10.3 Thin Ice

Shall I tell you my favourite thing about Thin Ice? 

My favourite thing about Thin Ice is that when the street kids are taken to the big house for a meal, there there is milk, served in wine glasses, by their place settings. 

Someone sat down and thought about this. If you are going to give a group of early nineteenth century orphans a treat, then you give them a Christmas dinner, obviously, even if it is February. (Those are Christmas puddings on the table, aren’t they?) But what would you have given them to drink? Not fruit juice; oranges and grapes are still quite exotic, and you can’t get strawberries or raspberries out of season. Not wine or small beer. Not tea or coffee. So then, milk. Someone cared that much about getting the scene right. 

And no-one felt the need to say “Gee, Doc, I know this is the olden days and I don't understand time travel but couldn't anyone find some pepsi?”

*

So: the Doctor goes back in time to London, 1814. The Thames has frozen over, so everyone is having a festival on it, with fish pies and elephants and everything. This is a real thing: they did it on Blue Peter. (The overlap between what they did on Blue Peter and where Doctor Who goes has been insufficiently explored. Any day now I expect a story in which alien kangeroos take over the minds of the Tulpuddle Martyrs.) It was easier to obtain an elephant in those days because circuses and menageries were less squeamish about keeping wild animals in cages. Jesus was probably an elephant. 

It turns out that there is a gigantic Metaphor hidden under the ice. The Metaphor has lived there for hundreds of years. What the Metaphor does is eat little orphan children (and presumably other people, but mostly orphans) and shit them out the other end. The shit is collected by an Evil Capitalist who uses it to power his mills, which are, I imagine, dark and satanic.  At one point the Doctor thinks that the shit is going to be used to power a starship, but everyone gives up on this idea.

If we were talking about an animal we would ask if it only produced intensely flammable shit when it ate little boys, and how much faeces a mile long creature would be passing if all it had eaten since 1795 was a couple of small boys, and whether it wouldn't be more efficient for the Evil Capitalist to feed it cows and pigs?There are also little fish with luminous noses that swim round the Metaphor. Have they also been living in the Thames since 1788? What do they eat? Why has no-one ever caught one before? What is their relationship with the Metaphor? I suspect the true answer is “Someone had the idea of spooky green lights and came up with idea of dong-fish after the fact to retrofit the spooky lights to the Metaphor.” When someone is about to be sucked down under the ice, the green lights whizz round and round and form a vortex; which isn’t something you could remotely imagine the little fish doing. 

But it isn’t fair to ask how any of this shit works. It’s metaphorical shit. 

The dreadful Torchwood made extensive use of drug called “Plot Device”: when a human being saw an alien or discovered the existence of Torchwood, our heroes gave them a shot of the drug and they would instantly forget what had happened. (This idea was derived from Men in Black, as, indeed, was Torchwood.) There is a new consensus among Doctor Who writers that human beings don’t need the drug: they “have infinite capacity to forget the unusual and inexplicable”. Dalek invasions and giant metaphors in the Thames all get automatically edited out of everyone’s mind after they happen. That means Doctor Who is now taking place in a kind of invisible parallel universe, like London Below or Hogwarts. Homeless gods and wizards and fish with luminous noses are all around us all the time, but we never see them. 

Which would explain a good deal.

Obviously our idea that a slow-flowing river might freeze for a few days every couple of decades is a little lie we’ve invented to cover the uncomfortable fact that there has always been a giant Metaphor living under the Thames, and that one of the Metaphor's powers is to make everything really really cold. And obviously our far-fetched idea that if a big river in a big city did freeze over, carnies and street traders would move in and hold a big party there is necessary fib to cover up the fact that an Evil Capitalist was bribing people to go onto the ice in order to feed them to the Metaphor and turn them into shit to power his mills with. 

Obviously.

I assume that it is the same kind of ret-con drug which prevents everyone, including the audience, from understanding how the Metaphor works. Evil McEvilface makes it pretty clear that the fish represents Capitalism. That’s what Capitalism is for, isn’t it: chewing up little kids and shitting them out to power mills. But the Evil Capitalist is cunningly disguised as a one-note baddy who says racism and rehashes old Blackadder jokes, so no-one notices when he makes an extremely good point. There is no moral difference between sending little boys down mines, where they may die, in order to dig coal out of the ground, or feeding little boys to giant goldfish in order to harvest the goldfish poo. We are all, in a very real sense, Lord Sutcliff, which is why it is so satisfying when he gets punched. We have all, in a very real sense, sent orphan boys down coal mines and fed them to sea monsters. 

The Doctor doesn’t have a solution to the Metaphor. Or at least, he does have a solution, but not a very metaphorical one. The Evil Capitalist Mill Owner is going to blow up the Fair with explosives, so that the monster gets to eat everybody at once and do a really really big poo; but the Doctor escapes from being tied up while the orphans tell everyone to get off the ice and gets into a diving suit and transfers the explosives to the Metaphor’s chains, so the Metaphor can swim off to…wherever it came from and do...something happily ever after. Which is a lot better than last week and the week before and in fact next week where the Doctor solves the problem just by being the Doctor.

It isn’t even that great as a non-metaphorical solution, really. Right back at the beginning of New Who, the Doctor was chastised for not thinking through the consequences of his actions — not worrying about where defeated slitheen go at the end of the episode. Today, he is quite happy to just let the Metaphor swim away and not give a second though to where it came from and where it is going to go and how many orphans it is going to eat along the way. 

At the very end, he physically alters evil Lord Sutcliff’s evil will so that one of the un-eaten orphans inherits the evil money he made from killing orphans. But this doesn’t address the general issue of capitalism devouring children. Even metaphorically.

*

Thin Ice is recognizably a Doctor Who story; and even a good Doctor Who story. Not a great Doctor Who story — political sketch writers 50 years from now will not reference the story in order to poke fun at the incumbent prime minister — but a good one. The Doctor goes back to the olden days, and encounters a monster. Not merely an alien: a monster. The twist — that the giant, orphan eating fish is relatively benign (provided you don’t mourn the orphans to much) and the real monster is Capitalism — is the kind of twist that Doctor Who has done once a season since the 1960s. The Doctor defeats the monster using his ingenuity and innate goodness, and returns home literally in time for tea. What could be more like Doctor Who than that? 

It is very possible to imagine Doctor William or Doctor Patrick visiting the Frost Fair. And it is a racing certainty that they would have found some sort of Monster under the ice. Well, Doctor Patrick would have done. Doctor William would have had to foil a plot to assassinate the prince regent while Ian and Barbara got involved in a separate plot about one of the wrestlers turning out to be a runaway Moorish prince. And the BBC would have done it very well: impressive painted backdrops, and six or seven extras in period costume, with historical research that would warm your teacher’s hearts. But you wouldn’t have had sweeping shots over the Thames, London skylines, scores of extras, wrestlers, jugglers, elephants, orphans, and a whole nother plot-line set in a posh Regency house. Or any black people at all. 

This isn’t merely “spectacle” or, god forbid “special effects”. This is about taking us back to a particular time and place and making it live again, which is arguably the whole point of Doctor Who. Bill loves it, the Doctor loves it, we love it.  We get chases across the ice. We see the Doctor and Billy in massively anachronistic diving suits, looking into the giant eye of a mile long sea creature. We see the Doctor and Bill tied up, and doing the classic heroic wriggle to free themselves from the ropes. We see the Doctor bantering with con-men and reading stories to little kids and punching fascists. The nasty capitalist who feeds orphans to sea monsters gets eaten by the sea monster in the final scene. No buckle remains unswashed; no devil is undared. This is what I watch Doctor Who for; if Doctor Who were like this every week, I would have nothing to complain about and this column would be very boring.

So here comes the "but"...

