Love and Liberty

This week’s inspiring thought in my occasional series of Liberal moments is close to my heart: it is, of course, from Doctor Who. A confrontation between the Doctor and a much more dictatorial egomaniac, it’s taken from Episode Five of The Green Death, first broadcast forty-one years ago today. From the same story that featured Jeremy Thorpe as Prime Minister, this pits a monopolistic megacorporation, totalitarianism and pollution against the Doctor’s freedom, ecology and individualism. The argument crystallises in one especially memorable exchange that says benevolent authoritarianism is not enough if it means absolute ignorance and conformity. It’s about freedom:

“Doctor, believe me, we wish you no harm…”
“Ah, don’t worry, my dear feller. I’m having a whale of a time.”
“In the end, we all want the same thing; an ordered society, with everyone happy, well-fed…”
“Global Chemicals taking all the profits…”
“What’s best for Global Chemicals is best for the world – is best for you!”
“Such as a little touch of brain-washing.”
“Freedom from fear, freedom from pain…”
“Freedom from freedom!”

This 1973 story was co-written by Robert Sloman and then-producer Barry Letts, who it appears was rather pro-Liberal. The Doctor (Jon Pertwee) had spent a few years exiled to Earth in the near future, and was still popping back on occasion to help out his friends at UNIT; The Green Death has one of the slyer little suggestions about their stories being set a few years later than broadcast, as the phone is at one point handed to a Prime Minister called “Jeremy”. Unfortunately, the striking Liberal revival in the following year’s elections didn’t quite carry him that far, and the 1975-but-set-in-1980 story which suggested Mrs Thatcher as PM was altogether more on the button. Since then, actual Liberal politicians have mostly just had backward references, such as Mr Asquith springing one of the Doctor’s companions from Holloway or Mr Lloyd George drinking the Doctor under the table. A Liberal worldsview, on the other hand, has always been part of Doctor Who’s RNA. I argued that most comprehensively in my “How Doctor Who Made Me A Liberal”, but it’s summed up with particular clarity here.

The Doctor’s been captured and is being interrogated by the managing director of Global Chemicals, himself only a cog in the company machine (and that taken to extremes). For greater efficiency, productivity and profit, the company’s BOSS has decided to take over the world. Just as its workforce are brainwashed into servitude, a signal will be transmitted from the sinister multinational’s subsidiaries all across the world to bring the entire human race under its control in a literal ‘command economy’. So far, so familiar. But as you’ll have seen from the key quotation above, this particular mind-control story has thought about its message and argues it in unambiguously Liberal terms.

All Power Is Dangerous – Especially If It’s ‘For Your Own Good’

My favourite contribution to Mark Pack’s “What do the Liberal Democrats Believe?” is on the basic conviction that unites social and economic Liberals:

“All POWER (be it government, business or other people) can both PROTECT and THREATEN LIBERTY.

“Economic and Social Liberals put different emphasis on the BEST DEFENCES and the BIGGEST BULLIES.”

The Green Death’s Liberal analysis is dead-on that same line. It chooses as its main target a monopolistic mega-corporation – but it’s just as applicable to totalitarian government that would exert the same degree of power over individuals. Indeed, part of its point is that any body that exerts total power can be exactly as dangerous and as illiberal as any other. When the Doctor carelessly resists the brainwashing, the political applicability comes as thick and fast as Global Chemicals’ poisonous pollution. First, the machine grumbles that:

“The subject is not responding to therapy.”

“Therapy” is exactly the “pretty euphemism” for what political opponents in the Eastern Bloc of the time were often subjected to – and this story would have exactly the same philosophical underpinning were the villains, say, Evil Space Communists with the same plan. No doubt many of those who praise The Green Death for being ‘left-wing’ because it’s ‘anti-big business’ would have criticised it as ‘right-wing propaganda’ had the allegory apparently pointed against big government instead, but that’s missing the point: it’s not a left-wing or right-wing critique of the ‘wrong’ sort of big power, but a Liberal critique of any sort of Big Power.

The crux of the argument above isn’t simply that ‘turning the entire human race into zombies is bad’, though. I’ll admit that even most of my political opponents would agree that’s a bit much. It’s that what Global Chemicals wants to impose is in many ways tempting. It’s simply taking to a sci-fi extreme the ‘perfectly reasonable’ exercise of power to ‘help’, and that’s an argument that this scene ruthlessly exposes and explodes:

“You’re not trying to tell me this is all for my own good?”

Which, of course, is exactly the point. Pay attention to the characters and their motivations, and no-one here is simply perfect or simply evil: the Doctor’s attitudes aren’t always appealing, with his own insufferable prejudices showing through, and the villains are at times endearing and well-meaning. From their point of view, it is all ‘for people’s own good’. Which is one of the political phrases that always sets alarm bells ringing for me, along with “we all want the same thing”. Who could object to an end to pain and hunger? To universal happiness? Well, what if my idea of happiness is different to yours? Liberals don’t say ‘We know best’, because everyone’s best is different.

This goes right back to my first Liberal Monday choice, when I observed how over the course of a century the most-quoted Liberal creed had thankfully moved from utilitarianism to Mill-and-Taylor-flavoured social Liberalism. I said there that utilitarianism and utopia had a superficial attraction, but gave me the creeps. Here’s the difference in a nutshell: today’s Liberals prize freedom from conformity for every individual to live their own life; Global Chemicals offers a perfect utilitarian future of absolute happiness, absolute equality and absolute mindlessness, forever. Even Liberals need to guard against the price some would too eagerly pay ‘for your own good’.

I was only a year old forty-one years ago, but as a boy the novelisation of this story was one of my favourites, and one of the books I credit with making me a green Liberal. And yet this most cuttingly Liberal of all scenes, as blatantly applicable to big states as big business, wasn’t even in the book. I didn’t see it until repeats nearly twenty years later, when it instantly struck an unforgettable chord with me. So why wasn’t it in the book? Well, the story was novelised by Malcolm Hulke, one of Target’s most talented writers, the one most likely to chop out scenes from the script and add his own that fleshed out the characters – so that’s probably it – but also the range’s card-carrying Communist Party member, so it’s just possible that like me he saw the Doctor objecting to an utopian regime promising freedom from material want at the price of “Freedom from freedom” for exactly what it was…

Or you may simply remember this as The One With The Maggots.

Labels: Books, Doctor Who, Environment, Ideas, Jon Pertwee, Liberal Mondays, Liberalism, The Golden Dozen, The Green Death, Utilitarianism, Utopia, What the Lib Dems Stand For, Why Is Doctor Who Brilliant?

Sometimes you find a Liberal quotation in a book, a speech or a politician you know. Sometimes you find a Liberal quotation in a Dictionary of Liberal Quotations when your a-bit-too-occasional-lately series needs kick-starting. And sometimes you find a Liberal quotation in a cinema and scrabble for a bit of paper while trying not to grind too much popcorn into your pocket. That’s how to go from Lord Dahrendorf to Simon Pegg on a pub crawl, finding they’ve got more in common than you might think. Spoilers for the movie follow later…

“It is our basic human right to be fuck-ups!”

My previous Liberal Monday put together three quotations from respected academic, politician and peer Ralf Dahrendorf into a critique of utopia, a theme close to my heart. On an in-between Friday, Richard and I went to see the new Simon Pegg-Edgar Wright comedy drama The World’s End. I’d loved most of their previous work; I grew up reading and still love the sort of John Wyndham / Nicholas Fisk / John Christopher-esque ‘cosy catastrophe’ that I’d heard the movie was to open up into. And, obviously, I love Cornettos. What I was less expecting was for The World’s End also to morph into ‘Ralf Dahrendorf: The Movie’ (spoiler: may not contain actual Dahrendorfs. Other movie spoilers will be less prominent than my latest move to spoil the concept of utopia).



The World’s End is a less approachable film than, say, Hot Fuzz, and will probably make less money: it might make the audience ask difficult questions of itself, the paradox shared by many ‘cosy catastrophe’ novels that, at heart, they make you uncomfortable. But as far as I’m concerned, that’s another excellent reason for you to go and see it anyway. It’s been called a film about growing up, but it’s less dreary and more complex than that – with themes about consequences, and choices, and that while it may be better for you to grow up and better yourself and that the opportunity to do so is important, when you have all that imposed on you it’s really not worth it. And by the end it’s as explicitly anti-utopian film as any. Which is exactly where it chimes with Liberalism, those Ralf Dahrendorf quotes, and my sudden need to dig out a piece of paper and a pen in front of the big screen.

I left sixth-form in 1990 to a similar soundtrack to the lead characters in the film’s opening flashback, which struck the first of several eerie notes with me (though the flashbacks on grainy film are the sort of flashbacks people having grown up to turn 16-18 at that time would imagine, if it was really a flashback to 1990 it’d be on cheap video. But I digress. The digression in this paragraph is merely a device to separate the spoiler at the end. Honest). Some of you may know that drinking isn’t one of my many vices, so my only pub crawl was a year or three later, in the unlikely circumstances of being stranded in London after a business meeting (due to IRA bombs shutting down London Transport). This involved a friend who I worked with at the time going round a long assortment of pubs he wanted to check out while wearing identical pink ties (Tony was the straight one, and camper), with him sinking pints and me on fruit juices and the occasional absurd liqueur (I’d have thought it rude only to ask for tap water). The point of this anecdote is partly to express the movie-appropriate nostalgia that I’d like to get in touch with him, and the also movie-appropriate worry that he’d give me Nick Frost-face these days. But the main point of the anecdote is that, after a business meeting in Kensington, our crawl wound round Chelsea and Fulham and, inevitably, centred on The World’s End.

Spoilers. Liberal Bits. Ready?



The big reveal towards the end of the film is that the reason our heroes’ home town has been repopulated with very slightly higher-achieving Stepford people is that benevolent but disapproving aliens have decided that Earth is the least civilised planet in the galaxy (with a disapproving Polly Toynbee-esque chart to prove it). They’ve come to give us the opportunity to stop being such a blight on local spiral arm property prices, and to serve Alien Spitting-image Behaviour Orders on us if we don’t co-operate with the opportunity.

Yes – it’s New Labour From Space.

“Face it! We are the human race and we don’t like being told what to do!”

It turns out that we don’t like being forced to conform even if conformity can be shown to make things better against recognised galactic standards – with charts – though I suspect the percentage of those refusing to conform shows a slightly optimistic view of human nature. Less optimistically but chiming right in with my own prejudices, the attempt to impose a top-down utopia and sulky withdrawal causes massively more problems than the fuck-ups it was intended to ‘solve’.

The very end of the coda also displays in hearteningly simple form the difference between Liberals and UKIP: a fuck off to enforced utopia; but emphatically not a fuck off to aliens.


[Additional joke critique: Richard rightly points out that “Fuc-King Gary” would have been funnier, while I couldn’t believe that they didn’t knock over Chekhov’s roundabout sign.]

Labels: Books, Comedy, Film, Ideas, John Christopher, John Wyndham, Liberal Mondays, Liberalism, Nicholas Fisk, Personal, Reviews, Simon Pegg, The End of the World, The World's End, Utopia

Earlier in the year, I started an occasional series of Liberal quotations that made me think. Perhaps I’ve not been thinking enough, but I haven’t published any for a while. So today I opened Duncan Brack’s 1999 Dictionary of Liberal Quotations at random and found myself nodding at a few thoughts from Ralf Dahrendorf, German, British and European Liberal thinker and politician. Here are three that seem to me to go together:

“Liberty remains a response to the fact that we live in a world of uncertainty.”

“Utopia is always illiberal, because it leaves no room for error or correction.”

“There is no state of affairs in which Liberalism has been completely realised. Liberalism is forever process, the process by which human beings explore new opportunities for more people.”

These three quotations from different times and places – a book in 1975, a paper to the Liberal International Congress in 1988, and one the Dictionary couldn’t pin down – but of all the quotations selected from his works these leapt out at me as part of the same train of thought. Perhaps because I’ve read so many dystopias and remembered that they’re the same thing as utopias (so many people having taken the satire literally), perhaps because my heroes are messy and resist filing, perhaps because I suspect or hope I’d always be the one asking the awkward questions in the ‘perfect society’ and spoiling the party, the idea of utopia instinctively fills me with dread.

