Love and Liberty

Heard the one about the Labour MP telling snide porkies about the Liberal Democrats and using homophobic innuendo against the Tories on the radio? Or the Tory candidate so steeped in dirty tricks that she’s called herself a nasty name and blamed it on the Liberal Democrats? I know from back when I used to be a candidate that it can be frustrating when no-one’s talking about you, but I never stooped to making up coverage. So, stand up in the last week Caroline Righton, Conservative Liar in Cornwall and, from The Westminster Hour, Denis MacShane, Labour Liar for Rotherham.

Insults have always been a part of politics – and regular readers will know that I tend to be Mr Grumpy Sweary on here quite often, so I can’t really slag people off for using ‘strong language’. But still… When I was a candidate, I used rather less fruity language, partly because I was talking to a different audience and partly because I wanted to be respectable. But I’ve always taken responsibility for the words I’ve used, even when I’ve said completely the wrong thing – and I’ve only used a mildly rude word once on TV (it was after midnight, I wasn’t a candidate at the time… But my Mum was still horrified). Look, being rude can be fun, whether it’s being sweary or being insulting. It can make a point; it can be pithier than a reasonable argument; perhaps most tellingly, being nasty to your foes can cheer up your supporters. If you’re on the receiving end, the answer should usually be, ‘So what?’: you take it on the chin, and you just look daft if you whine about an ordinary insult – which is clearly why Denis MacShane’s upped the ante, because being rude is one thing, but telling lies about people is very different.

On the down side, even the ‘harmless fun’ sort of insult doesn’t half put people off. Many people find ‘bad language’ jarring – and not just people who don’t use it in everyday situations. If someone in authority swore at me, I’d be offended, even if I’d say the same sort of thing with people I know. Swearing can be much starker out of a familiar context – or even relatively mild language (as smearing lying Tory Caroline Righton clearly knows, by pretending a Liberal Democrat was foul-mouthed). But any insult, pejorative term or just shouting someone down can be off-putting; it doesn’t have to be language you can’t use in Sunday School. It can just be mean, or untrue. It may be satisfying if you’re doing it (boy, can it be satisfying to lay in to some git), but it’s also frequently very counterproductive. Go on – ask people what they think of the baying mob at Prime Minister’s Questions each week.

Caroline Righton – The Tory Who Calls Herself Names To Get Attention

Caroline Righton’s bizarre and pathetic attention-seeking behaviour has been much blogged-about in the last week since the story was broken by the lovely Matt Davies. In short, the just as lovely Stephen Gilbert hopes to become Liberal Democrat MP for the new Cornish seat of St. Austell and Newquay, and decided to go to a local regeneration meeting rather than a radio programme. Conservative candidate Caroline Righton, the attention-seeking behaviour being a bit of a clue here, decided on the press opportunity rather than the getting things done, so Steve reported this difference of views on Twitter, and not in Ms Righton’s favour. The Tory was understandably miffed, and told her supporters as much.

That’s where most political stories would have ended.

Unfortunately, Ms Righton decided this didn’t get her enough attention – so she made something up. And, in the way of bizarre attention-seeking fantasists everywhere, she decided that everyone had to be sorry for her and excoriate Steve because, oh woe, how terrible, she was the ‘victim’. One snag: no ‘victimising’. So she made it up. When she circulated Steve’s Tweet to her supporters, a word reported as “D***h***d!!!” was added to the end of it. ‘Look! That horrid Liberal Democrat said a beastly word about me! How uncouth!’ was the underlying message.

The trouble is, Twitter’s an easy to check public posting place, and the only place the “D***h***d!!!” appears is when Ms Righton republished Steve’s Tweet. And that wasn’t the only lie – she also claimed, explicitly, that she couldn’t read Stephen Gilbert’s Tweets:

“I was sent the comment below by a constituent who is privy to my opposition's Twitter emissions, which I am not. Apparently his asterisk'd comment is highly abusive.”

But surely, Ms Righton, you do have a Twitter account yourself, and Steve is one of only six people you’re following on it? So that was another proven and clumsy lie, wasn’t it?

Lots of politicians lie. Lots of them throw insults. But Ms Righton is the first I can remember hearing about that’s lied about being insulted because she’s so desperate for attention.

A week later, she’s still not apologised for smearing Steve with her own foul mouth – or perhaps I should say foul fingers. Nor has David Cameron, after Steve’s office wrote to him to confront him with the evidence of his candidate’s lying smear. What she has done, though, is got her staff to delete her Wikipedia page – twice – against Wikipedia rules, evidently petrified that this story will appear on it.

She makes things up… She’s desperate to get attention… She says, ‘it wasn’t me, it was him!’… She’s sticks her fingers in her ears and pretends nothing’s happened when she’s caught out… She tries to cover up facts about herself… Come on, Mums and Dads reading, this is familiar behaviour, isn’t it? Astoundingly, according to that Wikipedia entry that Ms Righton was so desperate to censor out of existence, she’s around 52 years old. I know Wikipedia’s not always reliable, so is it possible they’ve misplaced a decimal point?


Top posts to read on Ms Righton’s made-up woes have been recommended by Lib Dem Voice and particularly well-documented by Andrew Reeves (here, here, here and here) and Jeremy Rowe (here, with the rather brilliant comment, “That Righton’s a wrongun,” here and here). Or, if you want to do something positive, why not just get in touch with Steve Gilbert and offer to help, perhaps with a monthly donation like mine? Otherwise this lying fantasist might be elected purely because the Tories have vastly more money to pour in.

Denis MacShane – The Failed Former Minister Who’ll Make Up Any Nasty Horrible Thing

I saw on Lynne Featherstone’s blog earlier that she’s to be on Radio Four’s The Westminster Hour again tonight. Suddenly, I remembered and iPlayered (dash quickly, it’ll be gone soon) last week’s edition. The three political guests were Lib Dem Paul Holmes, Tory Roger Helmer and smug, hectoring, hypocritical, nasty git Denis MacShane.

Yes, that was an insult, but one based on factual observation. The sort of insult I try not to indulge in is nasty smears and lying (yes, I like making things up, but not misrepresenting people: if you see something preposterous on this blog in single quotation marks, ‘like this,’ I’m making it up, usually for comic effect. If you see something preposterous in double marks, “like this,” it’s a proper quotation). Mr MacShane, on the other hand, doesn’t summarise someone’s views in a way that makes them look silly, but just makes nasty, slimy accusations with no basis in fact.

Take last week’s The Westminster Hour. Women MPs are being discussed, and the BBC, with no sense of irony, have asked three male MPs to discuss them. A good political attack point is made by Mr MacShame; if David Cameron says he’ll have one-third women in Cabinet, why are there so few women in his Shadow Cabinet, when he has power to choose them, too? “The Conservative Party remains, I’m afraid, a Bullingdon boys’ own club,” he concludes, bringing in a bit of old-fashioned class hate (ironic, in his voice) and hypocritical faux-regret (watch for more) to finish his evidently pre-prepared ‘answer’. “Denis has been reading the briefing from Labour central office,” observes the Tory. “I used to write it,” Mr MacShameless concedes – then, realising he’s just given himself away, sneers:

“Today, David Cameron could promote women to senior positions in the Shadow Cabinet. He, I’m afraid, only likes boys.”

Roger Helmer was right to call that “an outrageous line”. Yep: caught out as a Labour spin-poisoner, Mr MacShame spits out a smear that translates as ‘they’re all public schoolboys, so they’re all bumming each other, and probably your kids’. Did he really get away with that? Yes he did. If it wasn’t a Labour git saying it in a desperate attempt at class war, but a Tory saying it when caught out, imagine the howls of “Homophobia!” from Labour. Well, I don’t have any reason to believe Mr MacShame’s genuinely homophobic – he’s probably just an opportunistic panderer to the bigot vote. Not better, is it?

Next up, Paul Holmes quotes Jo Swinson’s barnstorming speech a few years ago against all-women shortlists, and talks about Jo heading up a taskforce to help find and encourage people to stand. What does Mr MacSmear toss in from the back?

“Nobody wants to be a woman candidate in the Liberal Democrats. They’re a very anti-women party.”

Has it occurred to him that, on average, women may be even more put off than men by politics full of sneering, jeering arrested schoolboys saying pointless, malicious, lies about each other and screaming like a zoo in the House of Commons? Who would want to be part of all that?

