Love and Liberty

I’ve been busy with other things than blogging over the bank holiday, and if Stephen Tall’s spectacular return to the Interweb is true, I’ve just constructed the least interesting headline* possible for Lib Dem Blogs. Two of you still here? Good. My erratic performance on last Wednesday’s Simon Mayo Show will disappear from the BBC’s currently even more erratic Listen Again tomorrow, so you’ll have to listen sharpish to get in your own critique. Getting in before that deadline, I shan’t give as much depth as Millennium’s lovingly partial write-up, but I will say who I think came out best…

The best on the Five Live discussion panel: well, obviously, that would be me. I had the best lines, I had the most passion, I occasionally displayed a sense of humour and – this is the decider – curiously enough, I agree with what I said. As the topics were crime, immigration and Europe, rather than join the de facto party line by keeping my head down, my contribution boiled down to ‘This won’t win a lot of votes but, oh, bugger it, I’m a Liberal’.

The most terrifyingly on-message: Tim the Tory. He had an impressive stack of colour Tory Party press releases, but, to be fair, I don’t think he was actually reading from them; they were just piped straight into his brain. Calm, intimidatingly loud in the studio without raising his voice, brilliant at delivering contentious put-downs then bulldozing through, and clearly thinking it was Christmas come early with the choice of topics. Main drawback for me: I disagreed with almost every word he said. Main drawback for listeners: while they probably agreed with him more often that I did, he did sound like a robot.

The one whose point of view was a little vague: Labour Kerron. He had a smaller bunch of print-outs, mostly in black and white (I had one tatty sheet with nothing on it but my own brainstorming; I admit I chatted for a couple of minutes to someone at Cowley Street, but I suspect asking them “Have our MPs said anything about this? I’d rather be forewarned than ambushed when I disagree with them” wasn’t too slavish). General line: ‘The Tories are pandering to a vile, shocking right-wing Daily Mail agenda… And I agree with them.’ I found one of his answers so shocking that I didn’t press him on it in the studio, but just asked if he really meant it afterwards… Still, at least he likes the TARDIS, so he’s not all bad.

The worst on the panel: well, obviously, that would be me, too. I may be consistent in philosophy, but as far as performance goes… The others didn’t say “Um” as every fourth word, I missed several opportunities, and I was the one most likely to be completely derailed. More than once. On the plus side, no-one could have mistaken me for a Tory, and I somehow wasn’t derailed by the classic attack question, ‘So, Alex Wilcock, Mr Angry from just outside Cheltenham [see, I do know where Winchcombe is] wants to know how you personally will solve all his personal anti-social problems this very minute?’


Despite all that, my favourite line I’ve heard on the radio all week was not on BBC Radio 5 but on BBC7, in a 1920s play by Arnold Ridley (long before he was the most sympathetic old gent in Dad’s Army), The Ghost Train. An appallingly rude woman summons the guard to accuse a young man of molesting her after she refuses to make way in the corridor and he attempts to get by:

“Don’t believe a word he says. He is probably a member of the Liberal Party!”

In other blogging news, I’ve just got round to updating my sidebar links for (cough) the first time this year. So my selection of what I reckon are my best posts so far – no stats, just personal preference – is now up-to-date again (though I couldn’t work out how to get two links on one line, as in both the ‘Best of Politics’ and the ‘Best of Fun’ lists I had two posts that went together).

I’ve also added quite a few new blogs that I read regularly. Not as many as I’d like, though, as I decided there had to be a limit: I started cutting Lib Dem Bloggers off so that bit of the list’d still fit at one glance on my usual screen resolution. You may be able to spot three links I might have dropped but retained in the hope they’ll start writing again, too. But imagine my distress when I noticed the lovely Antony Hook had started blogging just after the updates… Sorry, Antony, but I think your link’ll have to wait until I next steel myself to pick someone else for the chop!


*Apart from one mentioning local casework, obviously. Er, sorry, councillors ;-)

Labels: Blogs, British Politics, Personal, Radio, The Golden Dozen

This morning’s interview with David Cameron was a typical example of the pointless tedium now provided by the Today Programme’s once-sharp cross-examinations of senior politicians. Bland evasions and trad-Tory dog whistles by Conservative Leader? Check. Lumbering efforts to make pre-prepared cheap points by Jim Naughtie, so he misses the live slips? All present. Not in any way illuminating, nor remotely as entertaining as Mr Cameron’s shell-shocked performance a fortnight ago, in which he fell spectacularly to pieces. Yes, I’m afraid today’s Today was merely dull, which was a definite step up for the beleaguered ‘Mr Balloon’. Remember the last time? Mr Cameron dropping clangers about his dismal by-election third places, grammar schools, plummeting opinion polls, donors complaining, candidates attacking and his embarrassing choice of the wrong traditional Tory vote dog-whistle issue (yes, he called for more school discipline while his Eton-educated party were rioting). Oh, and he impressively denied all responsibility for “David Cameron”, which may be a contender for some sort of award.

I’ve taken until a little later in the day to deal with his latest performance, because this time it wasn’t a disaster. It had good bits, it had bad bits, it even had a bit where I agreed with him – well, he does try to be all things to all people, so statistically it was bound to happen eventually – but mostly it had boring bits. Last time, I was inspired by the uselessness of Sarah Montague’s interviewing and David Cameron’s shaky inability to deal with her, and I have to admit I rather enjoyed sounding off about it. Several other people were kind enough to say they enjoyed that, too, including that week’s editions of Liberal Democrat Voice’s Top of the Blogs and the Britblog Roundup – though the latter had a funny idea that I was displaying “an unusual sense of irony for a Lib Dem”. Tsk! Honestly, when we’ve lost as many elections as we’ve managed in the last hundred years, irony is all that keeps a lot of us Lib Dems going. But I digress. No, I have to further admit, vanity was one of the things that delayed me writing this post: it’s just not going to be as amusing as the last one, is it?

I’d say that, technically, Jim Naughtie is a better interviewer than Sarah Montague. He gives a significantly greater impression of knowing what he’s talking about, and is more likely to press a slippery interviewee when they dodge a question. Despite that, he has his drawbacks, and I can’t help thinking that it was a mistake to field him against Mr Cameron this morning. He may seem more a bully than an airhead, but he can be just as superficial, and the previous encounter suggests Mr Cameron may find it much more difficult to do his usual shtick against a female interviewer. His favourite trick is to sound like a reasonable, nice guy put upon by a great big bully (‘Please don’t hurt me’), and while last time he’d clearly lost his grip anyway, his inner nastiness was bound to be more exposed when he couldn’t pretend to be a victim. The BBC’s strategy of sending a great big bully to tackle him is one that almost always fails, because it plays to Mr Cameron’s oily strengths, as it did this morning.

Can anyone have thought Jim Naughtie would achieve anything by opening his attack this morning by quoting the words “hug a hoodie” (not the more talented blog), and immediately saying that he wasn’t going to let Mr Cameron answer back on them? No, Mr Cameron reasonably interrupted him, “I never said it.” Mr Naughtie then blustered that if you asked most people, they’d say they thought he did, as if that mattered. So… Let me paraphrase: ‘I’m going to repeat something I know is a lie, and try to bully the person I’m talking to so he can’t tell the listeners it’s a lie. Then I’m going to admit it’s a lie, but say that most people believe it anyway, so I’ll act as if it’s true.’ This was an experienced Today interviewer so doggedly determined to take a cheap shot that, if you’ll forgive the mixed metaphor, he dug a great big elephant trap for himself and seemed surprised when he got pushed into it. Mr Cameron probably couldn’t believe his luck that he’d been gifted the opportunity to pose as Mr Nice, the reasonable chap who the beastly unscrupulous journo wants to do over, quite so early in the interview.

Mr Cameron’s luck held, I have to say, when pressed by Mr Naughtie’s Daily Hate Mail agenda on culture and the drinking age. Astoundingly, he stood up to Mr Naughtie’s authoritarian scorn, declined the opportunity to tickle the Tory grassroots’ g-spot and even took a policy position. Even more astoundingly, I agreed with it: a handful of younger violent criminals are no excuse to penalise every 18-, 19- and 20-year-old. For that fleeting instant, he sounded like the “Liberal Tory” (of a piece with being a Christian Satanist, a carnivorous vegetarian and a scientific alternative medical practitioner) he’d once posed as, firm, with a brain in his head, and potentially dangerous. But then his nerve failed him, and he reached straight back to the basic Tory vote. That might have been more damaging if Mr Naughtie had noticed, obviously. Perhaps he was having a bad day, perhaps he’s not really that bright and his researcher was asleep, perhaps he’d simply realised how badly his opening gambit had misfired and it was putting him off his stride… For whatever reason, Mr Cameron was about to be allowed to get away with a bit of spin that any competent interviewer should have pounced on.

So what did they talk about next? Mr Cameron was going to tackle knife crime. He didn’t say how, of course, but it was, well, bad. Very firm, that. Oh, and he’d had a bet with one of his chums that he could mention the Sex Pistols, so he shoehorned in the alarming hyperbole of “anarchy in the UK”. This one was so risible that even Mr Naughtie pounced on it and Mr Cameron immediately started retreating from it, but it did make me wonder if “broken society,” his previous attempt at a Tory meme and now largely abandoned except in the Tory press release BBC news story (edit: it’s vanished even from that now. Do you think the Tories have realised people thought it was rubbish?), had been taken from a song as well. Perhaps it’s a competition. He did claim:

“I think if people break the law, the law should come down on them very hard indeed.”

…Except for taking coke for rich kids, obviously. Anyway, the suggestion came – unsurprisingly – that tackling violent crime (or, at least, announcing he would like to, without saying how) was not a particularly unusual thing for a Tory to go on about. Oh no, said Mr Cameron smoothly, of course that’s “the traditional Tory thing to do,” but he would “also” introduce measures to support marriage. And Mr Naughtie let that sleight of hand pass without a question. Er, excuse me? Since when has the back to basics faux-Victorian wish-fulfilment of blaming all the ills in the world on single parents and pretending the government can wave a magic wand that’ll make every married couple stay together not been traditional Toryism? It even came pre-labelled with the words “…from Iain Duncan Smith”.

