Fish Custard (7)

The one with the Vampires is an altogether lighter romp than the previous five episodes, driven by some perfectly harmless gobbledegook. (Naturally, giant fish with cloaking devises don't have a reflection in the mirror, except when they do, because, er...)

Where the one with the Angels was a backdrop for some heavy stuff between the Doctor and Amy and some more clues about River Bloody Song, this was a backdrop to develop the relationship between Amy and Rory. Although he appears in episode 1, this is the first time we've really seen him as a character: in terms of what is going to happen over the next two weeks, it's pretty imperative that we like him. Which, I think, during this story, we pretty much do. He's a buffoon, but a nice buffoon, pointlessly trying to repel the not-vampire with a cross; jealous about the Doctor and Amy but not getting into a Mickey type strop about it. A running thread through Old New Who was that the Doctor is an inspirational figure, changing the lives of everyone he comes across. So it is very pointed and clever for Rory, the gormless normal guy to see through this or at any rate spot the downside of it. The Doctor, just by being the Doctor, inspires people to take risks which may harm them or get them killed.

But mostly, this story was a very agreeable piece of padding; showing us the Doctor and Amy having an adventure and quite enjoying it -- putting across to us the idea that they travel together and have fun travelling together, and that while dangerous stuff happens all the time every single minute isn't as incredibly heavy and angst ridden as last week's story was and next week's story is going to be.

There are Vampire myths in every civilisation in the universe, because the Time Lords had a big war with creatures called The Vampire Lords who drained whole planets of their energy, but who, so far as I know, didn't have heralds on shiny surfboards. However, at the very end of time, the Earth becomes so polluted that the human race evolve into Haemovores who drink blood, dislike sunlight, hang out around graveyards, take boats to Whitby and recoil from crosses. And hammer and sickles. Hammers and sickle. (*) But that's no reason that fish people who drain the water from humans shouldn't have vampirey attributes as well, because the Doctor Who universe is a self-consistent fictitious cosmology which makes perfect sense. When the First Doctor met an animatronic Dracula at a futuristic funfair, he assumed that it was, not a haemovore or a vampire lord or a fish-thing, but that he was in an alien dimension where human nightmares had somehow come to life, and got a jolly stiff cease and desist letter from Universal Pictures a result. I'm sorry. What was the question again?

[*] Radio 4 newsreaders still say things like: "The MOD has announced that three soldiers will face Courts Martial...."

continues.....

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Fish Custard (9)

So, in the one with Toby Jones, the Red Kryptonite – sorry, the Psychic Pollen – is pure plot machinery. And the two different worlds which Amy has to choose between – they are plot machinery as well. Toby Jones himself -- the Dream Lord, the Doctor's dark side – is probably best seen as a plot device. In fact, once you've taken all the plot machinery away, it's quite hard to track down the actual plot. At times, it feels an lot like The Edge of Beyond the Inside of the Sun or whatever we're supposed to call it nowadays – the third William Hartnell story, where the TARDIS goes mad and everyone starts having hallucinations and wearing dressing gowns and attacking each other with scissors. Not really a story: more a sort of crucible to force the first story arc to come to some sort of conclusion. The "solution", if you remember, was that everything had gone weird because a button on the TARDIS console had got stuck. The First Doctor spent about five minutes playing around with a torch to make sure that everybody knew exactly what he meant by "button" and "stuck". But it was fairly clear that the point of the story was to bring Barbara to the point where she'd tell the Doctor to stop being such an old git, and to bring the Doctor to the point where he can apologize and agree to be the main character in the series from now on.

So what exactly was the point of Amy's Choice?

When I saw the pre-cred – or at any rate, when I read the summary in Radio Times – I thought that something really interesting was being set up. We'd seen Amy as a child, and as a grown up – it would have been so cool if, without telling us, the story had skipped another 5 years and picked up the action after she'd stopped travelling with the Doctor. So when we flashed forward / backwards to the TARDIS, I was rather disappointed. "Oh", I said "It's just another dream sequence virtual reality alternate time line thang, like Turn Left and Silence in the Library and every damn episode of Sarah Jane."

