Love and Liberty

Spring is in the air, so I know you’re thinking of only one thing. No, not elections – Doctor Who! It’s marvellous to have again a reliable time of year when the series returns, even if Easter means “reliable” is also “moveable”. Dalek Easter Eggs in the shops and traditionally messed-up trailers on BBC1 signify just three weeks to go until the new season, with today the fourth anniversary of one of the best season openers, Smith and Jones. So watch that to stave off the pangs, and consider just what it has in common with a memorable 1980 tale…

Rumours that the blanked-out bit of last night’s Doctor Who trailer featured explosions in five colours and Dalek Sec gliding into view holding a ‘Did you miss me?’ sign are apparently unfounded.

Having meanly pulled Mr Moffat’s leg over his Christmas special and fabulous old Doctor Who Weekly comic strips, it’s about time I redressed the balance by taking a look at one of Russell T Davies’ homages to the past. The image I displayed at Christmas was from The Iron Legion, still arguably the best strip they ever did, and terrific Doctor Who. If you didn’t read it at the time (I was a marvelling eight-year-old), grab hold of Panini Books’ smartly reprinted graphic novel Doctor Who – The Iron Legion, which collects that superb story together with several other Tom Baker Show strips – or, if you feel like splashing out, there’s a colourised Doctor Who Classics Omnibus with even more inside it, though for me larger pages in the original black and white win out. Either way, consider Smith and Jones when, as I did at Christmas when unable to put the book down after opening it, you flip a few pages forward to encounter Doctor Who and the Star Beast (the penultimate episode of which was in the shops 31 years ago this week), another story written by 2000AD creator Pat Mills and stunningly illustrated by Dave Gibbons, this time set on our Earth, in the present day, with ordinary people and their families caught up with an alien on the run…

Watch out for spoilers!



The Doctor meets his ‘first’ black companion while she’s looking after an apparently unwell, harmless, eccentric character who’s a bit anaemic at first sight – an apparently harmless character being chased by big, ugly, ruthless monsters who shoot first and ask questions later. Once the Doctor’s been examined by a rather scary surgeon, he teams up with his intelligent young black companion-to-be (who, though English, has a Welsh surname) and together they discover that the ‘harmless’ character is really a sadistic, murdering space criminal and the trigger-happy brutes are in reality galactic police who have their own translator machines to talk to the humans. The story also sees a chunk of a British city being lifted up into space, taking its foundations with it, and as the tension ramps up towards the end of the tale the Doctor has to deal with the threat of deadly radiation – though he still finds time to show off a trick he used to do as a young Time Lord…



One of the reasons the early Doctor Who Weekly strips by Pat Mills and John Wagner were so superb was that they were written as potential Doctor Who television adventures. Technically, they never made it to the screen – but compare Smith and Jones to The Star Beast, and you might very well wonder if Russell thought he could do something about that.

Now, of course, there are a lot more differences between the stories than I’ve intimated. If anything, Smith and Jones is most influenced by wanting to be a lively introduction in the manner of Rose, for me the only one of the five ‘new’ series opening episodes that’s even better than Martha’s first (and can you believe that that was first broadcast six years ago last weekend?). Still, I’d be amazed if Russell had never read The Star Beast – though Martha Jones is older and more capable than Sharon Davies, Beep the Meep is fluffier even than Florence Finnegan’s slippers, and the Judoon look more like Sontarans (arguably more than Russell’s Sontarans do) than Constable Zreeg and the Wrarth Warriors.

For me, both are terrific stories, and enormous fun, boasting some great images and ideas (rain rolling upwards and tying a knot in time; a starship crashing in a Northern town and aliens running for the bus). I’ve read the comic strip again recently and loved it, and I’m very much looking forward to seeing Smith and Jones again – the story after next in Richard and my David Tennant retrospective. Neither of them’s entirely perfect: though almost everything from the start to the climax and then the coda of Smith and Jones is rather marvellous, the climax itself consists of the Doctor striking a heroically suffering pose with the woman in his arms while, er, hoping the sort-of-villains will fix the plumbing; and while if you’ve read this far you’ll know the Meep’s secret, it’s always jarring in the comic strip that after having the Wrarth Warriors behave so ostentatiously villainously to give you the wrong end of the stick, an eeeeevil internal monologue gives away Beep’s true nature considerably before the moment of maximum dramatic tension. And if you think Martha – written out perfectly, I have to say, at the end of the terrific 2007 season – eventually being seen married to Mickey Smith is a bit forced, poor old Sharon’s time in the TARDIS comes to an abrupt end when (after being handily aged a few years to legalhood and, shh, ignore the emotional maturation) she finally lands on a planet with one other black character. Were this an American series, he would crassly be fated to become her love interest, but thankfully, as this is Doctor Who… What’s that you say? She never! And he’s just complained about losing his pet and needing something to keep him warm in its place? You can’t be serious. Anyway, Sharon starts well.

So, settle down with some tea (just eight sugars) and cake, or milkshake through a straw that I hope you’ve sterilised, flip open your shiny Doctor Who – The Iron Legion graphic novel and pop in your shiny Doctor Who 2007 DVD. And enjoy two stories that, as my lovely Richard said of Smith and Jones but applies just as strongly to The Star Beast, have a

“fantastic mix of the brilliantly bizarre and the horribly frightening, with down-to-Earth relationships and finest British whimsy.”

Labels: Comics, David Tennant, Doctor Who, Doctor Who Magazine, Obscure Doctor Who Jokes, Tom Baker

With twenty old Doctor Who stories due out on DVD this year and my long having lost the habit of writing teaser reviews, I know the one or even two of you who come wondering which to buy have been confounded. So don’t worry: in single-paragraph reviews below, I reveal which are the most exciting (and which the… slightly less exciting) releases of 2011. Cheer as the late, great Nicholas Courtney stars in a record number of DVD releases; goggle at the bizarre ways different tales are combined; marvel as I reveal which letter of the alphabet inspired the schedule.

The Secret of the Schedule

While the continuing series of Doctor Who since 2005 all exist in their prime and are no harder to find than looking at BBC3 every single day, the stories made back in the Twentieth Century are a little more erratic, with some no longer existing on video and others requiring time-consuming restoration work before they can be released. So while every story from Rose onwards has simply been released in sequential order, the “Classic” Doctor Who DVD range is a little more complicated. With efforts made to balance the schedule between different Doctors and different qualities – not wanting to be left with the least loved stories to crawl out at the end – the release order has sometimes looked a bit random. But with only a few dozen left to appear on DVD, all expected by the show’s fiftieth anniversary in 2013, you can tell that Commissioning Editor Dan Hall has been putting a lot of thought into the remainder. Last year, for example, he ensured that not all the terrible stories would be left ’til last, by bringing most of them out early across six eye-watering months of tedium.

For the end of last year and the early months of this year’s range, the amazingly literal Restoration Team techies reported to Mr Hall’s desk and asked which stories, oh mighty master, they were to prepare to DVD standard. ‘Mmmmm…’ mused Dan, stuck for an idea.

And so the amazingly literal Restoration Team techies went away and buffed up for shiny silver disc tales of Magnus Greel, Magma Beast and Morgus, the Master, Meglos, Mutants, Monoids, Mara and Metebelis Spiders. Even the double-pack of the two original Auton stories is not to be titled, as any sane person would, ‘The Auton Invasions’, nor even ‘Plastic Fantastic’. No – they’re marketed as Mannequin Mania. It’s proof, I tell you! And what I want to know is, what have the Mandrels done to offend them?

Still, it could have been worse: Dan might have snored “Zzzz…” at them, and then they’d have prepped The Sensorites.

But on with the previews…

The 2011 Doctor Who DVDs In Brief(ish)

Meglos (starring Tom Baker; out since January)
This gets us off to a slightly misleading start, as it’s probably the weakest story scheduled for one of the DVD range’s more exciting years – and certainly the weakest of one of Doctor Who’s best years as broadcast, completing as it does the releases of 1980-81’s superb Season 18. Watch the whole thing on DVD (The Leisure Hive / Meglos / The E-Space Trilogy / New Beginnings) and it has a striking thematic coherence, with even Meglos displaying many of the running themes of decay and change. Add to that a very entertaining villain, some excellent DVD extras and a rather good isolated score, and it’s not that bad. Just try to ignore the lacklustre direction, the way it can’t decide if it’s meant to be undramatic drama or unfunny comedy, and how the author keeps praising his own limp script as if the terrible sci-fi clichés are all his own brilliant invention.

The Mutants (starring Jon Pertwee; out since January)
Well, it’s perhaps slightly better than Meglos… What’s good about it? It’s ambitious, certainly, and has a strong central story – both its sci-fi and its political ideas (though it features the smallest ‘rally’ ever seen). The location filming often looks terrific; the ‘monsters’ are a great piece of design; grave Geoffrey Palmer and wide-eyed Jo Grant are worth watching; and, again, there are some very strong DVD extras, from a documentary on race in Doctor Who to an hilarious interview with the Oscar-winning costume designer. On the down side, much of the actual script is awful, as are several of the actors delivering it, and the effects are at best variable. It sags very tediously in the middle, too, though if you can stay awake until Episode Five, that has several cracking scenes in a row. Then there’s the Universe’s only naturally occurring species of drag queen, so you’ve got that to look forward to.
Try the DVD Coming Soon Trailer today!

