'SKY'

(The first part of Teatime Dystopias, our look at SF in Seventies Kids shows, on ‘The Changes’, lies here. Though they can be read in any order.)

”It is like this. The truth that men once saw was a window of many colours, now the window is shattered and lies in glittering shards across the floor. But the fragments you pick up cannot be the whole and the wind of chaos begins to blow through the open space.”

When middle-aged men blog about old TV shows its normally because they have youthful memories they wish to indulge. But this post is appearing precisely because when the ITV children's series 'Sky', by Bob Baker & Dave Martin, was first shown back in 1975 I didn't watch it.

I mean, I didn’t miss it either. I was home from school and plonked before the telly every evening. This was the Seventies, after all, there was bugger all else to do. But truth to tell, my young brain found it all too much to take. Some weeks I'd try risking it only to find myself hastily changing channels. While with others I didn't dare put myself through the ordeal at all and I'd stick to the altogether safer realms of the BBC.

Of course, times were simpler then and I certainly was. But it wasn't just that I found it scary. Worse, I found it unsettling, reason-defying, literally uncanny. It was like a bad dream. It seemed almost impossible to figure out what was going on, even who the good guys were.

I'd now be less likely to reach for the word 'scary' than 'Seventies'. It seems like the elements from every other Seventies SF show distilled into one - someone's overlaid, composite memory of them all. Strangely blonde alien messiahs, psi powers, cosmic pontificating, ecological themes, visions of armageddon, Stonehenge-is-really-sci-fi, a spaceship as a wicker man… all seen through a filter of spacey music and post-psychedelic screen effects. Even Glastonbury hippies get a look-in.

Part of what so fazed my young brain was the title character (up top). With his synthesised unearthly voice, spaced-out eyes, spectral presence and general all around alien-ness, was he hero or villain? He had recognisably human sidekicks, but unlike the good Doctor seemed far too otherly to be the hero. He didn't look so far from the scarily superior aryan kids from the film 'Village of the Damned' (above). And yet he simultaneously seemed so vulnerable, so haunted. Without that sort of pole to set your compass by, how could a young child be anything but lost?

I knew it not at the time but, also archetypically for the Seventies, the character was channelling a great deal of David Bowie. Actor Marc Harrison was encased in a blonde wig and blue contact lenses. (Which ironically made him look most like Bowie in 'The Man Who Fell to Earth',, above, a film not released until the following year.) And of course blondeness and whiteness was a general signifier of futurism in the Seventies, in fashion and design as much as SF.

Bowie had repeatedly used the metaphor of aliens to represent generation gaps, with youth as the nascent “homo superior” who were becoming increasingly unknowable to their own parents. (Which, as we’ve seen, was a phrase instrumental in developing another ITV children's SF series,'Tomorrow People', in 1973.) Yet the Tomorrow People didn't wear weird all-blue contact lenses but smart jumpsuits, and behaved quite properly – as if the cast of 'Blue Peter' had developed psychic powers, which they'd decided to utilise to defend the Earth when they weren't busy on bob-a-job week.

'Sky', conversely, was almost the anti 'Tomorrow People,' the point in the schedules where the uncanny just erupted. And one component of this was its incorporation of generational conflict, albeit in an unusual way. It's almost a staple of children's SF that its young protagonists are as beset by everyday travails as by extraordinary ones – they're set detention at school or grounded at home, and always on the night when they need to meet the passing space rocket. (Of course appealing to the young mind, with whatever it had fixed on to do that evening feeling as important as meeting a space rocket.)

'Sky' has a school, true, but one seemingly without any teachers to it. In general, adult characters are weak and marginal - an alcoholic Major, ineffectual yokel cops. But this just allows adult authority to be bundled up inside one figure – Sky's antagonist, the ironically named Goodchild (above). Played in an almost absurdly melodramatic way by a black-clad Robert Eddison, like Dracula but with less redeeming features.

The patriarchal Devil was a staple of Seventies horror (albeit in horrors more normally aimed at adult audiences), and Goodchild is a chip off this block. After a first line “I'm looking for my charge”, he spends almost the whole series chasing Sky around the place. He often explicitly takes on roles of adult authority, such as that of a Doctor at the hospital.

More unusually, class makes an appearance alongside age. With Sky so strange and remote, the primary audience identification character is Arbie (above). He's not just working class, but surly and widely distrusted as a tealeaf – James Dean meets Ed Grundy. His family lives next door to the more middle class Roy and his Major dad, not out of any Seventies egalitarianism but the better to juxtapose them.

In a seemingly perpetual plot point the natural word is constantly turning against Sky, like antibodies against a foreign intruder. Which was perhaps the main source of my youthful disquiet. Firstly, it found horror in what was all around you – the English landscape, the stuff more commonly used for pretty backdrops. And worse - if this was the hero, how could the very Earth turn against him? Which is actually quite a good question. Despite Goodchild's panto villainy, there's a sense that the two are locked in some endless Manichaean dualism.

Sky's white coding goes against Goodchild’s black, not just foes but primary antagonists. Upon age versus youth and white versus black the show then places every other dualism – authority versus rebellion, custom versus innovation and earth versus... well, sky. Only some way in do we discover the SF-sounding Juganet which Sky searches for is actually Stonehenge, which of course is some time machine/ astral portal sort of thing. (The original purpose of Stonehenge was almost certainly to link earth and sky rather than oppose them, the builders abundantly aware how deep those stones had to be sunk just to stand up. But let's not fret.) In fact the moralistic name Goodchild is perhaps not entirely ironic, for he ultimately represents the natural order.

Nor is this just a matter of painting Goodchild less black. Contemporary viewers watching the opening scenes would most likely assume Arby to be the sidekick to pheasant-hunting posh kid Roy – at which point he promptly drives off on his own. But there's a sense in which by finding Sky he merely swaps one bossy rich kid for another.

Arbie's sister Jane seems inserted into the script at a late stage, to give the girls someone to relate to. And as she mostly just follows Arbie around as he follows Sky, it's doubtful that strategy was particularly successful. Yet at one late point its she who not unreasonably suggests Sky is simply using them. And certainly nothing happens to dissuade us of this. The war of earth versus sky seems to have little interest in the human jam sandwiched between them. One way of reading things would be to pursue the Bowie metaphor, where Sky is the star with his head full of visions and mouth dispensing significant statements, and Arbie his lowly earth-bound fan.

As we discover, while Sky is a saviour he isn't really our saviour. Because of reasons he's shown up at the wrong time and, while he expects and accepts human assistance, he shows a right royal lack of gratitude for it. Not being meant for us, he's consequently not able to tell Arby anything particularly useful. What he does have to say basically boils down to “I'm not your messiah, I just took a wrong turn. Actually, you lot.. well, you're all buggered. Sorry about that.”

Which seems the mood of the moment. To go back to Bowie, the year before ‘Sky’ was broadcast he tried explaining what the ‘Ziggy’ album was all about: “Ziggy has been talking about this amazing spaceman who will be coming down to save the earth. They arrive somewhere in Greenwich Village. They don’t have a care in the world and are of no possible use to us. They just happened to stumble into our universe.” This is clearly a post-hoc construction, almost entirely unrelated to the album made a couple of years before. But the remarkable thing is how close it is to ‘Sky.’ 

One intriguing aspect of this is that neither Sky nor Goodchild wants the world as it is now. If Goodchild represents nature, it doesn't follow Sky is in hock to the white heat of technology. Despite his name he's not here to predict any media empire branding, explaining things have been on the wrong track since the time when “with the first flint man bent nature to his will”.

As stated at the opening, psi powers were a staple of Seventies SF, mind control battles about as common as bell bottoms. Yet what's interesting about 'Sky' may be less than it's yet another iteration, but the way it knocks out what often seems a core component of them. Think again of 'Tomorrow People’ and their jaunting belts, human evolution and technological development so aligned as to be almost symbiotic. Whereas in 'Sky' it's all just got to go.

What Sky's mission means in practise, or how it even differs from Goodchild's vision, is... wait for it... ill-explored. Insofar as it's possible to tell, his psi powers – and in particular his telepathy - represent a kind of nouveau spiritualism. Using them makes us at one with the world, while tools and even speech just separate us from it. Or something. Yet while there is something New Agey about this it doesn’t have the feelgood factor that seems central to New Age ‘thinking’. We get to visit Arbie’s post-tech future and it’s not much of a utopia. (Despite the telepathy it’s not unlike the world of ‘The Changes’, including the sense that we’re in somebody’s utopia, just not ours.

