Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Paul M. Cray's LiveJournal:

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Saturday, May 26th, 2012
6:48 pm	Doctor Who: "The Sensorites" "The Sensorites" is not very good. In fact - whisper it quietly - it is probably worse than "The Keys of Marinus". At least, that had a portmanteau format and, if you didn't like one setting there, there would be another along in a minute. Here we get six episodes in which almost nothing seems to happen, certainly nothing of any real interest. The Sensorites themselves, leaving those pesky feet, do actually look surprisingly good, in spite of the zips, although the idea that are all identical is clearly absurd,  They must be the most timorous race in the universe. This is not a promising premise. They are afraid of everything it seems (bright lights, loud noises, making decisions) even if they do possess some pretty advanced technology (see later) and apparently don't need vacuum suits (perhaps there is a pressurised walkway around the spaceship). If this were a story of the Sensorites overcoming their timorousness with the Doctor's help, there might be something to get our teeth into, but the humans are as bad as the Sensorites. Lorne Cossette did not so much phone in his performance as radio it in by Morse from the Southern Ocean, but at least Stephen Dartnell is trying. A bit too hard. It's not until we get to meet the Commander that things liven up. We can see what the story should have been about and this fits with the theme of Newman's Yesterday's Enemy. A problem was commissioning a writer who clearly had little feel for sf. For all his many flaws, Terry Nation at least had some. "The Sensorites" needs a lot more shaping from Whittaker and Lambert, but it probably looked better on the page and much of the blame has to be placed at the hands of the directors and, to a lesser degree, the actors. "The Sensorites" could probably have been saved by cutting it down to four episodes and increasing the amount of screentime of the Commander and the survivors of the original Earth expedition. As it is, this is probably the weakest story to date and had things gone on like this, it's hard to imagine that the programme would have long survived. Luckily, every story is a reboot for Who. Things can get better.      The best thing on the DVD is Toby Hadoke documentary "Looking for Peter". Peter R. Newman's short life and scant career are a tragedy of unfilled potential. He suffered writer's block and worked as a porter at the Tare Gallery. He died after a fall at the gallery in 1975, aged just 48. He never got to have the consolation though "The Sensorites" isn't very good, he and it aren't and won't be forgotten.   Now Write On... It is as much, if not more, than the Sensorites could hope for that the RTD created the Ood as an homage to them. The Sensorites are able to remove the TARDIS lock and thus prevent the Doctor and co. getting back in. No other race manage to do that, which suggests either that the Sensorites are a lot more advanced than they look or that the have access to Time Lord(-level) technology that few if any other races in the Whoniverse do. There's a hook there: someone removes the TARDIS lock and the Doctor has to find out where they got the the technology to be able to do that from. It turns out to be the Sensorites. Of course, that just raises another question... I also think there might be some mileage, if handled delicately enough, in the idea of a group all the members of which appear identical to members of the group, but which are clearly differentiable to other people.   (Comment on this)
Tuesday, January 31st, 2012
12:09 am	Doctor Who: "The Web Planet" It's a pity that the "The Web Planet" isn't actually very good and, indeed, at times doesn't merely verge on the ludicrous, but smashes right through the ludicrosity barrier and just keeps on going. It is an attempt to do something different with Doctor Who and the lore has it the failure of the story is the reason why we've been pretty much stuck for the last 47 years with either aliens who look exactly like humans or aliens who look exactly like humans in rubber suits. In fact, in "The Web Planet" we aliens who look exactly like aliens in rubber suits (butterfly-humans and weevil-humans), but at least they were making an effort and the Zarbi at do look like giants ants rather than ant-humans (OK, OK, giant ants with human legs). As for the venom grubs, well, I think we have to remember that all of this probably made a whole lot much more sense to the average viewer in 1965 than it does today. The heyday of the cosy duopoly was an era when ITV could show opera in primetime and "The Web Planet" is best thought as a piece of experimental ballet-theatre (indeed the Menoptera were choreographed by a choreographer from the Royal Ballet). In many ways, NuWho - modern television in general - is much more sophisticated than Classic Who. But most viewers in 1965 with access to at the very most three channels and would have had a much more varied and richer televisual diet than many viewers today, Sky Atlantic and boxed sets of The Wire notwithstanding. Today the notion of spending six weeks doing experimental ballet-theatre on kids' sf show in primetime seems unimaginable, but in the mid-60s people would have seen it as another part of the televisual tapestry and thought little more of it. Whether they liked it or not is another matter and certainly this kind of thing wasn't tried too often again (but see, for instance, "The Underwater Menace", of which we now have a whole extra episode to look forward to), but "The Web Planet" definitely made some kind of impact at the time. Doctor Who and the Zarbi was one of the three DW novels published in the 1960s and the first DW annual is full of the Zarbi and the Menoptera, including, of course, feature them in living colour on the cover. OK, they didn't have the rights to the Daleks and I think the Voord are in there somewhere too. If only "The Web Planet" had had a more engaging story and they had somehow managed to transcend the limitation of the budget and the available technical resources, we might have enjoyed a much more varied range of aliens over the last decades. Or at least we'd have more period curios to look back at and ponder upon. Now Write On... Just imagine a sequel to this with modern effects. And a half decent plot. OK, OK. That's never going to happen. There was saying current in the Moorcock New Worlds era that the only truly alien planet is Earth. I recall Steve Gallagher opining that all aliens are really humans in rubber suits. But the one thing that an actual alien wouldn't be is a human in a rubber suit. Pace Wittgenstein, if an alien could talk, we would not understand ver (see, for instance, "The Creature from the Pit"). And it's pretty clear from the last couple of decades of planetological research that there are some really wacky worlds out there (not that plenty of writers haven't come up with those without recourse to the latest scientific thinking). So someone should take half a leave out of Hal Clement's books, but add in psychology that is a product of the aliens' evolutionary history. Imagine a story set on a hot Titan orbiting a gas giant around a red dwarf. Gravity would be so low that flight would be easy in the thick atmosphere. And just pick an interestingly different (to humans) reproductive strategy and imagine the consequences extended to a technological civilisation. I am sure we can do better than "The Power of Kroll"         (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, September 16th, 2011
12:10 am	Red Rose on a Shirt, Trophy Still Gleaming, 77 Years of Hurt, Never Stopped Us Dreaming Well, this was a day I never expected to see. The first Wisden I owned was the 1977 edition and Lancashire finished 16th in 1976 in the County Championship (Andrew Kennedy bizarrely Young Cricketer of the Year) compared to 4th in 1975 (there was a 1976 Wisden in the reference library at Fulwood library). That was the beginning of a miserable run in first class cricket for Lancashire and the cause of much soul-searching on my part. How my ten year old self would have loved today! Of course, Lancashire have had two good runs in one-day cricket, but it's not quite the same and they came second by one point to Nottinghamshire in 1987, but it is the championship that all true fans have been demanding all these years. To be fair, Lancashire have finished second five times since 1998, but not since 2006. And it nearly didn't happen today. If it hadn't been for a deeply improbable rearguard action by bottom of the table Hampshire following on against Warwickshire, it would all have been for nothing. But after struggling slightly to scuttle Somerset for as small a sum as we would have liked, Lancashire were set an eminently defendable 211 in quick time. Somerset must have fancied their chances, certainly of a draw. But, amazingly, they polished off runs for the loss of just two wickets to win by eight wickets and bring the county championship trophy back to where it belongs after 77 years. Luckily, I didn't actually burst into tears at work on hearing the commentary of the winning runs. This was an amazing effort by a team that blended youth and experience. Kerrigan for England surely. And now all they have to do is an establish a dynasty. There is a precedent for that in Trafford, I understand. Essex won their first county championship in 1979 and proceded to five more over the next thirteen seasons. That would be all right, but why not go better and make it eight in a row to put the legendary Surrey team of the 1960s in the shade? Come on, Lancy!   (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, March 26th, 2011
