DARK KNIGHT

Be warned! Great big bat-spoilers ahead!
(NB Such is the popularity of this film that it’s still showing at the flicks – meaning this review counts as current. Fear not good citizens - normal service will shortly be resumed.)

1. A Different Bat Time, A Different Bat Channel

Before the feature started, the cinema played the old Batman TV theme. (You know, the one where his Bat-mum calls him in for his dinner.) Surely a calculated piece of cheek, for this is preannounced to be not Batman but Dark Knight! Even if you’re not enough of a comics fan to know the Frank Miller associations of the term, you’ll have seen the trailer where the Joker talks about killing “the Batman”. That pronoun alone is enough to tell us this is Batman for grown-ups, the creature cursed to wander the night battling its monsters. The TV show Bats was always too weighted down by the contents of his utility belt to find use for a pronoun.

...none of which is good news. Its a peculiarity of superhero films that they’ve become stuck in the same trap as were comics in the Eighties. “Finally”, the argument goes, “we have the sophistication to give these characters the gravitas they always deserved.” Perhaps it’s just me, but I tend to reserve the term ‘gravitas’ for those who keep their underwear inside their trousers. To quote from the film, “why so serious?”

Christopher Nolan’s earlier Batman Begins, though popular among many, seemed to me a classic example of such folly. It spent its time building up a credible case for how a man might take up pointy ears in order to frighten off the Mob... in short it set itself up to fail. But others who had reacted to Begins in the same way seemed to take to Dark Knight (for example PatrickMM), so I tried it out. And found it genuinely was from a different Bat Time and different Bat Channel.

There’s an early clue that we’re in for a different take. Lieutenant (not yet Comissioner) Gordon has made a pin-board of ‘Batman sightings’, with pictures of the Sasquatch, Loch Ness Monster and the like pinned to it. Though the film has almost no plot overlap with the Miller comic whose name it borrows, in this way it picks up something Miller did which was missed by many of his imitators. Miller was never interested in the mundane details of how superheroes might function, whether they changed into their costumes on rooftops or in phone boxes. His fascination was with them as beings larger than life. He used them as symbols rather than bearers of supposed psychological depth.

2. Join the Laugh Side


So to start on a high note and go out on a limb, let’s praise Heath Ledger’s portrayal of the Joker – which brings out this approach to a tee.This icky, feral monster, smeared in peeling make-up, is the film’s centrepiece. Compared to Ledger, Jack Nicholson now seems a gurneying cabaret turn.

Super-villains tend to be more interesting than the straightlaced heroes. But this is the Joker’s film to the point where even the makers aren’t working very hard to pretend otherwise– some of the film posters feature only the Joker. “Ledger has a weird collection of tics and twitches, kinks and quirks” comments The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw. Ironically, this is the sort of Hollywood ‘method acting’ that’s normally so irritating, assembling a bag of mannerisms and calling that a character. (Check out Meryl Streep in just about anything.) But it so happens for the Joker this is absolutely perfect.

Origins tend to take a special place in superhero films. Comics often saw them only as an excuse to get going. Films, conversely, fixate upon them. Partly this is for formal reasons. Unlike comics, films aren’t ongoing but are one-off events, and so require a starting point. But also, films often aspire to supply a psychological dimension missing from the flat paper. Characters in the comics just are, they’re described by their appearance. In film, as in the first rule of drama workshops, they always need a motivation. (In the comics, Batman himself waited six months to get given one.) In Batman Begins, Tim Burton’s Batman , or for that matter Spider-Man or Daredevil, their origins continue to define them through the films.

In the very inverse of the Batman from Begins, the Joker has no backstory. When he’s caught, he can’t even be pinned to a set of fingerprints. (Gordon grumbles “No matches on prints, DNA, dental... Nothing in his pockets but knives and lint. No name, no other alias.”) He taunts his victims with supposed origin stories, each a bedtime story tailored to terrify that victim the most. Taking his origin out is a powerful a statement as putting something in. As K-Punk points out “What Ledger does... is play the make-up... evacuating the Joker of all interiority, by refusing anything which would contain the Joker's wildness or compromise the autonomy of his facepainted persona.”

Partly as a consequence, you’re never quite sure how crazy he really is. One moment he’s looking like he can’t reach the end of his next sentence, the next he’s pulling off the most audacious masterplan. Is it all an act, calculated to induce fear? Or is he really limitlessly malevolent? It even feels possible he could be completely crazy and entirely calculating. This serves to keep the Joker unsettling and unknowable. You can neither reason with him nor even give in to what he wants – for you don’t even know what he wants.

Though he commits crimes, the Joker is entirely unmotivated by personal gain. When he ends up with the money, he does with it what he’d do with anything else – he burns it. As K-Punk comments “The Joker is free in the same way that the death drive is free: he acts with indifference to consequences, glorying instead in a kind of ungrounded unbinding of orderly causal sequences.” Hence the scene where he is brought in ‘dead’ for a mobster who’s taken a contract on him. Of course it’s a ruse, but the point is he’s unbound by mortal fears - he’s living as if already dead.

Yet despite his fully indulged pyromaniac tendencies, what he really loves to take apart is people. He sees the law and the mob equally as his opponents, and devises elaborate and sadistic schemes purely to disrupt their schemes. “The mob has plans, the cops have plans, Gordon's got plans,” he complains. “You know, they're schemers. Schemers trying to control their worlds. I'm not a schemer. I try to show the schemers how pathetic their attempts to control things really are.... Introduce a little anarchy, you upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I am an agent of chaos.” The really scary thing about the Joker is that he thinks he’s doing what’s best for us. When he dresses as a Nurse, he’s administering us a short for what ails us – no matter how much it stings.

The Joker is what Rogan Taylor labelled a Demon Clown in his study of shamanism The Death and Resurrection Show. Demon Clowns, though themselves part of tribal societies, would recklessly disrupt the most sacred ceremonies and provocatively break the most deeprooted taboos. Taylor associated them with the immaterial underworld demons who tore apart the astral shaman. Both were about assaulting and stripping the psyche, reducing all that’s false and extraneous to leave us with what we’re really about. When we have all our illusions torn from us, how will we see the world then?

The character’s propensity for knives and (in one case) pencils comes in here as a counter-weight. He may be an agent of an abstract, but these serve to make him feel immediate and in your face, not some phantasm of boogeyman. He’s half-whispered-legend, half-feral monster.

But like all good updates on a theme, all this also harks back to the original Joker from 1940. To quote K-Punk again the film “manages a feat that is near impossible: it reinvents The Joker look whilst also maintaining fidelity to the comics.” His schemes are often the same as in his very first appearance, audaciously announcing his crimes in advance purely to trounce the authorities, declaring war on the criminals as well as the cops. The original, more dandyish Joker look may simply have come from being easier to draw than all those cracks in that make-up. (Wikipedia states the film’s also based on a more recent comic I haven’t read – The Long Halloween.)

3. The Two Faced Contagion



If it’s significant that one film poster features a solo Joker, it’s as significant that another manages to combine a signifier for himself and Batman. “You complete me”, the Joker tells pointy-head exultantly, professing them to be eternal forces who will “do this forever.” But it’s not just a matter of the laughing Joker against the scowling Bats. The one thing Batman Begins did get right was to find parallels between its heroes and villains. If we only see a contrast between them, we’re watching a fixed system, with no movement, no interplay. The Joker’s scheme to bring down Batman is not to kill him after all, but to make the two of them more alike. And in a sense they are alike, both operating outside of society to force their vision upon it. There is always the paradox that Batman does to criminals what they would do to their victims – terrify and intimidate them. He’s not big on due process. Batman’s chief differentiator from crime, that he doesn’t work for personal gain, is struck out here – neither does his adversary. The Joker would agree with Batman that criminals are superstitious and cowardly. He’d just say the same about everybody else.

But they are not the only parallels in town. Notably, Rick Norwood complains “every other character [bar the Joker] is one-dimensional... None have any of the complexity of real human beings. Even Harvey Dent {Two-Face] switches between all good and all bad at the flip of a coin.” This criticism isn't wrong, at least in the sense of being inaccurate. But it misses what the film is trying to do.

The characters are big and bold as primary colours, but we get our shades and patterns from watching their interplay.There’s a key scene where the camera circles Batman, Gordon and Dent on the police station rooftop. (A scene echoed in the film’s finale.) Dent is the sun to Batman’s moon, the public face of good. He’s endlessly referred to as “the shining light” or (still less subtly) “the white knight.” He will clean up Gotham by legal and public means, by rallying the people behind him. But Gordon contrasts the others too. He’s more anonymous than the crusading Dent, low-key and pragmatic. While Dent wants to focus on cleaning up the Police Department, Gordon would rather see it imperfect but functioning. At one point Gordon ‘dies’ to go undercover. Meanwhile Dent publicly takes the rap for something he didn’t do, to a roomful of flashbulbs.

