2: City of Death - iii

It’s set in Paris. It has to be set in Paris because it’s about the theft of the Mona Lisa: the theft of the Fighting Temeraire wouldn’t have had the same iconic punch.

Doctor Who wasn’t being shown in France at the time, so all those by-standers who shrug nonchalantly as the English guy in the long scarf runs past them are genuinely bemused Parisians. It would be an interesting fan project to track some of them down and find out if any of them knew what the hell was going on. Apparently, it was cheaper to film in Paris than to dress London streets to look Parisian.

Lalla Ward spent Destiny of the Daleks dressed in a feminised parody of Tom Baker’s outfit, but here she is wearing an English school uniform. For some reason. She says that it didn’t occur to her that some English gentlemen quite like looking at grown up ladies in school uniforms. 

Does Romana know what a school uniform is? Do they have uniforms or indeed schools on Gallifrey? Why does she think it particularly appropriate to Paris? Perhaps, like Ford Prefect, she thought it would be nicely inconspicuous?

With the exception of the cafe, all the interiors are filmed in London studios: so the main thing which the four days of filming produced was endless shots of the Doctor and Romana running through the streets. We see them on a metro with the Eiffel Tower visible through the window; sitting in a pavement cafe with Notre Dame behind them; and walking to and from the Louvre. You may find it all rather charming, or you may dismiss it as shameless padding. There is a full four minutes of Duggan tailing the Doctor and Romana in Episode Two. The filming is very pretty indeed.

Studio-bound stories can suffer from a lack of geography: we have no real sense of where the McVillains ship is in relation to Davros’s chamber, and the Doctor can move between them without seeming to pass through intermediate space. But in City of Death, no-one can say “back to the Louvre!” or “off to the Chateau!” without triggering an extended Paris street montage. One is tempted to wonder if this is intentional: a running gag.

In several of these scenes Romana and the Doctor seem to be holding hands -- not something the Doctor and the first Romana would have been likely to do. (It is also fairly hard to imagine Mary Tamm in a school uniform.) Tom Baker and Lalla Ward officially became an Item during the filming of this story. They got married a year later, although it sadly only lasted a couple of years. In the Whose Doctor Who? documentary, Tom remarked that one of the challenges about playing the Doctor (from a thespian point of view) is that the character doesn’t experience romantic emotions. In the present story, he says that the Countess is a good looking woman, "probably". But knowing what we know, it is very hard to avoid head canon-ing it into a honeymoon.

Or, at least, a dirty weekend.

I was today years old when I realised that Cité de la Mort and Cité de l'Amour is a play on words.

Shortly after City of Death, one of the Doctor Who fanzines published an interview with David Agnew. It was a not-very subtle in-joke: “Agnew” was a composite name attached to scripts that no-one person was prepared to take responsibility for. In this case it seems that David Fisher had submitted a kind-of follow up to Androids of Tara: a literary pastiche involving scams and detective work in 1920s Paris and Monte Carlo. But the script was deemed unworkable: for one thing, using time travel to cheat at roulette wasn't thought to be a quite suitable subject for what was ostensibly a children's TV show. So Graham Williams and Douglas Adams were locked in a room for a weekend and rewrote the story from scratch. (This kind of thing seemed to have happened to Douglas Adams rather frequently.) They excised the gambling and the historical setting, but held onto the idea of an alien having been fragmented through time.

We often talk about the special effects in Old Who having been “cobbled together”: but the same was often true of the scripts. There are a few places where you can see the joins. An artist in a cafe sketches Romana, with a broken clock where her face ought to be: he is never mentioned again. When the Count's scientist demonstrates his time machine, a chicken de-evolves into a Jaggarroth,  suggesting that life on earth evolved from Scaroth rather than merely haveing been kickstarted by his exploding spaceship. But we should not be too surprised when Old Who stories feel like concatenations of different scripts. We should rather be amazed that it hangs together as well as it does.

You can’t really expect Douglas Adams to be at his best, dosed up on coffee and whisky and writing to a hard deadline in the middle of the night: but there are recognisable flashes of his trademark wit. The Countess says that the more the Doctor pretends to be a fool, the more she will realise that he isn't; which recalls Trillians insight about Zaphod pretending to be stupid in order to look clever. The Doctor’s discussion with Duggan recalls Ford’s chat with the Vogon about shouting. 

--Are you just in it for the thumping

-- I'm in it mainly to protect the interests of the art dealers who employ me

-- I know, but mainly for the thumping.

And occasionally, you get pure quotable gobbets of the Book: 

— Where are we going?

— Are you speaking philosophically or geographically.

— Philosophically

— Then we’re going to lunch.

But rather too often, the dialogue is in the too-clever-by-half category 

--You should go into partnership with a glazier. You'd have a truly symbiotic working relationship.

--What?

--I'm just pointing out that you break a lot of glass.

It sounds a bit too much like a geeky schoolboy who thinks it's real clever to ask for a glass of H20 or put sodium chloride on his fish and chips. Who is, admittedly, the main target audience of the programme. 

A Gamble With Time would have been a fantastic title.

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2: City of Death - II

Tom Chadbon may have been cast as Duggan because he looked a little like Tintin. But the Sixteen Million — and me — would have instantly identified him as the vet who Nerys Hughes nearly married in the Liver Birds. He’s a detective in a long raincoat who does the kinds of things that detectives in long raincoats might be expected to do, only slightly more so. He comfortably assumes that the Doctor and Romana are mad when they talk about being aliens; and is only mildly nonplussed when they whisk him back to the dawn of time. He is not so very far removed from Harry, or for that matter Steven and Ian. [1] 

But mainly, he punches people, breaks things, smashes windows, and generally acts like a hard-boiled detective. In an earlier draft, he was an explicit parody of Bulldog Drummond (“Pug Farquhasan”) a character no-one under fifty would be likely to have heard of.

He may be comic relief, but he isn’t all that funny. Chadbon does his best to say things like “I give up, you’re crazy” and “locked in a cellar with two raving lunatics” with nuance, but comes across as a decent actor doing the best he can with rather thin material. All the humour comes from the Doctor and Romana's reactions to him. Which are very funny indeed. 

"Why is it that every time I start to talk to someone, you knock him unconscious?” asks the Doctor. 

“If you do that one more time, I'm going to take very, very severe measures…" 

"Like what?" 

"I’m going to ask you not to.”

But in the end, the Earth is saved, and human history proceeds along its proper course, because Duggan does indeed thump Scaroth, terribly hard. The universe and everything may still be obscure, but that is the answer to life. If this is a shaggy dog story, that is the punch-line.

Much the same could be said of Count Scarlioni. He is an extreme incarnation of a suave James Bond villain: entitled, rich and utterly callous: not unlike the original incarnation of the Master. He orders the most terrible things to be done without stooping to vulgar anger. “My dear, it was not necessary for you to enter my house by...we could hardly call it stealth. You had only to knock on the door. I've been very anxious to renew our acquaintance.” Scarlioni believes himself to be the cleverest person in the room, and indeed, on the planet, which annoys the Doctor no end, because he actually is. 

Fans at the time thought that Season Seventeen was Far Too Silly; and that Tom Baker had undermined the show’s credibility by treating the Doctor as a comedic role. And certainly, as the season progresses, the Williams/Adams Doctor becomes very silly indeed. Critics have sometimes said that we are looking at a very good actor who stayed in one role for too long and stopped taking it seriously -- or else at a repressed comic genius trying to remake a venerable show in his own image. But in fact, the "silliness" seems to be an entirely valid take on who the Doctor is. 

Which is the question every incarnation of the programme has to find an answer for. 

