Back to the Future II

So, where did we get to?

Progress is a good thing. 

The principle of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" was a mechanism intended to achieve this thing called Progress. We have now abandoned this particular mechanism. But this is okay, because the mechanism was never what we cared about. What really mattered were the Underlying Values, and these have not changed. 

I am a bit unclear about what the Underlying Values are. I am a bit unclear about whether Marxism has been abandoned because it is old or because the external circumstances happen to have changed. (You might stop wearing wooly hats because they are out of fashion and make you look like your granddad.  But you might stop wearing them because the weather has turned hot all of a sudden.) I am also a bit unclear if we are talking about what is right, what will work, or what will win elections. I am not even sure if Tony Blair would recognise the distinction.

It might be that Marxism was morally good in the 1960s in the same way that slavery was morally good in the 1760s, but that the inexorable march of cosmic evolution has changed the nature of morality. 

It might be that people in the 1960s were stupid, and honestly believed that Marxism was good, in the same way that people in the 1760s were stupid and honestly believed that witches existed. We know better nowadays. But we shouldn't blame the people in the past for burning witches and believing in Marxism. They truthfully didn't know any better. 

It might be that "from each according to his ability" was a very good means to an end to adopt in the 1950s, when everyone worked in factories, but that now everyone works on the internet, a different means (unspecified) needs to be adopted to achieve the same ends (also unspecified). 

Finally, it might be that in the 1960s a canny politician had to pretend to believe in Marxism because that was the sort of thing gullible people would vote for, but nowadays you to pretend to believe in something else if you want to fool people into supporting you. 

When it turned out that Blair's reasons for starting a war with Iraq were not entirely true, he didn't think that this invalidated the war. He said that if he had known then what he knows now he would have "deployed" other arguments. Possibly Marxism and Progress are things which you deploy in order to achieve something else. I just wish I knew what the Something Else was. 

* 

I think that we should go North at 100 miles an hour. You agree that we should go North, but only at 10 miles an hour. We are going in the same direction but at different speeds. 

Maybe we want to end up in the same place, and you think that by going slowly we are more likely to get there in the end. Or maybe I want to get to John O Groats but you think that Edinburgh is quite far enough. 

But someone else might find themselves thinking like this. 

"I want to go North, and my followers want to go North: but our opponents want to go South. I reckon that if I go South at 50 miles an hour, most of my supporters and some of my opponents will still vote for me. And even going South at 50 miles an hour is better than going South at 100 miles an hour, which is what is going to happen if I admit that I want to go North at even 1 mile per hour. Southhampton may not be Inverness, but it is slightly better than Penzance." 

That is the difference between sweet Moderation, which is the hope of our nation, and Centrism, which leads inexorably to Johnson, Trump -- and worse. 

* 

I do not think that SCIENCES!! automatically leads to Progress, but I do agree that SCIENCES!! changes the kinds of things you can do to make Progress happen. 

Assuming that we all agree what we are Progressing towards, which we don't.

It is very silly, in the age of the Interwebs and Twitface, to be selling paper copies of Socialist Worker outside railway stations and spending hours and hours putting statistically dubious bar charts through people's letterboxes. Obama and Trump both understood that elections are won on social media. So, in fact, did Momentum. 

Blair, and by Blair I mean Peter Mandelson, won three elections because he understood how television and newspapers worked: how to take control of an interview, how to associate himself with "eye-catching initiatives", how to keep his acolytes "on message". The rebranding of his party as "new" Labour, and the wallet sized "pledge card" were both highly media-savvy tactics. If he had carved his pledges on a giant stone tablet he would have doubtless done even better. But Blair came to power when The World Wide Web was a novelty and no-one had heard of Facebook: those tactics would not work nearly as well tomorrow. 

I think I can envisage ways in which SCIENCES!! might make the old questions about Left and Right wing politics redundant. 

It might go something like this. 

"We want to get books into the hands of poor people because knowledge is power and I used to love the Famous Five when I was a kid. But we are using the Old Ways -- charging people Council Tax, and using the money to pay librarians to keep paper books in alphabetical order. I think we should close all the libraries and reduce council tax (which will earn us votes) and use SCIENCES!! to get books into people's hands. We will go to Jeff Bezos and say "It's all right. You don't have to pay us any tax, and you don't even have to let your staff go for a wee. But in return, we want all ebooks to be free, and for you to provide a tablet computer for every school kid in the country. (That will cost about three billion but you are worth about a hundred and thirty three billion so its not like you can't afford it.) Result: a massive democratisation of knowledge and literacy. Which was the Enduring Value we started from." 

*

It would not be true to say that New Labour was the same as the Old Tories, and that Blair as Prime Minister didn't do anything nice. It would be cynical to say that today's Labour Right don't believe in anything. But if you ask a continuity Blairite what the party achieved in power (having agreed that we are not going to mention the war) what you would get is a shopping list of small reforms. 

The thing which the Blair Party is most proud of is SureStart, which increased poor people's access to childcare and nursery education. They also introduced a national minimum wage. Blair took incremental steps towards full equality for LGBT people. He made some big political reforms, like devolved government in Scotland. He incorporated the human rights act into English law and formally abolished the death penalty. He banned fox hunting. These were undoubtedly Good Things. Some of them would have happened anyway, but some of them most definitely wouldn't. But they were hardly an all-consuming new vision of Britain. And they were not particularly informed by SCIENCES!! 

Now we are going to tear down the Labour party and three days later raise up another in its place. Nothing less will do, apparently. 

So, is this New New Labour Party forged in the white heat of the genome project and sat-nav going to be anything more than a new shopping list of moderately liberal reforms? Or is Progress (like Marxism before it) simply a rhetoric that we are going to deploy so we can dupe the voters into putting us in the position where we can introduce identity cards and ASBOs and frogmarch drunk teenagers to cashpoints? 

* 

Screwtape said that Christian clergymen always warn people against the sins they are least likely to commit. When everyone is itching to launch a crusade against the infidel, they will hear stern sermons against lukewarmness and nominalism. When they regard churchgoing as a pleasant social duty they will be warned from the pulpit of the dangers of extremism and fanaticism. Blair does not tell Starmer to be more exciting; more radical; more daring; to take more risks; to try to get the public excited. Instead he presents a tabloid parody of the Left, and solemnly warns Kier Starmer not to be like that. 

Blair's analysis of the current political situation is very obscure: but it is just about decipherable. He seems to say two different things. 

First he says that young people -- and a new generation of uniquely and specially young people appear to have unexpectedly emerged fully formed in the the last year or two -- want change for change's sake. He seems to envisage them looking for something to rebel against and asking "what have you got?" Because the Moderates -- Kier Starmer -- are not talking about big economic changes, the young people have started calling for big changes in other areas. They are saying we should change the way black people, transexual and homosexual people are treated. They are saying we should change the way we do industry and travel, so as to halt global warming before we all die. They are saying we should change the way that nationality, gender and religion inform and define political beliefs. He lumps these together as "culture" or "identity". He says that moderates (Kier Starmer) don't understand these issues. But they are aware that their views may be wrong, or out of touch, or at any rate perceived as such. So they stay out of the argument altogether. This makes them look weak. So we have a vicious circle: the Young are radical because Starmer is so boring; Starmer is boring because the Young are so radical. 

But he also says that the agenda around "cultural" issues has been set by the Right. I think he is thinking here about the Far Right -- the ones who are prepared to say that imperialism was an unreservedly good thing and that trans people ought not to be allowed to go to the loo, and whose supporters are often nakedly racist and homophobic. But the result is the same. The moderates (Kier Starmer) are reluctant to push back against the Right's anti-immigrant, anti-trans rhetoric, so the only opposition comes from Young Radicals. But the Young Radicals scare everyone else off, meaning that the Right keep on winning elections. Which the Young Radicals secretly like, because they would rather be heroic martyrs than actually have to worry about the boring nuts and bolts of government. The Silly Right created the Culture Wars; the Sensible Left failed to oppose them, and the Silly Left have lept into the vacuum. And since the Silly Left are too silly too actually win the argument, the Right have victory handed to them on a plate. 

I don't know how true any of this is. I am, for example, intrigued by the idea that left-wing, Marxist politics are hopelessly old fashioned and mired in the past and at the same time especially attractive to the dynamic, new, young generation. If it is a bad thing to have old fashioned views on trains and trades unions, why is it kind of okay to have old fashioned views about transexuals?

Blair seems to agree with us recovering Corbynistas that Kier Starmer is hopelessly moderate, dull, weak and wet, and that he is failing to provide and intelligible response to the scary right wing agenda of Priti Patel and Nigel Farage. But that is not how the Centrists whose votes Blair wants perceive him. The Daily Mail call him hopelessly Woke for taking a knee during a black rights matter demonstration. A Tory MP described him as "prisoner of woke" during a serious debate in the Houses of Parliament. I think Starmer is boringly moderate; Blair's target audience think that he is terrifyingly left wing. 

I find it very hard to take seriously the idea that Greta Thurberg or the Colston Four are being radical for the sake of radicalism, and that if Kier Starmer had better policies about student loans and mortgages they would have been content to spend their evenings putting New Labour leaflets through their neighbours doors. 

There is room for more than one opinion about direct action: it may be that you shouldn't remove kitch Victorian statues of 18th century human traffickers from city centres, even when they have become the focus of nasty local nativist movements. These things are always better handled through process than through protest. I understand that you are cross about not having the vote, but tying yourself to railings and jumping in front of race horses only hurts your case. 

But I shudder, slightly, when I hear that behind the agenda of Black Rights Matter, Reclaim the Streets and Extinction Rebellion "lies an ideology that ordinary people find alien and extreme". What ideology lies behind these movements? One Daily Mail pundit thinks that they are working towards the destruction of "white society". Is this the kind of thing which Blair has in mind? 

But still, I do recognise the vicious circle that he is pointing to. The young are too extreme because the left are too moderate. The right are too extreme in response to the extremism of the left. The left can't provide an alternative to the extreme right, because they are too moderate. So the young become even more extreme to counter the extreme right. 

Starmer's moderation and the left's radicalism are both part of the problem. On this argument, the left need to dial it down and Starmer needs to turn the volume up. 

So: what is Blair's solution? How is this new scrub-it-out-and-start-it-again Labour Party going to look? 

* 

Blair is not really a moderate or a compromiser. He may be interested in forming an alliance between New New Labour and the Liberal Democrats, but he isn't interested in a rapprochement between Corbynites and Millibandians. He is a populist. He sets about telling us what The People, or People or Ordinary People really want. 

A third of The People of Hartlepool wanted a Labour MP. A third of the People of the UK wanted Corbyn to be Prime Minister in 2019. (About forty per cent did so in 2017.) Nearly half The People voted to stay in the EU in 2015. Nevertheless The People are a homogenous lump who all speak with a single voice. I, a remain voting, Corbyn supporting, human rights advocating, pro-immigration, multi-cultural Old Labour Marxist am not one of The People. 

I do not, in fact, exist. 

