Hide [7.10]

"This house is exactly what you would expect in a nightmare. Yes, we're in a world of dreams. Creaking doors, thunder and lightning, monsters and all the things that go bumpety bumpety in the night. "
             The First Doctor -- The Chase

How to write your own Doctor Who story.

1: Introduce monster.

2: Introduce supporting cast.

3: Demonstrate that situation of supporting cast ironically mirrors the situation of the Doctor and Rose.

4: Demonstrate that situation of monster ironically mirrors that of supporting cast.

5: Pull solution to monster out of thin air.

6: Show that solution to monster pulled out of thing air is also solution to supporting cast.

7: Hint that solution to supporting cast would also be solution to Doctor and Rose, but can't be applied, because if it did they would live happily ever after and the series would end.

8: Rinse and repeat. 

For example:

a: Monster is time traveller, lost lonely and alone, needing contact with other humans to help it. 

b: Other monster is apparently scary alien, but actually lonely and needing lurve and a place to be happy in. 

c: Supporting cast are Repressed Scientist and Empathic Assistant 

d: Repressed Scientist is lying about his past, origins, name etc because of terrible unspecified things he did during a war; Repressed Scientist's Empathic Assistant is attracted to Repressed Scientist but can't say so.

e: Solution to monster is to take a risk, reach out to it with your feelings, bring her home, etc.

f: This is also the solution to the other monster.

g: Solution to scientists is to take a risk, reach out with their feelings, etc etc etc. 

h: Solution to the Doctor and Clara would be....

This formula was established in Season 1, and yes, I suppose I am about to say that New Who isn't as good as it used to be. The formula worked at the beginning of the Doctor Who revival because the backstory was only gradually unwinding: we didn't know which bits of the Doctor Who "universe" had been carried over into New Who, and we didn't know what this new Doctor was going to be like. So, in Episode 2, "The End of the World", Rose see the earth destroyed, which turns out to reflect the Doctor's own situation  — which we didn't know about  — of having witnessed the destruction of his own planet. Similarly, the threat in "Dalek" — one Dalek, last of its kind, not even a proper Dalek, alone in the universe — reflected the Doctor's situation, which we were only just getting the hang of, being the Last of the Time Lords. It also introduced us to the idea that this Doctor has a bad side and revealed that the Time Lord's adversaries in the Time War were the Daleks.

But seven, or really eight, or actually arguably nine, seasons on, there is nothing about the Doctor left to reveal. There is a big tease going on about his True Name, but you can bet that this is going to be more or less a clever trick. So each week, we have a monster that ironically reflects the fact that the Doctor is, like, cosmically lonely, looking for love, the last of his kind, has a potential dark side, carries the weight of the universe on his shoulders, I've seen so much, I'm sorry, jammy dodgers, I'm so very sorry... Things which it is really not worth symbolizing because they are now just taken for granted facts. Huge fantasy artifices are being constructed in order to tell us things we already know and which weren't particularly interesting in the first place.  

*

Toilets are not, in themselves, particularly funny; but a skilled comedian like Ben Elton or Geoffrey Chaucer can make an adult laugh at a toilet joke. But if you want to make a child laugh, you don't need to bother with the joke. Just saying the word "poo" is enough. Similarly, a skilled story teller can construct a story about a  haunting in such a way as to scare an adult. But if scaring kids is your thing, you don't need to worry about the story: at a particular age, they seem to be just programmed to find ghosts scary.

See also: clowns. 

I wonder if the whole New Who project has been hog-tied from the beginning by a misunderstanding of what it means to find a TV show "scary". Being afraid of the Daleks (because they might kill you) is not the same as being afraid of a ghost (because it shouldn't exist). But that is different again from being afraid of a story with a ghost in it, or a story with a Dalek in it. Mr C.S Lewis asked us to consider how we would feel if someone told us that there was a lion in the next room; and compare it with how we would feel if someone told us that there was a ghost in the next room. He also said that growing up in Ireland, he had met people who honestly believed in both ghosts and fairies, and who were un-bothered by the former but terrified of the latter. 

If I were in an old house and heard unexplained banging noises and felt drops in temperature, I would probably think that there was a burglar in the building, or that the boiler was about to blow up. And that might "frighten" me, because being beaten up and having hot water poured over me are not things which I particularly enjoy. But that's not what we are talking about when we talk about being "scared" by ghosts, and that's why grown-up ghost stories are relatively unlikely to involve creaky floors, clanking chains, and things with sheets over their head that go woo-woo. The ghost story that actually "frightens" us is the one where we are unexpectedly visited by an old friend, have a drink with him, and find out a week later that he's been dead an buried for six months. Physical danger frightens us; ghosts creep us out. Somewhere in between is the weird yucky feeling we get in the presence of snakes, spiders, dead bodies and Nigel Farage.

Hide is heavily trailed as being a "scary" Doctor Who story. It isn't remotely creepy or uncanny, and the monster is less dangerous than the one which nearly set off a nuclear war last week. It is constructed on the the assumption that I am eight years old and will be sent into paroxysms of delighted horror every time a grown up says "ghost...boo!". I'm not and I wasn't and I don't, as matter of fact, believe I would have been. I had far more nightmares about nuclear war than I ever did about ghosts. Thank you, again, Mrs Thatcher.

The first quarter was pretty well done; but it was a pretty well done episode of the Sarah-Jane Adventures, rather than a pretty well done episode of Doctor Who. It seemed to be running through the standard tropes of ghost stories (it does indeed show every sign of being a dark and stormy night) and going nowhere very interesting with them. Mr Scott and Ms Raine (who my mother tells me features prominently in a popular TV show about babies) turn in good performances as the Repressed Professor and his Beautiful Empathetic assistant, always assuming that you believe that "she's- not-worth-risking-a-single-hair-on-your-head-for-not-to-me" is the sort of thing an actual human being might say. 

