Saturday, December 08, 2012
Doctor Who 50 – Eleven More Great Scenes. And More
Fifty weeks from today will be Doctor Who’s fiftieth anniversary. Next week I’ll be starting my countdown of fifty great scenes spanning the TV series so far to illustrate why it’s the most marvellous show ever made. But I know what you’re thinking – how can I have chosen fifty scenes… How can I possibly cram so many times and places into such a minuscule number? That is, indeed, impossible. So today I’ll introduce what I’ll be doing every Saturday until November 23rd, 2013, and offer tantalising glimpses of still more wonder in some of the ones that got away…
My idea is to pick a brilliant scene each week and set out just why it’s so brilliant – with a bonus quotation from the series each time that’ll mostly speak for itself. Many of the scenes will be from crucial moments in their stories, so watch out for spoilers (and today’s selection is particularly spoiler-heavy). All the Doctors will be there – just not necessarily in the right order. I’ll be counting down these marvellous moments roughly in order of preference, though not entirely: some might be there to tie in to a particular date, or spread out a bit so that similar scenes don’t all turn up in a row. Some scenes or sequences lasted mere seconds on TV… The longest up to a quarter of an hour. Most tend to be a couple of minutes long if you watch them, though who knows how long my write-ups are going to be.
The Fifty spread over this year will include my few absolute favourites – though not necessarily a ‘top fifty’. Looking at my instinctive choices, certain Doctors, certain stories, certain styles (not least speeches – and scary bits) came up much more than others. So, because I love the whole of Doctor Who, I’ve striven for more balance. The Fifty will include at least one scene from every year in which the series has first aired, and at least one from each of its TV seasons. There will be no more than one scene from each story featured (with one exception) – though the quotes will be more random and less calculated, some reflecting that week’s scene, others ones that just popped into my head, even if I’ve striven not to make them all from The Talons of Weng-Chiang. And I’m afraid this Fifty will be drawn only from the TV series, though I showcased a wider range at the last big anniversary with forty-five stories illustrating Why Is Doctor Who Brilliant? It was hard enough trying to weigh every scene in over two hundred television adventures, and I simply couldn’t have done it with what must now be thousands of different stories in all the many formats. Hopefully, these choices will be variety enough.
Most of all, I’ve picked scenes that I enjoy, and I hope you will, too.
I thought of hundreds of scenes before whittling them down to the Fifty. I could have done the Five Hundred… Except I’d never have managed to get them into any sort of order, still less found time to write about them all. Last week, I whetted your appetite for the forthcoming Fifty with Eleven Great Cliffhangers – though not quite the greatest, which you’ll see across the year – and, this week, Eleven Runners-up of various other descriptions, some to cast a different light, others which so nearly made the Fifty but for other choices already from their year, or their story. Inevitably, there are speeches and scary bits – but also special effects, some things that make me laugh, sentiment, excitement and more. Read on…
First off: my favourite story of them all, beginning with the opening titles and a sombre introduction. This is less a scene than setting the scene, so it seems the perfect way to start. This arrangement of the fabulous Doctor Who Theme is still the best, ending in that marvellous stuttering echo as the titles fade, and the titles themselves the greatest titles ever made, a time tunnel swirling in different shapes and directions, carrying the TARDIS, the Doctor, the logo and credits through time and space and visibly inspiring the title sequence still used today. Then, for the first time, the story is introduced with a scrolling text read in the moody tones of the Doctor (Tom Baker). It promises something special. And it is.
The Doctor will crash into a premonition of death – and then, alone now, become a hunted fugitive in a city that was once his home… A film noir nightmare, political satire, dizzying virtual reality, reimagining the Master and the Time Lords, this will be the series’ most radical and creative story, both conceptually and visually (and upset Mary Whitehouse like no other). But it all starts with that unbeatable time tunnel. That’s Doctor Who.
The first time the Doctor (William Hartnell) ever said goodbye to a travelling companion was to his granddaughter, Susan. And it’s been painful for him ever since. She’s fallen in love but feels she can’t leave him – so he makes the decision for her at the close of this story. It’s the beginning of so many times that writers have had to find a reason for someone to want to stop travelling in space and time, and one of the more plausible but sexist ones, being married off (an idea intermittently challenged by the Ponds); here it’s done with a little more conviction and a little more sexism than most, though the Doctor does show his love and pride in her and give her credit for looking after him as much as he’d looked after her. It’s William Hartnell’s beautifully played address to his grandchild that makes this so special, her shut out of the TARDIS, him standing at the console, both still smudged with ash from exploding Dalek mines. His stirring benediction falters slightly at the end, and he has to leave before he changes his mind. Susan walks slowly away from the vanished TARDIS, leaving her key in the ruins. The selection of part of this scene to open The Five Doctors cemented fans’ love for it, and when – after a decade of making speeches – I at last used a Doctor Who quotation in a speech of my own, I closed with this one. My voice broke at the end, too.
The brain of Time Lord war criminal Morbius has been restored to physicality in a hideous body of bits (and in an inspired twist not just on Frankenstein but on one of the ’60s and ’70s most often-used great TV threats). As the Nuns of Doom march to his castle in the final episode, bearing the traditional torches, the Doctor (Tom Baker) challenges him to a mind-bending duel: pitting their mental powers against each other to see which can force the other back through their lives to nothingness. Tom Baker and Michael Spice (plus Stuart Fell within the body) are both outstanding in their electric confrontation, Morbius arrogantly proclaiming himself “a Time Lord of the first rank,” the Doctor scorning him as a failed dictator, all set to one of composer Dudley Simpson’s finest moments, deep, stately chords offset with a spine-tingling counter-melody.
Two more things stand out. One is that the Doctor is fighting a desperate rear-guard action against of the titans of his race – what’s special about our hero is his choices, not his intrinsic power, and he’s overwhelmed by Morbius’ mental power: all he does is hold out long enough for the energies to be too much for Morbius’ new brain-case to bear, not the brain itself, and even that nearly kills him. We see Morbius thrust the Doctor’s psyche back through Pertwee, Pat, Billy… And through many previous incarnations as he hurtles back to his beginning. Contradicted or supported elsewhere as these may be (and some fans jump through such hoops to deny their intention), for me they’re a sign that Doctor Who can always surprise us, an enthralling sight and concept, and all that could make them more so is if the pre-Doctors were not members of the production team but old actors’ faces. Just imagine, say, Alastair Sim appearing, firing your imagination to see his black and white Doctor Who movies from the ’40s.
Doctor Who always beat its budget to create memorable images that no-one else could show you, from the first sight of the TARDIS’ impossible interior and the first alien world, with its petrified forest and gleaming city, to monsters like suckered embryos with a ship that seems grown rather than made and a howlingly alive alien jungle, to eerily beautiful robots in an Art Deco vessel, or multiple Mona Lisas, or an Escher painting that encloses you, to crossing the striations of the timelines wearing a splash of red upon strangely monochrome stately gardens, right up to a would-be tyrant’s face disintegrating horribly or a dying world with a stormily alien sky. All that without yet breaking into the series’ Twenty-first Century stories – until my next choice down. Out of all of them, to champion Doctor Who’s most visually exciting moments I’ve picked two where the series makes an impact on London: one in 1963, when Doctor Who started; the next in the Twenty-first Century, when it continues. This is the one with streetfighting Daleks blasting the hell out of each other and the fuck-off bazooka Dalek.
The Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) is juggling two warring Dalek factions: the wily old gun-metal veterans; the glorious white and gold new Imperial stormtroopers. In Part Four, the veterans have captured a superweapon – but the Imperials don’t intend to let them get away and land an attack squad to take it. The first engagement sees an Imperial force retreat under a hail of fire from the more experienced warriors, one blown satisfyingly apart… Only for the Emperor to order the Special Weapons Dalek into position. Daleks have always been one-being tanks: this one, with its heavier, grimier armour and one huge gun, takes that to extremes. Simply obliterating every rival in its path, when it reaches the enemy base it blasts the gate apart in an enormous fireball, a blizzard of energy bolts slashing through the blaze before it settles. Some of the explosions staged here were so outrageous they caused an anti-terror alert (I love the BBC) – yet the battle’s still more exciting in the novel. Thrill to the Abomination!
I said before Doctor Who returned to our screens in 2005 that it would have to deliver not just impressive special effects – which everyone can do these days – but also memorable images with ideas behind them, and that year alone it delivered in spades, from looking at the Lady Cassandra’s beautiful flatness, to Daleks that were everything you ever darkly dreamed, to flying, shrieking time-eaters clawing at a church, to heads choking and splitting into gas masks, and since then keeping up the pace with a werewolf running amok in a stately home, the TARDIS bouncing along a motorway, a hospital on the Moon and right up to, yes, dinosaurs on a spaceship. But the most cheekily memorable image of that first new year? This is the one with the spaceship crashing into Big Ben.
The Doctor (Christopher Eccleston) has accidentally brought Rose back home not a day but a year after taking her on a trip through time and space, which has not gone down well. Both are at their most unlikeable as they bicker on a rooftop, and no-one else on Earth is going to believe Rose if she tries to talk about aliens and spacecraft… Only for a spaceship to fly straight overhead, trailing smoke, weaving across London and eventually crash-diving along Whitehall, smack into the clock topping St Stephen’s Tower, before belly-flopping into the Thames. Thank goodness it came along to snap them out of it, though their initial reactions are mixed… It’s the first and still best moment of its kind, as Russell T Davies enters his vocation to destroy ever major landmark in London. When Doctor Who does a story called ‘Aliens’, it looks like a bumbling comedy where they can’t even fly their ship… But the ominous truth is that they’re as greedy as a Ridley Scott corporation, and can destroy a whole planet much more quickly than something with sinisterly sexual gnashers.
With something to delight and something to offend everyone, The Talons of Weng-Chiang might just be the most enjoyable and quotable and thoroughly unsuitable for children Doctor Who story of them all. Obviously, I’ve loved it since I was five, and remember many years ago standing in a video shop with the latest VHS release and being unable not to overhear another small boy arguing with his mum about which Doctor Who video to buy. He wanted several; she would only pay for one. He was oscillating between two that I didn’t think were much cop, so I felt the urge to intervene, but made the most appalling error in being grown up: I asked her what sort of thing he liked. Of course, she didn’t know. So I knelt and asked which stories he had already and were his favourites. Having listened to the right person, I recommended Talons to him because it was scary and funny – and to her, on the basis that it was six episodes for the same price as four. I’ve often wondered if she left him alone with it, or came in, saw any of it and disapproved of the young man who’d suggested such appalling viewing.
One especially entertaining sequence comes half-way through Part Two. We’re on the dark streets of late Victorian London. The Doctor (Tom Baker) has been auditioning for (he can play the Trumpet Voluntary in a bowl of live goldfish) and sleuthing with theatrical impresario Henry Gordon Jago, not quite the bravest man in the Empire; his warrior tribe companion Leela has remained with premier pathologist Professor Litefoot, a crustily congenial old cove. Someone should pair these two guest artistes. And the villains have been crawling the kerbs in their carriage in search of the plot (spot the Porsche!). That plot revolves around monstrous appetites, so even the comedy scenes that pepper it have disturbing overtones – and this one enriches the main themes even as Litefoot finds the usual late-night cold collation laid out by his housekeeper and innocently offers Leela dinner.
You think writing about special effects is doomed? What about describing comedy? I’d urge you to buy this on DVD and watch it, because the comedy of manners between Leela – raised in an alien jungle – and a perfect Victorian gentleman never fails to crack me up. Expecting a lady, Litefoot’s face as she picks up a joint and just tears into it is priceless. He quails (there’s one of those on the table too). But politeness demands he can’t criticise or embarrass a guest, still less a lady, and when Leela’s own understanding of hospitality makes her express her satisfaction with the food, all he can do is weakly pretend pleasure. Faintly proffering a knife or fork, he sees her seize a carving knife, the better to hack the beef apart, and is left with no option as a good host but to put down the plate he would usually stack with a dainty selection of slices and, instead, grab a whole leg of lamb in both hands and bite. The culture clash in their next scene, when Leela drinks from the trifle bowl while Litefoot looks on queasily, has been known to make me cry with laughter. His last gasp of Victorian propriety comes in trying to save the tablecloth from Leela so as not to mortify the housekeeper come the morning – but before the night is out, it’s doomed to the Doctor. And by the end of Part Three, Leela’s enthusiasm for chomping on a leg has its own darker payoff…
The Doctor (Colin Baker) isn’t the only one who wants to know what’s happened to his old friend Arthur Stengos; by half-way into Part One, Stengos’ daughter Natasha has broken into the galaxy’s biggest funeral home to find his ‘sleeping’ body missing and Daleks on guard. Overseeing all is Davros, remaking himself as the galaxy’s greatest doctor and promising eternal life – but of the kind that’s red-lit, tortured and underground. And the greatest horror for her is finding what’s left of her father growing into a Dalek, caught between his own self and one of Davros’ new breed of fascists. In a story of black comedy and dreamlike horror, this is the most nightmarish moment, a dramatic and visual triumph as Stengos is revealed in close-ups of eye and mouth, as if dismembered, and struggles to remember his love for his daughter when in his ranting New Order instead “The seed of the Daleks must be supreme.”
Stengos’ fate draws from perhaps the most memorable scenes in two of the greatest Doctor Who novelisations – a glass Dalek, a human slowly transforming into something ‘other’ and begging for death – each of which were too challenging (perhaps too expensive, certainly then too horrific) to portray in the original TV versions of The Daleks and The Ark In Space. And if you’re going to write as the David Whitaker or Bob Holmes tribute band, you’ve certainly got great tunes to play. As, if you didn’t think Natasha’s terrible choice was weird enough, does the resident DJ…
In World War II, the Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) contests an ancient force of evil on the North-East coast. By the end of Part Two / half-way through the Special Edition of this most complex and layered story, the lively two young women Eastenders are made vampires, draining their self-righteous landlady then stalking through the graveyard mist to the local vicar. He tries to understand them… But they understand him much better. Reverend Wainwright flourishes his Bible, but they know it’s only faith that keeps them at bay – something with a stunning payoff later in the story – and that his is crumbling not under the horrors of the undead, but the horrors of war. Only the Doctor’s ferocity as he hurls himself in front of Wainwright makes them recoil, but they’ll return for him… Will he be able to find it in himself to triumph then? The Doctor and the bloodsuckers are almost forces of nature in this spellbinding scene that turns the traditional vampire story inside-out.
Elton Pope’s been fascinated with the Doctor ever since he was a boy, and never been happier than with a little group of friends with the same interests. By half-way into the story, though, someone’s rather taken over, organised them, given them ways to track the Doctor (David Tennant) and his friends, but things are less fun. And some of Elton’s group have vanished. Be careful what you wish for… And Elton wishes he could find Rose, so he tracks down her mum Jackie. Turns out he’s not quite as in control of his infiltration plan as he thinks he is. She keeps inviting him round to fix all the things that keep going wrong about the flat, and it’s got nothing to do with the way Elton’s shirt keeps accidentally riding up to show his stomach as he changes a bulb or his jeans showing off his arse as he looks at the washing machine. It’s a complete coincidence that her tops are getting tighter and skirts shorter, too. But just as she flings herself – or at least her wine, twice – at him, a call from Rose spoils the mood. She feels ashamed of her ulterior motives, and shows it; so does he, but doesn’t. He goes off for pizza to make it up to her, but it’s too late – she discovers what he’s after and she’ll protect them until the day she dies…
Camille Coduri’s Jackie has long been a brilliant comedy creation by now, shot through with tragedy; this is her finest moment, never funnier and never more moving as the cracks show of how much she misses her daughter and even Mickey. “Put the telly on if you want – can’t bear it silent.” The way Elton’s unreliable narration within his unreliable narration collides with her at her most turbo-charged is hilarious, then she and the script turn in an instant and break your heart. It’s inspired how ELO’s Turn To Stone gives way to Jackie’s choice of romantic music as she takes control of the scene from the man who’s been narrating it; her joyous sexuality is brilliant; then she lets her defences down only to find herself betrayed, anger punching through her loneliness to show how selfless and ferocious her heart is. Rose never sees it.
