It's Got Cows, Rocs, and Trods, Stop Complaining

The BBC is now approaching its darkest hour, and - faced with what it believes to be stiff commercial competition - would like to prove itself with television programmes that are inventive, dynamic, and of-the-moment. NO, NOT LIKE THAT! INVENTIVE, DYNAMIC, OF-THE-MOMENT, AND LIKE ALL THEIR OTHER ONES! IDIOT! So they've taken a DNA swab from the corpse of the Davies era, and realised that the best way to mass-produce new product is by using an anagram of Doctor Who, just like Torchwood did. Ergo, here are the fifteen (yes, fifteen!) scrambled versions of those nine letters which might just make saleable telly...

1. Th' Cow Door
SF anthology series, produced in conjunction with America's YUKYUKYUKTV, known for supplying entertainment to those who live in the farmbelt and (according to the station's website) don't have any "haah-brow" ideas about TV drama. The press release from BBC Worldwide explains: "Why should science fiction, in this modern and democractic age, simply be for people who know what 'science' or 'fiction' mean? Or who can read? After all, Doctor Who itself is controlled by a man who considers sci-fi to be for complete saddoes, and who hasn't read an original SF novel written in the last thirty years because he thinks it might make him look bad in front of girls. Why not give yokels the same treatment as the British public?" In this series, the titular Cow Door is a gigantic udder-portal which allows the rural American audience to glimpse any number of terrifying nighmare-worlds, including a world where a black man is president and a world where things somehow changed after 1945.

2.Hot Crow Do
Another co-production, this time with Channel 5: a documentary series that takes a morbidly intimate look at "swinging" within the UK's voodoo community. Seemingly respectable middle-class couples gather for Activia cocktails and talk about the schools in their area, before one of their number rips the head off a carrion-bird with his teeth. The ensuing spatter of blood and polite self-hatred forms the "wallpaper" of the orgy, though the programme is most memorable for its catchphrase, "LET THE VOICE OF BARON SAMEDI BE HEARD but on leaving, please remember that this is a residential area".

3. How Cod Rot
Also a documentary series, this one starring Jeremy Clarkson, who goes on a license-fee-funded holiday to point at decaying fish in Europe's ports and pretend it's all the fault of Brussels. Given the tenuous Doctor Who link, he argues that it's demonstrably okay to hate everything that's not exactly like you, because anyone who tries to make friends with you is bound to be a stinking piece of extra-terrestrial garlic-munching Dago-shagging filth disguised as a human being. Mark Gatiss and the entire writing team of The Sarah-Jane Adventures applaud wildly as he crushes an Uzbekistani shepherd-boy's head beneath the wheels of his SUV. Because it's a pre-emptive strike. Somehow.

4. Howdo t'Orc
Remake of The Lord of the Rings set entirely in the North of England. "Eee, in't Golden Age of dwarves, we worked eighteen hours down't Mines of Moria and were glad to thank Balrog of't privelege."

5. Ood C. Worth
Older viewers of British television can't fail to remember Harry Worth, the '60s comedian best known for gitting around with his mirror-image in a shop window. The BBC now takes the opportunity to combine the nostalgia factor of the original Worth with the merchandising appeal of the Ood, by digging up his corpse, forcing an octopus onto his face, and dangling him in front of a reflective surface as part of a sit-com described by critics as "marginally less offensive than My Family". It may seem cruel, but it's no worse than what Brian Cox had to do.

6. Coo! RTD Who?
A poignant reminder of Doctor Who past, this docu-drama follows the hulking, tramp-like figure of Russell T. Davies as he mindlessly shambles from production company to production company. He flashes a childlike smile at passers-by on the way, and they instinctively smile back, before realising that they can't remember who he is or what he did that was any good. Ultimately, this worn-out sop of a man has to face the fact that however much he may have cared in his early years, he allowed his one true love to become a version of Merlin that's too scared to go up against X Factor. The consequences are tragic. Especially for the viewers, who are still living through them.

