This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world,
Is now leas'd out,—I die pronouncing it,—
Like to a tenement or pelting farm:
England, bound in with the triumphant sea,
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame,
With inky blots, and rotten parchment bonds:
That England, that was wont to conquer others,
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.
Ah! would the scandal vanish with my life,
How happy then were my ensuing death.
Friday, May 06, 2005
Thursday, May 05, 2005
Vote hypocrite. Get Bigot. Which liar do you want to ruin the country?
How can I go forward when I don't know which way I'm facing? -- John Lennon
I suppose I should say something about the election. I haven't followed it particularly closely. What I've seen has felt like a dark exercise in self-parody. Maybe on Friday morning, I will step out of the shower and find that the last three weeks have been Rory Bremmer sketch and the actual election hasn't started.
I have fantasies of what I might have done if someone had canvassed me.
"Hello. I'm your Conservative Candidate."
"I am amazed you are prepared to show your face in public. Please crawl back into your hole and set a pack of dogs on an asylum seeker, or whatever it is you do. "New" Labour make me angry. I can't be bothered to be angry with you. You are quite literally beneath my contempt."
"Hello. I'm your Liberal Candidate."
"Well, you've got me vote. Don't look so pleased. I couldn't possibly imagine your guy as PM. (Did you see the way he shriveled up on Paxman?) I'm only voting for you because you're what's left after eliminating Big Red Bastard and Little Blue Bastard. Have you thought of changing your name to the "None of the Above" party?"
"Hello. I'm your Labour Candidate."
"Are we going to go through the motions? Where I say "You sold out socialism?" and you say "Yes, but we did re-brand "Job Club" as "the New Deal."? Where I say "Iraq" and you say "I don't think that that is the most important issue facing the electorate? I'm a Guardian-reading metropolitan airy fairly civil liberties supporting elitist. I believe that education for its own sake is the main point of civilisation, as opposed to a dodgy medieval idea. If I'm anything, I'm a socialist. So why don't you just accept that I'm The Enemy and sod off?"
Have you noticed that the political cartoonists are still depicting Michael Howard as Count Dracula? It isn't remotely funny. And it does strike me as a little insensitive to wait until we have a Jew standing for high office and then start making jokes which more or less say that he, er, drinks the blood of infants.
Howard himself started out running rather a good campaign. My first reaction when I saw the "Are you thinking what we're thinking?" poster was "That's a very shrewd piece of political advertising. If you are widely regarded as out of date and out of touch, then selling yourself as the party of common sense is a very clever move." (Well, actually that was my second reaction. My first reaction was "I think so, Brain, but where would we get that much chocolate sauce at this time of night?") But then he attempted to reduce the campaign down to five key slogans: Fewer Taxes, Fewer Criminals; Fewer Foreigners; Cleaner Matrons; More Spanking. Regardless of what question he is asked, he reels of this list of five promises.
"Mr Howard, some people would say that you are too old to be Prime Minister."
"I know they do. And let me tell you why we need cleaner hospitals, better school discipline; more police-men...."
Five campaign targets turned out to be too many to keep track of, so, in a very 1984-ish way, the whole Tory campaign got reduced to a single over-arching political doctrine: "Tony Blair is a liar."
Saying "Tony Blair is a liar" had the advantage over the other slogans of being pretty obviously true. And, uniquely for a Tory poster, it makes loony-left peaceniks like myself nod in approval ("If he lied to lead us into a war, he'll lie to win an election.") The effect is rather spoiled by the fact that Howard supported the War against Iraq, and says that he would have done so even had known then everything that he knows now. So: you can't trust Tony because he got us involved in a stupid, expensive, un-necessary, illegal war and lied about it; whereas we would have got you involved in a stupid, un-necessary, illegal war, but we would have told the truth about it. Not the most scintillating message I have ever heard.
You'd have thought that someone would have spotted posters which appeared to have been written by hand were just asking to be scrawled on? The first time I saw the poster which says "It's not racist to want to limit immigration", a helpful graffiti artist had added "Of course it is you ****ing twat" in a similar handwriting. Not subtle, but...
By the way: it's not racist to want to limit immigration. No-one ever said it was. When Michael says he supports "controlled immigration", he's cleverly suggesting that Labour think that there shouldn't be any such controls, which is pretty obviously not true. (Similarly, when he asks "What's wrong with there being some discipline in schools?" he is implying that Labour positively opposes the idea of kids behaving themselves, which is nonsense.) Most racists want to limit immigration, but not all those who want to limit immigration are racists. But Howard's real triumph is that he has succeeded in giving the word "immigration" a negative aura. Just before parliament broke up, he did a knock-about routine in which he listed all the bad things which Tony had done. "Crime – up. School truancy – up. Tax – up. Immigration – up." Once "immigration" has come to mean "bad thing" it is very hard to have a rational discussion about it. If Howard says "Under Labour, the amount of Bad Thing has increased" it's next to impossible for Tony to say "Yes, and Bad Thing is a good!" Instead, he finds himself saying "No, actually, there was less Bad Thing, and if you elect us again, there will be even less!" (A long time ago, probably during John Major's infamous "Labour Tax Bombshell" campaign, Labour accepted the principle that Income Tax was a Bad Thing, and kept assuring us that they had no intention of increasing the amount of this Bad Thing. Once you've accepted this, then it's bye-bye to silly ideas like socialism.)
I blame the journalists for the nightmarish quality of the election campaign. Jon Snow, John Humphreys, the Dimbleby brothers and Darth Paxman all got to do interviews with Michael, Tony and The Other One. In fact, they all got to do exactly the same interview.
What do you think goes on in their little heads before facing the Big Man on live TV? "I know. I'll ask Tony whether he deceived parliament about the reasons for war in Iraq. That's the last thing he'll expect. So maybe I'll catch him off guard, and he'll blurt out the truth ("Of course, I knew that the whole WMD thing was a pack of lies. George told me that if I pretended to believe it, he'd let David Blunkett have a consignment of second hand electric chairs. Gosh, it feels good to have got that off my chest.")
