Canon Lore

The Mandalorian and Grogu is a joyless slog. 

I’d somehow picked up the impression that this would be the movie that tied all the threads of the various TV shows together — The Mandalorian  himself, baby Yoda, Admiral Thrawn, Ahsoka, Ezra, the Imperial Remnant…. But the big cross-over conclusion is still a few years in the future. For now, what we have is — well, an episode of The Mandalorian. Three, probably. With quite a lot of money spent on them. Any individual scene is tremendous fun; but cumulatively, it added up to…

The Mandalorian is the best thing which has been done with Star Wars since, literally, Star Wars. Yes, I know, the Empire Strikes Back is marvellous. Yes, I know, the Empire Strikes Back is the only example of a sequel which is better than the original, apart from the Godfather. [1] But the Empire Strikes Back wasn’t a sequel to Star Wars. [2] On this hill I will die. The Mandalorian gave me back that sense of being inside a universe, a universe with a history which I missed, with heroes who are embedded in that history and make a difference to it.

Granted, at the time of the original Star Wars, the galaxy’s history existed only in the mind of George Lucas. Mando and Ahsoka and Thrawn have back stories that can be found in two extended TV series, The Clone Wars and Star Wars: Rebels. The whole idea of Mandalore as a planet and a race, as opposed to a manufacturer of bounty-hunter armour, comes from those series. The Clone Wars is the second best thing to be done with Star Wars since Star Wars, and it is as close as we are ever likely to get to what George Lucas originally wanted the saga to look like. 

The various iterations of the new Star Wars canon reference each other promiscuously. When Boba Fett, in his self titled TV show, fights a blaster duel with a gangster called Cad Bane, he remarks “I’m not a little boy any more”. If you happen to have seen some episodes of The Clone Wars in which the young Boba hangs out with the younger Cad, that’s quite a nice little moment. Some Star Wars fans enjoy easter eggs and literary hyperlinks of this kind. Others find them highly aggravating. But I think the average viewer — if such a thing as Star Wars has average viewers any more — seems hardly to notice. They just accept Star Wars is the kind of thing which refers to in-universe events that the characters know about an we don’t. They may think this is part of the magic. Christopher Tolkien covers this at some length in his introduction to the Silmarillion.

I think we could all do without the word “lore”. It seems to imply an added extra; a dash of chilli in the narrative stew; a sixpence in the Christmas pudding for the hard core follower to bite on. “Oh, did. Prince Hals’s dad appear in Richard II? You can’t expect me to keep track of all this lore.” And clearly, Star Wars and the Marvel Universe do attract more than their fair share of train-spotters, people who care much more about the livery on the second X-Wing on the right than about the actual story. You may very well think I am a train spotter because I have heard of Cad Bane. 

Many, many years ago I uncharitably suggested that some science fiction fans of my acquaintance were using “consistency with the rules of Star Fleet Battles” as the main criteria by which to judge Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country. (They felt that a Klingon Bird of Prey ought not to be able to outrun the Enterprise, or at any rate that it was fitted with the wrong brand of photon torpedo.) I was clearly in the wrong; but I don’t think I was completely in the wrong. Some people do use genre movies primarily as sources of data about the setting. Others use fiction primarily as raw-material for fan fiction, or as inspiration or settings for role-playing games. And very, very many think that the main purpose of literary texts is to give elderly professors something to deconstruct in post-grad seminars. All of the above are, on CS Lewis’s terms using the text, rather than receiving it. 

And some people think that all negative critical reactions are really pedantic quibbles about lore, and can therefore be disregarded. If I say that I think Rings of Power is bad there will always be someone on hand to tell me that I am sulking because one particular orc-sword was a few inches shorter than it says in a foot-note to an appendix to a volume of Tolkien’s unpublished notes that it ought to have been.

I did, genuinely, come across someone on Facebook the other day who was denouncing the new series of Beatles biopics (not due to be released for another two years) because backstage footage appeared to show Paul Mescal as Paul McCartney wearing a badge on the wrong lapel during the Candlestick Park concert. 

If I had to explain Star Wars to a complete newbie, I don’t think I would say “It’s about a farm boy who through a series of accidents ends up being the only one who can destroy the bad guy’s ultimate weapon and save the life of the princess with whom he has fallen in love.” I think I would be more likely to say “It’s about how the Old Republic fell to treason, and how one of the last of the Jedi passed his knowledge on to the son of his old comrade, who defeated the turncoats and started the whole thing up again.” Something like that. At the very least, you have to know the time-line, or you have at least to know that there is a time-line: Andor is set after Revenge of the Sith, when the Empire is building its power and the Rebel Alliance is coming together. The Mandolorian is set after Return of the Jedi but before the Force Awakens, when the Empire has recently been defeated and the New Republic is establishing itself. Ahsoka is a child in The Clone Wars cartoon, but a venerable Jedi Master in the TV series. Indeed, the point of  “Baby Yoda” may be to connect the current milieux to that of a future movie set a slightly less long time ago, in a galaxy still a fair distance away. 

So perhaps we should say that Star Wars is nothing but lore. In 1979, some people imagined that Star Wars 2 would simply show “Luke n’ Han n’ Leia off on another thrilling adventure.” Some fans, indeed, are  still very aggreived that the Last Jedi didn’t deliver exactly that. But every successful addition to the franchise has been a thrilling adventure that moved the galaxy forward in some way. 

The Mandalorian and Grogu largely ignores the rich background that has accumulated over five TV series and an infinite number of cartoons. We may recognise some of the aliens and hardware and characters from previous iterations but it doesn’t make any difference if we don’t. Mando spends a lot of time hanging out with a purple furry alien called Zeb. I, being a train-spotter, can tell you that this is Zeb Orrelios, one of the heroes of Star Wars: Rebels, set about a decade earlier. In the cartoon, his relationship to the trainee Jedi, Ezra, is that of an elder brother to a younger — quite like the relationship between Ben Grimm and Johnny Storm. He pranks him and roughhouses with him, but is always heroic when the real adventure starts. There is none of this in the movie: literally not one single scene would be different if Zeb were a human NPC name C.O Pilot. It’s cool, but not very cool, to see a cartoon character make the jump to live-action. I look forward to seeing him reunite with Ezra in Ahsoka series two. 

