The Key To Time

 

He that is not busy being born is busy dying.

Doctor Who has always been in a death spiral; undermining it's own credibility and trampling it's own legacy. But equally it has always been struggling to come into being; edging toward the moment when it has finally become Doctor Who.

But what is Doctor Who? 

We think we know. Pseudo-science, corridors, second rate Equity members over-acting in the general direction of extras in rubber suits. And no one can say that that version of Doctor Who never existed. But the crock of gold at the end of the corridor is always receding. We think we've arrived at the definitive Doctor-Who-as-it-always-was: and we find that what we're watching is a clever costume drama on left-over sets from Anna Karenina.

The Doctor has to retrieve a powerful object referred to as the Key to Time. It has been split into Six Segments and scattered across the Universe. Since there are six stories in a season of Doctor Who, the artificiality of the device pretty much screams at you from the first synopsis.

The term "story arc" was not quite current in 1978: the production team were inclined to talk about "the umbrella theme" or "the blanket story line". But we could all see that the Key to Time was a McGuffin hunt: a trek across time and space searching for what Nick Lowe memorably called "plot coupons".

There are two extant documents which explore the idea behind the saga. One is written by incumbent producer Graham Williams; the other by incoming script editor Douglas Adams. Two writers, thinking on paper, trying to sort out in their heads what the Key to Time saga could possibly be about.

Williams is interested in cosmology and lore. He's interested in what kind of universe the Doctor inhabits. I have said in the past that most Doctor Who backstory amounts to "lore-babble": stuff that sounds good but which has no real "sub-creation" behind it. However, the Williams memo does seem to envisage a self-consistent Whoniverse: even if he is ad libbing it in the very act of typing the words.

There are writers who can't write the big sex scene unless they know what kind of handles there are on the bedroom door and the colour of the wallpaper. And there are writers who don't give the hero a name unless and until it becomes relevant to the plot. Douglas Adams seems to have been in the second camp. When someone asked him if Arthur Dent used an Apple Mac, Adams said it was a silly question because Arthur Dent didn't exist, and there had never been a scene in which we saw him typing. Graham Williams is more like the actor who can't say "My lord, your carriage awaits" unless he knows what the footman had for breakfast. The Guardians have to have a purpose and the Key to Time has to have an origin even if he has no intention of sharing them with the audience.

Tolkien worked out elvish rates of fertility to a hundred decimal places as a kind of displacement activity before writing some of the most beautiful mythic prose any human being has ever composed. Williams is similarly doodling on the page, trying to get a head of steam up before working on his story. But his ideas barely impact on the actual TV show.

The memo keeps dissolving into gibberish. Elisabeth Sandifer memorably called it the most spectacularly incoherent thing she had ever read. There are three forces in physics, right? Gravity, electromagnetism, nuclear? And some theories require there to be a fourth force, which might be space-time? And humans can control gravity and electromagnetism? So maybe the Time Lords control the fourth force? 

Come on. It was 1978. Of course it was going to involve the Force.

But the Time Lords are corrupt, right? So mustn't there necessarily be a power that is as far above the Time Lords as the Time Lords are above us humans? But the higher force can't be purely good; because then the universe would be good, which it obviously isn't. So there must be two higher forces; a good one and an evil one.

Voila: the Black and White Guardian Show.

"Eternity and Infinity, as concepts, do not by their very nature, allow for an absolute Authority -- the Pyramidical Hierarchy stretches through time and space and can have no apex... But the next step is logical. The balance must be kept by someone..."

If "must" is a moral imperative ("you must be home by tea-time") then this doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Who or what made the rule that there "must" be a balance? But if it's an inductive "must" ("he must have been home by tea-time because the kitchen light was on") I think we can see what Williams is driving at. If Time and Space are infinite there can't be any supreme being. A pyramid with infinitely long sides never comes to a point. If the Time Lords are above the humans and the Guardians are above the Time Lords, there must be Something Else above the Guardians, and Something Else above the Something Else. It's turtles all the way down. (Williams literally quotes Jonathan Swift's poem about fleas.) But if the next in line above the Time Lords were good then we'd expect goodness to be running the whole show: which obviously it isn't. So it follows that there "must" be both a good and an evil force, in some kind of balance.

It's the old, old question. If the supreme being is good, then how do you account for the existence of haemorrhoids and Sir Kier Starmer?

There is some pretty weird moral philosophy in the memo:

"Must responsibility and objectivity lie solely in the hands of the good influence? Demonstrably not so. Of our recent history there is no account nor any evidence that Hitler believed his principles less sincerely than Churchill believed in his. Where were Nuremburg, had Hitler won."

This is monstrously confused -- we're looking over Williams' shoulder as he vomits ideas into a notebook. But I think we can see the thought he is trying to have. He's contrasting a monotheist universe in which good is good and all alone and ever more shall be so with a dualist world where good and evil are two equal and opposed forces.

In a strictly dualist universe there is no particular reason why you ought to choose to be good rather than evil. They are just two teams, like the Arsenal and the Spurs. Dungeons & Dragons conceptualises "good" and "evil" as antagonistic clubs you choose to join, not meaningful descriptions of codes of conduct or ways of life."You ought to follow the light rather than the dark" implies that there is a third force, over and above the light side and the dark side that approves the Jedi and deprecates the Sith. That's why orthodox Christians have always been very clear that Satan is not an evil god; he's merely a very naughty angel. I believe that even so-called dualistic systems like Zorastrianism and Manicheism say, under their breath and off mic, that the good force came first and will beat the bad one in the end. You ought to back the winner.

