God, do you remember Arthur Negus Enjoys? Arthur was a stalwart of the Antiques Roadshow, but when he went it alone for his "Enjoys..." series, we couldn't help writing "A Good Hard Seeing-To from a Professional Sex-Worker" on the Radio Times. Nonetheless, I'd like to say that I enjoy...
..."Pilgrim" on Radio 4. On Tuesdays, but for those in the UK, the first episode of Season Two is still available on the iPlayer. I like it partly because it's competent fantasy drama, and party because it feels like what Torchwood should've been.
That is all.
Oh, except that it's got faeries in it. Deal with.
Saturday, 4 September 2010
Wednesday, 25 August 2010
Trout-Mask Replica
Wrong kind of fandom on the tracks.
This week, Nick Briggs stated - while in his small-but-nicely-kept garden on Radio 7 - that Kurt Vonnegut is one of his favourite authors. What? Couldn't anyone, himself included, have mentioned this before? Then I could at least have tried to make a Proper Fiction pitch for Big Finish, rather than grumpily turning my back on the fanboy off-cuts of Gary Russell or BBC Books (all right, until someone asked me in a crisis). My younger self feels stupid and cross. My older self feels like Kilgore Trout, which is stupid and tired, obviously.
All that said, what does this tell us? I'd like to see it as a lesson that contrary to Hollywood lore, you can underestimate your audience, but... maybe it's truer to say that everybody can be more than one audience at once. Mr Nick likes Slaughterhouse 5, yet he's also shown a strong proclivity towards Doctor Who stories that are much like episode three of "Earthshock". (Oh, wait. "Captain Briggs" joke? I trust he's never had that sort of hairstyle. I'll also avoid the Titanic gag.) I'm remembering those '90s Doctor Who readers who liked the novels to be as close as possible to "Terror of the Zygons", but at the same time challenged modern TV for not being challenging. One medium is for the clever, one medium is for the obvious: is that how we think? A bit like those fans of The Matrix who tried to pretend it was intellectual, because even though it was clearly hackneyed, uber-phallic drivel more than thirty years behind popular literature, "movies don't usually do that".
Personally, I like to treat all things as existing on an equal level of combined intelligence and stupidity. Then again, my career as a writer is effectively dead. So it goes.
This week, Nick Briggs stated - while in his small-but-nicely-kept garden on Radio 7 - that Kurt Vonnegut is one of his favourite authors. What? Couldn't anyone, himself included, have mentioned this before? Then I could at least have tried to make a Proper Fiction pitch for Big Finish, rather than grumpily turning my back on the fanboy off-cuts of Gary Russell or BBC Books (all right, until someone asked me in a crisis). My younger self feels stupid and cross. My older self feels like Kilgore Trout, which is stupid and tired, obviously.
All that said, what does this tell us? I'd like to see it as a lesson that contrary to Hollywood lore, you can underestimate your audience, but... maybe it's truer to say that everybody can be more than one audience at once. Mr Nick likes Slaughterhouse 5, yet he's also shown a strong proclivity towards Doctor Who stories that are much like episode three of "Earthshock". (Oh, wait. "Captain Briggs" joke? I trust he's never had that sort of hairstyle. I'll also avoid the Titanic gag.) I'm remembering those '90s Doctor Who readers who liked the novels to be as close as possible to "Terror of the Zygons", but at the same time challenged modern TV for not being challenging. One medium is for the clever, one medium is for the obvious: is that how we think? A bit like those fans of The Matrix who tried to pretend it was intellectual, because even though it was clearly hackneyed, uber-phallic drivel more than thirty years behind popular literature, "movies don't usually do that".
Personally, I like to treat all things as existing on an equal level of combined intelligence and stupidity. Then again, my career as a writer is effectively dead. So it goes.
Saturday, 26 June 2010
The Squee Doctors
S'okay, I didn't actually bother watching the second half. So this will be largely hypothetical. However...
...five days ago, I was standing in front of the window of the local newsagent's. There was a poster advertising "Archaeological Adventures: Dinosaurs" (I've mentioned this on Twitter, but if you don't already know, then it's the perfect thing for an intelligent child or autistic adult who wants to whittle while watching an unfulfilling World Cup match or BBC drama), and also a poster advertising Doctor Who stickers. I ignored the latter, because I'm really not joking when I say that I can't even look at the gormless foetus-face of Matt Smith without wanting to slap it. That thing with Van Gogh looked like the most interesting episode this year, but as soon as he did the "could you breathe a little more quietly?" schtick in the trailer, I literally made an effort to be out on Saturday.
(Sidestep One. ITV did a remake of The Prisoner which, by all precedent and reason, should've been unbearable. It was quite good. Jesus! ITV is doing a "cult" reboot, but uses proper actors - Ian McKellen and Ruth Wilson, the latter of whom steals the "Most Attractive Woman in the UK Who Looks Like a Fish" crown from Miranda Sawyer - while Doctor Who does a piss-poor Harry Potter impression with a footballer and a blow-up doll? Gutted.)
So I'm in front of the window. And then a little girl, of the kind that Moffat pretends to like when he's stuck in a narrative corner, pulled her mum up to the glass and pointed at the poster.
'I saw that Doctor Who on Shannon's widescreen!' she said. 'It was scary. The Girl One had to run loads...'
(Sidestep Two. To anyone who's read my Twitter-log: yes, that's why I've started using the phrase "the Girl One".)
'...but the Boy One had to save... something.'
The narrative slip is, of course, acceptable from a seven-year-old. However: the Boy One? And, yes, I did indeed turn eyes-left to make sure she was pointing at the photo of Matt Smith. Then I turned eyes-right, sharpish, beacuse I was scared of looking like a paedophile.
The Boy One?
About a week and a half ago, Stephen Fry (defined by a sometimes-wise critic as "a stupid person's idea of what a clever person is like") attracted venom by critising Doctor Who in the era of Steven Moffat (defined by me as "oh, what a complete arse"). Yet in this epic cage-fighting battle between drivelling self-involved pretend-intellectuals, the most important point seemed to be missed. Fry talked about programmes "like" Merlin and Doctor Who.
If you can use those two titles in the same sentence, then something's gone terribly wrong.
But then, this is what I've been saying for a loooooong time: Moffat stated that he didn't want to be remembered as "the man who killed Doctor Who", and yet he already did kill it. He killed it in "The Girl in the Fireplace", a rather good episode if you concentrate on what the author genuinely likes - robots and temporal screwing-around - but an abysmal and emotionally-extorting one when you understand that he's trying to redefine the Doctor as a Sexy Immortal and himself as the Sexy Immortal's Agent. I wasn't kidding when I said the the series in 2010 is competing with Twilight, y'know. Doctor Who at its best has been awkward, experimental, and unpredictable. Moffat's version, as laid out in "Silence in the Library", is slick, conservative, and entirely founded on things that have been proven to work. In short... it's like Merlin. Only even stupider.
Here's the grand irony, though -
(Sidestep Three. How many times have I used the phrase "here's the grand irony"?)
- by attempting to squee-up the Doctor, Moffat has destroyed him as a meaningful figure. In "Forest of the Dead" (the Doctor defeats the shadow-nasties by saying "do you know who I am?", thus removing any possible dramatic tension and making him look like the petulant celebrity he's bltantly becoming) and "The Pandorica Opens" (the monsters have spent ages planning this, yet a version of the Doctor of whom even I wouldn't be scared gives himself breathing-space by telling them that he made their mums wee themselves), we're shown a Doctor who can do anything he likes because he's... well... famous. He never proves he's clever, or brave, or moral, or indeed, anything at all. We're just told that he always wins, and we're expected to swallow it without question. His fandom-strength makes him the weakest hero in history.