These three lines from Ralf Dahrendorf appealed to me because they sum up why utopia’s deadly and why Liberalism is a better answer – because it doesn’t pretend to have all the answers and put aside people who don’t fit into ‘perfection’, and because it’s not so rigid that the whole thing shatters when reality gives it a twist. Freedom is messy and awkward, but it’s both more human and more practical: trying to force people to fit your utopian ideal hurts real people and is never going to work anyway, so you’re better off leaving whatever system you have with room for people to grow into it.

Chiming so much with me, you’ll not be surprised that I’ve written along similar lines before: you can read here my critique of “the end justifies the means”. Like Liberals rejecting the left-right axis for a Liberal-Authoritarian one, I argue that utopians get it wrong even in assuming there’s a difference between ends and means: the ‘end-point’ of utopia is mythical and only means they trample the real ‘ends’ in politics, every unique individual, along the way.



I understand that Duncan Brack and Mark Pack are at work on a new edition of the Dictionary of Liberal Quotations; I’d like to get round to making lots of suggestions, but suspect I won’t (I can see lethargy beating vanity for proposing my own lines). But you might…

Labels: Ideas, Liberal Mondays, Liberalism, The Golden Dozen, Utopia

A sea of acid; faltering speeches; bizarre rules; glassy-eyed pretty young things; aggressive men in rubber; realising that designing utopia may not be such a good idea after all… But if you’re not going to Liberal Democrat Conference in Bournemouth (or if you need to get away from it in your hotel room), Monday sees Doctor Who: The Keys of Marinus released on DVD. An early black and white tale starring top Doctor William Hartnell and the alien Voord, it’s the only Who story with an actor from Citizen Kane. Just don’t expect Citizen Kane (more very cheap Flash Gordon).

That Golden Moment

“They’re treating me well enough. Have you found the Doctor yet?”
“No – there isn’t a sight or sound of him anywhere.”
“We must find him, Barbara, we must. The laws in this country are a mockery.”
“I quite agree with you, my boy!”

With each of the six episodes of this 1964 story very different to each other, easily the best sequence for me comes about eight minutes into easily the best episode – part two, The Velvet Web – with an unusual amount of video editing and Kafkaesque psychological horror for the time… But Barbara’s waking nightmare has already been chosen as this story’s “Golden Moment” by Jonathan Morris in DWM, so I thought I’d pick something completely different. Fortunately, one sprung instantly to mind that never fails to make me smile. Sentence of Death, part five of the story, opens in a different nightmare – being accused of something you didn’t do, with no way to prove your innocence and all the rules changed. Accused of murder, even unflappable Ian blurts out that “this business is beginning to run away from me!” When Barbara, Susan and two friends arrive to see him – threatened with a year in the desert glass factories if they disturb the court – he’s visibly depressed, shaking his head from side to side as if punch-drunk. Who can save him now?

Then, six minutes into the episode, and after a fortnight away, the Doctor unexpectedly reappears.

There’s instantly a babble of happy voices and smiles as the friends mob him (“I’m just glad we’re together again,” gushes his granddaughter), and I always feel that reactions in living rooms around the land must have been the same. Certainly, mine’s always like that. For the first time in the series, the lead has taken a fortnight off – necessary, not just with ailing health but with making over forty episodes a year at the time – and, though I love the team of Ian and Barbara, the middle episodes sag noticeably without William Hartnell to spice them up. The relief for the viewer at the star coming back is given beautiful mutual reinforcement among the characters, as just as they reach the darkest point of the story, the man with the brilliant brain is back, and instantly striking a pose, hands on lapels, to take charge of Ian’s defence.

Despite hanging on a locked room mystery with such an obvious alternative solution that Susan almost hangs a lamp on it without anyone ever quite mentioning it (see if you can spot what I mean), much of the following courtroom drama is fun, from the non-speaking judge who nods so enthusiastically you fear his fabulous hat will fall off, to the Doctor’s first arranging a stay of execution while he divides his friends into library forces and detectives, to his bluffing flourish that flushes out one of the conspirators – hollow-cheeked, shifty young Martin Cort* – into an ill-fated confession at the side of his wife, the magnificently slinky and dubious Fiona Walker. Our elephant ought to be very keen on the city in which this takes place, except that the scripts suggest they can’t spell “Millenium”… But, above all, this is a golden moment because the Doctor’s back, and everyone – on both sides of the TV screen – suddenly knows things are going to be all right.

DVD Tasting

Something Else To Look Out For

Doctor Who started with a run of superb stories. An Unearthly Child, The Daleks and The Edge of Destruction are all extraordinary television – all available in The Beginning DVD boxed set – with Marco Polo something of an epic to follow. The show’s sixth story, The Aztecs, is one of the best in the programme’s forty-six years, a stunning historical tragedy. But the fifth Doctor Who story, The Keys of Marinus, is the first that feels merely ordinary (if you can call an attempt to produce a series of alien globe-trotting spectacles on 2 and 6 ‘ordinary’). As if the money and the energy have run out, and the early pressure to strive for greatness has worn off. It’s not actually bad, but whereas every previous story had had high ambitions, whether or not you agreed with them or thought them fulfilled, the ambition here is… To churn out six weeks of telly.

After a smash success writing The Daleks, Terry Nation here settles into a comfortable formula of plot devices he’ll use for ever after, a Flash Gordon serial-inspired travelogue ‘narrative’ that substitutes movement for twists or characterisation, and suspiciously familiar names (“Marinus” for a planet of seas, “Arbitan” for an ultimate judge, and, of course, “Just a minute – what’s your name – Tarron?” the first of many characters named after himself). Yet despite all that, this is a hugely important story, introducing many ideas to Doctor Who that will become mainstays of the series (and be done much better) later: the superior second episode has the series’ first signs of the Gothic; it also introduces mind control and possession, like a cheesy prototype of The Macra Terror’s delusional utopia; and the series’ first out-and-out ‘quest’, to find the eponymous Keys, is also the first to suggest that, like The Key to Time, you may not be all that keen on the object of your quest and that, like The Keeper of Traken, taking away people’s free will ‘for their own good’ may not have the best of consequences, though that moral’s rather shoehorned in at the end.

William Hartnell as the Doctor, teamed with granddaughter Susan and teachers Ian and Barbara, may well be my favourite of all the TARDIS crews, but they’re not seen entirely at their best here. Babs and Susan take it in turns to be typecast as ‘hysterical females’ (Barbara, in particular, is usually far stronger than this – though, in an otherwise insipid episode, she’s subjected to a deeply disturbing threat), while the writing out of the Doctor for two weeks is done in an especially clumsy way, his skipping ahead to find the final Key logically splitting their forces into equal teams of, er, five and one, as well as volunteering to be separated from Susan, usually the one thing he would never do. Still, Billy’s visibly refreshed on his return, having been so fagged out in the first episode that he fluffs his lines in several entertaining ways, most famously

“If you were wearing your shoes, you could have given her hers. Hmm!”

The direction is more listless than the script, but the sets at least try gamely. The one substantial extra – that is, on top of the usual full commentary and text notes – is on the sets, with the highly talented (if famously grumpy) designer explaining why writing a script with an entirely new country in every episode on no money may not have been Terry Nation’s most practical idea. He still did wonders on occasion, ranging from an amusingly cost-cutting idol through some rather intriguingly expressionist crags to the Key machine “the Conscience of Marinus” itself, which looks stunning. And, as I’ve suggested, the whole thing might be better off without its two shoddy middle episodes, the look included: The Screaming Jungle in particular is Doctor Who’s first unmistakably dumb and disappointing episode, where plot, incident and design all falter, without even the Doctor to distract us.

Many people know this story for its monsters, the Voord (immortalised in the phrase “Yartek, Leader of the alien Voord,” part of what passes for the Nicene Creed of fans of a certain age), yet we know surprisingly little about them. In theory after the same eponymous Keys as our questing heroes, they only appear in the first and last episodes, and we never find out so much as whether a Voord is a “man” “wearing a suit” (in early dialogue) or alien “creatures” (later), or even whether their name should or shouldn’t have an “s” on the end in plural. You’d think, though, if their fearsome appearance – remarkably similar to that of 2000AD’s Nemesis the Warlock, making me wonder if Kevin O’Neill was terrified at the age of 10 or 11 by a dark, horned creature with a curving bit of ‘spine’ – really was just a form of wetsuit that the one that hilariously ‘disguises’ itself would take its helmet off… Despite being promoted as ‘the next Daleks’, though (with the B-Movie disembodied brains in one episode actually much closer in concept), they never really took off. You can, at least, find them in The Fishmen of Kandalinga, an infamous story in The Dr Who Annual 1966 – sadly, unlike his splendid recording of The Lair of Zarbi Supremo on The Web Planet DVD, there’s no reading of this one by William Russell (Ian). As to why not, I suspect budget cutbacks, but you might also try reading the title out loud. In other exciting comic-related goodness, one of the legendary Grant Morrison’s early works was Colin Baker Doctor Who strip The World Shapers, now available as a graphic novel. It saw the return of the Voord in one of the barmiest Who stories ever drawn.

The Keys of Marinus is released on DVD on Monday 21st September. YouTube has the official BBC DVD trailer, and an unofficial one in the style of the Twenty-first Century “Next Time…” teasers, both rather jolly. A friend has just reminded me that a few seconds of the story were missing from the VHS release but have now been restored for DVD, so I’m particularly looking forward to seeing those for the first time. If I can spot them.


*Martin Cort in fact plays three different roles in The Keys of Marinus, but this one’s the most memorable – acting, rather than just menacing from inside a mask.

Martin is currently directing The Unimportant History of Britain at the Lion and Unicorn Theatre, Kentish Town, London, without being dressed as a Voord. It runs there until October 11th.

Labels: Comics, Doctor Who, DVD, DVD Tasters, Liberal Democrat Conferences, Reviews, Utopia, William Hartnell

Have you caught any of BBC Four’s “This is Scotland” season? Because some of it makes you think, ‘No, it really isn’t’. A rare showing of Culloden was impressive, only a few weeks after I praised it, but as for last weekend’s outing for Brigadoon… It’s a textbook example of a story which, when someone tells it to you in a few lines, really captures your imagination – but which, when you actually sit through it, makes a terrible movie. An enchanted old village appearing from the mist just once a century… What could possibly go wrong? Go on, guess.

Perhaps it’s that I lack patience with musical theatre – I know, dock my gay points – except in rare cases, and that though Almost Like Being In Love is a good tune, the rest of the songs here are syrupy and go on for ever. Perhaps it’s the distracting accents. Now, every American producer knows that there are only three ‘English’ accents: upper class (evil, which permits intelligence, or inbred and very dim); Cockerney (lovable, poor and stupid); and Scotch / Oirish, which are of course the same (rustic, poor, quaint and stupid). In this quaint little story set in the quaint little Scottish Highlands, this realistic range of accents is on full display – while the heroes are, of course, American (think of it like An American Werewolf In London, except that they start singing instead of getting bitten. It’s horrific).

Welcome To Brigadoon – You’ll Never Leave

My main problem with the film, though, is that a mythic return to the Eighteenth Century is very much more attractive as a dimly imagined myth, and that when you’re invited to step into the past, you’d much rather it stayed in the past. While the village is supposed to have made a deal with God, it seems more like hell on Earth.

It goes like this. Back in 1754 – two centuries to the day before the story is set – Brigadoon was put under attack by witches, and prayed for deliverance. So they were snatched out of time to escape destruction, and the village now drifts back into reality for just one day every hundred years. So far, so intriguing. Unfortunately, in the film producers’ quest to expand an intriguing one-line idea to as long and turgid a movie as possible, they then strip as much magic as possible out of the story: audiences will swallow an enchanted village that lives one day a century without batting an eyelid, they reckon, but we couldn’t possibly ask them to believe in witches.

