Fish Custard (4)

Or take the one with the statues. It's a "sequel" to Blink and "brings back" the Weeing Angels which were one of the "scariest" monsters in New Who.

Actually, the minute you start describing things as "scary" you've side-slipped away from the actual TV series and into another virtual Who clone in idea space -- "that programme which children watch from behind the sofa". Kids can be scared by anything and everything – Big Bird and Laurel and Hardy and the India Paper edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica -- but a glance at, say, Robot would be enough to blow away the theory that Doctor Who was always and irreducibly a horror show. The editors of Doctor Who Adventures, Radio Times, and other children's publications continue to ask whether this story is, or is not, as scary as that story. But they all agree that the scariest story ever was Blink, and that Blink was, coincidentally, the work of the present incumbent, sir, Mr Moffat, sir.

Blink was a good story. (I think that it was a very good story, but dissent from those who think that it was a very, very good story.) But the Angel itself was a very small part of the success of Blink. Steven had, in fact, written an angel-free version of the story in the 2006 Doctor Who Annual. The story was – like The Gel In the Fireplace and the Eleventh Hour – and, come to think of it, like Silence in the Library and Curse of Fatal Death and everything else the Moff has ever written – about Time Travel. Not from the point of view of historically accurate portraits of Winston Churchill, or even from the point of view of marrying your Grandad and stepping on a butterfly, but from the point of view of events confusingly starting to happen in the wrong order. Which, come to think of it, is what Time Travel in the context of a story pretty much has to be: a way of disrupting the narrative, foreshadowing, putting effects before causes and carts before horses.

So Blink is about people who are young at one moment and old the next because they've been sent backwards in time; and the Doctor trying to get a message to himself about something which hasn't happened yet. The Statues concatenate all the wibbly wobbley timey wimey ideas that Moffat wants to muck around with into a bloody great lump of plot device. Making them statues which can only move when nobody's looking at them (manifestly a stupid idea) is as good a way as any to signify to us that they are only a plot device and we shouldn't waste too much time thinking about them. It would be a bit like giving your hero a huge and inexcusable lump of technology and signalling the fact that it's never going to be explained by making it look less like a space ship and more like, I don't know, a phone box. (People who have invented something called a Doctor Who Universe go on and on about something called a Chameleon Circuit and thereby miss the absurdity, and, arguably, the point.)

So: bringing back the Angels is pretty much a category mistake, as if there was anything that was bringable backable. Everything which was angelly about them – the fact that they don't move (by the end of the second episode, they have) and the fact that they send people back in time (these ones don't) the fact that you can defeat them by making them look at each other (you can't, for some reason) has been dumped. They have randomly acquired new powers. It turns out that whatever carries the image of an angel becomes an angel and it turns out that Angels can turn people's arms to stone and it turns out a bit later that they can't turn people's arms to stone after all but only make people think that they have turned their arms to stone and it turns out that they can talk to people through the bodies of people they've killed which is only a bit identical to the invisible telepathic alien piranhas in the library.

And – you know where I am about say next, don't you? – none of this matters in the least.

My god-daughter says that she had "always wanted" to see a story with the Angels in it. Well, three years is a long time in television and an awfully long time when you're ten. Having always wanted to see the Angels in 2010 is no odder than having always wanted to see Yeti and Cybermen in 1973. (I never did see any Yeti.) The Angels are things which happened in Doctor Who a long time ago, and things which everyone knows are really, really, scary, even people too young to have seen them the first time round.

The story was as everyone has boringly but correctly persisted in pointing out, a remake of Aliens, plucky marines being picked off one by one by indestructible monsters. The idea of space marines fighting statues that don't move is manifestly absurd. The imagery of stone angels massing in spaceship corridors is manifestly absurd. And that's fine. Daleks are manifestly absurd. Daleks never made the slightest sense outside of the corridors of Skaro. Angels are Moffat's Daleks. They are the scariest thing in the universe because Moffat says they are the scariest thing in the universe. We have a race memory stretching all the way back to 2007 that says that they are the scariest thing in the universe. Even though they can't go upstairs

continues...