I liked the idea that the Professor has become Obsessed with ghost hunting because of the people he killed during the war, although this seems to rather take for granted that "inexplicable apparitions" and "post-death survival" go together like "metaphor" and "perfunctory". (Surely that's what superstitious natives think? Serious Paranormal Investigators know better.) I liked the confrontation between the Doctor and Clara in the TARDIS, shoehorned into the script though it undoubtedly was. I don't buy the idea that, because the Doctor can travel forward in time to a point where any given person has already died, every person is, from his point of view, a ghost. I'm not even sure what that means. There is a very nice episode of Sarah-Jane in which Rani is sent back in time by a man with a funny hat and meets Lady Jane Grey. There is no expectation that she should be less engaged with her new friend's tragic situation because, from a certain point of view, she's already been dead for five hundred years. I thought that the use of the TARDIS to get at the explanation for the ghost was quite fun: I like the idea that the entire history of the human race is, for the Doctor pretty much just a short detour and a minor subplot. 

The noise about pocket dimensions made no sense at all, and to be honest, I had very little idea what was supposed to be happen during the last twenty minutes. I sometimes complain that Doctor Who has offered us a reasonable "magic" solution to a situation, and overlaid it with an unconvincing scientific gloss. This one I couldn't even follow as magic. The Doctor needs some weird equipment and the Repressed Obsessed Professor's Beautiful Empathic Assistant because the TARDIS can't go into the pocket dimension except at the very last minute when Clara persuades it that it can. Oh well.

The monster that was chasing Future Lady around the blasted heath was genuinely alien, and the dreamlike quality of those sequences were about as close as we got to "scary" in this "scary" episode. Did you notice that it was credited as "the crooked man"? Would anyone like to bet folding money that the episode was going to be called "the crooked house" write up to the very last minute?

The final 30 seconds are one of those times when my jaw drops and I find it impossible to believe that I am actually watching Doctor Who. Or, indeed, anything that has been put together by a professional writer. Lots of writers, I guess, change their mind about how their story should end in the process of writing it. Most writers go back and do a second draft and put in foreshadowing and clues and stuff. But Doctor Who is the bestist and most wonderfullest and most seriousist bit of proper grown up drama on television, so there's no need to bother. "It's not a ghost story, it's a love story." You're just not trying, are you?

I pretty much stopped taking the episode seriously during the scene when the Doc and Clara were by themselves in the music room, and there was a scary cold spot and a scary banging. (The episode therefore scores a weak 33% on the Ril/Moff Scale.)

"I know I'm a teeny tiny bit terrified" says Clara "But I'm an adult. There's no need to actually hold my hand". 

"Clara" says the Doctor "I'm not holding your hand", whereupon they scream and run down the stairs.

I grant that, on the fifth viewing you find out that there is a reason for this. It seems that the genuinely horrible monster chasing Future Lady is not genuinely horrible at all, but merely looking for a lover, and presumably holds hand with Clara across the dimensions because he's lonely. But at this point in the story, it feels less like something out of a ghost story and more like something out of a pantomime. In the, er, quintessentially splendid "Ghost Light", Ace was scared of Gabriel Chase because it freaked her out when she was a little girl. ("Ace tells the Doctor about her worst nightmare" explained the Radio Time "So he takes her there.") In the also pretty good "Satan Pit", the Doctor claims to be unnerved by the devil creature but because the idea of something coming from "before the universe" doesn't fit into his world view. Here we have two people who kept their nerve on a nuclear sub when an alien was about to blow up the world screaming like two kids on a ghost train pretending because they think they are in a room with ghostie. 

So. A ghost which isn't frightening, wrapped up as a metaphor for stuff we already know, with a more than usually meaningless magical-science explanation.

And it's "MET A BEE LIS" not "MET TEB A LUS"

Cold War [7:9]

Today I unveil a new metric for the testing of New Who episodes: the Ril-Moff scale.

Every Doctor Who story gets a rating based on how many minutes I was able to accept and enjoy the story on its own terms for, before giving up and yelling "Oi! Moffat! Stop!" compared with the overall length of the episode.

Cold War scores an impressive 84%.

From time to time, someone sends me an e-mail saying something along the lines of "Oh, writing a critical assessment of Lord of the Rings, are we; well, until you have written a thousand page fantasy novel with made up dialects and really boring descriptions of forests and changed the course of twentieth century Beowulf scholarship, you should just shut up about it." I regard them as being on about the same level as the ones who can't tell the difference between comparisons and analogies.

But on the other paw.

I have over the last few months occasionally idled away the odd minute by strumming on a ukulele, and no, that is not a euphemism for anything at all. This has greatly increased my tolerance for musical support acts. The fellow singing the not terribly good songs about American ladies, trains and whisky before the act that I paid money to hear may not be all that good, but he generally shows signs of knowing more than three chords, and being able to do one thing with his left hand while doing an entirely different thing with his right hand, and often singing at the same time. 

"Well" I often find myself saying "I certainly couldn't do that."

I came around some time ago to the idea that while I was quite clever at doing things with words, I didn't have the knack for arranging them into stories or scripts. And this makes me slightly nervous about accusing someone who can clearly construct a script, write dialogue and get it commissioned and filmed of being a rank amateur who I could do better than.

He clearly isn't and I clearly couldn't. I even quite like Sherlock.

But for goodness crying out loud sake!

Yeah, I get the idea of doing Alien with an Ice Warrior, and I get the idea of it doing it on a nuclear sub so you can turn the jeopardy up to 11 and I get that it has to be a Russian sub because a Brit or American sub would be too obvious and I get (obviously) that if that's what you are doing then it has to be in the 1980s when T.B.W was trying terribly hard to help Reagan (who believed in the literal truth of the book of Revelation) to start a nuclear war.

But honestly...you couldn't think of a better way of reminding the young people that this is the olden days than by having the elderly, Russian scientist obsessed by young English people's music? 