Still, at least Paul got the better of him with a genuine suggestion rather than just the same old ‘Labour did things by rigid, control-freak top-down machinery, so everyone else must too’ – because after a dozen years of control-freakery, we’ve seen how well Labour doing everything by diktat has worked out – in pointing out that, as well as the Lib Dem internal measures to encourage and support candidates from the bottom up, the big changes in women’s representation have taken place in countries which have switched to proportional representation:

“When you’re selecting a panel of candidates rather than one, you don’t go for the safe, white, male stereotype – you go for a broader panel.”

Despite Paul hitting back with positive facts, I can’t believe Mr MacShame will stop. It wasn’t a one-off, you know; last week was just the most egregious example, but I’ve heard him at it again and again, the git. To pick a time when he wasn’t smearing a Lib Dem, did you hear him saying Gary McKinnon’s Asperger Syndrome was a sham (what, he’s a doctor now? Or just a knee-jerk smearing liar)? Mr McKinnon’s mother accused Mr MacShane of “gutter” tactics and “an absolutely awful, cheap shot”. They’re his speciality.

On tonight’s edition, as I said, Lynne Featherstone MP guests for the Liberal Democrats. I hope Mr MacShame is back on, and calls her ‘anti-men’.

And that Lynne pulls his lungs out.


In other news, the Governator has sworn at his Democratic opponents and tried to pretend he didn’t when caught out. Does he follow Caroline Righton on Twitter?


Update: I feel so guilty. I missed out the SNP’s smears. So here you go…

Labels: Blogs, British Politics, Conservatives, Labour, Liberal Democrats, Radio, The Golden Dozen

A Government position is newly vacant this evening: and for the first time, it’s explicit that only liars* need apply. For Labour Government Ministers, of course, the requirement to lie is only implicit.

This case is very simple. Chair of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs Professor David Nutt told the truth, and was exasperated with Labour Government Ministers lying about their findings. The last Home Secretary said the carefully considered scientific evidence didn’t matter: cannabis was more harmful than tobacco and alcohol because, er, she said so, fingers in ears, lalala I am not listening to you.

Yesterday, Professor Nutt made it clear that she had not told the truth (and who’d have thought, when Jacqui Spliff was such a model of probity she, er, had to resign for being a crook and made the most grudging unpology about it?).

Today Alan Johnson, the current Home Secretary, sacked him (and who’d have thought that Alan Johnson would make a nakedly lying political point when he knows the evidence is completely against him?).

So, it’s official: under Labour, telling the truth is now a sackable offence.

It’s the obvious joke, but you know who the nuts are here.

Obsessive Ideology Over Evidence and Bossing Everyone About – the Labour Way

The evidence has piled up by the decade and the sackload. Cannabis does some harm; it does nothing like the harm it’s made out to; it does nothing like the harm legal drugs tobacco and alcohol do. But this Labour Government can’t even keep to the – brace yourself – lone liberal twitch by David Blunkett. They’re so desperate to sound ‘tough’ that their policies bear no relation at all to reality. Again and again. When Professor Nutt said that you’re more likely to die horse-riding than taking cannabis or ecstasy, to wails of horror from Labour hypocrites, he was simply looking at the facts of risk. Yet even that’s not really comparing like with like: unlike Professor Nutt, I support legalisation, which would enable proper quality checks (as well as destroying the criminal trade) – no-one gets on a horse, trots half-way along the path, then finds the ‘horse’ collapsing under them because they suddenly discover the beast is in fact half-gerbil.

One of my key memories about the harm caused by illegal drugs came about a decade ago. I left home one afternoon just after hysterical national news headlines about a single tragic death allegedly caused by ecstasy (whether the drug itself, or the impurities allowed in because it’s illegal and can’t be regulated)… And arrived at my Grandad’s a couple of hours later, to see a minor headline in his local paper that another single tragic death had come about because of an allergy to nuts (not to be confused with the Labour Government’s allergy to the truth, of which an inability to tolerate Nutts is merely a symptom). Guess which substance causes far, far more deaths, to an almost complete lack of media interest? Yep – the one you buy safely in the shops, not dangerously on street corners. Another win for prohibition.

On Radio 4’s PM programme tonight, Professor Nutt has just said that:

“This is about the difference between evidence and policy… Everything I’ve done has been evidence-based.
“…Gordon Brown made a series of irrational statements that cannabis is lethal, which of course it isn’t.”

Asked about the Labour Government refusing to take his former committee’s advice on cannabis and ecstasy, because they weren’t interested in any evidence, just in making a political point that he described as Luddism, the interviewer mouthed the meaningless tabloid platitude that these were the “controversial” drugs:

“They’re only controversial if you want them to be controversial – the Government’s views have, they’ve said, had nothing to do with science… I am not prepared to mislead the public about the harm caused by drugs.”

Good for him, and good luck to whoever next gets the job – it had better pay well, because by definition they’ll have to kiss their scientific reputation goodbye to take their position as official Labour Government Liar.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to calm down by eating a large amount of chocolate cake. Bad news: it doesn’t have any dope in it. Good news: it does have lots of chocolate in it. That was once banned as a dangerous, addictive drug by a nutty Westminster Government bent on scarifiying the populace too, you know.

If No-one Agrees With Alan Johnson, Will He Have To Sack the Whole Country?**

I’ve added rather more updates than usual below, as a lot of people seem to have something to say (none of them ‘The Home Secretary was right’). Even ultra-loyalist former Labour minister Lord Falconer said Mr Johnson was wrong on Any Questions.

Starting half an hour later: posts already popping up worth reading from Dr Mark Pack and Duncan Stott (who ironically shares a name with a drug enforcement officer from Doctor Who).

And yay for Liberal Democrat Shadow Secretary Chris Huhne in the 7 O’Clock headlines for calling the sacking “disgraceful”:

“What is the point of having independent scientific advice if you’re going to sack the person who’s giving it to you? You may as well have a committee of tabloid newspaper editors advising you on drugs policy.”

Incredibly, the Tories have gone along word for word with the Labour Government.

Continuing the next morning, Mr Mark Reckons has kindly linked to me in a thoughtful post which also has an interesting set of comments. He’s also called attention to the Tories’ ludicrous knee-jerk photocopy of Labour authoritarianism in a far more memorable way than I did above.

Liberal Vision has also linked to me, encapsulating the spirit of my post in a far more memorable headline. Again, I’m just not tabloidy enough. One of the British Medical Journal’s bloggers doesn’t link to me, but finishes on a particularly appropriate request from his friend Kate. You might also glance at Darrell, Jonathan and Jennie.



*Or pot-heads, ironically, as only someone with a distinctly loose grip on reality would believe in the Government’s policy.


**Fortunately for Mr Johnson, he does turn out to have the support of: the Conservative Party; spin-poisoner columnist Amanda Platell; and the Daily Mail, the paper that spits on much-loved dead people and refuses to apologise. And, er, that’s it.

Unfortunately, these are the handful of hate-filled obsessive ideologues who are running the country, whatever the sensible majority of us think.

Labels: Chocolate, Drugs, Labour, Meddling In Things That Are Nobody's Business But Your Own, Newspapers, Radio, Stupid Ideas

Are you watching The Sarah Jane Adventures right now? With Doctor Who himself guest-starring? Then get to it!

But meanwhile, did you see Andrew Marr’s The Making of Modern Britain last night? Not bad, but it didn’t half demonstrate his own political prejudices – and did you spot the three things the Liberals got right and one thing we weren’t terribly impressive on a century ago, and the very same today? Not that there was an awful lot on the Liberals, as our Edwardian landslide dominating last night’s ‘era’ didn’t fit into Mr Marr’s very old Labour narrative of history: Tories are wicked, the rise of Labour’s a great thing, and the Liberals are to be mentioned as little as possible.

Much of yesterday’s opening episode, which itself was opening the Twentieth Century, was a critique of the Tories and the upper class. I was right with him on our disgusting invention of concentration camps in the Boer War (though I notice he omitted Mr Campbell-Bannerman’s famous denunciation of the “methods of barbarism”), of a piece with the rise of eugenics in showing the seeds of what we now recognise as Nazism rising in Britain… But little was made of the socialists supporting eugenics, and – as Richard observed – while Britain offered ourselves the choice of fascism, we didn’t take that choice.

