Chibnall and I (3)

 2: Spoilers

There were relatively few trailers or pre-publicity materials prior to the transmission of Power of the Doctor. This led to some fan conspiracy theories. (Everything leads to conspiracy theories.) Perhaps the BBC hated Chris Chibnall and positively wanted the show to fail; perhaps they didn't quite regard Jodie as a proper Doctor because she was a woman. Perhaps they just accepted that the era had been a failure and were now focussed on the 2024 relaunch under the steady hand of Russel T Davies.  Or perhaps they hated the fans and wanted to deprive them of the fun of speculating about new the story in advance of transmission. 

Or perhaps there were so few Doctor Who trailers because the BBC was woke.

It is perfectly true that we already know more about Ncuti Gatwa's debut, which is still a year away, than we did about Jodie Whittaker's swan-song the day before it was transmitted. But the explanation is probably boringly simple. Russell T Davies is good at publicity. One of my main complaints about his era was that he introduced "NEXT WEEK" trailers which tended to give away major plot twists, and advertised "surprise" villains on the cover of Radio Times. Chris Chibnall, who is probably more fannish, is also a lot more spoiler-averse.

Some people hate spoilers. Other people think that anything which can be spoiled with spoilers wasn't worth not spoiling to begin with. The Sixth Sense is exactly the same movie if you already knew that Janet Leigh takes her sledge into the shower as it would have been if you didn't.

My view is that "surprise" is one of a number of techniques that a writer can use to extract emotions from an audience. Gag-writing may not be the highest form of art, but that's no reason to give away the punch-line. Twists and stings in the tales can be good fun when they work. Serious writers sometimes make use of surprise as well: the very first time I saw King Lear, I was truthfully expecting it to have a happy ending.

I suppose there could be a moral point at stake here. Reading serious literature is good and improving. Reading lowbrow literature is wicked and degrading. Good literature is the kind of literature that is worth re-reading. Twist-ending stories only work once. If I tell you how a Tale of the Unexpected or one of Tharg's Future Shocks ends, all the enjoyment drains out of it. Which serves you righyt: you jolly well ought to have your fun spoiled as a punishment for liking such low-brow rubbish. 

Citizen Kane, which famously ends on a surprise revelation, is widely regarded as one of the greatest films ever made.

There was a short trailer after The One With The Sea Devils that alerted us to the fact that Tegan and Ace, were going to guest-star in Jodie's reincarnation story.

Tegan is a former companion. She arrived in Tom Baker's last story, and stuck around for most of the Davison incumbency. Ace is also a former companion. She appeared alongside Sylvester McCoy in the final two seasons. The Seventh Doctor and Ace have a special place in the hearts of Doctor Who fans of a certain age. After the show was mercy-killed in 1989, they appeared in some thirty-five full length novels (and then a ludicrously large number of audio-CDs.) With Doctor Who off air, those novels -- the Virgin New Adventures -- were all there was. They worked very hard to present themselves as the continuation of Doctor Who by other means. Just as there are fans for whom the "real" Doctor will only ever be Matt Smith or Patrick Troughton, so there are some who think of those novels -- the so called Wilderness Years -- as "their" era. So the return of Ace is a pretty big deal.

Tegan appeared in the twentieth anniversary special, the Five Doctors, with Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee. She appeared with Colin Baker in the thirtieth anniversary skit, Dimensions in Time. She also appeared with Colin in a sketch about a little boy who wanted to be in Doctor Who, part of a TV show presented by a disc-jockey whose name can no longer be spoken. She has a fair claim to have appeared with more Doctors than any other actor.

After leaving the Doctor, Ace turns into a Time Lord. Or else she becomes a space-marine. Or possibly she goes respectable and runs a philanthropic organisation called A Charitable Earth. Tegan has a less established off-screen life, but a slightly mawkish epilogue to the Sarah Jane Adventures implied that she was gay and ended up in a relationship with Nyssa, who was last seen volunteering at a leper colony on a distant planet in a parallel universe.