But if the big threat in the movie isn’t the return of the witches in a new sorcerous assault, or if it’s implied God didn’t save Brigadoon from an attack by real witches at all, what could the God-fearing people of the village have yanked themselves out of history’s progress to save themselves from?

Ah.

Well, there’s a clue in tourist Jeff’s line on witches, “Oh, we have ’em; we just pronounce it differently,” but the village’s raison d’être is made quite explicit by the schoolteacher: “Oh, I know there’s no such thing,” he says of witches – just women they didn’t approve of. Yes, Brigadoon is social conservatism gone mad. The terrifying ‘attack’ and threat of ‘destruction’ was not physical but their unelected leaders’ view of moral, and the religious maniacs cried out in their surety that they couldn’t win by persuasion, ‘Stop the world – we want to get off!’

The biggest surprise to modern audiences, more even than the jawdropping misogyny and wandering accents, is that the tourists are American and the scary intolerant control freaks living in another century British. Nowadays, surely the film would have to have visitors from this side of the Atlantic discovering a mysterious village in some landlocked part of the United States that vanished from reality for fear the gays are getting married.

Clearly, some of the filmmakers realised that this was a monstrously scary form of social conservatism even for 1954, because it’s deeply schizophrenic about its sympathies. It’s a huge romance, with one of our modern American souls falling in love with the place and one of its people – and who couldn’t fall for Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse dancing around each other, and hope that love conquers all?

Well, his friend Jeff, for one, who as played by Van Johnson is a breath of urban, cynical sanity, with lines like “I’m a strange man, and you’re a mighty strange woman,” and “Is it formal, or shall I wear my Napoleon hat?” And then you discover that – jerking against the chain of the romance, the script and the enchanted hellhole – some of the young people are desperate to escape (and no, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to have people forgetting / missing the outside world so much after two nights for them, but I’ll let that pass), and it turns out that no-one can ever leave, or the whole spell will collapse. You can’t even do an ‘exchange’. Gee, thanks. How much more repressive can this set-up get? I’m glad you asked, because of course one of the poor desperate prisoners makes a break for it, and there’s a hunt. Which, inevitably, requires a killing, even if it’s accidental (and again, I sense the scriptwriter who’s in love with this conservative utopia wresting the script back from the one who isn’t for a moment to stop the village dictators being so blatantly the villains by deliberate murder).

The idea at the heart of Brigadoon is a powerful one, borrowed from a German folk tale and borrowed by many other stories in turn, even a secret location protected by a “Brigadoon Circuit” in one of the finest Doctor Who novels – though in Robin of Sherwood’s Cromm Cruac and Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) : A Man of Substance, both splendid pieces of television, each village has more blatantly made a deal with a devil – but not only is the film dreadfully dull, its social and sexual politics are diabolical.


On the other hand, this is just the film you want to watch to make you appreciate the go-ahead, all mod cons, funky charms of Bournemouth, should anyone be heading there soon.

Labels: Bigotry, Film, Liberal Democrat Conferences, Music, Religion, Reviews, Robin Hood, Scotland, Utopia

A 1982 Peter Davison tale of jungle weirdness, Doctor Who: Kinda is still the source of ferocious arguments (just wait ’til it’s out on DVD and they explode across the special features). Is this a brilliant piece of art, or does it just have the most rubbish ‘snake’ ever broadcast? Is it a Buddhist metaphor, or borrowed from Ursula le Guin? Is it mind-expanding or mind-deadening, philosophically intriguing or just New Age socialism? I answer some of these questions in a highly partial and occasionally spoilertastic way…

“You will agree to being me… This side of madness or the other.”

Few Doctor Who stories have raised such wild passions for and against them as Kinda. Yes, I was one of those ten-year-olds who helped vote it bottom of Peter Davison’s first season for DWM’s poll back in 1982, largely through a vivid last memory of ‘that snake’; at the other end of the spectrum, some fans have announced that anyone who disagrees with their assertion that this is the best Who story ever is an emotional Nazi. I shall leave it to your own judgement any irony involved in people who use “Nazi” to decry those whose precise tastes do not absolutely accord to theirs…

I started a re-evaluation of Kinda through my wobbly audio copy, in those days before video. The old wise woman’s “Wheel turns” speech was quite hypnotic, and so I gradually found myself thinking Kinda was rather interesting – despite one of Uncle Terrance’s least lively novelisations trying to convince me otherwise [like the director, his prosaic prose isn’t in sympathy with the weird wonder of the story]. Nowadays, with repeated video viewings, I’ll admit that I can’t see how I ever thought the story worse than Four to Doomsday or Time-Flight, and I’ve got a lot closer to the adoring end of the spectrum than the embarrassed end I used to sit at. But will I go all the way? Well, I don’t think so, though I’ll waver between perhaps eight and nine out of ten. Let me explain.

On the whole, Kinda is interesting and refreshing, one of the Who stories with the most ideas, married to one of the Who stories that looks most like a pop video. The Dark Places of the Inside are fantastically imagined and realised, and the ‘time’ sequence is hardly less impressive. Unquestionably, the subversive ‘menaces’ of the trees, the “primitives,” Hindle, Dukkha and The Dark Places of the Inside or wherever, all combine tantalisingly to disrupt expectations and are carried off brilliantly.

In the story’s second half, however, and especially after the main hallucinatory effects sequences end, the action-based director and thoughtful script start to work against each other (notably from the blown cliffhanger to Part Three on), particularly as the author’s ideas become less successful. The fourth episode is definitely the weakest, despite quite a strong scene with Hindle’s toy madness and Panna’s consciousness passing on to demonstrate that no-one actually dies in the story (albeit the three ones who went missing…?). Studio floors, technobabble and ‘that snake’ summing up a glib and dull resolution – not to mention interminable Adric / Tegan bitching scenes – make it a curiously uninventive and unimpressive ending. This story is probably best watched as a whole, rather than an episodic let-down.

I’ve recently taken to watching Who again on an episodic basis. Yes, that’s right – as the BBC gods intended! As you might expect, with all stories written that way, most of them work much better that way. And it’s become clear that a key reason so many of us disliked Kinda on first watching – other than the shame of (all together now) ‘that snake’ at school the next day – was that this story didn’t. For a few stories where not all the episodes work, the resolution is the killer. Watch a rather good story with a poorer Part Four (Paradise Towers or The Creature From the Pit spring to mind to tease you with, or perhaps The Leisure Hive if you want one that fewer people hate so much), and it’s plain that only watching ‘the bad bit’ in one sitting leaves you with a nasty taste in your mouth that wouldn’t be so strong if you’d watched it as a ‘movie’. Watch Kinda episodically, rather than all of a bundle as video encourages you to, and it’s striking that it wasn’t just the increasing sophistication of the viewing fans that has led to Kinda’s startling turnaround since its original broadcast. It was the ‘poor Part Four’ effect at work in a peculiarly devastating way when we first watched it.

Oddly, watching Kinda episodically, I’m also struck that despite every review mentioning how the story centres on Janet Fielding, it isn’t a ‘Tegan story’ at all – more of an Adric story. He has quite a lot to do throughout the whole story (though achieving little, at least he only pretends to side with the villain this time; clearly Hindle responds to another boy to play with), while her strong role in the first two parts vanishes almost completely later on. She is superb when oppressed and then possessed by Dukkha (though an effective ‘rape’ scene apparently unlocking her sensuality is an unpleasantly disturbing message), but her appearance in Part Three is just that. Aris merely steps over her unconscious body at one point, and she neither moves nor speaks in a ‘blink and you’ll miss her’ cameo. As all the companions are buried way down in the cast list to start with, it seems particularly unfair on Matthew Waterhouse that he still gets later (and shared) billing than Janet Fielding for Part Three, and that Sarah Sutton gets no billing at all for the middle episodes.

My other reason for recently re-evaluating Kinda is that I’ve now read the book that’s said to be one of its main sources, Ursula Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest. Now, this isn’t a story that can simply be explained by reference to any one of the mountain of references it makes, whether Judaeo-Christian Garden of Eden symbolism, Buddhist analogies or Vietnam-era sci-fi. However, as the Buddhism’s been written about in great detail, I found comparisons with Le Guin’s book intriguing, and they helped crystallise why I don’t think Kinda is quite as clever as many take it to be – or quite as enjoyable.

Despite some clear similarities in the setup, including a sophisticated sexual division of labour in the “primitives,” “idiot” / “insane” colonial military leavened by a sympathetic anthropologist, and dreaming, sophisticated “primitives” (as well as blatant nods like “Planet S14” in Kinda for “World 41” in the book, Aris’ captive brother for Selver’s enslaved and murdered wife, or “ILF” – “Intelligent Life Form” – for “hilf” – “High Intelligence Life Form”), the story itself has remarkably little in common with The Word For World is Forest. Quite funny that the villain of the book is “Captain Davidson,” though, as it’s of course the Doctor who enables the snake to enter Eden! Kinda is far less successful in getting across an idea of the local people as sophisticated – with the dubious exception of Panna and the double helix jewellery, it’s merely told, rather than shown. How do they have access to molecular biology? On the face of it, nicking the necklaces from an alien spaceship crashed in the jungle would be more logical an explanation. Shouldn’t we have had some shared dreaming, or something to put the Box of Jhana in context? Instead, these “primitives” really are telepathic, which even the Mara correctly notes is a very boring way to communicate.

Instead of evidence of intelligent thought, the Kinda (surely everyone in this story bar the Doctor, Todd and Panna are just that – ‘children’?) follow Aris like sheep, and flee after a ludicrous attack on the Dome using a TSS-style ‘wicker man’ (instead, in Le Guin’s book Selver’s attacks on the Terrans use their own bombs against them, as well as showing the lethal effectiveness of ‘primitive’ weapons. The Kinda merely appear stupid). Of course, the whole effect is engineered by the Mara to bring about their misery, but instead of a powerful, co-dependent, co-defending (“the dreaming of an unshared mind”) group intelligence, they merely combine into a herd. This is especially obvious in contrast with Aris and Panna / Karuna, who are intelligent and resourceful because they are individuals. The extremely collectivist ideological slant of the story is objectionable both because it isn’t to my personal taste anyway, and because the author’s clear wish to impose it on us has not led him to consider whether it works – in the context of the story, it doesn’t, and it fails even to make an attractive case. It seems not only philosophically disagreeable, but artistically unsuccessful.

The message that progress is horrid and only leads to destruction, and that people are much better off as happy sheep, is despairingly poor. Even the ‘dangers of progress and exploration’ message of The Green Death, for example (which I rather like), is leavened by the saving grace of individuality, while even that other anti-questioning Buddhist parable, Planet of the Spiders, notices the danger of not having a mind of your own as well as of unrestrained ego. Again unlike The Word For World is Forest, which shows the destructive effect of ‘progress’ on the Athshean culture, Kinda is a zero-sum game – there has been no effect on the tribe by the end; again, intelligent life is changed by experience, while the Kinda appear like drones.

Perhaps Christopher Bailey should have read the author’s Introductions to The Word for World is Forest. Ursula Le Guin talks of art as the pursuit of liberty, “escapist” from reality into the freedom of imagination. She also warns of the power an artist has over their characters leaching into desire for the power to influence other people.

“The desire for power, in the sense of power over others, is what pulls most people off the path of the pursuit of liberty,”

she warns, and notes that when artists believe they can do good to other people, they forget about liberty and start to preach. Bailey has failed to heed her warning, and has been “inextricably confusing ideas with opinions”.

Another of my Summer holiday repeat season, originally written for the now-junked site Outpost Gallifrey in 2000 or 2001, I quite enjoyed that one, despite being more pompous than usual (these days I flatter myself I hide it better). As you can tell, I’d recently read The Word for World is Forest, and wanted to explore that ‘source’ for the story rather than go along with the fan meme that the story was all about Buddhism, despite both being mentioned in the famously po-faced and impenetrable media studies textbook Doctor Who – The Unfolding Text which studied Kinda at length a quarter of a century ago.