Moreover, characters are often contrasts with themselves. This is most obvious in Harvey Dent’s transformation into Two Face, but is also true for Batman. Of course, we know that, ike Dent, he wears two faces. But here, when Bruce Wayne, he’s given to talk about Batman in the third person. There’s a repeated scene where he faces his Batsuit on a stand, as if it were somebody else.



To get here, something of a leap is made. After a film which concentrated entirely on Batman’s origin, it’s never mentioned here at all. This isn’t akin to the Joker’s tauntingly with-held backstory, this film is a continuation and we assume it’s there. But it is pushed into the background, and for a solid reason. When Wikipedia claim “a main component that defines Batman as a character is his origin story” we might quibble about those first six months, but when they add “Batman is...driven to fight crime” it seems unarguable.
However, a major plot element rests upon the conceit that Bruce Wayne is not similarly driven. He imagines that Gotham will one day be cleaned up, at which point he can retire Batman and marry his fiancee. Wayne’s will for this can even make Batman more fanatical, more intent upon his mission.

All of which are smart ideas... which don’t quite come off. Dark Knight is part explosive action film and part cop thriller, and manages this join. It’s also part slam-bang superhero story and part polyphonic psychodrama...and here it gets itself into more trouble.

Which isn’t to say such a thing couldn’t work. But transcending genre conventions is like transcending the rules of grammar. You have to understand those rules before you can go breaking them, or the results become messy and incomprehensible. Here the whole three-way thing tends to vie with Batman as the titular hero. It’s not that genre has limits which preclude anything morally ambiguous happening. It’s that its conventions stack so high that we need it telegraphed when something morally ambiguous is incoming. Perhaps his bat-vices need to be more telegraphed, like the Dalek episode of Doctor Who.

And it doesn’t help that the Joker’s star shines so brightly no-one else really competes. Batman has unfortunately come across as something of a stiff in all his films. He doesn’t look action-figure ready, he looks like he’s already the action figure. What can be rendered sinewy on paper merely looks blocky and lumpen on screen. They implicitly acknowledge this during the film and give the costume a redesign, to ill effect. Batman looks great as a shadowy figure, hovering on the corner of events. But when the spotlight falls on him he looks uninteresting.

Neither can Two Face match the Joker for villainy. His make-up, the very thing that so sells the Joker, seems something of a mash-up - like they couldn’t quite decide whether to make him frightening or cartoony. This is never more evident in the um... eccentric decision to leave the Joker out of the finale. You realize at that point that the whole emotional triangle only really works as a supporting act. Asked to carry the show, it limps home. Bereft of the Joker, none of the film’s other themes really adhere. They’re just.... you know... plans.

4.Torture Porn For Neo Cons?

Perhaps as a measure of the way we’re supposed to take this sort of stuff seriously nowadays, the political ramifications of this film seem to have sent the hens a-clutter. Some liberal commentators have seen in it a dangerously right-wing agenda, such as Spencer Ackerman’s review ‘Dark Knight Reflects Cheney Policy’:

"The Dark Knight" weighs in strongly on the side of the Bush administration. Confronting the Joker, a nihilistic enemy whose motives are both unexplained and beside the point, the Batman faces his biggest dilemma yet: whether to abuse his power in order to save Gotham City.”

Needless to say, Conservative sites have been lining up in agreement, such as SouthCon:

“Chris Nolan's Batman is basically Dick Cheney, forty years younger, in a black ninja suit. How cool is that?”

(Meanwhile, check out the mailing comments here)

Of course as I noted in my Spider-Man 2 review (from Lucid Frenzy’s Olde Printe Days), this partly just par for the course. Superheroes are big broad symbols, not tight and focused ones. We imagine what lies under the mask, and we imagine what we want to see. Picture a superhero appearing in an editorial cartoon, and you already picture him getting cramped and diminished, pinned to a position. And, as with Spider-Man 2, just because someone’s interpreted a film doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re right. The Neo Cons were presumably busy counting up all their foreign policy victories all the times the Joker manipulates his enemies into torture, including the occasion this leads directly to his escape. This is clearly not built to be a pro-Cheney treatise.

Nevertheless, the liberal critics are tapping into something, for there is something problematic going on here. Ultimately, Dark Knight trips over its own genre roots and fails to reach anything a genuine anti-conservatism would entail. Part of the problem is putting the larger-than-life characters in a ‘realistic’ (please note inverted commas) city setting. There’s a gulf between the main characters and the troubled populace which cuts as deep as any Shakespeare. The vigilante Bat-men seem to be there purely to make it clear we should be cheering his Bat-deeds rather than aping them – don’t try this one at home, kids. K-Punk is correct to dismiss the Neo-Con reading, but still see in this the shadow of Leo Strauss and his “noble lies and deadly truths” doctrine. Perhaps the conceit is that these main characters decide to give the populace what they consider them to need, but then just morph into their own roles.

The classic example of this is what everyone is calling the Deux ex Nokia finale. Batman’s collective eavesdropping on all the City’s mobile phone conversations is a brick-subtle analogy of the infamous Patriot Act. It’s openly questioned within the film, by the Bat-sidekick Lucius Fox. However, we also seem supposed to associate it with an earlier conversation about Caesar. With the barbarians at the gates of Rome, the populace decide to grant Caesar absolute but temporary power. Except... surprise!.. when its time for Caesar to give up these powers he seems less than keen to. But why is this analogy raised? Is it all a red herring? For having won his battle Batman merely torches his own device. Is his sheer ‘goodness’ supposed to stem from the fact that, if he can’t hang up his cape, at least he’s always wanting to? Or is it, as seems equally likely, that he’s our hero so is ipso facto untempted by such apples? It’s like Frodo slips the Ring on anyway, luckily finds there to be no adverse results and everybody can just go home. As an answer to the problem of granting others supreme power it isn’t one.

Superhero films do not naturally offer us the concept of collective responsibility. The one time the populace do rise above the status of a bewildered herd is in the twin boat/prisoner’s dilemma scene. Here they are only partly rescued by Batman, and they do much to resolve the situation themselves. However, it should be noted that the implications raised are themselves literally anti-social. Society is merely a kind of mob, inside which we feel safe to bay for blood. Everyone votes for the other boat to be blown up over theirs, but when asked as an individual to be the one to press the button we then assume responsibility. But even granting this conservatism, the scene rings false. You’re simply not convinced they would have acted the way they did, either in reality or the world the film has conjured up. Like the scene in the first Spider-Man where the crowd turn on the Goblin, you can’t help but feel the makers baulked at the implications of their own logic and bottled it.

In some ways this scene feels a microcosm of the film. The whole structure can’t withstand the presence the Demon Clown it itself releases, he corrodes what it is trying to create. If all we have to hold us together is these noble lies, this mask of bogus heroism, isn’t he the one actually telling us the truth? Isn’t his shock therapy actually setting us free after all, while Batman merely offers us the blue pill? The film can never quite raise itself up above its own genre conventions, indeed it often seems to fail to understand them, so is riddled with fault-lies for him to exploit.

Of course you can argue this doesn’t matter much. With the twin boat scene as perhaps a glaring exception, and unlike the characterisation problems raised earlier, none of this is likely to disrupt our ride too much. These are politico-philosophical questions that might not occur to too many popcorn-munchers. And as Savanaroloa puts it, commenting to K-Punk’s Bat Mailbag: “The real political ‘problem’ with the film...is also a political insight... It is a sign of the times that the people is simply a fickle opinionated multitude (with) never a collective in sight.” A film can be more expected to encapsulate its era than fix it. In which case it is only too appropriate for the poster to be given over to the Joker.

OH NO, NOT AGAIN!

Yes, but this is the last Doctor Who episode for Andrew Rilstone to write about, and consequently for me to comment on.

So next will have to be me saying something myself...

OOPS! I DID IT AGAIN!

More Who-related stuff will appear here, for those who like that sort of thing.

But for now all I've managed is some jibes from the cheap seats as Andrew Rilstone discusses Silence in the Library.

It's worth reading.

Honest.

SO GAVIN, WHAT'S NEW AND EXCITING ON YOUR BLOG THIS WEEK?

Er...

...um...

...look over there!

THE NEW DOCTOR WHO AND THE STRANGE DEATH OF LIBERAL ENGLAND (Part Two)

Click here for Part One

Two Hearts to the Doctor

It would be tempting to try and split this tension into some Doctor vs Rose dichotomy, presenting the old Gallifrean as uneasily cohabiting the Tardis with some “happenin’” street gal from Streatham (innit). Something like the Simpsons episode where Itchy and Scratchy get Poochy dumped on them because he’ll appeal to “the kids”. Certainly, the Rose subplots are at times the most annoying and the least Doctor Who-like. In The Empty Child, for example, the Doctor gets caught up in some genuinely creepy goings-on with a gas-masked kid, while Rose puts on a trendy Britpop T-shirt and employs the whole of the BBCs CGI department for no discernable reason before bumping into the equally gimmick-prone (and ceaselessly annoying) Captain Jack.

