Love and Liberty

There are some “F-words” that you hesitate to use in politics for fear of offence, but David Cameron’s new European Parliament Conservative Group, bodged together with sticky tape and suspicious armbands, has already had a rebellion, an expulsion and a putsch. Much more of this f-wording about and they’ll be completely F– ascisted. Newly re-elected, newly expelled Tory MEP Edward McMillan-Scott described the Polish extremist who seized the Group’s Leadership as “essentially a fascist,” and on last night’s PM programme, you can hear what the Conservative Leader said about “fags” that made one of his staff exclaim, “Oh my God!”

I’ve often criticised David Cameron for not having the honesty to make any policy commitments, merely asking people to vote for… Something that he hasn’t thought of yet. The Liberal Democrats make it clear what we’re offering, but Mr Cameron has been desperate to avoid doing any such thing. And, this week, it’s hard not to have some sympathy with his approach. In the three and a half years since he stood to become Conservative Leader, Mr Cameron has made a whopping two cast-iron unbreakable commitments, and both of them are causing him terrible difficulties. At home, he’s absolutely committed to one policy, one tax cut… But unlike the Liberal Democrat commitment to close loopholes on the ultra-rich and raise green taxes in order to raise allowances, helping those on middle incomes and taking millions of the lowest-paid out of tax altogether, Mr Cameron’s one tax pledge is to slash the inheritance tax paid by millionaires (even Ken Clarke, a man who knows his populism and his political poison, was forced to apologise for trying to back down on that). Unsurprisingly, now all of us non-millionaires are finding it harder than ever to make ends meet, Mr Cameron and his millionaires’ club are taking a lot of flak for getting their priorities greedily wrong.

Even that out of touch, self-serving tax disaster seems like wisdom, however, when measured against Mr Cameron’s one other promise – made when he was struggling for the more extreme voters in the Conservative Leadership race – to leave the largest, most influential group in the European Parliament and set up a ‘Billy No-Mates’ sect of their own. Not only has this alienated all the major centre-right governments in Europe – the ones Mr Cameron would have to work with should he be elected – and relegated the British Conservative MEPs from the largest part of the most powerful group, able to get things done, to a tiny squeak at the sidelines (dropping instantly from the biggest Group to the, er, fifth-biggest, and shrinking), but several of their new bedfellows are extremists of the most disgusting kind. And, to cap it all, on the new group’s very first day together in the Parliament, it was already straining at the seams. Was it worth it?

Conservatives Held To Ransom By “Essentially Fascist” Fruitcakes

The big problem is that the “European Conservatives and Reformists Group” is made up of only 55 MEPs from eight countries, only just enough to qualify as a “Group” within European Parliament rules – by contrast, the major players that can actually get things done, the European Socialists, the European Liberals and the European People’s Party that the Conservatives have just flounced away from all each have between two and four times as many MEPs, from three times as many countries. This isn’t just a matter of voting strength and influence, though obviously that’s important: the unfortunate fact for Mr Cameron is that if one or two MEPs from the ‘wrong’ country drop out, he suddenly ceases to have a Group at all.

Unlike any of the three major groups, then, Mr Cameron’s new Conservative Group can be held to ransom by most of the crackpots within it. And guess what? It’s already happened. On its very first day, Mr Cameron’s extremist Polish partners threatened to pull the plug unless their man became leader. So the brave British Conservatives instantly surrendered. If that’s his idea of standing up to Europe, I’d be interested to see what difference he can find between that and complete collapse of all negotiating positions.

Who knows what demands the smaller parties can get the British Conservatives to cave in on, when almost any one of them can nuke his Group on a whim?

And how did Mr Cameron get himself into this corner in the first place? Because the promise was forced out of him in surrender to the most hardline anti-European extremists among the British Conservative MPs. If Mr Cameron becomes Prime Minister, how many of them will he be forced to surrender to, how often, and on what scarily right-wing policies, now that he’s proved that his instant response to being held to ransom is to give in completely?

The catalyst for this week’s first row of many was a longstanding Conservative MEP, Edward McMillan-Scott – just re-selected by the Conservative Party, just re-elected by the voters – who refused to support the new Group’s nominee for one of the European Parliament’s Vice-Presidents. Yesterday he called Polish MEP Michal Kaminski “essentially fascist” and an unsuitable person to be a Vice-President, or to lead a Group. Now, it’s possible that Mr McMillan-Scott may not have opposed Mr Kaminski on grounds of entirely selfless principle – his preferred Vice-Presidential candidate was the successfully elected MEP with the strangely familiar name of Edward McMillan-Scott – but he made a clear case yesterday about the “essentially fascist” background and “essentially fascist” voting record of Mr Kaminski.

Mr McMillan-Scott, it should be noted, stood by the Conservative manifesto on which he’s just been re-elected, and by the allies that the Conservatives had announced before the European Elections… But didn’t see why he should be committed to an “essentially fascist” Polish party and others with “links with extremist groups” that the British Conservatives did deals with only after the results had been declared. If even Conservative MEPs think they’ve been forced to buy a pig in a poke, what choice did their voters have?

And, of course, on the pretext of Mr McMillan-Scott’s one-man rebellion – though you can’t help wondering if this was their plan all along – the British Conservatives’ Polish partners announced that their man was to become the Group’s Leader, or the deal was off. So he is. Yes, the British Conservative MEPs are now led by a man who one of their own – just expelled for it – described yesterday as “essentially a fascist” and as unsuitable a person to lead a Group as he was to be a Vice-President.

What a success, Mr Cameron!

As Liberal Democrat Voice reports (and is it just me who’s getting a weird effect with LDV at the moment, where the pages won’t load and I have to read them in cached form?), the Financial Times has said Mr Cameron’s decision

“to quit the European People’s Party (EPP), the main centre-right political group in the European Parliament, is backfiring on the Tories in spectacular fashion. The decision was always daft – a bit like the right wing of the US Republican Party splitting off and forming a minority group in Congress – but it now looks more short-sighted than ever.

“To meet the requirement that an officially recognised faction should have at least 25 MEPs from seven countries, the ECR has been cobbled together out of 26 Tories, 15 Poles, nine Czechs and a solitary politician each from Belgium, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania and the Netherlands (a Finn was also supposed to be in, but dropped out a couple of weeks ago). The Tories are bound to spend half their time nursing the egos of the last five individuals, any two of whom could destroy the group by leaving it.”

Conservatives In Bed With “Essentially Fascist” Homophobia

The “essentially fascist” extreme nationalism of most of the parties within Mr Cameron’s new sect includes a Czech party that opposes any action to stop climate change, a Polish party that says “homosexuality threatens to bring about the downfall of the human race” and calls President Obama’s election “the end of white man’s civilisation,” and of course the Latvian Fatherland and Freedom Party, who have a suspiciously swastika-like logo and hold ceremonies celebrating the SS (the British Conservatives explicitly denied before the European Elections that they would do a deal with this party – and, once the elections were over, instantly broke their promise, as widely predicted). Liberal Democrat Ed Davey wrote to the Conservatives challenging them about these “essentially fascist” bedfellows before the European Elections but, of course, they only came clean about them once the elections were over.

In a week where reports of homophobic hate crimes are soaring in London, the British Conservatives have teamed up with parties whose members call for gay people to be locked or beaten up.

I don’t know for certain what David Cameron’s personal views on equality are. He first stood for election as an MP on a viciously homophobic platform, and started his Parliamentary career with solidly homophobic votes; since he became Conservative Leader, however, he deserves praise for some of his personal actions. He’s appointed out gay MPs to his Shadow Cabinet and, when votes on gay rights have come round in Parliament, he’s generally voted for them or abstained – though most other Conservative MPs have voted against, so he’s a Leader without many followers. My gut instinct is that Mr Cameron has no very firm views on gay equality, which is how he could be so opportunistically homophobic just a handful of years ago, and now makes opportunistically gay-friendly noises as part of “detoxifying the Conservative brand”. Make no mistake – I’m extremely happy for the Conservative Leader to be making gay-friendly noises, even opportunistic ones. When I first got involved in politics, the Conservatives made vicious attacks on lesbians, bisexuals and gay men one of their main campaign tools, Liberal Democrats took the flak for supporting equality and Labour were gutless abstainers. I’m glad those days seem to be over for Mr Cameron and at least some of his party.

But if he strongly believed in equality, he couldn’t have formed an alliance with Europe’s biggest bigots. He couldn’t be held to ransom by any one of those bigots. And he couldn’t have his own Group, the one he promised to form and personally made happen, led by a man with an “essentially fascist” record of viciously homophobic policies. While Mr Cameron may personally have a ‘live and let live’ attitude, it’s now been proved beyond doubt that, if the choice is between standing up for equality for lesbians, bisexuals and gay men and another priority, lesbians, bisexuals and gay men will get dumped.

There are signs, of course, that Mr Cameron is worried about what a PR disaster this is, and has asked his Polish playmate to tone down his statements for UK consumption; in interviews with the UK press this week, Michal Kaminski made clear that, while he doesn’t agree with that sort of thing (carefully only hinting at his extreme homophobic policies), he certainly has nothing against “them” and has never used any sort of homophobic language.