You'd think that one of them could have thought of a slightly off-the-wall question which would get him off his pre-written script and force him to say something slightly interesting.
"Mr Blair, Mr Howard. Supposing you knew that you were going to be in power for another 20 years, what would Britian look like at the end of it?"
"Mr Blair, given that George Bush is a pro-gun pro-hanging anti-abortion anti-gay religious fundamentalist – pretty much the incarnation of every liberals worst nightmare -- what goes through your mind when you shake hands with him? Did you vomit the first time?"
"Mr Howard, what finally convinced you to stop advocating capital punishment?".
In fact, of course, they all ask him the same questions and he responds with the same answers in precisely the same words, and we all start to wonder whether we can actually be bothered to vote for any of them.
"I have an idea, boys and girls. Let's split the audience down the middle, and when Mr Dimbleby says "Mr Blair, are you a fibber" we'll all join in the chorus and see who can shout it the loudest. Let's have a practice: all together now....
I don't dis-respect
those who take a different view
but I became Prime Minister
in order to make difficult decisions
and I happen to think
that the decision I took was the right one
and the attorney general was there in the room
he was there in the room
he was there in the room
he was there in the room
(one last time, let's try to raise the roof:)
he was there in the room"
The Tories say "vote for us, because you can't trust Tony."
The Liberals say "Vote for us, because we actually opposed the war, and have got some nice policies and a very good chance of coming third."
Labour says "Even if you agree with the Liberals, you mustn't vote for them because then the Conservatives might get in."
The main reason for supporting Michael Howard is that Tony Blair is so awful; and the main reason for supporting Tony Blair is that Michael Howard is so awful, so awful, in fact that we mustn't vote Lib Dem even if agree with them.
I would find a Michael Howard government aesthetically displeasing. But I do not accept the theory that a Conservative government would be the Worst Thing Possible. It could hardly come up with Home Secretary more right wing that Blunkett, for example. The "anything but Howard" theory amounts to a blank cheque that excuses all Labour misbehavior. We can do what we like, because the opposition is so dreadful. Vote for the party you hate, because otherwise the party you hate slightly more might get in. That's democracy, folks.
Tony made one rather clever rhetorical breakthrough during the campaign. When asked about Iraq, he effected to be irritated with the issue; to say that it was irrelevant; that it was in the past; that "people really cared" about hospitals, crime, police... As a result of this tactic, it becomes hard to say "To me, the war is the decisive issue" or "It comes down to a question of trust" without appearing to to be repeating a dreadfully hackneyed cliches.
However.
To me, the war is the decisive issue. It comes down to a question of trust.
Howard spoilt things slightly by shouting "liar" a bit too loudly. This enabled Blair to hide behind mock outrage. It was also a mistake to lean so heavily on the dozen or so memos that leaked out in the week before the election. Only a complete political geek can understand them. Did this lawyer change that piece of advice from "maybe" to "probably" before or after this resolution? I, for one, am entirely lost.
What bothers me more is the way in which Blair's reasons for going to war keep shifting. Before the war, it was, as we all know, about weapons of mass destruction: But when it turned out that there had never been any such weapons, Tony, in effect, said "Did I say weapons of mass destruction? Oh. Sorry. What I meant was that Saddam was a wicked dictator, and it was right to liberate his people from him." But during the election, it has changed again, presumably because one of the memos specifically said that a war for "regime change" would have been illegal. So now, it's all about the War on Terror. After September 11th, Tony decided that there were lots of really bad terrorists in the world, and it was tactically necessary to "deal with" all countries that had nuclear-bioligcal-and-chemical-weapons. Saddam happened to be first on the list. In this version, "regime change" was merely a means to an end, the end being removing the weapons which didn't exist but might have done. Liberating the poor suffering Iraqis was simply a pleasant side-effect.
This confirms what everyone who isn't a New Labour partisan believes: Blair decided very early on that he wanted to go to war against Saddam, and started looking for reasons that could justify it. I used to think that the true reason he wanted the war was in order to suck up to the biggest kid in the playground: he would sooner be a junior ally of America than an equal partner in Europe. But his new "September 11th" version of events has a ring of truth to it. It's the way someone with messiah complex might actually think. ("I decided to remove Saddam". By myself. Cabinet? Americans? Generals?) But the reasons given at the time – legal, tactical, moral, intelligence-based – were only pretexts to give support to a course of action he had already decided on. Is this the same as "lying to get us into a war"?
"I am not lost: I just haven't pin-pointed my precise location on the map yet." "I did not have sexual intercourse with that woman."
I think that the fact that Tony led the country into a war without being entirely honest about the true reasons – yes, that's a good way of putting it – is itself, grounds for not voting for him, ever, ever again. Blair says that if I do this I might let Howard in. I don't for one moment believe this to be true. But even if I did, the fact would remain that honour demands that any politician who had been less than 100% honest about a war should be punished by the electorate at the next opportunity. If five years of Howard is the price for that, then we should grit out teeth and put up with it. Perhaps, in opposition, New Labour would evaporate and re-form as something more recognisable as a socialist party. Wouldn't that make the 2009 election more interesting?
I suppose I should say something about the election. I haven't followed it particularly closely. What I've seen has felt like a dark exercise in self-parody. Maybe on Friday morning, I will step out of the shower and find that the last three weeks have been Rory Bremmer sketch and the actual election hasn't started.
I have fantasies of what I might have done if someone had canvassed me.
"Hello. I'm your Conservative Candidate."
"I am amazed you are prepared to show your face in public. Please crawl back into your hole and set a pack of dogs on an asylum seeker, or whatever it is you do. "New" Labour make me angry. I can't be bothered to be angry with you. You are quite literally beneath my contempt."
"Hello. I'm your Liberal Candidate."
"Well, you've got me vote. Don't look so pleased. I couldn't possibly imagine your guy as PM. (Did you see the way he shriveled up on Paxman?) I'm only voting for you because you're what's left after eliminating Big Red Bastard and Little Blue Bastard. Have you thought of changing your name to the "None of the Above" party?"
"Hello. I'm your Labour Candidate."
