Love and Liberty

Name-calling, Invective, Slurs or Smears? And Tory and Labour Liars, Obviously

2009-11-01T20:52:00.024Z

Heard the one about the Labour MP telling snide porkies about the Liberal Democrats and using homophobic innuendo against the Tories on the radio? Or the Tory candidate so steeped in dirty tricks that she’s called herself a nasty name and blamed it on the Liberal Democrats? I know from back when I used to be a candidate that it can be frustrating when no-one’s talking about you, but I never stooped to making up coverage. So, stand up in the last week Caroline Righton, Conservative Liar in Cornwall and, from The Westminster Hour, Denis MacShane, Labour Liar for Rotherham.

Insults have always been a part of politics – and regular readers will know that I tend to be Mr Grumpy Sweary on here quite often, so I can’t really slag people off for using ‘strong language’. But still… When I was a candidate, I used rather less fruity language, partly because I was talking to a different audience and partly because I wanted to be respectable. But I’ve always taken responsibility for the words I’ve used, even when I’ve said completely the wrong thing – and I’ve only used a mildly rude word once on TV (it was after midnight, I wasn’t a candidate at the time… But my Mum was still horrified). Look, being rude can be fun, whether it’s being sweary or being insulting. It can make a point; it can be pithier than a reasonable argument; perhaps most tellingly, being nasty to your foes can cheer up your supporters. If you’re on the receiving end, the answer should usually be, ‘So what?’: you take it on the chin, and you just look daft if you whine about an ordinary insult – which is clearly why Denis MacShane’s upped the ante, because being rude is one thing, but telling lies about people is very different.

On the down side, even the ‘harmless fun’ sort of insult doesn’t half put people off. Many people find ‘bad language’ jarring – and not just people who don’t use it in everyday situations. If someone in authority swore at me, I’d be offended, even if I’d say the same sort of thing with people I know. Swearing can be much starker out of a familiar context – or even relatively mild language (as smearing lying Tory Caroline Righton clearly knows, by pretending a Liberal Democrat was foul-mouthed). But any insult, pejorative term or just shouting someone down can be off-putting; it doesn’t have to be language you can’t use in Sunday School. It can just be mean, or untrue. It may be satisfying if you’re doing it (boy, can it be satisfying to lay in to some git), but it’s also frequently very counterproductive. Go on – ask people what they think of the baying mob at Prime Minister’s Questions each week.

Caroline Righton – The Tory Who Calls Herself Names To Get Attention

Caroline Righton’s bizarre and pathetic attention-seeking behaviour has been much blogged-about in the last week since the story was broken by the lovely Matt Davies. In short, the just as lovely Stephen Gilbert hopes to become Liberal Democrat MP for the new Cornish seat of St. Austell and Newquay, and decided to go to a local regeneration meeting rather than a radio programme. Conservative candidate Caroline Righton, the attention-seeking behaviour being a bit of a clue here, decided on the press opportunity rather than the getting things done, so Steve reported this difference of views on Twitter, and not in Ms Righton’s favour. The Tory was understandably miffed, and told her supporters as much.

That’s where most political stories would have ended.

Unfortunately, Ms Righton decided this didn’t get her enough attention – so she made something up. And, in the way of bizarre attention-seeking fantasists everywhere, she decided that everyone had to be sorry for her and excoriate Steve because, oh woe, how terrible, she was the ‘victim’. One snag: no ‘victimising’. So she made it up. When she circulated Steve’s Tweet to her supporters, a word reported as “D***h***d!!!” was added to the end of it. ‘Look! That horrid Liberal Democrat said a beastly word about me! How uncouth!’ was the underlying message.

The trouble is, Twitter’s an easy to check public posting place, and the only place the “D***h***d!!!” appears is when Ms Righton republished Steve’s Tweet. And that wasn’t the only lie – she also claimed, explicitly, that she couldn’t read Stephen Gilbert’s Tweets:

“I was sent the comment below by a constituent who is privy to my opposition's Twitter emissions, which I am not. Apparently his asterisk'd comment is highly abusive.”

But surely, Ms Righton, you do have a Twitter account yourself, and Steve is one of only six people you’re following on it? So that was another proven and clumsy lie, wasn’t it?

Lots of politicians lie. Lots of them throw insults. But Ms Righton is the first I can remember hearing about that’s lied about being insulted because she’s so desperate for attention.

A week later, she’s still not apologised for smearing Steve with her own foul mouth – or perhaps I should say foul fingers. Nor has David Cameron, after Steve’s office wrote to him to confront him with the evidence of his candidate’s lying smear. What she has done, though, is got her staff to delete her Wikipedia page – twice – against Wikipedia rules, evidently petrified that this story will appear on it.

She makes things up… She’s desperate to get attention… She says, ‘it wasn’t me, it was him!’… She’s sticks her fingers in her ears and pretends nothing’s happened when she’s caught out… She tries to cover up facts about herself… Come on, Mums and Dads reading, this is familiar behaviour, isn’t it? Astoundingly, according to that Wikipedia entry that Ms Righton was so desperate to censor out of existence, she’s around 52 years old. I know Wikipedia’s not always reliable, so is it possible they’ve misplaced a decimal point?

Top posts to read on Ms Righton’s made-up woes have been recommended by Lib Dem Voice and particularly well-documented by Andrew Reeves (here, here, here and here) and Jeremy Rowe (here, with the rather brilliant comment, “That Righton’s a wrongun,” here and here). Or, if you want to do something positive, why not just get in touch with Steve Gilbert and offer to help, perhaps with a monthly donation like mine? Otherwise this lying fantasist might be elected purely because the Tories have vastly more money to pour in.

Denis MacShane – The Failed Former Minister Who’ll Make Up Any Nasty Horrible Thing

I saw on Lynne Featherstone’s blog earlier that she’s to be on Radio Four’s The Westminster Hour again tonight. Suddenly, I remembered and iPlayered (dash quickly, it’ll be gone soon) last week’s edition. The three political guests were Lib Dem Paul Holmes, Tory Roger Helmer and smug, hectoring, hypocritical, nasty git Denis MacShane.

Yes, that was an insult, but one based on factual observation. The sort of insult I try not to indulge in is nasty smears and lying (yes, I like making things up, but not misrepresenting people: if you see something preposterous on this blog in single quotation marks, ‘like this,’ I’m making it up, usually for comic effect. If you see something preposterous in double marks, “like this,” it’s a proper quotation). Mr MacShane, on the other hand, doesn’t summarise someone’s views in a way that makes them look silly, but just makes nasty, slimy accusations with no basis in fact.

Take last week’s The Westminster Hour. Women MPs are being discussed, and the BBC, with no sense of irony, have asked three male MPs to discuss them. A good political attack point is made by Mr MacShame; if David Cameron says he’ll have one-third women in Cabinet, why are there so few women in his Shadow Cabinet, when he has power to choose them, too? “The Conservative Party remains, I’m afraid, a Bullingdon boys’ own club,” he concludes, bringing in a bit of old-fashioned class hate (ironic, in his voice) and hypocritical faux-regret (watch for more) to finish his evidently pre-prepared ‘answer’. “Denis has been reading the briefing from Labour central office,” observes the Tory. “I used to write it,” Mr MacShameless concedes – then, realising he’s just given himself away, sneers:

“Today, David Cameron could promote women to senior positions in the Shadow Cabinet. He, I’m afraid, only likes boys.”

Roger Helmer was right to call that “an outrageous line”. Yep: caught out as a Labour spin-poisoner, Mr MacShame spits out a smear that translates as ‘they’re all public schoolboys, so they’re all bumming each other, and probably your kids’. Did he really get away with that? Yes he did. If it wasn’t a Labour git saying it in a desperate attempt at class war, but a Tory saying it when caught out, imagine the howls of “Homophobia!” from Labour. Well, I don’t have any reason to believe Mr MacShame’s genuinely homophobic – he’s probably just an opportunistic panderer to the bigot vote. Not better, is it?

Next up, Paul Holmes quotes Jo Swinson’s barnstorming speech a few years ago against all-women shortlists, and talks about Jo heading up a taskforce to help find and encourage people to stand. What does Mr MacSmear toss in from the back?

“Nobody wants to be a woman candidate in the Liberal Democrats. They’re a very anti-women party.”

Has it occurred to him that, on average, women may be even more put off than men by politics full of sneering, jeering arrested schoolboys saying pointless, malicious, lies about each other and screaming like a zoo in the House of Commons? Who would want to be part of all that?

Still, at least Paul got the better of him with a genuine suggestion rather than just the same old ‘Labour did things by rigid, control-freak top-down machinery, so everyone else must too’ – because after a dozen years of control-freakery, we’ve seen how well Labour doing everything by diktat has worked out – in pointing out that, as well as the Lib Dem internal measures to encourage and support candidates from the bottom up, the big changes in women’s representation have taken place in countries which have switched to proportional representation:

“When you’re selecting a panel of candidates rather than one, you don’t go for the safe, white, male stereotype – you go for a broader panel.”

Despite Paul hitting back with positive facts, I can’t believe Mr MacShame will stop. It wasn’t a one-off, you know; last week was just the most egregious example, but I’ve heard him at it again and again, the git. To pick a time when he wasn’t smearing a Lib Dem, did you hear him saying Gary McKinnon’s Asperger Syndrome was a sham (what, he’s a doctor now? Or just a knee-jerk smearing liar)? Mr McKinnon’s mother accused Mr MacShane of “gutter” tactics and “an absolutely awful, cheap shot”. They’re his speciality.

On tonight’s edition, as I said, Lynne Featherstone MP guests for the Liberal Democrats. I hope Mr MacShame is back on, and calls her ‘anti-men’.

And that Lynne pulls his lungs out.

In other news, the Governator has sworn at his Democratic opponents and tried to pretend he didn’t when caught out. Does he follow Caroline Righton on Twitter?

Considering the Evidence Means You Must Consider Your Position

2009-10-30T17:53:00.022Z

A Government position is newly vacant this evening: and for the first time, it’s explicit that only liars* need apply. For Labour Government Ministers, of course, the requirement to lie is only implicit.

This case is very simple. Chair of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs Professor David Nutt told the truth, and was exasperated with Labour Government Ministers lying about their findings. The last Home Secretary said the carefully considered scientific evidence didn’t matter: cannabis was more harmful than tobacco and alcohol because, er, she said so, fingers in ears, lalala I am not listening to you.

Yesterday, Professor Nutt made it clear that she had not told the truth (and who’d have thought, when Jacqui Spliff was such a model of probity she, er, had to resign for being a crook and made the most grudging unpology about it?).

Today Alan Johnson, the current Home Secretary, sacked him (and who’d have thought that Alan Johnson would make a nakedly lying political point when he knows the evidence is completely against him?).

So, it’s official: under Labour, telling the truth is now a sackable offence.

It’s the obvious joke, but you know who the nuts are here.

Obsessive Ideology Over Evidence and Bossing Everyone About – the Labour Way

The evidence has piled up by the decade and the sackload. Cannabis does some harm; it does nothing like the harm it’s made out to; it does nothing like the harm legal drugs tobacco and alcohol do. But this Labour Government can’t even keep to the – brace yourself – lone liberal twitch by David Blunkett. They’re so desperate to sound ‘tough’ that their policies bear no relation at all to reality. Again and again. When Professor Nutt said that you’re more likely to die horse-riding than taking cannabis or ecstasy, to wails of horror from Labour hypocrites, he was simply looking at the facts of risk. Yet even that’s not really comparing like with like: unlike Professor Nutt, I support legalisation, which would enable proper quality checks (as well as destroying the criminal trade) – no-one gets on a horse, trots half-way along the path, then finds the ‘horse’ collapsing under them because they suddenly discover the beast is in fact half-gerbil.

One of my key memories about the harm caused by illegal drugs came about a decade ago. I left home one afternoon just after hysterical national news headlines about a single tragic death allegedly caused by ecstasy (whether the drug itself, or the impurities allowed in because it’s illegal and can’t be regulated)… And arrived at my Grandad’s a couple of hours later, to see a minor headline in his local paper that another single tragic death had come about because of an allergy to nuts (not to be confused with the Labour Government’s allergy to the truth, of which an inability to tolerate Nutts is merely a symptom). Guess which substance causes far, far more deaths, to an almost complete lack of media interest? Yep – the one you buy safely in the shops, not dangerously on street corners. Another win for prohibition.

On Radio 4’s PM programme tonight, Professor Nutt has just said that:

“This is about the difference between evidence and policy… Everything I’ve done has been evidence-based.
“…Gordon Brown made a series of irrational statements that cannabis is lethal, which of course it isn’t.”

Asked about the Labour Government refusing to take his former committee’s advice on cannabis and ecstasy, because they weren’t interested in any evidence, just in making a political point that he described as Luddism, the interviewer mouthed the meaningless tabloid platitude that these were the “controversial” drugs:

“They’re only controversial if you want them to be controversial – the Government’s views have, they’ve said, had nothing to do with science… I am not prepared to mislead the public about the harm caused by drugs.”

Good for him, and good luck to whoever next gets the job – it had better pay well, because by definition they’ll have to kiss their scientific reputation goodbye to take their position as official Labour Government Liar.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to calm down by eating a large amount of chocolate cake. Bad news: it doesn’t have any dope in it. Good news: it does have lots of chocolate in it. That was once banned as a dangerous, addictive drug by a nutty Westminster Government bent on scarifiying the populace too, you know.

If No-one Agrees With Alan Johnson, Will He Have To Sack the Whole Country?**

I’ve added rather more updates than usual below, as a lot of people seem to have something to say (none of them ‘The Home Secretary was right’). Even ultra-loyalist former Labour minister Lord Falconer said Mr Johnson was wrong on Any Questions.

Starting half an hour later: posts already popping up worth reading from Dr Mark Pack and Duncan Stott (who ironically shares a name with a drug enforcement officer from Doctor Who).

And yay for Liberal Democrat Shadow Secretary Chris Huhne in the 7 O’Clock headlines for calling the sacking “disgraceful”:

“What is the point of having independent scientific advice if you’re going to sack the person who’s giving it to you? You may as well have a committee of tabloid newspaper editors advising you on drugs policy.”

Incredibly, the Tories have gone along word for word with the Labour Government.

Continuing the next morning, Mr Mark Reckons has kindly linked to me in a thoughtful post which also has an interesting set of comments. He’s also called attention to the Tories’ ludicrous knee-jerk photocopy of Labour authoritarianism in a far more memorable way than I did above.

Liberal Vision has also linked to me, encapsulating the spirit of my post in a far more memorable headline. Again, I’m just not tabloidy enough. One of the British Medical Journal’s bloggers doesn’t link to me, but finishes on a particularly appropriate request from his friend Kate. You might also glance at Darrell, Jonathan and Jennie.

*Or pot-heads, ironically, as only someone with a distinctly loose grip on reality would believe in the Government’s policy.

**Fortunately for Mr Johnson, he does turn out to have the support of: the Conservative Party; spin-poisoner columnist Amanda Platell; and the Daily Mail, the paper that spits on much-loved dead people and refuses to apologise. And, er, that’s it.

Unfortunately, these are the handful of hate-filled obsessive ideologues who are running the country, whatever the sensible majority of us think.

The More Things Change…

2009-10-29T16:52:00.016Z

Are you watching The Sarah Jane Adventures right now? With Doctor Who himself guest-starring? Then get to it!

But meanwhile, did you see Andrew Marr’s The Making of Modern Britain last night? Not bad, but it didn’t half demonstrate his own political prejudices – and did you spot the three things the Liberals got right and one thing we weren’t terribly impressive on a century ago, and the very same today? Not that there was an awful lot on the Liberals, as our Edwardian landslide dominating last night’s ‘era’ didn’t fit into Mr Marr’s very old Labour narrative of history: Tories are wicked, the rise of Labour’s a great thing, and the Liberals are to be mentioned as little as possible.

Much of yesterday’s opening episode, which itself was opening the Twentieth Century, was a critique of the Tories and the upper class. I was right with him on our disgusting invention of concentration camps in the Boer War (though I notice he omitted Mr Campbell-Bannerman’s famous denunciation of the “methods of barbarism”), of a piece with the rise of eugenics in showing the seeds of what we now recognise as Nazism rising in Britain… But little was made of the socialists supporting eugenics, and – as Richard observed – while Britain offered ourselves the choice of fascism, we didn’t take that choice.

Similarly, attacking Mr Balfour because he wasn’t really up to being Prime Minister but, Bob’s your uncle, and he suddenly was – well, that’s all right. But delighting in constant repetition of what sounded very like homophobic jeers against him from a century ago? Not so much. And the same with his approving hail for the creation of the Daily Mail, not yet infamous as the paper that spits on much-loved dead people and refuses to apologise when he recorded his voiceover, but still a vile rag, his encomium considerably lacking in any alternative view to the wonderfulness of tabloids. I enjoyed his class-warrior proclamation that posh Mr Rolls having to visit engineer Mr Royce rather than the other way round was proof that power was shifting massively in Britain. For some reason, though, he omitted the photos of the Rolls-Royce cars standing outside every humble tenement that would have proved his case. Can’t think why.

Andrew Marr and the Invisible Liberals (Just Like Bedford All Over Again Before)

As for the Liberals – on the rare occasions he mentioned them, and there was considerably more about violence-inciting imperialist turncoat Joe Chamberlain (hiss) than of any Twentieth-Century Liberal, with Mr Marr seemingly rather admiring of his protectionism and landslide victor Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman not even getting the courtesy of a name-check, despite technically being Britain’s first Prime Minister – when we were mentioned, it was generally in passing, as an afterthought, with the big story of 1906 election not a Liberal landslide majority but half a dozen Labourites who were all lovely, apparently.

What I did notice, though, was that the Liberals were right – not that you’d notice from Mr Marr’s commentary – on:

The barbarous war Britain had undertaken abroad

Investing in the welfare state for people who needed it

The big economic questions.

And we were a bit rubbish on involving women in politics (though horribly worse then).

How things change, eh?

Why I’m Not Watching The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith (I Might Cry)

Sarah Jane Smith is right at this very moment, thrillingly, engaged in a whirlwind romance and at some point (I’m not looking) to be joined by the Doctor himself, David Tennant diving in for a guest appearance before he hangs up his coat at the end of the year – but I’m recording rather than watching The Sarah Jane Adventures on BBC1 and BBCHD, as Richard’s not home yet to watch her with me. If you’re not doing the same, catch it on iPlayer and umpteen CBBC repeats this week.

This first part of The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith and tomorrow’s concluding episode are both written by Gareth Roberts, one of Doctor Who’s most entertaining authors, and tomorrow’s will be the first Doctor Who broadcast on my birthday since I was five, when my favourite story of all time premiered: so, no pressure, then. And read Richard’s review of last week’s as a taster.

PS Ooh! And there’s the third series of Bleak Expectations starting on Radio 4 tonight at 6.30. Harrumble for Mr Gently Benevolent!

Ex-Liberal Democrats in the News (including two you may not have spotted)

2009-10-28T07:52:00.008Z

Much heat and little light has exploded in the Liberal Democrat Blogosphere over Sith Lord of Liberal Vision Mark Littlewood’s becoming Director of the Institute for Evil Acquisitiveness. I quite like Mark, despite frequently thinking he gets it wrong, and the party’s worse off for losing a talented individual (I’m with Mat on this) – just as it’s a shrewd move for an often Tory-associated thinktank to pick a non-Tory, all the better to stand up to a potential new government. But outside of our own little enclave, two much less recently ex-Lib Dems have been in the ‘proper’ news – one the party can, I think, feel does us credit to any extent that we influenced him, and one whom we’re probably well shot of…

Martin Lewis

I’ve just heard a heated exchange on the Today Programme’s truncated Yesterday in Parliament early slot where consumer champion Martin Lewis gave evidence to a Select Committee yesterday about lenders’ virulently anti-competitive practices, while bankers and credit agencies offered weasel words and refused to give any figures. Who’d have thought? Yes, when in these credit crunch days it’s even more vital than ever to shop around and compare prices, the money-saving expert (TM) reveals that banks and other lenders are brilliantly penalising anyone who does that when it comes to getting a loan – meaning that, under the guise of ‘protecting’ themselves, people blindly have to take the first rate offered to them, or they’ll be punished for looking around by being forced to take one that’s even higher. Hmm, protectionism giving consumers a raw deal… Again, who’d have thought?

The first time I met Martin Lewis, though, he wasn’t a well-known financial expert; in 1993 or so, he was a bright and rather well-turned-out students’ union president, at a Student Liberal Democrat Conference or an NUS Conference (he may even have attended both). I was the much less well-turned-out students’ union president for Essex University, and although I was a far more active Liberal Democrat, when I few years later I spotted that good-looking young chap on the telly I instantly remembered when he was involved. So, well done him.

Elizabeth Truss

In other news this week, though, you may have read about Elizabeth Truss, a newly selected Conservative candidate who’s been picked for a safe seat and is now ‘in trouble’ with her local party after she was done over by a scabrous rag for – shock horror – having had sex some years ago. Something a scabrous rag had already criticised her for years ago. Now, my views on this sort of ludicrous attack are firmly on record: I’ve suggested the slogan, ‘Liberal Democrats – the Party That Says Sex Is All Right’, and not only is it no-one else’s business who you have sex with or don’t, but it’s a bloody stupid reason not to vote for someone. Of course, it’s a century and a half since John Stuart Mill observed that the Conservatives are the stupid party, and that’s not changed since, but – durrhh, when something’s already been in the public domain for several years, it’s really stupid to say ‘but we didn’t know’. If you vote for a candidate without having done a thirty-second Google check on them, you can’t very well complain that you don’t know everything about their lives: it’s your fault, not theirs, if you believe in prying through your net curtains but don’t bother looking!

If, on the other hand, any dyed-in-the-wool traditional Conservatives would think any worse of Liz Truss if they knew that, again in around 1993, she was a self-styled radical Liberal Democrat who kept attacking me when I was Chair of the Liberal Democrat Youth and Students because I wasn’t left-wing enough, and whom I once held a meeting with to try and get her to work with anyone else in the organisation because she was a complete and utter egomaniac pain in the backside incapable of working in a team, that would be entirely a matter for them. I hope she’s as well-loved and effective a teambuilder for the Tories as she was in the Liberal Democrats.

David Owen Goes Nuclear Again

2009-10-26T08:05:00.003Z

This morning’s “Coming up in the next hour” special for why you should shortly switch off the Today Programme: Lord Owen is to talk about Britain’s 1970s nuclear secrets.

My beloved, on his way to the shower after we exchanged exciting fifteenth anniversary presents:

“Is it to be revealed that Lord Owen split the atom?”

This is one of the many reasons why I love Richard.

Masterchef – The Professionals With India Fisher

2009-10-21T09:22:00.012+01:00

To split up two long fulminations about things named “Mail,” I have a confession: I’ve become addicted to the BBC’s prime food porn. I remember when Masterchef was endearingly amateur and Loyd Grossman was entertainingly imitable… But then it became blokeish and rather more like The Apprentice, so despite the gorgeous voiceovers from Doctor Who’s India Fisher (of whom more in a minute), I’d left it. A few weeks ago, though, Richard put the latest version on in the background for something neutral while we cooked, and I’ve been glued to it ever since. Particularly for posh egg and soldiers.

I won’t, in fact, be posting my fulmination about the Daily Mail for a few days at least, nor many others I’ve half-written and probably let go off in the last few weeks, as I’m about to dive off up north and I don’t know where the Internet cafés are in Stockport and Manchester. What excitement is this? Seeing my parents; hopping on the train with old friends to brave the October winds at Blackpool and visit the Doctor Who Exhibition before it finally closes, like the beloved one of our youth; and to have my teeth drilled. Well, I hope the rest’ll make up for that (and hush, Lib Dem Conferencegoers who claim you’d rather have your teeth drilled than return to Blackpool. I bet you wouldn’t).