Though there is a sense this is fitting. We see all this from our perspective, from a fallen, lesser world. So of course what we see is fragmentary, and hard to interpret. And perhaps what's really significant is what's absent. In a quietly brilliant scene, when Arbie finally gets back home he doesn’t rush back into the arms of his family but goes round the kitchen switching on lights and taps – refamiliarising himself with familiar things. But we’re supposed to do the opposite. The ambiguous dualism essentially tells us soon there’ll be no more water in that tap, the whole thing is up the spout and we need to sort it out for ourselves.

Producer Patrick Dromgoole later said “What we were trying to say to the children was their normal definition of good and bad was not going to work because they were suddenly confronting one of the great mysteries of the universe and a very simple definition wasn’t available.” (So yes, they were screwing with my young mind!)

And perhaps that’s what's significant. Nowadays we fancy ourselves as dystopian connoisseurs, like a drunk boasting he can take his booze. But would we countenance anything so bleak, strange and challenging as this on contemporary children's TV?

True there may be films which have taken on this mantle. ’The Hunger Games’, based on teen-lit novels, may be something of a sibling. But they’ve mostly been overwritten by apocalypse porn. A genre where, while the disaster may even be pulled from the headlines, it is always rendered as something known and explicable. Both characters and audience will be aware what they’re up against. Even horror variants, such as zombies, are normally subject to quite rigid rules. And, however much they fetishise the spectacle of destruction, at heart they’re Robinson Crusoe stories. Even when stripped of our lattes and i-phones, we Westerners will find within ourselves the will to survive.

But most of all… Wilfred Owen once said “all a poet can do today is warn.” And when you’re issuing a warning, it makes sense to direct it at the young, those least inured in the bad habits. I’ve now lived through many of the dates they used to flaunt so ostentatiously in science fiction in those big futuristic fonts. We passed those warning signs. So inevitably they now seems prophecy. I’m not surprised that things have skirted so close to disaster. What I’m surprised about is that they haven’t tipped over yet.

’Sky’ is not particularly well-acted or even necessarily that well-written. As Goodchild chases Sky from one hidey-hole to another, as the super-intelligent alien hides in another country setting (“you'll be safe here”) then belatedly remembers nature has it in for him, it quickly becomes repetitive. And its boldest defenders would have to work hard to claim it's in any way coherent.

But it's got the sort of qualities that analysis can miss. It throws up interesting concepts and memorable images, which can stick in your brain. (In my case, over decades. Despite the fact I didn't even watch it.) You're never sure what are flaws or weaknesses, or what are deliberate ambiguities and clever devices. (For example, the rather wooden performances of the others throws into relief the larger-than-life nature of Sky and Goodchild.)

Compare it to a dark psychedelic track, like something by Trees or early Pink Floyd. (Similar visual effects were, after all, regularly used on music programmes of the time.) The underlying structure may be of an overly familiar pop number, but that's simply not the part to focus on. The disorientating psychedelic effects leap up at you, take you by surprise, drag you into their realm. Similarly the spooky music, the photo-filter effects, the strange-looking characters aren't embellishments to what's going on, they are what's going on. As Sky says at one point, “What you read are symbols, and fragments of symbols.” My eight year old self was right. It can't be made sense of, and that's the key thing about it...

That very Seventies credit sequence...

Coming soon! Perhaps the best-known teatime dystopia of them all...

‘THE CHANGES’

(Here starts ‘Teatime Dystopias’, a three-part series on how science fiction was used by Seventies children’s TV. Which, primarily, was as a means to traumatise tots. Please BEWARE PLOT SPOILERS!)

Adverse Conditions Ahead

“We interrupt our regularly broadcast programme to bring you the end of Western civilisation...”

That’s not quite how ’The Changes’ started, but it’s not far off. If it's something like a junior version of ’Survivors’, it actually came first. (Both were broadcast in 1975, but it had been filmed two years before.) Except ’Survivors’ took a scientifically plausible explanation for social collapse, reiterated in its title sequence. While this took a fantastical one, as in its own title sequence. Speaking of which…

For the first but not the last time in this series, those highly effective titles are an example of restriction generating innovation. The repeat image of things just stopping is as effective as it is simple. To end life as we know it doesn’t require an epidemic to be unleashed, the nuclear button be pressed, resources to run out or the workers to rise up from the Lower City. In fact it doesn’t require anything. The lives we had been living weren’t even precarious, they were arbitrary. They could have stopped at any point, it just happened to be today.

And the soundtrack… it’s bizarre to think that little more than a decade later, electronic beats would be used to induce ecstatic states. Here its machine sounds to convey a machine sense - the regular, the humdrum heartbeat of the daily grind. Then that stopping.

There’s two things you can’t avoid saying about ’The Changes’, and they go together. First, it’s strong use of location footage gives it an immediate, verite feeling quite at odds with the staginess of much TV from this time. Added to which the camera is mobile, following the action around.

Second, it needs to be situated in its era, a time of power cuts and social upheaval. Our modern phobias are wrapped up in mighty CGI conflagrations, sometimes referred to as the spectacle of the end of the world, where we’re all inevitably going to die but at least it’ll be while watching a good show. While the Seventies was about the taps stopping working and the water going bad. Their apocalypse wasn’t just coming, it was going to get you where you live.

Peter Dickinson’s source novels predate this era, the last being written in 1970. Many scenes from them are excised, to be replaced by more budget-friendly alternatives. But there’s two significant points where the show adds scenes, and this is the first. All the books started after the Changes had begun. Whereas some of the show’s most memorable moments are in the first episode, where we see the actual a-changin’.

We first see young Nicky dutifully doing her homework in a setting of domestic quietude. Then a mere three minutes in, to quote the first episode’s title, the Noise starts. And the family are immediately reduced to a destructive frenzy against anything mechanical. As, it transpires, is everyone else. The motivation is moralistic if not actively religious, the machinery deemed “wicked”. (And not in the “well wicked” sense.) The first blood-and-thunder preacher has shown up mid-way through the first episode. While you’re probably not intended to think of it directly, it recalls the iconoclastic fury.

(If they why of this is taken up later, its somewhat unclear how people are affected. At first it seems it’s an intermittent madness, lasting only as long as the Noise sounds. Once it stops, people’s immediate reaction is to escape somewhere, as if the problem’s confined to others. But it’s also a permanent reset, bedded in people’s minds, where even mention of the wicked things by name can cause shock and outrage. Or for that matter what the limits of this wickedness are. For example, bicycles are bad but carts are okay.)

Nicky soon falls in with some Sikhs, travelling with them. Why Sikhs? The Seventies were the ‘look East’ era, with an increased interest in its mysticism. But that rarely took in Sikhism. Dickinson dedicated the book they appear in to a Sikh name, so possibly this originally stems from a personal relationship.

However, two things are striking. Firstly the Sikhs are accurately presented as, in the book’s words, “a warrior people”. When the distrust they’re met with spills over into hostility they are quick with self-defence, which makes them useful protectors for Nicky. (Note to self - when civilisation ends, don’t get yourself stuck with a bunch of aum-ing Buddhists if Sikhs are available.)

But a wider (if not unconnected) point is that they’re outsiders, that they were outsiders before any of this started, and they’d be scarcely any less outsiders if they were still in India. Which manifests within the story as their being unaffected by the Changes. In fact their initial reason to allow Nicky to travel with them is that she can be their ‘canary’ of wickedness, alert them to what’s considered wrong-doing in these new social mores.

Based on a trilogy, the series divides neatly into three. And it’s significant that even after Nicky parts company with them she takes up with Jonathon. Who is white but before the Changes was a keen engine tinkerer, and so any Noise effect has already rubbed off him. Meaning Nicky always has someone with her less changed than she is.

Why do this? She’s the audience identification character, if not our brave heroine. Why not show her as unaffected by the Changes as we are? Instead things are played very much the other way. She loses her parents when, rather than follow them, she joins a mob attacking a car. And at first she attacks the Sikhs, when one tries to start up an engine.

Before watching, I’d blithely assumed the Changes would only affect the adults. Who when I was a child always seemed strangely vexed about technology which I just saw as ubiquitous, rationing TV viewing, guarding telephones, fretting about amplified music’s ability to suddenly strike you deaf and so on. The story does suggest the Changes wear off with the children the quickest, but still has them affected initially.

Let’s segue into another question, as that may turn out to have the same answer. The Changes are shown as a terrible rupture, a “madness” which kills many and constantly throws Nicky into danger. England has descended into a kind of Home Counties Fascism, ruled by village despots and malevolent witchfinders. (Prone to saying things like “Wickedness! Right here in the heart of Shipton!”) Otherness is so feared it’s like the Daily Mail comments board comes to life. The reassuringly strangulated BBC voice-over at the start of each episode seems strangely jolting.