That's what I meant by "irony": Moffat tries to make the Doctor a fetish-object, because that's how we think of him as long-term Doctor Who viewers, and because we're the ones to whom he's pandering. (Well, not me. But you know what I mean.) What the author's actually doing is ensuring the Doctor's worthlessness. If you make someone all-powerful, then power's worth nothing at all, especially if you do it just to reinforce fan-opinion of the safe and clean-cut Boy One.
And of course, the really horrible thing is that this might - I stress "might" - be my fault. Over the last week, I've been informed by numerous people that "The Pandorica Opens" was a lot like "Alien Bodies". This never occurred to me while watching it, but then, I never saw the link between "Honey to the B" and "Never Ever". However -
(Sidestep Four. For the sake of those unfamiliar with late-'90s British pop music: "Honey to the B" was an entirely negligible single by Billie, AKA Billie Piper, engineered as a clone of the glorious "Never Ever" by All Saints. Unfortunately for the future Surprisingly Good Companion, it was such an artless, lumpen, misshapen parody that nobody who actually liked "Never Even" even realised it was supposed to sound like that. It went Top Ten in the UK charts, but at that point, B*Witched would've got to number one by breaking wind into a microphone for three minutes. I'm stating all this from memory, so the details may be faulty.)
- I don't think it's true. At least, not in the way they meant: technically, "Pandorica" is a lot closer to "Dimensions in Time" than "Alien Bodies". No, screw technically, "Pandorica" is like "Dimenions in Time". Only on a big budget. And without Big Ron.
Still... I remember what Moffat said he liked about "Alien Bodies". He specifically drew attention to the end of Chapter Five, claiming that it was the best cliffhanger he'd ever read. Since he was still capable of wit in those days, I remember the exact way he put it: "And that includes 'Mr Holmes, it was the footprint of a gigantic hound'."
Now, that's a compliment and a half, and I felt duly chuffed. Yet I can't help wondering about the consequences. In "Alien Bodies" (and on the off-chance that anyone reading this doesn't know what happens in it, I'll be vague regarding the end of Chapter Five), the Doctor becomes the subject of Doctor Who rather than its medium. I wrote it that way for a specific reason: a lot of very silly people, mentioning no Jon Blums, were trying to "redefine" the Doctor's past after the "half-human on my mother's side" blather of the TV movie. Like the editor of the books at that stage, I didn't give a rat's minge about his past, and thus wrote something about the future. Not just his future, either.
But in doing that, I... sort of... turned the Doctor into a fetish object. Literally, in fact, according the the dictionary definition of "fetish".
And Moffat read it. And liked the end of Chapter Five.
And now he runs a version of the series in which the Doctor is a living fetish object.
Even though it completely destroys the series' (pardon me) Prime Directive, by making it about an all-powerful all-male hero-figure rather than a traveller who's just interested in things.
And to an extent, I admit it: "Alien Bodies" was stupidly popular because it made the Doctor the subject rather than the medium.
Especially because of the end of Chapter Five.
And Moffat knew that.
And his Prime Directive is to be liked.
And the crucial thing to realise about the "Pandorica" arse-fest isn't the plot (if you've found one), but that it puts the Doctor at the very centre of the universe: there's a box, and you're primed to think that he's going to be in it, but it's actually a trap so that he will be in it. It's pitched not as a prison for the Doctor as a character, but for the Doctor as an icon of modern-day telly.
So I find myself asking. Did Moffat get that from me? Despite what's been said elsewhere, "Pandorica" isn't structurally similar to "Alien Bodies" at all. Yet his vision seems... uncomfortably close, if for all the wrong reasons. Oh, you know: like Neil Gaimain ripping off Alan Moore, then wearing sunglasses and pretending to be a rock star in LA.
This is the question that's bothering me. If you like the eejit but don't like me, then please feel free to say no, I'd honestly like the reassurance. If the reverse, then please lie and say no anyway.
Otherwise, I'm going to apologise, just on the off-chance that I'm right. Doctor Who is now more awful than at any point in its prior history, not because the chief-writer-stroke-producer is vastly more inept than any of his predecessors (he clearly isn't), but because he's vastly more cynical. I, for one, would rather have a bad programme that's attempting something - anything - than a programme designed specifically for BAFTA judges and fans of superhero movies [see previous blog-entries]. And if there's even a 1% chance that I laid 1% of the groundwork for this, then I'm so, so sorry.
Also, "Alien Bodies" isn't even that good. Well, the prologue's good. I'm proud of the prologue. Could do Chapter Five about eight times better these days, though.
...five days ago, I was standing in front of the window of the local newsagent's. There was a poster advertising "Archaeological Adventures: Dinosaurs" (I've mentioned this on Twitter, but if you don't already know, then it's the perfect thing for an intelligent child or autistic adult who wants to whittle while watching an unfulfilling World Cup match or BBC drama), and also a poster advertising Doctor Who stickers. I ignored the latter, because I'm really not joking when I say that I can't even look at the gormless foetus-face of Matt Smith without wanting to slap it. That thing with Van Gogh looked like the most interesting episode this year, but as soon as he did the "could you breathe a little more quietly?" schtick in the trailer, I literally made an effort to be out on Saturday.
(Sidestep One. ITV did a remake of The Prisoner which, by all precedent and reason, should've been unbearable. It was quite good. Jesus! ITV is doing a "cult" reboot, but uses proper actors - Ian McKellen and Ruth Wilson, the latter of whom steals the "Most Attractive Woman in the UK Who Looks Like a Fish" crown from Miranda Sawyer - while Doctor Who does a piss-poor Harry Potter impression with a footballer and a blow-up doll? Gutted.)
So I'm in front of the window. And then a little girl, of the kind that Moffat pretends to like when he's stuck in a narrative corner, pulled her mum up to the glass and pointed at the poster.
'I saw that Doctor Who on Shannon's widescreen!' she said. 'It was scary. The Girl One had to run loads...'
(Sidestep Two. To anyone who's read my Twitter-log: yes, that's why I've started using the phrase "the Girl One".)
'...but the Boy One had to save... something.'
The narrative slip is, of course, acceptable from a seven-year-old. However: the Boy One? And, yes, I did indeed turn eyes-left to make sure she was pointing at the photo of Matt Smith. Then I turned eyes-right, sharpish, beacuse I was scared of looking like a paedophile.
The Boy One?
About a week and a half ago, Stephen Fry (defined by a sometimes-wise critic as "a stupid person's idea of what a clever person is like") attracted venom by critising Doctor Who in the era of Steven Moffat (defined by me as "oh, what a complete arse"). Yet in this epic cage-fighting battle between drivelling self-involved pretend-intellectuals, the most important point seemed to be missed. Fry talked about programmes "like" Merlin and Doctor Who.
If you can use those two titles in the same sentence, then something's gone terribly wrong.
But then, this is what I've been saying for a loooooong time: Moffat stated that he didn't want to be remembered as "the man who killed Doctor Who", and yet he already did kill it. He killed it in "The Girl in the Fireplace", a rather good episode if you concentrate on what the author genuinely likes - robots and temporal screwing-around - but an abysmal and emotionally-extorting one when you understand that he's trying to redefine the Doctor as a Sexy Immortal and himself as the Sexy Immortal's Agent. I wasn't kidding when I said the the series in 2010 is competing with Twilight, y'know. Doctor Who at its best has been awkward, experimental, and unpredictable. Moffat's version, as laid out in "Silence in the Library", is slick, conservative, and entirely founded on things that have been proven to work. In short... it's like Merlin. Only even stupider.
