Love and Liberty

Happy thirty-first birthday, Liberal Democrats?

Liberalism is desperately needed today. Liberal Democrats are sometimes powerful voices, but sometimes tongue-tied.

We must demand better.

Last year I chose six words (three positive values, one urgent priority) for a short video on ‘Why the Lib Dems’:

Exit From Brexit

If our MPs would even pick six such words and sound like they meant them, that would be a start.

Our Leadership seems to think ‘Why can’t we all get along?’ is good enough. It isn’t. It’s a cry of helplessness, and they have no answer to their own question.

I don’t have all the answers. But the least the Lib Dem Leadership can do is answer why we shouldn’t all pack up and go home. The slogan “Demand Better” is a headline to get attention, but with absolutely no idea what to say if anyone then looks our way and asks, ‘Yes, what?’

It’s a cliché to say a Liberal won’t take their own side in an argument, but even after years of singularly failing to put any passion into Liberalism I didn’t expect our own Leadership’s answer to ‘Demand a better Centre Party’ to be ‘Oh, perhaps they have a point’. After a year of navel-gazing about ‘Registered Supporters’, now our Leadership doesn’t even seem to have the energy to ask potential supporters to register with this party in particular. Rather than assuming people would rally if we tinkered with the mechanics, perhaps the Liberal Democrats should have considered that the way to get people to support us is to articulate something worth supporting.

Some time ago, I wrote about “What It Means To Be A Liberal Democrat”. I made the case for the values I believe in and the positive difference Liberal Democrats should make.

Liberal Democrats can certainly demand better than what I publish here. But first we need our Leadership to stop standing frozen in the headlights in the middle of the road. To go anywhere, we must set out a direction of travel.

What It Means To Be A Liberal Democrat

To be a Liberal Democrat is to believe in freedom.

Freedom grounded in real life, starting with people as they are. Not ‘The People’. Not ‘Our People’. Freedom based on the unique worth and potential of every individual person, and the reality that the person who knows best how to live their life is themselves.

To be a Liberal Democrat is to demand better. Government shouldn’t just protect the interests of those who are already well-off, and sneer at and push down people working hard to make a life for themselves, or those who aren’t able to support themselves. Liberal Democrats demand freedom from poverty. Government shouldn’t assume it can do everything, control everyone, as long as you take what you’re given and don’t ask awkward questions of those in charge. Liberal Democrats demand freedom from ignorance. Government shouldn’t tell you that your nation is the only thing that matters about you, drive out ‘outsiders’ and call anyone who doesn’t want their flag cut smaller, narrower and meaner ‘traitors’. Liberal Democrats demand freedom from conformity.

Liberal Democrats feel in our guts that everyone should be free to live their own life, that pushing people about and telling them what to do or who to be is wrong. We feel in our guts that everyone should have a fair chance, that prejudice and lack of opportunity are wrong. We feel in our guts the need for a better future, that piling up today’s problems for our kids to deal with tomorrow is wrong. But politics isn’t just about gut feelings and protesting when things aren’t right. We must face up to how things really are to work out how to change them, and change our own methods if experience shows us better ways to achieve our ideals. So Liberal Democrats are principle-led, but evidence-based.

An open, fairer society and a greener, stronger economy are interdependent. Liberal Democrats champion opportunity, fairness and economic responsibility. An economy that works, that encourages enterprise, that’s environmentally and financially sustainable, and where everyone pays their fair share. All thriving within an outward-looking, optimistic society that’s open-minded, open-hearted and open to co-operating with other countries to tackle climate change, promote peace and increase prosperity for our whole planet’s future.

Liberal Democrats believe freedom needs both positive help to make it real for everyone, and action to break down barriers to freedom such as poverty, ignorance and conformity. Education is the single most crucial way to combine both. A great education ensures everyone has the opportunity to realise their potential, whatever their background, whatever their choices. Every child getting the best education is central to them growing up with the freedom to live their own lives, getting a fair start and building for the future. If you’re for every person, and you want every person to have the ability to ask the important questions and make their own informed decisions in realising their own dreams, education is where it starts. If you want an economy growing and succeeding with innovation and creativity and where the most talented get ahead instead of just the most wealthy, education, training and apprenticeships are where it starts.

From the foundation that society should be for everyone and that everyone should be free, Liberal Democrats understand that individual people choose to come together in any number of complementary ways – families, jobs, mutual interests, neighbourhoods, nations, the whole human family – and that decisions can be made at any of those levels without giving up the others. That’s why we’ve always been both the most localist and the most internationalist party. Any political party denying diversity, defining itself by just one single identity or community and telling each individual that your birth or your faith or your cash or your class or your country is the only thing that counts doesn’t just diminish people’s lives and hopes, doesn’t just make society more fearful, hateful and divided, but is the mark of a party so stuck in its own prejudices that it has no idea how real people’s real lives work.

One vivid, simple answer to what Liberalism is for has always stuck with me: Liberalism is about standing up to bullies. That’s why a Liberal’s gut instinct is to side with the underdog – whoever the bully is and whoever the underdog is at any one time. Any sort of power can threaten liberty, but any sort of power can defend it, too. Whether it’s the state, or big business or big unions, or just other people, any of them can boss you around and anyone can help stop you being bossed around. So Liberals wouldn’t label any of them ‘the enemy’ or do away with any of them – just as we won’t say any of them are right all the time. When government acts fairly it can be the biggest force to restrain bullies, from crooks and murderers to stifling communities and bad employers; but a government that bosses you around or that only protects one special interest or only picks on another is just a bigger bully. The closer anyone has to a monopoly of power, the more it’s abused. Liberals challenge power and privilege, break up monopolies, set the same rules for everyone and make the starting point for any decisions the people that they affect.

When the starting point is people, what’s the end point? Get real! If you start with people you never say ‘that’s it.’ Whether it’s a grandiose utopia that you’ll never finish building or a thousand mean little targets to tick, imaginary end points have two things in common. Believing the ‘ends’ justify the means, they throw real people under the bus, seeing individuals only as statistics or as problems. And they never work. A Liberal society isn’t a perfect society, because there aren’t any perfect people or perfect politicians – but an open, untidy society that develops constantly in response to the individuals who form it has the advantage of being about real life. Liberals don’t say ‘We know best’, because everyone’s best is different.

To be a Liberal Democrat is to be wary of grand plans and little prejudices. To say of human nature, ‘It’s complicated’. Anyone might be kind or selfish, creative or lazy, successful or failing. Other parties see that as a reason to control people, because they believe people who disagree with them can’t be trusted with freedom, and they think ‘their people’ will want to do what they tell them anyway. Other parties fear pluralism, diversity, flexibility and individuality. Liberal Democrats might give an instinctive two-word answer to that ending in “—off”, but we have a better answer, too, countering fear with hope. Our fear is more that if a government makes a mistake in its giant one-life-fits-all authoritarianism, it’s going to be a doozy. And our hope, based on realism, is that the more different ideas run free, the more brilliant, practical ones will succeed. Believe in people, enable people, and unlock everyone’s potential.

To be a Liberal Democrat is to embrace the contradictions – because people are contradictory. Because only one idea has room for how messy, contradictory and wonderful real life and real people are. Freedom.

The Story Since 2016

I’ve never published this before, but for a couple of years it was on the Liberal Democrat main website as one of nine shortlisted essays chosen in early 2016. The competition was part of a consultation on “What It Means To Be A Liberal Democrat In 2015”. I re-read it a couple of weeks ago and was surprised how relevant it still seemed (even the ‘traitors’ line was in there back then). I aimed to make our Liberalism instinctive and accessible, and that stands. My video above is much more politically punchy for our immediate priorities and better to show someone who’s not interested in philosophy. Comparing this essay to my 2017 General Election post “A Liberal Britain. A Brighter Future. My Hope”, that takes a very different approach and that, too, has some punchy lines confronting issues I didn’t mention at all here (though in trying to find hope post-Brexit I was a little too shell-shocked to do more than wish it would all go away).

You’d think British politics has changed a lot since 2016. As the Prime Minister might say, nothing has changed, and yet everything has. Back when I wrote my “What It Means To Be A Liberal Democrat”, I was concerned that I’d leaned a bit too hard on vigilance about the state rather than its power to help – giving emphasis to education, but not health or infrastructure. After two years of Theresa May in charge, I didn’t go nearly far enough in warning against the might of government to be a heartless bully, an unmitigated f— up, or both at the same time. Back then, Brexit was a looming threat, not yet a tectonic shift. Since then, British politics has been frozen while Britain itself has become far worse – all because of the worst decision ever made in British democracy, and a slither of decisions and non-decisions ever since that have only made the worst decision worse still.

In the face of this titanic catastrophe, the Liberal Democrat Leadership has been more frozen than most. Much of the time their only message has been ‘Why can’t we all get along?’ when the answer is ‘Because an awful lot of people made a decision based on hating other people’, and wishing and hoping that they didn’t really mean it and that the clock would turn back has failed to make any impact as a political strategy because it has no political appeal and no political reality. Liberalism is worth fighting for. Bullies must be stood up to. Looking hand-wringingly heavenward and wishing that the bully and the bullied would just get along simply does not cut it.

If I’d started writing this today, stopping Brexit would have been the angry focus and I would have been far more pugnacious against Theresa May and her fascistic Hostile Environment or Jeremy Corbyn and his sub-BNP attacks on immigrants stealing British jobs. I’ve written quite a few times on what the Lib Dems stand for, and I may well write again. But I realised that what I’d written was something positive – and that wasn’t afraid to take a side. I’ve decided to publish pretty much what I entered, with a couple of small polishes. The competition set a limit of a thousand words. I’ve reintroduced a sentence or two that I’d originally cut for space, but mainly I’ve put back one whole paragraph. The reason I removed that one at the time was that I liked what it was aiming for but it just didn’t quite flow. Ironically, I found the Lib Dems’ “Demand Better” gave me the edge I was looking for, so that one paragraph has been rewritten today and restored to set the tone at the top.

You see? You can get something out of demanding better – but you have to give people some idea of what you’re demanding.

Labels: Brexit, Bullies, Economy, Education, Environment, Ideas, Liberal Democrats, Liberalism, Meddling In Things That Are Nobody's Business But Your Own, What the Lib Dems Stand For

Forty years ago today, the Doctor was facing The Armageddon Factor – the climax of his quest for the Key To Time. It’s one of my favourite and most fun years of Doctor Who, yet this finale tells a grimmer story. A world inexplicably breaks off trade with its closest neighbour, goes to war instead and ends up nearing utter destruction, while its leader* spouts self-deluded nationalist propaganda with Churchillian rhetoric but Hitlerian meaning, promising

“Victory – or death!”

