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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Infrequently Asked Questions 2026

As I did this time last year, I am offering my more devoted followers the chance to decide what I write about for the month of July this year. Hop across to Patreon and find out how you too can join the fun. 

The Horns of Nimon

Horns of Nimon has been cited as the worst Who story of all time. It was the end of Tom Baker's sixth season and he's obviously bored to death. He sleepwalks through his scenes and clowns around shamelessly. So no-one else can take the story seriously. When K-9 breaks down, the Doctor tries to give him mouth-to-mouth. When the TARDIS malfunctions, it emits a series of comedy "boings". Graham Crowden (the evil Soldeed) seems to think that he's competing for the Brian Blessed Award For Overacting. And keep your Spotters Guide to Doctor Who Clichés handy: people really do say things like "You meddling fools!" "It's too late for me - I'm done for!" and "All these corridors look the same!"

Andrew Rilstone

Review -- Doctor Who: Myths and Legends Boxed Set DVD - Sci-Fi Now - March 2010

That concludes my retrospective look at the Seventeenth Season of classic Doctor Who. I am sure I will have a look at this final season in due course.  If you want to support me, read outtakes and specials and get early access to my nonsense, then please, please, please, pretty please, I'm not going to get down and beg, but, consider joining my Patreon. 

The Horns of Nimon

In the totally canonical Curse of Fatal Death it is established that nature abhors the absence of the Doctor. If his existence is threatened then the Universe itself will intervene to save him. 

At the end of the Key to Time saga, the Doctor seems to have become consciously aware that he is a fictional character. He has entirely ceased to take the Universe seriously. But the Universe only exists for the Doctor’s benefit. If he has stopped believing in it, then mere anarchy will be loosed upon the world. 

So the Universe herself intervenes. She divides the Doctor into two beings: a Serious Doctor and a Silly Doctor. It may be pure coincidence that the Serious Doctor happens to be female and the Silly Doctor happens to be Male: or it may be that the Universe is making a sly feminist joke. 

The Fourth Doctor was always a multi-faceted character: that was what made him so fascinating. He could pivot from the serious to the silly in a moment; he would treat the gravest subjects lightly and the most frivolous ones with gravity. But after the Universe’s intervention, we are left with a female Doctor who has no sense of levity; and a male Doctor who is incapable of being serious. Neither of them could carry a TV show or save the planet alone; together, they add up to a hero. 

When did the split occur? Perhaps, as soon as the Guardian decided to gather the segments of the Key, the Meta-Doctor became an inevitability. The origins of Romana are somewhat occluded: she arrived in the TARDIS claiming to have been sent on a mission by the Time Lord President; but later learns that the person who instructed her was the White Guardian. 

How if the Guardian had borrowed one or more of the Doctor’s lives and formed a woman out of them? This kind of thing is possible: in future stories we are going to see it giving rise to beings like “the Watcher” and “the Valeyard”. Before Romana, the Doctor was always represented as a brilliant scientist and a pioneer, after her arival, he was revealed to have been an academic failure. And this makes perfect sense. His Feminine self contained the Doctor's learning and expertise; while the Male persona retained his experience and intuition. 

But by the time of her anomalous regeneration in Destiny of the Daleks Romana is clearly fully aware of her role: she presents herself in an exact replica of the Doctor’s clothes; and then in a “feminine” version of them. But it is only now, in The Horns of Nimon, that her function becomes explicit.

She even has her own sonic screwdriver.

It’s the Doctor who dismantles the TARDIS on a whim, and Romana who tries to persuade him not to. It’s Romana who verbally chastises Soldeed before his death. “The Nimon told you what you wanted to hear, promised you what you wanted to have. They are parasitic nomads who’ve been feeding off your selfishness and gullibility.” She delivers the lines dead-pan: it is no longer possible to imagine the Doctor doing so. 

Look at the Episode Two cliffhanger, and its resolution. Romana is doing a perfectly workpersonlike job shepherding the young people (who have been sent from Aneth as a sacrifice) through the labyrinth, and doing her best to keep their spirits up. They discover the Nimon’s larder, which looks something like the frozen humans on the wirrn-infested Ark and something like the tombs of the Cybermen on Telos. “ I'd guess that the Nimon feeds by ingesting the binding energy of organic compounds such as flesh” she techno-babbles. The nasty Co-Pilot appears and summonses the Nimon; he grovels about, zaps it with an ineffectual ray-gun, and is shot himself with its luminous horns.

This may not be the greatest piece of TV ever, and you might think they could have reshot the scene when the co-pilot’s pants very obviously split, but we are clearly watching a bog-standard episode of Doctor Who. You are a liar and a coward. You will die. Mercy Lord Nimon. The episode ends with the Nimon advancing on the captives, and Romana thrusting her arms out, as if that would help. 

And then, at the beginning of Episode Three, the Doctor arrives.