But at the same time the series demonstrates the way Sixties counter-cultural themes had by the Seventies gone mainstream, the critique of consumerism, the back-to-the-land movement and so on. Another show which premiered in 1975 was the long-running sitcom ’The Good Life', about a middle class couple who opt out of the rat race for “self-sufficiency in Surbiton.” And in their travels Nicky and Jonathon come across a remarkably similar couple, Michael and Mary, who had swapped London for “the simple life” of rabbit-hunting and bread-baking before the Changes even began. (They’re the second major invention of the show, with no correlative in the source novels.)

And these can clash. The witchfinder chases Nicky across a whole episode, gaining knowledge of her whereabouts by threatening another with a knife. But the chase is a leisurely affair, a canter across the countryside set against repeat panoramas of bucolic England, taking in a visit to a village pub. The incidental music sticks to the Seventies synths, but to fit those views shifts into pastoral. (And there’s little that’s more Seventies than folky snyth.)

Laid out like that, it sounds like a weakness. Some popular trends have been tossed together, and what results is a mish-mash. And at times it seems that’s the case. But at others it turns out quite the opposite. It’s perhaps best summed up by the kindly old man Nicky meets in the first episode, before she’s left Bristol. Much like the tramp in ‘Quatermass II’, he acts as a kind of moral compass. He comments “it’s funny not having the noises, it’s like when I was a kid, nicer really, more peaceful”, even as he knows he’s dying. Let’s look at how that works…

The End of Civilisation And Its Discontents

First off, Nicky consistently under-reacts to all of this. After the initial outbreak of the Noise, to her parent’s shock she calmly gets dressed for the next day’s school. When they tell her not to go, she sneaks out anyway. She then seems strangely phlegmatic about being left behind by them, who seem strangely phlegmatic about leaving her. This may just be a narrative necessity, to avoid having multiple episodes where she’s just sobbing on her bed. But it’s referred to diegetically, she’s asked about this by the Sikhs and shrugs the question off. And children can be a strange combination of conservative and adaptable, adjusting to a new normal more quickly than adults.

It’s also noticeable that in both the first and second section Nicky is befriended by both a boy and a girl. There’s a scene where the camera stands with the Sikh girl Ajeet as she looks up at Nicky and the Sikh boy Gopal, who have climbed a tree. She’s asked if she doesn’t mind getting so dirty, but doesn’t seem to. Then later as she goes travelling with Jonathon his sister Margaret helps their escape, then returns to help her mum with the farm. The Changes of ’The Changes’ grant her what might, in Seventies terms, be called ‘boy’s liberties’. Had the Noise never happened, she’d probably have just stayed with her homework.

For some reason, I never watched this show at the time. However, I was a big fan of ’Here Come The Double Deckers’ (first broadcast 1970/1, but endlessly repeated). And what attracted me was the trope of Free Range Children. It showed kids living in a secret hideout, where adult authority would attempt to intrude with slapstick ensuing. No parental edicts about bedtimes or the tidiness of rooms, just endless hanging out with your mates.

And the first film I saw at the cinema was ’Lost In the Desert’ (1969), a tale of a young boy who got lost in the… well, you probably guessed. (It’s essentially ’Walkabout’ without the elder sister.) Watching a child about the same age as me strive to survive on that big screen was a demanding watch, a feeling amplified by the realisation that if I reacted too visibly I wouldn’t get taken to the cinema again.

Both stemmed from the same source. But it was an unspoken assumption that it was okay to feed kid’s desire to be free of adult authority and also stir their phobia of being without their parents, provided they were delivered via different channels - never the twain shall meet.

Except for ’The Changes’, which was (consciously or otherwise) all about them meeting. Nicky gets to climb her trees, but with that freedom comes the witchfinder who wants to stone her to death.

And that was in a sense a juvenile microcosm of the wider culture, which both fretted about what technology was doing while fearing it being taken away. There’s more to this than the love of adventuring, even if that becomes our route in. It’s the notion that technology has coddled us, disconnected us from the real world, to the point that life now lies elsewhere.

And popular cultural themes are normally conflicted. Quite possibly it’s that conflict which causes them to become themes. Dramas can seek to resolve them, which they’re unlikely to do to everyone’s satisfaction. Or they can opt to ride the turbulence, and perhaps even map some of it.

Deus Versus Machina

And what turns out to have caused the Changes? There’s a megalith-like stone, sitting in a cave, seen over the closing credits of every episode. That’s our culprit. It’s a kind of spirit of the land - “there in nature, deep in the root of things.” And it’s Nicky, not the unaffected Jonathon, who’s able to sense it, to realise what it is and to plead with it. (In a scene remarkably like the ‘talking down the maverick supercomputer’ trope Seventies SF was so fond of. This was the decade that truly wrapped science and mysticism up together.)

She saves the day by appealing to it’s better nature, which is an example of the ‘talking cure’ so beloved of liberal culture. But it makes more sense in this context than something like ‘The Quatermass Experiment’. 

Some while ago, we looked at ‘Day of the Dead’. Which speculated that the zombie rising happened because our hubris made God wrathful. But the Changes seems more like something so powerful a force would do. Take away our noisy toys, not give them back till we’re better behaved. (Though at one point lightning strikes Nicky and Jonathon’s boat, so the stone’s willing to do its own dirty work at times.)

They encounter Furbelow, who touched the stone and made a wish upon it. “I didn’t mean it to turn out like this, of course”, he cries, “I thought it was for the best.” And he’s like all of us at this point of history, concerned about something, not quite knowing why or what to do about it, in his befuddlement just making the whole thing worse. Which is echoed in the stone’s warning - “whoever touches me unbalances the world”.

Though how this muddled wish transpires as the Changes is, perhaps inevitably, in itself muddled. He wishes for world peace, a cure for cancer and the usual stuff. Perhaps the stone picks up on his underlying technofear, or on waking up sweeps the land of all the newfangled stuff its not used to.

Furthermore, we’re also told that the stone’s wake-up call was “too soon, too sudden”. (In which case it must surely have set the alarm clock for about now.) What its waiting for, or what this has to do with Furbelow’s befuddlement is anyone’s guess. (This confusion may be here because the book’s ending gets changed, without being entirely overwritten.)

Still, if you need to squint at the thing for it to work then let us squint. The upshot is - because Furbelow, one of us, has made this muddled wish which becomes more like a curse it takes Nicky, another one of us, to un-wish it. And with it un-wish her adventuring.

After which, there’s noticeably no happy-ending shot of Nicky being reunited with her parents. She explains to Jonathon that its all over. Then the end credits are essentially a mirror image of the opening ones, with motion restarted. The immediate problem is over, the stone’s gone back to sleep. But the underlying causes, they all remain.

Coming soon! Further teatime dystopias! (Same time, same channel...)

‘A NEW BRAND OF BRILLIANCE’ (A SPOTIFY PLAYLIST)

Click here for a Spotify playlist packed full of Xmas songs and general good cheer! Well, some Christmas songs… okay not any, just the usual stuff. Sights along the way include…

Bardo Pond's blistering psychedelia doesn't know about us but we know about it, Brian Eno talks only in incomprehensible proverbs, New York punk trio Ut provide the spikiest of no wave, Low disappear (as they unfortunately did after the untimely death thus year of Mimi Parker), Jonathan Richman finds the financial zone to be something akin to Wordsworth’s field of golden daffodils, my bloody valentine take off for dimensions unknown (as is their wont), Mazzy Star ring dem bells - and more!

The illo’s a collage by the pioneering Pop artist Eduardo Paolozzi. (Much appreciated in these here parts.)

The Delgados: Lazarwalker
Bardo Pond: Don’t Know About You
Brian Eno: Blank Frank
The Waterboys: Nobody’s Baby Anymore
Ut: Big Wing
Sleater-Kinney: Ruins
Low: Disappearing
Emma Ruth Rundle: Protection
Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers: Lonely Financial Zone
my bloody valentine: sometimes
Mazzy Star: Bells Ring
Swans: The Sound

"Blank Frank is the siren,
He's the air-raid, he's the crater
He's on the menu, on the table,
He's the knife and he's the waiter”

Back in the New Year…

'PHILP GUSTON’

Tate Modern, London

“Probably the only thing one can really learn is the capacity to be able to change.” 
-Philip Guston

A World To Win With Murals

Everyone knows the Guston story. It’s the one about the dissident American Abstract Expressionist, the one who went back to painting… gasp… things, to great controversy. In a style bordering on cartoony, which some also found controversial. Which included depictions of the Ku Klux Klan. Which also proved controversial.

