Sunday, June 30, 2013
Set A Pirate Capitalist to Catch A Pirate Capitalist – Running Down the Tax-Dodgers
Most inspired political-economic idea of the week: Irish blogger Jason O’Mahony proposes updating a centuries-old idea to capture taxes from offshore corporate tax-dodgers. Governments should privatise the hard-to-land tax liabilities at auction and let the hungriest privateer capitalists harry the behemoths. Memo to Danny Alexander: it may sound like a joke, but how better to harness innovation?
“Back in the day, governments used to issue letters of marque to ships, permitting them to engage in legal piracy against the vessels of other specified countries. Privatising sea war. Hence the phrase ‘Privateers’.Some privatisations make sense. Some don’t. I quoted Conrad Russell a couple of months ago on how Liberals need to think more carefully about them than Tories or socialists do: what will work? What’s the empirical case economically? Socially? Will it reduce or boost monopolies? I read about two privatisation ideas this week that reminded me of such tests and prompted more: is it politically bat-shit-crazy? And can it do something the state can’t?
“Hoist the Jolly Roger, and set sail for Starbucks!”
Tuition Fees Again? Danny, Please, No
First, and with no pleasure at all, as part of the Coalition Government’s latest spending review, Danny Alexander announced this week that they’re privatising the Student Loan Book. It’s a tiny change to promote off-the-book borrowing that makes little economic and no social sense, and will probably have adverse consequences for students and ex-students. For those reasons alone, Danny shouldn’t have touched it with a barge pole. But in his role not as Chief Secretary to the Treasury but as a senior Lib Dem MP and, having known him for twenty years, a person with a sharp brain, there’s a much more political reason why rather than agreeing to it Danny should have retorted, ‘Are you fucking kidding me?’
I disagree with plenty of Simon Titley’s you-have-to-have-been-on-my-side-in-Liberal-Party-infighting-in-1982-for-your-views-to-count school of Lib Dem commentary, but there’s no doubt he got it bang on the money here:
“What political genius thought of this? Yes, let’s pick at some old scabs, shall we?The tuition fees fiasco was by common understanding the most politically disastrous single action for the Liberal Democrats since the party was formed (and arguably the most damaging to the British Liberal family since the First World War and Lloyd George’s egomania). The economic effects of this new change are minimal, giving the Tories very little leverage to insist on it as part of the wider plan, but the political effects are pure poison. Why on Earth are our ministers reminding everyone of this Lib Dem suicide pill?
“…reopening the issue of student loans makes no political sense either. That issue has become a byword for mistrust of the Liberal Democrats. So why revive the controversy?”
However, while student loans are a very straightforward and easy form of debt for the government to recover – another reason, of simple inertia, not to sell them off – there are other liabilities that it’s a lot harder for governments to recover, and for those, having established the principle that you can sell off government debts just as you split off banks’ ‘toxic assets’, there’s a brilliant case for privatisation…
Labour Government By Debt and Tax-Dodging
Another piece of my reading in the last week – which deserves my coming back to on its own, but just in case, here it is as an aside – is Nick Thornsby’s table of “UK tax revenue and public spending 1997-2012”. Sounds boring, doesn’t it? But – shockingly – in the last 15 years, UK governments have only balanced the annual budget once, relying on massive borrowing in every other year while lying about “prudence”, and dating from a full decade before Labour could blame the international crisis. The thirteen-year-Labour Government’s sole credit year: +£16bn. Biggest debt year: -£186bn. No wonder the deficit’s taking a while to fix.
Labour simply decided that it was better to make people happy with a public and private credit boom, spending oodles of money that they didn’t have long before the financial crisis – in their ten years of power before the storm hit, nine of them were already on tick. That’s the problem with Keynesianism: the broad idea makes simple economic sense, but no-one ever practises it because of the politics. Borrow in a downturn? Absolutely. Run a surplus of taxes when the economy’s doing well? Nah, we’d rather not. And part of Labour’s long-running credit-fuelled feel-good factor was that they laudably wanted to pull in jobs from multinational corporations, so they let them get away with dodging taxes by the supertanker-load.
It’s only since the Coalition came to power that the UK Government’s focused on tax-dodging – partly because the Lib Dems insisted it be a priority, partly because the Tories realised that (for all they wanted to) they couldn’t get away with sucking up to big business like Labour did, and partly because, as even Labour admitted (though not of course that it’s their fault),
“there is no money”and the Coalition Government now has little choice but to chase the money that Labour nodded and winked at companies to say they needn’t bother with and that’s harder to get even now the Government is actually trying.
But some of the tax that’s been dodged is very hard to get hold of indeed.
From Privatisation To Privateers
As an innovative way of prying taxes out of the biggest avoiders, it’s time to look again at the empirical case for privatisation. Will it work? Does it make economic sense? And can it do something the state can’t? The oft-quoted reason for many Thatcherite privatisations, even those that set up new private monopolies that logic suggested would be worse than public ones, was that even when there was no boost to competition, privatisation would automatically lead to ‘innovation’ and so ‘efficiency’. Sometimes this was true, sometimes not. One where it sounds more than worth a try is a case of very ostentatious state failure – the power of massive multinational corporations to avoid paying taxes. And so I come to my second and far more exciting piece of privatisation reading this week (though it was actually published the previous week, before you correct me).
Jason O’Mahony is a former Progressive Democrat and, if he counts himself as any sort of cousin to the Liberal family, is definitely at several removes from me (let alone Simon Titley). But, cover me in advertising and call me a Thatcherite, I think his “here’s a mad thought” blog post “Want to tax multinationals? How about privatising their tax liabilities?” is a brilliant notion.
“One of the challenges of taxing large multinationals is the fact that corporate taxation is like a war at sea. The fronts keeping changing, and you’re fighting on many different fronts at once. On top of that, the fact is that multinationals, because of the huge sums involved, pay huge money to their tax advisors, and so tend to attract the best. Tax authorities, on the other hand, get quietly competent but under resourced people…And he’s quite right about the counter-argument – people would scream that we’re “losing some of that tax revenue” to “mercenary taxmen”. That’s the tax revenue that we’re not getting. Half of something still being better than all of nothing. Because that’s the beauty of the idea – you only auction off the tax liabilities that you’ve already failed miserably to get hold of. And this way, you don’t have to pay all the lawyers to do battle in court and board the boardrooms. The auction-winners do that. You don’t need to sell off the lot – perhaps just some of the worst, pour encourager les autres – and you can set a ‘reserve price’ at the auction to prevent too big a disparity between liability and profit, or bar the dodgers from bidding on their own debts, or whatever… But it can’t be beyond the wit of government to set rules that are both lucrative for the public purse and exciting for innovators.
“Auction off their tax liabilities to the highest bidder, as a legally recoverable asset, in the same way banks are selling off distressed, toxic assets. If company X owes state Y a nominal €100 million, auction it off. The state gets a chunk of money with ease, and the asset, the tax debt, becomes a private liability.
“Sure that’s mad, says you. Sure, who’d buy that debt? Some entrepreneur would, at a knock down price, and would pay hotshot young lawyers out of the finest universities in the world big fat bonuses for figuring out ways of recovering the debt. In short, we’d fight rogue tax dodging capitalists with the most innovative, hungry force on Earth: other capitalists.”
If it doesn’t bring in much money for the privateers, governments will already have had their cash up front by privatising the risk, and few will cry about it. If it brings in a lot of money for the privateers, the multinationals might be forced to settle with governments instead and agree to a binding international system of tax in future. And if the privateers’ lawyers hit on innovative arguments that spike the dodgers’ guns and set legal precedents, then government lawyers can move in and capitalise on those to rake in all the other liabilities.
So how about it, Danny? It would certainly bring in vastly more cash – and do far less political damage – than making more students walk the plank and keelhauling the Lib Dem vote.
Labels: Big Business, British Politics, Coalition, Ideas, Labour, Liberal Democrats, Pirates, Tax, The Golden Dozen
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
DVD Detail: Doctor Who – The Trial of a Time Lord: Mindwarp
Mindwarp is one of the most extraordinary-looking Doctor Who stories ever made – sometimes brilliantly, sometimes just breathtakingly ’80s. Bright pink! Bright blue! Bright orange! And as well as the scenery, some of the people look like that, too. Today* is officially Peri’s birthday, and this was her final story with the Doctor, building up to a shock ending… Or is it? Add a memorable villain, guest stars who return with David Tennant, and behind it all, the Doctor’s still on trial: has the evidence here been falsified? Why is he behaving so strangely? And can he out-act Brian Blessed?
A couple of months ago, I wrote about the opening four episodes of Doctor Who – The Trial of a Time Lord… And, twenty-five years ago this evening, that superb cast led by Colin Baker and Michael Jayston was still in the middle of it. Before you watch Mindwarp, the second set of four episodes, you’re best off watching those earlier ones, The Mysterious Planet – not that you have to go out of your way to do so, as they’re all part of the same The Trial of a Time Lord DVD box set. The two mini-stories have much in common: the same ‘Trial’ framing device; the same lead actors; the same postmodern attitude to the series being on trial by hostile BBC executives, as I wrote last time. What’s different about this one is that it’s a much less straightforward narrative – to the extent that even the actors and director didn’t know what was supposed to be going on for some of it. And so it’s possible to slightly unfairly sum up the four mini-stories that make up The Trial of a Time Lord two by two: the odd-numbered stories as not very odd at all, but a bit forgettable; the even-numbered stories as memorable messes, full of interesting ideas but few of them complementing each other. I don’t know if this explains the bulk of fans’ relatively low opinion of Mindwarp (while a few think it brilliant), but it’ll do for mine (and why I have a very high opinion of some of it). Back in September 2009, Doctor Who Magazine 413 published “The Mighty 200” – 6,700 fans’ votes on all 200ish TV Doctor Who stories to that point – and placed the whole Trial of a Time Lord 142nd (about right, to me) but this second set of four episodes at a lowly 160ish (not far off for me either, though I might put it as much as ten places higher).