But the Doctor’s trip to neighbouring planet Zeos poses a question that’s never been answered until now: where have all the Zeons gone?


*Meanwhile, the powerless figurehead constitutional monarch offers subtly coded resistance in her speeches.

Enjoying The Key To Time

The Doctor is on a mission from God. Surprisingly, that’s where the fun starts.


I was six when Season Sixteen of Doctor Who began in Autumn 1978, and I adored it. I still adore it now, for all the old reasons and quite a few more besides. For the first time, the whole season has a declared mission statement and story arc: the Doctor must search for the six segments of the Key To Time, to prevent the Universe from being plunged into eternal chaos. Marvellously, the series reacts against this grimdark threat by revelling in being fairy-tale, fluffy and fun. Tom Baker’s enjoying himself as the Doctor, Mary Tamm’s Romana is icily fabulous, and this is the year when K9 really works. The sheer entertainment of the actors and the style is built on some of the best authors ever to write for the Doctor, who include Douglas Adams, Robert Holmes and David Fisher (the most underrated, but who for my money gets the best balance of character and wit here, and is rather grown-up about sex).


Striking out into science fantasy with citadels, evil queens and the Doctor as a wizard on a quest, the most consistent theme underlying the magical journey is that gods aren’t to be trusted. From the very beginning, the Doctor chafes against being told what to do, and through a succession of witty adventures with larger-than-life opponents, despite the warning of impending doom, he and the stories are far more about having fun than following the holy writ. In the first story of the season, The Ribos Operation, the Doctor gets involved in a small-time scam and does his best to ignore the ‘important people’, while the most moving and heroic figure is an alien world’s equivalent of Galileo. The Pirate Planet fizzes with ideas, builds a very serious story seamlessly out of a very silly one, pits the Doctor’s fury against a cyborg Pirate Captain and features the Daily Mail’s worst nightmare – young people today who are gay hoodies. The Stones of Blood follows that with a fabulous lesbian goddess, female Gothic and sausage sandwiches. The Androids of Tara – my favourite in one of my favourite seasons – is almost a summer holiday in gorgeous countryside, playing at swordfighting with a dastardly double-dealing moustache-twirling villain. The Power of Kroll is a bit flatter than the rest, but does have a very big god indeed and a performance by Philip Madoc of a man who knows he could do a better job than his rubbish boss that becomes immeasurably more entertaining if you know the behind-the-scenes casting details. And then there’s The Armageddon Factor.

The Armageddon Factor

“We have the power to do anything we like…”

The Armageddon Factor is a story that almost no-one has a good word for. After six months of the search for the Key To Time, I’ve seen quite a few reviews complain that it’s not a sufficiently epic finale – the money’s clearly run out, the macho space battles are dismissed as a very bad idea, and the conclusion of the whole quest is an anti-climax because it resolutely rejects the self-importantly deterministic apotheosis that messianic sci-fi often marched towards. But those reviews tend to see the whole season as incorrigibly frivolous already. Many fans who enjoyed the rest of it, though, are disappointed by this story because after so much jolly colour in both style and tone, the finale is dark and drab. Writer Gareth Roberts praises Season Sixteen as Doctor Who’s best, but still thinks it tails off: his novel The Well-Mannered War attempts a grand finale for the era, most blatantly going for The Armageddon Factor II, with a ton of reworked plot riffs (even his own version of ‘Where have all the Zeons gone?’) though with characteristically misanthropic overtones.

For me there’s a lot to the story, not least the ending that winds so many people up: I don’t want the Doctor to create Universal order. I can’t think of a more Doctorish answer to absolute power than that no-one should be trusted with god-like supremacy… Not even God. Along the way, John Woodvine’s Marshal is a toweringly watchable dictator, the eerie skull on a stick both fascinated and disturbed me, and its critique of war offers some very black humour. I do have some problems with the plot structure – the ‘comic relief’ comes in too late, when it’s starving for some drama towards the end (but even then, that inspires John Dorney’s brilliant The Trouble With Drax, possibly the most enjoyable of all Big Finish’s modern Tom Baker adventures) while the middle sags a bit and could have done with something more diverting than too many corridors. But it’s in those corridors that you find a question that’s been nagging away at me for years…

Having landed in the midst of an interplanetary war between Atrios and Zeos, the Doctor spends roughly a third of the story each on Atrios, then on Zeos, then in the sinister base of the sinister third force behind the whole sinister plan. The trouble is, there isn’t much there on Zeos: a few beige corridors; a bit of dust; an over-intelligent Weapon of Mass Destruction that K9 exchanges sexts with; and, er, that’s it. This makes a problem for the viewer, as Zeos being so unexciting sometimes gives the impression that the war is less between two planets than between two leisure centres in need of refurbishment. But it also makes a problem for the script: where have all the Zeons gone?

The Missing Planet Vs the Missing People

“The fleet is still trying to locate the target, sir.”
“The target, Major Shapp, is Zeos! The planet. Isn’t that big enough?”

The story’s initial mystery is not the Zeons, but their entire planet: earlier in the story, what remains of the Atrian fleet is unable to find their target, then engaged and hopelessly outfought by the Zeon ships. The Doctor works out the answer to the ‘missing’ planet, which though a bit iffy in terms of spatial understanding gives the clue that there is something else, and someone else, out there; the inhumanly efficient Zeon attacks in turn are a clue as to the nature of the Zeon ‘commander’, not a person but an alien-built super-computer, Mentalis. That revelation is part of the intriguing mirror to that opening question: once you’ve found Zeos, why does it appear deserted?

Whoever wrote the Radio Times teasers for this story certainly considered this a crucial question. For Part Two, it intrigued readers with:

“The Atrian defences are finally exhausted and the Marshal enlists the Doctor’s help in fighting off the Zeon attack. But who are the Zeons? Why has no one ever seen one?”

Which we later find out isn’t strictly true, but pales next to Part Three:

“The Doctor discovers the bizarre truth about the Zeons.”

About Zeos, perhaps – but when Part Three was broadcast on 3rd February 1979, the Doctor’s visit to Zeos asks the question but only gets answers to a different one. The sleight of hand is such, though, that I didn’t notice until long after 1979. It took until The Key To Time was released in a DVD box set for Richard and I to watch The Armageddon Factor together and, chatting after each episode as we often do, discover that we both had diametrically opposed assumptions. I’d always had in the back of my mind that the Zeons had all emigrated to some other system or something of the sort; Richard had always assumed they’re all dead.

Which of those you think is true graphically changes the tone of the story.

Now, there are a lot of clues in the story before we get to Zeos. The Doctor’s bluffing suggestion of a cheap and energy-saving psychological barrier, inducing “Atrophobia”, to keep the Zeon fleet away is really a stab at being able to talk to a Zeon prisoner and get a wider picture of what’s going on – but there are no prisoners. At first, this seems of a piece with the way that the Atrians can’t find Zeos – but if it isn’t there, where are the attacks coming from? The Doctor notes that of course it’s there, but hidden, which suggests some sort of outside interference with Zeos (a much bigger part of the plot in the original storyline). Then the Zeon fleet’s suddenly gone, like ghosts, and the Marshal declaims, “Deliver us from the terrors of war and the evils of pestilence…” Are we supposed to wonder if the Zeons have all been killed by disease? Are people dissolved by disease on Zeos (the Doctor pointedly tells one character that people aren’t dissolved by radiation)? After the Doctor has the idea of going to Zeos to investigate, his odd nagging question en route is why the Marshal, leader of the world at war with Zeos, should have the equivalent of a secret passage straight there – but it’s odder still in retrospect to look at the exchange between the Marshal and the Doctor that leads to the trip:

“There are no Zeons!”
“There are on Zeos.”
“What exactly are you proposing?”

When the Doctor arrives on Zeos, he’s been clobbered by the sinister Shadow’s henchbeings: of course, we assume that the blokes apparently from and on Zeos in black robes and skull masks are Zeons. That mirrors the implications for the first couple of episodes that Zeos is some sort of ghost planet, a planet of the dead (a frequent state in Doctor Who – one that writers Bob Baker and Dave Martin had tried to get in before – and another of many elements that this story would have in common with the following one). Atrios’ Princess Astra calls the war futile and begs for peace, warning, “We shall all be wiped out if we go on, Zeons and Atrians alike.” Is that perhaps another clue that they may all be dead already? And then, of course, what appears to be the clincher, as the Doctor concludes:

“There are no Zeons on Zeos…”

I’m not sure there’s such a thing as a fan consensus, except not to ask the question: The Discontinuity Guide buries a questionable ‘fact’ in its summary that “Atrios and Zeos have been waging nuclear war on each other, despite the fact that for the last five years Zeos has been uninhabited and that its warfare has been prosecuted by Mentalis, a computerised commandant… The Zeons were human, but were possibly wiped out by the Atrions’ attacks” but makes no attempt to think past that ambiguity, while About Time IV states baldly that “they’re all dead now”, and even assumes it’s been for the last five years, since Mentalis was built. So what killed them at the very beginning of the war, or earlier, then?

The Missing Plot

The roots of the problem surely lie in what happened when the Doctor arrived on Zeos in the script as originally planned. This outline, Armageddon, had much the same structure, but once it’s been established that the now near-uninhabitable Atrios is too weak to win, we were to be surprised to meet plenty of Zeons – who are all in much the same radiation-sick, bombed-out state as the Atrians. Thanks to the DVD text notes (or, if you have them, In-Vision and Doctor Who – The Complete and Utter History), you can read quite a bit about the original storyline and the Zeon people – but, by the time the story made it to screen, script editor Anthony Read had decided that the Zeos episodes essentially repeated what the Doctor had already encountered on Atrios and, with the budget already at breaking point, were a prime target for a cut. He deleted the Zeons and added Mentalis the sexy WMD, a “totally invincible” commander whose robot fighters now have the edge against untrained young Atrian pilots after too many casualties. Though fewer speaking parts in the middle episodes are a problem for audience engagement, the change at least comes up with something different – as well as taking the script in a different direction to what seemed at times Bob Baker and Dave Martin’s cover version of the earlier story Genesis of the Daleks (war, radiation, mutants, a dictator in a bunker making familiar speeches and even another Brothers Karamazov moral dilemma; peculiarly, the new additions are in part a satire on Game Theory, something that also crops up in the next story along, Destiny of the Daleks, which is in itself a direct sequel to Genesis of the Daleks). So, in one fell swoop, that’s the behind-the-scenes reason why we don’t meet any Zeons. But that still leaves an unanswered on-screen question – what happened to them? Are they all dead? And if so, how?