There’s something that needs to be nailed here. Nobody likes family break-up. Divorces are traumatic and tragic, and I’d much rather than everyone lived happily ever after. But in real life, rather than in Tory back to basics campaigns, not everyone does. And people don’t get divorced because the government has failed to shove a couple of tenners their way to bribe them to stay married. If loving parents love their kids and each other, it’s going to be a loving family and good for the kids. To most people, that’s a truism; to a Tory politician, it’s treated like an astounding revelation they can trot out to prove they’ve been right all along. Gosh, people who are happy together give their kids a happier life than people who aren’t happy together? Stop the presses! But the answer isn’t for the state to order the latter to pretend to be happy.

I’m a Liberal Liberal, so I don’t support the state bossing people around in their private lives: I think people know better about how they can live their own lives, and that even if they make mistakes, nine times out of ten they’ll make smaller ones than the government would make on their behalf. By contrast, Mr Cameron thinks he knows better than the rest of us. But go back to making divorce harder – which Mr Cameron doesn’t support – and adults and their children will be forced into old-fashioned Victorian misery. Go back to punishing people who live together without being married – which Mr Cameron doesn’t support – and you’ll hurt millions of people without making them believe the morality you’re trying to force on them. Go back to any sort of heavy incentive in favour of marriage and penalties for people who aren’t – which Mr Cameron doesn’t support – and you encourage lies, state-sponsored infidelity and have people marrying for greed rather than love. So what does Mr Cameron support? A very small financial bonus for marriage. Does he really think a tiny bung will “solve the family problem”? It won’t even cover a fraction of the costs of most weddings. All it’s there for is for him to sound like he supports some back to basics ‘solution’ without any pain, but aside from favourable noises in the Daily Hate Mail, it’s impossible to see any gain either. This is the homeopathic version of back to basics: big on the sales pitch, a placebo to the true believers, but so watered down that no objective observer thinks it’ll make the faintest bit of difference. Perhaps Mr Cameron has finally become both a lame duck and a quack?

The rest of the interview was an even greater waste of space: yet another tour around John Redwood’s tax proposals, the ones even Mr Cameron is unlikely to be foolish enough to commit to but would like to have his cake and eat by teasing his traditional voters with the possibility of. Yes, it’s another golden oldie, back to helping out poor people by suggesting a whopping tax break for the richest one-sixteenth of the population (no, I can’t say I’m completely convinced, either), and Mr Naughtie tried for a moment to pin down Mr Cameron to coming out on one side or another, pressing him on the desirability of “a low-tax economy”. “Well, why not give us one?” demanded the interviewer. “Well, because…” There! Did you spot what Mr Naughtie didn’t? Yep, Mr Cameron’s answer began by conceding that he wasn’t going to give those tax cuts. And the BBC’s star man didn’t even notice. Give me strength!

Hey ho. Well, the tide of blandness was unstoppable by that point, and Mr Cameron was clearly on a roll; not sounding impressive, you understand, but back to his old vacuity and clearly delighted that he was getting away with it. And, astoundingly, he really is the only interviewee who sounds much less rattled without Sarah Montague. Then he blathered about hospitals, completely ignoring the question of what if health professionals (whom he’d normally say should make the decisions) think people will get better care through smaller, non-specialist hospitals being closed. Obviously, Mr Naughtie should have challenged him on that when it was obvious he was just coming out with a pre-prepared and quite different statement but, well, you can imagine what actually happened. All I can think of was that the Today interviewer was losing the will to live as well as this listener by this point. No idea what the actual Tory policy is, though, aside from ‘Wouldn’t it be better if things were vaguely a little bit more like they used to be?’ So, while Mr Cameron was technically far more accomplished today than on his previous Today, and while he still lacks all policy substance, it may be significant that the feel of all his statements was of U-turn and abject surrender to his traditionalists. The mood music of his leadership has now changed in just the way that those of his ill-fated predecessors did: less ‘Today’ and more ‘back to yesterday’.


More back to basics: this afternoon, BBC2 showed World War II propaganda piece Lady Hamilton, in which Europe is saved from dictatorship by That (rather marvellous) Hamilton Woman. In the early hours of tomorrow morning, it’s going to be Nell Gwyn (narrated by Seventeenth-Century blogger Samuel Pepys). But the sanctity of marriage has only been undermined by these dreadful liberals who’ve been in power ever since the 1960s, you know.

Nicholas’ LiveJournal brings news that it isn’t just Today; famous Newsnight interviewers may not be as bright as they think they are, either.

In other news, today – or, rather, yesterday, as it’s just slipped past midnight as I attempted to post this and suddenly ran into Blogger being unco-operative, curses (edit: though now it’s showing the time I attempted to post, rather than when it deigned to do it) – I received the latest e-mail from the Metro newspaper, with one of their every-couple-of-monthly ‘Urban Life’ polls. One of the results of the previous poll amused me. 76% of reader respondents agreed with Mr Blair that the media is a “feral beast”… But, unaccountably, they didn’t agree with him that the herbivorous Independent was top predator. Fancy! Instead, they placed the ardently-Blair-loyalist Sun at the top of the guilty list among national newspaper publications (no mention of where the Daily Hate Mail came in, of course). Who’d have thunk?

Labels: British Politics, Conservatives, Meddling In Things That Are Nobody's Business But Your Own, Quackery, Radio, The Today Programme

For my 250th post, I have fantastic news and, unusually, even pictures. While Richard and I were up north with our parents last week, we got to see my brand-new niece (then just a week old)! Congratulations to my sister Helen and her husband Jay, and little Caitlin is lovely. The evening we arrived, I walked over with Mum to see the new mum. I know it’s wrong of me, but I have to share with you that, while Mum criticised my awkward holding style, Caitlin stopped crying when her uncle rocked her delightedly but not when her granny did. If Mum ever gets round to reading this blog, I’ll suffer for that… Congratulations are also due to my eldest nephew, Sam, who’s my brother’s son and turned fourteen three days after Caitlin was born.


 
Alex with Helen and Caitlin – awwhhh!

The following morning, Richard and I went over together on our way to his parents’ fortieth wedding bash (congratulations, June and Tom!). “She’s just been sick all down one side,” said Helen, “so you might not want to hold her right now.” Well, one uncle jumped over, beaming, and took her, while the other stepped back and decided just to take the photos rather than get vomit all over his tie. See if you can guess which was which.


 
Proud Uncle Alex with Caitlin – awwhhh!

Yes, all right, Richard has now discovered that I am not immune from babies (awwwwhhh! She’s lovely!) while he definitely is (except for elephants). On the other hand, he’s still very fond of her, and we teamed up to look for early indulgences. As she’s already quite a big girl – eight pounds at birth, half a pound heavier a week later when most babies lose a bit – we’d been warned not to go for the very tiniest little clothes, as not only had she already been given quite a few but several were already too small to fit. So when we looked out for clothes in the 6-9 month range for her to grow into (and not grow very far, at that), it was Richard who spotted the little sun outfit that looked like a miniature Emmapeeler from The Avengers, and the cutest little hoodie. Being us, we worried a bit about the Emmapeeler, because most of it was in vivid pink, and we’d been determined not to buy pink things for a girl. It turned out my sister doesn’t like pink, either, but she loved the outfit – because all the other pink clothes she’s been given are pale, pastel, dainty pinks, while ours was screaming. We didn’t hesitate over the hoodie, though, and Helen liked that, too. Almost equally delightfully, my Mother was a bit wary of it (though I should point out right now that Mum is lovely too, and really not remotely like the Daily Mail. Hello Mum!). I should almost certainly also not point out that my Grandma, Caitlin’s great-granny, sent a card from New Hampshire giving her middle name as “Bela,” which caused her wicked uncle to make swooping motions at her with fingers raised as vampire fangs. Because that would be wrong.


 
…And this was just on the way there

Lots of fun was also had at June and Tom’s fortieth wedding anniversary do, where the food was splendid and Richard and I in no way over-indulged in it. We spent a lot of the time entertaining our middle nephew and niece, Jamie and Holly, who are Richard’s sister’s children and very lively. Richard’s much better at the entertaining than I am, in part because he gets the hang of Jamie’s computer games. They’re also big Doctor Who fans – being proper wicked uncles, we’d primed Jamie with lots of Tom Baker DVDs from well before the new series started – and always have plenty of questions. It’s often said that boys just do lists, while girls are interested in the characters. Well, Jamie always wants to know why people do things, while Holly asks “How many Doctors have there been? …How many companions? …How many stories with the Master? …How many monsters?” until even Richard’s head is exploding.


 
Richard menaced by the Empress of the Racnoss – scary, eh?

Fortunately, we had a morning with Jamie and Holly which was almost entirely visual, as we made it to the Doctor Who exhibition at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester – albeit slightly delayed as their mum and nana went straight into town while Richard picked me up and then hit the joy of A6 roadworks.

There’s a minor spoiler coming up in the last photo you’ll scroll down to, by the way, though it’s already been in all the papers…

The exhibition’s great fun, though take your time going through it, or it’ll all seem over in a flash. Its array of new series costumes and sets is constantly evolving, and much better-laid-out than the more plentiful supply of old series oddments to be found in Blackpool (both are worth a visit, naturally).


 
Alex and a big old Face

Highlights include a shattered Big Ben (smaller than you’d think), the Face of Boe himself, the alarmingly huge Empress of the Racnoss, Professor Lazarus’ experimental booth – not spinning – and, of course, the Daleks. Go on, treat yourself.


 
Do you think someone else was with us in secret…?

The main museum has some cool science to play with upstairs, too, as we found out with Jamie.


 
The Beast shall rise from the Pit and make war on his uncles…

Of course, some highlights may find their own reasons to slip away…


 

Labels: Doctor Who, Richard

There’s nothing better to wake up to in the morning than The Today Programme. Not because it’s any good, but because the exasperating rubbish they spout gets me properly awake and raring to have a go. This morning saw a particularly silly example of their usual editorial stance, where the programme adopts a tone that is either vociferously in favour or vociferously against something and implies that to hold any other opinion would be sheer insanity. Today, Today thought it was both entirely ludicrous and completely reasonable to ban things, without spotting the minor flaw in holding both positions simultaneously.