But as the opening rooms of this show demonstrate, his origin story was almost bog-standard. He was even a teenage friend of the most Ab of all Exers, Jackson Pollock. He followed the familiar recipe, which as we’ve seen before, was a mixture of Surrealist practices and the scale of New Deal muralism.

We start off with some fairly standard Surrealist works, clearly indebted to de Chirico but with the silkily synthetic painting surface of post-Dali. There’s nothing wrong with them, but nothing particularly right about them either. They’re regular, when Surrealism needs to be estranged from us.

The murals are a different story, however. He’d soon joined the Block of Painters, a group of political muralists in Los Angeles. As these are somewhat challenging to transport, they often get left out of this story. But the Tate goes to efforts, including projecting roving sections of ’The Struggle Against Terrorism’ (1934) on a wall. But let’s focus on a drawing, specifically ’Drawing For Conspirators’ (c. 1930, below.)

Its as politically committed a work as any Berlin Dadaist ever spewed. Had it been given a thumbs-up by the critics and no more, it would have failed in its intent. It exists to make a point. Yet however politically charged it might be, its not a reportage image. In fact its as much a tableau as any Victorian ever painted.

You don’t question this, the crucified Jesus and the black lynching victim being placed next to one another, because there’s no attempt to convey any actual pictorial space. The setting’s a stage, not a place, the figures theatrical. And the creation of works from big, broad symbols… this segues quite neatly into Abstract Expressionism. The symbols just become more general, more universal, that all.

But also… yes, the Klan show up this early. And why wouldn’t they? This period, the inter-war years was their strongpoint. And while this work displays their notorious anti-black racism, they were as much anti-semitic and anti-immigrant. With Guston (birth name Goldstein) a Jewish child of immigrants. In 1932, another mural of his was defaced by the LA Police (then closely linked to the Klan) when they raided the centre which held it. Yet at the same time the era contained a sense of hope, the feeling that old certainties had eroded, that what gave danger also raised possibility. “There was a sense of being part of a change, or possible change” he commented afterwards.

Guston’s personal image bank was filled up then, and he continued drawing on it throughout his life. In his later return to the representational pretty much all that’s new in terms of imagery is the backdrops. (Which are of his adopted New York rather than his original Los Angeles.)

And why shouldn’t this be? After all, when we’re young aren’t we soft clay, impressionable and absorbing? We then progressively harden as we go through life, until our attitudes become impervious.

’Bombardment’ (1937, above) is Guston’s ’Guernica’. Literally so, like the more famous Picasso work it was painted in immediate response to the fascist bombing of that town. The unusual roundel design is used to create a vertiginous effect, explosion placed dead centre, figures flung out at you from it. War’s presented as a kind of ‘big bang’ event, gestating the world we live in.

’Gladiators’ (1940, above) is similarly war-based, only this time it’s not happening to but embodied by the figures, who look inseparable from their masks. The composition’s a swirl of ceaseless combat, your eye never coming to a focus point but forever rolling round. Particularly with the blue angle, the frame seems to be moving down on them. The violence feels menacingly real, but at the same time the weapons are toys, a dustbin shield, a wooden sword. And it's another tableau. The upper left figure outsizes the others, but in so symbolic a work it takes you a while to notice.

’Martial Memory’ (1941, above) is in many ways a successor work, incorporating many of the same elements. (“Guston and the dustbin lid motif, in this talk I will…”) But its a more static composition, working out from the central triangle of the main figure. It’s thing isn’t motion but density. It features, as the indicia puts it, “forms overlapping one another in a very dense manner”. The result is that it neither resolves to either a literal or allegorical reading, inhabiting a kind of ‘between’ space similar to Paula Rego.

In this work the figures have become children, who frequently appear in this period. It’s reminiscent of the way children will repeat back to you what’s on your mind. Inevitably, their response to a world of war is street games of battle. Which easily tip over into true fights of their own.

’The Porch' (1947, above) seems a transitional work into his later abstraction. There’s still some suggestion of pictorial space, but with a cruciform shape imposed upon it. And the figures are stretched, the way a scream is an elongated note.

And 'The Tormentors’ (1947/8) seems almost the next step along in a timeline, the foreground figures fading into inscribed lines, the red-and-black background darkening to dominate the composition. Yet those shapes look not just like they might oncer have been things, they retain some sense of anthropomorphism. (The title suggests we should look for pre-Klan figures.) Perhaps because there’s something primal about the work, as if made from some pre-verbal urge.

All would seem to bode well for Guston’s future abstraction…

”The Process of Creation”

…alas not.

Guston's reasons for turning to abstraction are textbook and exemplary, both the right ones and the best expressed. Briefly, it allowed him to just paint. He made a point of never stepping back from his canvases never pausing work to check on the overall composition, lest that interrupt the flow of paint. “I am not concerned with making pictures,” he commented, “but only the process of creation.” The action of painting the painting is the painting.

But the results don’t particularly honour that noble intent. ’Beggars Joys’ (1954/5, above, is quite typical, with the de-centred cluster of brighter strokes against a paler background. In fact its one of the better works, with its shimmering quality. But this is art for aesthetes.

At the time, with Ab Ex ascendent, these cemented his reputation. He represented America at the Venice Biennale in 1960, aged 47 (a neophyte in painting circles), followed by a Guggenheim retrospective two years later. But the truth is, in the New York School he was but one enrolment among many. There’s no suggestion he broke away for this reason, but the fact remains - if he was going to be Head Boy, he needed to found his own establishment.

The impression’s often given that his return to imagery was some sort of Damascene convention. Like he sat up in bed one morning and went, “hey, everybody - things!” This show demonstrates how slow and tortuous it really was.

In the early-to-mid Sixties black heads started appearing in his work, floating Zardoz-like over clouds of brushy grey. ’Painter III’ (1963, above) is one of the more developed examples, with a brush-sporting arm appended, even reflected in the title. It’s scarcely a great work, and in a room of essentially similar efforts it becomes both repetitive and unfinished. But its significance is in his timeline.

Did those heads just keep arising, unbidden, in his work? And did he break off when he saw what he’d done, alarmed at the forbidden imagery, only to do the same again? It seems a bit too romanticised. Plus these works were apparently shown at the time, not hidden away. Nevertheless, surely something of this sort happened.

From 1966 he then took an eighteen-month break from painting. (“You have to die for a rebirth”, he commented later.) And when he started again, it was with lines. Just lines. Over time these became simple doodles. Blown up to the size of small paintings, but still simple doodles of single objects. As basic as basic can be. But, like the heads, their significance is as steps on his timeline.

The phrase often used for Guston is ‘return to figuration’. Yet he started off painting things, and that’s significant. The first object we see here is a book. And, from an artist’s perspective, what does a book ‘mean’? It’s a repository of words, the alternative to images. If an artist paints a head, he must find a specific head. Even if he doesn’t model the work on a real head, if one comes from his imagination, it becomes a specific head once its painted. While in four letters the word ‘head’ can stand for all heads.

And the stripped-down, iconic way they’re painted is surely to circumvent this problem. A chair or a shoe is designed to represent chairs and shoes as directly as the word would. Significantly, he called these works a ‘visual alphabet’. And a great many items from this alphabet then reappear in his paintings. At the same time there’s something cartoony about them, which makes them least a little anthropomorphised.

Amid Idiot Evil

By 1970, he had fully worked up paintings which were shown at New York’s Marlborough gallery. And this is where the legend starts. Critics raged, former Ab Ex soulmates never spoke to him again, leading to him feeling like he’d been excommunicated. No less than John Cage was dismissive, only de Kooning positive. From that point on, and significantly, his main associates became not artists but writers and poets.

Okay, about time we looked at some…

’Open Window’ (1969, above) recursively hangs some of those 'visual alphabet’ pictures inside a larger work, works-within-a-work. But the window of the title makes them fairly accurate descriptions of a stripped-back urban environment. (And this the New York that classic Modernists were so rhapsodic about!) Downward strokes predominate, suggesting dumbed-down art as a response to a dumbed-down world. It’s reminiscent of the Matisse quote, that the build environment does to our eyes what prejudice does to our intelligence. And we’ll see that stripped-back colour scheme recur again and again, off-whites, chewing-gum-pinks, muddy reds and deep greens, lurid and cheap.