The Ark (starring William Hartnell; out since February)
A noticeable step up in quality, the most important thing to say if you plan to buy this DVD without knowing the story is just to buy it, and start watching straight away. Perhaps trying to avoid spoilers from 1966 is as ambitious as the story’s impressive design work, but steer clear, if you can, from summaries, trailers and even the DVD menu, which (as usual) gives away half the story. Set in the far future (in the same time as a famous 2005 story), this looks good, has a great concept, and unfortunately rather cardboard characters, but like The Mutants, has an intriguing mix of sci-fi and political ideas – though in this case the sci-fi is rather more elegiac, and the politics rather more shonky (it’s as close as ’60s Doctor Who ever gets to Star Trek). Again, there are superb extras – particularly the one on Doctor Who and HG Wells from the excellent Mr Guerrier – while you get a chance to admire Peter Purves in one of his finest acting performances, and wonder what they were thinking with the Doctor’s other companion, who’s perky to the point of sociopathy… It also has an elephant in it, so get cracking.
Tragically, a version of a well-known Beatles song featuring clips from this story and a Monoid demanding “Get Back!” appears to have been double-copyright-bombed off YouTube, but if anyone should find it lurking anywhere on the Internet, please let me know. It made me laugh.

Mara Tales: Kinda / Snakedance (starring Peter Davison; out in March)
Two of the Fifth Doctor’s most compelling ‘arthouse’ stories, I’ve previously taken a critical look at Kinda (and marvelled at how Christmassy Snakedance is). With a giant leap in story quality, this might well be the best release of the year; psychodramas of the Dark Places of the Inside, with superb guest stars and intelligent, frightening scripts. Snakedance looks terrific, too, and for me is even better than its predecessor. This boxed set contains both original stories of the Mara, an inner demon that looks rather like a giant snake (and, with luck and a spot of Special Edition CGI, may look rather more so than it used to), will have lots of lovely isolated music to listen to, and it’s 2011’s first absolute must-have purchase.
Try the DVD Coming Soon Trailer today!

Revisitations 2: The Seeds of Death / Carnival of Monsters / Resurrection of the Daleks (starring Patrick Troughton / Jon Pertwee / Peter Davison; out in March)
Picture restoration techniques, DVD technology and expectations of extra features have all improved strikingly since the first Doctor Who DVD was released twelve years ago, and so it’s no surprise that some of the earlier releases have been scheduled for up-to-today’s-standard Special Editions, based on their having video quality that could now be sharply improved, documentaries that could now be made, or egregious cock-ups that could now be corrected. This boxed set features three stories that may already be on your DVD shelves, much like last year’s Revisitations Box 1, which boasted two of the absolute very best Doctor Who stories ever made, which everyone should have. And the 1996 TV Movie. Unfortunately, in this forthcoming monster-packed selection the ratio is the other way round; while Carnival of Monsters is rather brilliant, the other two had better look bloody fantastic to justify buying them again, particularly as the far-superior Vengeance on Varos has been dropped from the line-up [3rd March Update: it’s been announced this evening that, due to popular demand, a Varos SE will be released next year. Hurrah!]. Carnival is witty, satirical, has some great monsters and is very silly indeed. Seeds is a bit more tired; the very last of the Second Doctor’s monster extravaganzas, it’s something of a Troughton megamix and, despite a great villain and occasionally inventive direction, one of his weakest. With horrible outfits. Resurrection, similarly, has a feel of many other Dalek stories, and while it starts excitingly, has fabulous music and some strong guest stars, it also has a script that falls apart, a string of pointless macho killings, and an author that can see Davros’ point but not the Doctor’s when it comes to a moral argument. On the bright side, though, if you’re suffering David Tennant withdrawal symptoms, he’s got a lot to do with the star extra here.

I’m not having a great time at the moment, and so am having a lot of trouble writing, but hope at some point I’ll be able to write something about the marvellous Nicholas Courtney, who played the Brigadier through five decades of Doctor Who and who sadly died last week. In the meantime, among many tributes, Richard’s piece for Millennium about Nick Courtney is rather wonderful, and Nick’s friend Tom Baker wrote a touching memorial. Though not planned this way, it turns out that the Doctor Who DVD range is also mounting something of a tribute to the Brigadier in 2011, with more of his stories due out this year than in any other so far: three stories released for the first time; two re-released as Special Editions; and just possibly another coming soon (though The Ambassadors of Death has been dropped for the time being due to more complex than hoped restoration problems, The Dæmons is likely to be out either at the end of this year or the beginning of the next). And the first of these is…

Planet of the Spiders (starring Jon Pertwee; out in April)
Jon Pertwee’s grand finale, this has almost everything you’d expect of his era, along with many of its strengths – and weaknesses. The Brigadier is loveable; Sarah Jane is intrepid (and may surprise you); the villains are both more down to Earth and more grand than you might expect; actors, effects and alien landscapes all vary wildly in their effectiveness; it’s a bigger Buddhist parable even than the Mara Tales; and there’s a car chase that goes on for ever. Well, I say a car chase – it’s also a gyrocopter, motorboat and hovercraft chase. And unlike everyone else, I love it, though I suspect it may be cut from the movie-style edition that’s going to be one of the extras. Though I have problems with the story’s philosophy, the Doctor’s final confrontation with his last enemy remains, for me, one of the greatest scenes in Doctor Who.
Try the cheeky UK Gold Trailer today!

Mannequin Mania: Spearhead from Space / Terror of the Autons (starring Jon Pertwee; out in May)
Spearhead from Space was one of the first DVD releases, and vies with Genesis of the Daleks as perhaps the best-known single Doctor Who story – and here it’s given a brace of Special Edition features, and packaged with its first sequel, new to DVD. I say its first, as 2005’s Rose was another, with Russell T Davies clearly seeing the deadly plastic Autons as the perfect way to reintroduce Doctor Who, while Steven Moffat’s brought them back too, as well as borrowing from Spearhead again in The Eleventh Hour. Much as I love Rose, though, it’s Spearhead From Space for me: like its massively successful descendant, it relaunches Doctor Who for a new decade, a new Doctor and, most importantly, a new audience, and in each there’s not only a considerable amount of comedy amidst the horror, but the Doctor isn’t really the lead character. In Rose, we see much of the story from the point of view of Billie Piper’s Rose; back in 1970, it was Nicholas Courtney’s finest hour, as the Brigadier takes the lead. Like Russell’s carefully crafted introduction, each episode really ramps up the tension more than the last, and gets steadily more sci-fi until the final episode’s famously memorable set-piece scariness on the high street. I expect it to look more terrific than ever, too, as it was made entirely on film, and the restoration promises to be exceptional. Also from Robert Holmes, still Doctor Who’s greatest author, Terror of the Autons isn’t quite as strong (with the Brigadier less prominent and Pertwee at his most insufferable), but has almost as much to do – introducing more new regular characters, friendly, ditzy or just plain evil: this is the Master’s first story, and he grabs it and takes over, particularly with some of his brilliantly nasty marketing ideas. The whole thing’s like a circus – colourful, funny and slapdash, not really much of a plot, but if you don’t like one act, there’ll be another along in a minute. And it’s the second DVD this year to have elephants! This boxed set, too, might well be the best release of the year, and is another absolute must-have purchase.

Frontios (starring Peter Davison; probably out in May)
Now here’s a strange thing. With all of the Sixth Doctor’s stories already available on DVD, this year it’s the Fifth’s turn to be completed – with (after the Mara Tales) three stories that were originally broadcast consecutively. But they’re all to be released in different boxes. And in reverse order. So what Frontios is doing on its own is anyone’s guess, when there’s an obvious, perfect companion for it also out on DVD in 2011. I refer, of course, to The Ark. Who could have resisted those two boxed as The Ends of the Earth, ideally with a The Ark In Space Special Edition on top? Anyway, it’s well worth buying even on its tod – they’ve kept half the best of Peter’s ’til last, with all four of his new-to-DVD stories this year among his strongest, and all with a strong streak of horror to them. This is the last written by another of the series’ finest authors, Christopher H Bidmead, and in which the Doctor wears his brainy glasses and fights terrible monsters, and shocking things happen to the TARDIS. And it’s much, much better than Outcasts.