"Are we going to go through the motions? Where I say "You sold out socialism?" and you say "Yes, but we did re-brand "Job Club" as "the New Deal."? Where I say "Iraq" and you say "I don't think that that is the most important issue facing the electorate? I'm a Guardian-reading metropolitan airy fairly civil liberties supporting elitist. I believe that education for its own sake is the main point of civilisation, as opposed to a dodgy medieval idea. If I'm anything, I'm a socialist. So why don't you just accept that I'm The Enemy and sod off?"
Have you noticed that the political cartoonists are still depicting Michael Howard as Count Dracula? It isn't remotely funny. And it does strike me as a little insensitive to wait until we have a Jew standing for high office and then start making jokes which more or less say that he, er, drinks the blood of infants.
Howard himself started out running rather a good campaign. My first reaction when I saw the "Are you thinking what we're thinking?" poster was "That's a very shrewd piece of political advertising. If you are widely regarded as out of date and out of touch, then selling yourself as the party of common sense is a very clever move." (Well, actually that was my second reaction. My first reaction was "I think so, Brain, but where would we get that much chocolate sauce at this time of night?") But then he attempted to reduce the campaign down to five key slogans: Fewer Taxes, Fewer Criminals; Fewer Foreigners; Cleaner Matrons; More Spanking. Regardless of what question he is asked, he reels of this list of five promises.
"Mr Howard, some people would say that you are too old to be Prime Minister."
"I know they do. And let me tell you why we need cleaner hospitals, better school discipline; more police-men...."
Five campaign targets turned out to be too many to keep track of, so, in a very 1984-ish way, the whole Tory campaign got reduced to a single over-arching political doctrine: "Tony Blair is a liar."
Saying "Tony Blair is a liar" had the advantage over the other slogans of being pretty obviously true. And, uniquely for a Tory poster, it makes loony-left peaceniks like myself nod in approval ("If he lied to lead us into a war, he'll lie to win an election.") The effect is rather spoiled by the fact that Howard supported the War against Iraq, and says that he would have done so even had known then everything that he knows now. So: you can't trust Tony because he got us involved in a stupid, expensive, un-necessary, illegal war and lied about it; whereas we would have got you involved in a stupid, un-necessary, illegal war, but we would have told the truth about it. Not the most scintillating message I have ever heard.
You'd have thought that someone would have spotted posters which appeared to have been written by hand were just asking to be scrawled on? The first time I saw the poster which says "It's not racist to want to limit immigration", a helpful graffiti artist had added "Of course it is you ****ing twat" in a similar handwriting. Not subtle, but...
By the way: it's not racist to want to limit immigration. No-one ever said it was. When Michael says he supports "controlled immigration", he's cleverly suggesting that Labour think that there shouldn't be any such controls, which is pretty obviously not true. (Similarly, when he asks "What's wrong with there being some discipline in schools?" he is implying that Labour positively opposes the idea of kids behaving themselves, which is nonsense.) Most racists want to limit immigration, but not all those who want to limit immigration are racists. But Howard's real triumph is that he has succeeded in giving the word "immigration" a negative aura. Just before parliament broke up, he did a knock-about routine in which he listed all the bad things which Tony had done. "Crime – up. School truancy – up. Tax – up. Immigration – up." Once "immigration" has come to mean "bad thing" it is very hard to have a rational discussion about it. If Howard says "Under Labour, the amount of Bad Thing has increased" it's next to impossible for Tony to say "Yes, and Bad Thing is a good!" Instead, he finds himself saying "No, actually, there was less Bad Thing, and if you elect us again, there will be even less!" (A long time ago, probably during John Major's infamous "Labour Tax Bombshell" campaign, Labour accepted the principle that Income Tax was a Bad Thing, and kept assuring us that they had no intention of increasing the amount of this Bad Thing. Once you've accepted this, then it's bye-bye to silly ideas like socialism.)
I blame the journalists for the nightmarish quality of the election campaign. Jon Snow, John Humphreys, the Dimbleby brothers and Darth Paxman all got to do interviews with Michael, Tony and The Other One. In fact, they all got to do exactly the same interview.
What do you think goes on in their little heads before facing the Big Man on live TV? "I know. I'll ask Tony whether he deceived parliament about the reasons for war in Iraq. That's the last thing he'll expect. So maybe I'll catch him off guard, and he'll blurt out the truth ("Of course, I knew that the whole WMD thing was a pack of lies. George told me that if I pretended to believe it, he'd let David Blunkett have a consignment of second hand electric chairs. Gosh, it feels good to have got that off my chest.")
You'd think that one of them could have thought of a slightly off-the-wall question which would get him off his pre-written script and force him to say something slightly interesting.
"Mr Blair, Mr Howard. Supposing you knew that you were going to be in power for another 20 years, what would Britian look like at the end of it?"
"Mr Blair, given that George Bush is a pro-gun pro-hanging anti-abortion anti-gay religious fundamentalist – pretty much the incarnation of every liberals worst nightmare -- what goes through your mind when you shake hands with him? Did you vomit the first time?"
"Mr Howard, what finally convinced you to stop advocating capital punishment?".
In fact, of course, they all ask him the same questions and he responds with the same answers in precisely the same words, and we all start to wonder whether we can actually be bothered to vote for any of them.
"I have an idea, boys and girls. Let's split the audience down the middle, and when Mr Dimbleby says "Mr Blair, are you a fibber" we'll all join in the chorus and see who can shout it the loudest. Let's have a practice: all together now....
I don't dis-respect
those who take a different view
but I became Prime Minister
in order to make difficult decisions
and I happen to think
that the decision I took was the right one
and the attorney general was there in the room
he was there in the room
he was there in the room
he was there in the room
(one last time, let's try to raise the roof:)
he was there in the room"
The Tories say "vote for us, because you can't trust Tony."
The Liberals say "Vote for us, because we actually opposed the war, and have got some nice policies and a very good chance of coming third."
Labour says "Even if you agree with the Liberals, you mustn't vote for them because then the Conservatives might get in."