How unfortunate, then, that last night’s Radio 4 PM programme, about 43 minutes in (it’ll only be available for a few days, so if anyone captures that item and makes it available on their own site, I’ll happily link to it), dug out a Polish interview in which Mr Kaminski kept using a Polish homophobic word which translates as “fags” even after his interviewer twice challenged him on it, and that, when PM contacted him for a statement on his having told an obvious lie to cover up his homophobia, Mr Cameron’s new Leader in Europe… Refused to talk to the BBC, while the one of his assistants they played the interview to exclaimed, “Oh my God!” The British Conservatives must be so proud.




And in at number 95 on The Golden Ton for 2008-9.

Labels: Conservatives, European Politics, Gay, Stupid Ideas, The Golden Dozen, The Golden Ton

A review from the days when there were just three Doctor Who DVDs available rather than sixty-odd…

“Rather amusing, don’t you think?”

Spearhead From Space has a lot of baggage. Surely one of the best-known stories, it was the first novel created for the Target range, one of the first videos released, one of the first re-released, one of the few recent terrestrial analogue repeats, and now one of the first DVDs. It’s highly entertaining, but still something of an oddity – one of the series’ most significant relaunches, it’s both highly derivative and a taste of things to come.

The first colour story, it looks better than BBC colour did for years afterwards, through the happy accident of all-film, all-location filming denying us the soon-to-be-usual harshly videotaped studios. The first story of the Doctor’s new exile to Earth, it’s also startlingly similar to Quatermass II, or any number of episodes of The Avengers, or even a pared-down version of the previous season’s The Invasion, with the same factory and all the trimmings. Regarded now as a typical, reliable Bob Holmes ‘film homage with witty dialogue and exaggerated character parts’, it was actually his first of these, following on from two little-regarded late Troughtons. It’s the first story for Pertwee’s more ‘serious’, haughty Doctor after Troughton’s ‘clown’, yet Pertwee spends much of his time clowning instead. It’s even a four-part story before such economy became fashionable, set in a season of seven-part epics, and perhaps because of that, perhaps because it was Pertwee’s first story, perhaps because of that terrific high street invasion scene, or perhaps just because the book was so good, it was remembered and talked about for years, alone from the ‘forgotten’ Season 7. Even Doctor Who and the Silurians tended to get overshadowed by its flashier, emptier sequel, but somehow Spearhead From Space never did.

So, is it any good? Familiarity has bred a little contempt for some fans, but although suffering from the usual Pertwee problem of much better books than TV, in this case it’s because the book is fantastic, not through any deficiency in the production. This is really good, if perhaps only on the edge of my top twenty. It’s a cracking action tale, basically, with dabs of horror to scare the kiddies, and loads of comic bits to say that it’s all right really – and only one horror bit that’s unintentionally funny. So, a pretty good recipe for Who.

People often say how “grittily realistic” this is. It isn’t. While generally more ‘realistic’ than the previous season, it’s far less ‘gritty’ than the rest of the famously dark (for Who) Season 7. Had it been made on video, some of it might have looked much sillier; as it is, the convincing visuals really help make the funny bits entertaining rather than seem mistakes. Much of its reputation must lie with the Autons themselves, which are fantastically creepy monsters, and of course Hugh Burden’s eerie boggling eyes. Even so, it’s not such a big change – horror stories a couple of years earlier like The Web of Fear and Fury From the Deep had far less in the way of comforting comedy to defuse the tension.

This being such a collection of firsts, the regulars are decidedly irregular. Pertwee is generally comic and – with the aid of some rubber tentacles – renders the climax rather silly, but has a fresh appeal in many scenes. Caroline John’s Liz Shaw is a bit too mannered to begin with, but shows huge promise that was to blossom into probably the best TV companion after Barbara. The real star here is Nick Courtney’s Brigadier, a relatively familiar face and an assured performance that is constantly delightful. It’s almost a shame when the Doctor gradually evolves as ‘the star’, with Nick playing the lead so well in the early episodes. By the end of the story, the three are working together awfully well, and while there is a fair bit of scientist-soldier tension, they all get on well from the start.

Liz, in fact, has a lot more problems with the Brig than the Doctor does, largely because he’s just kidnapped her. The Doctor getting her on side with a great piece of eyebrow acting actually brings her into the UNIT fold. That’s not the only exciting thing about this new character – she wears such a stunning array of plastic coats and dresses that you’re surprised the Nestenes don’t seize control of them and strangle her with them. Oh, well, maybe in the X-rated version. Have you noticed, the ’70s begin with a woman in charge (of the tracking station, in the first scene), and probably the strongest woman companion so far… You’d hardly know what was coming next, would you? The new Doctor also betrays some of his more unpleasant character traits early; his ‘escape attempt’ shows he’s a ruthless git. Let’s face it, he uses Liz, and as he can’t fly the TARDIS straight (The Green Death, still years in the future, is the first time in the show’s history he manages that unaided!), we know he’d be leaving the Earth in the lurch here and never be able to get back to sort out the Autons. And is there a little touch of the famous Pertwee Moral Message? You heard it here, kids – automation is evil! People who sack their workers are aliens!

It all looks like it cost about a hundred times more than The War Games. And even though that had loads of soldiers, here they seem like the main characters. It’s a different series! Despite The Invasion the previous year, it’s a bit of a shock to have the serial open with some modern soldiers. It used to be an eccentric traveller in time and space, and suddenly it’s gone all macho. You’d think with the advent of colour, they could find a more exciting one to start with than beige… On the other hand, the horror elements are distinctly anti-beige in their excitement; the shocking splash of red for the soldier in the car crash, the Auton tearing its way into a tent to kill Ransome and terrify the kiddies off camping, and Ransome becoming a gibbering wreck. We should get that more often – in the following story, too, people see things and lose their minds. Shame the series had so few such Lovecraft and Quatermass and the Pit-style reactions, but perhaps they would have caused too many nightmares. There’s more for parents and teachers to disapprove of when it comes to the Nestene energy unit, too. Either the Doctor’s or the designer’s maths is terrible, as the Nestene energy unit is much bigger than his guesswork. And who’s the woman with the world’s largest eyepatch in the hospital waiting room? What’s she waiting for? A head transplant?

On the production side, the Bob Holmes script is well-paced to slowly introduce the new Doctor (though attempts by the director to hide his face after he’s already toppled out of the TARDIS just, er, fall flat), then pick up with the scary Autons, and leavened with some great dialogue and, of course, those splendid stereotypes Mr and Mrs Seeley. As well as the obvious Quatermass borrowings, Holmes seems to have lifted much of the early set-up from Invasion, a rather poor sci-fi film he co-scripted in the mid-’60s (though the hospital scenes are also reminiscent of Adam Adamant Lives: A Vintage Year for Scoundrels and The Avengers: The Forget-Me-Knot). The crude-faced, unstoppable, homing killers are very like The Avengers’ Cybernauts, but no less impressive for that, and it’s a nice twist that they’re more interesting than just another robot. Dudley Simpson’s incidental music – particularly for the ‘Auton invasion’ – is awfully good, as we’ve fortunately come in just before he goes quite dreadfully mad with a synthesiser for a few years. Derek Martinus turns in some great pieces of direction, with super zooms in on and out from hunting Autons, and even for the episode titles. Two dazzling scenes in particular stand out – first, the Brigadier’s impromptu press conference at the hospital. I defy you to watch Nick Courtney calmly insisting, “I know nothing about a man from space” while pursued by a camera, and not have a little part of your brain think it’s real. The other scene, of course, is in Episode 4, and involves the most aggressive January sales windows you could imagine…

Anyone who brings Doctor Who back to the TV really must give a thought to some great visual set-piece. Get people talking afterwards about ‘The one with the dummies coming to life / The one with the Dalek in the Thames / The one with the Daleks climbing the stairs / The one with the maggots, or spiders, or monsters walking out of the sea’; high-quality pretty images aren’t enough. Everyone does pretty these days. It’s got to be a memorable image, with any luck rising out of a memorable plot.

This being a DVD, though, it’s not just the show itself that’s there to be excited by (well, it would be if it were issued by Revelation, but fortunately the BBC have learnt better). The extras are very jolly; for example, a UNIT recruitment film, sadly missing the phone number at the end it used to display (they could have updated it!), some terribly hammy Pertwee publicity stills, and the BBC2 ads from 1999 – the second of which sadly has different music after copyright problems, is way too loud and doesn’t work nearly so well. At least they’re much better than the ad for Genesis of the Daleks… Which reminds me, shame there’s no BBC2 Dalek on here. Oh well.

That’s not the only boon on DVD, however. For my money, the best thing about it is what else you can have playing while the show’s on. First, there’s the option to display little text factoids on the screen in random scenes. It sounds terribly dull, and admittedly it tries very hard to be written that way, but actually they’re so surreal, we fell about laughing (this effect does wear off as they become more and more boring with later releases). Some are appropriate to the scene in question; many just pop up out of left field. There’s one long set of items about Jon Pertwee’s career that appears mid-way through Episode 2 for no reason at all. We just sat and imagined Richard Molesworth strapped to a chair, being hit with electric shocks every 2 minutes 37 seconds to come up with something (very faintly) interesting, and tapping out all this foolishness.