8:43 pm	Confused? It is Practically every second advert on UK TV seems to be for an insurance price-comparison website - or an insurance company telling us that we won't find them on insurance price-comparison websites. This is notable contrast to the US. They did have some annoying adverts for particular firms, but nothing like the saturation level bombardment we have here. Do they even have insurance price-comparison websites in the US? There are 50 different insurance markets (plus DC, Puerto Rico...), but some of those markets are quite large (California, say). Can you market across state lines or is there some obscure inter-state commerce regulation that prohibits this? Would it even be possible to have a state-based site or to do various regulatory issues or a lack of effective competition prevent such things? Anyway, getting back to the UK. Confused.com launched a new campaign a new months ago. Of course, if you know it's for confused.com, you'll be fairly safe ground. The banner being towed by the animated plane at the end of the spot seems to be promoting loveconfused.com. This is just a place-holder site. Quite why confused.com haven't acquired it is a mystery; presumably the owner is demanding too much money. Although why confused.com are encouraging us, presumably to love confused.com, when it is a ruddy insurance price-comparison website and has nothing to do with small furry animals with East European accents I am not sure. I keep expecting the advert to drop the "love" bit, but it hasn't after several months (interestingly, a new spot in the same animated style makes no reference to "love"). But it is one of the great enigmas: why did no-one at the agency, client or focus groups spot the potential for the consumer to be "confused"?     (Comment on this)
Wednesday, January 12th, 2011
5:01 pm	Vanity of Vanities On the strength of the blurbs, it is hardly to wondered at that Sir Stuart had to set up his own press to see his books in print. I suppose even MPs should be allowed their recreations, and, of course, self-publishing will prove an increasingly popular and valuable channel in the future. Also, in terms of cover design, Sir Stuart could have learnt something from Berthold Wolpe. (10 Comments |Comment on this)
4:26 pm	Who Will Save Us From This Nightmare Future of Adequate Housing and Nutrition? http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19946-housing-9-billion-people-wont-take-technomagic.html http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19947-we-can-feed-9-billion-people-in-2050.html (Comment on this)
Friday, January 7th, 2011
11:54 pm	Play for Today Talking of no-brainer commissions for TV executives: Play for Today. Reading about the kinds of things that were broadcast makes me weak with desire. The depth, breadth, seriousness (with the opportunity for comedy) and sheer ambition of what was produced is quite extraordinary. The past is another country and at least in so far as these kinds of things were broadcast a better one. To think, this is what was provided for primetime audiences. And ITV used to show opera. And what he need isn't a single short series of one-off plays on BBC4 or even BBC2, but the proper thing: a five year commitment from the BBC to produce 26 new original plays to be shown at 9:00 on BBC1. The project would allow new writers, directors and actors to learn their trades through a BBC repertory company. Perhaps a new Mike Leigh or Dennis Potter might emerge. Imagine the places we'd go! Of course, there was much that by the numbers, plain dull or simply.nugatory. But at least people were given the chance to do something interesting and see something interesting - and very often it worked magnificently. I know, I know. Television in the UK in 2011 just doesn't work like that. and the world is a poorer place for it. See also http://www.britishtelevisiondrama.org.uk/?page_id=858. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, January 2nd, 2011
11:40 pm	A Fiver or Two I got two fivers among the cash I got out of a Barclays cash machine in Chiswick the other day. It is years since I can remember getting a fiver out of a cash machine. I can only hope that this "trend" continues in 2011. (Well, it won't technically be a trend until I have got fivers from two other cash machines, preferably non-Barclays ones.) (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, August 25th, 2010
12:06 am	Doctor Who: "The Rescue" I quite liked "The Rescue". At only two episodes, it's the length of a NuWho episode and it is very easy to imagine it being remade as one. The Doctor has been to the planet Dido before, but things are very different now to when he first visited. This is a situation that will reoccur through the series as a way of deepening the mystery by shifting it from "Where are we?" to "What's gone wrong?" Who did the Doctor visit the planet with? Susan? He is clearly missing her, which is hardly surprising given her unceremonious dismissal from the TARDIS. Luckily there is an al-purpose Susan replacement to be found on the planet. It is noteworthy that Susan is replaced by an almost identical character. Why did Carole Ann Ford leave the series? And why wasn't she replaced by XXX from "The Dalek Invasion of the Earth"? Susan was presumably supposed to be 15-16 in "An Unearthly Child", although, of course, we now know that she is a Time Lord and thus we might not feel quite as bad about the Doctor abandoning her with a virtual stranger at the supposed age of 16-17. How old is Vicki? (Maureen O'Brien was 21 to Jackie Lane's 24.) Vicki is is the audience-identification character for the young segment of the viewership. It'll be a while before it is realised that one isn't actually needed (indded, right at the end of the Hartnell era with "The War Machines"/"The Smugglers"). But they could have rung the changes by making the character from contemporary Earth (too much like Barbara and Ian) or from the past (we'll certainly see that) or alien (with the exceptions of Susan and Romana, who don't really count being a Time Lords like the Doctor, I don't think we have had that) or a boy (Adric!). We might be concerned that someone in the production team either has a bit of a Lolita complex or perhaps even more disconcertingly believes that a section of the audience has something of as Lolita complex (see in particular "The Space Museum" and possibly "City of Death").               Now Write On...   Given that the Doctor has been there twice, a third visit to is perhaps overdue. Just how have the Dido people got on since the destruction of Koquillion? And the Robinsonade is a sub-genre that appeals so directly to elemental components of the human psyche is never going to get old (survival in a hostile environment and the imposition of order on chaos). What about the Doctor encountering Robinson Crusoe himself (after all he has met Gulliver)? Who indeed did leave that footprint? Or the Doctor could encounter Crusoe's real-life prototype, Alexander Selkirk. Lots of opportunities for a C17th romp there. Or what about the Doctor being stranded sans TARDIS on some alien world? (Of course, in "Inferno", the Doctor describes himself as" a shipwrecked mariner" with the non-functioning TARDIS on Earth.) This gets us back to the notion of time in "Doctor Who". The notion of unseen adventures has always been there. See "The Romans". And there is no reason why the ellipsis could not be 10 years rather than a few weeks. In fact, this kind of timey-wimey stuff quite appeals to Moffat. See for instance "The Girl in the Fireplace" and "The Eleventh Hour" as well as Rory waiting for Amy in "The Big Bang" (see also "Human Nature"/"The Family of Blood", but then that was based on a novel, where it is easier to get away with this sort of thing, and "The Girl Who Waited"). It would be easy to imagine the Doctor being stuck somewhere remote and having to do something interesting for a few years. Another Shakespeare crossover suggests itself, this time with the Doctor as Prospero. And, of course, that would get us the double whammy of Forbidden Planet too.      (Comment on this)
Thursday, May 6th, 2010
