Thursday, August 25, 2011
DVD Taster: Doctor Who – The Dominators
This Saturday, Doctor Who comes back for Autumn – the second-earliest it’s ever returned, only beaten by 1968’s The Dominators, in which the Doctor and his companions land on the peaceful planet Dulkis and encounter the cruel Dominators and their deadly servants. So just how terrible are its politics? Which actors nearly save it? What do Doctor Who writers old and new think of it? What exciting work by Paul Cornell do I reprint below? What connects it all to The Da Vinci Code? What’s my shameful secret? And is it worth buying on DVD? Look out! It’s the Quarks!
Doctor Who – The Dominators may not set the happiest of precedents for this weekend’s Let’s Kill Hitler. With mediocre ratings and bad reviews, it may be set on an obscure planet in a distant galaxy rather than in the recognisable history of the Third Reich, but its authors would claim it’s all about what happens when a culture lacks the moral backbone we showed in 1939, while its detractors point out that the authors set up a fight between fascists and hippies, then side with the fascists. I once wrote about How Doctor Who Made Me A Liberal; ‘not like this’ would be a start. Even the less political broad sweep of fandom don’t much care for this story: back in September 2009, Doctor Who Magazine 413 published “The Mighty 200” – 6,700 fans’ votes on all 200ish TV Doctor Who stories to that point – and placed this at a lowly 191 (at 49.99%, the first to score under half marks). Against all reason, I’m fond of it, so I might put it 20 or so places higher…
While this ‘taster’ may not be short, incidentally, my style in these is not to be too spoilery. So read on without fear of finding out the key twists.
This argument comes to a head early in Episode 4, in a much more tense mirror of a scene in Episode 2, both set in the Dominators’ incredibly groovy spaceship control room. In that earlier scene, the Dominators subject the Doctor and Jamie to a series of physical and intelligence tests, a disturbing sequence that might tip into unpleasantly sadistic but for Patrick Troughton and Frazer Hines’ inspired ability to clown around and make things entertaining. Toba, on the other hand, is not one of nature’s jollifiers (despite providing some mirth by apparently peering up Jamie’s kilt in Episode 2). The drama when Toba oversteps the mark and gives Rago reason really to slap him down is more gripping than anything else in the story: the ambitious young subordinate makes the mistake of calling his boss weak during an unfavourable performance review, and suddenly finds himself subjected to exactly the same treatment as their victims. Officially, there’s no music in this story, but quite a bit of it’s actually supplied by Brian Hodgson of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and the deep clattering tones as a Quark (of which more later) closes threateningly on Toba are very effective. It’s a vicious humiliation, and you wonder just how far Rago is going to push it – the half-crazed joy that comes into Rago’s eyes when he unleashes just a tiny bit of the sort of sadism Toba’s been boasting shows that he is a far more dangerous individual.
Senior Dominator Rago is for me the performance of the story, played by guest star Ronald Allen – a playboy in The Avengers, a send-up in The Comic Strip, and a mainstay of… Crossroads. Yet whatever you’ve heard about that soap, he has massive charisma that’s all the more effective for being underplayed. Playing one of the two characters who has a brain – and doomed by never quite realising that the Doctor is the other – he’s made up to look almost like a zombie, with staring, sunken eyes. Ironically, not only is he far less of a zombie than the Dulcians, and not only does he notice the Doctor’s eyes when his are the most noticeable in the show, but also, out of scary make-up he returned to Doctor Who a couple of years later (in a much better story) and turned out to be very handsome when being laid-back instead of intense. This time round, though, his charisma is very cold indeed.
Forty-three years ago this evening, The Dominators was broadcasting its… Middle bit. At the risk of giving the impression that the production was a bit sloppy, what would have been “Episode 3” is forever untitled, as they forgot to stick the caption on it. Inauspicious, you might think (though Terror of the Zygons and The Leisure Hive also began in late August and they were both terrific, so take your pick). At the time, The Dominators was broadcast between a repeat – something so rare, before BBC3 and DVD, that they worked it into the story – of The Evil of the Daleks, Patrick Troughton’s best story, and the first broadcast of The Mind Robber, his next-best story. So it was just one of many stories, with a brilliant one either side. Today, it’s one of the rare survivors of the BBC purges that burnt most of Mr Troughton’s time as the Doctor, forcing attention onto it as it never was in 1968.
This opened the third and last season for Matt Smith’s favourite Doctor, and Mr Troughton’s variable here: brilliant thinking on his feet with the Dominators, entertaining taking an aircraft to bits while flying in it or doing other bits of business with Frazer Hines’ Jamie; bizarrely fond of Dulkis, a planet of dull, two-hearted reactionaries who never do anything, particularly in view of their far scarier counterparts at the opposite end of the season; and noticeably losing interest and hamming it up at some points, having grown the catchphrase “Oh my word!” over the summer. His other companion Zoe gets a bit of a raw deal, as (the special features reveal) did the actress, so no wonder she doesn’t look like she’s having much fun. And another new member of the team, the sonic screwdriver, already has amazing magic powers way beyond its design specs – to think, Deputy Script Editor Terrance Dicks complains about how they use it these days…
Arthur Cox – later seen in last year’s The Eleventh Hour – is often slagged off for his part here as Cully, Dulkis’ James Dean, the oldest, plumpest, most follically challenged teenage rebel in space, but for me he’s up with Beryl Reid as Sigourney Weaver, Bernard Cribbins as Luke Skywalker and using Weta’s The Lord of Rings army-building CGI to make cute waving alien babies as perfectly wonderful Doctor Who casting. And he’s very entertaining, too, from his early “An adventure with Cully is something never to be forgotten” to a glamorous woman (they’ve clearly shagged, and she looks embarrassed about it) right through his exasperation at his civilisation to turning into a gleeful bomber. Cully gets involved by sailing into a danger area in a dodgy ship (it looks like a lemon-squeezer, making one of his party’s use of the word “zest” difficult, difficult, lemon difficult to get away with. Still, it blows up spectacularly, in what may be Doctor Who’s earliest example of serious BBC pyromania) and getting his handsome but dumb passengers killed; they also include a very camp handsome young man who’s clearly heckling because he’d expected to get the part and the girl, who in later life becomes a leading Shakespearean actor and the despicable Bruno Kransky in Brogue Male, and a dumpier, grumpier actor who also had a significant part in The Horns of Nimon, yet didn’t turn up at any of last year’s signings. Perhaps he’s embarrassed. No, for me the only thing about Cully that doesn’t work is that his part of the story was inspired by The Boy Who Cried Wolf: we never hear of his earlier pranks, just that he breaks the rules and so people sneer at him; everything he says on screen is the truth; and, undermining the fable entirely, not only does he never cry wolf, but the whole point of the story is that the Dulcians would never come running to deal with a threat, anyway.
Another element of the story that everyone slags off is the Quarks, the Dominators’ terrifying robot servants (not a spread, a subatomic particle nor a Star Trek character). And, all right, they’re not very terrifying, but they’re an attempt at something different, and I love them. Short boxes with spinning spiked heads and arms that pop out at strange angles, they have memorable voices: intended to sound like homicidal children (and with real schoolboys, mental state unmeasured, within their boxes), their giggling mania is mostly so high-pitched as to be incomprehensible. And then there’s the famous sound effect Quark Goes Berserk and Explodes. They were expressly commissioned as a marketing rival to the Daleks, but this was their only major appearance; as, despite their obviously 360-degree sensors, by the end of the story they’re being tripped up and destroyed in ways so pathetic that you can’t help going ‘Awwhh’ at them, they split fandom. Essentially, some fans think they’re completely rubbish… And on the other side, there’s me. You see, when I was a little boy, I saw photos of three green Quarks striding across the Radio Times Doctor Who Tenth Anniversary Special, and I thought they looked brilliant. Sources differ as to whether they were actually green or grey, but I know for a fact they’re really maroon and orange. Because those were the two colours of paint my Dad had enough of when I was a schoolboy, mental state uncertain, in a home-made Quark box – aged eight, I came second in the local fancy dress competition to my mate Ste’s fantastic Dalek creation (which had the curves). And they’re still really groovy. Even now I’ve seen them.
The Quarks have some great point-of-view shots, at least – used to fabulous effect in the brilliant DVD Coming Soon trailer (though this DVD really needs a trailer for The Mind Robber, too) – and an eerie electronic bubbling sound as they open fire; the first, and most expensive, time they kill someone is a chillingly memorable effect. Andrew Skilleter’s moody cover for Ian Marter’s taut and gripping Target novelisation of the story helped, too, and the book encouraged me to play with chemistry sets (I bet one friend’s bedroom ceiling is still covered in marks after I persuaded him to let me mix the more poppable substances in his). I can’t see them coming back on telly this Autumn, or next, though. Not least because after the Macra returned in 2007’s marvellous Gridlock, I wrote about how I’d redesign the ‘homicidal children’ Quarks in the forms of spheres with spikes and expandable implements, like evil penknives… And then along came the Toclafane two months later.