The climax to Part Three of this story, one of Doctor Who’s best, is an odd beast. On screen, the cliffhanger is a slightly underwhelming threat to the Doctor (Tom Baker). On the truncated LP (and now CD) release, the half-way cliffhanger comes a couple of minutes later, with the annihilation in fire of the Daleks’ parent species, the Kaleds, by their ancient enemies, the Thals (a model city with a sense of scale as, for once, the explosions take an age to die away). But it’s Davros, the half-Dalek creator of and would-be Führer of the new race, who actually betrayed the secret of their defences – to stop their leaders bringing the Dalek project to a halt. And in the originally scripted climax to the overrunning Part Three, moved back to begin Part Four, Davros uses the moment of shock for his scientific Elite (now the only survivors save for their mutated, battle-tanked progeny) to destroy his only outspoken internal critic. Ronson has asked awkward questions about the future of the Daleks and aided the Doctor’s escape; biding his time to respond, Davros now denounces Ronson as traitor and spy, ordering in his new Daleks to carry out their first ever extermination and promising vengeance on the Thals, too, then the absolute power and glory to which he aspires.
Genesis of the Daleks is packed with great moments, and another will make my Fifty. It’s the finest example in Doctor Who of actors and writers coming together to forge proper speeches, rather than just assuming ‘speaking at length’ makes great rhetoric. Others might choose the Doctor’s key moral dilemma – asking “Do I have the right?” – but this scene captivated me growing up and listening to it again and again on scratchy vinyl. The sheer power of Michael Wisher’s performance as Davros; the sheer ruthless chutzpah of the character; the sheer horror of Ronson screaming in denial. On screen, it’s the negative blaze around him and the sight of his colleagues backing quickly away, shielding their eyes, that stays with you; on LP and CD, the raw immediacy of the sound design, Davros’ harshly escalating triumph, the crashing march as the Daleks enter and their gun-sticks seethe. Gripping.
Of all the Doctor Who stories criminally underrated by fans, for me this is the most unfairly overlooked – or, at least, 75% of it is. The first ever Doctor Who story, nearly everyone (rightly) looks on the first episode as one of the greatest pieces of television ever made, but nearly everyone else then goes on to do down the following three episodes, in which the Doctor (William Hartnell) and his as-yet unwilling companions plunge into prehistory and are caught up in the power struggles of a Stone Age tribe. Yet I’ve argued that these episodes are not only brilliant, but crucial to the show’s story. One outstanding scene comes at the beginning of the fourth episode, by which time the TARDIS crew have escaped the tribe with the aid of an old woman, only to be pursued by Za, one of the two rivals to be chief. Meanwhile, the cleverer but nastier rival, Kal, murders the old woman on finding them gone – and pins the blame on Za. With Za and our heroes captured together, things look bleak. But the Doctor brilliantly invents a genre tens of thousands of years early to beat Kal…
Kal’s great strength has been as a demagogue – Za learns how to adapt over the course of the story, but he’s comparatively slow. Yet as Kal waves Za’s stone knife before the tribe, weaving his story before them, the apparently frail old Doctor shows he can not only defeat a physically much stronger opponent with superior brainpower, but beat him at his own simple declamatory style and even muster the physical force to drive him out. It starts with the Doctor’s simple observation that Za’s knife has no blood on it, and from that point Kal unravels: he calls it a bad knife for not showing what it has done; the Doctor needles his vanity, saying it’s much better than his; Kal falls for it, proudly pulling out his bloody weapon; and the Doctor parades it around the tribe like a prize lawyer. Rousing the whole tribe against the strong fighter, he throws a stone at him and gets everyone else to do the same, making him retreat under a barrage of rocks.
This is simply a terrific scene. William Hartnell is outstanding, slipping effortlessly between quiet, naturalistic instructions and a theatrical display of Stone Age rabble-rousing, but it’s a brilliant idea, too: years before Columbo ever aired, Doctor Who invents the format. We’ve already seen the murderer, and the Doctor exposes him through a combination of psychology and forensic evidence. And while he’s settling the rivalry between Kal and Za, at the same time he’s settling with argumentative teacher Ian Chesterton just exactly who is the leader of the TARDIS crew, and the star of the show (he still is). Just as with the Twentieth-Century humans, the Doctor can speak their language and then get into their mindset and manipulate it, which makes you wonder just how much he’s talking down to our level, too. And I still love the idea of taking a standard of crime drama and reinventing it in an utterly different setting: within a few stories after this, the Doctor will triumph in another courtroom drama, this time on an alien world, and go on in another story to solve both a locked room mystery and a whodunit…
Even with these Runners-up I could easily have chosen many more – or even many more fifties. Do you remember the Doctor looking entirely at home in a steaming Victorian laboratory until the devils the owners made a pact with appear in the mirrors? Or the Doctor explaining the TARDIS at its most Victorian with the aid of boxes and points of view, and getting it absolutely right (nine times out of ten)? The Doctor and Amy lying in a field with Vincent van Gogh and seeing the swirling stars he sees; the Doctor echoing, “Do we have a deal?” on a diamond planet; the Doctor dining with a monster, consumed with comedy and tragedy; the Doctor’s shoes and mind clicking into place at exactly the same moment; the Doctor roaring defiance at a murderous, self-perpetuating oligarchy only for them meekly to admit they, too, can’t make the decisions? The Doctor fading but determined as he goes to find his other selves; another self the Doctor would rather not find deriding his tawdry quirks; a man who isn’t the Doctor dreaming of a life with the woman he loves; the Doctor’s people dispassionately putting him on trial for caring too much and ripping away his own self and those who care about him…?
What about Daleks rolling off the production line and shrieking their crusade to conquer and destroy – or as masters of a ruined London – or whimsically playing trains, suddenly made childlike; the Master wielding the devilish charisma of a revivalist preacher to demand his enemies be burned – or telling his allies what fun it is to watch the Clangers, or the Teletubbies; Cybermen bursting free from their tombs to plunging, echoing music and owning those who’ve come to free them – or being mass-manufactured from other victims whose screams are drowned by tacky pop? A masked sordid sex murderer’s monstrous disfigurement revealed; a treacherous monk’s inner fire revealed; a police officer’s two-facedness revealed; a monstrous violation of the dead revealed as the lost leader himself undermining his people? Rose’s father sacrificing himself in the hope that grace may yet save the world; King Richard’s sister defying him with the Pope; an ancient monk unleashing a terrible substance from another dimension to overwhelm the Earth; a carefree couple woken by sacred stones out for blood…?
Think of a suave businessman in a beautiful suit jeering at a tortured Cyberman driven mad, or sneering at a mild-mannered scientist to shoot him – then only laughing as holes appear in his shirt front; a deranged schoolboy taunting his headmaster with deadly science projects; a woman’s mind and then body destroyed by a greedy alien and a bombastic warlord; an interplanetary agent with a licence to kill finding, like each of those others, exactly what happens when the Doctor isn’t there? A deposed princeling surrounded by his dead warriors hearing nothing but the clamour of old battles as he charges to his own death; plague-ridden commuters collapsing at a busy London station while a Cabinet Minister staggers through the streets, spreading the infection; the US President’s appeal to our shared humanity echoing to the stars as a huge spacecraft looms over Earth; the Master becoming Prime Minister of Great Britain and smiling a public smile at a secret joke; the head of a secret UN space defence force curtly telling an impromptu press conference he knows nothing about a man from space…?
I could go on. I will go on! But while I didn’t have room to more than hint at some of those marvellous moments above, the Fifty that do make it are on their way… Every one, you may be relieved to read, much shorter than this week’s post. And each week, you can try and guess which one’s coming next! I even have a special prize ready for the person who guesses the most of them over the next year, should more than one of you try in the comments each week.
So:
Next Time… Two words. The basics.
My idea is to pick a brilliant scene each week and set out just why it’s so brilliant – with a bonus quotation from the series each time that’ll mostly speak for itself. Many of the scenes will be from crucial moments in their stories, so watch out for spoilers (and today’s selection is particularly spoiler-heavy). All the Doctors will be there – just not necessarily in the right order. I’ll be counting down these marvellous moments roughly in order of preference, though not entirely: some might be there to tie in to a particular date, or spread out a bit so that similar scenes don’t all turn up in a row. Some scenes or sequences lasted mere seconds on TV… The longest up to a quarter of an hour. Most tend to be a couple of minutes long if you watch them, though who knows how long my write-ups are going to be.
The Fifty spread over this year will include my few absolute favourites – though not necessarily a ‘top fifty’. Looking at my instinctive choices, certain Doctors, certain stories, certain styles (not least speeches – and scary bits) came up much more than others. So, because I love the whole of Doctor Who, I’ve striven for more balance. The Fifty will include at least one scene from every year in which the series has first aired, and at least one from each of its TV seasons. There will be no more than one scene from each story featured (with one exception) – though the quotes will be more random and less calculated, some reflecting that week’s scene, others ones that just popped into my head, even if I’ve striven not to make them all from The Talons of Weng-Chiang. And I’m afraid this Fifty will be drawn only from the TV series, though I showcased a wider range at the last big anniversary with forty-five stories illustrating Why Is Doctor Who Brilliant? It was hard enough trying to weigh every scene in over two hundred television adventures, and I simply couldn’t have done it with what must now be thousands of different stories in all the many formats. Hopefully, these choices will be variety enough.
Most of all, I’ve picked scenes that I enjoy, and I hope you will, too.
I thought of hundreds of scenes before whittling them down to the Fifty. I could have done the Five Hundred… Except I’d never have managed to get them into any sort of order, still less found time to write about them all. Last week, I whetted your appetite for the forthcoming Fifty with Eleven Great Cliffhangers – though not quite the greatest, which you’ll see across the year – and, this week, Eleven Runners-up of various other descriptions, some to cast a different light, others which so nearly made the Fifty but for other choices already from their year, or their story. Inevitably, there are speeches and scary bits – but also special effects, some things that make me laugh, sentiment, excitement and more. Read on…
The Deadly Assassin
“Through the millennia, the Time Lords of Gallifrey led a life of peace and ordered calm, protected from all threats from lesser civilisations by their great power.
“But this was to change. Suddenly and terribly, the Time Lords faced the most dangerous crisis in their long history…”
First off: my favourite story of them all, beginning with the opening titles and a sombre introduction. This is less a scene than setting the scene, so it seems the perfect way to start. This arrangement of the fabulous Doctor Who Theme is still the best, ending in that marvellous stuttering echo as the titles fade, and the titles themselves the greatest titles ever made, a time tunnel swirling in different shapes and directions, carrying the TARDIS, the Doctor, the logo and credits through time and space and visibly inspiring the title sequence still used today. Then, for the first time, the story is introduced with a scrolling text read in the moody tones of the Doctor (Tom Baker). It promises something special. And it is.
The Doctor will crash into a premonition of death – and then, alone now, become a hunted fugitive in a city that was once his home… A film noir nightmare, political satire, dizzying virtual reality, reimagining the Master and the Time Lords, this will be the series’ most radical and creative story, both conceptually and visually (and upset Mary Whitehouse like no other). But it all starts with that unbeatable time tunnel. That’s Doctor Who.
The Dalek Invasion of Earth – Flashpoint
“One day, I shall come back. Yes, I shall come back. Until then, there must be no regrets, no tears, no anxieties. Just go forward in all your beliefs – and prove to me that I am not mistaken in mine.
“Goodbye, Susan. Goodbye, my dear…”
The first time the Doctor (William Hartnell) ever said goodbye to a travelling companion was to his granddaughter, Susan. And it’s been painful for him ever since. She’s fallen in love but feels she can’t leave him – so he makes the decision for her at the close of this story. It’s the beginning of so many times that writers have had to find a reason for someone to want to stop travelling in space and time, and one of the more plausible but sexist ones, being married off (an idea intermittently challenged by the Ponds); here it’s done with a little more conviction and a little more sexism than most, though the Doctor does show his love and pride in her and give her credit for looking after him as much as he’d looked after her. It’s William Hartnell’s beautifully played address to his grandchild that makes this so special, her shut out of the TARDIS, him standing at the console, both still smudged with ash from exploding Dalek mines. His stirring benediction falters slightly at the end, and he has to leave before he changes his mind. Susan walks slowly away from the vanished TARDIS, leaving her key in the ruins. The selection of part of this scene to open The Five Doctors cemented fans’ love for it, and when – after a decade of making speeches – I at last used a Doctor Who quotation in a speech of my own, I closed with this one. My voice broke at the end, too.
The Brain of Morbius
“How far, Doctor? How long have you lived?”
The brain of Time Lord war criminal Morbius has been restored to physicality in a hideous body of bits (and in an inspired twist not just on Frankenstein but on one of the ’60s and ’70s most often-used great TV threats). As the Nuns of Doom march to his castle in the final episode, bearing the traditional torches, the Doctor (Tom Baker) challenges him to a mind-bending duel: pitting their mental powers against each other to see which can force the other back through their lives to nothingness. Tom Baker and Michael Spice (plus Stuart Fell within the body) are both outstanding in their electric confrontation, Morbius arrogantly proclaiming himself “a Time Lord of the first rank,” the Doctor scorning him as a failed dictator, all set to one of composer Dudley Simpson’s finest moments, deep, stately chords offset with a spine-tingling counter-melody.
Two more things stand out. One is that the Doctor is fighting a desperate rear-guard action against of the titans of his race – what’s special about our hero is his choices, not his intrinsic power, and he’s overwhelmed by Morbius’ mental power: all he does is hold out long enough for the energies to be too much for Morbius’ new brain-case to bear, not the brain itself, and even that nearly kills him. We see Morbius thrust the Doctor’s psyche back through Pertwee, Pat, Billy… And through many previous incarnations as he hurtles back to his beginning. Contradicted or supported elsewhere as these may be (and some fans jump through such hoops to deny their intention), for me they’re a sign that Doctor Who can always surprise us, an enthralling sight and concept, and all that could make them more so is if the pre-Doctors were not members of the production team but old actors’ faces. Just imagine, say, Alastair Sim appearing, firing your imagination to see his black and white Doctor Who movies from the ’40s.
Remembrance of the Daleks
“BANG!”
Doctor Who always beat its budget to create memorable images that no-one else could show you, from the first sight of the TARDIS’ impossible interior and the first alien world, with its petrified forest and gleaming city, to monsters like suckered embryos with a ship that seems grown rather than made and a howlingly alive alien jungle, to eerily beautiful robots in an Art Deco vessel, or multiple Mona Lisas, or an Escher painting that encloses you, to crossing the striations of the timelines wearing a splash of red upon strangely monochrome stately gardens, right up to a would-be tyrant’s face disintegrating horribly or a dying world with a stormily alien sky. All that without yet breaking into the series’ Twenty-first Century stories – until my next choice down. Out of all of them, to champion Doctor Who’s most visually exciting moments I’ve picked two where the series makes an impact on London: one in 1963, when Doctor Who started; the next in the Twenty-first Century, when it continues. This is the one with streetfighting Daleks blasting the hell out of each other and the fuck-off bazooka Dalek.
The Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) is juggling two warring Dalek factions: the wily old gun-metal veterans; the glorious white and gold new Imperial stormtroopers. In Part Four, the veterans have captured a superweapon – but the Imperials don’t intend to let them get away and land an attack squad to take it. The first engagement sees an Imperial force retreat under a hail of fire from the more experienced warriors, one blown satisfyingly apart… Only for the Emperor to order the Special Weapons Dalek into position. Daleks have always been one-being tanks: this one, with its heavier, grimier armour and one huge gun, takes that to extremes. Simply obliterating every rival in its path, when it reaches the enemy base it blasts the gate apart in an enormous fireball, a blizzard of energy bolts slashing through the blaze before it settles. Some of the explosions staged here were so outrageous they caused an anti-terror alert (I love the BBC) – yet the battle’s still more exciting in the novel. Thrill to the Abomination!
Aliens of London
“BONG!”
I said before Doctor Who returned to our screens in 2005 that it would have to deliver not just impressive special effects – which everyone can do these days – but also memorable images with ideas behind them, and that year alone it delivered in spades, from looking at the Lady Cassandra’s beautiful flatness, to Daleks that were everything you ever darkly dreamed, to flying, shrieking time-eaters clawing at a church, to heads choking and splitting into gas masks, and since then keeping up the pace with a werewolf running amok in a stately home, the TARDIS bouncing along a motorway, a hospital on the Moon and right up to, yes, dinosaurs on a spaceship. But the most cheekily memorable image of that first new year? This is the one with the spaceship crashing into Big Ben.
The Doctor (Christopher Eccleston) has accidentally brought Rose back home not a day but a year after taking her on a trip through time and space, which has not gone down well. Both are at their most unlikeable as they bicker on a rooftop, and no-one else on Earth is going to believe Rose if she tries to talk about aliens and spacecraft… Only for a spaceship to fly straight overhead, trailing smoke, weaving across London and eventually crash-diving along Whitehall, smack into the clock topping St Stephen’s Tower, before belly-flopping into the Thames. Thank goodness it came along to snap them out of it, though their initial reactions are mixed… It’s the first and still best moment of its kind, as Russell T Davies enters his vocation to destroy ever major landmark in London. When Doctor Who does a story called ‘Aliens’, it looks like a bumbling comedy where they can’t even fly their ship… But the ominous truth is that they’re as greedy as a Ridley Scott corporation, and can destroy a whole planet much more quickly than something with sinisterly sexual gnashers.
The Talons of Weng-Chiang
“It’s good.”
“Oh. I’m so glad.”
With something to delight and something to offend everyone, The Talons of Weng-Chiang might just be the most enjoyable and quotable and thoroughly unsuitable for children Doctor Who story of them all. Obviously, I’ve loved it since I was five, and remember many years ago standing in a video shop with the latest VHS release and being unable not to overhear another small boy arguing with his mum about which Doctor Who video to buy. He wanted several; she would only pay for one. He was oscillating between two that I didn’t think were much cop, so I felt the urge to intervene, but made the most appalling error in being grown up: I asked her what sort of thing he liked. Of course, she didn’t know. So I knelt and asked which stories he had already and were his favourites. Having listened to the right person, I recommended Talons to him because it was scary and funny – and to her, on the basis that it was six episodes for the same price as four. I’ve often wondered if she left him alone with it, or came in, saw any of it and disapproved of the young man who’d suggested such appalling viewing.
One especially entertaining sequence comes half-way through Part Two. We’re on the dark streets of late Victorian London. The Doctor (Tom Baker) has been auditioning for (he can play the Trumpet Voluntary in a bowl of live goldfish) and sleuthing with theatrical impresario Henry Gordon Jago, not quite the bravest man in the Empire; his warrior tribe companion Leela has remained with premier pathologist Professor Litefoot, a crustily congenial old cove. Someone should pair these two guest artistes. And the villains have been crawling the kerbs in their carriage in search of the plot (spot the Porsche!). That plot revolves around monstrous appetites, so even the comedy scenes that pepper it have disturbing overtones – and this one enriches the main themes even as Litefoot finds the usual late-night cold collation laid out by his housekeeper and innocently offers Leela dinner.
You think writing about special effects is doomed? What about describing comedy? I’d urge you to buy this on DVD and watch it, because the comedy of manners between Leela – raised in an alien jungle – and a perfect Victorian gentleman never fails to crack me up. Expecting a lady, Litefoot’s face as she picks up a joint and just tears into it is priceless. He quails (there’s one of those on the table too). But politeness demands he can’t criticise or embarrass a guest, still less a lady, and when Leela’s own understanding of hospitality makes her express her satisfaction with the food, all he can do is weakly pretend pleasure. Faintly proffering a knife or fork, he sees her seize a carving knife, the better to hack the beef apart, and is left with no option as a good host but to put down the plate he would usually stack with a dainty selection of slices and, instead, grab a whole leg of lamb in both hands and bite. The culture clash in their next scene, when Leela drinks from the trifle bowl while Litefoot looks on queasily, has been known to make me cry with laughter. His last gasp of Victorian propriety comes in trying to save the tablecloth from Leela so as not to mortify the housekeeper come the morning – but before the night is out, it’s doomed to the Doctor. And by the end of Part Three, Leela’s enthusiasm for chomping on a leg has its own darker payoff…
Revelation of the Daleks
“It is our duty to eradicate all those who wish to pollute the purity of the Dalek race… If you ever loved me, Natasha, kill me! Kill me! …It is vital that the Daleks are supreme in all things!”
The Doctor (Colin Baker) isn’t the only one who wants to know what’s happened to his old friend Arthur Stengos; by half-way into Part One, Stengos’ daughter Natasha has broken into the galaxy’s biggest funeral home to find his ‘sleeping’ body missing and Daleks on guard. Overseeing all is Davros, remaking himself as the galaxy’s greatest doctor and promising eternal life – but of the kind that’s red-lit, tortured and underground. And the greatest horror for her is finding what’s left of her father growing into a Dalek, caught between his own self and one of Davros’ new breed of fascists. In a story of black comedy and dreamlike horror, this is the most nightmarish moment, a dramatic and visual triumph as Stengos is revealed in close-ups of eye and mouth, as if dismembered, and struggles to remember his love for his daughter when in his ranting New Order instead “The seed of the Daleks must be supreme.”
Stengos’ fate draws from perhaps the most memorable scenes in two of the greatest Doctor Who novelisations – a glass Dalek, a human slowly transforming into something ‘other’ and begging for death – each of which were too challenging (perhaps too expensive, certainly then too horrific) to portray in the original TV versions of The Daleks and The Ark In Space. And if you’re going to write as the David Whitaker or Bob Holmes tribute band, you’ve certainly got great tunes to play. As, if you didn’t think Natasha’s terrible choice was weird enough, does the resident DJ…
The Curse of Fenric
“Objects can’t harm us – it’s human belief. And you stopped believing when the bombs started falling.”
“I’m not frightened of German bombs.”
“Not German bombs… British.”
“On German cities. British bombs killing German children.”
In World War II, the Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) contests an ancient force of evil on the North-East coast. By the end of Part Two / half-way through the Special Edition of this most complex and layered story, the lively two young women Eastenders are made vampires, draining their self-righteous landlady then stalking through the graveyard mist to the local vicar. He tries to understand them… But they understand him much better. Reverend Wainwright flourishes his Bible, but they know it’s only faith that keeps them at bay – something with a stunning payoff later in the story – and that his is crumbling not under the horrors of the undead, but the horrors of war. Only the Doctor’s ferocity as he hurls himself in front of Wainwright makes them recoil, but they’ll return for him… Will he be able to find it in himself to triumph then? The Doctor and the bloodsuckers are almost forces of nature in this spellbinding scene that turns the traditional vampire story inside-out.
Love & Monsters
“You should take your jacket off.”
“No, I’m fine, I’ll just –”
“No, look, you must be boiling. Oh, look at your shirt. Sorry.”
“I – I – I’m fine. It’s all right.”
“I’ve ruined it.”
“No, honestly, i-i-i-it’s – it’s fine.”
“Take it off. I’ll put it in the wash.”
“Oh, come on! It’s only a little drop.”
“Oop! There now. Ruined.”
Elton Pope’s been fascinated with the Doctor ever since he was a boy, and never been happier than with a little group of friends with the same interests. By half-way into the story, though, someone’s rather taken over, organised them, given them ways to track the Doctor (David Tennant) and his friends, but things are less fun. And some of Elton’s group have vanished. Be careful what you wish for… And Elton wishes he could find Rose, so he tracks down her mum Jackie. Turns out he’s not quite as in control of his infiltration plan as he thinks he is. She keeps inviting him round to fix all the things that keep going wrong about the flat, and it’s got nothing to do with the way Elton’s shirt keeps accidentally riding up to show his stomach as he changes a bulb or his jeans showing off his arse as he looks at the washing machine. It’s a complete coincidence that her tops are getting tighter and skirts shorter, too. But just as she flings herself – or at least her wine, twice – at him, a call from Rose spoils the mood. She feels ashamed of her ulterior motives, and shows it; so does he, but doesn’t. He goes off for pizza to make it up to her, but it’s too late – she discovers what he’s after and she’ll protect them until the day she dies…
Camille Coduri’s Jackie has long been a brilliant comedy creation by now, shot through with tragedy; this is her finest moment, never funnier and never more moving as the cracks show of how much she misses her daughter and even Mickey. “Put the telly on if you want – can’t bear it silent.” The way Elton’s unreliable narration within his unreliable narration collides with her at her most turbo-charged is hilarious, then she and the script turn in an instant and break your heart. It’s inspired how ELO’s Turn To Stone gives way to Jackie’s choice of romantic music as she takes control of the scene from the man who’s been narrating it; her joyous sexuality is brilliant; then she lets her defences down only to find herself betrayed, anger punching through her loneliness to show how selfless and ferocious her heart is. Rose never sees it.
Genesis of the Daleks
“Today, the Kaled race is ended, consumed in a fire of war – but from its ashes will rise a new race: the supreme creature; the ultimate conqueror of the Universe; the Dalek!”
The climax to Part Three of this story, one of Doctor Who’s best, is an odd beast. On screen, the cliffhanger is a slightly underwhelming threat to the Doctor (Tom Baker). On the truncated LP (and now CD) release, the half-way cliffhanger comes a couple of minutes later, with the annihilation in fire of the Daleks’ parent species, the Kaleds, by their ancient enemies, the Thals (a model city with a sense of scale as, for once, the explosions take an age to die away). But it’s Davros, the half-Dalek creator of and would-be Führer of the new race, who actually betrayed the secret of their defences – to stop their leaders bringing the Dalek project to a halt. And in the originally scripted climax to the overrunning Part Three, moved back to begin Part Four, Davros uses the moment of shock for his scientific Elite (now the only survivors save for their mutated, battle-tanked progeny) to destroy his only outspoken internal critic. Ronson has asked awkward questions about the future of the Daleks and aided the Doctor’s escape; biding his time to respond, Davros now denounces Ronson as traitor and spy, ordering in his new Daleks to carry out their first ever extermination and promising vengeance on the Thals, too, then the absolute power and glory to which he aspires.
Genesis of the Daleks is packed with great moments, and another will make my Fifty. It’s the finest example in Doctor Who of actors and writers coming together to forge proper speeches, rather than just assuming ‘speaking at length’ makes great rhetoric. Others might choose the Doctor’s key moral dilemma – asking “Do I have the right?” – but this scene captivated me growing up and listening to it again and again on scratchy vinyl. The sheer power of Michael Wisher’s performance as Davros; the sheer ruthless chutzpah of the character; the sheer horror of Ronson screaming in denial. On screen, it’s the negative blaze around him and the sight of his colleagues backing quickly away, shielding their eyes, that stays with you; on LP and CD, the raw immediacy of the sound design, Davros’ harshly escalating triumph, the crashing march as the Daleks enter and their gun-sticks seethe. Gripping.
An Unearthly Child: The Firemaker
“This knife has no blood on it.”
Of all the Doctor Who stories criminally underrated by fans, for me this is the most unfairly overlooked – or, at least, 75% of it is. The first ever Doctor Who story, nearly everyone (rightly) looks on the first episode as one of the greatest pieces of television ever made, but nearly everyone else then goes on to do down the following three episodes, in which the Doctor (William Hartnell) and his as-yet unwilling companions plunge into prehistory and are caught up in the power struggles of a Stone Age tribe. Yet I’ve argued that these episodes are not only brilliant, but crucial to the show’s story. One outstanding scene comes at the beginning of the fourth episode, by which time the TARDIS crew have escaped the tribe with the aid of an old woman, only to be pursued by Za, one of the two rivals to be chief. Meanwhile, the cleverer but nastier rival, Kal, murders the old woman on finding them gone – and pins the blame on Za. With Za and our heroes captured together, things look bleak. But the Doctor brilliantly invents a genre tens of thousands of years early to beat Kal…
Kal’s great strength has been as a demagogue – Za learns how to adapt over the course of the story, but he’s comparatively slow. Yet as Kal waves Za’s stone knife before the tribe, weaving his story before them, the apparently frail old Doctor shows he can not only defeat a physically much stronger opponent with superior brainpower, but beat him at his own simple declamatory style and even muster the physical force to drive him out. It starts with the Doctor’s simple observation that Za’s knife has no blood on it, and from that point Kal unravels: he calls it a bad knife for not showing what it has done; the Doctor needles his vanity, saying it’s much better than his; Kal falls for it, proudly pulling out his bloody weapon; and the Doctor parades it around the tribe like a prize lawyer. Rousing the whole tribe against the strong fighter, he throws a stone at him and gets everyone else to do the same, making him retreat under a barrage of rocks.
This is simply a terrific scene. William Hartnell is outstanding, slipping effortlessly between quiet, naturalistic instructions and a theatrical display of Stone Age rabble-rousing, but it’s a brilliant idea, too: years before Columbo ever aired, Doctor Who invents the format. We’ve already seen the murderer, and the Doctor exposes him through a combination of psychology and forensic evidence. And while he’s settling the rivalry between Kal and Za, at the same time he’s settling with argumentative teacher Ian Chesterton just exactly who is the leader of the TARDIS crew, and the star of the show (he still is). Just as with the Twentieth-Century humans, the Doctor can speak their language and then get into their mindset and manipulate it, which makes you wonder just how much he’s talking down to our level, too. And I still love the idea of taking a standard of crime drama and reinventing it in an utterly different setting: within a few stories after this, the Doctor will triumph in another courtroom drama, this time on an alien world, and go on in another story to solve both a locked room mystery and a whodunit…
The TARDIS Can Go Anywhere – Super, Super Fun!
Even with these Runners-up I could easily have chosen many more – or even many more fifties. Do you remember the Doctor looking entirely at home in a steaming Victorian laboratory until the devils the owners made a pact with appear in the mirrors? Or the Doctor explaining the TARDIS at its most Victorian with the aid of boxes and points of view, and getting it absolutely right (nine times out of ten)? The Doctor and Amy lying in a field with Vincent van Gogh and seeing the swirling stars he sees; the Doctor echoing, “Do we have a deal?” on a diamond planet; the Doctor dining with a monster, consumed with comedy and tragedy; the Doctor’s shoes and mind clicking into place at exactly the same moment; the Doctor roaring defiance at a murderous, self-perpetuating oligarchy only for them meekly to admit they, too, can’t make the decisions? The Doctor fading but determined as he goes to find his other selves; another self the Doctor would rather not find deriding his tawdry quirks; a man who isn’t the Doctor dreaming of a life with the woman he loves; the Doctor’s people dispassionately putting him on trial for caring too much and ripping away his own self and those who care about him…?