While this ‘Detail’ obviously goes into some detail, incidentally, my policy in these is not to be too spoilery. So read on without fear of finding out too many key twists from the end. Should there be such things (tip: if you’ve not seen this, don’t read the comedy sketch at the bottom).
In the caverns of Thoros-Beta, profit is in progress, with Lord Kiv and the self-styled Mentors piling up trade with other cultures – if necessary, by lethal force (or even by recycling old costumes). And while the wriggling other Mentors led by Kiv’s aide Sil have no love or loyalty for their leader, they’re desperate to keep him alive for his brilliant business brain, without which they might all end up dead or, worse than that, poor. But that very brain is fatally expanding within his slimy skull, and only the greatest – as he’d be the first to tell you – doctor in the galaxy can transfer it to a new frame. The first ‘monster’ we meet in the story is a forewarning of this, as well as a basically terrible piece of design kept wisely in the dark, then almost redeemed by the way people chat about him afterwards like he was Harold down the chip shop.
Colin Baker makes the most of a wildly inconsistent script, Brian Blessed is at his most BRIAN BLESSED, and Nicola Bryant is terrific as she approaches her end, but it’s stolen from all of them by Patrick Ryecart as Crozier, playing it so intense and deadpan that he becomes much funnier – and more sinister – than anyone else. Confined mostly to one set, dressed for citrus insanity in lemon and then orange, he’s somehow still the centre of the story. An obsessive rather than the ‘mad scientist’ that the brain transplant storyline might suggest, he’s marvellously self-centred, regarding anything bar his medical experiments as an utter waste of his time. And, though with brilliant touches of eccentric charisma, as Patrick Ryecart has explained his part, he’s more Nazi than nice. Clipped, staccato, disturbing and funny, you can see how he can go on to give such a great sit-com performance as the awesomely continuity-error-in-reality-named Captain Hilary Duff.
Kiv rambles wonderfully about his donor body-to-be having an primitive sting at the end of its tail – and how “I could, perhaps, sting all my assistants to death!” – as they prepare to operate; the Doctor camps up his pleasure at being allowed to monitor the equipment; Crozier eyes the Doctor like a wolf assessing a tailored suit (in a threatening plotline that, unfortunately, never goes anywhere, built up until suddenly dismissed in a late aside, as if they’d just thrown the script in the air and picked the bits up at random… Similarly, the nature of Crozier’s experiments changes at the last minute and makes a nonsense of much of the earlier dialogue); piercing music echoes; Crozier’s eyes narrow in a fabulously crazed single moment as he begins the operation. Later, Kiv will come round and see a thing of beauty; later still, Crozier’s eyes shine as he sees his ambition to conquer death within his grasp… But my favourite moment of him is tiny, arrogant, and perfect, and brilliantly down to Patrick Ryecart and a bit of business. Once the operation’s complete and the spectators have drifted away, Crozier is simply how we imagine every brilliant surgeon to be: dismissive and rude to his patient, and only caring for his own achievement. In a scene framed by a gorgeous effects shot of the arching roof of his lab, he’s sipping a cup of tea when his assistant, Alibe Parsons’ glamorous Matrona Kani, alerts him to something going wrong. Crozier takes this in at a glance:
Patrick Ryecart and Brian Blessed spar deliciously in rival interviews in the ‘Making of’ – the former saying the latter needs to be licenced, the latter that the former never knew his bloody lines (and, to show he’s watched it, tipping his tea. Patrick Ryecart is still as reliable today; he didn’t turn up to a convention earlier this year, and was represented on stage by a dummy in his orange surgeon’s gown to wicked lines from Alibe Parsons). Other stories found on the disc will reveal a moment when Mr Blessed, too, may not have got his own lines word-perfect…
While the postmodern commentary of the Trial impinging on the ‘main’ story got in the way on The Mysterious Planet, here it suddenly works better on a much more fragmentary story where the viewers, too, must be arguing about what’s really going on. Informed by Philip Martin’s groundbreaking series Gangsters (from whom it borrows Alibe Parsons), the hints of today’s interactivity make it seem far more modern. So while, for me, this isn’t the best segment of the Trial, it’s the one that makes best use of the overarching story in its own, with the interruptions resembling a DVD commentary in which cast members argue over the deleted scenes and try to salvage their own parts in a box-office disaster. It’s not the a clever noir-style plot the format could have led to, an unreliable narrator usually works better when the production end has more of an idea than the audience, and there are still riskily near-the-knuckle complaints such as calling it “inconsequential silliness” and “gratuitous,” but when the Valeyard counting the precise number of times the Doctor and his companions have respectively been in danger is a point-perfect echo of Mary Whitehouse, ticking off numbers of unsuitable incidents with no regard for narrative, and when Michael Jayston sarcastically invites us to watch “The Doctor’s next – frightening adventure,” you feel that they at least knew what they were doing better than Gerald Ratner.
The sparring between Colin Baker and Michael Jayston suddenly becomes more dangerous as the stakes rise: the Doctor becomes less playground and more lost; the Valeyard seems to know exactly where to twist the knife to stir up self-loathing in the Doctor; and his “Who else is there?” booming out of the sky is one of the few times he makes a telling point, a dramatic moment that almost anticipates the Doctor damning him as a second-rate god at the climax.
You can see how good Colin Baker is when the script deals him an almost crippling blow: as Colin glumly notes on the commentary, it takes him back to square one, completely destroying the character progression planned for his Doctor. Conceived as a ‘Mr Darcy’ who begins aloof and to whom we slowly warm, lead writer Eric Saward was utterly hopeless at writing that overarching story from the first, when The Twin Dilemma’s terrible writing blighted him. Just as finally, and far more thanks to the actor than his scripts, the Doctor has been mellowing, this story magnifies his ‘nice or nasty’ struggle without planning or revealing which bits are which. And the script editor had the nerve to blame other people? No wonder Philip Martin saw him as mentally fragile and “a bad guy pretending to be good” – which is when the lead writer should have stepped in to contextualise, rather than piss off. Mr Martin explains some of where he thought he was coming from on the commentary, but this is the first anyone’s heard of it – while the confusion of the Doctor being good, bad, mad or fake isn’t helped when none of the rest of the story can decide what it is, either (horror, comedy, sci-fi, barbarian swordplay, vivisection, a Dallas satire with green slugs as the Ewings, or a runaround with rebels?). On The Mysterious Planet, I talked about how seeing that when I was fourteen led to empathy with existential crises; something else I’d become very aware of at that age sprang to mind watching the ‘Doctor jiggles about too enthusiastically’ cliffhanger on broadcast, so I’ve always been amazed no-one said ‘Hang on…’ before it went out. What it looks like has always distracted me from the key turning point in the story, after which it’s anyone’s guess whether the Doctor’s in his right mind, in Brian Blessed’s, or simply invented. Though one scene, at least, is obvious, even if it was horrible for Nicola Bryant: the Doctor on the Rock of Sorrows saying ‘I am a wrong ’un and no mistake, I did it, guv’ like the notes of a provincial PC read out in court never fails to be a scream.
Nicola Bryant gets a far better deal from the script than her co-star, and rises brilliantly to the opportunity of something more stretching than being chained to a rock (though as I’ve just noted, she has that too). Betrayed and abandoned, Peri seizes control of her own fate at key points rather than just suffer or revenge, and Nicola gives a truly powerful final scene, explaining on the commentary that she’d seen anaemic exits and decided that wasn’t for her. All that, despite being stuck in an electric pink smock after finally being allowed to dress as a grown-up in the previous segment – though it goes with the bright pink seawater. With so many others dressed in the same colour, they could make a camouflage bathing party that would be camouflage only ever on that one world (or in the ’80s).
The scene where the Doctor and Peri land at the seaside – the shocking pink seaside, with the brilliant indigo rocks and bright green sky – is a striking one, and not just to your eyeballs. Though it is a glorious example of finally having the technology to turn a cold British beach into an alien planet, and really going for it (thrillingly for fact fans, Peri goes out as she came in, with a story filmed on a nudist beach. And though she spends most of this one fully clothed, in one arresting respect she finishes up wearing much less than she started out, and it’s a fantastic look she’s much happier signing than a bikini shot). It gives Peri some oomph, and sets up many of the themes of the story: gun-running for profit; the great gag of ‘liquefied’ for ‘liquidated’ from the killer capitalists; and the in-joke and foreshadowing in one of the “Dirty old warlord!”
Which brings us to that old pulp SF cliché of ‘What is this Earth thing called love’, about which the kindest thing that can be said is that I’d rather have that than the horrible, horrible ‘Planet of Women’ script it replaced and on which Doctor Who once again dodged a CD phaser (it must be that they gaze into each other’s eyes and see the same taste in eye make-up. I say ‘taste’…).
Like the story, the supporting actors are absurdly variable – a mixture of over the top and totally flat. The Samurai-ish warlord Yrcanos (in a story that’s far more racially mixed than most Who, to its credit, both in the actors and in the costume influences it plays with) is played by Brian Blessed, at one end of the scale – you may be able to guess which – while his companion in rebellion, Gordon Warnecke’s Tuza, is gorgeous but you’ll need to watch My Beautiful Laundrette to realise he’s not always wood from the neck up. I suspect that the Valeyard may have got bored with doing a director’s cut on the Doctor and tinkered with King Yrcanos, too, as I can’t say I’m sold on the notion of a bloodthirsty hereditary warlord suddenly becoming Che Guevara. Mind you, something needed to gee up the galaxy’s least lively rebels, who make the Tribe of the Free seem full of character and multilayered performances in top fashions (meeting them even brings Peri out in a rash of terrible dialogue, while the idea of twenty-year-olds being aged to death seems less about vampirism or time experiments than a bit bunged in before a cliffhanger and then forgotten about). It’s impossible, though, not to enjoy the bizarre inventiveness – and shouting – of Brian’s performance, and his grumpy concession:
For once, director Ron Jones – the bane of many ’80s Doctor Who stories – creates a bit of atmosphere here, though not consistently: ironically, his two strongest achievements are respectively in the dark and in chaos. The epilepsy-inducing strobes in the tunnels mostly come across as distracting escapees from the Top of the Pops studio, but they work brilliantly in the second (or sixth) cliffhanger, where a perfectly timed flicker of light enlivens an otherwise stock moment. Even better, though, is the climax to the final (or eighth) episode, half a dozen minutes in which everything at last delivers as Thoros-Beta collapses into a hellish clamour of claxons and lost souls and the Doctor enters his own private hell. With Nicola Bryant and Colin Baker each perhaps giving their finest moments, it’s a stunning evocation of everything falling apart without the actual production doing so.