Actually, that's not quite fair. I like Sarah Jane an awful lot. There's a character called the Trickster who periodically pops up and plays, well, tricks on the main characters. They often involve mucking about with Sarah's time lines, showing her what would have happened if she'd made a different choice. (Who was it who said that "what would have happened" was only ever a vivid rhetorical tool for describing what actually did happen?) In Season 2, the Trickster tricks her into going back in time and (stop me if you've heard this before) preventing her parents from being killed. At the time I said it was the single best thing to have been done with the franchise since the relaunch. The Trickster is really just so much psychic pollen, and Amy's Choice is a very, very good episode of the Sarah Jane Adventures.

So. The Dream Lord sets the TARDIS crew a Puzzle. Are you, he asks them, the crew of the TARDIS dreaming that you are in Leadworth, or three people from Leadworth dreaming that you are on the TARDIS. Chuang Tse asked a similar question, but he didn't expect anybody to answer it. The point of the problem is that it's insoluble: every time Amy says "This is real, definitely real" we feel that she hasn't understood it properly.

Some people claim that they have become aware that they are dreaming without waking up, because they have noticed something in their dream which is silly, illogical, or contradictory. Freud himself says that he once thought, or dreamt that he thought "How can I possibly have arrived late for my first year medical exams, when I am an eminent professor who has been practising medicine for many years?" [*] So all our heroes have to do to identify the dream is to look for elements which are silly, illogical or contradictory.

In an episode of Doctor Who? How could they tell?

Every episode contains things which are silly, unbelievable, or surreal. Shop window dummies, anyone? Gas masks? Statues? Robot replicas of Anne Robinson? In the surreal stakes, evil child eating zombie grannies with eyeballs on stalks that pop out of their mouths would hardly make it into the top ten. And the Doctor can't open his mouth without scientific gobbledegook popping out. The idea of a cold star (and one which freezes the inside of the TARDIS, which is presumably capable of a withstanding the absolute zero of space) is not obviously sillier than sonic paper or fluid links or evil time lords living in black holes or any of the stuff he's been asking us to believe in for decades. Stuff in Doctor Who is "believable" or "unbelievable" purely on the Doctor's say-so. He's the fixed point in an often absurdist narrative. Remove his authority and all bets are off.

Jeremy Bentham (the Doctor Who historian, not the philosopher) once remarked that there were very few successful parodies of Doctor Who. The series undercuts itself so shamelessly that there's no point in a comedian doing so. As early as 1964 Crackerjack had done a sketch featuring Peter Glaze as a dotty old man called Doctor What who lived in a post-box. The substitution of the word "What" for the word "Who" and a post-box for a phone box produced something that was no sillier, and arguably less silly, than the programme that was being sent up.

Doctor Who is already the kind of story where funny men turn up in your garden and demand fish custard; where naughty school children are fed to giant whales who live under London; where statues, and pictures of statues, and memories of pictures of statues, only move when you aren't looking at them. It is already dream like. It already works according to dream logic. In something like Star Trek, a dream sequence is a surreal break with established narrative conventions. In Doctor Who it's business as usual.

Unless – perchance – that is the point? Unless something very clever and story-arcy is going on, and Steven has spent a whole episode drawing our attention to the dream-like-ness of New New Who to soften us up for the moment when Little Amelia wakes up and realises that all her adventures with the Raggedy Doctor were only a dream. Or perhaps a little game that she's been playing with her home made action figures?

Is all that we see or seem....

[*] In my experience, it more often works the other way around: I have occasionally actually been awake and eating breakfast before saying "Since I am 44, I can probably stop worrying about whether or not I left my

homework on the bus."

continues...

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Fish Custard (14)

I usually try to translate cultural references as I go along. I know that I have literally several readers in America, and it worries me that they may not know that "the tube" is "the subway" or that "pavement" is another word for "waistcoat".

It's a good exercise. Assumptions, as a very wise man once said, are things that you don't know you are making. Everyone in England instantly understands that "bobby" means something different from "policeman" and that "Tory" means something different from "Conservative", but it's hard to put into words what that difference is. The Union Jack "means" Britain, and the Stars and Stripes "means" America. I am pretty sure that the Union Jack means something different to a British person from what the Stars and Stripes means to an American, but I couldn't articulate what. Nor cold I articulate why I chose to write "British person" rather than "Briton" or "Brit."

So, before moving onto the one in the flat, I need to ask: what is the American cultural equivalent of "Marmite"?

