Doctor Who Season 16: The Stones of Blood (1)

 I: Introduction

"And so", concluded Andrew, "the Key to Time is a metafictional debate about what Doctor Who is going to be like going forward.  A search for balance between what the Troughton and Pertwee years were, and what the remaining Baker years are going to be."

"I have a question"  said someone in the back row. "Well, it's not really a question, so much as a comment. This is all jolly clever, but there is no way you can spin it out over another four essays. Sure, every Key To Time story is either a traditional Doctor Who story, or not a traditional Doctor Who story. But whichever side of the line a story falls out on, you can say that it proves your point. It's time to move on and talk about something else. Like, Stones of Blood as a metaphor for Marxist economic theory; or how Androids of Tara illuminates the UNIT dating problem."

"Well, I'm glad you asked me that question" said Andrew. "Made that comment, I mean. It's a valid point, and one with which I am not entirely unsympathetic. But let's use Stones of Blood to test the hypothesis one last time, shall we?"

He started to write on the blackboard.

Chalk board.

White board.

One of those projector thingies where you scribble on slides with transparent pens. 

"Consider the following. 

"1:  Stones of Blood is the weakest story in the sixteenth season; and, if you are asking for my opinion -- which, considering I am writing both sides of the argument, you presumably are -- the worst story in the entire Tom Baker era thus far. 

"2: Stones of Blood doesn't even pretend to fit into the Key to Time story arc. Yes, the villain does have a necklace, and yes, she did steal it from the Boney King of Nowhere. It may even give her shape shifting powers. The Doctor takes it off her in Episode Four, and it turns out to be Segment Three. But it makes no difference the to story. The Doctor would have got just as involved, and involved in just the same way, if it had just been a shape shifting emperor's magic pendant and not the Key to Time at all.

"3: There is a very odd prologue in which the Doctor restates the Quest for Romana's benefit, and in which the a magic voice warns them about the Black Guardian. Which would make complete sense if the Black Guardian were in the story: but he isn't. It's as if the scriptwriter puts in a prologue saying 'This is part of the Key to Time Saga' because otherwise it wouldn't be.

"4: The actual story is pretty much a collection of Doctor Who tropes and cliches and nothing else. There's a set of chanting robed mystics (we had one of those last week); there's a cargo cult (we had one of those last season); there's a gothic mansion (we have one of those every season); there's a feisty lady scientist; there's an unconvincing model spaceship and there is, you guessed it, an execution. There is an actual cliff which seems only to exist so people can hang off it. And some of the tropes are treated so ineptly that it is impossible not to think that they are being deliberately subverted -- or at any rate handled by someone who actively hates the show."

"And" concluded Andrew, with the air of someone pulling a rabbit out of hat, or possibly a wig out of a pocket "Members of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society votes Stones of Blood their favourite story of the entire Key to Time saga. They chose a David Fisher script above a Robert Holmes script and a Douglas Adams script. And, come to that, above a much better David Fisher script.

"And the reason is not hard to see. Stones of Blood is a terrible Doctor Who story. But it is, at least, clearly a Doctor Who story.  The DWAS members could see that Pirate Planet and Ribos Operation were taking the programme off into new territory; and they cast their vote clearly in favour of old territory.

"Which is ironic. Because either Stones of Blood is a genuinely terrible Doctor Who story by someone who doesn't much like Doctor Who. Or else it is a deliberate parody of Doctor Who. And that's what Doctor Who is, in fact, going to become: a self-parody. Stones of Blood is the story where the metatextual weirdness fully takes hold.

"I'm not going to attempt to summarise the plot, because basically there isn't one. But I am going to have a look at half a dozen defining moments in the serial."

"I have another questions. And it really is a question, as opposed to a comment. Are you going to keep this device going for the whole essay?"

"Probably not. Could I have the first slide please?"

II: Cake

In the opening scene of Stones of Blood, Romana throws a surprise party for the Doctor. 

It is his 759th birthday. She provides the cake. It isn't clear if she baked it herself; or if the TARDIS food machine can produce candles and sponge and pink sugar icing to order. She also gives him a present. And only then do they resume their mission -- which happens to be on the Doctor's favourite planet. And to revisit many of his favourite cliches. So the Stones of Blood is a kind of birthday treat. 

Looked at diegetically (from a Watsonian perspective) the scene is a bit of a problem. For one thing, it ties the Doctor's age down a bit too specifically. For another, it asks us to swallow the idea that Time Lords have the same traditions as humans -- they give presents and blow out candles on the anniversary of their birth. We could, of course, execute the Moffat Manoeuvre, and say that birthday cakes and candles are a Time Lord tradition that English humans copied. But there's a simpler explanation. Romana knows that the Earth is the Doctor's favourite planet. She must also know that he has adopted some of its customs -- tea, jelly babies, ginger beer, cricket. So she has very thoughtfully given him a traditional human birthday party: in the way you or I might throw a Japanese style party for someone who we know loves manga. It's a kind thought and the Doctor accepts it as a kind thought.