Leading a fine set of extras, the twenty-minute The Making of Mindwarp is excellent and very entertaining, particularly – as above – Patrick Ryecart and Brian Blessed (of whom a career summary notes his subtle and varied roles, “And then Flash Gordon happened”). Half the cast do their Brian Blessed impressions; Brian does the Queen, asking him to say “Gordon’s alive!” before thoughtfully observing that with Yrcanos, like Vultan, he could let his hair down. It’s just a shame there’s no Nabil Shaban. And, wonder of wonders, before flouncing off in a strop, absentee script editor Saward for once even praises Colin’s performance, while Colin brightly observes:
The best anecdote, though, is obviously when Colin Baker is quoted – and asterisked out – in the mostly unthrilling text notes recalling how, at the visual effects-laden and stressful end for one day’s shooting, Brian Blessed cost a lot of money in setting it all up again next time by exuberantly forgetting the name of his slimy enemies in a way that will surprise few viewers of Fry’s Planet Word:
These photos, too, are from the Blackpool Doctor Who Exhibition. A major part of my childhood, it was closed in 1986, making The Trial of a Time Lord its last new season of Doctor Who. A new version opened in the 2000s, but the BBC closed it and flogged off the exhibits two years ago rather than preserve them for the nation. Philistines. So even in these glory days, some BBC brass are still Fuckerons.
Philip Martin’s novelisation is not a happy experience. The other stories of the Trial had been published a couple of years earlier, so you got the impression he was struggling with it – though there’s more material, most of it was probably cut from the script, as his overwritten and ponderous prose style suggests he’s much happier with writing for television. Unusually for a book, though it’s not a perfectly plotted descent in quality, it’s easy to identify the best of it – the first page, as the Doctor muses over his trial and struggles with disturbing flashes of memory (flash-forwards, in the context of most of the narrative – and the worst, which with eerie symmetry is the epilogue’s comedy ‘afterlife’. Even the cover’s a mess: not matching the style of the three other Trial novelisations, and a pretty horrible painting that’s almost certainly the worst from the normally almost photorealistic brush of Alister Pearson (compare it to his gorgeous cover for the whole season-length story on VHS a few years later, for example). Rather more effective follow-ups to the end of the story, incidentally, can be found in Colin Baker’s own graphic novel The Age of Chaos, Big Finish’s audio play Her Final Flight and, certainly the best work overall though with the relevant echo its most self-indulgent part, the superb New Adventures novel Bad Therapy by future Doctor Who TV author Matt Jones.
Though I usually review a whole DVD release at once, and though The Trial of a Time Lord box set is in theory all one big story, again there’s more to come. So, Next Time… Er, with all the “Next Times” I’ve found online too spoilery, why not try this hilariously ’80s fan trailer?
And finally… Richard and Millennium have a few things to say about this story, too. Millennium’s (spoilerish, as it covers the next six episodes too) Mysteries of Doctor Who #15: What the TRUNK is going on at Dr Who’s Trial? Less seriously than the elephant, but also with a spoiler at the end if you look carefully, Richard has helpfully condensed the whole story into three scenes for your entertainment and delectation:
Part Two: Mind How You Warp
*All right, technically yesterday by the time I published this, but these things take time.
A couple of months ago, I wrote about the opening four episodes of Doctor Who – The Trial of a Time Lord… And, twenty-five years ago this evening, that superb cast led by Colin Baker and Michael Jayston was still in the middle of it. Before you watch Mindwarp, the second set of four episodes, you’re best off watching those earlier ones, The Mysterious Planet – not that you have to go out of your way to do so, as they’re all part of the same The Trial of a Time Lord DVD box set. The two mini-stories have much in common: the same ‘Trial’ framing device; the same lead actors; the same postmodern attitude to the series being on trial by hostile BBC executives, as I wrote last time. What’s different about this one is that it’s a much less straightforward narrative – to the extent that even the actors and director didn’t know what was supposed to be going on for some of it. And so it’s possible to slightly unfairly sum up the four mini-stories that make up The Trial of a Time Lord two by two: the odd-numbered stories as not very odd at all, but a bit forgettable; the even-numbered stories as memorable messes, full of interesting ideas but few of them complementing each other. I don’t know if this explains the bulk of fans’ relatively low opinion of Mindwarp (while a few think it brilliant), but it’ll do for mine (and why I have a very high opinion of some of it). Back in September 2009, Doctor Who Magazine 413 published “The Mighty 200” – 6,700 fans’ votes on all 200ish TV Doctor Who stories to that point – and placed the whole Trial of a Time Lord 142nd (about right, to me) but this second set of four episodes at a lowly 160ish (not far off for me either, though I might put it as much as ten places higher).
While this ‘Detail’ obviously goes into some detail, incidentally, my policy in these is not to be too spoilery. So read on without fear of finding out too many key twists from the end. Should there be such things (tip: if you’ve not seen this, don’t read the comedy sketch at the bottom).
That Golden Moment
“You’ll not die on me, you fish-faced monster!”If you’ve ever seen Mindwarp, you’ll know that there’s one completely awesome scene. And why I can’t mention it. But I can mention one of the key characters in it, friendly neighbourhood surgeon Dr Crozier – in whose laboratory the chaotic story keeps snapping into focus. As do an Alien and a throbbing brain. That means that another brilliant sequence takes place there, half-way into the third episode (or Part Seven of The Trial of a Time Lord), as he performs his first big operation on Lord Kiv…
In the caverns of Thoros-Beta, profit is in progress, with Lord Kiv and the self-styled Mentors piling up trade with other cultures – if necessary, by lethal force (or even by recycling old costumes). And while the wriggling other Mentors led by Kiv’s aide Sil have no love or loyalty for their leader, they’re desperate to keep him alive for his brilliant business brain, without which they might all end up dead or, worse than that, poor. But that very brain is fatally expanding within his slimy skull, and only the greatest – as he’d be the first to tell you – doctor in the galaxy can transfer it to a new frame. The first ‘monster’ we meet in the story is a forewarning of this, as well as a basically terrible piece of design kept wisely in the dark, then almost redeemed by the way people chat about him afterwards like he was Harold down the chip shop.
Colin Baker makes the most of a wildly inconsistent script, Brian Blessed is at his most BRIAN BLESSED, and Nicola Bryant is terrific as she approaches her end, but it’s stolen from all of them by Patrick Ryecart as Crozier, playing it so intense and deadpan that he becomes much funnier – and more sinister – than anyone else. Confined mostly to one set, dressed for citrus insanity in lemon and then orange, he’s somehow still the centre of the story. An obsessive rather than the ‘mad scientist’ that the brain transplant storyline might suggest, he’s marvellously self-centred, regarding anything bar his medical experiments as an utter waste of his time. And, though with brilliant touches of eccentric charisma, as Patrick Ryecart has explained his part, he’s more Nazi than nice. Clipped, staccato, disturbing and funny, you can see how he can go on to give such a great sit-com performance as the awesomely continuity-error-in-reality-named Captain Hilary Duff.
Kiv rambles wonderfully about his donor body-to-be having an primitive sting at the end of its tail – and how “I could, perhaps, sting all my assistants to death!” – as they prepare to operate; the Doctor camps up his pleasure at being allowed to monitor the equipment; Crozier eyes the Doctor like a wolf assessing a tailored suit (in a threatening plotline that, unfortunately, never goes anywhere, built up until suddenly dismissed in a late aside, as if they’d just thrown the script in the air and picked the bits up at random… Similarly, the nature of Crozier’s experiments changes at the last minute and makes a nonsense of much of the earlier dialogue); piercing music echoes; Crozier’s eyes narrow in a fabulously crazed single moment as he begins the operation. Later, Kiv will come round and see a thing of beauty; later still, Crozier’s eyes shine as he sees his ambition to conquer death within his grasp… But my favourite moment of him is tiny, arrogant, and perfect, and brilliantly down to Patrick Ryecart and a bit of business. Once the operation’s complete and the spectators have drifted away, Crozier is simply how we imagine every brilliant surgeon to be: dismissive and rude to his patient, and only caring for his own achievement. In a scene framed by a gorgeous effects shot of the arching roof of his lab, he’s sipping a cup of tea when his assistant, Alibe Parsons’ glamorous Matrona Kani, alerts him to something going wrong. Crozier takes this in at a glance:
“Cardiac arrest. His body’s – reacting to the drugs.”And in that gap in the middle of his sentence, in protest at being interrupted by what he clearly sees as his patient letting down his genius, instead of leaping to his feet he takes another sip of tea. It’s a perfectly calculated little moment, and the tiny stutter on the “F” as he calls his lord and master a “fish-faced monster!” allowing us just for a fraction of a second to think of another, more Brian Blessedy word, is the icing on the cake.
Patrick Ryecart and Brian Blessed spar deliciously in rival interviews in the ‘Making of’ – the former saying the latter needs to be licenced, the latter that the former never knew his bloody lines (and, to show he’s watched it, tipping his tea. Patrick Ryecart is still as reliable today; he didn’t turn up to a convention earlier this year, and was represented on stage by a dummy in his orange surgeon’s gown to wicked lines from Alibe Parsons). Other stories found on the disc will reveal a moment when Mr Blessed, too, may not have got his own lines word-perfect…
“The major thing was sort of replacing Brian Blessed’s brain. Which some people would argue is not a bad idea in real life – in fact, having replaced his brain, I think it might be what sent him up Everest without any oxygen.”