In The Armageddon Factor as broadcast, despite the revelation of Mentalis fighting a zombie Zeon war, all the other hints about the dead planet suddenly hit a beige wall. We’ve been given a mystery – but there’s no pay-off. When the Doctor arrives on Zeos, it’s just a load of dusty corridors, and the more weirdly fairground-ride planet of the dead is somewhere else entirely. The revelation that “There are no Zeons on Zeos” should be a shattering twist, like it turning out there are no Russians in Russia for a World War III thriller, but the line’s tossed away and no-one shows any interest in it, as if suddenly none of it matters. We’re left wondering if someone’s going to finish off telling us the plot eventually, but they never do. Mentalis resembles a high-tech version of a dead man’s switch, but we never see the dead men.

I suspect that my understanding that the Zeons had just ‘gone away’ came from the novelisation Doctor Who and the Armageddon Factor. In it, Terrance Dicks does what he often did, zeroing in on a plot hole he’s spotted and explaining it away with the option that will be less disturbing for kids. So, on page 69 of the book, the Doctor finds Mentalis and concludes that “The whole planet is automated. There are no Zeons on this part of Zeos.” Atrian Major Shapp then asks where the Zeons are, prompting the Doctor to guess, “On the other side of the planet, I imagine, somewhere in hiding. But before they went, they set this up.” It’s a stab at an explanation, but on closer examination, surely it doesn’t hold up (planets turn, after all. Emigration might have made sense – but with nothing anywhere to support that theory, you’d just have to make it up). Yet the TV version suddenly falters at the obvious counter-conclusion.

The more disturbing option, the one that seems much more heavily implied by all the signifiers before we actually reach Zeos, is that all the Zeons are dead, but that the Shadow has had Mentalis set up to fight for them from beyond the grave, or that they built Mentalis to ‘win the war’ and as a result didn’t put enough effort into Atrios-like bunkers so were all killed by the radiation or, as Shapp asks, “Could be the result of… biological warfare?” Though it’s worth noting that, as well as being atrociously acted, Major Shapp is atrociously written; he doesn’t seem sure whether Atrios used or even possess biological weapons, despite being second in command of all Atrian forces.

The trouble with this reading is that, while the war’s a little protracted, it can’t be a millennium-long one like Genesis of the Daleks’ Thal-Kaled war that might explain how bodies could have crumbled to dust over centuries while the machinery just continues remorselessly – the only skeletons we see are perambulatory and not local (the Shadow’s robed, skeletal servants, the “Mutes”, are literally represented by the costume designer as having no mouths – the most ‘extra’ of all extras, with even their costumes saying, ‘There’s no way on Earth you’re getting a line’ – but are apparently a leftover from the Zeons being mutated after all the nuclear war, again much like the “Mutos” of Genesis of the Daleks. Yet though the idea of them began as Zeons, on screen they are explicitly not). Bob and Dave pull off ‘walking on crumbled corpses’ very effectively in The Hand of Fear, but those took millions of years to collapse into sand; here, Shapp’s only in early middle age, but he clearly remembers trading with Zeons before the war, and that they looked just like the (humanoid) Atrians, while we hear later from Drax that the war started only just over five years ago.

The clues are all set up, then, for all the Zeons to be dead, until we actually reach Zeos. At that point, not only is there is no real moment of resolution, but every clue suddenly backs away from the grisly ‘truth’: K9 makes no warnings (unlike on Atrios) of high levels of radiation; there appears to be almost no damage; the Doctor even makes a point of pointing out to Shapp, “There’s no sign of your attacks getting through though, is there?” The revelation of Mentalis itself raises another question: its Dr Strangelove parallel is explicit when Marshal Jack D Ripper launches his own mad mission in person and Mentalis is programmed to respond with its ‘If you bomb us we will blow up the entire solar system… Maybe we should have told you this in advance’ Non-Deterring Deterrent Doomsday Device (that apparent oversight in itself a clue to what’s really going on). Yet if all the Zeons are already dead, how did whatever killed them not already trigger such Mutual Assured Destruction? Early in Part Four, Romana notes:

“Well, since there don’t seem to be any Zeons on Zeos, if you know what I mean…”

As established, I’m not sure we do, but the script seems to keep worrying at it like a missing tooth or a distracting thought they can’t quite place. To confuse matters further, as late as Part Five (once the plot’s already left Zeos, and after you’d think all the facts were established) Romana observes that there are only four seconds left in their makeshift time-loop designed to delay the system’s total destruction, and that if it should snap, “millions of people on Zeos and Atrios will die”. So, did she see quite a lot of people on Zeos that we didn’t see, or was she just left reading an earlier version of the script? And, as the black-hearted plan behind the war is to foment chaos and suffering and trap the Doctor in a moral dilemma with millions of lives at stake, why would the Shadow cut short the chaos and suffering for one world, or wipe out half his ‘hostages’?

The mystery of the missing Zeons hurts The Armageddon Factor not just by making it less coherent, but by drawing back from the mood of death and destruction with which the story starts, making it one of the elements that fight against the drama by actively reducing tension as the story goes on. With a heavily rewritten script at the end of a full season’s overarching story, it seems that this was a detail that just fell through the cracks. It may well be that the script hinted at a dead planet, then bottled out of the idea as too frightening when it got there, and there just wasn’t the time to change all the promising details even when they were no longer going to deliver. The Armageddon Factor had two credited writers; many changes were made to it by the outgoing script editor (the equivalent of today’s lead writer); incoming script editor Douglas Adams and producer Graham Williams were concentrating on making the ending to the whole six-month story arc work, rather than the details of the six-episode story. It’s not hard to see how the Zeons got lost down the back of the sofa between drafts.

The Watsonian conclusion that most fits the tone of the story is that all the Zeons are dead, and simply try to ignore everything that pulls against that – or, at the risk of making it even closer to Genesis of the Daleks, to fill in the gap with the sole suspect to hand: single-mindedly programmed to win the war, Mentalis did it, clinically deciding that the Zeon people were a waste of scarce wartime resources. It’s almost a relief that none of the many writers made such an obvious sci-fi cliché explicit, merely leaving it a lurking possibility. But the real, unsatisfyingly Doylist answer lies in the decision to take them out of the script, but leave their planet as their meaningless ghost in the middle of it: by the time The Armageddon Factor went into production, the truth is that the Zeons aren’t all dead – they were never alive.





As well as today being the fortieth anniversary of the Doctor’s trip to Zeos, it was thirteen years ago today that I began this blog. While Love and Liberty was never exactly prolific, I’ve found it incredibly difficult to write as my health has nosedived faster than ever over the past few years. But this has been rattling around my head and various drafts for ages, so today seemed a good day to buckle down to it at last, and rather to my surprise, I have. Will there be more? Who knows.

Labels: Brexit, Doctor Who, The Armageddon Factor, The Golden Dozen, The Key To Time, Tom Baker

Liberal Democrat members have attacked the proposed Migration paper A Fair Deal for Everyone for reasons ranging from fairness, to morality, to family, to economics. But for a political party, it has another fatal flaw. Its well-meaning, wishful-thinking naivety is just terrible politics. It’s time to get politically streetwise with a bit of hard-headed realism. Let’s ask the tough questions, get back to evidence-based policy and demand better.

Meaning Well and Wishing Are Not Enough

I’m sure the people who wrote the proposed paper for debate at Lib Dem Conference and its defenders mean well. I know and respect quite a few of them. And I can see how they got themselves into this mess. Two of the deepest Lib Dem instincts might be put simply as ‘Stand up to bullies’ and ‘Why can’t everyone get along?’ And most of the time those go hand in hand. But at times like these, when the country’s split, hate’s on the rise and things seem to be going horribly wrong, cracks can appear between the two. The proposed Migration paper feels upset at how nasty things have got – and I feel the hurt of that too – and wishes, really hard, that everyone would be nice to each other again. ‘Why can’t everyone get along?’ And so it compromises: a bit for immigrants; a bit for people who hate them and want them all gone. But in the real world, wishing doesn’t cut it, and there comes a time when you have to choose standing up to bullies instead of hoping they’ll turn nice if you only half-encourage them.

In thirty years of the Liberal Democrats, there can’t have been many more wince-inducing juxtapositions than one month ago. On August 14th, Lib Dem Leader Vince Cable said unequivocally that, hard as it might be, there was no room for racism in the Lib Dems. On August 15th, Lord William Wallace – a peer I have a lot of time for and usually agree with – gave an apologetic defence of the proposed Migration paper by saying that we have to pander a bit to racists otherwise they won’t vote for us (I paraphrase, but not unfairly).

The proposed Migration paper has the point of view that policy and the British polity should be kinder and gentler, wishing that people were nice, assuming everyone means well deep down and really agrees with us, and if they don’t yet then compromises in good faith will help them agree with us, and if nothing else maybe they’d vote for us after we tell them we agree with them, really, just a bit, and please, please, don’t hurt us. I can empathise. The problem is that the evidence supports none of it. I believe the Lib Dems backing these proposals mean well. But I’m realistic enough to know that not everyone else means well, and that wishing won’t make it so. The fight to make Britain better can be won. But it will take a fight, and if Liberals don’t put up a fight, who will? It won’t be won by acting as if we’re non-combatants who won’t take our own side in a quarrel, saying, ‘If you don’t want immigrants then you have a point’.

I don’t want to take this unduly personally, but when the proposed Migration paper puts forward a well-meaning compromise and I realise, ‘I’m the son of an immigrant and had this proposed Lib Dem policy been around when my parents met I’d never have been born’, it loses its appeal. That’s the trouble with compromising between haters and the people they hate; it always makes things worse for the ones who are already getting all the flak, but never goes far enough to satisfy those who want them gone. The proposed Migration paper proposes as a moderate compromise that I shouldn’t exist. What would I have left to give on the next compromise?

Stop wishing. Look at the evidence. Ask the difficult questions.

Look back ten, twenty, thirty years: the attitudes and policies and hostile environment against immigrants that are now ‘mainstream’ were confined to a few vicious hatemongers like the British National Party and then UKIP. How did we get here?

Has compromising bit by bit to defuse racists worked? Has mainstream politicians talking about ‘valid concerns’ increased harmony? Has fanning flames extinguished them? Has encouraging xenophobia quietened it? Has being too scared to confront lies made the truth more widely known?

I don’t blame people for thinking, once – maybe if we give a little we can avoid something worse. I do blame people who still stick to that hope when it has been tried over and over again and every time, the bigots have grown and strengthened as a result. Hostile immigration policy – hate crimes – Brexit – all these were unimaginable ten, twenty, thirty years ago. Compromising a little at a time has never stopped at a little. It didn’t work. That is the evidence. That is the unhappy fact. As the saying goes, one definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results. The ‘wishing’ approach of the proposed Migration paper has been tested to destruction.