At least Clara resisted the temptation to say "What was a 'tape' Doctor".

I wish I'd been a giant maggot on the wall during the script read through. I don't have to read this rubbish. I was King Lear and the Cardasian in that episode of Next Gen.

Is this the story where a monster gets loose on the Russian nuclear submarine? Or is it the one in which an Ice Warrior gets loose on a Russian nuclear sub-marine? Or is it the one where an ICE WARRIOR does some stuff somewhere or other, it doesn't really matter, a nuclear sub will do?

How exciting, basically, do you find the arrival of an Old Monster?

Daleks, Cybermen, Ice Warriors. Daleks and Cybermen and Ice Warriors go together like lions and tigers and bears. The Daleks appeared, what, fifteen times? The Cybermen appeared seven or eight times. The Ice Warriors appeared twice, in a very good story imaginatively called The Ice Warriors, which the BBC have lost, and in a rather weak one officially called the Seeds of Doom, but usually known as Invasion of the Bubble Bath (by me, at any rate.)

They also had a supporting role as one of a number of alien races attending a parish council meeting in The Monster and Curse of Peladon. Their function in that story is to be Old Monsters; former enemies of the Doctor who the Doctor naturally suspects of murdering the Lord Chancellor, even though the Hound of the Baskervilles dunnit.

It's almost as if the Ice Warriors whole job is to be Old Monsters. Iconic monsters. (I wonder if this is really because the kinds of people who drew the Doctor Who Monster Book and the Weetabix Picture Cards grew up during the Troughton era?)

There is no reason why, when the Ice Warrior comes on stage ten minutes the Doctor shouldn't say "Ice Warriors...Ice Warriors...who the hell are they?" as we presumably did when the Macra appeared at the end of the one with Father Dougal. But he doesn't. He says "We go way, way back" and it's one of those old fan validation moments. 

"So do we" we all cry out "So do we!"

I think that what Cold War wants to be is THE ONE WHERE AN ICE WARRIOR TAKES OFF ITS ARMOUR. If you are in the fan party, then you have been waiting to know what a naked Ice Warrior looks for forty years. At least, the episode seems to have been constructed on the assumption that you have. I am not sure I ever even realized that the Ice Warriors were wearing armour. I think I thought it was shell. I think I thought they were ancient warlike Martian turtles. Still, I thought the final scene where the Warrior takes off his armour so he could look the Doctor in the eye was rather nice, and the creature was both alien and sinister and pathetic.

I think that maybe the original brief was "Do Alien, but set on a Soviet Nuclear Sub." The problem with that brief is that the Aliens in Alien are slithery lizard-like spider-like vagina-like penis-like things you can hardly see whereas Ice Warriors are great big clunking space vikings who talk like Worf. 

No problem, says Gatiss, we'll detach the Ice Warrior from his armour, and have him slithering along corridors like a green slithery thing. He can have big long scary fingers which can hug people's faces like an Alien Face Hugger. And we can do that scene where someone says everything's all right, and then a big alien hand comes down and grabs them from above. And then we can do it again.  And then we can do it again.

On the other hand, maybe Moffat looked at the first draft, in which an Alien Soldier was trapped on a sub with Human Soldiers (and was eventually beaten by the Doctor holding his nerve and threatening to blow everybody up) and said "This is great Mark, really really great: it's just that in Doctor Who, everyone including evil green space vikings has to have a sensitive side. And I really, really like the idea of reintroducing an Iconic Alien Race by just showing how threatening one single individual who thinks he is the last of his kind can be. But we did that once before. Could you go and dig up the first season story with the Dalek in it and make this one more like that?" 

Which would explain why Ice Warriors have become scary pathetic creatures in a big metal suits; and why "what does the Ice Warrior look like?" was done as a big reveal, and why the situation was finally resolved through dialogue, and why we had the wholly gratuitous and nonsensical scene in which the companion is locked in a dark room with a chained up monster just before it gets loose.

If you were going to do the Naked Ice Warrior plot, wouldn't it have been cleverer to have a green slimy thing running loose around the sub for 30 minutes, and then finished Act III by revealing as a total out of the blue surprise that actually it's an Ice Warrior? But that, I suppose would have risked the mainstream audience crying out "An Ice what?

Mostly, I really liked it. It was an old fashioned, traditional Doctor Who story, made in a modern style with modern special effects and modern sensibilities. Put this Ice Warrior alongside a Troughton-era Ice Warrior, and it would be very clear that we were looking at a new version of the original creature: jazzed up a bit, more animatronics, and, of course, in colour, but definitely the same beast. The New Silurians and the New Cybermen really only had a coincidental similarity to the original versions. (This is also true of the Daleks, except insofar as anything with a dome and a sink plunger is unmistakably Dalekoid.)

The look and feel of the story — the individual shots, the pictures we see on our magic screens — were far prettier and far more atmospheric than anything that ever happened in the original series. I felt this was how the original series would have looked if it had had the time and the money. Doctor Who not as it was but as it should have been. Doctor Who as we remember it being if we are the sort of people who embellish old TV in our heads or only know Fury From the Deep from the novelisation. The Doctor and the Ice Warrior facing off in extreme close up; the Russian commander's finger, and the the Warrior's claw, hovering over the big red button; the sheer smallness and wetness of the sub — I kept thinking that it looked like and exceptionally high quality 1980s fanzine, when fans with pen and ink could pull off special effects that the BBC couldn't.

Doctor Who has been a lot of things in its time. It has been costume drama and nerdy sci-fi and action adventure and whacky and unpindownable surreal stuff with Douglas Adams and a robot dog. But if we say "This is a Doctor Who story" I think we know the kind of story we are talking about. Aliens invading London; plucky soldier boys trying to help, boffins saving the day. Big galactic empire at war; broken down freighter ship caught in the middle; Doctor mistaken for a spy. Moonbase full of scientists besieged by nasty robots. Polar base full of scientists besieged by nasty robots. Oil rig full of scientists besieged by nasty sea-weed. Lighthouse full of Victorians besieged by nasty balloon.