What Williams appears to be blurting out is that Hitler believed himself to be good and the allies to be evil and that there is no absolute perspective from which one can say that he is wrong. Cosmically speaking, murdering six million Jews and not murdering six million Jews are equally neutral acts. It's a fortunate quirk of history that we happen to have been educated on the non-genocidal side of the line.

But "Hitler thought that doing evil was good, so maybe doing good is evil" is not meaningful or helpful, even as a thought experiment. The relevant insight would have to be something like "Suppose you honestly thought that monstrous aliens dedicated to the destruction of humanity were dispersed through your population: might genocide be one of the solutions which would occur even to a good person?" We stopped executing witches, not because we changed our mind about executions, but because we stopped believing in witchcraft.

But that's exactly the kind of thinking which the Doctor rejects. There would be a contradiction in wiping out the whole Dalek species because the Daleks are genocidal monsters. The Daleks are bad and if the Doctor acts as they do he would be as bad as them.

The second half of the Williams memo attempts to connect all this back to Doctor Who. It proposes that the President of the Time Lords is told about the higher authority when he assumes office. (The Doctor must therefore have learned about them in Invasion of Time -- or would have done if he had not had his memory erased at the end of the story.) The two Guardians are representatives of the Higher Power within the Cluster -- the section of the universe the Time Lords are in charge of. The Key to Time is a neutral source of power for both the White and the Black Guardians. In Williams' original conception, the Black Guardian has already stolen the Key and scattered it through Time and Space; the Universe is already descending into chaos. He seems to entertain the thought that the Doctor has always been resisting the chaos and his enemies have always been agents of the Black Guardian. He wonders if perhaps Time Lords are periodically promoted to being Guardians, and that the Doctor might be rewarded for completing the quest by being offered the chance to level up.

But none of this makes its way into the actual episodes. Neither does the attractive idea of a magic candle which burns dimmer and dimmer as the Black Guardian's power waxes. And Williams philosophical doodle entirely fails to answer the big question. How will a season of Doctor Who in which the Doctor is searching for the six segments of the Key to Time be distinguishable from a season in which he isn't?

In this respect, Douglas Adams' notes are a lot more interesting; albeit only as a counterfactual -- a brief premonition of a more interesting Key to Time which might have existed, but never did. Adams isn't interested in higher powers, moral relativism, or infinitely large pyramids. He's truthfully not that interested in Doctor Who. He's interested in scripts. The producer has determined that the Doctor is going to spend Season 16 collecting party favours for a cosmic scavenger hunt: so how can a writer use that idea to generate some interesting TV?

Adams zeroes in on one crucial fact. Each of the segments is disguised as a random object. So in each story, one object must be of exceptional significance. The important thing is to think of interesting and surprising objects and to think of interesting and surprising reasons why some character might want to stop the Doctor getting his hands on them.

"The problem in each case is that the object plays some significant role in the life of the planet on which it is located, either for good or evil, and the Doctor has to consider how its removal will affect life on [that planet]."

Being Douglas Adams, he tries to think of far-fetched and ridiculous things for the segments to be disguised as. The Moon and the Sun. Stonehenge. A person: Romana, maybe, or even the Doctor himself. Imagine a story in which the Doctor arrived in a future London and was required to ask the King (recognisably descended from Prince Charles) if he could please remove Buckingham Palace because he needed it to save the universe.

Adams was finishing up the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy at the same time he was working on what became the Pirate Planet and there is a certain familial wackiness between the two stories. What if the second segment turned out to be, er, Africa? What if the Doctor already knew this, and had the original continent in storage in his infinitely large TARDIS?

Adams' essay is not always very easy to follow. His mind worked very quickly but didn't stay in one place for long. But it is the idea of disguise which seems to fascinate him. He envisages characters being mistaken, or directly lying, about which object will turn out to be that episode's plot coupon. Maybe the Doctor pretends that he has found the segment to impress Romana? Maybe he lies about what the segment is to give him a pretext to take away some alien object he wants to possess for some unfathomable reason of his own? Maybe the segment is a weapon and the Doctor has to make a morally ambiguous pact with a supervillain to get his hands on it?

Williams' introduction of the tracer/core in Episode One pretty much closes off most of these interesting avenues: the Doctor has an infallible wand that flashes "this way to the plot" at the beginning of each episode. (Several times, the Doctor loses the tracer, but that simply turns the McGuffin detector into a temporary McGuffin.)

The memo may contain the germ of what became the Armageddon Factor. But very few of Adams' ideas ever see the light of day. It is hard to avoid the feeling that in many of the Key to Time stories, the quest was being retrofitted into stories which would have worked perfectly well without it.

Four seasons ago, the Doctor was sent on a quest: not by the Guardians but by the Time Lords. The TARDIS could, I suppose, have randomly dumped him on Skaro at the precise moment when Davros was about to activate his new range of outer space robot people. And the Doctor might have decided that this provided him with an opportunity to abort his enemy at the moment of their conception. And he might even have had moral qualms at the last minute. But that would have all been a bit of a stretch even by Doctor Who standards. The prologue to Genesis of the Daleks justifies the contrivance; and sets up the moral dilemma in the final episode. The Doctor questions whether he ought (that word again) to destroy the Daleks even though the Time Lords have told him to.