There are two key differences between Masterchef – The Professionals and the ‘ordinary’ Masterchef: first, it features young, ambitious professional cooks rather than members of the public doing it for fun; and second, and this is the key for me, they’ve got the balance of presenters right. Rather than two ‘blokes’, rough Gregg Wallace is now joined by smooth Michel Roux Junior, and they make a persuasive combination. Gregg is, if anything, a little too overawed by the famous chef: he hardly ever brings himself to disagree with him, so you can imagine how frightened the competitors are. For me, Michel is a great combination of steely disapproval and warm encouragement, with the most amazing grin when – rarely – he’s taken off-guard and delighted by something, though I suspect I’d find his style of meat very underdone (he likes it pink; I like it charcoal), and almost every dish before him seems to need more acidity. One of my few disappointments with the series has been that we didn’t see him introduce his ~~father~~ uncle [oops!] at the Michelin-starred high tea restaurant; Roux Senior, sitting wizened but authoritative and wielding absolute power over the pastry chefs, surely deserved younger Michel looming over the finalists to intone, ‘I hope these fancies will be perfect, for your sake. My ~~father~~ uncle is not as forgiving as I am’. You’ll not be surprised, I suspect, that the scariest bit about the competition for me is the way they have to do everything precisely to time…

Anyway, we’re now into the extended final all week, between Steve, Daniel and Marianna. The unceasing parade of determined, slim young men (is it just me who never quite trusts a thin chef?) finally ceased with no slim men in sight in the last round. I rather liked some of the ones who fell, though. The chunky, slightly dour French guy with the rare but nice smile who played it too safe and lost his flair in the semi-final; the tiny chap with the messy hair, rustic food and desperate eyes; the lean French-African guy with the amazing eye for invention, who I suspect Michel didn’t pass through to the next round because he wouldn’t follow the rules… And the one that really scared me, the cold-eyed epitome of the ambitious young man, who evoked the Terminator when he promised that all his work would be perfectly executed.

My money’s on Steve, who not only delivers exquisite food but is inventive with it. Despite all the scary encounters with Michelin chefs (one who cooks by touch and refuses to use timings, another who goes by the gram and the second and measures lines on the plate…), the dish that’s looked most interesting was his inspired reinvention of egg and soldiers, involving poaching, twisty concoctions and a smoke machine (with a dessert based on an exquisitely cooked ‘bag of sweets’ last night, his speciality seems to be supercharged versions of childhood treats). It was only last week, so it’s probably still on the iPlayer if you want to look. Though my favourite single moment was Marianna, praised, declaring it was “Heaven. Total heaven” – if only because I misheard it as “Potato heaven,” which just sounds fabulously surreal. Besides, you can tell Steve’s a perfectionist: look at his knifework on that designer stubble. Daniel’s beard growth varies, but Steve always looks like he’s just got out of bed.

India Fisher

And finally, the lovely India. I must dash, but Doctor Who listeners for Big Finish and BBC7 will know her as Charlotte Pollard, Edwardian adventuress, introduced in Storm Warning for many travels with Paul McGann’s Doctor, then latterly – if anachronistically – with Colin Baker. And she’s lovely. I’ve met her a couple of times, and she’s unfailingly intelligent and fun (for politics fact fans, she’s the daughter of Mark Fisher MP).

So what does she do on Masterchef?

She’s the voice. She narrates it with the perfect vocals – low, sexy, like chocolate pouring.

And there I must, literally, leave it: I don’t want to miss my train, but look out in a few days for an anecdote or two, my theory of why she doesn’t appear on TV much despite being heard so often, which of her final Doctor Who adventures is best – oh, look, it’s Paper Cuts, and it’s brilliant, but the others aren’t bad, either – and the effect she has on the straight boys…

In the meantime, you can always read the interview with her in the latest Doctor Who Magazine.

Update: …And, several days later – after seeing my parents, having another stage of root canal, and making obeisance to Kroll – I’m back, so it’s back to India. She’s an incredibly talented actor, and it’s certainly worth catching up with some of her Doctor Who work: the earliest ones with Paul McGann or her later ones with Colin Baker are probably her best, though if you snap up her final trilogy with Colin (Patient Zero, Paper Cuts and Blue Forgotten Planet) you may be surprised to find her not exactly playing Charlotte Pollard. In that, and in Masterchef, you can admire her marvellous voice… But it’s a shame you rarely get to see her.

The only time I can remember seeing her on TV, in fact, was in a dodgy wig impersonating one of the Eastenders cast on Dead Ringers shortly after Dirty Den and the Mitchell brothers had each made increasingly improbable returns from the dead (or from other channels) to the East End: wondering which villain from the past would be next for a preposterous reappearance, there was an ominous droning sound from above. India looked up and delivered a line that corpsed me completely:

“It’s the Luftwaffe! They’ve come back!”

Now, as well as having to admit that I’d call her voice sexy, and she’s one of the few women who, when I’ve met her, I can see exactly what the straight boys see in her. She looks fantastic from head to toe, as well as being witty, intelligent and awfully nice (each of which helps, I usually find). At a mini-convention a couple of months ago, I met her for the third or so time and, queuing for her autograph, told her that it’s always an enormous pleasure to hear her voice when I switch on at the end of Masterchef (“The gift that keeps on giving,” she described it on stage, adding that she refuses to read out menus for her friends). “The end of Masterchef? You cheeky sod!” she exclaimed, laughing, so I reassured her that it’s because Richard’s often not in until nine, and if I watch it I’ll already have given way and eaten before I cook for him. I’m forced, again, to admit that – having now watched most of the latest Masterchef – The Professionals series – this has turned out to be all too true. It mollified her, though, and after she’d signed for me, I was able to observe at first hand the India Effect on the heterosexual chap next in the queue. Returning to our seats and another friend not so bothered by autographs, the one who’d been behind me wailed, “How is it you could just speak to her, and I was right behind you and I melted?” You’ll be amazed that my reply involved a mime in which I talked to her by making eye contact, while [name excised to protect the guilty] stammered to two lower parts of her anatomy, which I suspect had something to do with our respective ability and inability to sound coherent. On the other hand, Gordon Warnecke was a guest on the same day, and as he played just about the first sexy gay role I saw on TV and fancied when a shy teenager, I probably gibbered a bit when I met him. Particularly as he still looks gorgeous.

The point of that little sexual reverie was to wonder just why, although India does have a very sexy voice, her voice seems to be all of her that the telly uses. Yet she’s a superb actor both vocally and physically, and – as this is often the determining factor for TV casting – I know very few straight men who’ve met her who’ve not found her fantastically attractive. So why doesn’t she get on the telly more often in person? I’m afraid the only answer I can think of is not one that reflects well on casting directors: she isn’t a stick. Like, oh, how can I describe them, real women, she has curves. And I suspect that it’s very difficult to be cast as a beautiful woman, probably, unless your ribs are showing.

Oh, and finally: Steve did win a well-deserved victory in the competition (another one with a rare but very sweet smile), and I think I was right about his speciality. In the, er, final parts of the final, too, some of his most distinctive and imaginative creations were exquisite reimaginings of things he’d loved when he was a boy. As well as being a great USP for a chef to open a restaurant on, you probably don’t have to look very far through this blog to work out why that might have a special appeal to me. How long before the Doctor Who production team commissions him to cook for them, I wonder?

When Postal Strikes and NHS Bureaucracy Collide

2009-10-20T11:52:00.009+01:00

Everyone has their own reason for being completely pissed off with the postal “service”. Is it missed birthdays, post simply dumped, your business suffering (I’ve lost count of the apologetic calls I’ve made asking for undelivered subscriptions when I know it’s not the companies’ fault) or simply lying posties stealthily delivering ‘Sorry you were outs’ while you’re in because they can’t be arsed actually bringing your parcels, so you have to wait extra days and go extra miles instead of them doing their jobs (yup, I’ve also had to complain about that recently)? Well, they’re bad for your health, too – and I don’t just mean giving you apoplexy with all the complaints and lost post thanks to the selfish indulgence of all those local strikes.

Regular readers may have noticed that there’s regularly been nothing for them to read recently; I’ve been more unwell than usual over the past few weeks, and – like many people who rarely get out – I depend quite a bit on the post (thank goodness for e-mail). Am I a big fan of the Post Office management? No. I’m sure they’ve got a lot of things wrong. But I know, and so does every other person who glares at the letterbox, who’s been causing so much misery. The CWU may have a case against some of the Royal Mail’s actions… But months of insufferable strikes before they even treat us to this week’s ‘official’ one have shot away every vestige of public sympathy. ‘You can’t deny us our right to strike!’ they bleat. That’s not what complaining we hate strikes is, fuckwit – it’s you who are trying to deny the rest of us our right to tell you all to fuck off for doing so.

What new self-deluding cant will the CWU come up with this week? Complaining that just because they’ve been doing no fucking work for months and actively boast that millions of items of post will never, ever be delivered, it’s “provocative” that bosses are getting in extra help over Christmas? When you’ve already said that we all have to post for Christmas in October, but that you probably won’t ever deliver any of it anyway? Gee, what an inducement! Is the CWU actually taking enormous bungs from private postal companies to destroy the Royal Mail?

Incapable of Simple Humanity Towards the Poor and Sick

Many of the people that all the many postal strikes have been hurting have been the weakest in society – people far, far worse off than the comparatively rather cushy terms and conditions of postal workers. People for whom a lost or even late piece of post can destroy their life chances through poverty or ill health. Let me give you just a couple of examples from personal experience.

A favourite big fat lie from despicable right-wing toe-rag politicians in both Labour and Conservative politicians is that there are too many people on incapacity benefit living the life of Riley (go on, let them take a sixty grand pay cut to try it) that nobody ever checks up on. As I’ve said before, despite the media reporting it uncritically*, this is a big fat lie. Everyone on incapacity benefit annually gets a twenty-page questionnaire to fill out every aspect of your illnesses in excruciating detail, followed by a medical check-up from a government-appointed dodgy private company (which no doubt has targets for removing people from the list).

If you don’t send back your questionnaire, and if you don’t turn up for your medical appointment, you will be struck off incapacity benefit – and these days, it’s now impossible to get back on. Yet both the questionnaire and the appointment are sent, just once, by post.

Imagine how petrified seriously ill people are that the postal strike could remove their benefits, with no appeal, and the first they’d know about it is when their poverty-line money suddenly vanishes.

I’m on incapacity benefit. A couple of years ago, my twenty-page form – and it’s quite daunting for me to fill out, despite being pretty intelligent and able to string a sentence together – went missing in the post, and it was only because I realised it should have arrived that I rang up and was able to get hold of another from a disapproving minion before the deadline. And that wasn’t a strike, you understand, with millions upon millions of items left to rot, just ordinary incompetence. Last month (a couple of months since sending off my latest depressing questionnaire in which every part of my health had either stayed the same or deteriorated since the last one), worried sick that I’d missed the appointment letter, I rang up and was told that they were running late this year – but how do I know how late, and when to ring again just in case? And how many people do you think will be doing what I did and making sure?

So, do you reckon the CWU are getting bungs from the Benefits Agency, too, to aid in kicking people when they’re down?

My current fun involves a hospital appointment. I have lots of them, so I’m aware of the bureaucracy that’s designed less to help sick people than to kick as many of them as possible off the waiting lists. Just like with benefits. Again, you get a single letter in the post, and if you miss an appointment, “Your co-operation is most appreciated. Failure to do so will result in patient discharge”. Yes, just like with benefits. Two and a half years ago, ringing to say I couldn’t make an appointment because I was ill led to my being discharged and told I could try and get on the list through my GP again when I was better. I could only use the hospital if I was completely well. No, you couldn’t make it up, could you?

As it happens, I had an appointment at the beginning of August for two of the bits of me that had up until now been in that rare category of ‘working’, and have now joined the more common ‘painful and not working properly’. I was told a follow-up appointment would be sent to me, usually for a fortnight or so’s time but, as the bloke responsible would be on holiday, probably more like the end of August.

I got the letter yesterday, telling me that I have an appointment today at 2 pm and “Failure to do so will result in patient discharge”. And, of course, not only have I been more ill than usual, but I spent much of yesterday – unusual one for me, this, and not my favourite – vomiting. So today I feel particularly ghastly, and I have to ring and tell them I can’t make it. But if I ring after two, I’ll automatically be discharged.

Was it the NHS bureaucracy sending out a letter very late? Or the posties delivering it a month after it was sent? I don’t know. But I do know that, after nearly three months of waiting for an appointment, if the letter had arrived a day later, I’d have had my entire case cancelled simply because of the post.

Gee, thanks, either way.

While I’ve been typing this, incidentally, I’ve been ringing the direct line at the hospital every two minutes for the past two hours. It would be a lie to say it’s been constantly engaged: twice, the phone’s actually rung, and rung. No-one’s answered, of course. Well, honesty compels me to correct that, too: after about seven minutes, one routed to the switchboard. They couldn’t take a message (after all, it’s nearly three minutes’ walk from the switchboard to the bit of the hospital I need to contact, and they only have paper and computer facilities: it’s practically impossible for them), and gave me the direct line. Which I’m still ringing.

Again, gee, thanks. Wish me luck for getting through before two o’clock.

And if some of that rant sounded like the Daily Mail, the newspaper that spits on the dead and refuses to apologise, don’t worry, I’ll be hitting them with a bigger baseball bat shortly.

*Almost all the time. The best interview of the Conference season for me (better even than mine) was Teresa May on The World at One just after she and David Cameron had prated that a quarter of the people on incapacity benefit (handy number, no scientific method) would have it cut easily by introducing medical check-ups, being asked in what way, precisely, these would differ from the medical check-ups that already take place. I wish I’d been up to writing about it and linking to it at the time, because her utter and total failure to have any answer deserved more than a swiftly-forgotten two-minute slot on Radio 4 when the Tories were making it the key to their new policy of kicking the poor and ill in the face.

I Can Has Peez Prys?

2009-10-09T20:52:00.001+01:00

Surely I have the same qualifications? I’m an American citizen, and – most importantly – I’m not George Bush.

Oh, all right, I’ve not been elected President (a technicality), but President Obama hasn’t had the chance to do much in international peacemaking yet, either.

I suspect this is most accurately viewed as a prize for the American people for not electing another Republican warmonger who despises the rest of the world and is despised in return… Yet this won’t do him any favours with those Americans who already think their President is too much other people’s President, will it?

Labour Delusion Max

2009-09-30T08:38:00.003+01:00

The Prime Minister, on this morning’s Today Programme:

“We’re the insurgents, not the incumbents.”

No, Mr Brown. Just because you’ve been in power for so long, been so incompetent and ground so many people down that no-one in the country can stand the sight of you any more does not suddenly make you the heroic Rebel Alliance. You are the incumbents, and that’s why people hate you. What are you rebelling against? That two other parties are ahead of you in the opinion polls? So that’s you, the Government, ‘rebelling’ against us, the people. Yeah. See how that works out.

Of course, he might be claiming today that he’s rebelling against the evil Murdoch Empire. But he’s left it very, very late after kowtowing to their every demand for a dozen years – and he knows The Sun’s only deserted him because the voters already have, and the evil Empire doesn’t dare be on the losing side. That’s the only reason they switched sides from the other Tories in the first place.

DVD Tasters: The Keys of Marinus

2009-09-19T13:22:00.010+01:00

A sea of acid; faltering speeches; bizarre rules; glassy-eyed pretty young things; aggressive men in rubber; realising that designing utopia may not be such a good idea after all… But if you’re not going to Liberal Democrat Conference in Bournemouth (or if you need to get away from it in your hotel room), Monday sees Doctor Who: The Keys of Marinus released on DVD. An early black and white tale starring top Doctor William Hartnell and the alien Voord, it’s the only Who story with an actor from Citizen Kane. Just don’t expect Citizen Kane (more very cheap Flash Gordon).

“They’re treating me well enough. Have you found the Doctor yet?”
“No – there isn’t a sight or sound of him anywhere.”
“We must find him, Barbara, we must. The laws in this country are a mockery.”
“I quite agree with you, my boy!”

That Golden Moment

With each of the six episodes of this 1964 story very different to each other, easily the best sequence for me comes about eight minutes into easily the best episode – part two, The Velvet Web – with an unusual amount of video editing and Kafkaesque psychological horror for the time… But Barbara’s waking nightmare has already been chosen as this story’s “Golden Moment” by Jonathan Morris in DWM, so I thought I’d pick something completely different. Fortunately, one sprung instantly to mind that never fails to make me smile. Sentence of Death, part five of the story, opens in a different nightmare – being accused of something you didn’t do, with no way to prove your innocence and all the rules changed. Accused of murder, even unflappable Ian blurts out that “this business is beginning to run away from me!” When Barbara, Susan and two friends arrive to see him – threatened with a year in the desert glass factories if they disturb the court – he’s visibly depressed, shaking his head from side to side as if punch-drunk. Who can save him now?

Then, six minutes into the episode, and after a fortnight away, the Doctor unexpectedly reappears.

There’s instantly a babble of happy voices and smiles as the friends mob him (“I’m just glad we’re together again,” gushes his granddaughter), and I always feel that reactions in living rooms around the land must have been the same. Certainly, mine’s always like that. For the first time in the series, the lead has taken a fortnight off – necessary, not just with ailing health but with making over forty episodes a year at the time – and, though I love the team of Ian and Barbara, the middle episodes sag noticeably without William Hartnell to spice them up. The relief for the viewer at the star coming back is given beautiful mutual reinforcement among the characters, as just as they reach the darkest point of the story, the man with the brilliant brain is back, and instantly striking a pose, hands on lapels, to take charge of Ian’s defence.

Despite hanging on a locked room mystery with such an obvious solution that Susan almost hangs a lamp on it without anyone ever quite mentioning it (see if you can spot what I mean), much of the following courtroom drama is fun, from the non-speaking judge who nods so enthusiastically you fear his fabulous hat will fall off, to the Doctor’s first arranging a stay of execution while he divides his friends into library forces and detectives, to his bluffing flourish that flushes out one of the conspirators – hollow-cheeked, shifty young Martin Cort* – into an ill-fated confession at the side of his wife, the magnificently slinky and dubious Fiona Walker. Our elephant ought to be very keen on the city in which this takes place, except that the scripts suggest they can’t spell “Millenium”… But, above all, this is a golden moment because the Doctor’s back, and everyone – on both sides of the TV screen – suddenly knows things are going to be all right.

DVD Tasting

There was nothing remotely fetishistic about the Voord costumes…

Something Else To Look Out For

Doctor Who started with a run of superb stories. An Unearthly Child, The Daleks and The Edge of Destruction are all extraordinary television – all available in The Beginning DVD boxed set – with Marco Polo something of an epic to follow. The show’s sixth story, The Aztecs, is one of the best in the programme’s forty-six years, a stunning historical tragedy. But the fifth Doctor Who story, The Keys of Marinus, is the first that feels merely ordinary (if you can call an attempt to produce a series of alien globe-trotting spectacles on 2 and 6 ‘ordinary’). As if the money and the energy have run out, and the early pressure to strive for greatness has worn off. It’s not actually bad, but whereas every previous story had had high ambitions, whether or not you agreed with them or thought them fulfilled, the ambition here is… To churn out six weeks of telly.

After a smash success writing The Daleks, Terry Nation here settles into a comfortable formula of plot devices he’ll use for ever after, a Flash Gordon serial-inspired travelogue ‘narrative’ that substitutes movement for twists or characterisation, and suspiciously familiar names (“Marinus” for a planet of seas, “Arbitan” for an ultimate judge, and, of course, “Just a minute – what’s your name – Tarron?” the first of many characters named after himself). Yet despite all that, this is a hugely important story, introducing many ideas to Doctor Who that will become mainstays of the series (and be done much better) later: the superior second episode has the series’ first signs of the Gothic; it also introduces mind control and possession, like a cheesy prototype of The Macra Terror’s delusional utopia; and the series’ first out-and-out ‘quest’, to find the eponymous Keys, is also the first to suggest that, like The Key to Time, you may not be all that keen on the object of your quest and that, like The Keeper of Traken, taking away people’s free will ‘for their own good’ may not have the best of consequences, though that moral’s rather shoehorned in at the end.

William Hartnell as the Doctor, teamed with granddaughter Susan and teachers Ian and Barbara, may well be my favourite of all the TARDIS crews, but they’re not seen entirely at their best here. Babs and Susan take it in turns to be typecast as ‘hysterical females’ (Barbara, in particular, is usually far stronger than this – though, in an otherwise insipid episode, she’s subjected to a deeply disturbing threat), while the writing out of the Doctor for two weeks is done in an especially clumsy way, his skipping ahead to find the final Key logically splitting their forces into equal teams of, er, five and one, as well as volunteering to be separated from Susan, usually the one thing he would never do. Still, Billy’s visibly refreshed on his return, having been so fagged out in the first episode that he fluffs his lines in several entertaining ways, most famously

“If you were wearing your shoes, you could have given her hers. Hmm!”

The direction is more listless than the script, but the sets at least try gamely. The one substantial extra – that is, on top of the usual full commentary and text notes – is on the sets, with the highly talented (if famously grumpy) designer explaining why writing a script with an entirely new country in every episode on no money may not have been Terry Nation’s most practical idea. He still did wonders on occasion, ranging from an amusingly cost-cutting idol through some rather intriguingly expressionist crags to the Key machine “the Conscience of Marinus” itself, which looks stunning. And, as I’ve suggested, the whole thing might be better off without its two shoddy middle episodes, the look included: The Screaming Jungle in particular is Doctor Who’s first unmistakably dumb and disappointing episode, where plot, incident and design all falter, without even the Doctor to distract us.

Many people know this story for its monsters, the Voord (immortalised in the phrase “Yartek, Leader of the alien Voord,” part of what passes for the Nicene Creed of fans of a certain age), yet we know surprisingly little about them. In theory after the same eponymous Keys as our questing heroes, they only appear in the first and last episodes, and we never find out so much as whether a Voord is a “man” “wearing a suit” (in early dialogue) or alien “creatures” (later), or even whether their name should or shouldn’t have an “s” on the end in plural. You’d think, though, if their fearsome appearance – remarkably similar to that of 2000AD’s Nemesis the Warlock, making me wonder if Kevin O’Neill was terrified at the age of 10 or 11 by a dark, horned creature with a curving bit of ‘spine’ – really was just a form of wetsuit that the one that hilariously ‘disguises’ itself would take its helmet off… Despite being promoted as ‘the next Daleks’, though (with the B-Movie disembodied brains in one episode actually much closer in concept), they never really took off. You can, at least, find them in The Fishmen of Kandalinga, an infamous story in The Dr Who Annual 1966 – sadly, unlike his splendid recording of The Lair of Zarbi Supremo on The Web Planet DVD, there’s no reading of this one by William Russell (Ian). As to why not, I suspect budget cutbacks, but you might also try reading the title out loud. In other exciting comic-related goodness, one of the legendary Grant Morrison’s early works was Colin Baker Doctor Who strip The World Shapers, now available as a graphic novel. It saw the return of the Voord in one of the barmiest Who stories ever drawn.

The Keys of Marinus is released on DVD on Monday 21st September. YouTube has the official BBC DVD trailer, and an unofficial one in the style of the Twenty-first Century “Next Time…” teasers, both rather jolly. A friend has just reminded me that a few seconds of the story were missing from the VHS release but have now been restored for DVD, so I’m particularly looking forward to seeing those for the first time. If I can spot them.

*Martin Cort in fact plays three different roles in The Keys of Marinus, but this one’s the most memorable – acting, rather than just menacing from inside a mask.

Martin is currently directing The Unimportant History of Britain at the Lion and Unicorn Theatre, Kentish Town, London, without being dressed as a Voord. It runs there until October 11th.

Big Government Vs Big Unions… Fiiiight!

2009-09-18T07:53:00.003+01:00

A small part of my brain still thinks ‘back to school’ in September, and it’s not the only reminder of my childhood* around: this week seems stuck in the 1970s, though sadly the unconvincing stop-motion dinosaurs aren’t in Doug McClure movies but ‘live’ from the TUC Conference. Thrillingly, the big unions are threatening to savage a dying Labour Government this Winter. Because that always worked out so well for them. And if seeing Peter (hiss) Mandelson exchange blows with Brendan (yawn) Barber isn’t enough to excite you, there’s the threat of postal strikes and Harriet Harman’s career-best daft, petty foot-shooting…

Clash of the Turgid

You never quite know with the TUC Conference whether to glower that the Labour Party in effect gets two weeks of conference publicity while the rest of us are lucky to get one, or grin that it’s more like fly on the wall footage of a family row. This week’s given Lord Mandelson and Gordon Brown an enormous amount of free pluggage, but the family row’s been even more bitter than usual.

Everybody knows that Labour’s principal, increasingly shrill and desperate message has for years been ‘We’re shit, and we know we are, but, oooooh! The Tories! Scary!’ but it’s rarely been so blatant. After so long claiming that the Tories were evil for considering “cuts,” Labour this week were forced to admit that they would also have to make “cuts.” Except that, look, the Tories are evil! Oddly enough, this hasn’t been a wild success.