In Ribos Operation, the Doctor and Romana were markedly hostile to each other. In Pirate Planet they achieved a kind of balance or equilibrium. And now here is Romana giving the Doctor thoughtful gifts. Before too long, it will be impossible not to think of them as a married couple. 

All the Doctors have had their own preferred wardrobe style; but the scarf, the Burgundy coat and the floppy hat have become the fourth Doctor's uniform -- defining him in the way that the bowler hats defined Laurel and Hardy and the deerstalker defined Sherlock Holmes. At this point in the cycle, Tom Baker is no longer The Serious One. He is no longer The Alien One. By the end of this story, he will certainly have become The Silly One. But more than anything, he is and will always be The One With The Scarf. And the series itself recognises this. 

What do you give a Time Lord for his birthday if he already owns a scarf? 

Romana gives him a new scarf. Exactly the same as the old scarf.

The Stones of Blood is the one hundredth Doctor Who story. Not the one hundredth episode (that was Dalek Master Plan Episode Ten): the one hundredth story. And by coincidence, the final part of the story was scheduled to go out five days shy of November 23, 1978: the show's Fifteenth Anniversary. Some sort of celebration was clearly in order. The cake scene stops short of saying directly that the Doctor and Romana are celebrating the longevity of their TV show, but the audience knows perfectly well that that is what is happening. 

And why not? The Doctor is clearly aware that he is a character in TV show -- it's only a dozen years since he looked out of the screen and wished the viewers at home a merry Christmas. He opens school fetes, sends fans birthday cards and introduces the first issue of Doctor Who Weekly (as it was then). He has more in common with John Noaks or Johnny Morris than he does with Captain Kirk or Robin Hood. The best analogy is still Father Christmas. A birthday party for a TV character on the birthday of their show makes perfect sense. The Doctor and Doctor Who are basically metaphors for each other. Post-reboot, Moffat and Davies would expand this idea at wearisome length.

Does the Doctor even know his own date of birth? He certainly recalls a childhood -- we have heard him talking about the daisyness of daisies with Time Lord gurus; looking into the Untempered Void with his friend the Master; and experiencing night terrors and being comforted by a future companion. We now know that the Doctor was adopted and doesn't remember his birth-family. But there's no reason why an orphan would not celebrate their birthday, even if they didn't know the exact date. The Division would presumably have dated the Doctor's birth from the day when Tecteun found him: but that was certainly a lot more than seven hundred and fifty nine years ago. The child-Doctors we have heard about must be younger versions of the person we have always thought of as the First Doctor. Indeed, the appearance of the child in Listen was based on childhood photographs of William Hartnell. It must be the seven hundred and fifty ninth anniversary of the current cycle of regenerations that Romana is celebrating.  

But even this would have sat poorly alongside the Cartmell Masterplan -- which, you will recall, states that Time Lords are not born, but knitted. I suppose a race of clones might celebrate the day they came out of the cloning machines. Then again, the Doctor believes himself to have had a human mother; details of whom have never been made public; so his birthday might be a poignant occasion for him. 

So, all told, it is probably just as well that there is no such scene in Stones of Blood. The birthday cake scene was, indeed, written -- by script editor Anthony Read. Tom and Mary reportedly really liked it. But Graham Williams thought it was too silly. That's the Doylist reason for the pointless Black Guardian warning in the prologue: it was a late replacement for the vetoed sequence.

The Key to Time saga is about law versus chaos; and also about nostalgia vs progress and plot vs anti-plot. But it is also, surely, about science fiction versus comedy; earnestness versus foolishness. One can almost imagine Graham Williams walking into the middle of the Doctor's birthday party like Graham Chapman's Colonel at the end of the Parrot Sketch and announcing "I am sorry: this is all getting far too silly." If Douglas Adams had been in charge, that might even have happened. He's the one who pitched an idea about the TARDIS slipping Time Lines and materialising in TV Centre during the filming of an episode of Doctor Who. Douglas won't assume his role as script editor until the beginning of next season, but Anthony Read is doing his very best to channel some post-Hitch-Hiker silliness.

"I knew a Galactic Federation once" says the Doctor in Episode Four "Lots of different lifeforms so they appointed a justice machine to administer the law." 

"What happened?" asks Romana. 

"They found the Federation in contempt of court and blew up the entire galaxy." 

That's a Douglas Adams joke if ever I heard one. 

But for now, the forces of sensibleness remain in control. 

Graham Williams vetoed the birthday party. 

The crew ate the cake.

