Oh, What a Serkis

 If there has always been a photograph of the King on the wall of a particular school, then only a very strong republican would want us to take it down. If there has never been a photograph of the King on the wall of a particular school, then only a very strong monarchist would suggest putting one up. It’s not about the picture. 

When I came to Bristol I didn’t know who Edward Colston was. When I found out, I was quite neutral towards his statue: “That’s quite interesting” I said “That someone who would definitely be regarded as a monster in one era was regarded as a hero in another one. We might as well leave it where it is.” However, as time went by, it turned out that not everyone did think that Colston was a monster. Some of them paraded about town carrying giant golliwogs, some of them wrote to the papers saying slavery wasn’t so bad and that most of the slaves had a cushy time, and some said that Bristol was a white town and we should celebrate our white history. So of course the statue had to go. When it was still there, I am sure that there were sensible moderate leftists and sensible moderate conservatives who would have been okay with it staying on display, maybe with an explanatory plaque,  but now it’s gone, only full on nutters would remotely think of putting it back.

Things that Tolkien “would have” objected to in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings:

—the change to Frodo’s age

—the juvenile characterisation of Merry and Pippin

—the comedification of Gimli

—dwarf-tossing

—Elf skateboarding

—the removal of Theoden and replacing of him with an entirely different character

—the removal of Faramir and replacing of him with an entirely different character

—the visualisation of the Balrog….

What Tolkien “would have” said about Rings of Power: 

“It has nothing to do with the history of Middle-earth, so why are you even asking me about it?”

What Tolkien “would have” said about the War of the Rohirrim: 

“Well, it’s not my middle-earth, but I respect the fact that “other hands” have taken my footnotes and appendices seriously enough to imagine them for themselves.”

Things that Tolkien probably wouldn't have cared about one way or the other.

Dark skinned Hobbits.

Yes, as a matter of fact, I can imagine a production of Romeo and Juliet in which the main characters are not played by Italians and a production of Hamlet in which the main character is not portrayed by a Dane. In fact the first time I ever saw Romeo and Juliet on the stage, at the Young Vic in the 80s, the Montagues were all played by black actors and Capulets were all played by white actors. Not what you would call subtle, but it made it terribly easy to keep track of who was on which side.

In the excellent National Theatre play about Nye Bevan, Winston Churchill was portrayed by a non-white member of the ensemble. They had the voice and the mannerisms and everyone understood what was going on. Most opera singers capable of singing the role of Cio-Cio-San don’t have the figure to pass for “fifteen exactly” but the audience uses their imaginations. 

There are, in fact, several famous non-white historical figures other than Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King. I agree that you probably wouldn’t use “colour blind casting” in a story which is about racial difference. Unless you did: I could imagine it being a really interesting avant garde experiment. On the stage, anything goes. But you certainly wouldn’t do it in something like The Crown where part of the fun is that the actors look enough like the historical characters that we can pretend we are watching candid historical footage. Beatles fans have already decided that the projected tetralogy is or ought to be a deep-fake reconstruction of real events and that since Barry Keoghan probably wouldn’t pass for Starkey in a looky-likey contest, the film will be a travesty. 

If you think that the whiteness of every white character in the Marvel texts and the Shakespeare extended universe is as important as the blackness of a black civil rights leader in a film about a black civil rights leader, then I think you need to take a long, hard look at yourself. Have I explained why the truly authentic way of adapting Spider-Man would be to make Peter Parker a Muslim)? [1]

There will always be someone who sees a person of colour playing Hamlet and says “I don’t understand — I just don’t see how a Danish prince could have African heritage.” That same same person will often see the same actor playing Othello and say  “I suppose nowadays only actual wizards can play Prospero and only actual sea-monsters can play Caliban.”

