Saturday, April 17, 2010
Daleks – The Top Twenty!
What a weekend for the first and greatest of the Doctor’s enemies to return. Just as it looks like, after over half a century, the Daleky forces of authoritarianism and conformity might be losing their grip on British politics. And what could be happening when, after nearly half a century of symbolising Nazism, the Daleks have suddenly joined the Allies with Winston Churchill, exchanging their Noughties Bling livery for khaki drab and, perhaps, more besides…? If tonight’s brand new Victory of the Daleks leaves you wanting more, here’s my highly partial guide to the Daleks’ top twenty stories (until today):
To date – between 1963 and 2008 – there have been twenty Dalek stories. That makes picking a top twenty a very easy thing to do… Except that two of them were remade as feature films with Peter Cushing, so I’d best not go into them right now. Nor all the Doctor Who stories that aren’t exactly about the Daleks, but brought us noticeable new cameo appearances from the blob-and-metal monsters: The Space Museum; Frontier in Space; The Five Doctors; The Waters of Mars…
Some of the Daleks’ most thrilling adventures, too, have been in media other than television. Many of Big Finish’s Doctor Who audio dramas have starred the Daleks or their creator Davros: Jubilee and Davros, in particular, are as good as almost anything that’s ever been on TV. Terra Firma and Brotherhood of the Daleks might just do strange things to your mind; then, of course, TV’s voice of the Daleks himself, Nick Briggs, created several epic Dalek Empire, starring such actors as Noel Clarke and, yes, David Tennant. Daleks have hit several books – though if I were you, I’d skip John Peel’s terrible twooriginal photocopied and reassembled novels – but for me, perhaps the pinnacle of the Daleks’ off-screen success was in the stunning, beautiful TV21 comic strips of the 1960s. Untroubled by the Doctor, the Daleks were the anti-heroes of their own adventures, telling thrilling stories in gorgeous colour – if ever a comic strip needs a lavish collected edition reprint, this is it.
So the top twenty I offer below is merely one dimension of the Daleks – if the dimension seen by millions. But first, if by some strange chance you’ve never met them… Well, watch BBC1 tonight at 6.30 (and BBCHD at 8.25)! And you can read my very best old-fashioned Doctor Who Monster Book-style introduction…
The Daleks are the Doctor’s greatest enemy – the personification of war in the Universe. Though apparently like robots on the outside, they are living creatures and far from emotionless, with their war-cry to “Exterminate!” all other life. Every Dalek machine has heavy armour and a camera eye, mechanical arm and powerful gun, like a fearsome personal tank driven by the creature inside. They believe themselves to be superior to every other being in the Universe, and their intelligence and appetite for destruction gives them total confidence to proclaim in their harsh electronic voices:
In one of the Doctor’s most dangerous adventures, the Time Lords sent him to prevent the rise of the Daleks, and saw how the Daleks shot their own creator because even he was not a ‘pure’ Dalek. But the Doctor decided he could not destroy the Daleks at their birth. Killing entire races is how the Daleks act, not the Doctor – and such a massive change to time could prevent too much good as well as evil from having happened.
The Doctor first met the Daleks long after their creation, when they plotted in their metal city to destroy the survivors of their enemies, the Thals. The Doctor defeated them, but he soon found that there were many other Daleks throughout time and space. The Daleks were the only other race to discover the full secret of time travel and, realising that the Doctor was a threat to them, tried to find and kill him as he travelled through time and space stopping their plans.
The Daleks even succeeded in conquering the Earth in the Twenty-Second Century, turning humans into zombie-like Robomen before being defeated by the Doctor. Their creator Davros also once operated on humans to create a new race of Daleks more loyal to himself, after he narrowly survived the first Daleks’ betrayal. Perhaps the Daleks’ most evil plan against humanity was to trick the Doctor into identifying “The Dalek Factor,” using it to alter the mind of every human into that of a Dalek who would obey and exterminate without question. Only the Doctor’s own cleverness turned the tables, giving Daleks free will through “The Human Factor” and plunging them into civil war.
No other monster has been such a terrible threat to all life in the Universe, so many times, as the Daleks, employing war, radiation and plague. When it suited them, they have enlisted alien servants such as the brutish, ape-like Ogrons, and schemed with greedy humans or with alien allies to advance their conquests. But whatever promises they may make, the Daleks hate all other life, and one thing is certain: all allies of the Daleks will be exterminated in the end.
With two great civilisations in the Universe both having control over time travel and one determined to dominate, eventually the inevitable happened. The Time Lords and Daleks fought each other in the last great Time War. Great tides of time damage swept the Universe, both races were destroyed, and it seemed only the Doctor survived. But there were Dalek survivors, too, with the Emperor Dalek and some of his most cunning acolytes hidden away to pose new and greater threats. The last time the Daleks appeared, the Doctor saw the destruction of a risen Dalek empire from which Davros and his creations had aimed to destroy the entire Universe except themselves. Was this the final end of the Daleks?
Often before they have seemed finally defeated – but they always come back for more…
In my own tribute to the traditional Dalek story, I’ve been horribly ill all week, so I’ve not been able to finish all the mini-reviews explaining why I think each Dalek adventure merits the position I’ve given it below. So please tune in for more, and I’ll have finished them before the same time next week. Update: …In fact, I finished by the end of Sunday. How about that? Read, enjoy, and disagree!
20 – Death to the Daleks (1974)
All Doctor Who is brilliant. But some of it’s more brilliant than other bits. If I was rating stories by the old “hit, miss or maybe,” I reckon that of the Doctor’s three biggest recurring enemies, the Master and the Cybermen might have a fairly even spread… But there’s something about a Dalek story that makes writers deliver. So many of them are stacked towards the top that it seems almost unfair to mention the handful that, when they do fall down, fall down hard (even the music here’s unspeakable). And yet even this most tired of Dalek stories has much to enjoy in it: ancient alien cultures falling to dust; Sarah Jane Smith; and the religious maniacs determined to wipe out their non-conformist naturist cousins (the ones who looked so thrillingly like living rock when I first saw their photos in The Doctor Who Monster Book as a kid). It isn’t out on DVD yet, but look out for it in the next couple of years and prove me wrong. Golden moment? The elegiac closing shots. Rather lovely.
19 – The Chase (1965)
Dalekmania gave Doctor Who its liftoff to initial mass success in the early ’60s, and they were great days for Dalek stories, too – William Hartnell faced the Daleks more often than any other Doctor, in an ascending spiral of excitement as their arch-enemy. There was one stumble along the way… The idea is to make the Daleks more impressive – first they took Skaro; then they were seen conquering our home as if the Nazis won World War II; now they can chase our heroes through time itself! Unfortunately, the analogy of a crack Gestapo squad hunting down the Resistance falls flat very quickly; a mixture of comedy that isn’t funny, sadly slipshod production and an hilarious ‘double’. But this, too, has its moments. While trying to play the Daleks for laughs in the middle doesn’t work, the opening episode’s light comedy ‘holiday’ opening with the Doctor and his friends is rather lovely, as is the story’s very end. And the climax, as the huge robot Mechanoids spit fire at the Daleks, is rather fab (even more so in those TV21 comic strips, where they’re a major space power and we can’t hear them). It’s just out on DVD, in a box paired with The Space Museum. Golden moment? It has to be the coda, as the Doctor’s companions Ian and Barbara return home in an inspired montage. My eyes get misty.
18 – The Stolen Earth (2008)
The epic finale to the 2008 season of Doctor Who, with more Daleks and returning companions than you can shake a stick at, and even more than one David Tennant. Topping the TV charts for the week, this was one of the series’ most massive successes. Well… For me, it looks glorious, and the first episode’s terrific, but the conclusion is an amazing lesson in how things fall apart. A magnificent cliffhanger turned into a great big cheating cop-out; the Doctor unable to answer Davros’ – Davros’ – moral arguments; the Doctor taking away Donna’s choice. Above all, perhaps, it’s that with the Daleks having been down (again) to one sole survivor, they then instantly regrew (again) like watercress to a huge new empire, destroyed (again) in the blink of an eye… It’s impossible to see the Daleks as a threat, or their defeat as an achievement [post-Victory: and I’m hugely relieved that their 2010 comeback didn’t make the same mistake!]. This has been released at least five times on DVD, paired with other stories and seasons. Golden moment? Sarah Jane picking up that transmission from space, and knowing exactly what it means.
17 – Planet of the Daleks (1973)
Terry Nation returns to write for the Daleks a decade after his glory days, and nothing’s changed. Well, the script hasn’t, at least. It’s almost a cheesier, dumber remake of some of the earliest Dalek stories, with none of the eeriness or subtlety – but with shaggy purple capes and added sexism! Made, in theory, as the second half of a ginormous epic, directly following Frontier in Space (with which it’s available in the Dalek War DVD box), it has the slight disadvantage that it doesn’t bother picking up the story at all. But there’s no hope for me – I quite enjoy it, particularly the early scenes where Katy Manning, playing the Doctor’s companion Jo, gets to ad-lib most of her lines and does a much better job for herself than the script does. Golden moment? The Daleks work out who the tall stranger who’s been causing trouble is. And brick themselves.
16 – Resurrection of the Daleks (1984)
A grim tale of mercenaries, death and Docklands, much of this looks terrific, it has a great score, and there are some very impressive guest stars. Unfortunately, the minor guest actors are often a bit shonky, and after a gripping first episode the plot falls apart. Half the cast never meet each other, nor the Doctor, still less have a clue what’s going on, while the Daleks’ plans get loopier by the minute. On top of all that (you can tell this isn’t a favourite trope of mine), the Doctor is unable to answer Davros’ – Davros’ – moral arguments. This one’s available on DVD both on its own and in a Davros boxed set. Golden moment? Despite having little to do in theory, the Doctor’s companion Turlough keeps stealing scenes – on hearing they’re headed back to Earth, I love his sarcastic “Best news all day”.
15 – Destiny of the Daleks (1979)
One of Doctor Who’s few direct sequels, this picks up after Genesis of the Daleks and has never really been forgiven by many fans for being nowhere near as good. Its big problem, I suspect, is that it’s such a mixture: funny and grim; beautifully designed and grotty; intelligent and impossibly dumb. Davros is rather a let-down, yet there’s some striking camerawork and sound design. Perhaps the biggest contradiction is that, although the first half tends to be very derivative and the second has intriguing ideas, it’s the ‘living dead’ opening episodes which rather work, and the ‘logic problem’ latter half that breaks up on daft details. This one’s available on DVD both on its own and in a Davros boxed set. Golden moment? I still find the tense build-up to the second cliffhanger rather thrilling, with its mixture of burial and exhumation.
14 – Evolution of the Daleks (2007)
I could probably have put my numbers 20-17 in any order; I could probably do the same for 14-11, too. This is the one that went down rather badly with most fans but, though for me the second half of the story (again) has a rather too easy resolution that doesn’t match the promise of the first, I love it for its ability both to build on Dalek stories of old and to do something very different. It’s 1930s New York, and the Great Depression has hit the Daleks in two ways: not only have they had a crushing material fall, but their leader is, quite simply, depressed. He thinks outside the casing to make himself a Dalek messiah – but the other Daleks stick to that old-time religion… All this, plus lashings of James Whale’s Frankenstein, and even musical theatre. This has been released at least five times on DVD, paired with other stories and seasons – I prefer to watch it with the preceding story Gridlock, as together they explore the same themes of loss and rebirth, heaven and hell, even (very visually) ‘up and down’. Golden moment? Dalek conspirators in the sewers, swivelling and whispering.
13 – Day of the Daleks (1972)
An intelligent story of temporal paradoxes with a great twist, in some ways this has quite a Moffaty flavour (as well as something of Planet of the Apes), and Jon Pertwee has one of his better stories as the Doctor, despite lashing out at MPs’ expenses and then drinking all the wine. It has a few faults: with interesting sets of both ‘fascists’ and ‘terrorists’ presented to us to dislike, it doesn’t maintain much ambiguity over which side the Daleks are on; and the Daleks are unimpressive, both in numbers and with very feeble voices. There are some very strong characters and ideas, though, and a fascinating story. It isn’t out on DVD yet, but look out for it in the next couple of years – I wouldn’t mind a talking book version of the novelisation, either, or even Nick Briggs overdubbing the weedy Dalek voices when the DVD comes out. Golden moment? The Doctor slouching at dinner like he’s at a Roman orgy and slapping down claims that a fascist police state:
One of the first Doctor Who stories to have an exciting pre-titles teaser, and it still grabs you today. This is a favourite of many fans, an intelligent and complex story that doesn’t pull its punches on fascism – and brilliantly made, too, with great guest stars and terrific explosions. Why, then, might you ask, do I not put it further up my list? In short, the ending, which I think makes a horrible moral mistake, one of the most offensive in the series’ history. Watch it, and see what you think. This one’s available on DVD both on its own (make sure you get the “Special Edition” version) and in a Davros boxed set. Golden moment? The first cliffhanger, when after many hints in previous stories, we see for the first time clearly, absolutely, a Dalek flying up the stairs.
11 – Bad Wolf (2005)
A story that starts as hard-hitting satire on TV – daring to confront the viewers in a way the series really hasn’t since – and finishes with the most visually stunning Dalek invasion we’ve ever seen, as hundreds of fabulous Dalek saucers swoop through space. Added to that, there’s not just the conclusion to the tantalising “Bad Wolf” storyline, but also to the whole life story of Christopher Eccleston’s Doctor, moving at last from death wish to new life. Ironically, though the first half is made up of many different reality TV parodies and the second moves inexorably towards (another) final confrontation with the Daleks, it’s the first half that tells a more coherent story for me, and the Doctor never quite manages to come up with the ‘third option’ at the end. But it’s a strong story, nevertheless. This has been released at least five times on DVD, paired with other stories and seasons. Golden moment? I’m tempted to say plucky Lynda-with-a-Y’s hideously memorable extermination, but the more hopeful choice is the moment when it all comes together for the first cliffhanger – the Doctor, the Daleks and determination.
10 – Dalek (2005)
The perfect way to reintroduce the Daleks for a new audience – one Dalek, alone, weakened, yet outthinking and outfighting (and, of course, outflying) the arrogant humans who think they’ve got it under control. Both in psychology and by action, this is all about what a Dalek is, and once again, it’s a hit… Though I still prefer the Big Finish drama Jubilee, which has the same kernel of an idea at its heart, from Rob Shearman, the same author. If the Dalek is perfectly characterised, the effect it has on the Doctor and his companion is still more remarkable. It’s a fantastic day for Rose, and a terrible one for the Doctor. Faced with a nightmare returned from the Time War – and the viewers suddenly shown what that War was all about – he loses it. Here’s a curious contradiction: in the very first Dalek story, it’s in reaction to them that the Doctor gains his moral sense; finding one here pulls his morality completely out of shape. Intellectually, I appreciate the point of the Doctor’s guilt and horror tipping him over the edge, but emotionally, making him suddenly a macho bully who sneers at intellect turns me right off. Even the Dalek can see he’s gone wrong (or, in its view, right). This has been released at least five times on DVD, paired with other stories and seasons. Golden moment? The little boy in me loves the Dalek going on the rampage. With just a teeny smidgeon of disappointment that the death-rayed victims didn’t start leaving burnt shadows on the walls.
9 – Mission to the Unknown (1965)
The only Doctor Who with the Daleks, but without the Doctor. Guess who wins? The shortest Who story ever, it’s a one-episode teaser for nearly the longest, The Daleks’ Master Plan, and like many of the best pre-titles mini-adventures, it has James Bond in it. Well, nearly. Edward de Souza takes the lead (you thought Doctor-light episodes were new to this century?) as space special agent Marc Cory, discovering a sinisterSPECTRE Dalek plot in a sinister space jungle. Unlike 007, he doesn’t make it through alive. It’s a fascinating snapshot of a much grimmer series – though, sadly, a snapshot with very few pictures. It’s one of those early stories the BBC carelessly burnt, but you can listen to it on a narrated CD of the soundtrack (as part of The Daleks’ Master Plan release, and also to be given away for free with the Telegraph in a week’s time, as luck would have it), or sort-of watch it on the rather excellent free Reconstruction. Golden moment? The brutal end, when you realise you really do need the Doctor to make everything all right.
8 – The Power of the Daleks (1966)
You can tell how good the stories from this point up are: the more you know them, the more you’ll realise how relentlessly plundered for ideas they’ve been. Having now seen Victory of the Daleks, you may be interested to know that – because this was the first story ever to introduce a new Doctor, Patrick Troughton – the Daleks are essentially here to convince us that he really is the Doctor. If that still doesn’t ring a bell, as part of their cunning plan here they present themselves to humans as helpful robots, intoning “I am yoursol-dier ser-vant” while the bow-tied new Doctor is a lone voice against them. The Daleks are brilliantly treated here: one lost ship rediscovered by a human colony tricks them into rebuilding a Dalek force, less a galaxy-spanning threat than a corruption from within (you might call it ‘Daleks Unplugged’). The human settlers are a bit of a nasty, squabbling bunch, though, so it’s difficult to be upset for any of them being exterminated. It’s one of those early stories the BBC carelessly burnt, but you can listen to it on a narrated CD of the soundtrack or sort-of watch it on the free Reconstruction. Golden moment? This time, the human scientist who reckons himself in control of the Daleks isn’t a robot, merely gullible. So guess what happens to him?
7 – The Daleks (1963-4)
Perhaps the most important Doctor Who of them all, this was only the second ever made, and introduced the series’ first monsters. You know what they are – from the first, a metaphor both for Nazism and nuclear war – and they’re as much the reason Doctor Who is still here today as anything else, for which we must be eternally grateful to writer Terry Nation, inspired designer Ray Cusick and determined producer Verity Lambert, who got it made. But it’s not just important because of the effect the Daleks had on the series: it’s the effect they have on the Doctor. Their ruthless plans bring the Doctor out of his detachment to make a moral judgement, and that’s the formation of the character we know today. It’s a good story, but a sheer masterpiece of design to evoke an alien world: the eerie sound, the stunning architecture and, of course, the Daleks themselves. It isn’t perfect – many of the characters are shallow, and after a strong start the later episodes simply meander – but it’s still mesmerising. This is available on DVD as part of the Doctor Who – The Beginning boxed set, and the novelisation (the first, and one of the best) is now a talking book, rather splendidly brought to life on CD by William Russell, who played the Doctor’s companion Ian. Golden moment? The wonderfully gittish Doctor discovering his morals despite himself – memorably railing in brilliant, passionate close-up against “This senseless, evil killing…”
6 – The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1964)
A powerful series of images of the Daleks in a ruined London really sells this blatant ‘what if the Nazis had won?’ allegory. It doesn’t reach the same heights of design or imagination as the first Dalek story, but it’s more satisfying, probably because it keeps up the pace and has a climax that works instead of petering out, despite the Dalek plan to pilot the Earth around like an interplanetary dodgem being barking mad. Both the grimy resistance fighters and the Daleks’ tattered zombie Robomen are quite effective – their pet ‘Slyther’ less so. The Doctor’s missing for a few too many chunks of the action, but has some haunting speeches when he’s around, not least his closing goodbye. This one’s available on its own on DVD (with the special bonus that you can switch on new CGI flying saucers to replace the not-completely-convincing model), while the excellent novelisation is now a talking book, rather splendidly brought to life on CD by William Russell, with Nick Briggs as the voice of the Daleks. Golden moment? Many, but today I’ll go for the first cliffhanger, as the ruins of men stalk the Doctor through the ruin of a city – only for a Dalek to rise from the Thames behind him…
5 – The Daleks’ Master Plan (1965-6)
What can you say about a story so huge that it was originally broadcast over three months, and takes five hours now if you put the whole thing on? That’s it’s brilliant, happily, but sags in the middle – it’s almost a series of linked short stories, evoking a dangerous Universe but with an outrageous Christmas ‘comedy’ episode half-way. It really shouldn’t work, but this is The Chase done right: the devious Daleks, their alien allies and a fabulous human traitor hunting the Doctor to get back the key to their invasion of the galaxy. This epic pits the Daleks one last time against William Hartnell, their arch-foe, and sees both Doctor and Daleks at their terrific best. More than one of the Doctor’s friends die along the way – not least future Brigadier Nick Courtney – and death is never far away. Perhaps it would have been better off ditching some of the ropier episodes in the middle, but its sheer scale and the time we’ve taken to know the characters help it build up to an awesome conclusion. It’s one of those early stories the BBC carelessly burnt most of, but you can see three surviving episodes in the Lost in Time DVD, listen to it all on a narrated CD of the soundtrack (Mission to the Unknown is included), or sort-of watch it on the CGI-Dalek-tastic free Reconstruction. Golden moment? This story features the best statement of the Daleks’ arrogant superiority ever broadcast, but as I’ve already quoted that above I’ll go for the finale: the emotional punch of the climax is still harrowing today, with the Doctor seeming almost an elemental force as the series absolutely makes up its mind that he isn’t human…
4 – Doomsday (2006)
A rip-roaring season finale mixing two of the most popular Doctor Who themes: the Twenty-first Century stories’ action-packed invasion extravaganzas; and the mid-’70s favourite of the dead returning – this time, in four different scary ways. ‘Harmless,’ sentimentalised “ghosts” have a terrifyingly logical explanation as undead Cybermen storm through them; the British Empire itself threatens to rise again under the fabulous Yvonne Hartman; and, from beyond space and time, the last of the Daleks return. Which will win? The finance and technology of Torchwood? The massed millions of Cybermen? Or just four Daleks? There’s no contest – it’s almost a disappointment when they find more of them. All that, and Rose says goodbye (#1), though Jackie steals the show (despite an inspired last-minute scene-stealer from Donna to kick us all out of moping). This has been released at least five times on DVD, paired with other stories and seasons. Golden moment? That cliffhanger – the Cybermen have won. But guess who’s back to say it won’t be for long?
