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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The Horns of Nimon

Doctor Who is littered with hypotheticals. What if Geoffrey Bayldon had succeeded Willian Hartnell? What if Mr Pastry had succeeded Patrick Troughton? What if Verity Lambert’s pitch for the 1996 TV special had succeeded? What if Christopher Eccleston had participated in the fiftieth anniversary?  

Paths we didn’t take: doors we never opened. 

And “Doctor Who does Greek Mythology” was a perfectly decent premise for a story. A perfectly decent premise that had been done twice before; but the show has never particularly cared about repeating itself. We all know that there are three Atlantises and two Loch Ness monsters.

The best thing would have been to focus firmly on the myth of Theseus. To have the randomiser whisk the Doctor back to the Bronze Age where he could have discovered that the legendary man-bull was a mutant or a genetically engineered bovine. Or an alien or a robot. Or a malicious rumour. Or perhaps the story would have begun further back; with the Doctor persuaded to design a prison to house the terrible creature, and then, to construct a primitive flying machine for the young prince…

It is more likely that the story would have revisited Underworld and proposed a Whoniverse driven by eternal recurrence, events in the distant future sending echoes back to the remote past. And that would have been fine too. We would have accepted, indeed, welcomed, a world of ray-guns and space-ships lightly dusted with Greek architecture and Greek costumes. There must have been a fair few togas lying around gathering dust since Up Pompeii! finished. 

One hopes, at any rate, it would have given us a break from the Doctor-Who-by-numbers format that the series was spiralling into. A mythology themed story could have avoided the chases through endless corridors (which all look exactly the same). And there would have been no need for the kind of BBC model spacecrafts that had become an even bigger embarrassment since Star Wars hit the big screen. And perhaps they could even have found actors prepared to deliver science fictional lines with a reasonably straight face? 

Perhaps the script would have given Romana a chance to shine; perhaps it would have allowed K9 to be K9. The previous stories had reduced the tin dog to a piece of hardware: a get-out-of-jail-free card and an exposition upload device. If K9 was going to justify his continued existence, it would have to have been as a character: as part of a double act with the Doctor. (It is not clear who would have been the straight man and who would have been the comic turn.) Tom Baker never had quite the rapport with David Brierly that he did with John Leeson, but we would still have enjoyed seeing them in extended two-hand sequences. 

Wishful thinking: all wishful thinking. Plenty of promising Doctor Who stories have foundered in the production. Graham Crowden, who would have played Soldeed, the major bad guy, had very nearly been cast as the Fourth Doctor. (He was literally offered the part in 1976 but couldn’t commit to it for the required three years: the role went instead to an out of work actor someone discovered on a building site.) Perhaps Crowden would have demonstrated that he could have been as Shakespearean and brooding and charismatic as Tom Baker ever was. But I fear there would have been an overwhelming temptation to simply out Baker Baker in the overacting department.

It seems so silly to us now. But tea-breaks and even toilet-breaks had been hard-won by the Trades Unions. They rightly believed that to concede a tiny point was to risk undoing the major strides that had been achieved in the first half of the twentieth century. A management / workers agreement stated that only the Standing Union of Domestic Staff could serve refreshments to performers. In a break during the first day of filming, Tom Baker absent-mindedly reached for a teapot. Lalla Ward gently put her hand on his wrist. 

But it was too late. 

The ensuing row between Equity and SUDS closed down the Doctor Who studio for the rest of the season. The Horns of Nimon was destined to sit forever alongside Song of the Space Whale and the Masters of Luxor as one of the great un-made stories in the Whovian canon. 

We will never know how good it might have been. If you enjoy my writing about Doctor Who, please consider joining my Patreon.

The Horns of Nimon

The Leisure Hive was something of a revelation. 

Certainly, the John Nathan-Turner era ended up in the mire. But when the story broke onto our screens, with minimal fanfare, towards the end of 1980, it felt like a phoenix had emerged from the ashes. There was a new title sequence, and a rejigged theme tune. The Doctor had a new, stylish costume. Tom Baker’s excesses were reined in: he was again the brooding Shakespearean figure I had fallen in love with in Miss Beale’s class. 

