I always said I'd stick with Doctor Who until the end of time.
My associate Tat Wood - who, if you're wondering about our relationship, swings erratically between "my wise and trusted friend" and "that git I'd like to punch in the face, very hard and quite often" - is delighted by the prospect of 2010. He's delighted because he wants to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of "Meglos". Not because he actually likes it, you understand: he finds it appealing because he sees it as the ultimate rite of passage, the event you have to sit through if you want to call yourself a Doctor Who fan and prove that you're capable of chewing the gristle as well as swallowing the steak. It's not the worst Doctor Who story ever made, as even Tat would agree. It's just the epitome of wig-wearing, badly-conceived-planet-bearing, late-'70s-but-in-the-early-'80s stupidity. Survive it while treating it as proper television, not making jokes about Space: 1999 or UFO (or Star Maidens, as Tat recently pointed out to me), and you'll be a man, my son. Or a woman, my daughter. No, probably a man, no woman would bother.
Many different geeks of many different hues will be reading this, quite possibly including Tat himself. So I'll divide the comments into discreet paragraphs. And, indeed, discrete paragraphs.
DON'T READ THIS IF YOU THINK THE MULTIPLE SUNS OF "PLANET OF THE DEAD" SHINE OUT OF RUSSELL T. DAVIES. I'm writing these words one day before "The End of Time" (i.e. it's Christmas Eve where I am), but I think we've all seen the pictures of the cactus-faced people from the Christmas / New Year story, even in the Radio Times. Which makes me wonder… if "The End of Time" is reaching its conclusion on the first day of 2010, then is Big Russell also celebrating thirty years of "Meglos"? Does he recognise his own failure, and want to express it in xerophyte form? Is he subconsciously saying "Praise Be to Ti"? Or what?
DON'T READ THIS IF YOU'RE TAT. I REPEAT, DON'T READ THIS IF YOU'RE TAT. Yeah, right, "Meglos" is the stupid-looking one. You know what Tat's idea of greatness is? "The Stones of Blood". In my book, that isn't even broadcastable. Not that I actually like "Meglos". I'm just saying.
Yet, as per usual, Tat makes a good point which we can only see clearly after we've finished swearing at him. Like an aristocrat (in the proper Ted-and-Ralph way, not the being-a-prince-and-dressing-as-a-Nazi way… oh, all right, in the Lady Michelle Ryan's Big Gold Cup way rather than the Slug King from "The Twin Dilemma" on His Evil Throne way), Tat thinks about generations rather than moments. So we should follow his lead and consider the future. Specifically, how the people to come will see this programme.
Mmmm.
Er…
Look, I'm sorry to say this, but it's probably time. Russell T. Davies made Doctor Who unkillable by bringing it back in the 2005 style, for which we should thank him. It went against all the rules of TV in the middle of what we're now supposed to call the Noughties, and it won. It bloody won. Of course, in the process, it spawned a number of imitators. All of whom kept the format, but abandoned the risks. Robin Hood? Doctor Who with macho. Merlin? Doctor Who with spells (watch it back-to-back with "The Shakespeare Code", and see what strikes you). Spooks…? Well, Spooks was "conceptualised" even before Chris Ecc, but it's now feeding off David Tennant's prajna in a big way. However, human entropy insists on turning all good ideas into cack, and we can see it here. People copy Doctor Who; Doctor Who-makers go to BAFTA ceremonies, where they rub various body-parts with the folk who do the copying; the Doctor Who-makers start to believe that the flattery must be true, and ergo start making a version of Doctor Who which copies the copies. The result is a levelling-out of energy that makes Our Programme look more banal with every episode.
It's unkillable, but it's wrong. Thrice-wrong now that the series has taken the coward's route, and replaced Tennant with a poxy, gormless, quasi-sexy young Doctor who might possibly turn out to be Tennant II in the public imagination. It is, if you will, like the undying corpse in eternal agony who turns up in Tales from the Crypt. Future generations will remember this series as "One of Those CGI Programmes", and it's apt that Russell T. has compared the indestructible central character with Sherlock Holmes, given that Sherlock Holmes is now the title of an FX-driven film which also has very little to do with the original. It's tempting to go for the easy shot, and point out that Big Him is now living in Los Angeles, yet the truth is that we should've known something was wrong as soon as "The Sound of Drums" showed us a version of modern-day Britain in which nobody exists unless they’re on TV.
All right, I'll say it. I hate this programme now. I hate the way that David Tennant - a brilliant, scintillating young actor, half a decade ago - has been turned into the laziest hack in the country thanks to even-lazier writers who earn their keep by scripting "things David Tennant always does as the Doctor". I hate the self-indulgent, ultra-masturbatory drivel that comes from treating the male lead as an object of fetishism ("Forest of the Dead" was bad enough, but the final minutes of "The Waters of Mars" were an insult to all human intelligence). I hate the fact that Doctor Who no longer means "going to strange places and seeing what happens", but "casting celebrities and seeing how much publicity we can get by putting them next to shite CGI monsters". I hate the thought that the mythology with which I grew up is now being re-routed for idiots who like superhero movies. "Talky bit, suggested menace, special effects set-piece, talky bit with sad orchestral music, set-piece number two, increase in menace, effects climax, hugs."
Hey, but it's Christmas! So look on the bright side. Next year, we get a whole series run by Moffat. The man whom Russell T. Davies cited as having solid gold brain-cells (even though his ideas ran out even before he became producer and chief writer, unless "Silence in the Library" really was a demo script he wrote in 1992, as many of us have suspected); the man who went on record as saying that he doesn't want to be remembered as the one who "broke Doctor Who" (bit late to worry now… he broke it with "The Girl in the Fireplace", a story which was quite good in itself - at least, when there were killer clockwork robots on the screen and the author didn't have to pretend to care about credible female characters - but which damned the series to an eternity of inane pretend-sexiness). And look what he's giving us! Churchill and the Daleks. A two-part Silurian story written by Chris Chibnall. Richard f***ing Curtis. Some of these are still in the "unconfirmed" file, but the fact that they even exist as rumours should tell you everything you need to know. Anyone would think the new boss is deliberately hiring the worst people imaginable, just to make himself look good. Except that he's also (supposedly) doing a two-parter which involves both Professor River Song and the Weeping Angels. Riiight. Big new ideas.
I've said, over and over, that the Doctor Who spin-offs might have been world-exploding if they'd been controlled by vaguely competent people. Instead, BBC Wales hired Chibnall for one, and then managed to sink even deeper into the offal-pit of ineptitude by finding Phil Ford for the other. Now Doctor Who itself is about to be run by the worst possible person, not because Moffat is a bad writer in himself - he isn't, and if those of you who still resent me would like to re-examine that "Pissing Blink" comment, then I think you'll find I was praising him for a certain sort of script - but because he's always going to take the easy option. This is, and always was, a programme about experiment and experience. It's the highest point of licence-fee telly. Nowadays, though, its creators always play safe.
What I want for Christmas, geek-wise? A Doctor Who writer with balls. Or ovaries, they'll do. Glands of any description would be good. But given the line-up for 2010… may I skip out now? I really, really, really, really don't want to see what happens next. I'm sure that the older nerdlings among us have felt the desire to give up at some point, the way I did during the cold, stark horror of Season 24, or in the most insipid period of the BBC Books run, or after "The Impossible Planet". But they were all cases of Doctor Who being Not Very Good. Now it's different. Now it's a case of Doctor Who being… well, nasty. Cynical. Smug.
Of course, I'll take it all back if "The End of Time" turns out to be half-decent.
DON'T READ THIS UNLESS YOU'RE ACTUALLY MOFFAT. "Mangling the English language"…? Is that really the strongest comeback you can manage? You're becoming complacent, y'old twat. You can do better than clichés. And please do so, or everyone else will want to give you a good slap as well.
Friday, 25 December 2009
Friday, 10 July 2009
Day Four... Ooh, I'm Getting Into This Now
Yeah, I still like this week's Torchwood. Sorry about that.
To misquote Hugh "Take Me Up the Arse, America" Laurie, who did the voice-over for a US breakfast cereal ad that's since become better-known as a gag about Michael Jackson on Family Guy (God, that's too many references even for me, but please bear with me because it'll get even more obscure by the end of this entry):
The left-wing kid in me hates the fact that the 456 are automatically evil for trying to take children away. I mean, they gave us a Hello-style tour of their charming tank, didn't they? And we don't know that Animatronic Boy is suffering. He may be having a great time in there, acting as a Macra's conscience and swanning around the universe like the navigators in movie-Dune. What the vomiting 456-beast says to Captain Jack is technically correct, after all: we really don't give a toss about the children, unless they're our own.
But the left-wing adult in me likes the fact that politicians are being this awful in something approaching the Doctor Who universe. Indeed, I think we can describe Children of Earth at a stroke with the words '"The Sound of Drums" done properly'. Or possibly '"The Ambassadors of Death" with balls'.
Also, I bet that someone involved in this series (probably Big Russell himself, but you never know) has seen Cosmic Slop. A 1994 TV movie so little-known that it doesn't even have a Wikipedia entry, but which features a similar pseudo-dilemma on behalf of the political class, i.e. the US government has to consider whether to give a sizeable proportion of its black population to aliens in return for massive and immediate wealth. The "we could save billions by giving them Chavs" scene is almost identical.
Beat that, Tat.
To misquote Hugh "Take Me Up the Arse, America" Laurie, who did the voice-over for a US breakfast cereal ad that's since become better-known as a gag about Michael Jackson on Family Guy (God, that's too many references even for me, but please bear with me because it'll get even more obscure by the end of this entry):
The left-wing kid in me hates the fact that the 456 are automatically evil for trying to take children away. I mean, they gave us a Hello-style tour of their charming tank, didn't they? And we don't know that Animatronic Boy is suffering. He may be having a great time in there, acting as a Macra's conscience and swanning around the universe like the navigators in movie-Dune. What the vomiting 456-beast says to Captain Jack is technically correct, after all: we really don't give a toss about the children, unless they're our own.
But the left-wing adult in me likes the fact that politicians are being this awful in something approaching the Doctor Who universe. Indeed, I think we can describe Children of Earth at a stroke with the words '"The Sound of Drums" done properly'. Or possibly '"The Ambassadors of Death" with balls'.
