THE LENS OF LUCID FRENZY IN LONDON!

For one reason or another, it has been an age since I uploaded any photos to Flickr. Check out some taken in London, at the London Zine Symposium, around the Barbican and of graffiti (samples below). Expect to follow shortly - stuff from Brighton (especially Brighton Festival), Bexhill and... um... more London.

DOCTOR WHO: ‘A GOOD MAN GOES TO WAR’

Reviewing the first of two-parters can feel a bit weird. Okay, we’re talking about something episodic in nature, it’s not like taking the first half of a film or writing up an entree. But the question remains... why not wait a bit and just do the whole thing properly? History suggests I did for some reason review ‘The Impossible Astronaut’ in isolation, perhaps prescient of the second half not really being a second half anyway. So I was half-wondering whether I’d be best of waiting until the Autumn to write this.

I seem to be writing this now, which I suppose is something of a clue.

Though it was Russell T Davies who wrote the contemporary Jesus tale ‘The Second Coming’, I for one have found the Moffat era to be redolent with religious themes. (In fact I seem to be the only one on this, but I’m sticking with it!) The first appearance of the Clerics, against the Weeping Angels, I found to be an anti-idolatrous parable. ‘Beast Below’, meanwhile, had a clergy/civil service who keep the Queen in a check which borders on a golden cage. With ‘The Impossible Astronaut’ I found a Easter story nuzzled inside it.

And now the Clerics are back – and on the other side! But the unhooding scene explicitly contrasts the Doctor most against his new foe - the Headless Monks. Their inhuman headlessness stands for unthinking rote observances. Their alliance with the Clerics seems fairly nebulous to start off with, they’re already demanding “converts” who are actually sacrifices. But they’re mostly held against the purgatorial Lorna Bucket, who has for-real seen the Doctor once, and dedicated her life to accomplishing this again. It’s Church versus religion, strictures versus experience, form versus content.

However, things were bothering me. There seemed to be quite a neat and perfectly ‘Doctorish’ moment, where he renders the Clerics weapons not only useless but self-destructive. All they seem able to shoot with them is each other, so they’re forced to disarm to survive. There was the Vogon guard in ‘Hitch-hiker’s Guide’ who was wont to cry “resistance is useless!” In the Doctor’s universe, it’s oppression which is useless. At which point it seemed not only redundant, not only counter-productive but jarring for the Doctor’s own army to then appear. Frankly, it felt a little too ‘Star Wars’ with it’s attack on enemy bases, sinister black swordsmen, surprise relation revelations and the like.

In fact the whole parade of guest stars, crowding the screen, just became annoying. If less is more than more can just as easily be less. It’s like the scene in ‘The Pandorica Opens’ where the Pandorica... um... opens and everybody from everywhere is cramming to get their rubber mug on screen. In fact it’s worse because that was an ill-concealed stab at a photo-op, here they’re supposed to be integral to the Doctor’s plan.

There also seemed a good supply of monsters fighting on the Doctor’s side – Sontarans, Silurians, even Juddoon. With all the rush, this didn’t seem to get explained very well. I wondered if we were supposed to reflect on the Doctor’s redemptive powers, most obviously on show in ‘A Christmas Carol.’ The Sontaran reassigned as a Nurse seemed to suggest this. The Clerics are also humanised, though that’s in part to distinguish them from the Monks. Now, however, I’m wondering if it had a slyer purpose...

...because half-way through the rug is pulled out from under the Doctor and us, and an apparent military victory becomes defeat. The Yoda-like irony of the title becomes clear, as the trap is sprung on him by appealing to his worst instincts. River’s here to tell him the news. He has not just inadvertently produced a weapon, he’s also become a weapon.

I have never been very comfortable with this “basically, run” bragging Doctor who faces off invasion fleets and says “boo” to monsters rather than the other way around. Wasn’t the Second Doctor always telling his own companions to run? The Doctor should be part-lord part-tramp, the great disguised as the lowly, mighty enough to be modest. Those fixated with wealth and power are essentially blind to what he is, someone who could possess all of that and wants none of it.

With two Clerics speaking in hushed voices of his mighty deeds, this was clearly planned from the episode’s out. But it’s not credible for a second it was planned from the series’ out, that Moffat wrote the Atraxi into running or Chibnall wrote him saying “monsters fear me” as seeds for this moment. The demands of modern event TV are that the protagonist does eventful stuff, that he has memorably heroic catch phrases, ratings reward gun battles and explosions not eccentric theatre actors chuckling to themselves. When the Doctor says “what have I become?” that’s the scriptwriters collectively saying “what have we made him?” What’s here is in no small part an attempt to lance a boil.