"People", Blair says, do not like "their" country, "their" flag, or "their" history being disrespected. I think that we need to flip this round: Blair thinks that Old Labour and the Too Radical Young are inclined to be disrespectful about Britain, the history of Britain, and the Union Jack. He says that it does not follow that we can never acknowledge that Britain has done some Bad Things in the past: but in what other respect has anyone ever been inclined to diss this great country of ours? Do you hear the Left saying that the Lake District is not very pretty at this time of year, that Blackpool is not a great holiday resort, that Keats didn't write great poetry, that the Beatles didn't write great tunes and that Stevenson didn't invent steam trains? 

It is when I say that maybe Britain should be ashamed of the slave ships in the same way that Germany is ashamed of the concentration camps that I get called unpatriotic. It is when I ask if a black person with a slave heritage might feel about a medal called "Member of the Order of the British Empire" in the same way a Jewish person might regard a medal called "Iron Cross of the Gestapo" that I get accused of dissing my country. It is when I say that the guide books to national monuments ought to tell us the whole story about where they came from, whips and sugar plantations and all, that I am told that I want to erase, destroy, eradicate and rewrite our history. Either we join the the Right in celebrating Rhodes and Colston as great British heroes, or we accept the charge of being being unpatriotic, or we retire from the argument altogether. 

A cowboy and his comanche companion were in the bad-lands. "We're surrounded by Indians!" cried the cowboy. You know the punchline. 

Again, Blair tells us that "people" like common sense, proportion and reason. And so they do. Very probably they also like chocolate cake and bunny rabbits. But the flipside is that Blair thinks that The Left are unreasonable, inclined to overreact to things, and prone to act in ways which are contrary to common sense. 

"Whatever is contrary to common sense" is a frequent definition of Political Correctness. I don't know if Blair means it as a dogwhistle. David Cameron fought a nasty election campaign around the idea that lots of nasty right wing talking points were plain and simple common sense. Are you thinking what I am thinking of. 

He says that "people" like the police and they like the army. He says that the Left are allowed to criticise police and military conduct provided they do it without smearing -- Beelzebub, what a useful word! -- the organisation itself. The implication being, once again, that the Left do not like the police or the army, and that they are always seeking to smear soldiers in general and police officers in general. I suppose a small number of the radical left are pacifists and anarchists. Corbyn was misquoted -- smeared -- as saying that he would like to disband the British army, but what he had actually said was that he hoped one day wars would come to an end and no-one would have any need for soldiers. Again: any suggestion that a soldier tortured an enemy combatant or killed a civilian or that the police roughed up a suspect or fabricated evidence or provoked a riot or didn't treat the murder of a black person as seriously as they would have treated the murder of a white person will always be deemed by the Right to be a scurrilous attack on Our Brave Boys and Bobbies On The Beat. "Don't smear the police and the army" means "Stop going on and on about institutional racism and human rights abuses." 

Blair does say that defund the police is a silly slogan, and I probably agree with him.

This is an absolute play-book of the tabloid right wing. The Woke Mob hate England and the flag; the army and the police; they are politically correct; they take everything out of proportion. Blair's New New Labour party will not be like this parody of the Left. 

And now comes the bit where he says that the left-wing critique of the Moderates is partly fair, and lists ways in which Starmer could be more Radical.

Like hell he does. 

His parodic critique of The Left is the beginning an end of his analysis. 

He is refreshingly honest here. He doesn't say that Labour should support the police unreservedly, assert that slavery and empire were Good Things and deny that trans people exist because those ideas are right and true. Pretending to believe those things is -- he says this explicitly -- a tactic. To believe anything else is "electorally off-putting". The party who does not believe those things will "not win elections". 

"Let's pretend to be more racist so we can get into power and reduce carbon emissions by 2030" or "Let's throw trans people under the boss so we can massively tax Amazon and send twice as many people to college" might conceivably be the kinds of compromises that a politician needs to make. The gay and lesbian issue really did cost Kinnock dear among the pensioners. But Blair is long on the "let's do this bad thing..." part and very short on the "...in order that we may do this good thing" element 

"On cultural issues, one after another, the Labour Party is being backed into electorally off-putting positions. A progressive party seeking power which looks askance at the likes of Trevor Phillips, Sara Khan or JK Rowling is not going to win." 

Trevor Phillips was suspended from the Labour Party for anti-Islamic statements: he talked about Islam being a nation within a nation, and complained that the Muslims did not wear Remembrance Day poppies. Sarah Kahn's appointment by Theresa May as an "anti extremist Tsar" was criticised by some Muslims because of her connection with the governments Prevent programme which it was felt equated Islam with extremism. And J.K Rowling wrote a lot of shit fantasy books argued that someone born with a cock could never transition to being a woman.

I am not a hundred per cent sure what "look askance" means: I think it is a way of saying "You should not disagree with them" without quite saying that you agree with them. Blair thinks that "we" ought to have a debate. The question of whether Muslims are scary nation within a nation (as opposed to a minority religious group like Roman Catholics and, er, Jews); whether people who go to Mosque rather than Chapel are more likely to be terrorists than anyone else; and whether trans people even exist is the kind of thing that is open for discussion. 

Flipside: the Left think that the existence of transpeople and the idea that Muslims are just British citizen is something which is not open for discussion. 

"The Labour Party needs to push back strongly against those who will try to shout down the debate." 

Flipside: If you think that Muslims are not truly British and trans people don't exist, the Left will not let you speak. 

The Far Right are not prepared to say "Racism is good, actually" or "We hate trans people and want to abolish them" although that is clearly what some of them think. So they have adopted a strategy of making Free Speech the issue of the day. We are supposed to be scared of the Woke Left, not because they are against Racism, but because they won't let people who are in favour of racism have their fair say. We are supposed to be sympathetic to J.K Rowling, with her book contract and her fourteen million Twitter followers, not because she is right, but because no-one can hear what the poor woman is saying. 

The Left are intolerant of other views. The Left need to embrace the right of people to hold racist and anti-Islamic and anti-trans opinions. Presumably not anti-gay opinions and definitely not anti-Jewish ones. Not because it is the right thing to do, but because it is the way to win elections. The Labour Party, dissolved and reconstituted according to Blair's vision, would be the party of Peter Hitchens, Piers Morgan and the tabloids who drool and rant about the Woke Left.

If you say you want to go South, you will be shouted down. The most important thing is not to go North: it is to allow the people who want to go South to speak because if you look askance at them you will not win any elections.

Fuck! How the hell did we end up in Cape Town?

 

If you enjoyed this, please give me what you think I need according to your own ability. 

Jeffcotism: The Foundation of 21st Century Thought (I)

Zechariah Jeffcott's destiny was determined at the age of five, when he heard his mother say to his father -- who had just said that it was universally agreed that the angles of a triangle added up to 180 degrees -- "Oh, that's because nowadays the geometry mob will vilify you if you dare to say they add up to anything else." 

"At that moment", Z. Jeffcott assures us "There flashed across my mind the great truth that behind every widely held opinion there is always a powerful elite systematically enforcing conformity and punishing dissent. The more widely believe something is, the more likely it is to be false."

That is how Jeffcotism became the foundation of 21st century thought. 

Over the next few days we are going to be looking at the fruits of his discovery. 

*

I ate a shepherd's pie last night. He was livid. 

      Thomas Cooper

On 23rd April (St George's Day) the Daily Mail published a recipe for spaghetti bolognaise. 

Nothing wrong with that. I quite like spaghetti bolognaise. 

But strangely, they published it as part of a political column, under the Jeffcotian headline: 

The woke mob can rant for all they're worth, but I'll keep adding Worcester sauce to my spag bol

Four years ago, an Italian chef, Antonio Carluccio, remarked that bolognaise sauce properly contained only meat, tomatoes, and wine: if it contained carrots and herbs, it's not bolognaise. He also thinks it should be served with tagliatelle rather than spaghetti. Three years ago, Nigella Lawson published a recipe for carbonara, which included cream as an ingredient. Some Italians on the Internet said that this wasn't how you made carbonara. Earlier this year, restaurant critic Jonathan Meades mentioned in a collection of old essays that he didn't think that authenticity mattered all that much: it was more important that the food tasted nice. So political writer Tom Uttley has decided it is his duty to publish a receipt for bolognaise sauce that includes Heinz tomato ketchup and Lee and Perins sauce. There comes a moment when everyone has to show the world which side they are on. 

Is there are valid point being made here? Yes, probably. 

Is it an interesting point? No, not particularly. 

Is the language in which Utley makes the point a fascinating and disturbing specimen of the ubiquity of Jeffcotism? Why else do you think I am writing about it?

Food criticism is indeed sometimes too proscriptive. Excellence is indeed more important than authenticity. A dish containing meat, vegetables, onions and spaghetti might very well be nice to eat, even though it is not a traditional Italian sauce. The pizza of New York is not the same as the pizza of Naples, but both are very nice to eat. When fish and chips is first mentioned in print -- somewhere in Dickens, I believe -- it is referred to as "Jewish style" fried fish and potatoes, but a hundred and fifty years later it is as English as, well, fish and chips.

False representation is a thing, and cultural appropriation is a thing. I probably ought not to advertise my shop as selling "authentic Italian cuisine" if I am not using Italian recipes and none of my staff have ever been near Italy. I certainly ought not to open a chain of restaurants festooned with Union Jacks and beefeaters claiming to be selling Authentic English Jerk Chicken. (And no, a diner full of green, yellow and black flags and pictures of Bob Marley selling "Authentic Jamaican Roast Beef And Yorkshire Pudding" would not be just as bad. That's not how it works.) But the only objection to a seaside landlady serving up mildly spiced mince with rice and (for some reason) sultanas is that it tastes disgusting. The fact that no-one on the Indian sub-continent would recognise it as curry is neither here nor there. 

I can see why chefs get annoyed when writers tell them how to cook. No artist likes a critic. "Why are you telling me how to paint?" they say "when you can't paint yourself?" 

Some consumers don't like critics either. "How dare you tell me that that is not a good painting?" they say,  "There is no such thing as a good painting, or a bad painting, there is only a painting which I like, and my opinion is just as good as yours. Why are you forcing me to read your column in the paper you have forced me to buy?" 

"When you have written a thousand page fantasy novel about wizards / run a busy Italian restaurant / sung Wotan at Covent Garden" they continue "Then you will be entitled to tell me that the book / pizza / singer was boring / burned / flat. But not before."

Those who can, do. Those who can't, write long learned articles in the Times about those who can.  

On the other hand, I recall a Thespian, possibly Sir Michael Hordon, saying that unlike some people in "the profession" he did read "the notices" because the critics went to the theatre every night ("poor bastards") and knew what they were talking about. To repeat myself: If I want to find a good middle-priced vegetarian restaurant; I would do better to ask Cecil, who eats out five nights a week but can't cook to save his life, than Joe, who hardly ever goes out but is widely regarded as the best pastry chef in the whole of Milton Keynes. I myself can point you in the direction of the best folk gigs in Bristol, even though I can't sing or play a single note. 

However, Tom Uttley turns this very obvious and uninteresting pushback against the preachy, proscriptive food critic  into a buzz-word bingo of Jeffcotian snarl words. 