Pandering to racists only increases racism. Saying ‘I share your valid concerns’ doesn’t win hearts and minds – it just makes people in the middle say, ‘Well, if even the Liberals say immigrants are bad…’ while hardcore racists think we’re just mealy-mouthed politicians out to con them. And saying out loud – the shocking naivety! – that we have to pander to racists not because we actually agree with them but just to make them vote for us, so we’ll campaign on a promise that although we want to make things nicer for immigrants, because we recognise their ‘valid concerns’, we wouldn’t make things as nice as all that? That’s just treating voters as idiots.

Since the Brexit Referendum there’s been more hard polling evidence than ever before in British history on how social attitudes break around votes for parties. About 90% of the Lib Dem vote comes from people who also voted Remain. Voters who hate immigrants as their top issue? That’s UKIP’s big thing. That’s Theresa May’s big thing. That’s even Jeremy Corbyn’s big thing. Why on Earth would Lib Dems propose a Migration paper in the hope of appeasing appealing to such a crowded marketplace as what will only ever be the fourth choice of authoritarian racists? Let’s make an evidence-based call here: stop asking, ‘How do we get racists to vote for us?’ Because they won’t anyway.

Look at Labour’s record. Gordon Brown in 2010 trying to recover from “I agree with Nick” in the first debate by monstering him over immigration in the second and third (the third Leaders’ Debate was the one in which an audience member said “We’re not allowed to talk about immigration,” despite it being the only issue bar the economy featured in every debate, because hardcore racists are impossible to satisfy or to shake from their lies). Yvette Cooper attacked the Coalition from the right for not being tough enough on immigrants. Ed Miliband put immigrant-bashing on a mug. Brexit-backer Jeremy Corbyn tells lies about foreign workers stealing British jobs. Do Labour get ‘credit’ for being tough on immigration? No. Racist voters still think they’re too soft. Because there are always other parties that will go harder right to compete.

When I campaign, I try for every vote. If someone disagrees with us on immigration, they might still respect us locally for getting their potholes fixed. But if the economic and moral and principled case for a powerfully Liberal migration policy doesn’t persuade you, here’s the naked political calculation. We’re on 11% in the polls (at best). We’re not chasing an immediate 500-seat landslide. So to build up our vote, does it make more sense to make policy that’s weaselly and indistinct in the vain hope that’ll attract the people who are least likely to vote for us, when they can get red meat from several other parties? Or should we put our effort into attracting people who already agree with our values into voting for us?

It’s worth reading Andrew Hickey’s The Howard Rule – in which he proposes testing Lib Dem policy against Michael Howard’s once-infamous authoritarianism as Home Secretary – not just as a statement of principle, but as a reminder of just how far right all political parties have shifted in the last quarter-century. In the 1990s, he was appalling. Present his immigration regime today and it would scare the horses with its liberal openness.

Taking A Stand

We must do better than the proposed Migration paper. We can do better by demanding better of ourselves again.

One of my defining early political experiences was Paddy Ashdown leading the newly formed Liberal Democrats alone in standing up for the rights of Hong Kong British citizens. You might think struggling on a good day to hit 11% in the polls puts our party in the doldrums now, but back in 1989 a good day was hitting half that and the sheer relief of getting beyond the margin of error of nothing in the opinion polls. Standing up for a liberal immigration policy then let us hold our heads up. Margaret Thatcher’s Government steered the familiar Tory course of nationalism tempered by greed: standing by Britain’s promises to only the richest, offering citizenship by bribery. Norman Tebbit led a Tory rebellion against Mrs Thatcher to stop anyone with the wrong colour skin entering Britain, and the Labour Party piously opposed the idea of citizenship for the rich – then voted with Mr Tebbit’s Tory far right to stop anyone being let in at all. Mr Corbyn takes the same faux-ethical stance of economic populism as cover for immigrant-bashing today.

In April 2000, during a hard-fought by-election campaign where the Liberal Democrats were striving to take ultra-Tory Romsey, Charles Kennedy took on the immigrant-bashing Conservative campaign head-on. The Lib Dem campaign could have played down our Liberalism, played it safe, stuck to ‘popular’ issues and only challenged the Tories where they were perceived as electorally ‘weak’. Instead, the Lib Dem Leader took the huge risk of facing down the Conservatives’ asylum policy, in a speech in Romsey, where conventional wisdom was that saying the right thing would lose us the seat. We didn’t cower. We won. Charles said afterwards:

“The voters of Romsey were not beguiled by William Hague’s personal brand of politics – those based on fear and division… By concentrating on the negative, and pandering to the small-minded, he insulted the electorate.”

Standing up for our principles heartens, rallies and recruits the people that none of the anti-immigrant parties can reach. And making the case instead of letting it go by default changes minds. We can persuade by telling it as it is – not by pretending and pre-compromising. How do we make racism less bad? Not by saying it’s right. Why can’t we all get along? Because some people don’t want to. Someone has to confront hate, say why it’s wrong, and don’t say they have a point when they don’t. But it’s not just about standing up to hate: it’s appealing to the better instincts of people for whom it’s complicated. Whose fears have been stoked by the Daily Hate, but who like their neighbours and were appalled by Theresa May over Windrush.

Liberal Democrats must make the case for immigration and for immigrants – because it’s right, because it’s the only way to turn back the poison, and because no-one else will. Immigration is good for the economy. But it’s not all about the money. Immigrants are the lifeblood of the NHS. But it’s not all about the work we get from them. Families should be able to be together because love is more important than money. Tabloids screaming lies about “open door” immigration, when it’s way tougher than anyone believes, has led to families being torn apart, but still most people think if you marry an immigrant they can stay. That would be a Liberal immigration policy. That’s the sort of appeal Lib Dems should make – not the proposed Migration paper keeping a price on family life.

Demand Better

Remember – these are only proposals to be debated and decided at Conference. It is not A Fair Deal. For Liberal Democrats, it is not a done deal.

Be politically streetwise. Look at the evidence. Tell the truth. Don’t pander to racism and don’t settle for wishful thinking that has been proven year after year only makes things worse. Vote to send the proposed Migration paper back so the Liberal Democrats can offer – can demand – something better.


This is a slightly longer version of my article published on Liberal Democrat Voice earlier today. I recommend going there to read Caron Lindsay’s The paper on migration, even amended, is not good enough. Her piece is brilliant, speaks from the heart on how to persuade people, and scathingly dissects the paper in detail.

Labels: Bigotry, Brexit, Charles Kennedy, Conservatives, Immigration, Labour, Liberal Democrat Conferences, Liberal Democrats, Paddy Ashdown, Vince Cable

I’m a Liberal and I want a brighter future.

This General Election hasn’t been about that. I’m sick at heart of the Theresa May—Jeremy Corbyn—Brexit bad trip to a meaner past.

But the hope of a Liberal future keeps me going.

My vote on Thursday will not be just to stop the Conservatives / stop Labour because though both are s**t I’m marginally more afraid of one than the other. I can’t vote to make Britain just a bit worse.

I’ll vote positively.

Here’s my hope of a future worth voting for.

Do you want a brighter future?

Because if you do, then I should warn you – it’s going to take all sorts of things. Making society be for everyone, so everyone can be free. Finding long-term funding for the NHS and schools. And not being afraid to reconsider when things go wrong.

It won’t be easy answers, fear and blame.

But I’ll tell you what it could be…

Britain, 2030. A Liberal Democrat government, and a decade since Britain voted against the mayhem of a disastrous bad Brexit deal and changed Britain’s future.

The biggest change was the one no-one expected. It was Brexit that broke Westminster. The Prime Minister no-one elected ordered everyone to obey. The government without a plan grabbed for more power than ever. But the more they tightened their grip, the more people slipped through their fingers. Their extreme Brexit mess brought Britain to the brink of disaster, yet they never took responsibility for their own incompetence and they still tried to stop anyone having a say. Labour just split four ways and fought each other. But with popular pressure (and all those Lib Dem gains), even MPs rebelled. A new hope. When Britain had another choice, we threw out the idea of government control too.

The Liberal Democrat government came to power to bring everyone together, admitting they wouldn’t always know best and promising to listen all the way. Principles first, then consulting people, testing plans out to make sure they work, building consensus – that’s how changes happen now. The age of imposition leading to massive screw-ups is over.

It’s much easier to be heard and make a difference. Britain’s nations, regions, cities and counties took back control from one-size-fits-all Westminster. With real power distributed, economies across the country are stronger. Fair votes mean you get what you vote for and can hold them to account. With the end of safe seats, some Labour and Tory MPs gave up, but now all parties have to work harder and listen more. And whether the best place to use power is locally, nationally or internationally, the most important place to take decisions is you taking power over your own life.

The NHS has the money it needs and now treats mental health as urgently as physical, but it’s also helped by preventative health and reducing pollution.

Schools have the money they need, but they’re also helped by tackling child poverty. Better education, training and apprenticeships enables everyone to have opportunity to realise their potential, whatever their background, whatever their choices.

At last there’s a government willing to tell it like it is. That people want to come to Britain because it’s a brilliant country with British values of tolerance, freedom and standing up for the underdog. That there’s no way to stop that without tearing down so much that’s good about Britain. And why should we want to? Openness and compassion have always made Britain a brighter country for everyone. And for the people for who still want Britain smaller and meaner, if you want the economy to thrive to support our NHS and schools – if you want the people to work in our NHS and schools – then we have to welcome migrants too.

At last Britain’s leaders are in tune with Britain’s bigger values. It’s made such a difference to have a government valuing diversity and inclusion, refusing to find groups to blame. The Liberal Democrats set their mission as freedom for everyone from poverty, ignorance and conformity. They tackled inequality and prejudice, saying whatever your sex, race, class, sexuality, gender identity, disability, belief or background, you were part of society, the barriers stopping you getting on must go, and we should all look out for each other when we need it. That was the turning point against the rise in hate crime a decade ago.

There’s more freedom and less crime. Everyone has the liberty to live their lives as they choose (without harming others) after scrapping victimless crimes that waste people’s lives, waste public money and waste police time. Now police get to chase the real crooks, far fewer young and ethnic minority people get criminalised, and the Cornish economy’s booming on the cannabis crop.

Remember when governments always acted like people were simple and taxes had to be complicated? That was the wrong way round. Now everyone pays their fair share and can see where the money comes from, and small businesses flourish because the wealthiest can’t find loopholes.