But for all that it’s a pretty smart lancing! The series went and came back, but it wasn’t really a reboot. The conceit was that events had been continuing off-screen all this time. Some we know of or can surmise – the Time War, the regeneration into Nine. But the very concept of this surplus repository of time has its own ramifications. Moreover, it cross-breeds with the new show’s sense that it is more sophisticated, that it has a clearer sense of continuity.

In the old days, every time the Doctor fought the Daleks it was essentially happening anew. (Truth to tell, it was fairly often the very same story told over.) Now both sides are aware just how many times this has gone on. But it’s not just the Daleks. That repository of unseen time has been like an echo chamber of reputations, the Doctor no longer just a wanderer but a legend to the universe. The effect is Caesar-like. Gaze long enough into monsters, and what are you likely to become? Can you keep being called The Oncoming Storm and no part of you start to believe it? The religious themes of earlier are given a deep, dark twist. Christ-like or Christ complex?

Before we get carried away, let’s admit we’ve been here before. ‘Dalek’ played, if not on the Doctor’s megalomania, then on his pathological hatred for the murderers of his people. Then, at the end of Davies’ run, we got the “Time Lord Victorious” theme – which was set up nicely at the end of ’Waters Of Mars’ only to... actually, what did happen to it after that?

But the real point is, after both things just went back to where they were again. Will all this be forgotten even by the Autumn, and the good man be back at war as though nothing has happened? Perhaps in a way that’s all that can happen, unless we expect a TV show to somehow resolve the age-old violence versus non-violence debate. This is, after all, precisely the way Yoda worked on ’Star Wars.’ (“Yoda am I. Wisdom I stand for, and here to tell you war does not make one great. But anyway, for great big fight in the finale stand by. Maybe fight scene myself will have in sequels, when special effects better.”) Perhaps we should just be glad the show is strong enough to question its own hero from time to time.

River Song’s revelation to the Doctor he’d become a warrior without noticing was perhaps more memorable than the revelation of her own identity. Conjecture has already taken us here, in fact some had not plumped for that option precisely because they found it too obvious! It’s not a bad idea at all. The problem is more to do with stretching teasers over such lengths – very little can bear that weight of expectation.

(I was still confused by the flashback scene. When River scans the busted-out spacesuit, does she then know who she’s talking about? Also, we now know she’s the child in the spacesuit. But if the Clerics have her imprisoned for killing “a good man” and stand here against the Doctor, does that suggest the killer astronaut is someone else?)

With all this kerfuffle, there still seemed some strange lapses. There was nothing more about the Flesh, how the bad guys got hold or it or whether it should be considered sentient. In fact, there was only the barest mention of how it worked on Amy. Our first instincts were right, two separate storylines were merely being forced together. (And it's now confirmed that Amy was replaced “before America”, in other words handily off-stage before the season even started. That feels too much like sleight-of-hand, up-your-sleeve stuff. It should have happened in the orphanage!)

...plus, despite the reappearance of guest stars we hadn’t even seen before (the ret-conned Madame Vastra), the episode was completely silent over the... um... Silence. How they relate to Madam Kovarian, the Headless Monks or just about anything remains unexplained. Let’s hope these things don’t just get dropped, and new mysteries thrown up to distract us.

...and speaking of Madame Vastra, with a spin-off show so heavily suggested I wondered at a replacement for ’Sarah Jane Adventures.’ But some elements of her character seemed a little... um.. risque for a children’s show!

...and finally,  ‘Let’s Kill Hitler’? Tell me you’re kidding!

Okay, this mini-season of 'Who' finished, it's time for me to get working on that backlog!

THE WALKING DEAD

Truth to tell, I never liked the comic that much.

That is, the comic series penned by Robert Kirkman, drawn (in early instalments) by Tony Moore and published by Image. In fact I confess to giving up on it after the first volume. (Though Robert Wells’ reviews in ‘Comics On the Ration’, which take things up to lucky volume thirteen, claim it continues in a similar manner.) But it did contain the germ of a good idea, which was enough for me to check out the TV show.

With zombies it is of course the George Romero ‘Dead’ films that set the template – films which didn’t feature characters so much as present ciphers. That apparent criticism is actually more of a description– they were parables about the collapse of civilization and the stripping away of humanity. Characterisation would just get in the way of all that, those ciphers had to be loose fits to act as a placeholder for all of us - not appear as individuals.