I remember an article in a Doctor Who Appreciation Society fanzine: TARDIS, maybe, or Celestial Whatnot. It was probably by Jeremy Bentham who I don't think ever really concealed the fact that William Hartnell was "his" Doctor. (There was much less history in those days.) He took it for granted – all fandom agreed with him – that what was then "new" Who, the Phillip Hinchcliff seasons were an appalling travesty; nothing at all to do with the Doctor Who we grew up with, and quite open about the fact that it wasn't meant for children any more. (Whenever you see an episode of New Who that you aren't quite convinced by, remind yourself that what you feel is mild compared with the sheer, visceral hatred that the President of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society directed at the Deadly Assassin.) But Bentham didn't think that fandom was being quite fair. Granted, seasons 12, 13 and 14 had nothing very much to do with the series we all loved: granted all this horror imagery was more suited to a Hammer Horror movie than Doctor Who, granted Robert Holmes had wrecked the Time Lords irretrievably. But at least Doctor Who was still travelling round the universe in a TARDIS. So fans were faced with a Dilemma. Embrace the new series, or give all your love to the early seasons: Hartnell and Troughton and Pertwee. Well, Hartnell and Troughton. But if we choose to stay behind in the past we may very well regret that staying until etc. etc. etc.

So now it comes: the parting of the ways, the day of choice that we have so long delayed.

Does it bother you that the Thing At The Top of the Stairs made absolutely no sense at all, didn't even pretend to make sense and was in any case the product of a Blue Peter "design a TARDIS interior" competition?

Leave. Leave now. Doctor Who is no longer your show.

And that's fine. It's okay to find it ridiculous when fat ladies who sing when they should be talking claim to be 15 exactly, when they are obviously 53 if they are a day. It is ridiculous. So stay away from the opera.

Your hour will come round again. 40 years from now the widening gyres will bring in a world where Inferno and Ambassadors of Death are the latest word in modernity. Until then, there must be no regrets: just go forward in all your beliefs and prove to me etc. etc. etc.

You are so not meant to be looking at the wibbly wobbley timey wimey thing at the top of the stairs. You are so meant to be looking at the Doctor and Craig and Sophie. Well, at Craig.

At me. At me.

What if Dr Who came to my house?

continues

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Fish Custard (2)

Doctor Who is watched at several levels in an average household. The smallest child terrified behind a sofa or under a cushion, and the next one up laughing at him, and the elder one saying 'sh, I want to listen', and the parents saying 'isn't this enjoyable'.

Tom Baker

It's all about expectations, isn't it?

If you go to a Bob Dylan concert expecting Mozart [*] then you might find Bob a bit simplistic -- decent melodies but not very much happening. But if you expect Mozart to be like Dylan, then you might find him a bit fiddly and showy offy, not enough tunes and too many notes. I myself spent many years thinking that Bob Howard wrote bad fantasy; I recently discovered that he wrote the best pulp fiction in the whole wide world. (Starting to think of him as Bob rather than Robertee helped, I have to say.)

I've talked before about the two different Doctors Who – the Who that exists in the mind of the fans and the Who that exists in the nostalgic memories of people who used to watch it on television in the 1970s. The former is all Time Lord politics and back story, maybe Harold Saxon is the Monk, maybe River Song is the Master, if James Bond is Rassilon then who is Omega? The latter is Basil Brush and Marmite and Frank Bough and the dividend forecast is very good.

And by all means, make a hobby out of the Dalek Civil War and the Other and that peculiar confection in which baby Time Lords are knitted and the Doctor has a pet Badger. By all means believe that some kind of golden age came to an end when Ernie Wise died and they replaced the BBC globe with the BBC hippopotamus. But just occasionally, sit down with Horror of Fang Rock and remind yourself what it is we are talking about.

Which is the real Doctor Who, after all? The one we remember from when we were twelve? The one invented by fan-fiction writers? Or the actual DVD we watch on our actual television?

If I was going to write about The Prisoner remake, and I might, then I could safely talk about it as if it was a telly programme; quite interesting in places but no substitute for the real thing. A bit dull in the middle...Jesus was a bit wooden....Gandalf saved the day...you'd have to have had a heart of stone to watch the scene in which [SPOILER DELETED] tops himself without laughing. I wouldn't waste ten words saying "Bugger all to do with Patrick McGoohan, though". My reader would probably send me a comment along the lines of "Well, duh!"