3 – Revelation of the Daleks (1985)
One of the most unexpected of Dalek stories, this delicious black comedy centres on Davros, a plotter, a poisonous tempter and a postmodern commentator on the action as he builds new ‘whited sepulchre’ Daleks from the bodies of the dead. A creepy, dreamlike – no, nightmarish – visual triumph, the horror at the heart of it is turning immortality into hell. Add perfectly cast guest stars, a touch of sex and politics, and what more could you ask for? Well, you might ask for more of the Doctor, but even though the script often sidelines him, Colin Baker’s striking performance still dominates as he strikes up a cracking rapport with Davros. This one’s available on DVD both on its own and in a Davros boxed set. Golden moment? A dead man entombed in a glass Dalek casing pleading with his daughter for destruction rather than become a Dalek…
2 – Genesis of the Daleks (1975)
Dark, gripping and brilliant, this is Doctor Who’s ultimate war story: the barren, shattered landscape after a thousand years of war is almost a character in itself; the Daleks are born out of a desire to end that war by any means necessary, and are never more blatantly Nazis; and the Doctor being sent by the Time Lords to stop them is today seen as the first strike in the Time War. Few stories are played with such gravity, and almost everything comes off – the odd giant clam aside – with Tom Baker’s Doctor perfectly playing the moral dilemmas (and ably assisted by Sarah Jane and Harry). The Daleks are used sparingly, but have the presence of tanks when they glide into view; the musical score is terrific; but what really counts is Davros and his story. It doesn’t take the easy route and have Davros completely in charge from the start, but using his wiles in a cleverly truncated portrait of a fascist’s rise to power, resembling an historical thriller, and Michael Wisher creates the part magnificently – intelligent, fanatical with extraordinary oratory. This one’s available on DVD both on its own and in a Davros boxed set; I remember it as the first Doctor Who you could ever re-experience at will, released as a heavy edited LP – that’s now a CD, and it’s another to be given away for free with the Telegraph in a week’s time (“Thank you, that’s what I wanted to know”). Golden moment? Davros engages the Doctor in scientific discussion, and the Doctor turns it into a moral debate. It’s probably still the most compelling scene in the whole of Doctor Who.
1 – The Evil of the Daleks (1967)
The greatest Dalek story of them all raises them from a physical to a metaphysical threat – malevolent spirits that plot to seed all humanity with “The Dalek Factor” in a darkly alchemical fairy tale. Patrick Troughton (Matt Smith’s favourite Doctor) is outstanding, and often disturbing, as he and the Daleks both lay secret plots against each other, both at their most devious, both going through the looking glass… Yet even the Doctor is taken for a ride by the Daleks this time. We see new sides of the Daleks: insidiously evil; child-like and trusting; the first appearance of the great Emperor. There’s even an apparently human servant of the Daleks with a strange magnetic force, saved by love, while another human falls into temptation. Passing from contemporary London to Victorian times to the Dalek City of the future for the epic climax, too, gives it a breadth of vision that is almost unbeatably ideal Doctor Who. Back in 1967 they knew how to do a season finale, too. It’s one of those early stories the BBC carelessly burnt most of, but you can see the one surviving episode in the Lost in Time DVD, listen to it all on a narrated CD of the soundtrack, or sort-of watch it on the rather fantastic free Reconstruction. Golden Emperor moment? Not just a terrific story, this is one of the most powerfully Liberal messages that Doctor Who has ever made. It’s the final cliffhanger where the Doctor defiantly stands up to the biggest bully in the Universe and sets out the battlefield between the Dalek Factor, to obey and to destroy, and the Human Factor – to ask questions.
Question authority. Don’t do what they tell you. And this time – the Daleks might be defeated.
So what do I think of Victory of the Daleks? Oh, I won’t know that for ages! I like to sleep on my Doctor Who reviews for a couple of decades. Well, I don’t rush things, you know? But if you want a brilliant and incisive assessment of exactly how wonderful it will be, catch Richard’s undoubtedly superb thoughts on it on Millennium’s Diary sometime in the next few days. I’m looking forward to it.
Well, Actually…
To date – between 1963 and 2008 – there have been twenty Dalek stories. That makes picking a top twenty a very easy thing to do… Except that two of them were remade as feature films with Peter Cushing, so I’d best not go into them right now. Nor all the Doctor Who stories that aren’t exactly about the Daleks, but brought us noticeable new cameo appearances from the blob-and-metal monsters: The Space Museum; Frontier in Space; The Five Doctors; The Waters of Mars…
Some of the Daleks’ most thrilling adventures, too, have been in media other than television. Many of Big Finish’s Doctor Who audio dramas have starred the Daleks or their creator Davros: Jubilee and Davros, in particular, are as good as almost anything that’s ever been on TV. Terra Firma and Brotherhood of the Daleks might just do strange things to your mind; then, of course, TV’s voice of the Daleks himself, Nick Briggs, created several epic Dalek Empire, starring such actors as Noel Clarke and, yes, David Tennant. Daleks have hit several books – though if I were you, I’d skip John Peel’s terrible two
So the top twenty I offer below is merely one dimension of the Daleks – if the dimension seen by millions. But first, if by some strange chance you’ve never met them… Well, watch BBC1 tonight at 6.30 (and BBCHD at 8.25)! And you can read my very best old-fashioned Doctor Who Monster Book-style introduction…
Who Are the Daleks?
The Daleks are the Doctor’s greatest enemy – the personification of war in the Universe. Though apparently like robots on the outside, they are living creatures and far from emotionless, with their war-cry to “Exterminate!” all other life. Every Dalek machine has heavy armour and a camera eye, mechanical arm and powerful gun, like a fearsome personal tank driven by the creature inside. They believe themselves to be superior to every other being in the Universe, and their intelligence and appetite for destruction gives them total confidence to proclaim in their harsh electronic voices:
“One Dalek is capable of exterminating all!”Once a human-like race called the Kaleds, they fought a terrible war with their neighbours the Thals, using everything from knives and bullets to chemical and nuclear weapons. Their planet Skaro was devastated, and both races were changed by mutation. The Kaled chief scientist Davros kept himself alive despite great age and injury, in a life-support wheelchair like the base of a Dalek. He became obsessed with similar preservation of his people. Hungry for power, he genetically modified the Kaleds into hideous mutants of great cunning and ambition, but conditioned to obey unquestioningly, to hate every creature that is different, and unable to survive outside protective travel machines he designed – the Daleks.
In one of the Doctor’s most dangerous adventures, the Time Lords sent him to prevent the rise of the Daleks, and saw how the Daleks shot their own creator because even he was not a ‘pure’ Dalek. But the Doctor decided he could not destroy the Daleks at their birth. Killing entire races is how the Daleks act, not the Doctor – and such a massive change to time could prevent too much good as well as evil from having happened.
The Doctor first met the Daleks long after their creation, when they plotted in their metal city to destroy the survivors of their enemies, the Thals. The Doctor defeated them, but he soon found that there were many other Daleks throughout time and space. The Daleks were the only other race to discover the full secret of time travel and, realising that the Doctor was a threat to them, tried to find and kill him as he travelled through time and space stopping their plans.
The Daleks even succeeded in conquering the Earth in the Twenty-Second Century, turning humans into zombie-like Robomen before being defeated by the Doctor. Their creator Davros also once operated on humans to create a new race of Daleks more loyal to himself, after he narrowly survived the first Daleks’ betrayal. Perhaps the Daleks’ most evil plan against humanity was to trick the Doctor into identifying “The Dalek Factor,” using it to alter the mind of every human into that of a Dalek who would obey and exterminate without question. Only the Doctor’s own cleverness turned the tables, giving Daleks free will through “The Human Factor” and plunging them into civil war.
No other monster has been such a terrible threat to all life in the Universe, so many times, as the Daleks, employing war, radiation and plague. When it suited them, they have enlisted alien servants such as the brutish, ape-like Ogrons, and schemed with greedy humans or with alien allies to advance their conquests. But whatever promises they may make, the Daleks hate all other life, and one thing is certain: all allies of the Daleks will be exterminated in the end.
With two great civilisations in the Universe both having control over time travel and one determined to dominate, eventually the inevitable happened. The Time Lords and Daleks fought each other in the last great Time War. Great tides of time damage swept the Universe, both races were destroyed, and it seemed only the Doctor survived. But there were Dalek survivors, too, with the Emperor Dalek and some of his most cunning acolytes hidden away to pose new and greater threats. The last time the Daleks appeared, the Doctor saw the destruction of a risen Dalek empire from which Davros and his creations had aimed to destroy the entire Universe except themselves. Was this the final end of the Daleks?
Often before they have seemed finally defeated – but they always come back for more…
The Top Twenty
In my own tribute to the traditional Dalek story, I’ve been horribly ill all week, so I’ve not been able to finish all the mini-reviews explaining why I think each Dalek adventure merits the position I’ve given it below. So please tune in for more, and I’ll have finished them before the same time next week. Update: …In fact, I finished by the end of Sunday. How about that? Read, enjoy, and disagree!
20 – Death to the Daleks (1974)
All Doctor Who is brilliant. But some of it’s more brilliant than other bits. If I was rating stories by the old “hit, miss or maybe,” I reckon that of the Doctor’s three biggest recurring enemies, the Master and the Cybermen might have a fairly even spread… But there’s something about a Dalek story that makes writers deliver. So many of them are stacked towards the top that it seems almost unfair to mention the handful that, when they do fall down, fall down hard (even the music here’s unspeakable). And yet even this most tired of Dalek stories has much to enjoy in it: ancient alien cultures falling to dust; Sarah Jane Smith; and the religious maniacs determined to wipe out their non-conformist naturist cousins (the ones who looked so thrillingly like living rock when I first saw their photos in The Doctor Who Monster Book as a kid). It isn’t out on DVD yet, but look out for it in the next couple of years and prove me wrong. Golden moment? The elegiac closing shots. Rather lovely.
19 – The Chase (1965)
Dalekmania gave Doctor Who its liftoff to initial mass success in the early ’60s, and they were great days for Dalek stories, too – William Hartnell faced the Daleks more often than any other Doctor, in an ascending spiral of excitement as their arch-enemy. There was one stumble along the way… The idea is to make the Daleks more impressive – first they took Skaro; then they were seen conquering our home as if the Nazis won World War II; now they can chase our heroes through time itself! Unfortunately, the analogy of a crack Gestapo squad hunting down the Resistance falls flat very quickly; a mixture of comedy that isn’t funny, sadly slipshod production and an hilarious ‘double’. But this, too, has its moments. While trying to play the Daleks for laughs in the middle doesn’t work, the opening episode’s light comedy ‘holiday’ opening with the Doctor and his friends is rather lovely, as is the story’s very end. And the climax, as the huge robot Mechanoids spit fire at the Daleks, is rather fab (even more so in those TV21 comic strips, where they’re a major space power and we can’t hear them). It’s just out on DVD, in a box paired with The Space Museum. Golden moment? It has to be the coda, as the Doctor’s companions Ian and Barbara return home in an inspired montage. My eyes get misty.
18 – The Stolen Earth (2008)
The epic finale to the 2008 season of Doctor Who, with more Daleks and returning companions than you can shake a stick at, and even more than one David Tennant. Topping the TV charts for the week, this was one of the series’ most massive successes. Well… For me, it looks glorious, and the first episode’s terrific, but the conclusion is an amazing lesson in how things fall apart. A magnificent cliffhanger turned into a great big cheating cop-out; the Doctor unable to answer Davros’ – Davros’ – moral arguments; the Doctor taking away Donna’s choice. Above all, perhaps, it’s that with the Daleks having been down (again) to one sole survivor, they then instantly regrew (again) like watercress to a huge new empire, destroyed (again) in the blink of an eye… It’s impossible to see the Daleks as a threat, or their defeat as an achievement [post-Victory: and I’m hugely relieved that their 2010 comeback didn’t make the same mistake!]. This has been released at least five times on DVD, paired with other stories and seasons. Golden moment? Sarah Jane picking up that transmission from space, and knowing exactly what it means.
17 – Planet of the Daleks (1973)
Terry Nation returns to write for the Daleks a decade after his glory days, and nothing’s changed. Well, the script hasn’t, at least. It’s almost a cheesier, dumber remake of some of the earliest Dalek stories, with none of the eeriness or subtlety – but with shaggy purple capes and added sexism! Made, in theory, as the second half of a ginormous epic, directly following Frontier in Space (with which it’s available in the Dalek War DVD box), it has the slight disadvantage that it doesn’t bother picking up the story at all. But there’s no hope for me – I quite enjoy it, particularly the early scenes where Katy Manning, playing the Doctor’s companion Jo, gets to ad-lib most of her lines and does a much better job for herself than the script does. Golden moment? The Daleks work out who the tall stranger who’s been causing trouble is. And brick themselves.
16 – Resurrection of the Daleks (1984)
A grim tale of mercenaries, death and Docklands, much of this looks terrific, it has a great score, and there are some very impressive guest stars. Unfortunately, the minor guest actors are often a bit shonky, and after a gripping first episode the plot falls apart. Half the cast never meet each other, nor the Doctor, still less have a clue what’s going on, while the Daleks’ plans get loopier by the minute. On top of all that (you can tell this isn’t a favourite trope of mine), the Doctor is unable to answer Davros’ – Davros’ – moral arguments. This one’s available on DVD both on its own and in a Davros boxed set. Golden moment? Despite having little to do in theory, the Doctor’s companion Turlough keeps stealing scenes – on hearing they’re headed back to Earth, I love his sarcastic “Best news all day”.
15 – Destiny of the Daleks (1979)
One of Doctor Who’s few direct sequels, this picks up after Genesis of the Daleks and has never really been forgiven by many fans for being nowhere near as good. Its big problem, I suspect, is that it’s such a mixture: funny and grim; beautifully designed and grotty; intelligent and impossibly dumb. Davros is rather a let-down, yet there’s some striking camerawork and sound design. Perhaps the biggest contradiction is that, although the first half tends to be very derivative and the second has intriguing ideas, it’s the ‘living dead’ opening episodes which rather work, and the ‘logic problem’ latter half that breaks up on daft details. This one’s available on DVD both on its own and in a Davros boxed set. Golden moment? I still find the tense build-up to the second cliffhanger rather thrilling, with its mixture of burial and exhumation.
14 – Evolution of the Daleks (2007)
I could probably have put my numbers 20-17 in any order; I could probably do the same for 14-11, too. This is the one that went down rather badly with most fans but, though for me the second half of the story (again) has a rather too easy resolution that doesn’t match the promise of the first, I love it for its ability both to build on Dalek stories of old and to do something very different. It’s 1930s New York, and the Great Depression has hit the Daleks in two ways: not only have they had a crushing material fall, but their leader is, quite simply, depressed. He thinks outside the casing to make himself a Dalek messiah – but the other Daleks stick to that old-time religion… All this, plus lashings of James Whale’s Frankenstein, and even musical theatre. This has been released at least five times on DVD, paired with other stories and seasons – I prefer to watch it with the preceding story Gridlock, as together they explore the same themes of loss and rebirth, heaven and hell, even (very visually) ‘up and down’. Golden moment? Dalek conspirators in the sewers, swivelling and whispering.
13 – Day of the Daleks (1972)
An intelligent story of temporal paradoxes with a great twist, in some ways this has quite a Moffaty flavour (as well as something of Planet of the Apes), and Jon Pertwee has one of his better stories as the Doctor, despite lashing out at MPs’ expenses and then drinking all the wine. It has a few faults: with interesting sets of both ‘fascists’ and ‘terrorists’ presented to us to dislike, it doesn’t maintain much ambiguity over which side the Daleks are on; and the Daleks are unimpressive, both in numbers and with very feeble voices. There are some very strong characters and ideas, though, and a fascinating story. It isn’t out on DVD yet, but look out for it in the next couple of years – I wouldn’t mind a talking book version of the novelisation, either, or even Nick Briggs overdubbing the weedy Dalek voices when the DVD comes out. Golden moment? The Doctor slouching at dinner like he’s at a Roman orgy and slapping down claims that a fascist police state:
“has never been more efficiently, more economically run. People have never been happier – or more prosperous.”12 – Remembrance of the Daleks (1988)
“Then why do you need so many people to keep them under control? Don’t they like being happy and prosperous?”
One of the first Doctor Who stories to have an exciting pre-titles teaser, and it still grabs you today. This is a favourite of many fans, an intelligent and complex story that doesn’t pull its punches on fascism – and brilliantly made, too, with great guest stars and terrific explosions. Why, then, might you ask, do I not put it further up my list? In short, the ending, which I think makes a horrible moral mistake, one of the most offensive in the series’ history. Watch it, and see what you think. This one’s available on DVD both on its own (make sure you get the “Special Edition” version) and in a Davros boxed set. Golden moment? The first cliffhanger, when after many hints in previous stories, we see for the first time clearly, absolutely, a Dalek flying up the stairs.
11 – Bad Wolf (2005)
A story that starts as hard-hitting satire on TV – daring to confront the viewers in a way the series really hasn’t since – and finishes with the most visually stunning Dalek invasion we’ve ever seen, as hundreds of fabulous Dalek saucers swoop through space. Added to that, there’s not just the conclusion to the tantalising “Bad Wolf” storyline, but also to the whole life story of Christopher Eccleston’s Doctor, moving at last from death wish to new life. Ironically, though the first half is made up of many different reality TV parodies and the second moves inexorably towards (another) final confrontation with the Daleks, it’s the first half that tells a more coherent story for me, and the Doctor never quite manages to come up with the ‘third option’ at the end. But it’s a strong story, nevertheless. This has been released at least five times on DVD, paired with other stories and seasons. Golden moment? I’m tempted to say plucky Lynda-with-a-Y’s hideously memorable extermination, but the more hopeful choice is the moment when it all comes together for the first cliffhanger – the Doctor, the Daleks and determination.
10 – Dalek (2005)
The perfect way to reintroduce the Daleks for a new audience – one Dalek, alone, weakened, yet outthinking and outfighting (and, of course, outflying) the arrogant humans who think they’ve got it under control. Both in psychology and by action, this is all about what a Dalek is, and once again, it’s a hit… Though I still prefer the Big Finish drama Jubilee, which has the same kernel of an idea at its heart, from Rob Shearman, the same author. If the Dalek is perfectly characterised, the effect it has on the Doctor and his companion is still more remarkable. It’s a fantastic day for Rose, and a terrible one for the Doctor. Faced with a nightmare returned from the Time War – and the viewers suddenly shown what that War was all about – he loses it. Here’s a curious contradiction: in the very first Dalek story, it’s in reaction to them that the Doctor gains his moral sense; finding one here pulls his morality completely out of shape. Intellectually, I appreciate the point of the Doctor’s guilt and horror tipping him over the edge, but emotionally, making him suddenly a macho bully who sneers at intellect turns me right off. Even the Dalek can see he’s gone wrong (or, in its view, right). This has been released at least five times on DVD, paired with other stories and seasons. Golden moment? The little boy in me loves the Dalek going on the rampage. With just a teeny smidgeon of disappointment that the death-rayed victims didn’t start leaving burnt shadows on the walls.