Something Else To Look Out For
While the postmodern commentary of the Trial impinging on the ‘main’ story got in the way on The Mysterious Planet, here it suddenly works better on a much more fragmentary story where the viewers, too, must be arguing about what’s really going on. Informed by Philip Martin’s groundbreaking series Gangsters (from whom it borrows Alibe Parsons), the hints of today’s interactivity make it seem far more modern. So while, for me, this isn’t the best segment of the Trial, it’s the one that makes best use of the overarching story in its own, with the interruptions resembling a DVD commentary in which cast members argue over the deleted scenes and try to salvage their own parts in a box-office disaster. It’s not the a clever noir-style plot the format could have led to, an unreliable narrator usually works better when the production end has more of an idea than the audience, and there are still riskily near-the-knuckle complaints such as calling it “inconsequential silliness” and “gratuitous,” but when the Valeyard counting the precise number of times the Doctor and his companions have respectively been in danger is a point-perfect echo of Mary Whitehouse, ticking off numbers of unsuitable incidents with no regard for narrative, and when Michael Jayston sarcastically invites us to watch “The Doctor’s next – frightening adventure,” you feel that they at least knew what they were doing better than Gerald Ratner.
The sparring between Colin Baker and Michael Jayston suddenly becomes more dangerous as the stakes rise: the Doctor becomes less playground and more lost; the Valeyard seems to know exactly where to twist the knife to stir up self-loathing in the Doctor; and his “Who else is there?” booming out of the sky is one of the few times he makes a telling point, a dramatic moment that almost anticipates the Doctor damning him as a second-rate god at the climax.
You can see how good Colin Baker is when the script deals him an almost crippling blow: as Colin glumly notes on the commentary, it takes him back to square one, completely destroying the character progression planned for his Doctor. Conceived as a ‘Mr Darcy’ who begins aloof and to whom we slowly warm, lead writer Eric Saward was utterly hopeless at writing that overarching story from the first, when The Twin Dilemma’s terrible writing blighted him. Just as finally, and far more thanks to the actor than his scripts, the Doctor has been mellowing, this story magnifies his ‘nice or nasty’ struggle without planning or revealing which bits are which. And the script editor had the nerve to blame other people? No wonder Philip Martin saw him as mentally fragile and “a bad guy pretending to be good” – which is when the lead writer should have stepped in to contextualise, rather than piss off. Mr Martin explains some of where he thought he was coming from on the commentary, but this is the first anyone’s heard of it – while the confusion of the Doctor being good, bad, mad or fake isn’t helped when none of the rest of the story can decide what it is, either (horror, comedy, sci-fi, barbarian swordplay, vivisection, a Dallas satire with green slugs as the Ewings, or a runaround with rebels?). On The Mysterious Planet, I talked about how seeing that when I was fourteen led to empathy with existential crises; something else I’d become very aware of at that age sprang to mind watching the ‘Doctor jiggles about too enthusiastically’ cliffhanger on broadcast, so I’ve always been amazed no-one said ‘Hang on…’ before it went out. What it looks like has always distracted me from the key turning point in the story, after which it’s anyone’s guess whether the Doctor’s in his right mind, in Brian Blessed’s, or simply invented. Though one scene, at least, is obvious, even if it was horrible for Nicola Bryant: the Doctor on the Rock of Sorrows saying ‘I am a wrong ’un and no mistake, I did it, guv’ like the notes of a provincial PC read out in court never fails to be a scream.
Peri’s Finest Hour?
Nicola Bryant gets a far better deal from the script than her co-star, and rises brilliantly to the opportunity of something more stretching than being chained to a rock (though as I’ve just noted, she has that too). Betrayed and abandoned, Peri seizes control of her own fate at key points rather than just suffer or revenge, and Nicola gives a truly powerful final scene, explaining on the commentary that she’d seen anaemic exits and decided that wasn’t for her. All that, despite being stuck in an electric pink smock after finally being allowed to dress as a grown-up in the previous segment – though it goes with the bright pink seawater. With so many others dressed in the same colour, they could make a camouflage bathing party that would be camouflage only ever on that one world (or in the ’80s).
The scene where the Doctor and Peri land at the seaside – the shocking pink seaside, with the brilliant indigo rocks and bright green sky – is a striking one, and not just to your eyeballs. Though it is a glorious example of finally having the technology to turn a cold British beach into an alien planet, and really going for it (thrillingly for fact fans, Peri goes out as she came in, with a story filmed on a nudist beach. And though she spends most of this one fully clothed, in one arresting respect she finishes up wearing much less than she started out, and it’s a fantastic look she’s much happier signing than a bikini shot). It gives Peri some oomph, and sets up many of the themes of the story: gun-running for profit; the great gag of ‘liquefied’ for ‘liquidated’ from the killer capitalists; and the in-joke and foreshadowing in one of the “Dirty old warlord!”
Which brings us to that old pulp SF cliché of ‘What is this Earth thing called love’, about which the kindest thing that can be said is that I’d rather have that than the horrible, horrible ‘Planet of Women’ script it replaced and on which Doctor Who once again dodged a CD phaser (it must be that they gaze into each other’s eyes and see the same taste in eye make-up. I say ‘taste’…).
Like the story, the supporting actors are absurdly variable – a mixture of over the top and totally flat. The Samurai-ish warlord Yrcanos (in a story that’s far more racially mixed than most Who, to its credit, both in the actors and in the costume influences it plays with) is played by Brian Blessed, at one end of the scale – you may be able to guess which – while his companion in rebellion, Gordon Warnecke’s Tuza, is gorgeous but you’ll need to watch My Beautiful Laundrette to realise he’s not always wood from the neck up. I suspect that the Valeyard may have got bored with doing a director’s cut on the Doctor and tinkered with King Yrcanos, too, as I can’t say I’m sold on the notion of a bloodthirsty hereditary warlord suddenly becoming Che Guevara. Mind you, something needed to gee up the galaxy’s least lively rebels, who make the Tribe of the Free seem full of character and multilayered performances in top fashions (meeting them even brings Peri out in a rash of terrible dialogue, while the idea of twenty-year-olds being aged to death seems less about vampirism or time experiments than a bit bunged in before a cliffhanger and then forgotten about). It’s impossible, though, not to enjoy the bizarre inventiveness – and shouting – of Brian’s performance, and his grumpy concession:
“Very well. Today, prudence shall be our watchword. Tomorrow, we shall soak the land in blood.”Again with the themes of The Mysterious Planet, only more so, Mindwarp moves from mere Minder-in-mass-murder to a full-blown critique of big business exploitation and capitalism as conquest, with Nabil Shaban again outstanding as Sil, the poison dwarf Mini-Me of Jabba the Hutt with a great tail and a fabulous laugh (which he was pleased gave at least one Doctor Who writer of my acquaintance nightmares). Returning from the previous year’s innovative if flawed Vengeance on Varos, he has considerably better design – suggesting, as with Kiv’s new body, that the Mentors become greener as they age – but a much less powerful part, becoming more the comic relief than the principal villain. Sil’s boss Kiv is a future returnee, with The Young Ones’ Christopher Ryan to become a Sontaran General opposite David Tennant (and, briefly, Matt Smith), while bored (occasionally amusingly so) head of security Trevor Laird comes back as Martha Jones’ dad.
For once, director Ron Jones – the bane of many ’80s Doctor Who stories – creates a bit of atmosphere here, though not consistently: ironically, his two strongest achievements are respectively in the dark and in chaos. The epilepsy-inducing strobes in the tunnels mostly come across as distracting escapees from the Top of the Pops studio, but they work brilliantly in the second (or sixth) cliffhanger, where a perfectly timed flicker of light enlivens an otherwise stock moment. Even better, though, is the climax to the final (or eighth) episode, half a dozen minutes in which everything at last delivers as Thoros-Beta collapses into a hellish clamour of claxons and lost souls and the Doctor enters his own private hell. With Nicola Bryant and Colin Baker each perhaps giving their finest moments, it’s a stunning evocation of everything falling apart without the actual production doing so.
Brian Blessed Versus the Fuckerons
Leading a fine set of extras, the twenty-minute The Making of Mindwarp is excellent and very entertaining, particularly – as above – Patrick Ryecart and Brian Blessed (of whom a career summary notes his subtle and varied roles, “And then Flash Gordon happened”). Half the cast do their Brian Blessed impressions; Brian does the Queen, asking him to say “Gordon’s alive!” before thoughtfully observing that with Yrcanos, like Vultan, he could let his hair down. It’s just a shame there’s no Nabil Shaban. And, wonder of wonders, before flouncing off in a strop, absentee script editor Saward for once even praises Colin’s performance, while Colin brightly observes:
“And for once, I wasn’t the most over-the-top person in it!”With this and the commentary between Colin, Nicola and writer Philip Martin, you can also enjoy tales of why Philip felt like an assassin, why he was told he couldn’t be political, which door cost more than Nicola, and how Colin observed BBC unions at work. In other extras, Lenny Henry stars as the Doctor in probably the ’80s’ key piss-taking clip, though it’s a shame they cut the sketch before his show’s end credits and lose him boogieing in the TARDIS (I wonder if anyone has the full version? Mine’s on a Betamax I’ve not been able to play for twenty years). I’m always unhappy when an ’80s Who story is released without the option of being able to listen to the musical score separately. Richard Hartley’s glistening and occasionally thumping incidental music here is the exception: it’s the only score of the decade for which the master tapes no longer exist, so it’s not cost-cutting nor lack of interest that means there isn’t one on this disc. I’m still miffed it’s the excuse for not making the scores for the other ten The Trial of a Time Lord episodes available, though. There’s an impressively comprehensive location feature, plus nine minutes of deleted and extended scenes which are interesting but don’t add much until the last couple, where Sil uses a vital word and Tuza half-remembers that there was someone else with him (with an appropriate idea of who it is from Yrcanos). Quite an extensive photo gallery, too, and thankfully the DVD menus helpfully don’t give too much away this time. My favourite extra, though, is the tiny additional commentary – for part of a later Trial episode – on A Fate Worse Than Death. Apologetic Colin. Appalled Nicola. Priceless.
