I don't often change my mind, but when I do, I do.

I don't very often change my mind: but when I do, I do.

About big things, I mean. I change my mind about whether I ought to order pancakes or a burger in the Boston Tea Party and whether it would be more fun to head over the road for a pint or stay in with a cup of tea and the new Acolyte several times in a minute.

I recall an pal of mine being slightly miffed because in or about 2000 I recommended that he read Hero With a Thousand Faces, and in or about 2010 I wrote a series of articles saying that Joseph Campbell was a snake oil salesman and charlatan.

I recently wrote an article saying that I had stopped watching a particular TV show that I used to watch rather assiduously, and you'd be surprised how many people ask me what I thought of the last series. "I didn't watch it. I thought I made this fairly clear; I'd decided to make a clean break for the sake of the kids. It's only a TV show, after all."

I've occasionally changed my mind about friends. Not usually after having a catastrophic row: if you can be bothered to have catastrophic rows you are probably still friends. ("You can really only hate people if you love them" as my mother once sagely remarked.) More kind of coming to the conclusion that neither of us are finding hanging out together very enjoyable any more and its probably time to give it up. But you'd be surprised how often people say "I suppose you'll be going out for a drink with Hezekiah when they're next in town" and I'll be, like, "Well no, we're kind of not friends anymore; I thought you knew that." I understand that people who do the romance thing call this process "breaking up" although I think in that case it generally does involve catastrophic rows.

But I think in practice most of us are more like the Pope. Our opinions and tastes and beliefs are not the same today as they were a decade ago: why would they be? But we are inclined to suddenly and infallibly declare that we never liked the restaurant that over-charged us for the undercooked fish, and we always thought the food there was terrible. And we always thought the goatee beard was a terrible idea; and always knew that Neil Gaiman was a wrong 'un and indeed never thought Sandman was very good to begin with. 

I am pretty sure that I thought that Harry Potter was kind of okay but not worth all the shouting before JK Rowling came out as a deeply unpleasant person; and I still think that Harry Potter is kind of okay but not worth all the shouting now JK Rowling is engaged in a race to the bottom on So Shall Mee Jah.

So Andrew: have you changed you mind about Jeremy Corbyn; are you still a socialist; or have you in fact admitted that you never believed in any of that nonsense to begin with?

It's complicated. 

I think perhaps Gloria Swanson summed up my position. I am still a socialist. But the movies got conservative.

Like the Bellman, I have said this several times before. I think that there are two ways of running a country. There is the approach which says that everyone must contribute some of their money to a Great Big Kitty, and that the money in the Great Big Kitty should be used to buy nice things which everyone can share: hospitals, schools, colleges, pensions, prisons, atom bombs, etc. And there is the approach that says that no-one has any business taking other peoples money and putting it in a communal pot; and that people should be free to buy the nice things they actually want with the money they have actually earned. (If one of the things they choose to do with their money is "donate it to help poor people" then that's their business. With great power doesn't necessarily come any responsibility at all.)

Hardly anyone has ever been 100% committed to the most extreme forms of either position. Of course, the Red Party (or the Blue Party, in America) are going to claim that the Blue (Red) Party think that taxation should be zero, that poor people who get sick should be shovelled into communal graves and kids whose parents can't afford school fees should be handed over to Jonathan Swift's new chain of landlord friendly fast food joints. (Look it up.) And of course the Blue Party (or the Red Party, in America) are always going to claim that the Red/Blue Party want to take 100% of your money, give most of it to black lesbian sociology collectives and force everyone to eat borscht at communal state funded kitchens while chanting passages from Owen Jones' Little Red Book. In real life the distinction has generally been between people like me who want slightly higher taxes, and slightly more nice things and the majority who want slightly lower taxes and are prepared to live with slightly fewer nice things.

That's the answer to the question about "have you ever had tea with a socialist?" and "would you ever kiss a Tory?" If by "Conservative" you mean "someone who would cut the Higher Rate of Income Tax" and by Socialist you mean "someone who would increase the Basic Rate" then of course the Plowboy and the Cowman can be friends. There are very good people on both sides. Not all socialists are Kobynites and not all Konservatives are Kunts. 

God help me, last time around I knocked on doors on behalf of Thangam Debonaire. And from what I can tell, she was a perfectly nice person and a perfectly hard working MP. (I am sure people who pay attention to these things will now send me letters pointing out that she was too far one way or the other way on Gaza and not far enough one way or the other way on Gender, but the point stands.) I knocked on doors because I wanted Jeremy Corbyn to be prime minister, or, failing that, to be the strongest possible leader of the opposition.

This never happens.

I fairly quickly formed the opinion that it could never have happened. I do not exactly say that Jeremy Corbyn -- and Tony Benn and Michael Foot and indeed Harold Wilson -- were errors which should never have occurred; and I definitely do not think that Tony Blair is right, or even intelligible, on anything at all. But I do now think that there is no point in campaigning for socialism (on any definition) in this country.