I do not think that the return of the Ice Warriors is a Good Thing In Itself. But once I spotted that Cold War was going to follow the good old Base Under Siege format, I certainly stood up and cheered "Hooray! Proper Doctor Who! At last!"

The attempt to do a very traditional Doctor Who story shows how wrong New Who has been allowed to go — at any rate, how far it as departed from its original format. I myself would be happy for the Doctor to be trapped in some interesting environment — submarine, temple, space ship — full of interesting non-player characters  threatened by interesting monsters on an almost weekly basis. I think that would be much better than running through five different styles in five episodes. But the Base Under Siege is no longer Doctor Who's natural storyline; Horror of Fang Rock and the Web of Fear are simply not tell-able in Moffat-style. Moffat has killed the thing he loved.

And that's OK, change is good and only the dead don't change and  a stopped clock gather no moss and so on;  but we should all accept that this is what has happened and move on. We shouldn't keep harkening back to forty year old stories in a style we've decided to jettison. Old Who was about a boffin with a magic box that he couldn't steer, who was stuck wherever it put him with nothing but his wit and his companions to help him. New Who is about a god-brat with a magic wand and an infinite supply of fairy dust. The New Doctor could have taken Skaldac back in time 5,000 years, dropped him off on Mars, fixed the submarine (or nipped back in time to a point before it was broken) and been on his way before the opening credits rolled. To set up the trapped claustrophobic scenarios that used to be the Doctor Who hallmark, there had to be a silly plot device to put the TARDIS our of action and a silly plot device to separate the Doctor from the sonic screwdriver to say nothing of a really silly plot device (and what the TV Tropes People would call a Gilligan Cut) to engineer a scene in which Clara gets to be heroic and important and the equal of the Doctor in every respect.

The B.U.S format emerged in a world of four and six part serials, long on atmosphere and suspense, punctuated by cliffhangers. There is, I grant you, some good dialogue between Clara and the Prof. I get the impression that we are meant to think that there is a sub-plot about the young Russian Officer who thinks that triggering nuclear Armageddon would be a good career move, but it gets too little screen time for us to really notice. It's structured and paced far more like a trailer for an episode than an actual story.

This is okay, too: the manic pacing works really well for mad stories like Let's Kill Hitler and silly stories like Dinosaurs on a Spaceship. But it completely prevents this kind of suspense / horror story from being either suspenseful or horrific.

Unless, of course, I missed the point again and it wasn't meant to be a suspense / horror story but a serious human drama about the futility of war which happened to borrow part of its form from the suspense / horror genre?

You may remember that Patrick Troughton never appeared in a story entitled The Slightly Different But Probably Equally Valid World View of the Daleks. During the golden age of Doctor Who monsters were evil and that was that. Some corners of the galaxy have bred the most terrible things; they had to be fought. But that doesn't work in the touchy feely 21st century emotionally literate version of Doctor Who. The Ice Warrior can't be defeated and obliterated. It has to be shown the error of its ways; and we have to have a go at seeing things form his point of view. 

I have spent the last eight years complaining that the Doctor too often defeats enemies by having a special Enemy Defeating Device in his back pocket. So I am hardly going to complain that this week the Doctor defeats his enemy by talking to it and persuading it that it doesn't really want to be quite so evil after all. 

As a matter of fact, I really liked this scene. It made sense on its own terms and in terms of the metaphor about the "ice warrior" and the "cold warriors" (and the fellow from the Red planet being trapped with the Red soviets). The idea of nuclear weapons and mutually assured destruction has been spelled out to those of us who haven't got that far in our history lesson yet. The Ice Warrior has spotted that by firing a single nuke, it can trigger a war that will wipe out the whole of the human race. Declaring war on a whole planet because one human prodded you seems a bit harsh, but he is the baddie. So when the Doctor announces (once he gets his sonic screwdriver back) that he would rather blow up the submarine himself, it makes perfect sense. It's the only way he can think of (deprived of his magic box but reunited with his magic wand) to save the earth. It's his own version of mutually assured destruction. The Ice Warrior takes off his mask, looks the Doctor in the eye and asks who will blink first. It was a really good ending. It really pleased me.

Thirty eight minutes. I'd been on board up to this point. Thirty eight minutes.

First, bloody Clara intervenes, and instead of appealing to the Ice Warrior's military honour, or facing him down tactically, she appeals to his sense of mercy and family ties. You aren't really a soldier, deep down, she says, you are really a cuddly fluffy bunny who wants to skip through the dead Martian meadows singing Ultravox songs.

I suppose that this is the only, and I used the term advisedly, politically correct ending available. If the Doctor's plot had worked it would have meant that in the end M.A.D was right and T.B.W won the cold war by outfacing Communists with nukes, but because in the end everyone decided that they'd just rather be nice. 

"Okay" says the Ice Warrior "Fair point. I won't blow up your planet after all" and is instantly beamed up by a passing Ice Warrior mothership. This is almost exactly as believable as a frozen Alexander the Great being discovered at the North Pole, and the first thing he does after he's been defrosted is send out a carrier pigeon and 40 minutes later a Greek Aircraft Carrier arrives at the North Pole to take him home. 

Yes, I know it's not meant to be real.

Third, we find out why the TARDIS vanished. This is so appalling it's actually brilliant. The Doctor has been fiddling with the TARDIS and has accidentally switched on a plot device which makes the TARDIS fly away whenever there is danger. He calls this the Hostile Action Displacement System. What is utterly wonderful is that the HADS were alluded to in once before, forty four years ago, in a story called the Krotons. (The Krotons was the only extant four part Patrick Troughton story until another one was discovered, so it was the one shown in 1981 as part of a repeat season to commemorate the departure of Tom Baker. So fans of a certain age know about the HADS.) The genius of this is that older fans, who are the only ones still paying attention, are so busy jumping up and down in excitement that they don't actually have time to notice that this was the Worst Plot Device Ever. Why did the TARDIS vanish? Because it did. But never mind. He referenced the Krotons!

