Actually, "dissent" is completely the wrong word. The overwhelming majority of people either hated her guts or else are totally indifferent to her.

I don't think it is particularly funny, and I think that there are better ways of showing dissent. But I take it for granted that when a Nazi enters the room, every decent person present will claim to be Jewish.

If she were (as those who knew who said she would have wished) having a quiet, private funeral in a   dignified location, attended only by family, close colleagues and maybe one invited photographer then political demonstrations of any kind would be unthinkable. 

Someone would probably still think about them, but they would be unthinkable. 

As it is, her funeral is being orchestrated by the Tory party as a Tory party political event to beatify a former leader of the Conservative Party.

Falklands themed funeral? Falkands themed funeral? With some Chalky White jokes from Jim Davidson, a revue by the Black and White Minstrels and a special celebratory episode of Jim'll Fix It, I shouldn't wonder. The policing of the funeral has actually been code-named "Operation True Blue".

So the question is not "Should we desecrate a private, religious event by holding a party political demonstration?" Of course we shouldn't. I understand that after his assassination, Osama Bin Laden was given as dignified a funeral as possible, according to the tenets of his faith. Myra Bloody Hindley was given a quick, dignified send-off in a municipal crem. [*]

But that is not the question. The question is "Given that the Tory Party has already decided to take what should, indeed, be a private, religious event and turn it into a party political demonstration should the Left a: do nothing or b: have a demonstration of their own to show that no, actually,  there is NO consensus, NO unanimity and that T.B.W is NOT the best loved English person since Churchill." 

Only a complete shit would march into Canterbury Cathedral and disrupt a solemn mass on Easter Sunday because he doesn't like the political views of the Archbishop of Canterbury. But if the Archbishop of Canterbury announced that he was going to hold a special mass to pray that all members of the banking profession should be damned for eternity, followed by the ceremonial excommunication of Sir James Crosby, I think that would probably be the wrong moment to say "I don't think it is right for the Banking Community to complain about what is essentially a private, sacred, religious event." The more strongly the Left threw up a police cordon around the Cathedral and said that dissent had to be prohibited because there was no dissent and everyone agreed with the Bishop anyway except the Right who don't count, the more important it would be for some kind of  counter demonstration to be hold. 

English British Prime Ministers don't generally have big public funerals. Churchill is the last one who did. That was a state funeral. This one technically won't be. The Daily Mail thinks that this proves that the Queen and David Cameron have been infiltrated by The Left. It is an "insult" that T.B.W will only have the same kind of funeral as the Queen Mother and the Princess of Wales, in the same way that is an insult to Christians that vegetarians also have a legal right to have their beliefs respected. (This is perfectly true and not something I made up.)

The whole point of the posthumous exaltation of T.B.W is to manufacture a false consensus. Love of T.B.W and support for the Conservative party, like love of the Queen and support for the Monarchy are not political points of view, they are a base-line neutral position which all British people agree with. [**] If you don't love the Queen, T.B.W and the Tory Party then you aren't British. Once we ignored all the dissenting voices then 100% of those questioned agreed with us. There will be no art, no science, no literature, no enjoyment, no laughter, but the laughter of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no love but the love of Margaret Thatcher. 

[*] Cats are to kittens as calves are to cows. "But that's ridiculous, Andrew: have you ever tried milking a cat?" 

[**] What is the British equivalent of Motherhood and Apple Pie? "The Church of England and Steak and Kidney Pie, perhaps?

Who Remembered Hills (10)

People sometimes say that something is "so bad it's good", but that's hardly ever true. Plan Nine From Outer Space, often said to be the worst movie ever made, isn't so bad it's good: it's so bad it's incredibly boring. It does sometimes happen that someone spectacularly fails to do what he set out to do (say, write edifying, tragic poetry) but inadvertently succeeds in doing something quite different (say, writing comic verse). That's why we still read William McGonogal: the things he does by accident -- bathos, mixed metaphors, mismatches between subject matter and tone -- are exactly what a skilled comedian does to raise a laugh. And it's all the funnier because he doesn't know it's funny: skilled comedians never do. (Except I think he probably does. I think that, far from being the World's Worst Poet, he was a clever man who knew precisely what he was doing.) [*]

There are people who get pleasure at watching someone fail at something: people who go along to the talent competition in order to laugh at the guy who can't sing a note. But that's really only one step up from picking on the fat kid who came last in the sack race. There were bullies who liked to laugh at Doctor Who's shortcomings. One of them was head of the BBC from 1984 to 1987. But I don't think that's what people who think that its home made quality was part of its charm are talking about.