He is holding a large red cloth, or a very small cape. His opening gambit is “Is this a private party or can anyone join in?” He treats the monster as if it were a naughty child or a yappy puppy-dog “Tell me are you really terribly fierce”? He holds the red rag as if he were a bull fighter; the Nimon lowers its horns as if to charge, but instead zaps the rag. One of the cryogenically frozen extras falls to the floor. It isn’t entirely clear what happens next: I think Romana shoots the controls with the Co-Pilot’s zap gun to create some smoke to cover the sacrifices' escape. The Doctor puts the red cape over the face of the boy who fell out of the larder.

It's not, truthfully, all that funny. And it begs all sorts of questions. Does the Doctor seriously imagine that the Nimon is likely to react to a red rag in the same way as the earth creatures that they happen to resemble? Or is he intending to mock it by pretending that he thinks it is an actual bull? (But why does he suppose that the Nimon will get the joke?) Or did a race-memory of the Nimon's literal attraction to red things give rise to the human blood sport of bull fighting?

Actual bulls are, as everyone knows, colour blind.

These are of course, silly questions. We can all see what has happened. When the Doctor arrives, the episode changes from melodrama to farce.

And that might have been an interesting direction for some future iteration of Doctor Who to have travelled in. The Sensible Doctor is the problem-solving scientist; the Silly Doctor is the trickster who enters into the narrative and changes the rules. She may think she is in a story about the Minoan Bull, but he will treat it as a skit on Spanish toreadors.

But the Silly Doctor does understand that he is in a Doctor Who story. He knows the rules of the game and keeps complaining about them. He points out that whenever he uses the phrase “what could possibly go wrong”, something does go wrong. He observes that whenever he arrives on a planet “there are always people pointing guns or phasers or blasters at him”. He responds to the phaser-wielding guards with the biggest cliche of all: “Take me to your leader.”

And we know the rules too. We are not surprised that, when the Doctor tries to fix the TARDIS console, it blows up in his face. We are not even surprised that he responds calmly "Well, thats odd". ("Don't you think that's odd, K9?" About two thirds of his humour now depends on irritating repetition.) But we were perhaps not quite expecting the explosion to be accompanied by Monty Python level comedy sound effects: an explosion, a siren, an electronic whizz, a boing, a twang.  

“But Andrew: the TARDIS is an alien craft, and for all we know removing the gravitic anonomyser would produce a sound like a schoolboy vibrating a wooden ruler on his desk.” 

Yes: indeed. But the fact remains: the universe is now such that when the TARDIS is in proximity to the Doctor it produces funny noises. 

And then there is K9.

At the beginning of Episode One, when K9 appears damaged, the Doctor literally tries to give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. ("But Andrew, how do you know that K9 is not the kind of computer that can be rebooted by air from a Time Lord's lungs?") When the robot is about to say something inappropriate, the Doctor covers its mouth. And when it appears that the TARDIS is going to be crushed by a black hole, the Doctor literally puts his arms around the machine for comfort. Indeed, he produces, from nowhere, a red rosette marked First Prize and attaches it to K9's ear, adding that he is “the best dog I ever had”.

K9 is, so far as we know, the only dog he has ever had. And in any case, he is not actually a dog.

There has been more than one science-fiction reworking of the Pinocchio story: the robot that wants to be, or believes itself to be, human. But K9 does not seem to perceive himself as a dog. It isn't quite clear if he has any self-awareness at all. Nearly all his humour comes from an inability to understand human language and idioms. (When the Doctor uses an unfunny mixed metaphor, up a gumtree without a paddle, K9 takes him literally.) But the Doctor treats him as a living creature, referring to him as "my dog" and calling him "good dog" and "good boy". (If he is sentient, this is actually rather degrading.) One almost feels that the Doctor is treating K9 as a toy: an inanimate object that it pleases him to pretend is a domesticated animal.

Do Time Lords even keep pets? Is there a Gallifreyan equivalent to the Terran dog? Or is this another example of the Doctor hyper-correcting: pretending to have a dog like the mortals on his favourite planet, but not quite grokking how it works?

The Doctor saves the TARDIS by putting it into a spin so it skims off the surface of the high gravity asteroid. And then he muses out loud “Sometimes I think I'm wasted just rushing around the universe saving planets from destruction. With a talent like mine, I might have been a great slow bowler.”

He is joking, obviously: although later stories will flirt more seriously with the idea that the Doctor might eventually retire. But to whom is the joke directed? K9 doesn’t understand humour. Is the Doctor breaking the fourth wall? Talking nonsense for the benefit of "all of you at home"? “Rushing around the universe saving planets from destruction” is very much how a casual viewer might perceive the character of the Doctor. It's not quite how the in-universe Doctor would see himself.

My sense is that at the moment he says the words, he means them. He genuinely does think he would rather have been a cricketer than a time-traveller. He speaks whatever thought happens to have flitted across his mind. Perhaps when he was split into two beings, one of the things he lost was his "filter".

