Bristol Nativist / Slave Trade Apologist Bingo, continued

For no doubt others from our recorded pasts are also likely to suffer the similar biased cultural shredding of Colston and I suspect there will be further opposition from authentic Bristolians…
      R L Smith

The music committee's sole aim, it would appear, is to change the name of a certain Bristol building - something I supsect 90 percent of genuine Bristolians do not want.
     H. W White

And to the rest of you people living here, born and bred: do something. Don’t less this happen. Colson Hall is Bristol’s. It’s ours, yours and mine. It’s not theirs. 
     H.W WHite


While we’re about it why don’t we get rid of everything Italian (restaurants, food shops, etc) for all the slavery the Romans brought to our shores…and whilst on the subject, all our Danish pastry shops for the raping and pillaging the Vikings did to us.
     Tim Lalonde

My family came from France in the late 19th century…We’ve never sought an apology for Trafalgar, Waterloo, Agincourt…
     Tim Lalonde

…if we change the name of the Colston Hall then we also have to look at Wills, Cadbury’s and Fry’s, all philanthropic dynasties but no doubt something in their past would offend some people.
      “A Bristolian with a voting bug.”

While there are  those who would clearly prefer to see the name of Edward Colston eradicated from Bristol altogether, he was and always will be a part of our great city’s history, warts and all…
     Adrian Courtney Smith

Slavery was bad and we all say that now, but…
    “A Bristolian with a voting bug.”

10.4 Knock Knock

Knock-Knock?

Who’s there?

Doctor.

Doctor Who?

Yes, Doctor Who, you know, Doctor Who, off the television, do you get it? 

Doctor Who isn’t the name of the character, it’s the name of the TV show. Also, Frankenstein is the guy who made the monster, not the actual monster

You spoil all my jokes.

Knock knock jokes were really popular in the 1930s. They are a very lazy way of generating puns. Certain first names sound a bit like the first syllables of certain words and phrases. Ha ha.

Amos who? 

A mosquito. 

Arthur who? 

A thermometer. 

Theodore who?

The a door wasn't open which is why I knocked. 

I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue has an item called Late Arrivals at the Ball which is based on the same idea, but starts from punchline and leaves your to work out the feed. So while

Knock Knock

Who’s there?

Archie

Archie who?

Archipelago 

...barely even qualifies as a joke 

“Will you welcome to the geographer’s ball, Mr and Mrs Peligo and their son.....Archie…” 

…really does. Something to do with the time it takes your brain to process what is going on, I shouldn’t wonder. 

The knock knock joke was intended for children, but taken up in a big way by adults. The form is now very tired indeed, and neither children nor adults are particularly interested in it. However, you can still raise a laugh, at any rate from a small child, by using a knock knock joke to make a joke at the expense of knock knock jokes: to make the form of the joke the joke's subject. At a particular age: 

Knock Knock 

Who’s there? 

Europe 

Europe who?

No, you're a poo

is the funniest thing in the world, even though it breaks the rules of the game because Europe isn't anyone's first name. 

Knock knock

Who's there

Doctor...

is such a perfect example of an anti knock knock joke that it both effectively terminates the genre, and justifies its having existed in the first place. But I can't help thinking that it removes all the updock from the original idea. 

This week's Doctor Who story is called Knock Knock. Its one redeeming feature is that it doesn't contain a single knock knock joke. 

We are no longer in the days of benign amateurism, when Douglas Adams beat out scripts in his bedroom on a manual typewriter, so what they lacked in coherence and polish they made up for in being amazing. Knock Knock was written the same Mike Bartlett who wrote that Prince Charles thing which the Daily Mail wet its knickers over. He wins Olivier Awards and everything. Was the Beeb too nervous to tell him just how bad this script was? Or maybe he submitted something coherent and Mofffat’s editing job cut out all the improvements? Would the National Theater accept a challenging new work about students who say "awesome" and "wicked" and use mobile phones as a signifier of youth and modernity? Would any science fiction or horror magazine accept “there are these insects which turn ladies into wood and make them immortal because they just do okay” as a premise? Was it a spoof where the jokes somehow got lost in the post? Or are we in some twilight zone where this is what everyone expect light fantasy-horror to be like.

I mean, it’s a haunted house. A fucking haunted house. Has anyone treated the haunted house as anything other than a joke — as anything other than a fairground attraction, come to that — in the past hundred and fifty years?

I read the Mysteries of Udolpho during a course on English romanticism, which is the only reason to. It’s the classic gothic novel from which all other gothic novels come: with a heroine stuck in a romantic but mysterious house with a romantic but mysterious host; and lots of mysterious noises; mysterious locked rooms; and above all a mysterious black curtain that you mustn’t look behind under any circumstances.