So while Gordon Brown’s been pretending that he’s been promising cuts all along to weary jeers around the country, it’s been left to Peter Mandelson to make a coherent argument. It’s coming up to a year since he was brought back into the Labour Government, and I still have the same equivocal feeling I did then: he’s one of their most effective ministers, but as a party politician, he’s pure poison. His much-quoted line this week was that they were going to be “Wise but not big spenders” – an approach cribbed from years of unreported Lib Dem soundbites on taxation, and simply not believable after a dozen years in power doing exactly the reverse. I could say, ‘It is big, but it’s not clever’, or ‘not little enough, and too late’, but it’s simpler just to point out that no-one believes him, and that they don’t have the time left to start now.

Compared to TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber’s Powellite rhetoric of “riots on the streets” if there are any public sector job cuts, however, Peter Mandelson seems positively plausible. It can’t just have been me who woke up to news of their competing speeches earlier in the week and imagined them animated by Ray Harryhausen: Lord Mandelson’s Labour Government a huge, coiling, venomous snake, darting and biting; Mr Barber’s TUC a vast, heavy, lumbering dinosaur, powerful but uncoordinated, hampered by only having several very tiny brains each wanting to move its limbs in different directions.

Voters hadn’t been treated to such a grisly display since those of us in London witnessed prehistoric relics Bob Crow and Arthur Scargill duking it out for rival far left fantasists on our ballot papers in June, their giant rubber bodies flickering in the cameras. Now, if you could explicitly vote against someone, surely Mr ‘I’d like to sit in my mansion and ruin your travel’ Crow would have topped the poll – and surely the only people voting for that self-indulgent old self-destructor Mr Scargill were extreme Thatcherites wishing the man who single-handedly destroyed the union movement was a power in the land again, rather than just The Man That Time Forgot.

My favourite bellowing union demand of the week, however, was blundering triceratops the GMB. They shouted to the Labour Government that there are ten thousand jobs in Barrow-in-Furness dependent on Trident, so that has to stay. Ten thousand? Goodness. If that’s the prime consideration, even senior bankers must be envious – these are some of the most expensive jobs in Britain. How about dropping Trident, and giving each of the workers there a million quid? It’d still save ninety billion.

Good News – No Post Strike!

At least, if you’re as fed up as I am with things being lost in the post even more than usual right now, and with random local strikes every few days (where’s my new Doctor Who Magazine, then? Eh? Eh?), there was a breath of relief this week.

You may have read that

“Ballot papers proposing a national strike at the Royal Mail over pay and job cuts are being sent out to members of the main postal union.”

“Sent out”? By post? Phew! Well, no chance of a national strike before Christmas, then.

Did Harriet Think Spitting Image Was A Documentary?

Thanks to Sara Bedford for highlighting a truly hilarious story. Gordon Brown’s Very Important Deputy (for Paperclips and Pissing People Off) Harriet Harman has spent years arguing for absolute, inflexible, dogmatic discrimination in favour of women, because neither any other social divisions nor political views matter. Earlier this Summer, Ms Harman provoked rows by stating that Labour should always have one woman and one man as Leader and Deputy Leader – even if, say, women got 80% of the vote in each contest and one was forced to stand down in favour of an unpopular misogynist as a result. Uncharitable people suggested she was rather hoping that when Mr Brown goes, entirely of his own free will and certainly not in any sort of putsch, as long as it’s within the fortnight, she would stand for Leader rather than Deputy and hope that no women stood for the latter position, thereby electing her on almost as democratic a technicality as Mr Brown’s coronation.

However, it appears that Ms Harman’s much-repeated argument that gender is all and political choice doesn’t matter is, er, self-serving hypocritical guff that she doesn’t actually mean a word of. Who knew? This week her “Equality Office” produced “Women in Power: Milestones,” listing the twenty-eight most significant events of the last century for female politicians.

Which mentioned all sorts of Labour hacks, but refused to name Margaret Thatcher. Oops.

Once again, people will struggle to be charitable to Ms Harman. Perhaps she used to watch a lot of Spitting Image, and on seeing Mrs Thatcher portrayed as a man, she was just dim enough to think everything on television was true…

Vince Tackles the Fiscal Crisis

If you’re tired of all the silliness and crashing dinosaurs, why not try a serious politician?

You won’t have seen much about it on the news, but Lib Dem Treasury Spokesperson Vince Cable this week launched Tackling the Fiscal Crisis: A Recovery Plan for the UK, which rather than just using rhetoric of undefined ‘good cuts’ versus undefined ‘bad cuts’ actually took voters seriously, and set out nine specific areas to start on saving (including a public sector pay freeze and pay cuts for top civil servants, tightening salaries to protect jobs). Now that even the Labour Government’s admitted they can’t afford the bills any more, isn’t it time the other political parties told us all what their actual proposals are rather than just calling each other names?

*I realise I may not entirely be flattering myself in bringing up my childhood at the same time as Jurassic metaphors.

Let’s Not Book A Room In Brigadoon

2009-09-16T10:52:00.006+01:00

Have you caught any of BBC Four’s “This is Scotland” season? Because some of it makes you think, ‘No, it really isn’t’. A rare showing of Culloden was impressive, only a few weeks after I praised it, but as for last weekend’s outing for Brigadoon… It’s a textbook example of a story which, when someone tells it to you in a few lines, really captures your imagination – but which, when you actually sit through it, makes a terrible movie. An enchanted old village appearing from the mist just once a century… What could possibly go wrong? Go on, guess.

Perhaps it’s that I lack patience with musical theatre – I know, dock my gay points – except in rare cases, and that though Almost Like Being In Love is a good tune, the rest of the songs here are syrupy and go on for ever. Perhaps it’s the distracting accents. Now, every American producer knows that there are only three ‘English’ accents: upper class (evil, which permits intelligence, or inbred and very dim); Cockerney (lovable, poor and stupid); and Scotch / Oirish, which are of course the same (rustic, poor, quaint and stupid). In this quaint little story set in the quaint little Scottish Highlands, this realistic range of accents is on full display – while the heroes are, of course, American (think of it like An American Werewolf In London, except that they start singing instead of getting bitten. It’s horrific).

Welcome To Brigadoon – You’ll Never Leave

My main problem with the film, though, is that a mythic return to the Eighteenth Century is very much more attractive as a dimly imagined myth, and that when you’re invited to step into the past, you’d much rather it stayed in the past. While the village is supposed to have made a deal with God, it seems more like hell on Earth.

It goes like this. Back in 1754 – two centuries to the day before the story is set – Brigadoon was put under attack by witches, and prayed for deliverance. So they were snatched out of time to escape destruction, and the village now drifts back into reality for just one day every hundred years. So far, so intriguing. Unfortunately, in the film producers’ quest to expand an intriguing one-line idea to as long and turgid a movie as possible, they then strip as much magic as possible out of the story: audiences will swallow an enchanted village that lives one day a century without batting an eyelid, they reckon, but we couldn’t possibly ask them to believe in witches.

But if the big threat in the movie isn’t the return of the witches in a new sorcerous assault, or if it’s implied God didn’t save Brigadoon from an attack by real witches at all, what could the God-fearing people of the village have yanked themselves out of history’s progress to save themselves from?

Ah.

Well, there’s a clue in tourist Jeff’s line on witches, “Oh, we have ’em; we just pronounce it differently,” but the village’s raison d’être is made quite explicit by the schoolteacher: “Oh, I know there’s no such thing,” he says of witches – just women they didn’t approve of. Yes, Brigadoon is social conservatism gone mad. The terrifying ‘attack’ and threat of ‘destruction’ was not physical but their unelected leaders’ view of moral, and the religious maniacs cried out in their surety that they couldn’t win by persuasion, ‘Stop the world – we want to get off!’

The biggest surprise to modern audiences, more even than the jawdropping misogyny and wandering accents, is that the tourists are American and the scary intolerant control freaks living in another century British. Nowadays, surely the film would have to have visitors from this side of the Atlantic discovering a mysterious village in some landlocked part of the United States that vanished from reality for fear the gays are getting married.

Clearly, some of the filmmakers realised that this was a monstrously scary form of social conservatism even for 1954, because it’s deeply schizophrenic about its sympathies. It’s a huge romance, with one of our modern American souls falling in love with the place and one of its people – and who couldn’t fall for Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse dancing around each other, and hope that love conquers all?

Well, his friend Jeff, for one, who as played by Van Johnson is a breath of urban, cynical sanity, with lines like “I’m a strange man, and you’re a mighty strange woman,” and “Is it formal, or shall I wear my Napoleon hat?” And then you discover that – jerking against the chain of the romance, the script and the enchanted hellhole – some of the young people are desperate to escape (and no, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to have people forgetting / missing the outside world so much after two nights for them, but I’ll let that pass), and it turns out that no-one can ever leave, or the whole spell will collapse. You can’t even do an ‘exchange’. Gee, thanks. How much more repressive can this set-up get? I’m glad you asked, because of course one of the poor desperate prisoners makes a break for it, and there’s a hunt. Which, inevitably, requires a killing, even if it’s accidental (and again, I sense the scriptwriter who’s in love with this conservative utopia wresting the script back from the one who isn’t for a moment to stop the village dictators being so blatantly the villains by deliberate murder).

The idea at the heart of Brigadoon is a powerful one, borrowed from a German folk tale and borrowed by many other stories in turn, even a secret location protected by a “Brigadoon Circuit” in one of the finest Doctor Who novels – though in Robin of Sherwood’s Cromm Cruac and Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) : A Man of Substance, both splendid pieces of television, each village has more blatantly made a deal with a devil – but not only is the film dreadfully dull, its social and sexual politics are diabolical.

On the other hand, this is just the film you want to watch to make you appreciate the go-ahead, all mod cons, funky charms of Bournemouth, should anyone be heading there soon.

DVD Tasters: The Twin Dilemma

2009-09-06T18:52:00.005+01:00

Tomorrow, a new Doctor Who DVD goes on sale. The Twin Dilemma is Colin Baker’s first story as the Doctor, and he’s terrific in it. As for everything else – well, its reputation is less terrific. When, in a week and a half, DWM reveals the results of their vote on “all 200” Doctor Who television stories, I confidently expect this to be near the bottom of the poll. Can neither Maurice Denham, Kevin R McNally nor a villain that’s a cheap Jabba the Hut knock-off save this 1984 B-Movie adventure? In a word, no. But it isn’t all bad…

“The shades of night were falling fast
As through an Alpine village passed
A youth, who bore, ’mid snow and ice,
A banner with a strange device:
Excelsior!”

That Golden Moment

Ten minutes into Part Two, the new Doctor appears to have settled down – if only temporarily – and, ironically, this brings one of the most extrovert scenes in a far from hesitant performance. Leaving the TARDIS for the cold, gritty wilderness of Titan III, the Doctor goes striding up a rocky hill, exuberantly decrying lines from Longfellow in an hilariously misguided attempt to ‘cheer Peri up’. She’s tagging along behind, complaining and unimpressed (“Who cares!”) until he finds a metallic outcrop and, searching the surface, presents her with a door into an underground passage…

This has always been my favourite scene from The Twin Dilemma. After the deliberately off-key and off-putting Doctor essentially emerging straight from a regeneration into a nervous breakdown the previous week, this was the scene where I knew I was going to love Colin Baker. His evident joy in cutting a dash and reciting at the top of his voice may not be infectious for Peri – scripted to say she’s tired, but with the mini-skirted Nicola Bryant visibly frozen too and clearly not having to act being pissed off – but it worked for me. Colin looks like he’s having the time of his life (and rather good-looking here, too), with his infamously multicoloured coat for once working a treat, standing out brilliantly against the bleak grey landscape and evidently keeping the actor much warmer than his companion. There’s a lovely bit of music underscoring it all, the Doctor gets to work out and seek out a clever way in, there’s a probably deliberately funny exaggeration of the traditional roles of the Doctor as wide-eyed explorer and companion as feebly fed up, but most of all it taught me that, if you’re frozen to death in some depressing wilderness and still have miles to walk, you’re best off being very loud to keep your spirits up. As the South Wales police officers who once picked me up in the middle of the night, yomping the last few miles to a particularly unpromising by-election after many hours of hitch-hiking and singing Shirley Bassey Bond themes with everything I could must muster against a hailstorm, would no doubt testify.

Something Else To Look Out For

Colin Baker’s verve and enthusiasm is by a long way the most entertaining thing about this story. Unfortunately, the dreadful and unwisely protracted regeneration crisis writing means the Doctor is also often the worst thing about it. The concept of Colin’s Doctor was a cold ‘Mr Darcy’ figure that could be gradually unwrapped, but despite the actor working wonders with rotten material, the script editor was utterly hopeless at writing that overarching story. Randomly making him a bully, a coward and a loon doesn’t conceal a deeper layer; it’s just wrong all the way down. He runs from endearing and stirring to deeply unlikeable, without any natural dramatic progression, while Peri even lectures him on compassion, flabbergasting after the previous Doctor has literally just given his life for her (it’s difficult not to conclude that she fancied the old him and is now grumpy at not getting a shag before he ‘died’). And showing this story at the end of a season blighted poor Colin’s Doctor: writers and fans alike got stuck on the idea that his post-regeneration trauma was ‘what he’s like’, despite almost every other Doctor’s opening story being very different to how they settled.

I’m fond of many elements of this story, but I don’t rush to watch it. While Colin is striking, almost anything else that can go wrong, does. Save for an intriguing frieze and the odd model shot, the design is shocking, and it’s a thoroughly rotten B-Movie cliché of a script, full of appalling science and worse characterisation. The guest actors range from rather good to awful, but even the good ones can only work with what they’re given. Future Pirates of the Caribbean star Kevin R McNally has a thoroughly unlikeable character in worse outfits than the Doctor’s; Edwin Richfield is wasted as a monster (in theory one of the most powerful enemies the Doctor’s ever faced, but largely ignored in lists of gods and demons because it’s a bit rubbish); and Maurice Denham, emerging with some dignity, perhaps tellingly does best when acting ‘weary’. But if you want one reason to watch this – and there’s not much more – it’s always Colin. Making you believe that a bit of turned earth was once a beautiful grove on an alien world by words alone, making “Thou craggy knob!” entertaining or exploding “Villain! Murderer! A thousand currants on your head!” (perhaps the DVD will tell me what the real line is, but from past subtitling fiascos I doubt it), his vocal style’s what I remember, but today it’s his physicality that strikes me: closing in menacingly on Peri, deranged; leaning on the console; just walking round a gun; pointing a dramatic finger of doom; sprawling across a lab; striding up that hill. He’s endlessly watchable.

Extras include a piece on fashion and the Doctors – I suspect Colin will not be kind about his coat – along with the usual commentary, text notes and Photo Gallery, with contemporary items from Breakfast Time and Blue Peter. I remember the latter, even down to the sound effect when Colin, in full costume as the Doctor, does some ‘Time Lord magic’ to make the cat disappear. I suspect David Tennant, only a few months older than I am, saw the same edition and that’s why he vowed never to do interviews ‘in character’, but only as ‘David Tennant’. There’s also, I’m told, a trailer for whole Doctor Who DVD range (have they finally dug out those commissioned-then-dropped ‘also available’ trailers?), though apparently Colin doesn’t come out of it well. The extra I’m most looking forward to is Stripped For Action – The Sixth Doctor, a look at one of the most vibrant and memorable periods for Doctor Who comics (not least for the character of Frobisher, an occasional penguin). The one I’m most grinding my teeth over is that, yet again, there’s no isolated music provided. It’s not Malcolm Clarke’s best score, with rather too many unsubtle clangs, but I enjoy listening to them and – noting no ‘making of’ feature this time, either – it’s hard not to conclude that, increasingly, they’re doing this once award-winning, standard-setting range on the cheap.

On the bright side, The Twin Dilemma’s release means Colin is the first Doctor to have every one of his stories available on DVD, and with this and Delta and the Bannermen out of the way this year, the only way is up.

Colin these days is immensely pleased that he now has more action figures than any of the other Twentieth Century Doctors, with “Old Sixie” available in his infamous coat of many colours, in a sober blue version and in the mud-covered Peter Davison outfit he’s still wearing at the start of this story. You might be able to track down the novelisation by script editor Eric Saward, who may have made a total pig’s ear of the original script but whose book, as I’ve written before, at least does something interesting with it. Far more interesting, though, is Paul Cornell’s Circular Time, a set of short Doctor Who audio dramas with one a re-imagined prequel to The Twin Dilemma. It’s almost worth putting up with the original to get that. Astoundingly, one of the worst guidebooks available on the series – John Kenneth Muir’s obvious, overpriced and often idiotic A Critical History of Doctor Who On Television – not only likes this story but makes some interesting observations for once, arguing that it borrows from cop drama with a crime boss, getaway vehicle with false number plates, and the Doctor and Hugo each fit the idea of flawed cops (fallen cop trying to atone and revenge-ridden vigilante cop). It’s not worth shelling out for that entry alone, though. Besides, a list of “50 Reasons To Love The Twin Dilemma” I once found online was far more enjoyable to read, and I even agreed with twelve of them…

Final (leading) question: if, for some baffling reason, you were dead-set on calling a story “The Twin Dilemma,” and if, for some utterly inexplicable reason, your script were only to feature one of those two key words, which would you pick? Would you supply endless scenes of terrible teen actors who happen to be twins, or remember to include some sort of dilemma? Consider your answer more carefully than the script editor did.

Daniel Hannan – A Reckoning?

2009-08-31T00:00:00.006+01:00

I made a flippant aside on MEP Daniel Hannan last week, then spotted fellow Lib Dem blogger Mark Thompson taking a diametrically opposite view. I did the Liberal thing and chipped in to argue; forced to think harder about what I was writing, I came up with something more thorough and rather better in his comments thread.

Mr Hannan can have his opinions (contradictorily, if he likes). So what? I can have mine, too. Free speech doesn’t mean he should be immune from criticism. And if a politician implies different things about immigration to different audiences, gosh, colour me stunned. It would hardly be the first time an ambitious Tory made libertarian noises to one crowd, and sent out a Powellite dog-whistle to others. Did he say, ‘Enoch Powell is my hero, but I would also like to point out that I have a substantially different view on immigration and race’? Of course not. Confronting both audiences with a single message spoils the whole effect for an ambitious politician, whatever their party and whatever the two messages they’re carefully keeping apart, and perhaps most of all in pandering to racism to make yourself look like a right-wing tough guy contrast to that anaemic Mr Cameron.

So imagine my surprise when I got back home a couple of days later to find that I’d grievously offended the Dan Hannan fan club, to the extent that they’ve plastered the thread with outrage at me! Tee hee :D

I’ve ploughed my way through it all, and it’s not terribly edifying. I reckon I’ve made my case, so there’s not a lot of point in replying forty places down to say the same thing again. If you’ve got half an hour to spare, though, you can read it yourself and make up your own mind. There’s a piece by Nick Barlow that links to us both, too.

Unfortunately, I think my problem with what’s there – not repeating my original points – is rather less with the criticism of me than with how Mark seems to react to criticism of him. He exploded onto the Lib Dem blogosphere and national media with an unusual blog piece that combined dogged hard analysis and inspiration. It’s a shame that to ‘prove’ his point about Mr Hannan, Mark’s commitment to linguistic accuracy is so much less rigorous than his statistical accuracy. When both Asquith and Duncan Stott take issue with Mark’s ‘quoting’ of Tony Blair, first putting it in context and then providing what Mr Blair actually said… Well, Mark’s been caught out being very misleading to make a point. But, bizarrely, Mark still sticks to it. I loathed Mr Blair, and argued many times that he was pure poison to British politics. But I didn’t have to change what he said to make my case – it was quite bad enough.

So, Mark, it’s cheap and stupid to state that a Conservative explicitly choosing to pick and praise Enoch Powell as his sole example of a British political hero is exactly equivalent to a Prime Minister expressing a politely mealy-mouthed tribute with caveats when faced with the death of a formerly important political figure. What’s cheaper and more stupid is that Mark pretends political statements never have a context… And that, to prove it (as Asquith and Duncan demonstrate) he has to ignore all context to Mr Hannan’s comments, then deliberately hack away the context to Mr Blair’s. Ignore the things Mr Hannan didn’t say, and hide the things Mr Blair did? That’s not an honest argument. And neither is Mark constantly protesting that free speech means that a politician can say whatever he likes – which he can – but that then somehow wrong for anyone to exercise their own free speech in criticising him (I would never say he doesn’t have the right to say what he did; but if people then disagree with something you’ve said, you don’t bleat ‘Not fair – they must shut up’!). I thought what I had to say about Mr Hannan was sharpened and improved by engaging with Mark in debate about it; it’s a shame his idea of engagement appears to be both one-sided and misleading.

I say the above because I’m disappointed by a Lib Dem blogger who I’ve read being logical, thought-provoking and – though I frequently disagree with him – fair by his own lights. This twisting words and arguments to fake up a point… He’s better than that. All Mr Hannan’s supporters flocking about to spit at anyone who has the temerity to argue with him are just funny, though.

I write a reasoned, evidence-based argument about political context; anonymous Hannan supporters first deny that any politics has any context at all, then make up a context for me (hypocrisy? What hypocrisy?) as a smear, that I’m “left” and Downing Street’s my favourite. Heh! Who knew? It’s almost as if they were utterly unable to answer a single one of my arguments, and had to sling abuse in exactly the same way I didn’t. I can’t remember the last time ‘criticism’ of me’s made me smile so much. I believe the word is ‘pwned’.

The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that this was originally the middle of my previous post, Wuthering, Wuthering, Wuthering… I’d intended to write a quick little compilation post, putting together a paragraph or two on each of three or so things I was thinking about this evening. Being me, they grew. I posted it, then Richard pointed out that ‘light-hearted but lengthy piece about a book / lashings of hard politics / light-hearted but lengthy piece about another book’ didn’t really go together. Ironically given the subject of this post, in woozily writing more and more, I’d lost sight of the context. So here it is, plucked out on its own and probably looking harsher than I’d intended as a result (Richard did suggest the alternative of leaving this where it was and pruning it down to just two key paragraphs, but being me…).

Wuthering, Wuthering, Wuthering…

2009-08-30T20:22:00.015+01:00

Tonight’s big TV event is ITV1’s new version of Wuthering Heights, for which I have an especially nerdy anecdote and a couple of fabulous YouTubes. It’s the great romantic story where the ‘hero’ is a brooding psychopath… Gordon Brown brilliantly took the man as his role model without looking at the context – what today’s called a “Daniel Hannan” (on which note, I Reckon Mark Thompson’s not covered himself in glory). In other news, Richard and I have been away visiting our parents, though I swapped groovy Manchester Pride for the dentist and re-read Professor Bernice Summerfield’s The Joy Device…

It’s many years since I’ve been to Manchester Pride – perhaps even before that was its name. And tempting as it was to pop along yesterday while we were in town, we drove back home instead; it was a lovely couple of days with parents, and friends, and sister, and brother, and nephew, and niece, but unfortunately set off with a dental visit involving lots of drilling, infection, and having to make three follow-up appointments. So with the pain, the painkillers and the antibiotics, Richard sensed I was a little woozy and not up to much. Don’t be too surprised, then, if I only write little nibbles this evening.

On a special Pride note, though, I refer you to John Abrams, who I’m certain was there and who wrote three excellent pieces at the end of last week: on gay people’s progress; celebrating the life of Alan Turing; and, yay for John, winning an apology and a correction from Auntie Beeb when they talked provable rubbish!

Wuthering Heights

I know what you’re thinking. ‘Alex is going to do a 4000-word review of a 162-year-old book. I can’t wait!’ Well… No, sorry. It’s, oh dear, about twenty years since I read it, which means that my main memory of the book is just about the only exam in my life I’ve really enjoyed. It was my final A-Level exam (yikes, nineteen years ago! And congratulations to our sixteen-year-old nephew, who we saw this week after doing rather well on his GCSEs), the second General Studies paper. I answered all the questions bar one, then entertained myself with all the time I had left writing an essay which asked for an assessment of works of art in different media comparing the Emily Brontë book, the Laurence Olivier film and the Kate Bush song. Happy days!

You’ll probably remember, as I do, the famous video of shimmering white Kate dancing against black for her first and biggest hit. You may not be so familiar, though, with the alternative video of our Kate weirding it up in red, in the forest.