"Before I write another word, I must issue a trigger warning to all culinary purists, vegans, opponents of cultural appropriation and others of a sensitive, woke disposition who are inclined to take offence at just about anything."

"Anyway, I can already sense the purists and politically correct leaping to condemn me for my sacrilegious treatment of goulash and bolognese." 

"The truth is that since the dawn of international trading, mankind has been culturally appropriating recipes, fashion tips, words, religions, artistic genres, scientific discoveries and economic and political systems from foreign societies. It’s only in this deranged modern world that fanatics have come to believe that adopting good ideas is a vile crime."

No-one has actually said anything is a vile crime, of course. It seems to me that a dish of minced beef, onion and gravy topped with mashed potato is pretty obviously not a "shepherds pie". If you wanted it to be a shepherds pie you would have made it with mutton. But no-one is claiming that being wrong on this point is or should be a criminal offence. 

At one time, most of the words in Uttley's Jeffcotian vocabulary had pretty clear meanings. A "trigger" meant something that could set off a PTSD episode, like a soldier having flashbacks to the trenches when he heard a motorbike backfire. "Political correctness" meant the avoidance of language which was demeaning to minorities. "Cultural appropriation" meant a more powerful or privileged group adopting the dress or religious symbols of a weaker or less privileged ons and presenting them as their own. 

People sometimes say neurotic" when they mean "worried" and "schizophrenic" when they mean "undecided". Jumping down the throat of every adolescent who says "that maths lesson triggered me" is about as helpful as pointing out that Frankenstien was not the name of the actual monster. But still: we are entitled to ask in what way might "using the correct ingredients of a meat dish" be analogous to "saying 'wheelchair user' rather than 'cripple'"? Why is Tom Uttley implying that "inventing you own version of a recipe" is somehow similar to "putting Jewish mystical symbols you don't understand on expensive designer jewellery"? 

Well, to be funny of course. But why would anyone find it funny? I am 90% certain that Boris Johnson doesn't really masturbate into the Union Jack. Well, 85%. But if I call him a "flagshagger", you reasonably infer that I think that he is patriotic in an exaggeratedly and slightly disgusting way, and that I think that performative nationalism is a bad and ridiculous thing. You could then write two hundred and fifty comments on my blog quoting facts and figures you have googled in order to establish that I am wrong to think that Boris Johnson is affectedly patriotic. What Uttley is doing is pretending (as a joke) that he thinks that the left are going to say that his recipe is a form of cultural appropriation. No-one has really said this, and no-one really thinks anyone is going to. But the joke wouldn't be funny if we didn't think that the left really do apply the word "cultural appropriation" to very trivial things: in fact, if we weren't assumed to agree that the whole idea of cultural appropriation is intrinsically ridiculous. 

I am fully on board with offensive jokes. The worse taste the better. One day I am going to write something in depth about Jimmy Carr. Jokes don't particularly have to align with my politics. I doubt if Ian Hislop put his cross in the same box that I did last Thursday. 

But jokes are not value neutral. Benny Hill really didn't approve of pedophilia. But the fact that he treated "dirty old men" as essentially funny figures tells us something about the prevailing attitude to sexuality in his day. The fact that we wouldn't make those jokes tells us something about ours. Carry On Camping and Jimmy Savile are part of one continuum. (So are John Barrowman and Noel Clark. Allegedly.) 

I see three possibilities. 

Perhaps Utley is consciously trying to defang these words: to render them unusable. When some very nasty Twitter thugs briefly attacked me for liking Jeremy Corbyn, having bad breath and wearing silly ties; one of their tactics was to claim that expressions like "I feel cross" was "triggering them" (because a: they were Jewish and b: one of their relatives had been killed with a crossbow.) They did not, of course, really believe that the word "cross" would cause a traumatic flashback. What they were doing was insinuating that that claim that the depiction of sexual assault in a literary work might cause a flashback in a rape-victim was just as silly as pretending to be triggered by the word "cross". 

So the tactic here is to imply that complaining about the ingredients of goulash would be just as silly as complaining about the use of the word "n*gg*r" or "sp*st*c". Since it would obviously be silly to accuse an English curry house of cultural appropriation, it is equally silly to complain about a white man who wears dreadlocks or a not-Jewish pop star who burbles on and on about the kabbala. Some entirely imaginary people might possibly claim that serving bolognaise with mixed herbs is cultural appropriation, therefore cultural appropriation does not exist. 

But perhaps he doesn't care what the words mean, or indeed, what any words mean. Political Correctness, Cultural Appropriation; Offence; Woke; Elite; Trigger; Modern; and Deranged are all simply synonyms for Bad Thing, or indeed, Double Plus Ungood. I contend that this article -- and indeed, every Daily Mail article -- makes a great deal more sense if you read it that way. 

The baddies can rant for all they're worth, but I'll keep adding Worcester sauce to my spag bol

Before I write another word, I must issue a warning to all baddies, nasty people, horrid people, and others of a silly, stupid disposition who are inclined to disagree with things that I like.

The hollowing out of political discourse is, in my view, double plus ungood; but it is very much what I would expect baddies and people I disagree with to be engaged in. The world is black and white; everything either gives you cancer or cures cancer. We can spot the bad opinions because they are believed in by bad people; we know which are the bad people because they have the bad views. If only we could deport, kill, or cancel the bad people then the world would become a good and happy place.

Words are not neutral. A different writer would have said that he fully expected the communists to object to his recipe; that he would carry on putting custard on his roast beef even though the papists would tell him not to; that he wasn't going to pay any attention to protestant heretics telling him how to cook. Different societies have different folk devils, which can be very uncomfortable if you are one of the folk devils that needs exorcising.

But there is a third, more alarming possibility. 

Perhaps Uttley honestly believes all this bullshit. 

Perhaps he expects his readers to believe it as well. Perhaps he honestly believes that everyone in the modern world (everyone apart from him) is literally mad. Perhaps he honestly believes that there is a more or less organised faction who want to tell him how to cook; and that adapting recipes is a serious act of political resistance. Perhaps he truly thinks that the statements "the slave trade was regrettable" and "you should cook Italian food the way Italians do" contain a similar quality called "political correctness" and that sinister forces will punish him for his dissent. 

 Perhaps he is a fully comitted Jeffcotian. 

There really is a Woke Mob, and it is coming for your spaghetti.

If you have enjoyed this essay, please consider making a small contribution to my Patreon. 

Back To The Future

Everything is different, but the same... things are more moderner than before... bigger, and yet smaller... it's computers...

        Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure

"They keep on inventing new things nowadays, don't they, and making things lovelier and lovelier?" 

     H.G Wells "Things to Come". 

The times in which we live differ from all other times in two important ways. 

1: In the olden days things like machines and social institutions used to stay pretty much the same from generation to generation. But we use different phones from the ones our parents did, and our attitudes to sex and crime and religion are different from those of our grandparents. 

2: In the olden days, everyone was pretty much content with the way things were. But nowadays, people would like there to be more money, and they would like the money to be shared out more evenly. They think this would be a good thing. 

Some people would like the world to carry on getting better and better. But they are divided into three groups. 

Group A think that in order for the world to get better, we would have to make very big alterations to the way we do things. Unfortunately their ideas wouldn't work in practice. And the alterations they want are so big that people are scared of them. 

Group B also want the world to get better and better. And they have some ideas which might really work. But because they don't think that we need to make big alterations to the way we do things, they come across as very dull and no-one pays much attention to what they have to say. 

Group C have only come into existence recently. They also think that you have to make very big alterations to the way we do things in order to make the world better; but they think that those alterations are mostly to do with preventing the people who have most of the money from exploiting the people who do most of the work. People also used to think this a long time ago, which proves they are wrong. 

Some of the people who want the world to be better agree with group C. This unfortunately means that group B -- the ones who think that we should make the world better but not change too much -- have to pretend they agree with group C only not quite so much. (When Group C want to do something very silly indeed, the people from Group B do sometimes manage to stop them.) 

But all this does in the end is make the people who just want a little bit of change -- who are the overwhelming majority -- think that no-one cares about or agrees with them. So they join one of the groups who want to make the world worse.

This is why Labour lost the Hartlepool by-election. 

* 

C.S Lewis said that all clergymen should have to do a translation exercise as part of their ordination exam: if you can't put an erudite passage of theology into ordinary language then you either don't believe it or else you don't understand it. This is why his religious books can come across as a little patronising and old-fashioned to modern ears. He plays the idea for not-particularly-subtle laughs at the end of his first science fiction book: the H.G Wells figure says things like: 

"But while I live I will not, with such a key in my hand, consent to close the gates of the future on my race. What lies in that future, beyond our present ken, passes imagination to conceive: it is enough for me that there is a Beyond." 

which the Christian philologist hero has to translate into the tongues of angels as: 

"He says that though he doesn't know what will happen to the creatures sprung from us, he wants it to happen very much." 

In this spirit, I attempted to translate a key passage from Tony Blair's New Statesmen essay into English. The original runs: 

"The progressive problem is that, in an era where people want change in a changing world, and a fairer, better and more prosperous future, the radical progressives aren’t sensible and the sensible aren’t radical. The choice is therefore between those who fail to inspire hope and those who inspire as much fear as hope. So, the running is made by the new radical left, with the “moderates” dragged along behind, uncomfortably mouthing a watered-down version of the left’s policies while occasionally trying to dig in their heels to stop further sliding towards the alienation of the centre." 

I made an honest attempt to attach meanings to words like "progressive" "moderate" and "radical left" and to work out what "an era when people want change in a changing world" could possibly mean. But I don't think that Blair himself could really say what they mean. I don't think that the essay goes into normal language. He doesn't understand it or believe it.

*

In Blair's world, the goodies are now called Progressives. "Progressive" encompasses both the The Centre and The Centre Left. The British Labour Party, the Lib Dems, and the American Democrats are all Progressives. The Right are still the enemy, of course, but The Left, the New Left, The Marxist Left and the Woke Left are also baddies because they will prevent the Progressive Centre getting back into power. 

Progressive is a weasel word. It might just be a synonym for Liberal. I might say that it is Progressive to think that gay people should be allowed to get married, and Conservative to think that they shouldn't. It might be used rather more widely: Progressives think that we can make the world better, as opposed to Conservatives, who think that it is just fine the way it is and Reactionaries who think it was better in the olden days. But the word is also bound up with the idea of Progress in technology and science; the idea that discovery and invention are constantly making the world lovelier and lovelier. We might use Progress to describe a genuine change for the better: but we might also use it to describe something which is regrettable, but inevitable. People used to die of diabetes; now it is eminently treatable. That's Progress. It's sad that we are going to cut down the forest to build a motorway: but the motorway represents Progress. You can't stop Progress. 

In power, Blair used "modernise" to mean "whatever is in my head right now". Schools and laws and hospitals were never merely changed or improved: they were always Modernised. (This meant that he didn't have to explain why his changes made things better: change was a good thing in itself.) The danger is that Progress in the scientific sense (we are making more and better machines) becomes merged with Progress in the political sense (we want to make everyone richer and happier) and then used rhetorically to justify any political change that you happen to feel like making. You may not like the idea of voter ID, but you can't stop Progress. If you aren't terribly careful you will find yourself saying that the Millennium Dome and the Iraq War must be good ideas because computers are so much faster and cheaper than they were twenty years ago. 