But that’s not all! The best is yet to come. While the earlier release The Robots of Death boasted an interesting, informative and serious commentary by the producer and writer, Spearhead does none of this. Its commentary is gloriously irrelevant, but pricelessly entertaining. Actors Nicholas Courtney and Caroline John appear to have been locked in the sound booth for a few hours with nothing but a microphone, a video and a tanker of gin. It’s clear that there is a break in recording before Episode 4; by the end of the marvellous Episode 3 track, they’re talking such enchanting gibberish I’d swear they’re paralytic.

Courtney is a fabulous old pro, reproducing every tiny detail and no doubt sending fanboys wild by talking about how the Brigadier’s wife Fiona left him (in spin-off Downtime). Ooh! If it wasn’t canon before, is it now that it’s been released as part of Spearhead From Space? I don’t know. I don’t care. But it’s lovely to hear! He announces that Zygons were “very funny,” complains that the uniform “Doesn’t flatter my bottom at all!” and steals the show. So, how can Caroline challenge him? By knowing nothing at all! Ah, it’s bliss. She knows that there were no loos and it was cold, but spends the rest of the time regaling us in her Mrs Doyle Oirish accent and saying she’s a nauddy nauddy girl for telling us the plot (which she doesn’t actually remember anyway – in fact, her recollections give away a whole different plot!). It’s as if they’ve decided to play it in gender-reversed character to the old song, I Remember it Well. Bless her, she promises “I shall spend my dotage watching every episode,” and draws our sympathy as she recalls, “I never got to go in the TARDIS. So sad,” or “Nobody ever said I was any good.” Oh, Caroline, Caroline, you were fabulous! I almost wrote my first ever fan letter to an actor on the spot. Still, she gives the game away in the end; “You were never averse to being in a pub a bit, were you?” she tells Nick, and finally proves she knows the world of Who far better than she pretends with her response to Nick’s “Now there’s a useless piece of information”: “Not at all! I should think some people are really thrilled!” Yes, Caroline. We were.

Spearhead From Space is a highly enjoyable slice of Doctor Who, and this DVD makes it better than ever – nine out of ten. So, even if you’ve got this on tape already, it’s a real treasure – not just for a far, far superior picture quality, but for the enchanting uselessness and sheer entertainment of the Caroline and Nick show. My only niggle is that it doesn’t give a proper time counter display, but with a package this good, I’ll live.

Lastly, it’s odd that both the early 2001 DVDs (this and Remembrance of the Daleks, if you can’t cast your mind back that far) have a solid claim to contain the series’ best-staged fight sequences ever, and are famous for looking terrific – yet both are thoroughly upstaged by their novelisations, for me the best two books Target ever did. Who says action scenes don’t work on paper?

It’s a strange experience, reading back through a DVD review I originally wrote in 2001. Looking at How Doctor Who Made Me A Liberal yesterday, I could write almost the same thing today, but while my politics haven’t changed, my expectations of DVDs certainly have. Though I allude above to my dislike of completely bare-bones, no extras, crummy-pictured DVDs – I’d just bought a very disappointing copy of Quatermass and the Pit released by Revelation at the time, which has since been issued as part of the BBC’s The Quatermass Collection with the other stories, fantastic picture restoration and documentaries – if a Doctor Who DVD were to be released with so few extras as that early edition of Spearhead today I’d be just as irate. The standard has climbed since to a remarkable degree.

It’s strange on other levels, too. Now that my Summer holiday repeat season from Outpost Gallifrey reaches a proper story, I thought it would need very little thought in reprinting before this link disappears forever. I was quite wrong. Obviously, my attitude to DVDs has become much more discriminating, as I’m comparing them now with the very best of DVD rather than just VHS. But I was also surprised to find that the version of this review that I wrote in 2001 isn’t the one I sent in to Outpost Gallifrey. The original draft I have on file went to a Doctor Who e-group when the DVD first came out; the one I’ve reprinted above is cut-and-pasted from OG (aside from minor ‘house style’ changes), which I clearly must have amended and submitted a year or two later, as I’d added a couple of lines and a new paragraph in the middle as well as trimming one bit, clearly having seen a few other Who DVDs in the meantime. And, perhaps most significantly, it’s now difficult to talk about this story without looking at its influence on the series’ return in 2005, as I’ll come to in a moment.

Despite all that, I still rather like that old review. It was written in a rush of enthusiasm (I can clearly spot some of the more critical lines I inserted a year or two later), and it was the only piece of my writing that the late Craig Hinton ever praised… Though that’s not quite as proud a memory as the only speech of mine that Paddy Ashdown ever congratulated me over, in which I had been bold, radical and risky, outlining our principles to move party policy forward, but also – summing up in a debate in front of a couple of thousand people – as then Chair of what-Liberal-Youth-was-then-called, a speech in which I brutally swatted down an executive member who’d spoken out of line. I never had the nerve to ask Paddy if he more agreed with the principles involved or the ‘leader tersely nuking a pesky colleague’ aspect of the speech… But back to Doctor Who.

Spearhead From Space and Russell T Davies

I mentioned the series coming back in that review far more in hope than expectation but, when it did return in 2005, they did indeed give the first story a memorable image like dummies coming to life and going on a killing spree on the high street – by the simple expedient of bringing the Autons back, so that dummies came to life and went on a killing spree on the high street. Good choice, though other elements of the relaunch were more original (and it rapidly found its own image that everyone remembered: ‘did you see the one where the spaceship crashed into Big Ben?’).

Looking at Spearhead From Space with Twenty-first Century Who on TV eyes, it’s striking how familiar it is. 1970 saw a massive overhaul of Doctor Who, for the first time in colour, with an entirely new regular cast and a new writing and visual style. It was the biggest reformatting the series had ever had until the still bigger 2005 relaunch – and even that was in some ways a less radical change to the series’ ethos, with 1970’s stories the ones in which the rootless, anti-establishment wanderer starts working with the military, and still the series’ only season in which a lead character defined by his travels in time and space is so Earthbound that he never once gets into his TARDIS and flies off.

So it’s no wonder that Russell T Davies chose to borrow much of this story for his own relaunch. Of course Rose restaged that Auton invasion, as did Love and Monsters (rather more stylishly), as well as at least three pop videos and even a Pringles ad, but there are other touches, too. The story starts off with a woman from ‘our world’ gradually introduced to strange happenings, only meeting the Doctor and aliens bit by bit to get used to them with the audience, luring you in with normality as a pilot for the new series. There’s a shifty character part who’s almost the first ‘ordinary’ person to appear in the series and certainly the first to do the vacuuming or sell his story to the tabloids, making him uncannily like a piece of Russell T Davies in the countryside. And in what we’re told is Essex, he’s Welsh, too. It’s a sign! Going right up to last week’s Torchwood story Children of Earth, the UNIT set-up here is not merely the seed of modern-day UNIT stories, but – in making the Doctor Earth-based and working for a secret alien-fighting organisation – plainly of Torchwood, including some form of government conspiracy that gets in our heroes’ way, a small alien incursion in the past that returns here on a much larger scale, an alien encounter threatening a man’s sanity and a half-seen alien roaring and spitting against a glass tank. Even that scene I mentioned that scares kids off camping, though Russell hasn’t borrowed it, got a grislier echo in the later story The Stones of Blood – which Russell’s described as his favourite “hopeless” death in the series. And, coming full circle from 1953 to 1970 to 2005, the week after Rose was first broadcast the BBC remade The Quatermass Experiment live, which had a strange look of Spearhead From Space by shooting many of its scenes on location in exactly the same sort of echoing warehouse as the inappropriately enormous UNIT lab.

Though it may be worth waiting for the rumoured ‘Special Edition’ reissue of this story in perhaps a year or so (if you want to see it with an improved picture transfer and what’s now the usual host of extras, as well as probably restoring a piece of music omitted from Episode 2 for copyright reasons which have since been resolved; the other early DVD I mentioned in the review, Remembrance of the Daleks, is actually getting a ‘Special Edition’ re-release next Monday!), right now you can probably find this DVD for a third of the price it was released at in 2001, and, as I say above, it’s a very impressive story to enjoy. Most of it looks like a rather well-shot film from the end of the ’60s – given that it’s very well-shot, on film, and made in 1969 – and has great style about it, but having to shoot the story on location rather than in studio corridors gives a lot of it a very modern-seeming immediacy. I praised the Brigadier’s jostling impromptu press conference above for looking like a real news report, while scenes of the Brigadier and Munro pedeconferencing, brisk and businesslike with the camera walking back in front of them, would probably be shot just the same way today (and decades before The West Wing). Though Mr and Mrs Seeley are outrageous stereotypes, they’ve got some great character touches, too; there’s Russell-style gossip, and she’s as real worrying about her dog and facing off against an Auton as she is when, in a brilliant moment, she suspiciously re-opens Sam’s shed door a moment after he ‘disproves’ her suspicions to try and catch him at it (whatever ‘it’ may be), and her husband’s still ready for her! And though Jon Pertwee’s Doctor is far more likeable here than he becomes later, his sneering to the Brigadier at the end that he has no use for a salary is worth scoffing at. As my lovely Richard put it last time we watched the story:

“Of course he doesn’t need money… Merely a car, and clothes, and equipment, and a building, and an assistant, which of course money could play no part in obtaining.”