If you like modern Doctor Who, well, 10 to 1 you'd like anything with the Doctor Who label on it on general principles. Running back to the TARDIS is the equivalent of grasping a favourite teddy bear, quite harmless, possibly, but not a valid basis for a critical response. If you don't like modern Doctor Who, then, 10 to 1, you're one of those fanboys who's still sore at Jon Pertwee for leaving and thinks that everything should be in black and white. And don't dare try justify your position by referring to specific strengths or weaknesses in specific episodes. Only the geekiest of geeky geeks would quote facts about a TV show, and we really shouldn't pay much attention to what geeky geeks say. Simpsons Comic Book Guy. Simpsons Comic Book Guy.

We may have differed by a star rating here or there; we may have dissented about whether Blink really put that much of a dent in the reputation of Phillip K Dick and why The Satan Pit was so quickly forgotten but there was a pretty broad consensus on New Who Seasons 1 – 4. Started well...Chris and Billie...Dalek...gas masks....Tennant...Bad Wolf bay...started to lose the plot....Torchwood....Olympic Torch....dragging the earth....please god, make it stop....John Barrowman...John Barrowman....John Barrowman. But this time, there seems to be a definite split, and I find myself on the wrong side of it. Both my readers have surfed here because they want to listen to me doing some witty pithy slagging off and I'm on the defensive. Not since Deadly Assassin have I felt so guilty about the fact that I'm, you know, a Doctor Who fan but I'm, you know, how can I put this – really enjoying Doctor Who...

continues....

[*] Or Bob Dylan, admittedly, but let's not get bogged down in the first paragraph.

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Fish Custard (8)

I was less convinced by the one with Toby Jones.

C.S Lewis or Aristotle or someone of that kind asks us to distinguish between the plot machinery and the plot itself. It doesn't matter too much if the mechanism by which your hero gets to Mars is plausible if the story was never about the journey, but what he saw when he arrived. We don't have to believe in Delphic oracles, sphinxes or improbable meetings at places where three roads meet: we're interested in how a man would react if he suddenly discovered that the woman he married was his own mother. Folk-singers (and for that matter Mr William Shakespeare) don't really expect us to believe that if a lady-shaped person slips on a pair of trousers, she'll instantly be assumed to be male by everyone she meets, including army recruitment officers and her own true love. We aren't interested in the practical problems faced by 17th century transvestites. "Imagine that a man who robbed at gun-point and the robber turned out to be his own girlfriend!" the singer is saying "Imagine the look on his face when he finds out!"

I forget whether or not Aristotle himself uses the word McGuffin.

If I were to write about The Prisoner, which I probably won't, I would say that in the original version, The Village was pretty obviously a piece of plot machinery, but in the new version The Village is pretty much the whole of what the plot is about. The original version is about the ways in which an exceptionally individualistic person stands up for himself in a society where there are is no such thing as an individual. It's about the relationship of individuals to society and what's so great about being an individual, anyway? It's about that tricks and traps that Number 2 sets to make Number 6 conform, and about Number 6's plans to escape. The remake is about The Village. It's about Number 2 (sorry, "2") who has a back story, a family, and considerably more personality than 6 does. It asks us what The Village is – a real place, the only real place, a dream, a virtual reality? The original only asked us what The Village meant. All sorts of questions which were unanswered and unanswerable in the original version – who did 6 work for? why did he resign? what was his real name? – are neatly tied up. [*]

There are, of course, Portmeirion literalists who try to answer those sorts of questions about the original programme. They are terribly disappointed to discover that English schoolchildren say "break" rather than "recess" so when Number 2 is in the persona of Number 6's old headmaster, he's much more likely to be saying "See me in the morning break!" than "See me in the morning, Drake." But even if you could conclusively prove that the protagonists of The Prisoner and Danger Man were the same person, it's hard to see how that would elucidate The Prisoner.

It occurs to me that a working definition of Science Fiction might be "literature without plot machinery; literature for people who are interested in the plot machinery; literature which tells you how the space-ship works stories where a girl can't pass herself off as a boy without a special sort of bra". Someone in the Grauniad pointed out that Nineteen Eighty-four was certainly not science fiction because it showed no interest in how the Screens worked. (I forget if this was someone who liked Science Fiction very much, but didn't like Orwell, or someone who liked Orwell very much, but didn't like Science Fiction.) Certainly some of the objections to New New Who have been science fictiony nit picks about the plot machinery: Why do the Doctor and the Daleks always meet each other consecutively? Why is the Doctor so confused by money and football and pubs when he's lived on earth for years and usually has no difficulty fitting in on weird alien planets?