If the issue had been Jeremy's personal electability then things would be a lot muddier. Sadly, Labour didn't lose the 2019 election because Jeremy was telling Romanian spies about Mrs Thatcher's preferred breakfast cereal; or because he wore a donkey jacket to the National Anthem or didn't sing the words of his bacon sandwich. He didn't even lose the election because he was an existential threat to all the Jews in Europe. (Whenever I hear something referred to as an existential threat, I imagine a threat in a black polo neck jumper with a French accent which shrugs a lot, but that is probably just me.)

If any of that had been the case the Fight Would Go On. It would just be a matter of finding a Better Jeremy. My New Labour Friends ("of whom I have none") still believe that I, and everyone else who thought that Jeremy was in with a shout of getting the through the doors to 10 Downing Street, were bewitched by his magnetic personality. We apparently have a Thing about old beardy guys with cardigans. No one can look into their own hearts or see there own secret motivations. Probably some 1980s Tories really did support radical monetarism because they had a thing about being told off by strict nannies. Maybe a certain number of Starmerites would run screaming into the arms of any charismatic prosecutor with a knighthood.[1] But at any conscious level, I supported Corbyn because Corbyn was putting forward the kind of policies which I agreed with an have always agreed with. Charge people more and buy more stuff with it. I would no longer support Corbyn because I no longer think we can have a country where the rich pay more and everyone shares the nice things. Unlike the Right, I don't think there is a sinister anti-woke mob who control everything; I don't believe there is a cabal of Cultural McCarthyites hidden away in a secret base in Frankfurt plotting the upfall of civilisation. I do think that the press, including the supposedly unbiassed elements of the press like the BBC and the supposedly left wing elements of the press like the Guardian all presented Corbyn in the worst possible light. 

But mainly, I think that the Labour Party is a loose coalition of left wingers and social democrats; and that the Tory party is a loose coalition of right wingers and social democrats; and the social democrats in the Labour Party would much rather the Tories got into power for a bit than that the left wing faction in their party should get into the ascendency. There was never any point in getting a newer and shinier left wing standard bearer to replace Jeremy. All the moderates would have upped and formed their own party which would have split the opposition vote and kept the Tories in power. There is certainly no point in the Left breaking away and starting a new party; that party would not win any elections, and it would make it easier for the Tories to win them. Even Jezza himself -- who did win his own seat as an independent, god bless him -- talks in terms of starting a movement, not forming a government.

I voted for Darren Jones, the official Labour candidate, who not only won, but celebrated his victory by making a quite good joke. I'm fine with that. We voted the Bastards out and that's the main thing. Darren Jones is a suspiciously working class name. I wonder what he's really called?

But I am left in an uncomfortable position. 

("That's because you've been sitting at the Mac typing since eight o clock this morning, Andrew. Why not get up and walk round the room for a few minutes?")

During every election debate, Rishi Sunak accused Kier Starmer of believing in the exact things I think he should believe in, and during every election debate, Kier Starmer denied that he believed them, and indeed, insinuated that saying that he believe them was a vile slurs. Don't vote for this man, we kept hearing, because if he gets in he will put up taxes and spend the money on welfare. 

And I did beat my chest and wail exceedingly and cry unto the TV screen saying "I would to God that that were true."

Maths and logic and ideology tells me that you can tax more and spend more or you can tax less and spend less. 

Or you can borrow. I am not clever enough to understand who countries borrow from and where the money goes; but it is generally considered to be not a great idea because you eventually have to pay it back and the only way you can pay it back is by taking money out of the Big Kitty and replenishing it with more tax money. 

However, there is now a consensus around a third position that you can not put up taxes and still have money to spend on nice things Because Growth. To that extent we're all on the same page as Liz Truss's cabbage. If everyone makes more widgets and sells more coffee (and especially, I think, builds more AI Net Zero Windmills) then money will money will flow into the kitty and we can have all the nice things we need.

I do not not want this to work. Kier Starmer absolutely seems like a competent guy and I think he's sincere when he talks about service and making the country better for everyone and his Dad being a toolmaker. I want there to be schools and libraries and roads and eventually student grants and tuition fees and trains you can travel on for less than three figures. I want the poor to be a bit richer and the rich to be a bit poorer: I have always assumed that the Tories are happy for the rich to get richer and the poor to get poorer, as in good Queen Margaret's golden time. Starmer has gambled 2029 on it being possible for the poor to get richer without the rich needing to get any poorer. 

And if he's right, I'm wrong: from each according to his ability to each according to his need was never a desirable goal. Indeed, if he's right, either Jesus Christ was wrong, or else Jesus Christ was right at a personal level but there is no means of applying Christian ethics to the economic or political sphere. If only we made the needles eye wider the poor would no longer be with us. And that would represent quite a radical change of mind on my part. 

See you in five years, God willing.

[*] Did you hear about the lawyer who had a fetish for jurisprudence? He got off on a technicality.

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This is me writing about the election

This is me writing about the election. 

So. We have had an election. We have voted the bastards out. There is now no need to go through the horrible process again until 2029. It would be nice to think that the success of Starmer's dull nice reasonable sensible party would mean that five years from now the Conservatives will try to outflank him by being even duller, even nicer, even more reasonable and even more sensible. But all the evidence is that their response to Starmer's nice part is go even further in the direction of being the complete bastard and nutter bastard party.

