Who Remembered Hills (6)

So. 

We have the people who, as Michael Grade put it, watch Doctor Who every Saturday like a High Mass. 

We have the ones who watch Doctor Who because it reminds them of how they felt when they watched Doctor Who. 

We have the one who treat Doctor Who as a secular scripture and perform various kinds of exegesis on it. 

And we have me, who thinks the Daleks are cool. 

Do any of us have anything useful to say about New Who?

The first lot have no difficult in talking about the new series. The first lot's approach was created specially to talk about the new series. The new series is brilliant and perfect by definition because everything with the words "Doctor Who" printed on them is brilliant. Even the TV movie. 

The second lot are impaled over the cleft stick of their own petard. The second approach isn't and can't be a way of looking at new Who: because it's how new Who looks at itself. Russell Davies and Paul Cornell and Steven Moffat are all convinced exponents of the Second Approach; they just happen to pour their nostalgia into making a highly successful television series, rather than into writing snarky blog posts. It comes though in all sorts of ways. Amy knew the Doctor when she was a little girl. Babies and children have a special ability to call out to the Doctor for help. The Doctor is a story who remains real only as long as we remember him. There are secret cults dedicated to asking the question "Doctor Who?". Practically every story is about how the Doctor is remembered, or how he will be remembered; or what stories are or will be told about him. 

An approach which is all about memory and nostalgia can't very easily talk about a show which is all about memory and nostalgia. Neither can it incorporate last week's story into its biographical narrative. Maybe we are just getting to the point when "How I felt when I first heard that Doctor Who was coming back" and "How I felt when I first saw 'Rose'" might be elements in our own, personal histories. Old Fans were delirious with amusement when Radio Times printed an unselfconscious letter from a viewer who thought that Doctor Who wasn't as good as it used to be when Christopher Eccleston was the star. But if you tried to say "How I felt when I first saw the Angels Take Manhattan, three hours ago" you wouldn't be taking the Nostalgic Approach: you'd either be reading it as text, or "just watching it." 

If New Who is increasingly an argument or a thesis or a critical essay about Old Who, we can easily see why Lawrence Miles is so antagonistic towards it. He isn't just watching the programme: he's in direct competition with it. 

So, maybe the Third Approach is the only game in town. Fear Her and the Doctor, the Witch and the Wardrobe may have been a load of old tosh; but so was War on Aquatica [*]. But they are still part of the Who-Text. Texts aren't there to be liked or disliked: they are there to be read and interpreted. I am sure that Andrew Hickey's will incorporate "new Who" stories into his "fifty stories for fifty years" series, and I am sure he will say very interesting things about them. As I'm sure he could about Rentaghost or Sugar Puffs Boxes. 

My approach, on the other hand, rapidly collides with a brick wall. Of course, I can and do watch New Who for its texture and atmosphere, and I can and do find stuff there which I like, as well as stuff which I don't like. But then I find stuff I like in Merlin as well, and that has nothing to do with my liking for Old Who, or indeed for the Morte D'Arthur. It's a coincidence. 

I suppose New Who might have been done as a pastiche of the old programme -- corridors and quarries and spaceships and all -- and some of us old fans would probably have enjoyed it. But that would have sealed it in a sarcophagus of nostalgia. In the very early days, the Big Finish audio plays tried to recreate the texture of Old Who, to the extent of being recorded in 25 minute chunks with fake Radio Times listings on the interlinear notes; but after a very few discs, they had grown, organically, into something that might have been "Big Finish Doctor Who" but wasn't simply "Doctor Who" and wasn't trying to be.

If there is a thing called Doctor Who to be a fan of, then "Doctor Who" must mean "whatever the Happiness Patrol has in common with A Good Man Goes To War" and it starts to look very much as if that's a null set. 

continues....

[*] I'm sure you know what that is so I'm not telling you. 