What about Daleks rolling off the production line and shrieking their crusade to conquer and destroy – or as masters of a ruined London – or whimsically playing trains, suddenly made childlike; the Master wielding the devilish charisma of a revivalist preacher to demand his enemies be burned – or telling his allies what fun it is to watch the Clangers, or the Teletubbies; Cybermen bursting free from their tombs to plunging, echoing music and owning those who’ve come to free them – or being mass-manufactured from other victims whose screams are drowned by tacky pop? A masked sordid sex murderer’s monstrous disfigurement revealed; a treacherous monk’s inner fire revealed; a police officer’s two-facedness revealed; a monstrous violation of the dead revealed as the lost leader himself undermining his people? Rose’s father sacrificing himself in the hope that grace may yet save the world; King Richard’s sister defying him with the Pope; an ancient monk unleashing a terrible substance from another dimension to overwhelm the Earth; a carefree couple woken by sacred stones out for blood…?
Think of a suave businessman in a beautiful suit jeering at a tortured Cyberman driven mad, or sneering at a mild-mannered scientist to shoot him – then only laughing as holes appear in his shirt front; a deranged schoolboy taunting his headmaster with deadly science projects; a woman’s mind and then body destroyed by a greedy alien and a bombastic warlord; an interplanetary agent with a licence to kill finding, like each of those others, exactly what happens when the Doctor isn’t there? A deposed princeling surrounded by his dead warriors hearing nothing but the clamour of old battles as he charges to his own death; plague-ridden commuters collapsing at a busy London station while a Cabinet Minister staggers through the streets, spreading the infection; the US President’s appeal to our shared humanity echoing to the stars as a huge spacecraft looms over Earth; the Master becoming Prime Minister of Great Britain and smiling a public smile at a secret joke; the head of a secret UN space defence force curtly telling an impromptu press conference he knows nothing about a man from space…?
I could go on. I will go on! But while I didn’t have room to more than hint at some of those marvellous moments above, the Fifty that do make it are on their way… Every one, you may be relieved to read, much shorter than this week’s post. And each week, you can try and guess which one’s coming next! I even have a special prize ready for the person who guesses the most of them over the next year, should more than one of you try in the comments each week.
So:
Next Time… Two words. The basics.
Labels: Christopher Eccleston, Colin Baker, Daleks, David Tennant, Doctor Who, Doctor Who 50, London, Obscure Doctor Who Jokes, Pictures, Sylvester McCoy, Tom Baker, William Hartnell
Thursday, December 06, 2012
Doctor Who – Survival: The Short Review
Before Doctor Who became the biggest non-soap opera TV drama and demanded a Radio Times front cover even a fortnight before it’s next on, it was once in a struggle to survive. Before Sylvester McCoy became a big movie star – will next week’s opening beat James Bond to the year’s biggest? – he was the Doctor. And exactly twenty-three years ago (checks watch) now, he walked off into the sunset at the end of a gorgeous adventure that was positively not the last of Doctor Who. It felt like a new start. And, in several ways, so it was…
Having picked a short and relatively classy trailer for Doctor Who’s no longer final year in my Eleven Great Trailers opening a celebration of the series’ fiftieth year, brace yourself. Survival has a superb guitar score that, like the story itself, is both part of and a critique of the ’80s. This trailer counts down to Doctor Who’s ‘final’ year without that critique, an overlong, overblown piece of – there’s no hope for me – irresistible cheese to get you in the mood.
With Richard and I re-reading Sylvester’s New Adventures twenty years on, I’ve also been watching his TV stories over again. Richard’s already reviewed Survival for Millennium’s blog; I hope to start a series of reviews to complete them all. But as tonight’s the anniversary of not the end, the end seems as good a place as any to start – so before I return to Survival on DVD in detail, I just happen to have a much shorter review to hand written by a much younger me in April 1996 (I suspect I’ve since evolved both more love for Survival than I had then and a greater resistance to fan clichés in my reviews). It was published in Liberator Magazine, looking at the VHS release and hoping desperately that the Doctor Who TV Movie starring Paul McGann and Sylvester McCoy would be a huge success…
I hope this has whetted your appetite for much more of the Sylvester McCoy years, a time when both on screen and on the page Doctor Who was determined to be strange and interesting – and under the surface of Survival more than most there’s a challenge to the viewer, to the times and to the series itself. When I return to it, I’ll look at how as well as reshaping the Master it looks right back across Doctor Who with an implicit critique of ‘standards’ like the Daleks, the Cybermen and UNIT era, while looking forward into the New Adventures, Professor Bernice Summerfield and of course Doctor Who’s triumphant return to TV.
But first, coming soon…
Having picked a short and relatively classy trailer for Doctor Who’s no longer final year in my Eleven Great Trailers opening a celebration of the series’ fiftieth year, brace yourself. Survival has a superb guitar score that, like the story itself, is both part of and a critique of the ’80s. This trailer counts down to Doctor Who’s ‘final’ year without that critique, an overlong, overblown piece of – there’s no hope for me – irresistible cheese to get you in the mood.
With Richard and I re-reading Sylvester’s New Adventures twenty years on, I’ve also been watching his TV stories over again. Richard’s already reviewed Survival for Millennium’s blog; I hope to start a series of reviews to complete them all. But as tonight’s the anniversary of not the end, the end seems as good a place as any to start – so before I return to Survival on DVD in detail, I just happen to have a much shorter review to hand written by a much younger me in April 1996 (I suspect I’ve since evolved both more love for Survival than I had then and a greater resistance to fan clichés in my reviews). It was published in Liberator Magazine, looking at the VHS release and hoping desperately that the Doctor Who TV Movie starring Paul McGann and Sylvester McCoy would be a huge success…
Well, the next month saw that TV Movie, and it wasn’t quite the huge success for which I’d hoped. Yet though that starred Sylvester and no previous Doctor appeared in Rose nine years later, Russell T Davies’ new series felt far more like Survival than the Movie ever did. Following this story with the glorious, inventive, emotional, allegorical New Adventures makes perfect sense; jumping straight to Rose, which takes the same real-world roots and family ties and does them so much more deftly feels equally right. I always wonder if the business with something nasty through the council estate cat-flap is a deliberate homage to this story, but I suspect Russell had better reasons for casting Noel Clarke than that his birthday is today. Though I can’t completely rule it out (it’s my Mum’s birthday too, though I don’t think she’d have been quite as right as Mickey). “I felt like I could run forever,” said Ace. And Russell made sure that it did.“If we fight like animals, we’ll die like animals!”For too long, we all thought this was to be the last TV Doctor Who story ever made and mourned it, even as we rejoice in Virgin’s superb series of original New Adventures novels. Transmitted back in 1989, a BBC production with a BBC budget, Survival has the same protagonists as the new TV Movie, but played by (mostly) different actors and almost certainly with a very different tone, with perhaps the last use of cliffhanger episode endings – all of which are refreshingly effective.
Survival is good, solid, average Who: story-driven, with something familiar, a few surprises, mostly rather well done drama and the odd let-down. Something is appearing in North-West London and carrying people away, aided by the Doctor’s arch-enemy. They turn out to be giant cat-people on horseback, a strikingly effective sight (although their animatronic cat ‘hunting dogs’ betray the budget). Their home world is falling apart as they fight – not just a quarry, but with a pink sky, the odd volcano and a satisfyingly stormy look. And while the inhabitants affect the planet, it casts its strange spell over them in turn…
There is a slightly dreamy air to this allegorical tale, which shows no love for machismo and ’80s values. A retired sergeant teaches ‘survival of the fittest’, but is killed in turn by a sharp-suited yuppie, and the Doctor in the end chooses not to fight. Both the Doctor’s companion, the self-reliant Ace, and his opposite, the Master, are possessed by the Cheetah Planet in superb performances (although some of the minor actors are a bit ropey). Sylvester McCoy’s seventh Doctor was by this stage far darker, less goofy and with a far greater presence than when he started; while Anthony Ainley’s Master had sometimes descended almost into panto, here he is underplayed and sinister, fighting to survive with the gadgets and the veneer stripped away. He positively smoulders as he and the Doctor circle each other in a fine send-off for the old leads.“There are worlds out there where the sky is burning. Where the sea is asleep, and the rivers dream. People made of smoke, and cities made of song. Somewhere there’s danger. Somewhere there’s injustice. And somewhere else, the tea is getting cold.And next month…
“Come on, Ace – we’ve got work to do.”
I hope this has whetted your appetite for much more of the Sylvester McCoy years, a time when both on screen and on the page Doctor Who was determined to be strange and interesting – and under the surface of Survival more than most there’s a challenge to the viewer, to the times and to the series itself. When I return to it, I’ll look at how as well as reshaping the Master it looks right back across Doctor Who with an implicit critique of ‘standards’ like the Daleks, the Cybermen and UNIT era, while looking forward into the New Adventures, Professor Bernice Summerfield and of course Doctor Who’s triumphant return to TV.
But first, coming soon…
Labels: Christopher Eccleston, Doctor Who, New Adventures, Paul McGann, Reviews, Survival, Sylvester McCoy, The Master, Tolkien
Saturday, December 01, 2012
Doctor Who 50 – Eleven Great Cliffhangers
It’s Saturday the First of December, so what does that mean? That all of us faithful followers are looking forward to the very special day when he first came to save us – he looks like a man, but he’s a legend, and… And is that enough Advent blasphemy to make up for this morning? I’m counting down weekly to Doctor Who’s fiftieth anniversary, today with the definition of what gets you coming back next week: the cliffhanger. Before more of them enter my fifty great scenes across the year, here are eleven terrific scary moments to whet your appetite… Watch out for spoilers – often quite big ones!
It’s in the Daleks’ second story that they make perhaps their most iconic cliffhanger entrance (at least until 2006), shockingly rising from the Thames as masters of Earth in World’s End, but it was this cliffhanger that made Doctor Who an overnight success: bringing Barbara and the viewer to a pitch of tension, what could it be? Tune in next week! And the brilliance of it lies in part that it is not a monster reveal, but – after an episode of no-one else but our heroes exploring a strange world – the first intrusion of something else, a something or someone that we won’t see for another week. But Barbara’s seen it, and she’s terrified, and that reaction makes us desperate to know. It also establishes the iconic cliffhanger as something voyeuristic from the start – and rarely more so than in showing the climax not with the ‘viewers’ viewpoint character’ Barbara, but making us the very camera that threatens her.
You can see some of that cliffhanger in this excitingly spoilery fan-made Remembrance of the Daleks trailer – and it may be coming soon…
All the while, an impossible sphere has been hanging in their air, defying all analysis; and just as the Cybermen come through, just as the Doctor thinks it’s all about them, just as the Cyberleader tells him that they merely followed the hole the sphere made between universes… The void-ship starts to open at last. And though Mickey Smith has turned from cowardly Mickey the Idiot to confident Defender of the Earth – that’s the positive power of gay sex – even he’s not ready for what’s coming out. A year after she destroyed every last Dalek in existence, Rose recognises the four Daleks as they float out of their sphere, identifying their location, the life-forms, and their desire, as always: “Exterminate! Exterminate! Exterminate! Exterminaaaaaaate!”
On a planet on the edge of the Universe, a scientific party has come to grief in the eerie living jungle, and the Doctor (Tom Baker) and Sarah Jane have inevitably taken the blame. There are more horrible deaths on the rescue ship; something is preventing it from leaving orbit; and something is very wrong with the expedition’s sole survivor, in a ghoulish sci-fi twist on the Victorian tale of Jekyll and Hyde. In the wrong place at the wrong time, the Doctor’s really not getting on well with the ship’s ambitious young commander, and things come to a head when, coming round from the Doctor socking him in the jaw, the commander finds him standing over yet another twisted corpse and shoots him down. We’ve already seen the ship’s dead ceremonially ejected into space; now the commander has the unconscious Doctor and the all too awake Sarah Jane strapped onto trays in the mortuary and presses the lever to send them the same way in a ghoulish sci-fi twist on the Victorian fear of burial alive, already out of sight down the tube as the music screams in… Claustrophobia, helplessness, arbitrary power and death all combine to make this the most horrifying cliffhanger of all when I was a little boy. For some reason, corpses and skeletons seemed exciting, but coffins frightening.
director governor orders a close-up on his death throes; a mini-Jabba gurgles with delight in the most fabulously evil laugh of the ’80s; we zoom in on Colin’s still face on all the screens… They cut. One of Doctor Who’s most postmodern stories, surely its most postmodern cliffhanger as we watch what we’d normally watch on the screen on a series of screens – fittingly for such a superb cliffhanger, it’s the story’s peak, unusually far better around the middle than at the beginning or end.
The Doctor (Tom Baker) has been blamed (as usual) for sabotage and murder on an alien world. This is a holiday world, run by a dying race, and it’s going bankrupt; the sabotage and murder, apparently by green lizardy things lurking in the shadows, doesn’t help. Nor does their wolfish human business partner Brock, who’s making them an offer too good to refuse. Suddenly, though, things turn inside-out: a friendly green lizard helps the Doctor out and he takes it to see the Board, just as the next Chairman is turning into a fascist messiah. But that’s the least of Brock’s worries as the lizardy thing, turning not so friendly after all, makes a grab for him. He screams in xenophobic terror for it not to touch him, which seems for once justifiable – as, in a series of brilliantly horrible fast cuts and close-ups, we see it seize him and tear his head off. To reveal the lizard within.
The Doctor turning evil? How about all of us? Perhaps overcompensating for disintegrating a git of a President last time the Master turned up, here we get some blatant hero-worshipping of Obama, Wilf gets Chekhov’s Button hidden behind the bluff of Chekhov’s Gun, and the man who thinks he’s the main villain gets to activate his big sparkly gate thing. But he’s not the main villain at all. The Master leaps into action and, with a burst of thrilling music, throws his self across the world and into every human. The Doctor (David Tennant) can only look on appalled as the Master’s laugh echoes from the entire formerly-human race, sometimes wearing rather stylish pink frocks, to the strains of the glorious music we always know as ‘Dance of the Macra’. But it’s a double cliffhanger, and even the Master this time isn’t the main villain either. We zoom out from Earth across the Solar System and far beyond as the President of the Time Lords (Timothy Dalton) promises the serried ranks of his people – all in Prydonian, or Dalek, colours, and whose death has been the only certain fact of the past five years – final victory, and the end of time itself.
Though the rest of the story survives, the final episode of The Tenth Planet is one of those the BBC “lost” (though in this case, rumours suggest in a less straightforward way than the usual skip or furnace). Fortunately, not only does the soundtrack exist, as for all “missing” episodes, but so do three clips of the climax – two filmed off-screen of the buildup, and the first regeneration itself in full quality. And in a strange way, the juddery flickering of those clips just adds to the sense of something weird and powerful happening. It’s marvellous that we still have that mesmerising shot of the Doctor near-swooning into camera as he tells Ben he’s wrong about it all being over, then all those overlapping shots of the Doctor and the ‘alive’ console amidst a catastrophe of sound remains spellbinding – even before the end of the story itself in a new Doctor, still such a fantastic idea! As you could describe both as ‘Holy shit! What’s that?’ scenes – with both then having such satisfying answers – this cliffhanger and the first one above are probably the two most crucial moments in explaining why we’re still watching Doctor Who five decades later.