This is the second part of a series of articles on the Doctor Who story Stones of Blood. 

All ten part have already appeared on my Patreon. 

Patreon followers have also read my definitive guide to the UK election, and are about to read my essay on the Doctor Who story Androids of Tara.

It would be great if the majority of people reading this could join them. 

Rilstone on Stones of Blood

Rilstone on Androids of Tara

Rilstone On the Election

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Walk The Line (1)

We have been asked to wear covid masks.

Automated pedestrian crossings are largely replacing zebras.

A black actor has appeared on a television programme.

The Democratic Party is harvesting the blood of infants in order to secure eternal youth.

Join the dots.

It is possible to draw a straight line between any two points; and a triangle or a circle between any three. But add a fourth point and there is only a small chance that they will form a straight line, or a pair of concentric circles. It follows that any four points which make a straight line (or any three which make an equilateral triangle) must have been placed there deliberately.

But if you generate a hundred random points, the chances of any four of them forming a line are quite high. And if you continue adding points until a line appears, then the chances increase. And if you are are allowed to draw a line between two or three points and then add points along it, because the line is telling you that is where the points are supposed to be, then you can draw all the lines you like.

It's a version of the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy. Fire off a lot of shots at a barn door. Find a place where there are several bullet holes close together. Draw a target around them; and claim that you a marksman.

In popular media, conspiracy theorists often cover their walls with photographs and press cuttings and physically map imaginary connections using push-pins and coloured thread.

Alan Moore is writer and a magician. Alan Moore says that writing and magic are both about drawing connections between things. Once you've made the connection, it is real, even if it wasn't before.

All stories are true.

Ley lines -- adherents prefer to call them simply "leys" -- are a theory without a conspiracy. It is empirically true that lines can sometimes be drawn between significant points on a map. It is an object of faith that these lines are deeply significant. But what that significance is, adherents can't quite decide.

I am looking at a paperback book. The cover shows a standing stone (in the foreground) and a stone circle (in the distance). It's either been shot at sunrise, or else the stone itself is glowing with an eerie golden light. You can almost hear the theme music from Children of the Stones playing in the background.

The title of the book is Quicksilver Heritage, written by Paul Screeton ("former editor of The Ley-Hunter".)

The titles of these old hippy paperbacks have a poetry all of their own. The View Over Atlantis. The Jesus Scroll. The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Chariots of the Gods? (Oh, the poetic placement of a single question mark!) "Quicksilver" is an alchemical term, magical, obsolete. But "quicksilver" is mercury, the stuff you chemistry teacher has locked away in a jar in the prep-room. And "mercurial" means shapeshifting, slippery, impossible to catch. So "quicksilver heritage" is the whole New Age keygma in a two word haiku. England's past contains something secret and mystical, which will change you if you know about it, but which is entirely impossible to express or pin down.

I believe the book was a gift from my Uncle Ted. He was a level-headed gardener, and come to think of it, a geography teacher. And he was a Cornishman. I recall him saying that Glastonbury was a powerful place because several ley lines crossed there. Ley lines were like the Bermuda Triangle and the Turin Shroud. Not everyone exactly believed in them, but everyone knew that they were mysterious.

I very nearly persuaded my equally level headed physics teacher to arrange a field trip, walking ley lines by day and star gazing by night. I remember him showing us a diagram of the Glastonbury Terrestrial Zodiac and remarking that "things like that don't happen by coincidence". (SPOILER WARNING: They do.)

For a couple of summers I lapped it up. There were pencil lines all over my parents OS maps.

I have in front of me a 1979 book called The Ley Hunters Guide, still bearing a sticker from Helios Books, High Street, Glastonbury. The cover is a birds-eye view of the English countryside, drawn in green: it could almost be a map of the Shire from the frontispiece of a three volume fantasy story. White circles have been drawn around a war memorial, a church, a stone circle and two barrows.

Opening it at random, I learn that there is a "Stratford on Avon Ley"; a line drawn between Warwick castle (built by William the Conquerer) and Childswickam Parish Church, also Norman, some twenty miles away. There are some moats adjacent to the church, which date from the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries. The line passes through two other churches, one of which is Holy Trinity Stratford. Shakespeare (d. 1717) was buried there: the writers regard this as a significant data point. They also tell us, as corroborative detail, that someone saw a UFO in Stratford in 1959. The ley line passes "close to" the theatre (est. 1879) "near" where another UFO was spotted in 1963. Warwick castle itself is home to a ghost, a fairy dun cow, and a black dog "a curious form of supernatural manifestation well attested in other parts of the country."

"There is no shortage of map-points -- churches and the like" on the Stratford OS map, the authors assure us "But somehow most of them do not seem, intuitively, to hang together."

If you follow your intuition, its surprising what does hang together.