And I’m willing to bet that you haven’t seen Robert and Alistair Lock’s rather fabulous home-made version, Mothering Swines. You should.

In the meantime, the big question for tonight and tomorrow’s new adaptation is – will they do the whole book, or just the bits people usually remember? The key thing I remember from reading the novel is being surprised that half of the book is Wuthering Heights: The Next Generation. Oops! Is that a spoiler? Depends if they put it in…

…So I’d better not write anything about A Pocket Full of Rye, the first Agatha Christie I’ve ever read – on an impulse from our local library, picking up the first Miss Marple for which I couldn’t remember the story from the TV – as, though the differences between the book and the Joan Hickson adaptation are fascinating, ITV1 are mounting a new version of that next week. Even though they rudely name the series after a place I used to walk to all the time in my teens, rather than Miss Marple the character. All I’ll say is that: surprisingly, Mrs Christie’s novel is very funny in parts (and far less abbreviated); that for a couple of years, I used to live in the same Essex village that Joan Hickson did, and she wasn’t as loveable as the hard-eyed angel of vengeance that she played; that the person behind the murders was indeed one of the three I mentally shortlisted, though (again surprisingly) one of them didn’t make it to the 1985 TV at all; and that the probable reason I didn’t remember their identity from TV is that, though they have the same name and basic place in the narrative, their character is hugely different.

A Reckoning?

…Er, has been moved!

The Joy Device

“I want to be happy.”

Ten years ago, Doctor Who was looking a bit shaky. The series had been dropped by the BBC, and the 1996 TV Movie (Time Waits For No Man) hadn’t been picked up for more. The most brilliant, influential and coherent continuation of Doctor Who between 1989 and 2005 – Virgin’s New Adventures novels – had lost their licence, too, and nothing else had really taken off instead. The BBC’s own series of novels was producing flashes of inspiration and long stretches of dreck, and Big Finish’s Doctor Who audio dramas had only just started, not yet hitting their heights. One of the saddest competing shards of Doctor Who were the Doctorless continuing New Adventures novels with the fabulous companion Professor Bernice Summerfield – unloved by the publishing house, constantly on the brink of cancellation, and reading like a grudge war between the two incompatible authors handling most of what was left of the range. Now Benny’s got a large and successful range of Big Finish audios that are still fun and still carrying on, but back in 1999 her book series apparently died with a whimper. And yet just before the end there was a return to fun and quality, entirely unexpectedly, in Justin Richards’ The Joy Device.

If you can track down this novel – which wasn’t so much released as escaped – it’s one of Benny’s most entertaining adventures, despite expectations. By all accounts, Justin Richards was writing half the books at enormous speed (though I’m waiting to get hold of Simon Guerrier’s big book of Benny to find out The Inside Story), and most of his, ah, passed the time adequately, usually with walking corpses. But you wouldn’t rave about them. But then came The Joy Device, the penultimate book of the range, which I read while having a joyless time staying at a god-awful hotel in New Brighton for the job I was in at the time. And it cheered me up enormously. Put simply, Benny decides that being an academic who spends her life sorting through an art collection doesn’t sound thrilling, and goes off on a trip to the Rim of known space for excitement, adventure and really wild things, with her own pet Indiana Jones as a tour guide (yes, he is a male version of Benny). What could possibly go wrong?

Well, of course there are muggers, murderers and a Maltese Falcon-like collection of gangsters hunting a mysterious artefact, but Benny pretty much misses all of that. Because the thing I really enjoyed about this book, and have just enjoyed all over again on grabbing a book to comfort myself with when off to the dentist, is that her friends worry that she’ll either get herself killed or like it too much back on the edge, and set off after her to get there before her and, essentially, spoil all her fun. And, yes, that in itself is a spoiler, but it’s not the biggest challenge to work out: every peril’s defused, every threat moved out of the way, all to make sure that before she gets into a thrilling situation it’s been made as boring as possible. And it’s very funny. Particularly the very literal angel (though don’t look at the pretty cover too closely).

The bit I always remember is – unsurprisingly to anyone who’s followed Benny’s adventures – in a bar, though coffee’s a bigger threat. There’s a lot of fun here. Boredom is, of course, by definition not that exciting, but having to stretch every sinew to set up boredom is very entertaining indeed. Yes, it’s full of appalling clichés (mainly from self-buffing adventurer Harper Dent), but only to send them all up mercilessly, and there’s an inspired idea at the heart of it all, too. Dorpfeld’s Prism, the MacGuffin everyone’s chasing, has the effect of blinding you to reality and making everything seem so much rosier than it really is – which is exactly what Benny’s friends are arranging to happen to her. It’s just that while the gangsters and wheeler-dealers want it as an escape from their vicious existences, it’s boring Bernice senseless.

Pretty much every contemporary review I remember reading of this said how dreadfully clichéd it was. I suspect by that time too many of the books had spiralled into such a grim ordeal that everyone had forgotten they were meant to be amusing. If you read it, don’t make the same mistake. If you want grim and horrid, grab a Brontë.

Beating Up Bankers Is Good For Them – Regulator

2009-08-27T09:52:00.008+01:00

Or, when homophones attack!

I woke up this morning to find The Today Programme announcing that Lord Turner, Chair of the Financial Services Authority, wanted attacks on bankers with excessive bonuses. Woozily, I heard that because people like Fred Goodwin were “socially useless,” it would be fine to vandalise his Edinburgh home, as happened a few months ago, or perhaps give the man a good going-over with a baseball bat. If the FSA Chair – who’s worked with these scum for so many years – has now concluded this is the only language they understand, who was I to disagree?

Clearly, lots of other people had heard the rather more radical than intended proposal that I did, so by the end of the programme, the headlines had carefully split up the words. Lord Turner said there should be a… new… bankers’… tax. Ah. Attacks. A tax.

Oh well.

Look, after a month of being more ill than usual, I’ve been having raging toothache this week and am zombied out on lack of sleep and surplus of painkillers. It was an easy mistake to make.

In other news, a health warning. If, like me, you’re a bit out of it today, don’t look into the scary boggling eyes of Daniel Hannan. Still less listen to his latest coded message to supporters that, ‘it’s fine, under all the “~~liberal~~ ~~progressive~~ oxymoronic Conservative” veneer, don’t lose heart, we’re still evil and hate poor people (let them die!) and black people (send them away!)’. You might have nightmares.

Update: Mark is more generous to Mr Hannan. I disagree.

Silly Season Stories – We Have A Winner!

2009-08-19T15:53:00.007+01:00

We may be barely mid-way through August, but I’m going to stick my neck out and say we’ve already had the winner of this year’s “Silly Season” news stories. If you were listening to Radio 4 at about a quarter to eight yesterday morning, the Today Programme had a feature on the epidemiology of zombie movies, revealing that a zombie infestation would lead to the collapse of civilisation unless terminated with extreme prejudice. You can still hear it on iPlayer, but be careful – it’s followed by Anne Atkins on Thought For the Day, and she will eat your brains.

Zombies On The Today Programme: How Could They Tell?

Apparently, research carried out at two universities in Ottawa using mathematical models of epidemiology warned that the only language zombies understand is to ~~cut their goolies off~~ chop their heads off at once, rather than pussyfoot around looking for a cure or containing the infectees. Although one of the UK’s leading swine flu advisers purported to dismiss the findings as “a little over-pessimistic,” expect our panicking Labour Government to issue swine flu warnings shortly involving guillotines, though with the saving grace of too long a waiting list to give many people the chop.

Of course, there is an ultra-violent alternative to this nasty ultraviolence. As any fule kno, sending that wet liberal Judge Dredd off in an armoured killer-truck to deliver a vaccine to the infected will work just as well, provided he can avoid such deadly perils as US Army vampire robots – of which more later, in case you thought they weren’t real – and the even more terrifying copyright lawyers for McDonalds, Burger King and the Jolly Green Giant (I have those issues, though if you own any of the graphic novel reprints, you’ll find four episodes curiously missing).

You’ll no doubt be aware that news programmes are infamous for sexing up their reports and distorting perfectly sensible and serious scientific works, so here’s a link to the full report, the sober and respectable When Zombies Attack!: Mathematical Modelling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infestation. One of the authors is Professor Robert Smith? – question mark included – which may help explain the erratic punctuation of the otherwise dull and unobjectionable title.

This morning’s Today Programme was much less interesting; I switched on shortly after half-six to hear Evan Davis exclaim “-anker,” and cheerily assumed he’d finally taken his mission as Today’s sole interviewer who tells it as it is to its logical conclusion. But instead of telling a Labour minister what he thought of them, it turned out to be an item about tragedies in Sri Lanka, meaning I started my morning with the burden of guilt over inappropriate levity.

US Army Discovers Sustainability At Cyber’s Diner

Naturally, zombie research is far from the only “Silly Season” news story calling out for attention, but having precipitately offered the award, I should explain why I’ve ruled out two other obvious front-runners.

You might think that the clear favourite “Silly Season” story over the past few weeks is the thought that Peter Mandelson might become Prime Minster, but while in itself it’s absurd – OK, so he’s just about the only Labour minister who’s not a/ incompetent and b/ terrified right now, but he’s in the Lords until at the very least the General Election, probably for ever, he’s sufficiently hated in enough of the Labour Party that he could never win a Leadership election, and even Labour MPs aren’t stupid enough to inflict another unelected Leader on their party after how the current one’s turned out – many would object that the Government, while certainly stupid, are too dangerous to be labelled “Silly”. With the zombie infestation “New Labour” still pushing us very close to “the collapse of civilisation,” comparing so vile a condition to something as harmless as a world-threatening undead epidemic is in poor taste.

My favourite story of the “Silly Season” also has to be ruled out of contention for the “Silly” prize by virtue of being truly quite scary. In answer to the twin conundrums of soldiers’ body bags and climate change, the US Army has commissioned a battlefield robot. You know that episode of The Simpsons in which Lisa encourages a bankrupt Mr Burns to discover the effectiveness of recycling, with lucrative but horrific results? Well, imagine something probably less lucrative – except for the weapons manufacturers, natch – but far more horrific.

Yes, the US Army is looking to bring into service an “Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot,” or “EATR,” which can trundle around the battlefield killing people but, replacing soldiers, can’t be killed itself. And, to avoid wasteful fossil fuel use, it will run itself off organic matter that it finds lying about the battlefield.

Now, hands up at the back of the class anyone who can tell me a/ how likely it is to be able to distinguish civilians from combatants and b/ what the most prominent, juicily fuel-filled organic matter lying around any given battlefield will be? A clue to the latter: headlines like “Darpa’s Self-Feeding Sentry Robot Is Not A Man-Eater, Company Protests,” reminding me of nothing so much as Good King Yulfric the Wise the Third’s expostulation “The Evil Flesh-Eating Lord of Kraan is not a cannibal! I don’t know why everyone thinks he is!” from Hordes of the Things. The Guardian helpfully reported:

“‘We completely understand the public’s concern about futuristic robots feeding on the human population, but that is not our mission,’ said Harry Schoell, the chief executive of Cyberdyne Power Technologies, one of the companies behind the machine.”

“That is not our mission”?! And, apparently, the EATR can be programmed not to recognise human flesh as a top source of nutrients. Well, I’m reassured.

If you want a break from all this real-world undead horror, tonight at 11pm BBC4 is broadcasting Gods and Monsters, a rather lovely and barbedly witty film about the last days of James Whale, one of Hollywood’s foremost filmmakers and homosexualists. Ian McKellen stars as Mr Whale, with the lovely Brendan Fraser as his incredibly buff gardener. Both actors are superb, in a film that covers 1950s mores, Hollywood hypocrisy, being out as gay fifty years before your time, the trenches of the First World War and the making of probably the finest film of the Twentieth Century, Bride of Frankenstein. While perhaps the key scene is the tragic revelation of the stroke-reduced limits of Mr Whale’s talents, and what they mean for the characters, I still fondly remember the way we hooted with laughter at the death scene, and how everyone else in the cinema looked round and glared at us. That’s the peril of going to an arthouse cinema to see what, despite the po-faced patrons, is – like Bride of Frankenstein – a comedy about death.

Please Come To Our Wedding, And Deny Your Own (FOSVP)

2009-08-15T15:20:00.020+01:00

Astoundingly, our identikit Labour machine politician local MP Jim Fitzpatrick (aka Fitzpanic) has been in the national news after years of anonymity. He and his wife went to a wedding the other day, apparently, but they walked out on being told they had to be segregated to separate rooms. To see who was being rude to whom, though, there are two questions that need answering. Obviously, given that I’ve been getting my news from journalists, none of them have answered those key questions – instead just framing everything in inane ‘pro-or-anti-Muslim’ political arguments to whip up bad feeling all round (and that, ironically, they’ve all reported the decision as if it was his alone, and his wife silently obeyed his commands).

The two questions are:

Did the invitation make it clear – or even give any indication – that couples attending the wedding were, ironically, to be forcibly broken up for the event?

And those idiots who’ve said ‘It’s the Muslim custom’, as if every Muslim practices rigorous sexual apartheid, are talking out of their apertures.

Who told the press about this?

Because if we’re meant to decide who’s rude and who isn’t, blatantly the people dragging the wedding into the media are the ones who are the rudest. Was it the MP, grandstanding to get his face on TV? In which case, that was rude – he should just have left, and left it at that. Or was it the bride and groom, grandstanding to make their own political point? In which case, they’ve cashed in on their union in a tackier way than selling the rights to Hello! with product placement by Playboy.

So all the resultant media explosion about ‘rude MP’ and ‘all Muslims are the same’ is just so much eyewash. If Mr Fitzpanic and his wife didn’t know what was going to happen in advance, just decided to leave on finding out, and then found themselves exploded all over the press, then well done them. They did the right thing and shouldn’t be pilloried for it. If he went along with a plan in mind, tipping off the press he was making a stunt, then he’s a git. And much as I hate to defend my local Labour MP, the fact that this has all exploded after the fact rather than showing photos of him storming out does rather suggest the former.

What Would I Do?

Well, in a similar situation, I’d ask Richard, of course, or he’d ask me, and I hope Mr Fitzpanic asked his wife.

Then we’d tell our hosts to fuck off.

I can think of nothing more absurd, nothing more wrong, and nothing more calculatedly anti-marriage at a wedding than telling couples they have to split up. I mean, really. ‘Celebrate our wedding by denying that you’re together?’ I don’t think so. Even if you don’t share my own moral conviction that being together means you’re both equal.

What does telling a couple they have to be segregated into separate rooms at a wedding tell them:

Our marriage is the only important one – yours isn’t?

One of you is important – the other isn’t?

We assume you’re so sexually insatiable that you’ll rip each others’ clothes off and frighten the horses during the ceremony?

Similarly, a mixed-race couple going along to a wedding where the bride and groom told them on arrival, ‘Look, we have no problem with you, and we’re not discriminatory, but you know, a lot of the older members of our families vote BNP, so one of you can be in the chapel but the other can listen from the servant’s quarters’ would at the very least be expected to walk out rather than bow their heads and accept that, ‘Well, that must be your cultural background which we’ll meekly accede to, rather than your own prejudices that you want to weasel out of responsibility for’.

If I were invited to a wedding but told not to bring Richard because people might be offended, not only would I decline, but I doubt I would speak to the people inviting me again (not without a lot of swearing, anyway). If we turned up and were told we had to sit apart, not dance together, not kiss or hold hands like most couples do at the key moments, because – not that the bride and groom were prejudiced at all, but you know, the families were very religious… Depending on how generous I was feeling, I’d ask them if they were joking, or tell them to grow a spine, or we’d just leave. What a thing to ask a couple.

It’s your choice how you stage your wedding, but if you choose to hold it at Bigots-R-Us, don’t act all offended if some of the people you invite won’t give up their choice not to like it.

The bottom line, surely, is that a wedding is a celebration of people getting together, and that nothing can be ruder and more bizarre than insisting that people do that by being forced apart.

We have, though, been to a wedding where the bride and groom have encouraged us to be as couply as we like and be tactile with the ostracized gay cousin just to make sure that the disapproving religious side of the family knew that the happy couple didn’t approve of them.

And all right, there was that one wedding where our presence was a bit of an issue and we were sat some way apart, but that was complicated and we laugh about it now… And even then, we knew in advance what it would be like. And no-one called the papers.

Nude Is Not Rude

I notice sadly that yet another council are prudishly forbidding people from being naked on a naturist beach (“warning: video contains tiny-minded locals”). Top marks to reporter Paul MacInnes, and he’s not “horribly ugly” at all – though rolled eyes to the Carry On-style music, and the predictably homophobic interviewees. Shame on Waveney District Council; there are few enough places you can get nude in public, and petty-minded so-and-sos are always trying to chip away at them. Not only should they get themselves lives and stop ordering people around, but it’s at times like these that I almost wish I was a Star Trek fan. Then I could turn up nude at weddings and bellow that traditional Betazoid dress was my ‘cultural tradition’.

DVD Taster: The Black Guardian Trilogy

2009-08-14T15:53:00.039+01:00

I’m rather late with this week’s Doctor Who DVD release, but there’s plenty of it: The Black Guardian Trilogy Box Set from 1983 (and how very 1983) stars Peter Davison as the Doctor across three stories and a new ‘Special Edition’ of the finale. It’s an intriguing set, though not an upbeat one – all three stories evoke the Flying Dutchman and hint at vampirism, though they do so in very different styles. Mawdryn Undead opens the set as rock opera, elegiac, flawed but compelling; the closing Enlightenment is captivating, inspired and beautiful; but Terminus in the middle is… Drab.

Back in 1978-9, the series was given over to the rather fabulous quest for the Key To Time, six linked stories which ended with the Doctor apparently turning his back on both the White Guardian (God – or is he?) and the Black Guardian (the Devil – or is he?), with the latter – if, indeed, there was ever any difference between them – vowing vengeance on him. In 1983, the Black Guardian returned for three linked stories (four episodes to each) in which he enlisted a young man, Turlough, to kill the Doctor. Turlough, then, becomes a rather refreshing change to most of the Doctor’s companions, having something of an ulterior motive when he joins the TARDIS crew. These three stories are rather more Turlough’s than the Black Guardian’s, though both are pictured with the Doctor on the rather nice DVD box set cover, and despite being a sequel to The Key To Time, you don’t need to have watched it first. In fact, this Trilogy’s probably best not watched back-to-back with the ’70s stories. Despite both storylines sailing as close to fantasy and magic as Doctor Who ever does, the ’80s set has a very different feel, not least in that the Guardians are no longer mysterious presences each scary in their own right, and possibly both the same person – subtlety has left the production office and strict Manichean dualism is in, with the Black Guardian now very definitely evil and having enormous fun cackling to prove it, while the once cold and frightening White Guardian eventually appears as now a rather ineffectual but nice old gent whom the Doctor regards as thoroughly trustworthy rather than a bullying sky git. Remarkably, while the overarching characters are comparatively crass, the scripts themselves are rather subtle, leading to an intriguing mix of moods in which the Black Guardian himself often stands out like a sore duck, though his ostentatious villainy’s always hugely entertaining.

If you want more of the Guardians, incidentally, Big Finish this year released The Key 2 Time, another set of three linked stories (plus prequel The Prisoner’s Dilemma), also rather good, which as the name implies follow on not only from The Black Guardian Trilogy but from the events of The Key To Time– and for these CDs, you are better off watching the TV stories first. The Judgement of Isskar, The Destroyer of Delights and The Chaos Pool all again star Peter Davison, with some rather fine work by actors such as David Troughton, Lalla Ward and Being Human’s Jason Watkins in some occasionally surprising roles…

Mawdryn Undead

Given any set of stories, usually the one I’d pick as ‘the best’ and ‘my favourite’ would be the same. Occasionally, though, while one story appeals to my head as clearly of superior quality, another will win my heart even when it fails. In this set, Enlightenment is clearly the best story, but there’s something fascinating about Mawdryn Undead, even though other bits are curiously disappointing (and I’ll cross Terminus when I come to it). I love the mournful intelligence of this story, but it’s not exactly all pulling in the same direction: a gently haunting morality tale with the overblown look and sound of a rock opera, scripted so every fifth line is incomprehensible jargon. But many of the other four lines are gorgeous.

If you’ve followed The Sarah Jane Adventures, you may find some of this story eerily familiar (or, to a lesser extent, if you’ve seen Doctor Who: School Reunion, while the Doctor and Turlough’s eyes meeting across the TARDIS console is very Time Crash). The Sarah Jane Adventures’ finest moment so far was the gripping, heartbreaking story Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane, and it’s safe to assume that author Gareth Roberts is more than familiar with Mawdryn Undead. The Trickster, a black-robed figure with mysterious powers who glories in chaos and destruction, not only looks and acts like a cross between the Black Guardian and his one-time servant the Shadow, but offers a remarkably similar bargain here (then last year, Gareth’s Secrets of the Stars shimmied around the copyright lawyers of The Masque of Mandragora in similarly stylish fashion). In a story set across two different time zones that feature younger and older aspects of our hero, someone is reckless with a schoolfriend and has a nasty accident – at which point, hanging between life and death, the mysterious black-clad figure appears and offers them a way out at the cost of someone else’s life. They’re given a squarish carved object which, when held in their hand, allows them to communicate with their dark ‘saviour’, who tells them that – yes, in the same words in both stories – “Waking or sleeping, I will be always with you…”

“Waking or sleeping, you can never escape me, Turlough.”

That Golden Moment

Half-way through Part Two, which involves the odd spoiler, and Turlough is gripped by a moral dilemma. It’s one thing to agree – while apparently injured and hallucinating, and under a lot of pressure – to kill someone who you’re assured is utterly evil, but he’s now met the Doctor and suspects he might actually be quite nice after all. Added to that, he’s not been given the ticket off Earth he was promised, and the Doctor looks as good a prospect for that as the mysterious man in black anyway. So with conscience, squeamishness and self-interest all pointing in a roughly similar direction, he no longer feels like going along with his bargain, and confides in his headmaster, a kindly figure in black robes looming over him. This may, in retrospect, be a clue (and, in keeping with the story’s theme of old glories going sour, the same actor once played in effect the Doctor’s headmaster in The Deadly Assassin).

More open-minded than many headmasters, he observes that “I must say, it’s a most remarkable story,” but takes everything Turlough tells him as the truth, making him the perfect sounding-board. It’s a superbly crafted argument over morality, Turlough asking “Haven’t I done enough?” and the other sympathising, “I can see, you’re in a most invidious position” but each time gently pointing Turlough towards the flaws in his trying to weasel out of it and towards making a final choice for himself. Initially, he seems just an inhumanly perfect arbiter, helping Turlough make up his own mind as if imagined by the young man to argue out his inner conflict – until the headmaster prompts him, “Are you absolutely sure?” and Turlough decides that, yes, he is going to abandon his deal… At which the headmaster turns on him, suddenly the Black Guardian. Turlough leaps from his sickbay bed in fright and tries to escape – but finds he’s left his body behind. That inhumanly perfect headmaster was indeed all inside his head, but not a figment of his own imagination, and there’s no getting away from the other guy who’s in there with him… In a story brimming with memorable moments, the confessor turned Devil is the most striking piece of imagery.

Something Else To Look Out For

Whenever Mawdryn Undead dwells on character, it’s an extraordinary success. Turlough’s inner demons, the Brigadier’s beautifully played double life and moment of revelation when confronted by the Doctor, Mawdryn’s torment and, especially, his final line – all of these are brilliant moments. I love the musical score, too, despite opinions being shall we say mixed; Tat Wood excoriates it in About Time 5 as the worst in the entire series, but though the opening scene’s relentlessly perky ‘driving’ music is a bit much, the eerie electric guitar chords for Mawdryn and his people add urgency to a thoughtful story – imagine how po-faced it would be with a portentous choir on the soundtrack – and Turlough’s ‘crystal’ theme perfectly suits his increasing hysteria. One of the story’s most gripping sequences is in Part One, as that theme rises slowly on Turlough, recovering from a car crash to realise his bargain wasn’t a dream, then power chords interrupt the Doctor’s wittering to signal that a ship is about to crash into them, before returning to Turlough as he becomes more desperate.