Next week – a last teaser before the Fifty start in earnest…
The Daleks Episode 1 – The Dead Planet
“Aaaaaaaahhhh!”The Doctor (William Hartnell)’s first adventure had fine cliffhangers to close each of its four episodes, not least the creeping threat at the very end of the story – but it was his second story that introduced not just the iconic monster but the iconic cliffhanger: a mystery; a monster; and a scream. The first episode of The Daleks is an early design triumph, as the TARDIS lands in the midst of a petrified jungle on an apparently dead planet. Exploring a strange metal city, full of sinister shining corridors with low arched doorways and with an eerie soundscape of hums and whirrs, the crew split up to explore… But when it comes time for them to meet up again, not only are they all feeling suddenly, strangely exhausted, but Barbara isn’t with them. She’s lost in the gleaming city, clutching the walls for support as she weakens, made all the more claustrophobic as doors close by themselves around her as if to herd her into place, hemmed in by a city coming alive and her own distorted reflections – then, as she’s reaching the end of her tether, to a piercing whine of musique concrète something extends a probe towards her as it closes in, and she screams…
It’s in the Daleks’ second story that they make perhaps their most iconic cliffhanger entrance (at least until 2006), shockingly rising from the Thames as masters of Earth in World’s End, but it was this cliffhanger that made Doctor Who an overnight success: bringing Barbara and the viewer to a pitch of tension, what could it be? Tune in next week! And the brilliance of it lies in part that it is not a monster reveal, but – after an episode of no-one else but our heroes exploring a strange world – the first intrusion of something else, a something or someone that we won’t see for another week. But Barbara’s seen it, and she’s terrified, and that reaction makes us desperate to know. It also establishes the iconic cliffhanger as something voyeuristic from the start – and rarely more so than in showing the climax not with the ‘viewers’ viewpoint character’ Barbara, but making us the very camera that threatens her.
Remembrance of the Daleks Part One
“The stairs!”Another iconic Dalek cliffhanger, this time from twenty-five years later, now the mid-point of Doctor Who; exploring a school basement full of Dalek technology, the Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) and Ace manage to disintegrate a Dalek transmitting in… But the one already there closes in. The Doctor shouts to Ace the same thing everyone at home does, and she bounds up the stairs to escape. But before the Doctor can do the same, the cellar door’s slammed shut in front of him and, for the first time, we see a Dalek shockingly glide up the stairs behind him, his face captured in its computer display as it identifies the enemy of the Daleks and shrieks that he will be exterminated…
You can see some of that cliffhanger in this excitingly spoilery fan-made Remembrance of the Daleks trailer – and it may be coming soon…
Army of Ghosts
“That’s not Cybermen…”The centre-point of Army of Ghosts / Doomsday doesn’t quite manage to spread today’s three Dalek cliffhangers evenly across the whole of Doctor Who’s first fifty years, but it’s close. The Doctor (David Tennant) goes downstairs again to investigate strange goings-on… Why does he keep doing that? It’s a thrillingly long build-up of tension that still manages to have the cliffhanger moment itself the undoubted climax: first, the Doctor is captured by fabulous villain Yvonne Hartman and Torchwood; then the Doctor works out (in an inspired twist on The Tenth Planet, with parallel rather than perambulating worlds colliding) that the Cybermen are behind it all; then the Cybermen effortlessly capture the Doctor and his captors; then the ‘ghosts’ across the world suddenly achieve full corporeality, as the Cybermen take control. The music, the imagery, Graeme Harper’s direction as the camera passes across eerily still Cyber-faces in close-up… It would be a terrific cliffhanger. So, pity the Cybermen, who have had some great cliffhangers of their own (faces in the snow, taking London in front of St Paul’s Cathedral, an army bursting from their containers and marching through a spaceship), yet the most exciting moment in their most victorious cliffhanger isn’t about them at all. I even usually name multi-part Twenty-first Century Who stories to myself after their first episode, yet this story to me is always “Doomsday” – because that’s about the Daleks, while “Army of Ghosts” seems more just the Cybermen.
“Oh my God—!”
All the while, an impossible sphere has been hanging in their air, defying all analysis; and just as the Cybermen come through, just as the Doctor thinks it’s all about them, just as the Cyberleader tells him that they merely followed the hole the sphere made between universes… The void-ship starts to open at last. And though Mickey Smith has turned from cowardly Mickey the Idiot to confident Defender of the Earth – that’s the positive power of gay sex – even he’s not ready for what’s coming out. A year after she destroyed every last Dalek in existence, Rose recognises the four Daleks as they float out of their sphere, identifying their location, the life-forms, and their desire, as always: “Exterminate! Exterminate! Exterminate! Exterminaaaaaaate!”
Planet of Evil Part Three
“You can’t do this! It’s murder!”Many of the cliffhangers I’m fondest of are those that most terrified me as a child. A man taking his wounded hand from his pocket and not recognising the half-Wirrn flesh it’s become; Sarah Jane recognising a Sontaran as it removes its helmet, or falling from a terrifyingly high gantry, or encountering the body, or brain, or body and brain of Morbius, or just not Sarah Jane at all; the Doctor caught in the merciless gaze of a dark god, or next to feel the blazing power of a cowled fanatic consumed by burning energy, or frozen underwater in the cliffhanger that most offended Mary Whitehouse (‘Finished, Doctor! The episode’s finished!’). Many more burned their way into my earliest nightmares – some of them will find their way into my Fifty Scenes across the next year, and it was very tempting just to fill up these eleven with more from the mid-Seventies. Instead, I’m going to write in detail about just one today, chosen – how else? – by virtue of being the one that gave me the most vivid and lasting recurring nightmare.
“She’s right. You have no evidence. You cannot do it.”
“How much evidence do you want? The whole crew dead? Eject! Eject!”
On a planet on the edge of the Universe, a scientific party has come to grief in the eerie living jungle, and the Doctor (Tom Baker) and Sarah Jane have inevitably taken the blame. There are more horrible deaths on the rescue ship; something is preventing it from leaving orbit; and something is very wrong with the expedition’s sole survivor, in a ghoulish sci-fi twist on the Victorian tale of Jekyll and Hyde. In the wrong place at the wrong time, the Doctor’s really not getting on well with the ship’s ambitious young commander, and things come to a head when, coming round from the Doctor socking him in the jaw, the commander finds him standing over yet another twisted corpse and shoots him down. We’ve already seen the ship’s dead ceremonially ejected into space; now the commander has the unconscious Doctor and the all too awake Sarah Jane strapped onto trays in the mortuary and presses the lever to send them the same way in a ghoulish sci-fi twist on the Victorian fear of burial alive, already out of sight down the tube as the music screams in… Claustrophobia, helplessness, arbitrary power and death all combine to make this the most horrifying cliffhanger of all when I was a little boy. For some reason, corpses and skeletons seemed exciting, but coffins frightening.
Vengeance On Varos Part One
“And cut it – now.”Colin Baker (the Doctor) is trapped in a voyeuristic world of TV where people delight to see the contestants suffer and everything is ruled by a TV vote. Make your own topical jokes. Here are mine. Tense music swells; the Doctor makes his way through a baking TV landscape, and we see people seeing him seeing Peri (yes, it is a bit meta); even the viewers at home feel thirsty watching; Peri is dragged into the studio and bursts out in horror at what she sees on the screen; the
The Space Museum Episode 1 – The Space Museum
“They’ve gone.”It’s another time where the cliffhanger builds and builds to a crescendo – before finishing in sudden silence and on a moment of quiet, charismatic authority. The TARDIS lands by the space museum to the triumphs of this planet’s conquerors – or does it? The Doctor (William Hartnell) and his friends explore, only to find no-one can see or hear them, to find they can’t touch anything, and ultimately to find… Themselves. Frozen exhibits alongside all the other monuments of conquest. It seems the TARDIS has been doing something very strange, by accident or design, and this eerie, intriguing opening episode closes with time catching up with its passengers: it never fails to send a shiver up my spine when to a sudden eruption of frankly barking, strident strings the TARDIS has another go at it, our heroes’ footprints belatedly appear, the display cases of doom fade away, Steven Moffat materialises and the Doctor ominously observes that they’ve at last arrived.
“Yes, my dear. And we’ve arrived.”
Carnival of Monsters Episode Two
“What was that?”When I think of Carnival of Monsters, I usually think of how funny it is, or how strange. The claim that it’s “Nothing serious, nothing political” even as it sends up xenophobic right-wingers; the high-concept weirdness that should mean the first episode’s cliffhanger is outstanding, though it doesn’t quite work on screen; the combination of the two in that what seems to be a puzzling mixture of times and places is revealed to be a peepshow satirising TV (and one show in particular). And yet the most memorable single moment is the most straightforwardly effective of all cliffhanger ideas: a simply brilliant monster reveal. The Doctor (Jon Pertwee) and Jo find themselves in part of an alien swamp, and as the entertainer and the alien planet’s MPs watch (plotting a good disaster but with no wish to be devoured by such monstrosities, even in the cause of political progress), there’s a terrific scream from a monstrous dragon bursting out of the water to menace our heroes… The Drashig is, in this shot, still one of the best monsters in the series, and completely lives up to its fourth-wall-breaking billing in all the ways we’ve already been told with grisly relish how scary it is.
“I don’t know – but it didn’t sound very friendly…”
The Leisure Hive Part Three
“I’ve got a surprise for you all.”Tom Baker’s final season as the Doctor is one of the series’ creative peaks: visually stylish; thematically brilliant; superb music; striking ideas. One of the elements it doesn’t get enough credit for, though, is its cliffhangers – it’s arguably Doctor Who’s most sustained run of terrific episode endings, whether in an outstanding mixture of villain revealed and turning point in the tale (not this one – a later one), fractured time suddenly crystallising as our hero arrives in danger (though differently to The Space Museum), or a lurch in the stomach of horror and delight at a mixture of fan-pleasing death and Tom solemnity. Two stories in particular stand out in every single cliffhanger. One of them’s made it to my Fifty. For the other, the Doctor’s pulled shockingly apart with a howl down a still shocking set of new titles; then aged to ancienthood; and in this third cliffhanger, the most shocking face-off of the lot…
The Doctor (Tom Baker) has been blamed (as usual) for sabotage and murder on an alien world. This is a holiday world, run by a dying race, and it’s going bankrupt; the sabotage and murder, apparently by green lizardy things lurking in the shadows, doesn’t help. Nor does their wolfish human business partner Brock, who’s making them an offer too good to refuse. Suddenly, though, things turn inside-out: a friendly green lizard helps the Doctor out and he takes it to see the Board, just as the next Chairman is turning into a fascist messiah. But that’s the least of Brock’s worries as the lizardy thing, turning not so friendly after all, makes a grab for him. He screams in xenophobic terror for it not to touch him, which seems for once justifiable – as, in a series of brilliantly horrible fast cuts and close-ups, we see it seize him and tear his head off. To reveal the lizard within.
The Trial of A Time Lord Part Thirteen – The Ultimate Foe
“This is an illusion. I deny it!”The Doctor (Colin Baker) has entered the Matrix – yes, just like that one. Doctor Who got there first, and this wasn’t even the first time (the first time was followed by a story with a great cliffhanger in which what looks like the Doctor’s evil self attacks him inside a computer. Completely different to this). Anyway, he’s gone inside this computer to track down his evil self, only to be enmeshed in dementedly Victorian bureaucracy. Told to go to a waiting room, he opens the door – and finds himself on a dour, windswept beach, the voice of his evil self (Michael Jayston) echoing down from the sky. He’s rather fabulous at that. Worried about his companion, the Doctor’s defiant – but threats boom like thunder to the Doctor himself, the music spirals, and below his feet the sand starts to heave as grimy hands erupt from it and, grasping at the Doctor’s legs, pull him to the ground. The Doctor tries to deny the reality of all this, but as the disembodied hands drag him deeper into the roiling sands, it seems all he can do is scream… The Doctor turning evil is one of the series’ great nightmares, so it’s appropriate that rarely has the Doctor been plunged into such nightmarish imagery.
“Not this time.”
“This – isn’t – happening!”
“You are dead, Doctor. Goodbye, Doctor…”
The End of Time Part One
“And so it came to pass, on Christmas Day, that the human race did cease to exist. But even then, the Master had no concept of his greater role in events – for this was far more than humanity’s end. This day was the day upon which the whole of Creation would change for ever…”OK. So not quite done with the Advent blasphemy. This is the longest buildup and cliffhanger in today’s choices (though not the longest scene in the Fifty, which will range from just a few seconds to…), as I will happily watch the last seven minutes or so of The End of Time Part One as one big climax. Russell T Davies has an amazing gift for great penultimate-episode cliffhangers, enthusing me for if usually outclassing the season finale that follows (here, neither the multiple Masters nor the Time Lords really seem to get a lot to do next time. But a great brink to teeter on). The Master (John Simm) is terrific, too, though I do rather prefer him more suave with occasional bursts of madness than the other way round, and so nearly went for the stunning images, music and charisma of his “Here – come – the drums!” …But it’s just possible that I may yet feature something else from that particular three-part story, and perhaps even another Russell pre-finale. What’s especially impressive about this cliffhanger is that, like Army of Ghosts’, it’s a double cliffhanger – setting up one huge menace that we expected, making it utterly victorious, and then topping it…
The Doctor turning evil? How about all of us? Perhaps overcompensating for disintegrating a git of a President last time the Master turned up, here we get some blatant hero-worshipping of Obama, Wilf gets Chekhov’s Button hidden behind the bluff of Chekhov’s Gun, and the man who thinks he’s the main villain gets to activate his big sparkly gate thing. But he’s not the main villain at all. The Master leaps into action and, with a burst of thrilling music, throws his self across the world and into every human. The Doctor (David Tennant) can only look on appalled as the Master’s laugh echoes from the entire formerly-human race, sometimes wearing rather stylish pink frocks, to the strains of the glorious music we always know as ‘Dance of the Macra’. But it’s a double cliffhanger, and even the Master this time isn’t the main villain either. We zoom out from Earth across the Solar System and far beyond as the President of the Time Lords (Timothy Dalton) promises the serried ranks of his people – all in Prydonian, or Dalek, colours, and whose death has been the only certain fact of the past five years – final victory, and the end of time itself.
The Tenth Planet Episode 4
“It’s far from being all over…”From the other end of time, and from another regeneration story before anyone had the faintest idea there could be any such thing, comes the biggest, most inspired shock cliffhanger in Doctor Who, for all that we’ve had so many years to get used to the idea: the Doctor (Patrick Troughton) is no longer the Doctor (William Hartnell). His old body wearing thin, exhausted by fighting against the Cybermen and their vampire world, the Doctor has won, but is in a state of collapse as he staggers back to the TARDIS. His companions Ben and Polly (good-looking guys) follow, only to find the TARDIS apparently working the Doctor rather than the other way round, and the Doctor himself, in a blaze of light and roar of sound – changing…
Though the rest of the story survives, the final episode of The Tenth Planet is one of those the BBC “lost” (though in this case, rumours suggest in a less straightforward way than the usual skip or furnace). Fortunately, not only does the soundtrack exist, as for all “missing” episodes, but so do three clips of the climax – two filmed off-screen of the buildup, and the first regeneration itself in full quality. And in a strange way, the juddery flickering of those clips just adds to the sense of something weird and powerful happening. It’s marvellous that we still have that mesmerising shot of the Doctor near-swooning into camera as he tells Ben he’s wrong about it all being over, then all those overlapping shots of the Doctor and the ‘alive’ console amidst a catastrophe of sound remains spellbinding – even before the end of the story itself in a new Doctor, still such a fantastic idea! As you could describe both as ‘Holy shit! What’s that?’ scenes – with both then having such satisfying answers – this cliffhanger and the first one above are probably the two most crucial moments in explaining why we’re still watching Doctor Who five decades later.
Next week – a last teaser before the Fifty start in earnest…
Labels: Colin Baker, Daleks, David Tennant, Doctor Who, Doctor Who 50, Jon Pertwee, Michael Jayston, Sylvester McCoy, The Master, Tom Baker, William Hartnell
Advent Countdown – Ten Seasonal Songs of Magic, Money and Nuclear War
Waking much too early on the First of December, I’ve spent the morning in seasonal mood for the first day of Advent with a selection of festive songs – and, impossibly, aiming to list a full ten that won’t make me gag! So I racked my brain (nearly a Ringo Starr song, though not a Christmassy one) for the likes of Paul Simon, George Harrison, Kate Bush, Tom Robinson, Gerry Rafferty, the Pet Shop Boys and Timbuk 3 for songs of magic, money worries and total thermonuclear destruction at Christmas. The usual suspects, then. And what else do you spot…?