The best anecdote, though, is obviously when Colin Baker is quoted – and asterisked out – in the mostly unthrilling text notes recalling how, at the visual effects-laden and stressful end for one day’s shooting, Brian Blessed cost a lot of money in setting it all up again next time by exuberantly forgetting the name of his slimy enemies in a way that will surprise few viewers of Fry’s Planet Word:
“Let’s find the Fuckerons!”
These photos, too, are from the Blackpool Doctor Who Exhibition. A major part of my childhood, it was closed in 1986, making The Trial of a Time Lord its last new season of Doctor Who. A new version opened in the 2000s, but the BBC closed it and flogged off the exhibits two years ago rather than preserve them for the nation. Philistines. So even in these glory days, some BBC brass are still Fuckerons.
Philip Martin’s novelisation is not a happy experience. The other stories of the Trial had been published a couple of years earlier, so you got the impression he was struggling with it – though there’s more material, most of it was probably cut from the script, as his overwritten and ponderous prose style suggests he’s much happier with writing for television. Unusually for a book, though it’s not a perfectly plotted descent in quality, it’s easy to identify the best of it – the first page, as the Doctor muses over his trial and struggles with disturbing flashes of memory (flash-forwards, in the context of most of the narrative – and the worst, which with eerie symmetry is the epilogue’s comedy ‘afterlife’. Even the cover’s a mess: not matching the style of the three other Trial novelisations, and a pretty horrible painting that’s almost certainly the worst from the normally almost photorealistic brush of Alister Pearson (compare it to his gorgeous cover for the whole season-length story on VHS a few years later, for example). Rather more effective follow-ups to the end of the story, incidentally, can be found in Colin Baker’s own graphic novel The Age of Chaos, Big Finish’s audio play Her Final Flight and, certainly the best work overall though with the relevant echo its most self-indulgent part, the superb New Adventures novel Bad Therapy by future Doctor Who TV author Matt Jones.
Though I usually review a whole DVD release at once, and though The Trial of a Time Lord box set is in theory all one big story, again there’s more to come. So, Next Time… Er, with all the “Next Times” I’ve found online too spoilery, why not try this hilariously ’80s fan trailer?
The Trial of a Time Lord… In a Hurry (Continued)
And finally… Richard and Millennium have a few things to say about this story, too. Millennium’s (spoilerish, as it covers the next six episodes too) Mysteries of Doctor Who #15: What the TRUNK is going on at Dr Who’s Trial? Less seriously than the elephant, but also with a spoiler at the end if you look carefully, Richard has helpfully condensed the whole story into three scenes for your entertainment and delectation:
Part Two: Mind How You Warp
Scene 1: int. laboratory. CROZIER, a mad scientist, and SIL, a slimy gonk, are discussing immortality. THE DOCTOR and PERI enter
THE DOCTOR: I wonder what Sil is up to?
PERI: Oh golly, Doctor, this is Sil’s home planet, isn’t it?
THE DOCTOR: Er…
Scene 2: laboratory, later that day. THE DOCTOR is attached to A MACHINE
SIL: Let’s Do the Time Warp Again!
MACHINE: [FX] Fizz Bang Wallop
THE DOCTOR: I’m BRIAN BLESSED!
Enter Brian Blessed
BLESSED: Ooh, how very dare you!
MACHINE explodes for no readily apparent reason
Scene 3: the TRIAL ROOM. THE DOCTOR confronts THE INQUISITOR
THE DOCTOR: You killed Peri!
THE INQUISITOR: Yes, we did, we really really did. [Miranda Hart-style to camera] We didn’t really.
Roll titles
*All right, technically yesterday by the time I published this, but these things take time.
Labels: Big Business, Books, Brian Blessed, Colin Baker, David Tennant, Doctor Who, DVD, DVD Details, Mary Whitehouse, Michael Jayston, Music, Pictures, Reviews, Richard
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
DVD Detail: Doctor Who – Colony In Space
There are a lot of fights going on in Colony In Space, last week’s Doctor Who DVD release, with guns, fists and ideologies. The Doctor fights to prevent the Master from gaining control of the most deadly weapon in the galaxy, but that’s not the only battle: individualists versus big business; the DVD versus the book; even EastEnders versus Corrie. But perhaps the toughest is whether the story can overcome its own reputation as long, drab and dull. It’s Jon Pertwee’s first crack at facing the unknown dangers of an alien planet, and it’s a quarry. Is there anything deeper?
I grew up reading the novels of the Pertwee Doctor first, and was inevitably disappointed when I got to see what I could only think of as the TV adaptations: last week I reviewed the newly-reprinted novels of two exceptionally good TV stories that quite lived up to the page; with this story, though, the ‘Pertwee Gap’ is at its widest. Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon was always a thrilling book (now also available on CD), full of character and politics – its TV original, Colony In Space, is grey, with occasional brown highlights. Even the fabled Doctor Who Monster Book’s pictures couldn’t make it look exciting. It came near the end of Doctor Who’s eighth season, in 1971, in which every story featured the Master and more location filming than any other, and is the first Pertwee story to get away from his exile on Earth. Less happily, it’s the first of the six-part stories with too little plot to cover their length that dominate his time (after, surprisingly, starting with three rather brilliant seven-part stories and one earlier action-packed six). If you’ve been watching new TV sci-fi this year, the good news is that it’s still much shorter and more exciting than Outcasts (though not Doctor Who – Frontios, also out on DVD this year), while the trailer for the next DVD release is the same story as Terra Nova. Back in September 2009, Doctor Who Magazine 413 published “The Mighty 200” – 6,700 fans’ votes on all 200ish TV Doctor Who stories to that point – and awarded Colony In Space a lowly 171st place, which isn’t unfair (if anything, slightly too kind). Almost universally, it’s seen as worthy but dull: “like watching socially aware paint dry”, in the words of CornellToppingDay. But it still has its moments, as I go sifting through the mud in search of glints of duralinium…
It’s my usual aim in these ‘tasters’ not to be too spoilery, so you read on without fear of finding out too many key twists from the end. But this time the ending gave me some extra ideas, so be careful to stop at the warning sign if you’ve not seen it.
So turn, instead, to the end of Episode Four. I wouldn’t usually pick a cliffhanger, for reasons of spoilers, but that this one is neither a surprise (you know the Master’s going to try to kill the Doctor) nor a turning point (you know he isn’t going to manage it). In theory, it’s an example of the least inspired form of cliffhanger, where the episode has no natural climax and so someone points a gun at the Doctor and declaims, ‘I shall kill you – next week!’ before inevitably finding a reason to do nothing of the kind. In practice, it’s remarkably entertaining: swift, stylish, and in character.
The Master has arrived, impersonating an Adjudicator, and made an excellent case against ID cards for the viewer: he has them (forged, of course, but immaculate), and makes the Doctor look shifty by asking to see his credentials. He rules in favour of the nasty mining corporation, IMC; he uses this to prompt the hapless colonist leader to tell him about the alien ruined city that he’s really come for; the other colonists rebel, and start shooting it out with IMC. So what would the Doctor do? Try to stop the killing. And what would the Master do? See it as an opportunity. A perfect little moment.
Remarkably, being on a new world again suits Pertwee’s Doctor: his desire for adventure and exploration fulfilled for a moment, he’s much more enthusiastic and much less of a git to Jo, if still insufferably smug to the colonists. Though he does get several pointless ‘action’ scenes in the style of the Batman TV series which make you worry for his companion: in her big stripy top, she looks like one of the Penguin’s henchmen, and could be in danger of a ‘Kerpow’. Hilariously, the Penguin’s actual henchman, Morgan, beeps the Doctor after one fight as if to say, ‘Oh, get on with it!’ Though Jo’s top is clearly a popular style, as the alien city’s decked out in just the same scheme, in tackier plastic (her home-made titanium chastity belt hasn’t caught on, though). The Master, meanwhile, gets a simply enormous frock that he can’t wait to get out of, clearly deciding that keeping his disguise comes second to not banging his head on his own collar. He has his dim moments, notably an incredibly slow-moving ‘cliffhanger finger’ that you’ll know when you see it, but for once has learnt from an earlier mistake: after the Doctor broke into his TARDIS in Terror of the Autons, he’s had an alarm fitted (Jo, on the other hand, tempts fate by staring right into a giant plastic flower, having clearly learnt nothing). And with this release, there are now only two more Master stories to go on DVD, both from the same season and both exceptionally good.
I can’t beat Tachyon TV’s review of the colonists as all men with mid-life crises (and WH Auden), and though characters called “Norton” and “Winton” aren’t as camp as you might think, this is surely the Who story with the largest proportion of ’taches, among both the pioneers and the miners (when Caldwell, with his hard hat and ’tache, is tempted away from his duty by Winton’s winsome charms, he’s already dressed to sing ‘IMCA’). There’s much detail of the overcrowded, authoritarian life back on Earth from which the colonists have escaped to set up their own lives amid the stars, and I suspect reading the book gave me an early mistrust of giant corporations, though no great love of rugged pioneers. The IMC Captain Dent is a superbly dead-eyed and threatening boss (though less a pointy-haired than a completely-unbelievably-haired one). And perhaps no moment is better-characterised than when IMC think they’ve won and have a piss-up, something very few villains take time to do on Who. And just to reinforce the rivalry between the two sides, one actor on each side does indeed become a major character in, respectively, EastEnders and Coronation Street.
The “monsters,” on the other hand, aren’t a terrific success. The “giant lizards” have an excellent reason not to be (unlike all the other dodgy giant lizards in this period of Who); the “Primitives” are all right, with interestingly gnarled faces and green-with-red-tracery bodies; their priests stumble about uselessly; and their ultimate ‘Guardian’ looks like a glove puppet in a toga, even though the ‘Making Of’ astoundingly reveals that there was an actor behind the face. His lines, pretty much those of a starchy Star Trek alien, are no better than his looks, though at least there’s some amusement to be had at the end of a particularly bad dialogue with the Doctor when our hero, having been let off scot-free, proclaims himself “overjoyed to find that justice prevails” in a tone suggesting the Guardian’s just crapped on his breakfast. It’s the “Primitives” that are the main problem, despite that, and not just because – in a score that’s easily among Dudley Simpson’s worst – they’re accompanied by exceptionally awful music. The planet is a bit of a mash-up of American colonial history, less the stereotypical Wild West than Puritans versus corporate land-grabs, with each side populated by different grumbling ’70s middle-class Britons, the ultimate evolutionary forms of the Goods and the Leadbetters. In this context, the deliberate lie against the “Primitives” that “They’re all the same, treacherous,” is very much playing on fears of stereotypical “Red Indians”… But Malcolm Hulke’s attempt to portray them as other than dumb villains is slightly undermined by none of them being able to talk, and their acting villainously. Some of the other politics in the story works, though there’s plenty crammed in: dystopia, overpopulation, capitalism, nuclear power, starvation, colonialism, one of the series’ earliest takes on ecology… Though not sexism, as none of the three women colonists get to do anything, there are no female “Primitives”, and BBC sexism infamously banned a woman IMC thug as “kinky”.