The City of Death Doctor is cheeky, rather than silly: which is one of the reasons he was such a bad influence on so many of us cheeky school-boys. He refuses to answer questions, wilfully misinterprets what people say, refuses to take the gravest matters seriously, and tells brazen lies without bothering to sound plausible. 

“Who sent you?” asks the Countess. 

“Who sent me what?” he replies.

Alan Moore described the aforementioned DR and Quinch as essentially the Bash Street Kids with thermo nuclear capacity. It would be a stretch to say that the Doctor is a naughty schoolboy with a magic box, but Tom’s version sometimes has more in common with the Meddling Monk that he does with the William Hartnell or Jon Pertwee Doctors. He is not, of course, really irresponsible: we know that he will, in the end, prevent Scaroth from retrospectively destroying the human race. But he will do so from a position of ironic detachment. It isn’t quite wit, or silliness: it's flippancy. The Doctor assumes as if the joke has already been told because he knows that the universe is, on some level, funny. 

Episode One opens with the Doctor and Romana at the top of the Eiffel Tower, talking about nothing in particular. We are told that Lalla Ward and Tom Baker wrote the dialogue themselves; and it certainly sounds like something two very good actors might have created in improv.

—That bouquet.

—What Paris has, it has an ethos, a life. It has...

—A bouquet?

—A spirit all of its own. Like a wine, It has...

— A bouquet.

— It has a bouquet. Yes. Like a good wine

It’s funny; but it’s slightly smug. It sounds like Pooh and Piglet talking about Nothing; or perhaps like Estragon and Vladimir trying to pass the time. Our heroes may like and admire Paris; but they are looking down on it, literally and figuratively. 

And then, there is this:

—Shall we take the lift or fly?

— Let's not be ostentatious. [2]

— All right. Let's fly then.

— That would look silly. We'll take the lift.

This is not what the young people would call a lore dump. You don’t need to amend your Series Bibles:  “Time Lords have the ability to fly, but they don’t like to use it.” There is no need for conceptual fan-fic about the levitation device Romana found among the Doctor’s junk and has been itching to try out. You don't need to wonder if Time Lords are like gelflings, and that the Doctor can't fly because he's a boy. [3] But neither should it be treated as a joke or a giveaway line or an unforgivable ad lib which should be struck from the record. It is a vision of who the Doctor and Romana are in the moment that the line is spoken.

In the cafe, the Doctor tells Romana that they are perpetual outsiders because of how frequently they have travelled through time. The Doctor has never felt quite this alien before.

In the final episode, they leave Duggan at the Eiffel Tower. They say goodbye to him at top and about twenty seconds later they wave to him from the bottom.

So perhaps they do indeed fly.

[1] I assume that Big Finish have done a 26 disc boxed set in a time line where he travelled off with the the Doc and Romana in Episode Four.

[2] I am reminded of the story Tom tells about when he was briefly a novice in a monastery. There was a kind of spiritual exercise in which the young men suggested the names of saints for the other’s to think about: “Saint Francis” “Yes, let us all be gentle.” Brother Tom summonsed up the courage to say “Polycarp of Smyrna” and after an awkward pause the novice-master said “Let us not be obscure”.

[3] I read that there is a semi-canonical story in which it turns out that the Romana who appeared in the regeneration scene was not Romana at all, but an illusion created by the TARDIS. I hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate this kind of thing and also respect the hell out of the people who think them up.

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The Pacifist, the Vivisectionist and the Humanitarian - Extended Edition

My latest collection of Serious Essays is now available as a 150 page PDF book.

It contains  -- 

The second part of my critique of CS Lewis's moral philosophy, this time diving deep into his theory of justice in The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment, Why I Am Not a Pacifist and Delinquent in the Snow. 

Plus:

What Did CS Lewis Make of Jesus Christ

The Cardinal Difficulty With Bulverism

and
Why CS Lewis Wasn't A Pacifist.

The PDF is currently available to all Patreon supporters.

2: City of Death (i)

City of Death is very good.

Perhaps not quite as good as its reputation suggests: but definitely very good.

On October 20th 1979, sixteen million people watched the final instalment of the story. Sixteen million. In 2026, a drama series is doing pretty well if six million viewers switch on.

Times were, of course, different. There were three channels, and one of those showed nothing but cricket commentaries in Welsh. There was no internet, cinemas showed the same movie for weeks on end, and the pubs didn’t open until 5.30. Kids (I am told) were allowed to play marbles and hopscotch unsupervised on street corners, but they had to come home when it got dark. 

So there was not much to do at quarter past six on a Saturday apart from watch Doctor Who.

The autumn of 1979 was unusual even by the standards of the time. ITV had replaced its regular programming with a card which said “We are sorry that programmes have been interrupted: there is an industrial dispute.” In August one of the ITV unions had gone out on strike in support of a perfectly reasonable 25% pay rise. They went back to work at the end of October, whereupon some of the BBC unions downed tools over an equally reasonable dispute about who was responsible for making sure the big hand and the little hand were in the correct positions on the Play School clock. (Or, according to some sources, that the Crackerjack clock was set to precisely five to five.) This resulted in the cancellation of Shada. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy includes a skit about the philosophers' guild threatening a walk-out over demarcation.

There is a widely dispersed oral tradition that a million people continued to watch ITV even when it wasn’t showing anything, and that there was a notable jump in the birth rate the following April.

But still, sixteen million is an awful lot of people. Enough to fill a line of double decker busses stretching from Lands End to John O’Groats. Or five entire Waleses.

What impression of Doctor Who did those sixteen million people come away with?

At the end of Episode One, the villainous Count Scarlioni pulls off a latex mask and reveals himself to be….a scaly green alien with one cyclopian eye.

This scene frequently turns up on compilation reels, alongside the Myrka and the Skarasen, as evidence of how primitive Old Who was and how right Michael Grade was to put it out of its misery. It’s actually not badly done: not as clever as the Sarah-Jane reveal in Android Invasion, but quite fun all the same. Julian Glover puts his hands to his actual face, we quickly cut to the mask being removed from what could well be a mannequin, and then back to Glover (or his stand-in) looking at his alien self in the mirror. The exact same shot is used when he unmasks again in Episode Four.

There is no particular reason for the Count to have pulled the mask off at that particular moment. Maybe, like the Slitheen, he just finds it uncomfortable to wear for prolonged periods. Julian Glover apparently did, hence the stand-in. [2]

But the cliffhanger does have a function. On the surface, Scarlioni is an urbane, Simon Templar bad guy: a witty, aristocratic art thief. But under the skin, he is decidedly a Doctor Who monster.

And that really tells us everything we need to know about City of Death. It appears to be a sit-com: a Wildean comedy of manners in which every line is a zinger or an aphorism. But under the bonnet, it is still very much a Doctor Who story.

Or, if you prefer: City of Death is a rather clever, high-concept science fiction romp which has cleverly disguised itself as a social comedy.

In the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams reduced the meaning of life to a punchline. City of Death turns on a similar conceit. When we were very young, human existence seemed to acquire new meaning and significance once you knew that an inscrutable alien stand-in for the Deity had been playing Strauss to cave-men since before the Dawn of Time. But that idea had become familiar through over-use, Daniken’s space-gods and Arthur C Clark’s Monolith were now ripe for parody. 

Count Scarlioni is really Scaroth of the Jaggeroth. Zillions and zillions of years ago, he blew up his warp drive, inadvertently kicking off the chemical reaction which gave birth to Life on Earth. As a side effect, he was split into twelve “splinters” of himself, scattered across time, and they have been clandestinely influencing human civilisation ever since. He wants to get humans to the point where they can help him construct a Time Machine, go back to the Dawn of Time and prevent the accident, and therefore the human race, from ever occurring.