Earth Story: The Gunfighters / The Awakening (starring William Hartnell / Peter Davison; probably out in June)
Although most Doctor Who stories have been released as single DVDs (often with an extra special features disc of their very own), there have now also been nearly twenty box sets. Sometimes these have been for stories that make much more sense seen together, such as the linked The Key To Time sequence. About half of them have featured consecutive tales, so they’ll make sense on your shelf in the order originally broadcast. The other half have had different themes to connect them, such as the same friend, enemy, or planet. All of them have helped get more DVDs onto the shelves, speeding up the release schedule but in a way that makes sense, where you can nod and think, ‘I can see why they did that’. Until now. “Earth Story” is the first box that’s connected by sheer desperation: all that links the two stories is that they’re both… set on Earth. As this applies to well over half of all the Doctor Who ever made for TV, it’s not the most distinctive connection. Still, if you can get over wondering why The Gunfighters wasn’t packaged with The Sun Makers in a comedy box set, or The Awakening with Frontios as two consecutive stories, or indeed either of them with (not due this year, but surely soon) The Android Invasion as, respectively, ‘Doctor Doppelgängers’ or ‘Spooky Villages’, both are very enjoyable little stories. While many fans hate The Gunfighters for its saloon-bar ballad, appalling American accents and wittily comic script, I love it for two of those reasons and can put up with the middle one; it’s a send-up of Westerns, and Billy is often at his best when playing comedy. The Awakening is, instead, a Sapphire and Steel-ish ghost story of the 1980s crossing over with the British Civil Wars and, like Frontios, has Peter really nailing his Doctor close to the end. Which absolutely should not have been packaged with The Dæmons, however soon it’s due, as that might have given the game away.

Paradise Towers (starring Sylvester McCoy; out later in 2011)
This usually makes it to the all-time ‘bottom ten’ in fan favourite polls, so you might expect me to lament a dip in quality in the promising range of 2011 DVDs. Nope. All the other fans are wrong – Paradise Towers is brilliant. Well, I admit the final episode goes off the rails a bit, and not all of the guest stars’ acting is as impressive as the best, but it’s still a brilliant story: putting a traditional Doctor Who ‘ancient powers awakening’ tale into an ahead-of-contemporary urban setting, with a witty and inventive script. Plus, cookies! But be careful who you eat them with…

Revisitations 3: The Tomb of the Cybermen / The Three Doctors / The Robots of Death (starring Patrick Troughton / Jon Pertwee, with Patrick Troughton and William Hartnell / Tom Baker; out later in 2011)
The last of this year’s Special Edition reissues is a great improvement on Revisitations 2 – none of these stories are on the weak side. Though The Three Doctors is less impressive than the other two, that’s only because they’re among the best the series has ever produced. The Tomb of the Cybermen is the one I’m most excited about here: probably the definitive story for the steel giants, this really gets across what they’re about, and has been copied ever after. It sounds and looks fabulous, from location filming in a quarry that, for once, could pass for ancient Egypt, to the Tombs themselves, almost a temple to maths. As you’d guess from the title, this has a strong horror inspiration – but, most importantly, it’s probably Patrick Troughton’s best performance as the Doctor, and possibly the best by anyone. It’s the story that Matt Smith saw and decided Pat was The Man, and that bow ties were cool (though you can gloss over such elements as the sexism and yet more terrible American accents. Points for homoeroticism, though). The Three Doctors has more variable design, but many utterly loveable performances, and an operatic villain whose moment of despairing realisation clutches my heartstrings like no other – and finally, The Robots of Death is another masterpiece of design, with gorgeous décor and robots, a tightly twisted murder mystery (though don’t look too hard when you’re only meant to see a bit of the murderer) and a terrific script. Particularly if you’ve not bought these stories already, then, this is another must-have release.

The Sun Makers (starring Tom Baker; out later in 2011)
Like The Robots of Death, this stars Tom Baker as the Doctor and Louise Jameson as his skins-clad companion Leela, both terrific; this adds K9 to the mix to make one of the series’ most memorable line-ups, though has noticeably cheaper design. Another strong script from Robert Holmes, this is rather more shakily brought to the screen, but look out for Tom at his Tommiest, some entertainingly enormous villains, and most of all a story that attacks left, and right, and mostly sends up politics, business and having to fill out your tax return…

Day of the Daleks (starring Jon Pertwee; out later in 2011)
One of Doctor Who’s cleverest scripts about time travel – very Moffat, decades before he started talking timey-wimily – this skips between the Brigadier’s time and a much bleaker, Dalek-infested future, joined by interesting direction and rather lacklustre Daleks, whose numbers and vocal performances have always left much to be desired. So I’m looking forward to the cleaned-up original version being joined on a Special Edition disc (they’re not just for re-issues!) by a new version complete with supercharged Daleks. Will it be able to stop Pertwee sneering at MPs’ expenses and then drinking all the wine? Though I suspect that, in both versions, the most ambiguous character will still be fascinating, and the Doctor working out the big twist will still be stunning.
There's even an exciting trailer already available.

Labels: Colin Baker, David Tennant, Doctor Who, DVD, DVD Tasters, Jon Pertwee, Patrick Troughton, Peter Davison, Reviews, Sylvester McCoy, The Brigadier, The Master, Tom Baker, William Hartnell

Tonight at 7.30, the lovely Doctor Who DVD people tweeting @classicdw invite everyone to watch 1982 thriller Earthshock, and I can see why. Ask any fan for the 1980s’ most exciting stories, and it’s bound to come up: brilliant direction; shock Cybermen return; Moffat-style ‘past Doctors’ clips montage; masses of action (and death); and a memorably tragic ending. Yet I never know if I’ll find it thrilling or disappointing to watch – and that’s not because of the collision of a certain member of the cast with planet Earth, but of Beryl Reid with the machismo stomping through the story. So here’s just why Earthshock is great… And why it isn’t necessarily good. Then, if you’re on Twitter, you can find out what other people think by following #cdwearth this evening.

1982 was a huge turnabout year for Doctor Who. As in 2010, a long-running Doctor who’d taken the series to new heights of popularity had just regenerated into the youngest actor yet to play the part, and people were wondering if the series could survive the change. There were more companions in the TARDIS than usual, one of whom gets killed off then briefly resurrected as a villain’s artificial creation (though at least in 1982 this had consequences – he didn’t then leap back from the dead altogether, just as the large chunks of the Universe destroyed at the close of the previous series stayed that way)… Well, all right, it’s not really very Moffatty in tone, with its incoming lead writer whose signature idea is ‘Just this once twenty-seven times, everybody dies!’ but in part that’s because it has a very unpredictable tone. Season 18 in 1980-81 had a striking thematic unity; Season 19, a year later, was all over the place, particularly in terms of the sudden chasm opening up between the ‘arthouse’ and the ‘macho’ stories, a divide I coined for a review of Kinda – the story that I was quite sure when I was ten was the worst of the season, and now might just be my favourite instead.

You see, one of the oddest things about Season 19 is that it’s one of the very, very few year’s-worth’s of Doctor Who where I’m not sure which I like best – or which is the best, which isn’t always the same thing. Back in 1982, I was absolutely sure that Earthshock was the best thing in the year… Yet now I could probably pick any one of five of the seven stories (not the other two, obviously). Is it still Earthshock, the ultimate in macho Doctor Who? Or Kinda, the epitome of the arthouse, along with Castrovalva – both exploring reality, identity and the dark places of the inside? Or, sometimes, my favourite of the year (more those I might like best, rather than consider the best quality) could step into history, with The Visitation’s sardonic aliens and gorgeous music – a feature of the year – or the sinister layers behind the jolly façade of Black Orchid.

So when I came to pick out why 1982 was brilliant for my series during the 45th anniversary year, obviously I chose Doctor Who Monthly’s masterpiece The Tides of Time.

So Why Is Earthshock Brilliant?

Slotting in the DVD, as we’ve been invited to do tonight, gives you a clue. Although it was quite an early release – out nearly eight years ago – the special features are much more in tune with those of the more advanced range. It was the first to feature its own special documentary, now almost a requirement: appropriately for a story that had made such a splash at the time, this was Putting the Shock Into Earthshock. And the story did indeed have an impact for its two big shocks – the well-hidden return of the Cybermen (not just for the first time in seven years, but the last time to date that a ‘returning enemy’ managed to stay a secret), and the ending, which I’ll be spoilering at the end of this section, so watch out… And which means I’d better not mention the cruelly funny “Episode 5,” still a rarity in being a ‘comedy’ DVD extra that’s actually amusing. Add to that the full isolated score, and an especially impressive one at that, a contemporary TV review, commentary, text notes, photo gallery, raw film sequences including deleted material, slightly underwhelming optional new CGI effects and all, and it still stands up as a particularly good DVD package. But to work out just why I thought so highly of the story, I have to go back not just eight years, but twenty-nine. What grabbed me the first time I saw it?

Put simply, the first episode is a brilliantly inventive horror piece. Perhaps presenting ‘scary shapes in the dark’ is more stylish than original, but what about the hi-tech scanner that becomes an old-fashioned portent of doom, or the weapons that melt people into pizza? When I was ten, that was the most memorably horrible form of death ever. Those opening twenty-five minutes are a superbly crafted build-up of tension, with great music, moody lighting and the threat building through troopers, then androids, then great gleaming uber-monsters that I recognised in delighted shock… While there’s no such thing as the ‘perfect’ episode of a series that takes you to any time and any place, in almost any style, this is as near to one type of it as you can get. Rarely had visual style and sound design come together so effectively to create an atmosphere of dark, echoing menace – and once the Cybermen were revealed at the cliffhanger, the march composed for them became one of the era’s most hummable pieces of ‘action music’. From the deep, low dripping echo acting as a bassline to eerier music dancing around it as troopers crawl through dark caves to the closing silver revelation, director Peter Grimwade, lighting operator Fred Wright, and – particularly – special sound designer and incidental musician Dick Mills and Malcolm Clarke do some of the best work the series has ever had.