When Evil McEvilFace asks the Doctor about the relative merits of coal mines and fish poo as a means of exploiting the working class, the Doctor replies: “Human progress isn’t measured by industry. It’s measured by the value you place on a life. An unimportant life….” This is a non-ridiculous thing for a liberal hero to say. It would work rather will in William Shatner's voice. But everyone swoons as if the Doctor has suddenly picked up Jessie Custer's knack of speaking in read typescript. The villain stops the action to tell us what a brilliant speech it was; and two scenes later Bill, who has previously misread the Doctor as being callous, wonders out loud how long it took the Doctor to make speeches like that. Which spoils the scene, the Doctor, and the perfectly harmless little speech. The Doctor is special and unique and we know he is special and unique because everyone keeps telling us how special and unique he is. Everything he does has to be triple underlined in fluorescent yellow marker pen.

“I make inspirational speeches now. Inspirational speeches are cool.” 

I grant that one of the things which Old Who did very badly was character development and emotion; and I grant that the Doctor’s conversation with Bill after the first orphan has died is piece of proper writing being performed by two proper actors. I perceived it has the Doctor talking to Bill, not two actors doing a Scene. (This is really the main thing I want from Doctor Who, Star Wars or indeed Twelfth Night.) But it is still self-referential as hell. Yes, of course, obviously, it’s a massive problem in any long-running adventure serial that if you remotely pretended that the main character was a real person, you’d have to conclude that he was a complete psychopath. (How many of Peter Parker's intimate acquaintances and close family members have been murdered?) This is a worse problem if the hero is nominally a liberal nice guy and not, say, a soldier or policeman whose job it is to deal with horrible stuff. And all Bill's aria about "how many people have you seen die / how many people have you killed" does is highlight the contradiction (in fluorescent yellow ink.) The Doctor couldn't possibly remain the affable trickster we see on the screen if we really believed he'd seen that much horror. So we really don't want our attention drawing to it. 

“But Andrew: that scene wasn’t about the Doctor; it was about Bill. It was Bill coming to terms with the sort of stuff she’s going to encounter as the Doctor’s new granddaughter.” OK. But here shock at the child's death and the Doctor's reaction to it last precisely 20 minutes. In the very next scene she admits that she, like the Doctor, is capable of moving on, and spends the rest of the episode doing her job as a spunky, happy go lucky Doctor Who Girl. "I was shocked when I saw a child being eaten by a monster, but that was half an hour ago. I’m over it now." This is not characterization; this is apparent characterization.

And finally, there is gigantic hand wave which comes from nowhere and goes nowhere, in which the Doctor tells Bill that she has to decide whether to release the giant orphan eating sea monster into the wild or not. He suddenly decides, for no reason, that he only interferes or helps out humans with their consent. It is never remotely in doubt that the Doctor will, in fact, free the beastie; it's just an obligatory piece of preparatory angst. Defeating monsters in New Who is supposed to involve Big Emotions, and the Doctor is actually going to free this one using explosives and the sonic screwdriver. 

Bad Doctor Who I can live with. There always was a lot of Bad Doctor Who. In fact, some of the best Doctor Who was, if we are being completely honest with ourselves, pretty Bad. And there is honestly no need to feedback and tell me that Doctor Who can't and shouldn't remain exactly where it was in 1963. Nothing would please me more than for Doctor Who to mutate into a new and different thing. But episodes like this feel like clones of Old Who having the life and joy sucked out of them by the parasitic growth of the new. As if something is chewing up innocent stories with intrinsic value and turning them into shit.

The Game That's Sweeping Bristol...Yes It's COLSTON BINGO!

Are they, or the trust members, even Bristolian?
   M Paul, Bristol Evening Post, 10 May

The Bristol Music Trust is not complying with the wishes of majority of Bristolians...
   Ibid.

....three to four hundred thousand Bristolians may find any new name not inclusive...
    Ibid

Yes, Colston made his money from slave trading which we now find abhorrent, but...

    Ibid

Many of us have been proud and fortunate to attend Colston's schools...Perhaps the do-gooders would like to eradicate all of us as well?
    Ibid

Some of our own lower classes and even children were virtually slaves... 
        Ibid

what do you mean, we, kemosabe?

Appendix

Here We Go Down the Slippery Slope

If the zealots responsible for airbrushing Colston continue, how long can the name Bristol survive? What about renaming it Utopia...?
     R.L Smith

(If) this student level of empty gesturing previals and everywhere in our fair city is renamed Mandela Street...
     Rob Pearce

….just rename everything you can, change the name Bristol to Constant Guilt. 
     F Cannon

For those against capital and corporal punishment, please rename Birch Road, Hung Road and Redlynch lane. For animals liberationist, change Badgers Lane, Dolphin Street (continue for four columns)
     Rob Pearce


The Pyre of Denthor

If people are offended by the building, maybe it should be razed to the ground
     C Stephens

If you are serious than raze the building the ground…
     Colin McNamee.

What next, witch hunts?
     F Cannon

Ah well, what next? Maybe we’ll burn a few books that we don’t like in Queens Square, before they rename it.
     C Stephens


Dead Cat’s Society

Unless Louise Mitchell, chief executive of the Bristol Music Trust can categorically prove that none of her ancestors were in any way involved with slavery, she should resign…
     MJ Dupont

We were slaves once, the Roman Empire. I don’t see the bleeding hearts complaining about anythign with a Roman name
     F Cannon


Ah div nae wint sugar on ma porritch 

Be assured that it will always be remembered by us true Bristolians as the Colston Hall
     Terry Pring

I hope all like minded Bristolians will complain long and loud
     Rob Pearce

I am sure that genuine Britolians are cpable of living in the shadow of whatever has gone before…
     A Bevington

Before jumping into a decision to chane the name of the Colston Hall I think those involved, who may not even be Bristolians, ought to do more historical research…
     Pamela Mitchell

Also is Dr Horton a Britolian?
     E Jones

May I suggest to those in favour of changing the name of the Colston Hall, we have a very good coach, bus and train station. If you don’t like Bristolian histoy then feel free to make use of them.
     A Hughes


Viva la brigada de corrección política!

In my opinion it is another stark example of politically correct fascism that we could well do withiout. 
     C Stepens

I would suggest that political correctness is the real reason
     Chris Johnson

Pandering to a current political correct few after generations of use as the Colston Hall. 
     Colin McNamee


"Genocide is supposed to be reprehensible, but..."

Colston may have been a slave-trader and hence anti-humanitarian, but…
     Francis Harvey

I agree that the slave trade was a disgrace but…
     Tim Mahooney

I do not believe these past actions of individuals or governments are acceptable however… 
     Chris Johnson

Why are we vilifying Edward Colston when he was only engaging in an accepted trade of the time? Why after nearly 400 years has this been blown out of all proportion?
     Pamela Mitchel


Send forth the best ye breed...

Europeans did not invent the slave trade. The slaves were made by their own people
     E Jones

The real culprits in the slave trade were the black Africans…
     Pamela Mitchell


all from the Bristol Post...

No True Bristolian

I feel like I need to apologize for my essay on Bristol's Colston Hall kerfuffle.

I have a habit of writing in a light, semi-ironic, affable style. And this is appropriate for writing about comic books and children's television. If "well, last weeks Doctor Who was an embarrassing piece of fifth rate horse shit, wasn't it" mutates in the editing stage into "In the future, committed Time Lord followers may not look back on last week's story with feelings of unalloyed pleasure" no harm is done. But I am afraid I sometimes allow my tones of whimsical bemusement to permeate subjects which really matter.

Ursula Le Guin berates C.S Lewis and his contemporaries for writing as if from a high-church club which treats the rest of the universe with slightly amused disdain. That's probably where I got it from.

For the avoidance of doubt: the Colston Hall Kerfuffle is not one of those subjects which really matters. Twenty years ago, my position would have been broadly "If the name changes, jolly good; if it doesn't change, never mind." Contrary to what you may read in the Guardian, the people of Bristol are not in thrall to a Colston cult, any more than the people of Charing Cross are in thrall to the worship of Eleanor of Castille. You can't move in Bath for bakeries which sell the only original Bath Bun, and the recipe for William Oliver's extremely dull biscuits is a jealously guarded secret. But I had literally never heard of Colston Buns before the Great Kerfuffle started.