As science fiction shaggy dog stories go, it’s quite a strong one. Alan Moore’s alien frat-boys DR and Quinch messed around with human evolution because they wanted the continents to spell out a very rude word in their own language. It’s a long way from the Star Child and Thus Spake Zarathustra.

These kinds of wibbly wobbly timey wimey plots were pretty rare in classic Who. Fans at the time felt that the use of the TARDIS to ferry the Doctor back to the Renaissance and then to the Dawn of Time was a severe breach of narrative etiquette. And to be honest, it is rather lame, given that it is only two stories since the Doctor relinquished control of the TARDIS to the Randomiser.

“Oh but Andrew, surely the Doctor can switch the Randomiser on and off when he wants to?” Yes: yes I am sure he can. And there might very well have been a scene in which he said that in order to save humanity he would have to make himself vulnerable to the Black Guardian. But there isn't.

In Episode Three, Scarlioni rants: “Can you imagine how a man might feel who has caused the pyramids to be built, the heavens to be mapped, invented the first wheel, shown the true use of fire, brought up a whole race?” In becoming a God Like Alien and taking control of human development, he is entering a fairly crowded field. The Daemons and the Fendahl and Sutehk have all had their turn. The Doctor is not above a bit of benign uplifting himself. In Pirate Planet he was claiming to have taught Newton about gravity (with a g); and this week he claims to have encouraged Shakespeare to write Hamlet. I imagine there is some fan-fic, or possibly a collectible card-game, in which the Doctor and the GLAs are engaged in an eons-long four-dimensional chess game, one heaving the human race hither and the other hauling it thither. Perhaps so many of them are at it that in the end it hardly makes any difference and Homo Sapiens is in control of his own destiny. Or perhaps it’s a huge philosophical metaphor: what we think of as  “human history” is merely the intersection of the self-interested schemes of forces far beyond our comprehension -- in the same way that what we like to think of as our “selves” is really the locus for an infinite number of malicious or benevolent “memes”.

But that line of thinking ruins the cosmic joke. While we are watching this story, we have to pretend that Life on Earth really is and always has been an accidental by-product of Scaroth’s scheming. City of Death is only fun if we pretend that Image of the Fendahl never happened. The Doctor travels sideways through multiple iterations of a single idea, not forwards and backwards along a singular timeline that gradually reveals itself.

Laugh at Doctor Who’s production values if you like: I am sure many of the Sixteen Million did.  But I don't think this kind of thing would have worked if it had been mounted on a more impressive scale. In Episode Four, the Doctor, Romana and their new friend Duggan arrive on Primeval Earth, seconds before the Jaggeroth ship accidentally gives birth to life as we know it. This is big, cosmic, biblical stuff. The Jaggeroth says let there be radiation and behold there is radiation. And yet what we are looking at is three actors and a guy in a mask in front of a painted backdrop in a studio. A perfectly good painted back-drop: not something you would single out as a terrible example of Doctor Who’s make-do-and-mend ethos. The model space ship is really nice and you can’t see the wire when it takes off. But it’s artificial: we have to suspend our disbelief and eke out its imperfections with our mind. If it had been a full-on CGI set piece, which we could swear had been filmed on location in the Archaeozoic epoch [3] we could never have bought into the preposterousness of the premise.

1: Creature From the Pit got a perfectly responsible ten million viewers, so in fact we are talking about six million people who would rather have been watching Mind Your Language.

2: One Richard Sheeky apparently, who has an impressive CV including such roles as Man at Reunion, Man, Policeman, and Man (Uncredited).

3: I looked it up.

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1: Destiny of the Daleks

Destiny of the Daleks is not very good.

It is quite hard to put your finger on what exactly is wrong with it. I think the answer is probably “everything.”

Perhaps we could have overlooked the story’s worse than usual production values if it had been based on some interesting or whacky idea. And if there had been some slickness and panache in the presentation, perhaps we could have overlooked the fact that the one idea it does contain makes absolutely no sense.

Wind back half a decade to, say, Planet of the Daleks, and you’ll find a similar ideas-famine: but that story manages to radiate a certain degree of Elusive Magic. Genesis of the Daleks, of course, was overstuffed with ideas and characters and astonishingly good writing, which makes up for the fact that it’s not particularly a Dalek story.

But Destiny of the Daleks is, well, just not very good.

It throws established mythos to the wolves. Doctor Who never had much in the way of canon or continuity, but there are things which everybody can be expected to know. The TARDIS travels through time; Time Lords physically change their appearance; stuff like that. Douglas Adams had watched Doctor Who when he was a kid; he snaffled scenes and ideas to use in his own Hitchhiker scripts. But he wasn’t necessarily a Fan, and he might have been labouring under the misconception that the Daleks had been hyper-logical automata for the last sixteen years. Terry Nation, who wrote the scripts, must have known better.

When Deadly Assassin debunked Established Time-Lord Canon, it was a conscious piece of iconoclasm, calculated to annoy a certain kind of fan. Genesis of the Daleks jettisoned Established Dalek Mythos because Terry Nation or Robert Holmes had thought up some new mythos which was more fun. Destiny seems to scupper the whole idea of Daleks without quite realising that that is what it is doing.

The production is bad. Laughably, can’t be arsed, who gives a shit bad. The interior of the ruined Dalek city feels like the Blackpool Haunted House exhibit during the off-season. There are some flats and some metal grills and strips of fabric standing in for doors. At the climax of Episode One a D-A-L-E-K smashes through a wall. It’s a pretty astonishing twist that no-one saw coming, given the title of the story. The wall is made of cardboard. No-one makes the slightest attempt to pretend that the wall is not made of cardboard. When we return to the same location a few episodes later, the wall is still made of cardboard.

I bet there is some fan fiction which reveals that the Dalek city literally was constructed from special anti-radiation cardboard, in the same way that the idea of bubble wrap was imprinted on human consciousness by ancient contact with the Wirrn.

There are a few tips of the hat to every previous Dalek story. Human slaves dig, dig, dig in a mine because as well as climbing stairs, automating drilling is one thing Daleks can’t do. The Daleks say that if one human tries to escape it will kill all of them, a bit like my old PE teacher. There is an interrogation scene with a lie detector, which at least means that no-one has to say “no, no, not the mind probe.” There is a Mexican stand off between the Doctor and Davros and the Daleks and the humans. And in fairness, Lalla Ward acts a lot. A lot. When the Daleks arrest and interrogate her she screams and yells and tries to make us believe that she is scared and angry and that these dilapidated props really are a species of outer space robot Nazi. In those scenes, I could almost convince myself that I was watching a Dalek story, that these beasts were as terrifying as I had always been promised they were.

Is it enough for the Daleks simply to be? Does Destiny of the Daleks exist simply to tickle our memories of chocolate and mint ice lollies and saying Extermenate, Extermenate in the playground? We see rows of Daleks gliding down corridors. We see them gliding past various windows and apertures. In the final episode we see kamikaze Daleks in formation in different parts of the quarry: background, foreground, middle distance, which makes the hearts of those of us who failed to pass the Anti-Dalek Force aptitude test three years running quicken. Just a little bit. The scene reminds us of something we used to love. 

If you had drilling machines, a slyther and an army of humankind slaves, you might be able to excavate an idea from Destiny of the Daleks. It’s admittedly the kind of idea that might have appealed to Douglas Adams. Two huge war fleets, controlled by computers: each computer able to foresee the next move of the other, locked in an eternal, centuries long-stalemate, to be broken only when one side turns off the computer and does something stupid.