I saw the X-Files movie (1998) having seem maybe six instalments of the TV show, and had no idea what was going on. I had no idea what was going on in Firewalk With Me (1992) but neither did anyone else. It looks as if the next Spider-Man movie will be predicated on viewers already knowing who the Hulk and the Punisher are, or else on it not making any difference. In the olden days, things like On The Busses and George and Mildred and Til Death Us Do Part and The Sweeney tended to remove the cast from their normal environments for the movie iteration: partly to make the big screen experience distinct from the small screen, but also to make it a stand-alone work. 

Presumably, the eventual “big screen cross over conclusion” will have to address this issue: but I would think that, Star Wars being Star Wars, there would be no difficulty in opening the story in media res and bringing new readers up to speed.

Ezra: he’s an apprentice Jedi who was trained by one of the last survivors of the Empire’s purge; he’s been missing in action for a decade.

Ahsoka: she’s an old Jedi who left the order when she thought it was corrupt.

Thrawn: bigwig in the Empire, trying to start the whole thing up again. 

On the small screen, Mandalorians were somewhere between the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and the Knights of the Round Table: a noble warrior race who all wear flying power armour, with fierce rivalry between different ruling families. By the time of the live action TV show, they are mostly deprived of their home world, and operating as freelancers, especially bounty hunters, in the rest of the galaxy. On the big screen, Mando is a guy in shiny steel armour who does missions for the New Republic. He says “This is the way” once or twice. There is a brief sequence in which he is miffed because the bad guys force him to take his helmet off. Not so much a space samurai with an interesting back story and code of honour: more an overpowered viewpoint character in a third person shoot-em-up computer game. 

The point of Grogu is that he looks like Yoda (who is the elderly Jedi who trains Luke in the Empire Strikes Back). He wears similar armour to Mando, but also does levitation and healing by means of the Force (which is  the energy field which gives Jedi Knights their power). By the end of the movie he has even acquired a stick like Yoda’s and is seen meditating. But his personality and attitudes are those of a toddler, stealing food and being mildly naughty and doing double takes at the wonder of creation. There is a kind of mystery associated with Grogu: around his origins, his relationship to Yoda and Yaddle (the female of Yoda’s race briefly glimpsed on the Jedi council in Phantom Menace), and about whether he has really forsaken the Jedi way to become a Mandalorian. None of this is remotely implicit in the movie: if anything, he is in the Jar-Jar Binks role: comedy relief to counteract an overly powerful protagonist. 

But granted that our heroes have been denuded of nearly all their points of interest, any twenty five minutes of the movie is terrific fun. It’s essentially a tapestry of missions and side missions and McGuffins. The Hutt Twins (who we met in the Boba Fett TV show) are prepared to tell the New Republic where a nasty Imperial Warlord lives if, and only if, the New Republic rescue Rotta, Jabba the Hutt’s surviving son, from the planet on which he is being held as a gladiator. (In the cinematic prequel to the Clone Wars cartoon, Anakin and his new apprentice Ahsoka had to rescue a very cute baby Rotta from Lord Dooku.) Everyone has got bored with subtitles, so the Hutts can now form coherent English sentences. It turns out that Rotta is a really nice guy who quite likes being a gladiator, and that the Hutt twins want to kill him to secure their control of the crime empire. So Mando won’t hand him over. So in vengeance the twins send a bounty hunter to capture Mando….

And so on, and so on, and so on. It is relentless. Mando escapes from the Twins, but in the process is bitten by an always fatal Dragonsnake. Grogu successfully nurses his foster-dad back to life and Mando says “The old protect the young and then the young protect the old this is the way”. There was a brief moment of joy when I thought that was the end of the movie, but inevitably Mando announces that it is his duty to go back to the castle and slay his captors. (This is important, because the Code used to say “No-one can ever see a Mandalorian’s face; but it now says “No-one can ever see a Mandalorian’s face unless he kills them”.) So: more robots, more explosions, more duels, more fights, more monsters, and an extraction by a fleet of X-Wings. The last time I felt this inclined to cry out “please, please, make it stop” was in the third Hobbit movie. 

It looks fabulous. I enjoyed the glimpses of the rusty trade federation robot dressed in skins. I enjoyed the extended, whimsical sequence in which Grogu is Mando’s sole protector. I thought the pre-cred opening sequence in which Mando single handedly takes on some Imperial Walkers on an ice planet was as a good as Star Wars action sequence as I have seen. I enjoyed Rotta, even though he says that he is not his father slightly too many times. (I have seen this movie before: he will end up shooting a policeman, hiding out in Sicilly, and taking over the Family.) I enjoyed the fact that the aliens Rotta fights in the arena are the same as the figures in Han Solo’s holographic chess set. I even enjoyed the fast-food truck run by a four armed chimp (possibly voiced my Martin Scorcese). I wish that fast food outlets in the Star Wars universe looked less like fast food outlets any where else, but that ship probably sailed when Anakin and Amidala caught a greyhound bus from Coruscant to Naboo. I enjoyed the little Minions who helped Grogu rescue Mando. They are actually called Anzellans and are the same race as the fellow who took Threepio apart in Rise of Skywalker. 

Compared with other two hundred and fifty minute fight scenes, it really is perfectly okay. You are being encouraged to watch it at your local Imax if you want it even bigger and even louder. I’d recommend streaming it in easily digestible chunks. If you don’t watch Star Wars TV shows, you may find it fresher than I did. On the other hand or you may find it is completely impenetrable. People who think The Mouse raped their childhood presumably do not read my reviews. I am still hugely looking forward to Ahsoka Season Two. I think there are rumours that we might get more Acolyte. 