9 – Mission to the Unknown (1965)
The only Doctor Who with the Daleks, but without the Doctor. Guess who wins? The shortest Who story ever, it’s a one-episode teaser for nearly the longest, The Daleks’ Master Plan, and like many of the best pre-titles mini-adventures, it has James Bond in it. Well, nearly. Edward de Souza takes the lead (you thought Doctor-light episodes were new to this century?) as space special agent Marc Cory, discovering a sinister
8 – The Power of the Daleks (1966)
You can tell how good the stories from this point up are: the more you know them, the more you’ll realise how relentlessly plundered for ideas they’ve been. Having now seen Victory of the Daleks, you may be interested to know that – because this was the first story ever to introduce a new Doctor, Patrick Troughton – the Daleks are essentially here to convince us that he really is the Doctor. If that still doesn’t ring a bell, as part of their cunning plan here they present themselves to humans as helpful robots, intoning “I am your
7 – The Daleks (1963-4)
Perhaps the most important Doctor Who of them all, this was only the second ever made, and introduced the series’ first monsters. You know what they are – from the first, a metaphor both for Nazism and nuclear war – and they’re as much the reason Doctor Who is still here today as anything else, for which we must be eternally grateful to writer Terry Nation, inspired designer Ray Cusick and determined producer Verity Lambert, who got it made. But it’s not just important because of the effect the Daleks had on the series: it’s the effect they have on the Doctor. Their ruthless plans bring the Doctor out of his detachment to make a moral judgement, and that’s the formation of the character we know today. It’s a good story, but a sheer masterpiece of design to evoke an alien world: the eerie sound, the stunning architecture and, of course, the Daleks themselves. It isn’t perfect – many of the characters are shallow, and after a strong start the later episodes simply meander – but it’s still mesmerising. This is available on DVD as part of the Doctor Who – The Beginning boxed set, and the novelisation (the first, and one of the best) is now a talking book, rather splendidly brought to life on CD by William Russell, who played the Doctor’s companion Ian. Golden moment? The wonderfully gittish Doctor discovering his morals despite himself – memorably railing in brilliant, passionate close-up against “This senseless, evil killing…”
6 – The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1964)
A powerful series of images of the Daleks in a ruined London really sells this blatant ‘what if the Nazis had won?’ allegory. It doesn’t reach the same heights of design or imagination as the first Dalek story, but it’s more satisfying, probably because it keeps up the pace and has a climax that works instead of petering out, despite the Dalek plan to pilot the Earth around like an interplanetary dodgem being barking mad. Both the grimy resistance fighters and the Daleks’ tattered zombie Robomen are quite effective – their pet ‘Slyther’ less so. The Doctor’s missing for a few too many chunks of the action, but has some haunting speeches when he’s around, not least his closing goodbye. This one’s available on its own on DVD (with the special bonus that you can switch on new CGI flying saucers to replace the not-completely-convincing model), while the excellent novelisation is now a talking book, rather splendidly brought to life on CD by William Russell, with Nick Briggs as the voice of the Daleks. Golden moment? Many, but today I’ll go for the first cliffhanger, as the ruins of men stalk the Doctor through the ruin of a city – only for a Dalek to rise from the Thames behind him…
5 – The Daleks’ Master Plan (1965-6)
What can you say about a story so huge that it was originally broadcast over three months, and takes five hours now if you put the whole thing on? That’s it’s brilliant, happily, but sags in the middle – it’s almost a series of linked short stories, evoking a dangerous Universe but with an outrageous Christmas ‘comedy’ episode half-way. It really shouldn’t work, but this is The Chase done right: the devious Daleks, their alien allies and a fabulous human traitor hunting the Doctor to get back the key to their invasion of the galaxy. This epic pits the Daleks one last time against William Hartnell, their arch-foe, and sees both Doctor and Daleks at their terrific best. More than one of the Doctor’s friends die along the way – not least future Brigadier Nick Courtney – and death is never far away. Perhaps it would have been better off ditching some of the ropier episodes in the middle, but its sheer scale and the time we’ve taken to know the characters help it build up to an awesome conclusion. It’s one of those early stories the BBC carelessly burnt most of, but you can see three surviving episodes in the Lost in Time DVD, listen to it all on a narrated CD of the soundtrack (Mission to the Unknown is included), or sort-of watch it on the CGI-Dalek-tastic free Reconstruction. Golden moment? This story features the best statement of the Daleks’ arrogant superiority ever broadcast, but as I’ve already quoted that above I’ll go for the finale: the emotional punch of the climax is still harrowing today, with the Doctor seeming almost an elemental force as the series absolutely makes up its mind that he isn’t human…
4 – Doomsday (2006)
A rip-roaring season finale mixing two of the most popular Doctor Who themes: the Twenty-first Century stories’ action-packed invasion extravaganzas; and the mid-’70s favourite of the dead returning – this time, in four different scary ways. ‘Harmless,’ sentimentalised “ghosts” have a terrifyingly logical explanation as undead Cybermen storm through them; the British Empire itself threatens to rise again under the fabulous Yvonne Hartman; and, from beyond space and time, the last of the Daleks return. Which will win? The finance and technology of Torchwood? The massed millions of Cybermen? Or just four Daleks? There’s no contest – it’s almost a disappointment when they find more of them. All that, and Rose says goodbye (#1), though Jackie steals the show (despite an inspired last-minute scene-stealer from Donna to kick us all out of moping). This has been released at least five times on DVD, paired with other stories and seasons. Golden moment? That cliffhanger – the Cybermen have won. But guess who’s back to say it won’t be for long?
3 – Revelation of the Daleks (1985)
One of the most unexpected of Dalek stories, this delicious black comedy centres on Davros, a plotter, a poisonous tempter and a postmodern commentator on the action as he builds new ‘whited sepulchre’ Daleks from the bodies of the dead. A creepy, dreamlike – no, nightmarish – visual triumph, the horror at the heart of it is turning immortality into hell. Add perfectly cast guest stars, a touch of sex and politics, and what more could you ask for? Well, you might ask for more of the Doctor, but even though the script often sidelines him, Colin Baker’s striking performance still dominates as he strikes up a cracking rapport with Davros. This one’s available on DVD both on its own and in a Davros boxed set. Golden moment? A dead man entombed in a glass Dalek casing pleading with his daughter for destruction rather than become a Dalek…
2 – Genesis of the Daleks (1975)
Dark, gripping and brilliant, this is Doctor Who’s ultimate war story: the barren, shattered landscape after a thousand years of war is almost a character in itself; the Daleks are born out of a desire to end that war by any means necessary, and are never more blatantly Nazis; and the Doctor being sent by the Time Lords to stop them is today seen as the first strike in the Time War. Few stories are played with such gravity, and almost everything comes off – the odd giant clam aside – with Tom Baker’s Doctor perfectly playing the moral dilemmas (and ably assisted by Sarah Jane and Harry). The Daleks are used sparingly, but have the presence of tanks when they glide into view; the musical score is terrific; but what really counts is Davros and his story. It doesn’t take the easy route and have Davros completely in charge from the start, but using his wiles in a cleverly truncated portrait of a fascist’s rise to power, resembling an historical thriller, and Michael Wisher creates the part magnificently – intelligent, fanatical with extraordinary oratory. This one’s available on DVD both on its own and in a Davros boxed set; I remember it as the first Doctor Who you could ever re-experience at will, released as a heavy edited LP – that’s now a CD, and it’s another to be given away for free with the Telegraph in a week’s time (“Thank you, that’s what I wanted to know”). Golden moment? Davros engages the Doctor in scientific discussion, and the Doctor turns it into a moral debate. It’s probably still the most compelling scene in the whole of Doctor Who.
1 – The Evil of the Daleks (1967)
The greatest Dalek story of them all raises them from a physical to a metaphysical threat – malevolent spirits that plot to seed all humanity with “The Dalek Factor” in a darkly alchemical fairy tale. Patrick Troughton (Matt Smith’s favourite Doctor) is outstanding, and often disturbing, as he and the Daleks both lay secret plots against each other, both at their most devious, both going through the looking glass… Yet even the Doctor is taken for a ride by the Daleks this time. We see new sides of the Daleks: insidiously evil; child-like and trusting; the first appearance of the great Emperor. There’s even an apparently human servant of the Daleks with a strange magnetic force, saved by love, while another human falls into temptation. Passing from contemporary London to Victorian times to the Dalek City of the future for the epic climax, too, gives it a breadth of vision that is almost unbeatably ideal Doctor Who. Back in 1967 they knew how to do a season finale, too. It’s one of those early stories the BBC carelessly burnt most of, but you can see the one surviving episode in the Lost in Time DVD, listen to it all on a narrated CD of the soundtrack, or sort-of watch it on the rather fantastic free Reconstruction. Golden Emperor moment? Not just a terrific story, this is one of the most powerfully Liberal messages that Doctor Who has ever made. It’s the final cliffhanger where the Doctor defiantly stands up to the biggest bully in the Universe and sets out the battlefield between the Dalek Factor, to obey and to destroy, and the Human Factor – to ask questions.
Question authority. Don’t do what they tell you. And this time – the Daleks might be defeated.
So what do I think of Victory of the Daleks? Oh, I won’t know that for ages! I like to sleep on my Doctor Who reviews for a couple of decades. Well, I don’t rush things, you know? But if you want a brilliant and incisive assessment of exactly how wonderful it will be, catch Richard’s undoubtedly superb thoughts on it on Millennium’s Diary sometime in the next few days. I’m looking forward to it.
Labels: Big Finish, Comics, Daleks, Doctor Who, DVD, Liberalism, Matt Smith, Reviews, Top Tips
Thursday, April 15, 2010
“OMG! Voting For THEM Might Let THEM In!”
It’s tired already. The soundbites, the leaflets, the screaming newspaper headlines – when it’s this hysterical from the start, what will it be like come May? So what’s the real truth?
And you know what?
Prepare yourself for a shock: every single one of those hysterical accusations is true.
But not one of them is true for the whole country.
They may well be true for individual constituencies… Though no-one knows for a fact which ones, because voters change their minds. OK, with quite a few you can make a pretty good guess, and most of the time it’ll be right – but even then, it’s only a probability, and in only one seat at a time.
The newspapers and leaflets and soundbites that say it applies across the whole country – like the literally millions of Unite-funded Labour leaflets claiming it’s between Labour and the Tories in seats where the Tories are in a poor third place and there’s either a Liberal Democrat MP already or perhaps soon will be – are simply telling a massive, shameless lie. It doesn’t say much for any positive reasons for voting, does it?
Yesterday, I saw Gordon Brown on TV saying that the Liberal Democrats really agreed with Labour – while his unelected crony Lord Adonis has made this into an art form (my friends Stephen and Prateek, like most Lib Dems, are not impressed) – and David Cameron on TV saying that the Liberal Democrats were really closer to the Conservatives. At the same time, I saw Conservative leaflets claiming a Lib Dem vote was a vote for Labour, and yet more Labour leaflets claiming – usually shrieking hysterically, insofar as you can do that on paper – that a Lib Dem vote was a vote for the Tories.
Here’s a newsflash. While Labour and the Tories both try alternately to insult, bully and love-bomb Liberal Democrat voters into supporting them, Liberal Democrats aren’t Labour or Tories. Most of us believe that the Conservatives and Labour are much closer to each other than they are to us: whether ideologically, with both hideously authoritarian; or on their near-identical records in government of green inaction, centralisation and warmongering; or just for a laugh about the Labservatives. But that’s a teeny bit of negativity coming through.
Let me ask a simple, positive question about why you think Liberal Democrats are Liberal Democrats: it’s much, much easier to get ahead and get power in a slightly bigger party that, thanks to the electoral system, has alternated in absolute power for most of the last century. I can see why people would become Labour or Tory even if they don’t really agree with them at heart, because, pragmatically, it makes a kind of sense. But given what a struggle it is even to be heard, let alone win power as Lib Dems – though we’re on 23% in the polls today, and have 63 MPs, when I joined we were on 19 MPs and struggling to make 5% – why on Earth would we bother if we didn’t believe in it?
Some Liberal Democrat supporters this election have got tired of all the negative campaigning and anti-voting, and set up a new Positive Voting site. Why not take a look? As opinion polls have often said – if everyone who said they’d vote Liberal Democrat ‘if they could win’ voted Lib Dem… Then we’d win.
If you’re passionately in favour of the Conservatives, or Labour, or any of the others, and if you’re really not keen on the Lib Dems… Well, then don’t vote Lib Dem. But why not take a look at what we stand for, if you’re not sure, and if you like what the Liberal Democrats say – then vote for us. Don’t be bullied into something you loathe fractionally less than something else.
Here’s the full Liberal Democrat Manifesto.
Or you could just read Nick Clegg’s and Vince Cable’s top priorities.
For me, I’d say vote Liberal Democrat for fairness. For freedom. For a green future. To fight poverty, ignorance and conformity.
And because we’re the only party that’s had the honesty to put all the figures in our Manifesto so you can work out for yourself if the sums add up.
The more votes and the more seats Liberal Democrats win, the more likely it is that Liberal Democrat policies will count in the next Parliament. Even while Labour’s had absolute power on a third of the vote, we’ve still made the difference on issues like the Gurkhas and civil liberties: every Lib Dem vote increases the chance of a Lib Dem government, or at least of stopping the other two being able to do every single thing they want to without anything like majority support and let some new ideas in for a change.
Which brings me to my final reason for a positive vote for the Liberal Democrats – even if you’re not a Liberal Democrat by natural inclination. If you think more voices need to be heard in politics… If you think absolute power when most voters oppose you isn’t healthy… If you think a government should represent the people… Then vote Liberal Democrat, not to shore up the system, nor to inherit it, but to break it open.
Because, you see, electing MPs by proportional representation would all but eliminate feeling you have to make a choice between the lesser of two evils when there’s something better on offer. Of course it wouldn’t stop people and parties campaigning negatively in other ways – there’ll always be attacks, and that’s an argument for another day – but it would cut off at the knees most of those daft ‘voting X is only a vote for Y’ babbles. Your X would simply be your X – or, in the Single Transferable Vote system the Lib Dems prefer, your 123: putting it simply, most types of PR give fair shares but too much power to parties, but STV gives voters a double power. Not only does it reflect your votes in proportion, but it lets you choose which individual candidates you want, either within or across different parties. Sounds a bit technical? It would mean the safe seats that led to the lazy arrogance of the MPs who most abused their expenses would be swept away, too.
The Conservatives will never choose to back proportional representation – unless actually letting the people in is the only way they can get power. And we all know now that Labour will never change the system on their own. In 1997, they had the largest majority in the House of Commons (on one of the lowest pluralities of votes) for a century. They promised in their manifesto that they would hold a referendum on proportional representation. They had the power to do it: they didn’t. They made the same promise in 2001. They broke it again. Last year, with defeat staring him in the face, Gordon Brown promised a referendum on ‘the Alternative Vote’ – a half-way system does give preferential voting, but that’s often even less proportional than the one we have now (at random). Then, just a week ago, they dropped that policy in the House of Commons. Now they promise to bring it back after the election. Of course you will, Gordon. No. You broke your promise when you had power, then broke it again, and again: offering a much weaker policy at some time in the future doesn’t deserve a second glance (though you might take a pause to realise that the Labour leaflets pretending sitting Lib Dem MPs can’t win deceitfully pretend the country is one big seat, despite the fact they’ve been the main protectors of it being lots of little ones).
A vote for the Liberal Democrats is a vote to deliver real change. It’s not the only possible vote for change in all seats: if making every vote count is your main aim, then in Scotland or Wales you might look to see if Plaid Cymru or the SNP are ahead in your seat, while in one seat in England – Brighton Pavilion – the Greens have a decent chance. I’d argue even then that you should vote Liberal Democrat, of course, but that’s because I do passionately believe that we need a party that’s fair, liberal and green, and mine’s the only one that’s all three. And I’ve already given you my reason my STV’s a better, more voter-powerful system of proportional representation than those other parties support.
If you support any smaller party, or even if you are Labour or Conservative supporter, and you want proportional representation, so every vote counts – then in nine out of ten Westminster Parliament seats the Liberal Democrats are almost certainly the party which is best-placed to gain PR. So, why not give us a try? If enough people support us this time, we are committed to changing the system – and then all those leaflets can go in the dustbin, and you can vote safely for your first choice for ever afterwards. Where the Labservatives want to scare you into voting for them by keeping the crooked system that might make you feel that’s necessary, the Liberal Democrats want to break open the system and run the risk you’ll then feel free to run to someone else. I think that’s a better way, don’t you?
And finally (courtesy of my friend Andrew)… Who do you get into bed with if you vote Liberal Democrat? The dreadful truth!
- Voting Lib Dem might let Labour in!
- Voting Tory might let Labour in!
- Voting Green might let Labour in!
- Voting UKIP might let Labour in!
- Voting Labour might even let Labour in!
- Voting Lib Dem might let the Tories in!
- Voting Labour might let the Tories in!
- Voting Green might let the Tories in!
- Voting UKIP might let the Tories in!
- Voting Tory might even let the Tories in!
- Voting Tory might let the Lib Dems in!
- Voting Labour might let the Lib Dems in!
- Voting Green might let the Lib Dems in!
- Voting UKIP might let the Lib Dems in!
- Voting Lib Dem might even let the Liberal Democrats in!
And you know what?
Prepare yourself for a shock: every single one of those hysterical accusations is true.
But not one of them is true for the whole country.
They may well be true for individual constituencies… Though no-one knows for a fact which ones, because voters change their minds. OK, with quite a few you can make a pretty good guess, and most of the time it’ll be right – but even then, it’s only a probability, and in only one seat at a time.
The newspapers and leaflets and soundbites that say it applies across the whole country – like the literally millions of Unite-funded Labour leaflets claiming it’s between Labour and the Tories in seats where the Tories are in a poor third place and there’s either a Liberal Democrat MP already or perhaps soon will be – are simply telling a massive, shameless lie. It doesn’t say much for any positive reasons for voting, does it?
Lib Dems Must Really Want To Be Either Labour Or Tory, Mustn’t They?
Yesterday, I saw Gordon Brown on TV saying that the Liberal Democrats really agreed with Labour – while his unelected crony Lord Adonis has made this into an art form (my friends Stephen and Prateek, like most Lib Dems, are not impressed) – and David Cameron on TV saying that the Liberal Democrats were really closer to the Conservatives. At the same time, I saw Conservative leaflets claiming a Lib Dem vote was a vote for Labour, and yet more Labour leaflets claiming – usually shrieking hysterically, insofar as you can do that on paper – that a Lib Dem vote was a vote for the Tories.
Here’s a newsflash. While Labour and the Tories both try alternately to insult, bully and love-bomb Liberal Democrat voters into supporting them, Liberal Democrats aren’t Labour or Tories. Most of us believe that the Conservatives and Labour are much closer to each other than they are to us: whether ideologically, with both hideously authoritarian; or on their near-identical records in government of green inaction, centralisation and warmongering; or just for a laugh about the Labservatives. But that’s a teeny bit of negativity coming through.
Let me ask a simple, positive question about why you think Liberal Democrats are Liberal Democrats: it’s much, much easier to get ahead and get power in a slightly bigger party that, thanks to the electoral system, has alternated in absolute power for most of the last century. I can see why people would become Labour or Tory even if they don’t really agree with them at heart, because, pragmatically, it makes a kind of sense. But given what a struggle it is even to be heard, let alone win power as Lib Dems – though we’re on 23% in the polls today, and have 63 MPs, when I joined we were on 19 MPs and struggling to make 5% – why on Earth would we bother if we didn’t believe in it?
A Positive Vote
Some Liberal Democrat supporters this election have got tired of all the negative campaigning and anti-voting, and set up a new Positive Voting site. Why not take a look? As opinion polls have often said – if everyone who said they’d vote Liberal Democrat ‘if they could win’ voted Lib Dem… Then we’d win.
If you’re passionately in favour of the Conservatives, or Labour, or any of the others, and if you’re really not keen on the Lib Dems… Well, then don’t vote Lib Dem. But why not take a look at what we stand for, if you’re not sure, and if you like what the Liberal Democrats say – then vote for us. Don’t be bullied into something you loathe fractionally less than something else.
Here’s the full Liberal Democrat Manifesto.
Or you could just read Nick Clegg’s and Vince Cable’s top priorities.
For me, I’d say vote Liberal Democrat for fairness. For freedom. For a green future. To fight poverty, ignorance and conformity.
And because we’re the only party that’s had the honesty to put all the figures in our Manifesto so you can work out for yourself if the sums add up.
The more votes and the more seats Liberal Democrats win, the more likely it is that Liberal Democrat policies will count in the next Parliament. Even while Labour’s had absolute power on a third of the vote, we’ve still made the difference on issues like the Gurkhas and civil liberties: every Lib Dem vote increases the chance of a Lib Dem government, or at least of stopping the other two being able to do every single thing they want to without anything like majority support and let some new ideas in for a change.
Which brings me to my final reason for a positive vote for the Liberal Democrats – even if you’re not a Liberal Democrat by natural inclination. If you think more voices need to be heard in politics… If you think absolute power when most voters oppose you isn’t healthy… If you think a government should represent the people… Then vote Liberal Democrat, not to shore up the system, nor to inherit it, but to break it open.
Because, you see, electing MPs by proportional representation would all but eliminate feeling you have to make a choice between the lesser of two evils when there’s something better on offer. Of course it wouldn’t stop people and parties campaigning negatively in other ways – there’ll always be attacks, and that’s an argument for another day – but it would cut off at the knees most of those daft ‘voting X is only a vote for Y’ babbles. Your X would simply be your X – or, in the Single Transferable Vote system the Lib Dems prefer, your 123: putting it simply, most types of PR give fair shares but too much power to parties, but STV gives voters a double power. Not only does it reflect your votes in proportion, but it lets you choose which individual candidates you want, either within or across different parties. Sounds a bit technical? It would mean the safe seats that led to the lazy arrogance of the MPs who most abused their expenses would be swept away, too.
The Conservatives will never choose to back proportional representation – unless actually letting the people in is the only way they can get power. And we all know now that Labour will never change the system on their own. In 1997, they had the largest majority in the House of Commons (on one of the lowest pluralities of votes) for a century. They promised in their manifesto that they would hold a referendum on proportional representation. They had the power to do it: they didn’t. They made the same promise in 2001. They broke it again. Last year, with defeat staring him in the face, Gordon Brown promised a referendum on ‘the Alternative Vote’ – a half-way system does give preferential voting, but that’s often even less proportional than the one we have now (at random). Then, just a week ago, they dropped that policy in the House of Commons. Now they promise to bring it back after the election. Of course you will, Gordon. No. You broke your promise when you had power, then broke it again, and again: offering a much weaker policy at some time in the future doesn’t deserve a second glance (though you might take a pause to realise that the Labour leaflets pretending sitting Lib Dem MPs can’t win deceitfully pretend the country is one big seat, despite the fact they’ve been the main protectors of it being lots of little ones).
A vote for the Liberal Democrats is a vote to deliver real change. It’s not the only possible vote for change in all seats: if making every vote count is your main aim, then in Scotland or Wales you might look to see if Plaid Cymru or the SNP are ahead in your seat, while in one seat in England – Brighton Pavilion – the Greens have a decent chance. I’d argue even then that you should vote Liberal Democrat, of course, but that’s because I do passionately believe that we need a party that’s fair, liberal and green, and mine’s the only one that’s all three. And I’ve already given you my reason my STV’s a better, more voter-powerful system of proportional representation than those other parties support.