And that's the question that neither Williams nor Adams successfully answers. What narrative effect will the Guardian's sending the Doctor on a cosmic treasure hunt have on the six stories that make up Season 16?

Read: The Ribos Operation (1)

Read: The Pirate Planet (1)

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Norwegian Blue

The Wolves of Eternity by

Karl-Ove Knausgaard

People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff. - Trad.

1

Some years ago, there was a TV series called Heroes. The first episodes followed the apparently unrelated life-stories of several super-powered characters. Gradually, over slightly too many episodes, we started to see how their lives were connected; until by the final instalment, they all turned out to have been part of a single story. Someone certainly had to save the cheerleader. Because it was about a network of overlapping relationships it was called the first popular drama of the Facebook era. By me, if by no-one else.

Social media makes a difference. Past Lives, a film which somehow didn't excite me quite as much as it excited everyone else depends on Facebook for its central premise. It would have been quite impossible, prior to 2005, for two people on two different continents who were sweethearts at the age of twelve to reestablish contact at the age of twenty four. Not without private detectives, or a gigantic coincidence involving handbags and strawberry marks. You may remember how Rustum (a father who long ago lost contact with his son) and Sorhab (a son who was raised entirely in ignorance of his father's identity) inadvertently killed each other in single combat. That sort of thing used to happen all the time in the days before Twitter.

Alan Moore's Watchmen, which came out as early as 1986, is another story in which multiple narratives about disparate characters gradually converge, until we perceive that, from a certain point of view, everything is connected to everything else. Moore's Ozymandias sits in front of a huge bank of television screens, randomly changing channels, in the belief that this will somehow enable him to perceive the Big Picture. Nowadays he would spend all day on Twitter. Come to think of it, he would probably own Twitter.

Conspiracy theory thrives online; and conspiracy theory, almost by definition, involves drawing lines between things which are not connected. Until 2022, the titular head of the United Kingdom was called the Queen. One of the Queen's children is alleged to have links to Jeffrey Epstein. Jeffrey Epstein was accused of sexual offences. Men who wear extravagangtly feminine clothes as part of a theatrical performance are sometimes referred to as Drag Queens. This proves...

But Alan Moore came to believe that ritual magic and creative writing were both equally about creating new connections between unconnected things.  All stories are true.

I wonder if the Marvel Cinematic Universe -- and the various franchises which have so far entirely failed to emulate its success -- are knock-on results of the ubiquity of Twitter? We're disinclined to see stories as lines and more inclined to see them as webs.

2

In 2012, someone called Helge listens to a record that they used to like when they were eleven.

"The cover alone sent a tingle down my spine. The image of the world, shining in the darkest firmament, the band name in electric lettering and the album title underneath in computer script–wow! But it didn’t really knock me out until I pressed play and started listening. I remembered all the songs, it was as if the melodies and riffs hidden in my subconscious came welling up to reconnect with their origins, their parents, those old Status Quo songs to which they belonged. But it wasn’t only that. With them came shoals of memories, a teeming swathe of tastes, smells, visions, occurrences, moods, atmospheres, whatever. My emotions couldn’t handle so much information all at once, the only thing I could do was sit there trembling for three-quarters of an hour as the album played.”

Well, quite. Frenchmen often have that kind of experience when they dip little cakes in their tea. One thought leads to another and suddenly Helge remembers something very odd that happened to him in 1977. It's all over and done with in six pages and I don't think we hear another peep out of him for the rest of the very long book. 

The second section, amounting to a longish novel in its own right, is about a second character, named Syvert. It's 1987 and Syvert has just come home from his national service (which is, or was then, a thing in Norway). He was a cook in the Navy and is rather good at it, although he doesn't want to go into the restaurant trade as a career. He doesn't know what he does want. Gradually, some facts about his life unfold. He lost his father a decade ago; his mother is seriously ill (he finds blood in the washbasin and then a bloody tissue in the bin). He has a younger brother who has been having vivid dreams about Dad. Almost without us noticing, a plot starts to happen. Syvert finds some of his father's old papers, which include letters written in Russian. He didn't know his Dad spoke Russian. He becomes curious, and gets them translated. Meanwhile and in passing he visits the local Vicar. It seems that everyone is automatically confirmed in the Church of Norway by default, and has to pay tax to the church: they need a signature from a clergyman if they want to opt out. The Vicar is very nice about it, but half-seriously asks Syvert to return the favour by reading Crime and Punishment. Dostoyevsky is the most Christian of writers, he says, more Christian than Jesus. Syvert is not only an atheist, but quite right-wing, although this only manifests as occasionally having unkind thoughts about people he assumes to be leftists. When he finds the only Russian speaker in the village to translate his dad's letters, they recommend Dostoyevsky to him as well. He rejoins a football team, develops a crush on a girl he has never met, unwisely gives an interview to a local newspaper and finds a temporary job -- as an undertaker's assistant.

After four hundred pages of this, we switch to Russia, where a lorry driver named Yeygeny Pavlovich is robbed by thugs and then wrongly arrested by the police. And then a new, long section about Alevitina, a Russian academic. She's lecturing in biology and becomes quite irritated by a student who tries to quote Intelligent Design texts at her. 