I think it was a Star Trek plot. If it wasn’t, it certainly should have been.

But what should have been a premise is presented as a twist, revealed in the final episode with very little build up or foreshadowing. Should we not have seen the horribly be-weaponed starfleets staring at each other in the opening establishing shot? Daleks and McVillains doing nothing in their long echoey corridors, waiting centuries for the command to go over the top which will never come? Douglas Adams might even have introduced some lemon-soaked paper napkins.

But neither Terry Nation nor Douglas Adams seems to have the faintest idea what “logic” means. Granted, Leonard Nimoy sometimes used “illogical” to mean “untrue” or “foolish”, and granted, some schoolboys started to use the word in that way, to their parents' intense irritation. But there are quite a lot of episodes where Spock really does use logic to solve a problem.

Home computers were a year or two in the future: but surely Davros ought to have understood the “garbage in, garbage out principle”? Presented with the syllogism “All elephants are pink, Nellie is an elephant, therefore Nellie is pink” the brilliant scientist would have said “That is perfectly logical provided the premises are correct” or “Yes, but this tells us nothing whatsoever about elephants” or indeed, “What you have told me is logically valid, but I do not have sufficient data to know whether or not it is logically sound”. 

The Daleks opponents are the McVillains—a long hair dark skinned generic spaceship crew who are peculiarly embarrassed about the fact that they are robots in disguise. To demonstrate how the stalemate has come about, the Doctor teaches them to play paper/scissors/stone. Sometimes the Doctor beats Romana, sometimes Romana beats the Doctor. But the Doctor always beats the McVillains, and the McVillains always stalemate each other.

Perhaps a human could learn to consistently beat a machine at the game—complete randomness is relatively hard to simulate. But this doesn’t mean that the human would beat the machine on every throw of the hand; only that he would do better on average over hundreds of iterations. Darren Brown did a stunt where he appeared to consistently beat punters at the game: I assume he was closely observing "tells" to skew the odds in his favour or using misdirection to fractionally delay his choice. (Or he have just been cheating, like when he demonstrated his ability to toss ten consecutive heads by spending a week in a studio tossing the same coins several thousand times.) What does any of this have to do with logic, or intergalactic space-ship tactics?

In Genesis of the Daleks, Davros eliminated “pity” from the Daleks psychological make up: but “pity” is not the opposite of logic. He thought that the only way the Daleks could survive was by killing everything in the universe that was not a Dalek. This is pretty callous and quite possibly a bad evolutionary strategy: but “callous” and “logical” are not synonyms. Up to now, the Daleks have been driven, not by excessive rationality, but by hatred. ("Seething bubbling masses of hatred" the Doctor called them in Death to the Daleks.) Certainly at the beginning they were a very thinly veiled metaphor for fascism. Hitler and Mussolini were not renowned logicians.

The story can't make up its own mind about what's supposed to be going on. The Doctor says that the McVillains are “another race of robots, no better than the Daleks” and that “one race of robots is fighting another”. Davros says that the McVillains are “another race of robots” and therefore worthy foes of the Daleks. Romana, on the other hand, says that the Daleks “were humanoid, once”. And there is a strange, orphan scene in which the Doctor finds a lump of green goo which he claims is a Kaled mutation. “Of course! The Daleks were originally organic lifeforms. I think you've just told me what the Daleks want with Davros, haven't you?” Possibly: but he never shares the insight with us, and the subject is never mentioned again. 

The Cybermen were originally conceived as humans with such advanced transplant technology that they eventually replaced their entire bodies with prosthetics. This was also the original back-story for the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz. The question of whether a “prosthetic brain” is any different from a computer, and whether a Cyberman is any different from any other robot, and why, in fact, they need a supply of humans to turn into next generation Cyberpeople is never very clearly thought through. Latter iterations seem to assume that they retain a certain amount of human wetware inside them. 

Is the thought that the Daleks have somehow replaced their organic core with cybernetic brains and realised this is a step too far, but one which they cannot undo? And that they have to run back to Daddy so that he can restore the biological component into their make up?

Or is Terry Nation merely using the word "robot" in some esoteric way? Doctor Who scripts sometimes say "universe" when what they mean is "solar system."

“What a brain” says the Doctor as he dismantles K9, again. The Doctor certainly treats K9 as if he is a person; although he might just be being deliberately exasperating. If K9’s brain can generate a mind, then it doesn’t really matter if it evolved or was constructed: and that must apply to the Daleks and the McVillains as well. “It’s what’s on the inside that counts”. It transpires that K9 is suffering from laryngitis. The term computer virus wasn’t coined until 1983, but Douglas Adams has a fairly good track record as an accidental prophet. So is this scene a set-up for the rest of the story, making the point that, organic or cybernetic, it is the Dalek’s software that is at fault?

Actually, not. The scene is there because John Leeson is unavailable, and the voice of K9 will be played by one David Brierly in his three appearances in this Season. (Given that there is an eight month gap between Armageddon Factor and Creature from the Pit, it is doubtful if anyone would have noticed.)

Does the story have any redeeming features at all? Well, the script is edited by Douglas Adams: indeed, it seems probable that Adams wrote it from the ground up, working from a minimal treatment by Nation. And we do get glimpses of authentic Adamic humour. Romana goes back to the TARDIS to fetch K9, leaving the Doctor stuck under a big rock. 

“Don’t go away” she says. 

“I rather hoped you’d have resisted the temptation to say that” he replies. 

But most of Adams’ input seems to be rather puerile word play.

"Oh, seismic. I thought you said psychic."

"Sidekick?"

"Like it? I haven't seen it yet."

It is hard to tell which jokes come from one of the funniest writers of the twentieth century and which are just Tom Baker arsing around. When the Doctor gets a glimpse of the quarry on the TARDIS monitor screen, he exclaims “Oh look! Rocks!”, which is very funny if you happen to be a cheeky thirteen year old. Escaping from the Daleks through a raised tunnel, he remarks “If you're supposed to be the superior race of the universe, why don't you try climbing after us?” Hold the front pages: Daleks can’t climb up stairs! Whether from Tom Baker, Terry Nation or Douglas Adams, it’s an unforgivable breaking of the fourth wall. Oh, if only the "floating" special effect from Remembrance of the Daleks had been available in 1979, so the Dalek could have wiped the smug grin off the Doctor’s face!

The one thing I would be inclined would be the infamous regeneration sequence: in which Romana appears to “try on” a series of bodies before settling on that of Princess Astra from the previous story. The Doctor continues to tinker with K9, and Romana continues to act as if she were literally picking a new outfit. (“The arms are a bit long; I could always take them in.”) One wonders if the whole scene was suggested by a weak pun on the word "changing"?

The Doctor has "changed" three times in the history of the show: once through some kind of rejuvenation or renewal; once as a deliberate act by the Time Lords; and once through a process called Regeneration, conceived as a natural part of the Time Lords’ life cycle. Douglas Adams’ writerly instinct—not to pastiche the regeneration scene from Planet of the Spiders but to come up with something entirely different—is mostly harmless. A year and a bit later, the change from Doctor Tom to Doctor Peter will involve prophecies and a future zombie version of the Doctor. Romana is an up-to-date, fully qualified Time Lord, where the Doctor is an out of date fossil with a ton of field experience. The TARDIS is the place where two utterly alien beings retreat, out of the view of mere mortals. And we all know that there has been a change of cast. So instead of exposition, Adams gives us a quite funny sketch.