But that would be more neat than accurate. To see past this, we have to somehow see past Billie Piper and get to Rose as a character. In Dalek for example, Rose plays a pivotal role, effectively telling the Doctor how things are done on his show. It’s even arguable Rose should be seen as the central character. Not only is the first episode called Rose but the last is Bad Wolf, after her nomme de plume. Perhaps, like Alan Moore’s Halo Jones, New Who is really the story of an ordinary girl who did extraordinary things.

Besides, the Doctor doesn’t always behave absolutely like the Doctor here. As a character, he is famously reluctant to resort to violence. He has two hearts rather than two fists. For example, in The Empty Child he mentions replacing a weapons factory with a banana plantation – “I like bananas.”

But let’s take the episode where the Doctor acts the most un-Doctor – the aforementioned Dalek. This pulls a similar rug from under us as End of the World. At first it seems to be about the conflict between the Doctor and the cocksure arrogance of millionaire collector Van Statten. The Doctor explains the Dalek will kill everything it encounters because “it honestly believes they should die.” The Dalek’s like a snake or scorpion, living out its nature. Van Statten, conversely, is the underbelly of human society – a spoilt child wanting all the toys for himself. The drama is wrought from Van Statten not heeding the Doctor’s warnings. But slowly we come to realise it’s about Rose, about her telling the Doctor not to become what you fight. “Look at you”, she tells him, as he finds himself holding a heavy-duty ray gun.

All very effective… except the Doctor has already had his persona blunted by too close an association with today’s he-man heroes, who mix right with might so often we’ve almost forgotten there’s any other type of character. Seeing him pick up a weapon loses some of its impact when we’ve already seen him guide missile strikes and the like. Captain Jack may be intended as an action man for the Doctor to counter-balance and overrule, but it rarely works that way in practice. At times it just feels like he’s contracting out the he-man stuff.

The true dichotomy at the heart of the series between Davies’ ‘man out of time’ vision and the supposed demands of today’s ‘yoof’ audience. There’s a Doctor Who where Davies’ childhood nostalgism mutatred with his more downbeat adult sensibility, and produced a dark meditation of alien-ness and exile. But there’s another where Davies got boyishly excited to play with all the action figures – hence the struggle. As Davies himself put it: “Right from the very first meeting, the BBC said to me ‘early Saturday evening, six or seven o’clock’ – and that has decided what the show is.” Most of the endemic weaknesses almost everyone has seen in the series – the lack of extended stories, the rushed and over-neat endings, the preponderance of Earth-bound settings – come from this source.

Of course, the BBC’s populist instincts may well have been correct in themselves. It’s worth pointing out that Davies’ dark vision of exile wasn’t really ‘old Doctor’ either, and could have turned into one of those cult classics which you and I loved and no-one else watched. What’s important to note is that the old Doctor was part of an era where it was more possible to straddle such contradictions, indeed where such an ability was regarded as one of the very foundations of broadcasting. For today’s narrowcasted times, things are much harder.

We Demand Narnian Wardrobes and Lucky-Dip Landings!

…and there’s another (associated) piece of traditionalism that should never – repeat, never – have been thrown out. In the ultimate rule of if-its-not-broke-don’t-take-your-sonic-screwdriver-to-it, the Doctor should not be able to control the Tardis! This rediscovery of the time-flight manual may well have been brought in to allow for the preponderance of Earth-set stories. Though there’s allusions to adventures on far stars, the furthest the on-screen antics get from our home planet is a couple of satellites around it. Davies has openly said the Saturday-night-at-six-or-seven-o’clock audience might not take the Quadrillian quadrant or whatever, so he was more prone to set events in central Swansea instead. A working Tardis might explain why they keep coming back to the same place week after week. If so, this was a mistake built to justify another one…

Of course the Tardis is like a microcosm of this, or for that matter any other, successful series. Apparantly occupying only a set amount of schedule time, it gives the optical illusion of being bigger than it looks – hinting at other offshoots and adventures which we never see but tease at our imaginations. But as any stage magician will tell you, for optical illusions to work the audience mustn’t look at them too hard.

There are functional reasons for a random Tardis apleanty. For one it keeps the box in the background, where it belongs. It works best as a Narnian wardrobe, enabling another adventure then sitting quietly in the corner until its end. (The corollary rule to its uncontrollability is that only the Doctor and his chosen assistants ever get to go inside it – a rule which gets broken just as often and just as annoyingly.)

For another, it stops the Tardis being a get-out-of-trouble-free card. A go-anywhere-at-any-time box which is by-the-way indestructible needs a pretty hefty chunk of green kryptonite to counteract it’s power. Without any of this it becomes either a story-extinguishing deux ex machina plot device or a time-paradox worrying tooth, with neither a path to go down. After I’d had this thought episodes appeared to encapsulate both these ideas, which marked the twin low-points of the first season. Fathers Day (the one with Rose’s Dad) nominally blamed the death of the Time Lords for it’s ultimately nonsensical timebending games, but it was the souped-up Tardis which (literally) drove them to it. Boom Town (the Slithene-in-Swansea episode) took the opposite tack and ended up in perhaps even a worse place. It’s bizarre to think we’d complained about deux ex machina endings before this gormless literalisation of the concept, where Tardis becomes just another word for God. We truly didn’t know when we were well off.

Finally, and most obviously, the lucky-dip landings make for a perfect source of stories – like the Tardis is a dressing-up box without a bottom. But there’s more than plot functionality afoot, and this takes us closer to the heart of it. The Doctor’s nomadism, his exile from his sedentary race, is the very nub of who he is – the endless itinerant, the astral traveller… (If you really can’t guess where this is going, it gets revealed in the finale.)

But the contradictions of Davies’ two vying approaches (as alluded to earlier) cut straight across this heart. Returning once more to The End of the World, imagine how much more poignant Rose’s plight would be if she was not just a visitor to a strange time but marooned from home. Her Earth would be as dead to her as surely as the other Earth was dying before her. Her calls to her mum on her astrally-assisted mobile could have become a regular feature. As the years travel go by her mum’s still inside the same afternoon she left, asking her what she wants for tea that night. The mobile, the totem of street-girl empowerment, would paradoxically come to underline her isolation. But this is Saturday-evening-at-six-or-seven-o’clock, and there is time for none of that.

The Re-uniting of the Ways

You really want to know how Doctor Who it all is? There’s a simple measure. Listen to the theme tune! Music is often drama’s skeleton key, the element they assume you’re only taking in subliminally. The new theme tune has strings added, this is true. They are annoying, an unnecessary intrusion to the cold electronic beauty of Delia Derbyshire’s original. But then it could be worse – they could be higher in the mix! With a little effort of will, you can even block them out. How high those strings are in that mix is a barometer of how watered-down the concept has become.

But, as the saying goes, who cares? Though everybody inevitably measures this Doctor against their childhood favourite, he should most sensibly be compared to his nearest neighbour – Sylvester McCoy. This despite the fact that so much is nicked from the McCoy era – modern tough-gal assistants and flying Daleks – then labelled as new by the hype machine. But, while the McCoy era could throw up some good ideas, it mismanaged them. This incarnation rediscovers and makes more of them. Though it’s anti-traditional ruthlessness is often pushed too far, it’s still the right direction to travel. And thank the Tardis for what it isn’t – a perfectly preserved museum piece.

Besides, in many ways this series takes things back to basics. For all his years of going anywhere and being anyone, the Doctor must have something at his core. In fact the series’ endless flexibility only makes it more vital that this core remains inviolate. Who – who really – is the Doctor?

Andrew Rilstone defines him as “an essentially non-violent character who solves things with his mind.” Fair enough in itself. But the Doctor is more than a latter-day Sherlock Holmes, asserting brains over brawn and subjecting mysteries to rational explanation. A brain in the wrong hands is just as much a weapon as an exterminator stick. The Doctor has an enlarged brain, true, but more crucially he has two hearts. He’s called ‘The Doctor’, has magician-like ‘assistants’, travels astrally. Science is merely his magic. He’s a shaman and an alchemist, and the thing he’s ultimately about is transformation. He’s even given to transforming himself from time to time.

Evil in his universe tends to be less an absolute force and more a product of the misguided or misunderstood. It’s less about kicking bad guys and more about healing the sick. In The Empty Child, for example, the malevolent monster disguised as a child crying for his mummy turns out to be nothing other than a child crying for his mummy.