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Fish Custard (6)

Moffat is doing rather more bleeding of stories into other stories than Davies did.

Davies seasons had running plot arcs, but they never amounted to much more than easter eggs for the more earnest bus enthusiasts to spot. It was quite fun to see the words "Bad Wolf" in the graffiti in Episode 1.4 and remember that the same words had been used by the clairvoyyant girl in Episode 1.3, but it didn't really have much bearing on either story. (The resolution -- that the word "Bad Wolf" appeared in every episode because when Rose became a demi-god she dropped the phrase Bad Wolf into every episode in order to give herself a clue that she should take the name Bad Wolf and drop that name into every episode when she became a demi-god was not very satisfactory. Couldn't she have just tied a knot in her hanky?)

This year's story arc is about Amy's crack. Er, the Crack in Amy's wall. In the first story of the season a Baddie said "The thingy will open! A bad thing will happen!" very much like baddies have been saying "He will knock three times on the window" and "You will soon die, metaphorically at least" pretty much since the show rebooted. I thought the Crack was going to turn out to be another case of the Bad Wolves. I thought it would appear in every story and that it's meaning would be revealed in the final two-parter, which would feature the end of the universe, the Daleks, and Amy temporarily becoming a demi-god.

But then, in the one with the statues, the back story came to the front. The Weeing Angels were feeding on a Crack in the space time continuum through which weird-crack-in-the-space- time-continuum energy was pouring. The question which had been set up the previous week (why doesn't Amy know about the Daleks, given they invaded earth only last Tuesday?) is more or less resolved. Things have been being sucked into The Crack, and things which are sucked into The Crack aren't merely destroyed, they never existed to begin with, so not one remembers them (except when they do.) That's why Amy Pond knows that the Pond in her village is a Duck Pond, even though it has never had any Ducks on it. (NOTE: Leadworth is an anagram of Dr Who Tale.) That's why everyone has forgotten about the giant Cyberman from the year before last's Christmas special. (I have certainly been trying to forget it.)

And The Crack was started by a Big Bang which the Doctor traces to the the day of Amy's wedding, which is also the day she joined him on the TARDIS and also (by a staggering coincidence) the day that the final part of Doctor Who Season 5 will be transmitted. And all this leads us straight into a huge odd soap operatic thang. Amy tries to kiss the Doctor, a scene which the Daily Mail thought was sordid, sexy and possibly a cure for cancer. This, in pretty short order, makes the Doctor decide that his preventing Amy's marriage is what has caused the The Crack and that it's his job to ensure that she and her fiance, the gorm free Rory (indistinguishably from Larry, Sally's boyfriend in Blink) should get back together, whereupon....

"Everybody" complained that Davies' plots were too rushed, but I rather like the speed with which Moffat is advancing the back story. Oh, it's clear enough what he's doing: Amy's sudden urge to kiss the Doctor, and the Extremely Unexpected Twist Ending to the one with the Silurians don't arise particularly naturally from the action which preceded them. They could have been dropped into any story and they would have made just as much sense. Amy kisses the Doctor because a bad scary thing has happened in which she nearly died: but bad scary and nearly fatal things happen to Doctor Who girls every week. It's an occupational hazard. I think that there may be a subtext about the way in which childhood dreams shade into wet dreams and imaginary friends turn into erotic fantasies. Poor Rory is, in every possible sense, in competition with the man of Amy's dreams.

I could have done without the "You, Amy Pond, are the most important being in the universe" speech. We've already had a "You, Donna Noble, are the most important being in the universe" speech and Rose actually being the most important being in the universe. Martha had to content herself with being the most important being on earth. What happened to companions who failed general science A level?