But the scheme to rebrand the Hall has brought a lot of very nasty arguments out of the woodwork; and it has revealed that some people hold some very nasty beliefs -- about history, about the city of Bristol and about the world in general. And this matters very much indeed.

I feel like I need to re-write that piece with an Obama style "anger interpreter" at my side.

Here is the entire text of a letter which was printed in the Guardian last week. It is a piece of writing which literally made me shake with rage. It has so many of the typical characteristics of this kind of "green inker" that I am tempted to wonder if I accidentally wrote it myself and submitted it to the Guardian as a wind up. But I fear it is quite real. 

Unlike many of the (mainly) students who campaigned to get the name of Colston Hall changed,  I am a Bristolian born and bred, and I am so incensed that the management has kowtowed to these so-called activists. I have to reluctantly agree for the first time with the former Bristol Conservative leader Richard Eddy that we cannot change history, and that place names give us a link with the past. Edward Colston gave the land on which the eponymous hall stands for the building of a school for orphaned and destitute boys. This is still thriving today, in a different part of the city. He also left money for almshouses for the poor, and with the residue of his fortune a girls’ school was founded (which, incidentally, one of the spokespeople for the anti-Colston name brigade attended, and presumably benefited from its excellent education).

Many cities and towns in Britain have monuments and buildings dedicated to people who were not 100% PC to our modern overtender sensibilities – leaders of industry in the north, who allowed children down mines, or forced them to crawl under looms. They did not all give part of their wealth to alleviate the lot of the poor of their cities as Colston did. Where does this nonsense end?

This is all about money. The management of Colston Hall is trying to attract sponsorship for its renovation and future preservation by offering corporate naming. So look out for the Tesco Hall or the McDonald’s Hall sometime soon. Silly, unnecessary, embarrassing to the city. I sincerely hope that Bristolians stop this in its tracks, keep the Colston name (while fully acknowledging the horrors of slavery) and leave history to the historians

Exegesis is what we do here, so let us exegize. 

1: "I am a Bristolian born and bred"

In the first sentence, we discover what the Great Kerfuffle is really all about. It's not about one theater or one historical person of dubious reputation. It's about nativism.

No-one in real life ever uses the word "Bristolian". (If you needed an adjective, you would just say "Bristol": "Blackbeard is thought to have been a Bristol sailor" or "The Bristol dialect is dying out.") No-one ever claims to be a Portsmouthian or a South Gloucesterani either. You might possibly say that someone was a Londoner, but you would just mean that they lived in London.

I know what it means to be born in Bristol, but who ever used the word "bred" of a person? You've never heard anyone say "Tolkien was born in South Africa, but bred in Oxford" or "Although he was bred in the United States, Bob Hope was actually born in Kent." Born-and-bred is one of those portmanteau words. It means "I have lived in this city all my life". It is only ever used to contrast "us", who were born-and-bred in Bristol and therefore have some kind of special status, with "you", who do not.

The writer thinks that only people who have lived in Bristol all their lives should have a say about what happens in the city; at any rate that born-and-bred-Bristolians have some special insight into what concert halls should be called that is denied to people who were bred here but not born here, or born here but not bred here, or people like me who were neither born nor bred here.

How long do you have to have lived in a municipality before you get a say in what happens here, do you suppose? I've lived in Bristol for twenty years. Do I have to travel back to London come local election time, like Mary and Joseph, or is there some process of naturalization?

Nativism is as foul when applied to a city as it is when it is applied to a country. It is about creating an "us", who are true Bristolians, real Americans, pure Germans and a "them" who just happen to live here. Sometimes, it may even happen, quite coincidentally, that "we", the natives, are mostly of one particular race (white, for the sake of argument) and "you", the incomers, are of a different race, perhaps (in some hypothetical case) black or Asian.

2: Kowtowed

You might think that a music trust would be quite capable of deciding for itself whether it wants to rebrand a building which it happens to own. You might think "We don't want to call it the Colston Hall any more because we feel the name is associated with the slave trade" was a perfectly good explanation for the rebranding, whether you agree with it or not. 

But in fact there is always some conspiracy at play. It always turns out that some nebulous Other has forced its will on Us Natives. In this case it turns out that the change of name is Us Bristolians making an act of ritual submission to a group of Non Bristolian Students.  

Former Conservative Councilor Richard Eddy makes this crystal clear. He describes the proposed change of name as:  

"a complete surrender to the forces of historically illiterate political correctness" 

and 

"pandering to the views of a tiny minority of non-Bristolians".

3: So-called activists. 

If the Non-Bristolian Students were trying to persuade the Bristol Music Trust to change the name of their hall, then they are, by definition, activists. If the letter writer is trying to persuade the Music Trust to reverse the decision, then they are, by definition, also an activist. That is what the word means. "So-called" is doing nothing in the sentence at all. It is a zombie word. The letter would be improved if we substituted "these pooey activists".

4: We cannot change history

The green inkers say this over and over again. You can't change history. You can't change history.

What does it mean?

No-one is traveling back in time and making it so that the sign outside Colston Hall already said Wilberforce Hall in the 19th century, although that would be an interesting premise for a Doctor Who story. No-one is denying, or trying to suppress the fact that some Victorian slavery apologists named a building after a slave trader, any more than anyone is denying that at one time Saddam Hussein was the ruler of Iraq, or that Jimmy Savile once worked for the BBC. We're just taking down some statues and some nameplates.

In 1867 the name plate was put up; in 2020 it was taken down. That's as much a part of history as anything else.

5: Edward Colston gave the land on which the eponymous hall stands for the building of a school for orphaned and destitute boys. 

Robinson Crusoe is the eponymous character in Daniel Defoe's novel (the book his named after him); although she is the eponymous character, Abigail does not actually appear in the play Abigail's Party. It is just possible that if you said that Colston Hall was the eponymous building in a novel called "Murder at the Hall", we would know what you meant. But in no possible sense can you call Colston Hall "the eponymous hall". Dropping four syllable jurisdiction words into the middle of phenomenon sentences doesn't improve an incorporeal argument.  

It is true that in 1708 Colston's school was intended to educate 100 poor boys, provided they were not Methodists. The school which now bears his name educates anyone of any gender or religion provided their parents have £13,000 a year to spend on school fees. 

6: Brigade

Green inkers always see everyone else as forming brigades. One wonders why it is never the "political correctness squadron" or the "health and safety corps"

7:  ...Presumably benefited from its excellent education.

People sometimes complain when a person who has been to grammar school argues that grammar schools are a bad idea; or when a person who went to private school says that private schools are unfair. "You have benefited from a grammar school education, now you want to deny it to others" they say. (The correct answer to this is "No, you mugwump, I want to ban second class carriages".) 

The writer seems to be creating a new argument based on the same template and ending up with word salad: "You have attended a school which was named after a slave trader and now you want to deny the right of a music venue to be named after a slave trader." What? 

8: ....not 100% PC to our modern overtender sensibilities 

And now it comes.

"PC" -- political correctness -- is a pejorative term for "politeness".

More specifically, it is what green inkers call the belief that you should avoid words like "wog", "cripple", "spastic" and "nigger" because they upset people. 

Even more specifically, it represents the belief that a group of so-called activists, very probably from out of town, and very probably organized into brigades, are actively preventing everyone else from using these words, as part of a plot to destroy western civilization. (So you should jolly well go out of your way to use bad words, otherwise you'll be kowtowing to the PC brigade!) 

I suppose that if I called someone "black" when the preferred term was "person of colour", or if I said "blind" to someone who thought of themselves as "visually impaired" you might say that I wasn't being 100% politically correct -- in other words, that I had inadvertently and unintentionally used a word which might possibly have given a small amount of offence. 

Buying and selling black people as if they were livestock is, in the mind of the person who wrote this letter, roughly comparable to inadvertently using a bad word. 

"Not 100% PC."