There was a very good story called Kinda which famously contained a very bad monster: a giant pink snake that was obviously a puppet. I do not think that the giant pink snake was so bad it was good. I do not think that the giant pink snake was "part of Kinda's charm". I think that the giant pink snake represented a weakness in the script. I think that it was a mistake for the metaphorical, psychological evil to manifest in physical form in the first place, and certainly a mistake for the physical form to be a giant pink snake. The DVD version replaced the unconvincing puppet with a more convincing CGI animation. This did not remove any of the charm from the story. It didn't improve the story very much, either. It was a giant pink snake. 

Christopher Bailley (the writer of Kinda) was reportedly disappointed with the way in which his story was mounted. It was, snake apart, a pretty polished and professional piece of work. But he felt that the jungle planet looked like a garden centre and the natives looked like extras in a shampoo advertisement. The sequel, Snakedance looked fabulous; but it still looked like a fabulous stage set, not a fabulous alien planet.

It's interesting to try to imagine Kinda being remade today. Exactly the same script, mind you, but location work in a real jungle, actors who really look like aboriginal natives -- or, better yet, CGI aliens, possibly with blue skin. I don't know if this would remove any of the episode's "charm", but I do think it would change the whole tone of the exercise. I think that dialogue which worked fine when spoken by BBC actors in a studio would seem stilted and artificial on a location shoot; I think that the whole idea of an alien worlds being used as the crucible for an experimental morality play would be harder to swallow if we half-believed that this really was an alien world we were looking into. For one thing, our attention would be focused on the wonderfully convincing alien shrubbery, when it ought to have been focussed on the script.

Gerry Anderson died recently. I used to love Thunderbirds. It was always on on Sunday lunchtimes. The episodes weren't shown in any particular order. I swear they showed that one where the explorers get stuck in the alien pyramid twice in three weeks. I remember the boy next door saying that he would like Thunderbirds better if it was real -- people rather than puppets, he meant. I think that he had missed the point of Thunderbirds. If you are going to make a series in which spaceships fly to the sun and property developers physically move the Empire State Building, and where skyscrapers, space ships and pyramids can be guaranteed to explode before the third advert break, then the thing has to be done with models. Most of the time, we couldn't literally see the strings, but it was important that we could see them metaphorically. It's not that the machines are unconvincing: they are incredibly convincing. The best models anyone has ever made; far better than anything Doctor Who ever had. But still obviously models. That was the point. Gerry Anderson had better toys than we did, but they were toys and he was letting us play with them for an hour. 

And isn't that what people mean when they talk about Doctor Who's homespun quality being part of its charm. Sometimes, the special effects were genuinely bad; more often, they were pretty good; but  they always looked like something someone had made. It was never really true that the sets wobbled: no more so than in any other TV show of the era, anyway. But it is true that there was an awful lot of running down corridors. And the line "all these corridors look the same to me" really did turn up: and not always ironically. And we all understood the reason: it was filmed in a studio; there were a finite number of sets available, so you couldn't always construct an impressive location for an expository scene to happen in, so you had one all purpose length of corridor and put the minor scenes there. 