Similarly, attacking Mr Balfour because he wasn’t really up to being Prime Minister but, Bob’s your uncle, and he suddenly was – well, that’s all right. But delighting in constant repetition of what sounded very like homophobic jeers against him from a century ago? Not so much. And the same with his approving hail for the creation of the Daily Mail, not yet infamous as the paper that spits on much-loved dead people and refuses to apologise when he recorded his voiceover, but still a vile rag, his encomium considerably lacking in any alternative view to the wonderfulness of tabloids. I enjoyed his class-warrior proclamation that posh Mr Rolls having to visit engineer Mr Royce rather than the other way round was proof that power was shifting massively in Britain. For some reason, though, he omitted the photos of the Rolls-Royce cars standing outside every humble tenement that would have proved his case. Can’t think why.

Andrew Marr and the Invisible Liberals (Just Like Bedford All Over Again Before)

As for the Liberals – on the rare occasions he mentioned them, and there was considerably more about violence-inciting imperialist turncoat Joe Chamberlain (hiss) than of any Twentieth-Century Liberal, with Mr Marr seemingly rather admiring of his protectionism and landslide victor Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman not even getting the courtesy of a name-check, despite technically being Britain’s first Prime Minister – when we were mentioned, it was generally in passing, as an afterthought, with the big story of 1906 election not a Liberal landslide majority but half a dozen Labourites who were all lovely, apparently.

What I did notice, though, was that the Liberals were right – not that you’d notice from Mr Marr’s commentary – on:

• The barbarous war Britain had undertaken abroad

• Investing in the welfare state for people who needed it

• The big economic questions.

• And we were a bit rubbish on involving women in politics (though horribly worse then).

How things change, eh?

Why I’m Not Watching The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith (I Might Cry)

Sarah Jane Smith is right at this very moment, thrillingly, engaged in a whirlwind romance and at some point (I’m not looking) to be joined by the Doctor himself, David Tennant diving in for a guest appearance before he hangs up his coat at the end of the year – but I’m recording rather than watching The Sarah Jane Adventures on BBC1 and BBCHD, as Richard’s not home yet to watch her with me. If you’re not doing the same, catch it on iPlayer and umpteen CBBC repeats this week.

This first part of The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith and tomorrow’s concluding episode are both written by Gareth Roberts, one of Doctor Who’s most entertaining authors, and tomorrow’s will be the first Doctor Who broadcast on my birthday since I was five, when my favourite story of all time premiered: so, no pressure, then. And read Richard’s review of last week’s as a taster.


PS Ooh! And there’s the third series of Bleak Expectations starting on Radio 4 tonight at 6.30. Harrumble for Mr Gently Benevolent!

Labels: British Politics, Charles Dickens, David Tennant, History, Reviews, Sarah Jane Smith

Much heat and little light has exploded in the Liberal Democrat Blogosphere over Sith Lord of Liberal Vision Mark Littlewood’s becoming Director of the Institute for Evil Acquisitiveness. I quite like Mark, despite frequently thinking he gets it wrong, and the party’s worse off for losing a talented individual (I’m with Mat on this) – just as it’s a shrewd move for an often Tory-associated thinktank to pick a non-Tory, all the better to stand up to a potential new government. But outside of our own little enclave, two much less recently ex-Lib Dems have been in the ‘proper’ news – one the party can, I think, feel does us credit to any extent that we influenced him, and one whom we’re probably well shot of…

Martin Lewis

I’ve just heard a heated exchange on the Today Programme’s truncated Yesterday in Parliament early slot where consumer champion Martin Lewis gave evidence to a Select Committee yesterday about lenders’ virulently anti-competitive practices, while bankers and credit agencies offered weasel words and refused to give any figures. Who’d have thought? Yes, when in these credit crunch days it’s even more vital than ever to shop around and compare prices, the money-saving expert (TM) reveals that banks and other lenders are brilliantly penalising anyone who does that when it comes to getting a loan – meaning that, under the guise of ‘protecting’ themselves, people blindly have to take the first rate offered to them, or they’ll be punished for looking around by being forced to take one that’s even higher. Hmm, protectionism giving consumers a raw deal… Again, who’d have thought?

The first time I met Martin Lewis, though, he wasn’t a well-known financial expert; in 1993 or so, he was a bright and rather well-turned-out students’ union president, at a Student Liberal Democrat Conference or an NUS Conference (he may even have attended both). I was the much less well-turned-out students’ union president for Essex University, and although I was a far more active Liberal Democrat, when I few years later I spotted that good-looking young chap on the telly I instantly remembered when he was involved. So, well done him.

Elizabeth Truss

In other news this week, though, you may have read about Elizabeth Truss, a newly selected Conservative candidate who’s been picked for a safe seat and is now ‘in trouble’ with her local party after she was done over by a scabrous rag for – shock horror – having had sex some years ago. Something a scabrous rag had already criticised her for years ago. Now, my views on this sort of ludicrous attack are firmly on record: I’ve suggested the slogan, ‘Liberal Democrats – the Party That Says Sex Is All Right’, and not only is it no-one else’s business who you have sex with or don’t, but it’s a bloody stupid reason not to vote for someone. Of course, it’s a century and a half since John Stuart Mill observed that the Conservatives are the stupid party, and that’s not changed since, but – durrhh, when something’s already been in the public domain for several years, it’s really stupid to say ‘but we didn’t know’. If you vote for a candidate without having done a thirty-second Google check on them, you can’t very well complain that you don’t know everything about their lives: it’s your fault, not theirs, if you believe in prying through your net curtains but don’t bother looking!

If, on the other hand, any dyed-in-the-wool traditional Conservatives would think any worse of Liz Truss if they knew that, again in around 1993, she was a self-styled radical Liberal Democrat who kept attacking me when I was Chair of the Liberal Democrat Youth and Students because I wasn’t left-wing enough, and whom I once held a meeting with to try and get her to work with anyone else in the organisation because she was a complete and utter egomaniac pain in the backside incapable of working in a team, that would be entirely a matter for them. I hope she’s as well-loved and effective a teambuilder for the Tories as she was in the Liberal Democrats.

Labels: Blogs, British Politics, Conservatives, History, Liberal Democrats, Meddling In Things That Are Nobody's Business But Your Own, Newspapers, Sex, The Golden Dozen, The Today Programme

This morning’s “Coming up in the next hour” special for why you should shortly switch off the Today Programme: Lord Owen is to talk about Britain’s 1970s nuclear secrets.

My beloved, on his way to the shower after we exchanged exciting fifteenth anniversary presents:

“Is it to be revealed that Lord Owen split the atom?”

This is one of the many reasons why I love Richard.

Labels: Richard, The Today Programme

To split up two long fulminations about things named “Mail,” I have a confession: I’ve become addicted to the BBC’s prime food porn. I remember when Masterchef was endearingly amateur and Loyd Grossman was entertainingly imitable… But then it became blokeish and rather more like The Apprentice, so despite the gorgeous voiceovers from Doctor Who’s India Fisher (of whom more in a minute), I’d left it. A few weeks ago, though, Richard put the latest version on in the background for something neutral while we cooked, and I’ve been glued to it ever since. Particularly for posh egg and soldiers.

I won’t, in fact, be posting my fulmination about the Daily Mail for a few days at least, nor many others I’ve half-written and probably let go off in the last few weeks, as I’m about to dive off up north and I don’t know where the Internet cafés are in Stockport and Manchester. What excitement is this? Seeing my parents; hopping on the train with old friends to brave the October winds at Blackpool and visit the Doctor Who Exhibition before it finally closes, like the beloved one of our youth; and to have my teeth drilled. Well, I hope the rest’ll make up for that (and hush, Lib Dem Conferencegoers who claim you’d rather have your teeth drilled than return to Blackpool. I bet you wouldn’t).