7. Rood Wotch
When an attempt was made to resurrect Doomwatch in 1999, it failed horribly, despite its best efforts to lever cyberpunk aesthetics and a fucking great black hole into the format. Why the problem? Head of BBC3 Marcus Shobgite explains: "It didn't speak to the now, the moment, the modern generation. With our new remake, we'll be talking about things that really affect the youth of 2010. Especially if they're a bit dirty, you know? Hence the title. The first episode's about breast implants, and raises the question... are these things justifiable, simply because they make women much more attractive? Or do they expand monstrously, turning girls into incredibly sexy she-demons with 56HH chests that suck the life - note, that's "life", clever metaphor there - out of the lead male characters? Plus, everyone carries mobile 'phones in this version." When asked about the eccentric spelling of the title, Marcus replies: "It's deliberate. It says everything about the gap between the so-called establishment and today's urban, hypertext-age kids. Besides, this show's mainly aimed at Chav-scum. And you know what they're like with spelling."

8. "Och!" to Word
A one-off Christmas ghost story in which a dour Scotsman refuses to use any software provided by Microsoft, on the grounds that "when I were a bairn, we used the Apple Mac of the Clan MacApple". In the haunting conclusion, Word comes to eat out his heart, as it does to us all. David Tennant provides a near-perfect rendition of the young John Laurie, whose life inevitably ends in an old empty barn. 2-1 says it'll have at least one member of The League of Gentlemen in it, and that it'll be followed on BBC4 by a documentary in which Kim Newman gets the author's history completely wrong.

9. Two-Ho Cord
The American production company refuses to reveal what this project will entail, although it's known to be a game show, and insiders believe it involves a pair of prostitutes and a piece of string.

10. Wot Roc? Oh!
Following the Chibnall-awful remake of Clash of the Titans, the embarrassing skeleton-fight in the aforementioned Merlin, and every half-arsed CGI Doctor Who monster of recent years, the modern world decides to piss on Ray Harryhausen's face one last time by remaking Seventh Voyage of Sinbad in the style of Hole in the Wall and/or that thing with Richard Hammond nobody watches. Contestants make their way across a landscape of hilarious obstacles, while avoiding the ever-present threats of falling in some water or being ripped to mince by a giant two-headed bird. The celebrity version might actually be entertaining.

11. O, Trod Chow
When dealing with any Doctor Who spin-off, the BBC's biggest problem is that it doesn't own the Daleks. The solution? Bring back the Trods, those suspiciously Dalek-like machine-creatures that turned up in the late-'60s TV Comic Doctor Who strip when they couldn't afford the Daleks. And what better way to introduce them to the twenty-first century than their own cookery show? Script ediotr Gareth Roberts tells the press: "I've been 'ironically' ripping off ideas from TV Comic for years, as a way of juxtaposing the optimistic future of the 1960s with a modern age in which people will swallow any old shit if it's got a CGI wasp in it. So as you can imagine, I find this weirdly hilarious!" For his brave stand in pretending that recycled comic-book arse is in some way creative, Roberts is later hailed as "the new Lichtenstein".

12. "Woot" Chord
Oh, you know. The one that kicks in two-thirds of the way through the full version of the original Doctor Who theme. What, you think the "woot" chord doesn't at least deserve a BBC4 documentary of its own? Then the ghost of Delia Derbyshire spits on you. (No, all right, it doesn't. Her ghost is nice. But my ghost won't be, I'm telling you that right now.)

13. Whor'd Coot
"Hey. You wanna sleep with my sister? Yeah, she's a Jacondan bird-person, like in 'Twin Dilemma'. Yeah, she's of the genus Fulica. What, you wanna get technical now? Huh? Huh?"

14. Hoot Crowd
Like an audience of African football fans with vuvuzelas, but more Silurian-y. Yeah, you're right, this whole concept is clearly winding down.

15. Octo Dr. Who
The BBC brings together all eight surviving Doctor Who actors, in a desperate effort to prove that Matt Smith isn't the worst one ever. This backfires when it turns out that even Colin Baker has some kind of soul.

Betcha

£10 says that...