"The kind of reductionist materialism you all stand for can only point to physical and chemical laws, but there’s nothing in those laws that can explain how life arose out of non-life. Is that science? And as for the theory of evolution, is it able to explain how the genetic code emerged, not to mention how it’s actually read? The theory has to be able to do that in order to be valid. Only it can’t. Is that science? Or is it orthodox faith?"

There is a very long flashback to when she was an graduate student; she was briefly interested in "biosemiotics"; the idea that if trees can at some level pass information to other trees, and if there are extensive networks (networks!) of fungi beneath the earth, forests could be complex enough to possess something analogous to consciousness. This led her into thinking about shamanism, and a brief experiment with magic mushrooms. 

And thence to a whole chapter of a work in progress by her friend Vasilisa. It deals with similar themes and is, of course, entitled The Wolves of Eternity. 

The starting point of Fyodorov’s philosophy is that death belongs to nature and life belongs to humans. Nature is a destructive force we permit to control us. Death is a result of our passivity towards nature: we allow nature to kill us. But this is by no means a necessary outcome. Whereas the forces of nature that tear everything asunder are blind processes taking place according to laws and systems of which nature itself is unknowing, we human beings possess consciousness, will and emotions.

3

How does Karl-Ove Knausgaard do it?

This is the sort of eight hundred page novel which you devour in hundred page chunks. It's the sort of book which leaves you breathlessly on the edge of your seat, waiting to find out if Syvert and his kid brother Joar will have a nice time at the swimming pool; or if Syvert is going to extricate himself from talking to a couple of over-chatty tourists without undue embarrassment. It's the kind of book you find yourself reading, if not quite from behind a sofa, then at any rate with mounting nervousness, almost afraid to get to the end of the chapter. If Syvert goes on the date with the girl he's been obsessing about for the past hundred pages, and leaves Joar home alone, will something terrible happen? Will his mother look at him in a judgemental way? Will he say exactly the wrong thing and ruin the date?

In fact, the answer to these kinds of questions is almost always "no".  A really, really bad thing did indeed happen in Syvert's family before the book started; and if the book has a single theme, it's Syvert's gradual realisation of what that bad thing was. But the bad thing happened a very long time ago, and the repercussions are not especially dramatic. But we keep reading. Karl-Ove's books grip us like nothing else. We apply words like "compelling" and "addictive" to them. One reviewer said correctly "even when he is boring, he is interesting." 

How does Karl-Ove Knausgaard do it? 

Some people might say that the question is really: how does Karl-Ove Knausgaard get away with it?

4

Knausgaard's fame chiefly rests on having written a four thousand page fictionalised autobiography, from the point of view of a writer whose chief claim to fame is having written a four thousand page autobiography. Naturally, it was entitled My Struggle. The book is quite aware of its own cheek, or provocation: a book about the trivia of daily life comparing itself with the most infamous and egotistical autobiography of the twentieth century. If I'd been doing it, I'd have probably gone with The Greatest Story Ever Told, which wouldn't have been nearly so clever. There is a three hundred page digression about Hitler in the final volume, which, treated as a sub-book in its own right, is genuinely interesting and informative.

My Struggle ended with Knausgaard declaring that he was no longer a writer; but in fact he followed his huge autobiography with a huge work of fiction. The Morning Star was a montage of first person narratives connected by the fact that a new star has inexplicably appeared in the sky; and that dead people are equally inexplicably coming back to life. When you have written four thousand pages about the minutiae of your own life, I suppose there is nothing much to do but write about the minutiae of other people's. 

The Wolves of Eternity is a sequel to the Morning Star, although even saying that amounts to a kind of spoiler. Two more connected volumes have already been published in Norwegian: the title of the third book in the series, Det Tredje Riket arguably translates as The Third Reich.

5

It would be misleading to say that the Wolves of Eternity reads like a soap-opera; but the Wolves of Eternity does read a little like a soap-opera. It would also be unfair to say that it reads like a writers' workshop exercise or an RPG scenario; but it does somewhat resemble both of those things. Here are two major characters and three minor ones: can you think up reasons, thematic or narrative, that their lives are connected? 

In a sense, it would be better to go into the book not knowing that it is a sequel to the Morning Star -- or perhaps we should say, that it is part of the Morning Star Extended Universe. The ideal reader would be following the ins and outs of Syvert's and Alevitina's lives and be surprised on page 700 (or thereabouts) when the grown-up Joar, now an astrophysicist, appears on TV trying to explain the sudden appearance of the new star.  "Aha, they would say: not only are the five characters in the Wolves of Eternity obliquely connected; but they are obliquely connected to the seven or eight we met in the previous volume."

I am, though, trying to avoid spoilers. The book doesn't contain a particular Astonishing and Surprising twist. But I would say that when I spotted the connection between Syvert and Alevitina -- and the reader works it out slightly before the characters do -- I said "Aha!" Syvert and Alevitina's meeting also reveals how Helge of the first chapter is linked to Syvert, albeit in an indirect way that neither of them are likely to ever discover. That also made me go "Aha!" "Aha!" is probably the correct reaction to the works of Karl-Ove Knausgaard.

But the book isn't about the characters or their interconnections. Beneath all the trivia, Knausgaard is really interested in huge philosophical questions. He gets through the entire book without saying "quotidian" once.