And in doing so, he gives us a perhaps needed signal. This is a playful riff. This is twenty five minutes of fun. This is entertainment. This is not an attempt to reveal new data about an emerging imaginary cosmos. This is not a programme you are meant to take seriously. But here is a glimpse of some battered old Dalek props as a consolation prize to your loyal old guard.

Is there an unintentional message here? The clunky old past it’s sell by date show running back to its roots to try to escape from the rut? A half-hearted pastiche of what the show had been like in the 1960s, while a spunky 1980 version struggles to be born? A clash in the actual script between what had been the voice of the old show, and what would be the voice of the new show? A cobweb shrouded version of Doctor Who twitches its fingers and comes back to life, but is shown to be comically out of its time, pushed around like an old relative in a wheel chair quite unaware how ludicrous it looks…

I wish I could say "but when I was thirteen years old I loved it; when I was thirteen years old I overlooked the faults; when I was thirteen years old it was enough that the Daleks were there, like that man who told Tom Baker that he was the only thing that made life in the orphanage bearable." But in fact I knew that people thought I was faintly absurd for identifying as a Doctor Who fan and I knew that this laughable amateurish piece of TV would be one more reason to bully me on Monday morning.

Destiny of the Daleks is really not very good at all.

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Shape of the Daleks

When I was very small indeed I had a set of skittles in the shape of Captain Snort and His Soldier Boys, who used to rattle along in an humpetty bumpetty army truck. There was also a farmer who had a modern mechanical farm with a tractor and a miller who milled the corn to make the bread in an old fashioned windmill and sometimes got drunk on cider. He really did sometimes get drunk on cider even though Trumpton was a show for pre-schoolers. (The thing about Master Bates and Seaman Stains is not true, though, and never was.) The soldiers wore red uniforms and Quality Street hats, with their musket, fife and drum. I see now that they were toys and hence could be Napoleonic and contemporary at the same time. It took me a long time to understand how the guard that periodically changed outside Buckingham Palace and the life sized khaki Action Men that you sometimes saw at county fairs were both soldiers.

The Daleks are a bit like that.

There were Dalek toys before ever there were Doctor Who toys. It was 1976 before you could get a Doctor Who action figure. It looked absolutely nothing like him. But you could buy little plastic Daleks in Woolworths as early as 1965. They cost a shilling, which is about £1.80 in modern money, which is quite a lot for what they were. I suppose Dinky or Corgi or someone made a die-cast Bessie?

Was Dalekmania actually a thing? The story about the little boy who slept under a Dalek sheet wearing Dalek pyjamas, washed with Dalek soap and did his homework in a Dalek exercise book with a Dalek pencil sounds like the kind of thing a journalist would make up. They told the same story about Roy Rogers in the 1940s. In the 1970s there was a slightly muted attempt to invent something called Womblemania.

There were definitely Dalek toys. Or there had been. I was born too late and missed out on all the good stuff.

There had always been Dalek toys. A child's bedroom, with a teddy bear and a rocking horse and some toys soldiers and a golly and some Daleks, what could be more natural? (I actually did have a golly. We have covered this previously.)

There was a slot machine Dalek in the penny arcade at Clacton where for a penny or a shilling or five-of-your-new-pence you could get spun around and say exterminate, exterminate, exterminate if it took your fancy. And people definitely ran round the playground shouting exterminate, exterminate, exterminate at each other. 

I still cannot hear that word without thinking of Daleks, whether in the context of pesticide or in — some other context.

In a way, the slot machine Dalek was the real Dalek because you could touch it and get inside it and the TV Dalek was small and fuzzy and usually still in black and white.

Of all the things that Father Christmas bought me in 1976, 1977, 1978 and 1979, the Dalek Annuals are the onwa I still own and which still live on my shelves. Terry Nation's Dalek Annual it said on the cover.  Terry Nation had a bloody cheek, or put another way, Terry Nation had a very shrewd business head. He was a very fine story teller and could spin a very fine yarn and would have never been out of work even if he hadn’t accidentally thought up the Daleks in 1963. Blake’s 7 and Survivors stand up better than most Doctor Who. But the comics and annuals and sweet cigarette cards sold in truck loads because of the Dalek’s shape, and the Dalek’s shape was invented by a BBC set designer who got a small bonus but no royalties. The Dalek Annuals contained reprints of the Dalek Comic strips from TV Century 21 and short stories about humans fighting Daleks which were probably pitches for a TV show he could never quite persuade the BBC to make and bits of free-floating mythos, maps of Skaro and cutaways of Dalek spaceships. The comic strips said Created By Terry Nation even though they were written by David Whittaker and drawn by Ron Turner and others. 

The mythos spilled onto the wrappers of a chocolate and peppermint lolly. (Not frozen ice popsicles but ice-cream on a stick, is there a word for that?) Dalek Death Rays: somehow the colour green was thought to signify Dalekhood. (There was a Dracula ice lolly at the same time, very dark blackcurrant ice, with white ice-cream and red jelly inside. Someone at Walls Ice Cream must have had a touch of the Willy Wonka about him.) They had plastic sticks, instead of wooden ones, with coded messages, not corny jokes. The wrappers told you facts about how the Daleks had tried biological warfare on the humans in the 1600s and how they had a special paint that made them invisible. I am not sure if that would work. Some of them might have been drawn by Frank Bellamy.

The Idea of the Daleks. Even the cartoon strip, which was cutting edge in England in the 1960s, evaporates like space-fog if you actually try to read it. Robot armies and space cruisers and floating hover pods and an emperor with a gigantic head and these obviously impractical mechanical creatures with a thing inside them you are never, ever, ever allowed to see. (Were there Dalek changing rooms or Dalek swimming pools where it was okay for them to take off their metal casings provided they didn’t stare?)

Someone once said that the Marx Brothers had never been in a movie as good as they were. The Daleks were like that.

But the Daleks were also this weeks adversary on a TV show that went out on BBC 1 which was normally good, occasionally excellent, but frequently not very good at all, a TV show that everybody watched but hardly anyone paid much attention to. It was The Merioneth and Llantisilly Rail Traction Company Limited, and it was all there was. And while it is true that the Daleks appeared more often than any other bad guy, it is also true that five out of six Doctor Who episodes didn’t have any Daleks at all in them.

The producers didn’t like them much because they were huge clumsy props; and the writers didn’t like them much because it is fairly hard to write monosyllabic staccato dialogue that doesn’t sound terrible, and the actors didn’t like them much because what actor does like acting at a prop where the voice is going to be dubbed in afterwards. Terry Nation was the only person who was allowed to write Dalek stories and he had long ago lost interest.

When I started going to Doctor Who conventions, there was a ritual question without which no production team Q&A panel was ever complete.

“Are you going to bring back any old monsters?”

By which we meant, of course, “Will we ever get to see the Daleks again?”

And the answer was always some polite variation on “Not if we can possibly avoid it?”

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What are we to make of all this?

There has been a belated but very interesting discussion between me and friend-of-the-blog Mike Taylor in the comments on the series of posts on Mark’s Gospel I published back in 2020.

Our disagreement concerns something I had rather taken for granted as the scholarly consensus: that “Mark” was a storyteller who compiled and shaped an oral tradition of Jesus stories into a literary work, and that “Matthew” and “Luke” used his text as a source. Mike takes a more traditional view, that all four Gospels depend on eyewitness testimony. They are not necessarily “infallible” or “inerrant”; but when Matthew alters Mark, he is doing so to make the narrative more consistent with how he personally remembered it, not to improve the story or bring it into line with his theological views.