In this or any gothic story the house itself is the main character. Mind you it doesn’t have to be a house. It could be a mansion or a castle or the Paris Opera. It translates into bricks and mortar a particular model of the human mind — all very pretty on the surface, but with locked doors and hidden tunnels and a vast cellar or labyrinth or sewer or bat-cave underneath it, full of terrible memories and forbidden desires…all of which magically go away if you pull down the veil, tear off the mask, or simply switch on the light. The Painfully Freudian Castle also pops up in Jane Eyre and Dracula and other books people actually read voluntarily. H.P Lovecraft is more gothic than the goths but he doesn’t really deal in castles. Too Euclidean, possibly. 

Jane Austen lampooned Udolpho in one of her earlier, funny books, and the Haunted House now survives mostly as a comedic idea. Bats fly out of towers; unreasonable amounts of lightening forks; floorboards creak; doors and shutters slam at random; people are heard moving around in empty room; mysterious music plays. Haunted houses are scary, but no-one is scared. They represent fear without being frightening. They are the kinds of places where you might encounter a funny sheet ghost, or even a friendly baby one, but definitely not the where you’d have a disturbing encounter with a relative you thought was long dead. The original Scooby Doo cartoon opened with the image of a gothic mansion (well, a New England colonial pile) replete with bats and lightening bolts to invoke the idea, not of horror, but very specifically of spookiness. 

Knock Knock is the result of a collision between two non-disastrous ideas for Doctor Who stories. They are smashed together with no regard for disguising the join or making even the vaguest amount of even fairy-tale sense. 

What if a group of students rented a house and found out that it was infested with cockroaches…but it then turned out that the cockroaches were actually evil alien monsters intent on invading the earth? 

What if a group of students rented a house and found out that it had a Jane Eyre style mad-woman in the attic? 

Both ideas would have worked better in a bog standard semi-detached des. res. but the Olivier Award Winning playwright places them in what is obviously and explicitly a Scooby Doo mansion. (Oh god, that lightening!) This requires absolutely everyone to be far stupider than any human being could ever actually be. David Suchet appears from nowhere, shows our characters around a house with no modern wiring, heating or wi-fi and a tower that the are not allowed to look in under any circumstances, and says “Would you like to sign….the contract” and no-one sees any potential downside. 

The house is populated by alien insects which hide in the woodwork but can be called to the surface by certain sounds  — a tuning fork, a record, but not, oddly, a sonic screwdriver. They can emerge in huge groups and consume humans in seconds — a bit like the invisible robot piranhas in Smile, but without even the decency to leave behind some bones for the garden. In the secret tower which no-one is allowed to visit lives landlord’s beautiful daughter. She was dying of movie-lady disease but the cockroaches saved her by turning her into wood. But the cockroaches have to periodically eat other humans to keep this one alive. We are given no hint as to any mechanism which makes this work: no magical explanation which says “they feed on human emotion” or “they survive by sucking the sparkle out of David Suchet’s acting”; but no pseudo-scientific explanation about harvesting squigglon gas which can only be found in burbleon neurons of adolescents either. 

The solution to the mystery is not ingenuity or bravery, but — once again — exorcism. Presumably, someone told the Olivier Award Winning Playwright was that that was what happened in Doctor Who: someone is bound to something, and some third party comes along and unbinds them by very emotionally giving them permission to depart. 

Thousands of questions about the scenario pour over us like a swarm of cockroaches. The Landlord’s beautiful daughter is actually the Landlord’s beautiful mother — this is what passes for The Twist. Many years ago in the Olden Days when his Mummy was sick a little boy found magic cockroaches in the garden and they made her immortal but also turned her into wood while he carried on getting older and older and finding students to feed the cockroaches. The cockroaches also give him the power to to manifest and disappear at will but this is not explained at any level. The Olden Days do not appear to have been any further back than the 1950s. How did it come about that a Little Boy and his Beautiful Mother were all alone in a gothic mansion and what happened to all the doctors and social workers and relatives?

Oh Andrew you spoil all my jokes you aren't supposed to ask questions like that it's only a children's programe no-one but you pays that much attention to it it isn't supposed to make sense. 

For the final denouement, the Landlord’s beautiful mother reveals that she can control the cockroaches with her mind — for how? And can infect her father by touch — for why? And as a final going away present she can bring the dead kids back to life. How? But only the recent ones. Not the ones who died in 1997 or 1977. Why not? 