Britain is becoming more respected again in the world. It’s been hard work. After decades of shouting insults instead of wanting to make Europe work, a lot of our European partners were just fed up with us. But it helped that there was relief all round when Britain voted not to keep trying for a much worse deal than we had to start with by leaving, and instead at last to get stuck in and change the EU for the better. Making it more democratic, decentralised and open. Encouraging both free and fairer trade in and beyond the biggest single market in the history of the world. Standing up against racism and intolerance. And young people feel like they’ve got their future back.

Above all, Liberal Britain has turned to the future. Innovation and enterprise are getting results. Green jobs are leading the economic revival as internationalist Britain becomes a leader in zero-carbon technology to tackle climate change. With environmental and economic responsibility at home, we’ve stopped leaving problems for the next generation to tackle, and started addressing intergenerational equality.

Not everyone’s happy. For bullies, busybodies and bigots it’s much harder to push others around. But life’s better for most people who want control over their own lives, not control over everyone else’s.

A Liberal Britain by 2030 isn’t a certainty. It’s a choice. And you always have more choices. You can stay back and let things happen. You can complain there isn’t a better yesterday. Or, every new day, you can decide to get stuck in and help make a better future.

Why I’m Looking Forward To Britain In 2030

If you’re wondering why this isn’t totally on-message, it’s partly because I never am, partly because the election’s had naff all vision in it so I wanted to say something I felt, and it’s partly because although it’s about the future, it’s one I prepared earlier.

My health has been almost as crappy as the election campaign and I’ve not been able to do much. And the election’s not cheered me up, to put it mildly. I’ve not had the mojo to write.

But this January the inspiring people at Your Liberal Britain ran a competition to imagine what a Liberal Britain might look like by 2030, and I wrote something for them then. Here it is.

I hadn’t been expecting a General Election, either.

You might have recognised some of the words, some from unexpected places, but not from our Manifesto. The way I’m most on-message, it turns out, is that the Lib Dem Manifesto is Change Britain’s Future and the party’s been campaigning for a Brighter Future. What I’ve published above was almost all written in January, but after using “better future” a lot in mine I’ve decided that I like “brighter” better. So I changed a few of those.

The Your Liberal Britain competition asked for 500 words. I wrote nearly a thousand in one big rush and, having left it until the deadline, was hacking bits out all evening to try and reduce my word count. I remember deleting one paragraph at five to midnight just because it was the right length. I didn’t much like what I slashed down to 500 words, and I didn’t win with my 500 words. Now I come to share my words, I’ve kept the ones I liked.

More Liberal Democrat Values

Every day in the 2015 General Election, I chose an inspiring Liberal quote from a wide range of people. You can see all the variety of Lib Dems Believe here.


Me on video in 2015: Liberal Democrats Believe



Me on video this year: Another Vote – Another Disappointment?



Your Liberal Britain: all sorts of goodies, and worth coming back to after the election for more inspiration and more consultation. I’ve not had the spoons to do all the Lib Dem philosophy I want to over the last couple of years. I’m thrilled these new members have been doing way more than I ever could.


And of course the official version – the 2017 Lib Dem Manifesto Change Britain’s Future, free to download in a range of accessible formats.


Now, please, if you found any of this moving, or inspiring, or just some hope, go out and vote for it.

Labels: Brexit, British Politics, General Election, Liberal Democrats, Liberalism, What the Lib Dems Stand For

One of the many ways in which beloved husband is doing an amazing job right now as Liberal Democrat candidate for Macclesfield is answering approximately a gazillion emails a day. Some, by this stage, literally in his sleep.

I’m long past ever standing as a candidate again, not least with this year’s catastrophically unhelpful health getting in the way even of helping Richard anywhere near as practically as I’d like.

So imagine my surprise and delight on receiving my own email enquiring about an urgent issue of Liberal Democrat policy which must be worrying people up and down the land: with Lib Dems committed to a referendum on the terms of the Brexit deal, if we form the new government on Thursday, who would negotiate a deal we were bound to oppose?

To B and How To B, That Is the Question

Here’s the question I was asked:

“…if you propose a second referendum for people to decide on the deal, assuming a Lib Dem government was in office, how would this happen in practice? Considering the party’s historic support for EU membership, who would conduct the negotiations for a Brexit deal for us to vote on? Would the responsibility for negotiations be devolved to the Civil Service or some other external body?”

And here’s the main part of my reply:

“In practice, of course, whatever party is in government, the vast majority of negotiations are conducted by civil servants: they are huge and vastly complicated and require a vast team of people and a lot of hard work. Even if David Davis isn’t doing any of it.

“The answer is to be found in the first chapter of the Lib Dem Manifesto, in effect – that doesn’t just set out the party’s policy around a third EU referendum, this time on the terms of the deal, but the party’s priorities in Parliament for setting the terms for the negotiators. The primary one is of course to remain in the Single Market, which virtually all the leading No figures led people to believe before last year’s referendum and then swerved into such a damaging far right isolationist position afterwards.

“Should there be a massive political earthquake and the Lib Dems form a majority government next week, I would be delighted and I have to admit a little surprised. However, there’s no doubt that would mean Britain’s centre of gravity on Brexit would have shifted markedly, so I would expect to see a choice between remaining as a full member or an exit deal based on a much closer relationship than Theresa May, Jeremy Corbyn and Paul Nuttall’s – one, as the likes of Farage or Johnson said before the referendum rather than what they’ve said since, similar to the relationship the EU has with Norway or Switzerland. Ironically, that means that the Brexit deal would be much closer to the one voters were told about in advance.

“As I say, the party’s aims for mitigating the disaster of Brexit in negotiations are set out in detail as the first chapter in the Manifesto, which you can download for yourself here.”

With the election constantly framed as a ‘choice’ between two parties offering two identical destructive chaotic Brexits and neither offering to talk about any of the detail – because they’re dumb, but they’re not that dumb – and the Lib Dems mostly failing to get a word in edgeways, I wish the question of exactly how Foreign Secretary Nick Clegg would lead Brexit negotiations come the glorious Lib Dem landslide this week were one that was keeping me awake at night.

Still, in the happy daydream in which the Liberal Democrats sweep to power on Thursday, imagine the Lib Dem government, with painfully honest commitment to its manifesto pledge, negotiating a liberal Brexit. Come the day of the deal referendum, instead of being offered destructive chaos, loss of British power and influence, rights stripped away, food riots and catastrophic collapse in living standards by the Theresa May—Jeremy Corbyn—Paul Nuttall Brexit alliance, which the majority of Britons would be likely to look at go ‘No thanks,’ the Brexit choice is instead a middle way, keeping most of the goodies but being able to say we’re not quite in. And so only a Lib Dem Government’s positive negotiations could save Brexit by producing a deal which the majority could swallow and go on to win the deal referendum for (mostly) out!

What an irony, eh?

No, somehow I can see a few steps along the way that I don’t quite believe, either…

What Should Negotiations Try To Keep (but probably won’t)?

What certainly will happen after Thursday’s result, whatever it turns out to be, is that Liberal Democrats in Parliament will stand up for British voters to have the final say on the final Brexit deal. The Conservatives and Labour will both deny that. They’ve both already voted to stop people having a say. And as the negotiations proceed into the long and complicated reality and away from back of a fag packet insult your intelligence slogans, Liberal Democrats in Parliament will stand up for these priorities and more:

• Protection of rights for EU citizens and UK citizens

• Membership of the Single Market and customs union

• Freedom of movement

• Opportunities for young people

• Defending social rights and equalities

• Maintaining environmental standards

• Law enforcement and judicial co-operation

• British business and jobs

• Science and research funding

• Travel and tourism

• Respect for the interests of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and the people of Gibraltar

I really should’ve put these in my email, too. Sorry to the person who contacted me. Replying set my mind going, and it probably should have been the other way round.

The more Liberal Democrat MPs are elected this Thursday, the more votes there will be in Parliament to press for these priorities in the Brexit negotiations.

The more Conservative and Labour MPs are elected, with their Leaders’ identical commitment to a disastrous Brexit, the more certain it is that Parliament will throw all those priorities in the bin.

There probably won’t be any UKIP MPs elected on Thursday, but with Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn following UKIP Brexit policy to the letter, that won’t make any difference.

Lib Dem voices in Parliament will probably only be able to make things a bit better unless we romp home. But a bit better is better than nothing. Why vote for parties that have promised to make everything worse?

I have a terrible feeling that all those priorities and so much that’s good about Britain will be thrown in the bin. And that the scale of what – to pick only the latest prediction I’ve seen – Will Hutton calls “an epic act of national self-harm” will only become clear not even when the details have been published but only once it’s all actually happened, everything’s wrecked and it’s too late to go back.

Which means that only after the economy has crashed utterly and Britain’s divided and unhappy will a Liberal Democrat government be voted in as the last resort to do the impossible job of fitting the broken pieces together. Tried a bit of that seven years ago. Can’t say we enjoyed it and were greatly thanked for it…

Labels: Brexit, British Politics, General Election, Liberal Democrats, Referendum

Time for another video…

Here’s what I say in it:






So there’s going to be another General Election. Maybe you’re not that excited. Maybe you’re still disappointed by the last one.

In a democracy, you get choices. So you expect the people who made a different choice to be disappointed.

But the great about democracy is that if you wanted something different, you can always keep putting another point of view, and there will always be another vote.

Wanting to silence dissent or saying one vote counts for ever is sticking a knife in democracy.

We’ve had two really big votes in two years, the General Election, then the referendum. Now we’re to have another one, think about something that’s strange about them.

It’s not just the losers who’ve been disappointed. Even the winners aren’t happy. What happened?

The Conservative Party

At least usually if you voted for the winning party, you’re satisfied for a bit. And the winning party’s quite happy for a bit.

Well, it didn’t happen this time.

Even though most people voted against them, two years ago the Conservatives won by that much. But they’ve been behaving as if they rule the world ever since.

That’s disappointed a lot of people who voted for them last time.

Because a lot of people said they liked David Cameron. He seemed like a moderate and not the nasty, arrogant sort of Tory.

And the Conservative Party promised that voting Tory meant two things above all: stable government and economic success.

That’s all gone, never to return.

Literally the day after the last election, they shut down support from disabled people getting into work. Just because they could. Nasty.

All the way up to today, with the Tories hell-bent on inflicting the most damaging hard Brexit they can. Arrogant.

In between, they’ve messed around with our schools. They put the NHS in crisis. Because their far right hate the environment, they’ve cut green energy so the Tories went from hugging a husky to tilting at windmills.

But above all, this Tory Government has meant utter political chaos and instability, and economic disaster.

The worst of it’s in one word: Brexit.

First the Prime Minister went.

Then none of them had a clue what happened next.