I like Cully. I like the Quarks. And yet even for me, The Dominators remains fatally flawed. I’ve not gone over how dull the script can be, how repetitive the ‘action’ ping-ponging between Island and City, how jaw-droppingly unflattering the dresses the Dulcians wear, how it’s not remotely as kinky as the title might make you hope. The problem is deep in the story’s very conception. I have problems with the series’ moral compass for this year’s stories, but this story’s moral compass isn’t uncertain – it’s pointing in absolutely the wrong direction, save the points where the producers intervened or the writers simply messed up their own conservative allegory. The production team wanted ‘the new Daleks’; the writers wanted to write a Terry Nation story, with much of it taken from the original The Daleks and The Dalek Invasion of Earth (though later Doctor Who borrows from The Dominators, too; not just the Toclafane, but look at the plot behind Aliens of London, or at The Sontaran Experiment, telling a similar story at 40% the length, with more style, but not as fab a robot). And what they took from The Dalek Invasion of Earth is not just the solution, and not just ‘what if the Nazis had landed,’ but ‘what if the Nazis had landed after those bloody hippies had taken over’.
The intimidatingly prolific Doctor Who blog TARDIS Eruditorum loathes The Dominators with a fiery passion and a plausible argument:
Whether it’s just the nature of Doctor Who or the writers making a hash of it, there are points at which the series’ innate Liberalism breaks through. Though Dulkis is presented as a world long after the hippies have taken over – men in frocks, horrors – they’re also rich and conservative, and while the younger generation (well, one of them) are rebelling to rediscover excitement, asking questions and resisting authority is not just Liberal but, well, counter-cultural. Not only do they not ‘get’ what the hippies stand for nor the courage of non-violence, but they don’t understand that backing a youth rebellion against stuffy old men undermines their attempt to pit the series against ‘young people today’. Even the younger Dominator does it; hopefully, the writers failed to spot that he is, in practical terms, right – the more intelligent, analytical Dominator is brilliantly played and written like the grown-up, but if he’d just shot everyone in a spasm of bloodlust as Toba wanted, he’d have won. So the script’s ‘We should stand against the Nazis and the hippies!’ message manages to fall apart both in a more Liberal and in an even-more-fascist-than-it-thinks-it’s-being direction. And as for the sexual politics… Well, the text notes reveal what the BBC thought of the purposes of their actresses, while star student Kando on screen is so blatantly as thick as two short planks that when she’s praised by her tutor after not even getting her parrot-fashion lines right, it’s difficult not to conclude that he must be shagging her (add that Jamie suddenly knows what “homework” is and that Zoe, with her perfect recall, shouldn’t think much of her). Though perhaps she is qualified to Dulcian standard, as Educator Balan turns out to be absurdly literal to the point of idiocy, too.
Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln having previously written two rather good stories, this is where they hit a brick wall and never wrote for the series again – the latter, hilariously, starting the whole Knights Templar / Holy Grail / Jesus’ bloodline conspiracy fad with The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail – though not necessarily for their politics being watered down, nor for their final couple of episodes being shredded. No, it was because they and the BBC fell out over who would profit from the Quark goldrush. Titter ye not. I’d still love a toy Quark, but I bet Character Options won’t touch those two’s contracts with a barge pole.
If this hasn’t been a wholehearted recommendation of the DVD, there are more reasons to buy it – not least because it has one of the biggest leaps in picture quality from the VHS. I watched my twenty-year-old tape recently, and it’s shocking how almost unwatchably fuzzy the first episode was, in particular; the improvement for the opening titles and space fleet is fantastic. Some of the old film stock remains quite perished, but if you have the story on tape, compare and marvel. Slightly more of the picture’s been captured here, too, as I suddenly noticed on spotting part of Barry Newbery’s lovely sets that I’d never seen before. There’s also about half a minute of ‘new’ footage, all from late in Episode 4 and the start of Episode 5 where censors slashed the shooting of Brian Cant (Brian Cant!), the torture of Teel – even in this restored version we only hear it, but if anything watching Toba’s greedily gleeful face is more disturbing – and Balan’s killing, which now goes on horribly long but is still very badly edited, not to spare our feelings but because it was just clumsily cut between shots in the first place.
As well as a photo gallery, pdfs and a feature on press clippings, Recharge and Equalise is a proper ‘Making of’ which essentially turns into one big bitching session about who’s to blame between the co-writer and the script editor, on separate cameras! Frazer’s a sweetie, though, while Brian Hodgson is handsome and dignified, and the late director comes across as a horribly sexist martinet. The commentary is similar but more variable, thanks to swapping people in and out – it only really catches light when teaming companions Wendy Padbury (now an agent, who discovered Matt Smith) and Frazer Hines, and that’s not often enough. Episode 4’s is probably the best, but perhaps I just enjoyed the shagging gossip and young David Troughton’s long-suffering reaction to one glamorous woman… I enjoyed the text notes revealing just how much Patrick Troughton and Frazer Hines worked out between them in rehearsal, too – including the laxative joke that About Time and TARDIS Eruditorum claim helped put him off the part – but am disappointed that, given that the sixth episode was dropped and the fifth written by the script editors rather than the writers, who took their names off it, there’s absolutely nothing about the storyline of the original ending.
I remain very fond of bits of The Dominators, but there’s a lot that just doesn’t work on screen (and sometimes that’s a blessing). Paul Cornell, Martin Day and Keith Topping’s seminal Doctor Who – The DisContinuity Guide (the first to include analysis – and mockery – rather than just an episode guide) called it sadistic and dull, and those two words stuck in my head. I remember some years ago talking about the story – goodness knows why – with Doctor Who writer Rob Shearman. Now, Rob’s written a great many erudite and a great many more piss-taking Who reviews in his time, and it’s sometimes difficult to tell which is which. There’s no other person I know with such a talent for barefaced Devil’s Advocacy. But when, unconsciously echoing Cornelltoppingday’s words, I told him how much I’d like to like it, but whenever I watch it, it just seems sadistic and dull, “But that’s what I like about it,” he replied judiciously, “its dullness, and its… sadism…” At which point he corpsed, defeated. Not even Rob could lie with a straight face about enjoying The Dominators.
Finally, these days Paul Cornell is a major TV and comics writer and author of the superb Doctor Who TV stories Human Nature and Father’s Day. Back in 1995, he was known to a smaller audience for short stories, reviews and silly songs, and author of the superb Doctor Who New Adventures novels Human Nature and Timewyrm: Revelation. While he didn’t think much of The Dominators in 1995’s The DisContinuity Guide, at around the same time that was published, the story and Blur’s Parklife inspired him to write some lyrics to a possibly familiar tune. As it’s hard to find these days, Paul’s kindly given me permission to reprint it here…
(from the tune by Blur)
Doctor Who – The Dominators may not set the happiest of precedents for this weekend’s Let’s Kill Hitler. With mediocre ratings and bad reviews, it may be set on an obscure planet in a distant galaxy rather than in the recognisable history of the Third Reich, but its authors would claim it’s all about what happens when a culture lacks the moral backbone we showed in 1939, while its detractors point out that the authors set up a fight between fascists and hippies, then side with the fascists. I once wrote about How Doctor Who Made Me A Liberal; ‘not like this’ would be a start. Even the less political broad sweep of fandom don’t much care for this story: back in September 2009, Doctor Who Magazine 413 published “The Mighty 200” – 6,700 fans’ votes on all 200ish TV Doctor Who stories to that point – and placed this at a lowly 191 (at 49.99%, the first to score under half marks). Against all reason, I’m fond of it, so I might put it 20 or so places higher…
While this ‘taster’ may not be short, incidentally, my style in these is not to be too spoilery. So read on without fear of finding out the key twists.
That Golden Moment
“It is not unknown for a leader who is unfit to be replaced.”Easily the most striking figures in The Dominators are the two Dominators themselves, representatives of an empire that stretches across galaxies and towering above the rest of the cast, both physically and in acting presence. We never hear about this empire again, so it’s easy to assume they fall into civil war (possibly giving way to their thrilling robot servants) – the two of them are arguing from the very first scene to the end of the story. Probationer Toba, of the hungrily sadistic expression, wants to destroy everything in sight. His boss, Navigator Rago, is the intelligent one who wants to evaluate and make use of things before just blowing them to bits, and it’s thank to a superb actor that he doesn’t come across entirely as the junior Dominator’s mum, given that most of his role consists of coming home and finding that young Toba’s broken another toy or impatiently directing Toba’s attention to yet another vital fact he’s failed to spot.
“It is not unknown for a mutinous subordinate to be executed!”