Bill has acquired five friends who are looking for digs. There is the shy Asian one who Bill is kind of friends with. There is the tall Scottish one who tries to hit on Bill but is relieved when it turns out that she’s gay. There is the geeky one who retires to his room with violin music and gets eaten. And there is the geeky Northern one who hooks up with the Doctor, acting (and I use the word loosely) like an exceptionally gormless old-school companion, wide eyes, gibbering, at no point recognizing what is going on at any level. He is not un-coincidentally called Harry. I suppose Hogwarts is a kind of haunted house; he kept making me think of the very early Ron Weasley.

Apparently, in an early version of the script he was going to be the grandson of an exceptionally gormless old-school companion named Harry. (This would have been the one redeeming feature of the episode, so they cut it out.) 

It appears that these students have only just started at college (the episode ends with fireworks going off for the freshers party) -- but what student only starts looking for accommodation in the first week of term? Don’t most colleges arrange for you to live “in hall” in your first year? And aren’t most university towns full of private blocks of purpose-built student housing? And why are they using an estate agents rather than a specialist short term letting agency? And why doesn’t the letting agency point out that there is no point in looking for somewhere to live in a group of six and tell them to split up into pairs and be prepared to share rooms?

Thin Ice ended up more or less working as a story, despite plot holes large enough to drive an elephant through, because Fun Stuff kept on happening. Fun is in short supply here A 1950s house isn’t as interesting a place to visit as a Georgian Frost Fair, and finding that the kitchen windows have mysteriously locked themselves isn’t as exciting as scuba diving into the mouth of a mile long haddock. 

It is tempting to wonder if there is an overall story ark going on. Knock Knock has a house which is in some sense made of person-eating cockroaches; where Smile had a city which is some some sense made of person-eating robot piranhas. Thin Ice was set in a fairground, and Haunted Houses are mostly things you encounter in fairs. The Doctor excuses the inability of Frank Cottrell-Boyce to think of an ending to Smile by telling a story about a magic haddock, and Thin Ice has a giant haddock hidden under the Thames. This story is called Knock Knock, and the prisoner in the vault keeps knocking, and there was a prophecy at the end of David Tenant that the Master would knock four times. 

But that implies that someone is thinking about what they are doing. On on the evidence of this story, they really, really aren’t. 

In 1964, the First Doctor, on the run from the Daleks, materialized in what he believed was an alien dimension populated by the dark side of the human imagination — Dracula, the Wolf-Man, Frankenstein’s creature, Universal Pictures copyright lawyers, etc. It turned out that he is actually in a literal Haunted House: a “spooky” fairground attraction full of animatronic monsters. This is approximately five times more convincing than anything in this episode.

10.3 Thin Ice

Shall I tell you my favourite thing about Thin Ice? 

My favourite thing about Thin Ice is that when the street kids are taken to the big house for a meal, there there is milk, served in wine glasses, by their place settings. 

Someone sat down and thought about this. If you are going to give a group of early nineteenth century orphans a treat, then you give them a Christmas dinner, obviously, even if it is February. (Those are Christmas puddings on the table, aren’t they?) But what would you have given them to drink? Not fruit juice; oranges and grapes are still quite exotic, and you can’t get strawberries or raspberries out of season. Not wine or small beer. Not tea or coffee. So then, milk. Someone cared that much about getting the scene right. 

And no-one felt the need to say “Gee, Doc, I know this is the olden days and I don't understand time travel but couldn't anyone find some pepsi?”

*

So: the Doctor goes back in time to London, 1814. The Thames has frozen over, so everyone is having a festival on it, with fish pies and elephants and everything. This is a real thing: they did it on Blue Peter. (The overlap between what they did on Blue Peter and where Doctor Who goes has been insufficiently explored. Any day now I expect a story in which alien kangeroos take over the minds of the Tulpuddle Martyrs.) It was easier to obtain an elephant in those days because circuses and menageries were less squeamish about keeping wild animals in cages. Jesus was probably an elephant. 

It turns out that there is a gigantic Metaphor hidden under the ice. The Metaphor has lived there for hundreds of years. What the Metaphor does is eat little orphan children (and presumably other people, but mostly orphans) and shit them out the other end. The shit is collected by an Evil Capitalist who uses it to power his mills, which are, I imagine, dark and satanic.  At one point the Doctor thinks that the shit is going to be used to power a starship, but everyone gives up on this idea.