But they’re still behaving as if they rule little England.

Now inflation’s rising, jobs are falling, companies are moving out of Britain, they’re throwing away the biggest Single Market in the history of the world. And Britain is getting smaller, meaner and nastier. A terrible disappointment to everyone who believes in British values.

And still no-one has a clue what happens next.

I bet one person does. Because in Britain we have General Elections every five years. The only reason not to is if a weak Prime Minister is in a total panic and does a massive U-turn. Theresa May has called an election before it’s even half-way time. It must be because she’s panicking. She’s seen some secret figures of how bad it’s going to be and is making a run for it before total disaster.

The most unstable government in decades. The economy thrown in the bin. Now there’s only chaos. Mayhem.

What can the Tories say to the voters they’ve let down? All the Tories stand for now is hating foreigners and bossing people about.

And it’s not just Tory voters who are disappointed.

Tory MPs have actually resigned from Parliament and left politics because they’re so fed up.

Even David Cameron did it! How much of a disappointment do you have to be for the guy who’s just been Prime Minister to say, that’s it, I’m sodding off?

And since the local elections a year ago, in the by-elections every week where people vote for new councillors – the Tories have lost 21. They must be disappointed with that.

The Labour Party

Now, I’ve never been a Labour supporter either. But even I can see that you need a strong opposition to hold the Government to account when they’re in such a mess. Well, there’s no such luck. If you voted Labour last time, well, you’d have been very disappointed they didn’t get in. But they failed by a mile. And since then, they’ve just got worse.

The one reason the Tories look like grown-ups after all their Mayhem is – the Labour Party.

Corbyn and Labour MPs and members who are even more at war with each other than the Tories are. When the country really needs someone to force the Tories to account, all you’re getting is the worst opposition in living memory, who are only interested in fighting themselves.

But the thing that’s really disappointed people is the one you’d never expect.

The most far left Labour leader ever votes with the Tories on everything – he’s given the Tories a blank cheque to do whatever they want on Brexit in every single vote in Parliament. And Labour are boasting they want a harder Brexit than the Tories. A harder Brexit than UKIP!

So there are Labour MPs who’ve resigned from Parliament too, and left politics too, because they’re so disappointed.

And since the local elections a year ago, in the by-elections every week where people vote for new councillors – Labour have lost 13. What a disappointment for what a let-down of an opposition.

UKIP

Then there’s UKIP. At the last election they got one MP. Just one MP.

Guess what happened?

He’s left the party because they all spent so much time fighting him.

Since they got their dream result in the referendum they’ve gone through four leaders. One of them twice. All they ever had was hate, and now they’ve got no-one else to hate but each other. They’re just falling apart.

No MPs. Very few councillors. And you can guess what’s been happening since the local elections a year ago, in the by-elections every week where people vote for new councillors – they’ve lost another 7, probably all they were defending. They must be disappointed with that. But nobody’s even paying any attention any more.

The Liberal Democrats

And then there’s the Liberal Democrats.

Everybody knows at the last General Election we had a terrible result. The worst since I’ve been alive. We all worked hard, we were all disappointed, and our voters were disappointed.

But that’s not where it finishes.

Two years ago we had over forty thousand people still working hard as Lib Dem members. And we didn’t give up.

We went up.

Within a week of the last election, we had more than fifty thousand members.

And still more people joined.

And when the referendum went Leave by that much, more people joined.

By a couple of weeks ago we’d doubled our membership to eighty-five thousand.

On the day Theresa May panicked and ran for an election, Lib Dems surged to more than ninety thousand members.

We’re still growing every day.

Because Britain is better than this, and there is only one party that is fighting against the disappointment.

Because standing up for a better future inspires people. Being a proper opposition. Standing up for working together. For trade and peace and prosperity and the environment and education and our NHS.

And our MPs have actually gone up instead of quitting. One of those brand-new Lib Dem members was determined to make a difference, and she did. She won voters over and overturned a huge Tory majority when she was elected MP for Richmond Park in December.

And since the local elections a year ago, in the by-elections every week where people vote for new councillors – Tories down 21, Labour down 13, UKIP down 7.

People have voted in 33 new Lib Dem councillors.

You don’t have to give up.

You do have a choice. You can change direction. You don’t have to live with disappointment.

There is always a new day.

We’re in league with the future. Join us.

If you want the choice to stop Brexit, if you want Britain to be the open, tolerant, outward-looking country we can be proud of again, if you believe in freedom, fairness and a better future, join the Liberal Democrats.

Theresa May has called a panic election at a time she thinks is best for her to fix the result. But we have a choice.

Mrs Mayhem – prepare to be disappointed.



*Local by-elections results May 2016 to April 2017 from Political Betting, April 8th 2017

Labels: Brexit, British Politics, Conservatives, General Election, Labour, Liberal Democrats, UKIP, Video

Introducing Doctor Who – Rose…

The first new Doctor Who story starts with an ordinary person who follows someone extraordinary to a blue box that’s larger on the inside than the outside and travels in time and space. Again.

Fast, funny and fantastic, Billie Piper and Christopher Eccleston burst onto our screens and deadly dummies burst through shop windows in the perfect Doctor Who relaunch, choosing strangeness over ‘normality’, running towards adventure and reinventing British television. And it all looks glorious. It’s nearly Christmas, but it was at Easter 2005 that Doctor Who – Rose.

“Right. Where d’you wanna start?”

The biggest question for me: how do I choose only ten reasons to watch this?

This blog post is also a sort of reprint or Special Edition, once again from a celebratory series I began last year. That was largely brought to a halt by my terrible health, and then since restarting I’ve fallen further behind after being hospitalised. This year my health’s been the worst it’s ever been even by my standards, and it’s so much harder than ever to be enthused, or to find inspiration or even the energy to move. I’m not sure right now whether the next one of these I attempt might skip to the Christmas one and run the risk of never getting back to those I’ve planned in between, or whether I should carry on in my own idiosyncratic order with the added downer that it could be always Winter and never Christmas. But you know, rewriting Rose today may not have given me the physical energy I need, but it has refired just a start of my enthusiasm and more determination. Because if there’s one thing 2016 proves we all desperately need and Rose long since proved just might happen beyond all hope, it’s that a comeback might just come if you keep at it hard and long enough…

Ten Reasons To Watch Rose (warning: spoilers lower down the list)

1 – Rose.

This episode is built on Rose Tyler, and Billie Piper is perfect. It’s Rose’s story, the story of a young woman who doesn’t know she’s looking for something better in her life until it runs into her – and who then goes after it. She’s completely normal – and smart, fresh and funny. She works in a shop. She knows nothing about the Doctor or walking dummies or miraculous travels. With the new audience, she comes in half-way through the story, tries to make sense of it all, and won’t let go when it’s horrifying, intriguing or joyous. The Doctor’s in a story of living plastic “Autons” animated by the alien Nestene Consciousness, but that’s just window-dressing. The story we’re watching follows Rose as she almost-unwillingly picks at the weird thread of the Doctor’s world intruding into hers, rather than us or her being given the whole lot in one big splat of culture shock or backstory. And she makes it an achievement – increasingly determined first to find out what’s going on and then to do something about it, even when her family tell her she shouldn’t bother and the Doctor won’t answer her questions. Her ‘hero moment’ comes when she swings in to save the Doctor with a great piss-take of a motivational speech:

“I’ve got no A-Levels. No job. No future. But I tell you what I have got – Jericho Street Junior School under-sevens gymnastics team. I got the bronze!”

But for me I was really sold on Rose, and Billie, in two moments where she shows she’s not just a foil to the Doctor but brings something more: when it seems her boyfriend Mickey is dead, Rose’s first thought is that she’ll have to tell his mother, grounding the series in consequences from the start; and her brilliant comic timing with just a nod and an eyebrow when she’s being smarter than the Doctor.

Above all, Rose is the symbol of the new audience who didn’t know they were looking for Doctor Who until they started watching, embodying the message that the series is for everybody – not least young women – so why don’t you demand something more interesting from your television set?




2 – The Doctor.

Christopher Eccleston is, like William Hartnell before him, at first a mystery to the ordinary person who doesn’t know what to make of him, but also fantastic from his first moment. When Rose and we first meet him, he’s a baffling mixture of reassuring and alarming as only

“Nice to meet you Rose. Run for your life!”

while waving a bomb could be. Of course he has to be the Doctor when he starts with “Run!” Speaking to Rose, he’s upbeat and engaging, but when he turns away that all switches off – and when he talks to someone who knows of his world, he can’t hide his pain. And at the same time he can be as innocent as a new-born about our world, from his appealing faith in a not-totally-a-disguise to having to be reminded that death might upset people, that there are details as well as the big picture. Rose keeps trying to make the Doctor pay attention to what she thinks is serious, and when she tracks down someone else who’s been trying to find out about the Doctor he’s even more so, telling her that “The Doctor is a legend woven throughout history”… When back at her flat, the legend had been worrying about his ears, losing control of a card trick and dismissing the celebrity gossip with a glance:

“Hmm. That won’t last; he’s gay, and she’s an alien.”

But then, he doesn’t seem quite human, dismissing the whole of humanity as “boneheads” and “stupid apes” to our faces… Only to stick up for us as “capable of so much more”. Christopher Eccleston is brilliant casting to relaunch the Doctor, a very serious actor who you wouldn’t expect in the role but who’s utterly right for it, bringing dramatic credibility and all the range of the Ninth Doctor: lonely, angry, hurt, wrapped up in survivor’s guilt… Yet surprised and delighted by Rose – and very funny.




3 – That introduction to the TARDIS.

“Right. Where d’you wanna start?”
“Um – the inside’s bigger than the outside?”
“Yes.”
“It’s – it’s alien.”
“Yep.”
“Are you alien?”
“Yes. That all right?”
“Yeah.”

This is the heart of Rose – when she walks into the Doctor’s world, coming up to two-thirds of the way into the episode. It’s one of the most wonderful moments – or series of moments – in all of Doctor Who, and I could easily find ten reasons to watch this sequence alone. But I’ve not put it first, because there’s a reason the story doesn’t start here. You have to earn it, to discover the wonder and terror and sheer fun for yourself alongside Rose. And though it runs across several different settings, it’s also a big, long talky scene. In disguise.

Before Rose aired, I’d admitted to three big fears – beyond the unsayable, existential one that Doctor Who would come back, only to go away again. I’d worried that pop star Billie Piper wouldn’t be able to act. I’d worried that the Doctor wouldn’t be likeable, as I’d seen Christopher Eccleston in many things and he’d been many things – intense, mostly – but not fun. And I’d worried that they’d mess up the TARDIS and not introduce it properly (like the 1996 TV Movie that came and went, starting off inside it rather than letting us find out). This was the point where I knew without a doubt that I’d been deliriously wrong on all three.