The Doctor says that for him, every day is a big day: he skips the little ones. In the same way, Moffat jumps over extraneous material and transitions. This works rather well: much better than Davies squishing long stories into small spaces. We go straight from the Angels to Amy

declaring her love for
revealing that she'd like to sleep with the Doctor; and straight from there to the Doctor popping up on Rory's stag night; thence to Rory already being a passenger on the TARDIS (and then to a point when he has been travelling on the TARDIS for some time).

And note, by the way, that there were no spoilers about Rory being a new member of the supporting cast – no press calls for for Arthur Darvil, no interviews with Peter Purves or Matthew Waterhouse about the weight of expectation about being a Doctor Who "boy", no articles about whether or not he is "something for the Mums". Okay, he doesn't get star billing, but he is very clearly a companion. Is this because Moffat is working hard to keep Doctor Who spoiler free (the man in the Grauniad keeps moaning that he doesn't get preview discs) or just because newspapers are irredeemably sexist?

continues...

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Fish Custard [17]

"Maybe the universe can't bear to be without the Doctor."

When we first met him, the Doctor was a wanderer in the fourth dimension; an exile. He had a Time Machine, but there was no sense that he was, in other respects, a particularly important individual. His insignificance in the grand scheme of things was part of the Elusive Magic: an old man and a little girl cut loose and lost in the vast cosmos. We know now that the original production team had a number of different ideas about why the Doctor embarked on his Flying Dutchman like wanderings through the Time and Space: but none of them involved him being a particularly important being. He was assumed to be on some personal quest: for an ideal time and place; for scientific knowledge; for his long lost home world. There was a certain bathos when the truth was finally revealed: Patrick Troughton shamefacedly blusters that he left home, like some cosmic teenager, "because he was bored."

"Maybe the universe can't bear to be without the Doctor."

Oh, he had been to lots of strange places and met lots of interesting people, but it was his possession of a Time Machine that made him unique. "No one else in the universe can do what we're doing" he tells Victoria "That's the exciting thing." But it was always inevitable that, if the series lasted beyond the first dozen or so episodes, the "crotchety old man" would move closer and closer to the center of the stage. Not merely a doddery old fool with a Time Machine, but a gentleman adventurer with a collection of fast cars and gadgets and knowledge of a special martial art that allows him to win every fight he's in. Not merely a gentleman adventurer, but a weird charismatic figure who talks about "homo sapiens" from the outside, and takes control of every situation he's in by virtue of some innate charisma. Not merely a charismatic alien but a Dark Doctor at the center of a web of time of his own creation, endlessly tripping over plans he made centuries ago and has forgotten about.

"Maybe the universe can't bear to be without the Doctor."

We know that when Old Who was canceled, the final script editor was at the beginning of what would have been a multi-season story arc, which would have repositioned the Doctor as a more central figure in the universe which he inhabited. It doesn't matter a great deal how this "Cartmell masterplan" would have developed if the show had not been canceled; neither does it matter how writers other than Cartmell interpreted it after he wasn't involved any more. What's important is that Seasons 26 and 27 25 and 26 took for granted a universe in which the Doctor was a fantastically important and significant person: "far more than just a Time Lord." And this gave the final months of the show a new and unique atmosphere which marked it out as different from what had gone before. You may or may not think that Silver Nemesis and the Ghost Light work: but you can't imagine them as Jon Pertwee stories.

"This time there will be a reckoning with the nameless Doctor who's power is so secret. In good time I will speak it."

The novelisation of Remembrance of the Daleks opens with a prologue in which three Time Lords – Rassilon, Omega and Someone Else -- discuss the future of the universe. I couldn't tell you, without looking it up, whether Someone Else turned out to be the Doctor or, er, someone else. But I like the scene. It's mysterious and dramatic and suggests that the well of the past is very deep, even on Gallifrey. The scene in Silver Nemeiss, where Lady Penfold asks the question "Doctor who?" and threatens to reveal his Dark Secret isn't quite as good. It's too in yer face: oy, the Doctor is special, right, but we aren't telling you why. Curse of Fenric did a much better job of making the Doctor's Time Lordness relatively unimportant and his Doctorness central. By virtue of being the Doctor, he has played chess with the embodiment of evil since the beginning of time.