After the opening headlines of today’s tragedy in Iraq, the lead story was a follow-up to the dreadful killing of a man by a group of youths, in which the Chief Constable of Cheshire has made the knee-jerk reaction that the legal age of consent for alcohol should be raised to 21. You can see it on the BBC website, illustrated with not at all misleading pictures of gentlemen apparently rather younger than the 18-, 19- and 20-year-olds who the Chief Constable wishes to waste his force’s time by criminalising. During the course of the day, the BBC has at least improved its English from the initial caption that

“The chief constable called for the legal drinking age to be raise,”

though, so that’s an improvement (perhaps the early morning typist was still a bit hung-over). The BBC has adopted a Daily Mail / Labour-esque line that all young people fall into the category either of ‘angel’ or ‘devil’, that there is nothing wrong with younger adults being given less money, fewer freedoms, more responsibilities and judged not on the basis of how their actions harm other people but arbitrarily by their tastes in music, clothing or recreational drugs. Well, despite the editorial line you may have heard this morning, I blame the killers rather than everyone in their age group, still less advocate prohibition as the panacea it has never proven to be in practice.

You might think, then, that The Today Programme gave out strong signals in its news agenda this morning that banning things because a few people had a problem was absolutely the right thing to do. And they did. So it would be ludicrous, wouldn’t it, for them also to adopt the editorial line at the same time that only some insane busybody would start banning things because a few people had a problem. But they did that, too.

Yesterday morning, there had been an item about, as far as I recall (‘Listen Again’ is very patchy when you have steam-powered dial-up), balloon animals being banned at children’s parties for fear of latex allergies. There was maximum sneerage at this absurd state of affairs, and again this morning when – it all having been blamed on “health and safety” – someone representing a health and safety officers’ professional organisation came on to deny that his lot had anything to do with it. We were treated to Jim Naughtie pouring scorn on the decision, and the official saying that, yes, this was absolutely wrong, and wasn’t it awful that his members always got the blame for such things, constantly citing what he called the problem of “Bonkers Conkers”. Obviously, two people fighting to let loose their invective by proving in ever more wild terms how much they agreed with each other wasn’t the most illuminating of interviews, however much I agreed with them.

Aside from the bizarreness of clearly facing both ways along their arbitrary, binary editorial position, the problem with the BBC doing the Daily Mail is that they’re so bad at it. Richard and I both goggled at the wireless when Mr Naughtie blithely announced that this was “health and safety gone mad” and that everyone had used the phrase: no, the well-known cliché he was reaching for and which a Hate Mail hack would have known by heart is “political correctness gone mad” (UK Google results for the former number 1,040, while for the latter it’s 34,100, and that seems astoundingly low), while people attacking this sort of thing usually use the term “compensation culture” (59,400, and jackpot). But perhaps I’ve been too kind by merely labelling the BBC’s two-facedness as bizarre. No, it’s actively harmful, and symptomatic of how the whole thing works, just as the health and safety official’s wish to deny everything is.

Who actually does all this banning? Well, New ‘New Laws Every Day’ Labour love it, of course, but for once it’s not all the government’s fault. No, it’s a vicious circle, in which no one takes responsibility. Look at the Daily Mail, which this morning screams for alcohol to be banned for people younger than its readership, but which will no doubt tomorrow be back to saying that calls for something it approves of (should there be such a thing) to be banned is “political correctness gone mad”, with exactly the same binary stupidity displayed by its Little Sir Echo Mr Naughtie this morning. Then there are officials, the well-meaning kind who genuinely believe all – or some – adults must be treated like children, and the probably more common kind who are fearful that they’ll be sued should anything unpleasant happen to anyone, ever. And then there are the companies that make a packet out of doing the suing, who advertise with nice-looking young women on the television, and the people who then ring Ambulance-Chasers Direct because, let’s face it, they want some free money and don’t care who pays for it.

The thing is, I just don’t like banning things. So railing against all this appeals to both the social Liberal and the economic Liberal sides of my invective. The stereotype of a social Liberal thinks everything’s the fault of heartless, rapacious big businesses who hurt everyone else in their scramble for cash. The stereotype of an economic Liberal thinks everything’s the fault of well-meaning do-gooders with no concept of reality who want to stop anyone doing anything ‘for our own good’. Well, the villains here include both. Hurrah for all Liberals!

I may not agree with everything John Stuart Mill ever said – what’s the point of a Liberal who entirely agrees with another Liberal? – but my instincts are ever likely to side with him over Roy Hattersley, and even when there are things I disapprove of or which are bad for me, I’d need a far, far stronger reason to ban them than just bleating that I don’t like what someone else is doing or that I don’t have the courage to take responsibility for my own mistakes. Drinking isn’t one of my regular vices, despite Richard’s parents’ fortieth anniversary bash, but I strolled over to my local supermarket earlier today to buy a bottle, just to stick some Vs up at the headlines. And, gosh! A little red light came on so I was challenged to make sure I looked over 21 (I do, and yes, it’s been quite a few years since anyone took a second look). So if someone of 16 gets sold booze, it’s not the fault of lax laws, but greedy suppliers. I have quite a few allergies – though not latex, fortunately for one of my regular vices – but I don’t feel the urge to ban things to make life easier for me. I don’t approve of the smoking ban, though it’s helpful to my asthma. I’m allergic to dogs, but I’d do nothing to outlaw them. It might be very helpful indeed if the government banned household dust, and sent a team round to vacuum every trace of it from under me to spare my allergic reaction. But no, they’d only send an inspector round to fine me because I don’t clean the flat thoroughly enough, and that wouldn’t stop me coughing, would it? And pretty much any kind of food can make me ill, but I know that certain kinds are much more likely to make me more unwell than others. But I still eat them from time to time, and the results aren’t something I’d sue the manufacturer for or that I’d want to campaign for a ban on so I won’t be tempted and no-one else can enjoy it – it’s simply an ill-effect that I know is largely my own fault.

So when bandwagon-jumping politicians, fear-stoking journalists, fearful safety officials, ambulance-chasing lawyers, anxious parents, authoritarian police officers and greedy citizens all say ‘It’s not my fault, guv,’ look at them askance. I can’t quite decide whether it’s ironic or appropriate that people who want to stop anyone being able to take responsibility for their own actions keep dodging responsibility for wanting to do so. Still, not my responsibility, is it?

The item on the balloons, incidentally, was followed by an item that regularly prompts an allergic reaction – the so-called Thought For the Day. So when I heard that the speaker was director “…of the thinktank Ecclesia,” I considered suing them for the dangerous lack of health advice: ‘Warning: may not contain real thoughts’.

Labels: British Politics, Drugs, Meddling In Things That Are Nobody's Business But Your Own, Radio, Stupid Ideas, The Golden Dozen, The Today Programme

Whoops. With everything going wrong for David Cameron in recent weeks, this morning he dropped three different messes of his own making all over the Today Programme. Reaching for another Tory core vote issue to shore up his fragile position, he chose the wrong one: what idiot prattles about school discipline whilst his own party are rioting? Then he fell flat on his pitiful by-election failures, describing the Conservatives without qualification as the third party. Finally, unable to answer multiple Tory attacks on him, he chose to attack each of them in turn, sounding like just another feuding, useless Tory.

School discipline (warning! Warning! Tory leader losing support and desperately blowing another dog whistle to their core vote instead of tackling the big issues!) is an issue that would normally be ‘safe’ for him – not reaching out to anyone new, a very minor issue that won’t make much of a difference to any of the problems in education, but making the right noises to stop the retired colonels, swivel-eyed Thatchianists and Daily Hate Mail ladies turning against him. You can tell he’s desperate – that one was even one of the five main points in the last Tory Manifesto, under Michael Howard. Oh, come on, you must remember that: it was the knee-jerk right-wing one that went down with most voters like a cup of cold Tebbit, written by some vitriolic right-winger called David Cameron who today’s brave Dave Cameron, progressive new Tory leader, has entirely repudiated. Well, until he has to reach back into it for a scrap to throw to the wolves behind him, of course.

But David, David, couldn’t you have thought of a different golden oldie to play today? Even the Today Programme couldn’t miss the open goal that was including something along the lines of ‘but of course Mr Cameron can’t even keep discipline in his own party, which is falling apart by the hour with most of the different bits calling for his head’ in the headline. Ouch. In Agatha Christie’s phrase, this was a drowning man clutching at a razor blade. Not that natural Tories will really have their jollies tickled by what he’s proposing, really: no wonder he keeps using the words “school discipline” like a mantra and rushing quickly past the actual details, which is merely denying kids the right of appeal. What the Tory base wants is the smack! of corporal punishment for oiks and hoodies, willow against flesh, mmmm, harder, headmaster, and a little thing like abandoning natural justice sounds rather namby-pamby compared to the fetishes of their overheated imaginations.

When asked why he couldn’t do any better in Ealing Southall, Mr Cameron made a big thing of being third. Again and again. Until, prodded beyond endurance, he delivered his verdict on the Tories’ electoral problem in general:

“You get squeezed by the top two parties”.

Whoops! Not something a Liberal Democrat would ever be dim enough to admit (well, there was that crushingly stupid by-election candidate in about 1996…), and saying both other parties are ahead of you without even bothering to qualify it is a pretty foolish admission for the leader of the Conservative Party to let slip. Really, it’s a good job for him that the interview finished after only about a dozen minutes: by 8.30, he’d probably have been conceding ‘We’re shit, and we know we are,’ followed by pleading ‘Please – don’t hurt me’. It’s no wonder so many people in his own party think he can’t be let out on his own.

It’s shame interviewers can’t do a tiny bit of homework, though; the obvious comeback from anyone with a clue would have been ‘So your result in Sedgefield must have been an absolute disaster by your logic, then, as the Liberal Democrats were in third place but leapt up to second, squeezing you down to third?’ Sarah Montague also got the name of the Tory candidate in Ealing Southall wrong, enabling Mr Cameron to score one of his few hits by gently correcting her (subtext: ‘she doesn’t know what she’s talking about, listeners,’ and unfortunately, she didn’t). It still wasn’t much of a good moment for him to claw back from that particular disaster area…

Mr Cameron also came unstuck when pressed on the hilarious success of putting “David Cameron’s Conservatives” on the ballot paper in Ealing (though not in Sedgefield, of course; you know the Conservatives, they always say one thing in one place and something completely different in another). Having already bravely taken responsibility for his own name by firing Grant Shapps on the grounds that he thought up the name “David Cameron”, this morning’s desperate attempt at an excuse was that it was all the local party’s fault, and they can call themselves any old silly thing, no matter how stupid. Brave, brave Sir David! What a marvellous display of leadership: to run away, shouting ‘They made me do it!’ and blame everyone else in sight for even his own name.