Good concept, good execution, tolerable script, terrible ending, shows that classic Old Who Stories don't really fit into the New Who Format any more and the Clara's natural accent is Northern. But that's okay. Lots of planets have a North. Move on.

Happy St George's Day

Please Stand For The National Anthem

Songs To Listen to on a Wednesday Morning

"Play it fucking loud."
Bob Dylan

Okay, let's take this very slowly. 

1: In pantomimes, the baddie is often called "the Witch" or indeed "the wicked Witch." The goodie is often "the Fairy", "the good Fairy" or "the fairy Godmother".  

2: In Frank Baum's anti-Christian parable "The Wizard of Oz", the heroine Dorothy (accidentally) causes the death of a character called "The Wicked Witch of the East". All the Hobbits are pleased that "The Wicked Witch of the East" has died, because she was wicked. 

3: In the 1939 movie version of "The Wizard of Oz", they sing a song of celebration. It is a very catchy song presumably suggested by the operatic version of "Hansel and Gretel". "The "Wizard of Oz" is the very epitome of camp. It is very much in keeping with this tone that the little people sing a funny happy song when someone dies. 

4: There is also a Wicked Witch of the West and a Good Witch of the North. 

5: Mrs Thatcher was an English politician. She became Prime Minister in 1978 and remained in office until it became clear that she had become insane and was ousted by members of her own party. [The neutrality of his section is disputed.]

6: She died last Tuesday.

7: The Daily Mail Apocalypse Cult, with the full support of Her Majesty's Alleged Opposition, has announced that mourning is compulsory, that anyone criticising T.B.W in any way is part of  "The Left" and therefore an un-person. 

8: The Left, who, on this definition, represent the overwhelming majority, are not bloody having it. They felt that the singing of a happy camp song celebrating the death of a Baddie in a children's movie would be an amusing counterpoint to the compulsory mourning. They bought lots of copies of the record from I-Tunes, in the hope that the BBC would have to play it on the Radio 1 Chart Show which I understand is a bit like Top of the Pops only with fewer paedophiles.

9: The point of playing a camp happy song celebrating the death of a baddie in a children's movie is that it is a camp, happy song celebrating the death of a baddie in a children's movie. The point is not that all females or all female politicians are witches. Neither do the left, on the whole, think that female neo-pagans should have houses dropped on them. Everybody knows that wiccans do not wear pointy hats or fly on broomsticks, in the same way that everybody knows that members of the Society of Friends don't particularly like porridge. 

Lighten up, for god sake, can't you. Bloody Chumbawamba use "ding dong the witch is dead" as part of the soundscape on their Thatcher album. Trying to be more right-on than Chumbawamba is like trying to be more catholic than the bloody pope. 

Actually, "dissent" is completely the wrong word. The overwhelming majority of people either hated her guts or else are totally indifferent to her.

I don't think it is particularly funny, and I think that there are better ways of showing dissent. But I take it for granted that when a Nazi enters the room, every decent person present will claim to be Jewish.

If she were (as those who knew who said she would have wished) having a quiet, private funeral in a   dignified location, attended only by family, close colleagues and maybe one invited photographer then political demonstrations of any kind would be unthinkable. 

Someone would probably still think about them, but they would be unthinkable. 

As it is, her funeral is being orchestrated by the Tory party as a Tory party political event to beatify a former leader of the Conservative Party.

Falklands themed funeral? Falkands themed funeral? With some Chalky White jokes from Jim Davidson, a revue by the Black and White Minstrels and a special celebratory episode of Jim'll Fix It, I shouldn't wonder. The policing of the funeral has actually been code-named "Operation True Blue".

So the question is not "Should we desecrate a private, religious event by holding a party political demonstration?" Of course we shouldn't. I understand that after his assassination, Osama Bin Laden was given as dignified a funeral as possible, according to the tenets of his faith. Myra Bloody Hindley was given a quick, dignified send-off in a municipal crem. [*]

But that is not the question. The question is "Given that the Tory Party has already decided to take what should, indeed, be a private, religious event and turn it into a party political demonstration should the Left a: do nothing or b: have a demonstration of their own to show that no, actually,  there is NO consensus, NO unanimity and that T.B.W is NOT the best loved English person since Churchill." 

Only a complete shit would march into Canterbury Cathedral and disrupt a solemn mass on Easter Sunday because he doesn't like the political views of the Archbishop of Canterbury. But if the Archbishop of Canterbury announced that he was going to hold a special mass to pray that all members of the banking profession should be damned for eternity, followed by the ceremonial excommunication of Sir James Crosby, I think that would probably be the wrong moment to say "I don't think it is right for the Banking Community to complain about what is essentially a private, sacred, religious event." The more strongly the Left threw up a police cordon around the Cathedral and said that dissent had to be prohibited because there was no dissent and everyone agreed with the Bishop anyway except the Right who don't count, the more important it would be for some kind of  counter demonstration to be hold. 

English British Prime Ministers don't generally have big public funerals. Churchill is the last one who did. That was a state funeral. This one technically won't be. The Daily Mail thinks that this proves that the Queen and David Cameron have been infiltrated by The Left. It is an "insult" that T.B.W will only have the same kind of funeral as the Queen Mother and the Princess of Wales, in the same way that is an insult to Christians that vegetarians also have a legal right to have their beliefs respected. (This is perfectly true and not something I made up.)

The whole point of the posthumous exaltation of T.B.W is to manufacture a false consensus. Love of T.B.W and support for the Conservative party, like love of the Queen and support for the Monarchy are not political points of view, they are a base-line neutral position which all British people agree with. [**] If you don't love the Queen, T.B.W and the Tory Party then you aren't British. Once we ignored all the dissenting voices then 100% of those questioned agreed with us. There will be no art, no science, no literature, no enjoyment, no laughter, but the laughter of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no love but the love of Margaret Thatcher. 