You might expect Simon and Garfunkel’s famously jolly 7 O’Clock News/Silent Night, but in the last couple of weeks I’ve mostly been listening to Paul’s most recent album, So Beautiful or So What, and while the title track is by far the best on it, I have to admit I enjoyed the stomping beat and sharp, bluesy guitar work of Paul’s song of Christmas worries in modern America that it quite put me in the mood for more Christmas songs. I’ve only found the video this morning, and that’s quite witty, too.
Oh, I love George, and I can only assume this was a comeback at people who grumbled he only wrote deep and meaningful lyrics. Or that he wanted a minor seasonal hit. So why not get your new year in early and, ideally, watch the video, which is a lot of fun and has pirates, silly hats and George naked? What more could you want? Look, it’s better than Paul’s Wonderful Christmastime (though the redoubtable Mr Hickey, who spray-paints his beard white every December, has a brilliant defence of it), or that endlessly replayed dirge from John and Yoko. Has Ringo done one (checks. Oh, Jesus! Is that where Annie Lennox got the idea)?
Oscar Wilde! Dropping down in my parachute! Coming to sparkle the dark up (I’m not doing a good job of covering the muck up)! Hurrah for twinkly Kate! Though the live version I’ve linked to’s OK, it’s worth looking for the proper ethereal studio one with her own backing vocals. All right, I’m strangely enjoying this Christmas lark, as long as it stays batshit-crazy.
Can I give a daytime TV link that Kate had a hit with Peter Gabriel and Tom wrote this (and a couple of minor hits) with Peter? It’s from Tom’s most depressed album, North by Northwest, with lots of early ’80s electronic instrumentation rather than his early punk sound. But don’t worry – this one’s lively and sounds like he’s having much more fun than the rest of it. That’s why I love it, because otherwise the lyrics wouldn’t be so funny. Discovering Tom in my teens, this festive epic of seasonal nuclear devastation was my favourite very ’80s Christmas song.
Another mournfully seasonal song from the ’80s (tears, broken heart) and from my favourite Gerry Rafferty album, the utterly gorgeous North and South. Like most of the album, this is achingly beautiful, with its icy pipes as wintry a sound as you’re likely to hear. And though thinking of Christmas songs that don’t set my teeth on edge is starting to become a bit of a struggle, it’s cheering to see today that Gerry’s just been given a memorial street in his old home (shipyard) town.
Slightly bad timing with this one – though not from the ’80s this time – released as a Christmas single just as the country was buried in blizzards. Oh well. The chorus is jolly and upbeat and the nearest to a Christmas love song I can put up with. And as well as making Bing Crosby! an exclamation, it still finds time to bitch about Christmas never being as good as it should be, so that’s all right. But, Neil… I thought you were a Doctor Who fan?
And back to the ’80s one last time for Timbuk 3, who I liked a lot ever since hearing their rationale for putting a nice piece of ass on the cover of their first album, Greetings From Timbuk 3, to sell more copies (look it up). I can’t say this is really my favourite of theirs – tragically, I still like toys with guns (particularly gun-sticks), and Tom’s similar message was much funnier – but their hearts are in the right place and, if you sing in an American accent, in amidst The Message the first verse closes on a spectacularly terrible pun. And I love those.
All right, I know I promised ten songs, but that’s seven that I actually like and yet I’m already losing the will to live. And it’s still the morning of December 1st. That bodes well, doesn’t it, boys and girls?
I have a terrible feeling I may prefer to listen to some of the more stately old hymns and carols. Richard will be appalled and my Mum delighted – that can’t be right! I shall have to compile a more blasphemous Advent countdown later to restore the balance…
Paul Simon – Getting Ready for Christmas Day
You might expect Simon and Garfunkel’s famously jolly 7 O’Clock News/Silent Night, but in the last couple of weeks I’ve mostly been listening to Paul’s most recent album, So Beautiful or So What, and while the title track is by far the best on it, I have to admit I enjoyed the stomping beat and sharp, bluesy guitar work of Paul’s song of Christmas worries in modern America that it quite put me in the mood for more Christmas songs. I’ve only found the video this morning, and that’s quite witty, too.
From early in November to the last week of December
I got money matters weighing me down
Well the music may be merry but it’s only temporary
I know Santa Claus is coming to town
George Harrison – Ding Dong, Ding Dong
Oh, I love George, and I can only assume this was a comeback at people who grumbled he only wrote deep and meaningful lyrics. Or that he wanted a minor seasonal hit. So why not get your new year in early and, ideally, watch the video, which is a lot of fun and has pirates, silly hats and George naked? What more could you want? Look, it’s better than Paul’s Wonderful Christmastime (though the redoubtable Mr Hickey, who spray-paints his beard white every December, has a brilliant defence of it), or that endlessly replayed dirge from John and Yoko. Has Ringo done one (checks. Oh, Jesus! Is that where Annie Lennox got the idea)?
Ring out the old, ring in the new
Ring out the old, ring in the new
(that’s half the lyrics already)
Kate Bush – December Will Be Magic Again
Oscar Wilde! Dropping down in my parachute! Coming to sparkle the dark up (I’m not doing a good job of covering the muck up)! Hurrah for twinkly Kate! Though the live version I’ve linked to’s OK, it’s worth looking for the proper ethereal studio one with her own backing vocals. All right, I’m strangely enjoying this Christmas lark, as long as it stays batshit-crazy.
December will be magic again
Take a husky to the ice
While Bing Crosby sings White Christmas… He makes you feel nice
December will be magic again
Old Saint Nicholas up the chimney
Just a-popping up in my memory
Tom Robinson – Merrily Up On High
Can I give a daytime TV link that Kate had a hit with Peter Gabriel and Tom wrote this (and a couple of minor hits) with Peter? It’s from Tom’s most depressed album, North by Northwest, with lots of early ’80s electronic instrumentation rather than his early punk sound. But don’t worry – this one’s lively and sounds like he’s having much more fun than the rest of it. That’s why I love it, because otherwise the lyrics wouldn’t be so funny. Discovering Tom in my teens, this festive epic of seasonal nuclear devastation was my favourite very ’80s Christmas song.
Let’s all party –
War has started
Let’s forget about days gone by
We won’t see another year like it
So drink your dinner tonight:
It's no use to face the future
Count to twenty –
Close your eyes
This year, next year
Thermonuclear
Merrily up on high!
Gerry Rafferty – Winter’s Come
Another mournfully seasonal song from the ’80s (tears, broken heart) and from my favourite Gerry Rafferty album, the utterly gorgeous North and South. Like most of the album, this is achingly beautiful, with its icy pipes as wintry a sound as you’re likely to hear. And though thinking of Christmas songs that don’t set my teeth on edge is starting to become a bit of a struggle, it’s cheering to see today that Gerry’s just been given a memorial street in his old home (shipyard) town.
Winter’s come – another year, another season begun
Every day brings a long cold lonely night
Pet Shop Boys – It Doesn’t Often Snow At Christmas
Slightly bad timing with this one – though not from the ’80s this time – released as a Christmas single just as the country was buried in blizzards. Oh well. The chorus is jolly and upbeat and the nearest to a Christmas love song I can put up with. And as well as making Bing Crosby! an exclamation, it still finds time to bitch about Christmas never being as good as it should be, so that’s all right. But, Neil… I thought you were a Doctor Who fan?
Christmas is not all it’s cracked up to be
Families fighting around a plastic tree
Nothing on the TV that you’d want to see…
Timbuk 3 – All I Want For Christmas (Is World Peace)
And back to the ’80s one last time for Timbuk 3, who I liked a lot ever since hearing their rationale for putting a nice piece of ass on the cover of their first album, Greetings From Timbuk 3, to sell more copies (look it up). I can’t say this is really my favourite of theirs – tragically, I still like toys with guns (particularly gun-sticks), and Tom’s similar message was much funnier – but their hearts are in the right place and, if you sing in an American accent, in amidst The Message the first verse closes on a spectacularly terrible pun. And I love those.
Transformers, superheroes
Thundercats in cast iron clothes
Rocket fingers, laser eyes
Cannon mouths and missile toes
All right, I know I promised ten songs, but that’s seven that I actually like and yet I’m already losing the will to live. And it’s still the morning of December 1st. That bodes well, doesn’t it, boys and girls?
I have a terrible feeling I may prefer to listen to some of the more stately old hymns and carols. Richard will be appalled and my Mum delighted – that can’t be right! I shall have to compile a more blasphemous Advent countdown later to restore the balance…
Labels: Christmas, George Harrison, Gerry Rafferty, Kate Bush, Music, Pet Shop Boys, Tom Robinson, Top Tips
Friday, November 30, 2012
Nick Clegg’s Garden Cities – Thinking Big, But Are There Any Foundations?
Last weekend’s Letter from the Leader was Nick Clegg’s boldest email missive for some time: headed “We need to think big,” it turned his speech on Housing last week into a rallying cry to Liberal Democrats. Starting with new Coalition plans to add an extra 50,000 homes, he outlined a vision of new “Garden Cities” adding up to a million in a decade. Nick’s inspired me not just to examine his new big idea, but to come up with hard-headed tests for any major policy proposal – not least ‘Can we get it done?’ and ‘Will we get any credit?’
The text of this Letter from the Leader is not yet available to read on Nick Clegg’s website (though you can sign up there to receive future ones), nor the Lib Dem website, though Lib Dem Voice have helpfully reprinted it on theirs. You can, however, read his speech to National House-building Council on the Deputy Prime Minister’s official website.
Housing has been an increasing problem in Britain for decades, but there’s no doubt that in the last few years the problems have boomed exactly as new houses haven’t. The population is rising; the number of smaller households is rising at a faster rate than the rest of the population; populations are not rising evenly across the UK, but in particular areas, notably the South East; and so house prices and rents are rising way ahead of general inflation, which both denies access to the housing ladder to many and through housing benefit massively distorts the benefits system (as I wrote earlier this year when proposing pilot studies for one part-solution that might be better than the alternatives – assuming no massive new miracle building programme that would drive down house prices and better manage the overcrowding of the South-East, as Nick’s might in a perfect world).
No government in my lifetime has done anything much about housing, save for the Tories’ 1980s plan of selling off social housing – which increased home ownership at the time, but which without replacement stock has long since come to a natural halt as a policy with broad appeal or effect. For whatever reason – ideological, financial, fear of confrontation – no level of government has made housing a priority for a long time, while for a different variety of reasons the private sector has simply not kept up with demand (and not been popular for “sprawl” where it’s tried bit by bit).
Nick Clegg last week made a speech in which he called for a bold turnaround – not just setting out some of the Coalition’s piecemeal policies to help building get off the ground in areas where it’s teetering on happening, but the sort of massive new, planned building programme I simply skipped over when I last wrote about housing because no-one was going to do it. And yet, when our national deficit is still in crisis and reducing ongoing borrowing, Nick proposes all this – surely a far better solution to soaring benefits rates than simply cutting them and hoping people can still find housing, but, as Sir Humphrey would say, bold. Having read Nick’s speech and seen some of the reaction since, I think it could be marvellous if it happened, but were I a betting man I could make more than a property speculator in wagering it’s not going to.
Nick’s vision is of a Britain (though, in effect, mostly the South-East) blooming with dozens of new garden cities – described by commentators who like the idea as new Letchworths, and by those who don’t as an outbreak of Milton Keynes. It’s a clever pitch; you’d be hard-pressed to tell the difference between what a “garden city” is and what an “eco-town” is, save that one is couched in language of an older era that sounds traditional and reassuring and for which you can go to poster-towns like Letchworth to show how nice they are, while the other was a despised New Labour eyesore of political correctness and bossy government, so it’s no wonder they didn’t get going. But imagine either actually built and a visit to each, and I can’t imagine they’d look any different. So when the biggest barrier to these new towns other than the immense cost is all the many shades of NIMBYism, it helps that for those suspicious of new ways more than of falling house prices Nick can ‘speak Tory’.
I agree with Nick’s ambition – and sometimes it’s good to take a risk. He does, right from the heading in that email to Lib Dem members that “We need to think big” and the introduction “I want to focus on an issue that wasn’t so high on the radar screen, but matters enormously to me: housing”.
This is the point at which I turned to Nick’s full speech to see if it offered anything more concrete (no, not nasty concrete, anything more flowery and trellised). It starts with a decent statement of purpose, on the money, at least:
Nick goes on to say, too, that:
I know it seems like I’m knocking the whole idea. But I’m trying to work out what Nick was actually trying to build up: houses, or hopes? Nick is right to come up with big ideas, and to sell them to the Party in the way he did at the weekend. The LiberaTory Coalition needs to inspire Liberal Democrats, let alone inspire voters, with positive prizes, not just restraining Tories. But I worry that this fanfare will only lead to disappointment and greater disillusionment among Party members if action doesn’t follow the call – and I can’t help but notice that this wasn’t a government plan, seemingly, but Nick’s. The government cash was only for 5% of it. Rather than just asking piecemeal, sprawling questions about elements of a speech or email, then, I’d like to propose my own strategic vision of big questions with which to test the big ideas.
If a speech in which “Nick Clegg calls for…” something is to have a more immediate impact than a Lib Dem motion where “Conference Calls For…”, we need to ask if it’s an aspiration, or if there’s real government drive – and money – behind it. And, for Lib Dems, we should ask something more. On the basis that if an idea’s good enough you should shamelessly nick it – something Lib Dems have long known to our cost – I’d like to focus Lib Dem minds with a message from Conservative Party part-owner Lord Ashcroft:
In effect, the only question the Lib Dems appear to have been asking in the first couple of years of the Coalition has been Ashcroft’s first – Is it the right thing to do? Which has led to some good government, some good policies, and many good kickings from voters who don’t see anything specific to give us credit for. Important as doing the right thing may be, if we selflessly serve the country while setting ourselves up for annihilation, we won’t be in a position to do the right thing for very long.
I think there are two key questions Liberal Democrats need to ask on top of Ashcroft’s tests.
Our reframing of “does it show strong leadership?” might simply be ‘Can we get it done?’ And at what price – in political capital, and in actual capital? Is it worth spending so much of either? Considering, too, “does it make the right enemies?” I might add that making the right enemies is all very well, but ‘Are we actually going to be able to beat them?’ Never mind local opposition; not only do we have to reach agreement with the Tory Leadership on the Government delivering anything not in the Coalition Agreement (and, increasingly, all over again on anything that is), but it’s obvious that thanks to Cameron’s “strong leadership” he’s increasingly unable to get his MPs to vote for anything he says. That’s the irony – Nick is seen as a weak Leader, but Lib Dem MPs are exceptionally united in voting for agreed proposals; it’s simply that there aren’t enough of them, and it’s the weak Tory Leadership that lets agreed Lib Dem priorities slide and makes us look a weak part of Government (and, conversely, the strong Lib Dem Leadership that often saves Cameron’s votes from his own rabble).
So, then, our first new question should be: ‘Can we get it done?’
Our second new question should be: ‘Will we get any credit?’