We don't care.

It further occurs to me that on this definition I probably haven't read, or at any rate enjoyed, a work of science fiction since Blast Off at Woomera in Miss Walker's class, so you probably shouldn't pay attention to anything I say about the subject. But you probably don't anyway.

continues....

[*] SPOILER WARNING: I do give them points for the ending in which 6 takes over from 2 and plans to create a new, happier Village. All the way through he's been saying "I am not a number": although he thinks he's "won", he's only done this by becoming a number, so he's really "lost". That's not a bad reading of the impenetrable final instalment of the original.

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Fish Custard (3)

The One With the Daleks, for example. Yes, it was rushed. Yes, the revelation that Braceman was an android should have come at the end of an episode, when we'd had time to get to know him, not five minutes after we met him for the first time. Yes. there's a sort of glitch in that it took Braceman ten minutes – it's carefully specified in the script as ten minutes – to jury-rig the Spitfires into spaceships, when, even supposing him to be a Dalek supercomputer, it should have taken at least a fortnight. But even that's not the sort of glitch I can bring myself to get really cross about, because it means that the show is being driven by narrative logic, not engineering logic. Given that he's an android with Dalek blueprints it makes sense that he can rustle up something with which to defeat the Daleks. Given that he can, I don't think my enjoyment would have been greatly enhanced by a caption reading "three weeks later, he did."

After 47 years of careful thought, Terry Pratchett has spotted that Doctor Who isn't really science fiction. In other news: Bob the Builder is an inaccurate depiction of the modern building trade.

If what you want is something that you can think of as a little window into a more or less believable universe – one that carries on existing outside of the frame of your TV set – then by all means, go back to your FASA RPG and your New Adventures. You have your reward. But Steven Moffat laid out his stall pretty clearly on Day 1 ("in which Doctor Who comes to the forest and has breakfast"), and on Day 2, ("in which the whole character of the Doctor is defined as 'he can't bear to see children crying'".)

Do you remember that day in ninetyseventysomething when the Test Match was rained off and the BBC put the Peter Cushing Dalek movie on, unscheduled, on Saturday morning? Or the earnest boy in the school blazer perfectly describing how the Doctor had beaten the Daleks in the previous clip, and Michael Rodd saying "Only the Daleks could be so stupid!", patronisingly? Or even the ninetyeightysomething Panopticon which showed the Invasion of Earth movie on Saturday night, and Jeremy Bentham telling the nearly empty hall that they had just relived the days of Dalekmania?

It's all right, I'm shall spare you Yarvelling, Mark Seven, chocolate and mint ice lollies, yoghurt cartons, slot machines, board games.... My point is that the New New Daleks are brighter and shinier and bigger and have deeper voices than the Old New Daleks. They are, as my god-daughter helpfully pointed out, fiercer. The Doctor confronts them in a big, empty white room, and he beats them because they don't know what Jammy Dodgers are and he does. And very pointedly, when the action cuts back to the Cabinet War Rooms, we look at the Doctor confronting the Daleks in black and white, which was how we all first saw the Daleks, in order to make the point that the New New Daleks are much more like the Old Daleks, indeed the Old Old Daleks, than the Old New Daleks ever were. (Notice that the slats have gone and been replaced by those sort of metal collar things which disappeared after The Chase?)

It's like Russell wanted to the Daleks to be sensible, believable, dark, metallic, Klingons that went up stairs and had existential angst and weird religious fanaticism but who were a little bit pathetic even -- especially -- when they were trying to destroy the whole of Life, the Universe and Everything. Steven wants them to be great big exciting toys in a flying saucer with an interior that looks like how the interiors of flying saucers ought to look, and unceremoniously wipes out the Rusellite half-Daleks in a single scene.

The Daleks aren't serious believable alien life forms: they just aren't. They're 1950s outer space robot people with an impractical design: more like Smash Martians than Borg.

I didn't think that the Doctor was really going to destroy planet Earth, of course, but I did feel that he was being presented with a moral dilemma that was a little on the hard side and he did seem to have to think about it a little bit.