As a matter of fact, I think that it is quite clear that Tolkien intended the Shire to be a slightly idealised and slightly comedic version of a small English town. I think that he is well aware that if you think about it too much, that it stops making sense. Hobbits are a brilliant dramatic device: by accidentally placing them in his Silmarillion universe, he created a viewpoint position and a way of making the mythological epic accessible to people who find mythological epics a bit heavy going, but at the expense of sacrificing the strict “realism” of his work. 

There are hand waves about the freedom of the translator to use anachronisms. TH White talked about Arthurian knights sending their sons to Eton, and provided a footnote that Eton did not in fact exist at the time, but that if he had mentioned the actual school, no-one would have heard of it. So Hobbits get to have umbrellas, and post offices, and matches, and book-collections, and clocks, and pocket handkerchiefs, and generally act as if they are from the end of the eighteenth century even though the the Riders of Rohan are clearly living in the tenth. 

I have no particular problem with saying that these almost cartoonishly more-English-than-the-English stereotypes all have white skin. It’s not an issue. Forty-eight hours ago I would not have given the matter the slightest thought.

However, it turns out that there are significant numbers of American Tolkien fans who see The Lord of the Rings as an irreducibly ethno-nationalist text. Tolkien, it seems, was creating a mythology for England, and “England” is synonymous with white people. Any colour-blind casting, let alone any suggestion that there actually were dark-skinned Hobbits, goes against the Professor's intentions, and is therefore to be perceived as a personal insult, resulting in the posthumous necromantic gyrations that dead authors always seem to suffer from. 

Canonical questions about ethnicity in Middle-earth can be left for another day. Tolkien, we know, was engaged in re-writing his mythos from the ground up when he died, because he wanted to make it more consistent with plausible scientific reality. The Third Age ended about 4000 BC, so either he imagined that human ethnic and racial difference arose in the last six thousand years, or else he imagined that there were racial distinctions in the original creation. It is an open question as to whether he himself believed in Darwinism, and how he reconciled that with either his catholicism or his Middle-earth mythology.

If the toxic Tolkien fans are correct, and Tolkien’s mythos is irreducibly ethno-nationalist, can we continue to read it? I have argued, frequently, that it is possible to enjoy texts with toxic ideologies and certainly texts produced by toxic individuals. Economic considerations apart, the Harry Potter series itself is not primarily about the mystical essentialism of bathroom arrangements. Wagner’s proto-nazism is arguably more central to his operas, but seventy five years of productions makes it possible to hear Alberich the dwarf obsessing about his gold without automatically thinking “and that, of course, is what Wagner thought Jewish people were really like.” 

I fully accept that if I was Jewish myself, I might not find the process of de-Nazifying Wagner very edifying: but at a purely artistic level, it is the case that once you ignore the poison, there is some non-poisonous stuff left. 

I remain convinced that Cerebus the Aardvark is one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century: but I would never express that view without also saying in large block capitals double underlined in red that it is shockingly misogynistic. 

In the case of Rowling and Wagner, we are either separating the art from the artist; or else deprioritising secondary themes in the work. “The person who wrote the book is horrible, but that doesn’t mean the book is horrible, necessarily.” “This book contains some horrible things: but it contains not-horrible things as well."

In Sim’s case, more problematically, we are privileging form over content: saying, in effect “This text says a horrible thing superlatively well”. It is certainly not the case that you have to agree with a work of fiction before you can read or enjoy it: indeed, if you can only enjoy books you wholly agree with you could probably never read any book at all. The Right very frequently say that The Left disapprove of (or, in fact, Cancel) anything which doesn’t meet their exacting standards of orthodoxy; although other aspects of The Right actively campaign for certain kinds of literature to be removed from school libraries, and indeed libraries in general. 

I think that most of us in practice apply a sliding scale: the worse the ideology, the better the book needs to be to justify us reading it. We put up with Shylock in Shakespeare because Shakespeare is Shakespeare. We wouldn’t put up with him anywhere else. I tolerate the ideology of Cerebus because I rate the work so highly. 