But it raises the question, what if you were to impose a zombie holocaust on credible characters? Would that bring the whole thing home? Would you start to wonder how you would cope if your world of hot showers and widescreen TVs was suddenly replaced by someone trying to eat your face off?

As I say, a good idea. But the trouble with the comic is... well actually there’s two of them. First off, it’s almost as if Kirkman has decided that the required characterisation comes from dialogue, so the more dialogue there is the more characterisation will ensue. Speech balloons puff up and bloat, to the point where you almost start to prefer the zombies’ company. They may try to kill you, but at least they shut up once in a while.

Happily, this works rather differently on screen. Take one early scene where our protagonist, the cop Rick Grimes, is asked by someone if he minds their squatting in a neighbour’s house:

“I’m not going to arrest you, if that’s what you mean. Most of the houses on my street had been looted. You seemed to be fixing the place up. The Thompsons will probably thank you when they get back. As long as you don’t put up a fight over the place. You don’t have to justify anything to me...”

...actually, there’s more but you probably get the gist by now. In the TV version, at a later point another character asks Grimes about looting. Looking to an undead army out the window he replies dryly, “I don’t think those rules apply any more.”

However, the TV version not only has its chatty moments, it habitually starts each episode with a lengthy monologue or duologue. Perhaps it has an inbuilt advantage here. Even when it’s not strictly functional, dialogue in comics tends to the purposeful. We’re always subconsciously aware that someone has written it down. The dialogue on the screen sounds casual, like a moment captured. Quite often it will seem completely inconsequential, and only slowly will its significance sneak up on you. (The opening conversation, banter about women between Rick and his cop buddy Shane, does not reveal it’s meaning until much later.) We do not feel that the characters are telling us about themselves, more that we are eavesdropping on them as they reveal things about themselves.

The show also develops and strengthens the characters. It makes sense to make Grimes a police officer, someone who would have a better chance of survival than a mere civilian. But on the page the ever-agonising Grimes is scarcely credible as a cop, let alone a survivor. The TV series makes him tougher, willing to take decisive action but also negotiate situations. Similarly, the comic-book Shane (though previously Grimes’ ex-cop-buddy) is a nasty and duplicitous piece of work. It leads to something of a good-cop/bad-cop dichotomy. On screen he is still a loose cannon, who over-reacts to situations and at times fights with Grimes. But he is more conflicted, less one-dimensional.

The comics’ other main failing is that in turning the human characters up it ends up turning the zombies down. They can vanish offstage for ages and when they appear its as something of a generic menace – they could as easily be feral aliens, or even wild animals. The vital sense that (in Romero’s phrase) “they are us” can get blunted.

This is one failing which is more or less duplicated by the TV show. The one plus point, however, is that zombie lore becomes a weird kind of anthropology. Having to survive around them, the humans inevitably learn more about what makes them tick. In a nice scene in the comic (curiously unreproduced on screen), Grimes and Shane are hunting and come across a zombie feeding on a deer. It’s so intent on its meal that it’s oblivious to them, and they stand observing it like an animal. Of course there are limits to how far this can be taken. Much of the horror of zombies lies in their being walking violations of nature. But it is never pushed too far...

In general, the screen version takes the comic as a first draft, something to develop and improve. The result is that it tends to get better as it goes along. The first episode is a little slow, though admittedly hamstrung by the convention that no-one is allowed to explain the set-up to Grimes... “you know, zombie outbreak –like those films!” By about the fifth episode it has almost completely moved away from the comic’s plotlines.

Are zombies simply better suited to the visceral world of the screen? Does live action capture verite, instill the vertiginous sense of being thrown into events? Are comics more the realm of big symbols and crazy concepts, what Alan Moore calls “ideaspace”?

Of course a great comics creator can buck those tendencies. Alan Moore can write dialogue which crackles. Kirby is nothing but a visceral rush. As Martin Skidmore has demonstrated, Junji Ito can hit you with the creepiest under-your-skin horror. But a less-than-great creator may be better off swimming with the current. With ‘The Walking Dead’, the news is not that the comic has reached a fourteenth volume but that the TV show will return for a second series!

DOCTOR WHO: ‘THE REBEL FLESH’/’THE ALMOST PEOPLE’

Spoilers! More spoilers!

Tell you what, I won’t start this review by saying “well at least it wasn’t ’Fear Her’.”

True, Matthew Graham wrote what is often considered the all-time low point since the series’ return. But all jobbing writers have off days. And besides, as we all know by now, he was bounced into speed-writing that script when an intended episode by Stephen Fry fell through. (Only because Fry was temporarily unavailable for rewrites. Let’s hope it re-surfaces someday.)