In a similar vein ’City’ (also 1969) reworks city buildings as Klan hoods, narrow windows doubling as eyeslits. As if the city itself was a product of, or perhaps producing, Klan ideology. And speaking of which…

The first room contained a 1924 photo of Klansmen in a car, publicising a white power lecture. An image which reappears in ’City Limits' (1969, above). Guston may not have ever seen it but he must have seen similar things, perhaps in person.

But what’s significant is that they are not depicted in the same way as the Klan of old, as in ’Drawing For Conspirators'. Their appearance, with those sinister costumes, had been designed to strike dread into their victims. But their role as racism boogeymen had waned over time. Racism clearly remained, but it was less embodied in the Klan. And so those pointy hoods started to look a little absurd.

If his personal image bank was filled up in those inter-war years, as he started to draw from it he knew he was spending old money to a changed world. So he paints not malevolent fascist entities but knuckleheads, goons, bozos, neighbourhood bullies. In fact they become a more generalised symbol for knuckleheads, goons and bozos. Their car has gargantuan wheels, yet three figures are crammed into a tiny bubble cab, complete with fag smoke. (You could read that giant car as their externalised self-image, and the diminutive figures as their actuality. If you wanted.)

Adrian Searle describes them as exuding “idiot evil”, and indeed they seem like henchmen without a criminal mastermind, wandering this way and that, often pointing forwards like they wouldn’t know which way to go otherwise. Their nearest comparison in contemporary art would be Crumb’s White Man, with his mantra “I must maintain this rigid position or all is lost.”

Ands the style they’re painted in is as different. Guston had once painted children reflecting adult concerns. Now he’s effectively doing the reverse, depictions of adults in a childlike manner which makes them essentially children. With those huge hoods, the Klan’s heads vanish into their toros, the way child art won’t differentiate head from body. They’re often depicted oversize, both from the child’s habit of ascribing size to significance and as a way of portraying their grasping nature. The banality of evil via the cartoonification of evil.

As is well known, this retrospective was originally planned a few years ago. Then, after the murder of George Floyd and the rise of Black Lives Matter, Washington DC’s National Gallery of Art in suddenly got cold feet over these images. Whereas of course when they’re relevant is precisely the time to show them! How could anyone get something so spectacularly wrong?

The answer is that the privileged forever mistake their status for smarts, when in fact it’s the reverse. Cushioned from the world’s sharp edges, they cannot see what we see. So they assume that they, the enlightened few, might be able to perceive these were anti-racist images, but what about us, the bewildered herd? As if someone could confuse Guston with DW Griffiths!

The only time either artists or black advocacy groups seem to have been involved in this is to complain it was un-necessary. Plus, all the furore when these works were first shown seems to have been over their representational form and their deliberately crude style. No-one then thought they were Klan-sympathetic. They were wrong - very wrong - about Guston’s art, but that didn’t make them cretins.

Further, the fact that galleries would worry then but go ahead now proves it wasn’t even the images being misinterpreted that worried them but the direction of social media trends. Potential flack coming down upon their own heads was a bigger deal to them than the knee on Floyd’s neck. Now black lives mattering is no longer this year’s thing, it’s safe to go ahead.

(Disclaimer: The Tate seem to have been more caught up in this delay than willing accomplices. And even then co-curator Mark Godfrey resigned from them in disappointment.)

And there another, equally important, dimension to this…

Klan Am I 

The Royal Academy show included a 1971 caricature of Nixon, skipped over here. Which may well be wise, as it can be played on too hard. Guston wasn't a 'political cartoonist'. More significant is all the self-portraits…

…such as 'The Studio’  (1969, above). It’s a painting of a Klansman painting a Klansman, brushes pushed to the foreground to emphasise this is a kind of self-portrait. Because as soon as Klansmen step from the sinister shadows and become regular bozos, we need to accept we are all part-Klansman. They’re our enemy, but not necessarily our external enemy. Guston said “it could be all of us. We’re all heels.” Or at another point, “I am the subject”. He’s shown smoking as he works in the accompanying filmshow, and I’d soon decided that any smoking Klansman was tagged as a self-portrait. (Which means that was also Guston in ’City Limits’.) 

By being a painting of someone painting, this foregrounds the graphic style, Guston painting himself as a Klansman in the way he depicts Klansmen. Klan men in a klan world in a klan style. And as Adrian Searle said, they “look exactly like they were painted by the kind of people they depict… some heavy, slow, intractable goon.”

Further, its significant the way the image is stacked - paint brushes before raised fingers before drawing hand before canvas. It’s not as dense as 'Martial Memory’, but it it feels crammed, claustrophobic, as if depicting an inescapable situation.

And this is enhanced further in ’Painting, Smoking, Eating’ (1973, above), by which point Guston was habitually painting himself as a one-eyed testicle. The horizontal figure actually only has a plate of food on him, the accumulation of objects is behind. But it's painted as if they weigh on him, accentuated by the flatness of the figure under the bedclothes. Guston called this stuff crapola, the detritus of life. And while critics’ claims to find Holocaust references in his work normally feels fanciful, the mass of discarded shoes here may well echo those photos of abandoned belongings in piles.

’Monument’ (1976, above) is like the antonym of those studio paintings, what Guston scuttled past on his forays out to buy more fags and tubs of off-pink. We grant a common identity to the crowd, simply by thinking of it as “the crowd”, while knowing at the same time it has none, its just an agglomeration of individuals. And so we get an apparition such as this, an assemblage of stamping feet without guiding heads, its bestial nature accentuated by the comparison of shoes to horse’s hooves.

There’s a famous quote from Guston: “what was happening in America, the brutality of the world. What kind of man am I, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything - and then going to my studio to adjust a red to a blue?” It’s blown up on the gallery wall, it takes up a page in the booklet. But it’s widely misinterpreted.

Guston was not such a fool as to imagine adjusting a red to an off-pink was a different matter. He wasn’t trying to recapture his politically committed youth, as if you could just transpose from one era to another, and from public walls to a gallery setting. He was using his work to ask himself just that question - what kind of man am I? If you didn’t care about the brutality, you weren’t a human being. On the other hand, if you didn’t care about your art, you weren’t an artist. So the artist cannot help but respond to world events, but at the same time cannot help but feel isolated from them. This art grapples with that conundrum.

Further, its now generally agreed that the New York School retained their leftist beliefs (apart from the occasions where they retained their anarchist beliefs), even when it wasn’t evident in their art. They would have all been aghast at what was happening in America. Which suggests Guston’s motivations were a combination of inner and outer, political outrage and a dissatisfaction with Ab Ex methods. And in saying this we don’t need to place one above the other.

Where did this new style come from? Robert Crumb, mentioned earlier, was soon complaining it had all been stolen from him. Yet he never really missed a chance to be vexatious. Both are really borrowing from the same source, the old American newspaper strips. It’s like arguing my band sounded like the Stones before yours did.

The show refers to this but, as is standard, insists that means George Herriman. Yet Herriman’s fluid, sketchy line could not be further from the blocky things stuck to these walls. Guston is borrowing from lesser-known but more regular newspaper artists, such as Bud Fisher. And he’s not even taking directly from Fisher or from any one of them. He’s taking from them on aggregate, the general way they depicted things, picking up on the common slang. Rather than trying to raise the comics style, Guston lowers himself to its base level. He’s more interested in their crudity, their scuzzy printing, their reduction of objects down to signs. And that’s why his pictures work.

Life After Klan

Though Guston is now defined by the crapola paintings, the style lasted less than a decade and the Klan had disappeared from them well before that. Laster works are more metaphysical, larger in scale and more spacious in content. They’re less fraught and frenzied, more contemplative. Expansive and calm oceans appear, as in ’The Ladder’ (1971, below.)

They’re perhaps best summed up by his comment “there’s nothing to do now but paint my life.” Guston said at the time that while he’s painting something he has no idea what it will be, and he didn’t see why that process should stop just because he’d stopped painting it. He quoted approvingly from Paul Valery, “a bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning.” He wanted back some of the inscrutability abstraction had afforded him.

Still later works swap off-white for much darker and more sombre hues, often full black. The motive for these is mortality, as both himself and his wife dealt with illness. ’Web’ (1975, above) is a particularly nightmarish image, the spiders dominating the horizon, their distance only emphasising how trapped the figure is. Whether his death is near or not, it remains inescapable. The reflections of two of his key colours, muddy red and green, might suggest it’s his art he’s trapped in.