I wrote:

“I think the point of disagreement here is that I am more or less convinced by the liberal scholarly consensus that the synoptic writers were primarily story tellers: working from an already existing collection of stories and assembling them and reworking them into the books we now call 'gospels'. They were less interested in reporting 'what actually happened' than in making sure the readers understood who Jesus was and why he was important. And where their understandings differ, they tell the stories differently.”

Mike responded by quoting the following passage in full.

“Another point is that on that view you would have to regard the accounts of the Man as being legends. Now, as a literary historian, I am perfectly convinced that whatever else the Gospels are they are not legends. I have read a great deal of legend and I am quite clear that they are not the same sort of thing. They are not artistic enough to be legends. From an imaginative point of view they are clumsy, they don’t work up to things properly. Most of the life of Jesus is totally unknown to us, as is the life of anyone else who lived at that time, and no people building up a legend would allow that to be so. Apart from bits of the Platonic dialogues, there are no conversations that I know of in ancient literature like the Fourth Gospel. There is nothing, even in modern literature, until about a hundred years ago when the realistic novel came into existence. In the story of the woman taken in adultery we are told Christ bent down and scribbled in the dust with His finger. Nothing comes of this. No one has ever based any doctrine on it. And the art of inventing little irrelevant details to make an imaginary scene more convincing is a purely modern art. Surely the only explanation of this passage is that the thing really happened? The author put it in simply because he had seen it.”

I am sure we can all identify this as coming from CS Lewis’s 1950 essay “What Are We To Make of Jesus Christ.”

*

“What Are We To Make of Jesus Christ?” can be found, alongside other examples of CS Lewis’s journalism, in a Walter Hooper anthology entitled God In The Dock, where it sits between a little sermon about judging others which first appeared in an Anglican periodical (“The Trouble With X”) and a learned debate with philosopher CEM Joad from a Jesuit journal. (“The Pains of Animals”).

But it was originally published in a book called Asking Them Questions. (The title refers to the story of the boy Jesus in the temple.)

It’s a rather charming idea: a Scottish clergyman named Ronald Selby Wright handed out slips of paper to the boys in his local youth club and invited them to write down any questions they could think of about Christianity. He was surprised (although he probably shouldn’t have been) that the boys came up with fairly deep, theological questions about Satan and the Trinity, where he had expected practical inquiries about faith and conduct. So he had the idea of sending the questions to bishops, philosophers and prominent Christians and making a book of the answers. The questions seem very much the sort of thing teenaged boys might ask. “Does the idea of original sin mean that even a wee baby is sinful?” “How can God be love? I always thought He was a person.” Wright comes across as slightly patronising. “A telegraph messenger asked ‘What was Christ’s position as God if he prayed to God’, an apprentice plumber about the Second Coming…” but he clearly means well.

So “What are we to make of Jesus Christ?” is a subject that Lewis had been asked to speak on, not one that he had chosen for himself—which explains why he begins by saying that it is a silly question! The essay is specifically directed at intelligent, but relatively uneducated teenagers. So it should be approached differently from, for example, "Fern Seed and Elephants" which makes some similar points but is addressed to candidates for ordination.

Lewis rose to national prominence as a result of his BBC radio broadcasts, and during the war he had a kind of ministry giving lectures about faith at RAF bases. Although he was not a theologian or a Bible scholar, he believed he had the knack of translating difficult religious ideas into the vernacular of ordinary people. It must be said that not all the contributors to Asking Them Questions have this skill. One Rev. AE Taylor, responding to a question about the childhood of Jesus (“He can’t have been much fun and if He were an ordinary Boy he must have sinned, mustn’t He?”) says that the idea that Jesus wouldn’t have experienced normal adolescent temptations “seems to me to be a relic of the Docetist heresy.”

If you are explaining quantum physics or natural selection to young people in five pages, you can’t be expected to give them a full understanding of what contemporary scientists actually believe. (Is it still the case that protons and neutrons whizz round an atomic nucleus like planets round the sun until year eleven?) But it is important to play fair. A poor analogy, or an analogy pressed too far could leave your students with the sense that scientists are not to be trusted.

*

CS Lewis’s essay appears in the third volume of Asking Them Questions which was published in 1950; as it happens, the same year as The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The earlier Narnia books were exercises in defamiliarisation. Lewis wanted to tell a story that was like the story of the Passion and the Resurrection, so that children would be able to experience emotionally what the story meant. “Better felt than telt” as the Scots say.

I think “What Are We To Make of Jesus Christ” is doing something similar. Lewis presents Jesus to the teenagers as someone strange, alien, compelling, attractive, even frightening. He wants to get past the dusty formulas (“...and in His only Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord”) and uncover the surprising heart of the Christian message.

And he does that kind of thing better than anyone else. The purely evangelistic passages brilliantly tip-toe past the sleeping dragons of habitual piety.

“If you had gone to Socrates and asked, 'Are you Zeus?' he would have laughed at you. If you had gone to Mohammed and asked, 'Are you Allah?' he would first have rent his clothes and then cut your head off.”

The point is made with great power and wit (regardless of whether or not you agree with it.) Lewis pointedly refrains from quoting directly from the English Bible, preferring pithy paraphrases of his own. In the final paragraph of the essay, he puts a series of statements about Christ’s identity alongside each other: it’s among the best bits of religious writing he ever published:

“Others say, 'This is the truth about the Universe. This is the way you ought to go,' but He says, 'I am the Truth, and the Way, and the Life.' He says, 'No man can reach absolute reality, except through Me. Try to retain your own life and you will be inevitably ruined. Give yourself away and you will be saved.’…”

Is it just me, or does this paraphrase come out sounding something like the gnostic Jesus of the apocryphal Thomas gospel?

In one or two cases, Lewis could be accused of “pressing” the text. In Mark’s Gospel, the High Priest asks Jesus “Art thou the Christ, the Son of the Blessed” to which Jesus replies “I am: and ye shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven.” (Matthew and Luke make Jesus a smidgeon more equivocal: the former has “Thou has said” and the latter has “You say that I am.”) It is intrinsically unlikely that a Jewish high priest understood “son of the blessed” in any Christian theological sense: he must have been asking Jesus if he was the expected Jewish Messiah.

But Lewis has subtly reworked the passage:

“The moment at which the High Priest said to Him, 'Who are you?’ 'I am the Anointed, the Son of the uncreated God, and you shall see Me appearing at the end of all history as the judge of the Universe.”

Again, Jesus did not quite say “I am begotten of the One God, before Abraham was, I am”. This conflates something which John says that Jesus said (John 8:58) with something John says about him. [John 1 14&18, John 3 16&18.)  

I am also very slightly troubled that Lewis say unequivocally that Jesus “went around saying to people ‘I forgive you your sins’”. What he said, to the disabled man and to the woman with the flask of perfume was “Your sins are forgiven”.

But I think all this is forgivable overstatement. Lewis might well have said that he was attempting to create an oil painting rather than a photograph: something more like Holman Hunt’s Light of the World — or, indeed, like his own Aslan—than any historical reconstruction.

*

In so far as the essay is apologetic rather than evangelical, it is largely a restatement of our old friend the Trilemma. You remember how it goes: we know that Lucy doesn’t tell lies; we know that Lucy isn’t crazy; so logically there must really be a fairy tale kingdom hidden in Prof Kirke’s wardrobe. I think the death blow was struck to this argument by AN Wilson who wrote in his 1990 biography of Lewis that it can’t possibly be that simple. If it were, the world would be neatly divided into an overwhelming majority of Christians and a tiny minority of spiritual flat-earthers too wicked or stupid or obstinate to accept the obvious.