The new design of the Cybermen, too, was both striking and seemingly powerful. Their last TV appearance had been when I was three, and it was one of the first stories I ever saw – while I loved it at the time, it’s fair to say it’s not generally considered a total, brilliant success. Before then, you had to go back to the 1960s, where they were the archetypal scary black and white monsters in the shadows. So this reinvention was stunning, if not without its own problems, as I’ll come to shortly. For me it’s still one of the four impressive Cyber-stories from the last century (though one’s yet to see a DVD release, the other three were once released together by Amazon in a handy boxed set as if to say ‘these are the ones to grab’ – as opposed to last year’s Cyber-box, which could have been labelled ‘these are the ones to avoid’). And yet the odd thing is that, in amid the excitement and despite much of it being made up of augmented parts from old Cyber-stories, you don’t really notice that there’s no particular reason for the monsters here to be Cybermen; they work, but they could have been almost any other monster, doing nothing to unearth the central terror of people who were once just like us.

There’s much less claustrophobic darkness after Part One, but the lighting’s still very effective, and the story remains packed with striking images. The silos the waking Cybermen punch their way out of may not stand up to a close look – but when those punches make such huge, echoing bangs, set to that riveting march, you don’t give it a close look; a perfect example of how sound design makes an image more impressive, add to the weight of what’s probably cardboard and assisting the build-up to a great cliffhanger of the steel giants marching remorselessly. Then there’s that fluid camera moving across all the dead crew on the stairs as the Cybermen march over them, or the Doctor’s finest moment in the story, as he does something clever to stop a Cyberman and create a cool and original image: for once, I’ll not say what it is, but it involves a door…

Earthshock also made a success of the programme’s new format. For Peter Davison’s three years as the Doctor, stories were shown not once a week but twice, with the 1982 adventures starting with twenty-five minute episode on Monday, continuing on Tuesday, and then carrying on the following week. This meant both that stories were over in half the time, and that they felt more like two halves than four quarters. Even now, Earthshock’s best watched not all in one go, but two episodes at a time, where it works almost as two two-part stories. One side-effect of this – heretical though it may be for a story most praised for its climax – is that Parts One and Three are vastly superior to Parts Two and Four. For me, both ‘first’ episodes are more interesting than the messy faffing around of their pay-offs… Though, cleverly, in each ‘first episode’ the Doctor meets a trigger-happy bunch who accuse him of murder, so we assume it’s a repeated meme when in fact (spoiler) the second accuser is complicit in the deaths. The one way in which the ‘two by two’ split fails is that, while you’d expect Part Two’s cliffhanger to be the strongest in order to keep your attention for the best part of a week, the three other episodes all have terrific climaxes, but Part Two’s is so banally clichéd that even Adric – who, unlike modern companions, has never ‘seen’ TV drama and can’t be genre-aware – can spot what’s going to happen and warns the Doctor, who at this point is so passive that he literally sits down and picks at his hat, waiting for someone to get killed. And the one you’ll care about isn’t for another week.

So Why Isn’t Earthshock Brilliant?

Adric and the Doctor are, of course, also at the heart of some of my problems with the story (and cover your eyes, folks, because here’s that big spoiler). I have no problem with a hero occasionally choosing to do a Zen sort of nothing, but it has to be the right sort of nothing. It isn’t, here. Instead, too often the Doctor comes across as simply not having a clue. Adric, on the other hand, has a terrifically memorable part in the story – because it’s still the only time that one of the Doctor’s long-running TV companion (as opposed to a few who’d been around rather less, or all of Russell and Steve’s modern ‘ooh, nearlies’) is killed. That’s the key reason so many people remember this story, and yet, and yet… For me, the final episode is its most obvious failure, even with that shocking emotional punch. It’s less that the Doctor fails to save Adric, but that he fails to do anything very much, spending most of the story wandering aimlessly in order to let the Cybermen make all the moves, hoist themselves by their own petards, and wait for the scriptwriter to put the pieces into place for a mechanically inevitable tragedy.

I considered mapping out some of the problems I have with the plotting of the story (if you’re interested, e-mail me for a screed), but I came up with such a list that it would distract from what really pulls me in two – that while Earthshock is fabulously exciting, there’s a lot about it that feels wrong, and that’s less about logic than ethos. It’s true, too, that Part Four was always less exciting for me, which counts against it. Just as we’re supposed to be running towards the climax, unfortunately by the start of the final episode now the Cybermen have ‘won’ and people are just being moved around according to their plan, while the actors are still working hard, the key behind the scenes people seem to have run out of ideas (and not just the writer). The formerly atmospheric team of sound design and music, particularly, suddenly runs out of steam – with no tension to be cranked up until the end, both the action and the sound underscoring it seems far more minor and directionless. And you’ll have gathered that sound cues have a big effect on me. For years, I’d assumed that ‘let-down’ feeling was because ten-year-old me preferred action to emotion. Now I realise I prefer action and tension to lots of aimless running around with a bit of emotion hammered onto the end of it.

My central problem with Earthshock’s ethos, though, isn’t one that I saw as any kind of problem when I was a bloodthirsty ten-year-old thrilled by Doctor Who violence. And yet, even then, I loved what many see as Earthshock’s biggest fault, and yet for me is its saving grace…

When Macho Wins, the Doctor Loses

I’ve explained a little (well, perhaps a lot, by most reviewers’ standards) of why Earthshock is one of the stories about which I have the most mixed feelings. Will it be thrilling? Will it be disappointing? And a lot of that’s simply down to the mood I’m in. Will I love the echoing caves? Will Part Four underperform? But as I’ve grown up with Earthshock, I’ve become increasingly uneasy with its unremittingly macho ethos.

Though it’s easy (and probably true) to argue that Earthshock turned out to have a negative influence on Doctor Who, I don’t blame it for all the excesses that it inspired – in part because it was so exciting and thrilling that people wanted to do it again, you could say it led to horrible, leaden messes like Warriors of the Deep and Resurrection of the Daleks, but you can’t judge a story by its wannabes. Earthshock is far better than any story I can think of that just ‘wants to be Earthshock’ – the direction, design, most of the performances and perhaps above all the music and special sound are all hard to fault, with gripping action and some of the most tense sequences of any Who story. Even the script, despite its faults, is a good deal better than that of its imitators.

My biggest problem with it is its ethos. It fetishises guns and macho values, and the Doctor rather gets lost in the mix. The literal poster boy for this sense of just not ‘getting’ the series is the infamous publicity shot of the Doctor kneeling and aiming a gun, as if that was what he was about. That’s scriptwriter Eric Saward’s unhappy signature piece – in every story he writes, the Doctor wields a gun and to some extent becomes just like every other ‘action hero’. What a failure of imagination.

There’s still a lot of the story I enjoy tremendously, but if I watch it with my brain on it simply feels wrong. There are four main groups of characters in the script – the Doctor and his friends, the troopers, the ship’s crew and the Cybermen. Three of the four are gun-wielding macho teams, while the Doctor either has to join in or be portrayed as weak. That’s a despairingly bad standpoint for a Who story.

Take the Cybermen. In their earlier stories, they’d always been a failing race hanging on to life and giving up their humanity for survival – there was something tragic about them, and their inherent weakness was illustrated through their low numbers, a people dying out, and their consequent need to mount insidious plots through infiltration and hypnosis. In Earthshock, this all changes (having started in The Invasion, where they may as well have been remote-controlled drones but where they’re far more forgivable in a story that’s not really about the Cybermen at all – even there, though, the Cybermen march impressively through streets they’ve stealthily put to sleep first). Mr Saward has a strange fascination with them, but as if protesting, ‘They’re my favourites, so they can’t be weak!’ has changed their character entirely into a thrusting military superpower. Clay Hickman can only have been thinking of this story when he described the Cybermen as the series’ most military monster – surely not, and clearly the Daleks or Sontarans, say – on their return in 2006. That simply wasn’t how they’d ever been presented, yet extreme butchness seemed desperately necessary to their new writer; Mr Saward’s obsession with Cybermen has been well-documented, but if you’ve missed it it’s at its most hilarious from Terrance Dicks on his The Five Doctors commentary (and I once heard him say much worse in person…).

Losing the ‘iron lung’ chest unit (and exoskeletal piping) isn’t just an aesthetic change – there’s no longer any mention of the Cybermen being a dying race putting themselves back together through cybernetics; their replacement parts are no longer a sign of weakness, but a butching-up to make augmented macho supersoldiers. The Doctor’s opposition to them is fatally undermined by his only being able to do so by hanging around with, er, another bunch of macho supersoldiers.

Similarly, Mr Saward obviously remembers that he loved the Cybermen when they were an insidious force of plotters conquering through hypnosis, so he has them doing some insidious plotting… But also makes them a big butch military power bloc with a ginormous fleet, because they have to be really macho and well hard. Ironically, this is also the one where they rely on terrorist bombings rather than their fleet, which as far as I can tell is just there to stand slightly off to one side of the story, willy-waving.