Someone on the American Twitter recently directed a question at LIBERALS:

Do you actually, personally know any conservatives? Do you really believe that they are as horrible as you say they are? Have you ever just taken the chance, sat down, and just talk with them? You might be surprised to find that they are actually human beings, just like you. You might even be surprised to find that they are exhausted and scared. You might even just discover that they're a lot like you after all.

Which is a nice bit of rhetoric. It's worth deconstructing, slightly. It is, of course, directed at conservatives, not at liberals: the Tweeter and the Tweetee are assumed to agree that LIBERALS don't believe that conservatives are human beings; that LIBERALS as a group don't think conservatives are anything like them; and the LIBERALS, as a point of principle, don't talk to conservatives. In the exact moment of saying "Liberals, don't demonise the other side" the other side is in fact demonising the liberals. They could have framed the question as "do you know any one with the opposite political views to yourself?" But they didn't.

But we long ago proved that most public conservatives utterances are a form of performance art; in which the actual views of conservatives are inverted and comedically attributed to liberals. Conservatives reallt do believe that everyone to the left of them politically are Stalinists and Communists; so they accuse the Left of saying that anyone they don't like is a Nazi. Conservatives are actively engaged in removing books they don't like from libraries, so they claim that the defining feature of the Left is that they don't allow freedom of speech. It's a fine old game. 

Conservatives -- do you actually know any liberals? Do you really believe they are as mindless as you say they are? Have you ever taken the chance to sit down with a member of the woke mob, and just talked to them? You might find out that they are human beings just like you....

Another man on the internet once wrote that Sigmund Freud spoke of "the Nazism of small differences." Rather ironically this was a Freudian slip: what the great man actually talked about was "the narcissism of small differences". But either way, it is a good point. It's a terrible cliche to say that all the political parties are exactly the same and just as bad as one another. But it is also true that more similar two sides become, the more fervently they hate each other. I seem to recall Monty Python wrote a funny sketch around this point. Labour has moved further and further away from it's original left wing principles; they have in fact found more and more common ground with the Conservative Party. And they are understandably reluctant to admit this. I think this post-Brexit centre-right consensus makes the discourse more poisonous than it needs to be. I have an impression that in the olden days when there real, ideological differences between politicians, there was less need to resort to abuse. Enoch Powell and Tony Benn could afford to have a civilised debate about their massive ideological differences of opinion. David Cameron could at least be open about how much he despised Jeremy Corbyn. 

The Right of the Tory Party think that Sunak is woke; the left of the Labour Party think that Starmer is Tory Lite; literally everyone agrees that the Tories have made a shocking mess of everything. It's not an argument about ideology; it's and argument about competence, that the Tories were always going to lose.  The two leaders spent six weeks pretending that they thought the other one was a monster whose election or re-election would instigate an apocalypse cover all the lands of Middle-earth in a second darkness. But under slightly different circumstances, they could very easily have been in the same party.

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Andrew thought he had better say something about the election

Andrew thought he had better say something about the election.

When Andrew writes about important subjects like Doctor Who and the Micronauts, he often edits and polishes and checks facts in standard reference works Wikipedia. He generally doesn't start a piece until he has thought up an interesting new angle or spotted something no-one has spotted before. He could perhaps sometimes be legitimately accused of overthinking.

Having just finished a long summation of Tom Baker's ante-penultimate season; he was quite tired. And he was about to go on his annual holiday to Sidmouth. So he thought he would blurt out everything he didn't have to say about the election in a couple of writing sessions and get them out into the world with minimum editing. 

Of course, I know how this goes. I expect that every writer does. You hand a friend some hastily written note and said "This is a very rough draft of the first couple of paragraphs of an idea I had, could you scan it and tell me if it's worth carrying on with?" and the friend will definitely say "I think there is an "e" in phenomenologial, and it would look better with Em dashes." Hand a friend a typescript and say "This is going to the publisher tomorrow; could you check it for any really obvious typos?" and the friend will say "I don't think the main character's dialect was authentic, and it would work better if it was set in the seventeenth century rather than modern times."

At least three times in the last twelve months I have published highly confessional apologia explaining why I am who I am and why I do what I do. No-one appeared to notice. Not that I particularly write in order to be noticed. And the best feedback is that sixty people send me money each month so that I can buy time to carry on doing what I am doing. But I fully expect any off-the-cuff and not particularly well thought through remarks I make about Kier Starmer is likely to be taken as my irrevocable judgement and result in a deluge of six or seven messages from the American internet.

I like both kinds of responses. I liked it when people use my blog as a forum to talk about things loosely related to my blog. Unfortunately, He Who Must Not Be Named killed or curtailed that, as one assumes he intended. I like the other kind, the kind when people give me money, even more. But I am kind of aware that just saying what I am thinking is a hostage to fortune.

I suppose there are always moments when writers start to write about why they write about writing. I know that some people find the Jocycean web of cultural reference points and insider jokes a barrier to reading my nonsense: so let's just say that the forgoing was my equivalent of Howard the Duck issue 16 and move on, shall we?

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Walk the Line (2)

 He talked of poetry and Cornish saints;

He kept an apiary and a cow;

He asked me which church service I liked best —

I told him Evensong… “And I suppose

You think religion’s mostly singing hymns

And feeling warm and comfortable inside?”