Who Remembered Hills (5)

So what, in fact, do we like about it? A short list would surely go something like this:

• We like the Daleks. The Daleks are design classic. Watching the Daleks gliding across the floor and bullying Romana is cool.

• We like the silliness of it. We like the banter. We like the arbitrary craziness of someone trying on new bodies in the way that they would try on new clothes (and the way that it hardly has anything to do with the story.) Our response to the regeneration scene while we are watching it is surely "Whay! It's silly, and it's not like anything else that there's ever been on TV!" "Hmm, what does that say about Time Lord culture and history, and how can it be reconciled with Brian of Morbius?" comes days or years later, if at all.

• We like the aesthetics: the safety of a cosmos in which planets look like quarries because that's what planets look like, and where spaceship move in that particular way because that's the way spaceships move.

• We like the gothic feel; while it is unlikely that the awakening of Davros at the end of episode one ever actually scared us, it has a quality about it which he have learned to think of as "scary."

The list could be extended as far as you like. 

• The Edwardian costumes.

• The juxtapositions: the high-tech TARDIS with the old fashioned hat-stand in the corner; the fact that it's not a meta-tricorder-o-gram but a sonic screwdriver. And the fact that the sonic screwdriver is tossed in the pocket with a some string and a bag of marbles. 

• The lady in the leather bikini talking to the robot dog, or having tea explained to her by a Victorian gentleman. 

• The jelly baby offered to the gothic skull. 

• In fact, the whole idea of jelly babies, the idea of a grown man with an old fashioned bag of sweeties in his pocket. I never took to cricket whites and celery as I did to floppy hats, but it was clear that cricket whites were at least trying to fill the same sort of niche that floppy hats filled, and that it was the natural order of things that cricket whites should succeed floppy hats just as floppy hats had succeeded frock coats. 

But more even than that. 

• The rhythms of the programme. 

• The twenty five minute episodes.

• The fact that Doctor Who was almost the last place on earth when an episode might end with a pretty lady tied to a circular saw. 

• The opening credits: how many of us loved the time tunnel thing long before we really understood the show itself?

• The slightly amateurish, home made look and feel of the programme; the bad special effects, the quarries, the fact that the sets wobbled (not that they ever did, of course.)

What we like and what we have always liked about Doctor Who is the texture and atmosphere of the programme: the fact that it looks and feels so much like Doctor Who. It's not a window that you look through -- its a stained glass window that you look at. 

Including the imperfections. Especially the imperfections. 

This is why I find the idea of the infinite canon so hard to agree with, even though it is quite obviously right. It's why I'm almost as apathetic towards the idea of a Doctor Who movie as I am towards Before Watchmen and the Bristol Mayoral Elections. I do have a sort of nostalgic attachment for the covers of the original Target novels, but only in the same way that I have a sort of nostalgic attachment to Rentaghost. Yes for many people and for a long time, those novels were the main and most important way of experiencing Doctor Who, and they were much better written than they needed to be: much better than most children's SF that was available at the time. [*] And there were, what, sixteen years when the only copy of Tomb of the Cybermen was sitting in the crypt of a Mormon Tabernacle in Tooting Bec when the novel was all that there was. Unless you include the Doctor Who Appreciation society's photocopied STINFO files, which would take us off in a whole different direction. [**] But I never really cared about that stuff, in the same way that, decades later, I could never really be bothered to read the Virgin or BBC novels, good as though some of them certainly were. Lawrence Burton (different Lawrence), re-reading one of the Virgin Doctor Who says they were "written as science-fiction novels that just happened to borrow from an existing mythos rather than simply trying to recreate a kid's telly show." And he thinks that that is a good thing. Which from one point of view, it might have been. From the point of view of not particularly liking Doctor Who. But it neatly encapsulates why I could never be bothered to read the things. Reading Doctor Who is a bit like stirring your porridge with a fountain pen. Possible, no doubt, but it rather misses the point of fountain pens. And you're likely to get ink in the porridge.