Also, I bet that someone involved in this series (probably Big Russell himself, but you never know) has seen Cosmic Slop. A 1994 TV movie so little-known that it doesn't even have a Wikipedia entry, but which features a similar pseudo-dilemma on behalf of the political class, i.e. the US government has to consider whether to give a sizeable proportion of its black population to aliens in return for massive and immediate wealth. The "we could save billions by giving them Chavs" scene is almost identical.
Beat that, Tat.
Wednesday, 8 July 2009
One of Us is Real... Is It Me?
Apparently, they do work.
I've been on prescription anti-depressants for about a year now. I've mentioned this before, but I've never mentioned the most important (and obvious) effect: the dreams.
We dream about things we know. When we dream about things which seem unfamiliar, they're made out of things we've seen and heard, half-seen and half-heard: a strange room is a room we might have known from infancy, sexed-up with images we've picked up from TV in the intervening years. At least, that's what I've always expected, and that's what I've always argued. But over the last twelve months, ever since I started taking the pills, every single night has been an away-match. There's not much percentage in trying to explain the details, because the sheer amount of sensual information in even one of these dreams - experiencing every twist of the landscape, every niche of the architecture, every sound and smell and peculiarity of a completely unknown environment - would need pages and pages and pages. And quite possibly pages. I'm there, in a way that I'd previously assumed you can only be "there" in real, physical, three-dimensional space.
I'm in no way superstitious, in no way New Agey. Quite the reverse: I'm a hardcore rationalist, no spirits or extra-sensory avatars allowed. Yet I can't find any explanation for what I've been witnessing over the last three-hundred-odd nights, and saying "the drugs are giving me delusions" just isn't a good enough answer. Yes, they probably are giving me delusions, but... where are those delusions getting their information from? How can I be so aware of the precise details of hillsides, libraries, streets, museums, oceans, offices, wastelands that I've never visited / seen on television / read about in books / even imagined? Why do I know what the tiling looks like in this house? Why do I know where all the best picnic-sites are, on a patch of ground where I can find myself tripping over every last knoll? Why do I meet complete strangers and know them in so much detail, right down to the jawbone-structures of faces I've never seen...? Psychic phenomena can kiss my arse, yet I simply can't account for this glut of data in any way except - oh, atheist gods forgive me - by assuming that I'm tapping into some peculiar Sheldrakian mass-consciousness. I like to think I'm an imaginitive human being. But my imagination isn't up to this level of creativity, and it's certainly not up to inventing a new territory every single bloody night without ever repeating itself. It is, quite simply, as if the drugs have blown something open in my head. And now I'm assimilating other people's sensory information into my own delusions.
And no, I don't believe in telepathy either.
But stranger than the otherness-of-place is the effect on time. We all know that time in dreams doesn't mirror time in reality, yet the hours spent asleep seem to be stretching in ways I've never experienced before. I've occasionally woken up sobbing, because my dream-self believes that it's been trapped in Bad Place A or Bad Situation B for months, and doesn't believe it'll ever escape. On the plus side, I've also experienced whole chunks of lifetime that simply shouldn't be possible over the course of seven hours. Example:
Last night, I was a member of a (wholly imaginary) film club that met every Thursday night to watch (also imaginary) kitsch films of the 1950s and 1960s. I remember those non-existent films in detail. Also the building in which we met, the grounds outside, the other members of the club, the terrible snacks we used to make in the tiny (pretend) kitchen... oh, and a (similarly imaginary) member of my (make-believe) family used to pick me up in her car at the end of every film-evening, usually with a (spurious, but consistent) passenger in the front seat. I believe the family-member was my cousin, and the passenger was a female friend of hers whom I found rather snidy and annoying. I say "usually", because I went to at least five weekly screenings in the course of the dream. On one occasion - when the film was some dreadful Irwin Allen-type schlock about cities under the sea, much like Stingray with real people instead of puppets - I had to go outside and tell my cousin that the film had a few minutes left to run, and yes, it was shite but I had to stay anyway. Why this sense of completism...? I felt duty-bound, since I worked for a magazine which dealt in all things pop-cultural and quasi-ironic. I remember the exact floorplan of the offices, not comparable to any real building I've ever visited. But I still knew where all the facilities were, not to mention the complete cast of employees, one of whom was an absolute bastard with whom I had a running feud. Fortunately, I also knew who to talk to in order to piss him off, and there was a... no, it's too complex to explain here, but the ramifications lasted for weeks. I particularly remember the time when I had to review a complete DVD boxed set of The New Avengers, and although I recall writing a detailed precis for younger readers which explained the need for Gareth Hunt to do "action" sequences beyond the capabilities of the ageing Steed, it was nonetheless a boxed set of The New Avengers from a parallel universe in which half of the stories were set in space. This may sound random, but my subconscious had thought about it to such a degree that the episode with the giant rats in the sewers (you know, the one that was shamelessly ripped off by "The Talons of Weng-Chiang") took place on a space-station in upper-Earth orbit which for some reason had an archaic sewage system. I still remember the plot, once again in disturbing detail. I could storyboard most of the chase scenes even now.
Eighteen months, I worked at that place. Eighteen months, with occasional film-club nights, of which - I admit - I remember only five. Eighteen bloody months, learning every crook of the building, every idiot twitch of my co-workers, every quirk of that game they played where... actually, that's probably too much detail as well, although I'm thinking of remaking it in the real world. But I had to suffer eighteen months of it. Twatting geeks. Eventually I even had to meet their friends outside of work, and they were hideous.
And then I woke up.
(Wait. Was there an episode of The New Avengers with giant rats in the sewers? I'm convinced that there was, even when awake, but it also sounds like the kind of thing I might have contrived while sleeping. I'll look it up later.)
The point is that I'm honestly not sure what's solid any more, because if one day is separated from the last by eighteen months of make-believe which feel at least as intense as everything else, then you're bound to lose continuity. Most peculiarly, I believe I'm living in a world where I just saw two episodes of Torchwood that were actually good. This is improbable, yet the detail was such that I'm inclined to think they were real. Then again, everything seems that detailed now, and further doubt is cast by the fact that the episodes in question featured Katy Wix. Katy Wix...! The name probably means nothing to you, but it has a full-on resonance for me (and those of you who used to read the Randomness Times may remember a photo in which she appeared as an octopus in a top hat). Ever since I went all stand-up in 2006, I've made a point of seeing her Edinburgh shows in preview, and not for any mentalist stalker-like reasons. She's quite simply quite good. A few months ago, however, I finally came face-to-face with her and tried to say hello. I felt I could reasonably do this, since she'd performed in some of the sketches I wrote for Recorded for Training Purposes on BBC7. So of course, my absolute social ineptness caused me to come across as a mentalist stalker, after which I ran away and resolved never to try talking to talented people ever again. Katy appears in many of my dreams these days, for the fairly obvious Freudian reason that she represents the whacking great gulf between my absolute competence as a writer and my absolute incompetence as a human being. Her appearance in the mythical good Torchwood story is, therefore, both clearly symbolic and just taking the piss. Although I note that whereas she's an alert, intelligent, sparkly-eyed young woman in the real world, here she's playing a fat Welsh chav with the complexion of BBQ-flavour Pringles. And with terrible teeth. I'm sure her teeth aren't that bad in the real world, I would've noticed.
The thing is, though... if we assume that what I think I'm watching is real, then Torchwood is suddenly working because it's abandoning all the '90s-style "Cult TV" trappings that led Chr*s Ch*bn*ll to try to make it as much like Angel as possible, and trying to be a proper BBC drama serial instead. What I think I saw was like Quatermass without the smug intolerance of Nigel Kneale or the drivelly nostalgia of Mark sodding Gatiss. No, wait, it was like a modern version of A for Andromeda (hence the plot device of aliens-send-instructions-for-receiver). And it was clearly better than either of the other modern versions of A for Andromeda, i.e. the God-awful BBC4 remake and the Hollywood one with the sexy-older-woman out of CSI, whatever it was called.
Did I really see that? I actually care what's going to happen in episode three. That's not natural for Torchwood, is it?
It's past nine o'clock in the morning. I've been awake for over 24 hours now. I want to go to sleep, but if I do, then it might be years before I can think about this again.
I've been on prescription anti-depressants for about a year now. I've mentioned this before, but I've never mentioned the most important (and obvious) effect: the dreams.
We dream about things we know. When we dream about things which seem unfamiliar, they're made out of things we've seen and heard, half-seen and half-heard: a strange room is a room we might have known from infancy, sexed-up with images we've picked up from TV in the intervening years. At least, that's what I've always expected, and that's what I've always argued. But over the last twelve months, ever since I started taking the pills, every single night has been an away-match. There's not much percentage in trying to explain the details, because the sheer amount of sensual information in even one of these dreams - experiencing every twist of the landscape, every niche of the architecture, every sound and smell and peculiarity of a completely unknown environment - would need pages and pages and pages. And quite possibly pages. I'm there, in a way that I'd previously assumed you can only be "there" in real, physical, three-dimensional space.
I'm in no way superstitious, in no way New Agey. Quite the reverse: I'm a hardcore rationalist, no spirits or extra-sensory avatars allowed. Yet I can't find any explanation for what I've been witnessing over the last three-hundred-odd nights, and saying "the drugs are giving me delusions" just isn't a good enough answer. Yes, they probably are giving me delusions, but... where are those delusions getting their information from? How can I be so aware of the precise details of hillsides, libraries, streets, museums, oceans, offices, wastelands that I've never visited / seen on television / read about in books / even imagined? Why do I know what the tiling looks like in this house? Why do I know where all the best picnic-sites are, on a patch of ground where I can find myself tripping over every last knoll? Why do I meet complete strangers and know them in so much detail, right down to the jawbone-structures of faces I've never seen...? Psychic phenomena can kiss my arse, yet I simply can't account for this glut of data in any way except - oh, atheist gods forgive me - by assuming that I'm tapping into some peculiar Sheldrakian mass-consciousness. I like to think I'm an imaginitive human being. But my imagination isn't up to this level of creativity, and it's certainly not up to inventing a new territory every single bloody night without ever repeating itself. It is, quite simply, as if the drugs have blown something open in my head. And now I'm assimilating other people's sensory information into my own delusions.
And no, I don't believe in telepathy either.