The fans might baulk to hear this, but the character can only time travel as well as the script writers allow him. Unless this new series is made for us, about our time, it’s a waste of our time. Its conceit is to present something that’s about now but to aim for the audience of old – the universal, family audience of long-lost liberal England. It finds that audience more fractured, less homogenous than in the past. So it presents its main character as lost, the last of his kind, fighting battles others have forgotten. The adventure is on. Just as he journeys to heal some imaginary alien society, the Doctor must spin stories whose telling re-bonds us, which heal our society. If that sounds like a tall order, then small wonder the failures are frequent. But adventures are not made to be easy. And there are successes in there too.

“You need a Doctor”, Christopher tells us in the series’ finale.

Damn right we do.

THE NEW DOCTOR WHO AND THE STRANGE DEATH OF LIBERAL ENGLAND (Part One)

Exploring new frontiers of time and relative dimensions in lateness, here’s something about the Ecclestone era of Doctor Who – beamed in from the old print days of Lucid Frenzy. After the second part, something slightly more recent will follow. Try to imagine the title atop an imaginary Target novelisation, Daleks advancing across village greens and exterminating cricketers. Oh, and PS – Plot Spoilers!

The Time Paradox

It’s reminiscent of that quote from the Woody Allen film, about wanting our loved ones to take over the role of our parents – while simultaneously putting right every wrong thing we feel our parents ever did to us. But it’s also reminiscent of the scene from the Simpsons where Bart hugs the TV instead of Homer, because “it did more to raise me than you did!”

In short we expect the new Doctor to live up to every selective and over-inflated childhood memory we have of the old – while simultaneously souping up and revitalizing the show for our more discerning modern palettes. And then we go and invest a completely disproportionate amount of emotional weight on it succeeding.

Meanwhile, in counting up special effects budgets or measuring the wobbliness of sets, we simultaneously miss the point from the opposite angle. Just turning a Dalek’s plunger arm into a deadly weapon is like sticking a tail fin and cattle grille on an old banger. Without changing anything under the bonnet, you’re just weighting it down.

Perhaps the best thing the new series can do is sidestep the whole question, and encourage us to do the same. Like a rock star’s son, it has to cut itself free from the shadow and take to the stage in its own right.

Mirrors That Reflect

Besides, for all our nostalgism there’s a lot with the old Doctor Who which needs putting right. How familiar does this sound? An old boy with contrived eccentricities and some annoying kids turn up on some arbitrary planet. There reside some good but rather ineffectual guys, who turn out to be beset by some apparently effectual bad guys. They run around for a bit, then by episode six find out the bad guys are super-susceptible to something or other. Maybe it’s the rubbing of fingers on balloons, the seven times table being recited backwards, or something else along those lines. This dispatches said baddies screamingly, there’s a wheezing groaning noise and they’re off to do it all again the following Saturday.

The very professionalism of the Doctor’s philanthropy becomes a problem. He’s like a cosmic plumber, the bodily extension of his sonic screwdriver, never actually touched by the problems he solves. He’s like a space tourist, admiring the scenery but never actually getting out the car. The right hands saw this problem and made sure the situation reflected the inner state of the Doctor and his companions in some way. But all too often he was in the wrong hands, and became a cipher.

The new series strides in proclaiming its desire to fix this fault in our cosmic fixer-upper. As ever, Andrew Rilstone puts it well: “[Russell] Davies said that he wanted Doctor Who to be character driven. Or ‘emotionally literate’, if you insist… The main ‘fantasy’ plot can be quite silly, but this doesn’t matter because it is really only a peg on which to hang some character drama. The End of the World was not really about a lot of rich aliens on a spaceship being menaced by a baddie, it was about the Doctor’s relationship with Rose.”

Once you grasp this central point you get the very advantage, not only of Doctor Who but of fantasy, SF, magic realism or whatever you choose to call it. In a soap, to reflect the character’s mental state you have their kitchen or front room. If they’re in a bad way, this room could look a bit messy. In SF you can build a whole planet up from scratch just for them. Its like comparing a fairground hall of mirrors with the mirror in your bathroom. One looks more interesting than the other, but that interest is based on the knowledge that its still reflecting you in some distorted way. Forget that and it soon becomes a gimmick or mere distraction.

No Direction Home – The Strange Death of the (Old) Doctor

Once you get the sense that this could all be going somewhere, then good plot construction can come on board. This means more than simple plot twists, such as the near-weekly notion that Rose must be dead… no really dead this time, no wait, there she is by the drinks machine. Several times it pulls the street magician’s trick of getting our eyes to follow him in one direction while he pulls the rabbit out from another. Returning to The End of the World, we start off thinking this is Rose’s story, about her exile from home. Then we’re hit with the Death of the Time Lords! The Doctor’s the one who can never go home! Whok! We never saw that left hook coming!

Once introduced, this ‘never go home’ theme becomes the main thread of the series.It’s not one that every episode hammers away at, but the more successful episodes tend to allude to it in some way. It’s a smart card to play for it has a metafictional dimension, which plays on the series’ nostalgism. In a very real sense the Doctor’s home world is dead – the family sitting down together and tuning in the paternalistic old BBC set, with honey still for tea. His reappearance conjures up associated memories of our own childhoods, also dead.

But it also has a deeper, more political dimension.The Doctor was the epitome of English enlightened paternalism. Shouldering the white man’s burden as he sorted out their problems for the Thals or this week’s gang of grateful foreigners. Yet there was simultaneously a genuine liberalism about him – a distrust of conformity, a celebration of difference, a faith in brains over brawn. Its scarcely a coincidence that the series’ classic era was the ‘permissive’ Sixties and Seventies, a moment of opportunity poised between the crushing rocks of the two Cold Wars.

But while the strange death of liberal England has dragged most popular media rightwards, Davies’ Doctor recoils to the left. Most episodes have some political subtext or other. Let’s take The End of the World again, seeing as it’s lying so handily where we last left it. It parries resurgent British xenophobia by exposing the absurdity of keeping Earth-race purity alive while the planet is dying. So far, reasonably traditional. Pertwee or Baker could have done all that. Other episodes push it a touch further, putting crop-tech dystopias against anarchist rebels (The Long Game).

But Aliens of London most decisively runs up the colours, which are no longer classic small-l liberalism. The real Prime Minister is usurped and locked in a wardrobe by shapeshifting profiteering alien imposters, only for the natural order to be restored and the golden age returned. In The Empty Child, the Doctor tells wartime London not to forget to create the welfare state. (Even though we all have.) For all its frenetic modernity and foregrounding of mobiles and internet connections, the New Doctor is Old Labour.

Try Satire and Some Take Ire

But perhaps the biggest leap is into direct political satire, undertaken most blatantly by the controversial Aliens of London. The significance wasn’t that the Doctor was put into conflict with some value embodied by the British Establishment (such as warmongering), but that he was put into conflict with the sitting Cabinet – or at least an immediately transparent stand-in. This was a leap too far for even the more intelligent quarters of Who fandom (aka Andrew Rilstone) who complained the programme traditionally addressed such questions through “allegory or morality play… Had I been briefed to talk about Iraq in the Doctor Who format, I would either have sent the Doctor to… some totally fictitious world on the brink of war, or else… used the real war as a backdrop to an alien-invasion story.”

As well as being ‘un-Who’, Andrew seems to take exception to the metafictional implications – the story is simultaneously set in our ‘real’ world and yet not. Well so is every other piece of political satire ever written! I have a vision of a puzzled Andrew sitting before Spitting Image or holding a Steve Bell cartoon, wondering why Thatcher is suddenly a puppet or Dubya now has a monkey’s body.

As for it being ‘un-Who’, perhaps so. Perhaps traditions are being undermined. But, if you’ll pardon the expression, who cares? For the post-war generation, sticking a Dalek spaceship in Trafalgar Square had a particular resonance. That’s why its variants could be repeated so often over the next twenty-five years without everyone switching off out of tedium. For us a flying machine crashing into a tower has a particular resonance, even when the tower’s the very un-twinned Big Ben. But it’s not the same resonance. The different image works upon us in a different way. We’re different folks and we need different strokes. New times warrant new approaches.

But if there’s no rule to stop the new Doctor doing satire as a genre, that doesn’t mean he can undo its own intrinsic flaws. This is less true of Aliens of London than of Bad Wolf, which mixes the old Pertwee episode Carnival of Monsters with Kneale’s Year of the Sex Olympics and then throws in a dash of the Truman Show for good measure. A parody of our TV-addled times is welcome, even from the TV, but going specifically for the Big Brother brand and the Anne Robinson quiz show is a mistake. It’s what turned the latter-day Simpsons to folly, seduced into toothlessness by the neatness of celebrity cameos. Animal Farm is not made a lesser work by the fact that Stalin never read Napoleon’s lines out on Jackanory. The first rule of satire is to never get too close to your target. Pissing on them works better that way. (Little capital is made from going for the brand names anyway. Giving The Weakest Link the death penalty is the throwaway gag you thought of the first time you saw it. More critical distance may have given more bite, not less.)