"Maybe the universe can't bear to be without the Doctor."

Lawrence Miles complains that the modern series has fetishised the Doctor: made him "the subject, not the medium" of the series which is named after him. He has a point. But this process didn't start with The Pandorica Opens (which we will get to eventually, I promise.) It didn't start with The Girl in the Fireplace. And it really, really didn't start with Lawrence's novel Alien Bodies. It's the logical conclusion of a process which has been underway since the series started.

The Doctor is a guy who rattles round the universe in a broken down spaceship. But he's also the most important person in the Doctor Who universe, because it, the Doctor Who universe, it has got his name on it. And he's also been allowed to become the personification of the television programme he appears in. The Doctor represents Doctor Who and Doctor Who represents every good memory anyone ever had of Saturday teatimes in November, of queuing for autographs on wet Sundays in Blackpool, of watching scary monsters from behind the sofa with a sense of wonder. It's an almost Trinitarian conception, and one that hardly any fictitious character could be expected to live up to. Hamlet was never asked to personify school English lessons and Oxford scholarship and the history of the Royal Shakespeare Company; Winnie the Pooh the bear was never a metaphor for Winnie the Pooh the book.

It is sometimes said each writer only has one story to tell, particularly by writers who have only one story to tell. Season 5 of Doctor Who unashamedly revisits the themes of Girl in the Fireplace. And the season finale spends 90 minutes re-stating ideas that were first presented in a silly sketch in which Joanna Lumley tried to use the sonic screwdriver as a vibrator.

Well, wasn't it Chekov who said that if you do it slow, it's tragedy, but if you do it quick, it's farce?

continues....

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Fish Custard [19]

Bob, what are you songs about?

Some of my songs are about four minutes, some are about five minutes, and some, believe it or not, are about eleven or twelve minutes.

I went for a walk.

I listened to my I-Pod.

I realized that Visions of Joanna is the best six minutes of anything ever recorded by anyone ever. In fact, I am pretty sure that the lyrics of Visions of Joanna contain everything there is to be known. 

I used to think that it was the opening bars of Parsifal, but now I'm pretty sure that it's Visions of Joanna.

And while I was walking and listening I saw what it was that I've been trying, and failing, to say about Doctor Who for the past three months.

Years ago, after Sylvester but before Paul, I read a fanzine article about growing up as a Doctor Who fan in the 1970s. Most of the people in DWAS still wrote about growing up as a Doctor Who fan in the 1960s. This one was written by someone my own age. The writer of the article told a lot of embarrassing stories against himself: about stealing another boys underwear during a swimming lesson because he desperately needed some Doctor Who knickers for his collection; about working the Doctor's dialogue into his own conversation. His fellow pupils thought he was a bit of a nerd, and he got the cane when he tried out a choice Tom Baker one-liner on the headmaster. I forget if there was a point to the article.

It would increase my confidence in the fundamental interconnectedness of all things if some forum contributor could step forward and say "I was that soldier" at this point.

This reminded me of a lad in my class in the top juniors (year six in decimal money) who was a serious Doctor Who fan long before I was, and by serious I mean "a fan of the books more than a fan of the series". He had a slightly posh accent and read real books about real science and was on Isaac Asimov when I was still on Blast Off at Woomera.

I remember being slightly perplexed that even after the One With The Spiders he continued religiously to watch Whodunnit on ITV and even wore a sort of frock coat arrangement to the end of term fancy dress party when everybody else was wearing scarves and hats that didn't fit. Whodunnit was a game show in which "celebrities" watched a dramatized murder-mystery, were allowed to interview the survivors "in character", and then had to guess who the murderer was. Hosting it was Jon Pertwee's job in between the Police Box and the Scarecrow. Watching ITV at all was pretty daring in those days.