If you support any smaller party, or even if you are Labour or Conservative supporter, and you want proportional representation, so every vote counts – then in nine out of ten Westminster Parliament seats the Liberal Democrats are almost certainly the party which is best-placed to gain PR. So, why not give us a try? If enough people support us this time, we are committed to changing the system – and then all those leaflets can go in the dustbin, and you can vote safely for your first choice for ever afterwards. Where the Labservatives want to scare you into voting for them by keeping the crooked system that might make you feel that’s necessary, the Liberal Democrats want to break open the system and run the risk you’ll then feel free to run to someone else. I think that’s a better way, don’t you?
And finally (courtesy of my friend Andrew)… Who do you get into bed with if you vote Liberal Democrat? The dreadful truth!
Labels: British Politics, Labservative, Liberal Democrats, Proportional Representation, The Golden Dozen
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Liveblogging BBC 10pm News 14th April
“Tonight at ten, fair taxes and cleaner politics – the Lib Dem appeal to voters.”For the first time in nine election days, the Liberal Democrats are given top billing – though, despite Labour and the Tories getting consistent main BBC headlines for their manifestos, the Lib Dems weren’t top during the day.
“Later” headlines: BNP given plug for later on. Two supportive quotes from public for them. None against. Unbalanced – as ever, media talk up the BNP way out of proportion to their support.
Liberal Democrat Manifesto Launch: Fairness
Click here to read the full Liberal Democrat Manifesto, with every policy paid for in figures you can read in full.
22.01
Liberal Democrat Manifesto launch – Nick Robinson sets the scene, as ever, by talking about a Hung Parliament.
Clip of Nick Clegg speaking – setting out the Lib Dem top four pledges about fairness.
Swiftly cuts to Nick Robinson speaking. Rattles breathlessly through some spending cuts. As ever, he has much more time than the real Nick.
“The figures are there for everyone to see,” says Nick Clegg – every penny’s accounted for.
Robinson voiceover misrepresents the IFS, then asks about tax avoidance figures in the big Lib Dem tax cut for low and middle earners: Robinson edits Nick’s answer to imply whole of £17 billion cut coming from tax avoidance – without even saying what the tax avoidance policy is (new legislation, not just an ‘aim’).
Robinson notes – with quote shots – that Cameron and Brown were being very nice to the Lib Dems today; links to Lib Dems voters, not Hung Parliament.
22.05
Huw explains all five ways in which Lib Dem £700 tax cuts are to be paid for according to our detailed costings – better late than never, but the misleading impression’s already been given.
Stephanie Flanders claims to fact-check the figures.
Poorest fifth of earners pay 38.7% in tax
Richest fifth of earners pay 34.9% in tax
She talks about the poorest families – not the poorest earners. This is comparing apples and oranges, but she doesn’t admit it. And never mentions marginal tax rates. Talk about added income from benefits – but ignoring that not all lower earners are entitled to tax credits, so they aren’t helped by them. Also ignoring that keeping your own money rather than have to apply to the Govt not only adds to self-esteem but means you don’t have to get involved in all the tax credit cock-ups – which they don’t mention.
Quote from IFS without facts to back it up. BBC at no point says that Lib Dem figures are from the Office of National Statistics – not from the Lib Dems. Implies all facts on the Fabian Society’s highly partial side, when in fact the UK’s largest factual body supplied the Lib Dem figures. Also doesn’t talk about who would gain – just singles out a few people who won’t. They do say it’s the biggest tax cut in modern times: so isn’t it strange that the BBC can’t bring themselves to say who all that money would actually go to?
Some of the poorest don’t gain, says Flanders – but doesn’t say that they won’t get income tax cuts because they don’t pay tax.
David Laws – it’s not a general tax cut. It’s all paid for by rises in other taxes. BBC treat this as if it’s some revelation they’ve unearthed, when in fact the Lib Dems have been saying almost exactly the same about a Green Tax Switch for three years: though the details of the policy have been updated, it has always been the case that for every penny Lib Dems cut taxes by, other taxes will rise on the wealthiest.
“The Liberal Democrats have got some credit today putting more numbers in their Manifesto than the other two parties, and they have much more ambitious tax plans.”Misleading at best, deceitful at worst – implies other parties have supplied any costings figures at all. That is untrue. The Liberal Democrats have full costings printed in their Manifesto which you can see with a couple of clicks: the Labservatives have none.
Flanders flat-out states won’t help poorest – when in fact Lib Dems will help lowest-paid. Highly partial – seems to have been taken straight from Labour Party attack book that says the poor shouldn’t be allowed to benefit if it means the middle will too. Richard adds that she claims not to know who some of the tax rises will hit: in fact, we set out exactly where they hit, but she’d have to do something intelligent like explain how behaviour affects impact – such as how often you fly, and how the airlines fill their planes – which is of course the point of green taxes.
22.09
Cameron says TV debates might be dull and boring and, oh, God, don’t tune in, please, don’t watch, you won’t enjoy it, just listen to the Tory spin the day after which will say I’ve won even if I fuck it up completely.
I may have paraphrased.
Tiny clips of Brown and Clegg on debate, then lots on the process, behind scenes at ITV for tomorrow’s debate.
22.13
Robinson says Brown and Cameron are both saying the other will win – and that both (again, excluding Lib Dems) have people from Obama team in to help.
All parties practicing. He names the Labour and Tories playing the opposite numbers – doesn’t bother naming the Lib Dems.
Afterthought: “The big difference here is Nick Clegg.”
22.15
Moves on to hopeful genetic medical breakthrough. This was the lead at 6pm.
…
22.24
Short item announcing there’s no evidence of wrongdoing in climate change inquiry. Richard snorts, quite rightly, that if there had been it would have been the top story!
Barking
22.27
Moves to Barking with James Landale to talk about the BNP.
Shows BNP hand on BBC camera.
Griffin talks about immigration.
Man who wants face hidden says Griffin’s a racist. Griffin laughs unconvincingly and denies it.
Other vox pops in doorways.
Landale talks about economic migrants in last ten years.
Hodge admits Labour has ignored the area. “What we haven’t done is listened hard enough to the fears…”
Labour claims that everyone has to vote Labour to stop the BNP – unbelievable chutzpah. They ignored the area, they let down the area, then demand to be rewarded for causing the rise of the BNP!
One sentence from Tory, one sentence from Lib Dem (the BNP have no substance, just riding on fears).
“Barking is a testing ground for politics.” Hardly – talking up the BNP. They have one chance out of 650, and that’s only because Labour and the media talk them up.
22.31
Move onto the return of Hair to the stage. Hippie shit it may be, but I like the songs (and the nudity, obviously).
Bankers
22.34
London news – and on Brown’s apology for getting it wrong on the banks. After thirteen years in power, he finally realises you have to make decisions “in the whole national interest.” So a macroeconomic story is “London,” yet Barking is national? Strange.
Good opening on actual policies, though: “When it comes to tackling bankers, the Liberal Democrats are the most radical.” With clip of Matthew Oakeshott, then just report for Labour and Tories (clips of them later). This is the first news item (aside from the one above that’s specifically a Lib Dem story) all election where the BBC’s given the Liberal Democrats the best coverage, and that by about five extra seconds. Are BBC London editors less biased?
Mike Ramsden on Brown:
“The Conservatives say this is an extraordinary admission. The Liberal Democrats say, in effect, ‘we told you so’.”22.37
And still more Paul Whiffen. He’s shouted vile racist abuse, but he’s actually been sacked as a UKIP candidate for being critical of the Queen.
22.38
Baby Peter story with Ed Balls.
Tories Split
22.40
Tory split story – Cameron’s written to everyone in Croydon Central to say ‘Don’t vote for Andrew Pelling,’ the sitting Tory MP. Pelling attacks him for extreme negative campaigning.
The Tory candidate is a former aide to Lord Ashcroft. He denies taking any Ashcroft money. He looks very nervous, and denies the party’s given up on him.
Labour “big hitters” have been in the constituency. Labour candidate gets a line, then a very brief bit from the Lib Dem.
All told, easily the best coverage of the Liberal Democrats since the election began – despite patently partial and misleading economic “analysis”.
Note – neither Richard nor I are feeling physically up to helping out at Lib Dem HQ tonight (I’m not too well, he’s been doing it too much and is knackered). I am, of course, still pro-Lib Dem, but still edited and instructed by no-one.
Incidentally, I was Chair of my party’s youth wing for a year, some time back. So was Nick Robinson. I always make it clear I’m a Liberal Democrat: he is, of course, strangely reluctant to mention his high-flying Toryness, despite the fact that I don’t talk from Lib Dem press releases, while he often gets his lines from Tory ones.
Labels: BBC, Bigotry, British Politics, Liberal Democrats, Tax
Pillow Talk
Where do you get your pillows? What are they like? How do you find ones that suit you? I ask because this week’s been a pain in the neck for me – I cricked my neck nastily on Saturday, and have since been in a lot of neck and upper back pain (plus a phlegmy sore throat, but no, I’ve not considered neck amputation), which means I’ve been spending rather more time mostly unsuccessfully trying to sleep than usual. And I’m not happy with my pillows – they’re just too soft, and I can’t find anywhere that sells firm ones.
You’d think it would be very simple, that with so many bed shops, furnishing shops and even supermarkets selling pillows there would be plenty of choice. Yet they all seem to be soft, very soft or ultra-soft, with no catering for those of us who prefer something with a bit less give to it. It doesn’t help that pillows in stores tend to be tightly bagged, which leads only to disappointment once you open them up and they go all saggy. Yet neither Richard nor I like sinking into pillows.
No thanks to feathers, by the way. They always seem to stick out and jab you, don’t they?
What I’m looking for is very simple. A pillow that’s quite firm under my head. I don’t care if it’s cheap or artificial – I just want one with minimal give, and no-one seems to stock them. Any ideas?
You’d think it would be very simple, that with so many bed shops, furnishing shops and even supermarkets selling pillows there would be plenty of choice. Yet they all seem to be soft, very soft or ultra-soft, with no catering for those of us who prefer something with a bit less give to it. It doesn’t help that pillows in stores tend to be tightly bagged, which leads only to disappointment once you open them up and they go all saggy. Yet neither Richard nor I like sinking into pillows.
No thanks to feathers, by the way. They always seem to stick out and jab you, don’t they?
What I’m looking for is very simple. A pillow that’s quite firm under my head. I don’t care if it’s cheap or artificial – I just want one with minimal give, and no-one seems to stock them. Any ideas?
Saturday, April 10, 2010
Nick and Vince Answer: “Why Vote Lib Dem?”
I don’t know what I’m going to be able to write about during this election campaign. I want to help at least five Liberal Democrat candidates; I want to volunteer at Lib Dem HQ; I know my poor health’s going to get in the way, as always. And I want to write about the election, not just getting pissed off with other parties but about my positive reasons to vote Lib Dem. So, in case I’m too ill, or too tired, or too busy, here’s a start: Nick Clegg and Vince Cable’s reasons to vote Lib Dem. It’s about fairness.
The Liberal Democrat constitution starts by saying that what we do, what we are is based on our values of Liberty, Equality and Community. Our purpose is to free people from poverty, ignorance and conformity. That’s why fairness was a key part of the Liberal Democrat campaigns in 2001 and 2005, and why for the last five years our policies have increasingly been aimed at creating greater fairness – not least economic fairness, in a society where under both the Tories and then under Labour, the gap between rich and poor has always widened, and in a tax system where under both the Tories and then under Labour, the richest in society pay a smaller proportion of their income in tax than the poorest.
For the last year, the Liberal Democrats have been campaigning on four key ways to make Britain a fairer place:
I’ve got my own beliefs and my own reasons to support the Lib Dems, but – though I hope to find time and energy to get on to those too – you might think it only fair that I tell you directly why Liberal Democrat Leader Nick Clegg is asking you to support him. He set out those four themes in detail at our Conference last month in Birmingham; click here to watch or read the whole speech.
This is why Nick wants a vote for the Liberal Democrats:
When Liberal Democrat Shadow Chancellor Vince Cable won the Channel 4 Ask the Chancellors debate on the 29th of March – my bias or my observation? I’m confident enough in Vince to say, don’t listen to the spin, just watch the whole thing and I think most of you will agree with me – he did something considered unusual: he answered the questions. He was measured, and sensible, and positive (even when giving bad news). But in his closing statement, he showed passion as he finally went on the attack.
This is why Vince wants a vote for the Liberal Democrats:
Update: Now you can read the full Liberal Democrat Manifesto, complete with all the figures at the back so you can see how every priority is paid for – the only party with fully worked-out costings.
Fairness
The Liberal Democrat constitution starts by saying that what we do, what we are is based on our values of Liberty, Equality and Community. Our purpose is to free people from poverty, ignorance and conformity. That’s why fairness was a key part of the Liberal Democrat campaigns in 2001 and 2005, and why for the last five years our policies have increasingly been aimed at creating greater fairness – not least economic fairness, in a society where under both the Tories and then under Labour, the gap between rich and poor has always widened, and in a tax system where under both the Tories and then under Labour, the richest in society pay a smaller proportion of their income in tax than the poorest.
For the last year, the Liberal Democrats have been campaigning on four key ways to make Britain a fairer place:
- A Fair tax system, with no tax to pay on the first ten thousand pounds you earn – paid for by more tax from the richest and on pollution
- A Fair start for children, with a pupil premium for schools to invest in the least well off
- A Fair economy, rebalanced to stand up to bankers and with investment in new green jobs to start the country growing again
- Fair, clean, open politics, including fair votes, the ability to sack your MP if they let you down, no more unelected second chamber so no more cronies, and a Freedom Bill to scrap many of Labour’s unfair 4,300 new laws.
Nick Clegg: “Why Vote Lib Dem?”
I’ve got my own beliefs and my own reasons to support the Lib Dems, but – though I hope to find time and energy to get on to those too – you might think it only fair that I tell you directly why Liberal Democrat Leader Nick Clegg is asking you to support him. He set out those four themes in detail at our Conference last month in Birmingham; click here to watch or read the whole speech.
This is why Nick wants a vote for the Liberal Democrats:
“Shall I tell you the one phrase that bothers me more than any other? It’s this.
‘That’s just the way things are’.
“No. The way things are is not the way they have to be.
”We do not have to live in a country where the poorest pay the biggest chunk of their income in tax. We do not have to live in a country where politics is the plaything of wealthy donors and corrupt MPs. We do not have to live in a country where the banks can profiteer at the expense of everybody else and our climate is in jeopardy. We do not have to live in a country where children’s chances are determined more by their parents’ background than by their own hopes and dreams.
“There is a better way.”
“We will give you fairer taxes.
“We will make sure your child gets the fair start in life they deserve.
”We will create a new, fair economy where we are no longer held hostage by the greed of bankers in the City of London.
“And we will give you a fair, open and transparent politics after the gross betrayal of the expenses scandal.
“It really is as simple as that. No-one can guarantee what the election result will be. But I can guarantee what we will always fight to deliver.”
“When you think about who to vote for remember that the future of your country is at stake.
“Whatever you do – do not settle for the way things are.
“Be demanding.
“Vote for what you believe in.
“Vote with your heart.”
“A vote for the Liberal Democrats is a commitment to hope and opportunity.
“It’s a vote that says:
“I want government to be honest and open.
“I want a green economy.
“I want fairer taxes.
“I want a fairer future for my children and for all our children.”
“And if you like what we say… If you share our values… If you want fair taxes, a fair start in life for your child, a fairer economy, and a new, fair politics… Vote for it.”
Vince Cable: “Why Vote Lib Dem?”
When Liberal Democrat Shadow Chancellor Vince Cable won the Channel 4 Ask the Chancellors debate on the 29th of March – my bias or my observation? I’m confident enough in Vince to say, don’t listen to the spin, just watch the whole thing and I think most of you will agree with me – he did something considered unusual: he answered the questions. He was measured, and sensible, and positive (even when giving bad news). But in his closing statement, he showed passion as he finally went on the attack.
This is why Vince wants a vote for the Liberal Democrats:
“I’ve set out my agenda. It’s financial discipline in the public sector; directed lending from banks to support small and medium-sized companies; we’ve got to have a fairer tax system; we’ve got to make the economy much less dependent on financial gambling. The question is – who can you trust to do it?
“The Labour Government led us into this mess; they have done severe damage to pensions and savings; they have wasted a vast amount of money on over-centralised public services.
“The Tories presided over two big recessions in office; they wasted most of the North Sea oil revenue; they sold off the family silver on the cheap; now they want to have another turn to get their noses in the trough and reward their rich backers.
“The Liberal Democrats are different. The Liberal Democrats are different. We got this crisis basically right. We are not beholden to either the super rich or militant unions.
“We have people of real experience who are committed to fairness. We want a change of government. Yes, we want a change of government. But it’s got to be a change for the better – not for the worse.”
Update: Now you can read the full Liberal Democrat Manifesto, complete with all the figures at the back so you can see how every priority is paid for – the only party with fully worked-out costings.
Labels: British Politics, Liberal Democrat Conferences, Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg, Tax, What the Lib Dems Stand For
Thursday, April 08, 2010
Liveblogging BBC 10pm News 8th April
Headline: pressure on Labour on NI
Tories reveal more business backers (yawn – why are the BBC falling for this?)
Labour hits back, apparently
Clips of Brown and Cameron talking
Image of Nick Clegg – but no speech (11 seconds in first 4 minutes)
Samantha Cameron coming up. Sexist tripe warning.
22.02
More than 80 prominent businessmen (not a single woman, the BBC implies) now backing Tories. Amazing! Unions apparently backing Labour, too. Still treating this as if it’s news: good heavens. What, the Labservatives’ wealthy interest group backers are backing the Labservatives? Who else here fainted from sheer surprise?
Landale: Can Labour rebut, from back foot?
Imagine of Brown and Cameron – no Nick – on an NI card
Brown press conference – speaks
Cameron press conference – speaks (Caine in background). Significantly longer.
And on to Stuart Rose backing Tories on NI, to no-one’s surprise.
22.04
Nick C’s first words – on Tory tax bribes paid for by VAT bombshell
Under a minute
Back to pics of Brown and Cameron for roundup.
22.05
Huw: NI has underlined clear difference between Labour and the Conservatives.
Hugh Pym. “Hugh?” “Yes, Huw.” Descending into parody now.
Presents analysis of Tory spending plans, with “Reality Check” graphics.
£6bn isn’t much out of total public spending £704bn.
Bizarre quote from IFS – quotes Tories, but gives no view on whether or not they add up! Just BBC editing?
Labour says efficiency savings can’t be done.
“And they’ve been backed by some public spending experts.” Quote from one.
Not a peep about Lib Dems.
22.08
Cameron and Caine reported on national citizens’ service. Caine gets speech.
22.08
Huw “Now, in a month’s time, the LD Leader could find himself holding the balance of power…”
Nick ‘Mate of Dave Cameron’ Robinson: “Early morning in the home of the man who knows he won’t be our next Prime Minister – but could decide who is.”
Robinson says no voters in sight (camera swivels) to show cameras and Lib Dem candidates.
Says Tories say they don’t need VAT on voiceover. Doesn’t let Nick refute.
22.10
Finally a couple of words from Nick and Charles on Lib Dem Scotland launch. Less than 30 secs the both.
“Mr Clegg travels like an American tourist” taking in many stops in a day. Tiny clip of Nick speaking in Bristol.
One line from Nick C, then talks to voters. Robinson: “Did you know who he was before he came in? What’s his name?” Didn’t ask that of anyone else.
22.12
Nick R then asks about Nick C’s tax plans on the bus. At last, Nick C gets a word in edgeways.
Robinson allows a few answers, but talks over footage in ratio 3:1 over Nick C, even in the Nick C piece. Why bother having the politicians on at all? Wouldn’t making ‘news’ all journalists talking to journalists stop actual facts getting in the way?
“In election time, Mr Clegg gets to use what looks like a ministerial car. Who knows – someone might offer him one.”
No “hung Parliament” framing for any Labour or Tory coverage.
22.13
Robinson: “I think both sides agree the Tories have won the politics of the first week, but Lab and Lib Dem hope they may yet lose the economics.” Only two sides. Bugger off, you biased Tory git.
Claims Lib Dems and others want to talk about gain, not pain: “You know what? There’s an election coming. They don’t want you to know the bad news.”
Flat-out lie – Vince Cable has set out large, definite cuts, not just vague “efficiency savings”.
BBC has two agendas: ‘Only two parties matter’ and ‘they’re all the same’. Disgusting abuse of ‘fair coverage’.
Note: no mention of Lib Dem tax plan – which is fully costed by taxing rich and pollution, and gives low and middle-income workers £700 back; nearly five times as much as the Tory plan they can’t pay for (except with VAT).
I can see why Labour and the Tories have a vested interest in not letting the Lib Dem policy be heard. What’s the BBC’s excuse? For more about how the tax system works than you will ever hear from the BBC, read Millennium’s latest General Election briefing.
22.14
“It was a dark day for motorists…” Next piece.
Still, we laughed on hearing “The Duchess of Cornwall…” on one TV news and the Sex Pistols’ God Save the Queen on the other in the next room! It’s a shame – we’re sad about Malcolm McLaren.