In fact, it is not even quite that bad. Buying and selling black people as if they were livestock is not, in itself, less than 100% PC; it is less than 100% PC only from the point of view of our "modern, over-tender sensibilities."

"Over-tender." 

We disprove of slavery because we are a little bit too gentle, too kind, too affectionate.

"Over-tender." 

How politically incorrect would buying and selling black people be if we were exactly the right amount tender? 

Oh, and it's only from the modern point of view that buying and selling black people like livestock is a bit like accidentally using a slightly bad word. From the olden days point of view it was even less bad than that.

I keep hearing this kind of thing. You can't judge the past by the standards of the present. People back then didn't realize that slavery was wrong.

Yes you can and yes they did.

Well, Mrs Miggins from the pie-shop who had never traveled outside her own village might, I suppose, just possibly, have honestly believed that negroes were a special kind of monkey and cruelty to them wasn't the same as cruelty to people, in the same way that she might have honestly thought that the world was flat and there were unicorns in India. But Bristol was a port town. Edward Colston lived in London. He had met black people, he had talked to black people. He had traded with black people. He knew that they were human beings, just like him. And he bought and sold them anyway.

Yes, free agricultural labourers worked longer hours than we would put up with today. 

Yes, it wasn't only slaves who were flogged, it was soldiers and sailors and kids and horse thieves too. 

Yes, there was a Star Trek story about a planet where the slave caste was treated quite well all things considered. 

Yes, if you honestly believed in witches then you might honestly believe in killing witches.

Be as culturally relativistic as you like.

Slavery. Was. Never. Okay.

9: – leaders of industry in the north, who allowed children down mines, or forced them to crawl under looms --

This form of not actually saying anything at all is known as "what-about-ery". If I say "here is a bad thing" you reply "here is another bad thing". If I say "let's do a sensible thing" then you reply "then you must do a stupid thing as well."

The logic of the position is "you cannot fix anything unless you can fix everything; you cannot fix big injustices unless you also fix small ones, you cannot fix small injustices unless you also fix big ones." If you think that it is in rather bad taste to open a pub in Whitechapel called "The Jack the Ripper" then you must logically want every pub and every building named for Henry VIII, who after all also killed two of his wives, to be taken down. If you allow women to vote, you'll have to allow farm animals to vote as well. If you allow gay people to get married, soon you'll have to allow hamsters and deckchairs to get married. 

Yes, it would be a good thing if there were no memorial to anyone who had ever made his fortune from human trafficking. Yes, it would be a good thing if there were no memorial to anyone who had ever profited from child labour. (*) This is where we happen to be starting.

A different green inker in the Guardian said that if we removed Colston's name from the theater, we would also have to tear the words of Amazing Grace out of every hymn book in the world, because John Newton was also a slave trader. This is a moronic comment at two levels. Firstly, and I don't know how many different ways it is possible to say this WE. ARE. NOT. PULLING. THE. BUILDING. DOWN. WE. ARE. JUST. CHANGING. THE. NAME. OVER. THE. DOOR. And secondly because John Newton, famously, was ashamed of being a slave trader. (*) John Newton thought that being a slave trader was wicked. John Newton thought that it was amazing that God still loved him even though he was a former slave trader. The clue's in the title.

10: They did not all give part of their wealth to alleviate the lot of the poor of their cities as Colston did. 

We've covered this. Using money to set up schools for poor white children (provided they are not Methodists) in England does NOT make it okay to have made the money by kidnapping black children in Africa. If anything, it makes it worse.

11: Where does this nonsense end?

It ends when there is no-one left in the world who thinks that being a slave trader was, all things considered, not really too bad.  

12: This is all about money. 

You have changed your entire argument mid-letter, you complete and utter dunderhead.

Your whole argument was that the management of Colston Hall were ritually abasing themselves before the non-Bristolian forces of Political Correctness. Suddenly it has nothing to do with incomers or activists or PC gone mad -- it's just a business decision.

Quite a sensible business decision, if you ask me. If the government is cutting spending on the arts, then the arts are going to have to seek private sponsorship. I wouldn't worry about Tescos Hall or McDonalds hall. Halls don't get named after supermarkets or burger bars: McDonalds wouldn't sponsor a hall that's already selling posh burgers and coffee, and their name is too famous already for it to be a good investment. But concert halls do get named after individual donors. By all means, take down the name of the nasty person who had nothing whatsoever to do with the founding of the hall in the 19th century, and replace it with the name of someone who has contributed some money to keep it going in the 21st.

13: I sincerely hope that Bristolians...

Real Bristolians? True Bristolians? People who were born in the city? Or people like me who just happen to live here? 

14: while fully acknowledging the horrors of slavery...

Now there's an idea.

I have been fortunate enough to have attended the Wagner festival in Bayreuth on two occasions. Bayreuth is another place which has to come to terms with its past. Richard Wagner's opinions about Jewish people were not 100% politically correct, and the place was frequently attended by Adolf Hitler, whose policy of gassing Jews would be unacceptable to our perhaps over tender modern sensibilities. 

The second time I went to the festspielhaus, there was an exhibition outside the building, memorializing every Jewish person known to have performed at the theater, from the time of Wagner down to the Nazi era.  (Wagner himself was quite prepared to hire Jewish musicians, it seems: only after he died was it discovered that only people born and bred in Germany could understand the master's music.) As you walked through the exhibition, you found that more and more of the performers had ended up in the concentration camps. This seems to be a positive way of dealing with the place's Nazi associations. You admit to the bad thing, you deplore the bad thing, you actively tell people about the badness of the bad thing. But under no circumstances do you say that the bad thing wasn't too bad, or was only bad by today's standards and that we shouldn't judge the past by the standards of the present.  

It helps that the good thing which Wagner did (compose the Ring Cycle) and the bad thing which Wagner did (hate Jewish people) are different and unrelated. (*)  It is possible to say "We condemn Richard Wagner for promoting anti-semitism; but we continue to celebrate him for composing Siegfried's funeral music." It would be harder to say "We condemn Jimmy Savile for molesting thousands of children, but we will continue to celebrate him for giving money to children's hospitals in order to gain access to children to molest."

Some Jewish people would say that you can't ever denazify Bayreuth: Wagner's music is irrevocably tainted by its connection with Hitler. I respect that point of view.

Instead of tearing down the kitsch Victorian statue of Colston in the center of Bristol, maybe we could have an exhibition along the lines of the one in Bayreuth? Perhaps we could commission a second statue, say of a slave, or of an anti-slavery campaigner, and put it right next to him... Maybe the slave statue could be positioned so that it was staring at Colston, accusing him in some way? Maybe there could be a permanent display about the Royal African Company? Maybe there could be some kind of memorial to the something like 100,000 people trafficked in Colston's lifetime, like the 127,000 shrouds that were put outside Bristol Cathedral to mark the Battle of the Somme. I bet that we even know the names of the some of the individual slaves. Their names could go on the memorial as well. 

Would the green inkers agree to that?

Or would they say that it was another example politically correct out-of-towners interfering with life in "our" city?

NOTE: 

1721 -- Death of Edward Colston

1807 -- Abolition of the Slave Trade

1833 -- Abolition of Slavery in British colonies

1863 -- American Emancipation proclamation

1865 -- End of American Civil War

1867 -- First theater named Colston Hall opened

1890 -- Colston Window installed in Bristol Cathedral

1891 -- Colston Girls school opened

1895 -- Statue of Colston erected

1898 -- Second theater named Colston Hall opened

1951 -- Present theater named Colston Hall opened

1973 -- Colston Tower opened

The Bristol Colston cult largely comes from the years after the end of slavery; very conspicuously, Colston Hall opened two years after the end of the American Civil War. The Victorians putting up the statues, the windows and the schools absolutely knew that slavery was not okay; but chose, for some reason, to retrospectively create a myth of the saintly slave trader. Why? 

(*)It's more complicated than that.

If you think my writing is worthwhile, please consider pledging $1 or more via Patreon. 