9:57 am	Think Strategically, Vote Tactically The one certain winner from the today's election is the Atlanticist neoliberal economic elite and their lackeys in the political class. But such is politics. The thing is does matter how is in power, even if it doesn't ever matter as much as it should. Consider the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, the poster-child of the Conservative Party and the test-bed for the kinds of policies and politics that a Cameron administration will put in place. Then imagine that multiplied by 200 across the country and amplified by a factor of 5 or 10 or 50 because of the Tory government in Westminster: it is the central government that pays for and thus gets to decide most of what actually happens to people around the nation. Strategically, the goal is clear: a Tory government will not be as bad we imagine, it will be worse. Our vote is a tool and we must use it operationally to bring about the least worst result  or, if you prefer, to avoid the worst result. So the question to ask when one enters the polling booth is this: how can I cast my vote to maximise the chance that a Conservative MP will not be elected in this constituency. If that means voting LibDem, so be it. I have voted LibDem myself many times in the past year even though they are not my team. If that means, as I will have to do this evening, voting for an odious party hack, so be it. She is better, far better, than the alternative of the even more odious Tory rent-a-candidate. I suppose it would even mean voting Green if one lived in Brighton Pavilion, although frankly the last thing this country needs right now is self-righteous, swivelled-eyed loons in parliament. But better a non-Tory one. Because that is the ultimate issue: we vote for a MP, but get a government and we must do what we can to try and ensure that the next government is the one of the complexion that will spend less time, even if only slightly less time, stamping on the face of humanity. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 28th, 2010
9:17 pm	Doctor Who: "The Dalek Invasion of Earth" I actually think this is better than "The Daleks", which I know goes against both the critical consensus and my own criteria for what makes a good DW story. But although TIoE is set on Earth, it is set in the C22nd (albeit one that looks a heck of a lot like 1964 London) and the invasion has already been successful. The title is thus something of a misnomer: it should be "The Dalek Occupation of the Earth". What we had here is no lame attempted invasion of a contemporary Earth by half a dozen ineffectual aliens. The Daleks have reduced the Earth's population to a state of servitude, which means that, for once, they must have done some things right - even if before the story begins. But the sight of the Dalek emerging from the Thames at Queen's Wharf by Hammersmith Bridge (sadly not Kew Railway Bridge, much less Kew Bridge itself as I have seen claimed) must have been quite something. And frankly there is something scary about Daleks on the streets of London, even if 1964 they probably couldn't have got up the Albert Memorial steps.   The ending is surely one of the saddest scenes ever to appear in the series. The Doctor locks Susan out of the TARDIS and makes a speech at her. No wonder she and David can't look one another in the eye. Of course, Time Lord "years" are different to human ones and so Susan isn't quite 16 going on 17 in the way that she might seem, but it's hard to believe that their relationship will be happy (or even a long one). Susan may also know things about the Time Lord reproductive system that may be news to David (of course, that might not necessarily be a problem). Obviously the plot doesn't make any sense. But the sense of a city and a country under occupation is effectively invoked. We have the resistance, but we also have the black marketer and we also have the ordinary, decent folk - who will report Barbara and Jenny to the occupiers in return for a some scraps of food. Given human nature that's a scene that few of us can watch with complete equanimity. In 1964, the memory of the threat of occupation was only 20 years old (and the fear that next year it could easily be the Red Army on the streets of a nuclear-devastated capital). Ian though at least manages to keep his suit and key on throughout. This is 1964 and perhaps Bill Russell might have thought himself unlucky not to have been in the running for the role of James Bond; he certainly offers a decent simulacra of the part. Still it is terribly incongruous to have him dressed like all the time.  But, of course, it was a more elegant age. And the Robomen are clearly there because children will be able to imitate them in the playground. Which seems an oddly Steven Moffat kind of thing to put in. I suppose the notion of that the transport museum might contain a 1930s lorry in working order isn't that silly. It's the kind of thing that they have in museums after all. Interesting though that the Daleks are clearly allowing some kind of ongoing maintenance of the exhibits, but I suppose that is part of British "Keep Calm and Carry On" pragmatism even in the C22th that the museum volunteer would to keep everything in order: they might not have much else to do. Where Barbara got her HGV training is another matter: she's surely too young to have been in Wrens or some such. But perhaps there's a missing adventure. Now Write On... This one has a sequel built in. The Doctor says he will come back to visit Susan. He didn't say when or which incarnation of himself it would be. Assuming that humans still have more or less the same longevity as today in the C22nd/C23rd, Susan is going, sooner or later, to find herself a widow. And before that she may have a lot of explaining to do as she ages so much more slowly than her husband. Assuming that some crisis in newly liberated Earth doesn't lead to her overnight changing into someone else. There is plenty her grandfather could help out with. The problem is that there aren't any Time Lords left now except for the Doctor. So we can't and visit Susan because she presumably was rubbed out of history in the Time War. And she only exists in the memory (recall the Doctor's conversation with Victoria in "The Tomb of the Cybermen"). The more I think about it the more I realise that getting rid of the Time Lords was the Worst. Idea. Ever. Because it traps the Doctor as the lonely god. We can only hope that the Moff will bring the Time Lords back again. Permanently. Other possibilities include scenarios set in occupied areas: the resistance in WWII Europe or, in an alternative universe, an occupied Britain. Another possibility is a successful invasion. Given that the Earth is invaded unsuccessfully so often and given that the Daleks did manage to do it properly once, perhaps some species might come with a plan more cunning than even the Doctor can counter.  (Comment on this)
Saturday, April 24th, 2010
10:30 pm	Doctor Who: "The Aztecs" Another John Lucarotti script. It is a pity that we only have one of his three stories in the archive because he was certainly one of the two strongest of the early Who writers (the other being Dennis Spooner). OK, it's cod Shakespeare, but it's cod Shakespeare in C15th Mexico (cf. The Royal Hunt of the Sun,which involves the Inca and does have Conquistadors; although the story was commissioned before the producers could likely have seen the play, it is possible that Lucarotti saw it when he was writing the story: it would be interesting to see a Compare and Contrast). We are in a completely alien society: this is pre-Columbus and there are no Conquistadors for us to provide some kind of reference point with the Aztecs. I wonder if a modern version of the story would have the self-belief to do the story straight (leaving aside the fact that there is always an SF element in Who pseudo-historicals). We have to, according to the Doctor, take the Aztecs on their own terms, human sacrifices and all. Barbara gets to the prophesied goddess and the Doctor manages to have a rather sweet romance and get accidentally betrothed thanks to a cup of cocoa. Interesting to contrast One here with RTD/Moffat's Doctors. Of course, in 1964, DW still wasn't quite the children's programme it would soon become, but then there was no reason why a widower (as we would assume) shouldn't have a chaste romance even in a children's programme. Hard to imagine this kind of autumnal dalliance in many modern shows. Ian gets to be in pretty good fights. So everyone has plenty to do except for Susan who gets sent off to a ladies' seminary. There could have been some interesting possibilities for a sub-plot there, but it's not developed in the way that might hope. It would be interesting to read a post-colonial analysis of "The Aztecs". We are inevitably skirting the boundary of exoticism here. But still what we have here is something much closer to DW as we know it than was the case a few weeks ago. In particular, the Doctor is now recognisably the Doctor (it's possible that he is in "The Keys of Marinus": it's just that the whole thing