in a Biggles hat to be the baseline of normality. Michelle Collins in a sweaty t-shirt, like the weird belief that adding a 24-style ticking-clock somehow stops the whole thing being a third-rate Aliens knock-off, is very nearly an insult.
Yes, we all have our own ideas about what this programme "should be" and "shouldn't be". Frankly, my only strong opinion is that it shouldn't be the kind of programme that sci-fi fans like, because they're the scum of the Earth and they're always wrong about everything. Aside from that, I don't really care what it's like, as long as it's not precisely like anything else. And now the series has successfully set the tone - now we've established that it's comfortable doing everything from sit-com to Broadway musical numbers - its chief problem is that it simply isn't mental enough. As I've said before, in a world where there are giant dinosaurs and shape-changing robots on every ad-break, a huge mutated scorpion-beast a la "The Lazarus Experiment" is simply ordinary… whereas, for example, armies of gasmask-people saying 'are you my mummy?' simply isn't. Bog-standard Starfleet-people "possessed" by sun-energy isn't merely ordinary, it's positively useless. This is never going to be a "serious" sci-fi programme, so isn't it time to go even further the other way? Because once you've turned Trinny and Suzannah into Playmobil androids with face-removing weaponry, there really isn't any turning back.
But if we're specifically talking about "42", then let's bear this in mind. The real-time clock marks it out as an obvious parody of 24 (even if it cheats and skips several minutes halfway through), yet three-quarters of the people who watched this episode on first broadcast will never have watched 24. "Love & Monsters" and "Kinda" may have left the children behind, but this is the first episode of Doctor Who which doesn't make any sense at all unless you're a smug, media-aware adult who's seen the specific source material. If you're unfamiliar with 24, then it just looks like a bunch of mediocre actors running up and down corridors. And that's exactly what it is. A 42-minute sci-fi in-joke, not a real story at all.
Saturday, 21 April 2007
Daleks in Manhattan
Regarding "Sec's in the City"…
Firstly, we should apologise to all Americans. True, the accents are appalling, but… it's set in '30s Manhattan, it's hugely over-the-top, and it involves monsters. So it's supposed to be like Singin' in the Rain ('I cyyyan't styyyaand him'). This aside, however…
…I love television. I hate sci-fi television. I love drama. I hate menky sci-fi drama. Helen Raynor, as a truly competent script editor, might be expected to know how television works but not care about sci-fi. And so she does, and so it is. "Daleks in Manhattan" is terrible sci-fi, yet brilliant television. Halfway through, I realised that I hadn't learned anything new or important about what's-going-on-with-the-Daleks in ten minutes, but that I felt I was being propelled forward by the plot anyway. This can only be called a result. Helen, you did a great job when you were overseeing things, and now I love you even more. Please come back.
In short: so far, the best twenty-first-century episode of Doctor Who that wasn't written by Russell T. Davies. Yes, I know Steven Moffat's very popular, but his scripts are too cynically "LOOK, EVERYBODY, LOVE MEEEEE!" for my tastes. This was just good television done well, without any personal agenda. I bloody loved it. Although I would have loved it more if the Radio Times hadn't given the cliffhanger away, obviously.
Can I mention some small historical niggles, though? One: nobody in Hooverville has his pockets turned inside-out (this was the custom in Hoovervilles, as it signified that you didn't have any spare cash hidden in your coat… turning the Doctor's pockets inside-out would have taken a long time, I know, but it might have been entertaining). Two: the mention of slavery in "Shakespeare vs. Rentaghost" may have been massively contrived and unconvincing, but in a '30s context, someone like Tallulah really should assume that the Doctor's lack of interest in Martha has more to do with race than sexuality (although it fits the overall character development, so I won't complain too hard, and at least the New Girl isn't pathologically thick this time). Three: Murray Gold. Yeah, yeah, I know he's great at writing anthems. But that song? Nobody pre-1980 could have written it. Not real '30s. Very bad parody.
Nonetheless… nothing's more satisfying than good Doctor Who, especially when the script treats Daleks as if they themselves were a period detail. "Piiigs iiin tiiime!"