Should we see this as a good exhibition? As you may have guessed from above, it presents a compelling timeline of Guston’s career. But that may be a better thing to write about than walk round, as it gives greater weight to lesser works when we could have had more Klan paintings. (Not something to quote out of context!) The Royal Academy show of 2004 effectively did the opposite, sweeping through his early years, encouraging us only to look for emergent symbols, in order to bring on the crapola. Neither porridge is quite right. And Guston would surely have exulted in remaining hard to pin down.

ANTI-SEMITISM VS. ‘ANTI-SEMITISM’

Okay, so I promised there wouldn’t be another politics post. And that has turned out to be a Tory promise. But then the so-called ‘March Against Anti-Semitism’ happened (ably analysed by Vashi Media here) and this seemed too timely to wait…

Remember when Jeremy Corbyn became Labour leader? Now back in 2015. It was pretty clear that a black propaganda campaign would be unleashed against him. But most of us (including me) assumed it would continue in the vein it had before, merely more concentrated. Which had chiefly been to accuse him of supporting the IRA. Instead, they almost entirely pivoted to accusations of anti-semitism. Which at first seemed odd. They had one script already written. Why switch to another?

Does this distinction matter much? After all, both serve the same purpose – which is really not much more than a heckle. What the heckler is saying is secondary, the point is what he prevents the speaker saying. The heckler’s role is to sidetrack them.

But treat this as a clue… Since then, it’s only become more widespread. It’s not just that the accusations against Corbyn are now taken as fact, including by the supposedly ‘liberal’ media. (I’m not bothering to debunk it all here. That stuff is easy enough to find if you want to read it.) It’s that it became their default brand of mud to sling against anyone they want to paint dirty. Partly they may just be building on success, of course.

But more is afoot…

It’s origins are easy enough to find. Criticism of the Israeli occupation of Palestine had been painted as anti-semitic for some time, and with some success in making mud stick. (We have had rather a lot of that lately, as it happens.) That worked over there. Why not try it over here?

But more is afoot…

Rare… perhaps even alone among racisms, modern anti-semitism isn’t linked to material deprivation. Jewish people living in Britain aren’t, on average, worse off than white folk. This doesn’t mean they don’t encounter prejudice, or that this prejudice is somehow without significance. (Anyone saying there are acceptable forms or degrees of racism is now being escorted to one of the exits.) But it makes it something distinct from anti black or Asian racism.

In short it takes institutional racism out of the equation, leaving individual prejudice. And individual prejudice is the definition of racism they like to push, because it lets them off the hook. Racism becomes a problem with a few retrograde types, usually portrayed as ‘uneducated’ or working class. To which the solution is performative public statements, or progressive educational campaigns. (Anti-racist slideshows and the like.) In this way the source of the problem dresses itself up as the solution, it even sells itself as the expert who can heal our poor contaminated souls.

(This is of course how they tried to portray Black Lives Matter. But then there was a conflict between a ground-level movement and its twisted official reflection. A slogan widely used by BLM demonstrators was “white supremacy is the enemy.” While corporations used “black lives matter” as a buzz term to slap beneath their logos. Post a black square on Twitter, job done, racism defeated.)

But more is afoot…

Depicting anti-capitalism as anti-semitic is of course an old trick. But this brings a new dimension to it. The demise of Corbyn was the last hurrah of social democracy in Britain. Those who had been allowed to inhabit the leftmost fringes of Labour, provided they didn’t try to actually influence anything, are now to be (in that delightful phrase) shaken off like fleas.

Neoliberalism is now to be presented not just as the dominant strand of capitalism but as capitalism. Earlier, more pluralist forms have been memory-holed. And those who try to criticise or ameliorate it are to be painted the same way us anti-capitalists always were, as dangerous hate-ridden extremists.

In essence, it works like this… You are by your own admission against capitalism, which of course means you are against money. Money is of course to do with the Jews. Therefore you are against the Jews. In short the accusation is itself anti-semitic, as it actively recycles anti-semitic tropes.

It’s sometimes suggested that these smear tactics may at times get over-excessive in their zeal, but they’re coming from a good place, the desire to combat racism. They’re really not. They’re an instruction to look out for anti-semitism where it isn’t, leaving it alone where it is.

Further, it is a worrying but undeniable fact that anti-semitism is growing. But that needs to be seen in context, of racism in general growing overall. Those on the receiving end of other forms of racism often feel there’s a hierarchy of racisms in supposedly ‘centrist’ political culture, with them on the bottom. They’re excluded by racists, and also by supposed anti-racists.

The main incubator of anti-semitism today is conspiracy theories. In fact anti-semitism at root is a conspiracy theory, in a way other forms of racism aren’t. Conspiracy theories always end up saying “because of them”, and while "them” doesn’t necessarily has to be "the Jews" a whole lot of working out has already been done for you once you accept that. Abbie Richards coined the term ‘anti-semitic point of no return’, for the point where you cross the event horizon of lunacy and QAnon shreds your capacity for reason forever more.

White supremacy is a material fact about the world. You could pretty much prove it by looking out the window. So anti-semitism, the pretence of Jewish supremacism, is required to let whiteness off the hook, in fact absurdly claim victim status for white people. Claiming there’s something inherently strange and suspicious about George Soros having all that money is a way of saying it’s perfectly normal for Elon Musk to have even more money.

And precisely because there’s no material basis to the claim it's magnified to a ludicrous degree, where “the Jews” are supposed to direct everything that happens. Lack of evidence is presented as proof of how clever the sinister forces have been in covering their tracks. Hence the common tropes of the trapping web, the puppeteer’s strings and all that crap.

The widespread use of money was the inevitable consequence of the rise of commodity production. When we use the word ‘capitalism’, we essentially mean the expression of commodity production across society. But in the conspiracy theory it becomes a malevolent magic force, a kind of sinister spell cast by “the Jews” to disrupt the natural order of things. We have been calling this stuff “the socialism of fools” for nearly a hundred and fifty years now.

(There is of course a more convoluted relationship between conspiracy theories and power than that. Right-wing governments react by trying to pin their anti-semitism on us. But they also indulge aspects of it, such as the ‘white replacement’ conspiracy. But let’s leave that aside for now.)

Reader’s voice: “Well that’s all very clever, Gavin. But what should we actually do to deal with this?”

For one thing, we should ensure we never entertain conspiracy theories in any form. It’s not enough to just state that we don’t. Any more than you get to shower once in your life and be clean forever after. We need to stay perpetually watchful.

But of course that’s not an answer to the question. Even if we were to get a completely clean bill of health, the accusations would persist. They are not being made in good faith, but out of opportunism.

There isn’t a magic bullet answer here. But the short answer is to look at everything Corbyn did. And then do the opposite. Some will not want to hear this, but his response to the attacks against him was hopelessly naïve, a how-not-to guide. Explaining patiently one more time just what his position was and how they must have misunderstood it, that didn’t really work too well for him.

The answer was given earlier on. We should avoid all forms of anti-semitism, but that’s because we don’t want to be anti-semitic. We should deny all conspiracy theories, but that’s because they’re all wrong. And we should regard these charges not as tests of our resolve, but as smears, as heckles, as derailments - and treat them as such. We should not let our enemies set the terms of debate.

Next time, not more politics. Would I lie to you, guv?

BRITISH POLITICS IS A SOAP OPERA (AND A RUBBISH ONE AT THAT)

The return of Call-Me-Dave Cameron has proved something. British politics really is like a soap opera which knows it only has causal viewers, so it can get away with recycling plotlines. The old villains can even come back with fanfare. Cameron is the Nick Cotton of parliament.

Anyone remember the mid Nineties much? Hard to think of it now really, but back then a well-and-truly scuppered Tory government was busily trying to pretend its days were un-numbered. While an incoming Labour administration, looking forward to a thumping majority, was assuring the nervous that to avoid inconvenience they didn’t actually intend changing anything.

Watching this all over again, it’s amusing to hear once more that this approach is pragmatic and statesmanlike. Of course a political party wants to win, and win with a working majority. Guys, this news has reached us thanks. Ever thought about what you might want this majority for? 

But party machines don’t actually work like that. In the same way the rich can never think of themselves as rich enough, they’re fixated on vote maximalisation. And in what’s essentially a two-party system, that means Labour taking votes from the Tories. By any means. Those other voters, already signed up with you, they’ve no other home to go to after all. So it hardly matters if they complain about the décor.

While the Tories didn’t counter by becoming more centrist, but by what they called “clear blue water”, by tacking further to the right. At least initially, this was electoral stupidity. But they were bounced into it, a prisoner of their ever-narrowing base. Like a constantly stumbling drunk, they’d then pretend they were intentionally acting that way. Then Labour, still guided to follow them by spreadsheet wonks, continued to step right after them. They carried on shadowing the Tories even when in power.