1: Also: The Lord of the Rings, Don Quixote book 2, and everything which isn’t the Colour of Magic.

2: Star Wars is the title of the stand-alone film which came out in 1977: A New Hope is what it is called when considered as part of a wider saga. Also, Frankenstein was the name of the creator, not the monster.

Hey! It's my birthday! Do you know what I would most like for my birthday? Well, since I can't have that, I'd like two more people to join my Patreon, so I had as many followers as my age! Come on. You don't want me to mope around all day thinking everyone has forgotten me, like a character in 1970s TV show, do you.....

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Hey! It's my birthday! Do you know what I would most like for my birthday? Well, since I can't have that, I'd like two more people to join my Patreon, so I had as many followers as my age! Come on. You don't want me to mope around all day thinking everyone has forgotten me, like a character in 1970s TV show, do you.....

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Birthday Cake Clipart PNGs by Vecteezy 

If this is Tuesday, Doctor Who must have just ended

I made my excuses and left after the Doctor hit the TARDIS with the giant hammer: although my heart hasn’t been in it since the stand-in First Doctor threatened to spank Bill Potts. So I probably have no right to an opinion. But you probably want to know what the opinion that I have no right to is. 

I recall the long  death of Doctor Who between 1985 and 1989. It was suspended for eighteen months: the fans made a huge fuss and the BBC caved and said that it would only be suspended for eighteen months. 

It is fair to say that Colin Baker’s first Season wasn’t very well received, but I don’t recall any “fans” gleefully crying “go Baker, meet your maker” or “go Nathan-Turner, get put in the waif and burn her” when the show was put on hold. 

It came back, of course, in 1986 (Trial of a Time Lord) and in 1987, 1988 and 1989 (in a grave yard slot opposite Coronation Street.) And then it somehow, without a fanfare, went on permanent hiatus. The producer, John Nathan-Turner must have known that the writing was on the wall, dropping the lacklustre “come on Ace, we’ve got work to do” epilogue into the final story at the last minute.

We remained in denial. I remember feeling mildly shocked when, three years later, an irreverent compilation of clips (Resistance is Useless) referred to the series in the past tense. 

The final season had been laying the groundwork for a big story arc. Some fans feel we were robbed. Some feel we had a lucky escape. Seven years later Paul McGann appeared in an American thing that had no discernible similarity to Doctor Who. Then there was radio silence until 2005.  

So: where are we now? At the point when Michael Grade can truthfully say “Stop being so hysterical: there is just going to be a slightly longer gap between seasons than usual”? Or at the point where we haven’t quite admitted that the show is dead, even though no-one is actually making it any more? Perhaps in 2033 there will be a 70th anniversary special in which the surviving Doctors run round and round in circles wearing 3-D glasses. 

I do not say that Doctor Who couldn’t form the basis for an enjoyable CBeebies cartoon or puppet show. Neither do I say that if someone pitches an adult, hard-science remake of the Clangers I will refuse to watch it. But we wouldn’t be talking about this if anyone thought the grown-up series had any kind of future. I look forward to arguments about canonicity.

Where are we? In Timeline A, a show called Doctor Who appears on Iplayer in, say, September 2027, following on directly from whatever the hell it was that happened in Ncuti Gatwa's swan-song, with a note in the credits saying that it was outsourced to HBO or Prime rather than to Bad Wolf. In Timeline B an entirely new series premiers on Netfux in 2028 carrying a small print rubric: “based on the BBC series Doctor Who”. It features a tough scientist from the Bronx who travels through space and time preventing homicides before they happen; or a member of the Time Lord Corps who is sent out by the Guardians of the Gallifrey to fix irregularities in the time flow. It begins with a handsome young scientist putting his baby son on board a Time Machine to escape the destruction of his planet. His evil brother the Master survives by being imprisoned in the Matrix when the planet explodes.  

My money is on Timeline C: nothing at all happens until 2040. I hope there will be streaming TV in whatever old folks home Nigel Farage has consigned me to.

I forget who said that Doctor Who fans are much more concerned with linearity than they are with continuity. We accept that the series will woefully contradict itself in every particular, but we insist that everything — everything which appears on TV, at any rate — must follow on sequentially from everything else, so that we can continue to think of Doctor Who as one infinitely long tapestry that is unrolling in front of us. 

Possibly the weirdest decision in the show's history was hiring Sylvester McCoy to appear in the American TV special, simply in order to be written out. I get what it was trying to do. Seven years on, the Doctor that we left behind was still on board the TARDIS. This is still the Doctor, the actual Doctor, the real in-canon Doctor and no-one can gainsay that. The torch, or at any rate the sonic screwdriver, was being passed. 

Russel T Davies was much cleverer; introducing us to the Doctor from the point of view of a human meeting him for the first time; making it clear that he had had previous adventures, but only gradually and tentatively making them part of the narrative. But there was no question that this was the same fellow who used to hang out with K-9 and Romana. Indeed, we eventually got to see, albeit as a “minisode” Doctor Eight (who had enjoyed precisely ninety minutes of screen time) regenerate into the very confusing Doctor Eight and A Bit; and eventually, the Eight and a Bit-th Doctor turning into Christopher Eccleston. 

Will Doctor Who Mark Three be a linear extension of Classic Who and New Who? Or will it be, in the parlance, a reboot: a new cycle of stories about the same fictional character. 

Russel T Davies was being mischievous; and he has every right to be a bit miffed; but he pointedly asked whether the next version of Doctor Who would still have a TARDIS, still have the same theme music, and whether a very obscure monster (the Drashigs) might be revived. He’d previously said that Doctor Who was like Robin Hood, and that even if he disappears for a while, someone will always tell new stories about him in some new form. This doesn’t seem to suggest a great deal of confidence that the saga will simply pick up from where it left off.