This, conversely, seems to have been planned to fill the slot of ‘traditional two-parter,’ previously staffed by the episodes popularly known as “that bloody Sontarans two-parter” and “that bloody Silurians two-parter.” These are usually scheduled half-way through a season, presumably intended as a kind of hand-hold, a central pillar to keep aboard all those trad fans who feared things were getting much too modern.

...and indeed we get a ‘classic’ base-under-siege scenario and a plot that borrows liberally from ’The Thing’, (the original ’Thing From Another World’ of course a big influence on the Second Doctor era), Duncan Jones’ ’Moon,’, the Cylons from the “reimagined” ’Battlestar Galactica’, ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ and that old stalwart ’Frankenstein’.

That last example probably sets the tone of the episode more than any other, which actually works out pretty well. The Gothic fits the show like an old velvet jacket, it feels fitting for them to be running round the corridors of a dimly lit monastery. Inevitably it means science is cast as an anti-religion, with coffin-like objects for the humans to climb in, and a kind of font for the clones (dubbed ‘Gangers’) to appear from. (The latter part an almost complete steal from ’Battlestar’, but what else is new?)

Given this shopping list of ingredients, it may be appropriate that it’s a story about clones who often appear semi-shaped. It’s a rough approximation of a script, in the semblance of form but forever slipping back into some pile of protoplasmic ooze. Many of the twists are too predictable, even for a show such as this. (Did anyone not foresee the ‘ganger’ Doctor appearing, or the two then switching roles? And why do the Gangers take him for one of them, when at that point they’ve no reason to believe there is a Doctor copy?)

Several story elements just kind of sit there, expecting to be accepted. Was it ever explained why they were mining and exporting the acid to the mainland? “Gee, something highly corrosive and toxic – thanks guys!” (Of course it’s there so the humans can ‘dissolve’ in death like the gangers do, but would it hurt to have an explanation internal to the story?)

And as with that bloody Silurians two-parter, there were set-ups which went precisely nowhere. When one crew member starts sneezing, we assume he’ll either pass the Gangers a virus which kills them, or claim to be one of them only for a sneeze to give him away. As it happens, he just sneezes a bit. (Maybe the actor actually had a cold and they just left it in...)

And yet at times there were signs of imagination, even moments which worked well. It was as if the actual Matthew Graham was intermittently wresting the controls from his ganger, and saving the script from being a simulacrum of itself. It even manages a fresh take on the alien imposter theme.
< The central premise succeeds in being more than the aggregate of its influences. The Gangers are not id-figures but genuine clones, perfect copies of us - they think and act just as we do. Our most precious illusion, that we are at our core a unique individual, is violated. (Graham has commented: “it’s a Frankenstein’s monster tale and complexities that comes out of the story are moral and social complexities rather than timey whimey stuff.”)

Admittedly this is interesting only in some abstract philosophical fashion. It’s not like one of those science fiction stories which acts as a metaphor for the real world, for slavery, the extraction of wage labour or some such. (And it’s another thing which makes no internal sense. In the future why don’t they just use robots for dangerous work? That’s what we’re already doing in the present, after all!) But it’s dramatically effective. When the scene is with the humans you side with them, but as soon as it switches to the gangers you find that so do your allegiances.

Graham also pulls a nice switch, in making two Gangers opposites, or shadow selves. The human site boss, Miranda, is a battleaxe who immediately sets about seeing the sentient Gangers decommissioned. Jennifer, meanwhile, is little more than a damsel in distress. But with the Gangers their roles are reversed, Miranda is philosophical and fatalistic while Jennifer becomes the ruthless decision maker. (She even makes a speech about being lost as a child, and imagining another self who is strong and decisive.) Admittedly this is yet another element which goes unexplained, but dramatically speaking was quite the right decision.

Reviewing the first episode, Mike Taylor takes issue with a scene where Jennifer shapeshifts in (appropriately enough) a toilet: “It’s not just that the effect wasn’t convincing; it’s that it was the wrong effect. The story doesn’t want or need to go there — we don’t need weird body-shaping powers for the duplicates. The thing about them that makes them interesting is that they are people — precisely not that they are monsters.”

...then in the second part this is compounded by yet another grievous logic-lapse. As Jennifer’s megalomania worsens, the other Gangers desert her for the humans. At which point she turns into a huge rampant monster, whose terrifying menace is only exceeded by its poor quality CGI. Yet the other Gangers seem to entirely lack the ability to respond in kind, despite being made from the same pliable stuff.