Labels: Christopher Eccleston, Doctor Who, DVD, In-Depth Doctor Who, Jon Pertwee, Outpost Gallifrey Reprints, Paddy Ashdown, Personal, Quatermass, Reviews, The Brigadier, Torchwood

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

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

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

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

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

Mitchell and Webb and the Homeopathic Quacks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Triffids, Newfangle and Quack Schools

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

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

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

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

Of all my articles once published on Outpost Gallifrey, this, from 2004, is the one that anybody read. The amazing Jennie quoted it before we met; a US Republican sent me a vitriolic e-mail; Liberator published an alternative version… So, before this link disappears forever, here it is.

“2003 sees an important anniversary for a great British institution. It has inspired countless young people to stand up against conformity, bigotry and oppression. It has fostered individual liberty, internationalism and human creativity.
“But as well as being the fortieth anniversary of Doctor Who, it’s also the centenary of the Young Liberals.”

That’s how I opened a rally in September 2003 to celebrate the Young Liberals, and while I did it mainly to get a laugh, the comparison’s crucial to my political life. I’ve always been driven by political ideas, since long before I realised they were ‘political’, and many of them came straight out of how I grew up with Doctor Who. These days my ideas and philosophy have led to becoming the Vice-Chair of the Federal Policy Committee, the main body that puts together policy proposals for the Liberal Democrats. Inside the party, more than a few people know I’m a fan, so when a set of Doctor Who-related questions came in to party HQ from a fan group during the 2001 British General Election campaign, I was given the role of answering them (making the Lib Dems the only major party to do so [I did the gay ones, too, marking me still more obviously as a Doctor Who fan]). This started me thinking…

I don’t think political parties give people a decent enough idea of their political philosophies, and I think that matters (when parties spend so much of their time ‘playing by ear’, it’s only fair to tell people what sort of tunes you like). When Lib Dems talk about our philosophy, it’s usually in dry, academic terms or in soundbites shortened for a headline or a campaign leaflet. That’s not how many people outside parties see their beliefs, though. Most people would express beliefs in terms of their religion, or in examples of how they affect people or things that are important to them; probably not a coherent philosophy, but rather referring to moral codes and ideas from which they’ve borrowed bits that appeal to them. If I was writing a political ‘how to…’ article, I’d probably say the best way to get your beliefs listened to is by relating them to the way they come out of things your audience cares about.

I’m not going to do that here.

No, I’m going to talk about Doctor Who instead, because it’s something I really care about. It’s A Good Thing, and to me it’s a Liberal one, too. I know scientists, actors and authors who all readily claim Doctor Who as their inspiration, though politicians are a bit rarer. However, while what triggered me getting involved in politics was working out I was gay, listening to Weekending, and my English teacher being a bastard and / or pushing me to stand up for myself, my early political instincts were formed by three outstanding influences.

The first are my parents, with a family habit of bolshily standing up for what you believe in; according to my Grandma, my first political act came naked on a beach at the age of four, challenging a teenager who’d arbitrarily kicked over a sandcastle. One parent being Scottish and the other American probably made me a bit less insular, too. My upbringing in Christianity also played a part – half-Baptist, half-Catholic, so again having to make up my own mind – particularly in the notion of individual worth and in a semi-anarchist reaction to Catholic institutions. Then Doctor Who probably did more than anything else to inspire my political interests. It fostered a free spirit, encouraged me to start reading, instilled a passionate internationalism, made me think about ecology, and give me a lasting hatred of prejudice; green scaly rubber people are people too. And, of course, it made me want to change the world, and believe that an individual can make a difference. No, I don’t think Doctor Who has a lot to say about individual policies, and no, I’m not going to write an article setting my own view of Liberalism to compare (though I’ll tell you if you mail me) – but the bits of Who I pick out should be able to give you an idea.

I can’t claim that everything about Doctor Who has a Liberal message – it would probably be very dull if it did. Some series are written for a particular point, or all by one guiding genius; Doctor Who has never had an Aaron Sorkin, Joss Whedon or J. Michael Straczynski, and all the better for it. When the new series comes, it will be under the guiding hand of Russell T Davies, creator of Dark Season, The Second Coming and Queer As Folk, but – much as I admire that work – it’s an enormous relief that he’s not been tempted to write every one himself, with four other writers for the first season and many others asked. One of the things I like about Liberalism is its celebration of diversity and freedom of thought, so my first (slightly cheeky) claim for Doctor Who‘s Liberalism is its variety, a variety of viewpoints, times, settings and solutions. No other political philosophy could point at the fact that something is all over the place and cry, ‘Look! That proves it’s one of ours!’

The series’ celeb fans include Ken Livingstone (Labour) and Tim Collins (Conservative), so assuming they’ve occasionally thought, ‘What would the Doctor do?’ it’s obvious you can get different views to mine from it – though perhaps there are odd creatures who may have watched the show, but haven’t bothered to listen to its values. Although Doctor Who had two periods when it ‘got a bit of politics’, the early ’70s on TV and the early ’90s in the New Adventures novels, it wasn’t even consistent within those times, and certainly not between them. The ’70s probably leant towards the Liberals, though the most political author was a communist, while the ’90s tended towards the New Age socialist, yet both have an essential ‘Whoishness’ founded on the freedom to live your own life that I can’t help but interpret as Liberal. These days, there’s BBCi’s animated story Scream of the Shalka, where the Doctor makes disparaging remarks about finding weapons of mass destruction, and interviews with Russell T Davies or Christopher Eccleston make it clear that they’ll join other periods of the series’ history by looking at social issues through Doctor Who‘s prism. Good for them, and I hope I’ll agree with them, but even more so I hope they’ll make all of us think.

In over 150 TV stories and over 200 original novels, let alone CDs, comics and other media, it’s possible to find support for pretty much any point of view (to think some people say Lib Dem policy papers are bad). The series must have inspired other politicians, though sadly Tim and Ken would be bound to charge too much to write an article. Still, I’d be interested to read an alternative political case for Doctor Who, but this is how I find the series. One of the few themes that is absolutely consistent, and born of its time, is a deep-rooted anti-fascism, yet even this can seem at odds with its equally strong predilection for scary monsters whose nastiness is evident from their appearance. While the series often preaches against violence, it’s always trying to square the circle of being for or against the military; some cite The Daleks or The Dominators as attacks on pacifism, while in the DVD commentary for the macho Resurrection of the Daleks Peter Davison gleefully claims a higher body-count than Rambo – First Blood. Remembrance of the Daleks is perhaps the most controversial story for mixing up-front anti-racism with the Doctor making a Dubya-like strike to commit genocide on the Daleks themselves (a mixed moral message on which even the author later changes his mind in The Also People).

The series is frequently revolutionary – but monarchies are usually a fairy-tale good thing. Religion is usually dubious – but while a scientific approach is praised, scientists themselves are usually madmen out to destroy the world. ‘Political’ stories are hostile satires: The Deadly Assassin anticipates by two decades both political ‘spin’ of events and, funnily enough, The Matrix; Tragedy Day lays into Kilroy and Children in Need; The Happiness Patrol is a blatant attack on Thatcherism, but is just as harsh on state as on private control. However, where socialist and conservative fans see contradictions, Liberals would recognise that distrust of the controlling state and bureaucracy is hardly incompatible with often making big business, too, a villain, as in The Caves of Androzani, and endorsing no one system is a much more fluid, Liberal approach than if the Doctor imposed the ‘perfect’ answer on everyone.

With so many stories, by so many authors, you can see that claiming one viewpoint may be a bit silly, yet there is a very Liberal and very British dislike of any big battalions that’s rarely contradicted. The Doctor prizes knowledge and individuality, and doesn’t like despots. There’s an ingrained repulsion from fascism from the very beginning that’s one of the most crucial ideals of the series. I means almost any Doctor Who story carries the belief that conquest and control is a bad thing, whether of a planet or of the mind.

The first political pamphlet I wrote (‘The Human Factor’, in Kiron Reid’s Riot and Responsibility) took its inspiration and several quotes from arguably the ultimate Who story, and one of the most unambiguously Liberal: 1967’s The Evil of the Daleks. The climax features the Doctor and the Daleks each attempting to instil in the other “the Human Factor” or “the Dalek Factor”. The definition of what makes humans Human is my sort of Liberal; it starts with ‘being a bit silly’, and graduates to ‘asking awkward questions’. Freedom of thought and expression is something Dalek society cannot stand; as the Doctor tells the Dalek Emperor:

“Somewhere in the Dalek race there are three Daleks with the Human Factor. Gradually, they will come to question. They will persuade other Daleks to question. You will have a rebellion on your planet!”