Progressives and The Left are now in opposition. Progressives believe that the world can be made lovelier and lovelier by science and technology; in contrast to Socialists, which thinks that the world can be made better through change to economics and the power structure. I, a Socialist, think that if the factory workers want a living wage, they should demand one, down tools, and refuse to work until the Boss agrees to give them a pay rise. You, a Progressive, think that if we build newer and better steam engines and warp drives, the factory will be making so many widgets that the management will be able to afford to double and triple everyone's pay (and will do so, out of the simple goodness of their hearts.) But he, a Conservative, thinks that if the workers want a living wage they should damn well work harder and buy a factory of their own. 

As an analysis, this is not intrinsically ridiculous. I know what a Progressive is, and I know that I am not one. You probably know whether or not you are a Socialist. The drawback is that for the first 90 years of its existence, Labour was definitely a Socialist Party. It had a little definition of Socialism on its membership cards. Before there can be a Labour Prime Minister, we have to admit that the party was predicated on a catastrophic error. 

"Wrong about everything for a hundred years -- vote for us anyway!" is not a great message. 

Blair thinks that technology might make the world a better place because it could increase freedom and opportunity. On the other hand, it might make the world a worse place by reducing those things. It's the role of the Progressives to make sure that the former happens and the latter does not. 

Freedom and Opportunity are two more dangerously vague and abstract words. So is Progress. Freedom to do what? The Opportunity to do what? Progressing towards what?

Twenty years ago a homosexual was not Free to get married in this country. Fifty years ago he was not free to have consensual sex. I don't think that science or technology caused his situation to change. I think that radicals -- the Loony Left  -- campaigned and argued and eventually won the argument because they were in the right. In this country, Muslim women are free to cover their faces if they want to. Some people think they shouldn't be. In France they do not have that freedom. In Saudi Arabia they are not free to leave their faces uncovered. We can have an argument about whether your right to dress as you like trumps my right not to be freaked out by people in weird clothes. But I can't see how any scientific advance affects the argument one way or the other. 

I can see in principle how a technological change could have a political and ethical implication. The contraceptive pill changed the way we behaved, and the way most people thought we ought to behave. You could plausibly argue that up to the 1950s it was immoral for a man to have sex with a woman he didn't intend to marry, because she would end up with a baby and he would end up on the next boat out of town; but nowadays there is no objection to it other than the purely prudish or religious one. If you said "Andrew, your belief that pre-marital sex is sinful is obsolete, redundant, a relic of a bygone era and a museum piece" I would understand what you were saying.

In so far as they mean anything at all Freedom and Opportunity tend to be buzzwords of the political right, not the political left. Conservatives tend to believe in Equality of Opportunity (everyone should have an equal shot at getting rich). Socialists tend to believe in Equality of Condition (everyone should have a good time even if they are poor). They don't think that everyone should have the same amount of money as everyone else (whatever the American internet may tell you) but they do think that the rich should be a bit poorer and the poor should be a bit richer. The Conservative says that the it is OK for the boss to have Rolls Royce provided the man sweeping the floor had a fair chance of owning his own factory one day. The Socialist says that we should take some of the money that the boss spends on smart cars and use them to set up a really good public transport system. The Progressive says -- what? That computers and the genome project will mean that it soon won't matter whether you have a car or not? That new technology will make Rolls Royces so cheap that everyone will be able to afford one? The pretty soon we'll have jetpacks so the question won't arise? A Socialist approach to technology would be one that asks how we could use it to make everyone more Equal -- in particular, how to make sure that everyone has equal access to the internet, say by giving everyone free wi-fi. But the word equality is not in Blair's political vocabulary. 

Compromise and moderation are good things. But Centrism always seems to mean "the left should become more like the right" and never "the right should become more like the left". I finds some of Blair's language quite alarming. Blair takes it for granted that Conservatives are proud of their country (and that this is a good thing) but that the Left are inclined to be ashamed of the whole idea of nations. And he speaks with apparent approval of The Right's championing of "flag, family and fireside". 

Freedom and opportunity. Flag, family and fireside. Traditional Values. Family Values. Back to Basics. We all know what this is right-wing code for. 

I am not completely sure if the technological changes that have happened in our lifetime really are the most significant since the invention of the steam train. I think that the two biggest shifts were the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century and the invention of television at the beginning of the twentieth. The Internet is the latest iteration of a mass media that has been evolving since 1922. I am not sure that Blair's talk of "a technology revolution of the internet, AI, quantum computing, extraordinary advances in genomics, bioscience, clean energy, nutrition, gaming, financial payments, satellite imagery " is a great deal more sensible than Boris Johnson's talk of pink eyed terminators and terrifying limbless chickens, and it's a lot less funny. And I remain to be convinced that computer games and satellite imagery have rendered Socialism obsolete in the way that the oral contraceptive pill (arguably) rendered Chastity redundant. 

Blair uses the idea of free university tuition (with scare quotes around the word free) as an example of something which used to be right but is now wrong. "Politically it is a museum piece, a lingering relic of an outdated ideology" he rambles. The argument seems to be that the idea of free education sprung from Marxism; Marxism is now out of date, so free education is out of date, so people should pay to go to college. 

But in what way is Marxism "out dated"? I don't want to hear Conservative arguments about why it is wrong. If it is wrong it was always wrong. I want to hear why the information technology has made it redundant. Does he mean anything more than "In the 60s, Marxism was fairly popular; now, not so much?" Or is there some sense in which Marxism was a good way of doing things in 1968 but a bad way in 2020? But in what way had Xbox III, Google Maps and Limbless Chickens rendered "from each according to his ability..." obsolete? 

If we believe in freedom and opportunity, then it follows that everyone who wants to go to university should be able to go to university: poverty and class should not be a barrier. 

There are other questions we might want to ask. Is education a good thing in itself, or are colleges merely one way to produce people who can fix computers and build bridges and perform heart surgery? Are universities centers of liberal wisdom or hotbeds of godless left wing book-learning? Are you better off getting a job at Apple and working your way up than taking you time getting a BSc in computer science? But granted that university is a good thing and that freedom and opportunity are also good things, then everyone who is clever enough to do the course ought to be able to study for a degree. 

The question is how we pay for it. Private fees and scholarships? State funded courses and maintenance grants? Student loans? Some other system which hasn't occurred to me yet? The answer depends on practical questions (what can we afford?) and moral questions (what is fair and just?) and social questions (what is good for the rest of the country?) If you think that education is a good thing in itself and that a country in which people have studied Proust and Quantum Physics and the life cycle of the mollusc lemur is a good country to live in, then you will be prepared to use tax money to finance higher education. If you see college in basically instrumental terms -- spend a few years studying to get a piece of paper which can be traded in for a better a job when you turn twenty five -- then you will think that students or their families should pay for it themselves. If you think that students are basically idle layabouts who drink too much then you'll be happy for college to be the province of kids with rich parents. The argument is very much the same as it always was. I don't see how gene sequencing or robot chickens effects it one way or the other. 

Yes computers are wonderful and science is wonderful. I had my Covid jab last week and the little wobbly line on the chart in the Guardian is going down every week. I take a little pink pill every day and my left leg happily remains the same size as my right leg. I can read obscure golden age Human Torch stories while sitting on the loo. If I want to. The internet has made online learning technically feasible: the Pandemic has normalized it to some extent. Of course that is something that the Minister for Education ought to be thinking about. "Now we have the possibility of Zoom classrooms, we ought to be looking at how to use them, and how to train teachers to use them" is a perfectly sensible thing to say. It is the idea that there is a distinctly Progressive way of doing remote learning -- and that this is different from the Old Left way of doing it, or the Conservative way of doing it -- that I struggle with. 

The Left used to talk about how the Eleven Plus and Streaming and the existence of private schools tended to mean that the children of middle-class parents were defined as "successful" by their school teachers, where the children of working class parents were judged to be "failures"; and that this made a nonsense of the whole idea of meritocracy. The Left are worried that black children might go right through school without reading a single book by a black author or encountering a single book about a black character. These discussions don't go away, or become less important, because we can now see our teachers on our IPads. Simply shouting "This is the future!" does not get us very far. 

Colstonians believe that flogging people and throwing them overboard would be wicked to day, but was really not wicked in the seventeenth century. Those of us who think that slavery was always out of order are condemned as Woke. That is what the word Woke means, I understand: the belief that you can judge the past by the standards of the present. Blair mentions Woke and Political Correctness in passing in the essay: the far-right press obediently responded to the dog whistle by running headlines about how the former Prime Minister had savaged wokery although that wasn't what the article was about. But maybe Blair really does have a Colstonian belief that morals and ethics mutate and change. Securing for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry really was The Good in 1901, but has really become a bad idea in 2021. He claims at one point that Clause IV -- the Labour Party's formal statement of its socialist principles -- was only ever a mechanism and that the mechanism is now obsolete but the underlying values have not changed. I can see how this could be true: the decent man in the 1950s abstained from pre-marital sex; but the decent man in the 1970s made sure he always had a packet of little rubber thingies in his wallet. His abiding value was that you don't make a woman pregnant if you can't or won't support the child; or more generally that you can't harm someone else for your own pleasure. Chastity and contraception were both mechanisms that enacted the same value. Not everyone would accept this: Christian might say "the risk of pregnancy is incidental: chastity is a Good Thing In Itself. A Socialist would certainly say "sharing the profits among the workers is not a means to an end: it is and end in itself, it is what we mean by the Good." It would help if Blair would say what the abiding values of Labour are; what values that he has in common with Tony Benn and Arthur Scargill (despite having a difference of opinion about the mechanics.)  But of course, he can't. 

I started out by trying to come up with concrete definitions of Blair's buzzwords. 

Progressive - Believing that the world ought to carry on getting lovelier and lovelier 

Radical - Believing that the world will only become lovelier if we make big changes 

Left - Believing that we need to make big changes to the economy and the power structure 

Centrist - Believing that the world can be made lovelier with only small changes 

Freedom - When everyone can do whatever they want to provided it doesn't harm anyone else 

Opportunity - When everyone has an equal chance to earn money and become rich. 

But the point of these words is that they cannot be tied down. The same goes for Woke and Political Correctness, of course. Blair specially says that he can't define them, but "ordinary people know exactly what they mean". I don't think ordinary people do know "exactly" what they mean; because I don't think they have an exact meaning. 

A better translation of Blair's word salad would have run as follows: 

"The problem with good people is that at a time when good people want things to be better; good people aren't sensible and sensible people aren't good. The choice is therefore between those who don't seem very good, and those who do seem good but who are also a bit scary. So the bad people do well, and the good people have to pretend to be a bit bad; while trying to stop the bad from being too bad in case the good all stop supporting them." 

Kier Starmer lost the election because he was not good. He will win the next election if he is better. I think that is a theory we can all get on board with.