All Along the Telegraphing

But while the programme needs updating for our age, it can’t be taken too far or change be made for change’s sake. Can’t, but inevitably does. The old Doctor cuppa is put through the makeover cappuchino machine, and ends up tasting different but with a whole lot of froth to wade through. The first episode in particular gets things off to a very bad start, with lots of flip ‘ironic’ dialogue clearly tailored for the Buffy generation.

And of course on the back of this comes the hype. Which at best is harmless, and its even fun to see Daleks back on the cover of the Radio Times. But with the hype comes the telegraphing. You can run from this, but it’s hard to hide. For example, even if you didn’t read the hype articles it was hard to switch off the telly before the next-episode trailer. First the initial Dalek appearance was given this way, when it was clearly written to be a surprise sprung on you mid-way through the episode. But this was beaten hands down by the second Dalek appearance, given away despite being a cliffhanger twist delivered at the end of the next episode!

Of course you can get all meta-historical about this if you so desire. Legends and folk tales absolutely lack the concept of a first reading (and with it the concept of a twist or surprise), as they were normally recited communally. It would be like putting a twist in the middle of the Easter Mass. Even early novels had chapter-head summaries which existed solely to give the game away – “whereupon Jane discovers Mr. Rochester’s first wife to be still alive, quite mad and hiding in the attic” etc. But those things were written that way! Today’s stuff is written with the twists in mind, then spoils them itself!

Part Two will follow shortly…

DOCTOR WHO SERIES 4 (Part Two)

SILENCE IN THE LIBRARY/ FOREST OF THE DEAD

Never one to shirk controversy, I’m willing to stick my head on the block and call Stephen Moffat a quite good Doctor Who writer. It’s only surprising how few others have noticed this…

This two-parter partly reminded me of The Matrix, only in a good way. After hordes of horrific copycats, including some by the makers of The Matrix, you need that qualifier! But like The Matrix it divided everything into two realities, then signifies the ‘real’ reality (where people do normal things) as fake and the big adventure one as real. It’s quite literally the TV adventure show which is the real thing here! Moffat even extended to convention by metafictionally lumbering ‘real’ reality with storytelling devices, such as jump-cutting.

By this point Moffat’s mofits are starting to show, for example the innocuous phrase turned into sinister catchphrase ("are you my catchphrase?", "Hey, who chose my catchphrase?"), or its corollary the hysterical cry repeated in modulated tones. Does this mean that in three years time we'd be as glad to see the back of Moffat as much as Davies? Possibly, except many of Davies' devices were bad news to start with. (Deux est machina = Latin for cheating.) A better example might be Chris Claremont, people found his scripts fresh at first but the faster and faster he was made to churn them out made them old fast. Maybe Moffat shouldn't write any more episodes per series than he is currently.

MIDNIGHT

A combination of the fact we know this to be the budget episode and the trailer suggested we were to get something of a rip-off, specifically of the classic Twlight Zone episode Nightmare at 20,00 Feet- so it was a pleasantly surprise when what appeared was a more intelligent homage to another episode entirely, The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.

Personally, I’m always a sucker for claustrophobic/cabin fever stories so I was away. I didn't quite understand the point of the trip if they couldn't even look outside once they got to the emerald waterfall, but...

Perhaps the moment which sums up the episode’s effectiveness is when the woman is first taken over by the monster. As she slowly turns to face us we naturally expect some sort of rubber mask, but the spooky expression she makes merely with her own face is much more effective. It was fitting for the 'monster' to stay unexplained (what was its relationship to the Sky woman? etc), and we can only hope they don't retrofit some post-hoc bollocks onto it later. With the whole point that it was the Wormtongue thing which could make you think and do the worst, to explain it would just undermine it. It’s also cool the way the Doctor didn't solve everything, the second time they've done that this series. (After Planet of the Ood.)

Whilst watching the episode, I wondered how much more involving it would be if this wasn’t a Doctor Who story at all, if we didn’t know for sure whether the stranger was or wasn’t involved with us all. However, some people on the Barbelith board argued it was effective to see the Doctor deprived of his powers – after all we’re used to his power of persuasion being used almost as a super-power.

TURN LEFT

It's classic wish fulfilment stuff of course. If we'd just taken one random turn left instead of right, we wouldn't be working in offices but out living lives of adventure and saving the universe on a semi-regular basis. Not that there's anything wrong with that. As a measure of how much I liked this episode I don't have actual criticisms. But there's a few points I was a bit agnostic about...

i) I found the motives for the Trickster a bit obscure. (Assuming it doesn't turn out to have been on the side of Armageddon, which isn't suggested. It’s more like it was a mega-cardshark who came across Donna at random.)
ii) The series often foregrounds genre conventions. Normally you're not supposed to ponder on the likelihood of the Doctor meeting Donna twice, you just accept it as a story enabler. Then they suddenly pick it up and wave it at you. The risk here is that by flagging up some conventions they’ll expose and undermine all of them, and bring down the house of cards we’re watching.

iii) Perhaps relatedly, this episode was heavily reliant on past continuity. You even had to think why the Master and the Toclafane don't turn up. (Presumably because the Doctor going to the far future makes that happen.) While elements had previously been seeded, that tended towards the background and the episodes themselves worked pretty much standalone. It's true I happily watch serials where the very opposite is true (I've even watched Babylon 5 from time to time!), but I'm not sure that a series shouldn't come down on one side or the other.

Moreover, this question perhaps has an extra edge in the context of New Who. More than anything else, New Who has two sets of foundations – the old mass-broadcast family TV show, then the later novels and radio plays thrown to hungry fans whilst it was off the air. I had previously dismissed these (sight unseen) as fanwank, though I was later to discover some of my more favourite stories to be based in them. (For example, Family of Blood.) Nevertheless, while it will be forever pulled in the direction of its more vocal audience, the show neglects its general audience at its peril.

THE STOLEN EARTH

These grand finales can’t help but induce a split reaction in you. Throughout New Who, they’ve normally been eclipsed by seemingly more minor episodes. And that seems true of them taken as a whole, it’s not just a matter of the pay-offs not packing enough of a punch. Dalek was much more memorable than Parting of the Ways, Girl in the Fireplace than Doomsday and Blink than Last of the Time Lords. It’s as if Who was always an eccentricity, a quirk of scheduling which didn’t translate into the scale and portent of event TV. (True, the mid-season two-parters have often fared better, for example Silence in the Library from this very series.) And yet when you sit down before them, cup of tea in hand, you find your hopes are high…

This finale induced a big fear in particular – crowding. With so many guest stars (most from two spin-off series I don’t even watch) would there be room to actually do anything, or would this be the wedding of Reed and Sue Richards? This did become a problem, but not as much as might have been feared. While some complained the ‘subspace network’ was yet another contrivance, we needed such a contrivance if this was to be stitched together at all. But Davies’ real smart move was to remove the Doctor from most of the action; the more and more who reappear the more we’re reminded the Doctor isn’t there.

However, the one pointless reappearance and cul-de-sac of a subplot was the Juddoon. It’s already been established that they’re the only sort of police we’re ever going to get in the Whoniverse, rulebook-bashing meatheads who border on mercenaries. Now, for the first time in his many lives, the Doctor goes running for the fuzz? Then gets surprised when they react a bit like… um… the police might do? Neither do they actually help him solve the riddle, their ostensible purpose, so much as stand around while Tennant speed-dates some exposition. It would have made more sense and induced more tension to keep the Doctor offscreen rather than subject us to this.

Now you, me and everybody has had cause to complain Davies just writes big set-pieces stitched together by sci-fi gobbledygook. But then again those set-pieces don’t write themselves, and at times he exhibits a huge talent for them. When we look upon our heroes crestfallen faces as they hear the massed Daleks endlessly chanting “exterminate… exterminate…” it’s a memorable moment, a positive twist on the way they’ve been successively reduced to a catchphrase over the years. (Though admittedly its heartrending to try and imagine how much better that would have worked if we hadn’t been tipped off the Daleks were coming.)

Better still, this is smartly followed by a scene which suggests the very opposite. Though not picked up on by the good guys, there’s clearly murky goings-on in the world of Dalek politics. What might have been mere melodrama suggests a slightly unstable triangle between Davros, the Red Dalek and the insane, babbling Caan.