10.2 Smile

1:

When a series has been running for more than half a century, it is inevitably going to acquire a lot of baggage. Some franchises expand outwards: it turns out that Klingons and Romulans are not enough to keep life interesting, so we discover there are also Cardasians and Ferengi and Borg and Gamma Quadrants. This makes a universe which is more fun for the dedicated geek, but less accessible to the casual viewer. DC Comics shakes up the cosmic Etch-a-Sketch and starts again every couple of decades, and even Marvel has come to terms with the fact that some of the narrative crimes which have been committed against Spider-Man can be unwritten.

Doctor Who has never really acquired a complicated back-story in quite that way. The history of the Daleks and the Cybermen is more or less re-invented from scratch every time they pop up. Last season's unforgivable Hell Bent made no more sense to those of us who are up to speed on Gallifreyan lore than it did to people who were completely ignorant about it. 

What Doctor Who does is expand inwards. The iconography stays much the same as it was in 1970 but each icon is progressively overlaid with more and more layers of symbolism.

The TARDIS is a fantastically sophisticated apparatus constructed by an inconceivably advanced civilization which the Doctor alone understands. It is at the same time a broken down obsolete cobbled together piece of junk that hardly ever goes where the Doctor wants it to. This reflects the dual naturae of the Doctor himself. He is both an omniscient benevolent star-man and a wandering hobo in broken down jalopy. (Compare this, incidentally, with Star Wars: the Millennium Falcon is both an incredibly cool turbo charged flying saucer and an embarrassingly unreliable hunk of junk.)

One of the amazing and wonderful things about the TARDIS is that it merges seamlessly into its surroundings wherever it lands. One of the way we know it is a broken down pile of junk is that this feature doesn’t work: it always and only looks like an obsolete English phone box. Which is part and parcel of another obvious duality: the Doctor is an ancient alien who has traveled all round the universe but at the same time he is parochially and archaically British.

It really doesn’t do to think about this stuff too much. If it turned out that tea and jelly babies were simply an alien fare which the Doctor has acquired a taste for, then some of the point of them would be lost. Tea means to the Doctor what it does to the average stereotypical Brit. If it turned out that the Doctor drank tea on Earth but blogwart bloodjuice on the planet Zog then we would lose our sense that the Doctor is British. Last week, Bill wanted to know why the T.A.R.D.I.S acronym works in English if the Doctor is an alien. This week she wanted to know why the Doctor was Scottish. And of course Rose wondered why the Doctor sounded as if he came from the North.  Speculate, if you must, that tea and crumpets and cricket are actually the protrusion into our dimension of an ancient Time Lord custom; say that that the Doctor comes to England because England reminds him of Gallifrey. The truth is that the Doctor is a British alien. (The Time Lords are British aliens; the Daleks are British fascists; the Cybermen are British borg.) The whole point of Doctor Who is that everywhere in time and space is forever England, just as the whole point of Star Trek is that everyone in the whole galaxy believes in the great American dream. But don't draw our attention to this, or we might stop believing it.

In the very olden days, the Doctor couldn’t control the TARDIS at all, either because it was broken, or because he had somehow forgotten how it worked. Tom Baker claimed to have fitted a randomizer so that neither he nor the Time Lords knew where he was going to land next. Script Editor Robert Holmes was having none of it: according to him the Time Lords controlled the movement of the TARDIS, and always have done, even before the Time Lords had been thought of.

Last week, the TARDIS was something to do with memory: Time and Relative Dimension in Space meant being like God and perceiving every moment as a present moment. This week, the TARDIS is back to being a character. “You don’t steer the TARDIS; you negotiate with her” says the Doctor. This is what any mucker might say about his jalopy ("Aaar, she be wilful until ye knows her manner!”). But it is also the literal truth: in the Doctor's Wife the incarnate TARDIS says that she didn't always take the Doctor where he wanted to go, but always took him where he needed to go. Taking the idea and running with it, Doctor Peter says this week that the TARDIS “finds the still point between where you want to be and where you need to be.”

How is this different from saying that “this old ship of mine is an aimless thing”? Both are blatantly admitting that the TARDIS is driven by the power of The Plot: the Doctor will always land where The Plot says he should land. But the old wanderer in the aimless Ship resonates differently from the lonely god in the semi-sentient vessel that knows where he needs to go. Robert Holmes retro-conceit was an admission that the TARDIS is not aimless, and never has been: it always ends up on an earth colony just before the downtrodden underclass rebel against their tyrannical insect overlords. “The still point between wanting and needing” is equally an admission that the show now less about the adventures and more about the Doctor. He will always end up in a situation where Character Development can happen.

Bill wonders why the Doctor, given that he has fixed so many things about the TARDIS, doesn’t just fix its fading-into-the-background mechanism. This question was first raised as far back as the American telemovie:  Doctor Paul's answer was "I like it like this". Doctor Peter's answers are equally evasive, but Bill catches him out and reveals that the shape of the TARDIS is a symbol. It is a Police Box, and the Doctor goes around fixing people’s problems, like a policeman. And on the door it says “Advice and assistance obtainable immediately”, which is what the Doctor does -- go around the universe giving people advice and assistance.

Which is quite a neat observation.

But it is the sort of neat observation that a fan ought to be making on a blog, not the sort of neat observation that a companion should be making in the TV series. The one thing the Prince of Denmark can never do is notice that he's speaking in iambic pentameters — and English iambic pentameters, at that.

In the end, this stuff feels like pouring purple food dye in the Atlantic Ocean. If the new explanation were accepted — the Doctor chose a Police Box because it symbolized who he wanted to be; the TARDIS is a mystical being who takes the Doctor to places where she thinks he needs to go — then you've redefined Doctor Who. And there is only so far you can go from the cantankerous wanderer with the bust time machine without breaking the show. But the new explanation won't be accepted. There will be another one a long in a minute. It's like the preacher who gives a brilliantly clever allegorical interpretation of his text this week, and next week, gives and equally brilliant but entirely different allegorical interpretation of the same text. After a few weeks, you start to wonder why he bothers.

Sydney Newman said that any writer who revealed the secret of Doctor Who should undercut the explanation by the end of the episode, to give other writers a chance. It seems to me that any attempt to pluck out the heart of the Doctor's mystery is now automatically undercut by the show itself.

2:

Nothing dates as fast as the future. Remember Four To Doomsday, where everyone spoke in hushed tones about something called a “silicon chip”, or even The War Machines where someone had developed a computer so powerful that it could do four figure square roots in mere seconds? Even that moment in End of the World where Cassandra mistakes a wurlitzer for an I-pod is starting to look distinctly of its time.

This week's story is based heavily around the emoji fad: and it was looking out of date before it had even been transmitted. 

The idea of putting tiny little pictures into you emails may turn out to this month’s craze; or it may turn out to be a whole new form of media that will swing the result of the 2024 elections. Back in the days of Usenet, there were people who thought that typing ":)" after a joke presaged the end of human literacy, if not human civilization; but most of us could see that there was a need for some new punctuation marks to indicate expression and tone of voice. But for a long time I could see no purpose at all in text messages. Why on earth would I send a telegram when I had my own personal walkie-talkie in my pocket at all times? Nowadays my phone, like everyone else's is primarily an SMS device, and I am quite taken aback when someone wants to speak words to me in their voice. Everything from Thunderbirds to Cold Comfort Farm predicted that, in the Future, everyone would talk to everyone else on videophones. Now I really have a perfectly functional videophone in my pocket, I mostly talk in teeny tiny telegrams. All the great historical events of our lives present themselves to us, not as solemn announcements on Radio 4, but as 140 character tweets. "Trump starts nuclear war. Bye! #bunker" “Queen Dead. Charles King. #sad”.

So it's quite possible that eighteen months from now I won't know how I ever managed without emojis. 