This was the first story directed by Michael E Briant, one of the series’ most enthusiastic and inventive directors and a lovely man to meet, and though he goes on to do far better, there are moments: great lighting as Jo is taken inside the city; an extraordinary fight in the mud (the poor actors); some interesting angles on location. He’s the star of the (pretty awesome ensemble) commentary and ‘Making Of’, too, particularly paired with Graeme Harper, his assistant on this and later another of the series’ most enthusiastic and inventive directors both in the 1980s and the 2000s. Even they can’t liven up such stretched-out plots as gunfight-wait-fifteen-minutes-swap-places-another-gunfight, though, and most of the design is pretty poor. The colonists’ geodesic domes are all right, but an astoundingly rubbish robot, a very cheap-looking alien city, and all the worst of the ’70s on the IMC ship fail to impress. While Pertwee’s UNIT stories have dated relatively ordinarily as ‘the day after tomorrow’ they aimed for became ‘the day before yesterday’, here Earth’s technology of “five hundred years in the future” sticks out like a giant claw: film projectors; open-reel tape recorders; and all the villains have an exciting new gadget they’d clearly only just heard of called a remote control.
I must have gone through three different phases of falling in love with the book, for three different reasons, roughly every 15 years or so: on first reading it in 1979 and loving it for itself; on seeing the actual story at last sometime in the mid-’90s, and realising how much better the book is; and then that gorgeous new audiobook reading a couple of years ago. For the book itself, I loved the characters – most of all Captain Dent’s three-page biography, but everyone down to the sarkier, sparkier Jo (who gets a different ‘origin’ here) and the scene-stealingly urbane, charming and rather camp Master (Malcolm Hulke seemed to love writing gayish villains). It’s so compellingly but readably written that it just sweeps you along – while the moral arguments at the end, something at which you’d expect the actors to have the edge, are given far more force on the page once Mac had had a few years to decide how to improve his very under-par scripting. Though one moral element that’s rather a surprise is how much old communist Mr Hulke adds not just an anti-capitalist tone but a religious one; like the novel of The Aztecs (coincidentally another story with the excellent John Ringham on TV), it brings in Christian preaching, though here at least the contrast is with Dent parrot-quoting every word of his IMC rulebook while Ashe is provoked to think about his.
The CD’s one of the best interpretations in the range, too – with the added bonus that while on TV you think, ‘Oh, it’s the Master (again),’ here you think, ‘Ooh! It’s the Master!’ when he turns up and lets Mr Beevers really get going. There’s one moment that sticks in my mind for adding something to the book, and one that strikes me as not quite as good as I’d imagined, so here are both. Mr Beevers has a great piece of delivery that gives a line an added meaning: when Captain Dent asks the Master for ID on first meeting him, he’s told “I am the… Adjudicator for this section of the galaxy”, which I’d always read simply as him putting Dent in his place, but here is given more than a hint of “I am the Master, and you will obey me” – after which nearly-the-magic words, Dent forgets to ask for his ID again, as if hypnotised. On the other hand, one line that had always stuck in my head has a reading that doesn’t quite fit for me; the Master’s “The Doomsday Weapon. It will never be mine” is desperate and a little high-pitched, rather than deep, bitter and slightly stunned, as I’d always imagined it. But that’s just down to individual interpretation, so I’m not going to say it’s “wrong,” like David Howe’s imaginationlessly pedantic liner notes about Chris Achilleos’ illustration of the Guardian. Yeah, it’s “wrong” for the TV. Or, alternatively, it’s the way it’s described in the book, and – more importantly, like the title, and much of the story – better.
If you come to this having seen a lot of later Doctor Who, particularly the Hinchcliffe years of the mid-’70s (or even read Harry Potter), you’ll see what’s deeply strange about it. In one of the most-told types of Doctor Who story, ancient forces of evil – either races or individuals – try to conquer or kill all before them, are to all intents and purposes killed, and then ages later turn out not to have been killed quite enough and try to rise from the grave to pick up where they left off. This is usually where the Doctor arrives, and spends a long time trying to explain to everyone else in the story that this ancient evil is, in Tat Wood’s phrase, insufficiently dead, and has to convince them all in a race against time while the ancient evil is becoming less sufficiently dead by the episode. And, usually, for the ancient evil to rise, it needs to get something back: a new body to walk around in (someone else’s will do); an old body rebuilt; or get hold of its all-powerful doomsday weapon so that it can carry on laying waste to the Universe in the way it was before it was so rudely interrupted. And the Doctor’s job is generally to make sure that old interruption is permanent this time.
But Colony In Space turns this whole theme on its head. And, confusingly (as with a comedy reference to Jim’ll Fix It before that programme started), it does this before it became perhaps Doctor Who’s best-known trope. Take Doctor Who – Meglos, for example: far from Doctor Who’s best ‘ancient evil rising’ story, but the one I reviewed most recently, and the other bookend to this year’s DVD releases. It follows several of the standard patterns to the point of cliché: the last survivor of an ancient race, buried for aeons on “the dead planet”; suddenly wakes up and possesses someone else’s body; once had an hideously powerful doomsday weapon which has since been picked up by someone else who doesn’t realise its true potential, and spends the story attempting to reclaim it and, with it, his position of megalomaniac supremacy. Colony In Space has many things in common: a megalomaniac super-villain; a planet that something has mysteriously laid waste to; an ancient but fallen alien race; and another planet-blasting doomsday weapon, so famous that they named the book after it. But just this once, these elements all appear in the wrong order.
The key to it is that there wasn’t some heroic battle by the forces of light that almost but not quite killed the ancient evil, so it hasn’t spent all the time since slowly regathering its strength. It isn’t really even evil, and it hasn’t lost its doomsday weapon. And the brutal capitalists and the inept drop-outs aren’t the only representations of ‘us’ in the story. Perhaps Malcolm Hulke doesn’t try hard to defend the natives from colonialism here because these aliens are ‘us’, too, having risen to a technological peak, discovered how to build a doomsday weapon, built it… And, rather than hearing about how they went on a terrible war of conquest and devastation that eventually provoked their victims to rise against them and cast them down, simply building the weapon meant they’d created a power source that would slowly poison them (picking one of the author’s many subtitles at random: A BIT LIKE NUCLEAR WASTE, DO YOU SEE?). They weren’t suddenly blasted to an inch of death and spent the centuries crawling back; they were just slowly eaten away until they forgot who they were. They didn’t disappear to vanishing point, only left as an ancient fear, and they didn’t lose their doomsday weapon; they’re still there, just ignored as they decline, and it’s been there all along, not being used as a weapon, but still very gradually killing them and their planet bit by bit, the series’ only doomsday weapon that does, indeed, destroy worlds, but not just in the way you expect. They weren’t – as far as we know – megalomaniacs, and they’re now no longer capable of producing megalomaniacs; the megalomaniac villain has to come in from somewhere else and try to exploit what’s left. But the Master doesn’t understand this story: it’s saying that even wanting empires consumes you, that a doomsday weapon isn’t about power but simply extinction, and that the Uxarieans have been sliding down and don’t want to soar back up to terrible glory. They’re no longer capable even of imagining it. The Doctor doesn’t try to kill the ancient evil again: he just asks it, understanding its lingering decline, knowing it’s not really evil at all, whether – after all this time painfully dying – it might be time to just die.
I grew up reading the novels of the Pertwee Doctor first, and was inevitably disappointed when I got to see what I could only think of as the TV adaptations: last week I reviewed the newly-reprinted novels of two exceptionally good TV stories that quite lived up to the page; with this story, though, the ‘Pertwee Gap’ is at its widest. Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon was always a thrilling book (now also available on CD), full of character and politics – its TV original, Colony In Space, is grey, with occasional brown highlights. Even the fabled Doctor Who Monster Book’s pictures couldn’t make it look exciting. It came near the end of Doctor Who’s eighth season, in 1971, in which every story featured the Master and more location filming than any other, and is the first Pertwee story to get away from his exile on Earth. Less happily, it’s the first of the six-part stories with too little plot to cover their length that dominate his time (after, surprisingly, starting with three rather brilliant seven-part stories and one earlier action-packed six). If you’ve been watching new TV sci-fi this year, the good news is that it’s still much shorter and more exciting than Outcasts (though not Doctor Who – Frontios, also out on DVD this year), while the trailer for the next DVD release is the same story as Terra Nova. Back in September 2009, Doctor Who Magazine 413 published “The Mighty 200” – 6,700 fans’ votes on all 200ish TV Doctor Who stories to that point – and awarded Colony In Space a lowly 171st place, which isn’t unfair (if anything, slightly too kind). Almost universally, it’s seen as worthy but dull: “like watching socially aware paint dry”, in the words of CornellToppingDay. But it still has its moments, as I go sifting through the mud in search of glints of duralinium…
It’s my usual aim in these ‘tasters’ not to be too spoilery, so you read on without fear of finding out too many key twists from the end. But this time the ending gave me some extra ideas, so be careful to stop at the warning sign if you’ve not seen it.