JOURNEY’S END

Okay, so Davies ain’t gonna quit those deux est machina devices anytime soon. We know going in that he’ll paint everyone into a corner, give us some feint about letting off a big bomb, after which it’s Donna’s go at becoming God - fixing everything then getting better. (Or more accurately, worse.) But why does it have to be yesterday’s card trick up his sleeve? What we get is a fusion of the ending of the first and second series, or possibly the second series upside down. Donna’s temporarily granted everything she was ever after, but this not only means she can never have it again – it has to unhappen, she has to be taken memory-less back to her former life, a kind of death.

But admittedly Davies is bringing back something which works. Donna’s entire plotline has throughout been classic wish-fulfilment, if a temp from Chiswick is ‘special’ enough to save the entire Universe then what price could be laid on you or me? (“You've had a life of work and sleep and telly, and rent and tax and takeaway dinners. All birthdays and Christmases and two weeks' holiday a year, and then you end up here.”) By embracing such wish-fulfilment, Davies hits the nail on the head.

And then what is there left to do to the nail but bend it? It’s perhaps ironic that after worlds have been moved and put back again, the most memorable scene is the Doctor telling her he’s off, her not really hearing and him walking out into the rain. Understatement can be the strongest language of all.

Onto other business… the Doctor’s ‘reincarnation’ was in itself merely manipulative. Davies had clearly thought there’s no point to a cliffhanger which ‘kills’ the Doctor, as we all know he won’t die. But he just might reincarnate – so let’s throw in that!

However, it did give us the subplot of the ‘other’ Doctor. There’s the nice scene when Davros triumphantly brings up something oft-mentioned by fans, that the Doctor merely outsources his destructiveness to others. The other Doctor is clearly his id, this destructiveness made manifest – as witnessed by his exterminating the Daleks. Unfortunately the episode is so busy that the plotline feels undeveloped. Though the proper Doctor registers his disapproval of this explosive solution, we really need a confrontation between them we don’t get. As in the genre conventions it foregrounds, it ends up almost proving the very rule it set out to undermine – in the absence of anyone else, the Doctor just conjures up another him to do the dirty deed.

And on the subject of underdeveloped subplots… It’s revealed that Davros is far from master of his creations. Though the Doctor taunts him as their ‘pet’, it seems more like he’s treated like an awkward grandfather, given his own flat from where he’s visited rarely. The supreme egoist might have preferred death to this dishonour. However this splendid revelation is dropped only to fall, it’s not really taken anywhere.

And what’s all this about the Daleks wanting to destroy the universe? Haven’t they previously clamoured to conquer, to press the rest of us into servitude? Isn’t one of the ironies of their limbless existence that they need slaves, to quite literally be their hands and feet? If they had reasoned that they were never likely to conquer the universe, that their failures had been too frequent, so instead they needed to burn Rome, that might have been a nice moment. As it was it pushed them back into the generic – they were simply bad aliens doing bad things, just so they could be stopped.

NOT MUCH OF A CONCLUSION...

After the distinctly below-par third series, this was something of a return to form. (Admittedly it had duff episodes, but Who always has and probably always will…) Whether this was Davies saving the good stuff up for his swan song is of course another thing but (as the saying goes) who cares?

DOCTOR WHO SERIES FOUR (Part One)

PARTNERS IN CRIME

It would be less than entirely unreasonable to assume the brief for this episode was 'Supernanny turned into Alien Villain'. As I would rather New Who reference current trends than just recycle old monster outfits, I don’t consider that a bad idea. Plus, if they're going to 'do' other TV shows I'd rather they did it this way, than actual parodies of Trinny and Suzannah or The Weakest link. (The author is here thinking of no previous episode in particular.) But... Davies, we have a problem.

The problem isn’t the lightweight tone, whatever was cried in some fan circles. (With Catherine Tate previously known as a comedian, fans may have feared she marked a permanent resetting of the series.) Who is hardly stuff to take in deadly earnest, it normally features some comic elements and has featured out-and-out comedies before now.

The problems are much more specific. It’s largely an attempt at the ‘screwball’ comedies of old. These don’t normally have much of a socially important theme to get across. They’re more like watching tapdancing or ice skating, you don’t expect innovation, what you hope for is that the predictable is done with style and panache. Consequently they don’t tend to be just okay, they either come up with a chemistry which reacts or one which just falls flat.

This episode does perhaps achieve this at times (for example the Doctor and Donna’s mimed conversation across a room), but only intermittently. Worse, the problem was not that the episode was lightweight but that it was indecisive about how lightweight it should be. Was it a dramatic episode with comic moments, the reverse or neither? A telling feature is that it can’t really decide how evil the Adipose or their Nanny are supposed to be. It’s nearest neighbour would be Boom Town, though admittedly it wasn’t as risible as that particular low point.

And one final complaint, call me a fundamentalist, but I don't like the
idea of the Doctor as some sort of Cosmic Detective going on
missions and investigating irregularities. The true Doctor should be a wanderer, and trouble should find him. He’s a personality, not a job!

Undoubted highlight: surprise reappearance of Rose. Even though you knew she was coming…

FIRES OF POMPEII

After the first few scenes, this put paid to any lingering fears that we were now watching a comedy show. Which was cleverly done, except the joke anachronistic dialogue worked against them when they wanted more gravitas later on. "These people are going to die? But they're only characters from a toga sitcom in the first place!"
But overall this was a quite strong episode. I'm not sure the intervention thing made much sense beyond "the Doctor can intervene when the scriptwriter says he can, just not when he doesn't". But the emphasis was on the emotional effect that had on the characters. You naturally assume the eruption was just being hidden from the soothsayers by the sinister aliens, stopping you seeing the twist coming. Equally, returning to rescue the family makes little sense. Is the worth of a human life measured in screen time? But it’s dramatically effective!

And were the two conceptions of time borne out by the sides? Were the rock-based Pyrovile intended to represent a fixed, linear perspective on time, while the Doctor introduces chaos and flux?

PLANET OF THE OOD

I suspect this won't go down well with Who fandom in general, who seemed to take against the upfront political allegory in Aliens of London. It’s quite clearly (at one point explicitly) an analogy for slavery. The references to the Circle, for example, presumably come from 'Will the Circle Be Unbroken' while the Great Galactic Empire… well, I expect you got that one yourself.

Some elements did seem to be present purely to stop it getting too literal, as a kind of self-denying schema. (I’d guess it was set somewhere icy to make it as much the opposite of Africa as possible.) But it also understood the point of using analogy is that you can deliberately distort the mirror to make your points the more sharply. Making the Ood a kind of telepathic hive-mind contrasted them against the single-minded entrepreneur who would enslave them.

It seemed to give the Doctor very little to do, bar witness events then switch off the bombs as an afterthought. This may have come through political correctness, wanting to avoid a ‘white-man-frees-the-slaves’ plotline. But again, it carried with it its own effectiveness. On a story—function level you’re waiting from the off for the Butler Ood to go all red-eye, then are caught out by the twist. And the twist itself, if not carried out by the Doctor, fitted well in the Whoniverse – a piece of poetic justice and an ironic twist on the ‘all men are brothers’ saying. Was there a kind of underlying contrast between the red-eye Malcom X Ood and the more patient Martin Luther King Ood?

SONTARAN STRATEGEM/THE POISON SKY

If we accept that Partners in Crime tried to do something a bit different just not very successfully, this was Who so formulaic as to be generic. Worse, with decades of back-history to raid, and just about any other film or series fit for plunder, why recycle things we’ve only just seen? Aliens hiding their sinister machinations in modern technology – what a novel and innovative idea, I wonder why no-one’s thought of that before! Ho hum…

At times it even felt like a remix of other episodes, scenes we've seen rearranged into a different order. Telling indeed was the extended 'mystery' of who was behind this plot, complete with cut-to shots of malevolent hands, rendered slightly less mysterious by being given away in the title. What happens here is the sort of stuff that's supposed to happen in Doctor Who, with no need to give the matter further thought.

Worse, while I’m not an old-show fundamentalist nor have some sentimental attachment to low budgets, in the Radio Times they contrasted the modern Sontarans against the first appearance…and really gave the game away. (Similar examples below.) One looks more realised, less thrown together, while the other draws it appeal precisely through looking rough and unfinished. As Timothy Hyman argued in his essay A Carnival Sense of the World “such grotesque figures may be best understood as conscious repudiations of the closed body of the Renaissance, in which all protuberances will be smoothed down, all apertures closed.” These Sontarans looked smoothed, and there is no better way of summing up this storyline.

Best bit? The Doctor deducing from the off who the interloper is, but not bothering to say.