There is probably a good story to be told about the emoji phenomenon. What would the world be like if picture language — hieroglyphics — replaced ordinary text or indeed ordinary speech as the primary form of communication, and therefore as the primary form of thought? Presumably, the young people's picture language would develop its own grammar and its own poetry -- just like British and American sign language -- and presumably that would be very different from the old people's written language. I am very nearly 35 and even I can see that half the fun of emojis is cleverly putting two or three symbols together in a way that your friend will understand but other people might not. The digital natives are probably doing much cleverer things which haven't filtered down to me yet. Could we eventually end up with two generations -- even two species -- who simply cannot talk to reach other?  Remember that episode of Star Trek The Next Generation where the aliens communicated only in allegory?

But Smile is not that story. I am not even sure if the writer quite understands what an emoji is.

The Doctor and Bill have to explore a Big Dumb Object, an empty white city populated by little chumblies with TV screens for heads. They communicate by showing different smiley faces on their screens. They give the Doctor and Bill little badges which also display happy and sad faces depending on their mood. They have to wear the badges on their backs, so they can’t ever know what mood is being displayed. If one of the badges ever turns "sad", the person wearing it will be eaten by a school of microscopic robot piranhas and used as fertilizer by the chumblies.

What has happened, as usual, is that the robots have interpreted their orders to keep humans happy too literally, and simply killed everyone who wasn’t. This has created an epidemic, because whenever a human being was killed, the human beings around him became even sadder and had to be killed as well. 

So not, in fact, a story about emojis at all, even if we keep referring to the chumblies as Emojibots. Emojis are little pictures of cups of tea and hearts and bunnies and turds which young people use in text messages. What this story is about is emoticons -- little representations of happy and sad faces which everyone has been using for decades. Possible, like me, Cottrell-Boyce thought that emoji meant "picture representing an emotion" where actually it is simply Japanese for picture-character.

If this isn't about emojis then what is it about? Nothing very much at all, so far as I can tell. Some of the banter is quite fun, and I was amused by the blue jelly food substitute. But there is nothing to it. The writer knows that he wants a scene in which our heroes are cornered by robots with smiley faces, knowing that if they themselves stop smiling, they will be instantly reduced to a skeleton. But he really can't think of any plausible reason for this scenario to have come about. The Doctor goes through three progressively less convincing theories about how the Big Dumb Object works. “The robots have built the city and are waiting for the colonists” works. “The robots have built the city and then wiped out all the colonists” also works. “The robots built the city and then wiped out some of the colonists but there are some spares in cold storage” feels like multiplying hypothesis.

Still, it leaves us with a decent riddle: “The invisible robot piranhas will kill anyone who is sad; once the new batch of humans discover that the old batch have been killed, they will be sad, How do you stop the robots from killing them?" One would imagine that the solution to this problem would involve some combination of

a: Explaining to the piranhas that it’s okay to be sad. Dammit, Jim, it’s part of what makes us human...

or

b; Persuading the humans that they don’t need to be sad about their families having been eaten by piranhas (a tougher call, admittedly.)

In fact, the solution turns out to be, “The Doctor does a thing and the bad thing goes away.” He is actually said, on screen, to have “switched the robots off and switched them on again.” (Since we aren't talking about a software glitch, but robots following their programming too literally, it's hard to see how this would help.) The presence of the Doctor makes everything all right; there is no need for any story-internal explanation. 

Douglas Adams famously got round the improbability of some of the events in the Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy by giving his heroes a space ship which caused improbable things to happen wherever they went.  Cottrell-Boyce gets round the problem of not being able to think of an ending for his story by having the Doctor recite a version of the “three wishes” fairy tale. You know, the one where the silly farmer has to use his third wish to undo the results of the first two? In the Doctor’s version, the third wish is “I wish I had never made the first two wishes”. The solution to all life's problems is for the Doctor to press the re-set button.

In case we miss the point, the Doctor's version of the fairy tale is called "the magic haddock". This is as clear and deliberate a signal as I can imagine that the writer is perfectly aware he is writing  but really can't think of anything better. 

Still, that's the one thing I will take away from the story. From now on, when the Doctor or anyone else solves a problem by just happening to have a can of anti-plastic spray in his pocket, I will turn around and say “Magic haddock! Magic haddock”

Hally MacHallface

Near my old school there is a block of flats called Feline Court. The developers gave the flats that name because they are situated on Cat Hill. The Hill acquired its name because, as late as 1955, there was a pub called The Cat at the bottom of it. And the pub was called The Cat, not because of some association with Dick Whittington or even the Royal Navy, but because there had been a bridge called Katebrygge there in medieval ties.

From Katebrygge to Feline Court in barely half a millennium.

There was once a school teacher who, when asked by a pupil “Why is that flower called a daffodil?” always replied “Well, it had to be called something, and hippopotamus had already been used.” 

*

Edward Colston was a London based businessman. He was born in Bristol during the reign of the ill-fated Charles I and died in London during the time of George I. (He therefore lived through the English Revolution, the Restoration and the Glorious Revolution, and lived to see our first Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole.) So far as we know, he never went to sea or worked in the merchant navy; but he served and invested in a number of companies who traded in slaves, and in products like sugar which were produced by slave labour. 

You could say that any seventeenth century grocer who sold jam was implicated in the slave trade, as was any housewife or tea shop that bought a jar. Jam is made with sugar and sugar comes from Jamaica and the Jamaican plantations rely on slave labour. John Wesley told his Cornish flock to use less sugar as a protest against the slave industry, but not to stop using the stuff altogether. They stopped putting sugar in their tea (except with pasties) but still used it in their saffron buns.

Or you could say that by slave trader you mean someone who has personally put a manacle on a slave's wrist or personally wielded a whip — which Edward Colston certainly did not. Conceivably, he didn’t even quite understand the awful reality that lay behind the pounds, shillings and pence on his ledger sheets. 

What is incontestable is that Colston made a lot of money out of buying and selling black people; and what is equally incontestable is that he donated a lot of that money to charitable concerns in his home city. But it is possible to exaggerate and romanticize this. Edward Colston was not personally the founder of the girls' school which bares his name: it was founded in 1891 (170 years after he died) with money that he bequeathed to the Society Of Merchant Venturers. The statue of Colston which stands in the center of Bristol dates only from 1895.

Colston did personally set up a boys' school in 1708, using a building which had previously been a sugar warehouse. In 1867, the school was pulled down and a concert venue built in its place. The new building was given the name Colston Hall, presumably because it was on the site of Colston Boys School; not because the proprietors particularly wanted to honour the memory of Edward Colston. This theater burned to the ground in 1898, and again in 1945. The present building was put up for the Festival of Britain in 1951. It was not founded by Edward Colston himself, and not built with his money.

It is not at all uncommon for buildings to change their names. The Westminster Clock Tower is now the Queen Elizabeth Tower; Covent Garden’s Floral Hall is now known as the Paul Hamlyn Hall. This is particularly the case when a particular person falls out of favour: a number of buildings named in honour of Jimmy Savile were hastily relabeled after he was exposed as a child molester. This is not at all the same thing as expunging someone from history. It is fair to say that Adolf Hitler is still very well remembered in Germany, but I imagine that relatively few public buildings are named after him. 

It isn’t clear when it was first suggested that it would be better if Bristol’s main music venue were named after someone who didn’t make his fortune buying and selling black people. Since at least 2003 a popular pop band named Massive Attack have declined to play in Colston Hall because of its name. On the other hand, Billy Bragg, Steve Earle, Martyn Joseph, Reginald G Hunter and the JC4PM road show seem to have had no particular problem with it.

I used to be broadly against the scheme to rename the building. I tend to think that each generation bequeaths its memorials to the next generation and the fact that one century’s heroes are the next century’s villains is a lesson worth learning. There would be no argument for removing the statue of Charles Napier from Trafalgar square, whether he really made that joke or not. On the other hand, much of the Bristol Colston cult was not the creation of grateful townspeople in the 1700s, but of a Victorian revival dating only to the turn of the 20th century. And Colston is not a particularly important historical figure. How many other Georgian businessmen can you name? Who was the founder of your nearest private girls' school? 