Contrast the testosterone-fuelled Cybermen with our neutered hero. Having thought up an exciting movie-style action adventure with several sets of exciting soldiers in it, Mr Saward appears to have no idea at all what to do with a lead character who doesn’t go for violence as his first choice.

Take this exchange from Part Three:

“Could that be the Doctor?”
“I hope not. Guns are not his style at all.”

Mr Saward’s script pays lip service to the Doctor’s ethos, but only as something to worry about because he’s so feeble – then has Tegan picking up a gun anyway, and relegates the Doctor to the narrator, while – closer to the action – Scott gets to say, “Set weapons to kill.” And within a couple of minutes the Doctor’s snapping up a pistol at the door, too (blink and you miss it, thankfully, unless you look at the horrible posters).

The moment where the Doctor really collides with Mr Saward’s preferred values and gets smashed to bits is Part Four – first metaphorically, in his debate with the Cyberleader, then pretty much literally, when Adric is blown up because the writer thinks the Doctor too weak to save him. He simply can’t believe in a hero who isn’t butch.

It’s not as if Mr Saward isn’t capable of writing some good lines for the Doctor – “always the perfect guests,” say, and he does have a memorable exchange with the Cyberleader about what’s wrong with being a Cyberman:

“I see that Time Lords have emotional feelings.”
“Of sorts…”
“Surely a great weakness in one so powerful?”
“Emotions have their uses.”
“They restrict and curtail the intellect, and logic of the mind.”
“They also enhance life! When did you last have the pleasure of smelling a flower? Watching a sunset? Eating a well-prepared meal?”
“These things are irrelevant.”
“For some people, small, beautiful events is [sic] what life is all about!”

It’s an argument against a brutish, macho script – which is why, in the end, Mr Saward from his viewpoint can’t think of an argument that would let the Doctor ‘win’. It’s easy to forget that this scene ends with the Doctor – the Doctor! – simply lost for words. Cue ‘woman as victim to be threatened and protected by young male hero’, one of the most B-Movie cliché absences of character the Doctor’s ever been submitted to, with the Cyberleader of course assuming the Doctor’s straight, only threatening him with Tegan, not reasoning that the Doctor might have any “affection” for the bloke he’s been with through the whole story. “Such a reaction is not a disadvantage?” “No,” replies the Doctor – and the script – hollowly. Absolutely no-one here is distinctive: Tegan reduced to a 1950s cipher; the Doctor to an ineffectual juvenile lead worried for ‘his girl’; the Cyberleader so blatantly macho that, rather than heralding a victory for machine logic, he’s merely a military cliché one step up from Scott.

So while Mr Saward can write some decent individual lines for the Doctor, he doesn’t seem to know what to do with him overall. Sure, the Doctor can’t win every fight, but he should at least have a reply to the Cyberleader saying how weak he is. The answer here appears to be, ‘Yes, being nice makes you puny. It’s a fair cop’. Zap! Pow! Grr! Aarrghh! Small, beautiful events aren’t what life is all about for Mr Saward, are they? Ironically, given that so many later stories borrow from Earthshock, one that doesn’t seem to resemble it at all (except for the hats) is Frontios, by Mr Saward’s infinitely preferable predecessor as lead writer – which does a very similar gag with the Doctor putting down Tegan to pretend he doesn’t care for her, and yet Chris Bidmead is also able to write the Doctor as outthinking the alien leader, something Mr Saward conspicuously fails to manage here.

“Can’t you do something?”
“Not at the moment.”

Or, indeed, at all, following on from not being able to better the Leader’s argument. The Doctor doesn’t save the day; it’s Adric with his Cyberman brain and Scott with all his big guns. The Doctor’s just left with the coda (not saving the Earth, and too late to save Adric); killing the Leader with, in effect, a bit of Adric would have a thematic rightness, but no, the gold star he grinds in only makes it grunt a bit. The Doctor then has to straddle it, pumping blasts and shooting to reclaim his masculinity.

The saving grace of all this is the not-macho-at-all Captain Briggs, who by accident or design (was it the producer going for a star name, the director putting a bit of personality into the story, or both?) almost single-handedly drags scenes back to being Doctor Who. As you’ll see in a moment.

I did a quick tot-up earlier of the Doctor Who stories that feature no guns at all. I make it very few – only about one in eight – but, interestingly, Russell T Davies’ period as lead writer’s was probably the one that manages it most often. When Mr Saward seemed so often to despair of his hero and have everyone else in the story tell him to ‘Grow a pair,’ it’s almost as if Russell told his writers, ‘You see how that Eric Saward did it? Try growing an imagination instead’.

Ironically, I think the easiest way to thoroughly enjoy this story is to adopt a particular frame of mind; you must first restrict and curtail the intellect, and logic of the mind, then also emotional feelings… Leaving you with the enthusiasm for excitement of an energetic boy. Surely a great weakness in a spectacle so powerful?

Or you can have some of whatever Captain Briggs is having.

Beryl Reid – No-one Else Would Dare

There are some word-associations by Doctor Who fans so common that they’re almost automatic. Long ago, when Target Books were our main way of experiencing the past, the first Doctor was always “crotchety” or the third always had “a shock of prematurely white hair,” for example. But surely few are so overused as the instant association of “Beryl Reid – miscast”.

I thought she was brilliant. And as I’ve got older and my view of Earthshock has become rather more complicated, I still think she’s brilliant. Not only is it a hugely enjoyable performance, but the space freighter’s Captain Briggs is the saving grace of a story that threatens to throttle the ethos of Doctor Who with its crashing (if often very exciting) machismo.

Unusually for a Twentieth-Century Who story, there are an impressive number of female characters in Earthshock – but you’d hardly notice. Nyssa, Kyle and Berger are all as bland as anything (no pun intended), while not just the men, and the Cybermen, but all the female troopers (even Tegan) are written to be played by Arnold Schwarzenegger.

What an enormous relief, then, to have the character written for Sigourney Weaver played by a short, crabby older woman who takes the piss. How can people say Captain Briggs is miscast, when Beryl Reid and her put-downs are a complete joy? Can you imagine how unbearable it would have been if Briggs had been as grim as Lieutenant Scott, so they’d all been like that? Thanks to the casting of the thankfully not-mighty Beryl, Briggs comes across as much more of a Whoish character than as written (and far more than any of the other guests).

So let’s celebrate a series that’s not afraid to cast differently and more interestingly than a dourly macho American series stuffed with people in uniform would: that isn’t miscasting. It’s a series that’s true to its own different ethos, where people aren’t uniform – in either sense – and individuals have personalities rather than just being exactly what you’d expect.

Think of Bernard Cribbins as Luke Skywalker blasting ‘incoming’ out of the sky (The End of Time).

Or Arthur Cox as James Dean, the oldest, plumpest, most follically challenged teenage rebel in space (The Dominators).

And Beryl Reid as Ellen Ripley.

No other series could. No other series would even try. Let’s hail them all!

Martin Wiggins’ “Earthschlock”…?

One last thing: Martin Wiggins, now famous (ish) for writing the wittier of the DVD production notes (and as a, cough, minor sideline, being a senior Oxford lecturer, and allegedly killed in The Shakespeare Code), is reported to have written a thoroughly brutal review of Earthshock when the VHS came out under the title “Earthschlock” in the October 1992 DWAS magazine.

Does anyone have a copy of that savage critique (or know Dr Wiggins and be able to ask him)? I’d be interested to read it, as I enjoy his writing and am intrigued to know what he thought (though I suspect I enjoy the story very much more than he does). A web search hasn’t been fruitful.


Having spent all morning listening to Gerry Rafferty, this piece has been written to the soundtracks from Earthshock (unsurprisingly) and Tron: Legacy, which may have been made in 2010 but sounds even more 1982.

Labels: Doctor Who, DVD, In-Depth Doctor Who, Peter Davison, Reviews

Gerry Rafferty, who died yesterday, had been one of my favourite singer-songwriters ever since I rather belatedly got into music in my mid-to-late teens. Of four artists I was particularly devoted to, I eventually managed to see two play live – so it was eerie this morning to be woken by the Today Programme's 6.30 headlines with one of them, Tom Robinson, quoted in a tribute to the other, Gerry Rafferty, as "an inspiration to a generation". You probably know him from Baker Street (the one with the saxophone solo) and Stuck in the Middle (the one without the ear).

It wasn't either of his best-known songs that first sparked my interest in Gerry, oddly enough; friends of mine at school had their own band, and their covers of Gerry's early band Stealers' Wheel got my attention. I think it was probably the slow build-up of different instruments coming in to set off the driving rock and roll of Blind Faith that first made me want to track down the original, and that fixed my taste for Gerry's multi-layered big sound, rock tempered by folk but with a uniquely rich harmony of many instruments and voices. It helped, too, that several of Gerry's album covers were by John "Patrick" Byrne, whose Tutti Frutti I'd loved, and that the utterly bizarre caricatures for the three Stealers Wheel LPs in particular looked so fabulous.

"The voice, redolent of both Lennon's and McCartney's, yet unmistakably his own; the music, a shimmering delta of sound; the songs, romantic yet pushily sardonic – all came to fruition thanks to Gerry's gift of perfect pitch and an obdurate determination to stick to his guns."