But stranger than the otherness-of-place is the effect on time. We all know that time in dreams doesn't mirror time in reality, yet the hours spent asleep seem to be stretching in ways I've never experienced before. I've occasionally woken up sobbing, because my dream-self believes that it's been trapped in Bad Place A or Bad Situation B for months, and doesn't believe it'll ever escape. On the plus side, I've also experienced whole chunks of lifetime that simply shouldn't be possible over the course of seven hours. Example:
Last night, I was a member of a (wholly imaginary) film club that met every Thursday night to watch (also imaginary) kitsch films of the 1950s and 1960s. I remember those non-existent films in detail. Also the building in which we met, the grounds outside, the other members of the club, the terrible snacks we used to make in the tiny (pretend) kitchen... oh, and a (similarly imaginary) member of my (make-believe) family used to pick me up in her car at the end of every film-evening, usually with a (spurious, but consistent) passenger in the front seat. I believe the family-member was my cousin, and the passenger was a female friend of hers whom I found rather snidy and annoying. I say "usually", because I went to at least five weekly screenings in the course of the dream. On one occasion - when the film was some dreadful Irwin Allen-type schlock about cities under the sea, much like Stingray with real people instead of puppets - I had to go outside and tell my cousin that the film had a few minutes left to run, and yes, it was shite but I had to stay anyway. Why this sense of completism...? I felt duty-bound, since I worked for a magazine which dealt in all things pop-cultural and quasi-ironic. I remember the exact floorplan of the offices, not comparable to any real building I've ever visited. But I still knew where all the facilities were, not to mention the complete cast of employees, one of whom was an absolute bastard with whom I had a running feud. Fortunately, I also knew who to talk to in order to piss him off, and there was a... no, it's too complex to explain here, but the ramifications lasted for weeks. I particularly remember the time when I had to review a complete DVD boxed set of The New Avengers, and although I recall writing a detailed precis for younger readers which explained the need for Gareth Hunt to do "action" sequences beyond the capabilities of the ageing Steed, it was nonetheless a boxed set of The New Avengers from a parallel universe in which half of the stories were set in space. This may sound random, but my subconscious had thought about it to such a degree that the episode with the giant rats in the sewers (you know, the one that was shamelessly ripped off by "The Talons of Weng-Chiang") took place on a space-station in upper-Earth orbit which for some reason had an archaic sewage system. I still remember the plot, once again in disturbing detail. I could storyboard most of the chase scenes even now.
Eighteen months, I worked at that place. Eighteen months, with occasional film-club nights, of which - I admit - I remember only five. Eighteen bloody months, learning every crook of the building, every idiot twitch of my co-workers, every quirk of that game they played where... actually, that's probably too much detail as well, although I'm thinking of remaking it in the real world. But I had to suffer eighteen months of it. Twatting geeks. Eventually I even had to meet their friends outside of work, and they were hideous.
And then I woke up.
(Wait. Was there an episode of The New Avengers with giant rats in the sewers? I'm convinced that there was, even when awake, but it also sounds like the kind of thing I might have contrived while sleeping. I'll look it up later.)
The point is that I'm honestly not sure what's solid any more, because if one day is separated from the last by eighteen months of make-believe which feel at least as intense as everything else, then you're bound to lose continuity. Most peculiarly, I believe I'm living in a world where I just saw two episodes of Torchwood that were actually good. This is improbable, yet the detail was such that I'm inclined to think they were real. Then again, everything seems that detailed now, and further doubt is cast by the fact that the episodes in question featured Katy Wix. Katy Wix...! The name probably means nothing to you, but it has a full-on resonance for me (and those of you who used to read the Randomness Times may remember a photo in which she appeared as an octopus in a top hat). Ever since I went all stand-up in 2006, I've made a point of seeing her Edinburgh shows in preview, and not for any mentalist stalker-like reasons. She's quite simply quite good. A few months ago, however, I finally came face-to-face with her and tried to say hello. I felt I could reasonably do this, since she'd performed in some of the sketches I wrote for Recorded for Training Purposes on BBC7. So of course, my absolute social ineptness caused me to come across as a mentalist stalker, after which I ran away and resolved never to try talking to talented people ever again. Katy appears in many of my dreams these days, for the fairly obvious Freudian reason that she represents the whacking great gulf between my absolute competence as a writer and my absolute incompetence as a human being. Her appearance in the mythical good Torchwood story is, therefore, both clearly symbolic and just taking the piss. Although I note that whereas she's an alert, intelligent, sparkly-eyed young woman in the real world, here she's playing a fat Welsh chav with the complexion of BBQ-flavour Pringles. And with terrible teeth. I'm sure her teeth aren't that bad in the real world, I would've noticed.
The thing is, though... if we assume that what I think I'm watching is real, then Torchwood is suddenly working because it's abandoning all the '90s-style "Cult TV" trappings that led Chr*s Ch*bn*ll to try to make it as much like Angel as possible, and trying to be a proper BBC drama serial instead. What I think I saw was like Quatermass without the smug intolerance of Nigel Kneale or the drivelly nostalgia of Mark sodding Gatiss. No, wait, it was like a modern version of A for Andromeda (hence the plot device of aliens-send-instructions-for-receiver). And it was clearly better than either of the other modern versions of A for Andromeda, i.e. the God-awful BBC4 remake and the Hollywood one with the sexy-older-woman out of CSI, whatever it was called.
Did I really see that? I actually care what's going to happen in episode three. That's not natural for Torchwood, is it?
It's past nine o'clock in the morning. I've been awake for over 24 hours now. I want to go to sleep, but if I do, then it might be years before I can think about this again.
Monday, 13 April 2009
Thumbnail Review: "Planet of the Dead"
Hahahahahah. Hahahah.
No, but seriously. Where's the real Easter Special?
God, how do you describe the awfulness of that last hour...? Let's start with basic scriptwriting principles. The whole point of transporting a London bus to the middle of the desert is that it puts the everyday inside the impossible. Yet we begin this story with an aristocratic cat-burglar doing the full Pink Panther schtick, as if to demonstrate that nothing about this story exists in the real world. Within ten minutes, everything here has been established as a fantasy-telly standard with no grounding in anything we might recognise, so we're basically watching Spice World II: The Scorpion Nebula. Worse, the people on the bus who aren't shameless works of self-indulgent pap-fiction turn out to be the same jokey working-class fodder we saw in "Father's Day", which means that their only function is to (a) die or (b) cry until the Good, Wonderful, All-Powerful Doctor reassures them with thoughts of chops. Except for the one who is, bizarrely and uselessly, psychic. This is followed by ten minutes of arseing-around in the desert which seem to exist only to prove how great David Tennant is, and to prove that nothing matters in storytelling terms except the need to invent new forms of faux-science to push the plot along. After that, there's twenty minutes of the Doctor explaining alien things to Michelle Ryan, whose complete lack of charisma beats the programme to death like a Medieval child who's been born with the wrong number of heads.
And then, Lee Evans.
After half an hour, nothing interesting has happened. Then there's some sub-Star Trek bollocks about wormhole-making things destroying Earth, which makes the same mistake as the very worst pulp SF of the '50s: saying that Earth is going to be destroyed doesn't make things seem dramatic, unless you can make it palpable. We're told that this is important because we see some CGI skeleton-fish on a hologram, and we're told it's a major crisis. We don't care. We've got no stake in it. It's not a major crisis, it's just Tennant running around and twiddling with improbable technology, while his sidekick makes some smug comments which are supposed to establish her as a strong, independent woman but actually make her seem like an over-talkative action figure. Finally, the manta-ray monsters turn up, and they're as trite and as tedious as everything else. Oh, what a surprise! They're defeated by a spurious piece of machinery. We've been brought on this journey just so we can look at a flying bus. Yeah, thanks. If we wanted that, then we'd watch Harry Potter, like everyone else.
Never have I felt more justified in my decision to f*** off and be somewhere else when this series - the series I've followed since I was two years old - finally dies. This isn't Doctor Who. It isn't even sophisticated enough to qualify as fan-fic.
(For the version that was written before broadcast, see this week's Randomness Times. Which is probably funnier, because I was less annoyed.)
No, but seriously. Where's the real Easter Special?
God, how do you describe the awfulness of that last hour...? Let's start with basic scriptwriting principles. The whole point of transporting a London bus to the middle of the desert is that it puts the everyday inside the impossible. Yet we begin this story with an aristocratic cat-burglar doing the full Pink Panther schtick, as if to demonstrate that nothing about this story exists in the real world. Within ten minutes, everything here has been established as a fantasy-telly standard with no grounding in anything we might recognise, so we're basically watching Spice World II: The Scorpion Nebula. Worse, the people on the bus who aren't shameless works of self-indulgent pap-fiction turn out to be the same jokey working-class fodder we saw in "Father's Day", which means that their only function is to (a) die or (b) cry until the Good, Wonderful, All-Powerful Doctor reassures them with thoughts of chops. Except for the one who is, bizarrely and uselessly, psychic. This is followed by ten minutes of arseing-around in the desert which seem to exist only to prove how great David Tennant is, and to prove that nothing matters in storytelling terms except the need to invent new forms of faux-science to push the plot along. After that, there's twenty minutes of the Doctor explaining alien things to Michelle Ryan, whose complete lack of charisma beats the programme to death like a Medieval child who's been born with the wrong number of heads.
And then, Lee Evans.
After half an hour, nothing interesting has happened. Then there's some sub-Star Trek bollocks about wormhole-making things destroying Earth, which makes the same mistake as the very worst pulp SF of the '50s: saying that Earth is going to be destroyed doesn't make things seem dramatic, unless you can make it palpable. We're told that this is important because we see some CGI skeleton-fish on a hologram, and we're told it's a major crisis. We don't care. We've got no stake in it. It's not a major crisis, it's just Tennant running around and twiddling with improbable technology, while his sidekick makes some smug comments which are supposed to establish her as a strong, independent woman but actually make her seem like an over-talkative action figure. Finally, the manta-ray monsters turn up, and they're as trite and as tedious as everything else. Oh, what a surprise! They're defeated by a spurious piece of machinery. We've been brought on this journey just so we can look at a flying bus. Yeah, thanks. If we wanted that, then we'd watch Harry Potter, like everyone else.
Never have I felt more justified in my decision to f*** off and be somewhere else when this series - the series I've followed since I was two years old - finally dies. This isn't Doctor Who. It isn't even sophisticated enough to qualify as fan-fic.