When Mawdryn Undead turns to plotting or explanations, it’s rather more uneven. There are intriguing mysteries and cleverly overlapping times and scenes, but an oddly thoughtful script has sudden grossly horrific moments thrown in as if at random to liven it up and a distracting flood of references to the series’ past, of which only the affecting portrayal of the Brigadier and the twist of someone using knowledge of regeneration as a bluff really work. The strong emotion, characterisation and moral dilemmas of the script keep being hamstrung by references only fans get and jargon nobody gets: how else could we be given the assertion that the Doctor will no longer be a Time Lord at the cliffhanger to Part Three, but only have explained how and why that’s a threat in the following episode? The design, too, is a mix. Mawdryn’s ship has a sinisterly funereal opulence, mixing luxury with death masks. There’s a richness to the design that’s also bloated and rotten – but then you get a control room that’s less stylish Art Deco than tacky games console, and what appears to be high drama with an exploding toaster. Twice.

Thank goodness for Turlough. Like an alternative Doctor as a reedy, amoral cowardly exile who needs the real Doctor to bring out the good in him, he not only livens up the TARDIS crew, but is interesting enough to save a trilogy where the Guardian/s’ former ambiguity becomes pedantic Manichean dualism. Even where Turlough’s concerned, though, the story has problems with consequences – here’s where he starts a running theme until the end of Enlightenment of repeatedly apparently breaking free of the Black Guardian’s bargain and apparently being utterly consumed by his purpose, only each time to revert to being somewhere in the middle without explanation. The other key figures in the story are not the Guardian but the Doctor’s old friend Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, with what we were all told at the time were the ‘glory days’ of UNIT held up in a distorting mirror – he’s a broken shell of himself, and can’t abide the alien exile he’s stuck with, one who’s a cowardly liar prepared to commit murder in order to escape – and Mawdryn, who’s also desperate to escape but turns the vampire legend upside-down, as the tormented undead who wants to drain the Doctor’s life in order to die, not to ‘live’.

To many Doctor Who fans, all of this ‘story’ and ‘character’ nonsense doesn’t matter – the important thing about Mawdryn Undead is what it suggests for the years in which the Doctor’s previous adventures with the Brigadier were set. Production teams at the time regarded them as in the near future, but that meant variously one year, five years or ten years ahead, or as little as ‘the day after tomorrow’, sometimes all in the same story. As Mawdryn Undead clashes with much of that, implying Lethbridge-Stewart retired before he was promoted to Brigadier, my advice is to ignore the dates and just enjoy the story (anyway, the absurdly old-fashioned public school ambience clearly dates UNIT to the 1920s). So, if someone ever mentions “UNIT dating” to you with a gleam in their eye, back swiftly away – this will not involve sex (unless it’s Richard Franklin, in which case don’t back away, run).

Terminus

This isn’t an actively bad story, more a disappointing one. Almost anything you can imagine going wrong does, from its gnawingly depressing design to a script that has many good ideas but finds them at odds with the direction and actors – and, unfortunately, needing a few more drafts to close up the gaping nonsenses in it. At the core of Terminus’ problems is that it raises an epic threat, but posed in such a tediously mundane way we don’t believe any of it – it’s not as if Doctor Who can’t pull off that sort of mix, but with irony, not this painfully earnest dullness. There’s an operatic ambition to the concepts, but (bubble-helmets and bubble-perms aside) everything’s played in such a drearily flat-lining way you’re just not interested, as if Wagner had written everything on one note for a Stylophone. The Black Guardian could have fitted in perfectly as the devil at the base of this medieval Hell, but instead is inserted jarringly to perk things up with a bit of shouty melodrama whenever the viewers are in danger of keeling over from sheer misery.

Meanwhile, this story’s Twenty-first Century Doctor Who connection is that Tegan and Turlough seem to be stuck in a dismal version of The Girl in the Fireplace: the new companion on his first TARDIS trip is left with the old one in a sinister ship with nasty robots, while the Doctor ignores them for a glamorous other woman. Thank goodness the 2006 story used colours more vibrant than grey and beige!

“Short-term memory’s the first to go…”

That Golden Moment

Half-way into Part Three, the Doctor comes across one of Terminus’ sinister armoured guards in the radiation-soaked Forbidden Zone. This one’s neither butch nor threatening, instead waiflike and both physically and mentally scarred by radiation poisoning. Similarly, he meanders both literally and conversationally, humming to himself and dragging oddments about in his cloak in an attempt to find something to block the leaks with. His mistakes have actually made things worse, but he’s also the one person who knows what’s really happening – and just how big a threat Terminus could be if it carries on going so catastrophically wrong. In a story where everyone’s depressed and depressing, being nasty to each other on badly designed sets in a badly assembled narrative, the wounded Bor is the unexpected heart of the story – both structurally, in that he’s escalated the problem but can explain it, and emotionally, in that amid all the grating macho clunkiness Peter Benson seizes the chance to make his character genuinely endearing. Endearing’s the last thing you expect in this story, and he wins you over at once.

Something Else To Look Out For

Kathy Burke. No, seriously, apparently she’s a leprous extra somewhere in here, and with DVD picture-sharpness I might at last be able to see where. Other than that, enjoy Mark Strickson as Turlough enlivening dull moments by deciding he may as well do some ‘acting’ even if it’s not written down. He starts fey, gets flirty, then patronising, then hopeful – and that’s all in just his first scene. With him trying so many different performances, did he still think he was auditioning? Mark, love, you’ve got the part, you can stop now!

Between the very ’80s British Empire stiff-upper-lip flavoured private school and sailing ship adventures either side, this could have been the story that went to the other very ’80s British filmmaking extreme and nailed social realism. The usual ‘sinister armoured guards’ are actually near-slaves not to an excitingly megalomaniac villain, but a faceless company, kept working by petty rivalries and drug addiction, doing a horrible job ‘looking after’ the sickest people in the galaxy, those who nobody cares about. But any thought that this is to be Doctor Who’s Boys From the Blackstuff was lost before even the designer and director stepped in, with the script editor at the time simply not ready to embrace naturalistic dialogue, as his infamous line change from “Do they think we’re stupid or something?” to the must-be-declaimed “They must think us fools!” demonstrates. And though the mixture of Norse mythology, NHS waiting lists and oppressed workers seems interesting on paper, the script still has a pile of problems – why does the radiation only affect the Lazars and Bor, rather than the Doctor and his friends? Why would an explosion in a void have exactly the same effect as one in a huge, expanded Universe? When it comes to the end of the story, avoiding spoilers, aren’t there some resource implications no-one’s thought through, or can you make anything you like from pseudo-lepers’ rags and a small aubergine?

We’re clearly meant to be scared by the guards’ ‘walking skeleton monster’ look, but not only does it look like a Halloween costume (even with a blanket knotted on its head for a cloak), the director doesn’t believe it either and blows the effect within seconds, as one opens his helmet. Add to that that they’re so huge, clanking and ‘symbolic’ that, taken with the ‘practical scaffolding’, you expect a spotlight to blaze down at any moment and Eirak to start singing an Andrew Lloyd-Webber knock-off while his underlings dance around on roller skates. Again, this isn’t Mike Leigh. Then the ‘real’ monster finally ambles up, and it’s a bored Muppet that’s one of the series’ naffest: again, the contrast with the monsterless stories either side makes you realise what a missed opportunity Terminus is (and these stories, surprisingly, are just about the least monster-packed since the series went into colour). Within this story, the contrast is with the OTT Black Guardian and the camp bubble-headed space raiders, but while they look like they’ve come to the wrong party, wouldn’t you rather go to their party than have such a relentlessly dismal time here?

As in Mawdryn Undead, there’s a Flying Dutchman / vampire vibe, this time where the oppressed workers trudge round in Hell lording it over the ghastly pale everyone-treats-as-dead people and live off a special fluid they appear to take directly into their hearts. It’s far more half-hearted, though, like the designer’s apparent decision to compensate for a ‘skull’ motif that might be ‘too scary’ by making every other set the dreariest possible ‘municipal offices in Dudley’ sort of corridors and ducts. Despite the presence of a fight arranger, you have to assume that some of the scenes were seriously short of rehearsal and filming time; Mark Pack writes today that, much as he enjoyed The War Games, the fight scenes were terrible, so perhaps he should avert his eyes from Olvir’s ‘ballet’ with Valgard while the monster picks up Nyssa, as well as its aftermath – the young man trying to help her can’t hear her scream from a couple of metres away, then on finally noticing she’s gone can’t spot her and the monster even though they’re still in the same shot as he is on screen. It’s impossible not to shout ‘Behind you!’

Finally, this story writes out Nyssa, one of the Doctor’s most innocent, suffering and (I’m afraid) unbearably priggish companions. I’ll not spoil how she goes but, famously, the ‘innocent fairy princess’ character spends most of the story shedding her clothes, at one point jumping on another character’s crotch in her underthings. As if to admonish any fans who obey the apparent on-screen direction to fancy Sarah Sutton, the cover of this DVD (each has its own separate packaging within the main box) appears to depict her breasts… Merging into a skull. Tasteful.

Enlightenment

Ah, my friend, Enlightenment is not so easily found. You must meditate upon it.

Or, alternatively, I’m feeling really ill now and have stopped for a Lemsip and a lie-down, and will fill it in later.

Hmm, catching up again, I realise that one of the problems with writing this on and off for a few days while not being well is that I put a flurry of activity into one part at a time, rather than looking at the whole thing. So this has ended up a lot longer than my usual “DVD Tasters”. I may offer less detail on Enlightenment, then – which suits the story, as if you haven’t seen it, you’re very much better off knowing as little as possible about it before you start watching. Don’t watch the “Coming Soon” trailer on The War Games (which ruins a perfectly decent special effect by ‘ramping’ it anyway); don’t read the back blurb; don’t even read my “Golden Moment” below; skip the menus – just press play, and let it surprise and delight you.

The Doctor is charged with intervening in a race that no-one must win, and the threats to him and his friends are far more complicated and dangerous than facing the barrel of a gun. Finding out what’s going on, for a start – and a disturbingly askew take on a love story. These are subtle and emotional challenges, set amid extraordinary visual invention; you might like to know that it’s the first Doctor Who story from both a woman writer and a woman director. But what does it all mean?

“Do not ask what it is. I will not tell you.”

That Golden Moment

There’s a breathless sequence as the end of Part Two approaches, by which time both Tegan and Turlough have been seriously weirded out in quite different ways, and want off creepy Captain Striker’s racing yacht as fast as possible. The Doctor agrees to take them back to the TARDIS – only for the camera to cut away to Striker silently, sinisterly toasting himself, his complacent air justified when the Doctor and his friends discover the TARDIS missing. Confronting Striker, the Doctor – someone whose strength of will hardly ever breaks, and then only with a fight – is told that his very fear of losing the TARDIS made his mind easy to read not just without a fight, but from a distance. Striker’s coldness, his utter certainty, and his evident, underplayed power freak out Turlough as much as they do the audience, and he tries to bargain with a stolen key given to him in confidence – but even his betrayal’s of no use to him, as of course the officer knows about that, too. The only effect Turlough ratting his friend Jackson out has is to make the Doctor even less keen on him: “There’s no need to look at me like that,” says Turlough miserably, his cowardice breeding self-loathing that’ll be horribly evident by the end of the episode. The Doctor attempts to intervene with Striker:

“Will Jackson be punished?”
“For entertaining us? Superior beings do not punish inferiors. We use them. Kindly.”

As Tegan’s taken up on deck to see the night, Striker finds a use for his “inferior” the Doctor in assessing his competitors in the race, and gives the merest taste of what the prize involves, languid as ever then with sudden ferocity as he forestalls a question:

“Enlightenment. The wisdom which knows all things, and which will enable me to achieve what I desire most. Do not ask what it is. I will not tell you.”

Something Else To Look Out For

I can’t help but reveal spoilers here, for a beautiful but disquieting story that restores much-needed ambiguity and fascination to the series, so watch out. This is as much a fable as any Doctor Who, and – like Kinda – a remarkable example of the ‘arthouse’ style of storytelling for Peter Davison’s Doctor. It’s a lot of fun, too. The obvious “Golden Moment” would have been the end of Part One… But if you don’t already know what that is, I’m not going to spoil it for you. In fact, all three cliffhangers are cracking: a fantastic ‘what’s going on?’ moment; a companion’s very character threatening himself; and who can resist Lynda Barron enjoying herself so very much? Rather marvellous music throughout, too, from eerie tones to vibrant sailing tunes to a gorgeous South American dance rhythm.

Another tale of travellers doomed to wander in an “echoing voyage,” the climax of The Black Guardian Trilogy underscores the ‘Flying Dutchman’ feel with wandering spirits, powerful but empty, with yet another dose of subtle vampirism from the parasitic aristocrats. The ships’ officers are the stars of this show, unsettling and soulless – and even the one who’s sold her soul to the devil is less disturbing than the one who appears to have no soul at all. Enticingly, the two principal lords-of-outside-time who look down on the Doctor are played by actors called Barron and Baron, sit-com stars Keith Barron and Lynda Baron each creating terrific performances entirely against the type of roles they’re usually known for – one dead-eyed and utterly cold, the other rejoicing in every variety of excess (Richard points out to me that, as embodiments of order and chaos, they’re rather better concepts of the White and Black Guardians than the Guardians themselves).

And yet the real one to look out for is cold Captain Striker’s first officer Mr Marriner, played by Christopher Brown with a disconcerting mix of blandness and hunger as Tegan’s upper-class, manipulative stalker. He seems genuinely otherwordly, and that old sci-fi cliché “What is love?” goes in quite a different direction to the one you usually find… Though his end is still more chilling than the rest of his scenes (the one bit of cold, hard light that recalls the original White Guardian), watch out particularly for Tegan’s moment of revenge on him, leaving him by claiming she has to see the Doctor, then just sitting down instead. It’s a calculated little piece of cruelty: she knows he reads her mind, so a deliberate and blatant lie is as good as a slap in the face.

Special Features

Uniquely so far for a multi-story set, all three of the Black Guardian Trilogy stories feature new CGI effects as an option on their DVDs, but Enlightenment boasts the most prominent set of changes. While you can go into the Special Features menus (as ever on Doctor Who menus, if you’ve not seen the story before, go through them very quickly for fear of spoilers) and set Mawdryn Undead and Terminus to play as normal with the occasional substituted effect, Enlightenment gets a second disc with a whole new edit of the tale on offer. Unlike the three previous Doctor Who stories released as DVD Special Editions, each of which added new footage as well as new effects, the re-edited Enlightenment is actually a lot shorter than the original – apparently, Peter Davison wanted one of his stories to have the same sort of pace and effects as one of the Twenty-first Century series, and this is the experiment (trimming about a quarter of it away in the process). Just how this new rapid pace will work on one of the series’ most dreamily arthouse stories will be interesting to find out. I had a go the other week at my own re-edit, using my own ultra-modern editing suite of some highly advanced wires connecting the old VHS to our DVD recorder and stabbing my thumb on the remote’s pause button until I got bored (about ten minutes), and found that while was surprisingly easy to find bits to cut out, it was a lot more difficult to ensure the narrative still flowed when scenes jump abruptly. Still, with a little judicious pruning the opening TARDIS scene as far as the Black Guardian’s cackling threat made quite an effective David Tennant-style pre-credits sequence. I wonder if they’ll do the same? And what they’ll pick for the new CGI in each? More exciting spaceship shots in Terminus, I suspect, and if the usual Doctor Who DVD house style holds, lots of pretty glowy effects that look exactly like all the other pretty glowy effects…

Of course, as this was released on Monday, you may well have a better idea of what the extras are like than I do, given that Richard has the DVDs delivered to his office and, being ill for much of the week, wasn’t at work to collect them. We’ve only just got our copy, and haven’t had a chance to watch any of it yet. I can add, though, that in addition to new effects each story has a full commentary, text notes, ‘Making of’ documentary, set of pdfs and photo gallery, as well as – hurrah! – the full isolated musical scores for each. I’m particularly looking forward to listening to two of them, though even here, Terminus sadly draws the short straw. There are plenty of other documentaries, too, ranging from writers to actors to astronomy, and even extended and deleted scenes for Mawdryn Undead. Wonder what we’ll be doing this weekend…?

Being Human and A Damned Good Thrashing

2009-08-13T20:52:00.024+01:00

Two picks of the day: remarkable comedy-horror-drama-tragedy Being Human, coming to BBC1 at 10.35 tonight (far less scary than Question Time), if you didn’t see it on BBC3; and an old-fashioned gentleman’s duel in the Lib Dem blogosphere. I don’t say “gentlemen’s,” as there’s only one involved, the Lady Mark. But that’s not all – also in tonight’s linkspamtastic collection, the less endearingly Victorian attitude of our police to naked statuary, a self-pityingly deluded Republican Congressman (doesn’t narrow it down), what makes a good pie, what makes a bad pie, and even a chocolate recommendation. And all in bite-sized portions.

Over the past several weeks, I’ve been rather more ill than usual, recurringly, and so haven’t blogged much – but I’ve still managed to read the odd post or news item and thought, ‘Ooh, I must write about that’. I haven’t, but I’ve been hoarding links with which to bombard you. Rather than going back a month or so, though, I can’t resist starting with the post that made me splutter on my morning Lemsip.

Inviting Mr Ahmed Outside

I can sometimes be a bit aggressive in my posts, but rarely will you find me so determined to utterly destroy line by line than when someone’s picking on a person I love. This can be unedifying to read (my spellchecker suggests “humidifying,” which is apt, too), but flying off the handle to defend your loved ones is sometimes difficult to resist. Witness the Lady Mark Valladares, who hasn’t always done himself favours in his combative defences of Ros Scott (I recognise my own faults in that style), but whose superb horsewhipping this morning is a perfect example of how to do it, and absolutely right. Go Mark! And go reader, to Irfan Ahmed – This Is Your Fisk! (the lovely Mr Quist gives an idea of what Mr Ahmed said before his latest ridiculous retreat).

Among the many posts I’ve not written in the last month or so is “Leave It To Me, Dear,” which would have replied to Mr Ahmed’s suggestion that women should get their husbands to tell them how to vote, sadly nowhere near his most stupidly reactionary comment. I still remember canvassing in a by-election about fifteen years ago where the ‘man of the house’ told me he was voting Labour and refused to let me speak to his wife, because she was voting the same way. Within a second of the door closing, an upper window opened and she murmured down, “I humour him, but I’m voting for your lot.” As good a reason as any to always canvass in ‘enemy territory’ (even if there’s only one name, it makes them worry – and I’ve had people with Labour posters up say they were voting Lib Dem before now, but felt they had to have the poster out of duty)… Still, Mark has far more reason to thrash Mr Ahmed, and besides, he reads Mark’s blog; I suspect he wouldn’t be a big fan of mine, because I’m the sort of person who reads Adam and Andy and recognises a lot of it from my life. And definitely best not tell him that I read Jesus and Mo…

Oh, Put It Away – Officer

Still, at least Mark’s icily polite evisceration this morning only expressed a slight air of regret that we weren’t still in Victorian days of duels and horsewhipping. Our police haven’t actually caught up with the last couple of centuries yet. Last night, post-watershed, you might say, a man stood up to take his turn on the fourth plinth at Trafalgar Square – and took his clothes off for an hour. Or, in fact, for five minutes, not due to any complaints from the crowd (who supported him), but because the police have nothing better to do with their time. It’s art; it’s free expression; if there’s one place in London to permit something unusual to happen, it’s there; it hurt nobody; and it’s not going to frighten the horses, because not only are there no horses about, but if there were, there are far more startling sights all over London of an evening. Many of them on advertising hoardings.

Presumably it will soon be a policing priority to go round every naked statue in the capital and chisel on little fig leaves.

Moving up the state enforcement tree to MI6, Millennium brings the story that not only are they colluding in something infinitely more degrading than persecuting nudists, but they’re rubbish at covering it up.

Still, at least not even the Met or MI High are as barking as the US Republican Party, who are rapidly descending into a delusionally exclusive club for Birthers and Deathers. Even among their ranks, though, Sara brings news of a Congressman so monumentally lacking in self-awareness than people have been queuing round the block to twit him over the head.

Good Pie

I tried this a week ago, so a swift review – I really need another, or six – but if there’s a Square Pie shop near you, this month’s special is a Moroccan-inspired Lamb Tagine that’s really rather worth trying. Tender lamb, always excellent pastry (tasty and just soft enough, never floppy), with rather a rich taste. Perhaps just too big chunks of sweet potato, but still mouth-watering. And if they don’t have that in, there’s always their Lamb and Rosemary, which is full-bloodedly delicious.

Bad Pie

Paying more and premium packaging is sadly no guarantee of quality. Ever heard of Delisanté? Don’t bother. I picked up one of their individually wrapped dainty slices of Game Pie the other week, and though I knew it was overpriced, it looked tempting. Mostly pork, expectedly, but what I didn’t expect was tasteless, cloying pastry and – oh, how very ‘premium’ – the meat to consist mostly on one long, thick, twisted skein of gristle. I shan’t be trying any of theirs again…

Good Chocolate

Canary Wharf, not to difficult for me to totter to some days, boasts both a Square Pie shop and a Waitrose in which to avoid Delisanté products, but sadly not yet a branch of Hotel Chocolat. I like a large variety of chocolate types, and have praised Hotel Chocolat’s lemon truffles before – as has Tom Baker – though some of their chocolates seriously overuse dull pralines… But quite often, I like a large amount of chocolate in one go, and that means a bar. White and dark both have a lot of appeal, though usually for me a whole bar at once means milk, whether it’s Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, Green and Black’s Butterscotch Milk (the little nibbles of butterscotch really make it) or, I’ll now add, one of Hotel Chocolat’s Cookies and Crème Caramel Giant Slabs. Or, as they peskily appear to have deleted this just as I’ve discovered it, the White and Caramel Cookies Giant Slab, which is due to launch soon and looks extremely similar (the “caramel domes” on the top may have changed, as I’m sure they were little white chocolate spheres in the previous model). I’m inordinately fond of their chocolate gemstones, very moreish little castings of mixed dark, white and milk chocolate, and they’re set into the top of a large bar made of creamy white and – here’s the bit that really works – a stunningly tasty caramel milk chocolate. It’s lovely. Oh, and crushed chunks of cookie are set into it from below, as the gemstones are above. Try it, if you can find one of these giant slabs left in your local Hotel Chocolat shop – if not, pre-order the new version, then bring it round to share with me for a tasting and I’ll tell you if it really is the same.

While I write, coughing and spluttering and wondering what shape my beloved will be in when he gets in this evening – he’s been back at work today, and though I always tiresomely outcompete him for illness, I worry – BBC3’s been showing Doctor Who on The Impossible Planet. Rather a fabulous and scary episode (causing much panic at the time, not necessarily for the reasons you’d expect), with lots of touches of older Who stories, Alien and a feature film feel thrown in, great music, Cthulood monsters and a fantastic vocal performance from Gabriel Woolf, possessor of arguably the most chillingly villainous voice in the world: “Don’t turn around…” The second episode, on tomorrow night, loses its way by comparison, but it’s got the finale of Torchwood: Children of Earth following, so worth a look. I notice this episode particularly because it’s from the same year – 2006 – that Toby Whithouse’s Doctor Who story was first transmitted, and though that reintroduced Sarah Jane Smith, oddly enough he’s not yet written for her spin-off series that’s followed. He has, however, created his own rather-more-than real show, and it’s Being Human that’s ‘promoted’ to BBC1 tonight.

Being Human

So, a werewolf, a vampire and a ghost go into a house-share… Wind back a year and a half, and Being Human was one of several pilots commissioned by BBC3 that might lead to a trendy new drama. Brilliantly, they decided which one to commission as the ‘success’ before they’d aired, and Being Human wasn’t it. Except… That Being Human was the pilot episode that grabbed people’s attention, saw petitions launched in its favour and won a climbdown. So while its first series comes to BBC1 for a repeat tonight, and a second series is already being made for next year, the pilot the BBC3 high-ups assumed would be a smash and was instantly commissioned for a full show… Has never been heard of again.

Being Human isn’t just an inspiring fable that quality will out, though. I have to admit, I was a little wary of the series before it started: out of four ‘regular’ cast members seen in the pilot episode, three of the actors were replaced before the show returned for a full run earlier this year. And each of the changes made our heroes prettier and the villain less so, which made me distinctly wary of the level of brain-downsizing that might have been the price of the recommissioning.

I needn’t have worried.