And he was right: most certainly I did.

                 John Betjeman

Paul Screeton dedicates an extended chapter of Quicksilver Heritage to UFOs. It opens with a rather moving account of a childhood holiday in the 1950s: 

"Once upon a time a small boy stayed for his summer holidays with distant relatives at a house in the scenic village of Redmire in Yorkshire in Wensleydale, where time passes so slow. He had a den at the bottom of the garden, beyond the nettles, where newts were hoarded in a glass tank..."

After a couple of paragraphs in this vein, he reveals that, during the holiday, he saw "a discoid golden craft" manoeuvring over Pen Hill.

"Years later the small boy read books about flying saucers, eventually heard of leys, began publishing a magazine on the two subjects and subsequently wrote this book. That day at Redmire my future path was marked."

The light is extraterrestrial rather than celestial; but meadow, grove and stream appear to be apparelled in it.  Everything else follows from that visionary gleam.  A charming holiday; a UFO sighting; a book about English pathways; enlightenment and the great work of the alchemist. Join the dots. My future path. The old straight track. 

The point is not that Alfred Watkins drew some lines on a map. That wouldn't be particularly interesting. The point isn't even that stone-age man might have used stones or trees to find his way. He very probably did. Hikers sometimes use churches as landmarks, or used to before the invention of mobile phones. Churches are very often aligned East-West, but that doesn't prove that the Ramblers Association are sun-worshippers. But ley lines aren't a theory; they are an epiphany. 

"Alfred Watkins discovery was in the nature of a vision" writes Screeton. "The revelation took the form of a rush of images forming a coherent whole. The insight...was as breathtaking as any vision any shaman, guru or mystic has experienced."

John Michell goes a lot further. "Suddenly in a flash he saw something which no-one in England had seen for perhaps thousands of years...The barrier of time melted and spread across the country, he saw a web of lines, linking holy places and sites of antiquity...In one moment of transcendent perception Watkins entered the magic world of prehistoric Britain, a world whose very existence has been forgotten."

If ley-lines are real, then it makes perfect sense that believers look for big, dramatic markers on maps, and then for smaller, less obvious markers on the ground. You'd expect them to have compasses and spirit levels and metal detectors and spades. Maybe they'd divide an area up into squares, and catalogue what was in each square, and look for statistically significant patterns. 

But this is not how Screeton and Michell envisage the Quest proceeding. 

"....He will walk through sunlit glades, meditate under gospel oaks, rest his weary feet on special mounds while listening to highflying skylarks....Slowly he will become attuned to the scene; his perception having shifted, there will appear a vibrant countryside humming not only with the buzz of bumblebees, the call of the curlew, or the scamper of rabbits, but throughout it all, the energy of nature, and criss-crossing it, always straight, the heartbeat of magic power which keep it alive...."

My paperback edition of Quicksilver Heritage was published in 1977.  A not insignificant date. If you wanted to, you could sum up the entire message of the book in five words.  "May the force be with you".

We are sometimes told that there is a thing called spirituality in all religious faiths. Politicians sometimes say that they support religious education because it promotes this thing called spirituality. Sometimes they say that they would happily get rid of religious education altogether and teach this spirituality thing instead. Spirituality has recently been repackaged as "mindfulness" -- as if that part of Buddhism where you sit facing a wall not thinking of anything in particular can be detached from the noble eightfold path and sold to people with boring stressful soul-destroying jobs as a technique for not minding too much. Different people: same old opium. 

But I guess we broadly know what spirituality is. It's what Daleks and Chatbots don't have. It's the bit which Thomas Gradgrind and Richard Dawkins don't believe in. Two chaps see a waterfall: one says "this is pretty" and the other says "this is sublime". But the third chap feels that it is imbued with significance and importance and meaning that he can't quite put into words. That thing which he can't put into words is spirituality. 

And there will probably be a fourth man saying that if you can't put it into words and express it to three significant figures and a margin for error, that it doesn't exist. Even the word "pretty" is a bit dodgy.

Evangelicals and Charismatics are inclined to reduce Christianity to a feeling -- an intense, personal moment of being "saved"; an ecstatic, shamanistic hysteria which sometimes breaks out at religious performances. They talk about "getting religion" and "being full of glory"; they may be "slain in the spirit" or start to "speak in tongues".

I don't know how many people in the born-again community have honestly experienced this. I don't know how common it is to have an overwhelmingly specific sensation of "making peace within" and "having your vile sins lifted". I strongly suspect that most of them merely point to a particular moment when they vaguely thought "Maybe I'll swing by that church and find out what they do there" or "This preacher seems to be making a lot more sense than I expected him to" and defined that as their moment of being Saved. They talk about chains falling off and dungeons flaming with light after the event because that's the kind of language they've been taught to use. The New Testament has a good deal to say about upper rooms and roads to Damascus, but you'd have to search quite hard for the primacy of the conversion experience.