‘Arthouse’ Vs ‘Macho’ Peter

Unfortunately, Kinda isn’t out on DVD yet, so it’s not as accessible as some to make your own judgements over (though a second-hand VHS is probably cheap enough). I’ll bet it’ll be paired with its even better sequel Snakedance when it is released, but in the meantime, what I didn’t say above is that it may be the most striking example of one of the two warring styles found throughout Peter Davison’s time as the Doctor. While most Doctor Who seasons have a relatively consistent tone within them, Peter’s stories divide sharply between what I think of as ‘arthouse’ and ‘macho’ – wild imagery and gently elegiac tales versus the sort that, as Peter cackles on his commentaries, have more on-screen deaths than Rambo or The Terminator (and those stories that are neither ‘arthouse’ nor ‘macho’ are mostly just forgettable). Like I suspect most fans, I’m convinced that Peter’s best story is his final one, The Caves of Androzani, but less usually I reckon one of the reasons is that it finally unites those two styles, bringing vicious characters and extreme violence to the screen but with evocative dialogue, a deranged love story and dreamlike music and camerawork. That combination, as much as its extraordinary quality, makes it the ideal Peter Davison Who story. There are some, though, who champion Kinda, the ultimate arthouse Doctor Who – and I think I’ve explained why for me it’s good, but not that good. It is, however, a hugely important story, marking out a new direction in which the series could go, helping pull it away from the nothing-but-macho approach of the incoming script editor at the time – where Kinda’s ‘possession with added hippy weird shit’ Vietnam-flavoured existential crisis (directly following two other existential crisis stories) sometimes makes you wonder if the author was on the same drugs as Philip K Dick, Eric Saward appears to be mainlining nothing but testosterone.

Kinda has a lot going for it as an experience. There’s brilliant imagery, and the psychological horror of Tegan in the Dark Places of the Inside uses ’80s video effects like almost no other story (though, as Not the Nine O’Clock News might say, nice video, shame about the song). There’s a remarkable cast – Richard Todd (a major film star actively subverting leading roles he actually took, such as Sanders of the River), Nerys Hughes, Simon Rouse – with superb roles, and Peter Davison finds his feet as the Doctor by stepping aside for much of this story in a way that it’s difficult to imagine Tom Baker doing. Most criticism I’ve read of Kinda focuses on the design, but though the jungle’s not much cop and the giant snake at the climax is every bit as funny as you can imagine, it’s the ideas that let Kinda down for me – both that it runs out of them by the end, and that some of them aren’t very good in the first place. A lot of it’s compelling, but there’s something off-putting at the heart of it. The sledgehammer-unsubtle moral that it’s better to be passive and pastoral than ask questions, develop speech or even be an individual at all seems more Pol Pot than Doctor Who. The series is all about thinking for yourself, about finding new ideas and new places; this pits itself solidly against both, so it’s ironic that it’s often called one of Doctor Who’s most ‘intellectual’ stories it preaches so earnestly against the intellect.

Labels: Books, Doctor Who, Ideas, In-Depth Doctor Who, Outpost Gallifrey Reprints, Peter Davison, Reviews, Utopia

Today is 25 Messidor, or Bastille Day in the old calendar, and one of the week’s most gripping pieces of TV was Saturday’s part-documentary, part-drama on the Reign of Terror. Spend your evening watching Terror! Robespierre and the French Revolution on BBC iPlayer, but have lots of chocolate to hand. Or, if you want a bit of politics but the lessons to learn for today from mass-murdering tyrannies are a bit heavy for a weekday evening, why not explode homeopathy with Mitchell and Webb? Or just have some nourishing Triffids with the Supersizers. I may have mixed two dishes there.

“Men who loved humanity so much, they felt entitled to exterminate the human beings who stood in its way.”

Terror! Robespierre and the French Revolution followed Robespierre’s time directing the Committee of Public Safety – and yes, that English translation of the French is very reminiscent of the English translation of the Russian Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, or the English translation of whatever the Home Secretary’s coming out with this week about having to sacrifice our liberties, our justice system, huge wads of our cash and the odd few people that we know are baddies for some undefined element of security. Unless the government doesn’t like you, or you don’t pay enough, or there’s a mistake in the system, or all your personal details are accidentally left on a train, in any of which cases you had it coming to you and don’t deserve to feel secure.

As you may have guessed, this programme (available through the week on iPlayer, and repeated tomorrow night at 1.30 am, signed on BBC1) focused on the end of the Eighteenth Century but cast a long shadow, particularly into totalitarians of the Twentieth. Simon Schama was there to be aghast at the moral horror of those who’d sacrifice so many for the sake of “higher truth”; for balance, a communist historian vividly put the case for the Terror. Disturbing, but important – because it’s much easier to ignore people who believe that you can do anything to anyone, as long as things will be fine in the future, “when humanity is perfected,” when they’re safely a couple of hundred years in the past than when they think it’s a good idea to do it to you. I knew a fair bit about the French Revolution (the historical instruction of Doctor Who), but realised watching this that I was mainly familiar with what happened in Paris; accounts of the near-razing of Lyons shocked me. As did the revelation from Robespierre’s private correspondence that even he realised it would never end: the man who almost personified the idea that the ends justify the means told himself and his inner circle of the time when all would be perfect and they could stop. The time will be “never”. Then why did you carry on, you obsessive butcher?!

And, once again, the reason why Liberals don’t believe in utopias is that every individual is important; if you see them only as means to some future perfection, you can discard anyone you like. If you see any system as necessarily imperfect, but doing its best along the way because everyone matters, you realise that the ends and the means are inseparable. It was finding out that Robespierre, the ultimate in starry-eyed fanatics, didn’t even believe the ends were attainable that really appalled. Then what’s it for?

Mitchell and Webb and the Homeopathic Quacks

Fortunately, Mitchell and Webb are on hand, the best in rather a good recent line-up of Thursday night comedy. Yes, I’m quite enjoying Psychoville (though last week’s seemed very like a tribute night to both Alfred Hitchcock and the League of Gentlemen, to the extent that it was mildly surprising to find the corpse wasn’t played by Jeremy Dyson), and even laughed at Krod Mandoon. Last week’s was all right, with a pointed attack on self-styled ‘dieticians’ (“I’m going to go online now and get you another doctorate”), another on Billie Piper’s main post-Who vehicle and an interview with Brian Paddick about police community support officers, but they don’t seem to be spacing out those deliberate “hits” and “misses” as well as they might. The previous week’s outing, the fourth in the series, was far better. I laughed at a deconstruction of online kissing – hmm, doesn’t seem so good when I type it – and celebrity cookery that was almost exactly like my old boss’ way of computer training (a bunch of trainees he’d bludgeoned at high speed once gave me a box of chocolates when I taught them half as much in twice the time but so they could actually learn the skills, because I was “much nicer than that scary man”).

The real highlights, though, were the sketches inspired by last year’s season of Doctor Who – the unfortunate Hennimore (a one-joke series of sketches which I quite enjoy, though they’re not a patch on last year’s bawdy 1970s hospital) facing off against the same giant bee CGI, or not, and a Pompeii soothsayer with a great punchline – and those laying into the credulous on all sides. Trying to lay off the chocolate at the moment, the advert for crisps made out of cress was dead-on:

“Cressps. Once you cressp, you just can’t splesp.”
“…Oh, Christ, they’re horrid!”

Did you see last night’s Supersizers, by the way? The Supersizers Eat… The 1920s seemed to miss the point for the first time, with fabulous music, fabulous lesbians… Really, almost everything about their depiction of the ’20s was fabulous: Sue’s fabulous fringe, fabulous frocks, fabulous fonts, even, but just not much fabulous food. Instead, fads. Far too many diets. I mentioned last week’s on the French Revolution yesterday, which – before the guillotine came down on the cooking – looked far tastier. If I hadn’t already given in to chocolate cravings and crashed out of my diet in spectacular fashion yesterday, I’d have plunged my head into that already empty box of chocs on principle. I wish they’d repeat BBC4’s original Edwardian Supersize Me, in effect the pilot for it all where almost everything bar the pressed duck looked rather enticing, as it’s the only one we didn’t record…

But back to Mitchell and Webb. A very testy vicar trying to pass off an atheist revelation was quite sharp, almost as if irrational one-offs shouldn’t be entirely convincing, but the best of it was undoubtedly the serious, high-energy drama set in Homeopathic A&E. Stephen Fry’s brilliant one-liner slashed homeopathy a couple of weeks ago, but, sorry Stephen, this was even better. And, gosh, who’d have thought treating homeopathy as if it was proper medicine would make it look like an expensive dangerous lunatic absurdity?

“I just can’t stand losing them. I don’t know… Sometimes I think that a trace solution of deadly nightshade or a statistically negligible amount of arsenic just – isn’t enough.”
“That’s crazy talk, Simon. OK, so you kill the odd patient with cancer or heart disease, or bronchitis, flu, chicken pox or measles, but – when someone comes in with a vague sense of unease, or a touch of the nerves, or even just more money than sense, you’ll be there for them with a bottle of basically just water in one hand and a huge invoice in the other.”

Stephen Tall picks out that outstanding sketch, though the whole programme’s still available on the iPlayer until the end of the series. Go for the whole thing, and that one’s also got another round of the post-apocalyptic game show, which I’m afraid I’m finding far too funny. Perhaps I’ve just watched too many horrible dystopian dramas of plague, nuclear armageddon, hideous rampaging giant plants… Some of them even written by people other than Terry Nation.

Triffids, Newfangle and Quack Schools

Speaking of which (and three quick daytime TV links coming up in a rush here), BBC4 is currently repeating perhaps the best of these, The Day of the Triffids, on Sunday nights. Survivors is impressive in each of its incarnations, but I can’t help feeling that it’s lacking something when it omits the poison-slapping killer vegetation and sticks a bit of The Archers into the monsterless void. This 1981 adaptation, easily the best among the various TV, radio and film versions of John Wyndham’s novel, has Triffids which are an extraordinary piece of design: not just scarily plausible rooted, rattling or striking, but even when they’re chopped in half – you see that sort of stringy vegetable breakage you get when you bite a piece of celery. Those strands that get caught in your teeth. How do they do that? And John Duttine was one of the first guys on TV I didn’t admit to myself but knew at several levels was rather hot.

In other news, I discovered an inspired Radio 4 comedy, Newfangle, too late into its run to get round to recommending it, but its prehistoric sit-com covered evolution, war and religion superbly from what I heard of it, and should it be repeated or released on CD, look out for it; it’s stolen by Maureen Lipman and, particularly, the incredibly talented Russell Tovey as the early hominid with all the ideas but not necessarily the wisdom to implement them to his best advantage. With soon-to-disappear Doctor Who website Outpost Gallifrey (current subject of my Summer holiday repeat season) usually known as “OG,” the meaning the series gives to the word “og” is particularly entertaining for Who fans. And so appropriate, as the site is shortly to og off.

And finally, though that poking of the credulous from one end of the human story is no longer available to listen to, you can still read Ministry of Truth’s attack on the ludicrous superstitious rubbish infesting our education system that the Conservative education spokesperson is lauding and that the Labour Government is paying our money towards to inflict on children. Good grief.

Labels: Comedy, Education, European Politics, Food, History, Quackery, Reviews, Stupid Ideas, The Golden Dozen, Triffids, Utopia

Gosh. The Sarah Jane Smith Adventures’ opening Invasion of the Bane and Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane… Big Finish’s Circular Time, 100 and Immortal Beloved… The Pirate Loop’s enthralling read… And marvellously interweaved TV Doctor Who: vampirism; transformations; bad, bad angels; David Tennant suffering brilliantly; Gridlock’s Dance of the Macra*; Utopia / The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords (the Master’s awakening making the year’s most gripping quarter-hour); and Paul Cornell’s beautiful, small-scale, essential story…

Human Nature / The Family of Blood

“But we need the Doctor.”
“And what am I, then? Nothing? I’m just a story.”

Can 1913’s attitudes, institutions and individuals deal with love and war? The Doctor’s human self doesn’t want his other life; wild-eyed Son-of-Mine wants to steal it and the show for super, super fun; and while Daleks now have no problem with stairs, John Smith does.