But, of course, it made perfect sense. My friend wasn't a Doctor Who fan: he was a Third Doctor fan; a Jon Pertwee fan. He liked to spend hours pottering around with his chemistry set, just like Doctor Who liked to potter for endless hours in the TARDIS. To the extent that eleven-year-olds have mannerisms he patterned his mannerisms on Jon Pertwee's. Fortunately for him, the Third Doctor was rather polite and courteous and would never have said "You're a classic example of the inverse relationship between size of mouth and size of brain" to the headmaster.

Bob Dylan fans talk a lot of rubbish. There are 1960s interviews where people ask him what his songs mean, and he says, "Huh, hmm, I can't remember". The daftest are the Dylanologists who think there's a consistent code behind the lyrics, that the one-eye midget shouting the word "Now!" is the same character as the one-eyed undertaker who blew a futile horn, and if only Bob could be persuaded to declare unto them this parable they would thereby know all parables. I myself have been tempted to wonder if "Joanna" is "Marijuana". But anyone who thinks that a code-book, a cypher, a "turn to page 54 for solution" could elucidate see the primitive wall flowers freeze while the jelly-faced women all sneeze and the one with moustache says "Jeeze! I can't find my knees!" will never, ever know what this poem, or any poem means: because they don't understand what poetry is.

And that's what I've been trying to say about Doctor Who.

You remember when John Byrne was about twelve months into his run on the Fantastic Four, after he'd worked out what he was doing, but before he got too up himself – about the time he did an issue that was half Galactus and half Doctor Doom the F.F themselves weren't in? You'd been reading the Fantastic Four for years because it sort of reminded you of the Fantastic Four and suddenly, this new guy was writing it and drawing it and you weren't so much reading it as swimming in it?

That's what I've been trying to say about Doctor Who.

The Tenth Doctor was dramatic and moody and funny, particularly when he went off on one; and the Ninth Doctor was like a tough working man with the Doctor hidden inside him; and the Seventh Doctor was like a jester carrying the whole universe on his shoulders; and the Sixth Doctor was scary and nasty and mad and fascinating; and the Fifth Doctor was played by Peter Davison. And 

I liked watching all of them, even Sylvester.

And that's what's different. Since 1981 there have been a long succession of Doctors who I really, really liked to watch. Matt Smith is the first Doctor since Tom Baker who I have wanted to be.

Christopher Robin came down the forest to the bridge, feeling all sunny and careless, and just as if twice nineteen didn't matter a bit, as it didn't on such a happy afternoon, and he thought that if he stood on the bottom rail of the bridge, and leant over, and watched the river slipping slowly away beneath him, then he would suddenly know everything that there was to be known, and he would be able to tell Pooh, who wasn't quite sure about some of it.

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Fish Custard (5)

The Lonely Space Whale was an obvious metaphor for the Doctor, and Amy's empathy for the Whale was an obvious metaphor for Amy's empathy for the Doctor and Amy understood the Whale better than the Doctor did to show that Amy understands the Doctor better than the Doctor understands himself.

The Weeing Angels aren't, in that sense, a metaphor for anything. They aren't anything at all. They are villains without motive or personality or clearly defined powers, almost an absence in a story which is about the relationship between three main characters: the Doctor, Amy and River Bloody Song.

Everyone talks about the Buffyfication of Doctor Who, and by everyone I mean "me", obviously. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a show of great underlying integrity. You could accept evil alien Buddweiser that literally turned frat-boys into cavemen, or a school swim team that were mutating into Deep Ones because you always and absolutely believed in and cared about every one of the characters. Every bit of teen angst was followed through to its achy breaky conclusion. Davies "got" that the monsters in Buffy were mainly metaphors, lights to shine a torch at the hopeless doomed love affairs between Buffy and Angel and Buffy and Spike and decided that this was how modern Who would have to be.