The leys certainly transmit some kind of energy; and that energy is certainly of some spiritual significance. Perhaps they were laid down by survivors from Atlantis. Perhaps they were placed by extraterrestrials. Perhaps they are a natural phenomenon. Perhaps they are used by UFOs for power or navigation. Or perhaps the Space People (so called) came to earth specifically in order to draw our attention to the lines. Perhaps the stones channel the energy; perhaps they merely mark where it is. Dragons and giants and quantum physics and dowsing and gnosticism and fairy lore and the Holy Grail and ghost stories all come into the mix. Paul Screeton takes a huge mass of unrelated and reassuringly vague areas of knowledge and draws arbitrary connections between them.

If he sees the irony, he doesn't say so.

A long time ago, an idealised figure called Neolithic Man was deeply attuned to his environment. By walking the ley lines -- or by knowing of their existence, or by pooling their power in churches and barrows and forests -- he was able to expand his consciousness. Probably he travelled to other planets. Astrally or in the Space People's own saucers? Who can say?

We aren't talking about Druids. Druids are too recent, too historical, too probably real. If they were associated with Stonehenge, that was only because they inherited the ley network without knowing what it was. Christians built churches on ley points because they thought that was a way of exorcising pagan powers. Or because they recognised the spiritual potency of the places. The presence of a church is prima facie evidence of an ancient site.

But there was a fall. Maybe when Neolithic Man started to use metal. Or when Christianity came to Albion. Or during the industrial revolution. Or the enclosure movement. Or at some other time. But there is a way back to the pre-lapsarian state. We too can explore Inner and Outer Space. We can travel with the Space People -- some people have. We can attempt the great work of the alchemist, which is about inner transformation, not turning lead into gold.

It's easy. All you have to do is go for a walk in the country.

The old track may be straight, but thinking is circular. The leys are a path to enlightenment: but enlightenment consists of intuiting the existence of the leys. Ley lines aren't a theory so much as a vibe.

You could say the same thing about many religious movements.

There is a kind of a political message as well. Not a particularly nasty one, unless you think that chatter about Albion and druids and Old England necessarily has a white supremacist tinge. Its a more or less benign insurgency against structures and authority and book-learning. Against modernity. A kind of pastoral anarchism. Tolkien, when pressed, said he was, politically speaking, an anarchist. You don't need to believe in ley lines and flying saucers and Atlantis to see the line from pastoralism and anti-structuralism and mysticism. Just go for a walk on Grasmere and look at the daffodils.

The villains of the story are the Archaeologists. There is an obvious truth: that Neolithic Man communed with aliens and astrally projected himself to Venus. Everyone who has bothered to look knows this to be true. There is an obvious falsehood: that Neolithic man was a primitive, naked, superstitious savage. We're setting the popular image of the Cave Man against the romantic figure of the Red Indian. Orcs versus Elves. There is a racist tinge to both conceptions. The false idea, the idea of Naked Savages comes from a pedantic obsession with digging things up and measuring them and putting them into neat little catalogues. The true idea is there to be discovered by anyone prepared to look for it.

Archaeologists are either too dumb to see the truth; too conservative to accept it; or actively engaged in suppressing the truth in order to maintain their own hegemonic power. The remark that you have to be an archeologist before you can put forward ideas about archeology is held up for derision in the first chapter. The last chapter warns us that "archaeologists are fierce".

Knowing about your field makes you suspect. Hidden knowledge is probably true precisely because someone took the trouble to hide it. I think we've heard quite enough from experts.

Ley lines were discovered, or invented, or imagined, by a man named Alfred Watkins in the 1920s. He certainly wasn't an archaeologist. But he was, in a way, an expert. One of those late Victorian amateurs: he travelled round Herefordshire on business and amassed a lot of knowledge of the place names, folk lore, landscape and geography of the area. His initial observation seems to have been perfectly sincere. If you stand on such and such a hill and look in one direction, you can see an old church and an old standing stone appearing to line up. If you look the other way you can see an ancient tree and a mill-pool doing the same thing. He went home and "proved" his observation on an ordinance survey map and found that wherever he looked, there were similar alignments. Since he believed that no alignment of four points could possibly be random, he understood himself to have discovered an undocumented system of pathways or roads.

His first book on the subject was called Ancient British Pathways; but his second one was called The Old Straight Track. Another one of those poetic titles. The book itself is rather dull.

He created a bit of a stir, and for a while, groups of Edwardian gentlemen started to go for rambles and picnics, walking along imaginary lines and making notes of undocumented markers they found along the way. And then Watkins died and there was a big war and everyone forgot all about it. Some 30 years later, an amateur UFO spotter (Tony Wedd) read an account of an alien abduction; the abductee mentioned that the alien spacecraft always travelled in straight lines. He made the obvious connection: the UFOs are following the leys. In 1969, John Michell took up the idea in a big way. He conflated Watkins' tracks with Frederick Blye Blond's theories of sacred geometry, the Nasca lines, something he terms fung shui and much else besides. The result was The View Over Atlantis: a kind of hippy Bible.