Here's the grand irony, though -
(Sidestep Three. How many times have I used the phrase "here's the grand irony"?)
- by attempting to squee-up the Doctor, Moffat has destroyed him as a meaningful figure. In "Forest of the Dead" (the Doctor defeats the shadow-nasties by saying "do you know who I am?", thus removing any possible dramatic tension and making him look like the petulant celebrity he's bltantly becoming) and "The Pandorica Opens" (the monsters have spent ages planning this, yet a version of the Doctor of whom even I wouldn't be scared gives himself breathing-space by telling them that he made their mums wee themselves), we're shown a Doctor who can do anything he likes because he's... well... famous. He never proves he's clever, or brave, or moral, or indeed, anything at all. We're just told that he always wins, and we're expected to swallow it without question. His fandom-strength makes him the weakest hero in history.
That's what I meant by "irony": Moffat tries to make the Doctor a fetish-object, because that's how we think of him as long-term Doctor Who viewers, and because we're the ones to whom he's pandering. (Well, not me. But you know what I mean.) What the author's actually doing is ensuring the Doctor's worthlessness. If you make someone all-powerful, then power's worth nothing at all, especially if you do it just to reinforce fan-opinion of the safe and clean-cut Boy One.
And of course, the really horrible thing is that this might - I stress "might" - be my fault. Over the last week, I've been informed by numerous people that "The Pandorica Opens" was a lot like "Alien Bodies". This never occurred to me while watching it, but then, I never saw the link between "Honey to the B" and "Never Ever". However -
(Sidestep Four. For the sake of those unfamiliar with late-'90s British pop music: "Honey to the B" was an entirely negligible single by Billie, AKA Billie Piper, engineered as a clone of the glorious "Never Ever" by All Saints. Unfortunately for the future Surprisingly Good Companion, it was such an artless, lumpen, misshapen parody that nobody who actually liked "Never Even" even realised it was supposed to sound like that. It went Top Ten in the UK charts, but at that point, B*Witched would've got to number one by breaking wind into a microphone for three minutes. I'm stating all this from memory, so the details may be faulty.)
- I don't think it's true. At least, not in the way they meant: technically, "Pandorica" is a lot closer to "Dimensions in Time" than "Alien Bodies". No, screw technically, "Pandorica" is like "Dimenions in Time". Only on a big budget. And without Big Ron.
Still... I remember what Moffat said he liked about "Alien Bodies". He specifically drew attention to the end of Chapter Five, claiming that it was the best cliffhanger he'd ever read. Since he was still capable of wit in those days, I remember the exact way he put it: "And that includes 'Mr Holmes, it was the footprint of a gigantic hound'."
Now, that's a compliment and a half, and I felt duly chuffed. Yet I can't help wondering about the consequences. In "Alien Bodies" (and on the off-chance that anyone reading this doesn't know what happens in it, I'll be vague regarding the end of Chapter Five), the Doctor becomes the subject of Doctor Who rather than its medium. I wrote it that way for a specific reason: a lot of very silly people, mentioning no Jon Blums, were trying to "redefine" the Doctor's past after the "half-human on my mother's side" blather of the TV movie. Like the editor of the books at that stage, I didn't give a rat's minge about his past, and thus wrote something about the future. Not just his future, either.
But in doing that, I... sort of... turned the Doctor into a fetish object. Literally, in fact, according the the dictionary definition of "fetish".
And Moffat read it. And liked the end of Chapter Five.
And now he runs a version of the series in which the Doctor is a living fetish object.
Even though it completely destroys the series' (pardon me) Prime Directive, by making it about an all-powerful all-male hero-figure rather than a traveller who's just interested in things.
And to an extent, I admit it: "Alien Bodies" was stupidly popular because it made the Doctor the subject rather than the medium.
Especially because of the end of Chapter Five.
And Moffat knew that.
And his Prime Directive is to be liked.
And the crucial thing to realise about the "Pandorica" arse-fest isn't the plot (if you've found one), but that it puts the Doctor at the very centre of the universe: there's a box, and you're primed to think that he's going to be in it, but it's actually a trap so that he will be in it. It's pitched not as a prison for the Doctor as a character, but for the Doctor as an icon of modern-day telly.
So I find myself asking. Did Moffat get that from me? Despite what's been said elsewhere, "Pandorica" isn't structurally similar to "Alien Bodies" at all. Yet his vision seems... uncomfortably close, if for all the wrong reasons. Oh, you know: like Neil Gaimain ripping off Alan Moore, then wearing sunglasses and pretending to be a rock star in LA.
This is the question that's bothering me. If you like the eejit but don't like me, then please feel free to say no, I'd honestly like the reassurance. If the reverse, then please lie and say no anyway.
Otherwise, I'm going to apologise, just on the off-chance that I'm right. Doctor Who is now more awful than at any point in its prior history, not because the chief-writer-stroke-producer is vastly more inept than any of his predecessors (he clearly isn't), but because he's vastly more cynical. I, for one, would rather have a bad programme that's attempting something - anything - than a programme designed specifically for BAFTA judges and fans of superhero movies [see previous blog-entries]. And if there's even a 1% chance that I laid 1% of the groundwork for this, then I'm so, so sorry.
Also, "Alien Bodies" isn't even that good. Well, the prologue's good. I'm proud of the prologue. Could do Chapter Five about eight times better these days, though.
Saturday, 19 June 2010
Footnote to the Below
Just in case you wondered...
...I say "tried" to watch it, because I occasionally got embarrassed and turned over to Poirot on ITV3. Ironically, it was "Cat Among the Pigeons", the episode of Poirot written by Mark Gatiss. (Sort-of-double-irony: it's perhaps the least successful feature-length episode, but on this occasion, it's not Gatiss' fault. The structure of Christie's original makes it hugely unsuitable for ITV. Mind you, it might not have been a great idea to hire Gatiss for the story that requires a convincing boy-meets-girl romance at its heart. There's no massive alien parasite that eats them at the end, for one thing.)
...I say "tried" to watch it, because I occasionally got embarrassed and turned over to Poirot on ITV3. Ironically, it was "Cat Among the Pigeons", the episode of Poirot written by Mark Gatiss. (Sort-of-double-irony: it's perhaps the least successful feature-length episode, but on this occasion, it's not Gatiss' fault. The structure of Christie's original makes it hugely unsuitable for ITV. Mind you, it might not have been a great idea to hire Gatiss for the story that requires a convincing boy-meets-girl romance at its heart. There's no massive alien parasite that eats them at the end, for one thing.)
JESUS!!!
Yeah... yeah, I tried to watch it today. Sorry.
And you people actually like this...? I recommend that you line up to form the back end of a Human Centipede. "Ooh, look! The Manga-faced girl who was set up to be something-cute-enough-for-everyone-to-care-about is apparently dead! Emote, you plebian scum! EMOTE!" I haven't seen such a sledgehammer attempt to make the audience cry since ET. The rest was Big Finish on a big budget.
When we were both Taverning, I used to joke that the difference between myself and Moffat was simple: I had an imagination. Now I know better: I have an imagination and a conscience.
Oh, for Heaven's sake, grow up! And learn basic storytelling skills. Because that was just... just awful.