The main reason for supporting Michael Howard is that Tony Blair is so awful; and the main reason for supporting Tony Blair is that Michael Howard is so awful, so awful, in fact that we mustn't vote Lib Dem even if agree with them.
I would find a Michael Howard government aesthetically displeasing. But I do not accept the theory that a Conservative government would be the Worst Thing Possible. It could hardly come up with Home Secretary more right wing that Blunkett, for example. The "anything but Howard" theory amounts to a blank cheque that excuses all Labour misbehavior. We can do what we like, because the opposition is so dreadful. Vote for the party you hate, because otherwise the party you hate slightly more might get in. That's democracy, folks.
Tony made one rather clever rhetorical breakthrough during the campaign. When asked about Iraq, he effected to be irritated with the issue; to say that it was irrelevant; that it was in the past; that "people really cared" about hospitals, crime, police... As a result of this tactic, it becomes hard to say "To me, the war is the decisive issue" or "It comes down to a question of trust" without appearing to to be repeating a dreadfully hackneyed cliches.
However.
To me, the war is the decisive issue. It comes down to a question of trust.
Howard spoilt things slightly by shouting "liar" a bit too loudly. This enabled Blair to hide behind mock outrage. It was also a mistake to lean so heavily on the dozen or so memos that leaked out in the week before the election. Only a complete political geek can understand them. Did this lawyer change that piece of advice from "maybe" to "probably" before or after this resolution? I, for one, am entirely lost.
What bothers me more is the way in which Blair's reasons for going to war keep shifting. Before the war, it was, as we all know, about weapons of mass destruction: But when it turned out that there had never been any such weapons, Tony, in effect, said "Did I say weapons of mass destruction? Oh. Sorry. What I meant was that Saddam was a wicked dictator, and it was right to liberate his people from him." But during the election, it has changed again, presumably because one of the memos specifically said that a war for "regime change" would have been illegal. So now, it's all about the War on Terror. After September 11th, Tony decided that there were lots of really bad terrorists in the world, and it was tactically necessary to "deal with" all countries that had nuclear-bioligcal-and-chemical-weapons. Saddam happened to be first on the list. In this version, "regime change" was merely a means to an end, the end being removing the weapons which didn't exist but might have done. Liberating the poor suffering Iraqis was simply a pleasant side-effect.
This confirms what everyone who isn't a New Labour partisan believes: Blair decided very early on that he wanted to go to war against Saddam, and started looking for reasons that could justify it. I used to think that the true reason he wanted the war was in order to suck up to the biggest kid in the playground: he would sooner be a junior ally of America than an equal partner in Europe. But his new "September 11th" version of events has a ring of truth to it. It's the way someone with messiah complex might actually think. ("I decided to remove Saddam". By myself. Cabinet? Americans? Generals?) But the reasons given at the time – legal, tactical, moral, intelligence-based – were only pretexts to give support to a course of action he had already decided on. Is this the same as "lying to get us into a war"?
"I am not lost: I just haven't pin-pointed my precise location on the map yet." "I did not have sexual intercourse with that woman."
I think that the fact that Tony led the country into a war without being entirely honest about the true reasons – yes, that's a good way of putting it – is itself, grounds for not voting for him, ever, ever again. Blair says that if I do this I might let Howard in. I don't for one moment believe this to be true. But even if I did, the fact would remain that honour demands that any politician who had been less than 100% honest about a war should be punished by the electorate at the next opportunity. If five years of Howard is the price for that, then we should grit out teeth and put up with it. Perhaps, in opposition, New Labour would evaporate and re-form as something more recognisable as a socialist party. Wouldn't that make the 2009 election more interesting?
Windmills of my mind
So. About three weeks ago, Miguel jumped down from the shelf and said "Andrew, you made a New Years resolution to read me. And it may only be May, but you made the resolution in 2004. So get on with it." A list of grown-up books which I am going to get around to is the only annual resolution I ever keep. I read right through the "Fairy Queen" in 2003. (C.S Lewis said he wished it had been twice as long. I didn't go quite that far.)
The trouble with coming to the end of something as big and important as "Don Quixote" is that it leaves you thinking. "Well. Now I think I have got some idea of what that monster is about. I guess I should read it again." (To quote the sainted Lewis twice in consecutive paragraphs: "There is some hope for the man who hasn't read Malory or Boswell or Shakespeare's sonnets, but what can you do with the fellow who says he has read them, and think that settles the matter?" I haven't read Boswell: maybe I should pencil him in for 2006?) I think I was probably somewhere around page 400 when I said "I get it. Don Quixote is clever but mad; Sancho Panzo is stupid but sane." So neither of them can understand the world, but they both misunderstand it in different ways. I guess the thing starts out as a joke, almost a shaggy dog story – suppose there was a lunatic who thought he was living in an heroic legend: mistaking windmills for giants and herds of cows for armies - what would he do? How many silly mistakes could he make? Somehow, the joke grows and turns into a novel. The First Novel, apart from all the ones which came before it.
What's it about? About a man who runs around imagining himself to be having adventures; and (in the second half) having fake adventures set up for him by "sane" noblemen, who, as the narrator points out, are probably madder than he is. About dreaming the impossible dream and being true to yourself even if everyone else thinks you're crazy? About whether anyone has any right to call someone else "mad" if he is obviously happy and noble?
I wonder if it's actually about anything at all. Cervantes just picks up the character of the mad knight and runs with it for as long as it carries on seeming funny. Which turns out to be "almost indefinitely." Don Quixote suddenly gets ill and dies for no good reason in the last five pages: if he hadn't done so, there would have been no reason for the book ever to finish.
It's the official Greatest Book Written On Earth By Anyone Ever. I sort of see why so many clever people think this. Somewhere around page 842, the Don and Sancho recover from another misadventure. Nothing very much happens.
The dust and weariness that Don Quixote and Sancho took away with them form their encounter with the discourteous bulls was alleviated by a clear, fresh spring that they found in a cool grove of trees, and the two of them, the fatigued master and servant, sat at its edge, leaving the gray and Rocinante free, without bridle or bit...."Eat, Sancho my friend" said Don Quixote "sustain life, which matters to you more than to me, and let me die at the hands of my thoughts and by means of my misfortunes...."