Let’s just give Mr Cameron’s career a minute’s silence for that point: the one leader in history so petrified of taking responsibility for anything that he says ‘Not in my name!’ about even his own name.

‘Brave’ Dave then got quite crabby when presented with one of his own party’s new attack on him which asked for “some substance and some credibility” and said he was just about “box-ticking and gimmickry” and “another Tony Blair” – and this from, not an old Tory die-hard, but from a new-look younger Conservative who introduced Mr Cameron’s leadership bid at their Conference! Was Mr Cameron able to produce a raft of policy substance to defend himself from this charge? Well, obviously not, because he knows the truth of it better than anyone. No, Mr Cameron just announced that Mr Miraj had asked him for a peerage, and he was only in a strop because that was “not a promise I would make to anybody” (he couldn’t even say he’d turned the man down flat, so forceful wasn’t this claim), as if that meant everything he’d ever said must be false.

Of course, if the Today Programme was the serious political forum it claims to be rather than sensationalist lightweights who mistake shouting for scrutiny, they might have done some of that thing, what do you call it, research (Wiki the word, Ms Montague), and asked, ‘Mr Miraj was your candidate in Watford, wasn’t he? That’s a seat that you’ve got to win, and a close three-way marginal. If he’s begging you to make him a Lord, aren’t you Conservatives admitting you’ve given up all hope of winning that seat and left it to the Liberal Democrats? After all, you are the third party.’ Mr Cameron found similar reasons to rubbish the next Tory she quoted saying he was useless. Oh, and the next. And the one after that. He still couldn’t answer the substance of their charges when she piled them all together and pointed out that all he was doing was criticising the individuals and not what they were saying, offering him what I believe is known in footballing parlance as an easy save. Has no-one told him that not answering the substance makes him seem shifty and vacuous (all right, I know lots of people have told him that)? More importantly to his image, has no-one told him that indulging in a constant series of bitchy personal attacks just makes him seem childishly nasty (and, yes, I know, pot and kettle, but I’m a blogger and we do petty gossip; he wants us to think he’s mature enough to be Prime Minister)? And I had to laugh when her last question was:

“Your party has a habit of getting rid of its leaders. So how long have you got?”

Ms Montague may not be a brilliant interviewer, but comparing Mr Cameron’s shifty playing-the-man-damn-person-not-the-ball technique to his success as posing as a poor tiny victim in the past shows he found it much more difficult this morning. He seems to be rather testy that he can’t snap so much at a female interviewer than he can at beastly John Humphrys, though, without looking like the oily bully that he really is. Mr Cameron is not a happy bunny this morning, nor – more importantly – looking remotely like a winner. Who needs to look at goat entrails, tea leaves or opinion polls to see how well he’s doing when his every word is muffled by the foot in his mouth?

Labels: British Politics, Conservatives, The Golden Dozen, The Today Programme

Commentators are saying Alan Johnston should feel robbed, but no. Not only was the counting method as fair as you can get under Labour’s bizarre system of ‘one person, potentially several votes, some worth a thousand times as much as others’, but there’s another failed candidate who has every right to feel peeved – not with the electoral system, but the voters. Harriet Harman is a vain, pontificating, hypocritical opportunist who won by saying anything to get elected, despite her actions in government… So tangerine-toned turncoat Peter Hain must be crying, ‘It should have been me!’ Tragically, he was annihilated by all the other candidates except the mini-me avatar of Tony Blair put up for the Labour Party to give the good kicking they never dared deliver to his face.

Curiously, my eyes remain dry.

Labels: British Politics, Labour

Very Junior Minister With Special Responsibility For Paperclips And Being A Nasty Piece of Work Liam Byrne has made a starry-eyed pronouncement about the Labour Government’s second-favourite useless, extortionate, intrusive, unworkable fiasco (obviously, Iraq remains ahead by a long way), claiming that ID Cards and the National Identity Register will become a “great British institution” for the Twenty-First Century.

Alex, from armchair:

“Some of us prefer not to live in institutions.”

Richard, from other armchair:

“Just like workhouses were the great institution of the Nineteenth Century, you great *****.”

Both:

“Ho ho ho ho!”

Perhaps the Government is trying to compensate for randomly releasing so many prisoners by turning the entire country into one huge penal institution?


And, yes, I know I’ve not blogged for ages and ages and have promised articles to many people. I’ve not been well, but, fingers crossed, I’m working on it…

Labels: British Politics, Labour, Meddling In Things That Are Nobody's Business But Your Own, Richard

If you’re up at midnight, there’s an especially good episode of The Avengers featuring Dad’s Army’s top eccentric John Laurie and a diabolical plot on a train. Tonight on BBC4, it’s the tasteful attack of the funny terrorists! It was on last night, too; with fabulous timing, if you took a break from wall-to-wall TV coverage of a slimy liar re-announcing that he’s really, really, really going to go this time, eventually, you may have caught someone called Blair’s involvement with a plan to sharply abbreviate a Labour Prime Minister’s reign in mid-term (then Hustle, with another load of con-artists).

Steed goes off the rails – Emma finds her station in life

“Durbridge. Population – two thousand, four hundred and thirteen. Principal industry – manufacture of glass eyes for teddy bears. Fame – non-existent. But – after tonight, there won’t be anyone in the civilised world who hasn’t heard of it.”

Perhaps you might not think ‘comedy terrorism’ the ideal subject material for television today. I can’t imagine it was a natural choice in 1967 either, but then that was the year kids were entertained by Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, a couple of dozen episodes of puppet fun in which a heroic living corpse battled an unending stream of zombie terrorists. Whose terror attacks sometimes succeeded. Anyway, this story opens with a big, brassy chase theme as a thoroughly respectable civil service type is chased between trains by two gun-wielding roughs… But turns out to be slightly less innocent and defenceless when he uses his neatly striped tie as a garrotte on one of them and escapes. Don’t worry, though, readers – he’s one of Steed’s sort of chaps, and has discovered a plan to assassinate the Prime Minister by a “splinter group of fanatics”. The funny thing that then happened to this script on the way to it being as dark as an episode of Cracker is, of course, that it became terribly funny. If it hadn’t been made forty years ago and was being put out on a channel where more than a handful of us were watching it, there would be letters of complaint. Hurrah!

Labels: British Politics, Reviews, The Avengers, The Avengers Season 5

Ding Dong! The Witch is dead!
Which old Witch? The Wicked Witch!
Ding Dong! The Wicked Witch is dead.
Wake up, you sleepy head, rub your eyes, get out of bed.
Wake up, the Wicked Witch is dead.
She’s gone where the goblins go,
Below, below, below, yo-ho,
Let’s open up and sing, and ring the bells out.
Ding Dong the merry-oh, sing it high, sing it low.
Let them know
The Wicked Witch is dead!

Perhaps I should wait until it’s verified legally, but he is morally, ethically, spiritually, politically, positively, absolutely, undeniably and reliably finished. And he has, of course, been so for years. Technically, even now he’s not gone yet, but after this latest, absurdly stage-managed (and characteristically pre-announced), self-justifying, faux-humble, faux-apologetic pile of cant, even this loathsome lying hypocrite will find it difficult to wiggle out of this announcement. Holding my breath that he doesn’t declare martial law, fulfil his greatest unrealised ambition by arresting Gordon Brown, and call the whole thing off, on the 27th of June the streets will ring to the joyous cheer, “Hail, hail, the Witch is dead.” As always, it emerged first through his spin doctors.

More charitable political obituaries will remember the first few months of Mr Blair’s reign, when he put into practice proposals championed by other leaders and other parties, all of which he was lukewarm over at the time and has bitterly regretted since: freedom of information; Scottish and Welsh devolution; the Human Rights Act. He grits his teeth and struggles to chip away at them to this day. And since then… What? Been more Tory than the Tories? Centralised more power than ever known in peacetime? Demanded government control to micromanage every area of our lives? Swept away centuries of British freedoms, so that reviled kings like John or Richard III who introduced them are certain to look better in the history books than he does? Brought in dozens of criminal justice acts that aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on while displaying nothing but contempt for the Rule of Law? Yes, what an incredible achievement it was to win three elections in a row, even with the astounding luck that our supercasino voting system gave him a jackpot of power with barely a third of voters backing him. But isn’t it still more incredible that, having won such immense majorities and all that power, Mr Blair so clearly had absolutely not the faintest idea of what to do with it, except keep it? No wonder he’s hung on so long. What else was he there for, but to be there? Mr Blair is the most public proof ever displayed that it’s not the size that matters, but what you do with it. Look at his record at home, and his protracted period of incompetently Orwellian absolute power has left nothing but the most mean-spirited of marks.

But it isn’t for any of those things that Mr Blair will be remembered. His legacy is one thing, and one only.

Iraq.

Because of Mr Blair’s appalling judgement and because of Mr Blair’s shameless lies, hundreds of thousands of people are dead, terrorists rejoice at the recruits he’s brought to them, and Britain is reviled around the world. Even before he came to power, Mr Blair had made ‘spin’ famous. His relationship with truth was always tenuous. But his lies to take Britain to war with Iraq, his lies to smear the opponents brave enough to stand up to him at the time, and his lies to cover it all up mean that politics has never been regarded with such contempt. And that’s not unfair. Because when the Prime Minister lies about something so serious, we all deserve to be held to account for it.