This argument comes to a head early in Episode 4, in a much more tense mirror of a scene in Episode 2, both set in the Dominators’ incredibly groovy spaceship control room. In that earlier scene, the Dominators subject the Doctor and Jamie to a series of physical and intelligence tests, a disturbing sequence that might tip into unpleasantly sadistic but for Patrick Troughton and Frazer Hines’ inspired ability to clown around and make things entertaining. Toba, on the other hand, is not one of nature’s jollifiers (despite providing some mirth by apparently peering up Jamie’s kilt in Episode 2). The drama when Toba oversteps the mark and gives Rago reason really to slap him down is more gripping than anything else in the story: the ambitious young subordinate makes the mistake of calling his boss weak during an unfavourable performance review, and suddenly finds himself subjected to exactly the same treatment as their victims. Officially, there’s no music in this story, but quite a bit of it’s actually supplied by Brian Hodgson of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and the deep clattering tones as a Quark (of which more later) closes threateningly on Toba are very effective. It’s a vicious humiliation, and you wonder just how far Rago is going to push it – the half-crazed joy that comes into Rago’s eyes when he unleashes just a tiny bit of the sort of sadism Toba’s been boasting shows that he is a far more dangerous individual.
Senior Dominator Rago is for me the performance of the story, played by guest star Ronald Allen – a playboy in The Avengers, a send-up in The Comic Strip, and a mainstay of… Crossroads. Yet whatever you’ve heard about that soap, he has massive charisma that’s all the more effective for being underplayed. Playing one of the two characters who has a brain – and doomed by never quite realising that the Doctor is the other – he’s made up to look almost like a zombie, with staring, sunken eyes. Ironically, not only is he far less of a zombie than the Dulcians, and not only does he notice the Doctor’s eyes when his are the most noticeable in the show, but also, out of scary make-up he returned to Doctor Who a couple of years later (in a much better story) and turned out to be very handsome when being laid-back instead of intense. This time round, though, his charisma is very cold indeed.
Something Else To Look Out For
Forty-three years ago this evening, The Dominators was broadcasting its… Middle bit. At the risk of giving the impression that the production was a bit sloppy, what would have been “Episode 3” is forever untitled, as they forgot to stick the caption on it. Inauspicious, you might think (though Terror of the Zygons and The Leisure Hive also began in late August and they were both terrific, so take your pick). At the time, The Dominators was broadcast between a repeat – something so rare, before BBC3 and DVD, that they worked it into the story – of The Evil of the Daleks, Patrick Troughton’s best story, and the first broadcast of The Mind Robber, his next-best story. So it was just one of many stories, with a brilliant one either side. Today, it’s one of the rare survivors of the BBC purges that burnt most of Mr Troughton’s time as the Doctor, forcing attention onto it as it never was in 1968.
This opened the third and last season for Matt Smith’s favourite Doctor, and Mr Troughton’s variable here: brilliant thinking on his feet with the Dominators, entertaining taking an aircraft to bits while flying in it or doing other bits of business with Frazer Hines’ Jamie; bizarrely fond of Dulkis, a planet of dull, two-hearted reactionaries who never do anything, particularly in view of their far scarier counterparts at the opposite end of the season; and noticeably losing interest and hamming it up at some points, having grown the catchphrase “Oh my word!” over the summer. His other companion Zoe gets a bit of a raw deal, as (the special features reveal) did the actress, so no wonder she doesn’t look like she’s having much fun. And another new member of the team, the sonic screwdriver, already has amazing magic powers way beyond its design specs – to think, Deputy Script Editor Terrance Dicks complains about how they use it these days…
Arthur Cox – later seen in last year’s The Eleventh Hour – is often slagged off for his part here as Cully, Dulkis’ James Dean, the oldest, plumpest, most follically challenged teenage rebel in space, but for me he’s up with Beryl Reid as Sigourney Weaver, Bernard Cribbins as Luke Skywalker and using Weta’s The Lord of Rings army-building CGI to make cute waving alien babies as perfectly wonderful Doctor Who casting. And he’s very entertaining, too, from his early “An adventure with Cully is something never to be forgotten” to a glamorous woman (they’ve clearly shagged, and she looks embarrassed about it) right through his exasperation at his civilisation to turning into a gleeful bomber. Cully gets involved by sailing into a danger area in a dodgy ship (it looks like a lemon-squeezer, making one of his party’s use of the word “zest” difficult, difficult, lemon difficult to get away with. Still, it blows up spectacularly, in what may be Doctor Who’s earliest example of serious BBC pyromania) and getting his handsome but dumb passengers killed; they also include a very camp handsome young man who’s clearly heckling because he’d expected to get the part and the girl, who in later life becomes a leading Shakespearean actor and the despicable Bruno Kransky in Brogue Male, and a dumpier, grumpier actor who also had a significant part in The Horns of Nimon, yet didn’t turn up at any of last year’s signings. Perhaps he’s embarrassed. No, for me the only thing about Cully that doesn’t work is that his part of the story was inspired by The Boy Who Cried Wolf: we never hear of his earlier pranks, just that he breaks the rules and so people sneer at him; everything he says on screen is the truth; and, undermining the fable entirely, not only does he never cry wolf, but the whole point of the story is that the Dulcians would never come running to deal with a threat, anyway.
Another element of the story that everyone slags off is the Quarks, the Dominators’ terrifying robot servants (not a spread, a subatomic particle nor a Star Trek character). And, all right, they’re not very terrifying, but they’re an attempt at something different, and I love them. Short boxes with spinning spiked heads and arms that pop out at strange angles, they have memorable voices: intended to sound like homicidal children (and with real schoolboys, mental state unmeasured, within their boxes), their giggling mania is mostly so high-pitched as to be incomprehensible. And then there’s the famous sound effect Quark Goes Berserk and Explodes. They were expressly commissioned as a marketing rival to the Daleks, but this was their only major appearance; as, despite their obviously 360-degree sensors, by the end of the story they’re being tripped up and destroyed in ways so pathetic that you can’t help going ‘Awwhh’ at them, they split fandom. Essentially, some fans think they’re completely rubbish… And on the other side, there’s me. You see, when I was a little boy, I saw photos of three green Quarks striding across the Radio Times Doctor Who Tenth Anniversary Special, and I thought they looked brilliant. Sources differ as to whether they were actually green or grey, but I know for a fact they’re really maroon and orange. Because those were the two colours of paint my Dad had enough of when I was a schoolboy, mental state uncertain, in a home-made Quark box – aged eight, I came second in the local fancy dress competition to my mate Ste’s fantastic Dalek creation (which had the curves). And they’re still really groovy. Even now I’ve seen them.
My Secret Shame: I Was A Pre-Teen Quark
The Quarks have some great point-of-view shots, at least – used to fabulous effect in the brilliant DVD Coming Soon trailer (though this DVD really needs a trailer for The Mind Robber, too) – and an eerie electronic bubbling sound as they open fire; the first, and most expensive, time they kill someone is a chillingly memorable effect. Andrew Skilleter’s moody cover for Ian Marter’s taut and gripping Target novelisation of the story helped, too, and the book encouraged me to play with chemistry sets (I bet one friend’s bedroom ceiling is still covered in marks after I persuaded him to let me mix the more poppable substances in his). I can’t see them coming back on telly this Autumn, or next, though. Not least because after the Macra returned in 2007’s marvellous Gridlock, I wrote about how I’d redesign the ‘homicidal children’ Quarks in the forms of spheres with spikes and expandable implements, like evil penknives… And then along came the Toclafane two months later.
How To Make Doctor Who A Bit Fascist
I like Cully. I like the Quarks. And yet even for me, The Dominators remains fatally flawed. I’ve not gone over how dull the script can be, how repetitive the ‘action’ ping-ponging between Island and City, how jaw-droppingly unflattering the dresses the Dulcians wear, how it’s not remotely as kinky as the title might make you hope. The problem is deep in the story’s very conception. I have problems with the series’ moral compass for this year’s stories, but this story’s moral compass isn’t uncertain – it’s pointing in absolutely the wrong direction, save the points where the producers intervened or the writers simply messed up their own conservative allegory. The production team wanted ‘the new Daleks’; the writers wanted to write a Terry Nation story, with much of it taken from the original The Daleks and The Dalek Invasion of Earth (though later Doctor Who borrows from The Dominators, too; not just the Toclafane, but look at the plot behind Aliens of London, or at The Sontaran Experiment, telling a similar story at 40% the length, with more style, but not as fab a robot). And what they took from The Dalek Invasion of Earth is not just the solution, and not just ‘what if the Nazis had landed,’ but ‘what if the Nazis had landed after those bloody hippies had taken over’.
The intimidatingly prolific Doctor Who blog TARDIS Eruditorum loathes The Dominators with a fiery passion and a plausible argument:
“…instead of pacifists being good people who can be made better, pacifists are deluded fools and it's funny to watch them die. It is easily the most cynical and mean-spirited scene I have seen yet in Doctor Who. It is a scene that exists only to take people who are acting out of a genuine moral conviction and mock them for their own morality.”And that’s about the toned-down version of the story, once the production team had taken a hatchet to it. If you read his article, you’ll find my partial defence underneath, though there’s not much I can do to salvage the politics. Basically, writers Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln hated hippies and thought their peacenik ways a threat to all that made Britain great, so wanted to write a story showing them rightfully getting their noses bloodied. It’s the horribly misbegotten Doctor Who equivalent of Carry On Camping, which made exactly the same mistake at almost exactly the same time of putting a resolutely anti-authoritarian series on the wrong side of the youth divide (though if you want to see Wendy Padbury’s Quarks, you’ll have to watch The Blood On Satan’s Claw). In part, they were toned down by the production team; in part, they just weren’t talented enough right-wing polemicists not to torpedo their own message. But it’s bad enough, and, yes, “mean-spirited” probably hits it, and that’s just not something Doctor Who should be.