And the actual pictures on the TV looked different. Deeper; darker; more professional, more somehow present. People often called them “glossy”. Possibly they were using more cine film and less video tape. Possibly they had got better at cleaning up footage in post production. Perhaps they were doing clever things with the lighting. John Nathan-Turner had been a Production Unit manager throughout Season 17, and probably had a head for matters technical. The budget had not significantly increased, but he may have been more canny than his predecessors about how he spent what little money he had. 

It would not be quite fair to describe Season 17 as the “don’t care” era. Graham Williams and Douglas Adams clearly cared, a great deal, about setting up funny jokes and surprising scenes and generally keeping seven million people entertained on a Saturday night. But John Nathan-Turner, I think, was more conscious of carrying two decades of TV history on his shoulders. With becoming producer of Doctor Who there must also come great responsibility. From Season 18 onwards, Doctor Who seemed to know that it was Doctor Who.

Whether this was a good thing or a bad thing in the long term is a matter of opinion: but back then, fandom breathed a collective sigh of relief. 

Yes, the change from “clothes” to “costume” or even “uniform” was a mistake, and the question mark motifs were a vulgar meta-joke. 

Yes, the over-staffing of the TARDIS with not-very experienced actors harmed the series in the long run. 

Yes, Matthew Waterhouse. 

Yes, in retrospect, Ian Levine.

A decade — a third of the show’s original run! — was certainly too long for one man to stay in charge.

The DWAS President, who had not been entirely wrong about Deadly Assassin, was not entirely wrong about Season 18: the gloss was arguably superficial. 

But in September 1980, none of this mattered. 

What mattered was that Doctor Who was no longer something we had to feel embarrassed about watching. 

“My god!” we all thought “It looks just like a real TV show.”

The only thing which mattered in 1980 was that the Leisure Hive was not The Horns of Nimon.  If you enjoy my writing about Doctor Who please consider supporting my Patreon.

Horns of Nimon

The last part of my retrospective on the 17th and worst season of classic Who is currently available to my Patreons and will be appearing here shortly. 

https://www.patreon.com/posts/horns-of-nimon-160327054

Nightmare of Eden (4)

 

Creature From the Pit was a costume drama with some mock-gothic horror and a quite imaginatively stencilled in alien world. That’s the kind of thing that Doctor Who does, and the kind of thing that Doctor Who does pretty well. But Nightmare of Eden, with its corridors, monsters, ray-guns, space-ships, and gobbledegook, is much closer to the Doctor Who which resides in the popular imagination. The BBC was never very good at this kind of thing, and Star Wars had raised the bar considerably. When Michael Grade wanted to cancel Doctor Who, it was things like Nightmare of Eden that he pointed at. 

Creature of the Pit was very silly. But it owned its silliness. Rightly or wrongly, it adopted an arch, pantomime tone, and ran with it. I didn’t much care for the Doctor teaching himself mountaineering from a book while dangling over the edge of a precipice: but it is reasonably funny and reasonably in keeping with the character we understand Tom Baker’s Doctor to be. Nightmare of Eden has some aspirations to be a science fiction story. It deals with a very serious subject. But comedy keeps inveigling itself into a basically serious script. Not light relief; but baked-in silliness which tells us that this is not the kind of story about genocide and drug-abuse that we ought to be taking seriously. 

Lewis Flander was hardly a big name: but he was an experienced and presumably competent actor. (His CV includes Henry Higgins, Pier Gynt, Shylock and Mr Darcy.) His character, if you take it at all literally, is as evil as anyone who the Doctor has come up against. He’s talking in terms of kidnapping whole species and using their desiccated remains to hook whole planets on civilisation-destroying drugs. And yet someone — possibly Tom Baker himself — must have taken him to one side and said “Lewis, Lewis, we think it would be absolutely marvellous if you played Prof Tryst as Peter Sellers playing Doctor Strangelove. We’ll even get make-up to find some evil glasses for you.”

What is going on? Is this a seasoned actor forced to play a script he doesn’t think a great deal of, and deciding a silly accent is the only way to make it bearable? Or has someone higher up made a decision that if we are going to make a kids TV show involving a genocidal drug-pusher, he had better be a comedic, parodic genocidal drug-pusher? 