That Golden Moment
“I’ve got to try and stop this senseless killing!”Roger Delgado’s Master is used relatively sparingly in this story, but lights up the screen, not least because he’s still caught between wanting to kill the Doctor to stop him getting in the way and being desperate to get the Doctor to be in his gang. So the obvious choice for a Golden Moment would be their big scene together in Episode Six, as he offers the Doctor not a rose and some chocolates but a half-share in the Universe; except that I’ve already picked this scene, as it’s quoting not just Goethe but Doctor Who – The War Games, in which the same authors gave us exactly the same ‘villainous seduction’, but done rather better.
“It won’t do any good, Doctor, they won’t listen to you. It’s always the innocent bystander who suffers eventually.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I’m afraid you are both about to become the victims of stray bullets!”
So turn, instead, to the end of Episode Four. I wouldn’t usually pick a cliffhanger, for reasons of spoilers, but that this one is neither a surprise (you know the Master’s going to try to kill the Doctor) nor a turning point (you know he isn’t going to manage it). In theory, it’s an example of the least inspired form of cliffhanger, where the episode has no natural climax and so someone points a gun at the Doctor and declaims, ‘I shall kill you – next week!’ before inevitably finding a reason to do nothing of the kind. In practice, it’s remarkably entertaining: swift, stylish, and in character.
The Master has arrived, impersonating an Adjudicator, and made an excellent case against ID cards for the viewer: he has them (forged, of course, but immaculate), and makes the Doctor look shifty by asking to see his credentials. He rules in favour of the nasty mining corporation, IMC; he uses this to prompt the hapless colonist leader to tell him about the alien ruined city that he’s really come for; the other colonists rebel, and start shooting it out with IMC. So what would the Doctor do? Try to stop the killing. And what would the Master do? See it as an opportunity. A perfect little moment.
Something Else To Look Out For
With Meglos the first ‘classic’ Doctor Who DVD release of 2011 and this the last, the year starts and ends with doomsday weapons, but this does a rather better job of setting one up. Colony In Space even has multiple prologues: with the Time Lords on screen; with the old Keeper in the book; even in comic strip form in the Radio Times. You know which is the coolest, as the several stunning pages of Frank Bellamy art here on pdf show (certainly my highlight). With the Doctor still exiled to Earth and just an undignified cameo for the Brigadier, the Time Lords are responsible for getting the TARDIS working, temporarily, to cover up one of their cock-ups, though this story does its best to convince us we don’t really want travels in time and space back after all.Remarkably, being on a new world again suits Pertwee’s Doctor: his desire for adventure and exploration fulfilled for a moment, he’s much more enthusiastic and much less of a git to Jo, if still insufferably smug to the colonists. Though he does get several pointless ‘action’ scenes in the style of the Batman TV series which make you worry for his companion: in her big stripy top, she looks like one of the Penguin’s henchmen, and could be in danger of a ‘Kerpow’. Hilariously, the Penguin’s actual henchman, Morgan, beeps the Doctor after one fight as if to say, ‘Oh, get on with it!’ Though Jo’s top is clearly a popular style, as the alien city’s decked out in just the same scheme, in tackier plastic (her home-made titanium chastity belt hasn’t caught on, though). The Master, meanwhile, gets a simply enormous frock that he can’t wait to get out of, clearly deciding that keeping his disguise comes second to not banging his head on his own collar. He has his dim moments, notably an incredibly slow-moving ‘cliffhanger finger’ that you’ll know when you see it, but for once has learnt from an earlier mistake: after the Doctor broke into his TARDIS in Terror of the Autons, he’s had an alarm fitted (Jo, on the other hand, tempts fate by staring right into a giant plastic flower, having clearly learnt nothing). And with this release, there are now only two more Master stories to go on DVD, both from the same season and both exceptionally good.
I can’t beat Tachyon TV’s review of the colonists as all men with mid-life crises (and WH Auden), and though characters called “Norton” and “Winton” aren’t as camp as you might think, this is surely the Who story with the largest proportion of ’taches, among both the pioneers and the miners (when Caldwell, with his hard hat and ’tache, is tempted away from his duty by Winton’s winsome charms, he’s already dressed to sing ‘IMCA’). There’s much detail of the overcrowded, authoritarian life back on Earth from which the colonists have escaped to set up their own lives amid the stars, and I suspect reading the book gave me an early mistrust of giant corporations, though no great love of rugged pioneers. The IMC Captain Dent is a superbly dead-eyed and threatening boss (though less a pointy-haired than a completely-unbelievably-haired one). And perhaps no moment is better-characterised than when IMC think they’ve won and have a piss-up, something very few villains take time to do on Who. And just to reinforce the rivalry between the two sides, one actor on each side does indeed become a major character in, respectively, EastEnders and Coronation Street.
The “monsters,” on the other hand, aren’t a terrific success. The “giant lizards” have an excellent reason not to be (unlike all the other dodgy giant lizards in this period of Who); the “Primitives” are all right, with interestingly gnarled faces and green-with-red-tracery bodies; their priests stumble about uselessly; and their ultimate ‘Guardian’ looks like a glove puppet in a toga, even though the ‘Making Of’ astoundingly reveals that there was an actor behind the face. His lines, pretty much those of a starchy Star Trek alien, are no better than his looks, though at least there’s some amusement to be had at the end of a particularly bad dialogue with the Doctor when our hero, having been let off scot-free, proclaims himself “overjoyed to find that justice prevails” in a tone suggesting the Guardian’s just crapped on his breakfast. It’s the “Primitives” that are the main problem, despite that, and not just because – in a score that’s easily among Dudley Simpson’s worst – they’re accompanied by exceptionally awful music. The planet is a bit of a mash-up of American colonial history, less the stereotypical Wild West than Puritans versus corporate land-grabs, with each side populated by different grumbling ’70s middle-class Britons, the ultimate evolutionary forms of the Goods and the Leadbetters. In this context, the deliberate lie against the “Primitives” that “They’re all the same, treacherous,” is very much playing on fears of stereotypical “Red Indians”… But Malcolm Hulke’s attempt to portray them as other than dumb villains is slightly undermined by none of them being able to talk, and their acting villainously. Some of the other politics in the story works, though there’s plenty crammed in: dystopia, overpopulation, capitalism, nuclear power, starvation, colonialism, one of the series’ earliest takes on ecology… Though not sexism, as none of the three women colonists get to do anything, there are no female “Primitives”, and BBC sexism infamously banned a woman IMC thug as “kinky”.
This was the first story directed by Michael E Briant, one of the series’ most enthusiastic and inventive directors and a lovely man to meet, and though he goes on to do far better, there are moments: great lighting as Jo is taken inside the city; an extraordinary fight in the mud (the poor actors); some interesting angles on location. He’s the star of the (pretty awesome ensemble) commentary and ‘Making Of’, too, particularly paired with Graeme Harper, his assistant on this and later another of the series’ most enthusiastic and inventive directors both in the 1980s and the 2000s. Even they can’t liven up such stretched-out plots as gunfight-wait-fifteen-minutes-swap-places-another-gunfight, though, and most of the design is pretty poor. The colonists’ geodesic domes are all right, but an astoundingly rubbish robot, a very cheap-looking alien city, and all the worst of the ’70s on the IMC ship fail to impress. While Pertwee’s UNIT stories have dated relatively ordinarily as ‘the day after tomorrow’ they aimed for became ‘the day before yesterday’, here Earth’s technology of “five hundred years in the future” sticks out like a giant claw: film projectors; open-reel tape recorders; and all the villains have an exciting new gadget they’d clearly only just heard of called a remote control.
“Grow a moustache, and see the stars!”The ‘Making Of’ documentary IMC Needs You! is hugely entertaining all the way from its Fanfare For the Common Man knock-off and South Park-style IMC men, steering exactly the right course between enthusiasm and mockery, with an impressive array of writers, actors and directors. Poor Katy Manning on the portaloo… Though I now wonder if Excelis was inspired by her real handbag. Michael, lovely, voluble chap that he is, is very much the star of this, though, particularly as he brightly recalls how it absolutely had to be shot in Tenerife (a clue: no) or just why he wept at Hello, Dolly! The commentary has most of the same people in a lively mix; there are text notes throughout; several minutes of extra film sequences; the story itself has four seconds ‘restored’ to it that I’ve never seen before, but I haven’t a clue which; and, as I’ve already mentioned, just about the best Radio Times ever – several pages of comic adaptation, two in full colour, with much more sinister Time Lords and a groovy time vortex.
Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon
“As Dent sat there, touching the controls of the IMC spaceship, he felt happy and secure in the fact that he was an IMC man, with an IMC wife, IMC children, with a beautiful four room IMC home. His present and his future were as secure as IMC, and IMC would go on for ever.”Malcolm Hulke’s renamed novelisation, on the other hand, was a triumph. One of the reasons I like his work is that, while several of his scripts don’t really cut it, a few years later he’s had a chance to mull them over and does far better second drafts in book form – I like to think about things for a bit, too! And this one was amazingly influential, first in offering the “chameleon quality” of TARDISes which Terrance Dicks then named “chameleon circuits” in another book and which eventually made it to the telly, but not least in providing the first part of a Pertwee era ‘future history’ of Earth and its Empire, in expansion and then decline: an innovation picked up in the ’90s for the superb New Adventures, with Adjudicators in such novels as Lucifer Rising, Original Sin and Cold Fusion, and even joining the Doctor on his travels. Even on its own, it’s still one of my half-dozen or so favourites of all the Target Books, and now Master Geoffrey Beevers does a silkily brilliant job of bringing it to life on CD, too (though Roger Delgado graces Jeff Cummins’ striking cover).
I must have gone through three different phases of falling in love with the book, for three different reasons, roughly every 15 years or so: on first reading it in 1979 and loving it for itself; on seeing the actual story at last sometime in the mid-’90s, and realising how much better the book is; and then that gorgeous new audiobook reading a couple of years ago. For the book itself, I loved the characters – most of all Captain Dent’s three-page biography, but everyone down to the sarkier, sparkier Jo (who gets a different ‘origin’ here) and the scene-stealingly urbane, charming and rather camp Master (Malcolm Hulke seemed to love writing gayish villains). It’s so compellingly but readably written that it just sweeps you along – while the moral arguments at the end, something at which you’d expect the actors to have the edge, are given far more force on the page once Mac had had a few years to decide how to improve his very under-par scripting. Though one moral element that’s rather a surprise is how much old communist Mr Hulke adds not just an anti-capitalist tone but a religious one; like the novel of The Aztecs (coincidentally another story with the excellent John Ringham on TV), it brings in Christian preaching, though here at least the contrast is with Dent parrot-quoting every word of his IMC rulebook while Ashe is provoked to think about his.