If we were talking about an animal we would ask if it only produced intensely flammable shit when it ate little boys, and how much faeces a mile long creature would be passing if all it had eaten since 1795 was a couple of small boys, and whether it wouldn't be more efficient for the Evil Capitalist to feed it cows and pigs?There are also little fish with luminous noses that swim round the Metaphor. Have they also been living in the Thames since 1788? What do they eat? Why has no-one ever caught one before? What is their relationship with the Metaphor? I suspect the true answer is “Someone had the idea of spooky green lights and came up with idea of dong-fish after the fact to retrofit the spooky lights to the Metaphor.” When someone is about to be sucked down under the ice, the green lights whizz round and round and form a vortex; which isn’t something you could remotely imagine the little fish doing. 

But it isn’t fair to ask how any of this shit works. It’s metaphorical shit. 

The dreadful Torchwood made extensive use of drug called “Plot Device”: when a human being saw an alien or discovered the existence of Torchwood, our heroes gave them a shot of the drug and they would instantly forget what had happened. (This idea was derived from Men in Black, as, indeed, was Torchwood.) There is a new consensus among Doctor Who writers that human beings don’t need the drug: they “have infinite capacity to forget the unusual and inexplicable”. Dalek invasions and giant metaphors in the Thames all get automatically edited out of everyone’s mind after they happen. That means Doctor Who is now taking place in a kind of invisible parallel universe, like London Below or Hogwarts. Homeless gods and wizards and fish with luminous noses are all around us all the time, but we never see them. 

Which would explain a good deal.

Obviously our idea that a slow-flowing river might freeze for a few days every couple of decades is a little lie we’ve invented to cover the uncomfortable fact that there has always been a giant Metaphor living under the Thames, and that one of the Metaphor's powers is to make everything really really cold. And obviously our far-fetched idea that if a big river in a big city did freeze over, carnies and street traders would move in and hold a big party there is necessary fib to cover up the fact that an Evil Capitalist was bribing people to go onto the ice in order to feed them to the Metaphor and turn them into shit to power his mills with. 

Obviously.

I assume that it is the same kind of ret-con drug which prevents everyone, including the audience, from understanding how the Metaphor works. Evil McEvilface makes it pretty clear that the fish represents Capitalism. That’s what Capitalism is for, isn’t it: chewing up little kids and shitting them out to power mills. But the Evil Capitalist is cunningly disguised as a one-note baddy who says racism and rehashes old Blackadder jokes, so no-one notices when he makes an extremely good point. There is no moral difference between sending little boys down mines, where they may die, in order to dig coal out of the ground, or feeding little boys to giant goldfish in order to harvest the goldfish poo. We are all, in a very real sense, Lord Sutcliff, which is why it is so satisfying when he gets punched. We have all, in a very real sense, sent orphan boys down coal mines and fed them to sea monsters. 

The Doctor doesn’t have a solution to the Metaphor. Or at least, he does have a solution, but not a very metaphorical one. The Evil Capitalist Mill Owner is going to blow up the Fair with explosives, so that the monster gets to eat everybody at once and do a really really big poo; but the Doctor escapes from being tied up while the orphans tell everyone to get off the ice and gets into a diving suit and transfers the explosives to the Metaphor’s chains, so the Metaphor can swim off to…wherever it came from and do...something happily ever after. Which is a lot better than last week and the week before and in fact next week where the Doctor solves the problem just by being the Doctor.

It isn’t even that great as a non-metaphorical solution, really. Right back at the beginning of New Who, the Doctor was chastised for not thinking through the consequences of his actions — not worrying about where defeated slitheen go at the end of the episode. Today, he is quite happy to just let the Metaphor swim away and not give a second though to where it came from and where it is going to go and how many orphans it is going to eat along the way. 

At the very end, he physically alters evil Lord Sutcliff’s evil will so that one of the un-eaten orphans inherits the evil money he made from killing orphans. But this doesn’t address the general issue of capitalism devouring children. Even metaphorically.

*

Thin Ice is recognizably a Doctor Who story; and even a good Doctor Who story. Not a great Doctor Who story — political sketch writers 50 years from now will not reference the story in order to poke fun at the incumbent prime minister — but a good one. The Doctor goes back to the olden days, and encounters a monster. Not merely an alien: a monster. The twist — that the giant, orphan eating fish is relatively benign (provided you don’t mourn the orphans to much) and the real monster is Capitalism — is the kind of twist that Doctor Who has done once a season since the 1960s. The Doctor defeats the monster using his ingenuity and innate goodness, and returns home literally in time for tea. What could be more like Doctor Who than that? 

It is very possible to imagine Doctor William or Doctor Patrick visiting the Frost Fair. And it is a racing certainty that they would have found some sort of Monster under the ice. Well, Doctor Patrick would have done. Doctor William would have had to foil a plot to assassinate the prince regent while Ian and Barbara got involved in a separate plot about one of the wrestlers turning out to be a runaway Moorish prince. And the BBC would have done it very well: impressive painted backdrops, and six or seven extras in period costume, with historical research that would warm your teacher’s hearts. But you wouldn’t have had sweeping shots over the Thames, London skylines, scores of extras, wrestlers, jugglers, elephants, orphans, and a whole nother plot-line set in a posh Regency house. Or any black people at all. 