This doesn’t mean the parties become identical. In fact that notion obscures what happens. Instead the small and trivial differences between the two become everyone’s focus, become what politics was. ‘Responsible’ and ‘mainstream’ politics, at any rate. In political trainspotter speak, this is called the shrinking of the Overton window. Which is already too narrow to fire an arrow through, and shrinking daily.

Further, public anger with the Tories was not to do with their policies but individual cases of corruption and ineptitude. Which to be fair, there was an abundant supply of. But it allows them to be depicted as being at odds with our free and fair democratic system, with no thought given as to exactly how they were able to get away with being so at odds for so long.

And it overlooks that things like (to choose a more recent case) the crony contracts given out over Covid are what free market politics look like, and will always look like, when actually applied. And it means that the Tories can kick a few wrong ‘uns offstage, bring forward a few unknown backbenchers and be back in business. Sunak initially had a mini-bounce for precisely this reason, though without it happening across the board it didn’t (and couldn’t) last.

But the Tories coming back out the wilderness, of course that took a while to happen.

It won’t this time.

Smarter Blairites soon gave up trying to defend the Iraq war. It being, you know, indefensible. Instead they chalked it up as a one-off, a unique situation unlikely to recur. And grossly simplified and distorted history by making out that criticisms of the Blair years were solely down to that debacle. In fact Labour even went on to win the next election, their majority reduced but still workable. Nevertheless the Gulf War was like a lightning rod, galvanising opposition.

Whereas Starmer is having his Gulf War moment right now, over Gaza. Before he even gets to meet the Downing Street cat. The still-further-right Tories, with Braverman The Barmy or someone interchangeably fanatical at the helm, will return the sooner and Labour will then shift to shadow them. (“Yes we support the chopping the arms off for anyone caught attending a demonstration, to stop them holding any more troublesome placards. But this new policy of them losing their legs too… oh alright then, off with the legs as well.”) That thing which worked so terribly last time, let’s do it all again.

So we’re screwed, right?

Possibly, yes. But there’s also a slower and more seismic shift going on. Both parties are busily chasing one narrow demographic, which will most likely not be here in a few years. And you can tell how significant it is by the way they’re both ignoring it.

Tories are losing the youth vote, to a magnified degree, with signs they’re now failing to gain the Fortysomethings. To adapt an old Sixties phrase, the young get old, but they don’t go Tory. You can see how this has happened. Their generation crept rightwards over time, so they assume this is some universal law at work, people growing up and getting sensible. The fact that their generation had economic inducements to do so (you know, property, savings, stuff like that) eludes them.

And when they don’t just expect voters to turn their way, their main tactic is to make it harder for youth to vote. Voter ID was largely seen as creating obstacles against the poorer voter, but that overlaps with the younger voter quite considerably.

The classic case would be immigration. The Tories always act as though this is their populist trick, a scare-word which needs only to be mentioned (“smaaaaal booooats, whoooooo!!!”), and the fear-stricken will flock to them. Whereas the majority now have positive views on immigration.

(It was rarely mentioned that, while Corbyn was quite popular among the youth, his policies read a different way to them. To my generation they meant a return to the social democracy of the Seventies. But that was a world the youth had no experience of. To them it was something excitingly new.)

But by also ignoring this vote Labour risk being in turn ignored by them. They lose the Youth wall. Which could turn to a rise in support for a smaller parties, or a general disenchantment with Parliamentary politics. Politicians are just people who ignore you, so just ignore them. The vote becomes something like landlines, perhaps it had once a purpose for those oldies but no more, not for us.

Could this take us to to a more autonomous, ground-level style of politics? Which mainstream politicians are stuck with being responsive to. We act, then they are forced to answer. Possibly.

But it could also take the form of an internet-generated activism. This doesn’t necessarily mean mere clicktivism. Things already look too much like a series of single-issue campaigns which come in waves, each replacing the last. We’ve already seen some of this. Black Lives Matter gets replaced by Me Too, which is replaced by pro-Palestine, and so on. Everyone updating their forever-provisional social media bios in order to keep up. Nothing is ever built on, ever consolidated. Which may not be in a dynamic with mainstream politics, but still is with the news cycle.

Anyway, apologies to Nick Cotton for comparing him to David Cameron. I now promise to shut up about politics. For a bit, anyway.

ON GAZA (OR WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT COLONIALISM)

On a recent ‘Question Time’, seeking to defend the military targeting of hospitals in Gaza, Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg ensured he repeatedly referred to Israel “the Jewish state”.

The ploy may seem obvious enough. In Europe we’re used to associating Jewishness with victimhood, so pressing that button might bounce us into the assumption “the Jewish state” must be the victim again.

As we seem to keep being asked, opposition to the bombing of Gaza has nothing to do with anti-semitism. But in itself that’s insufficient. It also needs to be said that the bombing of Gaza has nothing to do with Jewishness. Because the insinuation is also misdirection.

Let’s creep on this sideways…

Conspiracy theorist crank David Icke, when seeking to slip (much deserved) accusations of anti-semitism, came up with a novel defence - he can’t be anti-Jewish because there’s no such thing to be against. What we call ‘Jewish’ is just a polyglot agglomeration of people, an arbitrarily defined category.

And, at least insofar as that goes, he’s right. Except the thing he isn’t telling you is that the same applies to every other racial group.

As more and more scientific evidence has been gathered, it has pointed to the fact that racial distinctions have no basis in biology. It’s not even that there’s no significant distinctions between races, there’s not even any meaningful distinctions.

Race is, and always has been, a social and political construct. The racial categories we’re lumbered with today were largely devised in the era of colonialism, and precisely to justify colonialism, to legitimise one group of people colonising another. Most people seem to imagine something like the slave trade was a product of racism. Whereas it was the other way around, it was its existence which made racism necessary. Race, as it’s commonly thought of, was an invention of racists in order to be racist.

Does any of that let Icke off the hook? Nope. What he says is true, but that’s somewhat over-ruled by it being irrelevant. By comparison, national borders are political constructs. They don’t exist in nature, infrastructure has to be built to enable them. But realising this isn’t the same thing as denying it. Try explaining this as a means to get into another country, you’ll find passports work better. Those barriers and border cops may have been built, but that doesn’t stop them stopping you. Built things are still things.

Take Icke’s argument to its natural conclusion and the Holocaust is suddenly no longer a problem, because the Nazis may have thought they were murdering Jewish people in the millions, but they weren’t really, were they? If anyone thinks this, I hope I never meet them.

But it does point to a vital way in which racism works in actuality. Racism professes to be a ‘common sense’ doctrine, dealing with immutable facts. Racists sometimes adopt the name “race realists”, playing this up. Whereas in practise it can be bent whichever way you twist it, so it becomes an ever-shifting product of alliances being forged and breaking down. This combination is precisely what makes it useful.

Similarly, what groups do and don’t get included in ‘whiteness’ has varied greatly over time. As colonisers of Ireland, the Victorians were near-obsessed with the notion that the native folk were really black, even if they unsportingly refused to sport black skin. Yet the Irish who emigrated to America were often employed as cops, in order to keep the still-less-white Southern and Eastern European immigrants down.

And so on Armistice Day the far right chanted at the Police “you’re not English any more”. They see ‘Englishness’, by which of course they mean whiteness, as their natural birthright. They imagine others are inherently jealous of this, and so scheme to undermine it. But it’s there inscribed on you, literally, like a genetic family heirloom. Yet when it suits them, ‘Englishness’ suddenly becomes a political alignment, which some will betray and so lose. The Police are English because they’re predominantly white. But they also stopbeing ‘English’ as soon as they bar the far right’s way.

As well as rallying that mob, far-right thug Tommy Robinson has also attended more orthodox pro-Israel marches. In fact, most of the British far right have now turned to embrace Israel. Because it fights against ‘the Muslims’, their current hate group of choice. And they imagine that by associating themselves so readily with Jews this lets them off the Holocaust hook. Which of course means the ‘real Jews’, not those not-Jews but the most far right elements of Jewish society.

And this works more broadly. It would have been hard to not to hear that mantra phrase, so trotted out by British politicians of both main parties in defence of each successive atrocity - “Israel has the right to defend itself.” Ask not whether the Palestinians have a similar right, you’d be met by an outpouring of manufactured outrage.