This, particularly in the Baker era, created a feeling that there was no real geography, no transitions: Tom could pop up wherever he needed to be, wandering about spaceships and nuclear bases with apparent impunity. That capacity to walk into the boss's room and say "I'm the Doctor, this is Romana, would you like a jelly baby?" is far more believable in a universe which we know (deep down) consists of six sets, one corridor, and no space in between them one which plausibly consists of the whole of London, if not the whole of space and time.  The Doctor, like Gandalf, has the capacity to be always exactly where he needs to be. New Who uses, and overuses, devices like psychic paper and the bloody sonic screwdriver to explain how he gets there. In Old Who, he didn't need them so much. We accepted, at some level, that he was in a model universe which someone had built and he could, when he needed to, simply nip behind the scenery.  

So, then: the child man who is both inside and outside your TV is also both inside and outside of the scripts. He knows he's in a play; he knows the walls are really just flats, and he can nip backstage, look behind the backdrop, slip between the cracks. That character is easier to believe in if his world, at some level, looks like a stage set. Looks like something someone has made.

What I am describing as the texture of Doctor Who was -- of course -- the result of the physical limitations of low budget TV. Clearly, nothing of that texture can possibly survive in a programme made on a high budgie, with your newfangled CGI special effects and good actors and well written scripts. And I am not suggesting that it should. The idea that New Who should be made on the same shoestring as Old Who is as silly as the idea that all children should listen to Dick Barton and there should be no TV cookery show but Fanny Craddock. But the idea of the Doctor became what it was because, or partly because, of the physical limitations of the show, and it was, in the end, that idea which made people like Doctor Who in a way that no-one has ever loved any other television programme. 

So it's to Matt Smith we have to look: has he found a away of embodying the idea of the Doctor -- both child and adult; both inside you TV and outside it; both real and fictional; not bound by the script -- in this new modern thing? 

Or is just doing a funny affectionate portrait of a clever autistic man trying to form relationships that Benedict Cumberbatch does much better in Sherlock? 

Mr C.S Lewis once wrote an essay called "Hamlet - The Prince or the Poem?" He argued that critics were too keen to focus on the psychology of the Hamlet himself, a subject that Shakespeare was demonstrably uninterested in, and fail to talk about the structural ambiance of the actual play. (This theory was one of the chief causes of Planet Narnia.) 

So I guess I could have called this essay "Doctor Who: The TV Show or the Time Lord?" Or "The Corridor or the Cosmos?"

Actually, the title it really needed is the one which Andrew Hickey has already taken. "So, Do I Even Like Doctor Who?"

And I could probably have kept it shorter by giving the answer "Yes. Oh yes." 



[*] e.g But accidents will happen by land and by sea

Therefore, to save ourselves from accidents, we needn’t try to flee

For whatsoever God has ordained will come to pass

For instance, ye may be killed by a stone or a piece of glass.  

Who Remembered Hills (9)

Everyone knows that, on December 25th 1965, in the seventh episode of The Dalek Master Plan, William Hartnell "broke the fourth wall", appearing to turn to camera and say "A Merry Christmas To All of You At Home." 

In a small way, and in the margins of the Who-text, there is quite a lot of this "acknowledging the audience" stuff -- think of Tom Baker looking into camera and bursting out laughing when he opens up K-9 Mark II at the end of Invasion of Time; or being warned of the return of the Daleks by a BBC continuity announcer. Think of Patrick Troughton warning the viewers that their mummies and daddies might find this weeks episode too frightening; or even Sylvester McCoy winking at us from the title sequence. 

Think also of the blurring of the line between actor and character. Think of Jon Pertwee explaining the Whomobile to Peter Purves on Blue Peter; think of William Hartnell being followed around by children as if he was the Pied Piper; think of Tom Baker...well, just think of Tom Baker. William Hartnell's Christmas greeting may or may not have been ad libbed -- but Tom Baker really did make up his own lines, and the more lines he made up, the more like Tom Baker the Doctor became. If it wasn't quite clear whether it was Tom Baker or Doctor Who signing your book at the school fete, it was equally unclear whether the person playing chess with K-9 or suddenly taking up oil painting was the Doc or Tom. 