From Gerry Rafferty's obituary by his former personal manager Michael Gray, in today's Guardian.

North and South

Although Gerry Rafferty's commercial and critical success – such as it was – came in the 1970s, I may still love his three 1980s albums the most… Which is a bit of a drawback if you want to look them up, as they're obviously the ones it's most difficult to get hold of (except intermittently on download). 1988's North and South, if you can find it, is for me the best of all his work. Released just as I was getting into him, it was the first of his LPs I bought, and has perhaps the most distinctive sound: several songs have extended intros before his voice comes in, with most set in a swirl of many different instruments, including the pipes that, with world-weary lyrics of being caught between life down in Kent, working in the big city, and his longing to return to Scotland, make this his most Scottish album since his early folk days in the Humblebums with Billy Connolly (yes, that one). The title song might just be my favourite of all his tracks, when I'm feeling idiosyncratic and don't want to pick Baker Street; the single Shipyard Town (which sank without trace, with me probably being one of just two people in Stockport to buy it) has a hugely infectious thump driving happier memories than his usual tone of regret; the urgent, rolling guitar of A Dangerous Age used to be on my walkman every time I was on a motorway journey; Hearts Run Dry is appropriately heartbreaking; and Moonlight and Gold is simply gorgeous. So look out for that one, if it happens to be on iTunes, or if you spot a CD that isn't going for silly money on eBay.

I have to admit I've listened to Gerry a good deal less in the last decade than in the dozen years before that: in part because I tend to watch DVDs more than I listen to music; in part because I'm more likely to listen to music that Richard likes to, so my consumption of rock and roll or punk has fallen away; but largely, particularly in Gerry's case, because I had all his work on vinyl, but no longer have a record player, and had transferred it all to cassette for ease of listening, but it's several years since our last cassette player gave up the ghost. With so much of his output near-impossible to find on CD, that rather cut down the listening opportunities, though I remember being delighted when one of the first of Doctor Who Confidential's clips montages way back in 2005 was set to the gorgeous hypnotic swirl of Get It Right Next Time.

Stealers' Wheel

I'd actually been listening to Gerry rather more often in the last couple of years, aided by at last finding CD reissues of the three Stealers' Wheel albums, the early '70s band with Joe Egan (who turns up intermittently on later Rafferty solo releases) which recorded the massive Stuck in the Middle but never quite took off, with an exciting mix of commercial failure, pretty much every member of the band leaving, coming back or being added by the record company, and eventual legal warfare that I'm sure you can read about on the internet if you're interested in that sort of thing.

Although the eponymous first album Stealers' Wheel is their best-known and includes Stuck in the Middle and the altogether lovely You Put Something Better Inside of Me, its rather sparse production means I much prefer the other two (one of the tracks, Johnny's Song, doesn't do a lot for me here, but becomes fantastic when reworked on Gerry's 1980 solo album). No, the Paisley-titled 'difficult second album' Ferguslie Park is much better, with the caressing regret of Waltz (You Know It Makes Sense) and the thumpingly good rock and roll of Blind Faith and (Everyone's Agreed That) Everything Will Turn Out Fine, while I'm probably the only person in the world whose favourite of the three is the less difficult than near-impossible third album, which wasn't so much released as escaped after several years in lawyers' custody and long after the band had expired, Right Or Wrong. They may all have hated it, but it's the closest to the lush solo sound that came a few years later. I love the title track; the catchy Catholic cynicism of Benediction was right in line with my religious upbringing; even funky chicken Wishbone grabbed me.

Baker Street and the Rest

If you have a Gerry Rafferty album, it's probably 1978's City to City, which was deservedly a massive success along with its lead single, Baker Street, which mixes melancholic reflections on a singer's street life in London with an uncharacteristic but appealing closing paean of hope and sunrise, an arching guitar solo and, of course, one of the most blissful saxophone solos ever recorded (by Raphael Ravenscroft or, if you prefer your urban legends, Bob Holness. Look, he wasn't a saxophonist – he was James Bond). If you have a copy of the B-side, incidentally, Big Change in the Weather, I don't think that's ever been released on CD, so it's a very long time since I've heard it… Almost the whole album's superb, though – rock Home and Dry and romantic Right Down the Line are both fabulous and reasonably well-known; soaring, reflective Whatever's Written in Your Heart is rather lovely, and Waiting for the Day has another effortless rock bounce to it.

Although his music continued to be great, nothing Gerry Rafferty did after City to City had the same success – perhaps because soft rock was out of fashion, perhaps because of his famous distaste for fame and the music business (a theme that recurs through his work much more even than most singer-songwriters), perhaps because, in a business more about sex appeal than art, he was never much of a looker. His next four albums plotted a sharp downwards sales line – the follow-up, Night Owl, was the least interesting ('like City to City, only less so') but the only one that was a fair-sized hit. I've never really gone much for the title track – a hit single, yet hardly ever played since, and which might as well have been called, 'God, I Hate Touring' – though the swirling Get It Right Next Time is sublime near-perfect pop, Days Gone Down makes longing almost heroic, then Take the Money and Run and The Tourist… Are catchy tunes that hate the music business.

I'd much rather listen to Snakes and Ladders, not that I can at the moment because I'm not paying £60 for the CD on eBay, which was the point where his sales fell off a cliff and, predictably, a particular favourite of mine. All right, so it's not quite as good as the rock sublimity of City to City, but the feel's a great mix of laid-back and sardonic, with a sure musical sensibility. I've already mentioned his compelling bluesy retake on Johnny's Song, while the lush sound and cynically political lyrics of The Garden Of England (complete with sampled Willie Whitelaw, I seem to remember) is one of the most Raffertyish of all his songs. The infectious folk-rock of The Royal Mile (Sweet Darlin') was one I once had on many cassette compilations (and always cheering to walk with Café Le Cabotin, which I'd play next to a Paul McCartney song about a café which, obviously, I can't quite remember and also don't have on CD, though I probably could if I got round to it).

The next album, after which he stopped recording until his masterpiece (yeah, I know, only for me) North and South, was his shortest and his most uncharacteristic. Sleepwalking is starkly synthesiser-based (aside from the more complex shuffle of the title track) and has a fairly anonymous photographic landscape cover, giving the whole a feel of alienation, in severe contrast to the intimacy of most of his albums; while I love synth-pop, it's not something he seems entirely comfortable with, and yet some of the melodies are among his most lovely – The Right Moment, in particular… Wise As A Serpent, another standout track, is hypnotic but cold. And, yes, this is another one it's very difficult to find – but with a haunting desire to hear the guitar and bass opus of Standing at the Gates again, I have to admit I've just shelled out £30 on eBay for it. It had better play…

Like City to City, if considerably less celebrated, you can find On a Wing and a Prayer fairly easily and cheaply; it's rather good, with a big sound this time offered by very distinctive backing vocals – it was at this time that I saw him being terrific on stage in Hackney, and boy, there were a lot of singers, with the biggest voice offered by a very big chap indeed – and some of his most lingering melodies of loss. I'm sure someone once called this 'the divorce album', and it certainly runs through every emotional reaction, from wanting to hang on (the hauntingly regretful single I Could Be Wrong), to remembering the good times (Love and Affection), to the album's most electric and lively if not its most pleasant track, a cover of Allen Toussaint's Get Out Of My Life Woman. The track that most stays in my head, though, is the opening song Time's Caught Up on You, with a breathtaking a cappella introduction (and rather than divorce, this one's about… Oh, see if you can guess).

There weren't that many Gerry Rafferty releases after that one in 1992, save a legion of each-one-very-slightly-different-from-the-last compilations, and what new material there was didn't really live up to his previous work, despite occasional sparks. Over My Head in 1995 was OK, but the first of his albums where – aside from the atypically brisk single The Girl's Got No Confidence, and several songs re-recorded from his early '70s oeuvre – I was hard-pressed to get any of the tunes to sink in, while the last decade's Another World… Wasn't nearly as good as that. I found it a bit of a religious dirge, and aside from Land of the Chosen Few, such memorable tunes as there were tended to be borrowed from his earlier work or, again, simple re-recordings. His final album, Life Goes On from 2009, was a partial return to form, though very little of it was strictly new, with covers, re-recordings, different takes and only the odd new song. The material, though, appropriately stretches from reworkings of his early '70s songs through to his favourites from On a Wing and a Prayer, so it's not a bad elegy for him, and I'm particularly glad it's got a re-recording (if not quite as piquant as the original) of Shipyard Town B-side Heart's Desire, an otherwise difficult-to-find song that's as Rafferty as they came – a lovely melody, and very wry lyrics.

"And now you've got everything you ever wanted,
But money can't buy you a satisfied mind.
What can you do when a dream comes true
And you can't go any higher?
That's the price you pay for your heart's desire."