(For the version that was written before broadcast, see this week's Randomness Times. Which is probably funnier, because I was less annoyed.)
Wednesday, 24 December 2008
"Danish Kiddie-Fiddler Ring Infiltrates Toy Packaging Shock"
Twenty-four hours until Christmas Day. Thirty-two hours until I find out how badly my relatives have misjudged my personality while attempting to think of a suitable gift, thirty-six hours until I have to ask myself whether I really am going to bother roasting something for lunch rather than settling for a tube of Pringles with a picture of holly on the wrapper, forty hours until I find myself joining in with every single word of The Two Ronnies. Just under forty-three hours until "Voyage of the Damned", the BBC's new vehicle for Bernard Cribbins.
Oh, all right. Since we're on the subject… at 6:50 on Christmas Day, Film Four will be showing Time Bandits, which may literally be the worst piece of scheduling in television history. Time Bandits is a wonderful thing, but is there anybody that might want to watch an eccentric timetravel- based comedy-adventure who won't be otherwise engaged at 6:50 on Christmas Day? Even if a few Film Four viewers have somehow lost track of the time and forgotten to switch over to BBC1, surely they're going to find themselves thinking "hang on, I'm sure there was something I meant to do" during the sequence set on board the Titanic?
My great-grandfather was booked to travel on the Titanic, as part of a transatlantic business trip. He pulled out at the last minute. Our family history doesn't record why he pulled out, but if you're familiar with "Rose", then you'll understand why I find this amusing. Perhaps he was talked out of it by a big-eared Mancunian. And I see that in the weekend papers, one of the few still-living Titanic survivors has objected to the BBC's lack of Christmas Day tact, although she doesn't really seem to have captured the mood of the nation.
Given that the Christmas Doctor Who is the BBC's highest-yield warhead, it's interesting to note how the other channels have decided to deal with it. ITV has elected to show The African Queen, a film which could happily be screened on any Sunday afternoon without causing a fuss (thus wisely avoiding any attempt at a ratings war… it's like 1977 all over again). It works both ways, though: BBC3's Doctor Who Confidential, which is usually scheduled to immediately follow its parent-programme, begins half an hour after Doctor Who ends. And it's not as if BBC3 has anything better to do at eight o'clock, because it's showing a repeat of Football Gaffes Galore. But then you realise… at eight o'clock, ITV is presenting us with Harry Hill's Christmas TV Burp. Has the BBC noticed this, and delayed Confidential by half an hour, knowing that Doctor Who and Harry Hill share an awfully large chunk of the audience? This is, after all, a man who opened his very first show on Channel 4 by wrestling a giant maggot.
Like any good warhead, Doctor Who makes a big bang while covering the surrounding area with fallout, and this Christmas it's hard to look at any page of the (haaaa-lle-lu-jah) Radio Times without seeing traces of its influence. We note that the BBC's other "big" programmes this season include The Catherine Tate Show and The Shadow in the North with Billie Piper, neither of which is technically supposed to be Doctor Who-related, but the RT has thoughtfully put the interviews on the same page anyway. We'll gloss over David Tennant's appearance in Extras - a programme which, in all other respects, has a cast list that could only be worse if it had more than one copy of Ricky Gervais in it (in much the same way that ITV is marking New Year's Eve with a comedy-drama starring James Dreyfus in two different roles, i.e. a programme that's twice as bad as you might possibly imagine) - and instead turn our attention to New Year's Day, when we get BBC1's new adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, written by leading-dramatist-turned-soft-core-hack Andrew Davies. We might expect plenty of period stripping-off, with no actual genitalia but lots of male buttocks thrusting in and out of multi-layered underwear. I mention this only because Mark Gatiss is in it. Surely, he isn't going to be doing any deflowering? His chat-up technique in "The Lazarus Experiment" was bad enough, but now I'm trying to imagine him seducing a nineteenth-century virgin, and all I can think of is Briss the Butcher. Licking his lips. In close-up.
And since I'm not newsgroup-formatted, it was only this week that I learned of the existence of the on-line Doctor Who advent calendar, which provides a daily ration of photos, interviews, exclusive clips, downloadable chocolates and special coupons promising you a place at God's right hand if you watch the programme on Christmas Day. If I'd known about this sooner, then I might not have bothered writing 15,000+ words in the last three weeks: compared to footage of Kylie Minogue larking about in a maid's outfit, I can see how a JPEG of a box of Lego or a group shot of Android, Cyborg and Muton might seem insufficiently festive. (Oh, perhaps I should explain today's picture. Yes, this is a real Lego set. It celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the Lego Brick, and is a modernised version of the "classic" Lego Town from 1958, so the leering old man represents a grown-up / grown-old version of someone who might have bought the original '50s models as a ten-year-old. Out of context, though, he just looks like a paedophile laying bait.)
So as the Doctor Who Christmas Special approaches, we simply have to acknowledge that Russell T. Davies not only has the best job in the world, but the best job that's ever existed in the whole of human history. Some people have criticised my occasional bitterness towards the series by claiming that I'm just jealous, to which I respond: well, duh. We should consider that Big Russell not only has executive control over Doctor Who as a concept, but access to a multi-squillion-pound budget with which to depict anything in the entire span of space and time, almost on a whim. Even Hollywood executives don't have this sort of reckless power. The only person in / on television who's in a similarly enviable position is Gok Wan, easily-anagrammed presenter of Channel 4's How to Look Good Naked, whose job description involves touching up the wobbly parts of overfed women while they nod seriously and listen to his sage council on what bras to wear. But since Wan is (presumably) gay, it's safe to assume that he has no conception of how lucky he is.
With great power comes great responsibility: this is what I was getting at during the "Unquiet Dead" farrago, and if it was true of Gatiss, then it's twentyfold-true of Big Russell. This man has more influence over the minds of the nation's youth than anybody else in contemporary British culture - go on, prove me wrong - and according to the interviews, he even has the ability to make Kylie wee herself. ITV fears him. Ant and Dec have known his wrath. He may not be as famous as David Beckham, but then, nobody actually listens to what David Beckham says. Fortunately he tends to use this power for good, or at least, to say things like "I know, let's put rhinos on the moon!". But this doesn't mean we should take our eyes off the bugger, because…
…because even if power doesn't always corrupt, then showbiz invariably does. I know I'm not alone in feeling that "The Sound of Drums" marks a very specific jumping of the shark, yet apart from the relative dullness of it, two things seem especially worrying. One is that although it continues the twenty-first-century Doctor Who obsession with stores set in something like "the real world", the programme's idea of what constitutes "the real world" is becoming increasingly slanted towards the point-of-view of people who work in television. In much the same way that Jennifer Saunders is no longer capable of doing anything other than making jokes about meeting minor celebrities at BBC TV centre, Doctor Who's two default methods of establishing a contemporary British setting are (a) guest appearances by famous people playing themselves, and (b) set-pieces involving any event where TV cameras might be present (note that apart from the regulars and semi-regulars we already know, there are no modern-day characters in "The Sound of Drums" other than media figures and Saxon's co-conspirators). In other words, the Doctor's natural environment these days is a BAFTA awards ceremony. No other Doctor would seriously have considered putting on a dinner jacket for "Rise of the Cybermen" or "The Lazarus Experiment", because no other Doctor belongs on the Red Carpet. Tom Baker in
formalwear would have been unconscionable; David Tennant in formalwear seems perfectly normal.
Once you realise this, Tennant's appearance in Extras is rather unsettling, because you begin to see that the two programmes are converging on the same territory. "Real world" stories are supposed to draw in the viewers by giving the adventures-in-space-and-time concept some grounding in the world we recognise, but the Britain we see in "The Sound of Drums" just alienates us. Even if there are TV studios, press interviews and high-society get-togethers, there are very few actual people, so it's no more familiar to us than Mangooska Six in the ninetyeighth century. Using actual BBC presenters and perfect mock-ups of News 24 bulletins (starting with "Rose", but most notably in "Aliens of London") was clever, yet we've now reached the point where modern-day Britain doesn't seem to contain anything else, a version of the country in which TV is the only reality. We know that the Doctor, Martha and Captain Jack are in trouble, because their faces are on the television news; we know that the death of the President of the USA is a turning-point, because it's broadcast to the whole world; even the Master has started taunting the Doctor via the BBC, and just to rub it in, there's a bomb in the TV set.
If this were a story about television, a la "The Long Game", then this might make sense. But it isn't: the Master controls the population with a spurious hypno-satellite, not by manipulating the media, which blows a hole in the idea that this might be a satire. It's just how the programmemakers see the world these days. Similarly, even those who actually like Catherine Tate would have difficulty arguing that she can provide the voice of One of Us, which is theoretically what the companion is there for. She's been hired specifically because she's a Television Celebrity, so there's automatically a gulf between herself and the audience.
And if we're talking about a series that's rapidly becoming lost in showbiz, then this leads us on to the second problem with "The Sound of Drums": Ann Widdecombe is an evil Tory bigot, while Sharon Osbourne is a vicious parasitic brood-harpy who drinks the spinal fluid of little children. If only metaphorically. The point is, I'm having problems with the irony threshold here. These people are clearly - as it were - servants of the Jagrafess, people who might reasonably have been depicted as The Enemy during the Eccleston season. When did they become Friends
of Doctor Who?
That's enough cynicism. On a lighter note, this is also the time of year when we play the two key Doctor Who guessing-games, the "Who's Going to Be Next Year's Big Historical Guest-Star?" game and the "Name a Contemporary Character Actor Who's Likely to Turn Up in a Minor Role" game. However, we already know that 2008's Historical Guest Star duties are going to be shared by Agatha Christie and a great big volcano. (I'm hoping the Pompeii story will be a historical farce a la "The Romans", in which the Doctor and a young Captain Jack run around the streets of the city on Volcano Day but somehow never meet. Please, God, any excuse for a historical that doesn't have sodding aliens in it. Surely, CGI lava is as big an audience-grabber as CGI monsters?) As for the Character Actor game… this takes some skill, and requires us to think about the kind of television-friendly performer who's likely to move in the same circles as the production team. After the 2005 season, my guess for 2006 was Louise Delamere; I was close, but she eventually ended up in Torchwood instead. Last year, my guess for 2007 was Lucy Montgomery; again, I was on the right lines, since Debbie Chazen (the other one from Tittybangbang) is in "Voyage of the Damned". For 2008… how about absolutely anybody who was in Oliver Twist? Although personally, I'm still amazed that Celia Imrie has managed to avoid the series for so long.