This is crucial. The Ley Hunters Guide wasn't veering off course when it put UFO sitings alongside Shakespeare's grave and a Norman castle. UFOs and ley lines are part of a single idea. The combination of the two thoughts gave birth to the New Age movement. It was John Michell who gave Glastonbury its status as a mystical -- as opposed to merely Christian -- mecca. When I went to the Glastonbury Festival in 2015, Donovan made the audience in the Acoustic Tent chant "hail Atlantis!" before his set, and told us we were continuing a tradition that went back to Arthur and Guinevere. The 2015 festival was officially opened by the Druid Mayor of Glastonbury, who explained that decimal currency and metric measurement, had caused modern people to lose touch with sacred geometry and sacred numerology. I believe that this was John Michell's widow Denise. In 1970, Michell himself had used the principles of sacred geometry to calculate the dimensions of the Pyramid stage, and to position it where two of the ley lines cross.

And here is a funny thing. Some people (at least one person) thinks that Michell was the original inspiration for the character of Doctor Who. Doctor Who started in '63 and Michell came to prominence in '69, and it's hard to see where Verity Lambert of Sydney Newman would have come across him. It might be that a dowsing rod is a bit like a sonic screwdriver, but the sonic screwdriver didn't become an important accoutrement of the Doctor until the 1970s. (Arguably not really until the reboot.) But Michell is certainly an English eccentric, with a store of obscure knowledge, and is certainly regarded by some people as a kind of Merlin figure. And in photographs he often wears a scarf.

Now I have told you about the connection, it exists.

Flying saucers, stone circles, Atlantis. John Michell, Doctor Who.

Wolvesacre moat, Chester cathedral.

Join the dots. All stories are true.

This is the first part of a series of articles on the Doctor Who story Stones of Blood. 

All ten part have already appeared on my Patreon. 

Patreon followers have also read my definitive guide to the UK election, and are about to read my essay on the Doctor Who story Androids of Tara.

It would be great if the majority of people reading this could join them. 

Rilstone on Stones of Blood

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 Walk The Line (1)

Stones of Blood (1)

Stones of Blood (2)

Stones of Blood (3)

Stones of Blood (4)

Walk the Line (2)

Conscious Uncoupling

I like to spend some time every day reading. I am currently working my way through the complete poems of Alan Ginsburg, reading The First Kingdom for the fifth time and reading a book about television by that guy who wrote the good book about folk music. 

I like to spend some time every day writing: that's the only way I can justify not working full time, and indeed, continuing to exist at all. I am not a very quick writer: I generally have to free-write at random; select the sensible bits; edit them into a pattern, and then revise three or four times. 

I have a couple of schemes to promote books about my better chunks of writing (Jesus and Spider-Man) in various ways. Editing a podcast takes much longer than you would think, even when you take into a count that editing a podcast takes much longer than you would think.

I hold a season ticket for the Everyman cinema and like to see as many movies as possible: big geeky ones and proper serious grown up ones. Last week we saw Ralph Fiennes pretending to be Macbeth; next week we will finally get around to seeing Jim Moriarty pretending to be all the parts in Uncle Vanya. For a long time I thought that Waiting For Godot and Hamlet between them said everything that there was to say about anything, but I have more and more added Uncle Vanya to the list. I want to see Civil War at some point.

Bristol and Bath are very well supplied with live theatre: in the next ten days I am hoping to see a rap musical about the American constitution and a play about everyone being very repressed and hot in the Deep South. I forget if it's the one about the cat or the one about the tram. There is also a one man show re-imagining Lear's fool as a VR influencer, or something. 

I like to go t o live folk music  -- there was a Bristol Folk Festival last weekend and a Bristol Sea Shanty festival next weekend  and a gig I really ought to go to on Thursday. (The Buffalo Skinners, since you ask, with a local trad fiddle outfit called Freedom For Travelling People and another local punky folk outfit called Poor Old Dogs.) And to my utter and complete astonishment, I have actually started to sing myself, for certain values of singing, at pub sing-arounds and shanty sessions, and the applause seems in some cases to have gone from "polite" to "enthusiastic" although there may also be some element of "ironic". But that involves spending evenings in pubs drinking beer. One suffers for one's art. 