During this passage, I noticed that I wasn't so much reading the book as observing two people: that without realising that I had done so, I had come to believe in them and understand how they related and what they were feeling; and even to feel at home in the society they inhabited. Books which create a portrait of a society, or of a character's psychology seem to be the ones which are regarded as uber-classics. We are supposed to admire "Middlemarch" but regard "Tess" as something of a guilty pleasure. "Don Quixote" certainly evokes character and place as well as any book I've read. I understand that it also contains Spanish puns.
"Don Quixote" is about how insane it would be if someone started to believe that the chivalric romances really happened. But "Don Quixote" is a sort of a chivalric romance, and it fools us into thinking that it really happened, so that when we read it, we are as mad as the Don. (Bit of deconstruction, there.)
I suppose it's really about fandom, isn't it? Everyone despises Quixote for reading comic-books, but he loves them so much that he starts to dress up as his favourite characters and act out his favourite stories. So everyone thinks he's even madder. But in the end, he seems happier and saner than the rest of the world.
Anyway, it's very long. Very long indeed.
If you feel I need an excuse of having let this blog fall silent, then that will have to do.
Monday, April 18, 2005
Friday, April 15, 2005
Thursday, April 14, 2005
Monday, April 11, 2005
P.S
I only just "got" the ending -- why Dickens said "There are more thing in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Gosh. That is actually rather clever. And spooky.
Gosh.
Gosh. That is actually rather clever. And spooky.
Gosh.
Not The End of the World
"Exclusive" – Word used by tabloid newspapers to describe a story which is in all the others.
Guardian style guide.
The makers of popular domestic serial stories (or "soap-operas" as I believe they are called) like to fill their narratives with un-expected twists. Marriages, deaths, divorces, revelations, all popping up in that final five seconds before the signature tune. But it very often happens that a tabloid newspaper gets hold of the script in advance, so by the time the Surprise Twist happens, you have already read about it on the front page of the Sun. What is strange to me is that people carry on watching the soaps in any case. If you are following "Eastarchers" then, of course, the sudden return Dirty Dorris who supposedly died in a combine-harvester accident ten years ago is great fun. But how can it be fun when the Daily Lie told you in advance that it was going to happen? Maybe there is something post-modern going on. Maybe part of the pleasure of a soap is that you know what is going to happen to these characters, but they don't. Maybe it gives you a sense that someone, somewhere, might be watching over you. Everyone knew the plot of classical tragedy. The moment Oedipus walked onto the stage, the audience knew that he was going to come to a sticky end. Plays used to be called "The Tragedy of MacBeth" or "The Comedy of Errors" to ensure that the audience knew in advance whether they would have happy endings or sad ones. Perhaps tabloid spoilers, by creating a sense of fate and predestination lend soaps a mythic gravitas.
Or perhaps not.
In retrospect, it is pretty obvious that Christopher Eccleston was never going to stay in "Doctor Who" beyond the first season. I doubt that, 18 months ago, when the Dream Project landed in Russel T Davies lap, he gave much thought to Season 2. I imagine his aim was to make a stonking, self-contained series of 13 episodes. You can imagine the conversation. "Chris, you are the exact actor I want to star in my new, high profile project." "I'd love to do it, Rus, but only for one series." "Tough. If you won't promise to appear in a totally hypothetical second series, you can't play." Yes, I know that fans think that "the return of 'Doctor Who'" means "They'll be a new series every autumn for the next 27 years," but TV doesn't work like that any more.
The final episode of the season is to be called "The Parting of the Ways". The penultimate episode is called "To Be Announced." This rather suggests that R.T.D has a big surprise up his sleeve which he doesn't want to reveal too soon. The missing episode title is probably "The Daleks Murder Rose" or "The Doctor Contracts Incurable Time-lord Flu" or "Rose and the Doctor have passionate sex under the TARDIS console." (I do hope not.) Very likely,"the Parting of the Ways" concludes with an amazingly surprising last minute twist in which Eccleston leaves the series. Maybe the Doctor dies to save Rose. Maybe it was always planned that the season would end with a "re-generation." Perhaps R.T.D always intended "Doctor Who" to be a one-season-wonder with the potential for a sequel.
But of course, after episode 1, everything went completely apple-shaped. The BBC was surprised by the fact that their massively hyped revival of one of the most famous TV shows of all time, er, got very high ratings. They panicked, and announced there and then that they'd commissioned a second series. (Or, as it may turn out, a "sequel".). Whereupon the Sun discovers that Series 2 won't have Eccelston in it, and runs an "exclusive" claiming that Eccelston has "quit" after one episode. And the BBC, foolishly, instead of saying "Just wait and see" confirmed the story.
Maybe, if the Sun had kept its gob shut, Chris would have been persuaded to stay on for another season.(Presumably, if had said "Not 2006, but maybe 2007", the beeb could have talked business.) Maybe, if the Sun had kept its gob shut, we would have reached the final installment, and found that the "twist" of C..E's departure was a brilliant and appropriate way of ending New "Who" Season 1.
At first, the news depressed me. I felt as if someone had given me a box of pistachio Turkish Delight and then snatched it away before I had a chance to eat one. It felt as if instead of looking at "The New Doctor" I was looking at "The Old Doctor, the Temporary Doctor, the Doctor who Is Not Going To Be Around For Very Long."
But I calmed down, and am watching the series for what it is. Ten hours is a very long time for an actor to play one character. Longer than Mark Hamill played Luke Skywalker. Almost as long as Sean Connery played James Bond. John Clease said that he got 6 hours out of Basil Fawlty, and Shakespeare only got 4 out of Hamlet.
I could do without all the speculation about who the new Doctor should be. You would think they had learned their lesson by now. Everyone and his grand-daughter was reported as being "considered" for the part last time around. The one person whose name was never mentioned was, er, Christopher Eccleston. I fear that the doctrine of regeneration, which was the saving of the series in 1966, could be the thing which strangles it in 2005. The fact that the Doctor regenerates has become the most important thing about him, the one thing which everybody knows. "Doctor Who: oh, its that series where you have to guess who the leading man is going to be that week."