“Have you enjoyed it, Doctor? Being human? Has it taught you wonderful things? Are you better, richer, wiser, hmm? Then let’s see you answer this – which one of them do you want us to kill? Maid or matron? Your friend, or your lover… Your choice!”

Two forty-five-minute episodes make one story to get teary over, and – it’s wonderful. There are three DVD releases: a vanilla DVD along with Blink; in a box set of the whole 2007 season, complete with extras (though still mysteriously without John Smith’s anguished “I am not the Doctor” that was in all the trailers); and in Autumn 2009, paired respectively with 42 and Blink, each with magazines as part of the newly-launched Doctor Who DVD Files. You can buy the Doctor’s watch and toy scarecrows, too, while the original 1995 book on which the TV story was based is available for free as an eBook with notes from Paul Cornell.


*The piece of music most associated with this year is the terrific theme first used on the season’s trailer, its first appearance in a story for the blissful Gridlock. It opens 2007’s Original Television Soundtrack CD under the official title of All the Strange, Strange Creatures, but to us it’ll always be ‘Dance of the Macra’.

Labels: Big Finish, Books, David Tennant, Doctor Who, DVD, History, Music, Reviews, Sarah Jane Smith, The Master, Toys, Utopia, Why Is Doctor Who Brilliant?

There’s the first of Gareth Roberts’ signature Douglas Adams-style Tom, Romana and K9 novels, then a darker Tom in the twisted Managra. Sylv’s Doctor has the funny, postmodern, disturbing Head Games and, from Andy Lane’s Original Sin, future police companions blond, heroic Chris Cwej and grumpy Xhosa aristocrat Roz Forrester. And it’s a fantastic year for Paul Cornell, with stand-out novel Human Nature, sublime short story The Trials of Tara and Cornelltoppingday’s refreshing The Discontinuity Guide. But Ben Aaronovitch still pips him…

Doctor Who: The New Adventures – The Also People

“When is a lightning bolt not a lightning bolt?”

The other best New Adventure breezes through extraordinary prose, imagination, bread, techno-utopia, African legends, comedy, moral theology, drinks and very aggressive spaceships. The Doctor, Benny and Chris each have perfect roles, but it’s Roz’s noir murder mystery that captivates. And there’s a price to pay…

“‘In that case,’ said Bernice, ‘I’ll have an exaggerated sexual innuendo with a dash of patriot’s spirit and extra mushrooms. Roz?’
“‘I’ll have the same,’ said Roz. ‘But with an umbrella in it.’
“‘Coming right up,’ said the table.”

Once again, this is one you’ll have to track down second-hand to read, and you really should. And e-mail the BBC, too. Come on, BBC website – please could you dust off your ‘Classic Series’ website and add this to the eBooks, eh? Particularly as we’ve got three copies between us, yet all are peculiarly susceptible to their pages falling out, which is a bind.


Today – returning to the real year for a moment – is the one hundred and first anniversary of William Hartnell’s birth. Cheers, Billy, for starting it all so brilliantly, and isn’t it marvellous that last Saturday’s second-largest audience of the day was for a programme that said, in detail and very firmly, how wonderful you were? And quite right too. In fact, everything people said about each of the Doctors was praise; a bit like someone writing about how brilliant Doctor Who is, really.

Labels: Books, Doctor Who, Film Noir, New Adventures, Professor Bernice Summerfield, Reviews, Sylvester McCoy, Tom Baker, Utopia, Why Is Doctor Who Brilliant?, William Hartnell

The Doctor’s taking on mighty enemies: Remembrance of the Daleks is brilliantly made and intelligently scripted, from the pre-titles to the flying Daleks; The Greatest Show in the Galaxy mixes scary clowns and ancient powers; both have alarmingly large explosions. In shops, Doctor Who videos start affordable releases. And one night, the Doctor just turns up and topples an empire…

The Happiness Patrol

“Why don’t you do it, then? Look me in the eye? Pull the trigger – end my life?”
“No…”
“Why not?”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know.”
“No, you don’t, do you… Throw away your gun.”

An impeccably liberal parable in which state-dictated happiness is no happiness at all – the dictator may seem like Mrs Thatcher, but her policies are sheer New Labour. Plus, her executioner’s a giant killer sweet, and there’s a wonderful moment with a foot and an umbrella.


There’s no DVD as yet (sometime in the next four years), but a second-hand search can track down the novelisation and the VHS.

You might also like to read Will’s The Sound of Empires Toppling on the many different targets of the satire here.

Labels: British Politics, Daleks, Doctor Who, Liberalism, Reviews, Sylvester McCoy, Utopia, Why Is Doctor Who Brilliant?

The ultimate in Who ‘concept albums’ reaches its climax in themes of decay and change; K9 leaves for the show’s first spin-off; BBC2 showcases The Five Faces of Doctor Who; and the comic strip brings urban decay without happy endings in End of the Line. On screen we see the extraordinary vistas of Warriors’ Gate, and Tom Baker handing over to Peter Davison in three stories across two years that all form one three-act tragedy, inexplicably not titled The Master’s Doctor Plan:

The Keeper of Traken / Logopolis / Castrovalva

“It’s the end. But the moment has been prepared for.”

An old and a new Doctor and an old and a new Master clash across time and space in a continuing story that’s first beautiful, then doom-laden, then intricate and personal. The threat telescopes in from the Universe itself to the Doctor’s most hearts-rending regeneration.


The three stories / one big story have been released as an excellent DVD box set, still inexplicably not titled The Master’s Doctor Plan; you should look for New Beginnings instead, packed with extras such as bitchy commentaries, enlightening documentaries and, my particular favourite, some lovely music that you can play on its own track. Alternatively, in the usual second-hand way, they were released separately on VHS and as three separate novels (of which Christopher H Bidmead’s Logopolis and Castrovalva are particularly worth seeking out), while Castrovalva alone had a set of thrilling View-Master slides.

Labels: Doctor Who, DVD, Music, New Beginnings, Peter Davison, Reviews, Sarah Jane Smith, The Master, Tom Baker, Utopia, Why Is Doctor Who Brilliant?

My sexy, charismatic, wise (well, after a few shorts, anyway) friend Mr Costigan Quist writes today of the Labour Government’s latest puritanical sallies back into the progressive-conservative don’t-do-what-you-want-it’s-not-good-for-you brigades of a century ago. Occasional drinking is, they suggest, exactly on a par with helpless drug addiction, and it’s just as harmful for your child to see you with a glass of wine in your hand once a week as it is a glass syringe once an hour. Is it bollocks. Good timing, though, with debates raging on how libertarian Liberals should be, and at the seventy-fifth anniversary of prohibition’s scrapping.

If you saunter over to Mr Quist’s Himmelgarten Café this morning for a tipple, then, you’ll find something rather hard to swallow: Costigan thoroughly fisks a report for the Department for Children, Schools and Families (shortly to be renamed the Department for All-Purpose Reasons to Boss You About) that takes a pathological approach to any drinking at all, attacking any views other than their own in increasingly hysterical terms.

Labour – The Party That Likes To Say ‘Don’t Do That’

New Labour was born with a streak of bossiness. I remember back in 1995 calling Mr Blair a “Social and Christian Democrat” and predicting that, as they’d given up on socialist pretensions to muck about with the economy, their controlling instincts would now turn to bossing people about in their personal lives. For several years, this tendency fought with what, in retrospect, now look like a few more liberal instincts – though the moralising forbidders were almost always on top. These days, as they’re trying to rediscover the joy of ordering the economy about (but not actually sure what to do with it), most of the Labour Government’s day-to-day initiatives remain an ever-increasingly shrill and ambitious wish-list of control over people’s everyday lives and choices, even when everyone involved is consenting, simply because they think a couple of people in government know better than 60-odd million other people I could mention if I tripped over another discarded Labour Government data stick in the street.

The Labour Government often tries to hide its bossiness, whether as a health measure or a ‘crackdown’ (because those are always bound to be good), and while I used to think they were just pathetically desperate to cuddle the Daily Mail (a ‘disgust reaction’ is of course a very bad reason to oppose anything in politics but, well, Eeewww), after more than a decade it’s quite obvious that they mean it. Mr Brown sincerely believes that anyone not in (Labour Government-approved) work is a moral degenerate and so naturally punishes the old, the sick, the parents or the increasing army of those who can’t find jobs after he’s trashed the economy; many of his underlings betray similarly fanatical zealotry against many ways in which people consentingly enjoy themselves, but try to bring in harshly bossy legislation in stages and recruit armies of form-fillers and curtain-twitchers, so they don’t have to defend their outright prohibitionist instincts.

We won’t actually completely ban smoking, say the Labour Government… But we know it’ll be good for you if we stop you doing it in as many particular places as we can think of, even if everyone there consents. We won’t actually completely ban prostitution, say the Labour Government… But we know it’ll be good for you if we conflate utterly different statistics to justify making it virtually illegal for any man to pay for sex with a woman (because all prostitutes are women and all clients are men, at least in Labour Government Ministers’ reality-detached minds)… We won’t actually completely ban alcohol, say the Labour Government… But we know it’ll be good for you if we found ways to manage it slice by salami slice. And so on.

Liberals Say “Fuck Off To the Daily Mail”

The fact that many of the newly invented ‘crimes’ that Labour use the law to crusade against as gross moral turpitude are introduced in an incremental fashion so that each stage can be spun as reasonable, or that many of them are only indulged in by a minority – or that only a minority will admit to them – and that they can whip up tabloid hysteria against Nasty Things (Except On Our Pages) means that Liberal politicians are too hesitant to oppose them with the resounding “Fuck right off!” that they deserve. It’s sadly true that the Liberal Democrats have a sizeable minority of ‘ban nasty things for people’s own good’ mentality, but certainly much more unfortunately true that a large body of Liberal Democrats have no interest in banning things, say live and let live, but aren’t willing to stick their necks out for something that isn’t very important, doesn’t affect many people, and is very unpopular anyway.

I’ve said for a long time now, and feel much more free to say out now I’m no longer on the Federal Policy Committee, that the Liberal Democrats should announce a presumption against any new bans on anything, and make a much bigger noise each time the Labour Government gets bossy. I know we do it on occasion, and sometimes very well, including making a start on what nonsenses we’d repeal in a Freedom Law, but it’s far from an across-the-board line. It’s certainly never a campaigning issue, except on rare occasions where we can say it’s about money – such as ID cards – or doing something nasty to ‘nice’ people – such as holding the DNA of innocent people and kids because, hell, they’re bound to be guilty eventually. People ought to know, instinctively, that the Liberal Democrats are against people being bossed about, and for people being able to do what they want as long as they don’t harm others, whether people are nice or nasty. At the moment, I doubt a lot of even our elected representatives know that, and I’d be hard-put to point out solid policies to make it clear (when we were all writing the 2001 Manifesto, for example, it was fairly straightforward to come up with a ‘Green Action’ point on every page, but there were big arguments on coming up with even the most anodyne points to fill equivalent freedom boxes – partly because our policies were so threadbare on freedom directly, and partly because people disagreed with delivering it).

One example of the party’s occasionally mind-boggling timidity that remains close to my heart was when, some years ago, I wrote a letter to a newspaper expressing my frustration and disbelief at the media hagiography of Tony Martin. I pointed out that calling him a “hero” for shooting an unarmed man who was running away in the back was not a definition of “hero” I would be comfortable ever teaching a child, and that just because he was found sufficiently mentally disturbed that he wasn’t legally a murderer wouldn’t have stopped what he did being a murder if he’d been in full possession of his faculties. I signed myself as Vice-Chair of the Liberal Democrat Federal Policy Committee, which indeed I was. I was called into Cowley Street and read the riot act, and told in no uncertain times that I was not to mention I was Vice-Chair of the Policy Committee if I wanted to say anything so wildly contentious, and that people had been ringing up and threatening to resign their memberships because of me (and to think a decade earlier that was only happening because I wanted to legalise drugs and abolish the Queen, rather than say something really radical like ‘murder is bad’). I know, I know, I’m against bans and all that, but – on the one hand this, on the other hand that – I do draw the line at murder, which I know makes me a dangerous Liberal to many insane frothing right-wing bigots, as long as it’s the wrong kind of murder. As I’ve said so often before, the law should focus on whether actions are right or wrong and what harm is done by them, not on making moral judgments about whether people are nice people or nasty people.