Tony Blair has had a hideously corrosive effect on British politics. Even when he’s telling the truth, no-one can believe a single word the Prime Minister says. He preaches to the powerless and sucks up to the powerful; he is a loathsome, hypocritical, sanctimonious bully who lied his way into mass murder. I know many Liberal Democrats had a sneaking (or in some cases blatant) regard for Mr Blair when he was first elected. I started off finding him an untrustworthy Tory snake-oil salesman, and that was the high point of my regard for him. I came up with a Watchdog-style consumer questionnaire in 2001 for people who’d voted him into office: ‘Is This the Labour You Voted For in 1997?’ I didn’t come up with a funny list in 2005. ‘Did you expect Labour to pitch us into an aggressive, illegal war that will make us infamous around the world?’ just didn’t have that comic edge to it. Today’s was the first of his speeches for years that I’ve been able to bring myself to watch, and that only in the spirit of someone standing over the coffin with a mirror over the lips. Just to make sure that that irredeemable shit isn’t about to get up again. Even his own party has been desperate to get rid of him for months now, and in many cases years. Such a shame they didn’t stand up to him when it mattered, and just want to duck the blame now.

Members of opposition parties must, I think, be more selfless than members of the Labour Party. In the 1990s, Labour held their noses and wanted him as Labour Leader because, though they hated him and he despised them, he would win elections for them. Today, though he hates us and we despise him, few members of opposing parties will experience anything other than public-spirited relief at his going, though by cold electoral calculation we should want him as Labour Leader because he would win elections for us. While every day that Mr Blair stays means that the biggest focus of bitter resentment against the Labour Party remains in place and that no-one can properly set a future direction that might just get them out of that mess, all of which is hugely damaging to Labour prospects, his staying in office has been even more damaging to the national interest of the nation he closed his speech in synthetic fervour for, this scoundrel picking jingoism as his last refuge. I believe that the second everyone is certain he’s left Downing Street for the last time, there will be a surge in support for Labour through sheer relief, and the Liberal Democrats will be more squeezed than ever. Despite that, it can’t come a moment too soon. He’s pure poison to British politics, and that simply isn’t good for anyone.

For readers expecting one of my usual jolly Doctor Who references, I’ll leave you with this. Two Doctor Who stories were broadcast on this very date in years gone by. One was The War Games, in which sinister autocrats toyed with countless soldiers’ lives as part of their sincerely held conviction in creating a new order. No relation. I watched the other this morning, noting the uncannily prescient phraseology:

“I shall be the people’s liberator.”
“You came very close to being their destroyer!”
“That will be forgotten in my triumph.”

No such luck, Mr Blair. People will forget your ‘triumphs’, but your chosen role as destroyer will stain our history for centuries.

Labels: British Politics, History, Iraq, Labour

A small band of fighters for freedom, having scored years of remarkable victories against impossible odds, are finally annihilated by the overwhelming forces of a pitiless right-wing administration. But enough of the depressing world of the local elections: do you remember Blake’s 7? More than a quarter of a century since its heroes were shockingly gunned down at the series’ finale, the Sci-Fi Channel today relaunches Britain’s bleakest sci-fi as an online audio drama starring James Bond’s Colin Salmon and This Life’s Daniela Nardini alongside Derek Riddell as Blake – the only dramatic hero going labelled as a terrorist paedophile. Even more than when the series first started in 1978, it’s difficult to think of a worse combination to throw at someone.

Though the paedophile charge is fabricated by a totalitarian state desperate to destroy a political opponent, the line between terrorist and freedom-fighter in the series is likely to be more complicated; Blake was certainly veering towards the scarily messianic by some way into the TV series… And as far as the heroes go, he’s the ‘nice’ one. From political activist to convicted criminal, he’s shipped off to a prison world (a futuristic take on transportation to Australia) with, well, a bunch of criminals. So when, en route, their prison freighter encounters a mysterious abandoned space ship and Blake is able to board it, his crew won’t be a clean-cut bunch in starched uniforms. No, the people in uniforms are the ruthless galactic Federation he’s fighting, and Blake’s allies are thieves and murderers who don’t necessarily share his revolutionary ideals (if there’s an echo of a familiar old story, there’s more than a touch of the Robin Hood legend, too). Still, he looks on the bright side in an episode to be broadcast online next week:

“We need more crew. People we can trust.”
“And where are we going to find them?”
“We don’t have to. The Federation already have.”

It’s the third century of the second calendar, and just as in 1984, a future dystopian regime aims to define the past as well as the present – their smearing of Blake’s past being just the most obvious. The TV series began by depicting the Federation as a corrupt, faceless bureaucracy, communist-dreary with fascist enforcement, but before long it became personified in the figure of Servalan; with her charismatic leadership the focus of opposition more than the system itself, the totalitarianism grew to feel much more definitively fascist. Knowing that Daniela Nardini’s Servalan will be as central a part of the re-imagined series as the fabulous Jacqueline Pearce was in the original, I’m looking forward to finding out just what the political flavour will be.

In addition to the show’s political direction, I’m intrigued to hear what tone it’ll settle on. Even allowing for people’s occasionally justified sneers at the production values, the original series had a remarkably variable feel – it started and finished in a grim, gritty 1984-influenced style, but the introduction of Servalan (as well as altering the political balance) meant that much of the series in between struck a gloriously camp attitude, which is why I’ve previously described that series as “Robin Hood meets 1984, but with more frocks”. The two approaches have occasionally been termed ‘Gun’ and ‘Frock’, and though it’s not yet obvious which the new series is more likely to take, it would seem more difficult to depict someone in a fabulous cocktail frock striding across a quarry on audio… On the other hand, on noticing after Saturday’s event that the blurb in the Sci-Fi-London 6 booklet describes Daniela Nardini’s Servalan as their “arch nemesis,” I asked Ben Aaronovitch if there was any significance to the lack of the expected hyphen between those words. He agreed that she is, indeed, about as arch as a nemesis can get.

Saturday’s event? Oh, yes. On Saturday morning, Richard and I were at the Apollo West End for a new Blake’s 7 launch event as part of Sci-Fi-London 6: The 6th Annual International Festival of Science Fiction and Fantastic Film. With producers, writers and the star answering questions, a quarter-hour rough cut documentary (‘A Rebellion Reborn’) and a preview of one of the mini-episodes, we had an intriguing taste of the new series. New series lead writer Ben Aaronovitch (a hugely impressive author in Doctor Who’s late ’80s renaissance and the New Adventures, and an occasional but acerbic blogger about his distaste for banks) and writer James Swallow discussed whether the times and the ‘War on Terror’ had influenced what they could or couldn’t show – no – and, as the documentary put it (to one of the biggest laughs, as Derek Riddell turned in slo-mo on the big screen), how

“Blake is your worst nightmare – he’s a pragmatic idealist, and he will kill.”

Though they’ve retained the core concept of the original series, it has a different spin, and a very different style of storytelling; rather than a series of 50-minute TV productions, the new series recorded so far consists of three hour-long audio dramas… Each split into twelve individual five-minute segments to enable people to play them online – for free, incidentally, though CDs of the three complete episodes will be available to buy a little later on. The idea of telling an absorbing drama in such short bursts made me think more of comics like 2000AD than audio drama, and I did wonder about the audience: will graphic novel readers be interested in radio plays; and aren’t traditional radio listeners more interested in things that go on a bit? To be fair, James Swallow compared the fast-moving bite-sized chunks to the fast-paced storytelling of American TV ‘acts’ split for ad breaks, and I can see the similarity, along with the (not deep, but thrilling) Star Wars: Clone Wars series. I just hope they find their audience, not least as they all seemed so enthusiastic to do more… Of course, as well as the need to design the segments for an online audience, it’s impossible to imagine the series done in exactly the same way anyway, particularly after the ‘evolving story of a bunch of people in space who don’t like each other and may not survive the experience’ has been developed again in Blake’s 7-influenced series such as Babylon 5, Farscape and Firefly / Serenity. So, as well as learning from each of those to have a more modern style, the story may well go in a different direction to the original (and it’s already evident that one or two of the more convenient plot elements have been surgically removed). We know that one version ended with all its heroes brutally slaughtered and a boot stamping on the galaxy forever – now we have the joy of knowing that the new one might not. Or it might again!

In the meantime, today the first couple of chapters went online for Ben Aaronovitch’s introductory script, Rebel. Fans of the original series will discover this is pretty much a new take on the first three episodes back in 1978, as Blake is framed, tried, exiled and (in a remarkable stroke of luck) presented with the best ship in the galaxy, which he names the Liberator. Even if you’re not a fan of the original series, you’ll note that this is telling the story at three times the original pace, so it’ll have to go at quite a lick. Rather strangely, and in part because our steam-powered dial-up isn’t too good at streaming media, we’ve not yet heard the initial few chapters online now (with more added each Tuesday, Thursday and Friday), but we have heard the seventh one. About 35 minutes into the first story, this segment features Blake and a handful of others already aboard their new ship, trying to work out how to handle it and each other, while less lucky cast members are in the process of being dumped on a singularly unpleasant prison planet. From this instalment alone, it seemed very promising: the first few lines were a bit shaky – telling the audience they were on radio by painstakingly describing rather too many things to sound natural – but swiftly drawing us in with well-sketched characters and promising lines as two contrasting pairs of people explore their ship (“Shouldn’t we tell Blake?” Avon is asked of another discovery. “There’s no hurry,” observes the smoothly ruthless second lead), or as the prison ship’s computer reels off lists of crimes for the convicts, including a very funny murderer (no, really) and a superbly set-up gag from the chapter title ‘Space Fall’… And, yes, it does seem a little strange that they picked that one to preview, but that gave the people there the chance to skip the set-up, with most of us familiar enough with the original story to follow the re-imagining. And it sounded good.