And you people actually like this...? I recommend that you line up to form the back end of a Human Centipede. "Ooh, look! The Manga-faced girl who was set up to be something-cute-enough-for-everyone-to-care-about is apparently dead! Emote, you plebian scum! EMOTE!" I haven't seen such a sledgehammer attempt to make the audience cry since ET. The rest was Big Finish on a big budget.
When we were both Taverning, I used to joke that the difference between myself and Moffat was simple: I had an imagination. Now I know better: I have an imagination and a conscience.
Oh, for Heaven's sake, grow up! And learn basic storytelling skills. Because that was just... just awful.
Monday, 14 June 2010
Now I Can Sleep Again
Twitter's #lesserdoctorwho strand has spent the last few weeks speculating on the stories that were changed at the last minute, when the producers decided that they weren't quite exciting enough for television. But this newly-leaked episode list reveals the whole truth about Doctor Who at its most repressed. Here are the titles of all the first drafts, before the monsters, cliffhangers, and random acts of mild fantasy violence were added...
"An Unearthly Chive", "The Ordinary and Nearby Things in Serbo-Croat", "The Hegde of Destruction", "Volkswagen Polo", "The Keith of Marinus", "The ASBOs", "The Censored Rites", "The Rain of Telford", "Planet of Gnats", "The Harlech Invasion of Earth", "The Cress Queue", "The Mormons", "The Pleb Planet", "The Fourth Crusade" (ooh, subtle), "The Spaced Museum" (involves Simon Pegg being stuffed and put in a cabinet), "The Kiss-Chase", "The Time Mid-Fielder", "Galaxy Cookie Crumble", "Mission to My Uncle's", "The Urban Myth Makers", "The Daleks' Mastercard", "The Mascara", "The Arse", "The Comestible Toymaker", "The Bunfighters", "The Chaffinches", "The Warm Machines", "The Snugglers", "The Clenched Planet", "Power of the Horlicks", "The High Pandas", "Underwater Tennis", "The Spoonface", "The Macrame Terror", "The Chinless Ones", "Weevil of the Daleks", "Room of the Cybermen", "The Easily-Meltable Snowmen", "The Nice Warriors", "Enema of the World", "The Web of Ears", "Curry from the Deep", "The Wheel in Spain", "The Dick-and-Dominators", "The Mind Rabbi", "The Insertion", "The Scrotums", "The Smell of Meths", "The Space Pierrots", "The Fwoar Games", "Nobhead from Space", "Doctor Who and the Silly Urinals", "The Ambassadors are Deaf", "Infirm... Oh", "Terror of Joe Orton", "The Milder Evil", "The Corrs of Axos", "Colostomy in Space", "The Lehmans", "Day of the Dahl Ex" (it's about Stan Collymore), "The Curse of Pele's Dong" (you know his personal problems), "The Sea Brevilles", "The Mucus", "The Tie Monster", "The Knee Doctors", "Bar-Nibbles and Monsters", "Jeux Sans Frontieres in Space", "Gannet of the Daleks", "The Green Douche", "The Time Woggler", "Invasion of the Dinah Shores", "Bollocks to the Daleks", "The Monstrous Pele's Dong" (after the treatment), "Planet of Spyware", "Rowboat", "The Parking Space", "The Sultana Experiment", "Genitals of the Daleks", "Revenge of the Sideburn Men", "Terrier of the Zygons", "Planet of Eejits", "Invalids of Mars", "The Adenoid Invasion", "The Brain of Mo Mowlam" (now even I've hit my good taste barrier), "The Spuds of Doom", "The False Nose of Mandragora", "The Thing That Dangles from the Back of the Cat's Throat and That the Mouse Uses as a Punchbag in 'Tom and Jerry' Cartoons of Fear", "The Shit Assassin", "The Face of Weebles", "The Roberts of Death", "The Nipples of Weng Chiang", "The Horror of Gla... Oh, Wait, Paul Magrs Has Already Done It", "The Wish-It-Had-Stayed-Invisible Enemy", "Imagining a Fondle", "The Sunbed Makers", "Underpants", "The Invasion of Rosemary and Thyme", "The Reebok Operation", "The Pyrex Planet", "The Scones of Blood", "The Handjobs of Tara", "The Power of Krill", "The Armageddon Factsheet", "Density of the Daleks", "Settee of Death", "Retcher from the Pit", "The Nightmare of Ewoks", "The Horns of Michael Nyman", "The Letcher Hive", "Dead Loss", "Full English Breakfast", "State of Decaf", "Warriors' Gateaux", "The Rob Green of Traken", "Legopolis", "Cats Revolt Her", "Four to Dounreay", "Kinda" (pronounced the other way), "The Vivisection" (my brother-in-law actually thought it was called that), "Bloke Orchid", "Earthchops", "Cancelled Due to Volcanic Ash in the Eighteenth Century", "Arc of Banality", "Cowdance", "Mawdryn Unplugged", "Dermititus", "Hen-Night in Kent", "The King's Detox", "The Three Doctors, a Dodgy Impression, and a Waxwork of Tom Baker", "Warriors on the Cheap" (trad), "The Awankening", the next one's too rude to print, "Rusty Ret-Con of the Daleks", "Planet of Ire", "Chavs of Androzani", "The Twin Dialysis", "Tacky Old Cybermen", "Vengaboys on Varos", "Skidmark of the Rani", "The Too-Little-Too-Late Doctors", "It Doesn't Actually Get Any Lesser Than This", "Revelation of the Diabetics", "Thighs of a Time Lord", "Time and Jim Varney", "Paradise Towels", "Delta and John Barrowman", "Dog on Fire", "Remembrance of the Dulux", "The Sloppy Mess Patrol", "Sylvia's Nemesis", "The Greatest Blow in the Galaxy" (wrong in at least two ways), "Cattle Field", "'Oh F***, It's Fenric'", "Goat Light", "Some Trifle".
That is all.