I still don't know if this was the right decision. I don't know whether everything really does have to be all touchy-feely. When people say that the the Boys' Mountaineering and Boxing Society isn't attracting many girls and should therefore do less mountaineering and boxing, I'm inclined to say "But what about the boys who liked mountaineering and boxing but aren't nearly as keen on knitting and watching Glee?" Good thing to drop the "boy" bit though. Apparently girls can join the Boy Scouts but boys can't join the Girl Guides. Or maybe "don't". There's nothing wrong with girls wanting to learn how to kill and cook wild squirrels and boys wanting to bake cookies. But I'm not at all sure that there isn't room in the world for an all male space where boys can talk to other boys about their periods, so to speak. There really are a lot of socially awkward males in the world and Doctor Who really did used to be place for them to retreat and talk about Thals and Neutron Flows, and I am not sure if making it about dating, weddings, mothers and showing your emotions was an improvement, given that there are one or two programmes on TV which deal with that stuff already.

But given that we are committed to making Doctor Who a soap opera, at least lets make it a good soap opera. Once we had passed Bad Wolf Bay -- which I increasingly think was the moment when Russell had done what he set out to do and said what he had to say -- both we and him stopped caring, and that's the one thing that can never, ever happen in a soap.

Steven has made me care.

He's made me care about the relationship between the Doctor and Amy, and as long as I'm doing that it really doesn't matter whether this is a different kind of relationship to the one which a different Doctor, a long time ago, might have had with Jo Grant or Adric.

Me and Jon have recently seen a lot of movies we've quite liked, like Avatar and Iron Man; and a couple that we liked an awful lot, like Kick Ass; but we keep finding that we don't have very much to say to each other about them. But we've been talking about the Phantom Menace, which neither of us liked nearly so much, for years and years. (We agreed to differ about the abomination.)

Why, says Jon, is it so hard to talk about good movies?

I think the answer is that in a real sense you don't actually see good movies. As long as the movie is good, you aren't watching it: you are inside it, sharing the characters' experiences, seeing their world through their eyes. If you are in that state of mind, you can put up with almost anything, even the plot of Avatar. In the same way, you never actually see a good special effect: what you see is a spaceship or a sword fighting skeleton or a big blue willy. Only if the special effect has fundamentally failed do you have a chance to think "I wonder how they did that?" When a movie goes wrong something wrenches you out of it and you are looking from the outside: commenting that such and such an actor is doing this thing well, and that thing badly, noticing structure and shot. Sweet is the something which nature brings / our meddling intellect mis-shapes the beauteous form of things / and he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of knowledge, as the fellow said.

Criticizing Kick Ass would be a non sequitur. The only correct reaction is "Like, wow. Wow." Or as Jon said: "I never need to see another movie ever again."

The relationship between the Doctor and Amy is a relationship between two characters, between two people, not between two actors saying lines at each other. That's all that matters. Matt Smith gives us a panicky Doctor; an improvising Doctor; a Doctor who knows his own reputation and isn't quite sure if he can live up to it; a Doctor who knows that he is going to do something incredibly clever but hasn't thought of it yet; a Doctor who won't know what his plan is until he's finished talking; a Doctor who is concerned about being the Doctor.

"I'll do a thing. I don't know what thing yet. It's a thing in progress. Respect the thing."

Possibly maybe arguably perhaps a Doctor who is aware of his own Doctorness points to a show which is still not quite at ease with itself; a show which still thinks of itself as a revival of an old programme; a bit too post-modernist for its own good. "Doctor Who, based upon the BBC TV series 'Doctor Who'." But I honestly don't care. I haven't enjoyed the company of a TARDIS occupant this much since...I don't know, Logopolis, probably. From time to time David Tennant used to deliver lines which you wanted to take home and put on a tee-shirt because they defined everything you loved about this daft old silly TV programme. Matt Smith seems to do this every time he opens his mouth.