If you start out with the idea that the world is a huge battle between God and Screwtape it's not so hard to attribute spiritual significance to every day vicissitudes. "Satan hid my keys. I thought this was because he wanted to make me late for work. But in fact, he was trying to provoke me to use vulgar language. I resisted the temptation to swear. And sure enough, God revealed that I had put the key-fob down right by the kettle, like I always do. And then Satan departed from me, biding his time."

And that's not necessarily an unhelpful or unhealthy way of thinking. If anything has a spiritual dimension than everything does. And it did stop you from saying shit. But the fact that you lost your keys and found them again is not, I think, proof of the existence of God. Or Screwtape. Or anyone else.

If you have a strong belief that there is a magic line between Warwick Castle and Stratford-on-Avon Parish Church, then it is not particularly surprising that, when you walk along the line, you start to notice things that you wouldn't have noticed if you hadn't been looking for them. And if that makes you love this English earth more than you ever did before -- if it makes you feel that you are at some spiritual level transmuting base metal into gold -- I have not the slightest intention of telling you that it's not true. 

It's the concrete claims which are problematic. 

"To say that leys do not exist is to say that motorways do not exist. Both can be found on maps."

No, they can't. 

 "To say that ley power does not exist is to say that electricity does not exist. Both can be felt."

No, they can't. 

I come back to one of the men who taught me Chaucer at college. One day, out for a walk on a very cold night, he found a baby, abandoned in a telephone box. He took the infant to hospital; she recovered; he became her godfather. If he had gone for his walk at a slightly different time or on a slightly different path, the baby would certainly have died. He later described the event as "Providential". 

"I do not mean that if I did not already believe in Providence this event would have made me do so, but that, since I have that belief, the event fits readily to it."

You don't need to believe in flying saucers to think that if you get away from it all for a while, you will start to perceive sermons in stones and books in the running brooks. Alfred Watkins was hardly the first person to think that one murmur from the vernal Brook will teach you more of moral evil and of good than all the sages can. xxxx

Quicksilver Heritage mentions in passing that the early Christian Gnostics believed in a singular God; but that their unique insight was that humans could have direct contact with Him. A lot of Christians, particularly Christians of the born again protestant flavour, would say that "direct contact with God" is the unique selling point of Christianity.

Screeton suggests that the main point of ley lines is that they are a means of getting in touch with what he calls (following one John Keel) The Great Whatzit In The Sky. He's a bit vague as to whether The Great Whatzit is God or the Space People. I don't suppose it makes much difference. 

Joseph Campbell said that all mythology points us towards the Final Incomprehensible Mystery. He shares with the ley hunters the bad habit of drawing lines between things which have nothing in common. The Hero's Journey is every bit as imaginary and every bit as methodologically dubious as the ley system.

But that doesn't mean it isn't real. Joseph Campbell and Alfred Watkins had ideas, and we can't unthink them. We can't look at a stone circle without seeing lines of power. We can't watch a movie without seeing the Hero With a Thousand Faces. If all stories are true, then stories about stories are true to the power of truth. I rather suspect that the Final Incomprehensible Mystery and the Great Whatzit in the Sky are the same fella. 

Campbell tells the story of the western philosopher who asked a Shinto practitioner to explain the ideology and theology of his faith. 

"We don't have any ideology" replied the Shinto guy "We don't have any theology. We just dance."

Plenty of people would tell you that there is a nothing in the sky, great or otherwise. Plenty of people would tell you that nothing is mysterious, nothing is final and quite definitely nothing is incomprehensible. The belief in ley lines is a belief in something. Ley hunters don't have an ideology or a theology. They just went for a walk. 

The closest I ever got to actual ley hunting was a hiking holiday around Glastonbury when I was maybe nineteen. I was probably already too critical and too actually knowledgeable about the King Arthur literature to look at the landscape in quite the right light. I fairly consciously decided that if I was really interested in the Holy Grail, Glastonbury Abbey and Joseph of Arimathea, the most rational thing to be was a common or garden English Christian. I believe that is what pandits tell westerners who want to convert to Hinduism. It's Anglicans, not hippies, who literally drink from the chalice of Jesus's blood every Sunday. 

But the vibe -- the olden days England vibe, and the sense that stone circles are esoteric and mercurial never quite goes away. I deeply adore the Celestials and the Monolith. But Stone-Age-Man walking an invisible grid system and opening himself up to the Cosmos with a capital C has a magic all of its own. 

Quicksilver Heritage is a silly book. Researching this article I came across an essay (actually an interview) with one man who thinks that it is very silly indeed.  The "crystals, chakra, ether, orgone energy and spiritual bluff and guff" amounted to  "New Age pap" he says.  

"It now looks upon a quick scan" he goes on "like a right rag-bag of undiluted pseudoscience, pseudo-philosophy and too much following others’ woolly-thinking" 

The man expressing this opinion was, of course, Paul Screeton. He now describes himself as a gnostic Christian. 

I was there when it happened, so I guess I ought to know

Johnny Cash 

This is an epilogue to a series of articles on the Doctor Who story Stones of Blood. 

The whole series has already appeared on my Patreon. 

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

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

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Doctor Who Season 16: Stones of Blood (4)

VII: Tom

Stones of Blood is a terrible story. Stones of Blood is a terrible Doctor Who story. But this is not quite the same thing as saying that Stones of Blood is terrible.