So, of course, the trailer sent some sectors of fandom into overdrive. Ace and Tegan are coming back. We are going to find out what happens to them. Perhaps the New Adventures would be canonised; perhaps Tegan and Ace would become, er, canonically queer. Perhaps the A.C.E idea would be overwritten. It was really only a one-line gag in the Sarah-Jane adventures, although it was given a kind of canonicity in a minisode filmed to promote a Seventh Doctor box-set, but it never quite fitted in with anything we knew about TV Ace. At any rate: there was some hope that the destinies and futures of these characters would be explored, fan-fiction style.

But some of us boring old fans smiled wryly. Because Doctor Who just doesn't work like that.

What we actually got was two extended cameos. Sophie Aldred and Jan Fielding turn out to look a lot older than they did forty years ago. Actors who had supporting roles in the 1980s and haven't done much since turn out to look quite old fashioned and stagey alongside contemporary TV casts. They get brief meetings with the current Doctor. They each get a three minute scene with a holographic representation of "their" Doctor. Sixty year old Ace gets to wear the jacket she wore when she was a teenager; and biff some Daleks with a baseball bat, like she did in Remembrance of the Daleks. Ace mentions that she saw the Master turn into a cat. (Ooo, ooo, Survival! say fans) and the Master mentions Tegan's Auntie Vanessa (ooo, ooo, Logopolis!) and that's pretty much it. Quite good fun. But not a continuation of the story of Tegan and Ace. Because there really isn't one. 

There is, in fact, a story to be told about what it would be like to be an ex-Doctor Who companion: to have travelled all round the universe with God, and then been dropped off in Croydon and forced to pick up the threads of your life. School Reunion (a David Tennant tale) gestures towards a story of that kind, without actually telling it. Sarah Jane seemed to have led a slightly sad, unfulfilled life: everything after the Doctor had been a complete anti-climax. Russell T Davies always tended to use 'The Doctor' as a metaphor for Doctor Who and Doctor Who fandom, and Sarah-Jane was to some extent a metaphor for the sad fan-boy who enjoyed a particular TV show so much that he wasted the rest of his life writing incredibly bloggy essays about it, very probably in his underpants. But this was clearly too much of a downer, and when Elisabeth Sladen fronted her own, (very good) children's TV show, it turned out that having travelled with the Doctor always results in your leading the most brilliant, wonderful, amazing, fantastic, life it is possible to imagine. Sarah-Jane acquired teenaged prodigies who were guaranteed brilliant, wonderful, amazing lives at one remove. Doctor Who is good for kids, it seems, but nostalgia is harmful for grown ups.

It's a story which can probably only be told once, and an actual episode of Doctor Who is probably not the right place to tell it. It probably needs to be tackled in a grown up novel by a grown up writer with the serial numbers filed off.  I could imagine a serious novel about a middle aged man in therapy because a psychotic vigilante dressed as a flying mammal trained him as a ninja a few hours after his parents died in a freak trapeze accident.. But it probably wouldn't make a great Batman cartoon. The alternative is to just keep doing School Reunion over and over again, with Liz Shaw and Dodo Chaplet rather than Sara-Jane. 

But where would be the point? They had miserable lives or they had fantastic lives; they had a secret they never shared with anyone else; or else they told everyone but weren't believed. They are ever-so-much older than twenty and have forgotten how to fly; but to live has been an awfully big adventure. They think their experiences with the Doctor were a delusion. Everyone else thinks their experiences with the Doctor were a delusion. They are interested in nothing but nylons, lipsticks and invitations.