Pointless symbolic gestures are sometimes necessary, providing they are pointlessly gesturing in the right direction. There was in my opinion no practical purpose in granting a posthumous pardon to Alan Turing. He was already nearly universally regarded as a national hero, and it was already nearly universally acknowledged that the law under which he was convicted was a stupid law. The only thing that could have been done to rectify that stupidity had already been done: the stupid law had been repealed. However, once the question of a posthumous pardon had been raised, the debate inevitably divided along partisan lines. Those who didn’t think he should be pardoned were almost entirely of the “I’m not homophobic, but…” persuasion; moderates and liberals all thought he should be. At which point the government had no choice but to issue the pardon to indicate which side of the line they came down on. 

For the past six months, the Bristol Post has been publishing letters about the Colston Hall question; and those arguing that the name should remain unchanged have been, almost without exception, racists and lunatics. Only last week someone asserted that if Bristol Music Trust changed the name of Colston Hall it would logically follow that the Egyptian Government would have to demolish the pyramids, since they were constructed by slaves. Someone went so far as to say that we would also have to ban Alice in Wonderland because they seemed to remember reading somewhere that Charles Dodgson had once met someone who was a slave trader. A steady stream of writers, presumably entirely unfamiliar with the writing of George Orwell, have queued up to say that changing the name of the building would be exactly like Winston Smith editing history at the Ministry of Truth, or else like Stalin airbrushing enemies from Soviet-era photographs, or else Hitler, or else political correctness gone mad. More worryingly, many of the letter-writers have said that we should keep the name because slavery wasn't really all that bad, and certainly nothing to be ashamed of. After all, "we" built railways and established hospitals in Africa as well. And “we” weren’t as beastly to our slaves as the Belgians were to their's. And "we" weren't the only country that did horrible things, and some Africans sometimes sold other Africans to slavers and in some parts of the world at some times in history white people have been slaves.

The most frequently made argument is that the evil men do lives after them while the good is oft interred with their bones and it should be possible to memorialize Colston as a philanthropist while deploring him as a slaver. The crime of kidnapping black people and taking them to places where they will be literally used like cattle is mitigated if you use some of your profits to set up schools and buy cottages for white people. This reminds one of the story of the man who murdered his mother and father and asked for mercy on the grounds that he was an orphan. 

If the question had never been raised, I would have said “leave the name as it is”. But the question has been raised, and if Colston Hall had remained Colston Hall, we would be coming down on the side of racist lunatics and people who being sentences "slavery was horrible, but..." 

And I don’t think we want to do that.

*

So: what should the new name be? 

Clearly it should be named after some respectable Bristol Citizen. Maybe it could simply become Colstons’ Hall in memory of the apostrophizer? Perhaps it could be called Banksy Hall, on the grounds that Banksy is almost as divisive a figure as Colston himself. Realistically, it could be named after an anti-slavery campaigner with some Bristol connection: the Hannah More Hall or the Thomas Clarkson Hall, perhaps. My preferred options would be to name it after a revered, beloved and treasured local member of parliament. The Tony Benn Hall has a certain ring to it. 

It never ceases to amuse me that if you were a York based Jehovah’s Witness you would have to give your address as:

Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses

Trinity Road…

York

There is a doubtless apocryphal tale about a place of higher education that was forced to write at the top of its correspondence:

Thames University

Polytechnic Road

London

After all this kerfuffle dies down, we are likely to end up with:  

The William Wilberforce Hall

Op Colston Tower

Colston Ave

Bristol

And so history will be well and truly expunged.

https://www.patreon.com/Rilstone

10.1 The Pilot

The Pilot. The first proper episode in nearly 18 months. Partial reboot. New companion. Dalek

In some ways I liked it. I cheered a couple of times: the Movellans, the sonic screwdrivers, and (retrospectively) when it dawned on me what Bill’s girlfriend was called. I gurgled appreciatively at the Mary Celeste name plate; and at the two pictures on the desk; and at some of the banter, because, if there’s two things that Moffat can really do, one of them is banter; and at the Dalek. 

I went to the Doctor Who Experience a few years back with a couple of kids and we were beamed onto the bridge of a Dalek spaceship. When you went, you probably saw a very well constructed animatronic tableau but I promise you we were taken onto a real Dalek ship. I've wanted to go on a Dalek ship my whole life. So of course I loved the Dalek.

And that’s the problem, isn’t it. Daleks and sonic screwdrivers and supporting characters who appeared for one and a bit seasons half and century ago and jokes about the names of dead actors. All very frothy for us fans, but where's the, so to speak, beef?

Imagine if this were almost anything other than Doctor Who. The hero’s friend’s lover has become possessed by a shape shifting alien puddle and the hero pronounces that the only way to free her is with a special “remove alien puddle” ray, which one particular evil alien robot happens to have. So the hero and his new friend jump into the middle of a war and set up a situation where the alien robot zaps the alien puddle. And, so far as I can see, this doesn’t do any good whatsoever: the friend’s love isn’t freed, the puddle monster isn’t destroyed. It’s defeated a few minutes later by the power of love. 

No-one would write this kind of thing voluntarily; no-one would think that “deliberately getting caught in the cross fire of a war” was a sensible way of getting rid of an alien water demon; and (incidentally) no-one has ever remotely suggested that the Daleks gun is the hottest fire in the universe before. The scene is an exercise in shoehorning the Daleks into the wrong story; either so people like me can have a fangasm; or because nominal Whovians associate the show with Daleks and not much else, or (very probably) because if the BBC don’t use the Daleks every year they lose the rights to them. The Movellans were rubbish in 1979, part of a terrible script by a Terry Nation who had long since ceased to bother, But seeing them for 8 seconds forty years later is like, the coolest thing ever. 

This is dysfunctional television. Or else I am dysfunctional fan.

A very long time ago when the universe was black and white the Sonic Screwdriver was just a gadget. Then, in the 70s, it became the Doctor preeminent gadget. Then, in the reboot, it became the Doctor’s iconic gadget: as much a part of who he is as the TARDIS. Now, the fact that it’s the Doctor’s iconic accessory is the subject of a visual gag: it may be his magic wand, but he treats it like I treat my old biros. 

When Bill is introduced to the Doctor, she demands to know his True Name. "Doctor what?" This is funny because...well, for very obvious reasons. When she first goes inside the TARDIS she says everything apart from “It’s bigger on the inside than the outside” which is funny, because we know that is what companions normally say. When she finally does say it, the Doctor and Matt Lucas sort of high-five, because they know it, too. When the Doctor makes a weak joke and the Bill responds in kind, Matt Lucas points out that they are now bantering.

We’re not only laughing at the cliches but laughing at the fact that we’re laughing at them. 

I have completely forgotten who the Matt Lucas character is and what he is for. (Did he just pop up as a fait accompli, like Madam Vastra?) 

Every time there is a vacancy, I speculate about all the interesting things that a new Companion might be. Maybe a young boy, or a much older woman (as worked so well in the audio stories) or an alien or something historical — a Victorian governess, say, or an ancient Egyptian princess? The last six companions in the original series were, what — a delinquent biker chick with mother issues who liked exploding things; an annoying vegetarian dancer who thought she was in a panto; a shouty American; a naughty alien schoolboy who nearly betrayed the Doctor; a posh alien whose planet had been exploded by the Master; and a naughty maths nerd who can’t dance... But in the new series, it always turns out that the new companion is going to be a spunky twenty-something woman who the Doctor banters with. That’s the new definition: companions are spunky twenty-something women who the Doctor banters with. Granted, Bill is a Daily Mail baiting black lesbian spunky twenty-something woman and the first person to say “why didn’t they make her an amputee as well so they could have the set?” will be politely asked to leave the room.

If I were the sort of person who complained about this kind of thing, I would complain that race and sexuality are just being used as signifiers of difference, like a funny hat: the new companion is just like the old companion except with the twist, get this, that she fancies women. But other people complain about that kind of thing much better and at much greater length than I can. 