Firstly, we should apologise to all Americans. True, the accents are appalling, but… it's set in '30s Manhattan, it's hugely over-the-top, and it involves monsters. So it's supposed to be like Singin' in the Rain ('I cyyyan't styyyaand him'). This aside, however…
…I love television. I hate sci-fi television. I love drama. I hate menky sci-fi drama. Helen Raynor, as a truly competent script editor, might be expected to know how television works but not care about sci-fi. And so she does, and so it is. "Daleks in Manhattan" is terrible sci-fi, yet brilliant television. Halfway through, I realised that I hadn't learned anything new or important about what's-going-on-with-the-Daleks in ten minutes, but that I felt I was being propelled forward by the plot anyway. This can only be called a result. Helen, you did a great job when you were overseeing things, and now I love you even more. Please come back.
In short: so far, the best twenty-first-century episode of Doctor Who that wasn't written by Russell T. Davies. Yes, I know Steven Moffat's very popular, but his scripts are too cynically "LOOK, EVERYBODY, LOVE MEEEEE!" for my tastes. This was just good television done well, without any personal agenda. I bloody loved it. Although I would have loved it more if the Radio Times hadn't given the cliffhanger away, obviously.
Can I mention some small historical niggles, though? One: nobody in Hooverville has his pockets turned inside-out (this was the custom in Hoovervilles, as it signified that you didn't have any spare cash hidden in your coat… turning the Doctor's pockets inside-out would have taken a long time, I know, but it might have been entertaining). Two: the mention of slavery in "Shakespeare vs. Rentaghost" may have been massively contrived and unconvincing, but in a '30s context, someone like Tallulah really should assume that the Doctor's lack of interest in Martha has more to do with race than sexuality (although it fits the overall character development, so I won't complain too hard, and at least the New Girl isn't pathologically thick this time). Three: Murray Gold. Yeah, yeah, I know he's great at writing anthems. But that song? Nobody pre-1980 could have written it. Not real '30s. Very bad parody.
Nonetheless… nothing's more satisfying than good Doctor Who, especially when the script treats Daleks as if they themselves were a period detail. "Piiigs iiin tiiime!"
Saturday, 14 April 2007
Gridlock
I found that episode strange and confusing. I had no idea where it was going, what
sort of story it was supposed to be, or how it was meant to turn out. After the first
half-hour, I still had no idea where it was going, what sort of story it was supposed
to be, or how it was meant to turn out. Its structure was utterly unlike old-fashioned
Doctor Who, utterly unlike newfangled Doctor Who, and utterly unlike anything else
on television (the best summary I can come up with, for a comedy-drama about
people trapped in little boxes in the middle of a hostile CGI world, is “Harold Pinter
Gets Giant Crabs”… or possibly “Harold Pinter Re-Writes Attack of the Clones”,
which is even more interesting). In short: I thought it was fucking fantastic. I like
anything I canʼt see coming a mile off, and this was so bizarre that even I found it
surprising. God help the little children-stroke-fanboys, since it may have been a bit
non-monstery for their tastes, as with “Love & Monsters” last year. But speaking as
a grown-up, the sheer, relentless unpredictability of “Gridlock” made it even more
exciting than the preceding football match which determined whether it was
actually broadcast. I had problems with the Shakespeare runaround because it
was a cookie-cutter script that went everywhere youʼd expect a celeb-historical
story to go, yet this… this was just downright peculiar. I sat there not knowing what
was going to happen next, and at the end of the day, thatʼs the single greatest
feature of Doctor Who. If you can predict it, then itʼs rubbish.
And, kittens! There were even kittens.
sort of story it was supposed to be, or how it was meant to turn out. After the first
half-hour, I still had no idea where it was going, what sort of story it was supposed
to be, or how it was meant to turn out. Its structure was utterly unlike old-fashioned
Doctor Who, utterly unlike newfangled Doctor Who, and utterly unlike anything else
on television (the best summary I can come up with, for a comedy-drama about
people trapped in little boxes in the middle of a hostile CGI world, is “Harold Pinter
Gets Giant Crabs”… or possibly “Harold Pinter Re-Writes Attack of the Clones”,
which is even more interesting). In short: I thought it was fucking fantastic. I like
anything I canʼt see coming a mile off, and this was so bizarre that even I found it
surprising. God help the little children-stroke-fanboys, since it may have been a bit
non-monstery for their tastes, as with “Love & Monsters” last year. But speaking as
a grown-up, the sheer, relentless unpredictability of “Gridlock” made it even more
exciting than the preceding football match which determined whether it was
actually broadcast. I had problems with the Shakespeare runaround because it
was a cookie-cutter script that went everywhere youʼd expect a celeb-historical
story to go, yet this… this was just downright peculiar. I sat there not knowing what
was going to happen next, and at the end of the day, thatʼs the single greatest
feature of Doctor Who. If you can predict it, then itʼs rubbish.