It's entertaining. It's not boring. It's funny. It has a certain Doctor Who-ish quality to it, particularly if you are not paying attention. It's got Tom Baker in it. It's got Mary Tamm in it. And it's got K-9 in it. K-9 the annoying piece of hardware from Season 15 has become K-9 the character, K-9 the comic foil. We can no more imagine Tom Baker without K-9 than we can imagine Patrick Troughton without Jamie.

How are we supposed to watch Stones of Blood? The Doctor chained to an altar stone, menaced by unfriendly druids? The Doctor condemned to death by evil justice robots? Romana dangling from the edge of a cliff?

How do we react? Are we worried -- worried that the Doctor might die; as worried as we would be if we read in the news that a real-life person had been kidnapped by terrorists?

Do we think that is how the story is really going to end? "I guess I started watching too late: just in time to find out how this Doctor character finally dies?"

Or are we slightly more sophisticated viewers, but still focussed on what happens next. "I know, of course, that the Doctor will escape, but I wonder how he will pull it off? I wonder what ingenious solution the writers are going to come up with this week?"

The Librarians are Awesome Brigade keep on telling us that reading is a form of hallucination. As long as you are under the influence of a psychotropic novel, the people and places in the story are more real to you than your immediate surroundings. If you are aware of the hand of the author, the book has failed: the search for symbolism, sub-text and irony is antithetical to the reading experience.

And I suppose that is also how some people watch television. A TV show is an illusion. You believe that Inspector Morse and [Insert Name Of Eastenders Character Here] are real people whose lives you are observing. I am not talking about the very, very early cinema audiences who honestly thought that the steam train might come crashing through the screen and squish them. You are aware that it's all an illusion. You are perfectly well aware that Death In Paradise is not a fly-on-the-wall documentary about the day-to-day life of police officers on a Caribbean island. But it succeeds as drama precisely to the extent that you are able to pretend that it is. 

I guess that approach works for some TV shows better than others, in the same way that the Librarians Are Awesome approach applies to Lee Child more than it does to James Joyce.

Nothing against Lee Child. Nothing against James Joyce.

It may be that this kind of thinking lies behind the fannish obsession with canon and continuity. The more the scripts contradict each other, the harder it is to maintain the belief that what you are watching is reality TV. And it may lie behind a lot of chat about "special effects" and in particular "wobbly sets". If Matt Irvine (the special effects guy) is an illusionist -- trying to fool us into believing that we are actually having the experience of seeing a spaceship -- then we have to say that he is not very good at this job. Not as good as the folks at Industrial Light and Magic, anyway. But perhaps he is more in the nature of a storyteller -- a puppeteer  -- showing us an obvious model in order to suggest the idea of a spaceship?

The test case might, in fact, be Thunderbirds, which is explicitly a puppet show which shouts its artificiality from every frame. Some people like it a lot. Others not so much.

If drama is falsified reality TV -- if the excitement depends on our belief that the hero might really die -- then Doctor Who is and always has been an abject failure.

But perhaps our enjoyment of Doctor Who is more formal; more epicurean. We enjoy the idea of heroes chained to altars and heroines clinging to cliffs; we get aesthetic satisfaction from cliffhangers; even though we are way, way past finding them frightening or thrilling or thinking for one moment that our heroes may actually come to a soggy end.

Stones of Blood came out at the same time I was first reading Sherlock Holmes. I was also reading, gods of literature forgive me, the Shadow: little American paperbacks with yellow-edged pages and Steranko covers. The Shadow gets into cliff-hanging situations pretty often. Holmes, not so much. Although one story famously ends on a very literal one. In both cases, I liked the idea of the books more than I liked the actual books. I liked the pipe and slippers and the secret sanctum; the snarky chats with Watson and the secret messages to his agents; the opal fire ring and the hansom cabs; the invisible ink and the fussy landlady. There was almost a slight sense of disappointment when Holmes leaves Baker Street to solve some puzzle about a governess, a dog and a snake; or when the Shadow leaves his mysterious black lined radio studio to rescue a white lady from some terrifying racial stereotype. 

How do we feel when the Doctor wakes up and cracks a joke about the druid with the knife? Are we relieved because we honestly thought our friend the Doctor might have died? Or do we feel aesthetic pleasure because the hero has escaped from an archetypal death trap in a genre-appropriate fashion?

Do we smile because Tom Baker the actor has delivered a funny line in a wonderfully deadpan way? Or are we cross because the dramatic pulp cliffhanger scene has been turned into a skit?

Does the funny line enhance the sense of danger and adventure? Or does it explode, undermine, and undercut it? 

Did I watch Doctor Who mainly for the scenes on the TARDIS? Was I a little disappointed when they left the Ship and started on this week's Adventure? Graham Williams understands that there should be a moment on the TARDIS, a moment when K-9 fails to explain tennis to Romana, or when the Doctor leaves his hat on the uppsy-downsy control column for no reason. A moment when we are at home and all is right with the universe. And there should be a moment afterwards when normality resumes and everyone smiles and laughs and there is no Post Adventure Stress Disorder. The Doctor has been within seconds of execution twice in a single day, and is none the worse for the experience.

Who is Who for? For whom is Who?