"An Unearthly Chive", "The Ordinary and Nearby Things in Serbo-Croat", "The Hegde of Destruction", "Volkswagen Polo", "The Keith of Marinus", "The ASBOs", "The Censored Rites", "The Rain of Telford", "Planet of Gnats", "The Harlech Invasion of Earth", "The Cress Queue", "The Mormons", "The Pleb Planet", "The Fourth Crusade" (ooh, subtle), "The Spaced Museum" (involves Simon Pegg being stuffed and put in a cabinet), "The Kiss-Chase", "The Time Mid-Fielder", "Galaxy Cookie Crumble", "Mission to My Uncle's", "The Urban Myth Makers", "The Daleks' Mastercard", "The Mascara", "The Arse", "The Comestible Toymaker", "The Bunfighters", "The Chaffinches", "The Warm Machines", "The Snugglers", "The Clenched Planet", "Power of the Horlicks", "The High Pandas", "Underwater Tennis", "The Spoonface", "The Macrame Terror", "The Chinless Ones", "Weevil of the Daleks", "Room of the Cybermen", "The Easily-Meltable Snowmen", "The Nice Warriors", "Enema of the World", "The Web of Ears", "Curry from the Deep", "The Wheel in Spain", "The Dick-and-Dominators", "The Mind Rabbi", "The Insertion", "The Scrotums", "The Smell of Meths", "The Space Pierrots", "The Fwoar Games", "Nobhead from Space", "Doctor Who and the Silly Urinals", "The Ambassadors are Deaf", "Infirm... Oh", "Terror of Joe Orton", "The Milder Evil", "The Corrs of Axos", "Colostomy in Space", "The Lehmans", "Day of the Dahl Ex" (it's about Stan Collymore), "The Curse of Pele's Dong" (you know his personal problems), "The Sea Brevilles", "The Mucus", "The Tie Monster", "The Knee Doctors", "Bar-Nibbles and Monsters", "Jeux Sans Frontieres in Space", "Gannet of the Daleks", "The Green Douche", "The Time Woggler", "Invasion of the Dinah Shores", "Bollocks to the Daleks", "The Monstrous Pele's Dong" (after the treatment), "Planet of Spyware", "Rowboat", "The Parking Space", "The Sultana Experiment", "Genitals of the Daleks", "Revenge of the Sideburn Men", "Terrier of the Zygons", "Planet of Eejits", "Invalids of Mars", "The Adenoid Invasion", "The Brain of Mo Mowlam" (now even I've hit my good taste barrier), "The Spuds of Doom", "The False Nose of Mandragora", "The Thing That Dangles from the Back of the Cat's Throat and That the Mouse Uses as a Punchbag in 'Tom and Jerry' Cartoons of Fear", "The Shit Assassin", "The Face of Weebles", "The Roberts of Death", "The Nipples of Weng Chiang", "The Horror of Gla... Oh, Wait, Paul Magrs Has Already Done It", "The Wish-It-Had-Stayed-Invisible Enemy", "Imagining a Fondle", "The Sunbed Makers", "Underpants", "The Invasion of Rosemary and Thyme", "The Reebok Operation", "The Pyrex Planet", "The Scones of Blood", "The Handjobs of Tara", "The Power of Krill", "The Armageddon Factsheet", "Density of the Daleks", "Settee of Death", "Retcher from the Pit", "The Nightmare of Ewoks", "The Horns of Michael Nyman", "The Letcher Hive", "Dead Loss", "Full English Breakfast", "State of Decaf", "Warriors' Gateaux", "The Rob Green of Traken", "Legopolis", "Cats Revolt Her", "Four to Dounreay", "Kinda" (pronounced the other way), "The Vivisection" (my brother-in-law actually thought it was called that), "Bloke Orchid", "Earthchops", "Cancelled Due to Volcanic Ash in the Eighteenth Century", "Arc of Banality", "Cowdance", "Mawdryn Unplugged", "Dermititus", "Hen-Night in Kent", "The King's Detox", "The Three Doctors, a Dodgy Impression, and a Waxwork of Tom Baker", "Warriors on the Cheap" (trad), "The Awankening", the next one's too rude to print, "Rusty Ret-Con of the Daleks", "Planet of Ire", "Chavs of Androzani", "The Twin Dialysis", "Tacky Old Cybermen", "Vengaboys on Varos", "Skidmark of the Rani", "The Too-Little-Too-Late Doctors", "It Doesn't Actually Get Any Lesser Than This", "Revelation of the Diabetics", "Thighs of a Time Lord", "Time and Jim Varney", "Paradise Towels", "Delta and John Barrowman", "Dog on Fire", "Remembrance of the Dulux", "The Sloppy Mess Patrol", "Sylvia's Nemesis", "The Greatest Blow in the Galaxy" (wrong in at least two ways), "Cattle Field", "'Oh F***, It's Fenric'", "Goat Light", "Some Trifle".
That is all.
Tuesday, 30 March 2010
In-Between Days
"We will pan it, we will scan it / We will render it byte by byte / We will digitise, mass-produce and sterilise / We will turn it to shite, shite, shite." - Song of the Computer-Generated Mice on the Mouse Organ.
I think you should all know that I've finally worked out why I'm so at odds with the rest of modern culture. Or at least, why I don't seem to be down wit' da hip kids, and why I don't see Today's Stuff - particularly Today's Doctor Who Stuff - in quite the same way as other people in my own mildly dysfunctional peer group. Actually, working it out was quite easy: I just watched Spider-Man 3 on Channel 5.
Now, I loathe superhero movies. To be honest, I loathe anything CGI-driven that's indistinguishable from its X-Box tie-in. I loathe the artless techno-pettiness which believes the latest piece of industrial code from James Cameron or Peter Jackson to somehow qualify as cinema, even though the directors can't tell graphic realism from characterisation or a Tomb Raider end-of-level monster from a proper Balrog. But I double-loathe superhero movies, with extra bogies on. Not just because they're wholly founded on their "roll up, roll up, and see what we can make a digitally-generated humanoid do this year" faux-showmanship, but because they're so sodding banal. I crept into the cinema during the first Spider-Man in 2002 (I was leaving the cineplex after watching something else, there was no guard in the passage between screens, and the film was just starting… well, I wasn't going to pay), and ended up sitting through two hours of constipated narrative before a final showdown that looked for all the world like a massively overbudgeted episode of Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers. The fact that the jizz-awful Green Goblin mask was designed by the same man who wrangled everything from Zygon nodules to the Bespoke Time Lord Collar just made the experience more painful.
But I watched Spider-Man 3 on its terrestrial premiere, simply because… no, I don't mind admitting it. I used to read the comics when I was fourteen, and I'd gathered that this was the film in which Movie Spider-Man met Movie Venom. And in a moment of High Geekery, I wanted to see how the epic saga I'd read as a young 'un - a half-decade story-arc in which Spider-Man acquired a telepathic bodysuit from a bio-tech-happy uber-civilisation, then ditched it when he figured out that it was a parasite rather than a symbiote, then watched as it transmogrified its next victim into his Evil Twin - would be squeezed into a two-hour movie. In fact, the script managed this quite simply: it turned the alien git-costume into a meteorite full of goo, which conveniently happened to crash into a field right next to Peter Parker. The ineptitude of this was probably inevitable, but tragically I kept watching, and it's what else I learned from the movie that's been troubling me.
In Spider-Man 3, and all its bastard kin, there's a simple pattern. There are Big Events. You can tell the Big Events, because they're denoted by computer-generated action sequences. In this case, these include a skyscraper-chase between Spidey and Green Goblin Junior, a duke-out between Spidey and the Sandman (i.e. a man made of sand, because the Marvel universe is terribly literal), a "symbolic" passing-on of the meteor parasite from Spidey to Venom… punctuated, and I really do mean punctuated, by in-between scenes.
It's the in-between scenes which interest me. Nobody involved with the film seems in any doubt that the Big Events are the point of the exercise, yet spacing these out are the "slow" moments in which - ooh, let's say - Peter Parker talks to his Aunt May about something sentimental that no-one will ever remember, or goes through Relationship Problems with Mary-Jane that look exactly like the Relationship Problems you might get in an episode of Dawson's Creek, or goes all broody and starts to ask himself what he's doing with his life. Scenes which don't exist because any viewer might be capable of caring, but which instead act as a sort of Pavlovian buffer. I find myself remembering the extended schedules in early '70s porn cinemas, when audiences were required to sit through several hours of slightly pervy "documentaries" before the main feature, partly because it allowed the cinema-owners to appear legitimate and partly to make sure the punters were salivating by the time they got to see the first nipple.
The news that FX-based movies are stuffed with filler comes as no surprise, natch. Yet without understanding the way this kind of storytelling works, the modern form of Doctor Who makes absolutely no sense. I've been hugely critical of the last few years' worth of That Series I Grew Up With, but because I deliberately haven't been going to see arsecock like Fantastic Four 2: Rise of the Silver Surfer (which I tried to watch on Channel 4 two weeks ago, just to make sure I wasn't imagining things… no, I obviously wasn't), I didn't realise why I seemed to be witnessing a different programme to an awful lot of other viewers. Simply, modern Doctor Who is made for an audience weened on superhero movies. That's not just the… excuse me… core demographic, it's what the programme is fundamentally aiming for. Over the last few years, whenever people I know have engaged each other in protracted conversations about the quality of the effects work on Dr Octopus' robot arms, I've had a tendency to leave the room. If I'd stayed, I might have clicked sooner.