There are two key differences between Masterchef – The Professionals and the ‘ordinary’ Masterchef: first, it features young, ambitious professional cooks rather than members of the public doing it for fun; and second, and this is the key for me, they’ve got the balance of presenters right. Rather than two ‘blokes’, rough Gregg Wallace is now joined by smooth Michel Roux Junior, and they make a persuasive combination. Gregg is, if anything, a little too overawed by the famous chef: he hardly ever brings himself to disagree with him, so you can imagine how frightened the competitors are. For me, Michel is a great combination of steely disapproval and warm encouragement, with the most amazing grin when – rarely – he’s taken off-guard and delighted by something, though I suspect I’d find his style of meat very underdone (he likes it pink; I like it charcoal), and almost every dish before him seems to need more acidity. One of my few disappointments with the series has been that we didn’t see him introduce his father uncle [oops!] at the Michelin-starred high tea restaurant; Roux Senior, sitting wizened but authoritative and wielding absolute power over the pastry chefs, surely deserved younger Michel looming over the finalists to intone, ‘I hope these fancies will be perfect, for your sake. My father uncle is not as forgiving as I am’. You’ll not be surprised, I suspect, that the scariest bit about the competition for me is the way they have to do everything precisely to time…

Anyway, we’re now into the extended final all week, between Steve, Daniel and Marianna. The unceasing parade of determined, slim young men (is it just me who never quite trusts a thin chef?) finally ceased with no slim men in sight in the last round. I rather liked some of the ones who fell, though. The chunky, slightly dour French guy with the rare but nice smile who played it too safe and lost his flair in the semi-final; the tiny chap with the messy hair, rustic food and desperate eyes; the lean French-African guy with the amazing eye for invention, who I suspect Michel didn’t pass through to the next round because he wouldn’t follow the rules… And the one that really scared me, the cold-eyed epitome of the ambitious young man, who evoked the Terminator when he promised that all his work would be perfectly executed.

My money’s on Steve, who not only delivers exquisite food but is inventive with it. Despite all the scary encounters with Michelin chefs (one who cooks by touch and refuses to use timings, another who goes by the gram and the second and measures lines on the plate…), the dish that’s looked most interesting was his inspired reinvention of egg and soldiers, involving poaching, twisty concoctions and a smoke machine (with a dessert based on an exquisitely cooked ‘bag of sweets’ last night, his speciality seems to be supercharged versions of childhood treats). It was only last week, so it’s probably still on the iPlayer if you want to look. Though my favourite single moment was Marianna, praised, declaring it was “Heaven. Total heaven” – if only because I misheard it as “Potato heaven,” which just sounds fabulously surreal. Besides, you can tell Steve’s a perfectionist: look at his knifework on that designer stubble. Daniel’s beard growth varies, but Steve always looks like he’s just got out of bed.

India Fisher

And finally, the lovely India. I must dash, but Doctor Who listeners for Big Finish and BBC7 will know her as Charlotte Pollard, Edwardian adventuress, introduced in Storm Warning for many travels with Paul McGann’s Doctor, then latterly – if anachronistically – with Colin Baker. And she’s lovely. I’ve met her a couple of times, and she’s unfailingly intelligent and fun (for politics fact fans, she’s the daughter of Mark Fisher MP).

So what does she do on Masterchef?

She’s the voice. She narrates it with the perfect vocals – low, sexy, like chocolate pouring.

And there I must, literally, leave it: I don’t want to miss my train, but look out in a few days for an anecdote or two, my theory of why she doesn’t appear on TV much despite being heard so often, which of her final Doctor Who adventures is best – oh, look, it’s Paper Cuts, and it’s brilliant, but the others aren’t bad, either – and the effect she has on the straight boys…

In the meantime, you can always read the interview with her in the latest Doctor Who Magazine.

Update: …And, several days later – after seeing my parents, having another stage of root canal, and making obeisance to Kroll – I’m back, so it’s back to India. She’s an incredibly talented actor, and it’s certainly worth catching up with some of her Doctor Who work: the earliest ones with Paul McGann or her later ones with Colin Baker are probably her best, though if you snap up her final trilogy with Colin (Patient Zero, Paper Cuts and Blue Forgotten Planet) you may be surprised to find her not exactly playing Charlotte Pollard. In that, and in Masterchef, you can admire her marvellous voice… But it’s a shame you rarely get to see her.

The only time I can remember seeing her on TV, in fact, was in a dodgy wig impersonating one of the Eastenders cast on Dead Ringers shortly after Dirty Den and the Mitchell brothers had each made increasingly improbable returns from the dead (or from other channels) to the East End: wondering which villain from the past would be next for a preposterous reappearance, there was an ominous droning sound from above. India looked up and delivered a line that corpsed me completely:

“It’s the Luftwaffe! They’ve come back!”

Now, as well as having to admit that I’d call her voice sexy, and she’s one of the few women who, when I’ve met her, I can see exactly what the straight boys see in her. She looks fantastic from head to toe, as well as being witty, intelligent and awfully nice (each of which helps, I usually find). At a mini-convention a couple of months ago, I met her for the third or so time and, queuing for her autograph, told her that it’s always an enormous pleasure to hear her voice when I switch on at the end of Masterchef (“The gift that keeps on giving,” she described it on stage, adding that she refuses to read out menus for her friends). “The end of Masterchef? You cheeky sod!” she exclaimed, laughing, so I reassured her that it’s because Richard’s often not in until nine, and if I watch it I’ll already have given way and eaten before I cook for him. I’m forced, again, to admit that – having now watched most of the latest Masterchef – The Professionals series – this has turned out to be all too true. It mollified her, though, and after she’d signed for me, I was able to observe at first hand the India Effect on the heterosexual chap next in the queue. Returning to our seats and another friend not so bothered by autographs, the one who’d been behind me wailed, “How is it you could just speak to her, and I was right behind you and I melted?” You’ll be amazed that my reply involved a mime in which I talked to her by making eye contact, while [name excised to protect the guilty] stammered to two lower parts of her anatomy, which I suspect had something to do with our respective ability and inability to sound coherent. On the other hand, Gordon Warnecke was a guest on the same day, and as he played just about the first sexy gay role I saw on TV and fancied when a shy teenager, I probably gibbered a bit when I met him. Particularly as he still looks gorgeous.

The point of that little sexual reverie was to wonder just why, although India does have a very sexy voice, her voice seems to be all of her that the telly uses. Yet she’s a superb actor both vocally and physically, and – as this is often the determining factor for TV casting – I know very few straight men who’ve met her who’ve not found her fantastically attractive. So why doesn’t she get on the telly more often in person? I’m afraid the only answer I can think of is not one that reflects well on casting directors: she isn’t a stick. Like, oh, how can I describe them, real women, she has curves. And I suspect that it’s very difficult to be cast as a beautiful woman, probably, unless your ribs are showing.


Oh, and finally: Steve did win a well-deserved victory in the competition (another one with a rare but very sweet smile), and I think I was right about his speciality. In the, er, final parts of the final, too, some of his most distinctive and imaginative creations were exquisite reimaginings of things he’d loved when he was a boy. As well as being a great USP for a chef to open a restaurant on, you probably don’t have to look very far through this blog to work out why that might have a special appeal to me. How long before the Doctor Who production team commissions him to cook for them, I wonder?

Labels: Big Finish, Colin Baker, Comedy, Doctor Who, Doctor Who Magazine, Food, Paul McGann, Reviews

Everyone has their own reason for being completely pissed off with the postal “service”. Is it missed birthdays, post simply dumped, your business suffering (I’ve lost count of the apologetic calls I’ve made asking for undelivered subscriptions when I know it’s not the companies’ fault) or simply lying posties stealthily delivering ‘Sorry you were outs’ while you’re in because they can’t be arsed actually bringing your parcels, so you have to wait extra days and go extra miles instead of them doing their jobs (yup, I’ve also had to complain about that recently)? Well, they’re bad for your health, too – and I don’t just mean giving you apoplexy with all the complaints and lost post thanks to the selfish indulgence of all those local strikes.

Regular readers may have noticed that there’s regularly been nothing for them to read recently; I’ve been more unwell than usual over the past few weeks, and – like many people who rarely get out – I depend quite a bit on the post (thank goodness for e-mail). Am I a big fan of the Post Office management? No. I’m sure they’ve got a lot of things wrong. But I know, and so does every other person who glares at the letterbox, who’s been causing so much misery. The CWU may have a case against some of the Royal Mail’s actions… But months of insufferable strikes before they even treat us to this week’s ‘official’ one have shot away every vestige of public sympathy. ‘You can’t deny us our right to strike!’ they bleat. That’s not what complaining we hate strikes is, fuckwit – it’s you who are trying to deny the rest of us our right to tell you all to fuck off for doing so.