So, again, a werewolf, a vampire and a ghost go into a house-share… And it’s brilliant. Fortunately, they kept Russell Tovey as the slightly hysterical lead, even though he doesn’t get his kit off quite as often as he did in the pilot when changing into a wolf in impressively An American Werewolf in London effects – and I got used to the recast ghost, who does become multi-layered and very endearing, as well as the recast vampire, who’s… Well, actually, he’s about as pretty as the last one, but less pretentiously Pete Doherty-meets-Lestat. And, ironically, more hairy and wolfish, which as far as I’m concerned makes him much sexier. Still, Aiden Turner’s an impressive actor as well as a hot one, as you may have spotted if you’ve been watching BBC2’s hilarious art sit-com – er, I mean bio-drama – Desperate Romantics, in this week’s episode of which he and Rafe Spall (sadly with nasty beard, but you still would – as for him in The Chatterley Affair and Wide Sargasso Sea…) tussled with their tops off. As the upwardly mobile prostitute muse puts it,

“You boys, you boys. Why don’t you just poke each other and leave us girls alone?”

Er, where was I?

The key villain, leader of a rising vampire band, is now nowhere near as sexy as Adrian Lester was when playing him in the pilot, but he grows on me, too – a dowdy messiah with a grubby charisma, he’s actually very well-chosen (and does some excellent work in the Doctor Who audio trilogy The Key 2 Time… But more of that tomorrow).

Watch out, particularly, for the fourth episode – probably the most harrowing-to-watch piece of TV I’ve enjoyed all year. The final two pack a serious punch, too (see this slightly spoilerish first-broadcast review from Costigan). We’ve recently been watching it again on blu-ray on Sunday nights after a double bill of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And Being Human can hold its head up. Funny, moving, disturbing, with four superb leads, give it a try – it takes an impressive talent to shift so confidently between sit-com, thriller and horror story.

“I’ve got this friend… He says the human condition, human nature, being human… Is to be cold and alone. Like someone lost in the woods… It’s, ah, safe to say that he’s a ‘glass is half-empty’ kind of guy. I see nature differently. I see the ancient machinery of the world, elegant and ferocious, neither good nor bad, it’s full of beautiful things, unspeakable things. The trick is to keep them hidden – ’til the right moment.”

If you don’t fancy all that, of course, Dave (oh dear) are showing Passport To Pimlico tomorrow afternoon. Be careful not to take it as a blueprint for cocking a snoop at your current joyless Labour Government: nowadays they’d all be whisked away under anti-terrorism legislation before you could say “Jack Straw”.

There Are Some Words You Really Don’t Want to Put Together…

2009-08-11T18:49:00.015+01:00

…But at least ASDA aren’t selling frozen cod pieces.

Sausage?!

Sometimes you have to take your fun where you can. Eagle-eyed viewers will have noticed I’ve not blogged much in recent weeks; I’ve been rather more ill than usual and, just as I seemed to be getting over it, was re-flattened yesterday by something nasty, this time with extra helpings of guilt for giving it to my firmer-constitutioned beloved too. So when we struggled over to ASDA to dance through enough different aisles to pick up sufficient paracetamol so as not to have to go out again for a week (adults now not being trusted to be ill without lashings of exercise, by law), suspicious sausages made us smile.

Sausage?! Blast your eyes!

Well, made me smile. Richard just rolled his eyes. And the worst of it is, they’re not even very good bangers. Cheap and largely tasteless. On the other hand, their Extra Special Pork and Apple and their Pork, Parma Ham, Garlic and Red Wine sausages are excellent, and the sweet chilli ones aren't bad either.

I’ve just woken after a broken and fevered sleep which took me a good hour to stop coughing my guts out and settle into, and feel like some healthy, reviving bangers. And chocolate. Obviously.

Better Sausage Than Spam

Have also just had an entertaining text from a friend who, switching on his mobile on holiday, discovered fifty e-mail messages from Lib Dem bloggers. Apparently there may have been some exciting new round-robin service while I’ve been in my pit for the past few weeks, and I may have missed my chance to sign up to unlimited Lib Dem spam. I feel so deprived!

Kinda

2009-08-09T10:51:00.010+01:00

A 1982 Peter Davison tale of jungle weirdness, Doctor Who: Kinda is still the source of ferocious arguments (just wait ’til it’s out on DVD and they explode across the special features). Is this is brilliant piece of art, or does it just have the most rubbish ‘snake’ ever broadcast? Is it a Buddhist metaphor, or borrowed from Ursula le Guin? Is it mind-expanding or mind-deadening, philosophically intriguing or just New Age socialism? I answer some of these questions in a highly partial and occasionally spoilertastic way…

“You will agree to being me… This side of madness or the other.”
Few Doctor Who stories have raised such wild passions for and against them as Kinda. Yes, I was one of those ten-year-olds who helped vote it bottom of Peter Davison’s first season for DWM’s poll back in 1982, largely through a vivid last memory of ‘that snake’; at the other end of the spectrum, some fans have announced that anyone who disagrees with their assertion that this is the best Who story ever is an emotional Nazi. I shall leave it to your own judgement any irony involved in people who use “Nazi” to decry those whose precise tastes do not absolutely accord to theirs…

I started a re-evaluation of Kinda through my wobbly audio copy, in those days before video. The old wise woman’s “Wheel turns” speech was quite hypnotic, and so I gradually found myself thinking Kinda was rather interesting – despite one of Uncle Terrance’s least lively novelisations trying to convince me otherwise [like the director, his prosaic prose isn’t in sympathy with the weird wonder of the story]. Nowadays, with repeated video viewings, I’ll admit that I can’t see how I ever thought the story worse than Four to Doomsday or Time-Flight, and I’ve got a lot closer to the adoring end of the spectrum than the embarrassed end I used to sit at. But will I go all the way? Well, I don’t think so, though I’ll waver between eight and nine out of ten. Let me explain.

On the whole, Kinda is interesting and refreshing, one of the Who stories with the most ideas, married to one of the Who stories that looks most like a pop video. The Dark Places of the Inside are fantastically imagined and realised, and the ‘time’ sequence is hardly less impressive. Unquestionably, the subversive ‘menaces’ of the trees, the “primitives,” Hindle, Dukkha and The Dark Places of the Inside or wherever, all combine tantalisingly to disrupt expectations and are carried off brilliantly.

In the story’s second half, however, and especially after the main hallucinatory effects sequences end, the action-based director and thoughtful script start to work against each other (notably from the blown cliffhanger to Part Three on), particularly as the author’s ideas become less successful. The fourth episode is definitely the weakest, despite quite a strong scene with Hindle’s toy madness and Panna’s consciousness passing on to demonstrate that no-one actually dies in the story (albeit the three ones who went missing…?). Studio floors, technobabble and ‘that snake’ summing up a glib and dull resolution – not to mention interminable Adric / Tegan bitching scenes – make it a curiously uninventive and unimpressive ending. This story is probably best watched as a whole, rather than an episodic let-down.

I’ve recently taken to watching Who again on an episodic basis. Yes, that’s right – as the BBC gods intended! As you might expect, with all stories written that way, most of them work much better that way. And it’s become clear that a key reason so many of us disliked Kinda on first watching – other than the shame of (all together now) ‘that snake’ at school the next day – was that this story didn’t. For a few stories where not all the episodes work, the resolution is the killer. Watch a rather good story with a poorer Part Four (Paradise Towers or The Creature From the Pit spring to mind to tease you with, or perhaps The Leisure Hive if you want one that fewer people hate so much), and it’s plain that only watching ‘the bad bit’ in one sitting leaves you with a nasty taste in your mouth that wouldn’t be so strong if you’d watched it as a ‘movie’. Watch Kinda episodically, rather than all of a bundle as video encourages you to, and it’s striking that it wasn’t just the increasing sophistication of the viewing fans that has led to Kinda’s startling turnaround since its original broadcast. It was the ‘poor Part Four’ effect at work in a devastating way when we first watched it.

Oddly, watching Kinda episodically, I’m also struck that despite every review mentioning how the story centres on Janet Fielding, it isn’t a ‘Tegan story’ at all – more of an Adric story. He has quite a lot to do throughout the whole story (though achieving little, at least he only pretends to side with the villain this time. Clearly Hindle responds to another boy to play with), while her strong role in the first two parts vanishes almost completely later. She is superb when oppressed and then possessed by Dukkha (though an effective ‘rape’ scene apparently unlocking her sensuality is an unpleasantly disturbing message), but her appearance in Part Three is just that. Aris merely steps over her unconscious body at one point, and she neither moves nor speaks in a ‘blink and you’ll miss her’ cameo. As all the companions are buried way down in the cast list to start with, it seems particularly unfair on Matthew Waterhouse that he still gets later (and shared) billing than Janet Fielding for Part Three, and that Sarah Sutton gets no billing at all for the middle episodes.

My other reason for recently re-evaluating Kinda is that I’ve now read the book that’s said to be one of its main sources, Ursula Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest. Now, this isn’t a story that can simply be explained by reference to any one of the mountain of references it makes, whether Judaeo-Christian Garden of Eden symbolism, Buddhist analogies or Vietnam-era sci-fi. However, as the Buddhism’s been written about in great detail, I found comparisons with Le Guin’s book intriguing, and they helped crystallise why I don’t think Kinda is quite as clever as many take it to be – or quite as enjoyable.

Despite some clear similarities in the setup, including a sophisticated sexual division of labour in the “primitives,” “idiot” / “insane” colonial military leavened by a sympathetic anthropologist, and dreaming, sophisticated “primitives” (as well as blatant nods like “Planet S14” in Kinda for “World 41” in the book, Aris’ captive brother for Selver’s enslaved and murdered wife, or “ILF” – “Intelligent Life Form” – for “hilf” – “High Intelligence Life Form”), the story itself has remarkably little in common with The Word For World is Forest. Quite funny that the villain of the book is “Captain Davidson,” though, as it’s of course the Doctor who enables the snake to enter Eden! Kinda is far less successful in getting across an idea of the local people as sophisticated – with the dubious exception of Panna and the double helix jewellery, it’s merely told, rather than shown. How do they have access to molecular biology? On the face of it, nicking the necklaces from an alien spaceship crashed in the jungle would be more logical an explanation. Shouldn’t we have had some shared dreaming, or something to put the Box of Jhana in context? Instead, these “primitives” really are telepathic, which even the Mara correctly notes is a very boring way to communicate.

Instead of evidence of intelligent thought, the Kinda (surely everyone in this story bar the Doctor, Todd and Panna are just that – ‘children’?) follow Aris like sheep, and flee after a ludicrous attack on the Dome using a TSS-style ‘wicker man’ (instead, in Le Guin’s book Selver’s attacks on the Terrans use their own bombs against them, as well as showing the lethal effectiveness of ‘primitive’ weapons. The Kinda merely appear stupid). Of course, the whole effect is engineered by the Mara to bring about their misery, but instead of a powerful, co-dependent, co-defending (“the dreaming of an unshared mind”) group intelligence, they merely combine into a herd. This is especially obvious in contrast with Aris and Panna / Karuna, who are intelligent and resourceful because they are individuals. The extremely collectivist ideological slant of the story is objectionable both because it isn’t to my personal taste anyway, and because the author’s clear wish to impose it on us has not led him to consider whether it works – in the context of the story, it doesn’t, and it fails even to make an attractive case. It seems not only philosophically disagreeable, but artistically unsuccessful.

The message that progress is horrid and only leads to destruction, and that people are much better off as happy sheep, is despairingly poor. Even the ‘dangers of progress and exploration’ message of The Green Death, for example (which I rather like), is leavened by the saving grace of individuality, while even that other anti-questioning Buddhist parable, Planet of the Spiders, notices the danger of not having a mind of your own as well as of unrestrained ego. Again unlike The Word For World is Forest, which shows the destructive effect of ‘progress’ on the Athshean culture, Kinda is a zero-sum game – there has been no effect on the tribe by the end; again, intelligent life is changed by experience, while the Kinda appear like drones.

Perhaps Christopher Bailey should have read the author’s Introductions to The Word for World is Forest. Ursula Le Guin talks of art as the pursuit of liberty, “escapist” from reality into the freedom of imagination. She also warns of the power an artist has over their characters leaching into desire for the power to influence other people.
“The desire for power, in the sense of power over others, is what pulls most people off the path of the pursuit of liberty,”
she warns, and notes that when artists believe they can do good to other people, they forget about liberty and start to preach. Bailey has failed to heed her warning, and has been “inextricably confusing ideas with opinions”.

Another of my Summer holiday repeat season, originally written for the now-junked site Outpost Gallifrey in 2000 or 2001, I quite enjoyed that one, despite being more pompous than usual (these days I flatter myself I hide it better). As you can tell, I’d recently read The Word for World is Forest, and wanted to explore that ‘source’ for the story rather than go along with the fan meme that the story was all about Buddhism, despite both being mentioned in the famously po-faced and impenetrable media studies textbook Doctor Who – The Unfolding Text which studied Kinda at length a quarter of a century ago.

‘Arthouse’ Vs ‘Macho’ Peter

Unfortunately, Kinda isn’t out on DVD yet, so it’s not as accessible as some to make your own judgements over (though a second-hand VHS is probably cheap enough). I’ll bet it’ll be paired with its even better sequel Snakedance when it is released, but in the meantime, what I didn’t say above is that it may be the most striking example of one of the two warring styles found throughout Peter Davison’s time as the Doctor. While most Doctor Who seasons have a relatively consistent tone within them, Peter’s stories divide sharply between what I think of as ‘arthouse’ and ‘macho’ – wild imagery and gently elegiac tales versus the sort that, as Peter cackles on his commentaries, have more on-screen deaths than Rambo or The Terminator (and those stories that are neither ‘arthouse’ nor ‘macho’ are mostly just forgettable). Like I suspect most fans, I’m convinced that Peter’s best story is his final one, The Caves of Androzani, but less usually I reckon one of the reasons is that it finally unites those two styles, bringing vicious characters and extreme violence to the screen but with evocative dialogue, a deranged love story and dreamlike music and camerawork. That combination, as much as its extraordinary quality, makes it the ideal Peter Davison Who story. There are some, though, who champion Kinda, the ultimate arthouse Doctor Who – and I think I’ve explained why for me it’s good, but not that good. It is, however, a hugely important story, marking out a new direction in which the series could go, helping pull it away from the nothing-but-macho approach of the incoming script editor at the time – where Kinda’s ‘possession with added hippy weird shit’ Vietnam-flavoured existential crisis (directly following two other existential crisis stories) sometimes makes you wonder if the author was on the same drugs as Philip K Dick, Eric Saward appears to be mainlining nothing but testosterone.

Kinda has a lot going for it as an experience. There’s brilliant imagery, and the psychological horror of Tegan in the Dark Places of the Inside uses ’80s video effects like almost no other story (though, as Not the Nine O’Clock News might say, nice video, shame about the song). There’s a remarkable cast – Richard Todd (a major film star actively subverting leading roles he actually took, such as Sanders of the River), Nerys Hughes, Simon Rouse – with superb roles, and Peter Davison finds his feet as the Doctor by stepping aside for much of this story in a way that it’s difficult to imagine Tom Baker doing. Most criticism I’ve read of Kinda focuses on the design, but though the jungle’s not much cop and the giant snake at the climax is every bit as funny as you can imagine, it’s the ideas that let Kinda down for me – both that it runs out of them by the end, and that some of them aren’t very good in the first place. A lot of it’s compelling, but there’s something off-putting at the heart of it. The sledgehammer-unsubtle moral that it’s better to be passive and pastoral than ask questions, develop speech or even be an individual at all seems more Pol Pot than Doctor Who. The series is all about thinking for yourself, about finding new ideas and new places; this pits itself solidly against both, so it’s ironic that it’s often called one of Doctor Who’s most ‘intellectual’ stories it preaches so earnestly against the intellect.

Doctor Who and the Silurians

2009-08-08T13:21:00.008+01:00

One of the best Doctor Who stories ever made, and one of the most atypical – unusually long, highly political (even highly liberal), with not even a mention of the TARDIS and refusing to side with the ‘humans’ against the ‘monsters’, I’ve often said this was the story that turned me into a Liberal. For the new producer at the time, though, Doctor Who and the Silurians was even more significant, as a technological breakthrough forty years ago this week demonstrated…

“There’s a wealth of scientific knowledge down here, Brigadier – and I can’t wait to get started on it.”
Warning: More Spoilers than usual…

There are few Doctor Who stories about which I have such a wealth of feeling and which have had such profound effects on me. This may, on the face of it, seem a little strange – after all, I wasn’t born when it was first transmitted, and didn’t actually see it until the not terribly impressionable age of 21. This is, of course, because when I watch it now, it seems inseparable from Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters, a closely related story in novel form indelibly imprinted on me from the day I bought it (as pictures of little blond me clasping it excitedly to my little bosom on the way home from Blackpool will testify).

It’s a cracking story – slow and grim, but feeling unusually ‘real’ and undoubtedly the series’ best ‘world disaster’. One of the few seven-parters that seems epic enough for its length, this is easily the best Pertwee for me, and one of my all-time faves. It’s the only Third Doctor TV adventure I find as good as the book, a great relief after finding several of those other strange TV stories that came to me as ‘adaptation of the novel’ such a let-down.

Despite my delight in it, I can see a few flaws from the off. Some Who stories work best watched episodically rather than all in a bunch, but this is not one of those stories. It’s not hard to see why, stretched over seven weeks, it didn’t capture such a huge audience in the most recent BBC repeat (but it cheered me up, as at the time I was mostly working in Wallasey, hundreds of miles from my beloved and thoroughly cheesed off in a grotty hotel. Besides, it was jollier than listening to The Massacre on headphones). Although it builds up brilliantly by the end, it doesn’t start by following on from Spearhead From Space with anything like the same punch, verve or on-screen expense. It could do with a bit of a kick near the beginning to draw people in.

Starting off on colourised video, it immediately looks cheaper than the preceding story, and the dodgy T-Rex is no help. Not as dodgy as Bessie seems, though; with the Doctor tinkering to get his car going, you reckon that the Brigadier bought it for him from a scrap merchant to save on the budget. Once the story gets going, it’s terrific, but it seems to take an age to start up, and the ‘mystery’ of the opening episode isn’t pulled off as excitingly as it should be. But at least – despite the opening – it seems much more cerebral than last week (must be all the scientists about).

What makes Doctor Who and the Silurians work right from Episode 1 nonetheless is the quality of the characters, and the actors playing them, even before we come to the first not-all-bad ‘monster’ characters since Varga the Ice Warrior. It’s striking that no one character that can be labelled as just ‘utterly evil’, or ‘completely insane’ (at least to start with), the usual Doctor Who shorthands for the villain. Malcolm Hulke captures a fatal flaw in the Doctor here, perhaps more craftily than at any other point in the show. He writes for Pertwee at the perfect time when he’s still new and appealing and can get away with lines that make him less likeable, without coming over as merely unpleasant. Liz Shaw remains one of the most fabulous companions, despite being treated appallingly at times – already sidelined in just her second story, it’s sad that in a saga full of doctorates, only Dr Shaw is deprived of hers and made to work as a secretary: “Personnel will be handled by Miss Shaw.” Among many guest appearances, Peter Miles stands out in the first of many shrill, manic parts, and Fulton Mackay steals the show with the charismatic Dr Quinn. He’s frightfully good, very laid-back and with a little humour, though with an unmistakable undercurrent of bitterness. It’s a real shock when he dies so early, adding to the unexpected realism. Perhaps the standout performance, though, is Nick Courtney’s Brigadier, who in a story crammed with much better-drawn characters than we usually get still emerges as the most complex of the lot. While not playing the lead in the way he did in much of Spearhead From Space, he manages to move from hero to villain while remaining entirely true to the spirit of the man.

What story we get in the first episode largely consists of a spy plot, which might work a little better if it wasn’t dropped so quickly not because of underterrestrial evidence, but because the plot no longer needs it. Quinn and his would-be strumpet are briefly implicated, his throwaway line about knowledge to be gained providing the most intriguing moment. We hear about a planned programme of sabotage, but it never quite gets going. The Doctor, however, is on a planned programme of really winding everybody up. He’s already far less likeable than he was in Spearhead! “It’s not worth fifteen million pins if it doesn’t work, is it?” never fails to make me smile, but it’s not a line calculated to win co-operation. His threat to Dr Meredith that he can do whatever he pleases is also jarring; in the past, he may have said such things as a “Provincial Officer” or an “official Examiner,” yet that was play-acting, and our Doctor now appears to have become an authoritarian for real. Thank heavens the Brigadier is there to take him down a peg. Can you imagine anyone else getting away with dismissing all his clues and calling him “Dr Watson,” a bright remark which sends the Doctor into such a sulk that he decides to go down into the caves very suddenly. As if just for the cliffhanger.

It’s not as if the first cliffhanger is even much cop. We may have had a little tension from ancient mind-destroying horrors, all very At the Mountains of Madness and Quatermass and the Pit, but they lose their nerve and reach for the unconvincing T-Rex (or “some sort of dinosaur”) when it comes to something to bring us back next week. It’s then lured away by the sound of someone having sex on creaky bedsprings. I’m scared. As if to draw further attention to budgetary shortcomings, Lethbridge-Stewart admits he only has five or six men – and they really have a Brigadier in charge of them? The Doctor even returns from his deadly cliffhanger with no ill effects at all. Fortunately, it’s about this point that things really take off, with Baker swiped in the caves and the reptile person emerging into the light and wandering about so gorgeously shot it’s as if the director’s just woken up. Simmering tensions between Lawrence and Quinn come crashing on Miss Dawson, and all at once the stakes seem raised – it’s only Episode 2, and the director of the centre is already demanding UNIT be recalled.

Admittedly, Farmer Squire’s wife isn’t a patch on Meg Seeley, but I’m always a sucker for that Quatermass-style selective race memory, and the great three-eye-view of Liz as she’s attacked for the cliffhanger is actually rather gripping. Amazingly, the pace keeps up, and the Doctor both spots what’s suspicious and doesn’t help very much, forcing Quinn onto the defensive instead of gaining his confidence. And, gosh, they’ve got a ’copter for the search (which is done rather well). It all looks much darker than Spearhead, and the tone’s darker too, with very little comic relief and rather less pizzazz – but it no longer feels cheaper, and by now it’s drawn you in.

The Doctor’s baiting of Quinn at his cottage is well done, and finally gets under Quinn’s cool, but it’s a shame; if the Doctor had still been Troughton, he might have charmed him into something, not just got his back up. It’s a miracle that he nearly gets something out of Miss Dawson, given that she and Quinn are so blatantly both in love with the same person – Dr Quinn. It remains difficult not to feel rather sad and rather regretful at the Doctor’s tactics when we find Quinn dead, despite the rather good cliffhanger to introduce the new race. Given all that, the bathos of the following scene is shocking. Is “Hello – are you a Silurian?” the silliest line the Doctor’s ever uttered?

Hulke’s characterisation of the Doctor in regularly giving him such ‘foibles’ as being a git and lying to people, rather than making him entirely heroic, again come to the fore when his not informing the Brigadier of Quinn’s death instantly begins to undermine his position with Lethbridge-Stewart. While there’s perhaps a little much dodging in and out of the caves, Baker being trapped in the foaming rock pool looks rather nastily effective (and more interesting than the more prosaic mantrap of the book). The Doctor and Liz going down and then Liz popping up again seems a little easy, but it sets up the arguments which make up most of the next episode, and concludes, in effect, the first story. Yes, that’s right. It’s really two stories meshing in the middle, rather as if the Bob Holmes ‘split story’ technique had come in early: Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters (ooh, what’s going on in the caves?) followed by Doctor Who and the Silurian Plague, with a whole new set of issues once all the first have actually been resolved. Perhaps it’s this aspect that makes the serial seem to go on far less long than many other six-or-seven-parters, even if it means one story ends with a rather unimpressive gurning cliffhanger.

Perhaps resting on the cliffhanger point itself is a little unfair. Watching it now, it’s striking that the real revelation – and of course the ‘message’ – that we have by the end of Episode 4 is that both sides are very similar people, and not in a very attractive way. The immediate ancestors of this story are not the more straightforward monster tales of the Troughton era, but David Whitaker’s earlier-starting historicals and accounts of high-ranking intrigue. I wonder if Galaxy 4 would have had the same effect on me? I suspect not, with its simpler ‘Beautiful can be bad, ugly can be good’ reversal rather than shades of grey and two races each split into myriad fears and hopes, and without the critical innovation of the ‘prior claim’ on what we think of as our planet. It’s on these people that the story turns: a politician trying to do what’s best but with the minimum of embarrassment; young Silurian Morka arrogantly refusing to see any other view than that the planet belongs to his people; the Brigadier increasingly frustrated as the Doctor’s behaviour and lack of trust forces him into a corner; old Silurian Okdel hesitantly prepared to exchange knowledge; Miss Dawson gunning for the ‘monsters’. Having said all that about ‘character’, it’s interesting that Vietnam-era aggressor Morka (the book providing so much more memorable a name than ‘Young’ – presumably he wears a leather jacket and, aged only 65,226,801, is much more hip than Old Okdel’s ungroovy 65,226,858) is the only reptile person that sounds like he’s doing an American accent. Satire, or just bad acting?