I could really, really do without all the silly discussions about whether there could be a black Doctor or a Lady Doctor, which we have had to listen to every few years since the departure of Tom Baker. Answer: a version of the Doctor based on some supposedly "trendy" version of black-british yoof culture would be too hideous to contemplate: a Doctor who happened to have dark skin ought not even to be worthy of comment. A relatively androgynous female Doctor -- like one of those actresses doing Prospero or Hamlet or Richard II -- would be no problem at all: one who was self-consciously glamorous or feminist would be unendurable. But I hate the fact that the discussion is being framed in this way – which group or category ought to have a chance of being "a" Doctor. The Doctor, for all his multi-facetedness, is a character. He should be played by a person who the director thinks can play him best.
I am trying to decide whether to do the joke about David Tennant becoming pope, or just to claim that white smoke will appear from the chimney of Television Center when the new Doctor is selected.
I said before that Tom Baker was the Doctor, where Patrick Troughton was only someone playing the Doctor. Eccleston is neither. He is a third party who is periodically possessed by the spirit of the Doctor. When he starts bickering with Rose ("You think your're so great", "I am so great") he feels as un-Doctor-ish as Peter Cushing. The character tick of calling everything "fantastic" is already fantastically irritating. But then, suddenly, he will take control of a situation, or make some speech about man's place in the universe, and he is suddenly – well, to coin a phrase, the Doctorest Doctor your ever saw.
I was about to write "As a completely new time travelling hero, I like him very much. But I am not sure if he has anything to do with the Doctor of old." But when tried to define the characteristics of Eccleston -- the glee at traveling through time, the naughtiness, the mood-swings, the occasional arrogance, the underlying Holmsian callousness -- I realised that they were all totally Doctorish characteristics.
R.T.D clearly has a meta-plot brewing. I am worried that this story-arc will become more interesting than the actual episodes. I thought part 2 "The End of the World" was rather weak as space-opera goes: but all the punch came from the slow-burn revelation about the destruction of the Time Lords. (Getting rid of the Time Lords, much the most boring thing in the Who mythos, is a good idea: but making the fact that the Time Lords have been destroyed a central plank of the Doctor's character could be a mistake.) If I said "I bet the Daleks destroyed the Time Lords" would anyone take the bet?
R.T.D said that he wanted "Doctor Who" to be character driven. Or "emotionally literate", if you insist. He is obviously taking a leaf out of the books of U.S TV shows like "Lois and Clerk" and that thing about vampires and school girls that totally passed me by. The main "fantasy" plot can be quite silly, but this doesn't matter because it is really only a peg on which to hang some character drama. "The End of the World" was not really about a lot of rich aliens on a space ship being menaced by a baddie; it was about the Doctor's relationship with Rose and with the Tree-woman. "The Unquiet Dead" was not really about welsh ghosts, but about the character of Charles Dickens and how meeting the Doctor helps him overcome his general disillusionment with life. So far so good. But the relatively short episodes don't give much space for these characters to develop. The key character in Episode 3, Gwynneth the serving girl really only developed in one 5 minute conversation with Rose. If we were going to care about her, she needed a lot more screen-time.
I have no nostalgic attachment to the format of stories made up of 4 and 6 episodes (or rather, I do, but I don't expect the BBC to pay any attention to me); but the single 45 minute episode seems ill-suited to the type of story R.T.D wants to tell.
The Doctor is making too much use of gadgets. The sonic screwdriver in particular is becoming an all purpose get out of jail free card. Please stop it.
I think that it is a shame that the Doctor has got sufficient control of the TARDIS that Rose can nip home between adventures. I think that the sense of being lost in time and space and not quite knowing when and if the Doctor will get you home was an important part of the show's magic. Have you ever felt what it must be like to be wanderers in the fourth dimension? To be exiles?
"The End of the World" didn't feel very much like "Doctor Who"...and I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing. A lot of aliens gather on a ship to witness a big event, and then one of them starts killing the others: this is more "Trek" than "Who". Some of the jokes felt a little familiar. (The "end of the world as an entertainment spectacle" is right out of "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy"; the "I-Pod" joke is straight out of "Dancers at the End of Time".)
The moral messages were rammed home with a distinct lack of subtlety. It was one thing for Rose to refer to Cassandra as "Michael Jackson", but not necessary for her to follow this joke with a little speech about plastic surgery. I am not sure that the conclusion, about cherishing the world we live in because it will all be destroyed in only five billion years, really made a great deal of sense. I think that if I had not been sitting there chortelling "It's a new episode of "Doctor Who", it's a new episode of "Doctor Who", and there are eleven more to come", I would not have thought it was a particularly good story.
I guess its main point was structural: to say to the audience -- last week was set in contemporary London: this week we are five billion years in the future, next week we will be in Victorian England.
"The Unquiet Dead", on the other hand, was classic old-school "Doctor Who". I wouldn't go as far as the man in the Grauniad who said it was the best thing the BBC had produced in their entire history, but it was damned good stuff. Two ordinary characters witness a strange supernatural event in the pre-cred sequence; the Doctor turns up "just to have a look around" and gets embroiled in the plot; he takes control of the situation; he meets a historical character; there is a tragic outcome. I do hope, that the idea of a subsidiary character pulling the Doctor's fat out of the fire at the last minute doesn't become a recurrent motif.
It needed to be longer. We'd hardly met the zombies before we found out the explanation; we'd hardly had the explanation before we'd got the solution. Oh, for some old fashioned pacing – an episode of the walking dead; and episode of blue ghosts; an episode of thinking that they are "good" aliens; and a final episode fighting them as "bad aliens". And a whole month to get to know Gwynneth, so we could properly feel her sacrifice.
It wasn't "Talons of Weng Chiang", but then, what is?