[*] Cats are to kittens as calves are to cows. "But that's ridiculous, Andrew: have you ever tried milking a cat?" 

[**] What is the British equivalent of Motherhood and Apple Pie? "The Church of England and Steak and Kidney Pie, perhaps?

Nothing is more ungentlemanly than

Exaggeration, causing needless pain,

It's worse than spitting, and it stamps a man

Deservedly with other men's disdain.

Weigh human actions carefully. Explain

The worst of them with clarity. Mayhap

There were two sides to that affair of Cain

And Judas was a tolerable chap.

Belloc

Footnotes

1: No. I don't know why it is somewhat okay to say "Mark Twain uses the n-word in Huckleberry Finn" but not okay to say "Mark Twain uses the word "nigger" in Huckleberry Finn". I suppose that the magic lives in the shape of the letters, in the same way that the magic of the F-word lives in its sound. I believe that both Neil Gaiman and Alan Garner researched the kinds of spells and charms that real magicians used to add authenticity to their fantasy stories, but then deliberately quoted them incorrectly, in case someone tried them out. I can see why you would want to draw attention to the fact that you find the word very offensive each time you quote it, in the same way that some Muslim traditions write "Peace Be Upon Him" each time they mention the name of the Prophet. I think that might be worth trying as an experiment, actually. "Some of the characters in "Scoop" use the word nigger (which is a very offensive word)". "In the course of "v" Tony Harrison says cunt (WIAVOW) seventeen times." 

2: Yes, the use of bloody (WIAMOW) in Pygmalion is a signifier of class, not obsentiy. Other characters use expletives like damn, hell,  filthy, and beastly (WAMOW) : they might be regarded as impolite or unladylike but it doesn't create a sensation. Eliza's sin is that she uses a lower-class word in an upper-class context. (In My Fair Lady, of course she shouts "move yer bleedin' arse (WAMOW)" during a race at Ascot, which makes the point rather nicely. 

3: There were some people on the high street having a campaign to stop the Middle East. They didn't agree with the way that Israel keeps taking more and more territory from Palestine, unlike the rest of you squares. They provided a map to show where the borders were in 1948, and another map to show where the borders were now. What interested me was that the two areas were marked "Palestinian land" and "Jewish land". Not "Palestinian land" and "Israeli land", or "Moslem land" and "Jewish Land." Was there a hidden Dawkins agenda, do you think (that it was Bad Religious People taking land from Nice Non Religious People)? Or did they think that "Jew" still carries negative connotations for many English people, and using the J-word would make us more likely to support the other side (in the way that the Daily Mail used to insist on calling The Labour Party "The Socialist Party" even though that isn't what it's called.) Or was it just that Jew is a short word and Israeli is a long word and there wasn't much space on the map. 

4: It isn't a tax. It's a means test. 

5: If you are reading about some particular theory or interpretation of history, you start to see evidence for it everywhere; very ordinary words start to take on special meanings. I described how this happened during the fortnight when I was reading about the "Paul McCartney is dead" conspiracy theory. Once you have been told that "he blew His mind out in a car" means "Paul died in a road accident" it is very easy to think that any lyric anywhere means the same thing. You think you lost your love -- because he died in a road accident. The long and winding road -- where you crashed your motorbike. On penny lane there is a fireman with an hourglass -- who is about to rush to attend the road accident. I think that, once you have decided that there is quite a lot prejudice around (which there is) you can easily flip into a mindset where every sentence and every word is evidence of prejudice. I think that once you have decided that there are quite a lot of people around who are absolutely paranoid about the PC police, then very ordinary events and words, like teachers noticing that its always the same food that gets used in food fights and taking that food off the menu, is evidence of the sinister hand of the PC police. So I suppose the only thing we can actually do is look charitably at context and intention, accept that language is a wibbly fuzzy thing that doesn't always do what we mean it to do and get on as best we can. Which, I realise, is scary to fundamentalists who think that the word means what the word means and if you say differently you are giving the bad man permission to be bad. There are left wing fundamentalists and feminist fundamentalists as well as religious fundamentalists and Darwinian fundamentalists  and I am perfectly well aware that fundamentalist is one of the magic words and someone will be saying "oh, no, no, no, no, fundamentalist means bad people who believe wrong things without evidence and can't possibly be applied to good Guardian readers who have a perfectly neutral stance on objective reality." 

So. Is there anything good on TV this Saturday?

Anyone who might be interested in "The Physical Impossibility of Debate In The Mind of Someone on the Internet" or "Language, Truth and Bollocks", my two previous extended rants on this subject do please send me an e-mail asking nicely, or make a small donation (£1.20 has been suggested) or buy something off the Amazon list and I'll send both the PDFs.  Many thanks to everyone who has already done so.  

Appendix to the Appendix

i wrote a thing as a follow up to the thing that i wrote about the thing that i wrote

sort of about language and bad words in the light of what i said before and poets says "bum" on the radio and amazon selling tee shirts with "bum" on them and all the usual stuff like that

all the nice people who showed an interest in the last one already have it.

everyone else - send me an e-mail saying you are interested, or drop a couple of coins in the tin, or even buy me some comic books and i'll send you this one and the last one and anything else i do in the same vain. (this one is a 16 page A5 pdf at the moment.)

and no i am not going to a mailing list only format for the blog forever and ever and ever. my next essay will be printed on a t-shirt, the one after that will be a pod-cast, and third one will be tattooed on my bottom. i am, how you say, Exploring Alternative Formats.


Send me some money (£1.20 would be nice)

Buy Me Some Comic Books

Send Me an E-Mail Asking Nicely

"The Physical Impossibility of Debate In the Mind of Someone On the Internet" is now available in no-frills Epub and Mobi (kindle compatible, I do believe) versions. PDF is still available. Sales are already approaching double figures.