Altogether, this patch has got some splendid dialogue, with actors mainly arguing in twos – Young Silurian and Scientist, Doctor and Old Silurian, Lawrence and Masters (a youngish Geoffrey Palmer), plus that great debate, with Liz speaking for the liberals, Miss Dawson subbing for the Daily Mail (‘String the monsters up! It’s the only language they understand!’), Masterly inaction and the increasingly deranged Dr Lawrence hilariously accusing everyone else of delusions. Who says ‘talky’ means dull? The argument between Liz and Dawson fair blazes, for example, while the discussion between the Doctor and Okdel is far calmer, with the revelation of the Moon – and Baker shouting “traitor” (off) at him. Admittedly, I suspect the Saudis would have something to say about humanity giving away hot places, but at least it saves the Brigadier (ironically). It’s still not got quite everything going for it, though, as some splendid reptile people plotting and Baker’s near-escape are made far less watchable by the music reaching new lows – this is ‘When Kazoos Go Bad’. They’re so intrusive, you could call it ‘The Power of the Kazoos’, couldn’t you, making the ear-splitting Sea-quel ‘The Evil of the Kazoos’…

It’s a good job there are so many character moments about, of course, as once again the action seems to consist of people going into the caves and coming back out again. When the mucky Brigadier responds to another childish diatribe with “I lost a lot of men in those caves, Dr Lawrence,” there’s a calm pain about him that’s really impressive, and only slightly undermined by the way he’s already admitted he has very few men, none of whom were seen to die there. Meanwhile, back in the reptile people’s shelter, things are no more harmonious. There’s quite a savage row between the cave leaders, with Okdel basically saying ‘Shut up or I’ll kill you’. He’s clearly shaken by the time he gives the Doctor the bacteria, though (as well as shaking!), and then Morka does the equivalent of shooting him in the back. It’s not even a trial of strength! It’s a shame, as Hulke has given some thought to ‘creature character’, yet neither their characters nor culture are as complex as the humans’, and Morka in particular often comes over as caricatured (but I suppose you can’t get it all right first time). Let’s face it, this is hardly a very stable or civilised system of government. Mind you, the Cabinet might be more fun with third eyes; Brown boggles Blair while he’s not looking, Beckett blasts Brown over dinner, but is toasted by Jack Straw with his three-eyed glasses, and Straw’s then savaged by Blunkett’s guide dinosaur… Which all makes it rather odd that, up top, Masters remains an unusually subtle and well-meaning Doctor Who politician (or possibly civil servant, as it’s never made clear on screen, and the book gives him a civil servant’s rank but makes him an MP!). “My report will of course exonerate you completely – I’m sure you did everything in your power,” though, is just the sort of kindly way of saying ‘Bang goes your funding, good luck finding a university post’ that actually makes you sorry for Lawrence, a wretched man with no faith but suddenly acquiring Job’s job description.

This episode having been stuffed full of more drama than you find in most whole Doctor Who stories, it’s glorious to reach the end and discover that the climax lives up to it. The Doctor arguing about confining Major Baker and not putting him into hospital is done with real conviction, and it’s notable that once he returns to the surface, all the talking starts to pay off. His leaving the caves triggers Morka’s coup, and gets everything moving up top. Baker is very eager to convince himself that he escaped… But it’s hardly surprising, as he’s been self-delusional all along, with his saboteur obsessions. Then he staggers out to die, for a staggeringly grim cliffhanger – surely the scariest in the series so far. And there are still two episodes to go…

Facing the gravest threat to humanity since the Black Death (or possibly the last story), the Doctor immediately trusts the Brigadier to act, and Lethbridge-Stewart appears to trust the Doctor again to get the problem sorted – though he’s not forgotten the trouble his scientific adviser’s been earlier. The Brigadier’s worth his weight in gold, doing the right thing immediately at the hospital (even though that happens to be ordering people about with a gun), and the Doctor sets up his regimen of injections. Part of the implicit bargain here appears to be that when the Brigadier tells the long-suffering Liz to staff the phones and she protests, once again the Doctor backs him up! No wonder she ends up leaving so soon, and of course sooner still it’s all the more ironic that the Brigadier completely stiffs the Doctor at the end, with Liz his apologist – as if even she finally loses patience with the Doctor, despite agreeing with his views (and in the book, of course, she’s pissed off with him throughout).

Even the Brigadier’s unusually efficient bit of martial law is unable to prevent Masters reaching London, and while the journey there may be less tense than in the novel, the arrival is stunning. The Marylebone scenes are extraordinarily well-mounted and scary; aliens with rayguns are one thing, but this is even worse than the more obviously memorable Autons on the high street; this is an everyday place ravaged by a horrible illness, and is horribly plausible in its turn. It looks like a documentary or some disaster drama. It makes you really proud of Doctor Who, that it can be so depressing! Oh, hang on… As the guard pitches over and the camera follows the blue lamp, it looks like the end of the world is approaching.

Mass death and panic are brought home by also focusing on the death of poor Masters, staggering around London before toppling down, and accompanied by Morka’s most chilling line so far, a whispered “I am the Leader now” that finally sounds in control, just as Lawrence is on the verge of finally losing his in winding up Dr Shaw. The effect is to suggest the Wenley Moor director is stupid and the new shelter leader isn’t, but viewers will of course know they share the same critical error of disregarding the Doctor: “They’re only apes,” says Morka.

Lawrence’s final end is striking in a number of ways – it’s yet another real character who hasn’t even made it to the final episode, let alone out of the final credits, and as well as his ghastly blistering from the plague helping bring home its threat, his raving is highly disturbing. As with the disease, this unusual story first warns, then illustrates – it doesn’t just tell us that the place is riddled with nervous breakdowns, but actually shows us one, and very squirmy it is to watch, too. The story’s length and well-drawn characters mean that almost uniquely in the series, Lawrence has time to descend into paranoid madness, and we care about it.

This is perhaps the most frightening episode of Doctor Who, because it’s the most believable. We see the spread of the disease; we see people we ‘know’ die from it or lose their minds from the horror; we see our heroes desperately struggling to find a cure, or the Brigadier trying to keep the country afloat on the ’phone. Extraordinarily, rather than becoming dated, the modern advance of combined drug treatments to check the effects of viruses like HIV only adds greater plausibility – though the same can hardly be said for the line,
“Some of these drugs are so new we don’t even know their properties yet.”
So they could be, what, dancefloor fun, or antifreeze?

So caught up can you be by the terrifying culture shock of the biological warfare that it’s easy to forget its instigators. Unwise, of course, but so do the regulars, and although it’s interesting to see ‘young stallion’ Morka cutting through rock from the front, it’s difficult not to feel that the cliffhanger reintroducing a less virulent threat and carrying off the Doctor with his most unconvincing boggle actually lowers the dramatic tension rather than raising it as a climax should. Still, more room for the Brigadier to come over well (“With respect, sir, I don’t think you understand the gravity of the situation. …But there’s no time to refer it to the Defence Committee!”) before making something of a tactical blunder in allowing his men to be lured out.

In the endgame, it’s obviously easier to convey the drama of a big ticking bomb / gun / molecular disperser than it is to show a disease being cured all round (thrilling zooms on: hospital beds and Horlicks!), even if it still feels like a lower gear than last week’s. More interestingly, you can see points at which the trust between the Doctor and the Brigadier deteriorates further; after being kept waiting so long for the antidote formula, Lethbridge-Stewart would be only human to entertain the odd doubt on the Doctor disappearing in the company of ‘the enemy’. The Doctor then reappearing, in white, framed by psychotic reptile people, not only looks scary – he actually shows no sign of being bothered at first that they’re going to kill UNIT’s CO. It’s Hawkins’ attack that saves him, and only then does the Doctor appear to make up his mind (but, some might say, at least Avon gets killed).

The reptile people’s random killing of base staff at the end is actually quite chilling, too. Monsters usually threaten; they don’t just scythe down characters straight away! It’s rather more like a modern terrorist drama than typical Doctor Who, and serves to emphasise both this serial’s unusually high body count and how few of those have actually died in the ‘thrilling shoot-out’ action you’d normally expect. We’re still some way off the end credits for Episode 7, yet most of the people in Episode 1 are long-dead, and half the cast who made it this far will be dead by the end. It also serves to emphasise the deadly intent of the rather uninspiring prehistoric microwave with which the human race is to be cooked, though in fairness the machine also supplies more evidence of the so far somewhat sparse reptile civilisation. A bit of art wouldn’t hurt, a bit more technology, or more than two sound effects while they do everything by third eye ‘magic’.

“Doctor, what do you think you’re doing?” asks the Brigadier, who by now is clearly far from convinced that the Doctor is play-acting when he goes to help the Elder Earthlings (and in that rather unwise t-shirt, he does look a bit shifty). “You mustn’t help him!” he even orders Liz, who – like the audience – has more faith, but the skilful writing and Courtney’s performance make his not trusting the Doctor an inch perfectly understandable. It’s also rather impressive that the Doctor really does have to overload the power core to scare off the reptile people – for once, it’s not just a bluff – and that the same thing that wakes the reptile people in the first place becomes the cause of their downfall, rather than the power being merely a background detail.

With the machine blown up, the monsters in retreat and the Doctor saying “Yes, I know, I’ll try fusing the control of the neutron flow” (admittedly not then the cosy nod that that sort of line has become in retrospect), you’d expect this to be the end, but the last few minutes are brilliant – just when every other Who story would finish, we get great stuff like Morka finally showing he’s not just a violent egomaniac, as he realises that leadership involves responsibility. It makes his death suddenly poignant, and rather graphic. The Doctor is really, well, Doctorish with his pursuit of scientific knowledge, and what a joy it is to see that – except for the Brigadier, who is having none of it, but not yet blustering. Lethbridge-Stewart gives him a seriously evil look as the Doctor contemplates a reptile revival, and while I’m on the Doctor’s side through and through, now I can see what’s brought the Brigadier to this point, I wonder if the Doctor couldn’t have retained his trust, and so kept Morka’s people alive. It isn’t really their disagreement that precipitates the final crisis, but their distrust – it’s not impossible that the Brigadier’s sealing of the caves is not inevitable, but in part a lesson to the Doctor, to show him ‘who’s boss’. Both actors are at their very best, with shock meeting quiet, deadly efficiency. Has Jon Pertwee a finer moment than that appalled look at the exploding caves, in a fantastic Doctor scene that lures you into thinking it’ll just be the comic relief?

The Doctor loses. He actually loses. And the first person to beat him since The Aztecs’ Tlotoxl is to become his friend; it’s easy to conclude that it’s a shame they had to get on after this. I’m no longer sure that’s true. Perhaps this is simply a better story than any that follow with the Doctor and UNIT, and none of the rest could cope with this level of drama. But perhaps also the Doctor realises that UNIT is in the right place at the right time, and could be doing the right thing if he changed tactics and tried harder to persuade them; it’s a better excuse for his becoming the ‘establishment’ Doctor than any other I’ve heard, and despite his loud distaste for politicians, for once it’s an argument for working ‘inside the system’. This Doctor’s instincts have been spot-on, and he’s tried to do good throughout, but it’s all undermined by his own fatal flaw: arrogance. Ironically, the Doctor realises that the solution is for everybody just to get along with each other, but his confrontational approach and unwillingness to trust people with information shows that he’s incapable of following his own advice. In life, in politics and in Doctor Who and the Silurians, getting everyone’s backs up rarely gets you results, even if you’re right.

Run end credits – and notice how much shorter they are than for than Episode 1. Oh, and I have to get this out of my system: he’s not Doctor Who. They’re not Silurians. But it’s still a cool title.

This story has a lot to answer for… Reading its message that green scaly rubber people are people too turned me into a Liberal. Appropriately, it’s one of the few [Twentieth Century] Doctor Who stories I saw first as an adult that I can remember exactly where I was when I saw it for the first time. It was five am the day after it was released by BBC Video, and I was crashing in a sleeping bag on someone’s floor (the glamour of politics) and blearily determined to get it all watched before it was time to go out for another day’s trudging the streets to canvass and deliver leaflets in the 1993 Christchurch by-election, which turned out to be a great Liberal Democrat victory over the Tories. Devoted as I was to the cause, this story was still something I desperately wanted to make time for as early as possible, and I was thrilled – even though it had actually been a life-changing experience many years earlier. And without having read the book, who knows? Perhaps I wouldn’t have been there at all…

So that – originally written in 2002 – was where my crucial political breakthrough took place, probably aged about seven when I found a copy of the novelisation on holiday. I still love both the book and the TV story, though I often wonder what I’d have made of the Doctor (Jon Pertwee, of whom I have mixed feelings) suddenly stuck on Earth and working for the military rather than travelling through history and to alien worlds if I’d already been watching the series at the time. I might have hated it. But I wasn’t born by 1970, and with the Doctor long since freed to wander again through time and space by the time I was captivated by first seeing Doctor Who, it’s easy to be fond of a time that had finished. I love Doctor Who for its variety – and the period during which he was exiled to Earth, while denying that variety when it was all there was, is now an interesting part of it when I can look back across the lot.

Doctor Who In 1970, In Colour (Separation Overlay)

1970 was an extraordinary year for Doctor Who. A bold relaunch for the series, in colour, with a new Doctor exiled to modern-day-after-tomorrow Earth, it’s by a long way the most Earthbound the series has ever been. Again, you’d think that means I’d hate it. And yet… Each one of the stories is just so good. Doctor Who and the Silurians is undoubtedly the best of them, but I’ve also written reviews of Spearhead From Space and Inferno, and I’m sure I’ll be excited enough to do the same when The Ambassadors of Death makes it to DVD, so I can’t think of any other season where every single story is of such consistently high quality. It’s certainly not my favourite year of Who – yes, I do prefer those with more variety, with different times, different worlds, and a different tone to the fairly relentless butch soldiery – but that’s not any of the individual stories’ faults; the season’s hugely impressive, but it’s a little less than the sum of its parts.

I mentioned a technological as well as a political breakthrough above – on 6th August 1969 there was a five-hour test session at the BBC for a new technique called Colour Separation Overlay, or CSO. Well, it was called that at the BBC; everyone else called it “Chromakey,” or more commonly these days “greenscreen” or “bluescreen”; it’s when you programme a video camera so it doesn’t capture anything in a particular colour, usually green or blue, so you can insert the bit the camera does ‘see’ onto another shot (for example, have someone mime flying against a blue background, then add them to a picture of the sky). But in Doctor Who, of course, the colour of monsters is green and the TARDIS is blue, so in the early ’70s they used a lot of disappearing yellow backgrounds instead. As Doctor Who and the Silurians was the first of the series to be shot on colour videotape (Spearhead From Space, the first colour Who story, was on film, which needs different techniques), it was the first to use CSO. It’s to make the caves look bigger in Episode 6, if you’re wondering, but the man in charge of that August 6th effects test was Barry Letts, who took over as producer of Doctor Who with …and the Silurians and devoutly believed that you could use CSO to do anything. So, over the next five years, he tried to prove it…

Bye-Bye, But Why? Outpost Gallifrey

But back to my review above. It’s a little odd reading it after about seven years. My style’s changed a great deal, and so has the context. I originally wrote it for Outpost Gallifrey, at the time the biggest Doctor Who fan site. Regular readers of my summer repeats season (stalled in the last few weeks) will be aware that, as well as that site’s owner closing down its associated private forum and its successor forum, in an act of vandalism, he’s now obliterated the main site, too. I really can’t see the point: he’s said that the closed forums had to be deleted for privacy’s sake, but the thousands of reviews and articles people had contributed to Outpost Gallifrey were always free for use of the public. I had only eight pieces on there, but one bloke had reviewed every single Twentieth Century Who TV story, and many others as well – and, unlike a lot of Internet reviews, his were rather interesting. That’s about 200 just from one chap that I enjoyed reading and can’t any more, for no particular reason save selfish destructiveness, and the fact that the site domain still exists as a big advert for a money-spinning convention makes it seem like two fingers up to all the people whose work for free had made the original site a success.

Grr.

But anyway, back in 2002 I wrote this review for what I assumed was an audience of Doctor Who fans who’d be intimately familiar with the story, or at least with the general details surrounding it. So the main thing that struck me was that now I wouldn’t write something quite so utterly preaching to the converted; enthusiastically insular as I may still be, these days I at least make the odd concession to readers who don’t know exactly what I’m talking about before I start (and I’ve added the odd expositionary word above to make some of it marginally less impenetrable). Following on from that, it’s also a lot more spoiler-heavy than many of my pieces now, and without any spoiler warnings for those who’ve not seen the story.

The other huge stylistic difference is how linear it all is. Were I starting out on a detailed review of Doctor Who and the Silurians today, I might base it around the themes, or the characters – I wouldn’t just plough through the story in order any more. In many ways, my reactive approach above (and particularly the funny asides I thought of and crowbarred in) reads like a ‘not the DVD commentary’ years before the story was released on DVD.

It’s not just the DVD release that’s changed the context since I wrote it, of course – Doctor Who’s come back on TV, and I’d assume that people interested in the show would be a far wider group, but also far less knowledgeable of every single story from the series’ whole forty-six years (and, of course, today I’d imagine very different members of the Cabinet slaughtering each other).

Beneath the Surface On DVD

If you want to experience Doctor Who and the Silurians for yourself, then – and, for me, it’s still one of the best Doctor Who stories ever made, even aside from its personal effect on me – pick up the Beneath the Surface DVD box set, which has been out a couple of years now and so you should be able to find fairly cheap. The two sequels with it decline sharply (one exciting but dumb, the other rather less exciting and dumber), though the three collected ‘reptile people’ stories have the distinction of all having their own isolated scores on the DVD, which in the case of the two ’70s stories makes them exceedingly rare – though the quality of the scores rises sharply, in inverse proportion to the stories themselves (perhaps fortunately, listening to the music for this story in isolation you realise how very little there is of it, however shonky the crumhorns are when they sound). You’ll also find that Doctor Who and the Silurians has inconsistent picture quality; restored from a good black and white print and a very, very poor colour home video, it’s a massive improvement on the old VHS restoration, but you can still tell there’s something a bit iffy about it. Despite that, some scenes are arrestingly impressive with the new treatment – Jon Pertwee no longer looking like he’s been coloured in with felt-tips for the terrific Episode 5 cliffhanger, for example, or the sweeping helicopter shots and fantastic zooms for the UNIT search across the moors now looking far more expensive and expansive than they did in grainy near-black and white.

The other advantage of seeing Doctor Who and the Silurians on DVD, of course, is that it’s packed with extras. There’s a particularly fine commentary, mixing people from before and behind the camera. That means it can move naturally from details like the director explaining his painting the upper third of the lens red for a Silurian-eye view – in a story all about seeing things from different people’s points of view – to moments of dry humour like Peter Miles admonishing Caroline John over her flippant wish for a third eye with which to shut people up (“Some of us died because of these things”), or the marvellous Geoffrey Palmer bringing it right up to date with

“My son would have been hiding behind the sofa while watching this… And in the last series that went out, he directed four of them.”

And, back to the different points of view, the actors all constantly debate the story’s politics, often though not always siding with their characters’ viewpoints, while script editor Terrance Dicks calls the Doctor “an incorrigible liberal” and “a Guardian-reading liberal”. Hurrah! The text notes are informative and often amusing – thankfully, over seven episodes, they’re written by Martin Wiggins, definitely the best of the DVD annotators, deftly explaining such elements as the slightly confused science without either getting defensive or just slagging the programme off; after sketching out the Silurian Era, he concludes, “So why are the reptiles in this serial known as Silurians? Simply because Malcolm Hulke liked the sound of the name!” Which is as good a writer’s reason as any. And, amongst all the on-screen documentaries and other extras – photo galleries, “Now and Then” location features, the music, the restoration – there’s arguably the best single DVD extra the range has yet offered, What Lies Beneath, a BBC4-style visual essay on the issues behind the story, splendidly narrated by Geoffrey Palmer (I mention him again, but he does have a marvellous voice and knows how to use it), featuring Doctor Who writers from the ’60s to today and even Roy Hattersley. Well, he’s not bad in this.

Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters

Given that the novelisation Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters had such a profound effect on me, though it’s long out of print, I should of course mention that it’s now available on a shiny silver disc of its own, read by Caroline John (Dr Liz Shaw) as a talking book. She even plugs it on the DVD commentary, bringing in some of its extra details. It’s well worth picking up and a rather good reading of an outstanding book that adds much extra depth to the characters and situation, though not perfect. It suffers from printing the novel’s gorgeous original internal illustrations not at full-page size, but rather smaller than postage stamps, which reduces their impact. Caroline’s brilliant as Liz, particularly when she comes close to murdering the Doctor in his smugger moments, and has fun with her pompous Doctor and Brigadier voices, but is slightly uncertain as a narrator, though noticeably gaining confidence as she goes along.

The biggest let-down of both elements is Dr Quinn; the most fascinating character for me growing up, tensely written like the spy drama double agent who’s got the secret communications device from his handlers, ambitious to make his own scientific mark, manipulating Miss Dawson, then finally dying in a thrillingly written sequence accompanied by an outstanding illustration. Neither has quite the same effect when you have to squint at a tiny picture and, unfortunately, Caroline’s terrible cod-Scots accent makes it less poignant and more of a relief for Quinn to be killed off. Still, if you can ignore what Dr Quinn sounds like, I’d thoroughly recommend the book either on the page or on CD – and when I picked it as one of my summer reading choices for another site last year, people even seemed to like my writing…

Make Some Of It Happen (This Year, Next Year, Sometime, Never…?)

2009-07-22T15:22:00.027+01:00

This is an exciting day for Liberal Democrat campaigners, with publication of a very short new set of our priorities for these tight economic times and an interview with Nick Clegg in which he tells us which priorities got dropped (highlighting at least one major blunder). Our new approach in two Twitter-style bites:

“Lib Dems: no to business as usual! A Fresh Start For Britain: creating a sustainable economy; building a fair society; cleaning up politics.”

“Lib Dems: right on the banking crisis, environment, cleaning up politics and Iraq. The others were wrong. Who’ll be right on the next mess?”

And a more populist go at it added a bit later in the day:

“Lib Dems’ Fresh Start For Britain. 1: Green jobs & safer banks. 2: Fair taxes & investment in schoolkids. 3: Give you power to sack your MP!”

Libdemologists’ main source of intrigue today will be in reading between the lines of the new extremely-mini-manifesto A Fresh Start For Britain, trying to work out what the very few commitments mean and what’s left out… And their task will be made easier by this morning’s interview in The Independent, in which Nick Clegg explains the strategy rather well, while also offering a couple of hostages to fortune and serving up a handy bullet-pointable list of major priorities which are still very, very important… But which no longer have a budget or start date attached, because we probably can’t afford them right now. And it’s those that Liberal Democrats are most likely to be up in arms about, rather than what A Fresh Start For Britain actually says.

Now, I spent many long years on the party’s Federal Policy Committee, so I’m just about as experienced in reading between the lines of a policy statement as anyone. Having stood down from the FPC last year through ill health (and I’m more than a little peaky today; pass me another bacon sarnie!), it’s fascinating to read through A Fresh Start For Britain and work out what the arguments over it were. Because, of course, although it’s all in the name of Nick Clegg, he didn’t write it all and he’s very unlikely to have got it all his own way. Our Leaders don’t.

So, before this comes for debate at Conference in September – and you may be thrilled to learn that there’ll be a ‘part 2’ coming soon, spelling out the status of major policies in more detail – it’s already gone through the Federal Policy Committee, in a meeting which I’m told went on for five hours, which’d make it one of the longest since the final meeting on the 1997 Manifesto, after which fourteen of us crawled out alive at a quarter to one in the morning. And I’d love to know what went on at that meeting, so if any of my former colleagues fancy giving me a ring… All of which, of course, means that although if you’ve got a pet peeve with what’s in A Fresh Start For Britain (or, more likely, what isn’t), you should not only send a probing e-mail Cleggwards, but put a rocket up any members of the FPC you happen to know. Particularly as I’m not on there any more, so it’s not my fault (ha ha, ha ha ha ha).