“It is an overt attack on the ethical foundations of Doctor Who. Not only is it an attack on the entire ethos that underlies the Doctor as a character, it's an attempt to twist and pervert the show away from what it is and towards something ugly, cruel, and just plain unpleasant.”
Whether it’s just the nature of Doctor Who or the writers making a hash of it, there are points at which the series’ innate Liberalism breaks through. Though Dulkis is presented as a world long after the hippies have taken over – men in frocks, horrors – they’re also rich and conservative, and while the younger generation (well, one of them) are rebelling to rediscover excitement, asking questions and resisting authority is not just Liberal but, well, counter-cultural. Not only do they not ‘get’ what the hippies stand for nor the courage of non-violence, but they don’t understand that backing a youth rebellion against stuffy old men undermines their attempt to pit the series against ‘young people today’. Even the younger Dominator does it; hopefully, the writers failed to spot that he is, in practical terms, right – the more intelligent, analytical Dominator is brilliantly played and written like the grown-up, but if he’d just shot everyone in a spasm of bloodlust as Toba wanted, he’d have won. So the script’s ‘We should stand against the Nazis and the hippies!’ message manages to fall apart both in a more Liberal and in an even-more-fascist-than-it-thinks-it’s-being direction. And as for the sexual politics… Well, the text notes reveal what the BBC thought of the purposes of their actresses, while star student Kando on screen is so blatantly as thick as two short planks that when she’s praised by her tutor after not even getting her parrot-fashion lines right, it’s difficult not to conclude that he must be shagging her (add that Jamie suddenly knows what “homework” is and that Zoe, with her perfect recall, shouldn’t think much of her). Though perhaps she is qualified to Dulcian standard, as Educator Balan turns out to be absurdly literal to the point of idiocy, too.
Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln having previously written two rather good stories, this is where they hit a brick wall and never wrote for the series again – the latter, hilariously, starting the whole Knights Templar / Holy Grail / Jesus’ bloodline conspiracy fad with The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail – though not necessarily for their politics being watered down, nor for their final couple of episodes being shredded. No, it was because they and the BBC fell out over who would profit from the Quark goldrush. Titter ye not. I’d still love a toy Quark, but I bet Character Options won’t touch those two’s contracts with a barge pole.
New Bits!
If this hasn’t been a wholehearted recommendation of the DVD, there are more reasons to buy it – not least because it has one of the biggest leaps in picture quality from the VHS. I watched my twenty-year-old tape recently, and it’s shocking how almost unwatchably fuzzy the first episode was, in particular; the improvement for the opening titles and space fleet is fantastic. Some of the old film stock remains quite perished, but if you have the story on tape, compare and marvel. Slightly more of the picture’s been captured here, too, as I suddenly noticed on spotting part of Barry Newbery’s lovely sets that I’d never seen before. There’s also about half a minute of ‘new’ footage, all from late in Episode 4 and the start of Episode 5 where censors slashed the shooting of Brian Cant (Brian Cant!), the torture of Teel – even in this restored version we only hear it, but if anything watching Toba’s greedily gleeful face is more disturbing – and Balan’s killing, which now goes on horribly long but is still very badly edited, not to spare our feelings but because it was just clumsily cut between shots in the first place.
As well as a photo gallery, pdfs and a feature on press clippings, Recharge and Equalise is a proper ‘Making of’ which essentially turns into one big bitching session about who’s to blame between the co-writer and the script editor, on separate cameras! Frazer’s a sweetie, though, while Brian Hodgson is handsome and dignified, and the late director comes across as a horribly sexist martinet. The commentary is similar but more variable, thanks to swapping people in and out – it only really catches light when teaming companions Wendy Padbury (now an agent, who discovered Matt Smith) and Frazer Hines, and that’s not often enough. Episode 4’s is probably the best, but perhaps I just enjoyed the shagging gossip and young David Troughton’s long-suffering reaction to one glamorous woman… I enjoyed the text notes revealing just how much Patrick Troughton and Frazer Hines worked out between them in rehearsal, too – including the laxative joke that About Time and TARDIS Eruditorum claim helped put him off the part – but am disappointed that, given that the sixth episode was dropped and the fifth written by the script editors rather than the writers, who took their names off it, there’s absolutely nothing about the storyline of the original ending.
I remain very fond of bits of The Dominators, but there’s a lot that just doesn’t work on screen (and sometimes that’s a blessing). Paul Cornell, Martin Day and Keith Topping’s seminal Doctor Who – The DisContinuity Guide (the first to include analysis – and mockery – rather than just an episode guide) called it sadistic and dull, and those two words stuck in my head. I remember some years ago talking about the story – goodness knows why – with Doctor Who writer Rob Shearman. Now, Rob’s written a great many erudite and a great many more piss-taking Who reviews in his time, and it’s sometimes difficult to tell which is which. There’s no other person I know with such a talent for barefaced Devil’s Advocacy. But when, unconsciously echoing Cornelltoppingday’s words, I told him how much I’d like to like it, but whenever I watch it, it just seems sadistic and dull, “But that’s what I like about it,” he replied judiciously, “its dullness, and its… sadism…” At which point he corpsed, defeated. Not even Rob could lie with a straight face about enjoying The Dominators.
Finally, these days Paul Cornell is a major TV and comics writer and author of the superb Doctor Who TV stories Human Nature and Father’s Day. Back in 1995, he was known to a smaller audience for short stories, reviews and silly songs, and author of the superb Doctor Who New Adventures novels Human Nature and Timewyrm: Revelation. While he didn’t think much of The Dominators in 1995’s The DisContinuity Guide, at around the same time that was published, the story and Blur’s Parklife inspired him to write some lyrics to a possibly familiar tune. As it’s hard to find these days, Paul’s kindly given me permission to reprint it here…
Quarklife
(from the tune by Blur)
Resilience is a preference for the spiked practitioners of what is known as…– Paul Cornell, 17th April 1995
Quarklife!
And big-shouldered suits should be avoided if you want to make it through what is known as…
Quarklife!
Toba’s got a padded suit, he gets intimidated by the Dulcians, they’d love a bit of him.
Who’s that fat Time Lord snooping? You should cut down on your porklife, mate, get some exercise!
Dominators
The Dominators
They both go hand in hand
Hand in hand through their
Quarklife…
I activate when my power’s replenished, except on Wednesday when I’m rudely awakened by Dominator Rago.
I check my disintegrator, flap my arms about, and then think about leaving the saucer.
I spin my head, I sometimes spin my whole body. It gives me a sense of enormous well-being.
And then I’m happy for the rest of the day, safe in the knowledge there will always be a part of my programming devoted to it.
Dominators
The Dominators
They both go hand in hand
Hand in hand through their
Quarklife…
It’s got nothing to do with your Ka Faraq Gatri, you know…
And it’s not about you Chumblies who go round and round and round…
Labels: Carry On, Digby Spode, Doctor Who, DVD Tasters, Matt Smith, Music, Obscure Doctor Who Jokes, Patrick Troughton, Personal, Pictures, Reviews
Saturday, August 16, 2008
Robots, War Machines and Why BoxClever Isn’t So Clever
If you’ve ever considered renting some appliance, a word of advice: unless you intend to keep it for ever, don’t hire it from Boxclever. I mentioned the other day that we’d bought a big new telly (working fine, and very happy with it) to replace the TV we’d been hiring, so the next step was to return the old one. Well, I rang Boxclever and said that, though it’s still working fine, we’d like them to take the telly back as we’d got ourselves a new one. They asked a few questions, they tried to persuade me… Then the stunner. The contract will be taken as a month’s notice. Fine, I said, thinking ‘Well, they’ve had enough money out of us over the last decade, a redundant £45 isn’t too bad a sting.’ A month’s notice from next charging date, so the end of September. Uh huh, I said. And that that’s when they’d pick up the TV. What?! So, I queried, they couldn’t take it any earlier than September 29th? No. Keep the money, I suggested, just take it off our hands? Not possible. Now, this isn’t a small TV set – it’s less wide than our new one, but very much deeper and heavier – and we do have a small flat, which is getting smaller all the time as it fills with stuff. And we could use an extra 490,000 cubic centimetres that aren’t being taken up by a large, heavy object that you can’t stack anything on top of.
I’m really not impressed by this customer service. But don’t worry, this entry gets onto more fun things as it goes on.
If you’re familiar with Character Options, who make all the rather impressive Doctor Who toys in every supermarket, you may know that they’ve just issued a tentative first set of “Classic” series figures (preceded by the Dalek Collector’s Set #1), and they look terrific. They’re also apparently taking the company by surprise and outselling the new set based on this year’s Doctor Who series by four to one. So, I suspect a second set of Classic figures may be confirmed – personally, I’m very much hoping that their ‘collect and build’ figure is the Morbius Monster, which would be both appropriate and funny. Oh, yes, that collect and build idea… The first set of eight individual Classic figures – or nine, as one pack boasts two figures – has a strong incentive to buy the lot, as each contains one part of the giant K1 Robot, so you need to buy every figure in order to assemble it. I’ve seen a fully assembled one, and it’s superb (even taking into account that it appeared in my first story and I have an instinctive bias).