This comes to pass, with furious Dalek commanders exterminating their underlings merely for the unheard-of intellectual rebellion of asking “Why”, which on its own is enough to undermine everything Daleks stand for. In contrast, the Doctor defines the core of “the Dalek Factor” as “to obey,” even before “to exterminate”. While from the first and in many subsequent stories the Daleks have been metaphors for the Nazis, here they are broadened to encompass all enemies of free thought who simply do as they’re told.

This message is perhaps the most explicit statement of the anti-establishment ethos that its original producer Verity Lambert saw as the core of its appeal to children and a particular kind of adult. While authors like Paul Cornell, Malcolm Hulke or David Whitaker may have written particularly political stories, it was creator Sydney Newman and his team that made the Doctor inescapably Liberal from the start – a curious traveller in time and space, by definition unbound by rules and by instinct dismissive of authority, to a petty bureaucrat “the most subversive and anarchic figure of his entire career, a shabbily dressed little man known as the Doctor,” able to say that “Bad laws are made to be broken” and to change the world to get rid of them.

It’s from casting the Doctor as an individual and not an enforcer that the consistent Liberal feel of Doctor Who comes, whatever the views propounded in any one story. Others have been inspired by the utopianism of Star Trek, for example, but my own favourite series is about a person, not an organised group, with a wariness of militarism, no ‘one size fits all’ utopian solutions and a deep-seated mistrust of those in authority. Perhaps this is down to what sort of totalitarianism different series are against ‘first’; UK sci-fi tends to oppose fascism, while US sci-fi is more afraid of communism. A hero that isn’t a cop or a soldier or a secret agent or motivated by money, who doesn’t obey rules, who is individualist rather than collectivist but looks out for the little people, is a Liberal hero, on just the right side of anarchism. The Doctor is not a pacifist, but while caught in violent situations, he’s not a man of violence – he tries to find other ways to resolve them, and doesn’t possess a gun. As the novel Human Nature (now on the BBC website) puts it:

“There are monsters out there, yes. Terrible things. But you don’t have to become one in order to defeat them. You can be peaceful in the face of their cruelty. You can win by being cleverer than they are… It’s about not being afraid.”

That’s why I loved the Doctor as a child and found my political ideals inspired by him as an adult. The Doctor travels from place to place doing what he likes, demanding the freedom to go anywhere, see anything and talk to anyone, but never harming others unless it’s to stop them harming people, fighting injustice rather than merely being employed to fight, and if there’s a greater champion of freedom from conformity and ignorance I’ve yet to see one. He finds it all huge fun, too. So, liberty, eccentricity, kindness, standing up for the underdog, not being po-faced about it, and a bit sceptical of politicians – which, when I grew up, sounded a lot like the Liberal Democrats.

As I started watching Doctor Who in 1975, aged 3, we didn’t have videos, so I got the books to keep up my ‘fix’. That meant I had to learn to read much earlier than I would have done otherwise – ‘proper’ books at age 5 – and feeding the instinct for thinking and finding things out is a consistent theme of the series, too. Most of the early stories published were novelisations of Jon Pertwee’s Third Doctor. Ironically, when I saw him later on screen his persona seemed more of an old-fashioned Tory than the anarchic Tom Baker, so I probably had it the perfect way round. I saw the more freewheeling Doctor on TV (whose stories had few deep messages, other than to scare small children, much to my delight), but read the more Liberal stories without getting the feel of a more establishment personality.

If the message of the series is a Liberal one of ‘think for yourself’, the messages of more than a few Pertwee stories are only a step away from cheerleading for particular Liberal issues. The Third Doctor was exiled to Earth and, unusually, worked with the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce – a Liberal internationalist idea, if ever I heard one, and not too far from an idea you’ll find in the 2001 Lib Dem Manifesto Freedom, Justice, Honesty (at the same time as something that suspiciously resembles International Rescue. Go on, look it up). Even his rarer time and space travels were like Liberal propaganda – The Curse of Peladon was about a hidebound planet with a monarchy whose ruler wanted to join the Galactic Federation, but was threatened by conservative isolationist villains. Among the members of this Federation were the Ice Warriors, who of course had twice appeared as evil monsters, but were now reformed and peaceful. This was broadcast in 1972, and I’m sure the book had more of an impact on my developing Europeanism than any number of EEC spokesbeings.

Ecological themes pop up in a great many stories, including Robot, the first I ever saw, but the most blatant is The Green Death and its villainous, polluting oil multinational that wants to take over the world in a literal ‘command economy’ that will give freedom from all material need – at the cost of “Freedom from freedom”. Set a vague few years in the future, this 1973 show had a Prime Minister referred to as ‘Jeremy’ just as Jeremy Thorpe’s Liberal Party was rising in the opinion polls (even more outrageous than having a novel in which Liberal Prime Minister Asquith turns out to be one of the Doctor’s mates). Despite the series usually having the dramatic convention that ugly monsters = wicked, I got the message of Genesis of the Daleks, one of the first I saw and in which the Daleks are unsubtly created as a genetically pure super-race in mobile tanks by a charismatic madman in a bunker, surrounded by his black-uniformed elite (some of whom, er, wear iron crosses and carry Lugers).

The single most influential book I read was Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters, a somewhat luridly titled novelisation of the TV story Doctor Who and the Silurians. I wasn’t born when the story was first transmitted, and didn’t actually see it until the unimpressionable age of 21, though I can vividly remember where and when I finally did see it – released on video in mid-1993, it was 5am and I was crashing in a sleeping bag on someone’s floor (ooh, the glamour of politics), blearily determined to watch it all before another day’s trudging the streets to canvass and deliver leaflets in the Christchurch by-election. Ironically, the story had already long been a life-changing experience for me, and without having read the book, who knows? Perhaps I wouldn’t have been there at all…

Most readers will know that the story concerns some super-evolved reptile people being accidentally woken from the hibernation they entered to escape the destruction of the dinosaurs. Naturally, they have a prior claim and want their world back. Some of the reptile people are good, some bad; some of the humans are good, some bad. The situation escalates to near war, and the humans end up worse; they kill all the reptile people. The Doctor comes to a crisis point with the Brigadier on the other side of the argument - but that he can still work with him afterwards shows hope that peace can be made, even if not within that one story. Although I never quite took to the Doctor being semi-connected to the establishment and I know the Doctor doesn’t care for politicians, I suspect that story buried within me the notion that working ‘inside the system’ can sometimes be the right thing to do. I read that when I was 5 or 6, and while ‘nasty monsters invading’ never made me worried about ‘foreigners’, two sets of really very similar-acting people who had the same rights to live peacefully, one group different people to those I was used to, had a lasting effect on me. So, that’s the point at which I became a Liberal, even if it was years later before I put a name to what I believed.

Of course, even if you’re not interested in the many political facets of Doctor Who, you could always try and work out what your own political inspirations were. Did Doctor Who ever inspire you to change the world? And if it didn’t, shouldn’t it? Most people I know in politics get jaded from time to time, not just disinterested voters and non-voters. It can be a disillusioning experience, so it never hurts to remind yourself why you really believe in what you do believe in. Things as varied as the shock of Matthew Shepherd’s brutal murder or a Doctor Who story pitching me into an impassioned argument about pre-emptive strikes have, at different times, roused me to get back into political action, so next time you see the Doctor overthrowing a tyrannical regime, why not at least register to vote, if you can’t fly off in the TARDIS and do it yourself? Sure, it’s much easier when the Doctor changes the world in an hour and a half, but that’s no excuse not to find him an inspiration. And if you think politics is too serious to compare to a TV programme… Well, you should get out more. Not everyone’s way of life comes out of things that are Terribly Important, and when politicians sound terribly self-important, a lot of people just prefer telly. Besides, in its heyday, Doctor Who regularly had twelve million people supporting it, and any politician could do with a bit of that.

This idea for an article started out in the Spring of 2001, with a few paragraphs in reply to fan group “The Wolves of Fenric” on behalf of the Lib Dems – a piece that was online for a while, but has long since disappeared. I can, however, reveal that Charles Kennedy’s favourite Doctor was Patrick Troughton. Looking at the rewritten version from Spring 2004, I decided I’d rather not have what might be the most-quoted article I’ve ever written go the same way when the plug’s finally pulled on Outpost Gallifrey in a fortnight. I suppose it’s ‘the one to read’ of my old school BBC-style Summer holiday repeats!

Issue 293 of Liberator in which a version of this appears is still online as a pdf, the differences mainly being that I tweaked it for Liberals who might not necessarily be Doctor Who fans (the one above’s vice versa) and other members of the Collective chopped it about a bit for space, but used the Best! Dalek! Photo! Ever! on the cover. If you’re not familiar with Liberator Magazine, incidentally, despite what you might think, it was actually founded and named about seven years before Blake’s 7 was a glint in Terry Nation’s bank account.