I will, of course, continue to act like the frustrated conscience of Doctor Who fandom throughout the coming year. Because some f***er's got to do it.
And a Merry Cribbins to all of you at home.
Oh, all right. Since we're on the subject… at 6:50 on Christmas Day, Film Four will be showing Time Bandits, which may literally be the worst piece of scheduling in television history. Time Bandits is a wonderful thing, but is there anybody that might want to watch an eccentric timetravel- based comedy-adventure who won't be otherwise engaged at 6:50 on Christmas Day? Even if a few Film Four viewers have somehow lost track of the time and forgotten to switch over to BBC1, surely they're going to find themselves thinking "hang on, I'm sure there was something I meant to do" during the sequence set on board the Titanic?
My great-grandfather was booked to travel on the Titanic, as part of a transatlantic business trip. He pulled out at the last minute. Our family history doesn't record why he pulled out, but if you're familiar with "Rose", then you'll understand why I find this amusing. Perhaps he was talked out of it by a big-eared Mancunian. And I see that in the weekend papers, one of the few still-living Titanic survivors has objected to the BBC's lack of Christmas Day tact, although she doesn't really seem to have captured the mood of the nation.
Given that the Christmas Doctor Who is the BBC's highest-yield warhead, it's interesting to note how the other channels have decided to deal with it. ITV has elected to show The African Queen, a film which could happily be screened on any Sunday afternoon without causing a fuss (thus wisely avoiding any attempt at a ratings war… it's like 1977 all over again). It works both ways, though: BBC3's Doctor Who Confidential, which is usually scheduled to immediately follow its parent-programme, begins half an hour after Doctor Who ends. And it's not as if BBC3 has anything better to do at eight o'clock, because it's showing a repeat of Football Gaffes Galore. But then you realise… at eight o'clock, ITV is presenting us with Harry Hill's Christmas TV Burp. Has the BBC noticed this, and delayed Confidential by half an hour, knowing that Doctor Who and Harry Hill share an awfully large chunk of the audience? This is, after all, a man who opened his very first show on Channel 4 by wrestling a giant maggot.
Like any good warhead, Doctor Who makes a big bang while covering the surrounding area with fallout, and this Christmas it's hard to look at any page of the (haaaa-lle-lu-jah) Radio Times without seeing traces of its influence. We note that the BBC's other "big" programmes this season include The Catherine Tate Show and The Shadow in the North with Billie Piper, neither of which is technically supposed to be Doctor Who-related, but the RT has thoughtfully put the interviews on the same page anyway. We'll gloss over David Tennant's appearance in Extras - a programme which, in all other respects, has a cast list that could only be worse if it had more than one copy of Ricky Gervais in it (in much the same way that ITV is marking New Year's Eve with a comedy-drama starring James Dreyfus in two different roles, i.e. a programme that's twice as bad as you might possibly imagine) - and instead turn our attention to New Year's Day, when we get BBC1's new adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, written by leading-dramatist-turned-soft-core-hack Andrew Davies. We might expect plenty of period stripping-off, with no actual genitalia but lots of male buttocks thrusting in and out of multi-layered underwear. I mention this only because Mark Gatiss is in it. Surely, he isn't going to be doing any deflowering? His chat-up technique in "The Lazarus Experiment" was bad enough, but now I'm trying to imagine him seducing a nineteenth-century virgin, and all I can think of is Briss the Butcher. Licking his lips. In close-up.
And since I'm not newsgroup-formatted, it was only this week that I learned of the existence of the on-line Doctor Who advent calendar, which provides a daily ration of photos, interviews, exclusive clips, downloadable chocolates and special coupons promising you a place at God's right hand if you watch the programme on Christmas Day. If I'd known about this sooner, then I might not have bothered writing 15,000+ words in the last three weeks: compared to footage of Kylie Minogue larking about in a maid's outfit, I can see how a JPEG of a box of Lego or a group shot of Android, Cyborg and Muton might seem insufficiently festive. (Oh, perhaps I should explain today's picture. Yes, this is a real Lego set. It celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the Lego Brick, and is a modernised version of the "classic" Lego Town from 1958, so the leering old man represents a grown-up / grown-old version of someone who might have bought the original '50s models as a ten-year-old. Out of context, though, he just looks like a paedophile laying bait.)
So as the Doctor Who Christmas Special approaches, we simply have to acknowledge that Russell T. Davies not only has the best job in the world, but the best job that's ever existed in the whole of human history. Some people have criticised my occasional bitterness towards the series by claiming that I'm just jealous, to which I respond: well, duh. We should consider that Big Russell not only has executive control over Doctor Who as a concept, but access to a multi-squillion-pound budget with which to depict anything in the entire span of space and time, almost on a whim. Even Hollywood executives don't have this sort of reckless power. The only person in / on television who's in a similarly enviable position is Gok Wan, easily-anagrammed presenter of Channel 4's How to Look Good Naked, whose job description involves touching up the wobbly parts of overfed women while they nod seriously and listen to his sage council on what bras to wear. But since Wan is (presumably) gay, it's safe to assume that he has no conception of how lucky he is.
With great power comes great responsibility: this is what I was getting at during the "Unquiet Dead" farrago, and if it was true of Gatiss, then it's twentyfold-true of Big Russell. This man has more influence over the minds of the nation's youth than anybody else in contemporary British culture - go on, prove me wrong - and according to the interviews, he even has the ability to make Kylie wee herself. ITV fears him. Ant and Dec have known his wrath. He may not be as famous as David Beckham, but then, nobody actually listens to what David Beckham says. Fortunately he tends to use this power for good, or at least, to say things like "I know, let's put rhinos on the moon!". But this doesn't mean we should take our eyes off the bugger, because…
…because even if power doesn't always corrupt, then showbiz invariably does. I know I'm not alone in feeling that "The Sound of Drums" marks a very specific jumping of the shark, yet apart from the relative dullness of it, two things seem especially worrying. One is that although it continues the twenty-first-century Doctor Who obsession with stores set in something like "the real world", the programme's idea of what constitutes "the real world" is becoming increasingly slanted towards the point-of-view of people who work in television. In much the same way that Jennifer Saunders is no longer capable of doing anything other than making jokes about meeting minor celebrities at BBC TV centre, Doctor Who's two default methods of establishing a contemporary British setting are (a) guest appearances by famous people playing themselves, and (b) set-pieces involving any event where TV cameras might be present (note that apart from the regulars and semi-regulars we already know, there are no modern-day characters in "The Sound of Drums" other than media figures and Saxon's co-conspirators). In other words, the Doctor's natural environment these days is a BAFTA awards ceremony. No other Doctor would seriously have considered putting on a dinner jacket for "Rise of the Cybermen" or "The Lazarus Experiment", because no other Doctor belongs on the Red Carpet. Tom Baker in
formalwear would have been unconscionable; David Tennant in formalwear seems perfectly normal.
Once you realise this, Tennant's appearance in Extras is rather unsettling, because you begin to see that the two programmes are converging on the same territory. "Real world" stories are supposed to draw in the viewers by giving the adventures-in-space-and-time concept some grounding in the world we recognise, but the Britain we see in "The Sound of Drums" just alienates us. Even if there are TV studios, press interviews and high-society get-togethers, there are very few actual people, so it's no more familiar to us than Mangooska Six in the ninetyeighth century. Using actual BBC presenters and perfect mock-ups of News 24 bulletins (starting with "Rose", but most notably in "Aliens of London") was clever, yet we've now reached the point where modern-day Britain doesn't seem to contain anything else, a version of the country in which TV is the only reality. We know that the Doctor, Martha and Captain Jack are in trouble, because their faces are on the television news; we know that the death of the President of the USA is a turning-point, because it's broadcast to the whole world; even the Master has started taunting the Doctor via the BBC, and just to rub it in, there's a bomb in the TV set.
If this were a story about television, a la "The Long Game", then this might make sense. But it isn't: the Master controls the population with a spurious hypno-satellite, not by manipulating the media, which blows a hole in the idea that this might be a satire. It's just how the programmemakers see the world these days. Similarly, even those who actually like Catherine Tate would have difficulty arguing that she can provide the voice of One of Us, which is theoretically what the companion is there for. She's been hired specifically because she's a Television Celebrity, so there's automatically a gulf between herself and the audience.
And if we're talking about a series that's rapidly becoming lost in showbiz, then this leads us on to the second problem with "The Sound of Drums": Ann Widdecombe is an evil Tory bigot, while Sharon Osbourne is a vicious parasitic brood-harpy who drinks the spinal fluid of little children. If only metaphorically. The point is, I'm having problems with the irony threshold here. These people are clearly - as it were - servants of the Jagrafess, people who might reasonably have been depicted as The Enemy during the Eccleston season. When did they become Friends
of Doctor Who?
That's enough cynicism. On a lighter note, this is also the time of year when we play the two key Doctor Who guessing-games, the "Who's Going to Be Next Year's Big Historical Guest-Star?" game and the "Name a Contemporary Character Actor Who's Likely to Turn Up in a Minor Role" game. However, we already know that 2008's Historical Guest Star duties are going to be shared by Agatha Christie and a great big volcano. (I'm hoping the Pompeii story will be a historical farce a la "The Romans", in which the Doctor and a young Captain Jack run around the streets of the city on Volcano Day but somehow never meet. Please, God, any excuse for a historical that doesn't have sodding aliens in it. Surely, CGI lava is as big an audience-grabber as CGI monsters?) As for the Character Actor game… this takes some skill, and requires us to think about the kind of television-friendly performer who's likely to move in the same circles as the production team. After the 2005 season, my guess for 2006 was Louise Delamere; I was close, but she eventually ended up in Torchwood instead. Last year, my guess for 2007 was Lucy Montgomery; again, I was on the right lines, since Debbie Chazen (the other one from Tittybangbang) is in "Voyage of the Damned". For 2008… how about absolutely anybody who was in Oliver Twist? Although personally, I'm still amazed that Celia Imrie has managed to avoid the series for so long.
I will, of course, continue to act like the frustrated conscience of Doctor Who fandom throughout the coming year. Because some f***er's got to do it.