However, my set had a problem. I was going to post a picture of the lot on here, but that’ll have to wait – because, when I came to assemble my K1 Robot, the first four sections locked together fine… But the right arm had nothing to lock into. The small plastic socket that should have been fixed inside the shoulder was missing, and unfortunately once you’ve snapped one of the components into place, they don’t separate. So if you collect the set and want to build your Robot, be careful. Look inside each of the holes around the torso to make sure they all have that little grey gripping socket before you start, and don’t fool around with putting things in the wrong sockets for a crazy weird robot before you settle down to build the proper look: the wind’ll change, and it’ll stick like that. As a result, I’ve had to ring Character Options’ Returns line and send the whole head and torso packaged up back to them for a replacement of all four components. Let’s hope they have better customer service than Boxclever. Belated update: they do!
In the meantime, I have eight rather cool figures; I’m particularly happy with the Zygon, as they’ve long been one of my favourite monster designs (even my Dad thought Broton looked impressive), and with a couple of others I’ll come to in another post [update: click on the link at the end of the last paragraph]. If you treat yourself, incidentally, don’t think you’re missing a bit with your SV7 Supervoc figure, another classy robot – though he’s pictured with a separate hand in the publicity, they abandoned that idea at a late stage, so they haven’t left it out by accident and you probably shouldn’t try pulling his hand off to see if it’ll fit back on again. The matching Dum robot figure should, however, come with a smashed robot’s head on a stick (a makeshift robot deactivator, if you’re familiar with the story The Robots of Death), the ‘dead’ robot’s brain parts painted inappropriately red to make it especially unsuitable for children (yay!), and a tiny little sliver of stickers should be somewhere in the pack in order for you to choose to label it “D84” or one of three other id tags.
Finally, if you can’t find these in the shops yet, after the sad demise of Tenth Planet I have three mail-order suggestions. There are those nice Voga people in Edinburgh, who are a little more expensive than recommended price but fast, reliable and with reasonable postage; there are Forbidden Planet, who are a bit cheaper than recommended price but post slowly and in dribs and drabs, as well as having a deeply eccentric website that tends to go down in the middle of orders; and there are Character Options themselves, who are dead in the middle of both elements of the other two, charging RRP as you might expect and delivering within about a week. If you order from them directly, you’ll find that they apply a £4.99 postage charge unless you spend over £50 (so if you order the whole set, postage is free)… So you may like to take note of two discount codes. If you’re spending under £50, entering “shipping2008AW” at the checkout will get you free p&p anyway, while if you’re spending over £50 in one go, you’ll have free postage anyway but you can enter “5discount2008OT” to give you a 5% discount. Happy shopping!
Should you fancy watching a few things on your computer rather than a big telly, here are a few recommendations from blogs I’ve been reading this week:
And finally… A couple of weeks ago we watched the latest in ITV’s Marple series, Towards Zero. Richard points out that we’d not normally have done so, as Towards Zero isn’t a Miss Marple story and ITV doesn’t make stories with Miss Marple (Marple is a place a couple of miles from where I was born; Miss Marple would under no circumstances abandon her spinsterdom to sound like a public schoolboy). However, we winced and bore it, mainly for the guest cast. You may have spotted the magnificent Tom Baker sprawling around telling rolling anecdotes, a bit like a much-cleaned-up version of himself. What you may not have noticed is that the character he was playing was called Frederick Treves. I was in my local library yesterday, and noted that in Agatha Christie’s play Towards Zero, the character is named Mathew Treves. By an uncanny coincidence, however, there’s a grand old actor by the name of Frederick Treves, who readers of this blog might remember from political thrillers The Politician’s Wife and To Play the King or, of course, from the Doctor Who story Meglos, in which he hammed it up opposite one Thomas Stewart Baker as a character called “Brotadac”. Which, as I’m sure none of the production team on Marple are aware, is an anagram of “bad actor”.
I’m really not impressed by this customer service. But don’t worry, this entry gets onto more fun things as it goes on.
Doctor Who and the Miniature Robots
If you’re familiar with Character Options, who make all the rather impressive Doctor Who toys in every supermarket, you may know that they’ve just issued a tentative first set of “Classic” series figures (preceded by the Dalek Collector’s Set #1), and they look terrific. They’re also apparently taking the company by surprise and outselling the new set based on this year’s Doctor Who series by four to one. So, I suspect a second set of Classic figures may be confirmed – personally, I’m very much hoping that their ‘collect and build’ figure is the Morbius Monster, which would be both appropriate and funny. Oh, yes, that collect and build idea… The first set of eight individual Classic figures – or nine, as one pack boasts two figures – has a strong incentive to buy the lot, as each contains one part of the giant K1 Robot, so you need to buy every figure in order to assemble it. I’ve seen a fully assembled one, and it’s superb (even taking into account that it appeared in my first story and I have an instinctive bias).
However, my set had a problem. I was going to post a picture of the lot on here, but that’ll have to wait – because, when I came to assemble my K1 Robot, the first four sections locked together fine… But the right arm had nothing to lock into. The small plastic socket that should have been fixed inside the shoulder was missing, and unfortunately once you’ve snapped one of the components into place, they don’t separate. So if you collect the set and want to build your Robot, be careful. Look inside each of the holes around the torso to make sure they all have that little grey gripping socket before you start, and don’t fool around with putting things in the wrong sockets for a crazy weird robot before you settle down to build the proper look: the wind’ll change, and it’ll stick like that. As a result, I’ve had to ring Character Options’ Returns line and send the whole head and torso packaged up back to them for a replacement of all four components. Let’s hope they have better customer service than Boxclever. Belated update: they do!
In the meantime, I have eight rather cool figures; I’m particularly happy with the Zygon, as they’ve long been one of my favourite monster designs (even my Dad thought Broton looked impressive), and with a couple of others I’ll come to in another post [update: click on the link at the end of the last paragraph]. If you treat yourself, incidentally, don’t think you’re missing a bit with your SV7 Supervoc figure, another classy robot – though he’s pictured with a separate hand in the publicity, they abandoned that idea at a late stage, so they haven’t left it out by accident and you probably shouldn’t try pulling his hand off to see if it’ll fit back on again. The matching Dum robot figure should, however, come with a smashed robot’s head on a stick (a makeshift robot deactivator, if you’re familiar with the story The Robots of Death), the ‘dead’ robot’s brain parts painted inappropriately red to make it especially unsuitable for children (yay!), and a tiny little sliver of stickers should be somewhere in the pack in order for you to choose to label it “D84” or one of three other id tags.
Finally, if you can’t find these in the shops yet, after the sad demise of Tenth Planet I have three mail-order suggestions. There are those nice Voga people in Edinburgh, who are a little more expensive than recommended price but fast, reliable and with reasonable postage; there are Forbidden Planet, who are a bit cheaper than recommended price but post slowly and in dribs and drabs, as well as having a deeply eccentric website that tends to go down in the middle of orders; and there are Character Options themselves, who are dead in the middle of both elements of the other two, charging RRP as you might expect and delivering within about a week. If you order from them directly, you’ll find that they apply a £4.99 postage charge unless you spend over £50 (so if you order the whole set, postage is free)… So you may like to take note of two discount codes. If you’re spending under £50, entering “shipping2008AW” at the checkout will get you free p&p anyway, while if you’re spending over £50 in one go, you’ll have free postage anyway but you can enter “5discount2008OT” to give you a 5% discount. Happy shopping!
For Your Viewing Pleasure…
Should you fancy watching a few things on your computer rather than a big telly, here are a few recommendations from blogs I’ve been reading this week:
- The lovely Andy Strange points us to Stephen Fry’s lecture on public service broadcasting. It’s witty, erudite and spot-on, and though Richard and I watched it at the time, as Mr Fry points out in his speech the viewing figures on BBC Parliament are not large, so thanks to Andy for finding it online. The lecture is a sterling defence of the BBC, which I have to admit is an institution I may have my problems with but still love passionately as the best of British, and which I fear is under deadly threat. If the Tories get back in, they seem hideously likely to dismember it – one of the few issues on which the vague noises that pass for policy emanating from the Tory bunker are actually even worse than the Labour Government.
- The lovely Simon Guerrier, to whom I owe several e-mails (sorry, Simon, if you’re reading) has analysis and a link to a rather terrific trailer for the BBC’s next Doctor Who DVD release, 1966’s The War Machines. It’s a super story with a great lead performance by Billy Hartnell, and one that was both heavily borrowed from the works of Terry Nation and was highly influential on the series’ future – taking the monsters to the streets of contemporary London for the first time. It also inspired in part Simon’s excellent novel The Time Travellers, which I also recommend. The world’s computers are joined together down phone lines and things (a racy, far-fetched sci-fi idea for 1966), at which point they fail to look at porn or send each other amusing clips of each other’s readouts, so far as we know, and instead built pseudo-Daleks with which to conquer the world. When the computers link up, humans will get completely hypnotised by them, too; well, they got that bit right.