Liberals must stand up against the Labour Government / Daily Mail axis of bossiness. The Liberal Democrats should shout that we will stop government meddling in things that are nobody’s business but your own. That it’s government’s place to stop bullying, not to be the biggest bully of the lot. That the government and that hysterical, reactionary rags do not know best for you; that you know what’s best for you, because everyone’s best is different. We should state as a policy principle that people can do whatever they like, as long as they don’t hurt others, and as long as they give their informed consent. So, naturally, all sorts of things should have to wait until you’re an adult and can make an informed decision – but it’s not the job of one set of adults with power to order all the adults in the country to conform to their whims. The very idea of ‘victimless crime’ should be an abhorrence: if there’s no victim, there shouldn’t be a sodding crime. And rather than running piecemeal to paper over each of the Labour Government’s insane bits of bossiness, depending on what time of day it is and what our own spokesperson’s whim is, we should leave people in no doubt what our presumption is.

Years ago, I suggested the slogan “Liberal Democrats: the party that says sex is all right”; I came up with it again last week during a lively debate on expressing what the Liberal Democrats stand for in a sentence. I then suggested, again slightly tongue-in-cheek but still getting the point over better than most of the others, “Liberal Democrats. For people and things the Daily Mail doesn’t like” or “For government by the Daily Mail, vote for the other two. To tell the Daily Mail to f*** off, vote Lib Dem.” It may not cover everything but, perhaps tellingly, people seemed much more energised by that than by my (completely ignored) attempt to put ‘freedom to live your own life’ into on-the-doorstep language.

Because Prohibition Went So Well Last Time

Of course, politicians who claim to be progressives but who are in fact deeply socially conservative have been here before, always under the rallying cry of ‘We will improve you, because we know best for you’. Most infamously, a huge coalition of ‘progressives’ and social conservatives, with plenty of religion – though, as ever, they arranged both for people they didn’t like to be victimised and for the law to have a socking great get-out for religion itself, just like modern churches’ vicious bigotry and discrimination while wailing that anyone who hurts their feet when they kick them is persecuting them – and ‘we know what’s best for working people’ stirred in for good measure, managed to get prohibition of alcohol into the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

It was a disaster of epic proportions.

Last Friday, then, was the seventy-fifth anniversary of the repeal of prohibition through yet another amendment to the US Constitution, after all the people who charged into it were forced shame-facedly to admit that it had been utterly counter-productive. Those amendments are incredibly hard to deliver, but the fact that prohibition incredibly made it to the heart of US federal law tells you a lot about how bans can work. The letter of them passes because, although a large minority of people may be criminalised, and the majority may well not give a damn, moralising political and media hysteria can bully so many people into silence that opposition is too intimidated to stop it. But then the ban is a disaster in practice, because otherwise law-abiding people find ways round it – which means a jackpot for gangsters, no quality control, and that such a patently absurd law brings the whole of the Rule of Law into disrepute. Just because you can browbeat people into acquiescence, that’s not a good basis for law (and note that I’m not even going into one about how the law shouldn’t be used by genuine majorities to bash minorities, or I’d be here all day).

Prohibition is the criminals’ best friend. And the more popular the thing that’s prohibited is, the better. Governments can get away with banning small, little-practiced activities that they have no business banning; but if they ban something that a large section of the population does, prohibition is shown up as the massive absurdity that it is. Let me count just a few of the ways. From the government side, they have to expend massive extra law enforcement resources, at exactly the same time as people lose faith in a crazy law and the government loses its tax revenues, too. If the argument for banning something was that it’s associated with health problems, then that’s a disaster, too. Doing something illegal means people are far less likely to seek medical advice. Doing something illegal that most people know to be relatively harmless means that they’re much less likely to take seriously government warnings about something that may be much more harmful. And, while legal substances or activities can be subject to government quality control and health and safety inspection, the more illegal it is, the more slipshod and dangerous it can be with impunity. And, best of all, prohibition takes something that would be practised with a degree of openness and safety and gives every penny of the money to crooks who have it in their interests to keep it hidden and have very little interest in safety. Prohibition gets ordinary, law-abiding people into contact with crooks, undermines respect for the law, stops them being safe, and lets international and local gangsters all laugh all the way to the bank. It’s the biggest boost for crime on the entire planet.

Still, it’s a good job that we all learnt our lessons from the United States seventy-five years ago and that, say, no drugs less harmful and addictive than alcohol are massive money-spinners now for international crime.

Oh.

In Which Alex Meanders Down Memory Lane, Surprisingly Without the Aid of Getting Off His Face

And, at last, back to the drinks table where I started. Though I’ll drink a lot more of the non-alcoholic stuff to fuel a colossal series of raids on the buffet, I’m happy to have a glass of champagne at a wedding, wine at a do, or embarrass friends hideously by asking for a chocolate liqueur instead of something butch in a bar… But, those aside, I rarely drink. I never have, despite worrying my parents as a child when a report came back to them from a Sunday School class in which all the kids were asked what their favourite food and drink were: I answered “wine and cheese,” despite not particularly liking cheese and not being in any position to tell whether I liked wine. The odd thing is, when the other kids were saying things like chocolate, chips, burgers or beans on toast (all of which I still prefer to wine or cheese to this day, admittedly), I was the only one who was impeccably Biblical – King David had cheese, you know, and he never did anything dodgy, did he (not that was mentioned in Sunday School, anyway), and the Bible’s tanked up with wine from end to end. But, no, I was the one who got it in the neck. I suspect it wasn’t about the cheese. Thank goodness they were strict Baptists rather than Methodists, or they’d have chucked me out many years earlier than they actually did. So why this particular eccentricity? Well, because I was reading Doctor Who and the Day of the Daleks, in which the Doctor binges on both at taxpayers’ expense and hypocritically has a go at a leading diplomat for keeping a well-stocked larder, as he empties it. So, with the Doctor a more vivid role model to me even than that bloke who arranged to have the husband of the woman he fancied cut to pieces or that bloke who turns non-alcoholic party beverages into highly intoxicating ones, each of whom Sunday School tried to persuade me was better, it was only natural that I should testify out of allegiance rather than taste. If I’d been five or so years older and seen the story on TV, of course, I might have seen the two lead characters and been put off by their whine and cheesiness.

I suspect I never got into the habit of drinking much in part because I once helped ‘serve’ drinks at my Dad’s office party, sometime before the age of ten, was fascinated by all the buttons to push, pushed them (being an experimentative child) and made myself very ill. It’ll also be because I didn’t like the taste of much of it when all my friends were throwing surreptitious parties in their parents’ absence, and was sufficiently non-conformist that I didn’t see the point in either pretending to enjoy it or in ‘acquiring’ the taste. Oh, and because I was gay and – difficult as it is to believe now – was wary enough of betraying that secret that I didn’t want to lose control. If they’d done alcopops back then and I’d had a boyfriend (sniff), maybe I’d have done more than experimented with getting drunk a couple of times and not thinking much of it.

Hmm, something I’ve not thought about for about eighteen years: when I was at Sixth Form, I’m sure I went away for the weekend with some sort of temperance society. I don’t remember much of it, except that it was pretty countryside, and I viewed it very much as weekend away with a friend of mine, with all the temperance propaganda washing straight over me. It certainly didn’t turn my friend Tom into a raging campaigner: I’m fairly sure he only got the non-alcoholic freebie because it came through the religious studies people, and he was their mate. It absolutely wasn’t because he was a total abstainer. He picked me to come along partly as a mate and partly because I tended not to drink and could therefore attend the freebie with a straighter face than he could, and possibly act as cover if he sidled off to the pub. I often found myself in that position: because I couldn’t be arsed about drinking, friends would get me to go down the offy and buy them whatever they wanted. It wasn’t that I looked older, particularly, but that I didn’t care, so I didn’t give off those waves of teenage desperation. Well, not about booze, anyway.

I did once land a friend in trouble when being the presentable, non-drinking one; he’d been knocking it back at a church youth social (yes, all right, two different churches every Sunday and Catholic comps meant masses of religion in my misspent youth), so I was prodded forward in the early hours as a demonstration of sobriety to impress the ferocious aunt he was staying with while he lurked biliously behind me. “Hello!” I cried cheerily. “This is your early warning make-up call.” And just because I tripped over my words ever so slightly, she wouldn’t believe I was sober. Life can be so unfair to teenagers. On the other hand, she looked terribly disappointed when she cruelly cooked a massive fry-up for us in the morning, and I brightly asked for seconds. I like fry-ups. Her nephew couldn’t manage his, for some reason…

At this stage, it would of course undermine Mr Quist’s case as a moderate drinker were I to mention I was at his stag do, so I’ll stop there.

Labels: British Politics, Drugs, FPC, History, Jon Pertwee, Labour, Liberal Democrats, Liberalism, Meddling In Things That Are Nobody's Business But Your Own, Personal, Religion, Sex, Stupid Ideas, Utopia

Labels: Doctor Who, The Master, Toys, Utopia

Labels: Doctor Who, The Master, Toys, Utopia

…In which someone styling himself a Christian cleric devises a warped scheme to pick favourites and plunge England into a different century. But don’t worry – this villain’s rewriting of history is less demented than the Archbishop of Canterbury’s plan to turn the clock back, and you’ll find last week’s Doctor Who DVD release infinitely more entertaining than watching Rowan Williams. Set in 1066 (when the Church had a monopoly on reading and writing rather than just an Archbishop pretending they do), the centre of the story is a fabulous face-off between two Carry On stars, William Hartnell and Peter Butterworth. Oh, and skip to the end of this for a much less detailed set of previews of more of this year’s Doctor Who DVDs!

“So that’s it! You’re a time meddler – no wonder you wanted to get rid of me! …You know as well as I do the golden rule of space and time travelling. Never, never interfere with the course of history.”
“And who says so? Doctor, it’s more fun my way!”

The Doctor’s certain the TARDIS has landed in Northumbria sometime around the Eleventh Century – so how has someone been able to mislay a Twentieth-Century wristwatch, and why does the monks’ chant drifting down from the local monastery alter speed like a recording? This is the first story with perhaps Doctor Who’s most distinctive idea, of someone or something anachronistic, advanced and usually alien on the loose somewhen in Earth’s history. It’s a great example of the sort of wit, invention and setting that the series practises right up to the new series today, though on just a tad higher budget – and just as in two of the high points of last year’s series of Doctor Who, a watch is unexpectedly important to the Doctor’s discovery that he’s not alone (but more on watches down below).

Last week, rather than watching this exciting new DVD from 1965, I was watching the DVD of a much more stodgy old story from 1985. Yes, the DVD release schedules feel like time travel, too. In both this and The Mark of the Rani, the actors playing the Doctor are superbly watchable – Billy Hartnell and Colin Baker – and the scenery’s an awful lot better in 1985 than the odd tree stuck round a studio in 1965. But how come the later story’s the one that feels so slow? To say nothing of its both nonsensical and hackneyed plot, the terrible dialogue and that the audience laughs with the Monk in 1965, but laughs at the Master in the 1985 story where all the mystery’s gone by half-way into Part One. So don’t let this far superior tale from 1965 and 1066 being black and white put you off.