The dialogue sparkled, although Mr Davies needs to watch his habit of letting story-external humour work its way into the plot. It was a mistake in episode 1 for the wheely bin to belch, not because there is anything wrong with a belch-joke, but because there was no logical reason for it to do so: it wasn't a creature and it hadn't eaten anything. There was no reason for Charles Dickens to says "What the Shakespeare was that!" because, well, he just wouldn't have. We pardon both jokes for being funny: but too much of this kind of thing and we may stop believing in the show. The Doctor's own wit, and especially, Rose's reaction to it, is much funnier. ("I don't believe you just said that.")
Note: every time I type "Rose", I almost type "Ace". Hmm....
So then. An unquestionably cool stand-alone fantasy TV show, but with enough references and reminiscences of "Doctor Who" to satisfy my inner fanboy. I still don't know where it is going; I still want to find out. I hope that R.T.D doesn't blow the emerging backstory. And I want to see the Daleks. As relatively unequivocal a thumbs up as you could have expected an old anorak like me to give, then.
Guardian style guide.
The makers of popular domestic serial stories (or "soap-operas" as I believe they are called) like to fill their narratives with un-expected twists. Marriages, deaths, divorces, revelations, all popping up in that final five seconds before the signature tune. But it very often happens that a tabloid newspaper gets hold of the script in advance, so by the time the Surprise Twist happens, you have already read about it on the front page of the Sun. What is strange to me is that people carry on watching the soaps in any case. If you are following "Eastarchers" then, of course, the sudden return Dirty Dorris who supposedly died in a combine-harvester accident ten years ago is great fun. But how can it be fun when the Daily Lie told you in advance that it was going to happen? Maybe there is something post-modern going on. Maybe part of the pleasure of a soap is that you know what is going to happen to these characters, but they don't. Maybe it gives you a sense that someone, somewhere, might be watching over you. Everyone knew the plot of classical tragedy. The moment Oedipus walked onto the stage, the audience knew that he was going to come to a sticky end. Plays used to be called "The Tragedy of MacBeth" or "The Comedy of Errors" to ensure that the audience knew in advance whether they would have happy endings or sad ones. Perhaps tabloid spoilers, by creating a sense of fate and predestination lend soaps a mythic gravitas.
Or perhaps not.
In retrospect, it is pretty obvious that Christopher Eccleston was never going to stay in "Doctor Who" beyond the first season. I doubt that, 18 months ago, when the Dream Project landed in Russel T Davies lap, he gave much thought to Season 2. I imagine his aim was to make a stonking, self-contained series of 13 episodes. You can imagine the conversation. "Chris, you are the exact actor I want to star in my new, high profile project." "I'd love to do it, Rus, but only for one series." "Tough. If you won't promise to appear in a totally hypothetical second series, you can't play." Yes, I know that fans think that "the return of 'Doctor Who'" means "They'll be a new series every autumn for the next 27 years," but TV doesn't work like that any more.
The final episode of the season is to be called "The Parting of the Ways". The penultimate episode is called "To Be Announced." This rather suggests that R.T.D has a big surprise up his sleeve which he doesn't want to reveal too soon. The missing episode title is probably "The Daleks Murder Rose" or "The Doctor Contracts Incurable Time-lord Flu" or "Rose and the Doctor have passionate sex under the TARDIS console." (I do hope not.) Very likely,"the Parting of the Ways" concludes with an amazingly surprising last minute twist in which Eccleston leaves the series. Maybe the Doctor dies to save Rose. Maybe it was always planned that the season would end with a "re-generation." Perhaps R.T.D always intended "Doctor Who" to be a one-season-wonder with the potential for a sequel.
But of course, after episode 1, everything went completely apple-shaped. The BBC was surprised by the fact that their massively hyped revival of one of the most famous TV shows of all time, er, got very high ratings. They panicked, and announced there and then that they'd commissioned a second series. (Or, as it may turn out, a "sequel".). Whereupon the Sun discovers that Series 2 won't have Eccelston in it, and runs an "exclusive" claiming that Eccelston has "quit" after one episode. And the BBC, foolishly, instead of saying "Just wait and see" confirmed the story.
Maybe, if the Sun had kept its gob shut, Chris would have been persuaded to stay on for another season.(Presumably, if had said "Not 2006, but maybe 2007", the beeb could have talked business.) Maybe, if the Sun had kept its gob shut, we would have reached the final installment, and found that the "twist" of C..E's departure was a brilliant and appropriate way of ending New "Who" Season 1.
At first, the news depressed me. I felt as if someone had given me a box of pistachio Turkish Delight and then snatched it away before I had a chance to eat one. It felt as if instead of looking at "The New Doctor" I was looking at "The Old Doctor, the Temporary Doctor, the Doctor who Is Not Going To Be Around For Very Long."
But I calmed down, and am watching the series for what it is. Ten hours is a very long time for an actor to play one character. Longer than Mark Hamill played Luke Skywalker. Almost as long as Sean Connery played James Bond. John Clease said that he got 6 hours out of Basil Fawlty, and Shakespeare only got 4 out of Hamlet.
I could do without all the speculation about who the new Doctor should be. You would think they had learned their lesson by now. Everyone and his grand-daughter was reported as being "considered" for the part last time around. The one person whose name was never mentioned was, er, Christopher Eccleston. I fear that the doctrine of regeneration, which was the saving of the series in 1966, could be the thing which strangles it in 2005. The fact that the Doctor regenerates has become the most important thing about him, the one thing which everybody knows. "Doctor Who: oh, its that series where you have to guess who the leading man is going to be that week."
I could really, really do without all the silly discussions about whether there could be a black Doctor or a Lady Doctor, which we have had to listen to every few years since the departure of Tom Baker. Answer: a version of the Doctor based on some supposedly "trendy" version of black-british yoof culture would be too hideous to contemplate: a Doctor who happened to have dark skin ought not even to be worthy of comment. A relatively androgynous female Doctor -- like one of those actresses doing Prospero or Hamlet or Richard II -- would be no problem at all: one who was self-consciously glamorous or feminist would be unendurable. But I hate the fact that the discussion is being framed in this way – which group or category ought to have a chance of being "a" Doctor. The Doctor, for all his multi-facetedness, is a character. He should be played by a person who the director thinks can play him best.