is such a mess that once can't really tell). The Doctor projects avuncular charm and authority. He can still do spiky, but he is no longer the sinister, potentially malevolent figure that he came across in the first couple of stories and the viewer is no longer worried about what Babs might stumble across in the TARDIS broom cupboard (to be fair, very few viewers probably expected that at Saturday teatime in 1964; we are still a look way off a world in which Dexter or even Ashes to Ashes could exist). It would be interesting to know how much of this is the scripts and how much to the Hartnell and the rest of the team gelling together. By this point, DW is a very palpable hit and one especially among children. That's going to constraint what the show is and where it can. For the next 46 years. If perhaps not that surprising that "The Aztecs" was the first One DVD the BBC released. In a sense, what came before was the prologue; now we begin the series proper. Now Write On... The obvious NWO settings are the Maya (Mel Gibson) or the Incas. I recall a mid-70s ITV children's series about the Inca (I think it was the Inca) from the days when they made children's programmes for teenagers (I'd have been about 9). Other interesting possibilities would be Cahokia or Chaco Canyon. Several of these would work as ecological fables. But in the case of Inca, we could do a very interesting comparative critique of the Inca and Spanish societies (to what extent is this done in The Royal Hunt of the Sun?). (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 20th, 2010
11:58 pm	Doctor Who: "The Keys of Marinus" "The Keys of Marinus" is utter tosh. Supposedly, the story was late replacement with Nation being brought to crank out the scripts quickly as he had demonstrated the ability to do this on "The Daleks". The idea of the portmanteau story with the different settings was allegedly to save money, although how that can have been thought to be the case, I am at a complete loss. Perhaps Nation found it easier to do a series of vignettes than a longer story (see "The Chase"). George Coulouris, who had been in Pathfinders, another lost sf series from the 1960s, gives a bizarrely stilted performance as Arbitan, and most of the other actors seem to take their cue from him. It's obvious that most of the cast have realised that, on the evidence of the script and the budget, this seems to be a kid's show and there isn't really much point trying very hard. We get a model shot of the TARDIS dematerialising followed by some footage of the island, which actually isn't that bad and reminded before of Stingray before the wobbly sets are rolled on and everything goes down hill rapidly. Arbitan, Keeper of the Conscience of Marinus (don't ask) sends the travellers off to try and reclaim the eponymous keys, which have been scattered across the planet, and gives them teleport bracelets preprogrammed with the locations of the keys. I know, I know. But this was the early 1960s and Nation was not a hard sf writer. So we get to visit four different locales on Marinus. First, "Oz", an apparent utopia that is actually a decaying dystopia whose inhabitants are ruled over by BRAINS IN VATS, who use drugs to induce a state of reverie in the inhabitants. Interestingly, it is Barbara on whom the spell fails to take and who smashes the VATS (well, perhaps just a VAT). Second, "The House in the Jungle". Intelligent plants. We'll see that again with Nation. Third, "The Frozen Tundra". Actually, Vasor is an interesting character and, trapped in a hut in the middle of  the sub-polar snowfields, there is a genuine sense of menace for the companions (the Doctor is on holiday) This episode might almost have worked where it not for the ice soldiers, who come over look like something out of Monty Python. I could also have done without the implied nature of the particular threat to Barbara. Fourth, "Rumpole of the TARDIS". The Doctor gets to play Perry Mason and Ian the innocent accused. Contains some of the most ludicrously risible courtroom scenes in television history.  And then it is back to the island and the Voord, who are only in the first and last episodes. They are wearing flippers and one of the actors manages to trip over his own pair. I can't imagine that anyone really thought they were going to be the next Daleks. Yartek, the leader of the Voord is killed when he inserts a fake key into the Conscience of Marinus. Unlike W&M, I don't see how it could have been intended as an "I'll Be Back!" death.    Hardly any of TKoM makes the slightest bit of sense. Of course, that is true of most Who, but here there is so little less going on that you'd have chance to ignore the fact that it doesn't make sense. If things had gone on like this, I don't think DW would have lasted the year. Luckily, they didn't. And at least we know where the teleport bracelets in Blake's 7 come from. Now Write On... I think TKoM is an object lesson in what not to do. For instance, no "Collect the Plot Tokens" storylines - unless there is something intrinsically interesting about the plot tokens (by extension, this means no MacGuffins) or at least something intrinsically interesting in whatever it is that happens when you bring the plot tokens together (and a good reason why they are scattered in the first place).  Of course, it also helps to  have a coherent plot, scenery that doesn't wobble, monsters who aren't wearing flippers and actors who aren't phoning in their performances. As Del pointed out many years ago, there is no such thing as a desert planet or a jungle planet and it is always good to see a planet that has different cultural and geographical zones. I think there is stuff that could be done with that. I also  quite liked the idea of the Doctor as advocate. He certainly ends up on trial himself enough times in years to come. Given the popularity of courtroom dramas, the Doctor could surely roll out his Rumpole/Perry Mason routine again to defend a companion. Has this not been done? I think there is definite mileage in a Boston Legal crossover (surely they could get Shatner to do a cameo). And BRAINS IN VATS. You can never have enough BRAINS IN VATS. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
12:23 am	Doctor Who: "Marco Polo" The first lost story. Which is a great pity as it is supposed to be good. Why was it not part of the 1973 sale to Algeria? I have only seen the 30 minute recap that comes with Beginnings DVDs. Certainly from the production stills it seems to be have been sumptuously mounted. This is the first proper historical and represents both a prototype for much early Who as well as something of another road in terms of its framing device (Marco Polo as narrator and an animated map to show where the progress of the characters on their journey) and the in-story time span (several months). On the strength of "The Aztecs", John Lucarotti's next story, and what we see and hear in the recap, I suspect "Marco Polo" was pretty good with plenty of opportunity for Ian to dress up and play the (historical) action hero (he had done that before and he would do it again) and for Susan to do something other than scream. And the characters start referring to the TARDIS as the TARDIS again. I probably ought to source that CD. It is interesting that Marco Polo was the choice for the first historical and indeed it is until the end of Season Two  with "The Time Meddler" that we get an historical set in Britain and that's C11th Northumbria, not the most obvious setting. Which I think tells us something about the scope of the series and the assumed level of sophistication of the audience. Contrast with NuWho seasons 1, 2 and 5, which give us first historicals in Victorian Cardiff, Victorian Scotland and WWII London respectively. I think we lost something when we lost Newman's educational remit. We certainly lost something when the producers forgot that there is a whole world with a lot of history out there. Only two NuWho historicals has been set in the non-English speaking past (one by the Moff) and only one before the modern era. The contrast with the Hartnell era is telling. Now Write On... Historical drama is supposed to be something that the BBC is good at (of course, we are mostly talking corset operas, but I think we'll come back to that). A pure historical, especially one mounted on a grand scale, would probably seem an affectation today, but there is still of inspiration to be found here (and there is no such thing as a pure historical: the mere presence of the Doctor and his companions, whatever they do, ensures that). Marco Polo was the subject of one of the Ladybird history books. Who else was in that series? The Pilgrim Fathers, Captain Cook, Alexander the Great. I quite like the idea of Vasco da Gama or Magellan (don't think they were Ladybirded). The notion of a story spread over months offers enormous potential to a writer like Moffat (and consider "The Girl in the Fireplace"). It would allow the characters to act strategically, not just tactically. This