Some people might say that if something contains Bad Ideas, it cannot, by definition, be Good Art. And other people might say that if a work of art is Good, the ideas can’t, by definition, be bad. That’s why you get Bishops saying that Life of Brian was unfunny, fifth rate, undergraduate humour and Imams saying that the Satanic Verses is an unreadable novel. And also why some people are prepared to say that since Life of Brian is incredibly funny, it can’t possibly be offensive; and that since Satanic Verses is a work of brilliance, it can’t possibly be blasphemous. Some people even go so far as to say that those who take offence do not by definition have a sense of humour, and that the opinion of people who do not have senses of humour should be ruled out of the discussion of comedy movies.

What hardly anyone ever says is “You are a very funny man and that was a very clever joke, but it was completely wrong for you to have made a joke on that particular subject”.  

I was distressed to learn that some Doctor Who fans are still arguing: 

1: That Talons of Weng Chiang can’t be racist because it is such a good story. 

2: That it doesn’t matter if Talons of Weng Chiang is racist because it is such a good story. 

3: That it doesn’t matter if Talons of Weng Chiang is racist because racism wasn’t considered so bad in the 1970s.

4: That Talons of Weng Chiang can’t possibly be racist because some Chinese people really do work in laundries and talk like that. 

5: That no-one really believes that Talons of Weng Chiang is racist, but some people pretend that they think it is for bad motives. 

Spoiler alert: Talons of Weng Chiang is, in fact, racist. 

My position has always been that two things can be true: “This is an excellent Doctor Who story” and “This Doctor Who story is incredibly racist”.  But the existence of toxic fans who cannot see or do not care about the racism increasingly makes me inclined to revise my position. 

If the Lord of the Rings is incidentally or secondarily or accidentally ethno-nationalist, then we don’t have a problem. It was written by a rich white guy in the 1930s and contains many of the attitudes of rich white guys from the 1930s: it may never have occurred to Tolkien to do it in any other way. And he provided us, very conveniently, with a Watsonian get-out clause. We are supposed to imagine that the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit are very free translations of ancient texts. If the 1930s translator can give Orcs cockney accents or make Hobbits talk like posh English dons and school boys [2] then we can assume that a 2025 translator would have seen things that Tolkien did not see and overlook things which Tolkien saw.

If you can accept Frodo pushing Gollum into Mount Doom, or that Pippin clumsily knocked an armoured skeleton into the well in Moria (rather than foolishly dropping a pebble into it), you ought to be able to accept that some Hobbits have darker coloured skins than other Hobbits do. If you cannot, I respectfully submit that your problem is not about textual fidelity.

If the Lord of the Rings is centrally and irreducibly an ethno-nationalist text — if by “a mythology for England” Tolkien meant “a white mythology” then we have a very big problem indeed. If an adaptation cannot introduce of colour without violating the very heart of the text then I don’t think any decent director would touch it with a bargepole. The underrated movie version of John Carter of Mars eliminated the references to slavery from the character’s background, which had no discernible effect on the story. Conversely, there have been no serious modern attempts to adapt or revive Tarzan of the Apes because the colonial and patrician ideology is too central to the story. 

The Lord of the Rings is not, in fact, an ethno-nationalist text. Tolkien didn’t strongly believe that all English people were white, though he may have tacitly assumed it.  There was, in 1999, no obligation on Peter Jackson to introduce black or asian Hobbits into the Shire, and we should not retrospectively blame him for having made the artistic decision not to do so. However, the existence of toxic fans trying to appropriate the Lord of the Rings into their vile ethno-nationalist ideology does create such an obligation. Like it or not, he will be signalling which side he is on. I can’t discern any neutral position. 

Plus: annoying these people is a good thing in itself. It is one of the few redeeming features of Rings of Power. 

[1] Although now we have had Ms Marvel  that would be redundant.

[2] There was a period of about forty years when the idea that the Hobbits who patrolled the boundaries of the Shire were called "bounders" would have been funny.  

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Canon Lore

The Mandalorian and Grogu is a joyless slog. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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