And while we’re at it, there’s repeated suggestions that the Flesh (the putty from which the Gangers are formed) is sentient. (The Doctor claims it scans him, and it goes on to make a copy of him without anyone asking it to.) Yet this seems at odds with the notion that the Gangers were given life by accident, by a freak Frankenstein storm, and so are as thrust into events as the humans.

Okay, they can’t be bothered to work this stuff through so we’ll have to do it for them. Imagine that, unknown to both humans and Gangers, the Flesh is somehow sentient. To manipulate the Gangers into doing it’s bidding, it takes the form of their weakest member. (Who then becomes the strongest. It’s like ironic, gettit?) But its string-pulling fails and they side with the humans. At which point it abandons its Jennifer disguise and rears up in its true monster nature. (Incidentally, I would still have cut the toilet scene. The only sign of shapeshifting in the first episode would have been the later neck-twisting, shot in a quick blink-and-you-miss-it moment.)

You don’t really expect things to end by resolving the age-old philosophical question of what constitutes self, in fact you kind of figure there’ll be a monster and a big explosion. But there is something egregious in the way it ends up in such a pile-up of get-outs. First, fate conspires so that some humans and some Gangers survive, but no actual duplicates. Then it turns out the Tardis is handily kitted out to cure both ‘Gangeritis’ and the blood clot which Miranda suffers from.

There’s also something rather incoherent and dissatisfying about the cliffhanger we’re then served. Not over where any of it is going, of that only the Lord and Moffat know. (Though frankly I’m starting to have doubts about Moffat.) But how it fits with the episode we’ve just watched. Even if Amy is somehow a Ganger, and has been since before the episode started, how come the Doctor simply dissolves her? Hasn’t he spent the last hour and a half convincing us that the Gangers are a sentient life form, that to dispose of them is murder and all the rest of it?

Despite all the lapses and failings, there was enough good stuff to keep you watching. In the best trad two-parter so far, it pulled together some of the appealing elements from the old show and spread something more challenging (albeit thinly) on top. It’s just a shame it couldn’t have delivered a little more on its promise. In fact it seemed less a throwback than a typical episode for this season; a bunch of stuff slung together, some of which is quite appealing in itself. I’ve been tempted to call it ’The Almost Episode’ but perhaps we’ll end up using that description for the whole season.

I'M LATE! I'M LATE!

...okay, what else is new?

There's simply been too much good stuff going on lately for me to catch up with it all! This tends to happen this time of year with the Brighton Festival, but I've also been to a couple of other cool things in London I'd love to post about. (Just as soon as they invent more hours in the day...)

Of course this also means that when I'm finally able to write about it then it'll be late. But then you're surely used to that round here!

DOCTOR WHO: ‘THE DOCTOR’S WIFE’ (POSTSCRIPT)

Regular readers may remember me foolishly committing myself to print by saying of this episode:

”Everything seemed built around her [the Tardis].”

Then later I read the Guardian’s Q+A with writer Neil Gaiman where someone asks…

”Was this the one great Who story you've always wanted to tell?”

…which would pretty much have been my question. Surely this was the Who story which had been buzzing around Gaiman’s cranium since he was a young fan. “When I become a big, famous writer I shall do a ’Doctor Who’ where the Tardis is a lady!” Why, you could see that all over this episode!

But he replies…

”The story actually came about backwards. It began with me wanting to do a story like THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME set in the TARDIS, with the Doctor being hunted. And then I thought, that's no fun, because he knows everything about the TARDIS. It's no contest. It would be more interesting to have a companion be hunted through the TARDIS...

And I thought, Or even have something malevolent possess the TARDIS. But if I did that, I'd need to put the TARDIS consciousness somewhere.

And then I had a story.”

I had pretty much considered the corridor-chasing to be tangential to the main story, in effect a ‘bubble universe’ of its own. (Though of course it added to the tension and was fun in its own right.) We could have had the whole ‘possessed Tardis’ thing without it, in fact Amy and Rory could have been completely cut out of the story… maybe on a second honeymoon somewhere… with little functional loss. We would still have gone outside the universe, met everyone and come home again. Yet, like someone building an extension then figuring they need a house to go with it, that was the bit which came first.

It’s bizarre to think how many times the spark for a story turns out to be a stray spark, outside the main body of the thing.