And a Merry Cribbins to all of you at home.
Sunday, 27 July 2008
Lawrence Miles is On Holiday
The Wilderness Years: Part One
I’m in Wales. What am I doing in Wales?
Not even one of the cosmopolitan parts, not even the kind of generic, terraformed urban landscape that might double for London in the event of a Cyberman invasion. It’s... quieter here. I’m in a big house in the middle of a duck-green space that my child-self likes to call “the country”, which is like the “outside” we get in cities, but without the adverts. The nearest settlement is a village, so removed from consumer society as I recognise it that the (only) shop doesn’t sell Pringles. I wouldn’t be able to buy them even if it did, since there’s nothing as technologically gauche as a cashtill here. To get to the shop, I have to walk through a field of cows: at least, I believed them to be cows, having admired their work in episode one of “Image of the Fendahl”. But now I’m told that they’re bullocks, this being the name given to docile, castrated bulls. It seems cruel to turn a creature into a eunuch, and then give it a name that sounds so much like the most popular term for testicles. But the atmosphere of menace around them makes it hard for me to feel any sympathy. When I walked past them today – flanked by them on either side of the pathway, close enough to hear the flies in search of the next ready-meal – they stopped their grazing and stared at me, turning their heads as I passed, never looking away and never blinking. Then they started following me. Not following me the way nice animals do, the way a cat would, if it thought it might get food or attention. Following me the way a gang of adolescents would, if its members wanted to mark out their territory but didn’t have the nerve for a proper stabbing.
Stabbings...! There was another stabbing the day before I left London, not much more than a hundred yards from my house, outside a notoriously violent pub which someone with no foresight (or, just as likely, someone with both foresight and irony) decided to call The Flowers. To escape all that, and then be stampeded by sexually-mutilated cattle, would be the stupidest possible way to die.
In the daytime, I work on the laptop I’ve been given. Sometimes I go for walks in the forest, where I’ve learned to detect the presence of wildlife by the smell of badger-shit. I don’t feel close to the forest. I feel closer to the old yellow diggers that sit rotting outside the farms, some of them not used in decades, now overgrown with vines and gradually being dragged into the earth. Nothing, not even the broken statue of Ozymandias in the poem, is as poignant as the corpse of a JCB being ingested by the dirt and the high grass. At night, I try to study The Iliad and try not to giggle at the homoeroticism (not all of it deliberate, although finding "accidental" references to sodomy in Greek classical literature seems as unlikely as finding "accidental" camp in anything that involves John Barrowman). There’s obvious, inevitable humour in reading that Achilles was promised “seven Lesbians” by the Greek army – seven being an odd number, reminding me of the joke that an orgy is so-called because if there’s an odd number of participants, then the one who doesn’t end up with a partner gets to say 'aw, gee' – but it’s fairly clear in this context that “Lesbians” means “women from Lesbos”, apparently noted for their skills in housewifery. More striking, though, is the couplet from Book Fourteen:
Mean space flew Somnus to the ships, found Neptune out, and said:
‘Now cheerfully assist the Greeks, and give them glorious head...’
I assume this doesn’t happen on-screen in “The Myth Makers”, although it’s hard to judge from the telesnaps.
I’m lonely. Isolation is one of the reasons I was brought here, but there’s a sting to it: I wasn’t expecting to have access to the internet. This means that I didn’t bring any e-mail addresses with me, which means in turn that I can watch the rest of the world on a flattened, luminous screen, but not communicate with anybody I know who happens to live there. I also miss the presence of people – real-life, wrapped-in-skin, all-around-you people - which surprises me, given how little I seem to like them in my native environment. But, oh, yes... women especially. I miss the overfed Chav-girls of the suburbs, slouching nonchalantly outside Asda with their chip-fat breasts bulging out of their ill-advised T-shirts, waiting for someone over the age of twenty-one to buy them vodka. I wonder what my local high-street must look like now, in this weather, in this heat. I imagine boiling flesh straining out of every opening, like a side of ham being forced through a fishnet stocking. Outside this house, the only women I’ve seen here have been the two girls who work in the shop that knows no Pringle. One is plump, Welsh, pierced and smiling, the other pallid, red-haired, Birmingham-accented and almost as out-of-place as myself. They’re both adorable. I don’t like getting near them, of course. In the country, you’re always noticed: I hate being noticed. Perhaps that’s the prime reason I don’t belong here. Standing in a field, there’s no hope of camouflage, let alone any chance of letching.
Nobody else who’s staying in this house has any interest in Doctor Who, which is merciful. If nothing else, then I won’t have to sit through “Silence in the Library” in the television room tomorrow. I’d only complain about the lazy script-editing, and nobody else would understand a word I was saying. Television: when I came here, I didn’t think I’d see any television. Instead, I see it, but don’t have much control over it. I’ve watched every episode of Big Brother this week, although my interest in it ended yesterday, for reasons I don’t think I need to explain. The only thing I’ve insisted on watching (alone) was a topical comedy show on BBC2, purely because somebody I know was on the panel. She spoke four sentences in the entire half-hour, and her presence – all 5’2” of it – seemed to get lost amongst her aggressively tall, aggressively masculine co-comedians. I got the sense that she felt rather intimidated, but I could just be projecting, given that this is exactly how she makes me feel. The poor, short-arsed little genius.
There’s a copy of one of my books on the shelf in my room, as well as a Lego minifigure of Darth Maul, and I didn’t bring either of them with me. I’m guessing that the former was put there because they knew I was coming, but that the latter is just a coincidence. Because in this country, you’re never more than ten feet from a Lego minifigure of Darth Maul.
I’m in Wales. What am I doing in Wales?
Not even one of the cosmopolitan parts, not even the kind of generic, terraformed urban landscape that might double for London in the event of a Cyberman invasion. It’s... quieter here. I’m in a big house in the middle of a duck-green space that my child-self likes to call “the country”, which is like the “outside” we get in cities, but without the adverts. The nearest settlement is a village, so removed from consumer society as I recognise it that the (only) shop doesn’t sell Pringles. I wouldn’t be able to buy them even if it did, since there’s nothing as technologically gauche as a cashtill here. To get to the shop, I have to walk through a field of cows: at least, I believed them to be cows, having admired their work in episode one of “Image of the Fendahl”. But now I’m told that they’re bullocks, this being the name given to docile, castrated bulls. It seems cruel to turn a creature into a eunuch, and then give it a name that sounds so much like the most popular term for testicles. But the atmosphere of menace around them makes it hard for me to feel any sympathy. When I walked past them today – flanked by them on either side of the pathway, close enough to hear the flies in search of the next ready-meal – they stopped their grazing and stared at me, turning their heads as I passed, never looking away and never blinking. Then they started following me. Not following me the way nice animals do, the way a cat would, if it thought it might get food or attention. Following me the way a gang of adolescents would, if its members wanted to mark out their territory but didn’t have the nerve for a proper stabbing.
Stabbings...! There was another stabbing the day before I left London, not much more than a hundred yards from my house, outside a notoriously violent pub which someone with no foresight (or, just as likely, someone with both foresight and irony) decided to call The Flowers. To escape all that, and then be stampeded by sexually-mutilated cattle, would be the stupidest possible way to die.
In the daytime, I work on the laptop I’ve been given. Sometimes I go for walks in the forest, where I’ve learned to detect the presence of wildlife by the smell of badger-shit. I don’t feel close to the forest. I feel closer to the old yellow diggers that sit rotting outside the farms, some of them not used in decades, now overgrown with vines and gradually being dragged into the earth. Nothing, not even the broken statue of Ozymandias in the poem, is as poignant as the corpse of a JCB being ingested by the dirt and the high grass. At night, I try to study The Iliad and try not to giggle at the homoeroticism (not all of it deliberate, although finding "accidental" references to sodomy in Greek classical literature seems as unlikely as finding "accidental" camp in anything that involves John Barrowman). There’s obvious, inevitable humour in reading that Achilles was promised “seven Lesbians” by the Greek army – seven being an odd number, reminding me of the joke that an orgy is so-called because if there’s an odd number of participants, then the one who doesn’t end up with a partner gets to say 'aw, gee' – but it’s fairly clear in this context that “Lesbians” means “women from Lesbos”, apparently noted for their skills in housewifery. More striking, though, is the couplet from Book Fourteen:
Mean space flew Somnus to the ships, found Neptune out, and said:
‘Now cheerfully assist the Greeks, and give them glorious head...’
I assume this doesn’t happen on-screen in “The Myth Makers”, although it’s hard to judge from the telesnaps.
I’m lonely. Isolation is one of the reasons I was brought here, but there’s a sting to it: I wasn’t expecting to have access to the internet. This means that I didn’t bring any e-mail addresses with me, which means in turn that I can watch the rest of the world on a flattened, luminous screen, but not communicate with anybody I know who happens to live there. I also miss the presence of people – real-life, wrapped-in-skin, all-around-you people - which surprises me, given how little I seem to like them in my native environment. But, oh, yes... women especially. I miss the overfed Chav-girls of the suburbs, slouching nonchalantly outside Asda with their chip-fat breasts bulging out of their ill-advised T-shirts, waiting for someone over the age of twenty-one to buy them vodka. I wonder what my local high-street must look like now, in this weather, in this heat. I imagine boiling flesh straining out of every opening, like a side of ham being forced through a fishnet stocking. Outside this house, the only women I’ve seen here have been the two girls who work in the shop that knows no Pringle. One is plump, Welsh, pierced and smiling, the other pallid, red-haired, Birmingham-accented and almost as out-of-place as myself. They’re both adorable. I don’t like getting near them, of course. In the country, you’re always noticed: I hate being noticed. Perhaps that’s the prime reason I don’t belong here. Standing in a field, there’s no hope of camouflage, let alone any chance of letching.
Nobody else who’s staying in this house has any interest in Doctor Who, which is merciful. If nothing else, then I won’t have to sit through “Silence in the Library” in the television room tomorrow. I’d only complain about the lazy script-editing, and nobody else would understand a word I was saying. Television: when I came here, I didn’t think I’d see any television. Instead, I see it, but don’t have much control over it. I’ve watched every episode of Big Brother this week, although my interest in it ended yesterday, for reasons I don’t think I need to explain. The only thing I’ve insisted on watching (alone) was a topical comedy show on BBC2, purely because somebody I know was on the panel. She spoke four sentences in the entire half-hour, and her presence – all 5’2” of it – seemed to get lost amongst her aggressively tall, aggressively masculine co-comedians. I got the sense that she felt rather intimidated, but I could just be projecting, given that this is exactly how she makes me feel. The poor, short-arsed little genius.