The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

The Screwtape Letters 

If you have enjoyed this essay, please consider making a small contribution to my Patreon.

 Obviously, what the words needs most is playlist of songs mentioned in the last article. 

Warning: Contains Language. 

Why the peaceful death at an advanced age of a man I never actually met proves all my politics are right.

The Last Talons of Weng-Chiang Essay

“I have three things I'd like to say today. First, while you were sleeping last night, 30,000 kids died of starvation or diseases related to malnutrition. Second, most of you don't give a shit. What's worse is that you're more upset with the fact that I said shit than the fact that 30,000 kids died last night.” 

Tony Campolo 

Behind much discussion…there hover two propositions that I think much less admissible than the new morality 

1: That if a book is literature it cannot corrupt. But there is no evidence for this, and some against it… 

2: That if a book is a great work of art it does not matter if it corrupts or not, because art matters more than behaviour. In other words art matters more than life; comment on life, the mirroring of life, matters more than life itself. This sounds very like nonsense 

C.S Lewis 

Andrew Over-Thinks A Joke: Part 94

https://illustrationage.com/2013/06/21/tom-gauld-youre-all-just-jealous-of-my-jetpack/

Someone drew my attention to this cartoon. 

I hadn't seen it before, although I am familiar with Tom Gauld's cartoons in the Guardian. 

It troubles me. 

It troubles me in the way Jonathan Pie troubles me. 

At first glance, I thought it was saying "The kinds of people who read serious literature are inclined to look down on the kinds of people who read science fiction: and this is silly, because the people who read science fiction are having a good time." Since I am one of the people who read science fiction this made me smile. 

But then I stopped smiling because I am also one of the people who reads serious literature, so I thought that perhaps it was me who was being made fun of. 

Overthinking cartoons is probably a bad idea. It is probably the sort of stuffy thing that the kinds of people who read serious books would do. Probably I am only doing it because I am jealous of your red nose and your floppy shoes. 

But the artist must have thought about the cartoon before drawing it. At least I suppose he did.

A.A Milne said that he thought of putting a little comment before each of his children's poems explaining who was speaking the words: the author, Christopher Robin, or hoo. 

I think that is my question about this cartoon. Who is saying it: the cartoonist, Christopher Robin, or hoo? 

Are we being told what the science fiction reader really thinks about the serious literature readers? Or are we being shown what the serious fiction readers think that science fiction readers think about them? Or are we being told what the cartoonist thinks that the science fiction reader thinks that the serious fiction readers think that he is thinking? 

And who are we supposed to agree with? Do we read the science fiction reader's think bubble and say "Ha-ha, he's so right, they are only jealous of him." 

Or do we read it and think "Ha-ha, he's so wrong, imagining that they are jealous of him". 

The artist draws simple, iconic figures -- hardly more than stick men. The Proper Literature readers each have a single feature: one man is bald and wears glasses, the other man has a pipe and the woman has her hair in a bun. They are unattractive, fusty, old fashioned, spinsterish, studious -- in a word, uncool. This is the stereotype that people who don't like books have always applied to people who do. 

The science fiction character is also a cartoon, but he's more realistic: a combination of 1970s NASA spacesuits and 1930s Buck Rogers comics with a heavy overlay of steampunk imagery. The spacesuit seems to have been made out of tin cans. 

The idea of the jet-pack comes off a 1928 issue of Amazing Stories, and is sufficiently old that it may have provided some of the inspiration for Superman ten years later. Jetpacks were rendered pretty obsolete by the rise of superheroes who could fly under their own steam. They weren't a feature of most space-opera after the so-called golden age: they aren't part of the Lensmen books, Star Trek, Star Wars, Blakes 7 or Battlestar Galactica. They'd look pretty retro in the Expanse or Firefly. 

So: does the artist think that readers of serious literature really are old fashioned and stuffy; and that science fiction readers really are still reading century old pulps? Or is he saying that readers of serious literature foolishly and wrongly think that science fiction is still just Buck Rogers? Or that the science fiction fan thinks that literature fans think that he only reads space opera comics? Or that the literature fans think that he thinks that they think that sci-fi is only Buck Rogers. Or that he thinks that they think that he thinks.... 

Again: are we supposed to accept the premise that there is a category called "proper literature" and a category called "science fiction" and that never the twain shall meet? And if so, are we supposed to think that this is a bad thing, and they should both have a look at each other's books: or is the science fiction fan right in thinking that proper literature is joyless? 

Obviously cartoons have to deal in symbols. A cartoon in which someone in ordinary clothes said to someone else in ordinary clothes "Oh, yes, I also enjoy Elana Ferrante, why don't you have a look at Gene Wolfe one of these days" wouldn't be particularly funny. 

I notice from some of Gauld's other cartoons that this two-pronged approach is a fairly consistent feature of his humour. Darned if I do and darned if I don't. One cartoon depicts a simple labyrinth puzzle, with the instruction "guide the metropolitan intellectual back to his ivory tower without encountering his countrymen". "Liberal metropolitan elite" is a right wing trope: Eton educated Boris Johnson and commodities trader Nigel Farage were both presented by the far-right press as Men of the People, in contrast to Liberal Metropolitan Elitists like Jeremy Corbyn. It isn't clear from the cartoon whether Gauld is saying "Intellectuals really do live lives of isolated luxury, without contact with ordinary people: this is bad"; or "Silly, small minded Tories falsely imagine that intellectuals are remote from ordinary life: it is bad that they imagine this." Another cartoon has a fairy godmother providing Cinderella with a bank account and a fulfilling career rather than a coach and glass slippers, and saying that she only has to get married if she wants to. Again, it isn't clear whether he is saying "traditional fairy tales are sexist, and this is bad" or "feminists spoil fairy tales, and this is bad." Certainly "the left want to impose politically correct fairy tales on us" is a trope of the far-right; but in the context of the cartoon the artist might well be saying "the idea that anyone would write a fairy tale in this way is absurd; PC gone mad is a false fear." 

Laughter often occurs when the same text can be read in two different ways ("there were two fish in a tank"). So it might be that this ambiguity is precisely what the cartoonist is aiming at. He draws both for the New Scientist and for the Guardian literary section, so he himself may have a camp in the "Buck Rogers" and "joyless literature" camps. 

The accusation that the science fiction fan is making -- or that the the literature fans think that he is making or that he thinks they think he is making -- is that readers of literary fiction are insincere. They would rather be reading sci-fi; their disapproval of the genre is a mask for their jealousy. They are literary puritans, haunted by the fact that someone somewhere might be having more fun than they are. 

It is very tempting to say that Mary Whitehouse was an anti-smut campaigner because she longed to read dirty books or that Richard Dawkins hates Muslims because he secretly knows that there is a God, but it's highly unlikely to be true. I am not even sure that "if you were confident in your own sexuality you would not be so homophobic" is either fair or helpful, although it is very funny. But this kind of thinking underlies too much of our current political discourse. To call someone a virtue signaller, woke, PC or an SJW is ultimately to call them a hypocrite. They don't really believe in reducing global warming or promoting human rights: they are justing pretending to do so because they want to look good, feel superior, toe the party line, and ultimately destroy western civilisation. We have talked before about the stance known as "Bulverism", where the knee jerk reaction to any opposing position is to say "You only think that because..." 

You don't really think that serious literature is better than genre literature; you are just pretending that you think so in order to conceal the fact that you'd rather be reading Buck Rogers than Kazuo Ishiguro. 

Then again, there are still rather a lot of people who think that they have heard quite enough from experts. I am mildly concerned with how full my in-box seems to be with memes about English professors who are filling kids minds with some silly idea about how Edgar Allen Poe's Raven might have some element of symbolism to it (when the kids can all see that it is, you know, just a bird.) A perfectly sensible little parable about how the perfect can be the enemy of the good seemed to morph into a complaint about theory and theoreticians. It is very possible that in the 1830s the people of Denmark needed to be told that emperors were sometimes naked. But right now, I think people ought to consider the possibility that if ninety nine knowledgable folk think that the emperor is wearing his imperial robes and you are convinced he's starkers, then possibly you are the one who should have gone to specsavers.

I think that people who read serious literature read serious literature because they like serious literature because serious literature can tell them things about the world and human beings and life. I think that people who read science fiction read science fiction because they are interested in ideas and speculation and science and the future and philosophy and technology. I think that the some of the people who read serious literature believe, correctly, that some science fiction is poorly written and badly characterised and that some of the people who read science fiction believe, correctly, that some serious literature is dull and difficult. I think that very large numbers of readers of serious literature also read genre fiction and very large number of readers of genre fiction also read serious literature. Probably its a bad idea to only read one kind of thing. I don't think anyone is jealous of anyone. 

Spacesuits and jetpacks -- the whole ethos of Buck Rogers and Hugo Gernsback -- is not so much retro as an historical curiosity, with the same relevance to contemporary science fiction that Lonnie Donnegan does to Dizee Rascal. But we are only a few years on from the awards named after Gernsback being hijacked by reactionary science fiction fans who said -- very explicitly -- that retro, ray-gun and jet pack science fiction was the only real kind; that the intrusion of characterisation and and psychology and new-fangled good-writing into science fiction was the thin end of a communist wedge. They very much drew a line between science fiction and "proper literature". They said that science fiction was a purely masculine form; that the infiltration of "literary" ideas into science fiction was part of a feminist plot and that the girls should damn well get out of their treehouse. 

I don't for one moment think that the cartoonist believes this. And the fact that a trope can we weaponised by neo-nazis does not invalidate the original point. But the false dichotomy between Buck Rogers and stuck-up-librarians-with-hair-buns troubles me. 

Some reviewers and and university departments are quite snobby towards science fiction readers, and I wish they weren't.

If this annoyed you a lot, you probably shouldn't follow me on Patreon. 

Doctor Who 14.6 (1977)

That is why in all boys’ papers, not only the Gem and Magnet, a Chinese is invariably portrayed with a pigtail. It is the thing you recognize him by, like the Frenchman’s beard or the Italian’s barrel-organ... As a rule it is assumed that foreigners of any one race are all alike and will conform more or less exactly to the following patterns: 

FRENCHMAN: Excitable. Wears beard, gesticulates wildly. 

SPANIARD, MEXICAN: Sinister, treacherous. 

ARAB, AFGHAN: Sinister, treacherous. 

CHINESE: Sinister, treacherous. Wears pigtail. 

ITALIAN: Excitable. Grinds barrel-organ or carries stiletto. 

SWEDE, DANE: Kind-hearted, stupid. 

NEGRO: Comic, very faithful. 

                George Orwell 

PLOT 

An evil time traveller has lost the key to his time machine. He is sick and deformed, and subsists by draining the life-energy from human victims. After a long chase, a good time traveller destroys the key, and the bad one falls into his own life-draining machine and is destroyed. 

MAGIC 

WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO THE MAGIC OF DOCTOR WHO screamed the President of the DWAS in his infamous review of Deadly Assassin. 

As if in answer, Robert Holmes offers us the Talons of Weng-Chiang. 