As usual, the story’s been beautifully restored for DVD (complete with a feature about how they did it), though the patchiness of the old print is particularly noticeable in the final episode. Good news: it’s cheaper than usual. Bad news: because there are fewer extras than usual. Good news: there are still quite a few extras anyway. In addition to the usual photo gallery and informative text notes to play throughout the story, there’s a commentary with companion Peter Purves, script editor and terribly nice man Donald Tosh, designer Barry Newbery and producer and TV legend Verity Lambert, recorded just weeks before she died. There’s a small obituary and a photo gallery for her – let’s hope for a proper retrospective when they get more time to put one together, as production on this disc was already finished last November. The other standout feature is Stripped For Action – The First Doctor, looking at the comic strips based on the series’ early days, with their wacky plots, the Doctor’s different grandchildren and his recurring foes the villainous, vaguely cone-shaped, robotic, er… Trods. Daleks being a bit expensive to license. It’s an appropriate extra, as the Monk returned three times – once on TV, once in a novel and once in a comic strip (the latter really wasn’t very good, but you can buy it in a ‘Complete Fifth Doctor’ graphic novel and it’s well worth picking up for the fantastic title story The Tides of Time). Let’s hope they do more of these for the other Doctors, and commission documentaries about the books, too…

The Plot, With Spoilers – Skip to the Next Bit If You Don’t Want to Know Who Wins the Battle of Hastings

Watching The Time Meddler in 2008, it’s almost impossible not to look at it as an ‘important’ story introducing so many plot elements that would grow within the series from that point on. But I’m fairly sure that for viewers at the time, another change was much more important. From the series’ beginning in 1963, the Doctor had been accompanied by two teachers, Ian and Barbara, along with a teenager – and although his granddaughter Susan (apparently aged sixteenish) had left, she was instantly replaced by near-photocopy orphan Vicki. Well, at the end of the previous story, Ian and Barbara went back home to dear old Blighty and their claim to being the ‘parents’ in the TARDIS family was never replaced. If ever there was a debate about whether the Doctor was the lead character, with The Time Meddler it was definitely over and viewers knew that anyone else could come and go. How would the series carry on?

About four years ago, Richard and I watched the whole of William Hartnell’s time as the Doctor in order (with appropriate replacements for the bits the BBC chucked away). I’ve always found The Chase, the story before this one, a bit rubbish. It is, but after following the continuing story through I found myself tearful at the end because Ian and Barbara were leaving – and never tell me they didn’t marry and live happily ever after. By contrast, I’d loved The Time Meddler since I first saw it, and I wondered if now I’d be put off it by missing Mr Chesterton and Miss Wright. Then I started watching this story and found that I’m a fickle thing, much as the audiences at the time might have been (with another twenty-four years of the series’ original run to follow). This one is great fun from the start.

The Time Meddler has a marvellous first episode, doing exactly what it needed to – provide a particularly intriguing mystery, and show that the Doctor and the series can get on just fine with just young Vicki and sceptical space pilot Steven for company. And the dialogue between them is great, the Doctor being both off-balance and off the leash now the junior lead talks back rather than being the ‘straight man’, giving us all a treat as they fling put-downs at each other. When the series first began in 1963 and when it returned in 2005, the first episodes were taken up with introducing ordinary people to the Doctor’s life and astonishing them with the TARDIS – because those people, Ian and Barbara and then Rose, were exploring what this show was all about on behalf of the viewer. This time, as with last year’s Smith and Jones that brought Martha on board, there’s a new companion but most viewers already know what to expect, so the introductions are much briefer and played much more for laughs. If you thought the Doctor was cheeky to mouth “bigger on the inside than on the outside” behind Martha last year, wait ’til you see him exasperatedly point out to Steven such features in the TARDIS as:

“That is the dematerialising control, and that over yonder is the horizontal hold; up there is the scanner, those are the doors, that is a chair with a panda on it… Sheer poetry, dear boy. Now please stop bothering me!”

Like Martha, Steven refuses to believe the TARDIS travels in time. As the Doctor was rather less able to steer it back then, rather than popping about to do tricks he merely argues waspishly with his new companion that, as they’re in the Eleventh Century, perhaps he should stop being sarky and notice. Picking up a Viking helmet with horns – you know, like they never wore, but forgive the historical inaccuracy for the gag – he waves it at his sceptical stowaway, exclaiming:

“What do you think it is? A space helmet for a cow?”

The story’s a great showpiece for Billy’s magnificent Doctor, given the chance to be gentle with Vicki and Edith; much cleverer in finding out the date than later Doctors’ “What year is it” clodhopping; acerbic with Steven; and by turns amusing and authoritative with the Monk. He really dominates this story, despite spending a week of it on holiday! The entertaining script really comes to life, though, in the many confrontations between the Doctor and his counterpart the Monk. Every time they appear on screen together, the quality rockets.

Both William Hartnell and Peter Butterworth are actors with great screen presence, each able to play both comedy and drama with aplomb and switch between them with ease as they and their characters fight to get one up on each other. You can see why one was the first Carry On star and the other went on to star in several future Carry On films. The Doctor’s companions aren’t bad, either; Peter Purves (Stephen) later found greater fame in Blue Peter, while Maureen O’Brien (Vicki) went on to more acting fame and also writes a successful series of detective novels. She was signing DVDs of The Time Meddler at Tenth Planet last Saturday, and if you want future DVD speculation, she didn’t give anything away – though don’t put your bets on The Space Museum coming out this year. Of all the pictures from other stories she was given to sign, that was the one that rang no bells at all (“Everyone had big sideburns or strange eyebrows?” She shakes her head. “You started a revolution among teenagers in black pullies?” “Did I? I’m glad to hear it,” and so on). But anyway, the Monk…

This story wrong-foots the viewers more than any other since the first story, An Unearthly Child, going somewhere quite unexpected just as they’d got used to the idea of the ‘adventures in history’ and the ‘science fiction’ stories being completely separate. The rules change here, as the future gets mixed into the past to produce several ‘What the hell is going on?’ moments of the sort best summed up for the novel of the later story Carnival of Monsters:

“The Doctor and Jo land on a cargo ship crossing the Indian Ocean in the year 1926.
“Or so they think.”

When we first see the Monk, he’s a mysterious figure watching from a clifftop as the TARDIS appears (there’s a marvellous shot of it from above), and not only does he seem to recognise it, but he appears to be wearing a ring just like the Doctor’s (something that was occasionally significant in the early days, but which was soon dropped). Clues build around him as more and more anachronistic details are revealed, and he shows his capabilities as he traps the Doctor. When Vicki and Stephen investigate the Doctor’s disappearance, they discover the Monk’s mysterious plans regarding the Vikings (with help from that hoary old ‘one fatal mistake’ slip)… And then, in the cliffhanger to the penultimate episode, suddenly they and the audience find that the Doctor’s Ship is no longer the only TARDIS in the Universe. It’s a stunning moment, recently reworked to similar shock effect when the lonely Doctor of the new series was suddenly revealed to be not alone.

When I was little, I didn’t know a lot about this story. I’d read that it had the Monk in it, who was ‘A Renegade Time Lord’ and therefore ‘Very Important’, but not played by Roger Delgado and so not as impressive as the Master (unless you take Cadfael as proof of the unlikely theory that the Monk and the Master are one and the same). But fan lists long before I ever got to see the story labelled it the first ‘psuedo-historical’ story, the first with ‘another Time Lord’ (aside from Susan, and still not named as such), the first ‘indication that time can be changed’, the first time what the word ‘TARDIS’ means is changed (it’s changed back again, these days, but the tiny alteration lasted a quarter of a century) and even, according to some po-faced people that didn’t like The Romans, the first ‘comedy story that works’. The last may tip you off that, unlike Last of the Time Lords, this story has a refreshing lack of self-importance. It’s the end of the second season of Doctor Who, but it feels like a fresh start rather than a ‘season finale’ – though the closing fadeout, with Billy’s voice-over and the TARDIS crew’s faces across a starfield, is sheer magic. Though with such innovation and revelation you’d expect an over-hyped, climactic end-of-season cliffhanger, instead it just gets on with telling a jolly story and taking the mickey, and I’m very glad. First the very funny novelisation came along in the ’80s, then I saw a repeat in 1992, and I realised that it’s terrific. Not epic, not awesome, not immense, but a great little story, with huge entertainment value.

These days I sit back and enjoy just how good these characters are, and all the twists and turns of the Monk’s plan. Is he helping the Viking raiding party, and betraying the friendly Saxon villagers? In which case, what’s that atomic cannon doing pointed at the Viking fleet he’s signalling towards land? Yes, he’s one of the Doctor’s people, but rather than just occasionally helping people out from moral conviction he has grand schemes to rework the whole of history because, ooh, it seems like a good idea at the time! He boasts of building Stonehenge with anti-gravitational lifts and he’s made multi-century investments for the compound interest (though the banks would surely switch him to a worse rate), while his ‘to do’ list is a scream. And here, he plans to obliterate the Viking fleet in order that King Harold’s Saxon army will be fresh, uninjured and ready to win the Battle of Hastings (JRR Tolkien might approve).

The details beyond the two main characters are worth watching, too. There are lashings of post-modern wit long before it was fashionable – whether it’s the way About Time 1 notes how everything works in the way TV does twenty years before Moonlighting was ‘ground-breaking’, that the Doctor’s missing for the second episode and the cliffhanger is that – shock – he isn’t there, or the way that most of the ‘technology’ the Monk has is from the ’60s things, just as Russell T Davies these days deliberately makes a series from ‘now’ appealing to and joking with the contemporary audience. And, like writer Dennis Spooner’s previous scripts, the humour is leavened by alarmingly grim elements like the villagers’ hard lives, the threat of the Vikings and, shockingly, the implied rape of a character we’ve got quite fond of, taken deadly seriously (for all those people who said Billy was just for the kiddies, and that sex was invented in the New Adventures, the repeat of this story was the most shocking sexual reference in Doctor Who in 1992). The depth and deftness aren’t just in the script and the performances, either, but in some inspired direction and impressive design that belie the story’s wafer-thin budget – you can believe the dirty Saxon huts, there’s one of the series’ better forests not filmed outside, and there are touches like filming actors from below against scudding clouds that make it much less plain the clifftop is in the studio. It’s not perfect, but nothing is; some of the scenes with the minor characters are a little dull, and the Vikings aren’t exactly sparkling. Their fight scenes are a bit feeble, too, but you can’t have everything.

This is a super little example of what makes Doctor Who Doctor Who – I’ve always loved the uniquely Who-ish historical anachronisms of aliens or time meddlers, a type of story that could almost be the backbone of the series. Right from this prototype through Pyramids of Mars and The Curse of Fenric to Tooth and Claw and Human Nature, there are great tales to be found when the Doctor travels back to a well-known period of Earth’s history, meets both exactly the sort of people we’d expect him to and some outer space people we really wouldn’t, and everything collides. If anyone’s come up with a better idea of the perfect basis for Doctor Who story, I haven’t heard it.

Watch Out!

Today is the 77th anniversary of the première of Tod Browning’s Dracula, one of the great Universal horror movies and making an instant star of Bela Lugosi for his charismatic performance. This morning, I trudged out to the doctor – not the Doctor – after some of the latest dreary things wrong with me started to alarm Richard when I spent Saturday keeling over (thanks for driving me to Maureen O’Brien and back, love!), and found that there’s a two-week wait to see the phlebotomist for some tests. In 1931, they were keener to take blood…

While I was out, I nipped into the local supermarket and – among other bits of more necessary shopping – got myself a dinky half-price remote-control Dalek to cheer myself up with. Some readers familiar with more of Doctor Who’s second season than just The Time Meddler may understand (though the cashier didn’t) why I laughed on hearing that it all came to £21.64. On Saturday, though, I picked up a new Doctor Who toy at Tenth Planet that somehow particularly appealed to me, though; ‘the Doctor’s Fob Watch’. I know, it doesn’t sound like the top thing for kids, does it? But after the significance of the Monk’s dropped watch in The Time Meddler, you might remember how important and unfortunate a fob watch was to ‘John Smith’ in last year’s fantastic Human Nature. Well, now you can get one of your very own, with its rather lovely design (albeit in plastic), lights and squeakily played David Tennant quotes. It keeps terrible time, though. And it doesn’t even have the excuse that it’s on Malcassairo time. Here it is modelled by our Moomin, Billy:



To tell the truth, though, there’s something else that’s not quite as thrilling as it could be about the watch. Because, exciting though it is to have the nice Doctor speaking to me from it, what I’d really like them to bring out – and I suspect quite a lot of people will agree – is not the Doctor’s fob watch, but the Master’s. Because, though Human Nature was undoubtedly the most marvellous of all last year’s Doctor Who stories, the climax of Utopia as kindly Professor Yana opens his watch and becomes the Master was the most gripping quarter-hour of the year’s telly. So please, Character Options, next time let us press the button and hear Derek Jacobi:

“It’s time travel! They say there was time travel back in the old days… I never believed… But what would I know? Stupid old man! Never could keep time. Always late, always lost – even this thing never worked…”

“Time and time and time again…”

“Oh, it’s – it’s only an old relic. Like me. I was found with it, an orphan in the storm…”

“Does it matter…?”