FIERY GAV

(with apologies to Mark E Smith)

 My face is slack

And kidneys burn

In the small of my back

Will never learn

Well I'm not going back

To the slow life

Because every step is a drag

Cause I am Gav

From a burning ring

My brains I have

And I think think think

I just think think think

Too fast to write

Too fast to work

Just burn burn burn

I sat and thank

While my dreams decay

I'm forty-five

Cause I am Gav

From a burning ring

And my brains I have

And I think think think

I just think think think

Too fast to write

Too fast to work

I just burn burn burn

I eat veg saus

I cook stir fries

I'm forty-five

Cause I am Gav

And I think think think

Just think think think

Too fast to write

Too fast to work

Just burn burn burn

And post my left-wing tirades

On the film and TV trades

End free trade

I say eat this grenade

Gonna eat this grenade

Cause I am Gav

I march through North Laines

They not smart

Their brains are half

They never end

Just follow trends

But I am Gav

I post my left-wing tirades

On the film and TV trades

End all free trade

I said eat this grenade

I said eat this grenade

End all free trade

I said eat this grenade

DOCTOR WHO: ‘THE DOCTOR’S WIFE’

Plot spoilers... and how!!!

In a recent ’Radio Times’ feature, Steven Moffat enthused that this episode would be by Neil Gaiman – a “Proper Writing God.” He seems drawn to the idea of getting in one Proper Writer per season, even though the marriage hasn’t always worked well.

Neil Gaiman is a more complicated story. Starting out in the then-marginalised field of comics, he’s more of a genre-buster than a ‘proper’ writer, which is all to the good. He’s a known ’Doctor Who’ fan, though of course that can work for either good or ill. But more to the point, if truth be told I’ve never been much of a fan of his.

I’ve sometimes wondered if he’d listened to Bob Dylan’s ’Blonde on Blonde’ too much at am impressionable age. He tends to create a locale, then fill it with a collection of incongruous characters and get them to talk in idiosyncratic cadences. And then... well, he often seems to forget to then do anything else. A setting is a fine thing for a song or a painting, but a genre storyline really needs causation of one kind or another. There’s a reason why we call them storylines. His comics often read like someone had hired Samuel Beckett to write a thriller, the result being neither very Beckettian nor very thrilling. And indeed things start off with our crew stranded in a locale where everyone talks funny...

But just as we’re taking in this ill-boding - how brilliant a concept! That audacious-sounding title has been dangling before us for weeks, now we’re told the answer and its head-slappingly obvious! The Doctor’s wife has to be his only constant companion, the Tardis itself! All these years we’ve believed he stole that timeship and, as it turns out, they virtually eloped... The scenes between the Doctor and Suranne Jones as Idris/ the Tardis were perfectly played, blunted only slightly by the fact we’ve already had the bickering old couple routine between the Doctor and River.

Everything seemed built around her. There’s the supreme irony of the Doctor being drawn in with the promise of seeing his people again, only to finally meet the one he’s always had beside him. Beyond their sharing sentience, the House is of course the anti-Tardis, the perfect adversary. It is male to her female, it draws things to it rather then venturing afield, it’s inhabitants live on its surface not inside it, it treats those inhabitants as it’s servants not it’s master, as toys or parts.

All these sentient objects and people who behave like toys. Even the junk in the junkyard turns out to be Tardises! (In Gaiman’s original concept, they transform into Tardises.) Sailors commonly give their ships female names and figureheads. It seems to make sense that, come to life, the ship would first try to kiss her Captain. But perhaps there’s something deeper - a child’s drive towards animism, to ascribe every place and every thing with a personality. There’s a strange parallel with the sadness at the heart of ’Toy Story’, where this great love between person and object must always remain unstated.

(Though this did lead to one of the few complaints I could make. The Doctor seemed almost as indifferent as the House to the deaths which occur. Of course he is angry about the distress call scam, but even so...)

I am on record as having an antipathy to the Tardis being made the focus of the story, previously insisting “it works best as a Narnian wardrobe, enabling another adventure then sitting quietly in the corner until its end.” Of course there need to be firewalls against its use as a deus ex machina device, but there’s more to it. With it’s bigger-on-the-inside business, it is like a microcosm of the Whoniverse - it needs to be strange, unpredictable and seemingly infinite. When fans try to map it into a foolish consistency they erode one of the most vital ingredients of the show, it’s mystery, and kill the thing they love.

So it was splendid to see Tardis space presented as ceaselessly mutable; creating, changing and destroying rooms like files on a computer. This is an object lesson in the way you do continuity on a long-running show; past events can be evaporated into never-was at any point, without so much as a backward glance, but can be brought back without comment just as quickly. (Isn’t that the way we live our lives, after all? Don’t we rework the meaning and significance of past events according to what we’re doing now?)