It's the perfect Doctor Who story. It is full of magic; and it has a magician at the centre of it. 

In Episode 1 of the previous story, Leela had asked the Doctor to explain how the TARDIS could be bigger on the inside than the outside. The Doctor showed her two boxes, and said that one box is small, and the other box is far away. If something could be both far away and close at the same time, he explained, then big things could fit inside small things. 

"That's silly" said Leela. 

It's an explanation which fails to explain. It is a piece of sleight of hand. The only possible answer to the question "Why is the TARDIS bigger on the inside than on the outside?" is "Hey -- look the other way!" 

That's what happened to the magic of Doctor Who. We spotted how it was done. It was a matter of misdirection. 

"Next tlick; velly simple."

CONTEXT 

1818      Frankestein 

1850      In Memorium 

1887     A Study in Scarlet 

1892    Daisy, Daisy 

1892    The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes 

1895     The Time Machine

1895     The Importance of Being Earnest 

1897    Dracula 

1902     Down at the Old Bull and Bush 

1909     The Phantom of the Opera 

1911     The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God 

1913    The Mystery of Doctor Fu Manchu 

1919    My Old Man Said Follow The Van 

1953    The Good Old Days

1963    An Unearthly Child

1977    The Talons of Weng Chiang

STORY 

If you read a story about a whale, you think of Moby Dick. (Even if you have never read Moby Dick, you still think of it.) You may also think of Jonah, or Pinnocchio, or Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. But you can't read a story about a whale without thinking of all the other whale stories. 

This is also true of everything else. 

When a man in a clerical collar walks onto the stage you know he is going to be a Vicar. But you also know what kind of a Vicar he is going to be. One kind if the play is called Whoops, There Go My Trousers! another kind if it is called My Awful Miserable Irish Catholic Childhood. 

Talons of Weng-Chiang is more than usually reliant on cliches and stereotypes. We know what to expect from each character the moment they come on stage. In the first few minutes of the first episode we meet 

a stereotypical theatre owner ("so many feats of superlative, supernatural skill!) 

a stereotypical Cockney cabbie ("she come in here last night and nobody ain't seen her since") 

a stereotypical Irish workman ("hideous it was, hideous") 

a stereotypical English peeler ("well, if that don't take the biscuit") 

a stereotypical police doctor ("upon my soul!") 

and a stereotypical Chinese conjurer ("honoulable master kind to bestow plaise on humble Chang's miserlable, unworthy head.") 

To have one stereotype might be regarded as a misfortune. To have six seems like carelessness. 

And it isn't only the characters: every setting, every scene, almost every plot beat is weirdly familiar. 

Of course, it is foggy. We are in Victorian London: how could it not be? Everyone travels everywhere by hansom cab. The only streets which do not look like sinister rookeries are the ones which look like Baker Street. (There is a bale of hay on Baker Street, reputedly to conceal an inconveniently anachronistic horseless carriage that someone had parked there.) Women keep disappearing: the papers are saying that Jack the Ripper has struck again. There were other Victorian murderers; but Jack the Ripper is the one we have heard of. 

The police pull a dead body out of the river. An old woman, credited only as "ghoul" watches the proceedings. "Look, there it is guv....It's a floater, all right..." She is played by Patsy Smith, who specialised in dotty and eccentric older ladies. (She took her dentures out for the part.) She makes us think of the toothless whores in Les Miserables and indeed of the Wise Woman about whom Black Adder knew only two things. 

It is important to the story that a body has been pulled from the river, but a policeman gives the Doctor this crucial piece of information in the very next scene. We didn't need to see it happen. But corpses and barges and rivers and dotty mad ghoulish women who call everyone "gov" are part of the Victorian setting. It may possibly make us think of the opening of Our Mutual Friend. 

The scene is not there to advance the plot. The plot, such as it is, is there to provide an excuse or a pretext for the scene. 

And that is also true of everything else. 

In Episode 3 we see the Sinister Chinese Conjurer perform his act. (The Conjurer is called Chang: his sinister master is called Chiang. There is an old joke about a Chinese telephone book which I am not going to repeat.) Before Chang comes on stage at the Music Hall, we catch the end of the preceding act: a cockney lady singing Daisy, Daisy, Give Me Your Answer Do (I'm half crazy, all for my love of you!) Leela, rather delightfully, thinks they are at some kind of religious ceremony and worries that she does not know the correct responses. A snatch of the song also appeared in the incidental music when the Doctor stepped onto the stage at the end of Episode 2. 

There were lots of popular songs in the eighteen-hundreds: but Daisy, Daisy is the one we think of when we think of Music Hall. People still think it is the kind of song which goes down well with the inmates at the local Old Folks Home, even though your average octogenarian is more likely to have grown up with Rock Around The Clock. The song is a signifier of Victorian-ness. It is there to tell us we are in the Olden Days. 

And that is also true of everything else. 

At the beginning of Episode 2, Chiang tells Chang that he needs a new victim. Chiang is a kind of science-vampire: to stay alive he has to drain life energy from human victims. "You must bring another linnet to my cage", he says. Not a mouse or a rat: a linnet. I am not absolutely sure what a linnet is: but I know Victorians kept them in cages. The captive born of noble rage, the linnet born within the cage. Off went the van with my home packed in it; I walked behind with my old cock linnet. My Old Man Said Follow The Van is the second song you think of when you think of Music Hall. It stands for the Olden Days almost as much as the Bicycle Made For Two does. It wasn't written until 1919; twenty years after the death of Queen Victoria. The Mystery of Fu Manchu came out in 1913. The Olden Days lasted a long time. 

In Episode 2, the Doctor tells Professor Litefoot that he found Leela floating down the Amazon in a hatbox. Litefoot incredulously replies "a HAT box?". A trace of a smile goes across the Doctor's face. Either the Doctor, or Tom Baker gets the joke: but Litefoot decidedly doesn't.. 

Litefoot himself is a bit of a joke. He is, to all intents and purposes, the same character as Doctor Watson. A decent chap, but with all the prejudices and assumptions of his age, and an absolute knack for getting the wrong end of every available stick. After the unfortunate cab-driver has been assassinated by a malevolent ventriloquist's dummy, Litefoot leaps to the conclusion that the cabbie "got stupidly drunk and picked a fight with a dwarf". The Doctor has foregone his floppy hat and scarf, and spends the story dressed in a paisley jacket, tweed trousers, and a deerstalker hat. Theatrical manager Jago goes so far as to say that the Doctor solves most of Scotland Yard's cases and allows them to take the credit; and that the Doctor and Litefoot are the most formidable duo in the annals of criminology. Jago also discovers a masked, deformed murderer living underneath his theatre. The Doctor says that his adversary is like a vampire. He explains that Chiang is looking for a lost Time Machine. No-one seems to have read Oscar Wilde, or Conan Doyle or Gaston Leroux or Bram Stoker or H.G Wells. And certainly not Sax Rohmer. 

Talons of Weng-Chiang is a Victorian fiction entirely constructed out of other Victorian fiction: but none of the Victorians have read the books. How could they possibly have done? 

"On my oath, gov, you wouldn't want that served with onions" says the madwoman. Considering what the Whitechapel murderer used to do to his victims, this remark is in especially poor taste. 

PLOT 

The Doctor arrives in a city where a number of young women have mysteriously disappeared. It turns out that they have been kidnapped by cultists. It turns out that the leader of the cult is a cult-leader and that he is using mind control powers to control their minds. It turns out that the cult leader works for a being he thinks is a god. It turns out that the god feeds by sucking the life energy from the kidnapped women. It turns out that he is searching the city for a valuable artefact. It turns out that the god is really a war-criminal from the far future and the valuable artefact is a time machine. The Doctor beats him in the end. 

CLUE 

Talons of Weng Chiang does not have a plot. It has a series of links, of stitches, pathways which get us from one trope to the next. The links are intricate; the story is brilliantly constructed; a perfectly oiled narrative machine. But the paths lead nowhere. The story is bound together by nonsense. 

If you are a Doctor Who fan, you have seen Talons of Weng Chiang a hundred times. But I wonder if you could write a coherent summary: draw a map of which McGuffin propels which character to which location in which episode? One link leads to another, but there is Nothing At The End of the Chain. 

Leela is menaced by a giant rat in the sewer. She is in the sewer because she and the Doctor witnessed a murder and believe that is where the body must have been thrown. They believe the body must have been thrown into the sewer because the sewer flows into the river and that's where the body was found. The man was murdered because he came to the theater to ask the conjuror about the whereabouts of his wife. The conjuror abducted his wife because he is the servant of a Chinese God called Weng-Chiang. Weng-Chiang needs victims because he drains their life energy. Chang is posing as a conjuror because this provides a stream of female victims. They have to be female victims because... because... because... 

The endless chain of arbitrary links makes Talons of Weng-Chiang more than usually re-watchable. We forget the details; so we are surprised every time we watch the story. We enjoy saying "Aha!" every time Jago finds the glove bearing the monogram of the wife of the cab driver who was found dead in the river in the cellar of the theatre... 

Robert Holmes' script may sometimes do a little too much showing and not quite enough telling. In Episode 4 Leela sees Chang kidnapping a woman, and follows them back to his lair. Leela sees the captive woman: Leela sees a wardrobe. We see Chang take the woman to Chiang. And then we see the the woman is in the wardrobe. We have to infer that Leela has switched clothes with the woman: and Holmes doesn't give us much time to do so. But this tends to make the story even more memorable. We have to give it our full attention. The viewer collaborates with the writer.

There are several moments in the story when I think -- "Hang on: what is Leela doing in Chiang's lair" and "Wait a minute, why is the Doctor back in the theatre?" In each case, I went back a few moves and found that there was, in fact, a decent reason. Only the meaning of Chang's "Chinese puzzle" clue to the whereabouts of Chiang's lair in Episode 6 leaves me baffled after multiple rewatches. 

Some of it is contrived. The Doctor makes friends with Prof. Litefoot; Prof. Litefoot is conducting an autopsy on the body recovered from the river. (The body of the cab driver who came to the theatre to ask the Chinese conjurer if he knew what happened to his wife...) We know that the man was murdered by the Chinese martial arts ninja; we know that the the Chinese martial arts ninja are connected to the Chinese conjuror; and we know that the Chinese conjuror is looking for a Chinese McGuffin which is located somewhere in London. And suddenly, out of the blue Litefoot remembers that he just happens to have been brought up in China, and he just happens to have in his possession a mysterious Chinese cabinet that just happens to have been gifted to his late father by the Emperor himself... But this kind of contrivance is itself a Victorian cliche: the implausible plot developments make the story even more like itself. 

"Aha!" we all say. 

The McGuffins bring the characters together and separate them. The Doctor and Leela. Leela and Litefoot, the Doctor and Jago. Litefoot and the Doctor. And finally, inevitably, Litefoot and Jago. It is fun to watch Litefoot being the perfect Victorian gentleman while Leela eats whole joints of meat with her fingers. It is fun to watch him playing Watson to the Doctor's Holmes. And it is fun to watch blustering braggart Jago admitting that he is a coward and silly old fashioned Litefoot telling him that’s okay. Of course they don’t move the story forward. They get captured, they try to escape, they get captured again, and they get rescued by the Doctor. But Jago and Litefoot aren’t there to advance the plot. If anything they are the to slow it down. The plot exists in order to force Jago and Litefoot to spend some time together. 