THE DOCTOR’S DAUGHTER

As mentioned under Fires of Pompeii, it’ s possible to ignore lapses of logic in favour of dramatic truth. There are limits, however…

i) If both sides in this war can just keep cloning themselves for extra infantry, why get so excited when some
strangers pass by to clone? If they materialised inside the Royal Mint, would everyone look up and say "look, people with a bit of cash on them?"
ii) Why were the Hath there anyway? It might have made some sense if it was a water-world but no mention of that. As soon as one comes across anything resembling a liquid he promptly drowns in it!
iii) How come Time Lords understand any language in the universe apart from bubbly ones?

As soon as you get the 'two warring sides' set-up there's no real doubting where all this is going. And how's it all fixed? The Doctor scattering more bloody magic pixie dust!!! Can't we have a pixie dust embargo for the rest of the series now?

There were however, some counterbalancing nice bits:
i) The generations-not-years twist. (Even if it didn't make much logical sense it served to underline the horror of war rather than just repeat it - "Yeah, gotcha! War bad.")
ii) The Doctor arguing with his daughter about whether he's a warrior or not. It’s cool the way the series can sometimes questions its own hero.
iii) Martha's first scenes with the Hath where she's not sure what to make of them.

UNICORN AND THE WASP

If Partners in Crime confused itself over which tone it was using, this episode got similarly indecisive about a bigger question - what genre it was employing. It’s the difference between not knowing what mood you’re in and not knowing what you’re doing. It simply couldn’t decide whether it was a pastiche or an example of the Christie genre, while either option might have done.

There were plenty of examples of parody (the lead piping, the Doctor milking the ‘revelation’ scene). But we also seemed expected to take the whodunnit business seriously. For that to work, it has to be conceivable that we could get it. The best whodunnits aren’t those where you say “what a brilliant unguessable twist”, they’re where you kick yourself for not having got it – “oh of course it was him!” That doesn’t square well with shape-shifting carpet-pulling alien who can bend the rules of reality and do impossible, unguessable things. You can combine whodunnits with SF, but they tend to go with hard SF (Asimov etc) or somewhere where you canna bend the laws of physics. They don’t tend to go well with Doctor Who and it’s “timey wimey stuff.”

The story was so clearly retrofitted around the Christie cover you didn’t cry “of course” so much as “so that’s where all this nonsense came from.” (Contrast this final revelation with the one from Girl in the Fireplace.) The only exception seems to be the title. It’s not clear where that came from, but it was clearly invented before it had grafted onto it the pointless appendage of the Unicorn subplot – not so much a red herring as stinky.

But what really rankled was that it seemed permanently on the edge of exploring something interesting. Why is Christie still so popular a writer? Why is The Mousetrap or Cluedo so enduring? Is there some part of our brains that keeps wanting to go back to the Conservatory accompanied by the Candlestick? By metafictionally signposting that it was inserting itself inside that landscape, the episode was perpetually starting to ask what lies there which our minds find so appealing. As it was, instead of offering any insights in the genre, it failed to understand its most basic rules.

Compared to this, those Sontarans weren't smooth at all…

SEVEN SONGS

I never respond to those internet meme things, I’m far too much of a misanthrope. I mean, what would come next, saying hello to the neighbours? But when Rol Hirst succumbed to the lure of listing Seven Songs, somehow I got infected too. Here’s the instructions in full…

“List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to.”

I have left off the curse bit where it explains if you don’t do this your knees will knock, your teeth fall out and you’ll turn up as an extra on Torchwood…and those 7 other people? Tag! You’re one of them. Get to it.

BIG A, LITTLE A by Jeffrey Lewis

The question is - is what we really want right now a whole CDs worth of songs by anarcho-punk ranters Crass, only covered in the new folk idiom? Perhaps counter-intuitively, the answer turns out to be yes. Whilst performing the invectives with absolute conviction, Jeffrey Lewis manages to find toe-tapping tunes long hidden inside the turgid dirges! If you actually bother listening to the words (and there’s enough of them) you’ll soon discover an ideology mired in contradiction. But Lewis also reveals why so many found Crass to be such a transforming experience. Perhaps his secret lies in knowing exactly how much to polish up the diamonds and how much to keep them rough. The voices of Lewis and his collaborator Helen Schreiner may sound musical against Steve Ignorant’s shouting (there is no kinder word), but they’re pitched at an abrasive enough level to still convey Crass’ sense of outrage.

It’s hard to pick a favourite. The slower songs may be more audacious (Punk Is Dead becoming a soft piano-and-guitar lament), but Big A Little A feels like a keystone of the album. Typically it’s not a complaint about this policy or that event, it just plonks the whole of society centre stage and opens fire…

“External control, are you gonna let them get you?
Do you wanna be a prisoner in the boundaries they set you?
You say you wanna be yourself, do you think they’ll let you?
They’re out to get you…”

You will, I promise, be humming those words!

SUZANNE by Fairport Convention

“You don’t hear much from this era”, I thought as I availed myself of Fairport Convention’s Heyday compilation – BBC session tracks largely from before they turned to electric folk. The reason for this, I was to discover, is that they were actually pretty run-of-the-mill back then. But their superlative cover of Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne beamed out from the rest like a lighthouse amid rocks.

Now my normal reaction is to reach for the fast-forward as soon as a cover comes on of Cohen, early Dylan or similar. Bands tend to assume the pared-down original is some kind of demo tape magically recorded just for them, and that the world will thank them for rocking it up. It’s as if every pencil sketch was thought to be aching to become an oil painting, every speech an opera. But here it’s changed enough to be worth doing, whilst staying true to the spirit of the original.

Much of its effectiveness comes from the simple device of splitting the verses between boy and girl singers. This is effective partly just by delaying Sandy Denny’s entry, thereby making it more of an event. But it also emphasises the song’s theme of unfulfilment, the boy singing hopelessly of Suzanne and the girl of Jesus. Despite the song’s name I’ve long regarded the Jesus verse as key, depicting a purgatorial earth we wander like the ancient mariner, deprived of the divine spark we seek. (‘All men will be sailors then, until the sea shall free them.”) From those few words I find my mind constructing a whole alternate theology, where Jesus descended to earth to rescue us but instead finds himself trapped among us – “forsaken, almost human,he sank beneath your wisdom like a stone.” Like the man said, ain’t no getting out this world alive.

AFTER THE GOLD RUSH by Neil Young

Neil Young’s regarded by many as a guitar god, but me - I take to his ballads every time. Perhaps it’s partly that their plaintive quality best suits Young’s high-pitched, almost strained singing. But it’s not least because a rocking-out Young had a typically Seventies taste for self-indulgence.

…and so it came to pass that the great songwriter’s greatest song was either Needle and the Damage Done or After the Gold Rush – four minutes of voice and solo piano with no choruses, and the only ‘solo’ coming from a passing trumpet. (And even that’s not really a solo, the trumpet just stands in for the vocals on one of the verses.) The result is one of the most elegiac songs to the end of the Sixties ever composed. The stuff about aliens coming to rescue us is hippy bollocks of course, the sort of thing Jarvis Cocker parodied, but you can overlook that. Young can sing about fanfares to the sun in such a way as to make you feel he’s demonstrating them.

Over the years Young has had cause to change the line “look at Mother Nature on the run in the 1970s.” It’s now standing as “in the 21st century” and counting. Though clearly born from post-Sixties disillusionment, the paradox of the song is that it takes on a more universal aspect – posing today as an impasse between a golden past and perfect future, like a cloud temporarily passing over the sun. Perhaps today will always feel that way, no matter what time we’re in.

BEVERLEY PENN by the Waterboys

Pounding pianos, pummeling drums, swirling organs, soaring vocals and resounding sax solos that all sound not so much anthemic as hymnal – we’re back in Waterboys country again. This track was left off the original release of This is the Sea, and now belatedly appears on an extended CD of out-takes. By now we’re used to all sorts of slush being dredged up by marketing departments of course. But this time the song’s so good it’s curious why it was ever missed out in the first place. One rather prosaic answer is that a lot of tracks were recorded for that album, and in the time-truncating days of vinyl many had to be passed over.

But it perhaps lost the limelight for being too much its own thing, not quite fitting the more metaphysical, allusive style Scott was crystallizing for that album. Like Medicine Bow (a track which did make the cut, albeit an edited version) it conjures stormy skies. But Medicine Bow takes place in a heightened, idealized world –painted broadly so as to be beyond detail. You’re not supposed to be in a place, but the place, which wouldn’t appear on anything so petty as a map.

Beverley Penn paints much more of a picture. “Wrapped she is in furs and sable” is a specifying detail, allowing us to frame the scene in our minds. It even has named characters in it. (I can’t think of a single example on the released version – Pan excepted!) This song feels much closer to literature than symbolist poetry.

Turns out, the song’s based on a novel – Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin. The significance of that comes from an apparently throwaway line – “tell me the story again.” Scott reaches more of crescendo at other points, such as:

”It was dawn and it was December,
And Peter Lake loved Beverly Penn.”