In general, Gaiman gave us the upside of fannish writing – putting in things for other fans, but never to the degree that the general audience would notice they were missing something. Even the comparatively recent moment of bringing back the previous console worked this way, for only Amy and Rory step into it. Like any new audience member, they have never seen it before, so can’t start talking about things the viewer knows not of. (Meanwhile some of us oldsters were making mental references all the way back to ’Edge of Destruction’!) There was even a gag about running through corridors, transformed into something genuinely frightening.

Like the junkyard setting and its patchwork people, the whole thing was cobbled together from parts. ’The Bride of Frankenstein’, ‘2001’ (both the HAL plotline and the hotel room ending), the Avengers episode ’The House That Jack Built’, ‘The Shining’... I probably missed some in the headlong rush of it all. But, unlike other episodes we might mention, rather than recycle all these it combined them into strange new arrangements – it was collage, not facsimile.

My fears over Gaiman were ultimately unwarranted. A great concept was the focus for a good story, not a replacement. Stuff happened. People did things, went places and it all led to a resolution. Above all, it set the right tone - it was a tale of reckless adventure and cheerful absurdity. It probably all falls apart the second you stop to think about it, so let’s not. The love between a madman and his box may be integral to the show, but that’s only a means towards realising its very core. Gaiman has described the Tardis as “a door to adventure.” For ultimately, what this show is is a love affair with adventure...

GIG-GOING ADVENTURES: ASIAN DUB FOUNDATION (MUSIC OF RESISTANCE)

Brighton Dome, Sat 7th May, part of the Brighton Festival.

(Photo taken in Berlin by Libertinus.)

It is not normal practice to start a gig review with what the reviewer saw on the telly the night before. But bear with me...

The night before, this reviewer watched a documentary on the telly about Primal Scream. At one point Bobby Gillespe asserted “the great thing about us is that we’re not really a band.” He then broke off, unable to quite articulate what he meant.

What I think he meant was that they were more a collective. A band ends up with a guitar solo and a keyboard line on every track because they have a guitarist and a keyboard player, and they want to keep their turf. A collective is amorphous, free to float in and out of every territory that interests it. (The irony being that for long periods Primal Scream have been just a band, and it usually led to the tiredest of rock and roll clichés. They needed to break from those mooring to do anything worth listening to.)

I’ve now seen Asian Dub Foundation more times than I can actually remember, including (unusually for a laggard like me) relatively early in their career. Despite the collective-sounding name, I thought of them as a band in the best sense of the word – a lean and efficient machine, a bunch of guys united in a common purpose, driven to what they were doing. (“An Asian fights back, can’t afford to be meek/ With your back against the wall you can’t turn the other cheek.”)

But when they lost Deeder, their original frontman, quite literally on the eve of the millennium, they kind of lost their point - in the way a knife might lose it’s point. Key member Chandrasonic, effectively the Jerry Dammers of the band, was still aboard. But from that point they had collective-ness thrust upon them...

This led to what Homer Simpson calls a “crisotunity”, throwing them into things they might never otherwise have attempted. I thrilled to their live soundtrack to ’The Battle of Algiers’, premiered in 2004 at this very venue. But I remember that night above their gigs, which were no longer hitting as hard as they used to. It’s like it was hard for the collective to turn back into a band. So, given this night came with something of a concept, I wondered who would show up - band or collective?

Proceedings open with some spacey music, complete with violins, set to a video recording of a speech by Burmese dissident Aung San Suu Kyi. All very collective-like...

...only for things to explode with passionate fury. Turns out they now have a new frontman, Al Rumjen, to hold things together. (Unbenownst to me, he was even on the previous album.) The tracks were almost all new to me. But it’s the most intense I’ve seen them since the early days.

 It also turns out that their new release, ’A History of Now’, as part of it’s themes of refugees and globalisation, comes replete with guest stars. And we get all those guest stars tonight – Chinese violinists, Romany singer Kerieva, Indian drum troupe the Ministry of Dohl, a chap called Flutebox (who somehow seems able to beatbox and play the flute simultaneously) and others I think I am forgetting.

The result is a kind of win-win situation. The live unit of the band keep it forever tight and focused, the ceaseless parade of guest stars keep it fresh. They’re hitting you ceaselessly, but from ever-new angles. It’s like they’ve become band plus collective.