His having returned to them so much in his later years, I'll finish by rounding full circle to some of Gerry Rafferty's earliest recordings. Only having them on LP, it's been a long time since I've listened to Gerry and Billy's folky Humblebums albums, which were all right, or his first solo album, Can I Have My Money Back, which is better if not outstanding and shows a lot of his talent being honed (despite rather primitive production, with much more life than the late-period CDs that recapture some of the same songs) and even in the title track of this very early work displays his hatred of the music business – it's worth a listen, though, particularly for the melodic longing of Mary Skeffington (apparently inspired by his mother), Long Way Round (clearly a prototype of his later big numbers, as is the Humblebums' I Can't Stop Now), and Sign on the Dotted Line, the effusive catchiness of which is at odds with, unsurprisingly, its critique of the music industry (and it's also one of the tracks he did with Joe Egan, soon to be the other half of Stealers' Wheel. Which is where I more or less began, above).

Gerry Rafferty never seemed to enjoy fame very much, but I loved his songs, and very few singer-songwriters have ever matched the sustained quality of his work from the early '70s through to the early '90s, in fair sales and foul. And amid that, there are a handful of songs so outstanding and so lucky as to have caught the public ear (and Quentin Tarantino's) that he'll be widely remembered. And I'll miss him.

The lovely Stephen Glenn has also written about Gerry this morning.

The Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy

More happily, it was thirty years ago today that the first episode of the TV series The Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy was broadcast on BBC2 – for me, the definitive version of the much-written, often-made story. Douglas Adams had honed his scripts to perfection; it's one of the most visually imaginative TV series ever made; and Paddy Kingsland's music is so utterly gorgeous that hearing it to the sunrise can still make me tear up (OK, so it was only pop and rock that I took a while to get into; I always loved TV scores).

I think I'll go out and get myself a new towel. Though Marks and Spencer's in Salisbury is probably a bit of a trek.

Labels: Douglas Adams, Gerry Rafferty, Music, Obituary, Personal, Reviews, Tom Robinson

Liberal Democrat Blogger of Last Year, Millennium Dome Elephant, is ten eleven ten* years old today! So I bring very special wishes to him from top Lib Dem Peer Shirley Williams. It's an appropriate honour, because I'm very proud of him – and, of course, of my beloved Richard Flowers, top TV pundit, who helps Millennium with the typing. So here is a Lord…

Hang on! She's just opened her mouth to offer a special birthday greeting, and it doesn't sound like Shirley at all. What? It sounds like a man. What? In fact, it sounds rather like Millennium. WHAT?!



Maybe it's someone she keeps being mistaken for over her supermarket trolley. Who could it be? No – the name escapes me. Something to do with 'I loved what you did getting rid of the grammar schools, but I liked that Mr Hartnell better…'

And a happy 2011 to all of you at home.


*Millennium is the finest politico-economic blogger in the country. He should know how many birthdays make ten.
…He does, of course. But it's a point of principle.

Labels: Doctor Who, Pictures, Richard, Tom Baker

A Merry Doctor Who Special Day to you all, and there's just time, with Ronnie Corbett in full flow on TV and Richard coughing over his turkey at putting on some lederhosen, for me to spoiler an ultra-special Christmas secret. I've got to tell you: Doctor Who Supremo Steven Moffat very nearly pulled off a cracker of a con-job. You think, don't you, that tonight's story is going to be A Christmas Carol again? Honestly. As if the ever-inventive* Mr Moffat would give us such a Dickensian old chestnut that the series first did it more than twenty years ago! Why, just this afternoon we put on the Christmas turkey with killer sprouts**, and even I wrote an A Christmas Carol-referencing Doctor Who story for a friend over a decade ago (it's that obvious an idea. Come to think of it, even Blackadder did it, with the same Doctor Who companion that the Doctor did. And that's on again tonight, too). So it's a brilliant Yuletide prank, isn't it, that Mr Moffat's managed to convince everyone that he's just doing the same again.

So of course it's something much more original. Ignore the Continuity Errors. Yes, from the man who in 2007 brought a Doctor Who story to the screen that he'd first published in the Annual a couple of years earlier, and who this year commissioned Gareth Roberts to adapt a Doctor Who Magazine comic strip for TV, tonight I'm hugely excited to reveal he's got a special adaptation of one of the greatest of all Doctor Who stories, The Iron Legion. Oh, you were going to be so surprised! Which is why, amid all the fake "Dickens" clips (and to think everybody's fallen for it – biggest whopper printed in the Radio Times since Neil Toynay last guest-starred), when they accidentally let through a shot from the real Christmas special, Mr Moffat went hopping mad. Such incompetence! It's amazing so few people spotted it, but just before General Ironicus thrills and delights you by striding onto your screen at 6pm, here's the clip that let it slip, where the real Malevilus Temple was inadvertently revealed.





Sorry to spoil the surprise early.

Will there be any more blogs from me to mark the end of my least productive year yet? With a bit of luck, I might soon be publishing an arguably better-informed review of a spectacularly unChristmassy Doctor Who story. But, as is so often the way, I've got to the end with no problem, but am having difficulty with the start (and it's not even one of Mr Moffat's timey-wimeys).


Apologies, one and all, for my not having sent a single Christmas card. Well, that's not quite true (how unlike most of this post). I handed one to my beloved this morning in person, and I did post one to my Grandma in New Hampshire, as the alternative is execution (only joking). But having been distinctly ill and only out of the flat three times in three weeks, I'm afraid I've not done very much that's Christmassy for the people I love. Except the lovely one who made dinner for me this very afternoon and generally makes life worth living.


And finally, as my previous post was filled with rather unseasonable language, perhaps I could make up for it with a piece of festive opinion polling…

…Don't tell the children.


*As proven mathematically down Mr Miles' sidebar

**Unlike most of this post, it is in fact true that while eating Christmas dinner we watched Doctor Who's The Trial of a Time Lord Part Eleven

Labels: Charles Dickens, Christmas, Colin Baker, Comics, Doctor Who, Matt Smith, Pictures, Richard, Tom Baker

Tonight on tuition fees, the Liberal Democrats reach the climax of their worst political fuck-up for twenty years. This is a cause of ructions for Lib Dems, hilarity for the media, hypocrisy from Labour who created the policy (except the fairer bits), and disgusting hypocrisy from the Labour-run "National Union of Students," whose policy is functionally identical to the Coalition Government's but who pretend outrage.

What you won't see in the terrible press the Lib Dems are getting is that the Leaders of the Labour and, shockingly, the So-Called "Green Party" prioritise embarrassing the Government instead of tackling climate change.

I've meant to write about tuition fees for months, but as you'll have spotted, I've not been writing anything much. As I've been coughing all manner of unpleasantness up all day and I can't access any of the notes I've been making half-heartedly along the way, this won't be a long, methodical, carefully argued and linkful piece. More a shout of outrage at seeing the news. Yes, my temperature has been racing all day, but this evening part of it's self-induced (or at least politics-induced).

Who's Right To Be Outraged? And Who's Faking It?

The many students who voted for Lib Dems who signed a pledge not to vote for increased fees have the right to be outraged. Cutting or abolishing fees for the least well-off (based both on their families before graduation and their jobs after graduation) is a good achievement by Lib Dem ministers that a majority Tory Government would not have delivered, and that Labour proved they would never deliver in their long years of absolute power, when instead they created and then increased tuition fees. Extending the same system to all the part-time students (who tend to be poorer, and who Labour condemned to pay every penny up front) is a big step forward. The amended system is not absolute evil. It does help the poorest. It is more progressive than the system Labour left in place, or Labour's Browne Report on which it's based but which they now pretend to oppose. But it's not good enough. Promising to vote against raising the tuition fees people pay slowly after graduating, then voting to let some universities triple them, is a broken promise, and – more importantly – a broken principle.

Students who complain now but who voted in May for candidates who did not sign the pledge, particularly those who supported the defeated Labour Government which broke all their tuition fees promises, are hypocrites. And students who didn't bother to vote but protest now, leading to the under-25s having by far the lowest voter turn-out at the General Election, should be ashamed of themselves for their laziness (if 'they're all the same', how come you're burning Nick Clegg in effigy rather than any random politician?) – more votes would have meant more Lib Dem MPs and a stronger bargaining position.

As it is, 65% of the Lib Dem Manifesto is being delivered in government, and that's not according to Lib Dem spin doctors – it's from The Guardian, who pour shit over the Lib Dems on a daily basis. As (like everyone else) we didn't win the election, that's not just impressive but near-miraculous.

Do you know what the Lib Dems' top election priority on education was? You can see for yourself: it was on the front cover of that manifesto (tuition fees were not), and it's been delivered by the Coalition Government. It's a pupil premium to load extra money to the poorest schoolkids in the country. I'm proud that Liberal Democrats in government have made sure money's going to help the children who most need it. I'm not happy, though, about the coalition negotiators' work on tuition fees. They had to do a near-impossible job at frantic speed, and mostly they did great work (that 65%), but they should have seen the problems coming. It was the biggest single worry at the Special Conference that agreed the Coalition deal a week later, so it's not as if other people couldn't work it out. Abolishing tuition fees was a major campaigning issue as well as an issue of principle. It was also very expensive. But even if the Tories wouldn't agree to the money for abolition, the double-bind of the pledge not to raise them should have been the fall-back position, not the policy that fell into the abyss. I'm very glad I didn't have to sit in that room and work out what to cut instead. But the fact is, the Lib Dem negotiators made the one huge mistake of agreeing David Cameron's cast-iron promises but bargaining away Nick's. I know which of the Leaders is more instinctively honest, so it's a shame that the other one had the more finely attuned sense for covering his arse.