What new self-deluding cant will the CWU come up with this week? Complaining that just because they’ve been doing no fucking work for months and actively boast that millions of items of post will never, ever be delivered, it’s “provocative” that bosses are getting in extra help over Christmas? When you’ve already said that we all have to post for Christmas in October, but that you probably won’t ever deliver any of it anyway? Gee, what an inducement! Is the CWU actually taking enormous bungs from private postal companies to destroy the Royal Mail?

Incapable of Simple Humanity Towards the Poor and Sick

Many of the people that all the many postal strikes have been hurting have been the weakest in society – people far, far worse off than the comparatively rather cushy terms and conditions of postal workers. People for whom a lost or even late piece of post can destroy their life chances through poverty or ill health. Let me give you just a couple of examples from personal experience.

A favourite big fat lie from despicable right-wing toe-rag politicians in both Labour and Conservative politicians is that there are too many people on incapacity benefit living the life of Riley (go on, let them take a sixty grand pay cut to try it) that nobody ever checks up on. As I’ve said before, despite the media reporting it uncritically*, this is a big fat lie. Everyone on incapacity benefit annually gets a twenty-page questionnaire to fill out every aspect of your illnesses in excruciating detail, followed by a medical check-up from a government-appointed dodgy private company (which no doubt has targets for removing people from the list).

If you don’t send back your questionnaire, and if you don’t turn up for your medical appointment, you will be struck off incapacity benefit – and these days, it’s now impossible to get back on. Yet both the questionnaire and the appointment are sent, just once, by post.

Imagine how petrified seriously ill people are that the postal strike could remove their benefits, with no appeal, and the first they’d know about it is when their poverty-line money suddenly vanishes.

I’m on incapacity benefit. A couple of years ago, my twenty-page form – and it’s quite daunting for me to fill out, despite being pretty intelligent and able to string a sentence together – went missing in the post, and it was only because I realised it should have arrived that I rang up and was able to get hold of another from a disapproving minion before the deadline. And that wasn’t a strike, you understand, with millions upon millions of items left to rot, just ordinary incompetence. Last month (a couple of months since sending off my latest depressing questionnaire in which every part of my health had either stayed the same or deteriorated since the last one), worried sick that I’d missed the appointment letter, I rang up and was told that they were running late this year – but how do I know how late, and when to ring again just in case? And how many people do you think will be doing what I did and making sure?

So, do you reckon the CWU are getting bungs from the Benefits Agency, too, to aid in kicking people when they’re down?

My current fun involves a hospital appointment. I have lots of them, so I’m aware of the bureaucracy that’s designed less to help sick people than to kick as many of them as possible off the waiting lists. Just like with benefits. Again, you get a single letter in the post, and if you miss an appointment, “Your co-operation is most appreciated. Failure to do so will result in patient discharge”. Yes, just like with benefits. Two and a half years ago, ringing to say I couldn’t make an appointment because I was ill led to my being discharged and told I could try and get on the list through my GP again when I was better. I could only use the hospital if I was completely well. No, you couldn’t make it up, could you?

As it happens, I had an appointment at the beginning of August for two of the bits of me that had up until now been in that rare category of ‘working’, and have now joined the more common ‘painful and not working properly’. I was told a follow-up appointment would be sent to me, usually for a fortnight or so’s time but, as the bloke responsible would be on holiday, probably more like the end of August.

I got the letter yesterday, telling me that I have an appointment today at 2 pm and “Failure to do so will result in patient discharge”. And, of course, not only have I been more ill than usual, but I spent much of yesterday – unusual one for me, this, and not my favourite – vomiting. So today I feel particularly ghastly, and I have to ring and tell them I can’t make it. But if I ring after two, I’ll automatically be discharged.

Was it the NHS bureaucracy sending out a letter very late? Or the posties delivering it a month after it was sent? I don’t know. But I do know that, after nearly three months of waiting for an appointment, if the letter had arrived a day later, I’d have had my entire case cancelled simply because of the post.

Gee, thanks, either way.

While I’ve been typing this, incidentally, I’ve been ringing the direct line at the hospital every two minutes for the past two hours. It would be a lie to say it’s been constantly engaged: twice, the phone’s actually rung, and rung. No-one’s answered, of course. Well, honesty compels me to correct that, too: after about seven minutes, one routed to the switchboard. They couldn’t take a message (after all, it’s nearly three minutes’ walk from the switchboard to the bit of the hospital I need to contact, and they only have paper and computer facilities: it’s practically impossible for them), and gave me the direct line. Which I’m still ringing.

Again, gee, thanks. Wish me luck for getting through before two o’clock.


And if some of that rant sounded like the Daily Mail, the newspaper that spits on the dead and refuses to apologise, don’t worry, I’ll be hitting them with a bigger baseball bat shortly.


*Almost all the time. The best interview of the Conference season for me (better even than mine) was Teresa May on The World at One just after she and David Cameron had prated that a quarter of the people on incapacity benefit (handy number, no scientific method) would have it cut easily by introducing medical check-ups, being asked in what way, precisely, these would differ from the medical check-ups that already take place. I wish I’d been up to writing about it and linking to it at the time, because her utter and total failure to have any answer deserved more than a swiftly-forgotten two-minute slot on Radio 4 when the Tories were making it the key to their new policy of kicking the poor and ill in the face.

Labels: British Politics, Conservatives, Health, Personal, Stupid Ideas, The Golden Dozen

Surely I have the same qualifications? I’m an American citizen, and – most importantly – I’m not George Bush.

Oh, all right, I’ve not been elected President (a technicality), but President Obama hasn’t had the chance to do much in international peacemaking yet, either.

I suspect this is most accurately viewed as a prize for the American people for not electing another Republican warmonger who despises the rest of the world and is despised in return… Yet this won’t do him any favours with those Americans who already think their President is too much other people’s President, will it?

Labels: American Politics

The Prime Minister, on this morning’s Today Programme:

“We’re the insurgents, not the incumbents.”

No, Mr Brown. Just because you’ve been in power for so long, been so incompetent and ground so many people down that no-one in the country can stand the sight of you any more does not suddenly make you the heroic Rebel Alliance. You are the incumbents, and that’s why people hate you. What are you rebelling against? That two other parties are ahead of you in the opinion polls? So that’s you, the Government, ‘rebelling’ against us, the people. Yeah. See how that works out.

Of course, he might be claiming today that he’s rebelling against the evil Murdoch Empire. But he’s left it very, very late after kowtowing to their every demand for a dozen years – and he knows The Sun’s only deserted him because the voters already have, and the evil Empire doesn’t dare be on the losing side. That’s the only reason they switched sides from the other Tories in the first place.

Labels: Labour, Newspapers, The Today Programme

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

That Golden Moment

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

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

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

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

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

DVD Tasting

Something Else To Look Out For

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

A small part of my brain still thinks ‘back to school’ in September, and it’s not the only reminder of my childhood* around: this week seems stuck in the 1970s, though sadly the unconvincing stop-motion dinosaurs aren’t in Doug McClure movies but ‘live’ from the TUC Conference. Thrillingly, the big unions are threatening to savage a dying Labour Government this Winter. Because that always worked out so well for them. And if seeing Peter (hiss) Mandelson exchange blows with Brendan (yawn) Barber isn’t enough to excite you, there’s the threat of postal strikes and Harriet Harman’s career-best daft, petty foot-shooting…

Clash of the Turgid

You never quite know with the TUC Conference whether to glower that the Labour Party in effect gets two weeks of conference publicity while the rest of us are lucky to get one, or grin that it’s more like fly on the wall footage of a family row. This week’s given Lord Mandelson and Gordon Brown an enormous amount of free pluggage, but the family row’s been even more bitter than usual.

Everybody knows that Labour’s principal, increasingly shrill and desperate message has for years been ‘We’re shit, and we know we are, but, oooooh! The Tories! Scary!’ but it’s rarely been so blatant. After so long claiming that the Tories were evil for considering “cuts,” Labour this week were forced to admit that they would also have to make “cuts.” Except that, look, the Tories are evil! Oddly enough, this hasn’t been a wild success.