Rose keeps teasing the TARDIS before revealing it as the Doctor’s impossible time and space machine: a blue hut glimpsed in the shadows as Rose runs from her exploding workplace; the Doctor striding off towards what looks like another wooden booth with a light on top on another street in the light of day, a wheezing, groaning sound, Rose turns, and it’s gone – a scene with a special magic for Richard and me; the same blue box standing by the bins behind the restaurant in which a plastic facsimile of her boyfriend is going berserk.

And then a place of safety can be weirder than the threat.




Rose has seen Auton Mickey smashing everything in sight. Obviously she wants the Doctor to undo the padlocked restaurant back gates. So why is he strolling to a wooden box that can’t possibly protect them? He walks in. She follows… She has to come straight out again. She walks all the way round. Then she takes the plunge. A gloriously huge space, with a turquoise undersea glimmer, great coral arches and a control console and the Doctor at the centre, both packed with weirdness. It’s the best introduction to the TARDIS since An Unearthly Child, and even as the Doctor gently takes her through his and its strange origins, there’s a hint of more strangeness to come that he doesn’t even explain right now:

“The assembled hordes of Genghis Khan couldn’t get through that door. And believe me, they’ve tried.”

But it’s not just a surprise for Rose. The Doctor’s brought her world into his, too – not just in carrying an alien replica of her boyfriend’s head that he’s trying to trace a signal from. No, something much more alarming. He asks about her culture shock and gets instant culture shock whiplash back from her asking if this means her boyfriend’s dead. And he’s panicking and petulant at losing the signal, too, so he goes back outside. Where, obviously, it isn’t safe. Then Rose looks through the door. And they’re on the Thames Embankment without having moved.




The Doctor’s explanations are unspeakably joyous to watch. Sulky:

“We’ve moved. Does it fly?”
“Disappears there and reappears here. You wouldn’t understand.”

Angry:

“I’ll have to tell his mother. Oh… Mickey! I’ll have to tell his mother he’s dead, and you just went and forgot him, again! You were right – you are alien.”
“Look, if I did forget some kid called Mickey—”
“Yeah, he’s not a kid—”
“It’s because I’m busy trying to save the life of every stupid ape blundering about on top of this planet! All right?”

Hilarious pouty non-answer:

“If you are an alien, how comes you sound like you’re from the North?”
“Lots of planets have a north.”

And, best of all, so proud of his toy, so wide-eyed and so endearingly clueless:

“What’s a police public call box?”
“It’s a telephone box. From the 1950s. It’s a disguise.”

I can’t imagine more perfect dialogue and actors. Rose has stepped into the Doctor’s world and out the other side; now he’s telling her more about it, but in the way he does so telling her and us much more about himself, while Rose brings her ordinary life with her by being the adult, constantly taking a deep breath and moving on rather than reacting with a ‘What?’ or a ‘You’re joking’ or a ‘You unspeakable git’ to the countless ways in which he’s completely self-unaware.

And there’s one more thing, after the Doctor’s mini-1970s-Who-style lecture on ecology: the transmitter he’s come to track down. Something the alien Consciousness needs to boost its signal to control every single piece of plastic. How can you hide something that big? Which is where Rose shows just how useful she can be to the Doctor, and Billie Piper completely steals the show without saying a word. The Doctor’s on the Embankment, his head framed like a halo by the lights of the London Eye on the opposite bank, wittering on all night about how it must be round, and massive, like a dish, like a wheel, radial – “Must be completely invisible.” All the while, Rose is looking straight at him, and it, and raising her eyebrow, and giving little nods to point past him. And I was nearly crying with laughter. A perfect five minutes.

The TARDIS. Always the bridge between different worlds.




4 – The opening.

A thrilling version of the Doctor Who Theme – electronic and orchestral, with new bits to surprise even old viewers and to entrance the new audience. A blue box slipping through a scintillating time tunnel from blue to red (and still to find out the reimagined significance of both).

A zoom-in from a view of the Earth in space right to Rose’s estate, Rose’s bedroom, Rose waking up, montage of her Mum who’s settled for nothing much, the bus, the big shop where she works and which she can’t wait to escape, modern London whizzing around her, her boyfriend making her laugh, all in a couple of minutes of energy energy energy and fast music that keeps skipping playfully in and out of diegetic (with fabulously massive bass in the new Blu-ray mix), establishing her life in two minutes flat. And, for long-term viewers, a visual nod to the openings of Spearhead From Space and The Ark In Space – both stories major influences at the start of Russell T Davies’ Doctor Who – for Rose On Earth.

Then the end of the working day and the end of Rose’s old life: she goes down to the basement to collect the lottery money but finds creepy walking dummies and a man telling her to run instead. And to cap it all, he blows up the store. All told, seven minutes to grab your attention at breakneck pace and with a more complete mini-adventure than a James Bond pre-credits or The Avengers – The Town of No Return. Though with its mix of drama, comedy, British iconography colliding with strangeness and a man who does this for a life a woman who does this for fun, the closest thing TV’s come to The Avengers for a while, too.


5 – A man gives the first big scream.

A subtle reinforcement of ‘this is not the sneering stereotype people put the show down with’: the first person we see letting out a real cry of fear is a terrified man, who clutches the woman he’s with and screams his head off – just after fake Mickey’s head comes off. The real Mickey has been almost as useless a boyfriend, even before dissolving from laddish swagger into scared, helpless victim. Rose, meanwhile, hits the fire alarm to get everyone out to safety – and then saves the Doctor at the climax.


6 – Choosing strangeness over ‘normality’.

Those fantastic trailers spoke the truth. The Doctor told us “It won’t be quiet, it won’t be safe, and it won’t be calm”; Rose told us, “I’ve got a choice” between home, Mum, boyfriend, job – or chucking it all for danger, monsters, life or death. “What do you think?” And that’s what Rose is all about – taking the risk. Because choosing safety and ‘normality’ is the obvious choice, and this wants to show you the other side. The side of ‘strange’ and ‘change’. And danger.

It’s not that normality doesn’t have its appeal. It’s comfortable. You don’t need to think. And it’s safe. That’s the word that keeps pounding at us, from Rose’s Mum, from Rose herself, and the Doctor simply says, no, it won’t be. This first episode of the new series is not quite yet, as Russell T Davies described the Doctor’s constant companion, “Death,” and Doctor Who, “steeped in death” – even as killer shop window dummies break through their shop windows and start shooting, we don’t yet see the impacts and the bodies, but we know they’re there, and if he’s a little hesitant to start with on the danger (even the Autons breaking windows lack punch), the director excels in showing us weirdness colliding with modern soap-style life.

TV, chips, department stores, beans on toast, Mum and boyfriend. Russell T Davies’ Doctor Who was grounded in ordinary life as never before, and many fan critics complained that it was “soap opera”. The point was that the mass audience saw what was different instead. That it showed both sides, or there wouldn’t be a choice – but that it made the choice to go with ‘different’. Rose cares about her ordinary life. We all care about ours. She reacts as a real person when her boyfriend or her Mum are in danger. But that doesn’t mean she has to be forced to settle for them as the only thing in life. Both are in their own ways the anti-Doctor: her Mum Jackie tells her not to better herself, not to get airs and graces (she thinks even the upmarket store her daughter worked in was too good for her), not to stand up or stand out, to be safe, even that “There’s no point in getting up, sweetheart”; her boyfriend Mickey is an easy relationship to pass the time, but he cares more about the pub than her and they don’t have anything to say to each other and no longer even listen to each other, absurdly highlighted when she doesn’t even notice he’s been replaced by a plastic impostor.

The point of Rose, of Doctor Who, is that there’s more to life than being the same. You can choose freedom from conformity instead. Not everyone will make Rose’s choice, but this programme always will. You can just eat, sleep, work, never looking for anything different, never mixing with anyone different. From the start, Doctor Who was about opening your mind and life to the strange, the different, the alien. In 1963, that meant a mind-expanding TARDIS and allegories of fascism; by 1988 it was confronting racism head-on; in 2005, no-one mentions the new central character has a black boyfriend, but life’s got to reach higher than just the new normal. Mickey’s the one who bundles all the weirdness together, the good and the bad, when the Doctor asks Rose to come with him:

“Don’t. He’s an alien. He’s – he’s a thing.”

The show rejects xenophobia instead: not just about its alien hero, but even in his first reaction to the would-be invader:

“I’m not here to kill it. I’ve got to give it a chance.”

Rose could settle. But she makes the choice. Be outward-looking, go beyond the obvious, find out what her true potential might be – part of Russell’s optimistic, outgoing vision of humanity for the series. It’s completely at odds with so much of modern life and almost all of modern TV, but both Rose and Rose know the risks and take them anyway.

I first wrote this piece last year, and I still agree with every word. But what I wrote then in hope and optimism now seems like angry determination. Xenophobia has won this year. Hatred and fear have won this year. Racism has taken Britain so far back in time I can barely believe it, let alone stomach it. And the voice of Jackie Tyler, sitting where she is, never wanting to move or change or listen to anything else, seeing it as a personal affront that her daughter should do anything more interesting or ambitious, anything that’s not being exactly the same as her, and ordering her not to bother? That’s been the voice of 2016, small-mindedly, mean-spiritedly, self-and-other-harmingly trying to take back control over everyone else’s lives because she doesn’t have enough in her own and won’t let anyone else be better.

But you know what? Time travel goes forward as well as back. Be outward-looking. Go beyond the obvious. Realise your true potential. Love the alien. Free yourself – and others – from conformity. The worldsview of Rose is still the better choice. And once she’d seen a bit more of the world, even Jackie got off her bum to make it too. Time to change the channel.




7 – Choosing strange TV over normal TV, and reinventing British television.

2005 doesn’t seem like that long in the past, but they did things differently there. Russell T Davies and the BBC took a massive risk. There was nothing like Doctor Who on then. Well, there isn’t anything else like Doctor Who, but the BBC and ITV had been stuck for many years making virtually nothing but conveyor-belt banality. Reality shows, cop shows or medical shows or medical-cop shows, and that was it until a very different doc show threw a bomb into British TV. If you wanted anything remotely different then you had to pick up a vintage TV DVD or a vintage TV channel. No Merlin, Primeval or Robin Hood. No The Sarah Jane Adventures, Wizards Vs Aliens or Wolfblood. No Hyde – not even Jekyll. No Life On Mars, Torchwood, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell or Being Human. No Class. Nothing interesting made for the TV wasteland in years, and everyone told by a complacent media that anything different would be crap even if anyone dared show it, so no-one should even try. No wonder every industry expert said Doctor Who would be a flop. But because it was so brilliantly conceived and made, it became one of the biggest hits on television, all over again, and suddenly people started making shows that might be interesting again. Thank goodness.