- The almost certainly lovely – though I’ve not been formally introduced – Jennie brings a disturbing selection of reasons why John McCain should not be elected President, along with a devastatingly fine example of Rick-rolling. If you’re not sure who “Rick” is, he’s that gawky, lanky guy with the awkward dance moves who came out of nowhere to be suddenly incredibly popular and successful…
And finally… A couple of weeks ago we watched the latest in ITV’s Marple series, Towards Zero. Richard points out that we’d not normally have done so, as Towards Zero isn’t a Miss Marple story and ITV doesn’t make stories with Miss Marple (Marple is a place a couple of miles from where I was born; Miss Marple would under no circumstances abandon her spinsterdom to sound like a public schoolboy). However, we winced and bore it, mainly for the guest cast. You may have spotted the magnificent Tom Baker sprawling around telling rolling anecdotes, a bit like a much-cleaned-up version of himself. What you may not have noticed is that the character he was playing was called Frederick Treves. I was in my local library yesterday, and noted that in Agatha Christie’s play Towards Zero, the character is named Mathew Treves. By an uncanny coincidence, however, there’s a grand old actor by the name of Frederick Treves, who readers of this blog might remember from political thrillers The Politician’s Wife and To Play the King or, of course, from the Doctor Who story Meglos, in which he hammed it up opposite one Thomas Stewart Baker as a character called “Brotadac”. Which, as I’m sure none of the production team on Marple are aware, is an anagram of “bad actor”.
Labels: American Politics, Blogs, Digby Spode, Doctor Who, Stephen Fry, Technology, Tom Baker, Top Tips, Toys, William Hartnell
Monday, March 26, 2007
Rogue Male in The Trap
Did you see the final part of Adam Curtis’ “documentary” The Trap? I fear I was shouting at the screen so much last night that I didn’t make the detailed notes needed for a full rebuttal, so hopefully Tom Papworth will give it a thorough fisking while I just hit it with a hammer. Meanwhile, I’ve caught the far more satisfying first episode of BBC7’s thriller serial Rogue Male (listen again tonight). I’ve never read Geoffrey Household’s original book, but after discovering Michael Jayston’s superb reading last time BBC7 broadcast it, I’ve tuned in promptly now it’s come round again…
First, the dark side of Boys’ Own. I tuned in part-way through this story when it was last on BBC7 a year or two ago, and to my surprise I found it gripping. I suspect I listened initially because my favourite radio show of the 1980s – sadly not yet come to BBC7, nor to any commercial release, and my tapes are rather rickety – was Brogue Male, a terrific spoof of heroic British 1930s adventure tales starring Richard Johnson as dashing gentleman adventurer Sir Digby Spode, Royce Mills as his faithful friend Hubert Carstairs and, in especially large letters at the end, Stephen Greif as the villainous Count Lazlo Stroganoff. This absolutely fantastic but short-lived series evidently borrowed its name from Geoffrey Household’s 1939 novel, but at the time I’d never heard of it (and I’ve still not read it, and seen neither Fritz Lang’s nor Clive Donner’s film versions). After a couple of episodes of Rogue Male, though, I was listening to it on its own merits and not just thanks to Sir Digby.
The story is being broadcast from today in 15 half-hour episodes every weekday at 9.30 am, with repeats at 8.30 pm and 1.30 in the morning (I think I’ll give that one a miss), as well as the BBC7 website’s week-long ‘Listen Again’ function, so it’s not difficult to catch. What I think caught me about it is in part the tension of the thriller itself, but perhaps foremost Michael Jayston’s brilliantly sardonic reading style. Written in the first person, it’s ideal to be read, with Mr Jayston lending it a huge amount of character: he comes across as slightly dispassionate and distanced from events, but also as if he’s constantly taking you into his confidence. With so many episodes of such constant tension, it could have been disastrous if it had been read in an over-emotional style – with the unnamed, but far from ‘anonymous’ anti-hero undergoing gruesome torture and near death even from the first, if he had started off sounding on the edge, it’s difficult to know where he could gone from there. The story dares you to side with its protagonist, an affluent, conventionally amoral gentleman who actually has his own keen sense of morality, though as the story unfolds you feel how his honour and individualism both bind and distance him from his establishment background and politics (he claims none, though thinks he could easily have sat for an agricultural constituency in the South of England). I’m not instinctively on the side of a well-off member of the establishment with a misanthropic streak and whose fame lies in shooting animals for fun, but it worked remarkably well on me. Most of all, his survival instinct comes to the fore as, you’ll not be surprised to hear, the hunter becomes the hunted.
I generally prefer my old-fashioned heroic adventures more tongue-in-cheek, but this – though with quite an arch voice to it at times – seems to go rather the other way in making them darker, more realistic, and not a little macho. The anti-hero’s self-reliance and gritty manhood is tested to the limit as he undergoes torture, pursuit and horrible enclosure, turning by turns philosophically introspective and near-feral. But what’s he done to get himself in this situation? On holiday in an unspecified European country, the big game hunter used to stalking beasts becomes fascinated by the idea of hunting the biggest beast. If this was The Avengers, he’d be the villain; in that series, a more wholesome but not entirely dissimilar fantasy of Britain, any hunter who’s serious about their ‘sport’ inevitably turns to human quarry, and our heroes rather frown on that sort of thing. Rogue Male plays with rather more moral shades. His quarry is not a defenceless victim he’s chasing down in bullying fun – instead, he gets himself into the position where he could kill a dictator (and in early 1939, with a ruthless secret police set after him, you can guess which one would have been the biggest). He tracks the man, and aims his hunting rifle through telescopic sights… Then he’s arrested just before he could shoot, but that raises two complex questions from the start. Would he have shot? He tells himself he was just play-acting the possibility merely to see if it could be done, but is that true? And, given the target, might you have wanted him to shoot? So, though it draws on stiff-upper-lipped adventure fiction (and rogue elephants, but household sensibilities forbid me from examining that angle), it anticipates The Day of the Jackal, with just as much tension but in many more shades of grey. And all the ‘trial assassination’ business, first capture and escape is in just today’s first episode, so his ‘big game hunter’ moment is pretty much just a prologue to the role-reversal of his becoming the quarry throughout the rest of the book. I seem to remember it goes on quite a bit (well, it is unabridged) as he’s pursued by the ruthless ‘Quive-Smith’ – the only significant character with a name, but I’m sure it’s not his own – and driven to earth, but as in many ways it’s much more a ‘mood’ piece than a ‘plot’ piece, I also remember that not seeming to matter very much. I suspect I’ll keep listening to the end the second time around too…
Oh well, time for a swipe, then, and though I didn’t stop shouting long enough to get any of his lines down, never fear, I’ve found another source with similar logic to quote instead. I thought The Power of Nightmares (Adam Curtis’ last polemical “documentary” series for BBC2, covering the neo-cons and Al-Qaeda) was rather good, and was looking forward to the heavily-trailed follow-up. I wasn’t expecting such an incoherent mess. When Tom Papworth’s Liberal Polemic took the first two episodes apart, I thought he was a little harsh. I’d found Mr Curtis’ first two episodes more of a mixed bag than Tom’s critique suggested, and could see decent points in what each of them had to say. As far as the third goes, though, it was the most absurd critique of freedom I’ve ever seen and I hope Tom tears it to pieces and stamps on them. In his impeccably intellectual way. Could this just be because last time Mr Curtis was having a go at political beliefs I despise, but this time he was dissing liberty (though rarely ‘Liberals’, as it happened, because we’d have mucked up his paper-thin thesis)? There’s probably a bit of that. I get less animated if someone else is grievously misrepresented, true, but in part because I don’t know their arguments so well. Mr Curtis clearly doesn’t know his own terribly well.
To go back a little, one problem with the ‘series’ was that the three episodes didn’t follow on from each other with any kind of logic and felt instead like separate programmes. This would have mattered less if he didn’t treat unconnected ‘facts’ as if they were proofs of each other, presenting us with an entirely false syllogism. Using misleading phrases like “We have shown…” to give the illusion of having established a link, when he’s done nothing of the kind, merely got my back up. ‘There are some bad things in the world,’ would have been his starting point. ‘I believe they’re all the fault of people being encouraged to make up their own minds about things instead of accepting the wise instructions of left-wing intellectuals, so I’m going to make a wisely left-wing and intellectual programme with lots of scary clips and music to make people go “ooh”. Oh, and some evidence if there is any, but knowing The Truth is more important than any bourgeois so-called “facts” that might get in the way of belief.’ At least if he’d been on Tedious Platitude For the Day like most evidence-free authoritarians who want their beliefs imposed on everyone else, he’d have been two hours and fifty-seven minutes shorter.