It really is beside the point to say that it wasn't a very believable portrayal of Winston Churchill. There are people out there who think that Doctor Who ought to be about time travel -- that a story set in the War ought to be a story set in the accurate historical War and that cave men should speak with the kind of received pronunciation BBC accents that modern anthropology tells us that cavemen really spoke with. Russell was wrong to say that Doctor Who historicals should be like Horrid History books. Horrid History books are mainly about executions and toilet paper. But Doctor Who historicals have always been set in the world of English school history text books. This may not have been Winston Churchill, but it was Winnie. Not true, necessarily, but certainly memorable.

continues...

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Fish Custard (12)

"Hi. We're the makers of a TV show about a guy with a Time Machine."

"Ah. You want me to write an adaptation of H.G Wells' The Time Machine."

"No. We produce a children's television series about a man with a Time Machine."

"Oh. What does he do with it?"

"Travels in Time. Goes to the past and the future and meets historical characters and stuff."

"Crazee. Can't see it ever catching on. Why are you telling me about it?"

"We want to commission you to write a story."

"About Time Travel?"

"About people from the present day visiting an historical period. Because you're, like a mainstream writer, who writes period drama. Crossover appeal and all that."

"Any particular historical period you have in mind?"

"No – you choose. The sky's the limit. That's the whole idea. Mainstream writer, thinking outside the box."

"Can I bring historical characters into the present day?"

"Sure. It's, you know, as limitless as your imagination. We generally try to avoid our hero changing historical events too much, though. And he probably shouldn't create established history, either. Saying he caused the Fire of London would probably be a bad idea."

"Or the Fire of Rome?"

"Or the Fire, as you say, of Rome."

"It sounds like a fun, open ended format that will run and run. Here's my idea. Just extemporizing, but could your hero go back in Time and meet Van Goff."

"Van Gock?"

"Van Gow. I'd show all the scenes from the famous paintings – the cornfield, the church, the cafe...and how about this, I'd have the hero bring him some sunflowers, and suggest that he paints them. I'd get lots of irony out of all Van Gock's contemporaries thinking he's a terrible painter, but our hero knows that history will have the last laugh. I'd do a sensitive portrayal of Van Goff's depression, but steer right away from obvious cliched stuff about him chopping off his own ear. I'd probably take the line that he was bipolar. I'd allude to his suicide too. What time does this show go out?"

"Tea-time, but that's okay, we can drop in an 'If You Have Been Affected By' line at the end. Those chaps at the Samaritans get awfully bored if we don't encourage people to phone them, you know."

"But I haven't told you the clever bit yet! The clever bit is that we'll start the story up in an art gallery, doing a Van Goff exhibition. We can show all the paintings, so the young kids will get the references even if they don't know who Van Gock is. And we'll have an art critic doing a tour, talking about Van Gow's life. We'd need a really high class actor to do the cameo."

"I reckon we can get that guy with the tentacles from Pirates of the Caribbean. But we probably wouldn't credit him."

"Great. So he can do some funny dialogue with your hero. Maybe they can compete about who has the best..."

"....Bow tie..."

"Bow tie, great. But then, here's the clever bit. At the end, after the hero has visited Van Gow and got to know him a bit, and Van Gock has even developed a bit of a crush on your hero's beautiful young red-headed assistant, then...and this is the scene I want to write, this is the scene I've wanted to write all my life...your hero puts Van Goff in his Time Machine and takes him back to the present day and shows Van Gock the exhibition. So Van Gow knows that he'll be vindicated and dies happy. He even hears the famous actor lecturing about what a great painter he was, and what a great man he was. And, we'll do this subtly, but wouldn't it be cool if the art critic almost, almost, just out of the corner of his eye, sees his hero for one second, in the flesh! Oh, why I have I wasted my career working within the constraints of narrow social realism! This is the sort of moving, slightly surreal, magical realist material that only the conceit of a Machine that travels through Time can achieve! I hope your series lasts for 46 years and seven months!"

"It sounds excellent. Exactly the sort of thing we're looking for. How does the monster fit in?"

"I'm sorry. I don't quite follow you."

"The monster. We don't feel that a TV series based around a charismatic hero who can visit any historical time period (or, in fact, any place in the universe, but we've played that down, because the punters aren't very interested in stuff set on the planet zog) is exciting enough. So we have a rule that wherever or whenever he goes, and whoever or whatever he meets, there always has to be a monster."

"A monster?"

"That's right, a monster."

"You mean, like a giant chicken or something."