...there'll be a 3D episode of Doctor Who before the end of 2011. Probably the Christmas one.

Any takers?

Lawrence Miles Enjoys...

God, do you remember Arthur Negus Enjoys? Arthur was a stalwart of the Antiques Roadshow, but when he went it alone for his "Enjoys..." series, we couldn't help writing "A Good Hard Seeing-To from a Professional Sex-Worker" on the Radio Times. Nonetheless, I'd like to say that I enjoy...

..."Pilgrim" on Radio 4. On Tuesdays, but for those in the UK, the first episode of Season Two is still available on the iPlayer. I like it partly because it's competent fantasy drama, and party because it feels like what Torchwood should've been.

That is all.

Oh, except that it's got faeries in it. Deal with.

Trout-Mask Replica

Wrong kind of fandom on the tracks.

This week, Nick Briggs stated - while in his small-but-nicely-kept garden on Radio 7 - that Kurt Vonnegut is one of his favourite authors. What? Couldn't anyone, himself included, have mentioned this before? Then I could at least have tried to make a Proper Fiction pitch for Big Finish, rather than grumpily turning my back on the fanboy off-cuts of Gary Russell or BBC Books (all right, until someone asked me in a crisis). My younger self feels stupid and cross. My older self feels like Kilgore Trout, which is stupid and tired, obviously.

All that said, what does this tell us? I'd like to see it as a lesson that contrary to Hollywood lore, you can underestimate your audience, but... maybe it's truer to say that everybody can be more than one audience at once. Mr Nick likes Slaughterhouse 5, yet he's also shown a strong proclivity towards Doctor Who stories that are much like episode three of "Earthshock". (Oh, wait. "Captain Briggs" joke? I trust he's never had that sort of hairstyle. I'll also avoid the Titanic gag.) I'm remembering those '90s Doctor Who readers who liked the novels to be as close as possible to "Terror of the Zygons", but at the same time challenged modern TV for not being challenging. One medium is for the clever, one medium is for the obvious: is that how we think? A bit like those fans of The Matrix who tried to pretend it was intellectual, because even though it was clearly hackneyed, uber-phallic drivel more than thirty years behind popular literature, "movies don't usually do that".

Personally, I like to treat all things as existing on an equal level of combined intelligence and stupidity. Then again, my career as a writer is effectively dead. So it goes.

The Squee Doctors

S'okay, I didn't actually bother watching the second half. So this will be largely hypothetical. However...

...five days ago, I was standing in front of the window of the local newsagent's. There was a poster advertising "Archaeological Adventures: Dinosaurs" (I've mentioned this on Twitter, but if you don't already know, then it's the perfect thing for an intelligent child or autistic adult who wants to whittle while watching an unfulfilling World Cup match or BBC drama), and also a poster advertising Doctor Who stickers. I ignored the latter, because I'm really not joking when I say that I can't even look at the gormless foetus-face of Matt Smith without wanting to slap it. That thing with Van Gogh looked like the most interesting episode this year, but as soon as he did the "could you breathe a little more quietly?" schtick in the trailer, I literally made an effort to be out on Saturday.

(Sidestep One. ITV did a remake of The Prisoner which, by all precedent and reason, should've been unbearable. It was quite good. Jesus! ITV is doing a "cult" reboot, but uses proper actors - Ian McKellen and Ruth Wilson, the latter of whom steals the "Most Attractive Woman in the UK Who Looks Like a Fish" crown from Miranda Sawyer - while Doctor Who does a piss-poor Harry Potter impression with a footballer and a blow-up doll? Gutted.)

So I'm in front of the window. And then a little girl, of the kind that Moffat pretends to like when he's stuck in a narrative corner, pulled her mum up to the glass and pointed at the poster.

'I saw that Doctor Who on Shannon's widescreen!' she said. 'It was scary. The Girl One had to run loads...'

(Sidestep Two. To anyone who's read my Twitter-log: yes, that's why I've started using the phrase "the Girl One".)

'...but the Boy One had to save... something.'