So while Gordon Brown’s been pretending that he’s been promising cuts all along to weary jeers around the country, it’s been left to Peter Mandelson to make a coherent argument. It’s coming up to a year since he was brought back into the Labour Government, and I still have the same equivocal feeling I did then: he’s one of their most effective ministers, but as a party politician, he’s pure poison. His much-quoted line this week was that they were going to be “Wise but not big spenders” – an approach cribbed from years of unreported Lib Dem soundbites on taxation, and simply not believable after a dozen years in power doing exactly the reverse. I could say, ‘It is big, but it’s not clever’, or ‘not little enough, and too late’, but it’s simpler just to point out that no-one believes him, and that they don’t have the time left to start now.

Compared to TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber’s Powellite rhetoric of “riots on the streets” if there are any public sector job cuts, however, Peter Mandelson seems positively plausible. It can’t just have been me who woke up to news of their competing speeches earlier in the week and imagined them animated by Ray Harryhausen: Lord Mandelson’s Labour Government a huge, coiling, venomous snake, darting and biting; Mr Barber’s TUC a vast, heavy, lumbering dinosaur, powerful but uncoordinated, hampered by only having several very tiny brains each wanting to move its limbs in different directions.

Voters hadn’t been treated to such a grisly display since those of us in London witnessed prehistoric relics Bob Crow and Arthur Scargill duking it out for rival far left fantasists on our ballot papers in June, their giant rubber bodies flickering in the cameras. Now, if you could explicitly vote against someone, surely Mr ‘I’d like to sit in my mansion and ruin your travel’ Crow would have topped the poll – and surely the only people voting for that self-indulgent old self-destructor Mr Scargill were extreme Thatcherites wishing the man who single-handedly destroyed the union movement was a power in the land again, rather than just The Man That Time Forgot.

My favourite bellowing union demand of the week, however, was blundering triceratops the GMB. They shouted to the Labour Government that there are ten thousand jobs in Barrow-in-Furness dependent on Trident, so that has to stay. Ten thousand? Goodness. If that’s the prime consideration, even senior bankers must be envious – these are some of the most expensive jobs in Britain. How about dropping Trident, and giving each of the workers there a million quid? It’d still save ninety billion.

Good News – No Post Strike!

At least, if you’re as fed up as I am with things being lost in the post even more than usual right now, and with random local strikes every few days (where’s my new Doctor Who Magazine, then? Eh? Eh?), there was a breath of relief this week.

You may have read that

“Ballot papers proposing a national strike at the Royal Mail over pay and job cuts are being sent out to members of the main postal union.”

“Sent out”? By post? Phew! Well, no chance of a national strike before Christmas, then.

Did Harriet Think Spitting Image Was A Documentary?

Thanks to Sara Bedford for highlighting a truly hilarious story. Gordon Brown’s Very Important Deputy (for Paperclips and Pissing People Off) Harriet Harman has spent years arguing for absolute, inflexible, dogmatic discrimination in favour of women, because neither any other social divisions nor political views matter. Earlier this Summer, Ms Harman provoked rows by stating that Labour should always have one woman and one man as Leader and Deputy Leader – even if, say, women got 80% of the vote in each contest and one was forced to stand down in favour of an unpopular misogynist as a result. Uncharitable people suggested she was rather hoping that when Mr Brown goes, entirely of his own free will and certainly not in any sort of putsch, as long as it’s within the fortnight, she would stand for Leader rather than Deputy and hope that no women stood for the latter position, thereby electing her on almost as democratic a technicality as Mr Brown’s coronation.

However, it appears that Ms Harman’s much-repeated argument that gender is all and political choice doesn’t matter is, er, self-serving hypocritical guff that she doesn’t actually mean a word of. Who knew? This week her “Equality Office” produced “Women in Power: Milestones,” listing the twenty-eight most significant events of the last century for female politicians.

Which mentioned all sorts of Labour hacks, but refused to name Margaret Thatcher. Oops.

Once again, people will struggle to be charitable to Ms Harman. Perhaps she used to watch a lot of Spitting Image, and on seeing Mrs Thatcher portrayed as a man, she was just dim enough to think everything on television was true…

Vince Tackles the Fiscal Crisis

If you’re tired of all the silliness and crashing dinosaurs, why not try a serious politician?

You won’t have seen much about it on the news, but Lib Dem Treasury Spokesperson Vince Cable this week launched Tackling the Fiscal Crisis: A Recovery Plan for the UK, which rather than just using rhetoric of undefined ‘good cuts’ versus undefined ‘bad cuts’ actually took voters seriously, and set out nine specific areas to start on saving (including a public sector pay freeze and pay cuts for top civil servants, tightening salaries to protect jobs). Now that even the Labour Government’s admitted they can’t afford the bills any more, isn’t it time the other political parties told us all what their actual proposals are rather than just calling each other names?


*I realise I may not entirely be flattering myself in bringing up my childhood at the same time as Jurassic metaphors.

Labels: Bigotry, British Politics, Labour, Liberal Democrats, Stupid Ideas, The Golden Dozen

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

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

Welcome To Brigadoon – You’ll Never Leave

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

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

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

Ah.

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

Tomorrow, a new Doctor Who DVD goes on sale. The Twin Dilemma is Colin Baker’s first story as the Doctor, and he’s terrific in it. As for everything else – well, its reputation is less terrific. When, in a week and a half, DWM reveals the results of their vote on “all 200” Doctor Who television stories, I confidently expect this to be near the bottom of the poll. Can neither Maurice Denham, Kevin R McNally nor a villain that’s a cheap Jabba the Hut knock-off save this 1984 B-Movie adventure? In a word, no. But it isn’t all bad…

That Golden Moment

“The shades of night were falling fast
As through an Alpine village passed
A youth, who bore, ’mid snow and ice,
A banner with a strange device:
Excelsior!”

Ten minutes into Part Two, the new Doctor appears to have settled down – if only temporarily – and, ironically, this brings one of the most extrovert scenes in a far from hesitant performance. Leaving the TARDIS for the cold, gritty wilderness of Titan III, the Doctor goes striding up a rocky hill, exuberantly decrying lines from Longfellow in an hilariously misguided attempt to ‘cheer Peri up’. She’s tagging along behind, complaining and unimpressed (“Who cares!”) until he finds a metallic outcrop and, searching the surface, presents her with a door into an underground passage…

This has always been my favourite scene from The Twin Dilemma. After the deliberately off-key and off-putting Doctor essentially emerging straight from a regeneration into a nervous breakdown the previous week, this was the scene where I knew I was going to love Colin Baker. His evident joy in cutting a dash and reciting at the top of his voice may not be infectious for Peri – scripted to say she’s tired, but with the mini-skirted Nicola Bryant visibly frozen too and clearly not having to act being pissed off – but it worked for me. Colin looks like he’s having the time of his life (and rather good-looking here, too), with his infamously multicoloured coat for once working a treat, standing out brilliantly against the bleak grey landscape and evidently keeping the actor much warmer than his companion. There’s a lovely bit of music underscoring it all, the Doctor gets to work out and seek out a clever way in, there’s a probably deliberately funny exaggeration of the traditional roles of the Doctor as wide-eyed explorer and companion as feebly fed up, but most of all it taught me that, if you’re frozen to death in some depressing wilderness and still have miles to walk, you’re best off being very loud to keep your spirits up. As the South Wales police officers who once picked me up in the middle of the night, yomping the last few miles to a particularly unpromising by-election after many hours of hitch-hiking and singing Shirley Bassey Bond themes with everything I could must muster against a hailstorm, would no doubt testify.

Something Else To Look Out For

Colin Baker’s verve and enthusiasm is by a long way the most entertaining thing about this story. Unfortunately, the dreadful and unwisely protracted regeneration crisis writing means the Doctor is also often the worst thing about it. The concept of Colin’s Doctor was a cold ‘Mr Darcy’ figure that could be gradually unwrapped, but despite the actor working wonders with rotten material, the script editor was utterly hopeless at writing that overarching story. Randomly making him a bully, a coward and a loon doesn’t conceal a deeper layer; it’s just wrong all the way down. He runs from endearing and stirring to deeply unlikeable, without any natural dramatic progression, while Peri even lectures him on compassion, flabbergasting after the previous Doctor has literally just given his life for her (it’s difficult not to conclude that she fancied the old him and is now grumpy at not getting a shag before he ‘died’). And showing this story at the end of a season blighted poor Colin’s Doctor: writers and fans alike got stuck on the idea that his post-regeneration trauma was ‘what he’s like’, despite almost every other Doctor’s opening story being very different to how they settled.