There’s a copy of one of my books on the shelf in my room, as well as a Lego minifigure of Darth Maul, and I didn’t bring either of them with me. I’m guessing that the former was put there because they knew I was coming, but that the latter is just a coincidence. Because in this country, you’re never more than ten feet from a Lego minifigure of Darth Maul.
Saturday, 12 July 2008
Week Thirteen-And-Then-Some: Mission Debrief
If you thought what happened to Donna was sad...
As a 36-year-old obsessive who's now classified as being at the less intense end of the "Autism Spectrum" (a recent invention, which replaces the now-obsolete Spastic ZX-81), I've increasingly found myself able to look back at the cultural history of the '70s, '80s and '90s, and see just how badly the last three decades have been mis-remembered. I now appear to be living in a curious and unfamiliar world where everybody always said that Han Solo was the cool one out of Star Wars, and sci-fi fans immediately acknowledged Yoda as a modern icon instead of shouting "he's meant to be a Jedi Master, but he's just a shrieky Muppet!" for the first three years; where the whole of mid-1980s society revolved around The Breakfast Club, and viewers were shocked and appalled by The Word instead of saying "Christ, this is shit" but watching it anyway because they were too stoned to change the channel; where Kurt Cobain was a legendary figure even before he proved that he really, really did have a gun, and Oasis were the epitome of BritPop instead of the slug-bodied MOR behemoth that rolled over BritPop and flattened it forever; where Davros was always a ratings-winner, and we watched Doctor Who from behind the sofa instead of pressing our faces up against the screen.
This isn't just the result of all the clips shows and nostalgia exercises, in which minor celebrities who half-remember something from a conversation they had in a pub in 1986 are allowed to re-write the last thirty years in fast-setting soundbite-crete. Nor is it just the result of all the re-brandings and re-packagings, in which the stars of high-profile remakes try to tell us what the original film or TV series was "about", according to what the new version wants to be about (even Doctor Who Confidential is prone to this). No, it's the sheer speed of the modern media that really does it. These days, cultural events can be mis-remembered mere days after taking place: the first simple, one-paragraph description will be repeated and quoted until it becomes absolute. We might refer to this as Peter Haining Syndrome, and I mention it now just because of the media reaction to "Journey's End". According to the Entertainment News section of BBCi, the bank-breaking, logic-defying Season Finale received a "mixed" reaction from fans - which I'm assuming is accurate, in much the same way that the statement "sprouts receive a mixed reaction at Christmas" is accurate - but crucially, it used the words "anti-climax" immediately after pointing out that some viewers expected a New Doctor Who. I'm convinced that this is how pop-history will remember things, and that posterity will claim we felt disappointed because David Tennant didn't regenerate properly. Whereas in fact, we felt disappointed because the entire episode was one of the stupidest things ever broadcast on BBC Television.
Mind you, I can think of worse lapses in history. On the letters page of the latest Radio Times, one viewer writes (with some bitterness, but posing as sarcasm) that he was "surprised" to see professional Jesus-baiter Richard Dawkins appear in "The Stolen Earth", since Doctor Who involves a Cosmic Lord who's prepared to sacrifice himself for the good of humanity every week. Once again demonstrating that Christians not only believe themselves to have invented and copyrighted the basic tenets of human civilisation, but all the stuff they nicked from the world's other cultures, as well. Oh, yes... the Radio Times. Following last week's account of its descent from "Friendly Face of BBC Broadcasting" to "Heat magazine with more pictures of Daleks", you might perhaps find it surprising that I still read the sodding thing. I admit that until recently, my sentimental attachment to the publication which gave us Clive Doig's Trackword and Frank Bellamy's Skarasen allowed me to overlook the work / noxious bile / general existence of Alison Graham. But now, it seems time for a change. And not simply a change of listings magazine, either. Because in the last few weeks, an acquaintance of mine has done something which those of my generation and background once considered impossible: she's decided not to have a TV set any more.
Her logic seems sound. There's nothing she wants to watch, or at least, nothing that justifies paying £139.50 every year. If there ever is a Major TV Event, then she can always go and watch it round a friend's house, or possibly in a pub. And this has forced me to consider my own viewing habits. Last week, there were only three new programmes on UK television that I actually wanted to see, only three names I bothered to circle in the Radio Times (yes, I'm one of those people). Two of them had "Doctor Who" in the title, the latter being a 45-minute exercise in self-congratulation, the former being... well, a 65-minute exercise in self-congratulation, padded out with rotten old computer graphics. If I wanted to stare dumbly at spaceships blowing up and cartoon characters firing bazookas at robot-people, then I'd buy a PlayStation, not a TV Licence. (Admittedly, this all stopped after 45 minutes, and we then got twenty minutes of actors looking pleased with themselves. Did you know that the viewing-figures rose by 400,000 in the last quarter of an hour, as people started to drift over from the tennis on the court next door? Just try watching the episode from the towing-the-Earth scene onwards, while pretending that you don't know anything about the plot, aren't a natural Doctor Who fan, and aren't likely to make quasi-erotic squealing noises at the sight of Billie Piper kissing what looks like the Doctor. Not pretty, is it?)
Last week I suggested that although I'm perfectly-tuned to television as a medium and an institution, I'm also thirty years out of synch with its content. I belong in the world of I, Claudius, Dennis Potter and "Genesis of the Daleks", yet I've somehow become trapped in the world of Rome, Ashley Pharaoh and "Journey's End". It's like Life on Mars, only backwards and even more predictable. However, the wider issue is that for those who couldn't care less about "slick", the BBC has failed in almost all its duties as a public service provider. True, BBC1, BBC2 and BBC4 are palpably ahead of the commercial channels, but this is saying nothing. It's still an insult to expect anyone to pay £139.50 for the privilege of Bonekickers. Although if we're talking about insults, then let's not forget: it's only been a week since the revelation that Jeremy Clarkson has an annual contract worth £2 million. The knowledge that this vicious, bigoted thug is receiving such obscene quantities of Licence-Fee money, as a reward for making programmes which go against every principle the BBC has ever stood for, almost makes Jonathan Ross seem like a good investment. He can't even keep his bloated face out of QI, supposedly the Corporation's last-ditch attempt at in-te-leck-chew-ul TV.
(Oh, on a sort-of-related matter... this week, I've learned that Big Finish has hired David Quantick to write one of its audios. Is it now a kind of tradition, then, that only the worst people on Earth are allowed to write for Doctor Who? First the Neil Gaiman thing, now this. For those who aren't familiar with his work, Quantick is a comedy-hack-for-hire whose idea of "satire" is making the same cock-obvious jokes about celebrities that have already appeared in all the showbiz wank-mags, but in a grumpier voice. More tellingly, though: in the days when nobody seriously expected it to make a comeback, he described Doctor Who as "shite" and its fans as near-subhuman. He's obviously changed his mind now that it's both fashionable and profitable. Next month, BBC Books will be launching Jeremy Clarkson's younger-readers novel Doctor Who Gives It Some Grunt, in which the Doctor lands on the planet of the fox-people and slaughters its population with a twenty-mile-high combine harvester. Just for a laugh.)
Getting rid of the television seems counter-instinctual, and the fact that I can comfortably use a phrase like "viewing habits" should tell you something. Watching telly is part of our anthropological makeup, like hunting, mating, or marking our territory with urine. But for people like us, there's always going to be that extra question, isn't there? If I get rid of the TV, then... I mean, for God's sake... how am I going to watch any future Doctor Who? The obvious answer is "make lots of friends and always visit them at tea-time on Saturdays", but for me, the real answer is rather sad. The truth is that I now find it hard to imagine Doctor Who doing anything I might want to watch, at least in the forseeable future. Russell T. Davies has said everything he wants to say, and doesn't seem to have any back-up strategy apart from hitting the "bigger" button, over and over again: it's a bit like watching a teenage boy trying to blow up the dirtiest bits of a nudie JPEG, only to find himself staring at a screen full of meaningless pixels. And I think it's fairly clear by now that Moffat isn't likely to come up with anything I haven't already thought of. Bear in mind, though, that this isn't really about intellectual "depth". Great pop-art can surprise you by being bold, dynamic and inventive, even if it isn't particularly clever. The Eccleston season startled us all by telling contemporary fantasy stories in ways that had never been tried on TV before, and to an extent, great Doctor Who has always followed this pattern. But the last thing the series wants right now is to surprise anybody, least of all somebody like me.
I'm disaffected more than dissatisfied. Well, look at it from my point of view: geeks may not get loyalty-points, but I still feel as if I've spent a lifetime in the service of the Motherland. The fact that I've written around 85,000 words here in the last fourteen weeks - Dear God, that's longer than any book ever written by Terrance Dicks - should demonstrate that I still think of this as my native territory, however badly the 2008 series may have suffered from the global competence-crunch. And it's not as if I haven't fought for Queen and Country. When BBC Books re-launched / stole the Doctor Who range in the late 1990s, I did everything in my power to make it interesting enough for the twenty-first century, a duty which often involved sitting in the foyer of the BBC Worldwide building and waving my arms at Stephen Cole for hours on end. Whatever the results may have been, I genuinely tried to push the series forward, and - if only by chance - pre-empted a few things that ended up in the TV version when it finally reappeared. This is why it feels so painfully, heartbreakingly wrong that I should now find myself exiled from the books, while writers whom nobody likes are allowed to treat the show as a merchandising cash-cow. Just as it feels wrong that Big Finish still refuses to touch me (well, apart from giving me hovel-space in the Bernice Ghetto), while hiring people who've never demonstrated anything but contempt for Doctor Who. Now, however, the programme doesn't even seem to want me as a viewer. I'm simply not part of the target demographic.
Next week I'm going to Wales, in a Make-Yates-trying-to-get-the-dinosaurs-out-of-his-head sort of way. I'm not going to have easy access to a TV set while I'm there, although I will have my own radio (because I'm quite blatantly Homo BBC7, and besides, you don't need a licence for that). If the lack of pictures doesn't kill me, then... oh, damn it to Hell, this isn't fair. The BBC is our last remaining bulwark against the shrieking void of commercial anti-culture, but if it won't do its job properly, then I just can't keep paying for it. It's richer than I am, and it wants me to give it money for Graham Norton. Is it insane?