The narrative slip is, of course, acceptable from a seven-year-old. However: the Boy One? And, yes, I did indeed turn eyes-left to make sure she was pointing at the photo of Matt Smith. Then I turned eyes-right, sharpish, beacuse I was scared of looking like a paedophile.

The Boy One?

About a week and a half ago, Stephen Fry (defined by a sometimes-wise critic as "a stupid person's idea of what a clever person is like") attracted venom by critising Doctor Who in the era of Steven Moffat (defined by me as "oh, what a complete arse"). Yet in this epic cage-fighting battle between drivelling self-involved pretend-intellectuals, the most important point seemed to be missed. Fry talked about programmes "like" Merlin and Doctor Who.

If you can use those two titles in the same sentence, then something's gone terribly wrong.

But then, this is what I've been saying for a loooooong time: Moffat stated that he didn't want to be remembered as "the man who killed Doctor Who", and yet he already did kill it. He killed it in "The Girl in the Fireplace", a rather good episode if you concentrate on what the author genuinely likes - robots and temporal screwing-around - but an abysmal and emotionally-extorting one when you understand that he's trying to redefine the Doctor as a Sexy Immortal and himself as the Sexy Immortal's Agent. I wasn't kidding when I said the the series in 2010 is competing with Twilight, y'know. Doctor Who at its best has been awkward, experimental, and unpredictable. Moffat's version, as laid out in "Silence in the Library", is slick, conservative, and entirely founded on things that have been proven to work. In short... it's like Merlin. Only even stupider.

Here's the grand irony, though -

(Sidestep Three. How many times have I used the phrase "here's the grand irony"?)

- by attempting to squee-up the Doctor, Moffat has destroyed him as a meaningful figure. In "Forest of the Dead" (the Doctor defeats the shadow-nasties by saying "do you know who I am?", thus removing any possible dramatic tension and making him look like the petulant celebrity he's bltantly becoming) and "The Pandorica Opens" (the monsters have spent ages planning this, yet a version of the Doctor of whom even I wouldn't be scared gives himself breathing-space by telling them that he made their mums wee themselves), we're shown a Doctor who can do anything he likes because he's... well... famous. He never proves he's clever, or brave, or moral, or indeed, anything at all. We're just told that he always wins, and we're expected to swallow it without question. His fandom-strength makes him the weakest hero in history.

That's what I meant by "irony": Moffat tries to make the Doctor a fetish-object, because that's how we think of him as long-term Doctor Who viewers, and because we're the ones to whom he's pandering. (Well, not me. But you know what I mean.) What the author's actually doing is ensuring the Doctor's worthlessness. If you make someone all-powerful, then power's worth nothing at all, especially if you do it just to reinforce fan-opinion of the safe and clean-cut Boy One.

And of course, the really horrible thing is that this might - I stress "might" - be my fault. Over the last week, I've been informed by numerous people that "The Pandorica Opens" was a lot like "Alien Bodies". This never occurred to me while watching it, but then, I never saw the link between "Honey to the B" and "Never Ever". However -

(Sidestep Four. For the sake of those unfamiliar with late-'90s British pop music: "Honey to the B" was an entirely negligible single by Billie, AKA Billie Piper, engineered as a clone of the glorious "Never Ever" by All Saints. Unfortunately for the future Surprisingly Good Companion, it was such an artless, lumpen, misshapen parody that nobody who actually liked "Never Even" even realised it was supposed to sound like that. It went Top Ten in the UK charts, but at that point, B*Witched would've got to number one by breaking wind into a microphone for three minutes. I'm stating all this from memory, so the details may be faulty.)

- I don't think it's true. At least, not in the way they meant: technically, "Pandorica" is a lot closer to "Dimensions in Time" than "Alien Bodies". No, screw technically, "Pandorica" is like "Dimenions in Time". Only on a big budget. And without Big Ron.

Still... I remember what Moffat said he liked about "Alien Bodies". He specifically drew attention to the end of Chapter Five, claiming that it was the best cliffhanger he'd ever read. Since he was still capable of wit in those days, I remember the exact way he put it: "And that includes 'Mr Holmes, it was the footprint of a gigantic hound'."