22.28
Plaid Cymru launches their campaign in Ynys Mon. “With just a handful of MPs they have at Westminster, there’s little change they can deliver.” One line from Leader, then more voiceover round marketplace.
Plaid wants £300 million for any deal.
A better piece than their first launch, the day before yesterday, which looked like it was on a hastily propped stage at a jumble sale.
22.30
Huw: “The Leaders’ Wives are likely to have a bigger impact…”
And on to a puff piece about Mrs Cameron – who “wasn’t doing interviews” – at a charity farm.
Is this the very definition of a photo-op? Someone who isn’t standing for election and can’t be held to account.
“This morning, Gordon Brown was repeatedly questioned about Sarah Brown’s role…”
“Nick Clegg’s wife says she’s too busy working.” One line from Miriam.
Asks people if they’re undecided and if wives will help them choose. No suggestion that it may be sexist; only a hint that anyone might be put off by using women as smiling clothes horses attached to their husbands.
22.33
Top London news: UKIPper Paul Whiffen ranting about slave trade and four different racial groups apologises if “he may have upset anyone.” You don’t say.
“When I read the lies about UKIP people a racist party, I just saw red…” And proved they were right.
Tory in Ilford South attacks him for being anti-monarchist, bizarrely; Labour sitting MP attacks him; Lib Dem says everyone gets on round here in different communities.
Whiffen won’t appear. Just gives statement.
Piece finishes 22.37
Opinion poll talking to people on streets about nothing in particular…
22.40
One line: “Well, the Liberal Democrats launched their London election campaign today.” No Lib Dems speaking, over in 15 seconds and on to next item. So, letting people make up their minds about the key issues, then?
And on to talk about house prices. Is this being written by the Daily Mail?
Even Alistair Campbell says: “Only 15 shots of Nick Robinson in his package on Clegg. Wonder if broadcasters might do away with politicians completely soon.” No big Lib Dem fan!
Note: On occasional nights when I’m feeling well enough, I’m volunteering at Lib Dem HQ in Central London. Amongst other things, I’m watching the news, and thought I’d share it with you. I’m not paid; I’m not contracted; I’m here because I’m a Lib Dem who’s been involved in several election campaigns and was asked if I could help from time to time. No-one sees – much less controls – what I write before I publish. No-one has asked me ‘Please don’t say that’. However, I am obviously not impartial. I believe, however, that I am no more biased than usual; I don’t think a robot would be any help. There are enough of those in the other parties – I hope Lib Dems are more idiosyncratic and, indeed, human.
Incidentally, I was Chair of my party’s youth wing for a year, some time back. So was Nick Robinson. I always make it clear I’m a Liberal Democrat: he is, of course, strangely reluctant to mention his high-flying Toryness, despite the fact that I don’t talk from Lib Dem press releases, while he often gets his lines from Tory ones.
Tories reveal more business backers (yawn – why are the BBC falling for this?)
Labour hits back, apparently
Clips of Brown and Cameron talking
Image of Nick Clegg – but no speech (11 seconds in first 4 minutes)
Samantha Cameron coming up. Sexist tripe warning.
22.02
More than 80 prominent businessmen (not a single woman, the BBC implies) now backing Tories. Amazing! Unions apparently backing Labour, too. Still treating this as if it’s news: good heavens. What, the Labservatives’ wealthy interest group backers are backing the Labservatives? Who else here fainted from sheer surprise?
Landale: Can Labour rebut, from back foot?
Imagine of Brown and Cameron – no Nick – on an NI card
Brown press conference – speaks
Cameron press conference – speaks (Caine in background). Significantly longer.
And on to Stuart Rose backing Tories on NI, to no-one’s surprise.
22.04
Nick C’s first words – on Tory tax bribes paid for by VAT bombshell
Under a minute
Back to pics of Brown and Cameron for roundup.
22.05
Huw: NI has underlined clear difference between Labour and the Conservatives.
Hugh Pym. “Hugh?” “Yes, Huw.” Descending into parody now.
Presents analysis of Tory spending plans, with “Reality Check” graphics.
£6bn isn’t much out of total public spending £704bn.
Bizarre quote from IFS – quotes Tories, but gives no view on whether or not they add up! Just BBC editing?
Labour says efficiency savings can’t be done.
“And they’ve been backed by some public spending experts.” Quote from one.
Not a peep about Lib Dems.
22.08
Cameron and Caine reported on national citizens’ service. Caine gets speech.
22.08
Huw “Now, in a month’s time, the LD Leader could find himself holding the balance of power…”
Nick ‘Mate of Dave Cameron’ Robinson: “Early morning in the home of the man who knows he won’t be our next Prime Minister – but could decide who is.”
Robinson says no voters in sight (camera swivels) to show cameras and Lib Dem candidates.
Says Tories say they don’t need VAT on voiceover. Doesn’t let Nick refute.
22.10
Finally a couple of words from Nick and Charles on Lib Dem Scotland launch. Less than 30 secs the both.
“Mr Clegg travels like an American tourist” taking in many stops in a day. Tiny clip of Nick speaking in Bristol.
One line from Nick C, then talks to voters. Robinson: “Did you know who he was before he came in? What’s his name?” Didn’t ask that of anyone else.
22.12
Nick R then asks about Nick C’s tax plans on the bus. At last, Nick C gets a word in edgeways.
Robinson allows a few answers, but talks over footage in ratio 3:1 over Nick C, even in the Nick C piece. Why bother having the politicians on at all? Wouldn’t making ‘news’ all journalists talking to journalists stop actual facts getting in the way?
“In election time, Mr Clegg gets to use what looks like a ministerial car. Who knows – someone might offer him one.”
No “hung Parliament” framing for any Labour or Tory coverage.
22.13
Robinson: “I think both sides agree the Tories have won the politics of the first week, but Lab and Lib Dem hope they may yet lose the economics.” Only two sides. Bugger off, you biased Tory git.
Claims Lib Dems and others want to talk about gain, not pain: “You know what? There’s an election coming. They don’t want you to know the bad news.”
Flat-out lie – Vince Cable has set out large, definite cuts, not just vague “efficiency savings”.
BBC has two agendas: ‘Only two parties matter’ and ‘they’re all the same’. Disgusting abuse of ‘fair coverage’.
Note: no mention of Lib Dem tax plan – which is fully costed by taxing rich and pollution, and gives low and middle-income workers £700 back; nearly five times as much as the Tory plan they can’t pay for (except with VAT).
I can see why Labour and the Tories have a vested interest in not letting the Lib Dem policy be heard. What’s the BBC’s excuse? For more about how the tax system works than you will ever hear from the BBC, read Millennium’s latest General Election briefing.
22.14
“It was a dark day for motorists…” Next piece.
Still, we laughed on hearing “The Duchess of Cornwall…” on one TV news and the Sex Pistols’ God Save the Queen on the other in the next room! It’s a shame – we’re sad about Malcolm McLaren.
22.28
Plaid Cymru launches their campaign in Ynys Mon. “With just a handful of MPs they have at Westminster, there’s little change they can deliver.” One line from Leader, then more voiceover round marketplace.
Plaid wants £300 million for any deal.
A better piece than their first launch, the day before yesterday, which looked like it was on a hastily propped stage at a jumble sale.
22.30
Huw: “The Leaders’ Wives are likely to have a bigger impact…”
And on to a puff piece about Mrs Cameron – who “wasn’t doing interviews” – at a charity farm.
Is this the very definition of a photo-op? Someone who isn’t standing for election and can’t be held to account.
“This morning, Gordon Brown was repeatedly questioned about Sarah Brown’s role…”
“Nick Clegg’s wife says she’s too busy working.” One line from Miriam.
Asks people if they’re undecided and if wives will help them choose. No suggestion that it may be sexist; only a hint that anyone might be put off by using women as smiling clothes horses attached to their husbands.
22.33
Top London news: UKIPper Paul Whiffen ranting about slave trade and four different racial groups apologises if “he may have upset anyone.” You don’t say.
“When I read the lies about UKIP people a racist party, I just saw red…” And proved they were right.
Tory in Ilford South attacks him for being anti-monarchist, bizarrely; Labour sitting MP attacks him; Lib Dem says everyone gets on round here in different communities.
Whiffen won’t appear. Just gives statement.
Piece finishes 22.37
Opinion poll talking to people on streets about nothing in particular…
22.40
One line: “Well, the Liberal Democrats launched their London election campaign today.” No Lib Dems speaking, over in 15 seconds and on to next item. So, letting people make up their minds about the key issues, then?
And on to talk about house prices. Is this being written by the Daily Mail?
Even Alistair Campbell says: “Only 15 shots of Nick Robinson in his package on Clegg. Wonder if broadcasters might do away with politicians completely soon.” No big Lib Dem fan!
Note: On occasional nights when I’m feeling well enough, I’m volunteering at Lib Dem HQ in Central London. Amongst other things, I’m watching the news, and thought I’d share it with you. I’m not paid; I’m not contracted; I’m here because I’m a Lib Dem who’s been involved in several election campaigns and was asked if I could help from time to time. No-one sees – much less controls – what I write before I publish. No-one has asked me ‘Please don’t say that’. However, I am obviously not impartial. I believe, however, that I am no more biased than usual; I don’t think a robot would be any help. There are enough of those in the other parties – I hope Lib Dems are more idiosyncratic and, indeed, human.
Incidentally, I was Chair of my party’s youth wing for a year, some time back. So was Nick Robinson. I always make it clear I’m a Liberal Democrat: he is, of course, strangely reluctant to mention his high-flying Toryness, despite the fact that I don’t talk from Lib Dem press releases, while he often gets his lines from Tory ones.
Labels: BBC, British Politics, Conservatives, Labour, Liberal Democrats, Tax
Monday, April 05, 2010
Quatermass 2, Too! Plus Doctor Who: The Eleventh Hour, Sex, and A Harry Potter Legal Opinion
Want something groovy on the telly – yes, obviously, Doctor Who’s back, and something on that below – want something groovy on TV tonight? After BBC2 was splendid enough to show Hammer’s The Quatermass Xperiment on Friday, tonight at 1.50 they’re showing the even more splendid Quatermass 2, probably the best and tautest of all the Quatermass film remakes. It was also a major inspiration for Doctor Who: Spearhead From Space, large chunks of which you may recognise in last night’s The Eleventh Hour. And I’ve got a Harry Potter question for you: who do laws against underage wizardry protect?
1953, 1955, 1958: the three original BBC Quatermass serials, as I’ve said before, granddaddies of all UK TV drama and of Doctor Who in particular. Each were such successes that Hammer remade them for the big screen – the first two promptly, but with one each title randomly one character short and with a terrible ‘big name’ American lead. Ignore him, and tune in to BBC2 tonight at 1.50am (come on, it’s a bank holiday, you can sleep in). Monsters on an industrial scale, possession, conspiracy theories… It looks terrific, it’s scary, it’s intelligent – after the first film was exciting but pretty much lobotomised, original writer Nigel Kneale helped script the second one and did a far superior job of trimming the plot while retaining the point – and if you know your Doctor Who, you’ll recognise more than a little of it. Then, when you’re done, buy the proper BBC versions. Go on, go on, go on. They’re brilliant.
If you’ve read the Harry Potter books… Why? What started you? Richard and I, having resisted the bandwagon for the first couple of years, were driving back home from our parents on Boxing Day 2000 when we discovered that Radio 4 had given over eight hours of the day to Stephen Fry reading the whole of the first book. I ask you, what could be a better introduction (though still, to this day, I prefer us discovering the strangeness along with Harry, as we did after missing the first couple of chapters)? It helped, too, that we were hearing it together – all the better to make us laugh – and that we were pleasingly wrong-footed on a couple of the twists. Having read all the books since, Richard recently bought the whole set of Stephen Fry’s unabridged readings (7 CDs for the first book, 812 for the last, that sort of thing), and we’ve made a start on listening to them. So the other night, we found ourselves discussing a couple of questions…
You probably know that, in Harry Potter’s world, there are laws against the “Improper Use of Magic” – particularly against using magic in the presence of non-magical people. In theory, this is to protect Muggles, though it’s often hinted that it’s more to keep magic secret and safe for the users (as carelessly wiping Muggle minds rather than actually helping them is the usual response). The best known law about not using magic is, however, the Decree For the Reasonable Restriction of Underage Sorcery, 1875. If you’re a young and unqualified wizard, doesn’t it make sense to say you can’t use magic except under controlled conditions, to protect both yourself and any Muggles within spellcasting distance?
Anyway, the other day Richard raised a curio about underage wizards, which I’ll come to in a minute. But along the way, I thought of this particular law. Because, when you put it in the context of the rest of the wizarding world – and especially in the context of who makes the laws – it suddenly strikes me that the people who do best out of this law aren’t the ones it’s ostensibly there to protect at all. Because who tend to have the power and influence in the wizarding world? “Pureblood” wizards with money and power who don’t tend to care for Muggles and definitely don’t care for “Mudblood” wizards born to ordinary people.
So why not look at a law that saves Muggles from the “Improper Use of Magic” by underage wizards… When there are already laws protecting them against any wizard doing anything nasty to them? Why single out underage wizards for additional, unnecessary punishment if they perform any magic at all outside of school – and isn’t it convenient that, because enforcement relies on detecting the use of any magic by anyone in the area and not just the ‘accused’, that this law can only ever be enforced on young wizards living in Muggle homes?
It’s easy. The purpose of the Decree For the Reasonable Restriction of Underage Sorcery is to protect the interests of “pureblood” families and give them a leg-up against Muggle-born wizards (who, it appears, are more often than not more talented than families that have been wizarding for generations). If you live in a wizarding household, then… Hooray! You can use as much magic as you like, because the Ministry of Magic expects magic to ‘go off’ in your home and won’t notice if you add to it. But if your parents are Muggles… Oh dear. All that practicing magic that would be so handy for honing your skills for at least one-sixth of the year – longer if you go home for Christmas – is not just more difficult without other wizards to help you, but actively illegal. And if you break that law, you’re in danger of being expelled. Handy to keep those “Mudbloods” from being top of all the classes, eh? Wonder who thought that law up?
The question that Richard actually came up with was about magic without wands, and look away now if you’re offended by wandwork. If you’re very young and no-one knows you’re a wizard, you can do all sorts of thrilling things like fly, make panes of glass vanish and so on. Once you start learning to be a proper wizard at Hogwarts, you have a wand, and you can only do most types of magic through it. How come, asked my beloved, young wizards can unknowingly do all these fantastic and surprisingly powerful things, then get taught in such a way that they no longer can? Well, it’s possibly to do with social control, and stifling individuality, and making everyone just like everyone else – which is not impossible. But, personally, I think it’s rather like moving from having wet dreams to wanking. Once you’ve worked out how to, ah, perform your magic when you want to, you stop exploding at awkward moments without realising you’re doing it.
If you think it’s terrible to look for sexual innuendo in a children’s book, you really need toget out more read them. Why, in the second book there’s even a running joke about Percy wanking, which is cleaned up at the end of the book for the benefit of anyone who doesn’t get it. But, seriously, what are we meant to think on hearing that Percy spent all Summer locked in his room “polishing his Prefect’s badge”?
OK, OK, I know you’ve been waiting to find out what I’m going to say about the new Doctor Who. Well, in short: I loved him; I rather like her; I thought some of the early bits were a bit iffy but liked it better as it went along; I quite like the new titles but I’m not sold on the new theme music.
The trouble is, you see, that while Richard writes brilliant guest reviews on Millennium’s blog – here’s the link for Millennium’s Very Fluffy Diary, and here’s the link which, through time travel, will very shortly become his review, which I’d urge you to read as it will be far more well-argued and comprehensive than the following jumble of impressions – because Richard is good at getting his thoughts into coherent shape quite quickly, I like to sleep on my Doctor Who reviews for a couple of decades before saying something insightful.
Though, following on from the Harry Potter bit, there were a couple of elements in last night’s Doctor Who that I should bring to your attention: first, it may be just me, but the Doctor’s clearly enunciated capital letters for “Amy Pond – The Girl Who Waited” immediately called to mind Harry Potter – “The Boy Who Lived”; and second, my favourite series’ own wanking gags. In fact, what appears to be new Head Mekon Steven Moffat’s whole attitude to sex. I love his Press Gang, his Chalk, his Coupling, and much of his Jekyll, but I have more mixed feelings about his incredibly popular Doctor Who. Here’s where, incidentally, one of the 493 blog pieces I meant to write in the last couple of months but didn’t, provisionally entitled ‘Fear of Moffat’ in my head but marked to have a better title before I wrote it, might have come in useful. Anyway, the thing about Coupling is that it was a brilliant sitcom about heterosexual couples and male sexual embarrassment. And much as I loved it, it’s not the only perspective on sex (leaving aside for a minute whether you think Doctor Who should be about sex or not).
So… The Doctor notices what’s obviously porn on a laptop, and tells us so with his reaction and the embarrassed owner’s. Fine, liked it, funny. Then tells the owner to get a girlfriend, words straight from Steve, as the Doctor’s never been remotely interested in telling people how to make their relationships before. Then tells him to clear his Internet history, which could be about the Doctor’s top-secret science things, but comes across as Wanking: Point #3. Writer protests too much, I think – Steve likes wanking jokes but has the Doctor tell us off for wanking. Better point: Russell did ‘what’s on my hard drive’ more subtly, wittily and not preachily in his far less polished but far more inspired (and inspiring) Who re-launch Rose five years ago last week.
And if you claim the Doctor being suddenly censorious about people’s private lives might just be a one-off, what about his reaction on finding out Amy’s a kissogram: “You were a little girl five minutes ago!” So, more of the author having his cake and eating it: the new companion’s not a real woman, but something titillating – but just to make sure we don’t dwell on the author liking his women titillating, the Doctor tells her (and by extension us) off. Which has the effect of making her seem ‘naughtier’, and also not letting her own choices just go by as her own choices without an authority figure chiding her. She does get some plenty of good moments of standing up for herself, no doubt about that; I just winced when she’s thoroughly ‘put in her place’ about what she does for a living. And what about this Doctor, who suddenly acts like a censorious straight man, or possibly maiden aunt? He then does something more laid-back and alien, and – like Jon Pertwee’s Doctor before him (or indeed occasional Doctor Paul McGann in tonight’s Jonathan Creek with two of his Doctor Who co-stars) – strips off without any worries because he’s interested in trying on new clothes. Cue Coupling-style sexual embarrassment from bumbling implied-heterosexual man, and determination from spunky young woman: “Are you not going to turn your back?” “Nope.” I like the Doctor’s lack of concern about his own nudity (a subtle code that he’s not human; from a human perspective, he’s got a great face, and if he gets his kit off in a few years, when he’s had time to put on a bit of weight and a bit more chest hair…), but it simply doesn’t square with his ‘sex – oh, dear, it’s a bit naughty, I must chide you!’ attitude earlier in the episode, which is funny in a sit-com but wrong in a Time Lord’s mouth. Doctor, you don’t get embarrassed or disapproving about that sort of thing; you barely notice. Unlike humans, you don’t, if you’ll excuse the expression, give a toss.
If – and there’s no accounting for taste – you do want to see Jon Pertwee’s Doctor, just post-regeneration, in the buff in a hospital in mid-clothes-stealing, and if you think that sounds strangely familiar after last night’s episode, pick up a DVD of the excellent Spearhead From Space; you’ll spot that the bits of it that Russell T Davies didn’t use in Rose (and he used plenty of it) have now been used by Steven Moffat in The Eleventh Hour. It’s not just me that likes it, then. Even the hospital looks like it might have been picked to resemble the one in Spearhead. And it’s not just Pertwee’s first story that rang little bells in my head last night: as I watched Matt Smith’s debut, and wasn’t he brilliant, I thought, hmm, The Girl in the Fireplace / Castrovalva (even with a direct quotation) / Silence In the Library / Partners In Crime (or even The Stones of Blood, but more of that story later in the season, apparently) / The Empty Child / Aliens of London… And that criminal was very Zygon, though I loved the multiformness of it. If several of those earlier stories are Steven Moffat’s, well, that’s only to be expected. I’m not against Doctor Who writers who use the same themes and motifs over and over again – Robert Holmes and Russell T Davies spring to mind as among my favourites, among the most prolific, and among the most recyclable, but I am just slightly wary at how few stories Mr Moffat’s written before they start feeling samey-wamey. Come on, Steve, you wrote how many series of Press Gang all by yourself? You’re a brilliant writer; no-one can fit together an intricate plot like you do. Just try and fit together one that’s a bit less familiar once in a while. I do like your definition of Doctor Who as fairy tale, though – best ‘tone’ you could set for it. Keep that up!