It's breathtakingly erudite, although there are some signs of authorial contrivance. The central four hundred pages we spend with Syvert only cover a few days of his life: but when we rejoin him thirty-five years later, we find that all the important things in his life depended on those four days. He married the girl he had the crush on, stayed with the undertaking firm (and now runs a chain of four funeral homes) and is still concerned about the context of Dad's letters. 

The Wolves of Eternity, like all Karl-Ove's books, is about Death. (I think of the interviewer who asked William Golding why all his books were about the Fall of Man. "That's a bit like saying all my books are about people.") Both volumes carry epigrams from the book of Revelation. The Russian lorry driver, who doesn't otherwise intersect with the story, is sent to a remote location to pick up what appear to be very large fuel tanks. When he delivers them, he learns that they actually contain...cryogenically frozen heads and bodies. At the end of his chapter, he mysteriously hears banging -- from inside the tanks! Towards the end of Syvert's second narrative chunk, he is getting confused messages from the staff of his funeral parlours saying that, so far as they can tell, no-one has died in Norway for the past three days. 

While Alevitina was researching the consciousness of forests, she became interested in a (real) Russian philosopher, Fyodorov, who believed that it was possible, and indeed imperative, to resurrect dead people. He believed that Science! ought to be able to reassemble the actual atoms that the deceased were originally made up of and reconnect them with their souls, which must logically still exist somewhere. He also believed in aliens. Big Name Russians like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky took him seriously. Fyodorov's "cosmism" naturally makes one think of contemporary theories about transhumanism and the singularity which flourish because social media has made it so easy for crackpots to link up with other crackpots.

So perhaps, while praising the book for its erudition and fractal complexity, we need to lightly chastise it for its slightly clunky artifice. Syvert gets a job in the death industry while finding out about his dead father and confronting the mortality of his mother; meanwhile other characters discourse on the philosophical nature of death and the plot arc carried over from the previous volume suggests that death may literally be coming to an end. Or perhaps we are merely gob-smacked that the poet laureate of  prawn sandwiches is telling something with the general shape of a story?

6

There's no doubt that the writing style is odd: even Knausgaard's advocates smile at the endless cups of coffee and showers. A reviewer in, I think, the Washington Post prefaced his positive remarks with "if Knausgaard is your thing..."

The characters all speak in the same register: it always sounds to me, slightly, as if a patient primary school teacher is addressing a bright but obstinate child. 

‘Have you got any music?’

‘My record player’s in my room. I don’t think you’ll like my records much, though.’
‘Don’t underestimate me, thank you very much. What do you listen to?’
‘Heavy metal.’
'Is that all'
'Yes'
'You don't look the type if you ask me.'

Or

‘Listen,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry for being so presumptuous. I’m a bit drunk, you see. Well, more than a bit, actually. I’m very drunk.’
‘Some people get happy when they’re drunk,’ I said.
‘I know. I do sometimes as well. Only not tonight, it seems.’
‘That’s OK. I accept you as you are,’ I said. She laughed. I laughed too.

There is a sometimes self-conscious frankness; characters are a little too inclined to say things like "I put the beers and cokes in the fridge, the crisps in the cupboard, then went to the toilet for a shit, only there was someone in there". It isn't entirely clear who these detailed first person narratives are spoken to: perhaps everyone in Norway now writes incredibly detailed auto-fiction. Christos Tsiolkas also has a tendency to follow his characters into the bathroom: it may be the price we pay for living inside their heads. And, of course, we're reading a translation; it may be that Norwegian has a formality that doesn't quite have an English equivalent. When Syvert (Norwegian) and Alevitina (Russian) finally meet, it isn't immediately clear that they are conversing in English. A couple of times, I wondered what Norwegian quirk the English was representing: for example, when Syvert's girl-friend is surprised by his use of the word "flabbergasted".  Everyone uses "loo" for "toilet".

7

Knausgaard's second book, A Time For Everything, included a huge long section about a relatively normal family doing relatively normal Knausgaardian things, but as the section rolls on, we realise that they are contemporaries of Noah, and the point of the section is to imagine what a literal global flood would be like, and how it might have been perceived by its victims. (Which, come to think of it, recalls Jesus' words about people carrying on living normal lives right up to the moment when Noah went into the Ark.) My guess is that the Morning Star quartet is going to turn out to be Knausgaard's take on a literal, Biblical apocalypse -- Lucifer and the resurrection of the dead and all -- from the point of view of ordinary people on the edge of it.  A secularised Left Behind, if you will.

One could imagine Ray Bradbury, say, dispensing with the rising of Lucifer and the resurrection of the dead in three florid pages. Someone like Salman Rushdie would have taken six hundred pages in three languages, implied that the whole thing is a metaphor and offended two major religions in the process. Knausgaard just tells it, takes it for granted; as if it's not even the most important thing that happened. (I often imagine how the news media would cope if there ever was contact with aliens or a major nuclear exchange. "But now, in other news...") It's not magical realism, but it's not really science fiction, either. It's happening in a world where you have to change babies' nappies and check with the hospital morgue about the paperwork and decide what you're having for dinner. A world where a cancer diagnosis is necessarily followed by a discussion of whether it's better to take the train or the coach to the hospital. Syvert realises that he has promised to visit his maybe terminally ill mother on the same day that the girl he has developed the obsessive crush on has asked him for a date. Which is very much how life is. The big stuff is enmeshed in the small stuff; the small stuff is what we see the big stuff through.