Amazon Wish List

I wrote a thing about the thing that I wrote. And then I got someone who admires my writing very much to write some annotations. And then I stuck in some other bits and pieces I had lying around. and I put it together as a PDF. (I will take the arguments about formats for granted, and have a go at making an e-book tomorrow night.) If you are interested, please chuck a few coins in the tip jar and I'll e-mail it to you. Obviously, I don't do it for the money, I do it for the sheer love of people not knowing what the hell I am going on about, but about £1.20 per customer would be nice. It's about 20 page A5, including the original essay; comes in around 8,000 words, I guess. Possibly it will go some way to clearing up the confusion that the original piece generated.

Members of my direct family and people I've insulted in it will probably get one for free.

The Physical Impossibility Of Debate In The Mind of Someone On The Internet

If you feel that this essay is worthwhile, please consider purchasing the "extended edition" (PDF, epub, mobi) in return for a small donation.

Right so bitwixe a titlelees tiraunt

And an outlawe, or a theef erraunt,

The same I seye, ther is no difference.

To Alisaundre was toold this sentence:

That for the tiraunt is of gretter myght,

By force of meynee for to sleen dounright,

And brennen hous and hoom, and make al playn,

Lo, therfore is he cleped a capitayn;

And for the outlawe hath but smal meynee,

And may nat doon so greet an harm as he,

Ne brynge a contree to so greet mescheef,

Men clepen hym an outlawe or a theef.

Geoffery Chaucer

Woman is the nigger of the world.

John Lennon

Let us suppose, hypothetically, a country in which there was, and had always been, a link between complexion and seating on public transport.

Let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that dark skinned people have to sit in the rear seats on busses, but light skinned people are allowed to sit in the front seats.

Let’s assume that this has been the case for so long that it’s practically invisible: most of the time, even the dark skinned people take it for granted that that’s the way things have to be.

Let’s also note that in this hypothetical and imaginary country, dark skinned people tend to come from the lower social classes, are less likely to own cars, and therefore have to use the bus service more frequently.

We could conceptualize this unfairness in two ways.

We could say that the neutral state of affairs would be for everyone to sit in the front seats, and that the dark colored people are disadvantaged by having to sit in the ones at the back.

We could say that the neutral state of affairs is for everyone to sit at the back, but the light skinned people have the advantage of being able to sit in the front if they want to.

Or we could say dark and light skinned people are equal (they can all sit down) but different (they have to sit in different areas.) But we probably wouldn’t. The phrase “equal but different” is used almost exclusively by light skinned people who are quite sure that dark skinned people are not their equal. So toxic is the phrase that even if a situation arises where it happened to be true — say, at a school where there were separate boys’ and girls’ soccer teams — you almost certainly wouldn’t use it.

So: either the dark coloured people are disadvantaged — suffering from unfair discrimination — or else the light coloured people have an unfair advantage or privilege. Both descriptions are equally true, or equally untrue: the glass really is both half empty and half full. But if you take the first model, you are apt to think in terms of stroppy black people demanding something extra; if you take the second, you are more likely to think in terms of mean white people refusing to share their treat with anyone else. Taking the second model also makes it harder to be indifferent: supporting the status quo means “supporting the privileged position of the white people.”

(Some parents tell children: “if you are very naughty, you will not get any ice cream.” Other parents tell them “if you are extra good, you will get some ice cream.” American parents, or at any rate, parents in American situation comedies, say “If you are bad, I will take away your ice cream privileges.” Using food as disciplinary tool is a really bad idea because and can result in all sorts of hang-ups and eating disorders.)

However you describe it, the situation is horribly unfair: so if the dark skinned people finally decide that they are going to sit in the front seats regardless of where law and tradition says they should sit, then everybody would support them on general principles.

There are, in fact, two sides two every question (apart from the one about who created the Silver Surfer.) It might, in fact, be that the fight about bus-seats isn’t worth having; or at any rate, that it isn’t worth having today. Better let the light skinned people keep their symbolic advantage than anger the more extreme elements on both sides and risk riots and reprisals. It is certainly the case that all the seats are much the same and the bus takes you where you are going regardless of where you are sitting. Changing a law, even an obviously unfair law, takes time, and the lawmakers may have more urgent matters they want to deal with first.(Politicians do have to think like that, at any rate so long as we remain a civil society with a constitution, laws and procedures, as opposed to one of those anarchists utopias where you tear up the rule book and everyone starts being spontaneously nice.) It might be that what is in everyone’s best interests is a harmonious society where even the most prejudiced light skinned people put up with even the most prejudiced dark skinned people, and that a gradualist approach to reform is more likely to bring this about than radical reform. Politicians sometimes have to think like that, too.

But I can’t imagine anybody actually arguing any of those points. The situation is so blatantly unfair that we would have a two-horse race: between the small minority of racists who don’t really want coloured folks on their busses in the first place, and an overwhelming majority who think that it is obvious (once the question has been raised) that everyone should be allowed to sit wherever they want to.

Similarly, there could in theory be a disagreement about what kinds of tactics the reformers should adopt. Should they simply disregard the law? (But doesn’t civil society depend on us all obeying laws, even laws we don’t like? If I am free to disregard the bus law, whence cometh my obligation to stick to the law about paying my fare, or the one about not punching the bus driver on the nose? Because it’s my duty is to obey a higher, god-given law of morality? But whose god? And who decides? The stronger side? But isn’t that how we got into this mess to begin with?) Do they have organized protests in which everyone ostentatiously and pointedly breaks the law on a particular day? Or do they start lying down in front of busses and picketing bus stations? Do they politely ask the transport staff to change the rules, or actively intimidate bus drivers until they are too scared to enforce them? What about the fellow who sets fire to himself on the back seat of the Number 9 to make his point? Or sets fire to someone else? Or blows up the whole bloody bus?