My problem is that I don't believe in in-betweens. The very idea seems anathema to what might be called Proper Drama, but I'll stick close to home, and say that no Doctor Who story I ever considered half-decent was about the Big Event: the in-between moments were the story, not a way of marking time between special effects. The monster at the end of episode three isn't the main attraction of "The Caves of Androzani". Quite the reverse. Likewise, neither the Drashigs nor (most pertinently) the Top of the Pops-style psychedelia-gun in episode one are the reason "Carnival of Monsters" exists. And the giant clam certainly isn't the star of "Genesis of the Daleks", although now I've said that, I'm starting to wish that it were. By contrast, there's nothing really in "The Lazarus Experiment" except the ridiculous Mill-spawn (an apt example, given that Russell T. Davies explicitly described the story as being inspired by Marvel Comics), and BBC Wales is currently trying to sell us Matt Smith with the Sam Raimi-style shot of the Doctor dangling from a flying TARDIS. Rather than, for example, by getting him to do any acting. Let's not deny it, there were many, many, many filler scenes in the programme of old. But that's because it was made on the fly, on a minimal budget, under extreme stress. Whereas the modern programme has an insultingly large slice of the License Fee at its disposal, yet treats non-FX, non-stunt-based sequences as if they're dramatic pauses. Or, up until now, as excuses for David Tennant to do his "sad" face and make everyone go "awww, look, he's tortured".
You may, of course, recall that I keep insisting on seeing Doctor Who as a work of all-round BBC goodness rather than a "cult" sci-fi series. So I'll just point out that I, Claudius (yes, it is the best drama serial ever made, shut up) is nothing but in-between moments. In-between moments are good, if they're done properly. They're human. They give meaning to the parts where monsters or armies of legionnaires turn up, and should be treated as an art in themselves. Whereas we now have a culture which sees dialogue and characterisation as bubblewrap, except without the satisfaction of being able to pop the bubbles. Oh, and another telltale point: note that the Doctor is now being pitched to us with almost-macho displays of his power and invincibility ('there's one thing you never, ever put in a trap… me!!!' being both the latest and the stupidest), diluted forms of the "I'll be back" sloganeering you'd expect from America action heroes. When you can imagine Clint Eastwood delivering the Doctor's lines, but not Tom Baker, something's definitely gone awry. Actually, try imagining this kind of waffle being recited over a soundtrack by Dudley Simpson rather than Murray (spit) Gold, and it seems even dafter.
I could keep listing examples of the way this tendency has skew-wiffed recent Doctor Who, and I'm sure you'll be able to think of your own. But it's me, and I'm planning my exit strategy here, so I'll go for the big one. Yeah, I'm a-heading back to "Blink".
Now, here's the thing. When "Blink" was first broadcast, I got bored within the first twenty minutes, and assumed (as most of us do, in these "is it just me?" situations) that everyone else would feel the same way. You could've knocked me down with a Krolltacle when it was deemed to be the paragon of all things shiny, and for the last few years, I've been rather puzzled by the success of what seems to me like a rather dribbly script. After Spider-Man 3, however, I suddenly see it. What do people remember about "Blink"? The scary bits with the Weeping Angels, and the sexy bits with David Tennant talking to you - yes, you, straight female or gay male fan-person - out of a TV screen. Between those Big Events…?
Nobody much cares about those bits, and there's no reason that anybody really should. Sally's future-boyfriend (a geek called Lawrence, and I'm still not sure whether that was Moffat's idea of a joke) is introduced to us when he walks naked into a kitchen in front of the female lead and does the usual "ooh, hang on, am I naked?" schtick that sitcom writers use as filler when they don't have any better ways of getting the 18-30 demographic to keep watching. His nerdy personality is further underlined with the standard "all your friends are on the internet" bumf that even EastEnders had turned into cliché by 2007, while Sally spends much of the episode delivering the kind of dialogue that ageing heterosexual authors would like to imagine dynamic twentysomething women delivering in the real world, at least as long as they can imagine her saying "oh, yes, you big, rugged man who works in the media, yes, yes, yes" afterwards. Ah, but wait! This is supposed to be a scary story, yet the Weeping Angels don't actually do anything bad to anybody. So let's contrive a wholly negligible scene in which the Token Black Character snuffs it on his deathbed, just so Sally can say 'people have died', even though he's apparently had a pretty good life and we've spent more time watching him die as an old man than we spent getting to know him as a young one. Whoo, pathos.
This is terrible writing, and terrible characterisation. If you're a fan of "Blink", though, then… what do you remember? Do you remember anything at all about these puppet-people? Puppet-people on more than one level, in this case, since the plot of the episode is pretty much a denial of free will in the Doctor Who universe. Or do you just remember the creepy statues and the Easter Eggs? Plus some arse about timey-wimey paradoxes that the author's been constantly recycling since the 1990s, although that goes without saying in a Moffat script. (Jesus! I used to edit a thing called "Faction Paradox", but even I didn't resort to the old "we've seen evidence of this in the future, so it must be destined to happen" routine. Even once. Let alone five times. Yes, five! Count 'em.)
So, to summarise. I care about the in-between bits, because that's what I think "drama" is. The monsters are the moment of shock, they're not the story. Then again… if anything, does this just prove that I shouldn't be here at all? Interviews have cited Moffat as saying that he doesn't want to be remembered as the man who broke Doctor Who, but some of us would argue that he already did break it, even if we didn't notice it at the time. The moment of doom was "The Girl in the Fireplace", a story which - while quite good in itself, at least when the author's concentrating on robots, time-travel, and other things he pretends not to care about when there are women looking - changed our expectations of what the series is meant to be by playing to much the same audience as Twilight. From that point on, the Doctor was damned to a life of fetishism and well-groomed heroics. From that point on, he had to be young, cute, athletic, and godlike. Oh, and tragic. However unconvincing or repetitive the tragedy may be, he positively has to be tragic.
Looking at the revised, superhero-friendly version we've got in 2010, I find myself remembering two things about Moffat that I've previously suppressed. One is the conversation I had with him in late 2005, just after the title of his first Tennant-age story had been announced in the press. I said to him:
'Oh, I see a pattern forming here. First "The Empty Child", now "The Girl in the Fireplace". It's -'
And before I could say any more, he snarled into my face (in a fashion which, with hindsight, more than slightly resembled Rik in The Young Ones): 'Oh, what? Because they've both got the word "The" in the title?'
'Erm,' I said. 'Erm, no. Because they're both weird juxtapositions. You don't expect to get a child that's empty, and you don't expect to get a girl in a fireplace. It's like early surrealism. It's a bit… sort of… Magritte?'
He looked away. Stared at the pavement, as if annoyed by this outbreak of reasonable discussion. Then stomped off without answering.
But the most telling moment was this. I bought a video of The Complete Bagpuss (i.e. a video containing all thirteen episodes of Bagpuss, in case "Complete Bagpuss" sounds like one of the more obscure insults of Frank Butcher), and had it with me at the Tavern. I was showing it to a female acquaintance, when Moffat swooped past and looked down at it.
'That's just saaad,' he said.
'But… but it's Bagpuss,' said my acquaintance.
And Moffat twisted his face into a revolted sneer before leaving us.