It's compelling and gripping and several of the characters feel real in a way that fictional characters hardly ever do. It's eight hundred pages long and I wish I read Norwegian so I could plunge straight into volume three.

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Nothing At The End of Lane [complete]

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Notes

Doctor Who Sixtieth Anniversary....

I do understand that some people think that what I am doing is worthwhile but can't commit to a monthly Patreon Payment... so I've put all the recent Doctor Who essays (the ones about the Sixtieth Anniversary, and the extended piece on An Unearthly Child) into a little PDF book. It's available on the Ko Fi page. 

Patreon would have paid around £6 for these pieces, but I've set it to "pay what you like".

Much thanks for your ongoing interest. (The Tom Baker retrospective will go into a different book, at some stage.)

Andrew's Ko-Fi Shop

Nothing At The End of the Lane (Appendix)

NOTES

ACRONYM
While Sidney Newman and Verity Lambert may have come up with the word TARDIS; it appears that the writer of Unearthly Child came up with the idea of it standing for Time And Relative Dimension In Space. It is not referenced again until the Time Meddler, by which time the word Dimension has been pluralised.

Susan says she coined the name: which would make a great deal more sense if we assume that "TARDIS" is the personal name of this particular vessel -- along the lines of "Enterprise" or "Liberator" or "Shippy McShipface".

COAL HILL SCHOOL
For many years, Coal Hill School would have been a pub quiz answer for obsessives. Then Sylvester McCoy went back there for an anniversary story. More recently, wonderful Clara became a teacher there; and there was a pointless spin off about the place. An easter egg implies that Ian Chesterton is one of the governors.

FOG
In the pitch documents, fog was a significant plot device: Ian and Barbara walk Susan home because it is foggy; or else find her and her grandfather lost in the fog. It is still foggy at the beginning of the pilot episode; but the fog clears. In the transmitted episode it has been downgraded to potential fog.

Pilot episode

SUSAN: I rather like walking in the English fog. It's sort of mysterious.

BARBARA: You say that as if...

IAN: Then we won't deprive you of that romantic pleasure.

BARBARA: Well, hurry home, Susan. And be careful, the fog's getting thicker.

*

IAN: The fog's cleared. We're lucky.

Transmitted Episode

SUSAN: I like walking through the dark. It's mysterious.

BARBARA: Be careful, Susan, there'll probably be fog again tonight.

*

IAN: We're lucky there was no fog. I'd never have found this.

It may be that we are supposed to infer that the fog we see in the opening sequence (when the policeman is checking out the junkyard) is unnatural fog; fog produced by the Ship in order to disguise itself. By 1963 the clean air act would have meant that the thick London smogs you could get lost in were receding into folk memory.

LESSONS
Ian is usually said to be a chemistry teacher: so why is he setting a Fifth Form / Year 11 class elementary geometry? (The pitch says that "Cliff" taught applied science at a Secondary Modern.) Similarly, if Barbara is a history teacher, why has the subject of English currency come in one of her lessons?

In the pilot episode, the blackboard very clearly has a note on it that says:

America 100 c = 1 $

England 20 /- = 1 £

Which suggests that she must have reacted to Susan's error by writing the true state of affairs on the board; which wasn't a particularly kind thing to do.

POLICEMAN
The story opens with a policeman checking the gates of the junk yard. In the pilot episode; Barbara notices that there is a policeman standing outside Totters Lane, suggesting that their arrival follows straight on from the pre-cred and that the school scene is a slight flashback.

When the Doctor realises that Ian and Barbara are teachers, he says "not the police then..." as if he was concerned that the officer in the pre-cred was coming to ask him questions. Shortly after they enter the junk yard, Barbara says she is going to fetch a policeman; then Ian tells the Doctor that he is going to find one; and then the Doctor dares him, twice, to do so. But no policeman appears after the opening scene.

Note that they are referred to as "policemen" throughout as opposed to "the police", "coppers" or "cops."

POLICE BOX
In Episode 2, the Doctor and Susan express surprise that the TARDIS has not changed. This is not remarked on in Dead Planet or Marco Polo.

The image of the displaced Police Box at the end of Episode One brilliantly conveys the premise of the show: an ordinary thing ending up somewhere extraordinary.

It is sometimes said that the TARDIS being fixed in a single form was a late addition to the mythos, when it was realised that creating a new prop in each story would be too expensive; but this makes very little sense. But surely it would have been easier to say that some haystack or a postbox that would have been part of the setting in any case was this month's TARDIS?

The idea that the ship was some mundane object seems to have been part of the premise at quite an early stage: it is more likely that the "stuck camouflage device" was an after-the-fact rationalisation.

The TARDIS was police-box shaped in pitches and synopses prior to An Unearthly Child. It is sometimes said that Sydney Newman proposed that it should be night watchman's tent; but in fact, he gave that as an example of one of thing it definitely shouldn't be. But there is a persistent oral tradition that the author of the first story was the person who proposed the Police Box shape.

SMOKING
When Ian loses his torch, he says that he doesn't have any matches, which suggests that, unusually for the time, he is a non-smoker. ("I haven't got any" rather than "I just used my last".) The Doctor, smokes a big pipe, which may be why he keeps coughing.

Ian's lack of matches may be intended to foreshadow the storyline about the cave people who have forgotten how to make fire. 

76 TOTTERS LANE
The word "totter" can mean to stumble or collapse: however Totter is also an old English word for a trader; we still talk about "totting up" the days takings. There is an area of Bristol called Totterdown.