It would have been much more interesting if Bill’s sexuality hadn’t been trailed in advance as a selling point: look at us, we’re so clever, we’re introducing the first ever GAY companion, unless you count Captain Jack, who was probably not entirely straight, and Wonderful Clara who was strongly implied to swing both ways. It would have been much more interesting to introduce a spunky twenty something girl who dated other spunky twenty something girls and resolutely refused to mention it.

I liked the way her jacket was yellow and stripy like the chips she serves in the canteen, and that she uses “fat” as a verb. 

The Doctor has stopped traveling. Because of that bad thing which happened before. He has taken on a new role, which he quite likes, and hung about for what to us would be a life-time and sworn he would never take another companion. But then this spunky young thing with a tragic entanglement comes along, and he picks her out as special, but never intends to travel with her, but in the end he does. But then he has to part with her again, which leaves him sad, so he quits travelling again. But then...

That’s not the plot of this story or this season. That’s the plot of every story and every season.

There is nothing particularly wrong with formulas. A sonnet always has 14 lines and a haiku always as 17 syllables; Captain Kirk always falls in love with a pretty lady solves a moral dilemma which demonstrates why communism is wrong. But formula is the hook on which you hang the content. And what is now the content of Doctor Who? What are we watching for? Self-referential banter; references to old stories; and an endlessly recycled stream of autolacrymose sentiment?

What we have this week is one more possession-and-exorcism story, based around a Mills-and-Boon notion that you can be in LOVE with someone you don’t really know and have never really had a conversation with. Bill has a crush on Heather but Heather has a crush on a mysterious pool of water. Heather looks into the pool for too long, and the kelpie drags her inside. So from now on, whenever Bill looks into puddle of water, she will always see her lover’s reflection looking back at her from it.

No: that isn’t quite right. What actually happens is that Heather looks into the mysterious puddle of water for too long and the water somehow makes an exact copy of her. It, the puddle, can now follow Bill around, flowing under doors, through taps and shower fixtures, and then take on Heather’s form. A sort of wet, leaking Heather, a bit like the zombies in Waters of Mars. Liquid Heather is heavily coded as scary, although never does anything particularly frightening. 

But this isn’t quite right either. When the TARDIS travels instantaneously to Australia the puddle travels equally instantaneously after it, and when it travel instantaneously to a planet millions of years in the past, there seems to be a puddle waiting for it, and when it materializes in the middle of Destiny of the Daleks, there’s a Heather shaped pool of water waiting there as well. So all the flowing and dripping was just for show. It hardly flowed through a crack and along a pipe until it ended up on an alien planet eighty six million years in the past. It can just be wherever it wants to be. Which makes it far more powerful than the TARDIS. 

Clearly, we are engaged with what Freud would call primary and secondary dreamwork — an image, and an after-the-fact rationalizing of that image. Heather can spring up out of a pool on an alien planet because the primary idea is that Heather has been subsumed by a water elemental — wherever there is water, there she is too. The sciencey hand wave is that one little pool of water is somehow outrunning the TARDIS through time and space. 

Because the Puddle is actually a pool of super-intelligent oil from an alien space ship, and when Heather remarks that she would like to go run away, this somehow imprints on the Space Oil, so she gets whisked away through time and space, except that Bill told Heather “don’t ever leave me”, and that imprints on the space oil as well, so wherever Bill goes Heather goeth too. The Doctor’s first idea of getting Heather zapped with a Dalek death-ray doesn’t have any noticeable affect. Bill has to cast a spell of banishing: when Bill releases Heather, that is to say the replica Heather, from her promise, she goes away.

I get that the title, Pilot, is a double entendre, and I get that this episode is sort of kind of reintroducing Doctor Who after a long break, reselling the formula to people who may have forgotten what it is. So I get that it is in one way consciously revisiting Rose — note the alarm clock, the exaggerated rush through the day at work, and the fact that the new companion is called Billie. The episode coyly pretends that we might not have any more idea about who the Doctor is than Bill does, and has quite a fun time unravelling it. The best kinds of mysteries are the ones to which you already know the solution: they make you feel clever. Moffat makes us do some of the work ourselves. Bill says that she doesn’t have any pictures of her real Mum, and then finds a box of old photos in her wardrobe, and then notices that the Doctor’s reflection can be seen in one of them, and then realizes that the Police Box in the Doctor’s room has moved… But when we get to the big reveal — Capaldi standing in an exaggeratedly large TARDIS interior, looking positively regal, making his speech about “the gateway to everything which ever was or ever could be” Moffat feels the need to immediately under-cut it with some unfunny toilet humour. 

Pearl Mackie delivers the line about “You mean it can go anywhere…anywhere in the university?” as if she doesn’t quite get it. 

I also get that if you are reintroducing the Doctor, you might want to sell the idea of the show by having as much time and space travel as possible: from the university, to Australia, to the alien planet, to the Dalek war. (The only thing missing is a meeting with, say, Queen Elizabeth I or Christopher Columbus.) A surprisingly large chunk of the episode involves the Doctor explaining the concept of Time Travel, as if some people might not know what a time machine is, or might not think the idea was that exciting. This week, time is not a ball of wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff so much as a city made up of all the different moments of your life; or possibly just a strip of movie film made up of thousands of still images. Moffat likes the idea of the simultaneity of time: one of his first contributions to Who, The Girl in the Fireplace, involved a spaceship which contained a number of “time windows” so Rienette’s life seemed to be laid out in a series of frames. Several times in Pilot, the camera appeared to pull back and show us Bill’s life as a grid of frozen moments, which is nothing is not audacious. And several times we get little flash back sequences showing Bill’s life and her relationship with heather in the little non-sequential moments.

In very, very old Who, we are asked to think of the TARDIS as being a bit like a television set; a little box that could potentially contain anything in the universe. Are we now being asked to think of the TARDIS as being a metaphor for memory? What we can all do in our heads — zoom backwards and forwards following interconnections and patterns to find the shape — the Doctor can do in the actual universe? Which is a not uninteresting idea.

The Doctor concludes his lecture about time being like a city by exclaiming “Time and relative dimension in space!” exactly like a vicar desperately hoping you’ll believe his sermon had something to do with his text when it patently didn't.

Look, we don’t know where we are going with this season yet. It might be that after the terminally impenetrable conclusion to Season 9, we have to sort of regress to the norm (Doctor, travelling, companion, banter, Daleks) before we can even consider telling any more stories. It might be that the pictures of Susan and River are just there so fans can stroke their beards and say “Ah, photos of Susan and River…” but it might also be that there is a plot brewing in which Susan turns out to River’s time-sister. There may be something really interesting locked in the vault, or at may turn out to be another monster which wants to destroy the universe for no adequately explored reason.

The idea that the Doctor has gone into semi-retirement and become an academic is really interesting (and not the worse for being a bit like Human Nature and a bit like School Reunion) but it isn’t clear if this is a recurrent sub-plot or a give away line in the first episode. Surely there is a whole season to be got out of the Doctor as a college lecturer? 

As so often, the best thing about the episode was the Doctor himself. How many terrible stories and seasons have we continued watching because Tom Baker or Sylvester McCoy were so compelling? There are too many long speeches about how brilliant the universe is and what a wonderful idea time travel is; but Capaldi does a very good job despite the overwritten material. I like the little flashes of Tom Baker when he grins. I like the way he looks at Susan’s photo when he first talks to Bill. I like his macho pride in the TARDIS. The scripts keep telling us that he is magnetic and charismatic and fascinating; but Capaldi manages to make him magnetic and charismatic and fascinating even when there isn’t dramatic music playing in the background. 

It usually takes a new Doctor a couple of years to settle into the role; now he’s found his feet I hope he sticks around for years.






Thank you to the ten new Patreon supporters who joined last week because they wanted to read what I had to say about Doctor Who, and the thirty eight people who have been supporting me for the last couple years. If you like what you read here, please consider joining them.