In 1978 Doctor Who was the thing which happened to be on the screen of the receiving device which happened to be in your front room and happened to be switched on at the time. Some people simply ignored it, in the way that they ignored the music coming over the gramophone at a party and the pattern on Granny's wallpaper. Some were watching it less passively: but Stone Circles and Spaceships and evil squires and human sacrifices and cliffs were simply the kinds of things you would expect to be running past your eyes at that time on a Saturday evening. It was us fans, glued to the set and trying to get the sound track onto a C60 cassette (don't deny it) who were falsifying the experience. Just as we falsify it now with our blue-rays and our commentaries and our fan feuds.

Doctor Who starts to go wrong when it starts to assume that the audience is paying attention. Warriors' Gate is a much, much better story than Stones of Blood. But it is a much worse Doctor Who story, and arguably a much worse piece of television. 

Why did we switch on? We switched on to spend time with Tom. With Mary and K-9 as well, of course, but they exist mainly to put Tom's Tomness into sharper and sharper relief. No shame in that. In the days of vaudeville, straight men often commanded higher salaries than comedians.

Tom intersected with me in exactly the right years. Tom is the whole reason I fell in love with the show. Tom is the whole reason I fell in love with science fiction. Tom is the reason I am typing these words. Tom Baker is what everything built up to, and what everything which came afterwards failed to live up to. 

Not just everything in Doctor Who. Everything.

Graham Williams recognised that Tom Baker owned Doctor Who. Graham Williams sees that the only purpose of a script is to create a space for Tom Baker to be Tom Baker in. Graham Williams understands that as long as Tom Baker carries on being Tom Baker, people will carry on watching Doctor Who.

But a problem will emerge. Tom being Tom is not sufficient: we need Tom to be the Doctor. In the early seasons he had nuance. He was Tom Baker, the Actor. Tom Baker who had shared a stage (though no actual scenes) with Sir Laurence Olivier. Tom Baker who took all his clothes off for Pasolini, albeit fairly reluctantly. And that Tom Baker is fading away. The grin is gradually turning into a sneer. If the Doctor no longer takes the universe entirely seriously, that's because Tom Baker no longer takes Doctor Who entirely seriously.

And it works. Up to a point. One of the things we like about the Doctor is that he can stick his tongue out at Teacher and not get whacked. He resents authority figures, so naturally he resents being pushed around by the White Guardian. But the White Guardian is manifestly an authorial self insertion. The White Guardian is the personification of the Plot. And once the main character has rejected the Plot, the narrative falls apart. We're not watching a story about a hero being menaced by evil stone worshippers. We're just watching some big kids playing "human sacrifices".

Maybe Actor Tom despises the material. Maybe he's doing the best he can with material that David Fisher despises. It's funny; it's mesmerizing. But we're engaged in the deconstruction of the whole idea of Doctor Who. It is not going to end well.  

Tommy Cooper and John Cleese were just funny: their appearance, their demeanour, their presence. They could walk on to a stage and people would laugh. (This certainly isn't true of every comedian. Rowan Atkinson is famously dull without a script in front of him.) Maybe Tom Baker is just charismatic. Maybe Tom Baker is just the Doctor. Put him on a set and point a camera in his direction and we can't not love him. 

VIII: Ending

The Doctor defeats Viviane Fay, and says goodbye to Emilia.

She doesn't seem at all bothered that her friend, who she has shared a cottage with for at least several weeks, has been turned into stone for a billion years.

Actress Beatrix Lehmann was openly gay at a time when being openly gay wasn't a very safe thing to be. Graham Williams had wanted to hire Honor Blackman to play Vivian. (Honor Blackman correctly spotted that Beatrix Lehmann gets all the best lines.) Perhaps we are supposed to infer a slight -- frisson -- in the cottage? 

She give it all she's got; slightly too much, in fact, trying to make sense of some very silly lines. When Romana gently kisses her goodbye (she certainly never kisses the Doctor!) Emilia puts her hand very subtly on her cheek.

She is surprised that she has never noticed a Police Box on the moor before. She's old enough to remember when Police Boxes were a ubiquitous part of English street furniture, and doesn't know they have been phased out. Or maybe the story is set in the 1950s; there is no particular reason why it couldn't be.

And as the Doctor and Romana go into the TARDIS she acts at them. As the TARDIS disappears, she continues to acts ("I do have my academic reputation to consider"). And then she acts a bit more. She does a double-take. She sighs.

And once again, we expect to hear the signature tune; since the episode has quite clearly come to an end.

But for absolutely no reason we go back to the TARDIS, and we see the Doctor putting the segment in the cupboard, and we have a tiny homeopathic bit of business reminding us that he can't always tell how the segments fit together. And then we get a final exchange. 

Romana asks "Is Earth always like that?" A silly question: she is perfectly aware that what they have just experienced can in no way be thought of as a typical day on the blue planet. And the Doctor replies "Sometimes it's even exciting." 

He does not say "Sometimes, it's even more exciting". That would have made sense. That would have implied that what they had just been through was exciting, but that even more exciting things sometimes happen. But "sometimes it's even exciting" implies that what has just happened is not exciting. That the last adventure was dull. 