Richard is currently sitting eleven feet in front of me writing something far more coherent, and I’d like to read it, so I’ll cut myself off before I wander over the entire episode. But here are a few more random thoughts. Lots of lovely character actors in the village (and back to a very traditional Doctor Who village; I loved the Doctor’s reaction to suddenly not having all the tools of a new Russell city about him – “No nuclear power station? Not even a little one?” Of course, even villages had nuclear power stations in the Pertwee days), and I bet we’ll be seeing them again. The one you probably didn’t recognise, but who had me cheering, was the old bloke with the car: I’ve met him, he’s a lovely chap, and he was once an overaged teenage rebel in a frock in a Doctor Who story in the 1960s. Points for getting which one. I greatly enjoyed the Doctor’s food-tasting and his shark-infested custard, but someone should have hit Murray Gold with the frying pan after doing the bacon in it. “And stay out!” No, no, mostly I love him too, at least when he’s not smothering a scene in ‘comedy’ plinky-plonks. I like his rousing new ‘Eleventh Doctor theme’ (if strangely un-strange), but think the new main theme arrangement’s a bit of a mess, like the different ‘moods’ released on ill-fated CDs in the late ’80s. And the Atraxi looked way cool. If also slightly like the Nestenes should have looked in Spearhead From Space…
Oh, look, what I’m trying to say is, I really liked it, but my head’s still full of too many impressions to nail it all down yet. I was instinctively prejudiced in favour of a much older Doctor, but Matt Smith’s first TV interview in the role won me over 15 months ago with his wild hands and dislocated but fiercely excited manner, and he’s really delivered with a Doctor that seems almost as strange as he does. Karen Gillan’s got real potential, and I hope she’s not always written in Steve Moffat’s ‘sexy woman’ niche. I cheered, fan that I am, when the new Doctor stepped out of the other Doctors to prove he’s exactly the same man – and while I groaned at the self-satisfied, ‘I can’t beat you so I’ll just tell you how hard I am’ ending of Silence In the Library, it worked for me to set up a new Doctor. That’s the one time you’re allowed it. Oh, and if you were looking at that endearingly eccentric (that is, not really thought through in a The Mind of Evil cut-outs sort of way) set of monster flashbacks, when I was suggesting an Eleven Faces of Doctor Who season the other day, I nearly but not quite chose The Two Doctors and The Sea Devils as options. Why not sit down and watch them now? I’m sure you want to find the exact couple of seconds each have just had repeated from their two and a half hours’ worth. And, oh! I nearly forgot! “Brand new TARDIS! Bit exciting.” All that metallic orange – doesn’t it look like the Dalek City from the Dr Who and the Daleks movie? But I’ll get used to it. Twelve years ago, I went off to the States for three weeks. When I came back, Richard had painted several of our walls bright orange. I love it now…
The most important thing is, it’s back, and I’m excited. That’s five ‘season openers’ this century in a row that have been lots of fun – and I can’t wait ’til next week. And, if you thought that was a late-night incoherent babble and a waste of your time, at least I wasn’t paid for it. Not a fairy tale, but a cautionary tale: the lovely Mr Simon Guerrier brings news of why paid reviewers simply aren’t worth the money…
Half-midnight update: I need sleep, but fortunately many, many Cadbury’s mini-eggs are sugar-rushing me to the finish. I must have prayed to Santa at some point (hopefully not a robot one).
Richard’s review guesting for Millennium is, of course, utterly clever, and insightful, and well-written, and well-structured, and, well… Fun. For all these reasons, you should scamper off and read it; for all these reasons, I’m very glad that I didn’t read it before I fired off my random observations. His pointing out that the Doctor may have unwittingly created his perfect companion, though, reminds me that Amy’s set up as the polar opposite of Rose and the other family-set Russell companions – the traditional orphan with an aunt who doesn’t care very much (though, unlike many of the Doctor’s past companions, her tragically deceased father was not a lord. As far as we yet know). And then, in as perfectly-falling-into-place a closing image as Steve Moffat wrote last time he did The Girl in the Fireplace, he overturns the whole thing. Or does he? Rory will hope so…
In other and still immensely exciting news, I’ve now just spotted two other reviews by dear friends of mine and incredibly clever people popping up: Jennie’s, who wasn’t much of a fan of Russell but loves this and makes a perfect point about the Lib Dems (no, no, it is on-topic); and Andrew’s, who hated Russell’s with a fiery passion, but likes this up to a point, tries not to “ruin your squee,” and is only slightly cheesed off about the similarities between The Eleventh Hour and a story he’s just written (and I’ve read Andrew’s story; I’m not sure if I prefer it to this one of Steve’s, but I definitely like it better than his last one…). Read them too! Now, time to up-end another tube of Mini-eggs (5 for £4 at Waitrose – bargain!).
Further update: the lovely Caron and Count Packula, Prince of Markness have also given their views on the new Who, while Simon Goldie wonders why Doctor Who has an appeal for so many Liberal Democrats (I have an idea). Wonder if any non-Lib Dems have any thoughts?
Time To Watch Quatermass 2
1953, 1955, 1958: the three original BBC Quatermass serials, as I’ve said before, granddaddies of all UK TV drama and of Doctor Who in particular. Each were such successes that Hammer remade them for the big screen – the first two promptly, but with one each title randomly one character short and with a terrible ‘big name’ American lead. Ignore him, and tune in to BBC2 tonight at 1.50am (come on, it’s a bank holiday, you can sleep in). Monsters on an industrial scale, possession, conspiracy theories… It looks terrific, it’s scary, it’s intelligent – after the first film was exciting but pretty much lobotomised, original writer Nigel Kneale helped script the second one and did a far superior job of trimming the plot while retaining the point – and if you know your Doctor Who, you’ll recognise more than a little of it. Then, when you’re done, buy the proper BBC versions. Go on, go on, go on. They’re brilliant.
Underage Wizardry Laws In Harry Potter: Protection or Protectionism?
If you’ve read the Harry Potter books… Why? What started you? Richard and I, having resisted the bandwagon for the first couple of years, were driving back home from our parents on Boxing Day 2000 when we discovered that Radio 4 had given over eight hours of the day to Stephen Fry reading the whole of the first book. I ask you, what could be a better introduction (though still, to this day, I prefer us discovering the strangeness along with Harry, as we did after missing the first couple of chapters)? It helped, too, that we were hearing it together – all the better to make us laugh – and that we were pleasingly wrong-footed on a couple of the twists. Having read all the books since, Richard recently bought the whole set of Stephen Fry’s unabridged readings (7 CDs for the first book, 812 for the last, that sort of thing), and we’ve made a start on listening to them. So the other night, we found ourselves discussing a couple of questions…
You probably know that, in Harry Potter’s world, there are laws against the “Improper Use of Magic” – particularly against using magic in the presence of non-magical people. In theory, this is to protect Muggles, though it’s often hinted that it’s more to keep magic secret and safe for the users (as carelessly wiping Muggle minds rather than actually helping them is the usual response). The best known law about not using magic is, however, the Decree For the Reasonable Restriction of Underage Sorcery, 1875. If you’re a young and unqualified wizard, doesn’t it make sense to say you can’t use magic except under controlled conditions, to protect both yourself and any Muggles within spellcasting distance?
Anyway, the other day Richard raised a curio about underage wizards, which I’ll come to in a minute. But along the way, I thought of this particular law. Because, when you put it in the context of the rest of the wizarding world – and especially in the context of who makes the laws – it suddenly strikes me that the people who do best out of this law aren’t the ones it’s ostensibly there to protect at all. Because who tend to have the power and influence in the wizarding world? “Pureblood” wizards with money and power who don’t tend to care for Muggles and definitely don’t care for “Mudblood” wizards born to ordinary people.
So why not look at a law that saves Muggles from the “Improper Use of Magic” by underage wizards… When there are already laws protecting them against any wizard doing anything nasty to them? Why single out underage wizards for additional, unnecessary punishment if they perform any magic at all outside of school – and isn’t it convenient that, because enforcement relies on detecting the use of any magic by anyone in the area and not just the ‘accused’, that this law can only ever be enforced on young wizards living in Muggle homes?
It’s easy. The purpose of the Decree For the Reasonable Restriction of Underage Sorcery is to protect the interests of “pureblood” families and give them a leg-up against Muggle-born wizards (who, it appears, are more often than not more talented than families that have been wizarding for generations). If you live in a wizarding household, then… Hooray! You can use as much magic as you like, because the Ministry of Magic expects magic to ‘go off’ in your home and won’t notice if you add to it. But if your parents are Muggles… Oh dear. All that practicing magic that would be so handy for honing your skills for at least one-sixth of the year – longer if you go home for Christmas – is not just more difficult without other wizards to help you, but actively illegal. And if you break that law, you’re in danger of being expelled. Handy to keep those “Mudbloods” from being top of all the classes, eh? Wonder who thought that law up?
The question that Richard actually came up with was about magic without wands, and look away now if you’re offended by wandwork. If you’re very young and no-one knows you’re a wizard, you can do all sorts of thrilling things like fly, make panes of glass vanish and so on. Once you start learning to be a proper wizard at Hogwarts, you have a wand, and you can only do most types of magic through it. How come, asked my beloved, young wizards can unknowingly do all these fantastic and surprisingly powerful things, then get taught in such a way that they no longer can? Well, it’s possibly to do with social control, and stifling individuality, and making everyone just like everyone else – which is not impossible. But, personally, I think it’s rather like moving from having wet dreams to wanking. Once you’ve worked out how to, ah, perform your magic when you want to, you stop exploding at awkward moments without realising you’re doing it.
If you think it’s terrible to look for sexual innuendo in a children’s book, you really need to
After The Eleventh Hour…
OK, OK, I know you’ve been waiting to find out what I’m going to say about the new Doctor Who. Well, in short: I loved him; I rather like her; I thought some of the early bits were a bit iffy but liked it better as it went along; I quite like the new titles but I’m not sold on the new theme music.
The trouble is, you see, that while Richard writes brilliant guest reviews on Millennium’s blog – here’s the link for Millennium’s Very Fluffy Diary, and here’s the link which, through time travel, will very shortly become his review, which I’d urge you to read as it will be far more well-argued and comprehensive than the following jumble of impressions – because Richard is good at getting his thoughts into coherent shape quite quickly, I like to sleep on my Doctor Who reviews for a couple of decades before saying something insightful.
There Now Follow A Couple of Stream of Consciousness Paragraphs About Sex Which You May Wish To Skip Because I’m Not Certain I’ll Agree With Myself In the Morning
Though, following on from the Harry Potter bit, there were a couple of elements in last night’s Doctor Who that I should bring to your attention: first, it may be just me, but the Doctor’s clearly enunciated capital letters for “Amy Pond – The Girl Who Waited” immediately called to mind Harry Potter – “The Boy Who Lived”; and second, my favourite series’ own wanking gags. In fact, what appears to be new Head Mekon Steven Moffat’s whole attitude to sex. I love his Press Gang, his Chalk, his Coupling, and much of his Jekyll, but I have more mixed feelings about his incredibly popular Doctor Who. Here’s where, incidentally, one of the 493 blog pieces I meant to write in the last couple of months but didn’t, provisionally entitled ‘Fear of Moffat’ in my head but marked to have a better title before I wrote it, might have come in useful. Anyway, the thing about Coupling is that it was a brilliant sitcom about heterosexual couples and male sexual embarrassment. And much as I loved it, it’s not the only perspective on sex (leaving aside for a minute whether you think Doctor Who should be about sex or not).
So… The Doctor notices what’s obviously porn on a laptop, and tells us so with his reaction and the embarrassed owner’s. Fine, liked it, funny. Then tells the owner to get a girlfriend, words straight from Steve, as the Doctor’s never been remotely interested in telling people how to make their relationships before. Then tells him to clear his Internet history, which could be about the Doctor’s top-secret science things, but comes across as Wanking: Point #3. Writer protests too much, I think – Steve likes wanking jokes but has the Doctor tell us off for wanking. Better point: Russell did ‘what’s on my hard drive’ more subtly, wittily and not preachily in his far less polished but far more inspired (and inspiring) Who re-launch Rose five years ago last week.
And if you claim the Doctor being suddenly censorious about people’s private lives might just be a one-off, what about his reaction on finding out Amy’s a kissogram: “You were a little girl five minutes ago!” So, more of the author having his cake and eating it: the new companion’s not a real woman, but something titillating – but just to make sure we don’t dwell on the author liking his women titillating, the Doctor tells her (and by extension us) off. Which has the effect of making her seem ‘naughtier’, and also not letting her own choices just go by as her own choices without an authority figure chiding her. She does get some plenty of good moments of standing up for herself, no doubt about that; I just winced when she’s thoroughly ‘put in her place’ about what she does for a living. And what about this Doctor, who suddenly acts like a censorious straight man, or possibly maiden aunt? He then does something more laid-back and alien, and – like Jon Pertwee’s Doctor before him (or indeed occasional Doctor Paul McGann in tonight’s Jonathan Creek with two of his Doctor Who co-stars) – strips off without any worries because he’s interested in trying on new clothes. Cue Coupling-style sexual embarrassment from bumbling implied-heterosexual man, and determination from spunky young woman: “Are you not going to turn your back?” “Nope.” I like the Doctor’s lack of concern about his own nudity (a subtle code that he’s not human; from a human perspective, he’s got a great face, and if he gets his kit off in a few years, when he’s had time to put on a bit of weight and a bit more chest hair…), but it simply doesn’t square with his ‘sex – oh, dear, it’s a bit naughty, I must chide you!’ attitude earlier in the episode, which is funny in a sit-com but wrong in a Time Lord’s mouth. Doctor, you don’t get embarrassed or disapproving about that sort of thing; you barely notice. Unlike humans, you don’t, if you’ll excuse the expression, give a toss.
…And I’m Back In the Room
If – and there’s no accounting for taste – you do want to see Jon Pertwee’s Doctor, just post-regeneration, in the buff in a hospital in mid-clothes-stealing, and if you think that sounds strangely familiar after last night’s episode, pick up a DVD of the excellent Spearhead From Space; you’ll spot that the bits of it that Russell T Davies didn’t use in Rose (and he used plenty of it) have now been used by Steven Moffat in The Eleventh Hour. It’s not just me that likes it, then. Even the hospital looks like it might have been picked to resemble the one in Spearhead. And it’s not just Pertwee’s first story that rang little bells in my head last night: as I watched Matt Smith’s debut, and wasn’t he brilliant, I thought, hmm, The Girl in the Fireplace / Castrovalva (even with a direct quotation) / Silence In the Library / Partners In Crime (or even The Stones of Blood, but more of that story later in the season, apparently) / The Empty Child / Aliens of London… And that criminal was very Zygon, though I loved the multiformness of it. If several of those earlier stories are Steven Moffat’s, well, that’s only to be expected. I’m not against Doctor Who writers who use the same themes and motifs over and over again – Robert Holmes and Russell T Davies spring to mind as among my favourites, among the most prolific, and among the most recyclable, but I am just slightly wary at how few stories Mr Moffat’s written before they start feeling samey-wamey. Come on, Steve, you wrote how many series of Press Gang all by yourself? You’re a brilliant writer; no-one can fit together an intricate plot like you do. Just try and fit together one that’s a bit less familiar once in a while. I do like your definition of Doctor Who as fairy tale, though – best ‘tone’ you could set for it. Keep that up!
Richard is currently sitting eleven feet in front of me writing something far more coherent, and I’d like to read it, so I’ll cut myself off before I wander over the entire episode. But here are a few more random thoughts. Lots of lovely character actors in the village (and back to a very traditional Doctor Who village; I loved the Doctor’s reaction to suddenly not having all the tools of a new Russell city about him – “No nuclear power station? Not even a little one?” Of course, even villages had nuclear power stations in the Pertwee days), and I bet we’ll be seeing them again. The one you probably didn’t recognise, but who had me cheering, was the old bloke with the car: I’ve met him, he’s a lovely chap, and he was once an overaged teenage rebel in a frock in a Doctor Who story in the 1960s. Points for getting which one. I greatly enjoyed the Doctor’s food-tasting and his shark-infested custard, but someone should have hit Murray Gold with the frying pan after doing the bacon in it. “And stay out!” No, no, mostly I love him too, at least when he’s not smothering a scene in ‘comedy’ plinky-plonks. I like his rousing new ‘Eleventh Doctor theme’ (if strangely un-strange), but think the new main theme arrangement’s a bit of a mess, like the different ‘moods’ released on ill-fated CDs in the late ’80s. And the Atraxi looked way cool. If also slightly like the Nestenes should have looked in Spearhead From Space…
Oh, look, what I’m trying to say is, I really liked it, but my head’s still full of too many impressions to nail it all down yet. I was instinctively prejudiced in favour of a much older Doctor, but Matt Smith’s first TV interview in the role won me over 15 months ago with his wild hands and dislocated but fiercely excited manner, and he’s really delivered with a Doctor that seems almost as strange as he does. Karen Gillan’s got real potential, and I hope she’s not always written in Steve Moffat’s ‘sexy woman’ niche. I cheered, fan that I am, when the new Doctor stepped out of the other Doctors to prove he’s exactly the same man – and while I groaned at the self-satisfied, ‘I can’t beat you so I’ll just tell you how hard I am’ ending of Silence In the Library, it worked for me to set up a new Doctor. That’s the one time you’re allowed it. Oh, and if you were looking at that endearingly eccentric (that is, not really thought through in a The Mind of Evil cut-outs sort of way) set of monster flashbacks, when I was suggesting an Eleven Faces of Doctor Who season the other day, I nearly but not quite chose The Two Doctors and The Sea Devils as options. Why not sit down and watch them now? I’m sure you want to find the exact couple of seconds each have just had repeated from their two and a half hours’ worth. And, oh! I nearly forgot! “Brand new TARDIS! Bit exciting.” All that metallic orange – doesn’t it look like the Dalek City from the Dr Who and the Daleks movie? But I’ll get used to it. Twelve years ago, I went off to the States for three weeks. When I came back, Richard had painted several of our walls bright orange. I love it now…
The most important thing is, it’s back, and I’m excited. That’s five ‘season openers’ this century in a row that have been lots of fun – and I can’t wait ’til next week. And, if you thought that was a late-night incoherent babble and a waste of your time, at least I wasn’t paid for it. Not a fairy tale, but a cautionary tale: the lovely Mr Simon Guerrier brings news of why paid reviewers simply aren’t worth the money…
Half-midnight update: I need sleep, but fortunately many, many Cadbury’s mini-eggs are sugar-rushing me to the finish. I must have prayed to Santa at some point (hopefully not a robot one).
Richard’s review guesting for Millennium is, of course, utterly clever, and insightful, and well-written, and well-structured, and, well… Fun. For all these reasons, you should scamper off and read it; for all these reasons, I’m very glad that I didn’t read it before I fired off my random observations. His pointing out that the Doctor may have unwittingly created his perfect companion, though, reminds me that Amy’s set up as the polar opposite of Rose and the other family-set Russell companions – the traditional orphan with an aunt who doesn’t care very much (though, unlike many of the Doctor’s past companions, her tragically deceased father was not a lord. As far as we yet know). And then, in as perfectly-falling-into-place a closing image as Steve Moffat wrote last time he did The Girl in the Fireplace, he overturns the whole thing. Or does he? Rory will hope so…
In other and still immensely exciting news, I’ve now just spotted two other reviews by dear friends of mine and incredibly clever people popping up: Jennie’s, who wasn’t much of a fan of Russell but loves this and makes a perfect point about the Lib Dems (no, no, it is on-topic); and Andrew’s, who hated Russell’s with a fiery passion, but likes this up to a point, tries not to “ruin your squee,” and is only slightly cheesed off about the similarities between The Eleventh Hour and a story he’s just written (and I’ve read Andrew’s story; I’m not sure if I prefer it to this one of Steve’s, but I definitely like it better than his last one…). Read them too! Now, time to up-end another tube of Mini-eggs (5 for £4 at Waitrose – bargain!).
Further update: the lovely Caron and Count Packula, Prince of Markness have also given their views on the new Who, while Simon Goldie wonders why Doctor Who has an appeal for so many Liberal Democrats (I have an idea). Wonder if any non-Lib Dems have any thoughts?
Labels: Doctor Who, Harry Potter, Jon Pertwee, Matt Smith, Obscure Doctor Who Jokes, Quatermass
Friday, April 02, 2010
Flash! Douglas Adams Meets Professor Quatermass
It’s an exciting day for sci-fi; you know’ll that Doctor Who returns tomorrow evening, and that tonight the final series of Ashes To Ashes begins. But there are also several other goodies on today which have had less of an advertising blitz. The three closest to my heart are on Radio 4 at 11 this morning – The Doctor and Douglas, celebrating Douglas Adams’ work on Doctor Who – and then competing for your attention at 1.30am on BBC2 and ITV1, the movies The Quatermass Experiment (five years to the day since BBC4’s later remake) and the fabulous Flash Gordon.
Just as The Hitchhiker’s Guide To the Galaxy kicked off on radio in 1978, Douglas Adams finally had a Doctor Who script accepted for Tom Baker’s Doctor – The Pirate Planet, one of the finest stories in one of Doctor Who’s finest series, 1978-79’s The Key To Time. So impressive were his ideas, and so far undiscovered were Douglas’ unhappy relationships with deadlines, that he was offered the job of script editor on the show – a slightly less powerful and certainly less prestigious but in most ways identical job to the modern Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat ‘lead writer’ / Executive Producer. His year as script editor, Season 17, still splits Doctor Who fans to this day; cheap and silly, or witty and brilliant? It’s certainly cheap – late ’70s inflation had just inflicted the series’ biggest ever budget cuts – but I love it to bits (and I’m one of the very few fans who seems to love the 1980-81 right after Douglas left, in many ways a reaction against the season before, every bit as much. They tend to be a bit polarising).
When another of Doctor Who’s most wonderfully playful authors, David Fisher, wasn’t able to do the rewrites on one of his two scripts for Douglas’ time as script editor, Douglas and producer Graham Williams took over the redrafting, lending the resultant story a unique collaborative quality. Tom Baker and Lalla Ward are both effortlessly wonderful in it (or at least they seem to be; by all accounts they put the effort into rewriting large chunks of it in rehearsals, too), Julian Glover is a superb villain, the musical score is gorgeous, much of it is filmed in Paris – in Paris! – and it’s the only story of the year that looks like it’s had much money spent on it. Thanks to an ITV strike meaning it was on against nothing but BBC2 and the test card, it won the highest viewing figures in Doctor Who’s history. It’s called City of Death, and it’s still today one of the most highly-regarded of all Doctor Who stories (but can I be heretical and say that Douglas’ The Pirate Planet is even better?).