This isn’t merely “spectacle” or, god forbid “special effects”. This is about taking us back to a particular time and place and making it live again, which is arguably the whole point of Doctor Who. Bill loves it, the Doctor loves it, we love it.  We get chases across the ice. We see the Doctor and Billy in massively anachronistic diving suits, looking into the giant eye of a mile long sea creature. We see the Doctor and Bill tied up, and doing the classic heroic wriggle to free themselves from the ropes. We see the Doctor bantering with con-men and reading stories to little kids and punching fascists. The nasty capitalist who feeds orphans to sea monsters gets eaten by the sea monster in the final scene. No buckle remains unswashed; no devil is undared. This is what I watch Doctor Who for; if Doctor Who were like this every week, I would have nothing to complain about and this column would be very boring.

So here comes the "but"...

When Evil McEvilFace asks the Doctor about the relative merits of coal mines and fish poo as a means of exploiting the working class, the Doctor replies: “Human progress isn’t measured by industry. It’s measured by the value you place on a life. An unimportant life….” This is a non-ridiculous thing for a liberal hero to say. It would work rather will in William Shatner's voice. But everyone swoons as if the Doctor has suddenly picked up Jessie Custer's knack of speaking in read typescript. The villain stops the action to tell us what a brilliant speech it was; and two scenes later Bill, who has previously misread the Doctor as being callous, wonders out loud how long it took the Doctor to make speeches like that. Which spoils the scene, the Doctor, and the perfectly harmless little speech. The Doctor is special and unique and we know he is special and unique because everyone keeps telling us how special and unique he is. Everything he does has to be triple underlined in fluorescent yellow marker pen.

“I make inspirational speeches now. Inspirational speeches are cool.” 

I grant that one of the things which Old Who did very badly was character development and emotion; and I grant that the Doctor’s conversation with Bill after the first orphan has died is piece of proper writing being performed by two proper actors. I perceived it has the Doctor talking to Bill, not two actors doing a Scene. (This is really the main thing I want from Doctor Who, Star Wars or indeed Twelfth Night.) But it is still self-referential as hell. Yes, of course, obviously, it’s a massive problem in any long-running adventure serial that if you remotely pretended that the main character was a real person, you’d have to conclude that he was a complete psychopath. (How many of Peter Parker's intimate acquaintances and close family members have been murdered?) This is a worse problem if the hero is nominally a liberal nice guy and not, say, a soldier or policeman whose job it is to deal with horrible stuff. And all Bill's aria about "how many people have you seen die / how many people have you killed" does is highlight the contradiction (in fluorescent yellow ink.) The Doctor couldn't possibly remain the affable trickster we see on the screen if we really believed he'd seen that much horror. So we really don't want our attention drawing to it. 

“But Andrew: that scene wasn’t about the Doctor; it was about Bill. It was Bill coming to terms with the sort of stuff she’s going to encounter as the Doctor’s new granddaughter.” OK. But here shock at the child's death and the Doctor's reaction to it last precisely 20 minutes. In the very next scene she admits that she, like the Doctor, is capable of moving on, and spends the rest of the episode doing her job as a spunky, happy go lucky Doctor Who Girl. "I was shocked when I saw a child being eaten by a monster, but that was half an hour ago. I’m over it now." This is not characterization; this is apparent characterization.

And finally, there is gigantic hand wave which comes from nowhere and goes nowhere, in which the Doctor tells Bill that she has to decide whether to release the giant orphan eating sea monster into the wild or not. He suddenly decides, for no reason, that he only interferes or helps out humans with their consent. It is never remotely in doubt that the Doctor will, in fact, free the beastie; it's just an obligatory piece of preparatory angst. Defeating monsters in New Who is supposed to involve Big Emotions, and the Doctor is actually going to free this one using explosives and the sonic screwdriver. 

Bad Doctor Who I can live with. There always was a lot of Bad Doctor Who. In fact, some of the best Doctor Who was, if we are being completely honest with ourselves, pretty Bad. And there is honestly no need to feedback and tell me that Doctor Who can't and shouldn't remain exactly where it was in 1963. Nothing would please me more than for Doctor Who to mutate into a new and different thing. But episodes like this feel like clones of Old Who having the life and joy sucked out of them by the parasitic growth of the new. As if something is chewing up innocent stories with intrinsic value and turning them into shit.