PLOT 

Five thousand years in the future, the earth is experiencing a new ice-age and the human race is dabbling with dangerous new technology. Chinese scientists create a cyborg with the brain of a pig: they give it to the children of the Icelandic Commissioner as a toy, as you would; but it turns out to be so malevolent that it causes a war between Iceland and South East Asia; with the Doctor fighting on the Philippine side. 

Meanwhile an Australian politician, Magnus Greel -- becomes involved in an experiment, created by one Prof Findicker, to create a working Time Machine. This Time Machine uses zigma energy; human DNA; and psychic power: many thousands of humans are sacrificed to make it work. Greel is branded a war criminal, and uses the experimental time machine to escape. He takes the psychotic Chinese pig-doll with him. For some reason.

He arrives in China sometime after 1861, during the reign of emperor Tong Chi. Tong Chi's soldiers take the Time Machine from him, leaving him trapped in the nineteenth century. The zigma energy or possibly something else has effected his body, causing him to become horribly deformed. A Chinese peasant forms the impression that he is the deity Weng-Chiang. Greel gives the peasant powerful mind control powers, because he can, for some reason. The peasant becomes the leader of a cult of kung-fu ninja who worship Weng-Chiang. 

In 1860, Brigadier General Litefoot travels to China to put down a rebellion during the opium wars. After the war, he remains as a British representative in the Imperial court, and has a child, George. The Brigadier dies prior to 1875, and his wife returns to England with their son. The emperor gives them the Time Machine (not knowing its significance) as a gift. 

Over the next decade and a half, Greel, the Peasant and the Mannequin try to track the Time Cabinet down, eventually tracing it to London some time after 1888. 

Greel constructs a device which sucks the life energy from human females (to sustain him, as he still hasn't recovered from travelling through time). The process of building the device causes rats and spiders to grow to enormous size. For some reason. He trains them to respond to a Chinese gong and uses them to guard his lair. The Peasant pretends to be a stage conjuror and the killer mannequin pretends to be a ventriloquist’s dummy. He uses his mind control powers to hypnotise pretty ladies as part of his act and brings them down to Greel's lair afterwards, so Greel can feed on them. The energy draining machine only works on pretty ladies. For some reason. Eventually, he works out that the cabinet is still in the possession of Brigadier Litefoot's son, now a police doctor, who, by a staggering coincidence, is investigating murders committed by Greel's cultists and the dummy. 

He tries to get it back and go back to the future but the Doctor stops him. 

NONSENSE 

On the surface, Talons of Weng-Chiang is a Victorian melodrama about Fu Manchu and Jack the Ripper and the Phantom of the Opera. But beneath the surface, it is "really" about a war criminal from the future and a murderous toy and a failed experiment in time travel. 

Many Doctor Who stories work along these lines. Pyramids of Mars is a spooky story about an Egyptian curse in an Edwardian country house; but the Egyptian god is "really" an evil alien. Brain of Morbius is a loving pastiche of a Hammer Frankenstien movie; but it is "really" the story of an evil Time Lord and a failed revolution. The story of the Osirans is part of our enjoyment of Pyramids of Mars; and the story of Gallifrey and the Sisterhood of Kahn is a big part of our enjoyment of Brain of Morbius. But Magnus Greel, the Peking Homunculus and the Fifth, or possibly Sixth, World War have almost zero contribution to our enjoyment of Talons of Weng-Chiang. They don't amount to a back-story; they are just a hand-wave. They aren't even pseudo-science, they are just noise. 

"Look -- over there!"

There are giant rats. The murder victim has bite wounds and preternaturally long rat hairs on his body. So there must be giant rats. 

The Chinese Ninja belong to a Tong which worships Weng Chiang: and the Doctor notes that Weng Chiang is legendarily a god of abundance. So that explains why there are giant rats. 

Leela describes the police officers as "blue guards" and it occurs to the Doctor that the giant rats must have been put in the sewers as guards. So that explains why there are giant rats. 

The masked phantom living in the sewers beneath the cellar of the theatre is guarded by giant sewer rats. Of course he is. What else would he be guarded by?  One of the untold tales of Sherlock Holmes involved a giant rat. Sumatra is a long way from Iceland, but not too far from the Philippines. 

Doctor Who often seems to be driven by brain-storming: by an association of images. If the story is set in Italy then there will be intrigue, and torture, and astrology, and sword fights, and an evil Duke, and Leonardo Da Vinci, and salami. Scotland suggests bagpipes, moors, oil rigs, lairds, haggis, and lake monsters. So if this is the nineteenth century, of course there is a phantom underneath the theatre, and of course he is ugly, and of course he has a hat and a mask and of course he is guarded by rats. 

But Weng-Chiang isn't really a Chinese god. He's a war criminal from three thousand years in the future with a broken time machine. This piece of information should make everything else -- the mask, the rats, the hypnotism, the vampirism, the evil Chinese martial arts ninja -- fall into place. There should come a moment in the story when we can say "There was a perfectly sensible reason why all the science fiction things this Time Travelling Australian Butcher was doing would just happen to look like a Bram Stoker / Sax Rohmer / Conan Doyle mash up. Aha!"

But this moment entirely fails to come. It pointedly fails. Holmes' solution doesn't merely fail to make sense: it jumps up and down, waving its hands in the air, singing "Sense oh sense, oh sense, sense is what I do not make!" 

The Doctor says that Weng-Chiang -- Magnus Greel -- is deformed because "with his DNA helixes split open, the more cells he absorbs into himself, the more deformed he becomes.” 

"And the rats?" asks Leela 

"Just an experiment. He had to gauge the strength of the psionic amplification field. The rats were handy. After that, they were useful as sewer guards" 

Leela doesn't reply "That's silly" but I rather wish she had. 

What is a psionic amplification field? "Psionic" normally refers to mind powers, and Chiang has given Chang "mental powers undreamt of in this century": but why would that make rats grow, particularly? Chiang's deformity has something to do with the way in which he is preying on human females. But it also has something to do with his use of the Time Cabinet. And if he mends the Time Cabinet, something called Zigma energy will destroy London. Because of elastic. 

The evil ventriloquist's dummy is a decent enough idea. The puppet seems to move of its own volition; Jago finds blood on its hands. It helps to kill the cabbie in part 1 and tries to kill Leela in part 2 and Litefoot in part 3. A lot of people find dummies -- like clowns -- creepy and uncanny: inert caricatures of a human that seem to be alive but isn’t. But there is nothing particularly creepy or uncanny about a robot with a pig's brain. We have met artificial humans before. Last week there was a Sand Miner full of them. There aren't a lot of obvious Victorian precursors to Mr Sin: perhaps Victorian dolls weren't lifelike enough to be spooky. Holmes seems to flirt with the idea that Mr Sin is the instigator of the plot: the idea of a puppet that controls its master has obvious horror potential. We are told that the dummy is in reality "The Peking Homunculus"; that it is notoriously evil; that it almost started a war. It looks like a doll because it was constructed as a toy: it turned evil because it has a pig's brain. "It has a pig's brain" is a non-explanation, on a level with "that box is small and that box is far away." We don't generally think of pigs as especially psychotic animals. And it isn't quite clear that having a pig's brain would make a wooden robot grunt. Mr Sin seemed spooky and uncanny, but he is really only a small wooden psychopath.

Tom Baker once said that the role of the Doctor required him to speak complete nonsense with total conviction -- something which his Catholic background and flirtation with the priesthood gave him ample practice in. Neither part of that statement is completely fair. But I think it is true that we remember lines like "I was with the Filipino army at the final advance on Reykjavik" because of Tom Baker's starry-eyed delivery. It is a good line. I think Russell T Davies went a bit overboard in saying it was as good as anything Dennis Potter ever wrote, but it is a good line nonetheless. If it had been given to Jon Pertwee or Peter Davison we wouldn't remember it.  

How does an army get from South East Asia to Scandinavia? Has "Reykjavik" come in simply because of the reference to the New Ice Age in episode 5? If Greel is the Butcher of Brisbane, does that mean he is an Australian? Or is he a Philippine who committed an atrocity against the Australians? So why does he have a posh English accent? And why does his Time Machine have nineteenth century Chinese styling? 

There are fan fiction explanations. There are novels and audio plays. But in the original TV context the lines don’t make sense and deliberately don't make sense. Holmes has written "I was the butcher of .... the least plausible city you could think of... I was with the army of...somewhere incredibly unlikely....in the last advance on...somewhere even more incredibly unlikely..." He is signalling to the audience, as clearly as he possibly can, that these lines don’t really refer to anything at all. 

Doctor Who deals in pseudo-science all the time. But pseudo-science is different from nonsense. We don't know how the TARDIS works, or what a fluid link is, but we understand perfectly well that he needs some mercury to make the TARDIS fly. We don't know how the Sash of Rassilon works, but we understand that someone wearing it can get close to the Eye of Harmony, which would otherwise kill them. 

But this is not pseudo-science. It is nonsense. Misdirection. Don't think about this. If you think about this the magic will go away.

Why are there giant rats? Because. 

Why is Greel deformed? Science. 

Why is Mr Sin? Because science. 

Why is the Time Cabinet? Science. 

What is Greel trying to do? Science. DNA. Zigma energy. Psionic amplificiation. Pig's brains. This box is big, and that box is far away. 

Next tlick: velly simple. 

COUNTERFACTUAL 

At the end of Episode 5, Leela pulls off Chiang's mask and reveals the deformed face...of the Master. He was last seen escaping from Gallifrey in a grandfather clock three stories ago.

And in this single image, everything in the story makes sense. The innocent victims (the Master has run out of regenerations); the Time Cabinet (the Master's TARDIS has a chameleon circuit); Chiang's powers of hypnosis (he's the Master) and his general malevolence (he's the Master). 

Once you know this, it is impossible to unknow it. 

Of course Greel was originally meant to be the Master. Look at Chang kneeling to Chiang in Episode 2, very much as Goth knelt to the Master in Deadly Assassin. Think how much more sense it would make if Chiang had said "a Time Lord would not ask questions" rather than "a Time Agent would not ask questions". (Time Agents are not mentioned again, in this story, or in any other story. They indirectly cause Torchwood in the New Era.) And listen to Chang describing one of his victims as "a morsel that will feed my regeneration". 

"Because Chiang is the Master" is a very good answer to the question "Why are there giant rats in the sewers?” The Master is a villain by profession, so of course he is doing the kinds of things a villain would do. Very probably he is the archetype on whom the legends of Dracula and Jack the Ripper were based; just as surely as the Doctor and Litefoot gave rise to the legend of Holmes and Watson. 

But Hinchcliff vetoed the Master. He didn't want to use the same villain twice in one season. (Tell that to Barry Letts and John Nathan-Turner.) So "The Master, who has run out of regenerations is searching for his TARDIS" had to become "Just Some Villain, who is deformed, for some reason, is searching for some kind of time machine". 