The first programme had, I thought, some fair points against practises in psychology and economics, and though it gave no notion of what he was actually in favour of, his revelations about Game Theory (satirised by Doctor Who as far back as 1979, if you’ve fallen for Mr Curtis’ ‘I’ve got a uniquely brilliant insight!’ shtick) or political groups that argue there’s no such thing as altruism, the public interest or public service, and that people can only act selfishly, all seemed at least intriguing. His second programme, dealing with the failure of central targets and ‘marketising’ seemed good in the round, shaky in the detail and highly questionable in his claims about what the philosophies behind it were, but I wasn’t prepared for just how self-contradictory the final piece would be. The biggest trap that Mr Curtis appeared to fall into was the notion that anyone who uses a particular word subscribes to exactly the same world-view as anyone else who uses it. When it comes to a ‘hurrah-word’ like “freedom” that everyone wishes to stake a claim on, basing your programme on the idea that all rhetoric around freedom reflects the same ideology goes beyond ‘foolish’ and into ‘absolutely bloody stupid’.
Isaiah Berlin was constantly referred to throughout – “negative liberty” was attacked at least once a minute – despite the fact that in a clip played of him within the first few minutes, he pointed out that one of the keys to freedom from being bossed around is that the state can’t therefore impose a utopian ideal into which you don’t fit. Like Mr Berlin, perhaps in part from having read his famous essays about concepts of liberty many years ago, I’m deeply suspicious of utopianism, and believe it leads to terrible things in the name of the ‘perfect’ ends justifying the means (my most recent piece about it is here, though as even for me it’s rather long, you might scroll down to the section headed ‘Free Will and Utopia’). I don’t claim to know best for everyone, because everyone’s idea of ‘best’ is different. Mr Curtis doesn’t think people should decide their ‘best’ for themselves, so he quotes all this without understanding a word of it. He says anyone going out to clobber other countries while using the rhetoric of “freedom” – even when they’re doing exactly what Isaiah Berlin warned against – is fulfilling Mr Berlin’s prescriptions. And he also claims that making sure people have freedom to find their own way of life leaves them with nothing to live for. What?! If you need the state to provide your aim in life, what’s the point in having one? Having the freedom to decide your own way of life is not a way of life in itself – it just makes sure that, when you make your own decisions on your own ideals, you don’t clobber everyone else’s ideals along the way.
The number of times Mr Curtis flatly contradicted his own argument made me wonder if, like the odd blog piece I write in a strop, he’d actually read what he’d written before publishing it. The Trap was very like a blog post - a post many, many times longer even than mine, but with lots of pictures and music to make it exciting and cover up that he wasn’t saying anything meaningful. It’s a relief these days to find someone even attempting to make a “documentary” on politics, so I’ll give points for that even when the result was such inept, ill-thought-out, sensationalist drivel. It’s just a shame that the producer didn’t say at any point, ‘Here, Adam, you say these things are connected, but you’ve not brought in any evidence for that,’ and that there’s no fourth programme in which people who know what they’re talking about – or even that don’t – can bung questions at Mr Curtis and show up just what nonsense he was talking. Because three weeks of unchallenged portentous polemic pretending to be the objective word of God was just nonsense.
To paraphrase last night’s edition, Mr Curtis claimed that because people whose rhetoric has a tenuous link to other people who’ve said ‘people should be able to make their own choices without the government pushing them around’ are going around pushing everyone around and making everyone’s choices for them, it proves that letting people make their own choices is a bad idea and we should go back to finding a grand vision, whatever it might be – any one will do, he didn’t say what – and in the name of that, we can then push people around and make their choices for them, for which they’ll thank us because they have something to believe in again (and, presumably, new ‘witches’ to burn who disagree). At the end, Mr Curtis’ inspiring call to arms appeared to be this: authoritarians use the name “freedom” in vain, so freedom has failed and we should give people something to believe in from the top down, because only the government telling them what to think will make them truly free. For the life of me, I can’t see the difference between the “freedom” he was proposing and the “freedom” he was criticising.
Update 27.03.07: The Trap’s concluding programme has inspired still more critical blog posts… Look out for Liberal England’s crisp note on Isaiah Berlin and, courtesy of Jonathan there, Not Saussure’s detailed analysis.
And another update on the 28th: Millennium has now trampled down all three episodes.
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Rogue Male
First, the dark side of Boys’ Own. I tuned in part-way through this story when it was last on BBC7 a year or two ago, and to my surprise I found it gripping. I suspect I listened initially because my favourite radio show of the 1980s – sadly not yet come to BBC7, nor to any commercial release, and my tapes are rather rickety – was Brogue Male, a terrific spoof of heroic British 1930s adventure tales starring Richard Johnson as dashing gentleman adventurer Sir Digby Spode, Royce Mills as his faithful friend Hubert Carstairs and, in especially large letters at the end, Stephen Greif as the villainous Count Lazlo Stroganoff. This absolutely fantastic but short-lived series evidently borrowed its name from Geoffrey Household’s 1939 novel, but at the time I’d never heard of it (and I’ve still not read it, and seen neither Fritz Lang’s nor Clive Donner’s film versions). After a couple of episodes of Rogue Male, though, I was listening to it on its own merits and not just thanks to Sir Digby.
The story is being broadcast from today in 15 half-hour episodes every weekday at 9.30 am, with repeats at 8.30 pm and 1.30 in the morning (I think I’ll give that one a miss), as well as the BBC7 website’s week-long ‘Listen Again’ function, so it’s not difficult to catch. What I think caught me about it is in part the tension of the thriller itself, but perhaps foremost Michael Jayston’s brilliantly sardonic reading style. Written in the first person, it’s ideal to be read, with Mr Jayston lending it a huge amount of character: he comes across as slightly dispassionate and distanced from events, but also as if he’s constantly taking you into his confidence. With so many episodes of such constant tension, it could have been disastrous if it had been read in an over-emotional style – with the unnamed, but far from ‘anonymous’ anti-hero undergoing gruesome torture and near death even from the first, if he had started off sounding on the edge, it’s difficult to know where he could gone from there. The story dares you to side with its protagonist, an affluent, conventionally amoral gentleman who actually has his own keen sense of morality, though as the story unfolds you feel how his honour and individualism both bind and distance him from his establishment background and politics (he claims none, though thinks he could easily have sat for an agricultural constituency in the South of England). I’m not instinctively on the side of a well-off member of the establishment with a misanthropic streak and whose fame lies in shooting animals for fun, but it worked remarkably well on me. Most of all, his survival instinct comes to the fore as, you’ll not be surprised to hear, the hunter becomes the hunted.
I generally prefer my old-fashioned heroic adventures more tongue-in-cheek, but this – though with quite an arch voice to it at times – seems to go rather the other way in making them darker, more realistic, and not a little macho. The anti-hero’s self-reliance and gritty manhood is tested to the limit as he undergoes torture, pursuit and horrible enclosure, turning by turns philosophically introspective and near-feral. But what’s he done to get himself in this situation? On holiday in an unspecified European country, the big game hunter used to stalking beasts becomes fascinated by the idea of hunting the biggest beast. If this was The Avengers, he’d be the villain; in that series, a more wholesome but not entirely dissimilar fantasy of Britain, any hunter who’s serious about their ‘sport’ inevitably turns to human quarry, and our heroes rather frown on that sort of thing. Rogue Male plays with rather more moral shades. His quarry is not a defenceless victim he’s chasing down in bullying fun – instead, he gets himself into the position where he could kill a dictator (and in early 1939, with a ruthless secret police set after him, you can guess which one would have been the biggest). He tracks the man, and aims his hunting rifle through telescopic sights… Then he’s arrested just before he could shoot, but that raises two complex questions from the start. Would he have shot? He tells himself he was just play-acting the possibility merely to see if it could be done, but is that true? And, given the target, might you have wanted him to shoot? So, though it draws on stiff-upper-lipped adventure fiction (and rogue elephants, but household sensibilities forbid me from examining that angle), it anticipates The Day of the Jackal, with just as much tension but in many more shades of grey. And all the ‘trial assassination’ business, first capture and escape is in just today’s first episode, so his ‘big game hunter’ moment is pretty much just a prologue to the role-reversal of his becoming the quarry throughout the rest of the book. I seem to remember it goes on quite a bit (well, it is unabridged) as he’s pursued by the ruthless ‘Quive-Smith’ – the only significant character with a name, but I’m sure it’s not his own – and driven to earth, but as in many ways it’s much more a ‘mood’ piece than a ‘plot’ piece, I also remember that not seeming to matter very much. I suspect I’ll keep listening to the end the second time around too…
The Trap: Whatever Happened To Our Dreams of a Political “Documentary” With a Brain?