I am trying to decide whether to do the joke about David Tennant becoming pope, or just to claim that white smoke will appear from the chimney of Television Center when the new Doctor is selected.
I said before that Tom Baker was the Doctor, where Patrick Troughton was only someone playing the Doctor. Eccleston is neither. He is a third party who is periodically possessed by the spirit of the Doctor. When he starts bickering with Rose ("You think your're so great", "I am so great") he feels as un-Doctor-ish as Peter Cushing. The character tick of calling everything "fantastic" is already fantastically irritating. But then, suddenly, he will take control of a situation, or make some speech about man's place in the universe, and he is suddenly – well, to coin a phrase, the Doctorest Doctor your ever saw.
I was about to write "As a completely new time travelling hero, I like him very much. But I am not sure if he has anything to do with the Doctor of old." But when tried to define the characteristics of Eccleston -- the glee at traveling through time, the naughtiness, the mood-swings, the occasional arrogance, the underlying Holmsian callousness -- I realised that they were all totally Doctorish characteristics.
R.T.D clearly has a meta-plot brewing. I am worried that this story-arc will become more interesting than the actual episodes. I thought part 2 "The End of the World" was rather weak as space-opera goes: but all the punch came from the slow-burn revelation about the destruction of the Time Lords. (Getting rid of the Time Lords, much the most boring thing in the Who mythos, is a good idea: but making the fact that the Time Lords have been destroyed a central plank of the Doctor's character could be a mistake.) If I said "I bet the Daleks destroyed the Time Lords" would anyone take the bet?
R.T.D said that he wanted "Doctor Who" to be character driven. Or "emotionally literate", if you insist. He is obviously taking a leaf out of the books of U.S TV shows like "Lois and Clerk" and that thing about vampires and school girls that totally passed me by. The main "fantasy" plot can be quite silly, but this doesn't matter because it is really only a peg on which to hang some character drama. "The End of the World" was not really about a lot of rich aliens on a space ship being menaced by a baddie; it was about the Doctor's relationship with Rose and with the Tree-woman. "The Unquiet Dead" was not really about welsh ghosts, but about the character of Charles Dickens and how meeting the Doctor helps him overcome his general disillusionment with life. So far so good. But the relatively short episodes don't give much space for these characters to develop. The key character in Episode 3, Gwynneth the serving girl really only developed in one 5 minute conversation with Rose. If we were going to care about her, she needed a lot more screen-time.
I have no nostalgic attachment to the format of stories made up of 4 and 6 episodes (or rather, I do, but I don't expect the BBC to pay any attention to me); but the single 45 minute episode seems ill-suited to the type of story R.T.D wants to tell.
The Doctor is making too much use of gadgets. The sonic screwdriver in particular is becoming an all purpose get out of jail free card. Please stop it.
I think that it is a shame that the Doctor has got sufficient control of the TARDIS that Rose can nip home between adventures. I think that the sense of being lost in time and space and not quite knowing when and if the Doctor will get you home was an important part of the show's magic. Have you ever felt what it must be like to be wanderers in the fourth dimension? To be exiles?
"The End of the World" didn't feel very much like "Doctor Who"...and I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing. A lot of aliens gather on a ship to witness a big event, and then one of them starts killing the others: this is more "Trek" than "Who". Some of the jokes felt a little familiar. (The "end of the world as an entertainment spectacle" is right out of "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy"; the "I-Pod" joke is straight out of "Dancers at the End of Time".)
The moral messages were rammed home with a distinct lack of subtlety. It was one thing for Rose to refer to Cassandra as "Michael Jackson", but not necessary for her to follow this joke with a little speech about plastic surgery. I am not sure that the conclusion, about cherishing the world we live in because it will all be destroyed in only five billion years, really made a great deal of sense. I think that if I had not been sitting there chortelling "It's a new episode of "Doctor Who", it's a new episode of "Doctor Who", and there are eleven more to come", I would not have thought it was a particularly good story.
I guess its main point was structural: to say to the audience -- last week was set in contemporary London: this week we are five billion years in the future, next week we will be in Victorian England.
"The Unquiet Dead", on the other hand, was classic old-school "Doctor Who". I wouldn't go as far as the man in the Grauniad who said it was the best thing the BBC had produced in their entire history, but it was damned good stuff. Two ordinary characters witness a strange supernatural event in the pre-cred sequence; the Doctor turns up "just to have a look around" and gets embroiled in the plot; he takes control of the situation; he meets a historical character; there is a tragic outcome. I do hope, that the idea of a subsidiary character pulling the Doctor's fat out of the fire at the last minute doesn't become a recurrent motif.
It needed to be longer. We'd hardly met the zombies before we found out the explanation; we'd hardly had the explanation before we'd got the solution. Oh, for some old fashioned pacing – an episode of the walking dead; and episode of blue ghosts; an episode of thinking that they are "good" aliens; and a final episode fighting them as "bad aliens". And a whole month to get to know Gwynneth, so we could properly feel her sacrifice.
It wasn't "Talons of Weng Chiang", but then, what is?
The dialogue sparkled, although Mr Davies needs to watch his habit of letting story-external humour work its way into the plot. It was a mistake in episode 1 for the wheely bin to belch, not because there is anything wrong with a belch-joke, but because there was no logical reason for it to do so: it wasn't a creature and it hadn't eaten anything. There was no reason for Charles Dickens to says "What the Shakespeare was that!" because, well, he just wouldn't have. We pardon both jokes for being funny: but too much of this kind of thing and we may stop believing in the show. The Doctor's own wit, and especially, Rose's reaction to it, is much funnier. ("I don't believe you just said that.")
Note: every time I type "Rose", I almost type "Ace". Hmm....
So then. An unquestionably cool stand-alone fantasy TV show, but with enough references and reminiscences of "Doctor Who" to satisfy my inner fanboy. I still don't know where it is going; I still want to find out. I hope that R.T.D doesn't blow the emerging backstory. And I want to see the Daleks. As relatively unequivocal a thumbs up as you could have expected an old anorak like me to give, then.
Sunday, April 10, 2005
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