"There's something here which doesn't make sense. Let's go and poke it with a stick."

When a character is this mad, this endearing, this compelling it honestly doesn't matter if he's too like, or too unlike, the ten actors who previously played a character with the same name. (Have you noticed that Moffat keeps face-checking the First Doctor, as if to remind us that this Young Man is the same person as the Old Man who he is almost completely unlike?) I think I might be in love with the Eleventh Doctor if I had never seen another episode of Doctor Who in my whole life.

The scene where he leaves Amy with the clerical soldiers, warning her to keep her eyes closed and telling her to trust him ("But you never tell me the truth" "If I told you the truth you wouldn't need to trust me") seems to matter more than any Doctor / Companion scene has mattered since.... Well, since Bad Wolf Bay. But that wasn't about the Doctor and his companion, it was about the Lonely God and Dark Phoenix, over-the-top, overwrought, out of the range of normal human emotion, I'm burning up a star just to say good bye to you. This was the young old traveller and his human friend; the old young traveller about whom the question has never really gone away: can you trust him?

Doctor who?

continues...

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Fish Custard (10)

"Leadworth or the TARDIS: which is real, and which is the dream?"

It's an unanswerable question: but it isn't really the question which the Dream Lord is asking.

He's not asking "Which is real" but "Which would Amy prefer to be real?" Faced with a free choice between Leadworth and the TARDIS, which reality would she chose? (Clues in the title, I suppose.)

The answer is never really in doubt. New Who has consistently treated romantic happiness as the ultimate Good. Once the question has been articulated – once it has been made clear that "Leadworth or the TARDIS?" really means "the Doctor or Rory?" we know pretty clearly which way Amy will swing.

In fact, the question isn't even "Does Amy love Rory?" It's more "How will Amy realise that she loves Rory?" or more specifically "How will Amy be brought to the point where she can tell Rory that she loves him?" This is also going to be a large part of the plot of the one in the flat: one human coming to the point where he can say those three little words to another human. The rest of the story -- pollen, dream lord, philosophical riddle, emotional conundrum – is all plot machinery to bring Amy to this point.

There are a lot of good moments along the way. The idea that for Amy (as well as for us) the Doctor "represents" childhood is made explicit. Rory says that they can't stay on the TARDIS indefinitely, because sooner or later they have to grow up. "Do we?" she replies. The Dream Lord repeats the same thing to the Doctor, but puts a creepy twist on it. The Doctor is an incredibly old person playing at being young by always choosing the company of young people. When the Doctor asks what Rory and Amy do in boring Leadworth "in order to stave off the self harm" and Rory replies "we live".

So: that's the point of the story, is it? Amy's choice is really between growing up and not growing up: between being Amy and being Amelia. It's the Peter Pan dilemma: remain a child, and be lonely forever; or grow up, and be bored forever. "He had ecstasies innumerable that other children can never know, but he was looking through the window at the one joy from which he must be forever barred." Remind you of anyone?

It's a silly question, and it always has been. As a matter of fact, and with the exception of a very small number of brain damaged individuals, "never growing up" is not actually an option. And the TARDIS is (whisper it softly) fictitious. Asking an adult to consider what they would do, if, like Peter Pan, they were offered the chance of "never growing up" is only a vivid and rhetorical way of asking them to consider what "growing up" (or "being a child") means. If Peter Pan and Doctor Who "mean" imagination and creativity and the perception of beauty and having fun and all that stuff about the wonders of the universe that Sarah Jane goes on and on about at the end of every. damn. episode. – and if "being a grown up" means losing all of that – then surely every relatively well balanced individual would go for Never Never Land every time? But it's a false dilemma. The dichotomy between "being an adult" and "having fun" has been forced on us by psychologically damaged individuals like the Dream Lord and Mr. Darling.