Most of us would say that it was our duty to support the dark skinned people regardless of whether or not we happened to like their tactics. Even discussing the tactics is tacitly supporting the injustice. The power imbalance is so obvious and blatant that it's incumbent on you to support the weaker side. You simply have no right to sit in the comfortable seats saying that, although you agree with the point that the people in the uncomfortable seats are making, you wish that they wouldn't make it quite so loudly. 

“But what if the dark skinned people adopt violent tactics: are you obliged to support them even then?” I think you are. Or rather, I think that once you have asked the question “do you agree with violent tactics?” you have put yourself on the wrong side. “Violence” means “use of force by the side we don’t agree with”. It’s a word that the powerful invented by strong people to describe tactics used by weak people. It’s just very odd to look at the entire machinery of a nation state bearing down on the little guy and say “I deplore the fact that the little guy threw a stone at a police officer.” 

“Terrorist” is what the big army calls the little army. It’s only “class war” when the poor fight back.

And this is true of every argument and every disagreement. Every quarrel is, in the end, a quarrel between a person with power, and a person without power. So you only ever have two alternatives: intervene on the side of the guy being beaten up; or intervening on the side of the guy doing the beating. If you do nothing, then you allowing big guy to carry on whacking the small guy, which amount to supporting the bully. If you say "But what if the fight really about? Maybe the little guy antagonized the big guy in some way?" then you are still doing nothing and allowing the victimisation to carry on. 

Of course, you may dress it up in fancy words. "I feel sorry for you" I may say "I genuinely do. I have nothing against dark coloured people. Some of my best friends have dark coloured skin. But philosophically, you will concede that it is part of the Cosmic Essence of buses that the dark coloured people must sit at the back  of them and light coloured people must sit at the front? You wouldn’t want to upset the Balance of the Force, would you? Or if you do not concede that, you must at least concede that that is part of my sincere and devout beliefs, and the since and devout beliefs of many other Jedi? So in order to preserve the Cosmic Balance, or out of respect for other people's faith, I must reluctantly sit in the comfortable seat. But do please understand that it isn’t about you. It’s about the bus.”

If I said this, I think that you might well take the view that I hadn't really said anything at all. All my talk about the Force and Cosmic Essences amount to "Well, I would give up my seat, but I don't feel like it." La la la I'm not listening!

Of course, most people are better at concealing their privilege under a poor mask of logic; but that's all it ever is -- a mask. Suppose I say: “Why does the law ban me from killing foxes for sport, but permit me to keep chickens in horribly inhumane conditions?” Aren't I just invoking concepts like "humane" and "even-handedness" — which are in the long run just as made-up an imaginary as the Cosmic Essence of Busses — to assert the hereditary right of rich people (like me) to own the countryside and do whatever they like it in? 

Or if I say "Is there any statistical evidence that capital punishment reduces the number of murders in society?", aren't I just invoking mystical concepts like "statistics" and "evidence" to occlude my belief that I'm a rich white guy, want rich white guys to stay in charge, and think that culling a few hundred poor black guys every year to show the who's boss is a small price to pay for maintaining the status quo? My use of terms like "murder" and "capital punishment" show pretty clearly which side I'm on. When a weak person kills a strong person, we call it "murder"; when a strong person kills a weak person, we call it "capital punishment". (C.f The school teacher hitting a little boys backside with a big stick, while chanting "Never...hit...anyone...smaller...than...you.")

It isn't that my arguments are "bad". It's the whole idea of "argument" that's the problem. "Arguments", "logic", "evidence", "proof", "neutrality" are things you learned in school, and schools were set up by rich white guys to teach ideas thought up by rich white guys in order to keep rich white guys in charge. 

How did the light skinned people get to sit at the front of the bus in the first place? Not by winning an argument, that's for sure.

Everything's really all about power. (Unless everything's really all about sex, but that's an argument for another day.) You might think that you are talking about theology or music or sanitation but if you look under the bonnet, it's always really about who gets to sit at the front of the bus. The question is never "who is right?: it's always "which side are you on?"

All of which leaves me rather stuck.

So far as I can see, everything I've said above is true. But when I'm asked a question, my inclination is always to work out the answer from first principles. At any rate, to use some kind of argumentation and try to work out what the other fella is trying to say, and if he's wrong why he's wrong and if he might have a good point. Which keeps putting me on the wrong side of the question.

I have just deleted three separate paragraphs giving examples of questions I may be on the wrong side of. I know how toxic discussions about questions that people are on the wrong side of can become, and how quickly. 

I have also deleted a paragraph about why I think they become toxic. It has been explained to me that when I try to do that kind of thing, I come out, to use the technical jargon, "sounding like a cunt". (I suppose this is why it is called "vulgar Marxism".)

Despite early assurances, the internet does not contain a 3D virtual reality in which I can be taught Kung Fu by Lawrence Fishburne and drown Tom Baker. All the internet actually contains is words. Lots and lots of words. Oceans of words. Millions of writers telling us what they think. Good writers, bad writers, indifferent writers; informed writers; ignorant writers; boringly right, engagingly wrong. Writers telling you what they think about what other people wrote about stuff they read on the internet. Derrida was right. There isn't any stuff. There's only people talking about stuff. I've never experienced a murder, or an election, or a football match, or (god forbid) an instalment of I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. I just kind of intersect with the ripples these things put out in cyberspace. Which isn't really a space, and isn't really very cyber. It's more like a lot of very bored people making wisecracks in their coffee break. 

But all this argument is taking place in a space in which we have already agreed that argument is not even possible. "Right" and "Wrong" aren't qualities that any argument has: they are just descriptions of which side you are on in a big fight that has been going on throughout history, and will carry on until, any day now, history comes to an end.

And you knew that already. 

So why are you even reading this?

I beseech you in the bowels of Christ: think it possible that you might be mistaken.
Oliver Cromwell


The infidel might have a good point, you know. 
Les Barker










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