There is an old saying that radio is better than television because the pictures are better on the radio. And yes; the special effects in Doctor Who were much better when we were reading the books, reading Jeremy Bentham's from-memory summaries, or listening to tape recordings of the sound track of lost stories. But we followers of the Fourth Approach are interested in the special effects that we actually saw on the TV. We don't want to hear about what the "real" Dalek cruiser in the "real" Doctor Who universe "really" looked like; or to imagine a better one in our head. Matt Irvine's models are part of texture of Doctor Who. 

"But Andrew: isn't your "phenomenological" approach the most nostalgic of all? Andrew Hickey is openly watching Doctor Who with adult sensibilities; Lawrence Miles is watching it as an adult, remembering the experience of watching it as a child. Aren't you saying that if you just watch it, smiling at the jokes and clapping the good special effect and cringing at the bad ones effects, you can have the 1976 viewing experience all over again, like Holly wiping his memory so he can read Murder on the Orient Express without already knowing whodunnit? And that's patently impossible, because even in 1976 you didn't have a "pure" viewing: you were, by your own admission, viewing it through the lens of the Making of Doctor Who, the Radio Times Tenth Anniversary Special, Doctor Who Weekly, Jeremy Bentham... Watching something for the first time all over again is logically, and grammatically impossible." 

Yes. Yes. That's where it all breaks down, of course. 

But K-9, and Leela, and the Zygon space ship are like, incredibly cool. 

continues....


[*] I found a book called A Life for the Stars by the man who wrote Star Trek in the school library. I found it incredibly boring, but noticed that it was part of a series of grown-up books, and assumed that if I had read them as well, I would have understood it better. Fairly recently, I read the other three volumes. They are, in fact, incredibly boring. See also under "Kilraven".

[**] Mormon Tabernacles do not have crypts, and there isn't one in Tooting Bec. I assume that they do have toilets, but history does not record whether this one had a Yeti in it.

 

Who Remembered Hills (4)

So, I suppose, we come to my approach, which is really a complete lack of an approach. If the second approach says "What does Doctor Who mean to me?" and the third approach says "What does Doctor Who mean?" I am more inclined to ask "What is Doctor Who like?" Or, more simply,  "What is Doctor Who?"

Anyone who thinks that this approach could be described as "phenomenological" is invited to leave, right now.

Of course, Doctor Who is an historical and biographical phenomenon. It's a TV show that we saw at a particular time and in a particular place and because there is a so much of it those times and places carry on being pretty important to how we think about it. But not the only important thing. 

If you showed me an old episode of Rentaghost (or Basil Brush or Hope & Keen's Crazy Bus -- remember that?) I believe that I could recover the original sitz in lieben without to much difficulty. But it wouldn't be a very interesting thing to do, because Basil Brush and Rentaghost are not very interesting television programmes, unless you have a liking for incredibly contrived puns, which admittedly I do. Once I had said "Oh god, I remember that one! I was in Miss Walker's class! It was the week Graham got spanked for calling the dinner lady a Fat Cow! The joke about Timothy Claypole and the ladder practically made me wet myself" I would have said everything that could be said. [*] They may have great sentimental value, but they have practically no value in themselves. 

On the other hand I have absolutely no idea where I was when I first saw City on the Edge of Forever, and even if I did, it wouldn't matter. If I were to talk about Star Trek, you'd expect me to talk about allegories and moral dilemmas and sexism and the Cold War, but who I was when I first saw it would be irrelevant. The programme is just not entwined in our lives in that way. It's a text; it's only a text; it's always only been a text. It may have considerable intrinsic worth, but it has very little sentimental value. 

And you would think it very odd indeed if I tried to do Shakespearean criticism in terms of first seeing King Lear when I was sixteen and the seats being uncomfortable. I suppose I might possibly say "When I first saw King Lear, I thought it was going to have a happy ending, and was shocked when Lear brought in the dead Cordelia" but that would only be a rather pointed way of saying "The ending really is quite surprising". Some people say "I hate Shakespeare because Miss Muir made me copy out a long passage as a punishment for calling the dinner lady an old cow" but one feels they are mostly missing the point of Shakespeare. 