I don’t think my advice to any incoming producer or showrunner would be any different to the advice I gave Lorraine Heggessey in 2002. Get the Doctor right. Tell us old fashioned thrilling yarns. Ignore the backstory and the canon, and keep the Time Lords at arms length. Don’t over-use Daleks, Cybermen and Ice-warriors. Get the special effects as good as you can afford, but don’t sell the show on spectacle. 

The next version of Doctor Who can’t afford to be a pastiche, either of the post-RTD revival, or of the old classic show. It can’t assume that the average viewer knows or cares about sixty year old “lore”. Doctor Who has never had “lore” in the way that Star Trek or Star Wars has lore: the most it has ever had is a lucky-dip of iconography. Daleks are inhuman cyborgs that want to take over the universe, whereas the Cybermen are nasty inhuman cyborgs that want to take over the universe. It is quite cool that Daleks don’t have legs and it is quite cool that Cybermen have handlebars on their heads, but this is not the kind of thing you can hang a franchise off. 

James Bond is a great big action franchise, which carries with it a set of assumptions: car chases, gadgets, exotic locations, mildly risqué scenes with glamorous co-stars, a certain charmingly toxic masculinity. All of which, you could perfectly well find in a tin which didn’t say “James Bond” on the label: but you can see why Amazon wants to do something with the brand. If nothing else, the 007 logo signals very clearly to the ticket-buyer what he is going to get for his money. 

But wouldn’t it be more interesting to rethink Bond from the ground up? Maybe this version will be female and liberal, and maybe the next movie will accurately reflect the career of a real MI5 agent: a story primarily about paperwork and forensic investigations and decades long infiltrations.

To which the reply is of course “Much more interesting Miss Bennett; but not nearly so much like a James Bond movie.” 

"But why shouldn’t a future series explore a different or unexpected aspect of the Whoniverse?" Why shouldn’t Doctor Who become a kind of franchise, like the MCU. Space is big: why do we focus entirely on one particular Time Lord knocking about in one particular Time Machine? 

But what could that possibly mean? You could tell a story about a planet which the Doctor hasn’t visited yet; but you’d just be telling a story about a planet. You could tell a story about a period in Earth’s past which the Doctor never visited: but that would just be a piece of historical fiction. You could tell the story Terry Nation wanted to tell, about plucky humans fighting a backs-against-the-wall war against the Daleks, but that would be the same as a story about plucky humans fighting any other kind of heroic last stand. (With, admittedly, the Daleks in it.) Would a story about an alien and her human lover trying to rebuild earth in the wake of an alien invasion automatically become interesting if it said The Susan Foreman and David Cameron Adventures on the title page?

There has been one (1) successful Doctor Who spin-off, namely, the Sarah-Jane Adventures, and that didn’t depend on it’s connection with Doctor Who in the way that, say, Obi Wan depends on its connection with A New Hope. 

I wonder if there is a freemasonry of old folk who are anxiously waiting for the BBC to “bring back” Doctor Finlay’s Casebook after its fifty year hiatus. There may well be. There are certainly nostalgists who think that all changes to broadcasting schedules are the result of malicious conspiracies and that a future messiah will restore On The Buses, Fanny Craddock, the Potters Wheel and especially The Black and White Minstrel Show. But what is it that these Finlayvians want to restore? An exact pastiche of the old show, with artificial intelligence bringing, er, Andrew Cruickshank, back from the dead? A modern take on the same kind of story, with a similar setting, similar supporting characters, and a new arrangement of the theme tune? Or a bold reimagining in which Finlay is a junior doctor on a drug ridden Glasgow estate? Or is it just a religious imperative that there must at all times be a TV show about a medical practitioner with a Scots accent? (When ITV did, in fact, revive Doctor Finlay’s Casebook in the 1990s, they went for “linearity”, imagining the young John Finlay of the 1930s as an experienced medic in post 1945 Scotland.)

A rebooted Doctor Who will certainly consist of stories. But what in particular will make them Doctor Who stories? A Blue Box, some swirly lines, and a retro electronic theme tune?

Almost everyone agrees that the Timeless Child was a stupid idea. Turning inward and delving into the Doctor's origins was not in the spirit of the show: and there is something hubristic about a show-runner thinking that he can retrospectively obliterate established canon with a stroke of the pen. (“In an astonishing twist, it turns out that James Bond was a SMERSH double agent from the beginning.”)

Did people who saw The War Games in 1969 feel that the show they grew up with had been casually overwritten? Or did they say “Well, we have always known that the Doctor is an alien; and now someone has decided that his people are called the Time Lords. Well, that tracks." Changes to mythoi happen: but they happen incrementally and arise naturally from what has gone before.

Chibnall's all-consuming ret-con established that the Doctor could be — and indeed, probably had been — anyone: that there were potentially infinite Doctors knocking around the universe with infinite ethnicities, genders and orientations. And I can see why that might look like a good idea. It was always fun, in the weeks following a Regeneration Story, to explore and speculate what the New Doctor was going to be like; so why not tweak the format so that fun happens more frequently. Stephen Fry isn't going to commit to playing the Doctor for a full seven years, but he might well take on the role for a single episode.

But if absolutely anybody can be the Doctor then the Doctor isn’t anyone at all.

And that seems to be where we are. Any story in the universe can be a Doctor Who story, the Doctor can be any person in the universe.

Doctor Who is hereby defined as "a format in which things happen to someone, but definitely with an Old English Police Phone Box.

Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker’s Doctors were charismatic figures, much loved by their companions; and in some cases, their actions made them legendary figures on the planets they had visited.  But New Who developed a quasi-religious framing in which the Doctor was uniquely amazing, and by virtue of his amazing uniqueness, enabled everyone he comes into contact with to live unique and amazing lives. So perhaps the pitch you would present to HBO would be something like "Doctor Who is the story of a godlike being who transforms the lives of everyone he touches, but who never finds happiness himself.”