To Chibnall's relative merit, he kept the other celebrity cameos in the Power of the Doctor a pretty perfectly guarded secret. And they were carried off with a certain amount of panache. When the Thirteenth Doctor encounters David Bradley playing William Hartnell playing the Doctor, I think that many an Old Fan went "mmmm" in the manner of one who has just been reminded of a brand of confectionary that they don't make anymore. And when he turned into Colin Baker and Peter Davison, the "mmm" may have developed into the sound that audiences make after an impressive instrumental interlude, kind of like "nice!" or even "¡Ole!": Paul McGann was more an occasion for punching the air and saying "Yes!" when your team has won an important match.

Jo Martin's cameo was less of a surprise. She's pretty much a character who only exists to appear in cameos. Some people really like her: but I think that what they really like is the principle of there being a black lady Doctor. Which I like too. But there's not enough to The Fugitive Doctor for me to feel enthusiastic about.

But the final moments before the Regeneration can only be said to have brought on a fully fledged fangasm. Yaz has been perfunctorily sent away from the TARDIS; but immediately encounters Graham (along with Dan, who perfunctorily left of his own accord at the beginning of the episode.) Together they go to some sort of hall or community center where a kind of support group for former companions of the Doctor is having its first meeting. We can see the characters who have appeared in this story: Yaz, Graham, Dan, Teagan, Ace, and Kate Stewart -- along with three much older people. Bonnie Langford. Katy Manning. And good lord can it actually be, William Russell. Mel, Jo and Ian. Ian who last appeared in Doctor Who some 58 years ago.

The idea of "support groups" has turned up in the The Boys and in several Marvel Universe films; where the point is that, in those worlds, having been injured by passing superheroes or abolished from existence by a glove-wielding alien demi-god is a relatively normal experience -- as normal as a PTSD group for Gulf War veterans or grief counselling for 11/9 survivors. The "support group" metaphor is a less good fit to the Doctor Who situation: meeting the Doctor is regarded as an exceptional and unique occurrence. There's no particular reason for the meeting to be happening in a community hall: if you took the Doctor Who universe seriously, you would expect UNIT or Torchwood to have provided an ultra-high-security venue for it. But the burden of this essay, and indeed this blog, is that the Doctor Who universe is impossible to take seriously. So let's just sit back and enjoy the irony of a companion support group being run like an Alcoholics Anonymous cell.

Chibnall is a fan, and he knows what he is doing. Characters who everyone loves, and also Bonnie Langford, appear on the screen for only a couple of seconds, and get barely half a line each. And that makes the sequence more special. By the time we've registered what's happening, it's over. It's really the equivalent of a Regeneration Flashback Montage, which happened twice in the original series but was retrospectively declared a Tradition.

If we had known in advance that Jo Jones (nee Grant) would be appearing in the Big Centenary Special we would have spent a year speculating about it, in which case the brief glimpse would have felt like a punch in the gut. The scene works because we didn't know it was coming. Now I have told you about it, I have ruined it. 

We know that Bernard Cribbins is appearing in the November 2023 special; and we think we know that the Celestial Toymaker and/or Beep the Meep are in it as well. I hope our guts remain collectively unpunched.

There could be a story about a lot of the Doctor's companions having a meet up. There could be a story about anything. I imagine that at this very moment official fan-fiction is slipping into place in which each of the Doctor's exes sit round and tell a story illustrating some aspect of their Doctor's character and showing how it changed them. And then they probably all go on a pilgrimage to Canterbury. But this isn't that story. It's more like a Play School presenter reassuring the children that Humpty Dumpty wasn't hurt and the ten green bottles weren't broken after all. Don't be too sad. Jo Grant is okay. Yaz and Graham will do just fine. And there's a spare chair for Barbara and Sarah, just in case. 

We love these characters; we love Doctor who. A love that asks no questions. The point of the scene is to see Ian, and to be delighted that we are seeing Ian. And this jaded cynical blogger was as delighted as anyone. 

But....

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I'm Andrew.

I am trying very hard to be a semi-professional writer and have taken the leap of faith of down-sizing my day job.