Ergo. Having understood the nature of "state-of-the-art" narrative in the early twenty-first century, I can accept that this really is the Moffat Era, after all: an age of moments that could exist with equal comfort inside trailers or stories, movies or clips shows. But now I'm thinking of that scene from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead in which - as in Hamlet - the Prince's family ask R&G to figure out why Hamlet's so unhappy. Their conclusions: well, your dad's been unaccountably poisoned, your uncle's probably the murderer, and he's taken your throne while simultaneously marrying your mum. No, we can't imagine why you'd be unhappy. So for all those who've written badly-thought-out rants about this column over the last few years, and who genuinely can't tell the difference between "man who wants a war" and "man who's just disappointed and sarcastic", I'd like to say this…
Doctor Who taught me to be interested, xenophiliac, and prepared for strangeness of all magnitudes. Throughout its history - and this even applies to the best of the twenty-first-century episodes, before Big Russell started writing it for the BAFTA awards panel rather than intelligent children - it's been closer to Oliver Postgate than The Matrix. Yet now it's in the hands of a producer who's as arrogant as I've occasionally pretended to be and as cynical as I could never be, who deliberately overruled his own instincts and cast the silliest possible actor as the leading man, purely so he could continue his own mad campaign of pretend-populist squee. He sneers at Bagpuss, which is at least as bad as jesting at scars. Matt Smith has been given a demographically-tailored Quirky-Yet-Somehow-English costume, to make sure everyone feels comfortable accepting this as the same mass-produced product we got in the Tennant years, while the 2010 series has (it seems) been carefully stripped of any new or peculiar features and involves episodes written by the authors of "Exit Wounds", "The Idiot's Lantern", and Love Actually.
Now, why on Earth would I feel betrayed?
Look him in the eye and tell me I'm wrong.
I think you should all know that I've finally worked out why I'm so at odds with the rest of modern culture. Or at least, why I don't seem to be down wit' da hip kids, and why I don't see Today's Stuff - particularly Today's Doctor Who Stuff - in quite the same way as other people in my own mildly dysfunctional peer group. Actually, working it out was quite easy: I just watched Spider-Man 3 on Channel 5.
Now, I loathe superhero movies. To be honest, I loathe anything CGI-driven that's indistinguishable from its X-Box tie-in. I loathe the artless techno-pettiness which believes the latest piece of industrial code from James Cameron or Peter Jackson to somehow qualify as cinema, even though the directors can't tell graphic realism from characterisation or a Tomb Raider end-of-level monster from a proper Balrog. But I double-loathe superhero movies, with extra bogies on. Not just because they're wholly founded on their "roll up, roll up, and see what we can make a digitally-generated humanoid do this year" faux-showmanship, but because they're so sodding banal. I crept into the cinema during the first Spider-Man in 2002 (I was leaving the cineplex after watching something else, there was no guard in the passage between screens, and the film was just starting… well, I wasn't going to pay), and ended up sitting through two hours of constipated narrative before a final showdown that looked for all the world like a massively overbudgeted episode of Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers. The fact that the jizz-awful Green Goblin mask was designed by the same man who wrangled everything from Zygon nodules to the Bespoke Time Lord Collar just made the experience more painful.
But I watched Spider-Man 3 on its terrestrial premiere, simply because… no, I don't mind admitting it. I used to read the comics when I was fourteen, and I'd gathered that this was the film in which Movie Spider-Man met Movie Venom. And in a moment of High Geekery, I wanted to see how the epic saga I'd read as a young 'un - a half-decade story-arc in which Spider-Man acquired a telepathic bodysuit from a bio-tech-happy uber-civilisation, then ditched it when he figured out that it was a parasite rather than a symbiote, then watched as it transmogrified its next victim into his Evil Twin - would be squeezed into a two-hour movie. In fact, the script managed this quite simply: it turned the alien git-costume into a meteorite full of goo, which conveniently happened to crash into a field right next to Peter Parker. The ineptitude of this was probably inevitable, but tragically I kept watching, and it's what else I learned from the movie that's been troubling me.
In Spider-Man 3, and all its bastard kin, there's a simple pattern. There are Big Events. You can tell the Big Events, because they're denoted by computer-generated action sequences. In this case, these include a skyscraper-chase between Spidey and Green Goblin Junior, a duke-out between Spidey and the Sandman (i.e. a man made of sand, because the Marvel universe is terribly literal), a "symbolic" passing-on of the meteor parasite from Spidey to Venom… punctuated, and I really do mean punctuated, by in-between scenes.
It's the in-between scenes which interest me. Nobody involved with the film seems in any doubt that the Big Events are the point of the exercise, yet spacing these out are the "slow" moments in which - ooh, let's say - Peter Parker talks to his Aunt May about something sentimental that no-one will ever remember, or goes through Relationship Problems with Mary-Jane that look exactly like the Relationship Problems you might get in an episode of Dawson's Creek, or goes all broody and starts to ask himself what he's doing with his life. Scenes which don't exist because any viewer might be capable of caring, but which instead act as a sort of Pavlovian buffer. I find myself remembering the extended schedules in early '70s porn cinemas, when audiences were required to sit through several hours of slightly pervy "documentaries" before the main feature, partly because it allowed the cinema-owners to appear legitimate and partly to make sure the punters were salivating by the time they got to see the first nipple.
The news that FX-based movies are stuffed with filler comes as no surprise, natch. Yet without understanding the way this kind of storytelling works, the modern form of Doctor Who makes absolutely no sense. I've been hugely critical of the last few years' worth of That Series I Grew Up With, but because I deliberately haven't been going to see arsecock like Fantastic Four 2: Rise of the Silver Surfer (which I tried to watch on Channel 4 two weeks ago, just to make sure I wasn't imagining things… no, I obviously wasn't), I didn't realise why I seemed to be witnessing a different programme to an awful lot of other viewers. Simply, modern Doctor Who is made for an audience weened on superhero movies. That's not just the… excuse me… core demographic, it's what the programme is fundamentally aiming for. Over the last few years, whenever people I know have engaged each other in protracted conversations about the quality of the effects work on Dr Octopus' robot arms, I've had a tendency to leave the room. If I'd stayed, I might have clicked sooner.
My problem is that I don't believe in in-betweens. The very idea seems anathema to what might be called Proper Drama, but I'll stick close to home, and say that no Doctor Who story I ever considered half-decent was about the Big Event: the in-between moments were the story, not a way of marking time between special effects. The monster at the end of episode three isn't the main attraction of "The Caves of Androzani". Quite the reverse. Likewise, neither the Drashigs nor (most pertinently) the Top of the Pops-style psychedelia-gun in episode one are the reason "Carnival of Monsters" exists. And the giant clam certainly isn't the star of "Genesis of the Daleks", although now I've said that, I'm starting to wish that it were. By contrast, there's nothing really in "The Lazarus Experiment" except the ridiculous Mill-spawn (an apt example, given that Russell T. Davies explicitly described the story as being inspired by Marvel Comics), and BBC Wales is currently trying to sell us Matt Smith with the Sam Raimi-style shot of the Doctor dangling from a flying TARDIS. Rather than, for example, by getting him to do any acting. Let's not deny it, there were many, many, many filler scenes in the programme of old. But that's because it was made on the fly, on a minimal budget, under extreme stress. Whereas the modern programme has an insultingly large slice of the License Fee at its disposal, yet treats non-FX, non-stunt-based sequences as if they're dramatic pauses. Or, up until now, as excuses for David Tennant to do his "sad" face and make everyone go "awww, look, he's tortured".