Certainly, "the idea of the Doctor" would have to be at the heart of any revamp or reboot. And clearly the Doctors of the classic era were amazing and wonderful. But I rather think that "I am special because I met the Doctor" is generally code for "We are special because we are Doctor Who fans": and there are fewer and fewer "boomers" for whom watching Doctor Who was a formative experience. The original Doctor was not amazing by virtue of some Christ-like glory intrinsic in his being. We loved him for who he was, not for what he was. The Doctor was awesome because Bill Hartnell, Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker and Sylvester McCoy were awesome.

If you want to get me interested in Doctor Who all over again, you'll need to find an actor with the charisma and gravitas of Tom Baker; a Royal Shakespeare Company support actor who isn’t afraid of clowning around. But with this caveat: he can’t be anything like Tom Baker. If you can find a decent actor who can do a fair impression of Tom, he should be utterly debarred from the role.

The fan obsession with linearity often encompasses a desire to wind the show backwards — a desire slightly indulged by RTD when he gave David Tennant a second bite of the cherry. I read someone today saying that Sean Pertwee should be allowed to impersonate his father; I read someone else saying that the older Sly McCoy should wake up in the TARDIS at the end of Survival and say “what a strange dream”. That thinking tacitly acknowledges that Doctor Who is dead or moribund.  

I want to avoid easy labels like trickster or maverick and the Harpo Marx comparison has been done to death. The closest I can come to describing my Doctor is wise clown or clever idiot. One of the many sad what-ifs in the show's history is that Sylvester McCoy had so little time and so few decent scripts: in the brief moments that were allowed to him, he seemed to achieve the perfect synthesis of frivolity and seriousness. Matt Smith is the only actor in the revived series to engage with that literally sophomore persona. I think — I am not sure but I think — that Smith's first two seasons justify the whole revival project.

So is that our pitch? “Doctor Who is a series in which a completely inappropriate hero can be dropped into any storyline”. Or: "Doctor Who is a series in which a comedic, theatrical, cartoon loony  falls into a series of essentially serious science fictional scenarios - and turns out to be the cleverest and wisest person in the room."

I will now tell you what I truly think.

I truly think that Doctor Who is a format from a bygone age. I don't think it was ever really true that the show could go anywhere and do anything. The minuscule budgets made most places and most times technically unvisitable. If you look at the actually-existing episodes, Doctor Who is a format in which all the worst cliches from 1950s science fiction are replayed over and over again with minor variations. Doctor Who as it existed on our screens and not in our heads was about alien invasions, evil computers, mad scientists, perpetually besieged bases, savage inhospitable planets, revived dinosaurs threatening cities, giant rats, carnivorous mushrooms and sentient slime.

It might be argued that the series consumed the science fiction cliches of the day; so that a revived series would have to riff on The Expanse and Hail Mary and The Three Body Problem rather than It Came From Outer Space and the Day The Earth Stood Still: but I am not quite sure. I think that there may still be an “idea of science fiction” which encompasses ray guns, flying saucers and slightly comedic robots, and it is only in that universe that the Doctor makes sense. 

And I think that the Doctor is a character who can only really exist in a BBC studio. He is a creature of the theatre who loses his essential nature when obliged to conform to movie logic. How many of us saw Paul McGann careering through modern day San Francisco on a motorbike and thought "That is simply not the kind of thing that the Doctor does."

I think that actors best embody the Doctor when interacting with other actors and physical special effects, as opposed to lines of computer code and blue screens. I do not say this because I am nostalgic for quarries and corridors; although twenty years after the failed revival, it is astonishing how many people do still think of Doctor Who in terms of quarries and corridors. I say this because the wit and charisma of Troughton and Baker and McCoy is essentially improvisational. They don’t necessarily respect the script: they ad lib and put on silly voices and generally piss about in front of the camera. None of the life-changing magic of Tom Baker could have emerged on a set where he had to hit his mark and where each expensive shot was carefully set up in advance. 

And I really do wonder how much of the Elusive Magic depended on the format. I do not insist on Basil Brush. I do not insist on Larry Grayson. But I do think that the twenty five minute weekly format, with the often pointless cliffhanger and the often unconvincing escape is an irreducible part of what the series was about. 

I have just watched Tom Baker's penultimate season right through. It is not very good. It is much worse than I remembered it. But throughout the rewatching process I had a strong spiritual sense that I was watching Doctor Who; albeit a rather bad iteration of it. And that I couldn’t find the point of crossover with the show that had just been cancelled.

Apart, obviously, from the Blue Box. 

Do I think Doctor Who should be consigned to oblivion? Whatever I write here, I don’t think it will be. If there can be a big screen revival of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, I don’t think a show with a sixty year history is going to moulder in limbo forever. Sooner or later someone will look at the late 20th century TV show, or even the early 21st century sequel, and say “That quaint ol' thing gives me a fine idea for a high budget 3D Imax Saga, see if it doesn't.” 

It might have as much in common with Doctor Who as the Big Finish pastiches; or as little as the Paul McGann spin off. It might be as much fun as Matt Smith or as annoying as Jodie Whittaker. It will be called Doctor Who but it won't be Doctor Who.

And who knows: perhaps I will even be alive to see it.

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If this is Tuesday, we must have a new Prime Minister

My family was a BBC family: but for some reason, once a week, we were allowed to “turn over” to the “other side” and watch Opportunity Knocks.

You remember the format? An amateur singer, an amateur conjurer, and a man who did farmyard impressions would each perform a short turn, introduced by a friend or a family member. Viewers were invited to send in postcards with the name of their favourite performer, and the person who got the most votes got to open the show the following week. A sealed envelope was an acceptable substitute for a postcard, and if you couldn’t remember the act’s name and wrote “Irish Singer” they would know exactly who you meant. There was also a clap-o-meter but that was for fun only. 