And now, a series of repeats to fill the schedule over the summer holidays: my three favourite angsticles from this year's Doctor Who Thing. A couple of them have even had the mistakes taken out.
As a 36-year-old obsessive who's now classified as being at the less intense end of the "Autism Spectrum" (a recent invention, which replaces the now-obsolete Spastic ZX-81), I've increasingly found myself able to look back at the cultural history of the '70s, '80s and '90s, and see just how badly the last three decades have been mis-remembered. I now appear to be living in a curious and unfamiliar world where everybody always said that Han Solo was the cool one out of Star Wars, and sci-fi fans immediately acknowledged Yoda as a modern icon instead of shouting "he's meant to be a Jedi Master, but he's just a shrieky Muppet!" for the first three years; where the whole of mid-1980s society revolved around The Breakfast Club, and viewers were shocked and appalled by The Word instead of saying "Christ, this is shit" but watching it anyway because they were too stoned to change the channel; where Kurt Cobain was a legendary figure even before he proved that he really, really did have a gun, and Oasis were the epitome of BritPop instead of the slug-bodied MOR behemoth that rolled over BritPop and flattened it forever; where Davros was always a ratings-winner, and we watched Doctor Who from behind the sofa instead of pressing our faces up against the screen.
This isn't just the result of all the clips shows and nostalgia exercises, in which minor celebrities who half-remember something from a conversation they had in a pub in 1986 are allowed to re-write the last thirty years in fast-setting soundbite-crete. Nor is it just the result of all the re-brandings and re-packagings, in which the stars of high-profile remakes try to tell us what the original film or TV series was "about", according to what the new version wants to be about (even Doctor Who Confidential is prone to this). No, it's the sheer speed of the modern media that really does it. These days, cultural events can be mis-remembered mere days after taking place: the first simple, one-paragraph description will be repeated and quoted until it becomes absolute. We might refer to this as Peter Haining Syndrome, and I mention it now just because of the media reaction to "Journey's End". According to the Entertainment News section of BBCi, the bank-breaking, logic-defying Season Finale received a "mixed" reaction from fans - which I'm assuming is accurate, in much the same way that the statement "sprouts receive a mixed reaction at Christmas" is accurate - but crucially, it used the words "anti-climax" immediately after pointing out that some viewers expected a New Doctor Who. I'm convinced that this is how pop-history will remember things, and that posterity will claim we felt disappointed because David Tennant didn't regenerate properly. Whereas in fact, we felt disappointed because the entire episode was one of the stupidest things ever broadcast on BBC Television.
Mind you, I can think of worse lapses in history. On the letters page of the latest Radio Times, one viewer writes (with some bitterness, but posing as sarcasm) that he was "surprised" to see professional Jesus-baiter Richard Dawkins appear in "The Stolen Earth", since Doctor Who involves a Cosmic Lord who's prepared to sacrifice himself for the good of humanity every week. Once again demonstrating that Christians not only believe themselves to have invented and copyrighted the basic tenets of human civilisation, but all the stuff they nicked from the world's other cultures, as well. Oh, yes... the Radio Times. Following last week's account of its descent from "Friendly Face of BBC Broadcasting" to "Heat magazine with more pictures of Daleks", you might perhaps find it surprising that I still read the sodding thing. I admit that until recently, my sentimental attachment to the publication which gave us Clive Doig's Trackword and Frank Bellamy's Skarasen allowed me to overlook the work / noxious bile / general existence of Alison Graham. But now, it seems time for a change. And not simply a change of listings magazine, either. Because in the last few weeks, an acquaintance of mine has done something which those of my generation and background once considered impossible: she's decided not to have a TV set any more.
Her logic seems sound. There's nothing she wants to watch, or at least, nothing that justifies paying £139.50 every year. If there ever is a Major TV Event, then she can always go and watch it round a friend's house, or possibly in a pub. And this has forced me to consider my own viewing habits. Last week, there were only three new programmes on UK television that I actually wanted to see, only three names I bothered to circle in the Radio Times (yes, I'm one of those people). Two of them had "Doctor Who" in the title, the latter being a 45-minute exercise in self-congratulation, the former being... well, a 65-minute exercise in self-congratulation, padded out with rotten old computer graphics. If I wanted to stare dumbly at spaceships blowing up and cartoon characters firing bazookas at robot-people, then I'd buy a PlayStation, not a TV Licence. (Admittedly, this all stopped after 45 minutes, and we then got twenty minutes of actors looking pleased with themselves. Did you know that the viewing-figures rose by 400,000 in the last quarter of an hour, as people started to drift over from the tennis on the court next door? Just try watching the episode from the towing-the-Earth scene onwards, while pretending that you don't know anything about the plot, aren't a natural Doctor Who fan, and aren't likely to make quasi-erotic squealing noises at the sight of Billie Piper kissing what looks like the Doctor. Not pretty, is it?)
Last week I suggested that although I'm perfectly-tuned to television as a medium and an institution, I'm also thirty years out of synch with its content. I belong in the world of I, Claudius, Dennis Potter and "Genesis of the Daleks", yet I've somehow become trapped in the world of Rome, Ashley Pharaoh and "Journey's End". It's like Life on Mars, only backwards and even more predictable. However, the wider issue is that for those who couldn't care less about "slick", the BBC has failed in almost all its duties as a public service provider. True, BBC1, BBC2 and BBC4 are palpably ahead of the commercial channels, but this is saying nothing. It's still an insult to expect anyone to pay £139.50 for the privilege of Bonekickers. Although if we're talking about insults, then let's not forget: it's only been a week since the revelation that Jeremy Clarkson has an annual contract worth £2 million. The knowledge that this vicious, bigoted thug is receiving such obscene quantities of Licence-Fee money, as a reward for making programmes which go against every principle the BBC has ever stood for, almost makes Jonathan Ross seem like a good investment. He can't even keep his bloated face out of QI, supposedly the Corporation's last-ditch attempt at in-te-leck-chew-ul TV.
(Oh, on a sort-of-related matter... this week, I've learned that Big Finish has hired David Quantick to write one of its audios. Is it now a kind of tradition, then, that only the worst people on Earth are allowed to write for Doctor Who? First the Neil Gaiman thing, now this. For those who aren't familiar with his work, Quantick is a comedy-hack-for-hire whose idea of "satire" is making the same cock-obvious jokes about celebrities that have already appeared in all the showbiz wank-mags, but in a grumpier voice. More tellingly, though: in the days when nobody seriously expected it to make a comeback, he described Doctor Who as "shite" and its fans as near-subhuman. He's obviously changed his mind now that it's both fashionable and profitable. Next month, BBC Books will be launching Jeremy Clarkson's younger-readers novel Doctor Who Gives It Some Grunt, in which the Doctor lands on the planet of the fox-people and slaughters its population with a twenty-mile-high combine harvester. Just for a laugh.)
Getting rid of the television seems counter-instinctual, and the fact that I can comfortably use a phrase like "viewing habits" should tell you something. Watching telly is part of our anthropological makeup, like hunting, mating, or marking our territory with urine. But for people like us, there's always going to be that extra question, isn't there? If I get rid of the TV, then... I mean, for God's sake... how am I going to watch any future Doctor Who? The obvious answer is "make lots of friends and always visit them at tea-time on Saturdays", but for me, the real answer is rather sad. The truth is that I now find it hard to imagine Doctor Who doing anything I might want to watch, at least in the forseeable future. Russell T. Davies has said everything he wants to say, and doesn't seem to have any back-up strategy apart from hitting the "bigger" button, over and over again: it's a bit like watching a teenage boy trying to blow up the dirtiest bits of a nudie JPEG, only to find himself staring at a screen full of meaningless pixels. And I think it's fairly clear by now that Moffat isn't likely to come up with anything I haven't already thought of. Bear in mind, though, that this isn't really about intellectual "depth". Great pop-art can surprise you by being bold, dynamic and inventive, even if it isn't particularly clever. The Eccleston season startled us all by telling contemporary fantasy stories in ways that had never been tried on TV before, and to an extent, great Doctor Who has always followed this pattern. But the last thing the series wants right now is to surprise anybody, least of all somebody like me.
I'm disaffected more than dissatisfied. Well, look at it from my point of view: geeks may not get loyalty-points, but I still feel as if I've spent a lifetime in the service of the Motherland. The fact that I've written around 85,000 words here in the last fourteen weeks - Dear God, that's longer than any book ever written by Terrance Dicks - should demonstrate that I still think of this as my native territory, however badly the 2008 series may have suffered from the global competence-crunch. And it's not as if I haven't fought for Queen and Country. When BBC Books re-launched / stole the Doctor Who range in the late 1990s, I did everything in my power to make it interesting enough for the twenty-first century, a duty which often involved sitting in the foyer of the BBC Worldwide building and waving my arms at Stephen Cole for hours on end. Whatever the results may have been, I genuinely tried to push the series forward, and - if only by chance - pre-empted a few things that ended up in the TV version when it finally reappeared. This is why it feels so painfully, heartbreakingly wrong that I should now find myself exiled from the books, while writers whom nobody likes are allowed to treat the show as a merchandising cash-cow. Just as it feels wrong that Big Finish still refuses to touch me (well, apart from giving me hovel-space in the Bernice Ghetto), while hiring people who've never demonstrated anything but contempt for Doctor Who. Now, however, the programme doesn't even seem to want me as a viewer. I'm simply not part of the target demographic.
Next week I'm going to Wales, in a Make-Yates-trying-to-get-the-dinosaurs-out-of-his-head sort of way. I'm not going to have easy access to a TV set while I'm there, although I will have my own radio (because I'm quite blatantly Homo BBC7, and besides, you don't need a licence for that). If the lack of pictures doesn't kill me, then... oh, damn it to Hell, this isn't fair. The BBC is our last remaining bulwark against the shrieking void of commercial anti-culture, but if it won't do its job properly, then I just can't keep paying for it. It's richer than I am, and it wants me to give it money for Graham Norton. Is it insane?
And now, a series of repeats to fill the schedule over the summer holidays: my three favourite angsticles from this year's Doctor Who Thing. A couple of them have even had the mistakes taken out.
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