And, kittens! There were even kittens.
Saturday, 7 April 2007
The Shakespeare Code
Ahhhh, sexuality. This is always going to be a delicate area, so I'll risk the gauntlet and say: is it absolutely normal for gay writers to hate young women? I refer, as an obvious example, to "The Shakespeare Code". Written by Gareth Roberts, a great big gay man whom I've met several times and whom I rather like, although I'm aware that he's called me a dickhead behind my back on more than one occasion. (This is a fair judgement. I have no social skills, and freely accept that I'm offensive when encountered in person. If you read this log regularly, or if you've ever met me, then you'll already understand.) But even if you ignore the fact that you know the reasonably-attractive young woman is going to turn out to be an evil, two-dimensional, personality-free witch-cannibal as soon as she shows her face, and that you know the flirtatious / shallow barmaid is guaranteed to die in the first act… all of a sudden, Doctor Who's new assistant ceases to be the intelligent, inquisitive individual we saw in last week's opener, and becomes a bland, squeaky, irritating she-parrot who makes ****-obvious statements and then says "yeah?" at the end of the sentence in a desperate attempt to sound like a modern Chav-girl. (She's supposed to be training as a doctor. She doesn't know what "Bedlam" means. She doesn't understand anything Shakespeare says, even though it'd be easily comprehensible to any A-Level student. She's become a generic thick-woman sidekick, basically. Not a single line of her dialogue is either credible or likeable.)
Now, I can understand that a gay male might not particularly care about teenaged girls, obviously. But speaking as a technical heterosexual – albeit one who's sucked big **** on occasion, not in a "bi-curious" way but in a "well, why the hell shouldn't I?" way, which is perhaps what Doctor Who has really taught me over the years – I find this puzzling. I don't particularly care about seventy-year-old women, for example, yet this doesn't mean I'd turn them all into one-dimensional stereotypes if I were writing a script about an old people's home. Indeed, I'd argue that writers get better when they deliberately write against type and focus on things which aren't already within their personal experience or field of interest. But every gay writer in Doctor Who, other than Cuddly God-Bear Russell T. Davies himself, seems determined to turn each new female character into a mother-figure, a hate-object, or a human sacrifice: see also the "work" of Mark Gatiss and Matthew Jones, who routinely bump off the girls and let the mothers live. What's the root cause of this, I wonder? The affection for older women puts it beyond any accusation of misogyny, although the dislike of the sexually-active female suggests the same kind of horror which 100%-straight men are supposed to feel around 100%-gay men. I hope you can see why I'd feel uncomfortable about this. Me, I'm generally anti-horror. I'm also anti-100% of anything.
As for the rest… I think I'd rather like "The Shakespeare Code", if it weren't twice as long as it needs to be. Even my own mother thought it was a bit slow, and she's 76 years old, for Heaven's sake.
Now, I can understand that a gay male might not particularly care about teenaged girls, obviously. But speaking as a technical heterosexual – albeit one who's sucked big **** on occasion, not in a "bi-curious" way but in a "well, why the hell shouldn't I?" way, which is perhaps what Doctor Who has really taught me over the years – I find this puzzling. I don't particularly care about seventy-year-old women, for example, yet this doesn't mean I'd turn them all into one-dimensional stereotypes if I were writing a script about an old people's home. Indeed, I'd argue that writers get better when they deliberately write against type and focus on things which aren't already within their personal experience or field of interest. But every gay writer in Doctor Who, other than Cuddly God-Bear Russell T. Davies himself, seems determined to turn each new female character into a mother-figure, a hate-object, or a human sacrifice: see also the "work" of Mark Gatiss and Matthew Jones, who routinely bump off the girls and let the mothers live. What's the root cause of this, I wonder? The affection for older women puts it beyond any accusation of misogyny, although the dislike of the sexually-active female suggests the same kind of horror which 100%-straight men are supposed to feel around 100%-gay men. I hope you can see why I'd feel uncomfortable about this. Me, I'm generally anti-horror. I'm also anti-100% of anything.
As for the rest… I think I'd rather like "The Shakespeare Code", if it weren't twice as long as it needs to be. Even my own mother thought it was a bit slow, and she's 76 years old, for Heaven's sake.
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