“And I mean that most sincerely, folks” stands with “Beam me up, Scottie” and “Play it again, Sam” as a well known quote that no-one ever actually said. 

So: there was a particular singer who had written a perfectly harmless romantic ballad, and we the nation voted that he should come back next week and sing it again. The crop of talent in Week Two was so dreadful that he was invited back for a third week, and a fourth, at which point "the man with the quite good song" became "the man who had won Opportunity Knocks more times than anyone else". It was clear to me even at that tender age that everyone was voting for him because everyone else was voting for him; that he was winning because everyone expected him to win; and that either they would have to introduce some kind of Twenty Second Amendment, or else admit that the format was broken.

I know perfectly well that the singer was Bernie Flint and the song was I Don’t Wanna Put No Hold On You, but it suits my carefully cultivated online persona to pretend I can’t quite remember. I believe he resigned voluntarily after thirteen weeks.

*

We all hate Sir Kier Starmer, but we can’t quite remember why. The Right regard him as a radical left wing lunatic. The Left see him as somewhere to the right of the Conservatives, with policies on immigration that threaten to out-Reform Reform. If the Left think you are a Fascist and the Right think you are a Communist, there is a good chance that you are actually somewhere in the middle, and "somewhere in the middle" is the exact place you would expect to find a Centrist. 

After the trauma of Jeremy Corbyn, and the farce of Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, it looked like a good idea to put a boringly moderate man in charge for a bit. “Not being Jeremy Corbyn” and “Not being a Conservative” was a pretty good pitch for Leader of the Opposition, but not a viable unique selling point for the actual Prime Minister. Having elected a Centrist the electorate quickly got very bored with Centrism.

We all love Andy Burnham. I have no idea why. I am not even quite sure I know which one he is. I vaguely remember him trying to become Labour Leader in 2015; he would probably have won if not for the unexpected late Corbyn surge. Perhaps the idea is that if he wins this time we can rewind and pretend the intervening eleven years never happened? There is a general sense that he has done a good job as Mayor of "some town".  We have even coined the word "Some-Town-ism" to represent that idea. Recently, he didn’t lose a safe Labour seat to a Reform candidate in a by-election, which is a fairly low bar to have cleared.

I gather that he thinks that Brexit may have been a bit of a false step; and that possibly we oughtn’t to have privatised transport and water and air in the 1980s. The US President is cross with him because he doesn’t think we should dig any more oil out of the sea, and the Daily Mail is very cross with him because he believes in Net Zero. I too am in favour of going back into Europe, nationalising monopolies and not having another summer as hot as this one. He dresses casually and likes the Pogues. He has a degree in English Literature. I find it hard to convince myself that anyone who likes Tony Harrison can be entirely evil. Donald Trump says that he is “extremely liberal extremely”.

"Extreme Liberal" has a contradictory ring to British ears, as if you had said that someone was a "Catholic atheist" or a "nice PE teacher". We use "liberal" to mean "not too far to the Left and not too far to the Right": as a synonym, in fact, for Centrist. Americans tend to use it to mean "much too far to the Left". 

It may that Andy Burnham is extremely much too far to the Left extremely. It may be that he is extremely in the middle. It depends a good deal on where you are standing.

* 

You might think that Centrist and Liberal (in the British sense) mean roughly the same thing. But Mr Tony Blair has invested the word Centre with his own, esoteric, meaning. For him, Centrism is the belief that policy comes before politics. It is the belief that you should first establish what the “correct” answer is, and only then try to persuade voters to support that answer. So a Centrist is not always Moderate. “When the correct answer requires radical change, the centre should be the radical change maker.” On Blair’s terms, Margaret Thatcher, Enoch Powell and Tony Benn were all equally Centrists. They unquestionably did what they thought was right even when it was unpopular, and tried to persuade the public that their ideas were the right ones. 

Blair says directly that Starmer won the 2024 election because people thought he was a Centrist, although in fact he is not. I suppose the accusation is that Starmer shapes his policies around what he thinks he can convince the electorate to vote for; that he looks for vote-winning policies and then pretends that he believes in them. This is, of course, precisely the accusation that was frequently levelled at Blair himself, not least by me.

I am also intrigued by Blair's use of the word "correct". It seems to assume that everyone wants the same thing: that we are all trying to get to the same place, and that there is theoretically one "right" answer to the question of how we get there. Nigel Farage and Jeremy Corbyn are aiming for the same destination, but unable to disagree about the best route. The possibility that different people might honestly want different things is relegated to the waste bucket marked “ideology”.

*

I recall from my History "O" Level that one of the things the Chartists wanted was annual elections. They also wanted secret ballots, universal suffrage, the payment of MPs and roughly equally sized constituencies. We have long taken those things for granted: but if I proposed that from now on we should have an election every twelve months, you’d think I was very silly. If I proposed a system where an incoming Prime Minister could be kicked out of office if he had not achieved his stated objectives in the first eighteen months of a five year parliament, you would think I was very silly indeed. And if I proposed a system where, after that eighteen month trial period, a new Prime Minister could be selected, without an election, by the same MPs who three weeks previously were professing utter loyalty to the deposed one, and that this new Prime Minister would be expected (but not constitutionally compelled) to follow the policies laid out in the rejected one's manifesto, you would think I had gone doo-lally.

And yet this is where we find ourselves.

Starmer forced to resign twenty three months after winning a landslide majority. Seven prime ministers in ten years. Liz Truss and the Lettuce.

Can we all agree that the format is irretrievably broken?

When it suits us, we still think of the Prime Minister simply as the prime “minister”, the MP who happens to have been chosen by the other MPs to be in charge for the time being. I still think that’s not a bad system: the people elect local representatives and the local representatives choose a leader.

But when it doesn’t suit us, we act as if the Prime Minister is the President; the single person who the People jolly well elected to “run the country” and who all the MPs should jolly well defer to as if he were King. In 2016, the Labour Party went out of its way to frame the leadership election as an American style primary. By the end of her term in office, Mrs Thatcher was referring to herself with the royal “we”.