I also like to watch television programmes. I finally got to the end of The Bad Batch this week. I was kind of hoping there would be a Big Reveal and that everyone would die. Neither of those things happened, but it was very exciting: the action scenes are as good as anything in the movies. The is now a new thing called Tales of the Empire. Tales of the Jedi was very good indeed, although probably aimed a little too firmly at people who care about the lore, such as myself. I can't see that I will have a slot to sit down and watch any of that until this time next week. I am very keen to find out if The Three Body Problem is any good; and would ideally like to catch up with the last two iterations of Star Trek (Discovery and Strange New Worlds). The cartoon I watched a couple of episodes of and didn't find that funny. 

I occasionally like to drink coffee and even beer with human beings as well. 

I think I have currently got about as close to a lifestyle that works for me as I ever have. But like Christopher Robin, I don't do as much Nothing as I used to. Unless sitting in my chair reading 1960s beat poets and obscure graphic novels counts as Nothing, which I think it does. 

I have said several times that it is a Bad Idea to read a book or watch a movie simply in order to make snarky remarks about it on a blog; although in fairness I have a morbid fascination with Rings of Power and will probably not be able to look away from the next series. (It's so bad it's bad, as they say.) But I never went to see the second and third editions of the Abomination (i.e Abrams' Trek parody) and have avoided various evangelical Jesus TV shows that "everyone" is talking about. 

To come to the point: I am not saying that I will never watch the new Disney time travel show. Almost certainly, sometime in the next three to four years, I will. 

But it is very unlikely to be the next thing I watch.

And the fact that I feel the need to tell everyone this rather proves that the whole thing as got a bit out of hand. 

Doctor Who Season 16: The Pirate Planet -- Afterthought

I've never seen Aida, but I've known the music since I was a small boy: and how good it is. It's rather the fashion over here now amongst the musical snobs to look down their noses when Verdi is mentioned and talk about the "cheapness of his thematic material."  What they really mean is that Verdi could write tunes and they can't!

C.S Lewis

I watched the Pirate Planet, from beginning to end, twice, with a great big grin on my face. I watched the Church on Ruby Lane with a sinking feeling; it did what (I assume) it set out to do: but what it set out to do is of no interest to me.

And as surely as Basil Brush follows Grandstand, someone is already typing that this is the voice of Nostalgia talking; that fans have always said that Doctor Who isn't as good as it used to be; and that what I mistake for "good writing" is simply the air that kills blowing at me from some blue remembered madeleines.

It would even be possible to blame it on political reaction. I say that things from the 1970s are better than things from the 2020s because I secretly yearn for Mrs Thatcher, Clause 29, and the National Front. Or, more plausibly, if you know me, for the Winter of Discontent, Tony Benn, and British Leyland.

When a Western opera aficionado hears Chinese classical music for the first time, she may not understand what is going on. And if she's a certain kind of person, she may say that it's a cacophonous racket because Asia hasn't worked out how to write proper tunes yet. Nothing against Johnny Chinaman of course. He thought up fireworks and printing. But we thought up melody and cutlery.

A very stupid man once said that Roman letters were proper writing and Arabic letters were merely scribble (and therefore government bodies ought not to provide translations).  A very clever one once said that English church bells were intrinsically more beautiful than the Muslim call to prayer and this proved that white people's non-existent imaginary friend was better than brown people's non-existent imaginary friend. I assume that everyone reading this would agree that these were examples of what a very wise man once described as "a simple case of dislike for the unlike".

But styles and fashions do change. In his lifetime, William Ainsworth was more popular than Dickens. Young people nowadays find even Dickens a little hard to take.

I recently decided I ought to have a glance at Isaac Asimov, having muchly enjoyed Apple TV's 22 part dramatisation of the first three pages of the Foundation Trilogy. I had it my head that I was letting myself in for a kind of nerdy pulp; Robert E Howard but with equations rather than boobies. I was pleasantly surprised to find myself thinking "Gosh: this is actually rather decently done." Asimov is no prose-stylist, and there are no characters to speak of, but the long short stories ask questions and provide answers, offer setups and present pay-offs, and cleverly imply an interesting future-history with a minimum of exposition.

So. Should we say "nowadays writers don't know how to tell stories"?

Or indeed "these darn millennials don't know how to listen to stories"?

Or, even "the Deep State has BANNED proper stories"? 

Or would it be better to say: "Ho, and indeed, hum. The style of storytelling which was in vogue forty five years ago is out of vogue now. By 2069 the fashion will probably have shifted the other way"?

"But Andrew -- set up and pay off, foreshadowing and consistency, tension and jeopardy -- this isn't some fashionable narrative vogue, limited to a particular time and place like inter-titles, grease paint and masks. That is in fact what 'story' means: if you are correct that Douglas Adams can do it [or chooses to] and Russell T Davies can't [or chooses not to] then Douglas Adams is, in fact, the better storyteller."

No: I'm sorry; I can't be having that.