I’m fond of many elements of this story, but I don’t rush to watch it. While Colin is striking, almost anything else that can go wrong, does. Save for an intriguing frieze and the odd model shot, the design is shocking, and it’s a thoroughly rotten B-Movie cliché of a script, full of appalling science and worse characterisation. The guest actors range from rather good to awful, but even the good ones can only work with what they’re given. Future Pirates of the Caribbean star Kevin R McNally has a thoroughly unlikeable character in worse outfits than the Doctor’s; Edwin Richfield is wasted as a monster (in theory one of the most powerful enemies the Doctor’s ever faced, but largely ignored in lists of gods and demons because it’s a bit rubbish); and Maurice Denham, emerging with some dignity, perhaps tellingly does best when acting ‘weary’. But if you want one reason to watch this – and there’s not much more – it’s always Colin. Making you believe that a bit of turned earth was once a beautiful grove on an alien world by words alone, making “Thou craggy knob!” entertaining or exploding “Villain! Murderer! A thousand currants on your head!” (perhaps the DVD will tell me what the real line is, but from past subtitling fiascos I doubt it), his vocal style’s what I remember, but today it’s his physicality that strikes me: closing in menacingly on Peri, deranged; leaning on the console; just walking round a gun; pointing a dramatic finger of doom; sprawling across a lab; striding up that hill. He’s endlessly watchable.

Extras include a piece on fashion and the Doctors – I suspect Colin will not be kind about his coat – along with the usual commentary, text notes and Photo Gallery, with contemporary items from Breakfast Time and Blue Peter. I remember the latter, even down to the sound effect when Colin, in full costume as the Doctor, does some ‘Time Lord magic’ to make the cat disappear. I suspect David Tennant, only a few months older than I am, saw the same edition and that’s why he vowed never to do interviews ‘in character’, but only as ‘David Tennant’. There’s also, I’m told, a trailer for whole Doctor Who DVD range (have they finally dug out those commissioned-then-dropped ‘also available’ trailers?), though apparently Colin doesn’t come out of it well. The extra I’m most looking forward to is Stripped For Action – The Sixth Doctor, a look at one of the most vibrant and memorable periods for Doctor Who comics (not least for the character of Frobisher, an occasional penguin). The one I’m most grinding my teeth over is that, yet again, there’s no isolated music provided. It’s not Malcolm Clarke’s best score, with rather too many unsubtle clangs, but I enjoy listening to them and – noting no ‘making of’ feature this time, either – it’s hard not to conclude that, increasingly, they’re doing this once award-winning, standard-setting range on the cheap.

On the bright side, The Twin Dilemma’s release means Colin is the first Doctor to have every one of his stories available on DVD, and with this and Delta and the Bannermen out of the way this year, the only way is up.

Colin these days is immensely pleased that he now has more action figures than any of the other Twentieth Century Doctors, with “Old Sixie” available in his infamous coat of many colours, in a sober blue version and in the mud-covered Peter Davison outfit he’s still wearing at the start of this story. You might be able to track down the novelisation by script editor Eric Saward, who may have made a total pig’s ear of the original script but whose book, as I’ve written before, at least does something interesting with it. Far more interesting, though, is Paul Cornell’s Circular Time, a set of short Doctor Who audio dramas with one a re-imagined prequel to The Twin Dilemma. It’s almost worth putting up with the original to get that. Astoundingly, one of the worst guidebooks available on the series – John Kenneth Muir’s obvious, overpriced and often idiotic A Critical History of Doctor Who On Television – not only likes this story but makes some interesting observations for once, arguing that it borrows from cop drama with a crime boss, getaway vehicle with false number plates, and the Doctor and Hugo each fit the idea of flawed cops (fallen cop trying to atone and revenge-ridden vigilante cop). It’s not worth shelling out for that entry alone, though. Besides, a list of “50 Reasons To Love The Twin Dilemma” I once found online was far more enjoyable to read, and I even agreed with twelve of them…

Final (leading) question: if, for some baffling reason, you were dead-set on calling a story “The Twin Dilemma,” and if, for some utterly inexplicable reason, your script were only to feature one of those two key words, which would you pick? Would you supply endless scenes of terrible teen actors who happen to be twins, or remember to include some sort of dilemma? Consider your answer more carefully than the script editor did.

Labels: Big Finish, Colin Baker, Doctor Who, Doctor Who Magazine, DVD, DVD Tasters, Reviews

I made a flippant aside on MEP Daniel Hannan last week, then spotted fellow Lib Dem blogger Mark Thompson taking a diametrically opposite view. I did the Liberal thing and chipped in to argue; forced to think harder about what I was writing, I came up with something more thorough and rather better in his comments thread.

Mr Hannan can have his opinions (contradictorily, if he likes). So what? I can have mine, too. Free speech doesn’t mean he should be immune from criticism. And if a politician implies different things about immigration to different audiences, gosh, colour me stunned. It would hardly be the first time an ambitious Tory made libertarian noises to one crowd, and sent out a Powellite dog-whistle to others. Did he say, ‘Enoch Powell is my hero, but I would also like to point out that I have a substantially different view on immigration and race’? Of course not. Confronting both audiences with a single message spoils the whole effect for an ambitious politician, whatever their party and whatever the two messages they’re carefully keeping apart, and perhaps most of all in pandering to racism to make yourself look like a right-wing tough guy contrast to that anaemic Mr Cameron.

So imagine my surprise when I got back home a couple of days later to find that I’d grievously offended the Dan Hannan fan club, to the extent that they’ve plastered the thread with outrage at me! Tee hee :D

I’ve ploughed my way through it all, and it’s not terribly edifying. I reckon I’ve made my case, so there’s not a lot of point in replying forty places down to say the same thing again. If you’ve got half an hour to spare, though, you can read it yourself and make up your own mind. There’s a piece by Nick Barlow that links to us both, too.

Unfortunately, I think my problem with what’s there – not repeating my original points – is rather less with the criticism of me than with how Mark seems to react to criticism of him. He exploded onto the Lib Dem blogosphere and national media with an unusual blog piece that combined dogged hard analysis and inspiration. It’s a shame that to ‘prove’ his point about Mr Hannan, Mark’s commitment to linguistic accuracy is so much less rigorous than his statistical accuracy. When both Asquith and Duncan Stott take issue with Mark’s ‘quoting’ of Tony Blair, first putting it in context and then providing what Mr Blair actually said… Well, Mark’s been caught out being very misleading to make a point. But, bizarrely, Mark still sticks to it. I loathed Mr Blair, and argued many times that he was pure poison to British politics. But I didn’t have to change what he said to make my case – it was quite bad enough.

So, Mark, it’s cheap and stupid to state that a Conservative explicitly choosing to pick and praise Enoch Powell as his sole example of a British political hero is exactly equivalent to a Prime Minister expressing a politely mealy-mouthed tribute with caveats when faced with the death of a formerly important political figure. What’s cheaper and more stupid is that Mark pretends political statements never have a context… And that, to prove it (as Asquith and Duncan demonstrate) he has to ignore all context to Mr Hannan’s comments, then deliberately hack away the context to Mr Blair’s. Ignore the things Mr Hannan didn’t say, and hide the things Mr Blair did? That’s not an honest argument. And neither is Mark constantly protesting that free speech means that a politician can say whatever he likes – which he can – but that then somehow wrong for anyone to exercise their own free speech in criticising him (I would never say he doesn’t have the right to say what he did; but if people then disagree with something you’ve said, you don’t bleat ‘Not fair – they must shut up’!). I thought what I had to say about Mr Hannan was sharpened and improved by engaging with Mark in debate about it; it’s a shame his idea of engagement appears to be both one-sided and misleading.

I say the above because I’m disappointed by a Lib Dem blogger who I’ve read being logical, thought-provoking and – though I frequently disagree with him – fair by his own lights. This twisting words and arguments to fake up a point… He’s better than that. All Mr Hannan’s supporters flocking about to spit at anyone who has the temerity to argue with him are just funny, though.

I write a reasoned, evidence-based argument about political context; anonymous Hannan supporters first deny that any politics has any context at all, then make up a context for me (hypocrisy? What hypocrisy?) as a smear, that I’m “left” and Downing Street’s my favourite. Heh! Who knew? It’s almost as if they were utterly unable to answer a single one of my arguments, and had to sling abuse in exactly the same way I didn’t. I can’t remember the last time ‘criticism’ of me’s made me smile so much. I believe the word is ‘pwned’.