Or the Doctor and his friends:

“That’s a TARDIS…”

“TARDIS… The time vortex…”

“Regeneration… Regeneration…”

Or a wicked chuckle from Anthony Ainley, then Derek Jacobi being much more sinister and evil Roger Delgado:

“The drums, the drums, the drums, the never-ending drumbeat – open me, you human fool, open the light and summon me and receive my majesty!”

“Destroy him! …Then you will give your power to me.”

A Quick Peek At Forthcoming 2008 DVDs

The Time Meddler’s not the only Doctor Who DVD out this year – expect nearly a dozen releases – but since I rarely get round to doing these reviews, here are some quick previews of the stories coming up in the first half of the year. Oh, and the Beneath the Surface box that came out in January…

Beneath the Surface

Now, here’s a mix. These three stories, which Richard, our friend Stephen and I all think of as ‘Under the Sea’ after Homer Simpson’s song, all feature different ethnic groups of the same species, intelligent reptiles (misnamed ‘Silurians’) that lived on Earth before humanity evolved and went into hibernation to escape a global catastrophe – but though the stories all try to make the same sort of moral point with each group that wakes up millions of years later and comes into conflict with the human race, they do it in a textbook example of diminishing returns. The first story in the box is absolutely terrific and the series’ moral centre, despite iffy science; the second often looks great and is dumbed-down fun, but makes a horrible mess of the ending; the last is pretty much a horrible mess all the way through…

Doctor Who and the Silurians

This story has a lot to answer for… Reading its message that green scaly rubber people are people too turned me into a Liberal. It’s worth picking up the book, originally titled Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters, though it’s a lot easier today to get the talking book version on CD – it’s one of the finest Doctor Who novelisations ever written, with characterisation greatly expanded from the TV version into very much a story in its own right, though Caroline John isn’t as impressive a reader as she is playing the Doctor’s companion Liz Shaw on TV (her ‘Scottish accent’ has to be heard to be believed, but look out for her husband’s fantastic reading of another outstanding novelisation of the time, Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon). As far as the 1970 TV version starring Jon Pertwee as the Doctor goes, there’s a lot to treasure, despite a really naff T-Rex – a great guest role for Fulton McKay, some riveting dialogue as people (green and pink) divide into different sides about how to deal with the other species, and of course one of the series’ most memorable final scenes. Along the way, there’s a jaw-dropping documentary-style disaster in London, too. Really impressive extra: a documentary on the politics of the time and how it affected Doctor Who. Really, er, different extra: the earliest story to have its complete score presented as a separate music-only track, a feature which I love, always, and only slightly less when this one’s the attack of the killer kazoos. Probably the best of the stories so far announced for DVD release this year.

The Sea Devils

More Pertwee from a couple of years later, though I first saw it – like The Time Meddler – as part of a repeat season in 1992. This one, too, has a rare ‘early’ music-only score, and though I’m quite fond of it, it’s pretty notorious. The version released on CD has sleeve notes describing it as “uncompromising,” and if ever you notice an incidental score, you’ll notice this one. The story? Well, the Silurians’ cousins the Sea Devils are scarier but dumber and far less characterised, despite their rising from the sea giving a brilliant cliffhanger (one that inspired several more later in the series). The Doctor is increasingly unlikeable, if more flamboyantly dressed, and here faces off against Roger Delgado’s original Master, who’s in prison and claiming to be a reformed character. I suspect it’s not much of a giveaway to suggest he may be fibbing (watch out for a fabulous scene involving The Clangers that was remade with John Simm’s Master and more modern equivalents last year). On the down side, despite being slightly shorter than the previous story it feels much more flabby, it has the series’ crudest caricature of a politician, and the ending… Well, without spoiling it, it turns the morality of the previous story on its head, and that’s just wrong.

Warriors of the Deep

Bright lights; Cold War machismo; eyeshadow and morality applied with a trowel… It’s 1984, Peter Davison is the Doctor, and this is a story where very little goes right. The monsters fall apart – literally, in places – the cast are wooden, the script is clichéd and the Doctor’s stuck in a moral quagmire where the writer thinks agonising about it is the same as justifying it (even the much-praised final line is almost word-for-word from the final episode of The Daleks, twenty years earlier). On the good side, the Doctor’s companion Turlough is fun when screwed up to a pitch of twitchiness, the sets are impressive despite unmerciful lighting and the music-only score on this one is rather good… Probably the weakest of the stories so far announced for DVD release this year (though K9 runs it close).

The Five Doctors (25th Anniversary Edition)

Some series would have their 20th-Anniversary parties off-air. Doctor Who televised it, a story crammed with old friends – including Doctors Peter Davison, Jon Pertwee, Patrick Troughton, a bit of Tom Baker and someone pretending to be the late William Hartnell – and old enemies. It’s fun, but dumb, with as good a script as you could expect when asked to mix in so many ingredients, though significantly more plodding direction than you might have expected. This DVD is an all bells-and-whistles set, the 25th Anniversary Edition of the 20th Anniversary story, and includes both the original version and the 1990s ‘Special Edition’ (the only version previously released on DVD, though without any extras) with what are now much more dated special effects than those which were originally transmitted; will there be new new effects to cover up the old new effects? [R: NO! Ed] The best moments are probably Peter Davison’s emotionally affecting performance early on, underscored by evocative music, before the vivid cartoons of his other selves turn up – and the lovely pre-credits clip of William Hartnell, which is unfortunately more stylish than all the rest of it.

Sadly, despite all the extras that will be crammed onto this two-disc set (and probably due to shameless breakage of copyright), what’s by far the most exciting version of the story won’t be on the DVD – you can, however, enjoy both Part One and Part Two of it on YouTube. Do. It’s a work of genius, for fans of the old and the new series alike.

The Invasion of Time

Tom Baker as the Doctor, Louise Jameson in leather bikini as Leela and the tin dog – probably the best-remembered of all the line-ups from the original series, and all good characters, but rather starved of good stories together. The Doctor returns to Gallifrey and turns into a mad dictator over the Time Lords – you may, readers, suspect it’s acting, or indeed overacting – where there’s a striking mix of fabulous and wooden characters, exciting and very dull monsters, exciting twists and long stretches that seem to be made up as they go along. A lot of it’s very entertaining and there’s a great surprise appearance by the same monsters who’ll be making a surprise appearance in this year’s Doctor Who on TV (for once, last year I correctly predicted this would be out, and that there’ll be a box set of these same surprise monsters’ previous appearances, also now due this year). A lot of it’s one of the most inept ‘political thrillers’ you’ve ever seen, it treats intelligent, independent-minded Leela dreadfully, and it has perhaps the most thoroughly wrong ending of any Doctor Who story (yes, worse than The Sea Devils), both morally and in requiring the viewer to remember details of a very much better story shown a year and a half earlier. One to watch in parts, then…

Black Orchid

Peter Davison’s Doctor travels to 1926 for a comedy of manners crossed with Jane Eyre, all set at a country house. It’s short, it’s rather diverting and it has some marvellous frocks, but there’s not a lot of substance to it and it’s hardly up to Agatha Christie’s standards. Though it has one of the Doctor’s most widely ridiculed moments – ‘proving’ he’s not a murderer by saying, ‘Look at my TARDIS!’ – there is a strange sort of thematic sense to it; this story is all about masks and keeping up appearances, from the masked ball to the tragedy underneath, and the Doctor’s point is that he’s the only person telling the truth and so, literally, an innocent. Or it might just be very silly.

The Brain of Morbius

Tom Baker’s Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith, 1976, and the first Doctor Who I ever saw in colour (aren’t hospitals marvellous?). And what colour! Mainly rich red, appropriately for the series’ most Hammer-toned Frankenstein pastiche, with more ‘unsuitable material for children’ than in almost any other Who story (naturally, I loved it). It gets away with the brains and the blood by being simply so funny. The dialogue is fabulous, Philip Madoc enjoying every word as an outstanding villain, and there’s some of the most stunning ‘architecture’ ever seen in the series for the interior of his castle (the ‘outside’ shots are less convincing, though). Of all those I know are still to come this year, this is the story I’m most looking forward to on DVD, and there are three things in particular to look out for: the way it turns the Frankenstein story that everyone else had done upside-down, by having the ‘creature’ in control from the start; the way it turns the ‘Hitler returns’ story that everyone else had done upside-down, by making Morbius the ex-dictator of the Time Lords and so making the Doctor not the standard ‘dashing British agent preventing them from rising again’, but a horrified ‘German’ stuck with the responsibility; and an enthralling climax as the Doctor and Morbius fight a mental duel to spine-tingling music (which, sadly, won’t be available on a separate track).

The Invisible Enemy and K9 and Company Box

At some point in the year, there’s going to be a K9-themed twin pack featuring what are in effect his first and last stories from the series’ original run – the story that introduced him, and a one-off spin-off pilot for a series that, unlike Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures, never got any further. On the basis of what we got, though, that was a bit of a relief – it’s not a patch on the two new spin-off series, let alone Doctor Who itself, and even The Invisible Enemy’s very patchy. Personally, I’d have gone for a three-pack of stories and bunged in another K9 tale that was more entertaining (Nightmare of Eden, say), but – as I said last year – if you want a box set that shows off K9 at his best, hunt down a copy of the brilliant Key to Time…

The Invisible Enemy

Tom Baker as the Doctor, Louise Jameson in leather bikini as Leela and the tin dog – probably the best-remembered of all the line-ups from the original series, and all good characters, but rather starved of good stories together. It’s still true. A new producer had just taken over in 1977, and broke the bank on this one – some of it looks great, but with inflation and the writers’ ambitions both spiralling out of control, some of it looks downright terrible. The first episode is intense, with abrasive music, a mysterious catch-phrase and oppressive horror, but it goes rapidly downhill: mistakes include an outer-space hospital with a Level ‘4X’, which makes you think they couldn’t give one; an unintentionally funny giant prawn; and one of the two Doctor Who scripts that always spring to mind as riddled with such plot and scientific ineptitude you wonder if anyone had read it (points for guessing the other). K9’s not the only change to the leads, though – playing in effect a double role, here’s where Tom Baker starts a very different and more comedic performance, but also where free-thinking, intelligent Leela is hideously dumbed down to nothing but a savage in a skimpy outfit… Still, these days, contamination by superbugs in hospital is very topical.

K9 and Company – A Girl’s Best Friend

From the opening sequence of perky pop over Sarah Jane jogging and K9 sat on a stone wall, you suspect this is going to be funny without meaning to be. Unfortunately, a lot of it’s just very dreary. Sarah is good as the lead, despite the title “Girl” rather doing down a successful career woman in her thirties and her having much less to work with from the script than in today’s smashing Sarah Jane Adventures, but this is fatally flawed. It can’t decide if it wants to be cosily ’50s Miss-by-a-mile Marple-style village mysteries, modern woman Avengers, transatlantic Hart to Hart, outright Wicker Man horror or something with a cute robot for the children. So it manages to be none of them. K9’s role is so minimal he could largely be replaced by a gun and a tape recorder, while the ‘clues’ to the double-murder-mystery (without any murders) seemed ridiculously clumsy even when I was ten. Still, the music always makes me chuckle.



Enjoy all of these, and whichever you buy, remember to pop your DVD into the player and hit play on each feature straight away, because – on past form – the menus always give away the key bits of the plot that I’ve tried not to.

Labels: David Tennant, Doctor Who, DVD, History, In-Depth Doctor Who, New Adventures, Philip Madoc, Reviews, Sarah Jane Smith, The Brigadier, The Master, Toys, Utopia, William Hartnell