It would be on the exact level of the people in 1964 (and there were many) who said that since She Loves You (Yeah Yeah Yeah) didn't follow the expected canons of song-writing at the time, what the Beatles were writing was not music. And that it followed that they were a threat to civilisation, corrupting the youth of Athens. And, presumably, woke. 

And She Loves You (Yeah Yeah Yeah) was, as a matter of fact, radically different to everything which had come before it. And if you define "what came before" as "music" then She Loves You is, indeed "not music". And the fact that the song doesn't sound particularly strange to contemporary ears proves just how talented and influential the Beatles were. Not that that particularly needs to be proved.

"But Andrew: what you mean by 'story' is roughly what Aristotle meant by 'story'. If some people really prefer The Church on Ruby Lane to The Pirate Planet then that's a very temporary and silly blip in the grand scheme of history. "

I am reluctant to go very far down that path. Yes, some very great people with very strange middle names [Note 1] have talked about The Great Tradition and Great Western Man. But statements like "Aristotle had it right and any deviation from the Poetics is a temporary western decadence" are now the province of far-right thinkers with Greek statues in their avatars. Go very far down that path and you'll find yourself wearing a "Make English Literature Great Again"  cricket cap. 

It isn't true that How Much Is That Doggie In The Window is proper music and Hound Dog is just noise. But it is true that performers have occasionally created shows in which they hit instruments, scream, and generate feedback. Perhaps those performances could be described as "just noise".  In which case we would have to say "Ho, and indeed, hum: some people apparently find people standing on a stage making noise sufficiently interesting that they will pay money to listen to it." Artists have occasionally thrown paint randomly at canvasses and displayed the resultant mess in an art gallery. You can define art in such a way that random craft-less work is Not Art. But it can clearly be interesting, or interesting to some people. It can be quite bracing to go a gallery in the expectation of seeing a room full of pretty water-colours of flowers, and find that what you are actually looking at is a man with a blue face screaming at you. I believe that there is an exhibition in London right now where you have to squeeze between two naked people to get into the gallery. 

The Avant Garde is a thing. But if generating feedback and taking your clothes off completely replaced learning the chord shapes and mastering perspective, I might say that the world had gone a bit peculiar.

Should a person of my age be trying to understand this newfangled modern story-thing? 

And equally should a younger person be trying to get their head round older television? 

Should we cling to the idea that Jack Kirby was quite good at drawing comics and wave him under the noses on the faces of the young people; or should we just accept that our taste for the Galactus Trilogy and the New Gods saga is a preference for the disposable populist entertainment of one era over the disposable populist entertainment of another era? 

And if we can say that about Kirby (or Douglas Adams, or the Beatles) why can we not say it about Shakespeare or Milton or Jane Austen or any other sacred literary cow? 

A few weeks ago I sang (to use the term very loosely indeed) "Bold Sir John..." [Note 2] at a Bristol folk sing-a-round I attend,  and was surprised that most of the younger contingent had never heard of the Two Ronnies. But honestly, why should they have done?

Virtually the whole of Old Who recently became available on I-Player, meaning a lot of Very Young People are seeing it for the first time. I have been uncomfortable with the way in which even some Old Fans have taken for granted that the pacing of the older stories is an objective flaw: that the first black and white Dalek story would be materially improved if the chasm-jumping sequence were removed.

I entirely agree that the sequence takes a long time to get where it is going. I also agree that the dialogue in Intolerance is inaudible and that Twelve Angry Men does not contain any memorable show-tunes. But you can't cut the scene without cutting the characters of Antadus and Ganatus (and therefore Barbara's relationship with Ganatus). The fact that the Thals have names and up to a point personalities is a big part of the ambience of the story. It's what makes them different from the Daleks.

There is now a colorized, shortened version of the story. Some people think it is an improvement. To me, it feels like a montage;  a series of fragments of a longer whole strung together without transitions. The silly incidental music adds to the sense that we are watching a trailer or a highlights reel. The actual colorization is by no means unconvincing.

Messing with the past? Rewriting history? Cancel culture and Nineteen Eighty-Four? I could see the point of remounting Terry Nation's original script, with modern special effects and a contemporary cast. I could see the point of a modern writer creating a completely new script based on Nation's story line. But the 1963 Dead Planet is the 1963 Dead Planet and it should be allowed to stand, or fall, as such. 

And no: this is not all the same argument as the one about bleeping the N-word from Celestial Toyroom.

"But Andrew: aren't you in effect immunising all old television from criticism? 'This is old' is not a response to 'this is boring' any more than it is a response to 'this is racist'. Isn't it entirely possible that some Olden Days television was slow and brilliant; and some Olden Days television was slow and terrible? And can't we have a critical discussion about which sides of the line cherished chunks of Who-lore fall on?"