Television is weird. The word, as a great man said, is half Greek and half Latin. It's a piece of furniture which sits in the corner of your living room, in front of the proverbial sofa. But it's also as magical as a Narnian wardrobe. Valerie Singleton used to talk about whisking us away "through the magic of television" to the Ivory Coast or France or whatever exotic location she had visited during the summer recess. We had a strange, intimate relationship with TV presenters, which we never presumed to have with the movie "stars". They wore smart suits, talked politely, and regarded themselves (they sometimes used the phrase) as guests in your home. Everyone knows the story about how, one evening in 1977, Doctor Tom became literally the guest in strange families home. It may not be true: but if it wasn't true, it would have been necessary to invent it, and it's an important truth about Tom that stories like that cluster around him. We feel that the TV screen is permeable; if we are looking at the TV presenter, then surely he must be looking back at us. Kids shows like Play School were built on the conceit that Brian Cant and Chloe Aschcroft were relating to the audience on a one-to-one basis: they would pretend to be otherwise occupied, look up in mock surprise and greet the viewer as if he had just arrived in their house; or else they would pretend to be able to hear them joining in with the songs and nursery rhymes they were singing. Dixon of Dock Green did a similar thing. (Speak to the audience, I mean, not recite nursery rhymes.) 

Sometimes, the metaphor seems to be that the magic box in the corner is taking us to strange places; sometimes the presenters seem to be visiting us in our world; sometimes we are asked to imagine that we are visiting them in theirs. 

The magic window. The box that we are both inside and outside at the same time. Transcendental.

The analogy between the TARDIS and the television was made quite explicit by William Hartnell's Doctor: not only did he say that the bigger-inside-than-outside phenomenon was like showing a picture of a skyscraper on a nine inch TV screen, but when the TARDIS refused to go where he wanted it to, he claimed that the horizontal hold was malfunctioning. (Horizontal Hold was the bane of old black and white TVs, which used to make the screen scroll three minutes before your favourite show was about to come on.) The opening credits, which became a tunnel and then merely a starscape, were originally completely abstract, and resembled nothing so much as the random snow and interference you would have seen on an old fashioned TV which wasn’t working properly. Very similar imagery was used in the Outer Limits, which made the connection quite explicit. 

continues....

Nothing is more ungentlemanly than

Exaggeration, causing needless pain,

It's worse than spitting, and it stamps a man

Deservedly with other men's disdain.

Weigh human actions carefully. Explain

The worst of them with clarity. Mayhap

There were two sides to that affair of Cain

And Judas was a tolerable chap.

Belloc

Who Remembered Hills (8)

But, of course, I left two rather important items off my list of things which I like about old Who. Let's add them now:

• Tom
• Baker

I liked his wit. I liked his floppy hat. I liked his teeth. I liked the way he was clever enough to get away with being cheeky in the face of authority. 

I didn't, in fact, particular care about his jelly babies. I liked them  -- and of course this is a Type 3 interpretation which I could not have articulated at the time [*]  -- but only because because they were tangible expressions of the Doctorness of the Doctor. He's a grown up, but he has childish, old fashioned sweets in his pockets. My grandfather had sweets in his pocket, but they were serious grown up sweets like extra strong mints and liquorice. [**]

That is why Peter Davison never really worked for me. The jelly babies encapsulated the idea of the schoolboy pretending to be a grown up or the grown up pretending to be a school boy. The stick of celery, not so much. But if we are actually going to find some continuing essence of Doctor Who, that's the place we need to be looking. In the central, Peter Pan conceit. There is a temptation to come over all Joseph Campbell and say that the Doctor is the embodiment of a universal jungian archetype: trickster of somesuch. But he really isn't. He's just a man who thinks that there is no point in being grown up if you can't sometimes be childish.

We think of the yo-yo's and sherbet lemons as being mainly part of the Second Doctor's era. And it is true that Troughton is the definitive Doctor, in the sense of having defined the role for everyone who came after him. Hartnell had been a patronizing old man: almost the first thing Ian had said to him was "Doctor, you are treating us like children." But the child-like thing was already there, despite, perhaps because, he was "really" an old man. It's the first thing the makers of the Really Awful Dalek Movie latch onto when they want a single image to tell new readers what Doctor Who is like. In the opening scene, "Susan" is discovered reading Physics for the Inquiring Mind; , "Barbara" reading The Science of Science and "Doctor Who" reading...the Eagle. ("Most exciting, most exciting.")