The sound design is the work of the extremely talented Alistair Lock, who’s previously worked both on Big Finish’s Doctor Who audio plays and on the infrequent but gripping Kaldor City political thrillers that mixed story elements from both Doctor Who and Blake’s 7. Alistair’s preference both in audio environments and in music has always seemed to be for ‘big sound’, and he described the approach on Saturday as “audio widescreen”. Without big-budget visual effects on screen – because there are no visuals at all – it’s been up to Alistair to create the soundscape for the show, and it does indeed sound huge, with an epic theme that fits right in with modern sci-fi spectaculars (and, indeed, could easily fit in for one of Babylon 5’s seasons). Derek Riddell added that, rather than the TV sci-fi style of acting against a coloured backdrop which will be replaced by computer-generated images or the traditional style of radio drama where they do all the sound effects live, the Blake’s 7 actors are acting with just each other, and Alistair adds everything in afterwards by sound, an approach coined as “Audio Bluescreen”. I wonder if it’ll catch on? I’m commanded, incidentally, to add that the full benefit will only be reaped by listening to the whole thing on a proper surround-sound system – like George Lucas, but with hard work and talent standing in for an enormous budget, Alistair is very keen that people experience his work properly. I have to admit, though, it sounded fantastic in a proper cinema…

As far as the actors go, the very “contemporary” and quite big-name cast is impressive, too. We saw Derek Riddell in action on Saturday, and I’m also particularly keen to hear more of Colin Salmon as Avon – the cold, cynical anti-hero of the original – and Daniela Nardini as the villainous Servalan, but then there are also Queer As Folk’s Craig Kelly, Crusade’s Carrie Dobro, Robin of Sherwood Michael Praed (a series not unlike Blake’s 7 set in the forest), Hellraiser’s Doug Bradley and even Big Finish’s fabulous India Fisher. Derek Riddell, of course, has been in tons of dramas in the last few years – the BBC’s modern Shakespeare retellings, No Angels, Spooks – but you’ll not be surprised that I particularly remembered him as Sir Robert MacLeish in last year’s thrilling Victorian werewolf episode of Doctor Who, Tooth and Claw. All right, I admit it. Forewarned who’d be at Saturday’s event, I hummed and hawed over bringing books for the authors to sign (with another I recognised but wasn’t expecting sitting, surreally, directly behind me the night after we’d listened to his latest Doctor Who commentary; I won’t name him, as Richard’s rather embarrassed that he continued his occasional series of saying unfortunate things in authors’ hearing by observing that he “looks like Mooncat” without realising the man was about two metres away), decided that would be altogether too gauche, but did bring along just the one Doctor Who DVD booklet in case I got the chance to collar Derek Riddell. I did, surprised as he was that anyone remembered him from just one episode. “You don’t realise,” I chipped in brightly, “that now you’ve done Doctor Who and Blake’s 7, you’ll have two sets of stalkers who’ll never let you go for the rest of your life.” From the flash of animal terror that inspired, I somehow think that may not have been my most well-timed truism. So, if he flies off to LA and never, ever comes back, look, I’m sure it won’t be my fault, OK?

Blake, Avon and Servalan had always been very striking parts, but several of the other regulars were on occasion rather anonymous. The new cast may go some way towards rectifying that, but the writers and producers have made it clear they’re giving their cast more to work with than some of the ‘originals’ sometimes got. On Saturday, they promised that they’re not going to fiddle with already strong characters, but to put the work in on neglected ones. Appropriately for the reinvention of a series that helped inspire Babylon 5, a character they regarded as a particular waste of a good actor and promising backstory – Jenna, the show’s pilot – has had a lot of work put into her character and is now played by Carrie Dobro, not only a sassy former New York stand-up but a former cast member on (doomed) Babylon 5 spin-off Crusade. The series’ other early female lead, alien telepath Cally, will join the new team eventually in a story centring round her, so in the meantime there’s a new character, disgraced but still “true-blue” Federation Section Leader Laura Mezin (bound to be the cause of a little friction with the rest of the convicts). Thief Vila and big dim strongman Gan sound like they’ve been given a very different interpersonal dynamic, too, though from an excerpt we heard I suspect this version of the story doesn’t go along with the notion that Gan’s a sex killer, compellingly advanced in Fiona Moore and Alan Stevens’ intelligent critical study of Blake’s 7, Liberation (easily the best book to get hold of on the original series).

The other two stories already recorded are Traitor and Liberator, by James Swallow and Marc Platt (another creative powerhouse from late ’80s Doctor Who and the New Adventures). I suspect the triptych of Rebel, Traitor, Liberator both describes Blake and gives a clue into the subjects: Rebel giving Blake’s story as political criminal; Traitor perhaps seeing him from the Federation’s point of view and introducing their Supreme Commander Servalan; and Liberator, the name given to their mysterious ship and likely to involve ‘weird stuff’ hinted at by Ben Aaronovitch on Saturday as he praised the work of Marc Platt:

“He’s a very underused writer. I think he should be writing everything! He’s incredibly versatile, very funny, and quite cheap at the moment.”

Providing we hit on a way to listen to them smoothly – or when the CD comes out – we’re very much looking forward to them…

Labels: Blake’s 7, New Adventures

The very best of luck to all Liberal Democrats standing for election today across Scotland, Wales and England. With London curiously quiet, I’ll be doing some telephone knocking-up, which is less exciting but also warmer than a brisk tramp about the streets.

If you’re somewhere that has elections today, please get out and vote… Ideally for your local Liberal Democrat, but voting for someone else is much better than not voting at all.

Meanwhile, if you’re too eager for polling news to wait until tonight, or (understandably) fear that Mr Dimbleby will send you to sleep, here’s a placebo. Yesterday I wrote an analysis of the Britain-wide opinion polls during April for Liberal Democrat Voice, so if you want to pore over some sheep’s entrails, please read.

If you need a reminder of which parties do and don’t deserve your vote, too, and don’t have a local leaflet to hand, Lib Dem Voice also has a national (indeed international) hint for you. Whichever way you incline, do use your vote – or how will you be able to complain afterwards about whoever gets in?

Labels: British Politics, Liberal Democrats

Today’s our twelfth-and-a-halfth anniversary! After a late night when my beloved serenaded me to sleep with the Kroll song, Richard and I were up early for a romantic morning of presents, wondering what to do for dinner, discussing Doctor Who and shouting at the Today Programme. Awwhhh. Thanks to Liberal Democrat Blogs Aggregated, too, for giving us a special private day to ourselves and discouraging anyone from peeking in at our blogs; at least, both mine and Millennium’s have vanished from the listings (so much for his latest on Sir Mr the Merciless and mine on free Doctor Who books!).

After a horrible journey in to work this morning with a fire on another line overloading the DLR, poor Richard’s not home yet this evening, so I hope the trains have been faster and less packed. Still, I have dinner ready to go when he gets in, and one of the presents that took too long in the post has finally turned up for me to wave at him when he gets in (the unlikely concept of a Philip K Dick cartoon). What other presents have there been, you’re wondering? Knowing my taste for melodrama, I now have another film of Richard III; knowing my taste for film noir, I now have both The Blue Dahlia and The Black Dahlia. It was only after I’d opened them that my beloved realised he’d given me Richard and Flowers, bless him! While I’m afraid my own gifts couldn’t really compete for instinctive puntastic ability, I did think he’d be amused by a bag of chocolate. Not just any bag, you understand; Richard frequently gives our relatives dainty little selection bags from Clarins, so when I saw a similar arrangement with romantic chocolates at the overpriced but classy Hotel Chocolat, I couldn’t resist giving him a taste of his own medicine. The fact that the shop was entirely staffed by slim, pretty young men had nothing to do with it – not my type, though I have to admit the Carry On side of my nature was sorely tempted when they glided round me (their sole customer at the time) with little trays of chocolates, asking “Would sir like a taste?” Fortunately, I was able to restrain my tongue and just use it to appreciate their chocolates, so I’m here to greet Richard rather than in court on a sexual harassment charge.

And here he is! So I must go to prepare more chocolate (and other things). Toodle pip! Oh, and most importantly – an eighth of a century later, I still love him very much. Here’s to a quarter of a century!

Labels: Richard

One of the many lovely things about Doctor Who being a big TV success again is that people are buying the books in huge numbers, too. Right now, you can also get some for ‘free’ – some online, some with a magazine (requiring cash). So, should you? For me there were two golden ages where Doctor Who novels really seemed to matter: the scintillating New Adventures, aimed at older readers, which came to an end ten years ago yesterday after keeping the series going once the television dropped it; and the cheery Target novelisations of the original TV series itself. Happily, these are the very book ranges from which you can now obtain a selected few for free. Read on to find out just how and, perhaps more importantly, which ones you should try to lay your hands on…

Now, BBC Books have been publishing their own range of novels, nicely produced hardbacks featuring the two latest Doctors. In fact, there are three new stories of the Doctor and Martha just out in the last week or so, and while I’m particularly looking forward to reading the one with childhood terrors the Zygons, I’ll get to them shortly rather than dashing out for them on day of publication. So far, you see, this line’s been… OK. Aimed at children like the Target novels, but of a length closer to that of Virgin’s New Adventures, I quite enjoy them, but as far as I’m concerned they’ve not yet hit their stride. The best of both of my favourite book ranges can punch alongside the TV series; these BBC Books so far look very feeble alongside the new series. They lack either the depth and inspiration of the New Adventures – whose authors included half a dozen of the new TV series’ writers – or the crisp, well-told stories of the Target novelisations. Well, with one exception, which I’ll come to later and contrast with the least appealing of the new books.

Doctor Who – The New Adventures Ebooks

Rather than indulging my love for the New Adventures novels, I’m going to skip past those swiftly and then look in a bit more detail at some of the Target books. The reason for that’s simple enough; the magazine with Targets attached won’t be on newsagents’ shelves for long, but four of the New Adventures, and four other books from the same stable, have been redone as Ebooks on the BBC website and are in general likely to be around for a while. Having re-read a couple in the new online editions (I recommend Lungbarrow; not my favourite of those available, but intriguingly rewritten as well as supplying author’s notes, not to mention saving you a fortune on eBay), today I’ve picked out another in celebration of the range that came to a tragic end a decade ago with So Vile a Sin. The one I’ve just started on is Nightshade, an early novel by the League of Gentlemen’s Mark Gatiss (both a writer and an actor for Doctor Who on TV these days), and though hardly the most groundbreaking of stories, it has a place in my heart as the first bit of Doctor Who to scare me since the ’70s. This chilly paean to Quatermass and Doctor Who like Mr Hinchcliffe used to make now has new illustrations, notes by the author and, most excitingly of all, even MP3s of the long-deleted Cybertech ‘soundtrack’. Ever since the lovely Mike Fillis gave me a copy, I’ve loved that ‘Nightshade TV Theme’…

Anyway, you can pick the Ebooks up at leisure, but pop into your nearest newsagent and, with luck, they’ll have a Doctor Who-related magazine or two. The one with the free Target novel attached is SFX’s latest special, SFX Collection – Doctor Who: The Ultimate Unofficial Guide to New Who, and in the way of these things it’s more a free magazine to pick up with a book bumped up to about the same price as the new BBC ones; for the most part, it’s not the most enthralling read. Far more worth dipping into is the latest Doctor Who Magazine special, a fabulous pile of gossip labelled In Their Own Words Volume Three, 1977-81, but don’t let that put you off. Mini-reviews of the magazines at the end, but before then, at last to the point. The SFX specials come with a choice of fifteen novels. Which should you pick?