Yes: yes we can. There are classic silent movies and dreadful silent movies and an awful lot of mediocre silent movies. But I suspect that the only way of telling one from the other is learning the language, figuring out how they work -- which is to say: by watching a lot of silent movies. And of course, the passage of time and the volatility of celluloid has destroyed many of the sibylline books, meaning that even the worst of the silent era is of some interest and value. But "This is silent" is not a critical judgement. 

We don't object to English versions of the Aeneid or the Divine Comedy. It is possible to imagine a prose retelling of Paradise Lost. Shakespeare-in-modern-English is of use to some students, however silly it sounds to those of us who know the plays well. "Is it more noble to suffer through all the terrible things fate throws at you, or to fight off your troubles, and in doing so, end them completely?" It is an old joke that the definition of poetry is "that which is lost in translation".

The person who can read poetry in three languages is better off than the person who can only read it in one. I don't know if the English person with a superficial knowledge of German, Latin and Norwegian is better off than the native English speaker who has lived in China for a decade and knows all the nuances and colloquialisms. Differently off, I suppose. If you just don't grok silent cinema and can't be bothered to get the hang of it, there are quite a number of excellent talkies for you to enjoy.

My quarrel is with the person who doubts that silent movies can contain any artistry at all: who thinks that colourising the Marx Brothers and dubbing Metropolis necessarily makes them "better". 

And that person may not even exist. 

Lewis said that no-one should attempt to write English criticism until they have a fluency in Anglo-Saxon. Probably someone who refused to watch anything in black and white or with subtitles wouldn't be a great guide to the history of cinema. You may recall me sneering audibly at people who thought that prior to Frank Miller all American superhero comics were precisely like the Adam West TV Batman. 

Some of us do conceptualise Doctor Who as a Great Tradition. We came into fandom at the time when documenting and summarising the great old stories was the main activity, and it is hard for us to believe that anyone could call themselves a Doctor Who fan and not treat The Tomb of the Cybermen with deep respect and even reverence. 

But that's just another form of gatekeeping. If you haven't sat through Rosenkavalier at Le Scala, you simply have no right to enjoy a CD of arias and waltz music. 

Say you like football? Then name them all.

The Pirate Planet is joyous; funny and clever and well crafted. Perhaps the stories from 2018 onwards had a different kind of joy and a different kind of craft, a craft that I can't perceive, in the same way that (I fully believe) jazz obeys musical principles that I don't understand. Or perhaps my liking for craftspersonship is itself old fashioned. Perhaps, as Prof Richard Dawkins says about absolutely everything, it's exactly like the Emperor's New Clothes.

"This young's folks music has no tune". 

"Oh, get with the hip random vibe grandad. It's not meant to."

Or, if you like, deploy the nuclear option.

"It's all just a matter of taste. When you say that Douglas Adams is a good writer, you are just making meaningless noises. The only definitely true thing is that you happen to like him." 

What was it Hamlet said? "Nothing is inherently good or bad: it's what you think about it that makes it so."

NOTE 1: Staples, Stearns

NOTE 2: The twit, the twit, the twit, the twit/the twittering of the birds all day/ The bum, the bum, the bum, the bum/ The bumblebees at play. 

Serious face.

I currently have 62 Patreon followers, paying me very roughly £80 dollars per article.

Every single follow is a huge vote of confidence and massively appreciated; as, indeed, is every comment and every reader. (I am reminded of aline by favourite singer/songwriter: “It still blows my mind each time they let me play to anyone.”)

However, it remains true that I lost about five followers during March, on top of the ones I have lost since the beginning of the year, and any further drop in followers would be A Little Alarming.

I reduced the amount of hours I work on my day-job in 2022 specifically to spend more time writing; and Patreon remains my primary income stream.

I am only semi-serious when I say that I think my political writing drives people away. Certainly people have walked away (and in some cases stopped talking to me altogether) because of my shockingly right wing / shockingly left wing views. But I am sure it’s mostly because Times Are Hard and setting up monthly payments is a certain amount of hassle.

I also have to consider that I have over the last twenty years said absolutely everything I have to say on absolutely every subject, and that it is time to start looking for another hobby. I turn out to be quite good at singing sea shanties, for certain values of "singing". And obviously the Trolls said a long time ago that I had simply lost my marbles.

It’s definitely the case that if I find my Patreon followers go UP this month when I start writing about Doctor Who again, I am more likely to write about Doctor Who (or start some other Great Big Geek project). I set up a little Readers Poll for Patreon Supporters, which seems to show that the engaged followers are basically fine with me going off on one about Woke from time to time.

Coming this month:

I am writing my way around the 1978 Doctor Who story Stones of Blood, including a wild digression about Ley-lines, stone-circles and evangelicalism. I am hoping to do another Video Diary before too long. 

If this is even slightly interesting, do please consider clicking on the little button and pushing my follower back up to a healthy 70 or so. 

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