The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that this was originally the middle of my previous post, Wuthering, Wuthering, Wuthering… I’d intended to write a quick little compilation post, putting together a paragraph or two on each of three or so things I was thinking about this evening. Being me, they grew. I posted it, then Richard pointed out that ‘light-hearted but lengthy piece about a book / lashings of hard politics / light-hearted but lengthy piece about another book’ didn’t really go together. Ironically given the subject of this post, in woozily writing more and more, I’d lost sight of the context. So here it is, plucked out on its own and probably looking harsher than I’d intended as a result (Richard did suggest the alternative of leaving this where it was and pruning it down to just two key paragraphs, but being me…).

Labels: Bigotry, Blogs, Conservatives, The Golden Dozen

Tonight’s big TV event is ITV1’s new version of Wuthering Heights, for which I have an especially nerdy anecdote and a couple of fabulous YouTubes. It’s the great romantic story where the ‘hero’ is a brooding psychopath… Gordon Brown brilliantly took the man as his role model without looking at the context – what today’s called a “Daniel Hannan” (on which note, I Reckon Mark Thompson’s not covered himself in glory). In other news, Richard and I have been away visiting our parents, though I swapped groovy Manchester Pride for the dentist and re-read Professor Bernice Summerfield’s The Joy Device…

It’s many years since I’ve been to Manchester Pride – perhaps even before that was its name. And tempting as it was to pop along yesterday while we were in town, we drove back home instead; it was a lovely couple of days with parents, and friends, and sister, and brother, and nephew, and niece, but unfortunately set off with a dental visit involving lots of drilling, infection, and having to make three follow-up appointments. So with the pain, the painkillers and the antibiotics, Richard sensed I was a little woozy and not up to much. Don’t be too surprised, then, if I only write little nibbles this evening.

On a special Pride note, though, I refer you to John Abrams, who I’m certain was there and who wrote three excellent pieces at the end of last week: on gay people’s progress; celebrating the life of Alan Turing; and, yay for John, winning an apology and a correction from Auntie Beeb when they talked provable rubbish!

Wuthering Heights

I know what you’re thinking. ‘Alex is going to do a 4000-word review of a 162-year-old book. I can’t wait!’ Well… No, sorry. It’s, oh dear, about twenty years since I read it, which means that my main memory of the book is just about the only exam in my life I’ve really enjoyed. It was largely because it was my final A-Level exam (yikes, nineteen years ago! And congratulations to our sixteen-year-old nephew, who we saw this week after doing rather well on his GCSEs), the second General Studies paper, but also because it gave me a chance to camp it up with a bit of creative writing (must have gone down well, too: they gave me an A). I answered all the questions bar one, then entertained myself with all the time I had left writing an essay which asked for an assessment of works of art in different media – so I compared the Emily Brontë book, the Laurence Olivier film and the Kate Bush song. Happy days!

You’ll probably remember, as I do, the famous video of shimmering white Kate dancing against black for her first and biggest hit. You may not be so familiar, though, with the alternative video of our Kate weirding it up in red, in the forest.

And I’m willing to bet that you haven’t seen Robert and Alistair Lock’s rather fabulous, tasteless home-made version, Mothering Swines. You should.

In the meantime, the big question for tonight and tomorrow’s new adaptation is – will they do the whole book, or just the bits people usually remember? The key thing I remember from reading the novel is being surprised that half of the book is Wuthering Heights: The Next Generation. Oops! Is that a spoiler? Depends if they put it in…

…So I’d better not write anything about A Pocket Full of Rye, the first Agatha Christie I’ve ever read – on an impulse from our local library, picking up the first Miss Marple for which I couldn’t remember the story from the TV – as, though the differences between the book and the Joan Hickson adaptation are fascinating, ITV1 are mounting a new version of that next week. Even though they rudely name the series after a place I used to walk to all the time in my teens, rather than Miss Marple the character. All I’ll say is that: surprisingly, Mrs Christie’s novel is very funny in parts (and far less abbreviated); that for a couple of years, I used to live in the same Essex village that Joan Hickson did, and she wasn’t as loveable as the hard-eyed angel of vengeance that she played; that the person behind the murders was indeed one of the three I mentally shortlisted, though (again surprisingly) one of them didn’t make it to the 1985 TV at all; and that the probable reason I didn’t remember their identity from TV is that, though they have the same name and basic place in the narrative, their character is hugely different.

A Reckoning?

…Er, has been moved!

Professor Bernice Summerfield’s The Joy Device

“I want to be happy.”

Ten years ago, Doctor Who was looking a bit shaky. The series had been dropped by the BBC, and the 1996 TV Movie (Time Waits For No Man) hadn’t been picked up for more. The most brilliant, influential and coherent continuation of Doctor Who between 1989 and 2005 – Virgin’s New Adventures novels – had lost their licence, too, and nothing else had really taken off instead. The BBC’s own series of novels was producing flashes of inspiration and long stretches of dreck, and Big Finish’s Doctor Who audio dramas had only just started, not yet hitting their heights. One of the saddest competing shards of Doctor Who were the Doctorless continuing New Adventures novels with the fabulous companion Professor Bernice Summerfield – unloved by the publishing house, constantly on the brink of cancellation, and reading like a grudge war between the two incompatible authors handling most of what was left of the range. Now Benny’s got a large and successful range of Big Finish audios that are still fun and still carrying on, but back in 1999 her book series apparently died with a whimper. And yet just before the end there was a return to fun and quality, entirely unexpectedly, in Justin Richards’ The Joy Device.

If you can track down this novel – which wasn’t so much released as escaped – it’s one of Benny’s most entertaining adventures, despite expectations. By all accounts, Justin Richards was writing half the books at enormous speed (though I’m waiting to get hold of Simon Guerrier’s big book of Benny to find out The Inside Story), and most of his, ah, passed the time adequately, usually with walking corpses. But you wouldn’t rave about them. But then came The Joy Device, the penultimate book of the range, which I read while having a joyless time staying at a god-awful hotel in New Brighton for the job I was in at the time. And it cheered me up enormously. Put simply, Benny decides that being an academic who spends her life sorting through an art collection doesn’t sound thrilling, and goes off on a trip to the Rim of known space for excitement, adventure and really wild things, with her own pet Indiana Jones as a tour guide (yes, he is a male version of Benny). What could possibly go wrong?

Well, of course there are muggers, murderers and a Maltese Falcon-like collection of gangsters hunting a mysterious artefact, but Benny pretty much misses all of that. Because the thing I really enjoyed about this book, and have just enjoyed all over again on grabbing a book to comfort myself with when off to the dentist, is that her friends worry that she’ll either get herself killed or like it too much back on the edge, and set off after her to get there before her and, essentially, spoil all her fun. And, yes, that in itself is a spoiler, but it’s not the biggest challenge to work out: every peril’s defused, every threat moved out of the way, all to make sure that before she gets into a thrilling situation it’s been made as boring as possible. And it’s very funny. Particularly the very literal angel (though don’t look at the pretty cover too closely).

The bit I always remember is – unsurprisingly to anyone who’s followed Benny’s adventures – in a bar, though coffee’s a bigger threat. There’s a lot of fun here. Boredom is, of course, by definition not that exciting, but having to stretch every sinew to set up boredom is very entertaining indeed. Yes, it’s full of appalling clichés (mainly from self-buffing adventurer Harper Dent), but only to send them all up mercilessly, and there’s an inspired idea at the heart of it all, too. Dorpfeld’s Prism, the MacGuffin everyone’s chasing, has the effect of blinding you to reality and making everything seem so much rosier than it really is – which is exactly what Benny’s friends are arranging to happen to her. It’s just that while the gangsters and wheeler-dealers want it as an escape from their vicious existences, it’s boring Bernice senseless.

Pretty much every contemporary review I remember reading of this said how dreadfully clichéd it was. I suspect by that time too many of the books had spiralled into such a grim ordeal that everyone had forgotten they were meant to be amusing. If you read it, don’t make the same mistake. If you want grim and horrid, grab a Brontë.

Labels: Bigotry, Blogs, Books, Conservatives, Gay, Music, New Adventures, Personal, Professor Bernice Summerfield