More than any of my other pieces under the looming threat of deletion, I was tempted here to rewrite it, or at least add some observations – as opposed to mere speculation – about Twenty-first Century Who on TV, but I decided to leave the article as originally published (save my ‘house style’ on italics and quotation marks, and putting in some links), with just one small addition in brackets and retaining all the bits I might have got wrong or changed my mind on. This is what I thought in 2004 and, skim-reading it this morning, I’m happy to say also mostly what I still think now.

Since I originally wrote this, Doctor Who and the Silurians has been released on DVD as part of the varying-quality Beneath the Surface box set. That brilliant story, though, features arguably the best single extra in the range, a BBC4-quality documentary on politics in the series, What Lies Beneath, including interviews with several politicians – what an extraordinary idea! And though I’ve still yet to write a full-scale review of The Evil of the Daleks (though there was, of course, a small one that appeared in Liberator a good decade and a half ago and which I probably couldn’t lay my hands on in a hurry), if you read what I have to say on its early Patrick Troughton Liberal stablemate The Macra Terror, you might find very much the same point of view. Of all the Doctor Who stories which are political not just in the series’ overall tone but fiercely so in detail, that’s one of the best places to start.




And in at number 16 on The Golden Ton for 2008-9.

Labels: Doctor Who, Environment, In-Depth Doctor Who, Liberalism, Liberator, Outpost Gallifrey Reprints, Personal, The Brigadier, The Golden Dozen, The Golden Ton, Why Is Doctor Who Brilliant?

Back in the Space Year 2000, long before I started blogging, then top Doctor Who fan site Outpost Gallifrey published my review of a very silly CD, blazoned on the cover as WHO IS Dr WHO – The Amazing Musical Adventures of Dr. Who and his friends, the first and sadly only one of a ‘series’ collecting the wilder shoals of Doctor Who-inspired pop, here mostly from the 1960s (at least the fab Radiophonic Workshop music series made it to four CDs). With the disused remnants of Outpost Gallifrey set for deletion in a fortnight, here’s a terrifyingly camp reprint.

The review is as originally published (save my ‘house style’ on italics and quotation marks), overenthusiastic overuse of exclamation marks and all. It’s probably most worth tracking down – if at all – for Jon Pertwee’s infamous I Am the Doctor, a… A… A track that has to be heard to be believed, but which could be described as terrible poetry read in the most melodramatic manner possible (so much so that he almost gets away with it) over a very early ’70s cover version of the Doctor Who Theme. Another weirdly addictive highlight is ’60s companion actor Frazer Hines’ Who’s Dr Who? - earlier this year, at a rather grotty convention, I saw him do a fantastic stand-up session, including singing it (on request) for the first time in forty years. It was written by the team who penned It’s Not Unusual, he said, and he pictured hits, girls, money… A pause. “It was their only flop.” Anything by Roberta Tovey’s worth forgetting, though. Preferably with the aid of therapy. Still, on digging out this review before it vanishes from this link forever, it’s rekindled my interest. Slightly. I might even bother listening to it again one day…

“And when we both get up on Christmas morning,
I’ll kiss him on his chromium-plated head
And take him in to say ‘Hi’ to Mum
And frighten Daddy out of his bed.”

The cover of WHO IS Dr WHO is groovy (“Monaural or Stereo,” indeed!), and it’s thoroughly recommended as the campest Who purchase you can make on CD – yes, madam, even over The Rani Reaps the Whirlwind – but on listening to it, you can’t help feeling they’ve left a few things out. After all, with only 48 minutes used up, there’s surely more space on the CD! It also concentrates on tracks released as singles, which seems rather odd. Mark Ayres gives that excuse for not including much-played Who themes of my childhood like Geoff Love’s version, which I don’t find very convincing. He can’t understand the obsessional completism of those of us who’d happily pay for a whole CD of just different Doctor Who Theme versions.

No, hang on, that can’t be true – this is Mark Ayres we’re talking about ;-)

Anyhow, I quite enjoyed the CD, even the Spinal Tap glory of Frazer Hines (but more of that later). The opening Themes are excellent, of course, but I’m Gonna Spend My Christmas With a Dalek is a real find – a shockingly bad but very entertaining number apparently sung by a psychopath! Landing of the Daleks is an all right instrumental which, bizarrely, appears twice (the “Morse” version is better, but not different enough to merit inclusion over Mr Love), but March of the Robots tries the patience a bit… And even Mark Ayres admits Dance of the Daleks is an unrelated cash-in.

I’d not realised Who’s Who (partly played on documentary 30 Years in the TARDIS) was Roberta Tovey (Susan from the movies); it’s nice to have, but boy, even I think she’s flat! Fun, though, and the backing “doo-doo doo-doos” are a scream. I must warn you that “horse” as a desperate rhyme may just be the most cringe-worthy moment on the whole CD… Sadly, the B-side is a waste of space – creepy and not in a good way, Not So Old wins my bet as the track which will be least-played. It’s also quite nice to have the ‘uptempo’ versions of the movie themes (and Fugue for Thought, which is based on incidental music from Daleks – Invasion Earth 2150 A.D.), because I’d never heard them before, but not including the themes themselves is really a bit off. Daleks and Thals actually sounds curiously more like the James Bond Theme in places of this version…

Then we come to Frazer Hines. Phew. Well, he tries, bless him! Who’s Dr Who? starts with a little reference to the Who Theme, but really needs a high-colour, low-grade video of him singing it against a static background with lots of cardboard flowers and dear Frazer swaying out of time with lots of groovy chicks (there, you know exactly what it sounds like now, don’t you?), and it’s a surprise that his Time Traveller never previously managed a release with its low-power rockabilly style and lyrics like “I’m a time-traveller, honey, and I can’t get away from your love”. What’s that you say, children? It’s no surprise at all? Oh. Bet you never knew “Scottish Glen” rhymed with “Cybermen,” did you, though – sheer genius.

That leaves us with the one I know you’ve all been waiting for. Yes, it’s Jon Pertwee and I Am the Doctor. Listening to it straight after Frazer’s efforts, it’s startling how similar in concept the A and B sides Who’s Dr Who? / Punch and Judy Man and I Am the Doctor / Pure Mystery are. I’m forced to admit that Twerpee’s single is the classier effort all round, and quite the most exciting thing on there, with even his B-side about a performing magician surprisingly listenable. Or maybe it was just after Frazer’s. I Am the Doctor really has some ludicrously dramatic moments that only Mr Melodrama could have got away with (Tom would have pissed himself) – and I can still never get over the line, “As finglers move to end mankind…”!

To round off the collection, there’s one more version of the Who Theme, this time by Don Harper, and wins points as one I’d never heard of, let alone heard before. It’s actually rather good, though it goes on too long and gets a little strange by the end. The saxophone is where to walk out, I think. Now I can’t wait for the next one with songs from my own youth like K9 and Company or the ghastly single by Blood Donor (please, please, let there be a next one), even though it’ll drive my boyf mad.

So, certainly worth it, but I still prefer the Cybertech CDs any day…

Labels: Doctor Who, Jon Pertwee, Music, Outpost Gallifrey Reprints, Reviews

Fancy tasting a Smörgåsbord of appealing blog posts? Political restaurant critiques, Torchwood reviews, misleading statistics (I’m shocked, shocked, etc), how to get people involved in Lib Dem policy, pictures of Darwin, the limits of free will, and a beginner’s guide to Doctor Who DVDs. All splendidly worth a look, and you know which one got me most interested, don’t you? Astoundingly, it has by far the biggest comment thread, too. So, my own recommendations for ‘the nine Doctor Who DVDs you must have’ in a moment. Oh, and there’s even a bad news story about Gordon Brown that wasn’t true…

Gordon Brown Is Innocent (In One Tiny Respect)

First, that Gordon Brown story, mainly because I meant to link to it a month ago, and the poor failed dictator doesn’t get a lot of good news. Well, Jonny Morris has news for you (not good news, exactly, but wiping away one of the bad ones). He’s a chap who writes for Doctor Who and many other things, loves electropop, and – on the principle that two out of three ain’t bad – who believes in the Labour Party. I know this, because I’ve argued with him at parties about it, and he suggested voting for the Green Party last month. But, anyway, remember that story a few weeks ago when, after weeks of government cock-ups, we all heard “Gordon Brown booed by D-Day veterans!” Jonny gives us good reason to believe that wasn’t true.

Food, Glorious Food For Thought

Leaping more up to date, wasn’t last week’s Torchwood fantastic? And very much more brilliant than we could ever have expected? At some stage this week I may get my finger out and write a piece about the politics of it, but as I had long conversations about it last week with my very much more on-the-ball beloved and my piece would only be the ideas that didn’t make the cut, you should read his superb day-by-day reviews (I love the final title) of Children of Earth on Millennium’s blog.