My position hasn’t really changed. As long as we are talking about “Jesus”, the character in the Gospels, then “he was a fine fellow who said some jolly good things that we should all take a lot of notice of” is simply off the table. There are ancient writings about Jesus other than the Biblical ones. They say that Jesus only appeared to be human (the “docetist” heresy that Rev Taylor was concerned about) or that he was temporarily possessed by a divine spirit or that he was the son of a totally different God. But no-one in the ancient world seems to have had the view that he was a good teacher and nothing more. 

In this essay, Lewis presents the argument in a rather more measured way than he did in Christianity. Nearly everyone agrees that Jesus's moral teaching is sensible and impressive; but his statements about himself are extreme and megalomaniacal ("next to whom Hitler was the most sane and modest of men"). So you have to chose between what Lewis called "the Christian hypothesis"--that Jesus was what he claimed to be--or else declare him to be a madman ("on a level with someone who thinks he is a poached egg") or an actual demon. 

But what if there were another option? What if Jesus never said any of those things? Lewis goes on to address this question. If you are a fan of alliteration, you might want to say that he is expanding the “lunatic, liar or Lord” trilemma into a quadrilemma: “lunatic, legend, liar or Lord”

*

And the scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in adultery
and when they had set her in the midst they say unto him

"Master, this woman was taken in adultery, in the very act
Now Moses in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned
But what sayest thou?"
This they said, tempting him, that they might have to accuse him.

But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground...
So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them
"He that is without sin among you

let him first cast a stone at her"
And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground.
And they which heard it they went out one by one...
beginning at the eldest, even unto the last

And Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst.
When Jesus had lifted up himself
And saw none but the woman
he said unto her
"Woman, where are those thine accusers?
Hath no man condemned thee?"
She said,"No man, Lord."
And Jesus said unto her
"Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more"

John 8: 3-11

*

It is fairly ironic that Lewis should take the story of the woman taken in adultery as his demonstration that the New Testament stories must be historically accurate. The Good News Bible prints the story in [square brackets]. The New International Version prints it between two paragraph rules. The New English Bible puts it on a page by itself after the rest of John’s Gospel, labelled “An incident in the temple”.

This is because the oldest extant texts of John (from the second and third centuries) omit the story altogether. We don’t have it in a manuscript before the fifth century. And even then it is what folksingers would call a “floating” passage: it turns up in different places in different documents. Sometimes it is not in John’s Gospel at all, but in Luke’s, just after Jesus has finished preaching in the temple at the end of his public ministry. And sometimes it is placed at the end of John, or of Luke. As an appendix, of doubtful authenticity? Or as a story which sums up everything that has gone before? “Go and do not sin again” would be a good note to go out on. 

What happened? Did some scribes redact the passage because the implications were simply too shocking? Augustine thought that men deleted it because they thought it would encourage their wives to cheat on them. On the other hand, perhaps it was an oral tradition that eventually got incorporated into the canon because it is such a compelling story?

The fourth century historian Eusebius says that a late first century writer named Papias said that there was a story about Jesus pardoning an adulteress in a now-lost book called the Gospel of the Hebrews—which scholars think was probably a more Jewish version of Matthew.

It’s complicated.

*

I have the following problems with CS Lewis’s treatment of the material.

1: The text says “Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground….And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground.”

I do not know Greek and rely on dictionaries and concordances for this sort of thing. But it seems that on the first occasion, the word for “wrote” is katagráfo; on the second it is simply grafo. Strong’s concordance tells me that in the ancient world katagrafo sometimes meant “to write down an accusation”; in modern Greek it seems to mean something like “registered”. Lewis chooses to say that Jesus “scribbled”. Talking about the same passage in the lecture to theology students, he goes with “doodled”. These are not necessarily wrong: I understand kata to be an intensifier, so a possible translation could be “he very wrote”. But Lewis has chosen words which fit his thesis.

In the lecture to ordinands, he says that the passage is an example of the New Testament’s use of “pictures”. I think this is very telling. Lewis has read the story very closely and mediated on it. He has used his imagination to envisage the scene, which is just what a devotional reader, as opposed to a scholar, might be expected to do. He has pictured a slightly embarrassed Jesus doodling to defuse the situation. And he has unconsciously projected that picture back onto the text itself.

Gen means "earth" or "land" or occasionally "soil". Some translations say that Jesus wrote in the dust or on the earth: but the majority go with on the ground.

2: Tom Jones was published in 1749. Pamela was published in 1736. Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders were written in 1722 and 1719. The Canterbury Tales was written around 1400, and is full of things like “Ful smale ypulled were hire browes two" and “This Nicholas was risen for to pisse". The idea that realistic fiction didn’t exist before 1850 is risible.

3: The preservation of a particular detail doesn’t tell us anything about whether a memory, an oral tradition, or a folk-tale is accurate in any other respect. Everyone knows that Queen Victoria was not amused; everyone knows that Alfred burned the cakes: hardly anyone remembers the particular narrative context that those snippets occurred in.

In my book on Mark, I used the example of my grandmother and the elephant. The incident was told to me as true; but if I told it to my grandchildren, it would take the form of a story: “One day, when Queen Victoria was still on the throne, my granny, who was about six years old at the time, heard a knock on the door. What do you think she saw when her mother opened it…?” The tale—or if you like, the meme— would contain a great deal of actual information: that there were travelling circuses in Cornwall at the turn of the twentieth century; that even well-to-do-houses in the country had pumps rather than running water; that a little girl knew what an elephant was even though she had never seen one. But was my granny six or ten or fourteen at the time of the incident? Did the house have a bell or a knocker or did the circus man call out politely that his elephant needed a drink? I have no idea.

I forget who it was who said that the only thing we can confidently say about the historical Jesus is that he used to begin sentences with “Verily, verily.” For all we know, “Jesus used to scribble in the dirt before he answered questions” was a well-known fact that the author of John happened to make use of.

4: “No-one has ever based any doctrine” on the incident. Well, it depends what you mean by doctrine. If you mean credal statement or dogma, then this is entirely correct: in fact, very little of the New Testament has given rise to doctrines in that sense. (“I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Catholic church, the walking on the water, the writing in the dust, and the life everlasting”.) But if by “doctrine” you mean didache, teaching (“they were astonished at his doctrine") then yes, preachers and expositors have indeed derived teaching from the incident.

The two most common interpretations have been:

A: Jesus wrote down the specific sins of those present. This would fit well with the suggestion that  katagrapho means "write an accusation". It is pure speculation, but it is speculation which goes back to St Jerome.

B: “Thou shalt not commit adultery” is one of the Ten Commandments, and the Ten Commandments were written by the finger of God. (Exodus 31:18; Deuteronomy 9:10) So by writing on the ground with his finger Jesus is identifying himself with the Author of the law which has been broken. He is, in fact, telling the pharisees not to quote the deep magic to him, because he was there when it was written. And it could be taken to mean that the Torah is written in dust, not on stone: that it is a temporary thing that can be amended.

Which one do you believe? Your answer affects the wider meaning of the story. If you go with the first version, then Jesus is shaming these particular pharisees into letting this particular woman off,  but making no wider judgement on the use of the death penalty for victimless sex offences. He is saying no more than “Are you really going to kill this lady, considering what I heard about you and Lydia on Tuesday night?”

If you choose the second one, you are getting much closer to saying that the commandment against adultery no longer applies. Or at any rate, that there are no longer any secular or this-worldly punishments for breaking it. The Ten Commandments is more guidelines than rules.

The King James Bible, and practically no other English translation, says that the Pharisees left because they were “convicted by their consciences” which fits well with the first theory. But the majority of manuscripts don’t have that verse, and the majority of scholars think it is a scribal amendment. Did I mention that it was complicated?