is arguably something that drama is not very good at, or, rather, individual episodes are not very good at. If a film or a episode is a short story, then a series can be a novel, thus, proverbially, The Wire, The Sopranos, Battlestar Galactica, Deadwood and any number of other American series going back into the 1990s, and indeed we have the story arcs of recent seasons for what they are worth (very little; as the Weasel has consistently pointed out, irksome foreshadowing is no substitute for actual plot) and the unfolding text of the show over 46 years, but still it is to the shame of British television that it has completely failed to match the US series in terms of ambition and achievement, it barely even seems to have tried, which is very odd considering that television executives are presumably watching the boxed sets of the American shows every night over their Taste the Difference moussaka and glass of Carignan. Clearly DW is a very different beast to Battlestar Galactica or Babylon 5, much less Mad Men. But it will be interesting to see what Moffat does with the arc (so far, not so good; I'm just hoping that Amy's amnesia is something interesting). But, of course, what DW can do and has done is play with form, structure, theme and content, hence the unfolding text (to what extent do Coronation Street or EastEnders or --- it has been going for 37 years, and Tat Wood thinks it's funny these days --- Last of the Summer Wine have an unfolding text? Clearly the characters in EastEnders can never spend several weeks trekking across the Gobi Desert or working as schoolmaster/housemaid in "Human Nature"/"The Family of Blood". A few years here or there makes no difference to the Doctor, but could impact interestingly on the companions (the difficulty being that sort of thing might be considered to break the implicit contract with the audience, but see a certain story in Season Two). Two in "The Tomb of Cybermen" states he is 450; Ten is 906, so that's 456 years somewhere, mostly not on screen. But that seems right. Nine seems to travel only with Rose (has he just regenerated?), but we know that he had a more substantial career (probably several decades). Clearly in the current season, there is something wrong with time (the Doctor is constantly late) and we have already had a two year jump - for Amy, but who knows how long for the Doctor. We know we are getting some kind of flashforward for Amy. It would be fun to have a story spread over a century, although it would be easier to do that with a non-contemporary human companion (and we need another one of those soon; Cap'n Jack, of course). (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 13th, 2010
12:32 am	Doctor Who: "The Edge of Destruction" The thing about "The Edge of Destruction" is that is probably makes more sense now than it did at the zenith of Old Who in the late 1970s. It's a two parter, which makes it the length of a NuWho episode and it's a bottle episode with which we are also familiar from the new series. Here we just have the four regulars, in the TARDIS, going (more than) slightly mad. In 1964, everyone would have been familiar with television drama involving a small group of people trapped in some kind of restricted and claustrophobic environment. This was an age when Sartre's Huis Clos could be on primetime television and many of the plays that filled up the schedules would have demonstrated the influence of Beckett, Ionesco and the Theatre of the Absurd. If we imagine that the ideal viewer of Doctor Who as a 17-year old Galoise-puffing A-level French student who enjoys discussing Camus and the roman nouveau in the local espresso bar over a milky coffee served in those rather natty glass cups (when will we those back in fashion?), we get some notion of how this story is expected to work for the audience. Of course, another way TEoD made more sense then was that it could be seen as a sideways story - we've had a time story and a space story, so now was the turn of the third kind of adventure that the series was intended to feature. Melted clockfaces are the kinds of things that turn up in dreams (apparently one of telling whether you are in a dream is to look at your watch, look away and then look at it again - the time will be different) and Daliesque surrealist paintings. The characters are in some kind of fugue state and we can expect the unexpected. So we get Susan stabbing a couch a pair of rather nasty looking scissors. The kind of thing we might have expected  in a post-watershed play, but pretty strong stuff for Saturday teatime even in 1964. We won't see the likes of that again and we can imagine the kinds of interpretation that would have been put on it by our proto-Lacanians in the sixth form common room on Monday morning. Interestingly, it is only the third story and the idea that the TARDIS is both somehow alive and sentient, and able to communicate telepathically with the crew has been established. There'll be more of that in the decades to come. Of course, today the notion that TARDIS rearranges the interior of the TARDIS to suit the exigencies of the plot seems second nature (how physical is the interior of the TARDIS? - it seems to get a pretty good trashing at the end of "The End of Time", and regenerates in "The Eleventh Hour" - I believe this is treated in the late 1970s). It turns out that the ship hasn't been invaded, but that the fast return switch has become stuck (the name of the switch is written in felt-tip next to it), which causes the TARDIS to constantly go back in time and ultimately reach the fiery birth of a planetary system (possibly the Solar System, although given Whittaker's grasp of astronomy, he might have meant a galaxy or the universe) when the ship will be destroyed. The fugue state is the TARDIS's way of telling the crew that something is wrong. A flashing indicator "WARNING: FAST RETURN SWITCH ON" might have been more useful or perhaps an automatic override. But this was the 1960s. This was an age when things did go wrong because a button had become stuck in a particular position. It was also an age when the vehicle bus wasn't the single most expensive component in a car. People just didn't expect multiply redundant command and control systems in those days (I wonder to what extent they existed in aircraft in the early 1960s). Now Write On... "The Ghosts of the TARDIS": the Doctor or a companion alone in the TARDIS. A companion would have more reason to do some exploring - and go through that door that the Doctor has explicitly told her never, ever, to even think about opening. Of course, the Doctor is more likely to be alone in the TARDIS (the companion could have gone to visit her mother or aunt). And for him, the TARDIS is full of ghosts. We might never even see the "ghosts". It could all be done with lightning and sound. Has the TARDIS been invaded by something? Is the fast return switch stuck on again? Is something that has been living and evolving somewhere in the TARDIS for centuries? The Doctor thinks he is going mad as he tries to use logic and intuition to deduce what is going on. The Doctor eventually realises that the something has been growing in a single room and is now using the internal phone and servant bell system to try to escape. The Doctor realises that the infection will soon overwhelm the TARDIS. He somehow draws it out and then uses the TARDIS interdimensional pneumatic telegraph system that connects each of the infinite number of rooms in the TARDIS to split the "ghost" into an infinite number of pieces, which are then distributed to each of an prime-numbered rooms. There are still an infinite amount of rooms left to use in the TARDIS hotel and each "ghost" is merely an infinitesimal fragment of the infection and will take an infinite amount of time to grow back to its former size (perhaps). This could be a very economical episode. Given the new TARDIS set and the Moff's recent statement that he considers the TARDIS to be infinite (a very Borgesian notion and one in full concordance with my own idea of the TARDIS), we might need a couple of rooms we haven't seen before (in addition to the swimming pool and the library), but this would allow the actor playing the Doctor to some real acting. We don't see many one person shows on primetime TV these days, but the Doctor does talk to himself a great deal, so he doesn't have to have anything but the various ghostly phenomena to play off. I think  (I hope) we are going to see a lot more of the TARDIS under the Moff (despite his comment that we want want Narnia, not the wardrobe, but the TARDIS is no wardrobe), so this could be a real possibility for a (literal, almost) capsule episode for the new dispensation. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, March 25th, 2010