"Exciting" is not what you would say if you had a narrowly escaped being stabbed and sentenced to death on the same day. Traumatic would be nearly the mark. It's us viewers who are meant to find adventure stories exciting.

The Doctor has, once again, stepped out of the frame. He has commented on the story from the viewers point of view. He has said, in effect, "That was quite a dull story." And he's not wrong. 

And there you have it. Ribos Operation is not a Doctor Who story. Pirate Planet is a comedically extreme Doctor Who story. And Stones of Blood is a consciously bad Doctor Who story. Thesis; antithesis; synthesis. The metafiction remains intact. What will come next in the chain?

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

The whole series has already appeared on my Patreon. 

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

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

Rilstone on Stones of Blood

Rilstone on Androids of Tara

Rilstone On the Election

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Answers To Readers Questions

Achille Talon said...

I tend to feel the Doctor (and Romana) can shrug off execution threats because they are, after all, Time Lords. What's a body? Romana could even probably reconstitute herself as Lalla Ward again, if she didn't fancy a surprise change; she turns out of Ward and back again in the Destiny scenes. When the Doctor treats deadly threats seriously, it's because he has a more fragile human companion by his side, and is more broadly concerned with threats running amok and killing ordinary people.

(Face the Raven: "Why? Why shouldn't I be so reckless? You're reckless! All the bloody time! Why can't I be like you?" "Clara, there's nothing special about me, I am nothing, but I'm less breakable than you. I should have taken care of you.")

Possibly there's a line to be drawn between the decision of pairing the Doctor up with a fellow immortal, rather than a human, and his increasing insulation from natural human reactions to deadly peril.

This is a very interesting point. 

There can certainly be stories about immortal or indestructible heroes. The trick is to create jeopardy even though the hero's own life can't be in danger, and perhaps to show him surviving ever more extreme perils: e.g Captain Scarlet goes into the centre of an nuclear explosion in order to retrieve a weapon to save Earth from the Mysterons. Or else you treat it as a puzzle and try to find out ways of killing the unkillable man. What if you cut Captain Scarlet up into little tiny pieces, and put each piece in a space rocket and send them to different corners of the galaxy? Can Superman survive indefinitely without food or oxygen, and if so, why does he eat and breath in the first place? But one never feels that Doctor Who is "playing" with regeneration and immortality in that way.

In classic Who, the definition of "regeneration" was always fuzzy. The term was only coined in Planet of the Spiders. I don't think that in 1978 we had reached the point where "Death means nothing to a Time Lord because they can live indefinitely" was established lore. The argument was made semi-officially that Hartnell > Troughton was a "rejuvenation" and Troughton > Pertwee was "a change of appearance". The Romana regeneration, which we will come to shortly, suggest that either Graham Williams didn't remember Planet of the Spiders, or else that he didn't care. And Logopolis introduces The Watcher without explanation and treats regeneration as slightly new and surprising thing. "Ho hum I'll probably regenerate" doesn't come in until Caves of Androzani.

What does regeneration mean for a Time Lord? For Romana, it is just like changing a dress; for the First Doctor, it's like coming out of a chrysalis; for the Second, like being forced to adopt an unattractive disguise. New Who seems to treat it like reincarnation: the present form is really dying; but some essential element is carried over into the new form. Krishna told Arjun that death in battle is nothing to be feared because he will go on to a new life; Arjun replies that since he will be leaving his friends and loved ones, death is still death even if you subsequently get another try at life. The point being, I think, that the problem is not mortality but attachment. 

When the Doctor and Romana think that the TARDIS is going to be destroyed in Pirate Planet, they say that its been an honour to have known each other. When the Doctor goes to sabotage the nuke in Power of Kroll, he says goodbye to Romana in case he doesn't come back. When going to confront the giant squid he says that he has had a good life and can't complain if he dies. ("That's him saying that the Fourth Doctor has had a good life; bidding farewell to this incarnation." No: he specifically says that 760 is a great age, and that's clearly not the number of years he's been Tom Baker for.) 

I think that each individual Who story is constructed on the basis that the Doctor is putting his life on the line and that he could die; and that he would face death in the way that any brave (and spiritually serene) mortal would. I think regeneration is treated as a special case; and that there is a pact with the audience that it only happens when an actor wants to leave. 

Indeed, we could argue that the literary device which allows multiple actors to play the part of the Doctor deconstructs the narrative in which the Doctor is admirable because he risks his life for the greater good. It could, in fact, be that the introduction of the Twelve Regeneration limit in Deadly Assassin was Holmes' attempt to repair this crack. The fans who continued to argue right up to 2017 that the Twelve Regeneration was involatile and unchangeable might have been unconsciously recognising this point: if Capaldi isn't the last and final Doctor then the Doctor can't die and the series can't ever be exciting again. Many kids go through a stage of thinking that first person narratives aren't exciting, because they know that the hero must survive to tell the story. Which is a good point, in a way, but kind of misses the point of stories.

All that said "The Doctor laughs in the face of death because he knows he will Regenerate" is a perfectly good Watsonian description of what happens; and is a good work-around if "The Doctor is a meta-textual device who can break the fourth wall" is uncongenial.