Doctor Who pretty clearly lies half-way between Star Trek and Rentaghost, and you are cordially invited not to take that remark out of context. I can certainly tell you where and when I was when I first saw Destiny of the Daleks. I can probably reconstruct my original reaction to the Romana Regeneration pretty well. My overwhelming feelings were personal betrayal. It was well known at school that I was a Doctor Who fan, and I knew from the moment it started that this story was going to be silly in a way that would rob me of whatever shred of credibility I might retain in the playground i.e none whatsoever. I also experienced confusion, if not actual cognitive dissonance, which would, if I had put it into words, have come out as: "Oh, does regeneration work like that? I thought it worked like this. I must have missed something. I wish I had been born in 1955. Then I would have understood that scene." But I was delighted with the little Hitchhikers in-joke [**] and loved the fact that the Daleks were in it. I suppose I was already experiencing the programme through the lens of Doctor Who fandom: I liked to see the Daleks on the screen because Daleks had been part of Doctor Who in the olden days so every time I saw the Daleks I felt more like a Wise Old Fan.

But if that was all there was to say about Destiny of the Daleks, there would be hardly any point in saying anything at all. Trying to use fourteen-year-old Me's emotions to limit what it means, or can mean, for thirty-something me is as silly as invoking "canon" to make my version right and your version wrong.

Rentaghost is something which we used to like. Destiny of the Daleks is something which we like.

continues....

[*] Mr Claypole: To Majorca? Will that not involve many months at sea?

Mr Mumford: Ah! In the modern era, we have invented a machine that means that human beings are no longer limited to the ground, but can raise themselves high above the earth...

Mr Claypole: Oh, we has such a device in medieval times as well. We called it a ladder. Why are your parents taking a ladder to Majorca?

Mr Mumford: Oh, for pete's sake.

Mr Claypole: Ah. Peter has no ladder of his own...

[Later]

Mr Claypole: (To Mr and Mrs Mumford) I understand that you are taking a ladder to Majorca? For the sake of Peter?

[**] The Doctor is briefly seen reading a book by Oolon Coloophid. Why do I keep footnoting things you already knew?

Who Remembered Hills (3)

The third approach has a lot in common with the second. It's also inclined to make the concept of "canon" incredibly wobbly, if not actually non-existent. It doesn't feel that party loyalty requires it to pretend that Doctor Who was good even when it quite obviously wasn't. It takes the line that the story on the back of the Nestles Chocolate Bars is as much a part of Doctor Who as anything which ever appeared on TV -- or that it can be if you want it to be. 

But while it is certainly interested in ephemera and memorabilia, it isn't that interested in putting Doctor Who in a particular historical or biographical context. You can read whole articles written from this perspective without finding out how old the writer was when they first saw Genesis of the Daleks, or how much they disliked their P.E teacher. It regards Doctor Who as a text -- but it thinks that that text is potentially very large and (therefore) very contradictory. What you do with the text is "read" it, appreciate it, and, if you wish, interpret it. The Third Approach is interested in seeing how the Lyons Maid Dalek Death Ray Lolly wrappers fit into, or can be fitted into, the Total Text of Doctor Who: it is not particularly interested in how you felt when you first discovered them in the freezer cabinet in the long drought of 1976. The Daleks were created by a crippled fascist called Davros and also by a smurf named Yarvelling [1]: that contradiction is a fact about the text, in the same way that "it used to be in black and white and then it went to colour" are facts about it. What you do with it is up to you. But you shouldn't (according to this theory) use the concept of canon to privilege one over the other or to falsify a unity and consistency which simply isn't there.[2]

The Second Approach asked "What does Doctor Who mean to me?" The Third one asks "What does Doctor Who mean?"  