The Doctor doesn’t only say goodbye to K9: he also says goodbye to the TARDIS. Sailors, of course, do refer to their ships as "she": but the Doctor literally speaks of his time-machine as if it were a human friend."Well, it's been a great, great partnership, old girl”. And at the end of the story, he says that the "old girl" still has a lot of life left in her. Romana takes him to be talking about her, although he is actually talking about his ship. At first she scowls, and then smiles at the Doctor's little joke. It seems to convey a genuine partnership; a rapport. The two sides of the Doctor are complimentary, not antagonistic. (Lalla Ward is very good at acting.)

Perhaps, in fact when he says "you've got a few millennia left in you" he is talking about the Doctors Who, both of her, and the series which bears their name.

Despite hitting rock-bottom, it is going to survive. For a few seasons more. The Universe can't bear to be without Doctor Who and this is the nearest thing to Doctor Who she has been able to salvage. If you agreed with this essay, then please consider supporting Andrew's patreon.  If you did not agree with this essay, then please consider supporting Andrew's patreon. 

The Horns of Nimon

 

History has been wilfully unfair to The Horns of Nimon. 

Dig up your John-Marc L’Officier programme guide, or just google the Radio Times Archive. 

The Horns of Nimon, Episode One: 22nd December 1979 

The Horns of Nimon, Episode Two: 29th December 1979

The Horns of Nimon, Episode Three: 5th January 1980

The Horns of Nimon, Episode Four: 12th January 1980

A few days before Christmas Eve; a few days before Hogmanay; Twelfth Night; the first week of Spring Term. 

Panto season. 

Did you really expect to see a story about minotaurs in space treated with high seriousness during the Christmas Holidays? And do you suppose that the extreme silliness of the story was an unfortunate mistake? 

Look at any one of Soldeed’s scenes, if you can bear it. Look at his big entrance in Episode One. The Nimon have promised a new fleet of ships for the failing Skonnon empire; and one of his minions asks “are we on the brink of having the promise fulfilled." 

“I believe we are” says Soldeed. “I dooo believe we ARE!” And then he raises his arm, stares manically into camera and says “The second Skonnon empire WILL be borrrrn!”

Or look at his excruciating death-scene in Episode Four. His dialogue is somewhere between a chant and a howl; the sort of fake weeping that Stan Laurel used to indulge in. “My drer-heams of CON.......Quest” he yodels, sticking his fingers in his cheeks. Zapped by his own rod-of-power, he collapses against a wall, whimpering “You are all doomed!” before expiring in a fit of maniacal giggles. 

This cannot be failed seriousness: this must be deliberate spoof. The actor must be taking direction: “This is a daft skit about monsters in fright masks. You aren’t just playing a Doctor Who bad guy: you are playing every Doctor Who bad guy. There is going to be a scene where you, the good guys, and the monsters are hiding behind consoles in the baddies control centre and if you do it right, kids up and down the country will be shouting ‘he’s behind you’ into their TVs. Just have fun. Be as broad as you like. It’s panto season. Basically pretend we cast you as the Sheriff of Nottingham in Babes in the Wood.”

Or take a look at the actual script. Soldeed says things like “You meddling fool” and “After him, you fools, you dolts.” The Starship Pilot calls his co-pilot “You blundering fool” and “You blundering idiot”. The Co-Pilot calls the cargo of slaves “weakling scum” no less than five times. Soldeed’s counterpart on the the planet Crionth gets barely five minutes of screen time, during which he gets to say “It’s too late for me” “I’m done for” and “I’ll hold them off for as long as I possibly can.”

This must be deliberate. 

Or take a look at the costumes. The Skonnos soldiers' helmets are moulded in strange, non-euclidian shapes with guffaw-inducing plumes. One wishes that Tom Baker could have snipped them off with a pair of over-sized scissors, like Harpo did to the Freedonian soldiers in Duck Soup. 

The story is a half-hearted checklist of Doctor Who tropes. Alien invaders. Endless corridors (that all look the same). Priests who know very well that their god isn’t really a god, with silly robes and a Skeletor style sceptre of power. Six aliens representing an invasion force. A corpus of ineffectual rebels with floppy blond hair. 

I think that Williams, Adams and even Baker realised that, after Nightmare of Eden, the game was up. Doctor Who was done for: The Horns of Nimon was the Last Chance Saloon. Why not go out in a blaze of dreadfulness? Since whatever we do, you will accuse us of cardboard sets and overacting bad-guys, we will damn well build the set out of cardboard and tell the bad-guy to overact. 

I admit that this defence has been overused. If a movie is derivative, someone will always claim it as a loving homage; if a movie is dreadful, some apologist will say it is an affectionate parody. Even Plan Nine From Outer Space has its advocates. 

But after all, it was December. No-one complains that the village hall production of Jack and the Beanstalk failed to treat the Brothers Grimm with due reverence. No-one treats the Star Wars Holiday Special as a peculiarly inept attempt to make the Empire Strikes Back. 

The Horns of Nimon is a perfectly dreadful Doctor Who story and an all but unwatchable piece of television.

But you can’t blame it for that. It was clearly supposed to be. 

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