The cynical answer is ‘No’. Note that my questions, or something like them, must have been asked within the Party Leadership. The Lib Dems have clearly been thinking about specific, measurable claims that we might get credit for recently, rather than just ‘doing the right thing’ platitudes: the party slogan changing from “In government, on your side” of early in the Coalition to the much less inspiring but demonstrably true “Fairer tax in tough times”. And even then, with the massive rise in the personal allowance for most income-taxpayers the single policy the Lib Dems most banged on about at the last election and since, at the top of the list of four priorities on the cover of our 2010 Manifesto… Opinion polls show that only about 20% of people give us credit for it. So how wildly distinctive and how loudly and perpetually repeated does any policy have to be before anyone thinks of it as Lib Dem?
To aid any possibility of getting credit, then, there’s more to consider. The party has given precious little thought for many years to communicating our philosophy or core values, but to the extent that people have a sense of them or even vaguely ‘What the Lib Dems are about’, does a proposal arise naturally out of that? Would people think ‘That’s the sort of thing the Lib Dems like’? Is it something that we’ve consistently gone on about? If we adopt this policy and get the Coalition to act on it, will ministers be likely to keep going on about it, and will activists be inspired to keep campaigning on it? If the answer to many (or even any) of these questions is ‘No’, then the chances of it making an impact for the Lib Dems – as opposed to for the country – are practically non-existent.
There are two more big problems with my two more big questions. Firstly, the Lib Dems’ overriding focus on ‘Is it the right thing to do?’ both in Opposition and now in Government means that we’ve been much more willing than the other two parties to consider policies for the long term. The more ruthless ‘Can we get it done?’ and ‘Will we get any credit?’ are enemies of long-term thinking. A long-term plan is much more likely to cost money, and be changed or cancelled by changes in government; a long-term plan that succeeds is much less likely to be noticed in its early stages, or only be noticed for its downsides or not yet delivering, while the eventual credit is, again, something more likely to go to changes in government. I’ve always criticised governments for their short-termism; ironically, I’m now setting political tests that might encourage it.
Secondly, ‘Can we get it done?’ and ‘Will we get any credit?’ also clash with each other. Here’s the paradox of wanting both: the more distinctive a proposal, the less likely it is to be delivered through the Coalition; the more popular and consensual, the more likely it is that the Tories will claim the credit (and get it, thanks to all their friends in the media).
As it happens, I’m working on a Liberal Big Idea, too. Hopefully, I’ll be ready to come out with it in the next week or two. It does comes right out of our philosophy, it’s very distinctive, and it’d save a lot of money – so it sounds like it’d be good for all those tests. But in terms of making the right enemies, it’s a doozy – so the chances of it getting through any Coalition consensus aren’t high…
Can Nick deliver on this?
Improbably, the most hopeful straw in the wind in the last week has come from another Nick – Planning Minister and Tory MP Nick Boles. He spoke to Newsnight in a major piece on Wednesday night, complete with a smaller write-up on the BBC website. It was worth a look, and in the main he agreed with Nick – in almost as much as he could without ever once mentioning his speech or indeed his name. Bigging up his own constituency, not exactly a new town, I wondered if “It was not, you know, some grand prince’s design for a new town…” was not a swipe at Mr Clegg’s big vision, though his defence of new building against an array of the usual suspects in the studio sounded more in tune, and as the BBC trotted him off to existing garden city Letchworth to sing its praises the voiceover described such places as “The government’s answer”. So perhaps the Tories might move after all. Of course, I didn’t agree with everything Tory Nick said – the lovely Andy Hinton’s Tweets from the night summarise why succinctly:duckhouse near no loud noises and reacts with instinctual horror at the very idea of big cities (which no doubt has something to do with the fact that it’s decades since they last won seats in any of them). And I winced as he whistled up immigration, equally by Tory instinct. But on the whole, I saw in his attitude something we could (forgive me) build on, and hopefully the Planning Minister wouldn’t have just gone off on his own without at least some support from the Tory Leadership. Even with that sign of hope, though, watch the studio debate as people line up to attack new housing even when they’re really in agreement (hang your head, Wayne Hemingway) because they assume that it won’t be exactly what they want and so must be opposed until perfection is offered on a plate. Oh, and Paxman’s sneering faux-outrage at someone sounding momentarily more of a snob than he is was beneath contempt, but who didn’t expect that?
Will the Lib Dems get any credit if these new cities happen?
Well, the ‘garden’ part, and Nick taking a lead, might help – I may have characterised his reassuring framing of new towns as tradition as his ‘speaking Tory’, but it’s also true that the environment is among the few sorts of issue that polls suggest people associate us with. So if these massive building projects end up being real ‘garden cities’, that might chime. Unfortunately, along the way, they’re… Massive building projects. As I found above, Nick’s speech itself enabled me to put this grand vision into the context of what he, rather than the Lib Dems in general, has been banging on about for years – though it’s a slight worry that I had to do the contextualising myself, rather than the speech (still less the email) joining the dots.
And never mind the theme: what about who else takes it up? Look at the article on Nick Boles: no mention of “garden cities” from him. Listen to what he had to say on Newsnight: no mention of “garden cities” by him there either, though the framing at least implied something like them, and the voiceover that, hopefully, mentioned them as “The government’s answer”. Within just days of this being Nick Clegg’s next big thing, though, the number of times ‘our’ Nick was mentioned by either Tory Nick (predictably) or by the BBC (also predictably) was… Zero.
Remember, too, that “Of course development is always controversial.” If it’s done by private enterprise, people won’t think of it as a government initiative – unless it’s for someone to blame. And if it’s to be built over ten years, then who’ll remember who started it? Is it something that comes obviously from our philosophy, or that we’ve always been banging on about, then? Basically, no. We’ve not had any big ideas on housing until last week – neither has anyone else (not since the Tories came up with the idea of selling it). Look at the “What we stand for” section on the Lib Dem website: as well as an embarrassing lack of any statement of values or philosophy, merely a set of policy headings, there’s not even any heading for ‘Housing’. So will we refashion ourselves as ‘the party of housing?’ That’ll take an awful lot of doing.
I hope Nick – with help from Nick – does manage to get building. But I’d watch carefully for just how hard and how long he pushes for it, and whether any non-Nicks in Government join the clamour… And until then, I’d hesitate before making it a headline promise on your next FOCUS.
The text of this Letter from the Leader is not yet available to read on Nick Clegg’s website (though you can sign up there to receive future ones), nor the Lib Dem website, though Lib Dem Voice have helpfully reprinted it on theirs. You can, however, read his speech to National House-building Council on the Deputy Prime Minister’s official website.
The Housing Crisis
Housing has been an increasing problem in Britain for decades, but there’s no doubt that in the last few years the problems have boomed exactly as new houses haven’t. The population is rising; the number of smaller households is rising at a faster rate than the rest of the population; populations are not rising evenly across the UK, but in particular areas, notably the South East; and so house prices and rents are rising way ahead of general inflation, which both denies access to the housing ladder to many and through housing benefit massively distorts the benefits system (as I wrote earlier this year when proposing pilot studies for one part-solution that might be better than the alternatives – assuming no massive new miracle building programme that would drive down house prices and better manage the overcrowding of the South-East, as Nick’s might in a perfect world).
No government in my lifetime has done anything much about housing, save for the Tories’ 1980s plan of selling off social housing – which increased home ownership at the time, but which without replacement stock has long since come to a natural halt as a policy with broad appeal or effect. For whatever reason – ideological, financial, fear of confrontation – no level of government has made housing a priority for a long time, while for a different variety of reasons the private sector has simply not kept up with demand (and not been popular for “sprawl” where it’s tried bit by bit).
Nick Clegg last week made a speech in which he called for a bold turnaround – not just setting out some of the Coalition’s piecemeal policies to help building get off the ground in areas where it’s teetering on happening, but the sort of massive new, planned building programme I simply skipped over when I last wrote about housing because no-one was going to do it. And yet, when our national deficit is still in crisis and reducing ongoing borrowing, Nick proposes all this – surely a far better solution to soaring benefits rates than simply cutting them and hoping people can still find housing, but, as Sir Humphrey would say, bold. Having read Nick’s speech and seen some of the reaction since, I think it could be marvellous if it happened, but were I a betting man I could make more than a property speculator in wagering it’s not going to.
Nick’s vision is of a Britain (though, in effect, mostly the South-East) blooming with dozens of new garden cities – described by commentators who like the idea as new Letchworths, and by those who don’t as an outbreak of Milton Keynes. It’s a clever pitch; you’d be hard-pressed to tell the difference between what a “garden city” is and what an “eco-town” is, save that one is couched in language of an older era that sounds traditional and reassuring and for which you can go to poster-towns like Letchworth to show how nice they are, while the other was a despised New Labour eyesore of political correctness and bossy government, so it’s no wonder they didn’t get going. But imagine either actually built and a visit to each, and I can’t imagine they’d look any different. So when the biggest barrier to these new towns other than the immense cost is all the many shades of NIMBYism, it helps that for those suspicious of new ways more than of falling house prices Nick can ‘speak Tory’.
“We Need To Think Big On Housing”
I agree with Nick’s ambition – and sometimes it’s good to take a risk. He does, right from the heading in that email to Lib Dem members that “We need to think big” and the introduction “I want to focus on an issue that wasn’t so high on the radar screen, but matters enormously to me: housing”.
“As a country, we have built too few homes for far too long – and the economic and social consequences are massive. Prices out of reach of too many young families. Our economy vulnerable to boom and bust in the housing market. The housing benefit bill spiralling. Homelessness and overcrowding.Nick outlines the budgetary and regulatory changes the Coalition’s made to boost housing, and new funding he’s announced to develop nearly 50,000 new homes on top of over 100,000 this year – but he’s clear “it’s nowhere near enough,” with the population growing “by about 270,000 households” (unspecified, but he means per year). Now, I can do the maths, too: the boost he announced this week adds up to slightly less than 5% of the million new homes he’s calling for in the next ten years, and even a million homes in a decade is little more than a third of the number he implies will be needed. Perhaps Nick decided that “a million” was the biggest number he could mention before the fear factor became overwhelming.
“All these problems are solvable but only if we think big.”
“No wonder prices are out of reach for so many families. The average first time buyer is now 35, and home ownership is falling for the first time in a generation.”Again, Nick marshals a good case here, and it helps, again, that he speaks fluent Tory: he may have sensed a tipping point in ‘Middle England’. It’s no longer just people raising their skirts and drawbridges in horror at the thought of more houses spoiling their view and, worse, lowering their property prices, but that their grown-up children have nowhere to live – and couched in terms of tradition, not scary modernity. And it’s at that point that Nick pivots to anticipating problems:
“The only way out of this crisis is to build our way out.”
“I want us to go back to some of Britain’s proud heritage of urban development and build a new generation of “garden cities” – places that will grow, thrive and become part of the fabric of the nation.”
“Of course development is always controversial. It’s right to protect our precious rural landscape and not let England be concreted over. But the point I’ve been making in government (and there have been some lively debates) is that planning big new settlements is the best way to protect our countryside because the alternative is endless urban sprawl.”This, I think, is the key passage, which more than undersells one problem – the NIMBYs – and only hints at the other: will the Tories for a moment commit to this? Because the point at which I worry that this grand ambition becomes a house of cards is when it comes to putting the money in. Is this just a message from the Leader of the Liberal Democrats about positioning our aspirations, being on the side of young, growing families (which, to be fair to Nick’s consistency, is pretty much his whole message, whether taking about early education, social mobility or parental leave)? Or is it one from the Deputy Prime Minister that heralds a massive commitment by the LiberaTory Coalition Government? Because I’d expect a bit more of a fanfare if the latter, rather than merely a self-deprecating aside about arguments with the Tories.
“We can’t do this overnight. Scale and ambition take time. But I believe if we put aside partisan politics and think collectively about the housing needs of the next generation, we could set Britain on track for a major wave of new development, new jobs, and new hope.”So, Nick, does that mean that not just the Tories but the Labour Party – which greeted your words with the mix of shrieking abuse and wanking into the wind with which they greet all your words – would have to be on side before any of this gets done? It seems the bigger the problem, the bigger the vision, the smaller the chance that any of it might ever happen.
This is the point at which I turned to Nick’s full speech to see if it offered anything more concrete (no, not nasty concrete, anything more flowery and trellised). It starts with a decent statement of purpose, on the money, at least:
“I came into this Coalition Government to build a stronger economy in a fairer society, so that everyone can get on in life.All that is entirely right. But implicit in it is that this is a policy to supply the parts of Britain – the parts of South-East England – that are already expanding. He doesn’t say in so many words that new towns are to follow the money and become handy commuting bases, but that’s the essential message – so the missing figures aren’t to do with not much over 10% of the country being built on now and only needing a couple more per cent with houses sitting on it to solve the problem, but what share of the landscape will need to become town in the areas people want to live to get the jobs. And I suspect those figures will be very much scarier.
“That has meant immediate action to pay down the deficit and pave the way for growth – of course. But it also means looking further ahead, too: 10, 15, 20 years down the line. And that’s where Britain’s house builders could not matter more.
“Think about where lasting prosperity is going to come from. We need to create an economy that doesn’t rely so heavily on our big banks, where growth is driven by a much more diverse private sector filled with entrepreneurs and small and medium sized firms, spread across the country.
“An economy where people with good ideas have a real chance of starting a business. Where firms seeking to grow can find the staff. Where young men and women can fulfil their potential.
“But, bluntly, no matter what we do, Britain will not finish this journey unless we build enough houses. That’s the absolute basics.
“Our communities will only sustain strong local economies if they can attract and house the employers, high-skilled workers and consumers they need.”
Nick goes on to say, too, that:
“now is the moment for politicians of all stripes to get behind a major housing push.Hmm. Good luck with that. On a more practical, deliverable note:
“This will need to span more than one parliament. We need to work together, and we need to be ambitious in our approach.
“Departments aren’t used to thinking beyond the next Spending Review, or beyond the next Parliament – but we need to shift our sights to the horizon.”
“I want us to make the best offers to the most ambitious proposals. So not just 5,000 new homes, but 15,000, 25,000.That’s the nearest to a specific proposal in the speech, and the first half sounds hopeful – while the second sounds more of a hope than hopeful. I’d love it to be practical, but is it more an attempt to square the circle rhetorically between a localist party and planning running into local opposition than a practical plan to get things done?
“And what will be crucial in all of this is that while central government provides support, incentives and encouragement, that process will be locally-led.
“I lead a party that is localist to its core. We now have a chance to show that localism can deliver in a big way.
“I want us to prove that, when it comes to major development, we don’t need to revert to central planning, we can embrace a new era of community planning instead.”
I know it seems like I’m knocking the whole idea. But I’m trying to work out what Nick was actually trying to build up: houses, or hopes? Nick is right to come up with big ideas, and to sell them to the Party in the way he did at the weekend. The LiberaTory Coalition needs to inspire Liberal Democrats, let alone inspire voters, with positive prizes, not just restraining Tories. But I worry that this fanfare will only lead to disappointment and greater disillusionment among Party members if action doesn’t follow the call – and I can’t help but notice that this wasn’t a government plan, seemingly, but Nick’s. The government cash was only for 5% of it. Rather than just asking piecemeal, sprawling questions about elements of a speech or email, then, I’d like to propose my own strategic vision of big questions with which to test the big ideas.
Hard-headed Tests For Any Major Policy Proposal
If a speech in which “Nick Clegg calls for…” something is to have a more immediate impact than a Lib Dem motion where “Conference Calls For…”, we need to ask if it’s an aspiration, or if there’s real government drive – and money – behind it. And, for Lib Dems, we should ask something more. On the basis that if an idea’s good enough you should shamelessly nick it – something Lib Dems have long known to our cost – I’d like to focus Lib Dem minds with a message from Conservative Party part-owner Lord Ashcroft:
“Everything the Conservatives do between now and the next election must pass at least one of the following four tests, and it must not fail any of them.I don’t think this is a bad set of questions for us to ask, either – though Ashcroft’s questions show a confidence (or arrogance) that the Tories are leading the Government, can deliver, and will then get the credit (or blame) for any decisions. The last two and a half years have shown us that that isn’t really true – but that goes far more for the Liberal Democrats.