Can you imagine how soul-destroyingly boring all of British TV would still be without it?


8 – Looking back…

Since Doctor Who finished its original TV run in 1989, stories had flourished in novels, CDs and other media, but the only attempt to bring it back to TV had flopped. The 1996 TV Movie gave the impression you had to know everything before you even started, and was crammed with indigestible torrents of backstory. Rose wasn’t. It introduced the viewers to the bare basics of the series and only slowly filled in more, taking Rose and the audience with it. But at the same time the series was marketed as new for a new audience, it was clearly carrying on from all that had come before if you looked and listened carefully. Russell T Davies’ instinct for appealing to the widest possible audience was underpinned by a deep and abiding love of a show that was worth getting people to love all over again.

So notice how even the opening moments echo two influential stories from the 1970s, one suggesting a more Earthbound Doctor and the other an alien Doctor who both admires and is frustrated by humanity, and see how both run through Rose and the 2005 series, with the walking dummies once again an ideal way to introduce new viewers to a weird-but-not-too-weird alien attacker. See how by starting with an ordinary person becoming intrigued by the steadily more extraordinary and discovering the Doctor for herself echoes the pattern of the very first story, An Unearthly Child, even down to the title having a similar focus with an inverted meaning (and a nod to the day before it was first shown)… Right through to the cat-flap mystery on a council estate evoking Survival, the very last TV story until all the rest. And that’s before it becomes clear how much the underlying story owes to the novels from the years in between…


9 – Looking forward…

You expect a new TV series to start with a bang. Whether it’s the most explosive spaceship battle or the most explicit sex scene, producers show us the biggest money shot they can afford up front to get people watching, get people talking and get people to come back – even though what follows will never deliver quite as much again. This might be their only chance with the viewers, and they’re desperate not to blow it. Russell T Davies knew all that: it’s how he’d launched Queer As Folk. But his renewed Doctor Who held back instead. Doctor Who isn’t like any other show. It can go anywhere in time and space, and in almost any style. How do you show that all at once? You don’t. Doctor Who is too broad and too deep for any one piece of television. You have to get people to tune in again and again. You could call it caution – starting slow, letting an audience fed on years of banality discover the Doctor’s world with Rose one step at a time rather than frightening them off with every weird thing all at once. You could call it confidence – that the show would be so appealing that people would want more, and it would deliver much more. I call it amazingly good judgement.

Like Robert Holmes – the most celebrated writer for Twentieth Century Doctor Who, name-checked in the credits here – Russell drops in hints of history way beyond the plot’s requirements. I love a writer who leaves tantalising threads of backstory dangling, ones which may or may not ever be picked up (and am always put off by those which, like the endless post-Frank Herberts of Dune, or Revenge of the Sith, beat the life out of these intriguing hints by telling us exactly and only what we already know in the most banally obvious way and with no dangling creativity whatever).

Rose looks like a simple alien invasion story, but is packed with other layers, promising more to come. What’s startlingly new about the way Russell does it is that he begins with the characters: much of what we see of the Doctor here only makes sense in a context we don’t know yet, but we can already see what he’s feeling. We don’t get introduced to the Last Great Time War with a space battle or a portentous voiceover hitting us in the face in the opening scene: instead, that’s all about Rose, sketching in a life we recognise. It takes us longer to recognise that the jolly terrorist Doctor we first meet rattling off words as top-speed gags puts his survivor-guilt death wish right in the middle of them (and blowing up a London landmark won’t be a one-off, either). How do we know the War mattered, was so great and so terrible? The pain cracking the Doctor’s voice as he desperately pleads,

“I was there. I fought in the War. It wasn’t my fault. I couldn’t save your world – I couldn’t save any of them!”

This isn’t a history book. It’s still-raw personal anguish. And long before – or long after, according to taste – The Night of the Doctor, the Nestene Consciousness doesn’t recount but reacts to that backstory, too: it starts the invasion in panic, because it recognises a TARDIS. As my husband Richard puts it, “Terror of the Autons”, indeed. What did the Doctor, his people and their War do? Rose asks if the Doctor’s on his own; we don’t grasp the full implications of that yet, but the way the Doctor’s expressive face shuts down cold as he turns away from her tells us more. We get to feel it all before the second week gives us more of the story of just how he’s “a long way from home” – and a special effects extravaganza. In retrospect, reminders of weddings terrifying Jackie take on extra meaning, while even a shuffling wheelie bin looks like it’s foreshadowing a kid pretending to be a Dalek.

And there’s one more thing Rose promises us, right at the end, if it’s still not grabbed you…


10 – Running towards…

“By the way, did I mention – it also travels in time?”

The whole story runs towards the moment of choice. For Rose, and the viewer. It’s shown you so much already – and here’s the promise of more. “Is it always this dangerous?” asks Rose as her boyfriend literally holds her back. “Yeah,” says the Doctor, and suddenly she has too many everyday things to do, and he steps into the TARDIS, and we see the light flash, a wind rise, and it fades away.

And then Doctor Who comes back.

Rose has made the Doctor’s world so utterly compelling that it fills sixteen seconds away with the yearning of sixteen years, for Rose and for the audience together, old and new. Then we all feel the joy of an endless wait fulfilled when the TARDIS rematerialises and the Doctor steps back into our lives again. It travels in time? We’ve all just felt forever in sixteen seconds. The loss had already told Rose she’d made the wrong decision, and now there’s more even than she’d thought there would be. And when the first thing the Doctor said to her was “Run!” it wasn’t just a warning, but a promise of danger.

Rose runs towards the open door of the TARDIS with a massive smile on her face, slow motion prolonging the moment so we can delight in the sheer joy of it as the thrillingly deep musical sting of the Doctor Who Theme crashes in.

Of course we all want to go with her.

What Else Should I Tell You About Rose?

After all the wait, Rose was fantastic.

After all nearly twelve years, Rose is still fantastic. And the mixture of fear, hope and enthusiasm I had back then is now simply enthusiasm and the most abiding love. A few weeks ago, BBC Store offered Doctor Who’s 1989 adventures, Season Twenty-Six, as a bundle for half price. The last of the original series is still one of its very best, and I bought it (in the umpteenth format) while in hospital and in dire need of cheering up. Today I finished watching it with the no longer final story, Survival, then went immediately on with Rose. I’d not watched these two back-to-back before, and perhaps because I’m still more fragile than usual or perhaps because both stories are simply wonderful, the combination took my breath away.

Watching the final few minutes of 1989’s Doctor Who, I find myself standing, fists clenched at my sides, a sad, defiant thrill coursing through me at “I thought I could run forever” and “gone, but it lives on inside you. It always will”, even twenty-seven years on. My mouth twists in a bittersweet smile, my face tightens, my eyes moisten. Then, as the swirling starscape fades away, I press play again, the TARDIS hurtles into a blaze of blue, and I’m not even half-way into the titles when there’s a tear and a smile of fierce joy. I remember what my husband told me on one bloody terrible day in June when everything worthwhile seemed lost.

“Do you know what you get if you add Rose to Survival? A Revival.”

I’m never going to be objective about this one.

What am I saying? I’m never going to be objective about any of them.

I wasn’t the only one. It got ten million viewers – still one of the highest ratings for the Doctor in the Twenty-First Century. Within days, the BBC confirmed there would be another series, and a Christmas special. In retrospect, it looks like an inevitable rise. But at the time, when news also leaked that Christopher Eccleston was to leave the show after the trip of a surprisingly short time, it all felt terribly fragile. I was wrong there too. Just as I was about Jackie and Mickey only being comic relief characters, or the plots being perfunctory (Rose walks in half-way through the story of the Autons, but this is her story, not theirs, and you can tell that because her name’s the title and theirs are only in the credits), or the tone not being sinister, or the music not being grand or scary yet. All these things would develop. You can’t do all of Doctor Who in one episode. And this is still the best of all the season-openers this century.

One more thing about why Rose is special to me. Richard and I had friends near what on TV was about to become Rose’s estate. One day in July 2004, one of them went to the doctor – and saw the TARDIS. He rang us, and so that evening we saw Rose turn back and look into the sudden wind at something that wasn’t there, then run back, longing for it. We knew. We knew.

[I’ve still got that ancient phone because I can’t get the pictures off it.]

And, if you need one, my score:

Usually this is a simple mark out of ten, the crudest possible metric of how good I think it is. Some weeks there will be exceptions.

9/10 says my head
But the joy it always sparks in my heart is 10/10.

If You Like Rose, Why Not Try…

The 2005 season re-establishes where the series can go so perfectly that the same sort of pattern’s been followed almost annually to introduce new viewers, taking us to past, present and future in the first three stories. So it’s pretty much a perfect start to follow Rose with The End of the World and The Unquiet Dead. Or, for me, the whole Christopher Eccleston season, which whether you call it Series One or Season Twenty-seven is one of the few Doctor Who years where I can cheerfully enthuse about every single story without looking shifty. Or there’s the earlier season that most resembles this one, Tom Baker’s first, Season Twelve, from 1975 – or for a single story, Spearhead From Space introduces both Jon Pertwee’s Doctor and the Autons.

Not the Autons, but with a terrific monster that looks very like a modern take on an old-school Nestene, there’s Invasion of the Bane, another terrific launch episode in which Russell T Davies and Elisabeth Sladen spearhead Doctor Who spin-off series The Sarah Jane Adventures. Or from just the year after Rose, director Graeme Harper’s Rise of the Cybermen shows us an even more smashing entrance for a monster as the Cybermen break windows with stunning pace and energy.

But in particular I’m going to recommend The Christmas Invasion, seasonal and the final Doctor Who story of that fantastic year of 2005. The series had returned and become a massive hit – but could it continue without its first Doctor? Once again, Rose is the crucial character in discovering and accepting not the Doctor’s world, but the new Doctor. It’s a terrific alien invasion story in its own right, but Rose carries it all the way until David Tennant’s ready to step up. And it may not be the Nestene Consciousness behind it this time, but there’s still something ordinary turning deadly to keep you on the edge of your seat – are you going to get killed by a Christmas Tree?

Next Time…

From beginnings to an ending of sorts, a final evolutionary form…? Except, of course, there’s no such thing.

Labels: Bigotry, Brexit, Chris Achilleos, Christopher Eccleston, Doctor Who, Doctor Who 52, Fascism, Liberalism, Repeats Er I Mean Special Editions, Revival, Rose