You may, of course, recall that I keep insisting on seeing Doctor Who as a work of all-round BBC goodness rather than a "cult" sci-fi series. So I'll just point out that I, Claudius (yes, it is the best drama serial ever made, shut up) is nothing but in-between moments. In-between moments are good, if they're done properly. They're human. They give meaning to the parts where monsters or armies of legionnaires turn up, and should be treated as an art in themselves. Whereas we now have a culture which sees dialogue and characterisation as bubblewrap, except without the satisfaction of being able to pop the bubbles. Oh, and another telltale point: note that the Doctor is now being pitched to us with almost-macho displays of his power and invincibility ('there's one thing you never, ever put in a trap… me!!!' being both the latest and the stupidest), diluted forms of the "I'll be back" sloganeering you'd expect from America action heroes. When you can imagine Clint Eastwood delivering the Doctor's lines, but not Tom Baker, something's definitely gone awry. Actually, try imagining this kind of waffle being recited over a soundtrack by Dudley Simpson rather than Murray (spit) Gold, and it seems even dafter.
I could keep listing examples of the way this tendency has skew-wiffed recent Doctor Who, and I'm sure you'll be able to think of your own. But it's me, and I'm planning my exit strategy here, so I'll go for the big one. Yeah, I'm a-heading back to "Blink".
Now, here's the thing. When "Blink" was first broadcast, I got bored within the first twenty minutes, and assumed (as most of us do, in these "is it just me?" situations) that everyone else would feel the same way. You could've knocked me down with a Krolltacle when it was deemed to be the paragon of all things shiny, and for the last few years, I've been rather puzzled by the success of what seems to me like a rather dribbly script. After Spider-Man 3, however, I suddenly see it. What do people remember about "Blink"? The scary bits with the Weeping Angels, and the sexy bits with David Tennant talking to you - yes, you, straight female or gay male fan-person - out of a TV screen. Between those Big Events…?
Nobody much cares about those bits, and there's no reason that anybody really should. Sally's future-boyfriend (a geek called Lawrence, and I'm still not sure whether that was Moffat's idea of a joke) is introduced to us when he walks naked into a kitchen in front of the female lead and does the usual "ooh, hang on, am I naked?" schtick that sitcom writers use as filler when they don't have any better ways of getting the 18-30 demographic to keep watching. His nerdy personality is further underlined with the standard "all your friends are on the internet" bumf that even EastEnders had turned into cliché by 2007, while Sally spends much of the episode delivering the kind of dialogue that ageing heterosexual authors would like to imagine dynamic twentysomething women delivering in the real world, at least as long as they can imagine her saying "oh, yes, you big, rugged man who works in the media, yes, yes, yes" afterwards. Ah, but wait! This is supposed to be a scary story, yet the Weeping Angels don't actually do anything bad to anybody. So let's contrive a wholly negligible scene in which the Token Black Character snuffs it on his deathbed, just so Sally can say 'people have died', even though he's apparently had a pretty good life and we've spent more time watching him die as an old man than we spent getting to know him as a young one. Whoo, pathos.
This is terrible writing, and terrible characterisation. If you're a fan of "Blink", though, then… what do you remember? Do you remember anything at all about these puppet-people? Puppet-people on more than one level, in this case, since the plot of the episode is pretty much a denial of free will in the Doctor Who universe. Or do you just remember the creepy statues and the Easter Eggs? Plus some arse about timey-wimey paradoxes that the author's been constantly recycling since the 1990s, although that goes without saying in a Moffat script. (Jesus! I used to edit a thing called "Faction Paradox", but even I didn't resort to the old "we've seen evidence of this in the future, so it must be destined to happen" routine. Even once. Let alone five times. Yes, five! Count 'em.)
So, to summarise. I care about the in-between bits, because that's what I think "drama" is. The monsters are the moment of shock, they're not the story. Then again… if anything, does this just prove that I shouldn't be here at all? Interviews have cited Moffat as saying that he doesn't want to be remembered as the man who broke Doctor Who, but some of us would argue that he already did break it, even if we didn't notice it at the time. The moment of doom was "The Girl in the Fireplace", a story which - while quite good in itself, at least when the author's concentrating on robots, time-travel, and other things he pretends not to care about when there are women looking - changed our expectations of what the series is meant to be by playing to much the same audience as Twilight. From that point on, the Doctor was damned to a life of fetishism and well-groomed heroics. From that point on, he had to be young, cute, athletic, and godlike. Oh, and tragic. However unconvincing or repetitive the tragedy may be, he positively has to be tragic.
Looking at the revised, superhero-friendly version we've got in 2010, I find myself remembering two things about Moffat that I've previously suppressed. One is the conversation I had with him in late 2005, just after the title of his first Tennant-age story had been announced in the press. I said to him:
'Oh, I see a pattern forming here. First "The Empty Child", now "The Girl in the Fireplace". It's -'
And before I could say any more, he snarled into my face (in a fashion which, with hindsight, more than slightly resembled Rik in The Young Ones): 'Oh, what? Because they've both got the word "The" in the title?'
'Erm,' I said. 'Erm, no. Because they're both weird juxtapositions. You don't expect to get a child that's empty, and you don't expect to get a girl in a fireplace. It's like early surrealism. It's a bit… sort of… Magritte?'
He looked away. Stared at the pavement, as if annoyed by this outbreak of reasonable discussion. Then stomped off without answering.
But the most telling moment was this. I bought a video of The Complete Bagpuss (i.e. a video containing all thirteen episodes of Bagpuss, in case "Complete Bagpuss" sounds like one of the more obscure insults of Frank Butcher), and had it with me at the Tavern. I was showing it to a female acquaintance, when Moffat swooped past and looked down at it.
'That's just saaad,' he said.
'But… but it's Bagpuss,' said my acquaintance.
And Moffat twisted his face into a revolted sneer before leaving us.
Ergo. Having understood the nature of "state-of-the-art" narrative in the early twenty-first century, I can accept that this really is the Moffat Era, after all: an age of moments that could exist with equal comfort inside trailers or stories, movies or clips shows. But now I'm thinking of that scene from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead in which - as in Hamlet - the Prince's family ask R&G to figure out why Hamlet's so unhappy. Their conclusions: well, your dad's been unaccountably poisoned, your uncle's probably the murderer, and he's taken your throne while simultaneously marrying your mum. No, we can't imagine why you'd be unhappy. So for all those who've written badly-thought-out rants about this column over the last few years, and who genuinely can't tell the difference between "man who wants a war" and "man who's just disappointed and sarcastic", I'd like to say this…
Doctor Who taught me to be interested, xenophiliac, and prepared for strangeness of all magnitudes. Throughout its history - and this even applies to the best of the twenty-first-century episodes, before Big Russell started writing it for the BAFTA awards panel rather than intelligent children - it's been closer to Oliver Postgate than The Matrix. Yet now it's in the hands of a producer who's as arrogant as I've occasionally pretended to be and as cynical as I could never be, who deliberately overruled his own instincts and cast the silliest possible actor as the leading man, purely so he could continue his own mad campaign of pretend-populist squee. He sneers at Bagpuss, which is at least as bad as jesting at scars. Matt Smith has been given a demographically-tailored Quirky-Yet-Somehow-English costume, to make sure everyone feels comfortable accepting this as the same mass-produced product we got in the Tennant years, while the 2010 series has (it seems) been carefully stripped of any new or peculiar features and involves episodes written by the authors of "Exit Wounds", "The Idiot's Lantern", and Love Actually.
Now, why on Earth would I feel betrayed?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)