12:36 am	Doctor Who: "The Daleks" Everything changes again at the end of episode one with the sight of Barbara being menaced by a plunger. Just imagine if "The Sensorites" or some counter-Earth story had been the second story. I don't think we'd be talking about DW today. As I have said before, Daleks are bloody scary (I do want to get one). They shouldn't be really: they shouldn't be any scarier than a miniature tank. We know there is something alive inside a Dalek, that they aren't jut robots, but a Dalek as a Dalek seems organic in a way that, say, moving car with a person inside it doesn't. They don't have legs, they don't have faces, they don't look organic, and yet they are definitely alive. It's a classic arachnid reaction. Odd then that the production team didn't learn the lesson. I long for a monster that isn't a person in a suit, although at least DW has generally made more of an effort than Star Trek. The Daleks here (there's seems to be only about six of them plus some cardboard cutouts) are pretty wimpy compared to later Daleks, but people just hadn't seen anything like them before. They were as fresh as The Beatles and they caused a sensation (I will discuss further when we get to the later stories). The TARDIS has a faulty fluid link. Well, the Doctor says it does so that he can get to go and explore the Dalek city in search of mercury. The Dalek city has storerooms, just like a university department on Earth and the storerooms conveniently contain bottles of mercury. It is unclear what the Daleks might use it for, or why it would be in the kinds of bottles found on Earth. It seems odd today that Ian even suggests looking for in the city (or perhaps that he has any reasonable hop of finding it). Presumably the atmosphere of Coal Hill School was thick with the vapour from spilt mercury. Perhaps it had got him. I recall they had some mercury at Longridge High School in 1992; I don't suppose though they would now. Of course, mercury suggests the alchemists and Hermes Trismegistus. Whether that was David Whittaker really had in mind for the Doctor at this stage is debatable (see T&M).   The thing is that it is hard to imagine today that the TARDIS does not have a universal replicator/nanofactory aboard, or at least the kind of workshop facilities that a large or - small - warship would have. Of course, people didn't realise how big the TARDIS was in those days. If does have a food machine, which, of course, is presumably some form of specialised personal nanofactory. There is a problem here: to us, it is clear that the Doctor must know more than he is saying about the Daleks, for instance, and about the capabilities of the TARDIS. But thinking in this way seems dishonest both to the original creators and to the audience of the time. No-one in 1963 knew that the Daleks were going to the Doctor's greatest enemy (again see later stories though) and no-one knew about personal nanofactories. We've got to take the text as far as we can as it is presented to us. We get the classic DW story structure again of the Doctor  and companions becoming involved in a conflict between two antagonist groups. In "An Unearthly Child", we just get Kal, but here we get the Thals. Unfortunately, they are far more obviously refugees from the John Gielgud school of acting than the more kitchen sink cavepeople. The anti-pacifist message does perhaps leave a slightly bitter taste. It occurs me that if Ian is same age as William Russell then it wouldn't have been Malaya that Ian learnt his fighting skills, but Burma (I don't know what Russell himself did during the war). We get to see what is inside a Dalek, well, a hand. We also get the old get inside a Dalek and pretend to be a Dalek gag. In the first Dalek story. Given what we know of Daleks now, it's hard to believe that Ian could do that, but 1964 was a simpler age (although, of course, double declutching). The Daleks do use CCTV, although not effectively as they might, but at least it is there. There is a great deal of fairly tedious being captured and escaping, but eventually they get back to the TARDIS at the end of episode 4, although to discover - D'oh! - that they left the fluid link back in the Dalek city. So, effectively this is a story of two halves with the second recapitulating the first. Nation is no master of dramatic structure (again see later). So, the Thals have to risk their lives to help get the fluid link back, but at least they get to discover manly aggression and do defeat the (few, remaining) Daleks. Barbara has a bit of thing going on with Ganatus, who gives her some cloth to make a dress. There is quite a bit of this kind of thing in early Who and I will, again, discuss it in more detail later.   Overall, it would have worked better as a four episode story. The Doctor is still a sinister old man, whose quite happy to risk the lives of his companions and complete to slake his curiosity. The Daleks are like nothing on Earth and it is easy to forgive a creeky and dull story a great deal for them. And it would have been much easier still in 1964 (see the ratings). Now Write On... We might like to see some more of those Daleks. Oh. yes... We get back to Skaro and see the Thals again in the years to come. Of course, they are blond and blue-eyed. There are things we might want to do with that (I shall see to what extent they were done). We might like to find out what happened to Ganatus - and that dress. But this is the Daleks' story. And we aren't going to run out of Dalek stories.  (Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 9th, 2010
4:12 pm	A Bit of a Strange Thing for Gordon Brown Philip Hensher in 1996: "Which MP did he fancy most? "I've a bit of a strange thing for Gordon Brown. It's the shagged-out look I like."" I make no comment. (Comment on this)
Monday, March 8th, 2010
12:43 am	Doctor Who: "An Unearthly Child", Episodes 2-4 For those people watching the doubleheader on 30 November 1963, Doctor Who has turned out not to be a mystery story about a retired (or possibly defrocked) vaudeville magician now hanging out with his granddaughter and some of his old props in a junkyard in the London of 1963. Instead, the old man and his granddaughter are alien exiles from their planet, wanderers in the fourth dimension. And now we appear to be in the Stone Age, or at least a Stone Age. As Tat Wood and Lawrence Miles point out in About Time 1, we don't actually know that we are in Earth's Stone Age or even whether we are on Earth: we could be in a post-apocalypse future or on a lost colony or the Stone Age of another planet of humanoids (we will visit exactly those kinds of places in adventures to come after all). This might explain why we don't get any mammoths, much less dinosaurs, even if Raquel Welch in Hammer's 1 Million Years B.C. is still three years in the future (although the original 1940 film might have been known to the viewers and producers). As to whether it is a good thing that we don't see any mammoths or dinosaurs, we might consider the likely quality of the effects given DW's budget. What we do get though is pretty much the prototype DW story: the Doctor and his companions find themselves in some exotic and isolated environment, quickly come into contact with a local society, usually with an urgent need for some problem to be solved and often in conflict with some other local society. The Doctor and/or (some of) his companions get captured, escape (get captured, escape) before eventually solving the urgent problem and resolving the conflict between the two societies (for various values of "resolve"). Thus here the tribe of Gum have lost the secret of making fire (or rather Za, ostensible leader of the tribe, has lost the knack that he learnt from his father, "the Great Firemaker") and there is an interpolator, Kal, from another (possibly now extinct) tribe, who is trying to usurp Za's position. (And, frankly, if it hasn't worked by now, Za, just carrying on rubbing probably isn't going to do much good.) All this feels simultaneously like and not like the Who we know. "Not like" partly because, of course, no-one knows they are in Doctor Who yet (least of all the crowd of RADA-graduate types playing the cave people), partly because it's hard to believe now that the Doctor doesn't just solve the tribe's problem with a quick demonstration of how to make fire in any one of a number of ways (and surely Ian was in the Boy Scouts or would have learnt to make fire as part of his jungle survival training when he was a Royal Marine commando in Malaya during his National Service, and he is, after all, a science teacher, and, anyway, Barbara may well have been in the Girl Guides), but mostly because the Doctor isn't anything at all like the Doctor we came to know. He's a cantankerous and obstreperous old man, who is only just prevented by Ian from bludgeoning an injured caveman to death with a rock. He pretty much fails to take charge of the situation and engages in his constant petty squabbles with his companions. We do have to wonder whose idea it was to create a series whose main character is just so damned unpleasant and unsympathetic. At this stage, it's still not obvious that the Doctor isn't going to turn out to be the villain or perhaps an anti-hero (recall that this is the era of Look Back in Anger, the British New Wave - Room at the Top, Saturday Night, Sunday Morning and This Sporting Life, which, of course, featured Hartnell - that The IPCRESS File was published in 1962 as an antidote to James Bond,  and that existentialism is still very much the flavour of the era). We think of DW as a children's programme, yet it was made by the Drama Department and thus had a higher budget that a children's show would have been allocated. DW was aimed at families, but what exactly does that entail? Susan is a teenager and I&B are the solid, handsome, early middle age couple. Who is the Doctor supposed to appeal to? Certainly not 7-year olds and probably not 17-year olds doing A-level French and reading La nausée and La peste in the original. Ian looks, sounds, dresses and behaves like the hero (he was in Sir Lancelot) and yet he still refers and defers to the Doctor as leader of their tribe. One does wonder what people in 1963 made of it. It's also, to a modern viewer, terribly slow and ponderous. We long for the Doctor just to get on with things. And a decent sabre-tooth tiger would surely have livened up proceedings. The cave people speak English. No explanation is given for this. It's probably better than having them just grunt at the Doctor and his companions. This could be considered a genre convention or part of the grammar of fantasy. Did viewers at the time think it odd? At least the cave people's accents aren't too plummy (see "The Daleks"). Compared though to many of the stories to come, it is all over soon enough. In 1963, people wouldn't have known that the sojourn among the cave people would only be three episodes long and that the adventure wouldn't end with Ian becoming new leader of the tribe of Gum, with Barbara as his consort and the Doctor as shaman/witch doctor/priest and Susan being married off to Kal as part of the peace settlement. "Doctor Who". "Doctor Which". "Witch Doctor". It would have been a perfectly reasonable expectation at the time. This could have been something like John Carter for all anyone at home really knew. Or that we could have ended up back in the junkyard with the revelation that the whole thing had been some kind of Alice-like reverie. Instead the tribe is left to its own devices and end up back in the TARDIS, but it's not Totter's Lane where we find ourselves next... Now Write On... Where might we go this in NuWho? We've been back to Totter's Lane a couple of times since, but there might still be more to be done there. What did the Doctor and Susan get up to during their five months in 1963 London? And who exactly is I.M. Foreman? Prehistoric fiction is a major sub-genre and there is much that can be done with it. In modern Who, of course, we would not probably want to do a straight historical, which means that there has to be some kind of sf plot. That could be time travellers, perhaps tourists, big game hunters hunting mammoths - that's why they went extinct. Bringing aliens in might suggest something along the lines of 2001. What about the Toba Supereruption - with timetravelling aliens? And if we want to have a 1 Million Years B.C.-style hodgepodge, it can turn out either to a VR simulation or a mental projection or a zoo on an alien planet. Humh. There probably is something unexpected you could do along those kinds of lines. (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, March 1st, 2010
12:04 am	Doctor Who: "An Unearthly Child", Episode 1 So, there is where it all began. We open, of course, with those titles and that theme tune. The original title sequence is much more psychedelic than the ones from the mid-70s. It is would certainly be interesting to know whether the modal viewer in on 23 November 1963 (or, more likely, 30 November) would have seen or heard anything like the title sequence and theme tune. It is so familiar to us now, but what did people make of then? This is pre-2001 and the Stargate sequence, which might makes us wonder where Stanley Kubrick got his some of ideas from. It is also (arguably) much more psychedelic that the programme itself. But there are so many examples of misdirection that we might wonder if the programme makers themselves knew what the programme was about. Well, yes. This is a discussion I suspect we will be returning on a number of occasions in the years to come. We are back on slightly firmer ground as the title sequence dissolves: a good, old bobby, apparently (at least to 2010 eyes) searching for something in the foggy gloom (but the theme tune is still going). Out of the murk emerges a double wooden gate on which is painted "I.M. Foreman, Scrap Merchant, 76 Totter's Lane". The policeman appears to check the gate to see if it is locked (see below) and then exits right (never to be seen again). The right door of the gate then opens with a creek (so who has opened it, we might wonder) and the camera moves into the scrapyard. We see a few pieces of random junk and then the camera pans round to reveal - a police box inside the scrapyard! To emphasis this point that it is a police box, we get a close up of the legend on front of the police box, before a dissolve to the Coal Hill School noticeboard. "I.M. Foreman". Lawrence Miles has called it DW's oldest mystery (but what about the policeman?). Larry came up with some convoluted explanation involving a travelling Gallifreyan circus. I don't know if it turns out in his novel that I.M. Foreman is the Doctor in the end (I don't think so), but come on, Larry. Do we really need all that? "I'm foreman." Susan is definitely Susan Foreman. And the Doctor is certainly the Foreman. There you go. Although it is hard to imagine anyone would thought that in 1963. But then again why is it I.M. Foreman? As opposed to, say, John Smith? Coal Hill School appears, from the look of the corridor we see, to be a fairly modern school. We don't know what kind of school it is. Susan is "fifteen", and we can assume that it is November (1963), so presumably she is in the fifth year as it is unlikely that she has had her "birthday" yet as it is still relatively early in the academic year. The pupils we see are not wearing uniform. How common was this in 1963? But if CHS is a secondary modern, some (many? most?) of the pupils would have left at the end of the fourth year. In which case, there might only be a few pupils studying towards O-levels and perhaps they might be allowed to wear ordinary clothes (see "The Web Planet"). It's also possible that Susan is in the sixth form (I know that at Lytham St Anne's High School in 1991-2, the sixth formers did not have to wear uniforms, although the lower school did, but sixth form boys did have to wear a tie - and we do see a boy wearing a tie here); the fact that she is stared to be fifteen and is studying both chemistry and history would argue against that. Given that Susan is a scientific genius with an encylopaedic knowledge of history, and her guardian is a doctor, we might wonder why she did not choose to enroll at a grammar school - surely she came from the right sort of social background -   We get rather a long and lingering shot of Susan. Carole Ann Ford certainly has a somewhat exotic and alien look to her here, which may have been a reason why she was chosen for the part. She looks pretty hot to be honest and there must have been quite a few middle-aged patresfamilias feeling somewhat of a Lolita-like frisson (Ford was 23). Susan is listening to a transistor radio. Well, they were certainly explicitly banned at Cuthbert Mayne, but perhaps it was one of the special privileges of being in the fifth year at Coal Hill School, along with no uniform. John Smith and the Common Men are playing on the radio. "John Smith" indeed. More misdirection? In the original version (it's not really a pilot), Susan puts the book on the French Revolution that Barbara gives her away in her satchel. After B&I I have left, she then creates, to the sound of dramatic crescendo in the background music, a Rorschach pattern, around which she then draws a hexagon before screwing up the piece of paper with a look of fear in her eyes as though she might have spotted making the hexagram and revealed some secret. All of this gives the director an opportunity for a gratuitous leg shot that we don't get in the canonical version. In the canonical version, Susan starts reading the book (not superfast as it is implied she is capable of by the thickness of the book in the first episode and Susan's statement that she will return it in the morning; see also Nine in "Rose") and then announces that "That's not right". But maybe she has just read a few other books on the French Revolution. B&I go to 76 Totter's Lane. Interesting that Barbara doesn't think that there might be an error in the information the secretary has ("16" perhaps rather "76"). I am not sure what modern teaching standards would make of stalking a pupil in quite this way, but at least they are demonstrating their commitment to the pastoral aspects of the