"But Andrew: saying that Tom Baker is the best Doctor and that the true essence of Doctor Who is jelly babies tells us nothing except that you were born in 1965. Everyone knows that the Golden Age of Doctor Who is 'about twelve'. All this talk of atmosphere and texture really amounts to a set of audio visual cues which remind you of your last year in junior school. Everybody thinks that the popular culture they grew up with this the best popular culture."

Actually, what everyone thinks is that the popular culture they grew up with is the correct popular culture; the way popular culture would be if political correctness hadn't gone mad. I don't intellectually believe that vinyl is better than MP3: in fact I have never owned a turntable in my life. But it is still obvious that, in the natural order of things, music lives on heavy black discs. I still refer to my music collection as 'records'. (I also say "hang up the phone" and "pull the chain".) I was brought up to believe that English children had enjoyed Dick Barton and Muffin the Mule since the time of Alfred the Great at least, and that my generation had broken the apostolic succession by turning to Rentaghost. Our generation has done the same thing: Blue Peter is obviously part of the natural order of things and has to be kept going at all costs, even though the young folks show no interest i it. (Who cared, or noticed, when the Dandy ceased publication?)

But it must be the case that some things are better than other things; and some things are better than some other things at some particular times. Those of us who grew up in the 1970s had to contend with some of the very worst popular music that there has ever been. (Garry Glitter, the Osmonds, the Bay City Rollers.) We had a very bland light entertainment culture, give or take an Eric and Ernie. (Val Doonican, for crying out loud. Little and Large. The Black and White actual Minstrels.) On the other hand we lived at a time when Oliver Postgate was creating miniature worlds at the rate of approximately one a year; Blue Peter was being presented by Valjean and Pete and the Wombles and Magic Roundabout weren't half-bad either. If I had had my wish to be born in the 1955, I'd have lived through the Golden Age of pop music and the Totally Forgotten Age of Children's TV. 

I don't think Bagpuss was great because I happen to have been a kid when it was on; I just happen to have been a kid when the best children's programme ever made was being transmitted. Actually I was rather too old for Bagpuss, but that proves my point. I think. How many people have you ever heard claiming that Busy Lizzie was the greatest children's programme of all time?

Tom Baker is not the greatest because he was "my Doctor". But one of the reason that the expression "my Doctor" has gone on meaning something to me for more than thirty years is that I happen to have been twelve years old when the role of the Doctor was being played by the person who most perfectly embodied the part. 

"Embodied" being the operative word. You can't say "Jon Pertwee is playing the same character as William Hartnell, only younger" in the way that you probably can say "Roger Moore is playing the same character as Sean Connory, only worse." The different Doctors are different takes on the idea of the Doctor, and the notion that there is an idea of the Doctor that needs different people to embody it has increasingly been written into the metaphysics of the programme itself. 

I don't know what Patrick Troughton thought he was doing when he played the Doctor. He was probably the kind of actor who didn't think that he was doing anything except remembering his lines and not bumping into the scenery. But I have a strong sense of his Doctor being multiple. When the Second Doctor fools around with a recorder or passes round a bag of sherbet lemons, he isn't playing a role -- pretending to be stupid so people underestimate him. It's really him. He likes the toys and the sweets and the silly hats. But when he confronts the War Chief on his own terms, or makes that series-defining speech about how some areas of the universe have bred the most terrible things, he seems to be something else as well; or instead; or mostly. It's as if sherbet-lemons-Doctor has slipped under cosmic-entity-Doctor, or Sherbet-lemons is floating on a big sea of Cosmic. Which applies to jelly-babies-Doctor and fast-cars-and-gadgets Doctor and bow-tie-and-fez Doctor as well. The trouble with cricket-whites Doctor was the lack of conviction that there was anything very much going on beneath or alongside the stick of celery. 