The Master himself is only a plot device. He is a useful tool for explaining why there are demons in English country churches and killer plastic daffodils on the high street. He is a baddie because he is a baddie and we accept that he is a baddie and skip over the explanations. Holmes did not replace an established villain with a new one. He replaced a well established plot device with a hastily improvised one. 

The producer said "I think we are making too much use of the sonic screwdriver".

"Very well," replied the script writer. "In this story the Doctor will open a locked door with his luminous door opening courgette." 

CONTEXT

Feb 1972:  First season of Kung Fu begins on ITV

Dec 1973:  First issue of Marvel Comics Master of Kung Fu 

5 Mar 1975: Vengeance of Fu Manchu starring Christopher Lee shown on BBC 1 

24 Apr 1976: New season of the Black and White Minstrel Show begins on BBC 1 

4 Sep 1976: Two Ronnies Season 5 begins on BBC 1 

4 Sep 1976: Season 15 of Doctor Who begins on BBC 1 

5 Sep 1976: First Season of The Muppet Show begins on ITV 

23 Oct 1976: Two Ronnies Season 5 ends 

11 Feb 1977: Woman murdered by serial killer in Leeds

12 Feb 1977: First season of The Muppet Show ends 

24 Feb 1977: Larry Grayson and Hinge and Bracket star in the Good Old Days on BBC 1

26 Feb 1977:  Talons of Weng Chiang begins 

10 Mar 1977:  Arthur Askey and Josef Lock star in the Good Old Days on BBC 1 

2 Apr 1977:   Talons of Weng Chiang ends 

23 Apr 1977:  Woman murdered by serial killer in Leeds. 

13 Jun 1977: Two Ronnies Season 5 repeated 

12 Jul 1977:  New series of the Black and White Minstrel Show begins on BBC 1

16 Jun 1978: Final series of the Black and White Minstrel show begins on BBC 1

22 May 1981: Peter Sutcliffe sentenced to life in prison for the murders of at least thirteen women in and around Leeds. 

30 Sep 1983: Vengeance of Fu Manchu starring Christopher Lee shown on BBC 1

25 Mar 1987: Vengeance of Fu Manchu starring Christopher Lee shown on BBC 1

18 May 1989: Vengeance of Fu Manchu starring Christopher Lee shown on BBC 1

THE GOOD OLD DAYS 

Talons of Weng-Chiang does not begin with sinister Chinese conjurors or psychopathic mannequins: and it very emphatically does not beging with the assassination of the president of Iceland. It begins with a theatre audience The theatre audience is applauding wildly. One of the ladies is wearing a flowery straw hat, tied under the chin. One of the men has a pipe in the corner of his mouth; another is smoking one of those curly calabash pipes we associate with detectives. And there is a younger fellow in a red uniform: he could be a soldier, a bell-boy or a character from a box of Quality Street. 

It is 1977. We know where we are. Not in the Nineteenth Century. Not in Victorian Times. Not in Dickensian London. 

In the good old days. 

Come, come, come and make eyes at me 

Down at the Old Bull and Bush... 

Doctor Who began in 1963. The BBC had already been broadcasting a show called The Good Old Days for a decade. It eventually clocked up thirty seasons: the Doctor only managed twenty seven. 

Some people say that the age of music hall ended with the death of Max Miller. He died the same year Doctor Who started. Many people who watched An Unearthly Child would have had memories of seeing Marie Lloyd sing My Old Man Said Follow the Van live. The good old days were not that long ago. 

Victorian music halls were rough, boozy places and the jokes were dirty by the standards of the day; the Good Old Days was a very sanitised exercise in nostalgia. A resident dance troupe performed elaborately choreographed song and dance routines incorporating medleys of the old songs, but big name contemporary performers like Roy Castle and Ken Dodd did roughly the same turn they would have done in any other revue. It wasn't glitzy: for that you went to Sunday Night at the London Palladium on the other side. But it was popular and well-loved and an institution in its own right. The audience were encouraged to dress up in Victorian clothes: there was a long waiting list for tickets. 

The show was chaired by Leonard Sachs (latterly Borusa in Arc of Infinity) who gave absurdly wordy, alliterative introductions often translating them back into plain English for the benefit of an imaginary ignoramus in the audience. "An exuberantly extrovert extravaganza of uninhibited hilarity and equilibristic acumen....funny acrobatics!" 

Jago is the first (and indeed last) person to speak in Talons of Weng Chiang. His dialogue is pure Sachs. "I shall doubtless descry those lugubrious liniments at the crepuscular hour". When we first saw Talons of Weng-Chiang, we felt that we were watching the Phantom of the Leeds Variety Theatre; seeing unconvincing rats menace the Good Old Days; watching the host of our favourite light entertainment show trying to escape from the Tong by means of a dumb waiter. 

It is worth noting that the day after Season 14 of Doctor Who began, ITV launched the most sensational inspirational, celebrational Muppet Show -- which also involved an old-fashioned theatre, views of an enthusiastic audience, back stage action, and an unthreatening puppet rat. Variety was very much in the air. 

Come, come, drink some port wine with me 

Down at the old Bull and Bush 

Almost as popular as the Good Old Days, and very nearly as old fashioned was the Two Ronnies. Ronnie Corbett and Ronnie Barker weren't quite a double act, and their show doesn’t quite have the cachet of Morecambe and Wise. But their weekly confection of sketches, monologues and silly songs, are very fondly remembered. 

The show included a weekly serial, usually a parody, in a different comedic style from the rest of the programme. They haven't worn very well: The Worm That Turned was a pitch-perfect skit on BBC dystopian fiction based on the terrifying premise that, er, feminists have taken over the world. (There was also a cod police drama called Death Can Be Fatal.) Season 5's serial (September/October 1976) was a Victorian melodrama, written by the great Spike Milligan. The Ronnies normally dealt in puns and mild innuendo but this was much more in the surreal vein of Milligan's Goon Show. 

It runs through all the expected Victorian cliches: dense police officers, Queens who are not amused, and a shoe-maker who just happens to have royal connections. (There is a sign outside his shop reading "Cobblers to the Queen".) There is a lot of fog. A figure in absurd traditional Chinese dress appears alongside a Scotsman in a kilt, a vicar with a dog collar, and a man in an old fashioned swim-suit at a police identity parade. "It's so hard to choose..." says the eye witness "They all look so alike!" 

Now, in Episode 3 of Talons of Weng-Chiang, there is a brief cameo appearance by a young woman named Teresa. (She's the one who Leela cleverly switches clothes with.) It is mildly insinuated that she is a prostitute: but most of us would have associated her with Eliza in My Fair Lady. (You can't help hearing Audrey Hepburn's voice when she protests "I'm a lady!") East End rhyming slang is a real thing but when someone says "all I want is a pair of smoked kippers, a cup of rosie and put me plates up for a few hours, savvy" we understand that we are in the presence of a Stage Cockney. 

Having been rescued by Leela, Teresa notices the poster of Chang on the theatre wall, realises he is the person who kidnapped her, and exclaims "It's him! It's him!". 

And along with two thirds of the audience, I instantly interpolated the voice of Ronnie Barker into the soundtrack: 

"It's....the Phantom Raspberry Blower of Old London Town!" 

Milligan's Raspberry Blower, who wanders the fog-shrouded streets of London, surprising women and sticking his tongue out at them, is a burlesque version of the Whitechapel Murderer. When Casey, Jago's painfully Irish factotum, hears that a woman has been kidnapped from the theatre, he wonders whether Jack the Ripper has struck again. 

A few weeks before the BBC showed Talons of Weng-Chiang, a woman named Irene Richardson was murdered in Leeds, Yorkshire. A few weeks afterwards, a woman named Patricia Atkinson was similarly murdered in Bradford. The press took to referring to the killer as the Yorkshire Ripper: the police received a tape recorded message, purporting to come from the murderer, who referred to himself as Jack. 

The Phantom of the Opera. The Yorkshire Ripper. The Phantom Raspberry Blower of Old London Town. The Good Old Days. My Fair Lady. The Muppet Show. 

Everything is intertextual. Nothing happens in a vacuum. A whale is never just a whale. 

Do, do, come and have a drink or two 

Down at the old bull and bush, bush, bush 

MYTH 

C.S Lewis didn't like the Three Musketeers very much. He said that it didn't have any atmosphere: it was just a sequence of thrilling adventures, without any sense of place. On the other hand he enjoyed stories like Last of the Mohicans because they conveyed the atmosphere of the mythical American wilderness -- what he unfortunately described as "Redskinnery". Wagner is full of "northernness" and Squirrel Nutkin contains "the idea of autumn". Hamlet is a collection of images which cumulatively convey the atmosphere of death. Real places have atmosphere too: we can speak of the Londonness of London and the Donegality of Donegal. 

In his silly book about astrological symbolism, Michael Ward tries to get us to adopt the term Donegality as meaning "atmosphere-in-Lewis's-sense". 

When the first generation of fans lamented the passing away of "magic" from Doctor Who, I don't think that they were merely looking at their childhoods round the telly through rose tinted spectacles, though doubtless that was part of it. I think they were talking about Donegality. Very Old Who can be boring, sexist, repetitive and silly. But it had a sense of place which the more sophisticated stories didn't do nearly so well. When I watch Season 1 I do feel a sense of the Skaro-ness of Skaro, the Stone-Age-ness of the Stone Age -- and, crucially, the TARDISness of the TARDIS. It is hard to point to Season 14 and say that you have experienced the Sand-Miner-ness of the Sand Miner or the Kastianess of Kastia. 

In the aftermath of Deadly Assassin, the stories which were most frequently said to have restored the old "magic" to the show were precisely the ones with a strong sense of place -- for example Ribos Operation and Keeper of Traken. 

Doctor Who is about Time Travel. The TARDIS is a magic box. We don't want historical fiction. We don't want a plot that makes sense. We don't necessarily want a good story. What we want is to feel that the time cabinet has taken us back to the good old days. 

Talons of Weng-Chiang gives us that feeling. A feeling of time and place. The cumulative effect of tropes, cliches, stereotypes. Atmosphere. Donegality. Magic. The Victorianness of Victorian times. 

Next season, the show's penultimate producer will take over. It will become the show I remember best; the show I fell in love with: Tom Baker will become truly “my Doctor”. There will be weird aliens, cosmic plots, a robot dog and jelly babies. It will drink at the same well as Douglas Adams and George Lucas. But it will also become increasingly low budget and silly. And then, in the final years, it will turn from self-parody to fan-fiction, intelligible only to devotees. 

Talons of Weng-Chiang is the perfect Doctor Who story. Talons of Weng-Chiang is the final example of Doctor Who doing what Doctor Who was created to do. Talons of Weng-Chiang is the fulfilment of the promise of An Unearthly Child. Talons of Weng-Chiang may not have been the greatest Doctor Who story. It was certainly not the last good Doctor Who story. But Talons of Weng-Chiang was the last Doctor Who story I felt I didn't need to apologise for. 

It is also incredibly racist. 

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