Oh well, time for a swipe, then, and though I didn’t stop shouting long enough to get any of his lines down, never fear, I’ve found another source with similar logic to quote instead. I thought The Power of Nightmares (Adam Curtis’ last polemical “documentary” series for BBC2, covering the neo-cons and Al-Qaeda) was rather good, and was looking forward to the heavily-trailed follow-up. I wasn’t expecting such an incoherent mess. When Tom Papworth’s Liberal Polemic took the first two episodes apart, I thought he was a little harsh. I’d found Mr Curtis’ first two episodes more of a mixed bag than Tom’s critique suggested, and could see decent points in what each of them had to say. As far as the third goes, though, it was the most absurd critique of freedom I’ve ever seen and I hope Tom tears it to pieces and stamps on them. In his impeccably intellectual way. Could this just be because last time Mr Curtis was having a go at political beliefs I despise, but this time he was dissing liberty (though rarely ‘Liberals’, as it happened, because we’d have mucked up his paper-thin thesis)? There’s probably a bit of that. I get less animated if someone else is grievously misrepresented, true, but in part because I don’t know their arguments so well. Mr Curtis clearly doesn’t know his own terribly well.
To go back a little, one problem with the ‘series’ was that the three episodes didn’t follow on from each other with any kind of logic and felt instead like separate programmes. This would have mattered less if he didn’t treat unconnected ‘facts’ as if they were proofs of each other, presenting us with an entirely false syllogism. Using misleading phrases like “We have shown…” to give the illusion of having established a link, when he’s done nothing of the kind, merely got my back up. ‘There are some bad things in the world,’ would have been his starting point. ‘I believe they’re all the fault of people being encouraged to make up their own minds about things instead of accepting the wise instructions of left-wing intellectuals, so I’m going to make a wisely left-wing and intellectual programme with lots of scary clips and music to make people go “ooh”. Oh, and some evidence if there is any, but knowing The Truth is more important than any bourgeois so-called “facts” that might get in the way of belief.’ At least if he’d been on Tedious Platitude For the Day like most evidence-free authoritarians who want their beliefs imposed on everyone else, he’d have been two hours and fifty-seven minutes shorter.
The first programme had, I thought, some fair points against practises in psychology and economics, and though it gave no notion of what he was actually in favour of, his revelations about Game Theory (satirised by Doctor Who as far back as 1979, if you’ve fallen for Mr Curtis’ ‘I’ve got a uniquely brilliant insight!’ shtick) or political groups that argue there’s no such thing as altruism, the public interest or public service, and that people can only act selfishly, all seemed at least intriguing. His second programme, dealing with the failure of central targets and ‘marketising’ seemed good in the round, shaky in the detail and highly questionable in his claims about what the philosophies behind it were, but I wasn’t prepared for just how self-contradictory the final piece would be. The biggest trap that Mr Curtis appeared to fall into was the notion that anyone who uses a particular word subscribes to exactly the same world-view as anyone else who uses it. When it comes to a ‘hurrah-word’ like “freedom” that everyone wishes to stake a claim on, basing your programme on the idea that all rhetoric around freedom reflects the same ideology goes beyond ‘foolish’ and into ‘absolutely bloody stupid’.
“When I use a word,” Tony Blair said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”Mr Curtis appears to be the last credulous buffoon in the world who takes every word from Mr Blair at face value. In the Looking-Glass world of Mr Curtis, a Labour government with an unprecedented record of removing individual freedoms and grabbing control to the centre is proof that governments that are in favour of freedom don’t work. The thing is, while Mr Blair’s rhetoric may occasionally mention freedom – though usually just in international speeches – his philosophy and his policy record is entirely different, and most people with a brain would realise that someone hailing “freedom” who stamps down on it at every opportunity does not, in fact, believe in it, rather than taking it as evidence that all believers in freedom must turn to the dark side. Yes, Mr Blair’s tried to co-opt “freedom” into his ‘big tent’, but he’s tried to do the same for every political buzz-word. Back in 1997, that meant an awful lot of people heard what they wanted to hear. Ten years later, everyone has something a bit sturdier to go on. Mr Curtis, on the other hand, thinks that anyone who’s once said they believe in freedom – even if they’ve also professed to believe in a dozen contradictory things – is part of the same philosophical team. So, if you were watching last night, you’d have been told that people inspired by classical Liberals like Isaiah Berlin inevitably do the reverse of what he said, and so what he advocated becomes inseparable from shiftless authoritarians like Mr Blair, American neo-conservatives, ’60s European drop-out terrorists, Marxist revolutionaries in Africa, the Iranian theocratic revolution, the Khmer Rouge and George Michael, who all believe in exactly the same idea of freedom, and any failures for any of them are the fault of all. And of you and me, for liking the sound of “liberty”. If you think that’s an absurd caricature, it is; but by Mr Curtis, not of Mr Curtis. The only reference I made up there was George Michael. Yes, Mr Curtis admits that Mr Berlin argued positive liberty is dangerous, but claims that anyone proposing negative liberty enforces it by positive liberty and is therefore bad, so the solution is to have more nice positive liberty with which to inspire people (despite terror, Cambodia, Iran and Marxism, telling people what they should be inspired by is worth giving up the negative liberty of not killing them if they aren’t suitably inspired. I’ve never been sold on the idea that “negative liberty” is the only worthwhile sort, but another dose of Mr Curtis’ rubbish and I might convert). He repeated the terms constantly, but they may as well have been sheer noise for all the meaning he invested them with. When he railed against the way neo-conservatives reduce the idea of freedom to a very carefully circumscribed ‘economic freedom’ so that the state serves big business, telling people what to think and do for the advantage of big business, I could easily agree. When his woolly antidote was that the state should serve itself, and so tell people what to think and do for their own good, and that that would be lovely… Somehow, I didn’t find either option very attractive.
“The question is,” said Alex, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Tony Blair, “which is to be master – that’s all.”
Isaiah Berlin was constantly referred to throughout – “negative liberty” was attacked at least once a minute – despite the fact that in a clip played of him within the first few minutes, he pointed out that one of the keys to freedom from being bossed around is that the state can’t therefore impose a utopian ideal into which you don’t fit. Like Mr Berlin, perhaps in part from having read his famous essays about concepts of liberty many years ago, I’m deeply suspicious of utopianism, and believe it leads to terrible things in the name of the ‘perfect’ ends justifying the means (my most recent piece about it is here, though as even for me it’s rather long, you might scroll down to the section headed ‘Free Will and Utopia’). I don’t claim to know best for everyone, because everyone’s idea of ‘best’ is different. Mr Curtis doesn’t think people should decide their ‘best’ for themselves, so he quotes all this without understanding a word of it. He says anyone going out to clobber other countries while using the rhetoric of “freedom” – even when they’re doing exactly what Isaiah Berlin warned against – is fulfilling Mr Berlin’s prescriptions. And he also claims that making sure people have freedom to find their own way of life leaves them with nothing to live for. What?! If you need the state to provide your aim in life, what’s the point in having one? Having the freedom to decide your own way of life is not a way of life in itself – it just makes sure that, when you make your own decisions on your own ideals, you don’t clobber everyone else’s ideals along the way.
The number of times Mr Curtis flatly contradicted his own argument made me wonder if, like the odd blog piece I write in a strop, he’d actually read what he’d written before publishing it. The Trap was very like a blog post - a post many, many times longer even than mine, but with lots of pictures and music to make it exciting and cover up that he wasn’t saying anything meaningful. It’s a relief these days to find someone even attempting to make a “documentary” on politics, so I’ll give points for that even when the result was such inept, ill-thought-out, sensationalist drivel. It’s just a shame that the producer didn’t say at any point, ‘Here, Adam, you say these things are connected, but you’ve not brought in any evidence for that,’ and that there’s no fourth programme in which people who know what they’re talking about – or even that don’t – can bung questions at Mr Curtis and show up just what nonsense he was talking. Because three weeks of unchallenged portentous polemic pretending to be the objective word of God was just nonsense.
To paraphrase last night’s edition, Mr Curtis claimed that because people whose rhetoric has a tenuous link to other people who’ve said ‘people should be able to make their own choices without the government pushing them around’ are going around pushing everyone around and making everyone’s choices for them, it proves that letting people make their own choices is a bad idea and we should go back to finding a grand vision, whatever it might be – any one will do, he didn’t say what – and in the name of that, we can then push people around and make their choices for them, for which they’ll thank us because they have something to believe in again (and, presumably, new ‘witches’ to burn who disagree). At the end, Mr Curtis’ inspiring call to arms appeared to be this: authoritarians use the name “freedom” in vain, so freedom has failed and we should give people something to believe in from the top down, because only the government telling them what to think will make them truly free. For the life of me, I can’t see the difference between the “freedom” he was proposing and the “freedom” he was criticising.
“That’s a great deal to make one word mean,” Alice said in a thoughtful tone.Update: while I was writing this, Tom Papworth did indeed post his own piece on the final part of The Trap, followed by his concluding views on the series as a whole. Joe Otten also has a thoughtful piece. But neither of them shouted as loudly as I did: I can tell.
Update 27.03.07: The Trap’s concluding programme has inspired still more critical blog posts… Look out for Liberal England’s crisp note on Isaiah Berlin and, courtesy of Jonathan there, Not Saussure’s detailed analysis.
And another update on the 28th: Millennium has now trampled down all three episodes.
Labels: American Politics, British Politics, Digby Spode, Liberalism, Michael Jayston, Radio, Reviews, Utopia