The CD’s one of the best interpretations in the range, too – with the added bonus that while on TV you think, ‘Oh, it’s the Master (again),’ here you think, ‘Ooh! It’s the Master!’ when he turns up and lets Mr Beevers really get going. There’s one moment that sticks in my mind for adding something to the book, and one that strikes me as not quite as good as I’d imagined, so here are both. Mr Beevers has a great piece of delivery that gives a line an added meaning: when Captain Dent asks the Master for ID on first meeting him, he’s told “I am the… Adjudicator for this section of the galaxy”, which I’d always read simply as him putting Dent in his place, but here is given more than a hint of “I am the Master, and you will obey me” – after which nearly-the-magic words, Dent forgets to ask for his ID again, as if hypnotised. On the other hand, one line that had always stuck in my head has a reading that doesn’t quite fit for me; the Master’s “The Doomsday Weapon. It will never be mine” is desperate and a little high-pitched, rather than deep, bitter and slightly stunned, as I’d always imagined it. But that’s just down to individual interpretation, so I’m not going to say it’s “wrong,” like David Howe’s imaginationlessly pedantic liner notes about Chris Achilleos’ illustration of the Guardian. Yeah, it’s “wrong” for the TV. Or, alternatively, it’s the way it’s described in the book, and – more importantly, like the title, and much of the story – better.
Something Interesting About the Doomsday Weapon (Spoilers)
This hasn’t been a very surprising (or even exciting) Doctor Who story, and many of its metaphors have somehow managed to be both dull and unsubtle. But there’s something about the story that’s at least worth a second look. The end – I’m not sure it’s quite the ‘climax’ – does something very odd with the planet’s inhabitants; the “Primitives”, the Native Uxarieans, whatever you call them. And it’s even odder when you consider that the script’s by the same author as the previous year’s Doctor Who and the Silurians, in which he pioneered the idea that green scaly people are people too, and much odder still in retrospect compared to ‘usual’ Doctor Who. There’s this alien race… And the Doctor’s pretty much happy to see them all die at the end, in fact suggesting it. How jarring this is is particularly obvious in the TV version that you can now watch on DVD, as the Doctor’s moral ‘debate’ with the Guardian of the Doomsday Weapon / City is very poorly thought through by comparison to that in the book that I grew up with (the dialogue’s so bloody awful it doesn’t even stand much comparison with Doctor Who – The Dæmons, the story which followed it on television and the infamous ending of which it closely resembles). Particularly before Russell T Davies’ weary last Time Lord, how often did the Doctor just gently ask moderate, if not benign, aliens to die, and they just think about it and say, ‘Oh, all right, then’?If you come to this having seen a lot of later Doctor Who, particularly the Hinchcliffe years of the mid-’70s (or even read Harry Potter), you’ll see what’s deeply strange about it. In one of the most-told types of Doctor Who story, ancient forces of evil – either races or individuals – try to conquer or kill all before them, are to all intents and purposes killed, and then ages later turn out not to have been killed quite enough and try to rise from the grave to pick up where they left off. This is usually where the Doctor arrives, and spends a long time trying to explain to everyone else in the story that this ancient evil is, in Tat Wood’s phrase, insufficiently dead, and has to convince them all in a race against time while the ancient evil is becoming less sufficiently dead by the episode. And, usually, for the ancient evil to rise, it needs to get something back: a new body to walk around in (someone else’s will do); an old body rebuilt; or get hold of its all-powerful doomsday weapon so that it can carry on laying waste to the Universe in the way it was before it was so rudely interrupted. And the Doctor’s job is generally to make sure that old interruption is permanent this time.
But Colony In Space turns this whole theme on its head. And, confusingly (as with a comedy reference to Jim’ll Fix It before that programme started), it does this before it became perhaps Doctor Who’s best-known trope. Take Doctor Who – Meglos, for example: far from Doctor Who’s best ‘ancient evil rising’ story, but the one I reviewed most recently, and the other bookend to this year’s DVD releases. It follows several of the standard patterns to the point of cliché: the last survivor of an ancient race, buried for aeons on “the dead planet”; suddenly wakes up and possesses someone else’s body; once had an hideously powerful doomsday weapon which has since been picked up by someone else who doesn’t realise its true potential, and spends the story attempting to reclaim it and, with it, his position of megalomaniac supremacy. Colony In Space has many things in common: a megalomaniac super-villain; a planet that something has mysteriously laid waste to; an ancient but fallen alien race; and another planet-blasting doomsday weapon, so famous that they named the book after it. But just this once, these elements all appear in the wrong order.
The key to it is that there wasn’t some heroic battle by the forces of light that almost but not quite killed the ancient evil, so it hasn’t spent all the time since slowly regathering its strength. It isn’t really even evil, and it hasn’t lost its doomsday weapon. And the brutal capitalists and the inept drop-outs aren’t the only representations of ‘us’ in the story. Perhaps Malcolm Hulke doesn’t try hard to defend the natives from colonialism here because these aliens are ‘us’, too, having risen to a technological peak, discovered how to build a doomsday weapon, built it… And, rather than hearing about how they went on a terrible war of conquest and devastation that eventually provoked their victims to rise against them and cast them down, simply building the weapon meant they’d created a power source that would slowly poison them (picking one of the author’s many subtitles at random: A BIT LIKE NUCLEAR WASTE, DO YOU SEE?). They weren’t suddenly blasted to an inch of death and spent the centuries crawling back; they were just slowly eaten away until they forgot who they were. They didn’t disappear to vanishing point, only left as an ancient fear, and they didn’t lose their doomsday weapon; they’re still there, just ignored as they decline, and it’s been there all along, not being used as a weapon, but still very gradually killing them and their planet bit by bit, the series’ only doomsday weapon that does, indeed, destroy worlds, but not just in the way you expect. They weren’t – as far as we know – megalomaniacs, and they’re now no longer capable of producing megalomaniacs; the megalomaniac villain has to come in from somewhere else and try to exploit what’s left. But the Master doesn’t understand this story: it’s saying that even wanting empires consumes you, that a doomsday weapon isn’t about power but simply extinction, and that the Uxarieans have been sliding down and don’t want to soar back up to terrible glory. They’re no longer capable even of imagining it. The Doctor doesn’t try to kill the ancient evil again: he just asks it, understanding its lingering decline, knowing it’s not really evil at all, whether – after all this time painfully dying – it might be time to just die.
Labels: Big Business, Books, Doctor Who, DVD, DVD Details, Harry Potter, Jon Pertwee, New Adventures, Reviews, The Master
Wednesday, October 05, 2011
The Sky Is Falling – Result!
Good news for TV viewers, small business and Europe – bad news for Rupert Murdoch and big money. And perhaps the first time I’ve ever cheered a story about football. So congratulations to pub landlady Karen Murphy for standing up for herself against the big business bullies, and to the European Court of Justice for saying that big cartels can’t stop free competition. She bought a legal decoder, paid tax on it, and used it to show football on her pubs – only for greedy monopolists to shriek and fine her. Well, I hope Sky has to repay her £8000. And that someone in the vast corporation (not a Murdoch, obviously) feels slightly ashamed at pretending a small pub in Portsmouth that’s paid a proper subscription is a rival “broadcaster”, as if they were another giant.
I’ve never liked football and would choose a different pub, but I know what it’s like to be a fan, and I know that standing up to bullies is right and that big business monopolies are wrong. And a lot of football fans I know are far from happy at the big money that runs the Premier League and its unholy bargain with Rupert Murdoch (not least when it doesn’t matter how many millions you play a footballer if the spoiled brats decide they’d rather take the money but refuse to play anyway).
If Mr Murdoch and the Premier League want to charge Sky-high prices to let people watch football when it can be watched more cheaply under absolutely legal agreements in other European countries, the point of the EU’s free trade laws is that you can shop around. No wonder all the Murdoch press hate the EU, eh? Competition like this might force some of Sky’s prices down, put a brake on Murdoch power, and perhaps even throw some cold water in the faces of the Premier League fat cats. All good things from where I’m standing. This isn’t about not paying – it’s about not paying through the nose when someone else is selling the same thing more cheaply (like Sky, legally; like Sky, the Greek broadcaster has nothing to do with ‘making the product’ and is just selling on someone else’s work).
Apparently lawyers for the combined forces of monopolist fatcattery are aiming to mount a fresh challenge on “copyright” grounds – as if they invented footballers. Let’s hope the courts continue to uphold competition for consumers over the vested interests of bullying greed.
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I’ve never liked football and would choose a different pub, but I know what it’s like to be a fan, and I know that standing up to bullies is right and that big business monopolies are wrong. And a lot of football fans I know are far from happy at the big money that runs the Premier League and its unholy bargain with Rupert Murdoch (not least when it doesn’t matter how many millions you play a footballer if the spoiled brats decide they’d rather take the money but refuse to play anyway).
If Mr Murdoch and the Premier League want to charge Sky-high prices to let people watch football when it can be watched more cheaply under absolutely legal agreements in other European countries, the point of the EU’s free trade laws is that you can shop around. No wonder all the Murdoch press hate the EU, eh? Competition like this might force some of Sky’s prices down, put a brake on Murdoch power, and perhaps even throw some cold water in the faces of the Premier League fat cats. All good things from where I’m standing. This isn’t about not paying – it’s about not paying through the nose when someone else is selling the same thing more cheaply (like Sky, legally; like Sky, the Greek broadcaster has nothing to do with ‘making the product’ and is just selling on someone else’s work).
Apparently lawyers for the combined forces of monopolist fatcattery are aiming to mount a fresh challenge on “copyright” grounds – as if they invented footballers. Let’s hope the courts continue to uphold competition for consumers over the vested interests of bullying greed.
Labels: Big Business, Bullies