…as if human emotions were just as physical and as powerful things in the world as the seasons and elements. But the purity of Peter Lake’s love comes from the fact he’s a fictional character! In Scott’s romantic vision, he exists entirely to express this love, never distracted by tawdry or hundrum matters. It’s perhaps significant he is never involved in the events within the song, we’re just told of his love at the end of every verse. For Scott, characters in literature are not sparklers, bright but short-lived distractions, but beacons, blazing the way for the rest of us to follow.

I’ve never read a word of Helprin in my life, but I know Scott was a CS Lewis fan. There’s a scene in The Silver Chair where the Emerald Witch traps our heroes in a cave, and convinces them that not just their mission but all life outside the cave was merely a delusion. But her spell’s broken by the lowliest of their party, Puddlegum the Marshwiggle, who insists that even if the Witch is right "the made up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones."

”I would dive in a freezing river,
Set fire to a hundred men,
If I could for just one time,
Love somebody the way that he loved Beverley Penn.”

COME ON IN MY KITCHEN by Robert Johnson

And talking of stormy skies… Johnson’s chiefly known for his devil songs of course, but from his collected works it was the understated menace of this much more domestic track which I kept coming back to. “Well can’t you hear that wind howl?” As conjured by a few spare chords, you can – it feels like ice water down your back. In fact my favourite sequence may well be the hummed opening, before a single word is said.

Marc Bolan once said songs were spells with the power to change our mood. Johnson’s songs, even the ones without Old Red, are all black magic. Here the pathetic fallacy is operating at the height of his powers, the oncoming storm a projection of the singer’s rage. It’s as if he’s vested the whole world with his vengefulness then, in a sinister twist, presented his own home as the only refuge from it. You don’t need to keep banging on about the devil to have an effect. Would that many a black metal band had learnt that lesson…

HIS EYE IS ON THE SPARROW by Mahalia Jackson

From Satanism to Gospel in one simple bound! “I sing because I’m happy”, Jackson cries here, “I sing because I’m free.” But what would undoubtedly be zippy and exuberant in a pop song is here slow and measured, an accumulation of held notes, in front of the most minimal backing. Jackson isn’t merely singing at a slower tempo than we may be used to, she’s so self-assuredly unhurried it feels like a foreign tempo to our rushaday world. This must have sounded timeless the very day it was recorded!

While Marc Bolan was talking about spells, David Byrne claimed the appeal of music was that it created its own time, outside of clock time. The tempo here reminds me of a passage in Angela Carter’s Magic Toyshop where the heroine Melanie meets two Irish lads in a bustling Victoria station. “Her attention was caught by two young men who leant against a hoarding, drinking tea from cardboard cups with unhurried, slow, rustic movements. Their stillness attracted her. They created their own environment around them…They were country people in a way Melanie was not, although she had just come from the green fields and they might have lived in London all their lives. They were brothers…They drank their tea and did not talk to each other. They kept quite still, although all the commotion of the station swirled around them.”

Devoutly religious, Jackson wouldn’t have approved of many of the goings-on in Carter’s novels of course. I, to put it bluntly, take Carter’s side. But when she sings it feels an outpouring of love, the certainty without the fanaticism, the Christianity that stood for civil rights not the hate-filled fanatics who gloat when a gay man dies of AIDS.

LAST DAYS by Max Richter

Richter was wont to record with Future Sound of London, a fact which sometimes comes to the fore on his Memoryhouse CD. But it was the neoclassicism of the closing track which won me over. I’m not even particularly keen on the genre, which can often feel like mere pastiche, but here it’s pulled off with magnificence. The track gleams as it bounds along. Listening to it is like watching a piston-powered steam engine, it’s energy only matched by its grace. An electric train might run faster, but never with so much style.

Obligatory one complaint – neo-classicism has almost become a byword for film composition, something Richter himself has dabbled in. Of course film scores have to be epic but brief, expressing themselves in short bursts between the dialogue. This is probably a good discipline for composers, for short is often harder to achieve than long. But the downside is that everything is then obligated to come in at film or pop song length. It’s like adverts have set the pace of our lives. This track runs for four-and-a-half-minutes, but it’s not enough! Had it been the final movement in a symphony it could have won itself more elbow room.

PS Not sure the last one is strictly speaking a song, so maybe if you don’t want to be tagged that’s your get-out…

TONY CONRAD AT THE TATE

Unprojectable: Projection and Perspective, Turbine Hall, Sat 14th June



Tony Conrad’s place in official history may be down to his inadvertently naming the Velvet Underground. (It was his copy of the book they took their name from.) But for some of us Conrad is a legend, a pioneer of drone music through his involvement (with John Cale and La Monte Young) in the Theatre of Eternal Music – whose ritualised minimalist improvisations would run on for hours. Soon becoming interested in film and other media, Conrad has produced or even performed little in recent years – with the result I leapt at the chance to see him appearing at the Tate!

That the Tate’s Turbine Hall is not designed as a gig space just added to the sense of a special event. Oversized and full of extraneous lighting, it would be a terrible venue for just about any other type of music. For this it was like it was built for it! Its cavernous size made it the ideal acoustic home for the resonating sustained tones, while the industrial heritage of its architecture (as the former Bankside Power Station) could not have been more fitting.

While we sat around the extensive lower floor like a festival audience, the musicians occupied the upper mezzanine. Huge sheets were hung before and behind them, then single lights used to project vast silhouettes before us. This simple device perhaps started life as a ‘get around’; minimalist musicians don’t do a lot of rocking out, after all. But it was brilliantly effective. By blowing up the smallest of their gestures into vast size it provided the perfect visual corollary for the music, focusing in on micro changes like a magnifying glass. Moreover, the silhouettes were fittingly depersonalising. The focus wasn’t on the man, for drone music isn’t about someone selling their personality like in pop music. We weren’t invited to scour his expressions or biography for tidbits of information to try and decode the music. Similarly, neither Conrad nor anyone else spoke for the duration – the nearest to direct communication we got was a wave when he left the stage. (By which point I found even that gesture a bit rockist!) Notably though, many in the audience chose to just lie flat out and ignore the visual element entirely. Which is perhaps fitting too…

In the brochure Conrad had this to say about audiences: “I had observed how, when we started to play for an audience, people became restless, and I had the idea that this was a favourable pattern of response; namely that one third of the audience would be antipathetic, one third would be enthusiastic, and one third would not really have any idea what was going on… That was, and remains, what I consider to be the optimum cultural outcome for work.”

This left me wondering if the introductory segment was deliberately pitched to drive the lightweights out. Indeed, if not the desired third, perhaps a quarter of the audience didn’t make it through the sound of two drills drilling. At this point the silhouette of the permanently hatted Conrad did take on some of the aspect of Freddie Kreuger. However the ‘noise’ was much closer to music/noise than noise/noise! Formally it worked in the way many dance tracks divide into high-register lead synth and pounding bass/drum synth – it’s just that this was achieved by a whirring hand drill and a heavier power drill. Berlin noise scene stalwarts might have even walked out over the lack of noise!

From what you could ascertain from the silhouettes Conrad next attacked cymbals with phonograph arms. Both these segments were effective enough, but it was when the musicians switched to Conrad’s patented bowed strings that the evening truly hit the stratospheric. The music became timeless and mesmerizing and quite impossible to describe in words. There’s a recurrent theme in folk tales of a place which exists outside of time, where the hubbub of the world is held outside, a feeling almost exactly conjured up by this immersive music. It would be wrong to say the evening moved from the abrasive to the sublime, for even the sound of power drills has its beauty. But the juxtaposition of the two elements was surely quite deliberate, first finding beauty in the noise of the world then concentrating on the thing itself.

The one frustration of the evening was a problem of programming. Some of Conrad’s videos were shown earlier in the evening. However these were videos he made during the Eighties while working at New York State Uni’s Department of Media Study. Though not without humour these were mostly academic and pat exercises – once told the evening was titled ‘Who’s Watching Who’ you could probably picture everything about them. (Authorship, Identity, the Masochism of the Spectator – blah blah blah.) Conrad’s Sixties films, thematically if not chronologically linked to the performance, were shown the previous night when us out-of-towners couldn’t make it. Putting the two together would have been a dream ticket! Alas, all we have to go on is a few juicy stills from the brochure.

What will quite possibly be the live performance of the year – and all for free!



Post script! Perhaps not worth a special visit, but if you’re in London between now and August 25th the Tate’s Street Art exhibition is worth sampling. This includes not only huge figures painted upon the building itself (and visible from right across the river), but a street art trail to follow. The quality of the work is varied (though Nano 4814 alone is excellent), but it’s almost worth following just as a device to make yourself meander the streets rather than march purposefully through them. Perhaps the coolest thing is that I kept coming across examples of street art that weren’t even part of the trail!