teacher role. Interesting that they speculate that Susan might be meeting a boy as she is fifteen. In a scrapyard on a foggy night? Who exactly is this programme supposed to be aimed at? We get some flashbacks (we won't see those much in the DW to come). I am not sure what kind of science Ian teaches or Susan knows, but it doesn't sound much like the O-level Chemistry I was taught. Given that Time Lords have little use for money (presumably Susan, like the Doctor, doesn't carry any), perhaps it is not so surprising that she doesn't realise that the UK isn't on the decimal system yet. Susan eventually turns up and pushes the gate open without having to unlock it, so what was the policeman doing at the start (a scrapyard would presumably be open for business presumably at quarter to five or whatever time it is after school on a November evening). To our modern minds, it would seem that B&I should have shown more concern for Susan's physical safety up to now that they have done (she enjoys walking through the romantic, English fog and that's not something you'd imagine a fifteen year old saying in 2010). B&I follow her into the scrapyard (Ian doesn't bother locking his car). After a cursory examination (and Ian dropping his torch; the fact that he has no matches on him might be to suggest that he is the clean living type), they notice... a police box. It is buzzing. "It's alive!" declares Ian after touching it. Well, yes. Someone comes into the junkyard. B&I naturally hide. The first thing we see ever the Doctor doing is having a cough. We are eleven minutes into the episode and the Doctor has finally appeared (compare "Rose"). "There are you, Grandfather!" comes Susan's disembodied voice as the Doctor fiddles with the lock. "Susan!" exclaims Barbara. Ian shushes her loudly enough to relieve their presence to the Doctor. Perhaps his jungle fighting training during his National Service in Malaya wasn't as effective as it might have been. The Doctor first word, is, disappointingly, "What". Ian tells him "We are looking for a girl." Well, yes. The Doctor's plan to get B&I to go away by ignoring them and fiddling with bits of random junk presumably in the hope that they will get bored and wander off is doomed to failure. Inevitably Susan opens the TARDIS doors, there's a bit of argy-bargy, B&I end up inside and it's bigger on the outside than the inside! And the rest is history. This is the point that everything changes. Up to now you might think (probably in 1963 if you were seeing this cold would think) this is going to some kind of supernatural mystery story of the kind that the BBC and ITV did so many of in the 1960s and 1970s (consider also that Alan Garner's Elidor was published in 1964). Enigmatic teenager. Handsome schoolteachers. Creepy scrapyard. London smog. Pseudonymous leaders of popular beat combos who are actually members of the aristocracy. A sense of undefined threat and danger. And who is (to coin a phrase) "Doctor Who"? Susan's grandfather has been referred to as a doctor and those people who take the Radio Times might realise that "Dr. Who" is going to be Hartnell. So we can add a cranky and sinister old man to the mix. Doctor No and Goldfinger are named after the villain. How are we supposed to know who the hero of the story is?  But suddenly we are in an OpArt console room. Susan says she "was born in another time, another world" (not the 49th century as in the pilot) and the Doctor tells B&I that he and Susan are wanderers in the fourth dimension, exiles from their planet. Almost everything is in place for the next forty-six years. The Doctor compares Ian's reaction to the TARDIS to that of the savage mind of the Red Indian. Humh. Perhaps not. And then the ship is off. The TARDIS's flight is accompanied by vertiginous video effects (more 2001!), including a aerial photograph of some kind of modernist office or apartment block seen on the scanner, presumably to suggest that the TARDIS somehow takes off like a rocket. B&I are rendered unconscious by their brief trip, so. yes, not everything is yet quite as it will be. So we arrive in a desolate landscape, a shadow looming towards the TARDIS. And what an unexpected shot that must be in 1963. We won't see 1963 London or Coal Hill School or 76 Totter's Lane again (well, not for years). Wherever we are, we're not in Kansas anymore or even Kilburn or Kensal Green. But more about that later. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, February 28th, 2010
12:56 am	Doctor Who: the Whole Damned Thing We live in a time of transition. A time of transition from the Age of Rusty to the Age of the Moff. And, yes, being showrunner of Doctor Who is the best job in the world. I remember thinking that years ago, long before the Age of Rusty. (As an adult; as a child, I wanted briefly, when I was about nine, to be an actor so that I could play the Doctor - somehow though, I don't think I was ever going to David Tennant. Lawrence Miles, perhaps). Anyway, at any time of transition, our thoughts naturally tend to the past as well as the future. And I needed a personal project. So at Christmas I started one. Which is to watch every episode of Doctor Who in order. Or at least every episode available on DVD. Which is most of them. There are something like 750 episodes of DW, of which something like about 650 exist in the archive. At 4-5 episodes a week, that's about three years' worth. Not all existing episodes are available on DVD, but I suspect they will be the time I get through the ones that are (I had an email yesterday from Amazon saying that "The Space Museum"/"The Chase" has been dispatched to me, which is good as the official release is 1 March, and I finished watching "The Web Planet" on Friday night). So, OK, not precisely in order. There will be some backfilling. I know there are audios and reconstructions, but at least for the time being I will make do with what's the DVDs). Still, it will be possible to get some idea (a pretty good one) of the evolution of DW. The most important point to make about watching DW in order is that we can't watch it in the way that people watched it when it was first broadcast, especially people who were nine years of age. We know a great deal about the Doctor now that people in the mid-sixties. The Doctor is a Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey, a member of the most powerful race in the universe, and that he is no ordinary Time Lord, but (perhaps) the most great one of all, the sole survivor (or one of the very few survivors) of the devastating Time War. That he has two hearts, is hundreds of years old and periodically regenerates (and is limited to twelve regenerations). That Time Lords may not reproduce in anything like the way humans do thus that Susan may or may be not in his granddaughter (in something like the human sense). That the mortal enemy of the Doctor and (the Time Lords) is the Daleks. And that it is the TARDIS that is responsible for virtually everyone in the universe speaking (BBC) English. All these things we take more or less for granted today. But few if any of them were even dreamt of in 1963. Of course, there are many other things that the modal viewer in 2010s brings to the table today that the modal viewer in the 1960s did not: mobile phones, the Internet, (non-clunky) electronic devices that never breakdown, attitudes to class, gender, sexuality and race, global geopolitics, the world technoeconomic system and Britain's place in it. And as hard sf readers: molecular nanotechnology, artificial general intelligence, faster than light and time travel in an Einsteinian universe, "cosmography" (by which I mean developing picture of the Earth as embedded in deep time and deep space within the dynamic and evolving Solar System/Milky Way Galaxy/Local Group/Virgo Supercluster/universe/multiverse), life on other planets and its likely form and evolution, the Technological Singularity. All these things colour our reaction to what we see. It is very hard not to try and retcon the stories in terms of what we know now about the Whoniverse, the universe (or multiverse) and the course of cultural and technological history over the past five decades. And there is, I suspect, going to be plenty of that over the next couple of years. Even as a child, it is was obvious to me that continuity in DW wasn't something to be searched for too assiduously. And yet people have spent enormous amounts of time and energy trying to create a consistent timeline for DW. We might wonder why they bother, but the truth is everything is a case of trying to find meaning in the Sea of Story. If everything is possible (or, rather, if everything has happened or can happen), nothing matters. If we are to be honest to the original creators (and viewers) of DW, we have to try and treat the programme, difficult though it is, within the context that it was made and seen. It won't be quiet, it won't be safe and it won't be calm, but I'll tell you what it will be: the trip of lifetime. (4 Comments |Comment on this)