If the Prime Minister is just the fella who happens to be managing the club this week, then bringing on a substitute from time to time if you don’t like the job he is doing makes perfect sense. But if everyone who put the tick in the “Labour” box thought they were voting for Kier to be President, swapping him for a different President, with a different style and possibly different policies, without checking if the People are okay with the idea, seems markedly undemocratic.

I don’t think it would be a good idea to add yet another jigsaw piece to our already hopelessly diffuse constitution. Tomorrow someone could introduce an Automatic General Election Following a Prime Ministerial Resignation Bill. You could, in fact, introduce a bill to do whatever the hell you like, provided it doesn’t contravene the Human Rights Act, and there are quite a lot of people who would like to drop the “provided” part. That’s the beauty of parliament being sovereign and us not having a written constitution, and I suppose, Brexit. But by the same token, the day after tomorrow, a different politician could introduce an act to overturn said measure. When it was convenient, we invented the Fixed Term Parliament Act, which meant that the Prime Minister could no longer call a general election on a whim. But when a Prime Minister wanted to call a general election on a whim, they repealed it again.

If my constituency voted for Joe Bloggs of the Red Party to represent it by an overwhelming majority two years ago, I am not entirely sure that it makes sense that he should have to stand for election all over again because the Blue Party has decided to defenestrate its leader. Or at any rate, it makes no sense if you still see MPs as local representatives. If you see them as delegates to an electoral college whose only purpose is to cast their vote for the Red Party or the Blue Party’s Prime Ministerial candidate, perhaps it does.

What is needed, obviously, is a complete overhaul of the whole system and a written-down-in-one-place constitution. Do we still want MPs to choose a “prime” minister, or do we want separate Presidential elections? Do we really want to keep the House of Lords, and if not, what do we want to replace it with? And is it sensible that someone can have “a landslide majority” when two out of three people voted for the other guy, or do we want some more sane method of counting the votes?

But we’ve been through that movie before. The people hate voting and will never support a system where they have to put three crosses on a piece of paper instead of one. No-one, not even a Prime Minister who studied philosophy, politics and economics at the University of Cambridge understands how instant run-offs work. And a proportional system could generate results where no single party had a majority in the House of Commons; where the Commons and whatever-replaces-the-Lords were controlled by different parties; where the directly elected President was Red and the proportionally elected Commons was Blue. Politicians of different parties would have to start talking to each other and working together and making compromises, and then where would we be?

Someone might say that the fact that our present system produces decisive results from indecisive electorates is a feature, not a bug: that we actually want a Prime Minister who can do broadly what ever he likes, and a system where 30% of the votes equates to 60% of the seats has a certain elegance. I might be prepared to make out a case for a system where the people select a King, and for four years, agree to treat him like a King. But that’s rather undermined if the other house mates can vote him out whenever they feel like it.

Any major constitutional rethink would take years to thrash out. So I think we have to resign ourselves to a lachrymose speech on the lectern outside Downing Street every eighteen months or so. The format, as I say, is broken.

*

There is no point in re-litigating the strengths and weaknesses of Jeremy Corbyn. He was, on Blair’s terms, a Centrist: he put policy before politics; and tried to persuade voters that the things he believed were the things they ought to believe as well. The right wing press thought he was a communist, but the right wing press thinks that everybody is a communist. There is a strong body of opinion that rejects the legitimacy of any non-Tory Prime Minister on general principles. They crucified Jeremy Corbyn and they went on to crucify Kier Starmer and Andy Burnham hasn’t been installed in office yet and they are already sharpening the nails for him.

It used to be thought that the hoi polloi voted the way their newspaper told them to vote and that any leader had to court the good graces of the Sun and the Daily Mail to be in with a chance. But while supermarkets still sell newspapers, or at any rate have them on display near the hobnobs and digestives, the idea that “Daily Mirror readers” represent an identifiable club now seems faintly quaint. Trump and Obama both understood that he who controls Social Media controls the world. Perhaps we should not fear “Red Andy” headlines in the Mail as much as we used to. We probably oughtn’t to pay too much attention to Elon Musks tweets, although we probably should pay an awful lot of attention to his money.

Before the 2024 election, I said that since socialism was a busted flush, we had a binary choice between a Prime Minister who was a Tory and a Prime Minister who was not a Tory, and since Kier Starmer was the only Not-a-Tory candidate who had the remotest chance of winning, all non-evil people should support Kier Starmer, even if he was a little too far one way on Israel and not quite far enough the other way on gender. (I rejected the option of tactically voting Lib-Dem because the last time I tactically voted Lib-Dem they acted as Tory enablers. One of my friends correctly said in 2010 that if I had wanted a party that would never make an alliance with the Conservatives under any circumstances, I should have voted Labour.) 

I qualified this by saying that I would withdraw my support from Starmer if he crossed anyone of four, red, or possibly blue, lines. I said I would not vote for him if he reneged on his commitment to human rights, and especially, his opposition to the death penalty. I said I would not vote for him if he cut or threatened to cut Labour’s historic links with the Trades Unions. I said I would not vote for him if he started to treat Donald Trump as a friend — in the way that Tony Blair cosied up to George Bush Jnr. I accept, of course that a Prime Minister has to have diplomatic relations with all sorts of unsavoury people. And I said I would not vote for him if I ever caught him using the word “woke” as a pejorative. To my knowledge, he never crossed any of those lines, although he put his toe alarmingly close to some of them.