In Episode Four, we see the ship’s security guards and the horrible customs men drive the mandrels  along the corridors, using their ray guns as cattle prods. From time to time one of the mandrels gets out of line and gets a jolly good zap. (This is another scene that would be more comfortable if the aliens had been more beast-like and less humanoid.) One of the guards cries out  “the guns are failing” and the mandrels turn around and start to attack them. Just in the nick of time the Doctor appears, and gently takes control of the aliens using his K9 dog whistle. It isn’t clear if he is trying to be a sheep-dog or a school-crossing-patrol officer or the Pied Piper: but he ushers the mandrels through the screen and back into their own world. 

As we watch the Screen on the Screen, we see the Doctor disappear out of frame, pursued by the mandrels , which attack him, out of shot. We don’t see the attack, or the fight: but we hear the Doctor’s reactions. He says “oo” and “ouch” and “aargh”, rather as if he was stepping into a bathtub that was slightly too hot. Lumps of foliage are thrown from the wings onto the stage. The Doctor says, and I promise I am not making this up “Oh my arms! My legs! My everything!” before reappearing with his jacket in tatters (but otherwise, so far as we can see, uninjured.)

This is pure pantomime. More specifically, it is the kind of thing that would happen in a Carry On movie or Crackerjack skit. You don’t show the fight: you show the hero exiting and re-entering in a dishevelled state. It’s the equivalent of making Andy Capp and Flo disappear into a whirlwind when they are having a domestic fight. 

Why would you do this? Is it Tom Baker’s own input? One can imagine him refusing to play the gobbledegook straight, and improvising a slap-stick routine of his own. Is it conceivably a conscious post-modern conceit? The CED looks like a movie screen or a proscenium arch; so perhaps characters crossing the threshold ought to start obeying theatrical or pantomime conventions? Or is it simply a  signal to not take any of this nonsense seriously  — to soften a script which is both conceptually heavy and intellectually demanding? 

And then we have the aliens. 

You would have to have a heart of stone to see the climax of Episode One, when a mandrel appears through a hole in the spaceship wall, without laughing. The chase through the corridors in Episode Four regularly showed up in  “wasn’t Doctor Who terrible in the olden days” clip-shows. 

But let’s be clear: there is nothing inept about the actual construction of the creatures. No wires or actorly Y-fronts come accidentally into shot. The performers seem to be able to move around without bumping into each other; they even try their hardest to mime, a bit. The costumes are not obviously made of bubble-wrap and they studiously avoid resembling giant cocks. 

I theorised that the unfortunate monster in Invisible Enemy was the result of a simple transcription error: someone ordered a Nucleus of the Swarm and received a Nucleus of the Prawn. I have no immediate explanation for the mandrels. I can only assume that they were  intended to look like this. Someone read the script, and said “This calls for some frightening, but slightly tragic aliens, who the bad-guy is going to melt down and turn into cocaine. Let’s do them as Muppets.” 

We know that there was disquiet, among the production team and some of the actors, about the thematic content of Nightmare of Eden. Maybe children’s TV shouldn’t be dealing with drugs at all; and if it is, it definitely shouldn’t glamourise them in any way. So is it impossible that the script was intentionally sabotaged to hold the difficult subject matter at arms length? The idea of turning a sentient life form into a recreational chemical is pretty horrible: so perhaps Graham Williams  adopted the sensible strategy of depicting the mandrel as obviously cartoon creatures that you couldn’t possibly feel sorry for? 

My only other conjecture is that Tryst is so obviously evil; and the results of the Vraxoin so extreme; and the customs men so ludicrously over-zealous that Bob Baker intended the story as a satire against unrealistic and paranoid “just say no” propaganda. But I can’t construct a consistent reading based on that premise. 

 To the extent that I have worked out what is meant to be going on, I now think Nightmare of Eden contains the embryo of a perfectly good episode of Star Trek or Blakes 7, even if it isn’t quite the kind of thing Doctor Who does best. It is a pity that in 1979, the BBC still thought that “doing Star Wars badly” was a viable direction for their venerable franchise. Almost no-one loves the Fourth Doctor more than I do, but in these episodes he comes across as petulant and annoying and rather bored. (“Nothing is inexplicable” “Then explain it” “Its inexplicable.”) 

And I am approaching the story from the point of view of a fan and scholar, who is prepared to freeze-frame I-Player and switch on the subtitles when it is not at all clear who has been killed by what in the interface between the ships. The original target audience didn’t have that option.

Nightmare of Eden is quite a good Doctor Who story. But it is an absolutely terrible piece of television.