Except... The one thing which adults definitely have which children definitely do not have is the capacity for romantic love and....you know....sex. And it may be that faced with a straight choice between "the ecstasy of sex" and "all other kinds of ecstasy", most adults would forgo the sunsets and the daisies and keep the squelchy stuff, please. (When he was researching his book Talking Cock, Richard Herring discovered that an overwhelming majority of men would rather be blinded, crippled or brain-damaged than have their thing cut off.) [*] Maybe that's why Amy's choice is so specifically presented as TARDIS vs Marriage; Doctor vs Baby. Maybe that's why, since 1965, it's always been wedding bells that breaks up the happy TARDIS gang. When Susan Foreman fell in love the First Doctor cast her out of the TARDIS. She and her earthling boyfriend went off hand in hand. With wandering steps and slow, I shouldn't wonder.

But even this isn't really a choice, is it? You could choose to be celibate: that's an option; but that won't in itself make the universe more magical. It won't even make Easter Eggs taste like they did when you were six. The myths of Eden, or Never Never Land and of the TARDIS aren't really about choices. They are descriptions of the way things are. "When you were a kid, life seemed to be more happy and carefree, and the colours were brighter and the ice cream more delicious. All that is gone forever. But on the plus side, you get to have orgasms!"

The first person to mention nylons, lipsticks, or invitations will be ejected by security.

O.K. I admit it. I'm over-thinking. Whenever the Doctor asks a companion into the TARDIS, whether it's William Hartnell talking about another world in another sky, or Christopher Eccleston saying "Wanna come with me?", the question is really being director at us viewers. "Going with the Doctor" means "Watching a really quite thrilling TV show". So "leaving the TARDIS" means "not watching your favourite TV show any more." "You can't stay in the TARDIS forever, one day you'll have to grow up and get a life" boils down to "Eventually you'll have to stop reading books about unicorns and start reading books about kitchen sinks." Romance vs realism; escapism vs serious literature.

This seems to have been the kind of thing which Mr Stephen Fry had in mind: a liking for Winnie-the-Pooh automatically and necessarily precludes a liking for Middlemarch. And if we define television which is "surprising, savoury, sharp, unusual, cosmopolitan, alien, challenging, complex, ambiguous, possibly even slightly disturbing and wrong" as "adult" and drama which is fun and escapist as "childish"; and if the only two options on the table are a world where all television is "adult" and a world where all television is "childish" then I suppose we'd all go for the former. If the waves on the desert island really did wash away every one of my DVD boxed sets except one, I'd grab Wagner's Ring Cycle before I grabbed Star Wars [**].

But it's the falsest of false dilemmas. Very few people want to eat snail porridge and salmon liquorice every night of the week: but it doesn't follow that they subsist entirely on big macs and deep fried mars bars.

It's quite interesting that Steven Fry should use "adult" as a term of approval. Adults like all kinds of entertainment. They read Mills and Boon romances. They read Agatha Christie whodunnits. They read Zane Grey westerns, Black Lace sex stories and Andy McNabb memoirs about war and torture and field latrines. I don't think that books of that kind are particularly challenging, complex or ambiguous. I think they are safe, simple and straightforward. But wouldn't describing them all as "childish" be a little...well....adolescent?

"Which is the dream: the TARDIS or Leadworth?"

Of course it's an unanswerable question. So of course the Doctor answers it. They are both dreams. That's the trap. When faced with the choice between two mutually exclusive alternatives, always choose the third one.

[*] I'm not absolutely sure about this. Suppose NASA said tomorrow "We want volunteers, aged about 20, to travel to Alpha Centuri and contact the aliens who we are now pretty sure live there, and then come home and report. Only catch is, it's a small ship and a forty year round trip: you'd effectively be taking a vow of lifelong celibacy." I'm guessing they'd still have one or two volunteers. Mars is worth any number of grandchildren.

[**] Although I might be prepared to negotiate e.g if I forgo the Norns and the riddle game can I keep "A New Hope"?

continues...

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