This is of course the furrow that Andrew Hickey is plowing so cleverly, both in his Mindless Ones columns and his own blog. They are are full of interesting -- if highly tendentious -- ways of reading the actual text of Doctor Who. In his inspired riff on Logopolis he notes that Adric -- greedy for food, awkward around girls, obsessed with maths and computers, far too pleased with himself -- could have been a deliberate parody of a Doctor Who fan, and is, not un-coincidentally, the character Doctor Who fans most universally hate. That never occurred when I first saw the Adric stories; it hadn't occurred to me in the thirty years since; I very much doubt that it was consciously in John Nathan-Turner's mind when he dreamed up Adric; but now the observation has been made, it can't be un-made. It is obviously, compellingly true.

But this approach also has a drawbridge. "Textual interpretation" is arguably quite a strange thing to be doing to what is, when all is said and done, a children's TV adventure serial. When we wonder if "The Watcher" who is watching the Doctor in Logopolis might possibly represent us, the person who is watching the Doctor on the TV (which would mean that we, the viewers, were really the Doctor all the time) we are doing something to Doctor Who which it would never have occurred to us to do to Doctor Who if we had not already put Doctor Who up on the kind of pedestal where that's the kind of thing that it occurs to us to do to it.

And that's what "canonization" means, isn't it? Putting a book, or a person, on a pedestal? It originally referred to the canon of Holy Scripture. [3] No-one would argue about whether the book of Maccabees was, or was not, Scripture if they didn't already think that there was such a thing as Scripture for it to be -- a special kind of book that you treat in a special kind of way. We may admire the Screwtape Letters very much -- more than we admire the Epistle to Jude, if we are perfectly honest. But we don't think that it would be appropriate to pick a particular sentence from Screwtape as Collect of the Day or use it as the starting point of a sermon or set it to music or use it liturgically or swing censers of incense in front of. Neither do we, on the whole, write articles about the internal continuity of Rentaghost. Even though  we loved Rentaghost at exactly the same moment we first loved Doctor Who. 

Some clergymen treat the Bible as (at best) as a collection of raw material to do exegeses of; and at worst, a convenient source of sermon illustrations. Some academics regard novels primarily as things to fall out with other academics over. And if we aren't careful, the whole process of "being Doctor Who fans" can make Doctor Who, the television programme invisible. 

Almost the most interesting thing about Andrew's "Fifty Stories for Fifty Years" series is the way he treated The Iron Legion [4] and Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters [5] as part of the Total Thing Which Is Doctor Who. But by opening up the canon in this way, he is acknowledging that there is such a thing as canonicity. He reads The Iron Legion in a way in which it would not occur to us to read Beryl the Peril or Winker Watson [6].

"What if everything is canonical?" is a perfectly good question. But it's a slightly different question to  "What if nothing is?" 

What if the stories on the backs of the Sugar Puffs packets are just as much a part of the Doctor Who canon as the Dalek Masterplan?

What if doing a close analysis of a forty-seven year old television programme (of which no copies exist) is just as silly as doing a close analysis of the backs of old cereal boxes?

continues....

[1] In the TV Century 21 Comic Strip...but you knew that.

[2] I think that an explanation along the lines of: "They both happened, but in alternate time lines" is just as much a smoothing over as "Davros rediscovered Yarvelling's long lost blueprints" or "TV Century 21 is NOT CANON and DOESN'T COUNT." My preferred answer (to get ahead of myself) is "It doesn't matter that they contradict each other, because neither of them 'really happened': they are both stories."

[3] Andrew Hickey has helpfully reminded us that we owe the word's application to popular culture to a spoof article in which a clergyman applied the methods of Historical Jesus Scholarship and source criticism to the Sherlock Holmes stories.

[4] A comic strip in "Doctor Who Weekly". You knew that as well.

[5] The novelisation of "The Silurians". 

[6] Comic strips in the Beano.