First off, I suspect there’s very little quality control gone into the selection of free books in the SFX goodie bags. I imagine they simply found a supplier with a pile of remaindered books and picked out at least one for each Doctor (original series vintage), which is as fair a way to do it as any. They’re definitely not the best – perhaps one or two might be at the top end of the range – but, again with an exception or two, they’re not the worst of them. The mix of quality is about as thorough as the mixture of Doctors. There are a good few monsters around, too, though while Cybermen appear, you won’t find any Daleks. And there’s a good selection of authors, with most of the Target regulars represented (omitting only Ian Marter, a bloodthirsty childhood favourite) to illustrate the styles that came round most often, not to mention the clichés: if you buy more than one, look out for recurring chapter titles such as Attack, Escape or Trapped! Here they go, in the order in which the original stories were broadcast…

The Free Target Doctor Who Book Selection With SFX

Doctor Who – Marco Polo

Starring the Doctor (William Hartnell)
A greatly extended very early story of the Doctor’s encounter with the famous explorer in China makes a surprisingly short novel by comparison, though John Lucarotti does quite a good job of it. It moves more quickly on the page than the TV’s weekly variations of ‘see the sights of Cathay / the Doctor breaks into the TARDIS / Tegana’s discovered to be a baddie / he sets Marco against our heroes’, though less stylishly. I enjoy the additions of all Kublai Khan’s endearments to his Empress (Richard never responds to them), and it’s interesting to compare the two ‘versions’ – here, written once the TV series had been going for a couple of decades, important points are redrafted to give the regulars more of a starring role, presumably because everyone expected it by then, as if making little changes to bend it more into the shape of a Who story. A nicely characterised little adventure in history, if you pick this one up.

Doctor Who – Galaxy Four

Starring the Doctor (William Hartnell)
From a highly experimental period of the show where they went for big concepts but limited characters, this story saw our heroes land on a doomed planet where two other parties of travellers have crashed. The Rills are ugly but good, the Drahvins are wicked but ‘beautiful’, and that’s pretty much the whole story. It’s not the most layered morality tale. The book’s only got four chapters, straight from the TV episodes, which makes it less digestible than many; there’s some rather poor internal dialogue and a fair bit of backstory added, but it’s just not terribly interesting, with a final line that’s too melodramatic to take seriously yet not over-the-top enough to be entertaining. Fortunately, it boast a fabulous cover, easily Andrew Skilleter’s campest work, featuring ‘beautiful space women’ against a blazingly colourful planet. It’s worth getting for that alone.

Doctor Who and the Tenth Planet

Starring the Doctor (William Hartnell)
“The last thrilling adventure of the first DOCTOR WHO,” as the back will tell you, this is also the first story with the Cybermen – back when they even had names, plus a particularly bonkers planet pictured gloriously on the very striking cover. Right from Gerry Davis’ often-reused Cyber-intro, this is an exciting, macho tale (James Bond clip and all), with little changes to make it up-to-the-minute and beyond – for 1976 – as the Cybermen attack a polar military base. These Cybermen are nowhere near as eerie as on TV, but if you like your blood-and-thunder…

Doctor Who and the Cybermen

Starring the Second Doctor (Patrick Troughton)
Ahh, well, this is the first book I ever read, and I love it to bits, even if it’s a bit flat and pretty much The Tenth Planet again (though like several of the very early books, this adds pictures – even if only the one of a Cyber-silhouette and the one of them rising into space are much good – but has even less brain). On TV, this story was made as The Moonbase, and could be called the first ‘production-line’ Who story with no innovations; the book’s similarly functional, but from the opening of the TARDIS as a ship in a stormy sea, rather endearing. With the Doctor accompanied by Ben, Polly and Jamie, it’s rather a strong line-up, and Polly gets a stunning ‘the deb strikes back’ moment as she destroys Cybermen with The Nail Varnish Remover of Death. I was so impressed when I read about it that my Mum had to stop me playing with nail varnish remover to try to dissolve things… Read it to see why it was so particularly suitable for me to learn to read while alone in hospital.

Doctor Who and the Mutants

Starring the Third Doctor (Jon Pertwee)
At last we come to a book with the brisk, crisp, deceptively simple style of Target top writer Terrance Dicks. For reasons that passeth understanding, one of the biggest rivalries between Who fans is the vitriol thrown between those who champion Jon Pertwee and those who favour Sylvester McCoy. Yep, some things are a mystery even to as dedicated a fan as me. Anyway, as far as I’m concerned, both have stories that tend to be rather disappointing on screen (with glorious exceptions), but they come alive in the books. For Sylv, it’s the magnificent New Adventures; with Pertwee, his stories are vastly improved as the best of the Target novelisations. The Mutants is perhaps the definitive example of a Pertwee novel told with gusto that was a terrible disappointment when I finally got to see it, and arguably the best script by Dave Martin (who died just a few weeks ago) and Bob Baker, even if it’s always felt more like one from Malcolm Hulke. It tells the future as if it’s history – picked up by the New Adventures, too – in a resolutely anti-colonialist / anti-apartheid parable, which only really lets itself down with the Star Trek ending. Still, with the book you get a great monster on the cover, but escape the rotten actors, dodgy effects and seeing aliens that organically evolve frocks, sequins, rainbow lighting and shoulderpads (who said drag queens were unnatural?).

This book also makes me a little bit sniffly, remembering when I first got it. It was in a swap for a weirdly exciting ‘spaceship thing’ I’d found on some waste ground – in truth a GAS RING – in Mrs Rigby’s classroom at primary school, from my friend Jon Good, another Who fan and brilliant cartoonist who died much too young. So I always think of him.

Doctor Who and the Green Death

Starring the Third Doctor (Jon Pertwee)
Target’s other great scribe was Malcolm Hulke, and this was the only story he novelised that he’d not written the original script for. You can’t spot the joins, though, as it’s full of well-drawn characters with rounded lives and a homily for the way we live today. This was a particularly effective homily, as a TV tale of big-business-will-poison-you that people remembered as ‘the one with the giant maggots’ becomes, in novel form, the story that turned me into a green liberal before I was ten. Reading it now, of course, I notice all the self-contradictory, romantic socialist propaganda instead. Sorry, Mac! That bit didn’t work, but never mind. The TV story is truncated in parts to make way for character, but that’s all to the good (even when he drops my favourite scene), and the gay relationship is even more obvious than on screen. So this is rather a good one to pick, even if the pictures are rubbish…

Doctor Who and the Seeds of Doom / Doctor Who and the Deadly Assassin

Starring the Fourth Doctor (Tom Baker)
Ooh, bargain! I’m looking out for this one, as it’s two books stuck together, though I haven’t spotted an SFX carrying it yet. The Seeds of Doom’s by fantastic Who producer Philip Hinchcliffe, and though he’s merely a functional prose writer, it’s still pretty tense and fast-moving. Missing an actor’s charismatic turn as the villain, as a whole less stylish but also less insanely macho than the TV story, there’s possession, horror and an enormous killer plant to enjoy, though oddly it loses most of the comic relief. Famously, one of the chapters is titled ‘Cottage Under Siege’; find a copy to see whether that’s actually true.
The Deadly Assassin is another Terrance Dicks, based on a script by the great Bob Holmes, and, well, this was the greatest story of them all on TV. In the book, it still fires off a great many ideas but doesn’t display so many remarkable styles as the disorientating, brilliant TV story as the Doctor returns to his home planet but finds himself a hunted fugitive. Though the satire is toned down here, the repeated hallucination of the early chapters is still strikingly effective, as are the action sequences as the Doctor is hunted through a surreal wilderness and, of course, the story’s complete re-imagining of the Master, a villain who’d become rather a cliché and was given a whole new lease of life (or living death). It’s far from the best of the novel range, but the crisp storytelling based on such an extraordinary script still makes it an impressive read.

Doctor Who and the Power of Kroll

Starring the Fourth Doctor (Tom Baker)
Again, Terrance adapts Bob, but this time it benefits from the page, with the dialogue, setting and a rather effective little prologue all standing out rather better than in the slightly lacklustre TV story. Part of the quest for the Key to Time, though that’s not a huge part of the plot, it’s a tale of industrial beastliness to alien ‘natives’ and not the most original in the world, but, hey, the characters work rather well, and there are religious maniacs and a huge giant squid to enjoy – even if Terrance takes the edge off the nasty ending! The Doctor’s casual brilliance seems perfect, too. Appropriately for a story all about money and religion, I knelt in WH Smiths in Stockport and read the whole book when it first came out, refusing to buy it in protest at the outrageous 10p price hike to 85p. Sigh…

Doctor Who and the Armageddon Factor

Starring the Fourth Doctor (Tom Baker)
A slightly abrupt Terrance retelling of a Bob Baker and Dave Martin story that suffers without its guest star’s bombastic charisma – the character’s an intriguing mixture of Churchill and Hitler – but is improved by losing all those beige corridors. This is the climax of the Key to Time series, and quite exciting, really. All about the horrors of war, it’s sometimes a little too enthralled by it to get that across, and at times it seems like a cover version of Genesis of the Daleks as well as echoing elements from other of the Key to Time stories. It sags a bit in the middle, though much less so than on screen, and some of the mythic elements of the story come over rather better; on TV, this was a striking mixture of absolutely brilliant and quite disastrous, but the ending wins it for me when the Doctor realises that no-one should be trusted with god-like power… Not even God.

Doctor Who – Castrovalva

Starring the Fifth Doctor (Peter Davison)
Christopher H Bidmead (a writer not known for his shy hesitancy in singing his own stories’ praises, known to one friend of mine as Jesus H Bidmead) adapts his own script for the Fifth Doctor’s first story here, a beautiful scientific fairy tale that’s curiously text-dense for a Target novel. There are masses of long paragraphs of description or internal dialogue, and in a typeface that’s not as easy to read as some, though the story’s rather interestingly told. I’ve always been tickled by a line summing up a feeling I know all too well:

“He stared with the distant gaze of a man watching his departing train of thought from an empty platform.”