Another point worth emphasising... this is not the product of dilettantes, parading a self-conscious eclecticism, like that party trick where someone juggles three incongruous objects. It sounds a seamless blend, the musical corollary of their antipathy to closed-minded racism. This is underlined by the rhythm section, a combination of turntable beats and live Indian percussion. It became surprisingly hard to tell one from the other, several times I thought a beat music be electronic only to realise it was being supplied live.

In a fitting gesture, the guest stars played their own set on a small stage in the bar afterwards, sometimes separately, sometimes jamming with each other. Like an over-spilling glass, there was simply too much energy to keep inside one set list...

Nazis have Screwdriver. We listen to Asian Dub Foundation. Which side would you rather be on?

From Paris, last month...

DOCTOR WHO: 'CURSE OF THE BLACK SPOT'

Plot spoilers ahead, so there be!!!

Well, I was pleased it wasn’t ’Pirates of the Caribbean.’

Well, obviously it was. It was made entirely because of the popular film series, and was bumped up the season schedule in order to coincide more closely with the latest installment’s release. (Audaciously, it’s precisely one word away from duplicating the name of the first film!)

But if that’s the sort of thing that bothers you, then this is the sort of thing that bothers you. This is a show that has made off with others’ treasure a thousand times. It’s even stolen from pirates before! As Robert Holmes used to say “all you need is a strong, original idea. But it doesn’t have to be your own strong, original idea.”

No, I feared this because I thought the show would try and emulate Hollywood again. And whenever it tries that it sets itself a losing game, giving up everything that makes it idiosyncratic for a special effects arms race which it can only lose. Moreover, the style of ’Pirates of the Caribbean’, a theme park ride with Screen Guild membership, lurching from one high-concept set-piece to the next, would most likely lend itself to the show’s worst instincts. And is a TV set, even in these widescreen days, really big enough for the larger-than-life Cap’n Jack and the Doctor?

It didn’t really do that. Of course, it was equally frivolous. Amy donning her Pirate Queen costume so early on was a signifier. It’s here to play with the pirate dressing-up box; the cutlasses, the treasure, the mutinies, the planks for walking and... oh, yes... the black spots. But that’s just the way you do pirates. They pretty much are their paraphernalia.  There’s ‘revisionist’ Westerns, war films and Victoriana stories, conceived to ditch the clichés and genuinely convey the era. I can’t think of a single pirate story like that. No-one cares what they were really like. (They were actually all libertarian communists. No, really!)

Instead it decided to rip itself off. A base under siege, a plot conceit taken wholesale from ’The Empty Child’, Rory dead again... oh, wait... not. Which isn’t plagiarism or theft, it’s zombie cannibalism. This show is fast becoming like that Marx Brothers scene, where they have to saw off bits from the train they’re riding, to feed them to the engine and keep the self-same train going. For the sake of a gag, I’d call this episode becalmed. But to be honest it was more mired.

Nice bits included:

-       the Doctor running through several theories on the back of each other, instead of just coming up some smartypants breakthrough when we clock up forty minutes;

-       Rory’s seduced/ possessed babblings;

-       Lily Cole so looking the part you wondered if it was built around her.

 Some particularly rubbish bits:

-       The Tardis being “sick”. Did that make any sense at all?

-       The Doctor and pals waking up on the alien ship unnoticed by the Siren when she had everyone else trussed up. (See above.)

Things they should have done but didn’t:

-       Lost the Cap’n’s tiresome ‘atonement with the child’ subplot and have the crew fret and finally mutiny over whether their treasure “be cursed” or not. (About which they wouldn’t be entirely wrong.)

-       Dress Amy up as a “cabin boy,” for her safety or some similar contrivance. Not only would that have played up the panto, it would make the only two women in the macho pirate’s eyes the siren and the dutifully dead wife. With the pricking fingers, drawing blood and sheathed swords we already have some fairly obvious fairy tale style symbolism. We even have the Doctor’s “Freud would say you’re compensating” line. (No Rory dressed up as the dame though.)

-       Make the Siren/Nurse a mollycoddling kidnapper, keeping the crew in stasis for their own protection. A well-intentioned adversary, but then they’re always the worst kind. (Half of them are only in for pricked fingers after all...)

Will things carry on in this self-cobbling way? Treading-water sessions strung between the event episodes, watched by dutiful fans only for the few clues to the through-line? I have never been much of a Neil Gaiman fan, but am trying to be hopeful for next week. After which, I am looking forward to the two-parter by the guy who wrote ’Fear Her.’ [/sarcasm]

...and as for that through-line, I think I’ve hit on it. The Doctor strips the Silence of their powers, so they can be observed at all times. Then they take out a super-injunction on him and the whole thing’s useless...