'76 was the year of the American revolution; Barbara of course gives Susan a book about the French Revolution of '89.

There is a real Totters Lane near Guildford and Basingstoke in Surrey.

If the Doctor wants to keep his existence secret, why has he allowed the school secretary to know the real address of the place he has hidden the TARDIS?

Nothing At The End of the Lane (3)

This is the first part of an essay on An Unearthly Child which has already appeared on my Patreon.

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2024

And so, for many years, we fetishised An Unearthly Child. When John Nathan Turner took up the reigns of Doctor Who, he gave the Doctor three companions, instead of a single assistant. He made them bicker among themselves. He even made the Fifth Doctor a subordinate character in his own story. This was widely praised at the time because it was returning Doctor Who to its roots; which meant making it more like An Unearthly Child. It was almost as if the years between 1963 and 1982 had been one dreadful wrong turning.

I was delighted by an interview with Douglas Adams on the Wogan programme, in which he said that he and Graham Williams had taken the first four episodes out of the archive, intending to watch them in a spirit of ironic mockery. They were embarrassed to discover that 1960s Doctor Who was very much better than the 1970s version of the show. He added, not unintelligently, that it was the addition of colour had spoiled it. It is much easier to believe that jobbing actors in front of a painted backdrop are primeval cavemen when you are watching them in monochrome on a very small screen.

I was full of DWAS Story-Information Folders and CMS loose leaf essays and Radio Times specials. I knew all about the black and white era. But from Panopticon 2 until (I suppose) the National Film Theatre Doctor Who weekend, in or around 1987, Unearthly Child was the only black-and-white Doctor Who story I had actually seen. [*]

So the feeling developed: the Magic of Doctor Who was that quality which An Unearthly Child / Tribe of Gum possessed, but Deadly Assassin didn't. An Unearthly Child took itself seriously. Deadly Assassin did not. And the thing that Deadly Assassin was not taking seriously, the mythos -- Doctor Who's very identity -- was the very thing which An Unearthly Child worked so hard to establish. An Unearthly Child spoke the language of BBC naturalistic drama, and dropped cave men and time machines into the middle of it. An Unearthly Child was set in a gothic studio where everyone wore silly hats. An Unearthly Child was about the clash of fantasy and reality. Deadly Assassin was pure fantasy.

There is a fine irony in the fact that An Unearthly Child was transmitted less than a day after CS Lewis sadly died. It is, after all, the story of an adolescent girl named Susan, who is nearly old enough to be interested in boys. The marvellous device which takes her between the worlds is a wooden box; a wooden box which messes with time. Doctor Who is dressed up as Science Fiction, but it functions according to Narnian logic -- in fact to Looking Glass Logic. There's a magic kingdom in the bedroom closet, and a stone aged tribe in the phone box, and a set of homicidal playing cards at the bottom of the rabbit hole. 

Sydney Newman initially visualised the TARDIS as a kind of magic door between worlds. Magic doorways are a staple of children's fiction. An Unearthly Child is exceptionally successful because the outer world -- the fog and the bobbie and the notice board -- and the inner world -- the fire and the skulls -- are both treated with equal conviction. But before long there would only be a single world: the world of Doctor Who.

Ian refuses to believe in the stone age, just as Peter and Susan refuse to believe in Narnia. Lewis's Professor appeals to logic: you don't definitely know that cupboards can't contain magical kingdoms; but you do definitely know that your sister is not a liar. The Doctor accepts that the TARDIS defies logical analysis and doesn't try to prove it. It comes down to faith.

"I can't help it, I just believe them, that's all" says Barbara. But Ian, not unreasonably, demands proof.

"If you could touch the alien sand and hear the cries of strange birds and watch them wheel in another sky, would that satisfy you?" asks the Doctor. Ian concedes that it would.

Direct personal experience is not, in fact, sufficient grounds to believe the impossible. In the novel, Ian briefly considers that he is hypnotised, or drugged, or dreaming: which would, in fact be a more rational position. But maintaining that rational belief would really drive him mad. 

Blessed are they that have not seen, but have believed. Credo quia absurdum.

An Unearthly Child does what it does so very well that we are tempted to think that "what An Unearthly Child does" is what Doctor Who was always intended to do; and that everything since has represented a falling away from that platonic idea.

Fans were amused when a review from December 1963 came to light complaining that Cave of Skulls was not as good as An Unearthly Child: ho-ho, they said, people have been saying that Doctor Who is not as good as it used to be from before the beginning! But (assuming that the cutting is real) the journalist was in no way making a silly comment. You sold me on a mysterious story about a brilliant school girl and an alien hiding in modern London; and what you followed it with was a kids TV adventure involving cave men and spooky skulls. You offered me a well-drawn English science master and in twenty five minutes you turned him into Richard Hannay.

The scenes in the TARDIS follow directly on from Unearthly Child; the scenes in the cave are part of a completely different conceptual world. And it does seem very much as if An Unearthly Child and Tribe of Gum were conceived as separate entities. The exact process isn't known or knowable; but it certainly seems that CW Weber's lost script -- the one in which the heroes were going to be miniaturised -- began with Susan (or Sue, or Biddy) introducing Ian (or Cliff) and Barbara (or Miss McGovern) to her mysterious Grandfather. That script was rejected, not because it failed to capture the magical essence of Doctor Who, but because the BBC budget wasn't sure if it could run to Incredible Shrinking Man special effects. If we were living on another time-line, I might very well be saying that a Land of the Giants chase across Mr Chesterton's science desk was the exact and perfect way to begin Doctor Who. The familiar seen from a new angle: the ordinary made strange.