The Pirate Planet is available on DVD as part of the marvellous The Key To Time box set – recently reissued, so if you hadn’t got it already, you can now – and City of Death, too, is out on DVD (complete with opinion from Steven Moffat, who likes City of Death but thinks Douglas wasn’t a good script editor. In another strike of heresy, I disagree with the Grand Moff, but I don’t have time to go into why here, except to say, watch his stories and aren’t the scripts great?). Of the other stories Douglas script-edited, Destiny of the Daleks is already available on DVD, the extras including grand tales of Douglas’ drinking tours, while another was released just this very week in a box with two other stories. The latest Doctor Who DVD boxed set is titled Myths and Legends, and includes three stories which have in common that each was inspired by Greek myths and each isa bit rubbish not completely at the top end of my favourite Doctor Whos. It’s all a cunning plan to get you to watch them first, and so lower your impossibly high expectations of the new series, you see. The Horns of Nimon, however, is by far the most entertaining of the three for me, and while the budget may be showing and a few of the performances are a little de trop, it’s worth it for Lalla Ward’s blistering Romana, one of the few times the Doctor’s companion is essentially playing the Doctor (while he dosses about), and – as you might expect from rather good former script editor Anthony Read writing the script and Douglas Adams overseeing it – a strong underlying story and some very sharp lines.
Next month, The Creature From the Pit is to be released on DVD, possibly the most hated of all the stories Douglas had a hand in, regarded as terrible science fiction with an embarrassingly badly designed monster. While the eponymous ‘creature’ is indeed hilarious, he’s terribly well-characterised, while the Doctor, the principal villains and Geoffrey Bayldon’s supporting character are superb. It’s a terrific script from David Fisher, too, an intelligent fable about free trade – and you don’t get many of them to the pound – that deconstructs the ‘monster’ story. In short, buy it and make up your own mind, and I’m confident that you’ll find every other fan on Earth is wrong and I am right that is in fact brilliant. Yes, I’m coming out heretic all over today (and speaking of heretics, look out for one of Oolon Colluphid’s books turning up in one of Douglas’ stories, and find out for yourself how important Douglas turned out to be to Richard Dawkins). That just leaves the as-yet-unreleased Nightmare of Eden, which again doesn’t look terribly impressive but is rather a good story, and Shada.
Shada… Shada… Shada… That one went a bit wrong. Douglas’ six-part finale was only half-shot before a BBC strike called it off for ever. Ish. I have to say, it’s far from Douglas’ best script, but it has its moments, so there are two versions worth looking out for. BBC Video released the half of it that had been completed along with some linking narration from Tom Baker a couple of decades ago, and hopefully that, too, will one day emerge on DVD. Alternatively, the lovely people at Big Finish produced an audio adaptation a few years ago starring Paul McGann instead of Tom, and while it’s not nearly as much fun as the ‘original’, it’s not at all bad, and has the undeniable virtue of being finished. Best of all, you can watch their Shada for free on the BBC website, with some flash animation making it a jerky sort-of cartoon and a fabulous song from Lalla Vs Kylie (click “Full screen” if it doesn’t work immediately; if anyone can save it onto a DVD for me, I’d be terribly grateful)!
Douglas never novelised his Doctor Who scripts – in part because he was rather busy avoiding other publishers’ deadlines, in larger part because Target Books couldn’t quite come to terms with a multi-million-selling author’s advance – but, though you can’t technically read them, you can in some practical ways manage it. Douglas, an early practitioner of recycling, put large amounts of City of Death and much larger ones of Shada into some of his books, notably Dirk Gently, while a rejected Doctor Who script forms the basis of Life, the Universe and Everything (as I wrote yesterday). You can also read ebooks of his three Doctor Who stories and the only other two Twentieth-Century Who TV stories that were never released by Target, available as labours of love from New Zealand fan site TSV. They’re not a patch on Douglas’ writing, but some of them are by professional authors themselves, and they’re not bad (though steer clear of another fan adaptation of City of Death produced by Zerinza magazine; I read it once, and it was ghastly).
Anyway, 11 o’clock’s caught up with me, so turn on Radio 4 and you’ll hear Jon Culshaw probably going through all the same sort of things.
There’s newer Doctor Who on BBC3 tonight, of course – a double bill of David Tennant’s grand finale, The End of Time, to get us all ready for Matt Smith tomorrow – but if you want to go back to the week when David got the job, how about The Quatermass Experiment – and if you want to see Timothy Dalton being another aristocratic bastard, how about Flash Gordon…?
The first ever BBC TV science fiction – in fact, the BBC’s first ever specially commissioned original drama serial – was written by another of the Twentieth Century’s most inspired authors, Nigel Kneale, back in 1953. Like Shada, though for different reasons, you can only see parts of the original, and yet there are remakes of this, too. The original series in fact went out live, television being in its infancy, and they only recorded the first third of it as it was broadcast (you can still see that much on the terrific DVD The Quatermass Collection, along with a pdf of the script).
If you’ve seen The Quatermass Experiment today, the chances are it was one of the two remakes: one a movie made in the mid-’50s by Hammer Films; the other a live broadcast that took place on BBC4 on 2nd April 2005. That was just days after news broke that Christopher Eccleston was to leave Doctor Who almost as soon as he’d started, and rumours abounded that David was to get the job. So, when his Dr Briscoe walks on to tend to a patient with a strange, alien infection in BBC4’s The Quatermass Experiment, Jason Flemyng’s Professor Quatermass very deliberately greets him not with the scripted “Hello, Gordon,” but with “Hello, Doctor.”
By one of those lovely quirks of TV scheduling, Hammer’s The Quatermass Xperiment is on tonight at 1.35am on BBC2. You can celebrate today’s Quatermass anniversary by making a double bill of them to see how they compare: the 2005 version is available to watch for free on MSN.
I’ve written about all four of the Quatermass serials before, and while the existing Quatermass II and Quatermass and the Pit are still among some of the best TV ever produced, I can’t help wondering what the rest of The Quatermass Experiment would have been like: the first episode is rather staid; the second suddenly leaps forward in pace and quality; what might the other four have done? But, instead, there are two complete (though both hugely abridged from the original) versions to judge. The film is often well-shot and atmospheric; it’s a thriller with a superbly played hunted man. But the star casting of Quatermass himself is a terrible mistake (Nigel Kneale’s views about actor Brian Donlevy were, on a good day, only just printable), while too much of the script becomes generic B-movie – not least the ending, which while exciting, entirely misses the point. The BBC4 version, on the other hand, is occasionally a little slow and worthy and, being a live production, it’s a little too obvious that most of it’s taking place in the same warehouse. It does, however, have an excellent cast – Jason Flemyng, David Tennant and Indira Varma, as well as a notably fine performance from Mark Gatiss – and the last ten minutes or so are absolutely gripping, remaining entirely true to the human spirit of the original script.
One day, I might watch the surviving two episodes of the 1953 serial, then the middle of the Hammer movie, then the climax of the BBC4 remake and see if that adds up to the best approximation of the story as written…
Hmm, well, this hasn’t gone in a flash, has it? I was dashing to write a few paragraphs before 11, and now I’ve listened to that Douglas programme – listen again on the BBC iPlayer if you missed it – which was just as I thought it would be, with a particularly fine set of interviewees and several opinions I disagreed with, while this article has grown from something crawling along my arm to the size of Westminster Abbey (if not the Tate Modern). But there was one more thing I was going to talk about for tonight. ITV1 is showing the 1980 Flash Gordon movie at 1.30am. I love Buster Crabbe and Charles Middleton; I sigh with disdain at macho later remakes; but this brightly coloured camp extravaganza is one of the most entertaining films ever made.
Peter Wyngarde steals it from behind a mask as the evil Klytus; Max von Sydow has the time of his life as the louchest emperor in the galaxy; the gorgeous red and gold design and Queen and Howard Blake’s score makes it sumptuous sensory treat. There are some lines you must know from the Queen title song that you can’t resist saying along, I know – put your hands on your hips to do the fabulous Kala:
But best of all are three screen legends giving enormous and each differently entertaining performances: Topol’s Dr Zarkov, a performance more like Tom Baker’s Doctor than any other I can think of on the big screen; future Bond Timothy Dalton, who on being cast in the campest film of the year as a character in green tights, under the mistaken impression this would be something as gritty as the same director’s Get Carter, tries single-handedly to make the movie macho and serious, shouting random swear-words – in fact, all the film’s swear-words – such as “Freeeeeze! …You bloody bastards!” and as a result becomes more hilariously camp than the ones camping it up; and, of course, in the role he was born for, Brian Blessed. Oh, Brian Blessed. All together now:
Super fact: both Flash Gordon and The Horns of Nimon feature soon-to-be-Blue-Peter-presenters in scenes of deadly peril! Only one of them survives…
Oh, and tune in to BBC7 of an evening for more Doctor Who on the wireless, too. On Sunday at 6pm and 12am there’s the second part of former Doctor Who producer and writer Barry Letts’ memoir, Who and Me; on weeknights at 6.30pm and 12.30am Tom Baker reads Terrance Dicks’ novelisation of Tom’s first (and my first) story, Doctor Who and the Giant Robot.
Douglas Adams and Doctor Who
Just as The Hitchhiker’s Guide To the Galaxy kicked off on radio in 1978, Douglas Adams finally had a Doctor Who script accepted for Tom Baker’s Doctor – The Pirate Planet, one of the finest stories in one of Doctor Who’s finest series, 1978-79’s The Key To Time. So impressive were his ideas, and so far undiscovered were Douglas’ unhappy relationships with deadlines, that he was offered the job of script editor on the show – a slightly less powerful and certainly less prestigious but in most ways identical job to the modern Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat ‘lead writer’ / Executive Producer. His year as script editor, Season 17, still splits Doctor Who fans to this day; cheap and silly, or witty and brilliant? It’s certainly cheap – late ’70s inflation had just inflicted the series’ biggest ever budget cuts – but I love it to bits (and I’m one of the very few fans who seems to love the 1980-81 right after Douglas left, in many ways a reaction against the season before, every bit as much. They tend to be a bit polarising).
When another of Doctor Who’s most wonderfully playful authors, David Fisher, wasn’t able to do the rewrites on one of his two scripts for Douglas’ time as script editor, Douglas and producer Graham Williams took over the redrafting, lending the resultant story a unique collaborative quality. Tom Baker and Lalla Ward are both effortlessly wonderful in it (or at least they seem to be; by all accounts they put the effort into rewriting large chunks of it in rehearsals, too), Julian Glover is a superb villain, the musical score is gorgeous, much of it is filmed in Paris – in Paris! – and it’s the only story of the year that looks like it’s had much money spent on it. Thanks to an ITV strike meaning it was on against nothing but BBC2 and the test card, it won the highest viewing figures in Doctor Who’s history. It’s called City of Death, and it’s still today one of the most highly-regarded of all Doctor Who stories (but can I be heretical and say that Douglas’ The Pirate Planet is even better?).
The Pirate Planet is available on DVD as part of the marvellous The Key To Time box set – recently reissued, so if you hadn’t got it already, you can now – and City of Death, too, is out on DVD (complete with opinion from Steven Moffat, who likes City of Death but thinks Douglas wasn’t a good script editor. In another strike of heresy, I disagree with the Grand Moff, but I don’t have time to go into why here, except to say, watch his stories and aren’t the scripts great?). Of the other stories Douglas script-edited, Destiny of the Daleks is already available on DVD, the extras including grand tales of Douglas’ drinking tours, while another was released just this very week in a box with two other stories. The latest Doctor Who DVD boxed set is titled Myths and Legends, and includes three stories which have in common that each was inspired by Greek myths and each is
Next month, The Creature From the Pit is to be released on DVD, possibly the most hated of all the stories Douglas had a hand in, regarded as terrible science fiction with an embarrassingly badly designed monster. While the eponymous ‘creature’ is indeed hilarious, he’s terribly well-characterised, while the Doctor, the principal villains and Geoffrey Bayldon’s supporting character are superb. It’s a terrific script from David Fisher, too, an intelligent fable about free trade – and you don’t get many of them to the pound – that deconstructs the ‘monster’ story. In short, buy it and make up your own mind, and I’m confident that you’ll find every other fan on Earth is wrong and I am right that is in fact brilliant. Yes, I’m coming out heretic all over today (and speaking of heretics, look out for one of Oolon Colluphid’s books turning up in one of Douglas’ stories, and find out for yourself how important Douglas turned out to be to Richard Dawkins). That just leaves the as-yet-unreleased Nightmare of Eden, which again doesn’t look terribly impressive but is rather a good story, and Shada.
You Can Look at the Lost Bits For Free…
Shada… Shada… Shada… That one went a bit wrong. Douglas’ six-part finale was only half-shot before a BBC strike called it off for ever. Ish. I have to say, it’s far from Douglas’ best script, but it has its moments, so there are two versions worth looking out for. BBC Video released the half of it that had been completed along with some linking narration from Tom Baker a couple of decades ago, and hopefully that, too, will one day emerge on DVD. Alternatively, the lovely people at Big Finish produced an audio adaptation a few years ago starring Paul McGann instead of Tom, and while it’s not nearly as much fun as the ‘original’, it’s not at all bad, and has the undeniable virtue of being finished. Best of all, you can watch their Shada for free on the BBC website, with some flash animation making it a jerky sort-of cartoon and a fabulous song from Lalla Vs Kylie (click “Full screen” if it doesn’t work immediately; if anyone can save it onto a DVD for me, I’d be terribly grateful)!
Douglas never novelised his Doctor Who scripts – in part because he was rather busy avoiding other publishers’ deadlines, in larger part because Target Books couldn’t quite come to terms with a multi-million-selling author’s advance – but, though you can’t technically read them, you can in some practical ways manage it. Douglas, an early practitioner of recycling, put large amounts of City of Death and much larger ones of Shada into some of his books, notably Dirk Gently, while a rejected Doctor Who script forms the basis of Life, the Universe and Everything (as I wrote yesterday). You can also read ebooks of his three Doctor Who stories and the only other two Twentieth-Century Who TV stories that were never released by Target, available as labours of love from New Zealand fan site TSV. They’re not a patch on Douglas’ writing, but some of them are by professional authors themselves, and they’re not bad (though steer clear of another fan adaptation of City of Death produced by Zerinza magazine; I read it once, and it was ghastly).
Anyway, 11 o’clock’s caught up with me, so turn on Radio 4 and you’ll hear Jon Culshaw probably going through all the same sort of things.
There’s newer Doctor Who on BBC3 tonight, of course – a double bill of David Tennant’s grand finale, The End of Time, to get us all ready for Matt Smith tomorrow – but if you want to go back to the week when David got the job, how about The Quatermass Experiment – and if you want to see Timothy Dalton being another aristocratic bastard, how about Flash Gordon…?
The Quatermass Experiment
The first ever BBC TV science fiction – in fact, the BBC’s first ever specially commissioned original drama serial – was written by another of the Twentieth Century’s most inspired authors, Nigel Kneale, back in 1953. Like Shada, though for different reasons, you can only see parts of the original, and yet there are remakes of this, too. The original series in fact went out live, television being in its infancy, and they only recorded the first third of it as it was broadcast (you can still see that much on the terrific DVD The Quatermass Collection, along with a pdf of the script).
If you’ve seen The Quatermass Experiment today, the chances are it was one of the two remakes: one a movie made in the mid-’50s by Hammer Films; the other a live broadcast that took place on BBC4 on 2nd April 2005. That was just days after news broke that Christopher Eccleston was to leave Doctor Who almost as soon as he’d started, and rumours abounded that David was to get the job. So, when his Dr Briscoe walks on to tend to a patient with a strange, alien infection in BBC4’s The Quatermass Experiment, Jason Flemyng’s Professor Quatermass very deliberately greets him not with the scripted “Hello, Gordon,” but with “Hello, Doctor.”
By one of those lovely quirks of TV scheduling, Hammer’s The Quatermass Xperiment is on tonight at 1.35am on BBC2. You can celebrate today’s Quatermass anniversary by making a double bill of them to see how they compare: the 2005 version is available to watch for free on MSN.
I’ve written about all four of the Quatermass serials before, and while the existing Quatermass II and Quatermass and the Pit are still among some of the best TV ever produced, I can’t help wondering what the rest of The Quatermass Experiment would have been like: the first episode is rather staid; the second suddenly leaps forward in pace and quality; what might the other four have done? But, instead, there are two complete (though both hugely abridged from the original) versions to judge. The film is often well-shot and atmospheric; it’s a thriller with a superbly played hunted man. But the star casting of Quatermass himself is a terrible mistake (Nigel Kneale’s views about actor Brian Donlevy were, on a good day, only just printable), while too much of the script becomes generic B-movie – not least the ending, which while exciting, entirely misses the point. The BBC4 version, on the other hand, is occasionally a little slow and worthy and, being a live production, it’s a little too obvious that most of it’s taking place in the same warehouse. It does, however, have an excellent cast – Jason Flemyng, David Tennant and Indira Varma, as well as a notably fine performance from Mark Gatiss – and the last ten minutes or so are absolutely gripping, remaining entirely true to the human spirit of the original script.
One day, I might watch the surviving two episodes of the 1953 serial, then the middle of the Hammer movie, then the climax of the BBC4 remake and see if that adds up to the best approximation of the story as written…
Flash Gordon
Hmm, well, this hasn’t gone in a flash, has it? I was dashing to write a few paragraphs before 11, and now I’ve listened to that Douglas programme – listen again on the BBC iPlayer if you missed it – which was just as I thought it would be, with a particularly fine set of interviewees and several opinions I disagreed with, while this article has grown from something crawling along my arm to the size of Westminster Abbey (if not the Tate Modern). But there was one more thing I was going to talk about for tonight. ITV1 is showing the 1980 Flash Gordon movie at 1.30am. I love Buster Crabbe and Charles Middleton; I sigh with disdain at macho later remakes; but this brightly coloured camp extravaganza is one of the most entertaining films ever made.
Peter Wyngarde steals it from behind a mask as the evil Klytus; Max von Sydow has the time of his life as the louchest emperor in the galaxy; the gorgeous red and gold design and Queen and Howard Blake’s score makes it sumptuous sensory treat. There are some lines you must know from the Queen title song that you can’t resist saying along, I know – put your hands on your hips to do the fabulous Kala:
“What do you mean, Flash Gordon approaching?”And surely most people watching will fancy either Ornella Muti or Sam J Jones? Flash flashing those tiny leather shorts and that hairy chest. Mmmmm. Er… Where was I? While Star Wars was surely a better film, and a great modern legend, this film realised that it could do one thing better: never mind the purity of the Force, Flash Gordon positively drips with pervy sex, and yet never quite enough that could be complained about, so I could still be taken to the cinema to see it aged 8. Fabulous.
But best of all are three screen legends giving enormous and each differently entertaining performances: Topol’s Dr Zarkov, a performance more like Tom Baker’s Doctor than any other I can think of on the big screen; future Bond Timothy Dalton, who on being cast in the campest film of the year as a character in green tights, under the mistaken impression this would be something as gritty as the same director’s Get Carter, tries single-handedly to make the movie macho and serious, shouting random swear-words – in fact, all the film’s swear-words – such as “Freeeeeze! …You bloody bastards!” and as a result becomes more hilariously camp than the ones camping it up; and, of course, in the role he was born for, Brian Blessed. Oh, Brian Blessed. All together now:
“GORDON’S ALIVE?!?!”
Super fact: both Flash Gordon and The Horns of Nimon feature soon-to-be-Blue-Peter-presenters in scenes of deadly peril! Only one of them survives…
Doctor Who on BBC7
Oh, and tune in to BBC7 of an evening for more Doctor Who on the wireless, too. On Sunday at 6pm and 12am there’s the second part of former Doctor Who producer and writer Barry Letts’ memoir, Who and Me; on weeknights at 6.30pm and 12.30am Tom Baker reads Terrance Dicks’ novelisation of Tom’s first (and my first) story, Doctor Who and the Giant Robot.
Labels: Big Finish, Books, David Tennant, Doctor Who, Douglas Adams, James Bond, Julian Glover, Matt Smith, Quatermass, Radio, The Key To Time, Tom Baker
Thursday, April 01, 2010
The Eleven Faces of Doctor Who
On the day after tomorrow, we’ll have a new Doctor Who episode and a new Doctor. Are you as hugely excited as I am? And as desperate to avoid spoilers (though the 70-second preview on Freeview 301’s OK)? Then why not distract yourself with the other Doctors instead? The last time the most popular Doctor ever left he was Tom Baker in 1981, and to ready you for the youngest Doctor ever when he was Peter Davison the BBC mounted a repeat season, The Five Faces of Doctor Who. Here’s how to spend your Easter holiday weekend doing the same. Just don’t tell your local Lib Dem campaign team…
If you’ve had the misfortune never to see , by the way, and don’t know what it’s all about, click over for a couple of minutes to So Who is This Doctor Bloke Anyway? which reveals that the series’ essentials are actually very simple. Just very strange. A couple of the names have changed since – it was written exactly three years ago – but all the meaning’s still the same. And once you’re done, you should be all primed to want to watch some of it… Which is what today’s article is about.