- “First, does it show we are sticking to the right priorities for the country?
- “Secondly, does it show strong leadership?
- “Thirdly, does it show we are on the side of the right people (and, if necessary, make the right enemies?)
- “Fourthly, does it offer some reassurance about the Conservative Party’s character and motives?”
In effect, the only question the Lib Dems appear to have been asking in the first couple of years of the Coalition has been Ashcroft’s first – Is it the right thing to do? Which has led to some good government, some good policies, and many good kickings from voters who don’t see anything specific to give us credit for. Important as doing the right thing may be, if we selflessly serve the country while setting ourselves up for annihilation, we won’t be in a position to do the right thing for very long.
I think there are two key questions Liberal Democrats need to ask on top of Ashcroft’s tests.
Our reframing of “does it show strong leadership?” might simply be ‘Can we get it done?’ And at what price – in political capital, and in actual capital? Is it worth spending so much of either? Considering, too, “does it make the right enemies?” I might add that making the right enemies is all very well, but ‘Are we actually going to be able to beat them?’ Never mind local opposition; not only do we have to reach agreement with the Tory Leadership on the Government delivering anything not in the Coalition Agreement (and, increasingly, all over again on anything that is), but it’s obvious that thanks to Cameron’s “strong leadership” he’s increasingly unable to get his MPs to vote for anything he says. That’s the irony – Nick is seen as a weak Leader, but Lib Dem MPs are exceptionally united in voting for agreed proposals; it’s simply that there aren’t enough of them, and it’s the weak Tory Leadership that lets agreed Lib Dem priorities slide and makes us look a weak part of Government (and, conversely, the strong Lib Dem Leadership that often saves Cameron’s votes from his own rabble).
So, then, our first new question should be: ‘Can we get it done?’
Our second new question should be: ‘Will we get any credit?’
The cynical answer is ‘No’. Note that my questions, or something like them, must have been asked within the Party Leadership. The Lib Dems have clearly been thinking about specific, measurable claims that we might get credit for recently, rather than just ‘doing the right thing’ platitudes: the party slogan changing from “In government, on your side” of early in the Coalition to the much less inspiring but demonstrably true “Fairer tax in tough times”. And even then, with the massive rise in the personal allowance for most income-taxpayers the single policy the Lib Dems most banged on about at the last election and since, at the top of the list of four priorities on the cover of our 2010 Manifesto… Opinion polls show that only about 20% of people give us credit for it. So how wildly distinctive and how loudly and perpetually repeated does any policy have to be before anyone thinks of it as Lib Dem?
To aid any possibility of getting credit, then, there’s more to consider. The party has given precious little thought for many years to communicating our philosophy or core values, but to the extent that people have a sense of them or even vaguely ‘What the Lib Dems are about’, does a proposal arise naturally out of that? Would people think ‘That’s the sort of thing the Lib Dems like’? Is it something that we’ve consistently gone on about? If we adopt this policy and get the Coalition to act on it, will ministers be likely to keep going on about it, and will activists be inspired to keep campaigning on it? If the answer to many (or even any) of these questions is ‘No’, then the chances of it making an impact for the Lib Dems – as opposed to for the country – are practically non-existent.
There are two more big problems with my two more big questions. Firstly, the Lib Dems’ overriding focus on ‘Is it the right thing to do?’ both in Opposition and now in Government means that we’ve been much more willing than the other two parties to consider policies for the long term. The more ruthless ‘Can we get it done?’ and ‘Will we get any credit?’ are enemies of long-term thinking. A long-term plan is much more likely to cost money, and be changed or cancelled by changes in government; a long-term plan that succeeds is much less likely to be noticed in its early stages, or only be noticed for its downsides or not yet delivering, while the eventual credit is, again, something more likely to go to changes in government. I’ve always criticised governments for their short-termism; ironically, I’m now setting political tests that might encourage it.
Secondly, ‘Can we get it done?’ and ‘Will we get any credit?’ also clash with each other. Here’s the paradox of wanting both: the more distinctive a proposal, the less likely it is to be delivered through the Coalition; the more popular and consensual, the more likely it is that the Tories will claim the credit (and get it, thanks to all their friends in the media).
As it happens, I’m working on a Liberal Big Idea, too. Hopefully, I’ll be ready to come out with it in the next week or two. It does comes right out of our philosophy, it’s very distinctive, and it’d save a lot of money – so it sounds like it’d be good for all those tests. But in terms of making the right enemies, it’s a doozy – so the chances of it getting through any Coalition consensus aren’t high…
Nick’s New Big Idea: Will It Get Done, and Will He Get the Credit?
Can Nick deliver on this?
Improbably, the most hopeful straw in the wind in the last week has come from another Nick – Planning Minister and Tory MP Nick Boles. He spoke to Newsnight in a major piece on Wednesday night, complete with a smaller write-up on the BBC website. It was worth a look, and in the main he agreed with Nick – in almost as much as he could without ever once mentioning his speech or indeed his name. Bigging up his own constituency, not exactly a new town, I wondered if “It was not, you know, some grand prince’s design for a new town…” was not a swipe at Mr Clegg’s big vision, though his defence of new building against an array of the usual suspects in the studio sounded more in tune, and as the BBC trotted him off to existing garden city Letchworth to sing its praises the voiceover described such places as “The government’s answer”. So perhaps the Tories might move after all. Of course, I didn’t agree with everything Tory Nick said – the lovely Andy Hinton’s Tweets from the night summarise why succinctly:
“Impressive performance from Nick Boles on #newsnight, except for the pointlessly inflammatory insertion of immigration commentary.”I like cities, too, and from a party that keeps wanting to do away with the very idea of “human rights”, it was entertaining for Nick Boles to suggest a new human right to a garden – presumably making him so subsumed into the mindset of the typical Tory voter that he thinks everyone wants a nice little
“Little house with a garden in the suburbs not for everyone. I like my large urban centre with good transport and a vibrant cultural life.”
Will the Lib Dems get any credit if these new cities happen?
Well, the ‘garden’ part, and Nick taking a lead, might help – I may have characterised his reassuring framing of new towns as tradition as his ‘speaking Tory’, but it’s also true that the environment is among the few sorts of issue that polls suggest people associate us with. So if these massive building projects end up being real ‘garden cities’, that might chime. Unfortunately, along the way, they’re… Massive building projects. As I found above, Nick’s speech itself enabled me to put this grand vision into the context of what he, rather than the Lib Dems in general, has been banging on about for years – though it’s a slight worry that I had to do the contextualising myself, rather than the speech (still less the email) joining the dots.
And never mind the theme: what about who else takes it up? Look at the article on Nick Boles: no mention of “garden cities” from him. Listen to what he had to say on Newsnight: no mention of “garden cities” by him there either, though the framing at least implied something like them, and the voiceover that, hopefully, mentioned them as “The government’s answer”. Within just days of this being Nick Clegg’s next big thing, though, the number of times ‘our’ Nick was mentioned by either Tory Nick (predictably) or by the BBC (also predictably) was… Zero.
Remember, too, that “Of course development is always controversial.” If it’s done by private enterprise, people won’t think of it as a government initiative – unless it’s for someone to blame. And if it’s to be built over ten years, then who’ll remember who started it? Is it something that comes obviously from our philosophy, or that we’ve always been banging on about, then? Basically, no. We’ve not had any big ideas on housing until last week – neither has anyone else (not since the Tories came up with the idea of selling it). Look at the “What we stand for” section on the Lib Dem website: as well as an embarrassing lack of any statement of values or philosophy, merely a set of policy headings, there’s not even any heading for ‘Housing’. So will we refashion ourselves as ‘the party of housing?’ That’ll take an awful lot of doing.
I hope Nick – with help from Nick – does manage to get building. But I’d watch carefully for just how hard and how long he pushes for it, and whether any non-Nicks in Government join the clamour… And until then, I’d hesitate before making it a headline promise on your next FOCUS.
Labels: British Politics, Coalition, Conservatives, Housing, Ideas, Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg, The Golden Dozen
Saturday, November 24, 2012
Doctor Who 50 – Coming Soon…
Doctor Who was first broadcast forty-nine years ago yesterday. We’ve been celebrating. And that means that this is the first minute of the greatest series ever’s fiftieth year.
So, coming soon… On every Saturday until November 23rd, 2013, I’ll be counting down through fifty great scenes from the show. One a week, starting in a couple of weeks. So how better to whet your appetite for a year of celebration than with a selection of the most fabulous Doctor Who trailers? From BBC1, from the DVDs and from the Internet, from William Hartnell to Matt Smith, here come the teasers…
“The Trip Of A Lifetime!”
2005 – the great return… And Christopher Eccleston invites us into time and space. Still the most thrilling summons to adventure I’ve ever seen.
Next Time – An Unearthly Child
A fan trailer for the very first Doctor Who story. Of many I’ve seen for it, this is one of the better-made and the one that tickles me the most for its spin on modern Who’s “Next Times…”
Daleks vs Mechons
Remember the third Dalek movie from the ’60s? Course you do! Inspired, gorgeous and hilarious in equal measure.
Coming Soon To DVD – Planet of Evil
Well into the Doctor Who DVD releases, in 2007 each release started to feature a trailer for the next. At first, these were rather basic, with the occasional streak of creative fun like that for The Key To Time… But it was on The Key To Time Box Set that the first trailer appeared that felt like it was selling Doctor Who as a great big film epic. It’s a thrilling story to start with, but it had never looked or sounded like this before. And from then on, the DVD trailers were worth watching as works in their own right.
Coming Soon To DVD – The Deadly Assassin
The Coming Soon trailer for the greatest Doctor Who story of them all (or, if you prefer your trailers home-made, here’s Chris Batt’s The Deadly Assassin Trailer: Creepy Version from online).
Doctor Who – Season 26 Trailer
The Internet boasts several fine fan trailers for 1989’s final Twentieth Century TV season of the series – this one’s rather stylish, and the retro BBC logo’s appealing.
The Parting of the Ways Countdown
2005’s astonishing season finished with the first of many massive season finales… And yet almost the most exciting thing about it was this countdown. After teaser trailers counting down each day, this full version aired only once, immediately before the episode. Not to bring people to the screen – everyone watching had already tuned in anyway. No, just for the sheer joy of it.
Doctor Who 2008 – The Doctor’s Legend
The Doctor had addressed us to camera before; that year, BBC One came up with something different, a tale of the Doctor told round the campfire by a woman watching for him. All to the glorious piece of music we’ll always think of as ‘Dance of the Macra’.
Previously On Doctor Who…
Anticipating many of my forthcoming Doctor Who 50 choices, a rather marvellous (if dazzlingly swiftly intercut) compilation of every Doctor Who TV story in just five minutes. I did something like that once: mine took more than fifty. Funny, that.
Doctor Who: Every Story 1963 to Now – A Babelcolour Tribute
Why stop at one? A slightly longer, slightly more comprehensive compilation that ends with a frankly magnificent delivery of a speech by a different Doctor to the one you might be expecting…
Doctor Who – The Snowmen Trailer
And where else to finish but the future? This trailer for the forthcoming Christmas special aired last week on Children in Need. The fourth Victorian Christmas in seven years? Who’d have thought. While some people say Matt Smith’s Doctor is most like Peter Davison’s, for his portrayal of an old man in a young man’s body, I don’t usually see it – he was inspired by Patrick Troughton, and I find a lot of Sylvester McCoy – but this time I can’t help thinking of Davison’s detective Campion. Isn’t Commander Strax a dead ringer for Brian Glover’s Magersfontein Lugg?
Trailers aren’t everything. So I can’t resist two of the finest other multi-story assemblies online: if you enjoyed the above, why not try Flight of the Darned, which is frankly awesome, or something else which is… Good?
Newer› ‹Older
So, coming soon… On every Saturday until November 23rd, 2013, I’ll be counting down through fifty great scenes from the show. One a week, starting in a couple of weeks. So how better to whet your appetite for a year of celebration than with a selection of the most fabulous Doctor Who trailers? From BBC1, from the DVDs and from the Internet, from William Hartnell to Matt Smith, here come the teasers…
Doctor Who 50 – Eleven Great Trailers
“The Trip Of A Lifetime!”
2005 – the great return… And Christopher Eccleston invites us into time and space. Still the most thrilling summons to adventure I’ve ever seen.
Next Time – An Unearthly Child
A fan trailer for the very first Doctor Who story. Of many I’ve seen for it, this is one of the better-made and the one that tickles me the most for its spin on modern Who’s “Next Times…”
Daleks vs Mechons
Remember the third Dalek movie from the ’60s? Course you do! Inspired, gorgeous and hilarious in equal measure.
Coming Soon To DVD – Planet of Evil
Well into the Doctor Who DVD releases, in 2007 each release started to feature a trailer for the next. At first, these were rather basic, with the occasional streak of creative fun like that for The Key To Time… But it was on The Key To Time Box Set that the first trailer appeared that felt like it was selling Doctor Who as a great big film epic. It’s a thrilling story to start with, but it had never looked or sounded like this before. And from then on, the DVD trailers were worth watching as works in their own right.
Coming Soon To DVD – The Deadly Assassin
The Coming Soon trailer for the greatest Doctor Who story of them all (or, if you prefer your trailers home-made, here’s Chris Batt’s The Deadly Assassin Trailer: Creepy Version from online).
Doctor Who – Season 26 Trailer
The Internet boasts several fine fan trailers for 1989’s final Twentieth Century TV season of the series – this one’s rather stylish, and the retro BBC logo’s appealing.
The Parting of the Ways Countdown
2005’s astonishing season finished with the first of many massive season finales… And yet almost the most exciting thing about it was this countdown. After teaser trailers counting down each day, this full version aired only once, immediately before the episode. Not to bring people to the screen – everyone watching had already tuned in anyway. No, just for the sheer joy of it.
Doctor Who 2008 – The Doctor’s Legend
The Doctor had addressed us to camera before; that year, BBC One came up with something different, a tale of the Doctor told round the campfire by a woman watching for him. All to the glorious piece of music we’ll always think of as ‘Dance of the Macra’.
Previously On Doctor Who…
Anticipating many of my forthcoming Doctor Who 50 choices, a rather marvellous (if dazzlingly swiftly intercut) compilation of every Doctor Who TV story in just five minutes. I did something like that once: mine took more than fifty. Funny, that.
Doctor Who: Every Story 1963 to Now – A Babelcolour Tribute
Why stop at one? A slightly longer, slightly more comprehensive compilation that ends with a frankly magnificent delivery of a speech by a different Doctor to the one you might be expecting…
Doctor Who – The Snowmen Trailer
And where else to finish but the future? This trailer for the forthcoming Christmas special aired last week on Children in Need. The fourth Victorian Christmas in seven years? Who’d have thought. While some people say Matt Smith’s Doctor is most like Peter Davison’s, for his portrayal of an old man in a young man’s body, I don’t usually see it – he was inspired by Patrick Troughton, and I find a lot of Sylvester McCoy – but this time I can’t help thinking of Davison’s detective Campion. Isn’t Commander Strax a dead ringer for Brian Glover’s Magersfontein Lugg?
Trailers aren’t everything. So I can’t resist two of the finest other multi-story assemblies online: if you enjoyed the above, why not try Flight of the Darned, which is frankly awesome, or something else which is… Good?
Labels: Christopher Eccleston, Daleks, Doctor Who, Doctor Who 50, Matt Smith, Obscure Doctor Who Jokes, Sylvester McCoy, Tom Baker, Trailers, William Hartnell