When I wrote that essay, I had not predicted just how toxic Labour’s language about immigration would become; how authoritarian the anti-anti-semitism campaign would become; and how ready he would be to throw my trans friends under the bus when the equalities commission decided that nursery school taboos about boys and girls toilets were going to be enshrined in law. But he never reached a point where I felt inclined to say “We would be no worse off if Kemi Badenoch were Prime Minister” or indeed “Labour is now functionally as bad as Reform.” I was rather alarmed that in his resignation speech, he said that one of his key achievements was that he had persuaded the Labour Party to start brandishing the Union Jack all over the place. And when his Home Secretary said that white liberals should "fuck right off", I did feel inclined to say “To which party should we fuck off, oh Lord?”

All of the above still applies. I don’t know who Andy Burnham is or what he believes in, but I am pretty sure that he is Not-A-Tory. I don’t think we should split the Not-A-Tory vote because Lord Binface has some sensible suggestions about the price of kebabs.

*

Assuming that he is able to dislodge excalibur from the anvil on July 16th, Andy Burnham will not be short of people offering him advice, but if he is reading this, I would offer him the following counsel:

Do not assume that, because you beat the Faragist fairly and squarely in the by-election, that the bubble has burst and we can resume business as usual. Do not think in terms of winning a second term: think about mitigating the disaster when you lose. Ask the question: if I were the last Prime Minister before the new Dark Age, what would you do? Because you probably are.

The single best thing you could do: and the single best thing that any Prime Minister could have done since Kinnock threw the 1992 election would be to introduce Proportional Representation. The ideal system would probably be fairly complicated, and it would be easy for believers in the Divine Right of Pluralities to block or talk out any complicated proposal, in the way they talked out the perfectly sensible and reasonable proposals about physician assisted suicide. So simply go for a first-second-third choice / alternative voting / instant run-off system. It’s imperfect, but it massively reduces the chance of the Faragists gaining power on the basis of a large number of tiny majorities.

Form close alliances with the Green, Lib-Dem and other Not-Farage parties. Agree not to run candidates against each other; decide now that after the next election you will form a coalition government of national unity. More there are with us than them, but that doesn’t signify if we keep on voting against ourselves.

I understand that you would like to replace the House of Lords with a High Council of Realms and Shires. But if this is not feasible within the time frame, then use your Prime Ministerial fiat to flood the existing chamber with women, with people with dark coloured skin, with people who use different words than “God” to refer to God, with people who believe that climate change is real and that vaccines work, with people who think that women should control their own bodies, people who don’t much care which public loo anyone goes in provided there is sufficient paper, with scientists and economists and experts, and in general, with as many people who are not likely to be Faragists as possible. Do this on the understanding that they will lose this role as soon as the Great Council is introduced. The House of Lords cannot prevent a future Prime Minister from doing something obviously crazy but it can hold him up a bit.

Some of us are old enough to remember how, when local governments started doing things that Mrs Thatcher didn’t agree with, she enacted laws to reduce the powers of local government to do those kinds of things. She abolished the Greater London Council altogether, because the people of London would keep electing Ken Livingstone as leader. She passed deeply illiberal laws to prevent local councils allowing schools to say nice things about gay people. When there was a campaign of non-payment to protest about a deeply regressive tax she’d introduced, she tried to make a law that any local politician who supported the campaign wouldn’t be allowed to vote at council meetings. You may be able to think of other examples.

We have seen some rather half-arsed attempts in Reform controlled councils to dictate what books can be displayed in council schools and libraries, and what flags can be hung on council buildings. If I were the last Prime Minister before the Dark Age, I would enact laws and regulations to make it as hard as possible for my successor to impose his ideology on the country. I would fill libraries and schools with the best anti-hate books on the market. I would enact laws, or repeal existing ones, so that local and national government have no power to censor the curricula schools or colleges or adult education courses, or to make dictates about what insignia can and can’t be displayed. I’d look at making specific laws about secularism: safeguarding the rights of Muslims, Christians, Malaysian Frog Worshippers and atheists to pray and dance and sacrifice newts and evolve before council meetings, but absolutely prohibiting the imposition of official religious acts. I'd introduce much, much stronger rules about online hate speech, with violators barred from public office for, say, five years. I'd introduce a new criminal offence of using language likely to incite rioting -- I find it hard to believe that such a law doesn’t already exist. I'd look at how to strengthen the Human Rights Act. I believe that at present Parliament is not allowed to debate the restoration of the death penalty. We are looking at a situation when in incoming Monster Raving Loony Prime Minister might introduce a law that says that redundant churches can never be repurposed as places of worship for other faiths; or that canteens in government buildings will be required to serve pork twice a week with no veggie alternative; or to introduce French style beach patrols that would order ladies who were dressed too modestly to uncover themselves. We want to get to the position where Sir Humphrey could say “I am afraid you can’t do that Sir: it is unconstitutional.”

There is no precise British equivalent of a Presidential Executive Order: but is there a danger that a future MUKGA leader would find ways to misuse the Royal Prerogative? If so, that loophole needs to be closed, forthwith. But conversely, is there any way that our status as a Constitutional Monarchy could be a bulwark against extremis? Could we envisage a situation where, even if the Commons and the High Council voted in favour of bringing back witch-burning or sending orphans up chimneys, King Charles would be permitted — nay, constitutionally required — to withhold Royal Assent?

I am brain storming here.

I can very well see why you would object to these kinds of measure. 

Perhaps you hold fast to the Good Chaps theory of government: we may not necessarily agree with everything Mr Farage says, but at the end of the day he is a Hinglishman as opposed to a Proosian or a French or Dutch or Roosian, and he won't do anything as terrible as all that, because a Good Chap never would. 

Or perhaps you believe in Playing The Game. The really important thing is that, should the wrong guy win the election, we respect the Will of the People, the Fine Traditions of This House, and have an Orderly Transfer of Power, and let them do their thing until 2033. Just because they would play dirty if the situation was reversed is no reason to come down to their level.

Or perhaps you believe that if you do a Jolly Good Job like you did in Some Town, and that when the people start to see a real differences in the price of potholes in their pockets, everyone will love you and vote for you in sheer gratitude. 

I wish you luck. 

You have about eighteen months.

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