Before DVDs, videos and more than three TV channels, five old Doctor Who stories – or even four old stories and one that had been on a few months earlier – was almost unbearably exciting. We had a William Hartnell story, a Patrick Troughton story, a Jon Pertwee story, one with all three, and then the final one of Tom Baker’s… Complete with eight seconds of freshly-regenerated Peter Davison looking around blearily at the end (making it five faces, even though technically none of Peter’s stories had been broadcast yet, you see?). These days, of course, you can easily amass an enormous Doctor Who DVD collection, or watch old stories online through legal means or others Lord Mandelson wants to cut your head off for, so a repeat season’s both less exciting and far easier to put together at home.
For today’s exciting suggestions, girls and boys, it’s best have an enormous Doctor Who DVD collection to hand. If you are unaccountably missing such an obvious household necessity, there’ll be a free selection along tomorrow, all sourced in a BBC-authorised way that Lord Mandelson won’t cut you off for except in the case of some horrendous ‘punish first, ask questions later’ cock-up (O noes!).
To get into the spirit of the thing, imagine that you’re a BBC channel controller. What if you were designing an exciting proper repeat season to go out on proper telly and everything? And so – as BBC1 is for brand new Doctor Who and BBC3 is for endless repeats of slightly less brand new but definitely from this century Doctor Who, followed by as many different permutations of young people copping off with each other as can fill up the schedules – you can opt for either The (action-packed with famous baddies) BBC2 Schedule or The (very very slightly more intelligent) BBC4 Schedule. Or make up your own, of course, but that would be insanity.
Of course, if I really were a BBC channel controller, as I wrote a few weeks ago, I’d find it impossibly tempting not either to start at the beginning of Sir Thomas Baker and show his whole lot (his stories being, in general, my favourites), or – ideally – to pour the channel’s entire budget for the year into making swish animated versions of the Doctor Who stories from the ’60s the BBC carelessly burnt and showing all of those (the first two Doctors being, in general, my favourites, and the stories damn well deserving to be brought back to life). But with a new Doctor, you should be balanced, really, shouldn’t you?
For that properFive Eleven Faces feel, just as they did in 1981, you should start at the beginning with the very first story, An Unearthly Child, and finish with the very latest so far, The End of Time – so you can plunge breathlessly into the TARDIS when it was shiny, new, and utterly incredible, then get those breathless few seconds of shiny, new, and utterly incredible Matt Smith as the battered old TARDIS plunges towards… Where? But unlike the original repeat season, I’m going to recommend other William Hartnell and David Tennant stories to show them off as well – because the Tenth Doctor deserves a story of his own rather than just a big run-up to the Eleventh, and because… Well, because William Hartnell is utterly, sublimely brilliant in An Unearthly Child, but so scarily otherworldly that he’s not quite ‘the Doctor’ yet. That first story, incidentally, was four episodes long and for me the whole thing is terrific, but the very first episode – also called An Unearthly Child – makes an ideal introduction on its own, starting with two ordinary people in our own world who stumble across a futuristic time machine and then travel deep into the past. For either channel, I’d show those first twenty-five minutes as a standalone prologue to the whole series, probably back-to-back with a ‘Why Is Doctor Who Brilliant?’ half-hour celebration piece. I can’t make the latter for you, but I can suggest you start with the series’ first ever episode, perhaps the single greatest piece of television of the 1960s.
BBC2’s The Eleven Faces of Doctor Who would be shown on Saturday afternoons or evenings, each story roughly an hour and a half long (four old episodes / two new ones) and edited together into a movie format to grab people’s attention in one go and fit into the same slot each week. As one of the main channels, it would be quite populist, with infamous enemies people new to Twentieth Century Doctor Who would recognise from the last five years. So would you watch it…?
Tune in to BBC Radio 4 tomorrow at 11am, incidentally, for a programme that will almost certainly feature parts of The Pirate Planet and City of Death – because each was either written or co-written by Douglas Adams. I suspect there may be a remarkable amount about Life, the Universe and Everything, too, Douglas’ novel adapted from an unused Doctor Who script, with bits of several other Who stories flashing into it too. What I always notice is that the two characters who occupy a vaguely Doctorish space in Douglas’ novels – Ford Prefect and Slartibartfast – are squeezed in different directions for the rewritten Doctor Who story, Ford suddenly becoming far more louche and Slartibartfast far more driven… Because if either had kept their usual characters, you’d have noticed them competing (just not very hard) for the same sort of role in the narrative. Somewhere in some alternate universe, there’s a version of the book in which Ford decides to save the Universe with the reluctant aid of a Slartibartfast who wants to sit about just looking at fjords. That is, as you may have guessed, The Doctor and Douglas, Radio 4, 11am, 2nd April.
BBC4’s The Eleven Faces of Doctor Who would be shown on weekday evenings, repeated as the original episodes rather than re-edited, but with two shown back-to-back each night to fill the best part of an hour’s slot, and again made up of stories lasting in total roughly an hour and a half long (four old episodes / two new ones), making each spread across two nights or so. As one of the smaller channels, it could find an audience for Doctor Who that’s perhaps more thought-provoking, more satirical and more just downright strange. So would you watch it…?
Finally, if you don’t have time for all of those, to warm up for Saturday why not just go for the epic of time-travelling warlords, where the Time Lords catch up with the Doctor and prove to be utter bastards, that ends in long goodbyes and the Doctor’s regeneration? No, not The End of Time, but the finale for Matt Smith’s favourite Doctor – The War Games.
Newer› ‹Older
Where To Start?
If you’ve had the misfortune never to see , by the way, and don’t know what it’s all about, click over for a couple of minutes to So Who is This Doctor Bloke Anyway? which reveals that the series’ essentials are actually very simple. Just very strange. A couple of the names have changed since – it was written exactly three years ago – but all the meaning’s still the same. And once you’re done, you should be all primed to want to watch some of it… Which is what today’s article is about.
Before DVDs, videos and more than three TV channels, five old Doctor Who stories – or even four old stories and one that had been on a few months earlier – was almost unbearably exciting. We had a William Hartnell story, a Patrick Troughton story, a Jon Pertwee story, one with all three, and then the final one of Tom Baker’s… Complete with eight seconds of freshly-regenerated Peter Davison looking around blearily at the end (making it five faces, even though technically none of Peter’s stories had been broadcast yet, you see?). These days, of course, you can easily amass an enormous Doctor Who DVD collection, or watch old stories online through legal means or others Lord Mandelson wants to cut your head off for, so a repeat season’s both less exciting and far easier to put together at home.
For today’s exciting suggestions, girls and boys, it’s best have an enormous Doctor Who DVD collection to hand. If you are unaccountably missing such an obvious household necessity, there’ll be a free selection along tomorrow, all sourced in a BBC-authorised way that Lord Mandelson won’t cut you off for except in the case of some horrendous ‘punish first, ask questions later’ cock-up (O noes!).
To get into the spirit of the thing, imagine that you’re a BBC channel controller. What if you were designing an exciting proper repeat season to go out on proper telly and everything? And so – as BBC1 is for brand new Doctor Who and BBC3 is for endless repeats of slightly less brand new but definitely from this century Doctor Who, followed by as many different permutations of young people copping off with each other as can fill up the schedules – you can opt for either The (action-packed with famous baddies) BBC2 Schedule or The (very very slightly more intelligent) BBC4 Schedule. Or make up your own, of course, but that would be insanity.
Of course, if I really were a BBC channel controller, as I wrote a few weeks ago, I’d find it impossibly tempting not either to start at the beginning of Sir Thomas Baker and show his whole lot (his stories being, in general, my favourites), or – ideally – to pour the channel’s entire budget for the year into making swish animated versions of the Doctor Who stories from the ’60s the BBC carelessly burnt and showing all of those (the first two Doctors being, in general, my favourites, and the stories damn well deserving to be brought back to life). But with a new Doctor, you should be balanced, really, shouldn’t you?
For that proper
The BBC2 Schedule
BBC2’s The Eleven Faces of Doctor Who would be shown on Saturday afternoons or evenings, each story roughly an hour and a half long (four old episodes / two new ones) and edited together into a movie format to grab people’s attention in one go and fit into the same slot each week. As one of the main channels, it would be quite populist, with infamous enemies people new to Twentieth Century Doctor Who would recognise from the last five years. So would you watch it…?
Introducing the Doctor in An Unearthly Child, starring William Hartnell…That was awfully difficult, you know. I was torn between several for most Doctors, and many for Tom. I jotted down my instinctive choices, then thought, ‘but how balanced is that selection?’ With the most varied and marvellous series ever imagined, can any selection show every angle – a dash of horror, adventures in history, enough wit to make you smile, enough ideas and strangeness and to make you think, and enough action to get you excited…? So, raising my inner geekdom to heroic proportions, I made a great big table of all the elements that needed to be in a repeat season, so it wouldn’t all be the same, and make sure I had stories that balanced out neatly… Which is why I’ve ended up with two pairs of consecutive stories by the same authors, and two set in World War II, two mummy pastiches, and lots of scary ones and probably not enough funny ones, and, and, and… Oh, just watch ’em. The last to be crossed out, incidentally, were Tom’s Planet of Evil (another scary one, with the series’ most stunning alien world), The Robots of Death (a murder mystery with more gorgeous design), and The Pirate Planet, The Androids of Tara and City of Death, simply because all of them are fabulously playful fun.
William Hartnell is the Doctor in The Dalek Invasion of Earth
First of all the alien invasion stories, with scenes of a deserted London under Dalek occupation it would be impossible to shoot today. There’s grim horror, a famously marvellous closing speech from the Doctor, and some rather splendid DVD extras – including a fab CGI flying saucer that I’d show the story with rather than the slightly disappointing original. And yes, this is one of two stories here that are rather longer than my ‘limit’, but Daleks are a good draw for audiences, and this one was remade as a movie with Peter Cushing… So the idea of re-editing the proper version into movie form entertains me.
Patrick Troughton is the Doctor in The Tomb of the Cybermen
An ancient alien world, superb design, terrific villains and a trap laid by monsters who aren’t as dead as everyone thought… Suspense, eerie music and memorable images are all here, but the heart of it is the Doctor comforting his companion in a simply gorgeous quiet conversation. Introduced to all the old Doctors, Matt Smith saw this story and decided that Pat was his favourite – it’s where he gets the bow tie from – and Pat is so spellbinding in this story that it might just be my favourite single performance from any Doctor.
Jon Pertwee is the Doctor in Spearhead from Space
A newly regenerated Doctor crashes to Earth with a knackered TARDIS and takes a while to find his feet… You might find this influential, with Autons too taking the high street by storm in one of the series’ most memorable sequences. It’s also very witty, with the show almost stolen by the Doctor’s two companions, the bluff Brigadier and sharp scientist Dr Liz Shaw.
Tom Baker is the Doctor in Pyramids of Mars
Horror a hundred years ago, with stiff upper lips pitted against walking mummies and a dark god with the voice of the Beast – perhaps the series’ most chilling villain. All this, plus Michael Sheard (Mr Bronson), Bernard Archard and the wonderful Sarah Jane Smith. The DVD’s packed with marvellousness, too.
Peter Davison is the Doctor in Earthshock
The Cybermen are on the march in a brilliantly directed future war story with a famously tragic ending… In one of the series’ most macho stories – there are many roles for women, but most of them are written as if they could be Arnold Schwarzenegger – it’s also fantastic that the aggressive space captain is played not by Sigourney Weaver but Beryl Reid. This could only be Doctor Who.
Colin Baker is the Doctor in Revelation of the Daleks
A stunning black comedy, with a gurglingly delighted Davros plotting away at the heart of it, some great guest stars, really rather a lot of death and one nearly-Dalek that you will never forget. The director’s so good he’s the only one to direct Doctor Who in both centuries, too.
Sylvester McCoy is the Doctor in The Curse of Fenric
Vampires and counterplotting in World War II, with a story that’s both action-packed and intelligent. It’s also the easiest of all the choices – for Doctors where there’s a choice – for a season of movie-length repeats, as a rather brilliant movie-length special edition has already been created for the DVD. Pop it on, then.
Paul McGann is the Doctor in Doctor Who – The TV Movie
Another newly regenerated Doctor faces a fight on slightly-ahead-of-modern-day Earth, this time in America and against the Master. Admire the Doctor, enjoy the Master, see how pretty it all is, and try to ignore the script. While I took a while to decide on stories for some of the Doctors, with at least a dozen rattling around my head from The Tom Baker Years, sadly there aren’t many to choose between from The Paul McGann Early Evening… Though if I was doing a repeat season on BBC7, he’s had some fabulous audio adventures.
Christopher Eccleston is the Doctor in The Empty Child
Mysterious zombies stalk the night in a very different World War II story written by new Grand Mekon Steven Moffat – witty, scary, uplifting, even award-winning, and introducing Captain Jack. Featuring Richard Wilson as you’ve never seen him before (well, unless you’ve watched it in any of the 832 times it’s been shown on BBC3).
David Tennant is the Doctor in Last of the Time Lords
And, again, I cheat. I could have gone for The Impossible Planet, perhaps the most movie-like Doctor Who story I can think of – or the terrific Daleks-Cybermen-Torchwood battle of Doomsday. So a three-part season finale that adds up to well over two hours, where each episode is so different from the one before that it would make a very oddly-structured movie, seems a peculiar choice. And yet… It has one of the show’s three most stunning regenerations, and the only one of those that isn’t the Doctor. It’s funny, it’s shocking, it’s downright peculiar; David Tennant suffers outstandingly; Martha is heroic; it encapsulates the series’ travels through time and space by going from an alien world at the end of the Universe to our own Earth to Earth gone terribly wrong – most of all, despite its faults, it’s the single one of Russell T Davies’ stories that I keep coming back to watch over and over again for the sheer joy of it. Not least in that the return of the Master is the perfect scene-setter for…
David Tennant is the Doctor in The End of Time, which is on BBC3 again tomorrow night if you don’t have the DVD… And introducing Matt Smith!
Tune in to BBC Radio 4 tomorrow at 11am, incidentally, for a programme that will almost certainly feature parts of The Pirate Planet and City of Death – because each was either written or co-written by Douglas Adams. I suspect there may be a remarkable amount about Life, the Universe and Everything, too, Douglas’ novel adapted from an unused Doctor Who script, with bits of several other Who stories flashing into it too. What I always notice is that the two characters who occupy a vaguely Doctorish space in Douglas’ novels – Ford Prefect and Slartibartfast – are squeezed in different directions for the rewritten Doctor Who story, Ford suddenly becoming far more louche and Slartibartfast far more driven… Because if either had kept their usual characters, you’d have noticed them competing (just not very hard) for the same sort of role in the narrative. Somewhere in some alternate universe, there’s a version of the book in which Ford decides to save the Universe with the reluctant aid of a Slartibartfast who wants to sit about just looking at fjords. That is, as you may have guessed, The Doctor and Douglas, Radio 4, 11am, 2nd April.
The BBC4 Schedule
BBC4’s The Eleven Faces of Doctor Who would be shown on weekday evenings, repeated as the original episodes rather than re-edited, but with two shown back-to-back each night to fill the best part of an hour’s slot, and again made up of stories lasting in total roughly an hour and a half long (four old episodes / two new ones), making each spread across two nights or so. As one of the smaller channels, it could find an audience for Doctor Who that’s perhaps more thought-provoking, more satirical and more just downright strange. So would you watch it…?
Introducing the Doctor in An Unearthly Child, starring William Hartnell…This choice seemed easier, though again I drew up a great big grid to make sure it was terribly well-balanced – and so, of course, ended up with several stories by one author, and a clutch of postmodern satires about TV. Rather than The Time Warrior and Vengeance on Varos, by the way, I nearly opted for Carnival of Monsters and The Two Doctors; the former making a slightly better TV satire, though the latter with noticeably worse Sontarans. I probably enjoy the latter two stories more – all four are funny, and often tasteless – but, while The Two Doctors has Colin at his very best, it also goes on a bit too long and has some rather iffy morals… Besides, that would have ended up with four in a row from the same writer, and while he may indeed be my favourite, that’s a bit much for variety.
William Hartnell is the Doctor in The Aztecs
Pure history, with marvellous dialogue and a central moral dilemma – Barbara, perhaps the strongest of all the Doctor’s companions, seems to have been put in a position where she can change history and sets out to do it. The Doctor sets out to stop her. Both Jacqueline Hill and William Hartnell are simply stunning… And, if you’re a Shipper for the Twenty-first Century stories, here the Doctor gets engaged (but no tongues).
Patrick Troughton is the Doctor in The Mind Robber
The TARDIS explodes into the Land of Fiction in one of the weirdest, most brilliant of all Doctor Who. From sci-fi to superheroes, mythology to mind games, the inventiveness keeps going – and wait ’til you see the Doctor’s companion losing face. It might fit a little awkwardly into a BBC4 slot, as it’s actually in five episodes – but, as they’re each shorter than usual, the whole thing is barely longer than an ordinary story.
Jon Pertwee is the Doctor in The Time Warrior
Though starting off in Pertwee’s comfort zone of the-just-after-present-day, with a little help from the Brigadier, before long he’s travelling back to a castle in the Thirteenth Century to fight the original Sontaran. It’s the first story for Sarah Jane Smith, too, and she really grabs it – in a very funny story, she also gets the best deadpan joke without meaning to… Oh, and it’s got Dot Cotton and Boba Fett in it! While two of these stories have new effects on DVD that are must-sees, and two more have new effects that I can take or leave, this one puts me in a quandary: mostly, the added CGI offers greatly improved effects that I’d prefer to broadcast – but the final one replaces a stock great big explosion with a feeble one that resembles a dragon sneezing through a gateway.
Tom Baker is the Doctor in The Deadly Assassin
Death strikes on the planet of the Time Lords, as the Doctor and the Master return in a serial that’s exploding with ideas for both story and storytelling. It starts as film noir political satire, then swerves into virtual reality and gritty surrealism, with great cliffhangers along the way and even inspiring The Matrix movies… What more could you ask for?
Peter Davison is the Doctor in The Caves of Androzani
An extraordinary mixture of ‘arthouse’ and ‘macho’ styles, with a terrific script, dazzling direction, rattlesnake-eerie music and compelling actors. A cynical desert war, noirishly twisted love and graveyard humour meet for a revenge drama where everyone’s destroyed in a chain reaction from picking on an innocent – the Doctor. And it kills him: at the end, nice Peter explodes into Colin in a striking regeneration.
Colin Baker is the Doctor in Vengeance on Varos
Politics meets reality TV before reality TV was invented – with an irresistibly horrible new alien villain. Sharp, funny and violent, it’s just the thing to watch before a General Election: Martin Jarvis isn’t every voter’s favourite (though Jason Connery with his top off might be).
Sylvester McCoy is the Doctor in Ghost Light
A Nineteenth Century Darwinian fable that’s witty, intelligent and looks rather splendid, if you like spooky old houses, this is the one for you. It’s the shortest of my picks, at just three episodes, but worth watching over and over (and perhaps necessary), with the Doctor’s friend Ace put to the test not just by alien angels and icy screen legend Sylvia Syms but by the Doctor himself. And apologies to the author, who I know’s read this blog on occasion and doesn’t like one-line reviews; I’ll return to it properly eventually!
Paul McGann is the Doctor in Doctor Who – The TV Movie
Another newly regenerated Doctor faces a fight on slightly-ahead-of-modern-day Earth, this time in America and against the Master. Admire the Doctor, enjoy the Master, see how pretty it all is, and try to ignore the script. While I took a while to decide on stories for some of the Doctors, with at least a dozen rattling around my head from The Tom Baker Years, sadly there aren’t many to choose between from The Paul McGann Early Evening… Though if I was doing a repeat season on BBC7, he’s had some fabulous audio adventures.
Christopher Eccleston is the Doctor in Bad Wolf
The Doctor regenerates again to get you in the mood for Matt, this time giving us a glimpse of David at the end – but it’s Chris’ story, and he’s fantastic. Along the way, there’s more savage TV satire, the most memorable cry of “Exterminate!” you’ll never hear, and the series’ most stunning Dalek action (if you’ve watched my William Hartnell choices, here’s a still more brutal Dalek invasion of Earth and still more groovy saucers, as well as another companion becoming a goddess).
David Tennant is not the Doctor in Human Nature
The Doctor turns human, and his adventures turn into dreams. But the aliens chasing the inner him turn them into nightmares… A gorgeous, moving story in the looming shadow of World War I, John Smith is torn between love and war, while wild-eyed young Son-of-Mine has super, super fun. Perhaps my favourite of all the Twenty-first Century TV stories so far, and a small-scale, heartfelt moment to treasure before the epic that is…
David Tennant is the Doctor in The End of Time, which is on BBC3 again tomorrow night if you don’t have the DVD… And introducing Matt Smith!
Finally, if you don’t have time for all of those, to warm up for Saturday why not just go for the epic of time-travelling warlords, where the Time Lords catch up with the Doctor and prove to be utter bastards, that ends in long goodbyes and the Doctor’s regeneration? No, not The End of Time, but the finale for Matt Smith’s favourite Doctor – The War Games.
Labels: Christopher Eccleston, Colin Baker, David Tennant, Doctor Who, Douglas Adams, Jon Pertwee, Matt Smith, Patrick Troughton, Paul McGann, Peter Davison, Sylvester McCoy, Tom Baker, William Hartnell