Oh, and one from the archives: my position on tuition fees from 17 months ago. It's not changed, even if we can't deliver it today. The Coalition is something else I have two big problems with, and once again one of them's tuition fees (though it's at least made a big mark rolling back Labour's hideous attacks on civil liberties).

Pairing – No, It's Not Just Arcane Parliamentary Rules

Almost no-one will know about this, let alone care, because it sounds like an arcane bit of Parliamentary nonsense, and goodness knows there are a lot of those still cluttering up the place. But in fact 'pairing' is not some old-fashioned bit of flummery that politicians use to cover up being lazy, or arrogant, or out of touch. It's one of the few bits of Parliament that helps it work like a proper workplace. Which is why, of course, Labour doesn't actually believe in it – like Harriet Harman pretending commitment to equality but slagging off ginger people against the law she herself brought in, Ed Miliband has refused the sort of cover of which he himself has just taken advantage. Charlotte Henry explains:

"It has emerged that the Labour Leader is refusing to pair Energy & Climate Change Secretary Chris Huhne for tomorrow's vote on tuition fees, forcing him to return from the key climate change summit in Cancun. Pairing is the process whereby the absence of an MP who is whipped one way but can't attend a vote is negated by an opposing MP not voting too, and is agreed by the parties' teams of whips."

Basically, you need something to cover MPs who are seriously busy somewhere else or Parliament can't function – both Government and Opposition use and need it. Millennium Dome, Elephant points out that the Opposition parties (now the Coalition Government) co-operated with Labour 'pairs' even when Labour broke their own promises over tuition fees, if you read his Now Labour's Opportunism Threatens Climate Change Talks:

"It's done by a formal agreement between the Whips' Offices (which is just one of the reasons you can't "pair" with a rebel on your own side – never mind that if they're wound up enough TO rebel, they're hardly likely to agree to taking a stand by not being there!)

"It's been used for TIGHT votes before to allow Hard Labour ministers to attend important events such as – not un-coincidentally – the 2004 Higher Education Act (which you MAY recall was a bit of a tight pinch itself with seventy-one Labour rebels opposing, er, the Hard Labour Government manifesto-pledge tripling of tuition fees)."

But this is Ed Miliband refusing to 'pair' a single Labour MP for the Government Ministers away trying to sort out the survival of the planet. I can't think of a more serious issue for him to piss about with for a stunt. And he used to accept pairing personally from the parties that are now in government when he said it was vitally important for him to be away negotiating, back when he was… Energy and Climate Change Secretary.

Labour used to say the Tories were evil in the 1970s when they refused 'pairs' for close votes and forced sick Labour MPs to come from their hospital beds to vote. Today, Labour are happy to dick about with the planet's future to get a headline. Which party's meant to be evil, again?

Never mind the Labour Leader having exploited literally the same cover he's refusing now, the shitty hypocrite, but there are others that do much the same thing that he pretends to support. Think about it. It's not only Parliament that requires cover to function. It's a bit like there being a legal framework to guarantee maternity or paternity leave, so new parents don't have to work the day their baby's born. This comparison's particularly appropriate, because although the Labour Leader doesn't think anyone else should have cover for their jobs, Ed Miliband thought it was important that he take time off for his own baby in the last few weeks. Good for him, as far as that went.

But all those non-Miliband babies who might die because of climate change? But they're mainly in the Third World, aren't they, so they won't be in the news. And even more importantly, they're not little Miliband princes, so why should he give a toss? Oh – he doesn't.

So, Labour are despicable hypocrites who break the spirit and the letter of their own laws just for a stunt, and endanger vital international negotiations as a by-product. No-one can say they're surprised, after thirteen years of appalling Labour Government. But they're not the only opposition party, are they?

If only there were a single MP on the opposition benches whose entire stated raison d'être was to protect the environment, rather than being play politics with the Earth's future like the hypocritical scum in the Labour Party…

Caroline Lucas Says Climate Change Is Only Someone Else's Problem – As She Boasts On Twitter

I care about the tuition fees vote. But next to the threat of climate change, it doesn't matter a rat's fart.

I realise that's not going to win any votes. There's no one single hot-button climate change policy that will raise howls of outrage like tuition fees, and nothing's going to convince anyone reading that the Leader of the So-Called Green Party is a disgusting traitor just because she sits smugly back and, like the Labour Party, pretends that climate change is someone else's problem. But it should.

So-Called Green Party Leader Caroline Lucas could have proven that she, unlike the Labour Party, thought climate change was a serious issue. In fact, several people asked her directly if she would pair Chris Huhne.

She said there was no need, and he could just stay at the COP16 climate change negotiations in Cancún, pretending that wasn't a problem, pretending that would in no way distract one of the key negotiators, pretending that she doesn't know why pairing is important. Exactly along with all those other people who also say, 'Oh, climate change, who cares, someone else can deal with it. I'll just carry on as I was'.

Caroline Lucas, you call Nick Clegg a betrayer for breaking one policy that was a long way down the Lib Dems' manifesto when he had to make compromises with another party to fulfil any policies. What are you, then, for sitting back and putting your own smug ego ahead of the world's biggest climate change negotiations?

What are you for, then?

You are the first Self-Styled Green MP ever elected to the UK Parliament. What do you think people expect is your number one priority? What is the biggest possible betrayal you could commit?

You have no coalition agreement with any other party. Absolutely nothing dilutes your electoral mandate. You can vote however you like. That gives you freedom. It also means that you have no-one but yourself to take responsibility – or blame.

You choose to use your vote to help embarrass the Coalition Government, and you choose to refuse to help the delicate climate change negotiations in which the United Nations say the UK Energy and Climate Change Secretary is leading the charge to make them work. You choose to use your vote to embarrass the Government and put the climate change negotiations at risk.

You don't give a toss about the environment when you can posture to your voters in the two universities in Brighton, do you?

You are a lying piece of shit and the most despicable hypocrite.


I remain a supporter of the Coalition Government. I remain unenthusiastic about many of the compromises involved, and I remain in deep dislike for the Tories. One consolation, as it has been for most of the last six months, is that the Labour Party remain far worse. And for the Labour spin doctor who said on Newsnight last night that tuition fees might be the Lib Dems' "Iraq moment": no, you tasteless gobshite, it isn't. How can I tell? Because it's not killing hundreds of thousands of people illegally.

"Cancún"… Hmm, almost an anagram of a word made popular by Radio Four this week that's appropriate to the Labour and So-Called Green Parties for their fiddling while the Earth burns?

Good News

As I've been writing, news has broken that Chris Huhne is doing the right thing, because he cares about climate change while Ms Lucas only pretends to. Even if the government is defeated, he's staying put to do the more important job. If the tuition fees vote is lost by one vote, Caroline Lucas will crow that it was her that did it. It wasn't. It will have been the Energy and Climate Change Secretary taking responsibility and putting his money where his mouth is about climate change while the self-styled Leader of the fake "Green Party" postures and throws away all her most important principles when it comes to a choice rather than a soundbite.

Labels: British Politics, Coalition, Education, Environment, Labour, Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg, The Golden Dozen

This hasn't been my best year for blogging, has it? Mostly down to my own ill-health, though my computer's recently come out in sympathy. As most of my interaction with the outside world or even thinking time goes through it, this is a bit of a blow. In short, I was rebooting and it suddenly got no further than the company logo (a Dell PC running Windows XP) before the screen went blank. My very limited skills have got as far as unproductively re-plugging things and then failing to start safe mode, which simply sticks on one screen half-way through.



So if I've been grouchy, unsociable, introspective and silent, which I certainly have been, that's made it significantly worse. If you have any brilliant tips, please let me know – in addition to not being able to use the thing, I'm ashamed to admit that my last proper back-up was three and a half months ago, so while not everything is irreplaceable I feel like a chunk of my brain's gone missing, including all my most recent trains of thought.

Tiresomely, having become very much more ill than usual in the Spring, I still am. I seemed to be improving in parts of August and September, which was a relief – balanced by the crushing let-down of getting much worse again (and while he's usually spared my collapsing during the day, all that noisy late-night throwing up is difficult to hide from poor stressed Richard, who could do with a break). So I'm not getting out much, and that's been nothing to do with the weather. Today is my Mum's birthday, and while I'd hoped to be able to go up north to see the family, no chance. Hopefully I'll at least be able to totter out on the particular day in mid-January when my hospital appointment's due… The one my doctor said would come up within 30 days when he applied for it back in August. Ho hum. Maybe I'm just still ill so as not to waste it? Nah, probably not.

I'd like to write something today about the government's rubbish new drugs policy and about Doctor Who and Christmas, but as I'm feeling pretty ghastly and as Richard's laptop (which he very kindly lets me nab from time to time) knackers my hands much more than my usual keyboard does, it's unlikely. So try to imagine that you've read them, and then marvel at how different your memories of my different articles are when you talk amongst yourselves!

Labels: Health, Personal, Technology