What is certain is that the writer of An Unearthly Child incorporated some elements of the CE Weber script, which were themselves based on Sydney Newman's pitch; into that un-transmitted pilot episode; and that that pilot was partially rewritten, probably by script editor David Whitaker. Changing "I was born in the fifty fourth century" to "I was born in another world, another time" would be a very Whitaker thing to do.

The impact of Unearthly Child is so great that we are tempted to pretend that, as a matter of fact, Doctor Who was always like this, right up until the moment when it wasn't. 

And maybe that was even sometimes a little bit true. When I first saw the Aztecs (at the BFI) I could certainly convince myself that the proper grown up characters from the first episode were now enmeshed in a proper grown up historical drama. Dalek Invasion of Earth has quite a lot of silliness in it; but what we remember is its Orwellian, dystopian vibe: the two London school teachers carried sideways into a world where outer-space Hitler won the war. But the idea that An Unearthly Child was a tonal template could only be maintained when the black and white era was substantially lost or mislaid. It can't survive an encounter with the Sensorites or the Web Planet or the Keys of Marinus. Good stories; good Doctor Who stories; good Saturday evening telly: but much closer to Flash Gordon than Play For Today. (Not that there is anything wrong with Flash Gordon.)

Unearthly Child wrote cheques that the series itself was unable to cash. It sets up a question: who is Susan? who is the Doctor? -- to which the series never properly returns. Ian asks "who is he -- Doctor who?" but immediately loses interest in finding out the answer. The words "doctor who" became taboo; not spoken on screen for many, many years. No serious clues as to the Doctor's identity were laid down. A mutter about him having been a pioneer at the end of the Daleks, some boilerplate about alien planets in the Sensorites, and the arrival of a second time traveller in the Time Meddler, which is played for laughs. That's about all the follow up we get.

CE Weber's early treatments say that the Doctor stole his time machine (okay) and that he is being pursued by the police from his own time (makes sense) but nothing ever comes of that. You might have expected the Monk to be a central plank of the show, rather than light relief: in fact the idea of "the Doctor, but evil" doesn't occur to anyone until the second season of the colour era. The Time Lords are finally unmasked in the War Games but by then Unearthly Child is long forgotten. No-one mentions the Monk, or Susan, or the Doctor's kids, or Mrs Who. For the majority of the first ten stories, Susan is simply a kid, whose function is to scream and say things like "what is this, grandfather?" (She never calls him Granddad or Grandpa or Gramps.) The ending of Dalek Invasion of Earth -- where the Doctor kicks her out of the TARDIS to marry a mortal -- is problematic in many ways. But the big disappointment is that the two genuinely unsettling aliens have in one year turned into a generic teenager and her embarrassing Dad.

What would the time line have looked like if Charlotte Bronte had died on the eve of World War I, her early forays into romantic fiction eclipsed by a half century of mighty novels? But it is of course equally possible that a Charlotte who survived consumption would have become a dull Victorian moralist whose evangelical temperance tracts caused her promising juvenilia to be forgotten. No one is ever told what would have happened. An Unearthly Child might have been followed by a serious, cerebral piece of science fiction with heavy religious overtones, and thence into Marco Polo. And on that timeline we might be celebrating sixty years of challenging Wellsian science fiction. And if Luxormania had replaced Dalekmania perhaps the idea that science fiction is mostly about silly spaceships and silly monsters would never have taken root, and we would live in a more humane, literate world. But equally, if Sydney Newman had been less flexible about his original vision, Doctor Who might be an interesting science-and-history show that ran for 52 weeks from 1963 to 1964 and is now remembered only by TV historians.

An Unearthly Child could even be seen as getting the series off on the wrong foot. Some of the characterisation from the first story is carried over into the Dead Planet; but Edge of Destruction largely reboots the set-up. All the hostility melts away and everyone agrees to be friends. Marco Polo, probably the only story which ever got within striking distance of Newman's original concept has been inconveniently erased, and the record resumes with everyone being sent on a "collect the set" treasure hunt by a malevolent computer.

Four friends going on adventures in time and space. There is really no need for an origin. Even at the beginning we are in the middle: the TARDIS has been a sedan chair and a Greek pillar and they nearly lost it four or five journeys ago. The loss of An Unearthly Child episode is not a disaster. The Dead Planet is as good a jumping on point as any other.

[*] Full disclosure. They reshowed Unearthly Child at Panopticon 3, followed by all three Cavemen episodes: some Americans tried to take flash photography of the screen. There was a very short BFI film clip from Dalek Invasion Earth which I assume copyright applied differently to. The BBC showed Unearthly Child and Krotons as part of a retrospective, directly before Peter Davison's first appearance. Excerpts used to appear from time to time on Blue Peter; and there was a TV documentary called Whose Doctor Who? which included a few clips.

if you enjoy this kind of thing, there is more of it here 

Children in Need Special
Tales From the TARDIS
The Star Beast
Giggle
Honest To Doctor Who

The Key To Time

Ribos Operation (1)

Ribos Operation (2)

Or you can buy a little PDF of all the 60th anniversary stuff here...