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Chibnall and I (2)

2: Blossom

"Oh, the blossomiest blossom!" exclaims the Thirteenth Doctor. She is just about to regenerate. Her last will and testament, at least until Big Finish get started on the licensed spin-offs. 

What is the significance of her words? There is no blossom on screen, blossomy or otherwise, although she does appear to smell something beautiful. Why, taking in one last sunset, is blossom the thing which comes to mind?


In March, 1994, legendary TV playwright Dennis Potter was interviewed by very-nearly-as-legendary journalist and broadcaster Melvin Bragg. It would be Potter's last interview: he had advanced pancreatic cancer, and had asked his doctors to come up with a regimen which would give him the best chance of completing his last two plays (as opposed to necessarily prolonging his life). During the interview, he famously said that his awareness of mortality made ordinary things seem hyper-real.

"At this season, the blossom is out in full now … and instead of saying 'Oh that's nice blossom' … last week looking at it through the window when I'm writing, I see it is the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be, and I can see it."

So. The Time Lord and the Playwright both independently had the same thought. Blossom is a common enough symbol of mortality, after all. A.E Housman famously decided to go on more frequent woodland rambles when he realised he would probably be dead in only fifty years or so. But can it be coincidence that the Doctor and Dennis Potter should have expressed the same thought in nearly the same words? 

It is fairly normal in informal English to turn nouns into adjectives by adding the suffix -y. If something is catty, it has the qualities of a cat. This is a recurrent gag in the pun rounds of I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue.

 

"Define Anti-" 

"A bit like an ant."

Similarly, you can generally make a superlative by adding -est to an adjective. "Good-est", "evil-est" and "Republican-est" may not be strictly grammatical, but we understand what they mean. And it is fairly common to do both together: turn a noun into an adjective and then turn the adjective into a superlative. Andrew writes a very bloggy blog; Andrew's blog is the bloggy-est blog you've ever come across. The cheesiest cheese; the creamiest cream; and the chocolateyest chocolate are fairly common advertising formulations.

But directly adding -est to a noun is relatively unusual. Dennis Potter coined "blossom-est" as a nonce-word; the Thirteenth Doctor uses the much more conventional "blossomy-est".

Now, in a 1972 story, the Time Monster, the Third Doctor told companion Jo an edifying story about his childhood on Gallifrey. (It wasn't called Gallifrey back then.) On his "blackest day", he asked a wise hermit the secret of life; and the hermit pointed to a very nondescript wild flower. But because he was looking at it properly for the first time, all the Doctor's sense perceptions were heightened; and this helped him through his despair.

"Well, the colours were deeper and richer than you could possibly imagine. Yes, that was the daisiest daisy I'd ever seen....So, later, I got up and I ran down that mountain and I found that the rocks weren't grey at all, but they were red, brown and purple and gold. And those pathetic little patches of sludgy snow, they were shining white."

Producer Barry Letts was a member of the Western Buddhist Order, and what the Doctor was experiencing was a kind of enlightenment -- what might now be described more prosaically as mindfulness. The hermit-figure reappears as a Buddhist monk in Jon Pertwee's own regeneration story, Planet of the Spiders.

As a matter of fact, the word "daisy" is a corruption of "day's eye", but the word could be understood as an adjective, referring to an object with the quality of "dais". Robert Sloman (who wrote the Time Monster) has punningly imagined that if a flower can be "daisy" it could also be "daisy-er" and "daisy-est". (It's the same kind of joke as the one which says that since there is one actor called Tom Holland and another actor called Tom Hollander, there must logically be a third actor somewhere called Tom Hollandest.) It may have originally just been a matter of convenience. It would have been easy enough for Jon Pertwee to say "the buttercuppy-est buttercup" or "tulipy-est tulip" but "daisy-ey-est daisy" would have been quite a mouthful. But we have up with is a striking image of an object which has the quality of being itself to the greatest possible degree: the idea of a state in which reality becomes more real. The idea of an object possessing its own attributes to the greatest possible degree. 