5: But my really big problem is with Lewis's use of the word “legend”.

CS Lewis relatively often uses word-play in his essays, and there is nothing wrong with that. He begins “What Are We To Make of Jesus Christ?” by playing with the fact that you could take the question in two ways. In the passage in Grief Observed that I was talking about a few days ago, he rejects the idea of a cruel God on the grounds that a person who tormented kittens for the fun of it could not be imagined as the Creator. “He, make a universe? He couldn’t make a joke, or a bow, or an apology, or a friend”. Lewis’s point doesn’t depend on the ambiguity of the word “make”.

Suppose Jesus didn’t say the things that he is supposed to have said. Say, for example “His followers exaggerated the story, so the legend grew up that he had said them”. Well, in that case legends is what the Gospels would have to be. But from a literary standpoint, they are obviously not legends. And if they are not legends: they are reportage. (“Pretty close up to the facts; nearly as close as Boswell.”) Q.E.D

Lewis has rather skilfully palmed his cards: casually dropping the word “legend” into one sentence (“the legend grew up”) and then putting it in italics at the beginning of the next paragraph (“on that view you would have to regard they accounts of the Man as being legends.”) And of course, if “legend” is a literary genre, Lewis has a perfectly good point. The Gospels are not very much like Homer or Malory or even the rhymes of Robin Hood. But that wasn’t the point we agreed to: we only agreed that if they weren't literally factual then they might be stories with an historical basis that had drifted some distance from the original facts. In Bristol, we have a local legend about a man who for years collected parking fees for a car-park that didn’t exist; in Scotland, there are legends about lakes inhabited by sea monsters; any Liverpool tour guide might report a local legend about John and Paul drinking in a particular pub. Those stories don't have the artistry and completeness of an Arthurian myth, either. 

If some of the Gospel stories are not reportage, certainly they must be something else: folk-tales, or rumours, or gnostic myths, or attempts to answer the “WWJD?” question in narrative form. Lewis was aware of Bultman, who thought that the New Testament preserved no information about the historical Jesus. The Gospels were entirely about the struggles and conflicts in the communities that produced them. Heck, you can buy kitsch prints of Jesus playing little league baseball on eBay. They don't purport to be photojournalism; but they aren’t legends either. (Neither are they lies or frauds, though they may be in terrible taste.) 

It's an astonishing thing to say about historical literature: that artistically developed texts may be fictional, but clumsy and haphazard ones are probably true.

*

Eric Auerbach, who Lewis tells the theology students to read, talks of scriptural texts as having hermenuitic potential. They allow and invite preachers and thinkers and the pious to interpret them; to read things into them, to discover new meanings. I fear that an over-insistence on the literal, factual, journalistic accuracy of the texts risks emptying them of their meaning. 

I once heard an evangelical clergyman ask why we are told that the miraculous catch in the last chapter of John’s Gospel consisted of precisely one hundred and fifty three fish. 

“Because” he cried “It was the NUMBER THEY ACTUALLY CAUGHT!”

Well, okay: but why did John tell us that exact number—who, indeed, in the presence of  the risen Lord, bothered to count? And why pick out that particular fact, when there are other things in the story we would like to have known? (Are we to picture the resurrected Jesus walking along the shore collecting wood; or was the fire he was cooking on a miraculous creation?)

I have complained before about the kind of person who says that they love books, but who decries bad actors called “teachers” and “critics” who see literature as something more than a delivery-mechanism for vivid narratives.

You know the kind of thing:

What the Author wrote: "The curtains were blue.”

What the English Teacher thinks: "The blue curtains represent the character's immense depression and their lack of will to move forward….

What the Author actually meant: "The curtains were f***ing blue.”

To which my answer is always: yes, very probably they were. But why of all the thousands of things he could have said about the house, did the author choose to pick on the colour of the curtains?

Jesus was around thirty years old; we usually assume that his ministry lasted about three years. (Why we assume that I am not quite sure.) John’s Gospel runs to maybe twenty pages. Like the schoolboy in Rev Wright’s youth club; we would love to know more about his childhood, or what he was doing in Nazareth during the decades between his twelfth and thirtieth birthdays. We would love it if some Dead Sea Scroll dropped us a factual crumb. But they never do: the apocryphas and the folklore traditions always have a didactic purpose. Jesus is a figure filled with meaning, not as an individual with a shoe size and a favourite breakfast. Even something modern like Christ in the Carpenter’s Shop, which was thought scandalously realistic in its day, is almost comically over-stuffed with significance. 

If the story of the writing in the dust is reportage from which no-one has or should derive didache, should we say the same thing about the passage as a whole? “Here’s a funny thing: there was this one time when he shamed some Pharisees into letting off a woman who’d be caught cheating.” I think there are people who would actually say that this is the case. What you need to know s John 3:16 and Romans 10:9: the rest is background information and material for sermon illustration.

But the author of John’s Gospel says directly that he selected his material for a specific didactic purpose. 

"And many other signs truly did Jesus in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book: But these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name." [John 20 30-31]

I think you would be on shaky grounds if you said that he said the curtains were blue because blue happened to be the colour of the curtains.

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What does the story mean? Jerome’s theory about Jesus writing the pharisees sins (and in fact King James' interpolation about their consciences) tames the passage. The woman gets off in this case because her accusers happen to be hypocrites. A writer named Enoch Powell remarked that this tends to reduce Jesus to the level of an indulgent schoolmaster. “Well, I ought to whack you, but it’s a lovely day and my horse just came in at Newmarket, so be off with you, but remember smoking is still against the rules.”

But the alternative is that it means what it says: that only the sinless can condemn sin; but the one actually sinless person chooses not to. (Note, incidentally, that he does not say “neither do I condemn you on condition you accept Jesus Christ as your personal saviour”.) If the seventh commandment has been rescinded where does that leave the sixth. Or the eighth?

William Blake wrote a long, fragmentary poem celebrating a revolutionary Christ that he had largely conjured out of his own copious imagination. (“The vision of Christ that thou dost see is my vision’s greatest enemy!”) 

He sees the story as being about the abolition of moral law.

Good and Evil are no more!

Sinai’s trumpets cease to roar!

Cease, finger of God, to write!

The Heavens are not clean in Thy sight.

Thou art good, and Thou alone;

Nor may the sinner cast one stone.

To be good only, is to be

A God or else a Pharisee.

Blake was, I fully admit, as nutty as a fruitcake. But he is responding to something actually present in the story. I am quite sure that Enoch Powell was wrong when he said that Jesus was being ironic. And about several other things as well.

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A salesman has to really believe in his product. But we don't blame him too much for overhyping it: for saying that his portable electric grill is better than all the other portable electric grills on the market; and that owning such a device will make you healthier and happier than all the poor saps with an unbranded one. In 1940, when the survival of civilisation really was on the line, would we have blamed Winston Churchill if he sometimes went beyond the strict limits of factual accuracy in his speechmaking?

Right at the end of his life, CS Lewis was interviewed by a representative of the Billy Graham missionary organisation.

“Would you say that the aim of Christian writing, including your own writing, is to bring about an encounter of the reader with Jesus Christ?” he was asked.

“That is not my language” replied Lewis “Yet it is the purpose I have in view.”

If that was what he thought he was doing, I think we can forgive him if there were a few loose links in the chain of logic along the way.

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A religious joke

So, Jesus looks at them and says “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”

And from the crowd comes a large rock, which strikes the woman squarely on the head.

Jesus sighs. “You just couldn’t stop yourself, Mother” he says.