Though I’ve not written many restaurant reviews on Love and Liberty, I love food. So much that when on odd occasions I think, ‘hmm, maybe putting on three stone last year wasn’t my best move’ and try to lose weight, I suffer from appalling chocolate cravings and write blog digests as displacement activity. With tomorrow being 25 Messidor, I felt very much more in sympathy with French aristocrats than usual on watching The Supersizers Eat… The French Revolution the other day, as the food looked fantastic (though the sanitation was appalling. No French stereotypes, then). Top fact: astonishingly, the King and Queen managed to escape their imprisonment in Paris after the Revolution, and actually got half-way to the Austrian border. Still more astonishingly, the King was actually recognised from a coin. And horribly funnily, they would probably have got much further if they’d not loaded their getaway carriage with so many goodies that it couldn’t go faster than seven miles an hour. Oh, dear. You know, one of my first political articles to be widely praised by people who rarely agree with me – though hardly revolutionary – was a restaurant review, a dozen years ago, so damning that it apparently shut the place in question for a few days by destroying their conference trade. One day, I should republish it on here, but I’m embarrassed to say that the last time I remembered it and asked if anyone had a copy, the incredibly efficient Count Packula, Prince of Markness instantly posted it to me, and the incredibly inefficient me instantly lost it before I could type it in, so I’ve been too embarrassed ever since to ask again.

Where was I? Mmm, chocolate. Ah, yes. Food. Mark Thompson has this morning published a political satire in the form of a restaurant sketch that made me smile. Some regard it as a call for change in the electoral system – or at least for tactical voting in favour of the Vegetarian Party – but it strikes me more as underlining the need to abandon Labour and Tory control-freakery and devolve power to the lowest practical level… Which in an awful lot more cases should be the individual. But for all his usual stat-fans, Mark’s also mounted a very simple and effective critique of Fraser Nelson’s misleading chart scales, a striking example of how using graphs to make things ‘easy to understand’ can also make them ‘easy to completely misrepresent’.

Policy Talk, Free Will and How Darwin Was Framed

Did you know that, a decade and more ago, masses of Lib Dem policies were motions submitted by individual local parties and organisations like what’s-now-called-Liberal-Youth (I know; I was their Policy Officer then Chair for a couple of years in the mid-’90s, when they got more of their policies adopted by the main party than anyone else save the Federal Policy Committee), but that since then the numbers of motions coming in from the grassroots have almost entirely dried up – particularly if you notice that most of them now are really from the MP for that constituency? So, well done FPC Vice-Chair Jeremy Hargreaves for launching ‘Engage’, a new network trying to get more grassroots Lib Dems discussing policy. It must be a good thing – it’s been instantly slagged off in a typically sour comment from a member of the House of Lords and long-time grouchy establishment figure.

This morning, tippety top blogger Costigan Quist asks a particularly pertinent question about the limits of free will, though unusually without coming to any conclusion. I asked a similar open question a few years ago on the Lib Dems’ philosophy in a failed attempt to be provocative; alert readers will note that I didn’t manage to come up with an answer, either. If you want something more inspiring, though, Jonathan brings us an excellent poster of Charles Darwin.

Can you smell chocolate…?

Your ‘Must-Have’ Doctor Who DVDs

And finally, the lovely Andrew Hickey yesterday sparked off much debate with his own list of ten eight seven DVDs – one for each Doctor that counts, according to his lights, though with some extras on top – that you might buy as A Beginner’s Guide To Doctor Who DVDs. I’d agree with between about two and four of his choices, depending on how you count them, but he makes an excellent case and keeps an eye on your wallet (though he hasn’t noticed that one of his picks has been deleted from the DVD line, pending a ‘Special Edition’ release rumoured for next year). He’s also not afraid to say that some Doctor Who isn’t very good, or isn’t very suitable for newcomers – I firmly believe that all Doctor Who is good, even the stuff that Andrew repudiates, though I do sometimes describe some of it as… Not as good as others. I might add to his already massive comments thread later, though I’d probably be tempted to add far too much.

Instead, with over sixty Doctor Who DVD releases to date (totalling about eighty individual stories) hailing from the Twentieth Century, looking at both the quality of the stories and of the DVD release, extras and all, for me there have so far been many excellent DVDs, several all right ones and a handful that are simply… Ah, not as good as the others. Nine, though – I know it should be ten for a list like this, but while I could think of plenty that were nearly as good, none of them quite hit top marks for me – nine DVD releases so far are so superb that every home should have them:

• The Beginning – a terrific William Hartnell box set of the very first three and a bit stories, starting with a mystery in the then present and then going backwards, forwards and sideways in time, not unlike way each Twenty-first Century Who season has opened (but with a more convincing alien world).

• The War Games – the end of Patrick Troughton, just out last week, but already indispensable. A great story of war, sacrifice and twists, cleaned up to look superb, and with one of the best sets of extras yet.

• Genesis of the Daleks – another war story, grim, powerful, thought-provoking… And with a stunning performance introducing Davros, one of Doctor Who’s two most iconic villains.

• Pyramids of Mars – another awesome villain (heard again in 2006), as Egyptology meets aliens in 1911 for the series’ most effective horror story, with marvellous extras including a celebration of Mary Whitehouse’s least favourite producer. Yay.

• The Deadly Assassin – darkly funny, horrific, groundbreaking, talky, action-packed, surreal, satirical, Tom Baker facing a stripped-down Master on the planet of the Time Lords… All these things and more, my favourite story has been out on DVD for a couple of months now, so why haven’t you bought it yet?

• The Talons of Weng-Chiang – with all the Victoriana you could ever want, the series’ vilest villain and many of its funniest moments, and a rather fab 1977 documentary. It’s the only story already packed with extras that’s rumoured for a ‘special edition’ re-release somewhere down the line, though, and you have to buy the fabulously inappropriate toys separately.

• The Key To Time – six stories, a whole year’s worth, playful, magical, wonderful. Tom Baker at his frothiest, fabulous extra features, K9 and Douglas Adams. The main snag is that this was released as a limited edition, so it’s temporarily rather difficult to find. In its absence you might try Andrew’s choice of City of Death, which is almost as amusing, but I wildly prefer the Douglas Adams story that’s one of the three truly outstanding adventures in this box.

• New Beginnings – a box set of three stories with extraordinary ideas, a Shakespeare noir love story, doom for Tom Baker, the start of Peter Davison, lots of the Master and beautiful music.

• The Curse of Fenric – not just a cracking action adventure, a murky spy plot and a frightening horror story, but complex and political, too. Sylvester McCoy’s finest story, Richard’s favourite, with a whole feature-length special edition version included.

Update: If you’re used to the ‘DVD season box set’ approach, I can also recommend the run of Tom Baker’s first four stories on DVD: Robot, The Ark In Space, The Sontaran Experiment and Genesis of the Daleks. Two fun little stories and two outstanding ones, they work much better as a set, with both direct overarching plot arcs and recurring themes. And a remarkably similarity to the 2005 series… My beloved Richard has asked why there’s no Pertwee in the list, suggesting “Why not add Beneath the Surface? Then they can always give away Warriors of the Deep.” Well, I wasn’t trying for ‘balance’, simply the best as I see them, but I have to admit, if Doctor Who and the Silurians was released on its own – fantastic story, and with arguably the best single extra in the range, the BBC4-quality documentary on politics in the series – it would certainly be on my ‘absolute must-have’ list. But it’s paired with an exciting but empty sequel and a final story that’s… Not as good as the rest (though it does have nicer music), so the box set’s more of a microcosm of Doctor Who as a whole, for good and, er, not so good. For Colin Baker, superb black comedy Revelation of the Daleks isn’t far off this list, while his best performance is probably in The Two Doctors – finally given a script by someone who writes a good Doctor, he’s relaxed, warm and interested – but the DVD has an extensive set of extras which perfectly mirror the story itself, some brilliant, unmissable and intensely watchable, others tedious and far too long.

I’ve previously published a ‘Choosing Doctor Who DVDs Made Easy’ guide, with various updates, which Andrew kindly links to but suggests is a bit long. Technically, I only pick six stories, though, while he offers ten eight seven – well, all right, he goes for one for each Doctor, while I suggest three alternative sets of six, rather than the lot, but my point stands. Sort of. And I’ve, er, added some more since. Look, forget I said anything, OK? The point is, as Doctor Who can go anywhere in time and space, past, present and future, be scary and funny, exciting and thoughtful, it’s more difficult than with any other series to point to just one DVD and say ‘that’s it’. And if you think that was long-winded, back in 2004 I wrote an incredibly long article making suggestions on how fans might encourage others inside our eerie world (the Who equivalent of an ALDC training manual). If you’re not a fan, you’ll probably run screaming from it, but then, as it’s on what was then top fan site Outpost Gallifrey, how would you ever find it without a link?

Hmm. The retired remnant of Outpost Gallifrey is finally to be deleted in a couple of weeks’ time, and I have several articles and reviews up there, now I think about it. Perhaps I should do something about that…

Labels: Blogs, Doctor Who, DVD, Food, FPC, History, New Beginnings, Patrick Troughton, Peter Davison, Reviews, Sylvester McCoy, The Golden Dozen, The Key To Time, Tom Baker, Top Tips, William Hartnell

What should be done – what can be done – when Britain’s most powerful newspaper breaks the law and breaks people’s personal security literally thousands of times? When the massive media multinational owning it has both denied any further wrongdoing when the tip of the iceberg emerged three years ago, and paid millions of pounds in hush money to stop all the rest of it coming out? And when the Labour Party, the Metropolitan Police, the Crown Prosecution Service, the courts and the “very relaxed” (ie bricking himself) Conservative Leader are all apparently compromised by Mr Murdoch’s money and power?