"Exactly. Van Goff, an art critic and a giant chicken."

"You mock me and my muse, Sir. Please do not waste any more of my time. I bid you – adieu."

"What a pseud. I was hoping for something more like Blackadder."

continues

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Fish Custard (13)

"Hi. We're the makers of a TV show about a guy with a Time Machine."

"Ah. You want me to write an adaptation of H.G Wells' The Time Machine."

"No. We produce a children's television series about a man with a Time Machine."

"Oh. What does he do with it?"

"Travels in Time. Goes to the past and the future and meets historical characters and stuff."

"Crazee. Can't see it ever catching on. Why are you telling me about it?"

"We want to commission you to write a story."

"About Time Travel?"

"About people from the present day visiting an historical period. Because you're, like a mainstream writer, who writes period drama. Crossover appeal and all that."

"Any particular historical period you have in mind?"

"No – you choose. The sky's the limit. That's the whole idea. Mainstream writer, thinking outside the box."

"Can I bring historical characters into the present day?"

"Sure. It's, you know, as limitless as your imagination. We generally try to avoid our hero changing historical events too much, though. And he probably shouldn't create established history, either. Saying he caused the Fire of London would probably be a bad idea."

"Or the Fire of Rome?"

"Or the Fire, as you say, of Rome."

"It sounds like a fun, open ended format that will run and run. Here's my idea. Just extemporizing, but could your hero go back in Time and meet Van Goff."

"Van Gock?"

"Van Gow. I'd show all the scenes from the famous paintings – the cornfield, the church, the cafe...and how about this, I'd have the hero bring him some sunflowers, and suggest that he paints them. I'd get lots of irony out of all Van Gock's contemporaries thinking he's a terrible painter, but our hero knows that history will have the last laugh. I'd do a sensitive portrayal of Van Goff's depression, but steer right away from obvious cliched stuff about him chopping off his own ear. I'd probably take the line that he was bipolar. I'd allude to his suicide too. What time does this show go out?"

"Tea-time, but that's okay, we can drop in an 'If You Have Been Affected By' line at the end. Those chaps at the Samaritans get awfully bored if we don't encourage people to phone them, you know."

"But I haven't told you the clever bit yet! The clever bit is that we'll start the story up in an art gallery, doing a Van Goff exhibition. We can show all the paintings, so the young kids will get the references even if they don't know who Van Gock is. And we'll have an art critic doing a tour, talking about Van Gow's life. We'd need a really high class actor to do the cameo."

"I reckon we can get that guy with the tentacles from Pirates of the Caribbean. But we probably wouldn't credit him."

"Great. So he can do some funny dialogue with your hero. Maybe they can compete about who has the best..."

"....Bow tie..."

"Bow tie, great. But then, here's the clever bit. At the end, after the hero has visited Van Gow and got to know him a bit, and Van Gock has even developed a bit of a crush on your hero's beautiful young red-headed assistant, then...and this is the scene I want to write, this is the scene I've wanted to write all my life...your hero puts Van Goff in his Time Machine and takes him back to the present day and shows Van Gock the exhibition. So Van Gow knows that he'll be vindicated and dies happy. He even hears the famous actor lecturing about what a great painter he was, and what a great man he was. And, we'll do this subtly, but wouldn't it be cool if the art critic almost, almost, just out of the corner of his eye, sees his hero for one second, in the flesh! Oh, why I have I wasted my career working within the constraints of narrow social realism! This is the sort of moving, slightly surreal, magical realist material that only the conceit of a Machine that travels through Time can achieve! I hope your series lasts for 46 years and seven months!"

"It sounds excellent. Exactly the sort of thing we're looking for. How does the monster fit in?"

"I'm sorry. I don't quite follow you."

"The monster. We don't feel that a TV series based around a charismatic hero who can visit any historical time period (or, in fact, any place in the universe, but we've played that down, because the punters aren't very interested in stuff set on the planet zog) is exciting enough. So we have a rule that wherever or whenever he goes, and whoever or whatever he meets, there always has to be a monster."

"A monster?"

"That's right, a monster."

"You mean, like a giant chicken or something."

"Exactly. Van Goff, an art critic and a giant chicken."

"You mock me and my muse, Sir. Please do not waste any more of my time. I bid you – adieu."

"What a pseud. I was hoping for something more like Blackadder."

continues

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