Which might seem a little backwards, when it is after all Palestine which is the one being occupied. But that is precisely why this has to be so insisted on. Palestinian actions are inherently tainted, not to be trusted. What might look like hospitals, refugee camps or even UN relief workers to the innocent might turn at any moment into terrorist cells. While Israeli actions are inherently defensive, carried out reluctantly, any civilian casualties held to hang on their noble souls.

And that's because Palestinian existence is seen as inherently problematic. This is classic colonialism. They must be subjugated, expelled or removed, because while we have decided their lands should be ours the awkward buggers aren’t playing along. They’re the natives, the Aboriginals, the Native Americans.

And this is Rees-Mogg’s trick. The “Jewish state” angle has to be stressed precisely because Israel doesn’t represent “the Jews” any longer but the whites, the West, the civilised world… it doesn’t matter which term you use, they’re all polite euphemisms for colonisers. And at the same time the violations of international law are obvious and clear-cut, all the old colonial powers have allied with them in this. As have the media, from the far-right shock jocks to the liberal ‘centrists’.

Plus, those of us minded to oppose war crimes soon found we were subject to the same framing. We’d chant “we are all Palestinian”, and they were happy to take us up on it. Like the cops with the far right, in their eyes we have chosen to not be English any more, we have chosen to side with the enemy. So our demonstrations are held to be inherently problematic and threatening, never framed in terms of their demands but their potential for trouble. I think we can assume hours have been sacrificed raking over demo footage for angles, with next to no results. And yet the eye of suspicion still hovers over us.

With nothing more concrete, this often takes the form of mere insinuation, the claim some might feel intimidated by our protests. And somehow not by pro-Israel rallies. Or Conservative Party conferences. Or pretty much anything else really.

In short, Israel isn’t colonising a weaker neighbour because it’s a Jewish state, but because it’s a state. It’s acting the way colonial states have always acted. Don’t let liars and apologists such as Rees-Mogg red-herring you.

‘THE WHEEL IN SPACE’ (PATRICK TROUGHTON’S DOCTOR WHO)

First broadcast: Apr/June ’68
Written by David Whitaker
(From a story by Kit Pedlar)

“Everything’s so… dead, isn’t it?”
-Jamie

Sticking To The Plan

“Our plans are anticipated,” complain the Cybermen. And you can see how that might have happened. In fact, you picture the pitch meeting as going something like…

“Well, Dr. Pedlar, thats a good idea. But an Antarctic base being infiltrated by the Cybermen, with an international crew who initially distrust the Doctor then come to work with him… it does seem rather familiar.”

“Do you think? Okay, let’s say it’s not an Antarctic base. Instead, let’s set it on… the moon!” 

“There was that one called… uh… what was it now... ’The Moonbase’.”

“So there was. Okay, then let’s really think outside the box this time. How about… a space station!”

“Capital! Six episodes, first draft by end of the month. Oh, and write the Doctor out of the second one. Patrick’s after another holiday.”

…and by serving up just the formula, like something assembled from kit parts by a committee, this loses almost everything which made the earlier Cyber-stories appealing. From ’Tenth Planet’ to ‘Tomb of the Cybermen’, each had built chronologically on the one before. The Cybermen pimp up both their plans and their design, and try again. Significantly, though this story is surely set later in the same chronology, no-one on the Wheel has even heard of the silver darlings.

Worse, the Cybermen had always stood for something. True, this could change completely from one story to the next. But in a way that kept things fresh. This time they’re a merely generic menace, aiming to invade the Earth because that’s the sort of thing they’d do. They most resemble the sneaky scheming Cybermen of ’The Moonbase’. But there’s little connection.

Let’s face it, this story’s no good. But that’s not the problem with it. In truth ’Doctor Who’ was frequently no good, even if our rose-tinted memories shy from saying it. The problem with it is that it’s not mad. And it is the business of ’Doctor Who’ to be mad.

You couldn’t claim ‘Web Planet’ or ‘The Space Museum’ as any good. But, to pick up on a phrase used when we looked at them, there was a deranged imagination at work. The brief was to fill a half-hour hole in the schedule, watchable enough for viewers to keep paying their license fee, while sticking to the budget. And from that they came up with ’The Web Planet’. It’s the sort of left-field, out-there thing the show’s chief character would have made, if tempted from his travels and enlisted to programme TV shows.

The Hartnell era had effectively been the antithesis of formula. More because no-one had hammered one out yet than out of any kind of principle, but it remained the case regardless. Even when Hartnell was dull, as it often was, it wasn’t formulaic. If anything it had the opposite problem, it was hard to credit this wildly varying material was all part of the same series even if it had the same actors in it calling each other the same names. It flew without a safety net, leaving you obliged to accept falls.

But Troughton marked the time when formula came in, which proved tighter bonds than any captor foe. And from then that tension would never really go away, between going wilfully mad and voluntarily donning a straight-jacket.

Though this is true, it does need qualifying. It may be that the show required some sort of formula, if it was to have any kind of longevity. And it should be said there are stories aplenty which are ‘formula-plus’, which follow the formula but manage to go mad anyway, such as ‘The Macra Terror’. But then there are also stories like this. We’ve gone from flying without a safety net to six episodes of being tangled up in one.

True, there are flickers still of that deranged invention. And not a whole lot of citation seems required to attribute them to David Whitaker. The pod things the Cybermen first burst from are entirely unexplained and equally memorable. Jamie’s sabotage… well, getting him accused of being a saboteur would seem enough. Instead there’s reference to a Back to Earth campaign. (Whose slogan is what? ‘Just Stop Space’ or ’Leave Means Leave’?)

Had it been up to me, I’d have set the Wheel spinning in tension before the Cybermen arrive to exploit this, a relief ship delayed by months because of reasons. Instead of a couple taking six episodes to get together, have them already split up but with one unable to move out given the circumstances.

As it is, the lack of anything resembling drama becomes a drawback. There’s corridors aplenty, but instead of running through them there’s just sort of hanging around. On the other hand, the wilful avoidance of jump scares, and their replacement by an inexorable inevitability, is a rare strength. Most evident in the moment when the Doctor finally faces off the Cybermen. He turns around to find them already in the room, and calmly states “I imagine you have orders to destroy me.”

Some say the problem is is Pedlar’s science fiction approach clashing with Whitaker’s more classic-’Who’ sense of telling a story through symbols. They may be onto something. But this means that the absurd ignorance of science, for a story set on a space station, is often given as an ancillary weakness.

Certainly its there. Distance in space is measured in miles, even though space has rather a lot of those. The Cybermen (somehow) cause a sun to go nova, which is (somehow) near enough to affect the Wheel straight away. Which is does by “deflecting” meteorites at it, though they can handily be shot out of the not-air. (You suspect this is just a relabelling of the debris which would be caused by an earth explosion.) 

But rather than weakness this is a strength, adding to the quirky charm. Of course Whitaker’s not purposefully getting it wrong, he’s just not bothering to look that stuff up. But that tells you where his interests lie. It encourages us to see everything not literally but in terms of symbols, as he intends.

Meet The Cast

Whitaker has said his chief goal was to humanise the characters. He does make Gemma (the slightly more competent deputy) likeable. But the only one you could claim as characterised is Zoe. Who is clearly being signposted as the next companion. We see the others at work in the Operations room before the end of the first episode. Then we’re not told about her until the second, before finally meeting her. And she seems semi-removed from the immediate story, mostly hanging out with Jamie, barely encountering the Cybermen. (That widely reproduced shot of them menacing her is a publicity photo, not a still.)

As Pinocchio was a puppet who wanted to be a boy, this maths prodigy is like the calculator who’d sooner be a girl. In a story where the antagonist is essentially killer robots, she’s told she’s “just like a robot… all brains and no heart.” Causing her to reflect “but I want to feel things as well.”

(Fun fact! Originally ‘computer’ was not a machine but a job, for calculations which then needed to be made manually. Tedious work, it was often assigned to women. Though more often found working in teams, like typing pools, than a single teenager. ’Wheel’ seems to assume that in a space-age future there’ll be more need for this sort of work, with some even bred for it.)

Her precocious nature, manifested as a tendency to reel off facts and numbers on any pretext, is shown to be annoying to the other crew. Which makes you wonder if Zoe’s more popular than the later Adric simply because fans are more likely to fancy Wendy Padbury than Matthew Waterhouse. Nevertheless, in order to see more of life than log books she stows away on the Tardis. An improvement on the adopted waifs that were Vikki and Victoria.

It wasn’t great scheduling for this to come out after the already un-good ’Fury From the Deep’. It’s not just worse, it’s worse in all the same ways. If only Troughton’s second season could have ended on the high of 'Web of Fear’. But it never seems to work that way...