There a very many different daisies in the universe with an infinite number of minute differences. One very wise man thought that it followed that there must somewhere be one dasiest daisy of which all the other daisies are reflections or copies. Another very wise man thought that you could define God as the thingest thing: the being who had all conceivable positive attributes to the greatest possible degree. A third wise man reminded us that it is all in Plato. 

There is no reason on earth that Dennis Potter and Robert Sloman  could not independently have observed that intense emotional states make the world seem more vivid; and no particular reason that they might not both have chosen to describe that experience in terms of flowers. But it is quite a coincidence that Potter chose to say "blossom-est" when he could quite easily have said "blossomey-est". 

I doubt that Dennis Potter was particularly a Doctor Who fan, but he probably watched it from time to time. He liked TV and there were't many channels in those days. He found Blake's Seven mildly diverting and used a lot of science fiction tropes in his final, posthumous play, Cold Lazarus. There is a persistent oral tradition that he submitted a Doctor Who script to Verity Lambert in 1964 or 1965. And he was thinking about time travel, in a way: he had just told Melvin Bragg that you have to live in the present because you can't call back yesterday. So it is perfectly possible that he had seen episode six of the Time Monster and been struck by the line.

So. Perhaps the Thirteenth Doctor is simply quoting Dennis Potter: and it hasn't occurred to Chris Chibnall that the line from the interview resembles a line from Doctor Who. This seems a little unlikely.

Perhaps the Thirteenth Doctor is quoting Dennis Potter quoting the Third Doctor. Perhaps Chibnall intends to convey "Doctor Who is so important that serious writers are influenced by it; but even serious writers' words get changed and refreshed over time." This seems rather convoluted. 

So we have to say that the Thirteenth Doctor is quoting the Third Doctor directly. The world becomes super-intense to Doctor Jodie in the seconds before she regenerates; just as it had to Doctor Jon on that "blackest day". Although she is very sad to be parting from her companions and getting a new face, a new TARDIS console and a new title sequence, Doctor Jodie remembers the little wild flower that Cho-Je pointed out to her when she was a little boy, and gains courage from the memory -- just as Jo did.

But Chibnall has remembered the scene incorrectly. I think that he thinks that the Third Doctor told Jo that what Cho-Je showed him was "the blossom-est blossom". He thinks he is quoting Jon Pertwee, but he is actually quoting Dennis Potter -- and he hasn't even remembered Potter's quite correctly.

So. Power of the Doctor. A story made up of memories. Quotations. Motifs. References. Fan fiction. Fan service. Celebration. Reunion. One last bow before the final curtain. One half of fandom is cross because Tom Baker (88) didn't show up. The other half is cross because William Russell (98) did.

A long dead TV series, as remembered by a middle-aged man; vague actors vaguely repeating decades old catch phrases, ending with a confused centenarian expressing surprise about what the series has become.

Doctor Who is inseparable from our memory of Doctor Who. If everyone remembers that The First Doctor was grumpy then The First Doctor was grumpy. If everyone remembers that the sets wobbled, then the sets wobbled. If the first thing you think of when someone mentions Gregor Rasputin is that Boney M song, then that Boney M Song is the most important thing about Gregor Rasputin. 

History is the parts that you can remember. Sellar and Yateman invented memes half a century before that other fellow. 

Live in the moment, because you can't call back yesterday. Sense perceptions are the most real thing. What lives in your memory is more important than what actually happened. We can go anywhere in Time and Space: that's the exciting thing. 

Contradictions. 

Hi,

I'm Andrew.

I am trying very hard to be a semi-professional writer and have taken the leap of faith of down-sizing my day job.

If you have enjoyed this essay, please consider backing me on Patreon (pledging £1 each time I publish an article.) 

 Please do not feed the troll. 

Pledge £1 for each essay.

Chibnall and I (1)

 1: Review

The Power of the Doctor was a load of Rubbish. I enjoyed it very much indeed.