Every attempt to sum up the Doctorness of the Doctor gets you involved in obvious banalities -- that he always does what is right, that he prefers to solve problems without the use of violets, that his dress sense is questionable at best. True but unhelpful. (Christopher Eccleston rather pointedly avoided all the superficial Doctor signifiers, but was clearly the Doctor. Tennant was full of Edwardian mannerisms, but just didn't seem to get it.) 

So I don't insist on my child-man thing. I merely throw it up in the air.

And I am going to make one other, very tentative, stab in the dark.

Part and parcel of the Doctor's child/man persona is that he transcends categories. He is both real and fictional; inside and outside the TV set; able to break the rules because to some extent he knows he's in a story. And that's what people who say "oh, the home-made quality is part of the charm" are groping towards.

continues....

[*] and yes, that is a Type Two comment: do you want me to draw you a venn diagram?

[**] Grown ups bought sweets like that because they smoked and needed to clear their breath. That has literally only just occurred to me. 

Who Remembered Hills (7)

It would be very easy to make a list of thing which Star Trek had in common with Star Trek: The Next Generation.

• Series of fifty minute episodes 
• Humanistic in outlook 
• Idealized humans encountered aliens who were mainly characterized by cultural differences. 
• Human / alien conflicts generally settled peacefully 
• Conflicts involve a moral dilemma without a right answer 
• Often involved not-very subtle metaphors for some contemporary issue 
• Had Gene Roddenbury at the helm

I could, if you wished, add to that list:

• Included characters called 'Vulcans' 
• Included characters called 'Klingons 
• Space ships said to have 'warp drive'

And I suppose that there are people who like Star Trek because it contains Vulcans, Klingons and warp drives; who will put the Star Trek label on anything with Vulcans, Klingons and warp drives and who will take it for granted that anything with the label Star Trek on it is great, even if it even if it re-imagines Captain Kirk as James fucking Dean. But they are wrong. Love it or hate it Star Trek is a type of story; an approach to story telling. You could cut out all the window dressing and still be left with something that was recognisably Star Trek. Abrams cut out everything that was recognisably Star Trek, left us with the window dressing, or at least a sort of parody version of the window dressing, and has now been commissioned to destroy Star Wars as well.

If we tried to do the same exercise with New Who and Old Who, we wouldn't get very far. 

• Hero is an alien 
• Travels through time and space 
• Travels with pretty ladies.  
• Helps people 
• Mostly helps people foil alien invasions. 

Or, in fact:

• Hero travels around and does stuff.

Not much to go on, is it? 

The best definition anyone has so far come up with is "it's all about the triumph of intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism" which doesn't get us that much further. And it is the council of despair to say "The essence of Doctor Who is that its essence constantly changing" or "The essence of Doctor Who is that it doesn't have an essence". That's too much like one of those dreadful politicians who say "The French are characterized by their liking for good food; the Arabs by their hospitality; the Japanese by their honour; but the English are characterised by not having a national character but putting up with French, Japanese and Arab johnnies with their funny foreign ideas about food and etiquette." 

So we fall back on characteristics like 

• Has Silurians 
• Has Daleks 
• Has Cybermen
• Has Tardis
• Has Sonic Screwdriver
• Has Time Lords

And cool as some of the Doctor Who window dressing undoubtedly was, and indeed is, the fact that I used to like a TV series in which there was a blue police box with a control room inside it is not much guarantee that I will like a new series in which there is a blue police box with a completely different control room inside it. Some fans do talk as if the presence of some icon or bit of jargon from the old series is a sacred guarantor that New Who is still carrying the torch of Old Who and that there is some corner of a foreign field which is forever 1976. Which is why "Will there be any old monsters?" is such a totemic question. From the beginning of the 1980s, the old show had a fan adviser (cough, cough, Ian Levine, cough, cough) who would ensure that magic words like "UNIT" and "fluid link" were sometimes uttered by Peter Davison. The show honouring its history, they called it. For half a season, we were all ecstatic. Then it got cancelled.

continues....