Doctor Who – Time-Flight

Starring the Fifth Doctor (Peter Davison)
Peter Grimwade was a superb director, but though he was one of the few Who directors who wrote stories as well, asked to express his vision in script form… Well, let’s just say this story isn’t universally loved. I remember reading this book in the hope that it would give it a new life seen as it was in his head (though the dialogue would still be terrible). Did it? Well, no, and I still can’t work out just what he thought he was doing other than advertising Concorde, but while it’s still no epic it massively improves on the TV “crap”. Thankfully, the writing style makes a fairly feeble story bearable. The Doctor’s a bit daft, the Master’s a ridiculous cackling loon, and with help from and for Earth authorities, posh male companions and the Master plotting a diabolical scheme with aliens, it’s like a Pertwee story lost in the ’80s. Quite entertainingly written, but empty.

Doctor Who – The Twin Dilemma

Starring the Sixth Doctor (Colin Baker)
The Sixth Doctor’s first outing, just about the only thing this story had going for it on screen was Colin’s verve and enthusiasm. Well, it looks better in the book, but was the hackneyed script exposed? Actually, no. Half of the book’s taken from the first episode, which is hugely expanded and characterised while the rest’s cut down in the biggest departure from the televised story of any of these books. Adaptor Eric Saward was the most macho and bloody of Doctor Who script editors, and here he attempts to marry that style with pastiche Douglas Adams. It’s hardly an unqualified success, but at least it’s interesting.

Doctor Who – Delta and the Bannerman

Starring the Seventh Doctor (Sylvester McCoy)
A whimsical story that on screen was a showcase for ’50s music and not one that ever appealed to me; it should have been played like the TV Batman, but instead of arch, was wide-eyed and took itself terribly seriously. Just not very convincingly. And as for the ‘funny genocide’… Perhaps it would have been better with a straightforward ‘the Doctor’s holiday’ approach and drop the villains? Anyway, does writer Malcolm Kohll bring out the lighter, wittier touch this story needed when adapting his own script in a book? Nah. There’s a nice little prologue, but after that everything goes wrong. Dreadfully written, the only thing anyone’s ever remembered it for in my hearing is the misprints. If you avoid one, it should be this.

Doctor Who – The Greatest Show in the Galaxy

Starring the Seventh Doctor (Sylvester McCoy)
Now, this is more like it; Stephen Wyatt does an entertaining job of adapting his own much more successful piece of whimsy, one that a lot of people rave about. Scary clowns, futuristic hippies and strange gods fire the imagination (even if the Norse mythology doesn’t tie up to the next book, peculiarly), though the end’s a little too pat. It’s a good read, though I’m not quite sure about the writing style; he addresses the reader directly a lot of the time, which I always raise an eyebrow at. Not bad, though.

Doctor Who – The Curse of Fenric

Starring the Seventh Doctor (Sylvester McCoy)
This Second World War vampire tale was another absolutely terrific story on TV, and a very popular book – certainly a big influence on the New Adventures. I wonder why Ian Briggs never wrote one of those? It’s certainly very good, though the book’s no match for the TV version (the author improves his own Dragonfire rather more). There’s a lot of inventiveness here, with the story fleshed out with fragments of other styles such as Norse mythology, The Arabian Nights, Beowulf and Dracula. It’s probably the best of the books on offer as a book… It’s just that it’s better style on DVD.


So, if you see them on the shelves, which one will you choose?


If you see this next one of the new BBC Books at your local bookshop, though, I really wouldn’t advise it:

Two New Doctor Who Books – of Varying Quality…

Doctor Who – The Price of Paradise

Starring the Doctor (David Tennant)
I said earlier that the new series-linked Doctor Who novels from the BBC have so far been a comparative disappointment, flabbily talking down to their readers rather than the crisp, well-told stories of the Target novelisations, with one exception; I’ll come to that in a moment, but first, the least appealing of the new books. This one’s by Colin Brake, an eco-parable about the damage we do by not living in harmony with nature on an idyllic planet that’s already been thoroughly taken apart by Richard on young Millennium Dome’s blog (look out particularly for what he says about human sacrifice, how fusion works, and why the ‘allergy’ idea had no sense of proportion at all). For me, it started all right – a bit bland, but serviceable – but as the ‘point’ became obvious, it just went horribly, horribly wrong. When I was a kid, Doctor Who seeded a lot of my political ideals. Goodness knows what I’d have got if I’d read this one. Look at the series: the Doctor’s a traveller in time and space, always interested in new people and places, and helping them out. It’s easy to lift out of that internationalism, individual freedom and environmentalism, and the new series has added more strongly than ever before an optimism about humanity (as well as our dark side). This story? Don’t travel anywhere – it’s wrong and evil. May as well dump the series, eh? Humans – they’re wrong and evil. Our very souls are unclean. Even the orphan who fits in slavishly is just racially evil. Then the ‘natives’ are entirely characterless, with the planet the real personality, and what is its character? If I was feeling generous, it’s that God’s still in charge in Eden, and a jealous god – but, no, this is Doctor Who and the BNP Planet. It’s revolting, and entirely out of step with the ethos of a series that’s all about openness to new things and seeing the best in people. Oh, and it opens by paraphrasing ’80s blandster Phil Collins at his most sanctimonious. Think twice: if you want an eco-parable, find a copy of SFX with The Green Death stuck to the front and leave this well alone.

Doctor Who – Made of Steel

Starring the Doctor (David Tennant)
At last, a new series book by Terrance Dicks, and you know what? It really works. I thought Only Human and The Stealers of Dreams from the new BBC Books were very good, too, but this book has one huge advantage: it isn’t huge. From the £1.99 Quick Reads series like last year’s rather good I Am a Dalek, aimed at getting people reading who usually don’t, this reads as if it was effortless to write. After reading so many other people trying to pull off the same sort of thing, it patently isn’t! Now, I like my Who novels long and deep, or short and crisp, and Terrance doesn’t do ‘deep’. Straightforward, undemanding and entertaining, at 99 pages instead of 250 this is the perfect length to capture the feel of a TV episode, while the others are too long for what they’re trying to do but too unambitious to deliver anything ‘bigger’ and just plod on. I’m hoping Richard will come along with a full-length review, as he’s done with a lot of the new novels – so I won’t nick his brilliant observations about the title or why the Cybermen bicker – but here’s a whistle-stop tour. The Doctor brings Martha back to her own place and time, only to find survivors of Cybermen from the battle of Canary Wharf in last year’s TV season finale Doomsday. Guess the London landmark where they’re hiding out (I hooted)? Much of it recalls old Doctor Who as much as new, but there are simple but elegant lampoons of both versions of the series, as well as amusing dismissals of Primeval and Torchwood (while the whole thing shows up Cyberwoman terribly. But then, so do most things). It’s not a great part for Martha, though she’s good when she’s in it and her history with the Cybermen adds to the story, but Terrance surprised me by absolutely nailing David Tennant’s speech and persona as the Doctor. The way he deals with a bullying military policeman had me punching the air, though describing them as “gorillas” is back to Terrance’s ’70s novels, along with the stock ‘ambitious woman’ characterisation. On the whole, though, it’s enormously refreshing, perhaps the most entertaining Who novel Terrance has written for about a decade and a half, and certainly the best of the new series novels so far. With the new series moving along at a hell of a lick on TV, perhaps the novels all need the discipline – hark at me! – of being much shorter.

One of my biggest disappointments with Doctor Who publishing last year, incidentally, was that – unlike the 2005 series – there was no script book. I like televised Who stories on my bookshelf, as well as on the telly. If they’re not publishing the scripts any more, they could hardly do better than get Terrance to briskly novelise them. After all, it’s worked before.

…And Those ‘Doctor Who Special’ Magazines Themselves

SFX Collection – Doctor Who: The Ultimate Unofficial Guide to New Who

As long as you pick up one of the right Target books with it, the book’s the main thing to get this for, but it’s not bad. It’s just… Not terribly interesting. Less an in-depth guide to the new series than a cross between tepid description and DVD commentary, it covers the 2005 and 2006 seasons, plus Torchwood and Sarah Jane Smith, with the aid of pie charts not very amusingly depicting the ‘Anatomy of an Episode’ – though it did make me laugh about Cyberwoman. It looks a bit tacky, too (one of the few striking pages is an advert for all the Doctor Who DVDs; see if you can spot which one is missing. It’s like the ‘odd one out’ puzzles in Battles in Time comic). On the bright side, the micro-guide to spin-off websites isn’t bad, and there’s one thing entirely worth buying it for right near the end. There’s a joint interview and photos with Doctor Who’s original producer, St Verity of Lambert, and current creative supremo Russell T Davies. Lovely!

Doctor Who Magazine – In Their Own Words Volume Three 1977-81

And finally, the other new magazine special edition on the shelves. On the face of it, this doesn’t sound very promising either; interviews from three decades of Doctor Who Magazine selected and cut down to reprint the best bits. Amazingly, it’s brilliant, and though I can’t remember the last time I read a magazine cover to cover, I did here. Covering all but the earliest years of Tom Baker, this is the best of the three they’ve done so far, despite losing most of the amusing photo-captions, brilliantly assembled and highly entertaining (just be careful before you show some of the anecdotes to children). Look out in particular for the way lines from different interviews are chopped together so they seem to answer each other, often to ironic effect, and for anything by the barking but startlingly honest Tom Baker. In other news, directors are unfairly bitchy about scripts, writers named Chris praise their own scripts to the skies, and Graham Williams and Douglas Adams come across as having died far too early (and poor Graham seems to have been under a curse as Who producer. The Curse of Callaghan, perhaps). The highlight, though, is none of these things, nor even the great selection of pictures. It’s the still jaw-dropping selection of interviews from Lalla Ward, variously Romana in the series, Richard Dawkins’ wife and (very briefly) Tom Baker’s. This magazine would be worth reading for her eye-watering account of Tom’s proposal alone…

Labels: Books, David Tennant, Doctor Who, New Adventures, New Beginnings, Reviews, The Key To Time