The Guardian has today broken a story that’s actually shocking. When there’s corruption in politics or journalism, it’s easy to affect being shocked, when actually you know that either it’s not that significant in the grand scheme of things, or you always assumed a bit of it went on, or both. The News of the Screws hacking into three thousand people’s phones with impunity – again, literally with impunity, as it appears that the legal authorities knew about it but, far from doling out punishment, helped cover it up – is a type and scale of law-breaking that left me open-mouthed.

You can read in The Guardian and, I imagine, many more outlets today about The News of the World’s massive programme of illegal phone-cracking – including the then Deputy Prime Minister and the Minister with responsibility for the media, which looks like a multinational using its money and might to compromise national security in quite a significant way – about their massive hush money pay-outs as part of an incredible cover-up, about what some of the victims have to say for themselves and about Andy Coulson, David Cameron’s Director of Communications, who edited The News of the World when it was riddled with this criminal culture (if indeed it’s stopped today).

No doubt debate over a privacy law will erupt again. I’m wary of it, but in any case it’s irrelevant to this case – they’ve broken the law several thousand times anyway. Adding another law is hardly going to put them off. It’s not as if anyone was enforcing the existing laws, is it?

My main worry is over the enormous power wielded by a giant multinational company that’s enabled it to duck all the laws that apply to the rest of us – even when all the relevant authorities were involved.

The People Who Should Have Acted – And Didn’t

We know that the Labour Party has been crushingly afraid of Mr Murdoch’s press ever since it was defeated in 1992. We know that they’ve kow-towed and changed their policies, first to get The Sun’s backing to get into government and then, in government, not to lose it. It’s no surprise that, with defeat looming and every indication that Mr Murdoch does not back losers, Labour people are suddenly today starting to be critical of News International – too little, too late. Particularly when their immediate reaction to someone stealing people’s privacy on a massive scale must be, ‘but that’s our job!’

We know that David Cameron has been desperately attempting to get the same sort of deal with Mr Murdoch that Mr Blair once did. Part of that was to appoint as his head PR man the disgraced former News of the World editor Andy Coulson, who was one of the fall guys when a tiny, tiny fraction of this story came out three years ago. Mr Cameron has now said that he is “very relaxed” about his far-right-hand-man being a criminal gang boss, apparently because the hush money was paid out after he left. Well, hush money to cover up a crime isn’t usually paid to the victim before the crime takes place, is it, but when they eventually find out? After having such a massive hit with Gordon Brown’s PR man Damian McBride sending just a couple of e-mails that were legal but nasty, Mr Cameron must be sweating buckets when his own equivalent led a team that was committing thousands of crimes.

The power that The News of the World, its stablemates and its master exert over the two biggest political parties is bad enough. What’s terrifying about this case is that the authorities that should have acted not only didn’t, but actively assisted the cover-up.

• The Metropolitan Police didn’t fully investigate – and, astonishingly, though they managed to find evidence that many people’s phones had been broken into, they didn’t even tell any of the victims that a crime had been committed against them, nor that their security might still be compromised.

• The Crown Prosecution Service brought charges against one designated fall guy, then did bugger all with all the rest of the evidence.

• The Press Complaints Commission ‘investigated’ to no effect whatever. What’s the point of this press establishment club?

• The Parliamentary Select Committee that ‘investigated’ the last case were lied to by senior News International executives, and went no further.

Were they all afraid of Mr Murdoch’s power? Asleep on the job? Incompetent? Or even influenced by his money?

As Liberal Vision pointedly puts it this morning, “Rupert Murdoch: I liked it so much that I bought your country’s legal system”.

Is There Any Punishment That Would Matter to Murdoch?

This is vastly more serious than MPs’ expenses. Surely it’ll be hammered just as hard and just as long in the… media… Ah. I see the problem. So, with the Labour Government and Conservative Opposition compromised, with the press authorities, legal authorities and Parliamentary authorities all failing, who on Earth will hold this conspiracy to account?

Freedom of the press is vital. Giving the government power over it is deeply worrying. But while the government itself should play no part in individual cases, it must set a framework within which action is taken. The Labour Government has been such an overwhelming bully over our personal lives that it’s easy to forget that, just as the media, the courts and the rest of us have to keep watch on its power to bully, part of the point of having a government at all is to stand up to other bullies on our behalf.

I have no legal background at all, but I suspect it may be too late to do anything about this case on the scale of punishment that it deserves – even if the various authorities belatedly get off their arses. The simple fact is, a fine on the scale any of us have heard of before is unlikely to cut it. News International is simply so huge that it can take a few million here or there without breaking stride. It’s an occupational hazard – it’s no punishment, let alone deterrent (and the mind boggles at how a corrupt media giant might be induced to undergo any form of rehabilitation).

What this deserves is for any paper so riddled with criminal activity to be either closed down or sold off, and its owner barred from buying any replacement – and the whole British arm of the Murdoch empire to be dissolved if investigations reveal that other papers or TV channels were doing it too. I suspect our toothless media law framework has absolutely nothing like the power or inclination to deal with this sort of endemic institutional corruption. The Liberal Democrats should commit to changing it to something with a whole lot more bite before the next time this sort of thing emerges (and it will).

Three years ago, we saw one individual journalist apparently hung out to dry by the Murdoch empire when a tiny fraction of this exploded into the limelight. He said it was only him; The News of the World said it was only him; News International said it was only him. He went to prison. We now know that he was just the tip of the iceberg, that every single News International employee who commented on this was lying through their teeth, and that any who took the stand were perjurers.

Like gangsters who agree to take the fall and not name everyone else involved, what was the price for his silence? Another job? A big pay-off? Surely a police investigation into perverting the course of justice has to start today.

So, while going after individual journalists who have been implicated in this vast conspiracy is necessary, it is far from sufficient when the corruption and illegal practices are blatantly systemic in at least this one newspaper. Given the massive hush money ladled out by Mr Murdoch, The Sun and the rest of News International’s UK pawns must be thoroughly investigated, too. As well as officers of the police and the courts, whose competence, judgment and probity are all now under serious question.

If it’s true that fines are the only shot in the armoury for newspapers themselves, then surely News International have already set their own market rate. They’ve paid three sets of cash that we know of in secret compensation to their victims, totalling around a million pounds. It turns out there are something in the region of three thousand victims in total. That’s a nice easy sum to do, then, isn’t it?

One billion pounds, please, Mr Murdoch, and after that we’ll look at who goes to prison.

Labels: British Politics, Conservatives, Corruption, Labour, Meddling In Things That Are Nobody's Business But Your Own, Newspapers, The Golden Dozen

You’re rather brought down by the sad passing of the Queen of the Purple, Pink, Auburn, Green and Blue Rinse – and not by the “King of Pop”. Mollie Sugden’s Mrs Slocombe was a magnificent comic creation, always fighting her corner in Grace Brothers with a mixture of her usual assumed haughty grandeur and cutting asides in her real accent, and always vying with John Inman to steal the show in Are You Being Served?

“Before we go any further, Mr Rumbold, Miss Brahms and I would like to complain about the state of our drawers. They’re a positive disgrace.”
“Your what, Mrs Slocombe?”
“Our drawers. They’re sticking. It’s always the same in damp weather – Miss Brahms could hardly shift hers at all this morning. They sent up a man who put beeswax on them, but that didn’t work.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“I think they need sandpapering.”
“Would that help, do you think?”
“I puffed French chalk on mine, and they’re smooth as silk.”
“Perhaps you could puff some French chalk over Mrs Slocombe’s.”
“Would that solve your problem, Mrs Slocombe?”
“They ought to be changed. I’ve had them ever since I’ve been here!”

Mrs Slocombe, Mr Rumbold, Miss Brahms and Mr Humphries, from – appropriately for today’s return to its straitened economic times – the Are You Being Served? episode Our Figures Are Slipping.

“I think it would pay us to examine our whole customer handling technique. And to that end, I shall be holding a course in salesmanship this evening, after the store closes.”
“You mean in our own time?”
“It’s very short notice. There’s my pussy to consider.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Who’s going to let it out?”

It’s sad to see that Karl Malden went on the same day (I always remember him from Where the Sidewalk Ends, a favourite film noir), with both actors known for remarkably long-lasting marriages. Good for them. And who’d have thought Miss Brahms would go first?

If you’re wondering, the clips of Mrs Slocombe played on this morning’s Today Programme – including her exchange with the woman billed as The Large Brim With Fruit – were taken from the episode Camping In (naturally), which I found just after Our Figures Are Slipping on cranking up our steam-powered laserdisc player to watch our giant disc of Are You Being Served? last night.

She always did very well.

Labels: Comedy, Obituary, The Today Programme