Now, that's a compliment and a half, and I felt duly chuffed. Yet I can't help wondering about the consequences. In "Alien Bodies" (and on the off-chance that anyone reading this doesn't know what happens in it, I'll be vague regarding the end of Chapter Five), the Doctor becomes the subject of Doctor Who rather than its medium. I wrote it that way for a specific reason: a lot of very silly people, mentioning no Jon Blums, were trying to "redefine" the Doctor's past after the "half-human on my mother's side" blather of the TV movie. Like the editor of the books at that stage, I didn't give a rat's minge about his past, and thus wrote something about the future. Not just his future, either.

But in doing that, I... sort of... turned the Doctor into a fetish object. Literally, in fact, according the the dictionary definition of "fetish".

And Moffat read it. And liked the end of Chapter Five.

And now he runs a version of the series in which the Doctor is a living fetish object.

Even though it completely destroys the series' (pardon me) Prime Directive, by making it about an all-powerful all-male hero-figure rather than a traveller who's just interested in things.

And to an extent, I admit it: "Alien Bodies" was stupidly popular because it made the Doctor the subject rather than the medium.

Especially because of the end of Chapter Five.

And Moffat knew that.

And his Prime Directive is to be liked.

And the crucial thing to realise about the "Pandorica" arse-fest isn't the plot (if you've found one), but that it puts the Doctor at the very centre of the universe: there's a box, and you're primed to think that he's going to be in it, but it's actually a trap so that he will be in it. It's pitched not as a prison for the Doctor as a character, but for the Doctor as an icon of modern-day telly.

So I find myself asking. Did Moffat get that from me? Despite what's been said elsewhere, "Pandorica" isn't structurally similar to "Alien Bodies" at all. Yet his vision seems... uncomfortably close, if for all the wrong reasons. Oh, you know: like Neil Gaimain ripping off Alan Moore, then wearing sunglasses and pretending to be a rock star in LA.

This is the question that's bothering me. If you like the eejit but don't like me, then please feel free to say no, I'd honestly like the reassurance. If the reverse, then please lie and say no anyway.

Otherwise, I'm going to apologise, just on the off-chance that I'm right. Doctor Who is now more awful than at any point in its prior history, not because the chief-writer-stroke-producer is vastly more inept than any of his predecessors (he clearly isn't), but because he's vastly more cynical. I, for one, would rather have a bad programme that's attempting something - anything - than a programme designed specifically for BAFTA judges and fans of superhero movies [see previous blog-entries]. And if there's even a 1% chance that I laid 1% of the groundwork for this, then I'm so, so sorry.

Also, "Alien Bodies" isn't even that good. Well, the prologue's good. I'm proud of the prologue. Could do Chapter Five about eight times better these days, though.

Footnote to the Below

Just in case you wondered...

...I say "tried" to watch it, because I occasionally got embarrassed and turned over to Poirot on ITV3. Ironically, it was "Cat Among the Pigeons", the episode of Poirot written by Mark Gatiss. (Sort-of-double-irony: it's perhaps the least successful feature-length episode, but on this occasion, it's not Gatiss' fault. The structure of Christie's original makes it hugely unsuitable for ITV. Mind you, it might not have been a great idea to hire Gatiss for the story that requires a convincing boy-meets-girl romance at its heart. There's no massive alien parasite that eats them at the end, for one thing.)

JESUS!!!

Yeah... yeah, I tried to watch it today. Sorry.

And you people actually like this...? I recommend that you line up to form the back end of a Human Centipede. "Ooh, look! The Manga-faced girl who was set up to be something-cute-enough-for-everyone-to-care-about is apparently dead! Emote, you plebian scum! EMOTE!" I haven't seen such a sledgehammer attempt to make the audience cry since ET. The rest was Big Finish on a big budget.

When we were both Taverning, I used to joke that the difference between myself and Moffat was simple: I had an imagination. Now I know better: I have an imagination and a conscience.

Oh, for Heaven's sake, grow up! And learn basic storytelling skills. Because that was just... just awful.