A Fresh Start For Britain

A completely new, bold and fresh (and a little bit patriotic) title, which tells you… Er… Um… Well, all right, it’s not the most exciting title in the world, but it does tell you one of the key themes for the Liberal Democrats now – with both the economy and the political system more infuriatingly rubbish than they’ve been for half a century, that we’ve suddenly become less afraid to say, ‘Look, the whole thing’s been really buggered up for ages, hasn’t it? Let’s chuck it all and start again (and you won’t get that from the other two)’. Ironically, this was the message of the first draft of last year’s Make It Happen, but it was felt that a wildly anti-establishment tone was too scary in what was starting to look like might be a recession, so the tone was made more reassuring. Now that the economy’s much more fucked than anticipated and politicians are being spat at in the streets, ‘tear it all down’ suddenly has a more mass appeal. In line with Lib Dem statements of principles always having too many titles, there’s also the subtitle “Choosing a different, better future,” which includes the “Future” I’ve been using to imply “Green,” but sounds even less bold and distinctive than “A Fresh Start For Britain”.

A Fresh Start For Britain is not, of course, to be confused with 1981’s statement of principles commended by a joint working party of Liberals and Social Democrats and attributed (though probably even less written by them than this is by Nick) to David Steel and Shirley Williams, a set of priorities for an economic and political crisis with the entirely different title of A Fresh Start For Britain. Though some of the ideas in today’s fresh and exciting new approach are, of course, so fresh and exciting that they were there twenty-eight years ago, the new one’s better – at least as far as I can remember. It’s a while since I’ve read it and, despite getting dusty and sneezy excavating some of my thrilling collection of old SDP literature, I couldn’t find a copy. I’m peeved that though my old university promises an online pdf, the link’s dead. We should drop our commitment to university funding as a punishment! No, hang on…

A Slightly Fresher Start For Britain is, however, available as a pdf. Slightly confusingly, it’s not on the admittedly rather fresh-looking A Fresh Start For Britain website; instead, you have to e-mail them and ask for it. Still more confusingly, if you read the pdf you’ll find that this swish new statement of our priorities for a Liberal Democrat Government has been slimmed down to just seven absolutely essential short sections… But, if you read it on the website, there are only six of them. Yes – even one of our key priorities isn’t always a key priority, though I suspect that may be a mistake [update: it’s all on there now].

So, What’s In It?

Having been mean about A Fresh Start For Britain, actually… It’s pretty good. If you’re going to pick out eye-catching headlines rather than make a compendium of all known policy, this is pretty good – though I’ll come to two key things that aren’t there later. If you read it, you get a pretty good idea of what we’d do, and a pretty good impression that we’d actually be able to deliver it. And you’d be able to remember both of those points five minutes later.

In comparison with many election manifestos, that’s not to be sneezed at.

It’s phrased – as these things usually are – as a personal message from the Party Leader, and reads rather better than these things usually are. Whether or not it captures Nick’s ‘voice’, it comes across as a person (I remember writing an introduction “by Charles” for a manifesto in 2001, which was partly cobbled together from something attributed to him in 1999, etc, etc). Still more importantly, though I’d use even more vehement language, it’s the nearest to an angry, anti-establishment introduction I think I’ve ever seen in a Lib Dem manifestoish. It recognises people are angry with politicians and bankers – and sets out a narrative where a vote for the Liberal Democrats is a vote to tell the old parties, the greedy bankers and the whole old way of doing things they’ve got it wrong.

“Many people believed they would get change for the better in 1997. Instead, under Labour, the gap between rich and poor has got bigger, our politics has got even dirtier, our civil liberties have been eroded, the environment around us is in danger and our international reputation is at a new low. Labour let us all down.”

But, as well as pointing the finger, this is about choosing the right answers. And before you can provide them, you need to analyse the problem. Well done again, then, for succinctly putting it:

“Britain is in the teeth of three crises: a huge banking crisis and recession, a rotten Westminster system abused by too many MPs for personal gain, and the threat of climate change.”

I agree that those are the three biggest crises – though I’d emphasise a crisis of freedom as part of that crisis of politics – but, of course, not everyone would agree with that analysis. What you choose as the problems ought to determine what your solutions are… And you can see that, with the other parties afraid of taking action on the solutions the Liberal Democrats want, they’re afraid to admit to some of the same problems. That far, the narrative Nick’s telling hits home with me.

I’m less sure about where it goes next. Yes, we need big changes, and they need action. Read the problem, but see if you can spot my wariness at the alternative:

“We need big changes to fix our economy, our discredited politics and our environment, yet both Labour and the Conservatives are letting the City, the House of Commons and polluters off the hook. No action against bankers’ bonuses. No action to give people the right to sack MPs guilty of breaking the rules. No action to slash emissions. They say just enough to get in the headlines, but when the spotlight moves on it’s back to business as usual.
“I believe there’s a better way. This country can be fairer, it can be safer, greener, and stronger in the world.”

Despite the party deciding again and again that, when it comes to our philosophy, “It’s About Freedom,” I worry that freedom is, again and again, the bit that drops out of our priorities. Remember “Free, Fair and Green”? That was a good list of our aims, not always met in the detail – but, as so often, while we have “fairer” and “greener,” “safer” and “stronger in the world” convey a very different message. When the British and world economy’s in turmoil, “safer” has to be part of what we offer – but it’s not the be-all and end-all. When the political system’s in turmoil, too, playing it safe isn’t an option; safety for people in trouble, yes, steadying the financial system, but by freeing up the political system and having people bossed about much less. And the tone of A Fresh Start For Britain really isn’t all about playing it safe. In fact, it’s the furthest from that that any statement of our priorities has been for decades.

Add “stronger in the world” to “safer,” and I get actively worried. The detail here is about choosing our commitments more carefully; the rhetoric of “stronger in the world” just doesn’t match. It sounds like we’re desperately trying to butch up to cover up, say, dropping Trident. And that merely sounds confused, not strong. After Iraq, after ID cards, after any amount of Labour bossiness and politicians saying ‘We know best’ that’s got us into all this mess, I don’t want a Liberal Democrat Government to be butcher still, actually. I want us to have the courage to say, government’s done too much, and too much of the wrong things, and you should have more freedom to live your own life rather than throwing a new law at you for every hour of the day. And that will strike a chord with people even if for no other reason than because enforcing stupid laws wastes money, too.

Where I’d say Nick’s introduction does go for freedom at the end, he doesn’t frame it as such.

“Above all, we must do everything to protect the next generation from the mistakes made today. For me, how we treat young children is the most important measure of what kind of society we want, what kind of values we hold dear.
“Even in these difficult times, giving all children from all backgrounds the life chances they deserve will always be my personal priority.”

And I believe he means it. That does indeed come across as a personal priority, and all the more powerful for it. But – and particularly for all those of us who don’t have kids – he also misses a huge opportunity. What kind of society do we want? What values can be seen in a commitment to education? Because just ‘awhh, kids’ is going to leave a lot of non-parents cold. What about tying our priorities together, and showing our approach to kids as the key to our approach in general, as the importance of education has come back round (as it was in the ’90s) to being our USP?

‘Giving all children from all backgrounds wider life chances is the single most vital part of building a fairer society. It’s about helping every child grow up having the freedom to live their own life. And we need to tackle both climate change and the debt crisis today – because if we leave it to our kids, they won’t forgive us the rocketing financial, social and environmental costs we’ve dumped on them.’

“Change for real, change for good” is the punchiest bit of politics in A Fresh Start For Britain:

“Britain is in crisis, the worst in modern times. People are right to be angry. There is a great deal to be angry about.
“The economy is in a mess, but the people responsible are still in charge. The political system is rotten, but the establishment is still blocking change. The gap between rich and poor keeps growing, making British society so unequal that everybody suffers. Dangerous climate change threatens us all, but world leaders won’t act.
“…The two old parties have had their chances and failed.”

It frames the problem as one that only the Liberal Democrats can tackle – because only we understand the mess the country’s in, because only we have the ideas to tackle it all, and because only we’ll be honest enough to tell it like it is. And, rather than using headings like “Trust” and “Honesty” as we’ve rather unwisely done in the past, this section uses one of the simplest, most effective ways of communicating political honesty. As I said yesterday, if you want to tell people what you stand for so it actually means something, it’s got to put some people off:

“If you are happy with the way things are, the Liberal Democrats are not the party for you. If you want business as usual, choose Labour or the Conservatives – we know they won’t really change anything.
“But if you want things to be different, really different, choose the party that is different – the Liberal Democrats. There is hope for a different future, a different way of doing things in Britain, if we’re brave enough to make a fresh start. The Liberal Democrats are ready to make it happen.”

Another curiously familiar turn of phrase, there.

That – well-structured, this thing – leads naturally into setting out what our principles for government would be. And here they are! There are two key points that mark out our different approach… Different from the other two parties, and from what we’ve said before:

“First, any new spending will be paid for by a specific cut made elsewhere, to ensure it is deliverable even in these tough economic times. This means we will not increase public spending overall.

“Second, the tax cuts we propose to help those on low and middle incomes will not be funded by cuts in services, but by making taxes fairer and greener, so that the richest pay their fair share and polluters pay for the damage they cause.”

Over this decade, the Liberal Democrats have moved increasingly towards fiscal neutrality – but, while it looks like these two points are upholding that approach, they aren’t. Each of those two commitments sounds balanced, but is actually one-directional. The reason in both cases is that Britain’s balances are in a deep hole: tax takes down as people fall out of work; spending up to look after them; and debt rocketing most of the way to a trillion pounds. We quite literally can’t go on that way. So, look carefully at those two pledges: there will be spending on our new priorities, but always paid for by cuts elsewhere, and that means public spending won’t go up overall. But, with government finances in crisis, will there be cuts that don’t pay for other priorities, but instead aim to cut public spending overall? And all tax cuts will be paid for by tax rises elsewhere… Careful readers will realise that the Liberal Democrats have for some time promised that all tax rises will be paid for by tax cuts elsewhere, and that those two clauses have now been swapped – so the corollary may no longer be the case.

In other words, even according to what information Labour lets out, the public finances are in a bloody disastrous hole and need filling in. But if we’re elected and actually get to see the proper books, we may well find out they’re even worse, and if spending cuts or tax rises are needed to fill in the hole, while we’re ruling out extra taxes for extra spending and ruling out extra spending cuts for tax cuts…

Having set out the Liberal Democrats’ values, analysis and approach, it then turns to what many will consider the meat – our specific priorities for changing things. And it’s noticeable how very few of them there are, published here as cast-iron commitments. It means that everything here can be delivered – though what’s here isn’t all we would deliver, it’s all that strict honesty means we could say for certain. That’s quite a risk, and there are, for me, two glaring omissions, only one of them for obvious financial reasons…Usually, I advise people to read the small print in any Lib Dem pre-manifestos. That this one doesn’t even have any small print tells its own story.

Creating a sustainable economy: boosting employment particularly through green jobs; and splitting up the big banks to stop them gambling the economy away again.

Building a fair society: “We will empower every individual and community, fighting disadvantage and entrenched inequality” – I like that bit – with fair taxes, specifically and impressively keeping the commitment to raise allowances and boost incomes for low- and middle-earners, raising green taxes and the wealthiest’s loopholes to pay for it; and investing in early years education.

Cleaning up politics: Cleaning up Westminster, expenses, donations and the Lords, and making MPs sackable; and fair votes to get rid of safe seats.

And because the strongest underlying message of A Fresh Start For Britain is that only the Liberal Democrats will be up-front about the terrible mess the economy’s in meaning no government can do everything it wants to any more, it finishes with our approach to public spending – a short-term priority of maintaining investment to see us out of the recession, and a long-term priority of being far stricter with the public finances. And it outlines some of the major spending areas to be cut as the centralised state of quangos and databases, Trident, future public-sector pensions, deliberate expansion of higher education and tax credits for high earners. And there, at last, is the implication of more freedom.

As I put it yesterday in a Tweet-limited line:

“Can’t afford Labour? We won’t boss you about. We won’t knacker the environment. & We won’t waste your money on nukes, invasions or ID cards.”

So, What’s Not In It?

If you’ve noticed a lot that wasn’t in A Fresh Start For Britain and were wondering why, or how much more was missing, Nick Clegg helpfully gave an interview to this morning’s Independent which, as published, is about fifty-fifty underlining the new narrative and, er, being a bit iffy. Though I suspect rather less than 50% of the iffier bit is Nick’s fault.

The main strength of the article is that it positions the Liberal Democrats as making the tough choices up front about public spending that the other parties are petrified of admitting out loud.

The main weakness of the article is that it frames setting new priorities that can definitely be delivered as a great big retreat on all the other policies that might not be.

That strength is very obvious as the key aim of A Fresh Start For Britain; that weakness is partly in how a newspaper decides to spin it, but also reveals some weaknesses in the manifestoish itself. Perhaps the one that most gets in the way of a stronger narrative (there, even I’m butching up now) of a fresh, bold start is that the fresh, bold start is, er, a great big retreat, with nothing much to show for it. I can only guess at the even more eye-watering belt-tightening that would have been required to do it, but there’s an obvious ‘…but this is what you get instead’ positive message that’s missing that might have taken the place of ‘oops, bang go all our goodies’: to make cutting debt explicitly one of our priorities. To say that, if you’ve maxed out your credit cards and then your pay’s been cut, you need to start paying it off before you buy everything you want to.

Instead, the message The Independent delivers is far less about what Liberal Democrat priorities are, than about what they aren’t:

“Nick Clegg will today jettison many of the Liberal Democrats' long-standing policy pledges in an attempt to convince voters they would make the deep spending cuts needed to fill the hole in the public finances.
“In an interview with The Independent, Mr Clegg revealed that many of the promises cherished by his party will be downgraded from official policy to "aspirations" since there would be no money to fund them. They are expected to include flagship pledges to scrap university tuition fees, provide free personal care for the elderly, and bring in a higher basic state pension.
“The Liberal Democrat leader will ask his party's conference in September to make firm commitments in just three areas at the general election: a boost for education, the creation of "green jobs", and constitutional reform.”

You see, even they don’t fit in the bit about tax cuts, do they? But, still, there’s an impressive level of seriousness to the bulk of the article, where Nick talks about asking the difficult questions, and says clearly that while policies aren’t being dropped, we can no longer say for certain we’d implement them, and certainly not implement them immediately, because Labour’s totally fucked the economy. I paraphrase.

“Some of these might be retained as policies that we could not honestly place at the forefront of our manifesto, because we could not honestly claim they could be delivered in the first few years of the next Parliament.”

I know, I know. Saying it’s not the top priority isn’t the same as dumping a policy altogether. But if I were a Parliamentary candidate again, I’d be very careful indeed about what I said about policies that weren’t ‘on the list’. Getting politically involved when the Liberal Democrats were being up-front about what exactly we would spend, if necessary by raising taxes to do it, and when Labour were making mealy-mouthed noises to every interest group going that implied goodies, but termed them all “aspirations,” I learnt to treat every “aspiration” as something that will never happen. So, while in practice I know that governments usually find the money to do more than the few cast-iron promises they’ve pinned themselves to in advance, I can’t apply any less rigour to Liberal Democrat somewhere-down-the-line policies than I did when I was rubbishing Labour windbags. And that’s why it’s so important that the party debates what is, and isn’t, on that list – because if you want a reputation for honesty, you have to stick only to the bits you can be absolutely honest about.

One wince-inducing moment that I’m willing to bet is down to The Independent, not to Nick (note the lack of quote marks):

“Mr Clegg issued a wake-up call to a party which has traditionally had a long shopping list of policies but been less convincing about how it would pay for them.”

I very much doubt that is what Nick said, but it still needs stamping on. A Fresh Start For Britain is by a long way the toughest ‘spending round’ the Liberal Democrats have ever faced – but I’ve sat on the party’s Federal Policy Committee for three separate General Election Manifestos (and one that never was), and I can tell you that not saying how we’d pay for our commitments is a pile of bollocks. Every single time, we’ve said how we’d pay for every promise, always causing great distress to those wanting more spending, and the Institute of Fiscal Studies has given us a clean bill of financial health – unlike Labour and the Tories, who have never, ever published their manifesto costings, and always been frowned at for not saying where the money comes from. And, no, ‘I told you so’ is rarely an attractive line – though it’s not doing Vince any harm – but rubbishing a record of consistently getting it right is no way to build up trust for the future.

And another wince-inducing moment that suspect means Nick and the FPC should have thought a bit harder:

“Could the NHS, protected by both Labour and the Tories, face cuts? In theory, yes, because no area would be immune. In practice, Mr Clegg admitted, he found it "almost impossible" to think his party would not maintain health spending.”

This is, I’m afraid, the worst of both worlds. The Tories, terrified that Labour’s single campaign message of ‘We’re shit, and we know we are, but, ooohh! The Tories! Scary!’ actually has some bite on the NHS, have tied themselves in knots saying that they won’t cut a penny from the health budget (which, as it’s such a massive proportion of public spending - over £100 billion out of around £700 billion – means Labour are gleefully talking up the concomitantly bigger slashes to everything else). Do the Liberal Democrats avoid that political danger by saying ‘Not a penny cut from the NHS’ too, or do we get the ‘honesty’ gain by saying, ‘We hate cutting anything, in fact, but look – the NHS is vast and do you seriously think every penny’s well-spent? Let’s look at how every single bit of public spending adds up’? It appears we’ve decided to fall between the two stools.

Whether these came from Nick himself, from our background briefings, or from The Independent looking at our previous big spending commitments and simply circling the missing ones with a big red marker, the article concludes with a handy list of bullet-points summarising the priorities that were – and that might not be any more:

“Mr Clegg has grown in stature in recent months, winning over doubters in his own party with high-profile and timely interventions on the Gurkhas, the former Commons Speaker Michael Martin, the Trident nuclear missile system, and Afghanistan. Now his call for "candour" and a "grown-up" approach to public spending will test whether his party is prepared to grow up too.

Safe policies
Education £2.5bn "pupil premium" for a million children from disadvantaged backgrounds, smaller classes and extra tuition.

Tax Raise personal allowance to £10,000, reducing bills for most earners by £705 a year, funded by £17bn package of tax increases including abolition of top-rate tax relief for pension contributions and closing tax loopholes.

"Green jobs" Package to create zero-carbon homes, insulate existing homes, schools and hospitals, and expand rail network.

Political reform To clean up politics after MPs' expenses scandal, including proportional representation for Commons, elected House of Lords and state funding for parties.

Under threat
Universities Free tuition for first undergraduate degrees for full and part-time students.

Care Free personal care for those over 65 at cost of £2bn.

Pensions Higher "citizen's pension" with immediate restoration of link between state pension and earnings.

Disabled £200 a year winter fuel payment.

Post Offices £2bn pledge to keep open rural post offices.”

So, What Are The Two Big Misjudgements?

A Fresh Start For Britain has the right idea, and most of the right detail (that is, not much). But it makes two serious mistakes, in my view. One of them I’ve mentioned several times along the way already – it needs to punch up freedom as well as security. Because by keeping the balance still towards “safer” and “stronger” and not towards “freer,” it misses a key reason for doing much of what we do, and sabotages its own narrative by making us sound just like the two old, failed parties that boss people about and think they know all the answers. It wouldn’t have taken a major redraft: thinking about the rhetoric; adding the Freedom Bill to our list of priorities (a repeal of some of Labour’s thousands of bossy laws, something which in itself adds no extra public spending, and instead takes a lot of burdens off government departments, the police and people alike)… A major missed opportunity.

You might expect the other big problem I have with all this to be that it doesn’t make paying off the debt a big enough priority. Well… Actually, I’m torn on that one. It makes for a clearer narrative, but blimey, to make a really big impression there’d need to be so much cash paid off that almost all the spending we’d shift couldn’t be to other spending but just to keeping the interest down. So I suspect we just have to pay it off over even longer, as the final section on public finances implies, because there are some things so vital they simply need paying for.

No, the other serious misjudgement in A Fresh Start For Britain is one of its relegated priorities. It means finding more money – but not doing so would simply do us too much damage, in terms of narrative, in terms of practical aims, and in terms of hard-headed politics. While I wish we could find the money for all of those bullet-points The Independent this morning reports us putting a bullet into, dropping – I’m sorry; indefinitely postponing – free tuition fees for first degrees is the killer.

It cuts across our narrative. What are our priorities? Education is back to being our biggest issue… Yet we’re dropping one of our two biggest commitments on it. We’re firm on protecting government spending to keep jobs up and the debt down… So what message does it send to explicitly add to massive student debts, at the very point when graduate jobs have gone through the floor and everyone who’s just been to university realises they’ve got a mortgage-sized hole in their pocket and none of the promised salaries to make it worthwhile? We’re committed to investing heavily in early years education, which I accept is the key place to increase social mobility – but making university the place for the richer and richer clamps down on it too.

And then there’s the hard-headed politics of the issue. Tuition fees and Iraq were Labour’s greatest betrayals. This has for so long been a Liberal Democrat USP that we will be absolutely clobbered for dropping it – I’m so sorry, de-prioritising it into the unguessable future – and, looking at those other big-spending commitments we can no longer afford, to be cynical about it, for all the money we’ve kept down every other priority to throw at them, old people don’t vote for the Liberal Democrats, while students do. Despite the fact that I hope to get help in old age eventually, and have nothing direct to gain from making tuition fees free again – though I believe the economy and society as a whole will gain. And, of course, for those who say that a lot of the cost of tuition fees is a middle class pay-off… Yes, it is. And with taxes rising, pips squeaking and every kind of job looking insecure, with tax credits for the better-off one of the Liberal Democrat targets for cuts, tuition fees are a crucial way to persuade the people who pay most of the taxes that they get something out of it. And on top of all that, free education – at the very least, the education itself – is one of the clearest principles in public spending. Like being a little bit pregnant, this is one of those that’s an absolute.

On grounds of our political message, then, and on the fairness we’re trying to achieve, and naked political calculation, and even – good heavens, I’m so old-fashioned – of sheer political principles, the Liberal Democrats can’t afford to say ‘We can’t afford to pay for tuition fees’.

And in at number 63 on The Golden Ton for 2008-9.

Liberalism For Short Attention Spans

2009-07-21T12:52:00.016+01:00

How would you sum up what the Liberal Democrats stand for in, at most, 140 characters? That’s Darrell’s Twitter-inspired question today. Though I admit I read some people’s Tweets, regular readers will realise that extreme brevity isn’t really me – but, always up for a challenge, here are my first two bashes:

“Freedom, fairness, future: freedom from poverty, ignorance and conformity; fairness and financial sense; green action to protect the future.”

“Lib Dem Principles: freedom, fairness, looking out for the future. Best way to do it? Give you the power in your own life and community.”

What would you say? And, Darrell, what’s yours?

I’m sure I can come up with better, but those are just off the top of my head. I’m happier with 140 words, of course. Or 140 paragraphs. But that’s for another day.

Darrell got his idea originally from Conservative Home; I have to say, I like one of their entries, “Dislike of stuff does not equal a law against that stuff. Humans more important than machine algorithms. And love; always.” Send that man a Liberal Democrat membership form, because that bears no relation to any Conservative Party in history.

A poster called resident leftie, whom I subtly suspect of not being a member of the Conservative Party, suggests, “If you believe that the Britain is broken, that the past is better than the future and that poverty is fault of the poor, vote Conservative.” Less flattering, but more accurate.

Spot-on for Mr Cameron’s policy agenda, davidtbreaker sums up the next election campaign from the largest Opposition party: “Conservatives, we aren’t the Labour Party”.

Updates: Despite being known for ten-hour Budget speeches, Mr Gladstone very nearly made it to Tweet length with one of his most famous couplets, and one that’s easy to edit down to fit Twitter:

“The principle of Liberalism is trust in the people, qualified by prudence. The principle of Conservatism is mistrust of the people, qualified by fear.”

I’d say that the principle of the Labour Party is mistrust of the people, qualified by the tabloids, but of course the Labour Party doesn’t actually have any principles left.

Last year, Lib Dem Voice asked a similar question – “Can you sum up the purpose of the Lib Dems in a sentence? (Or ‘The Quest for the Lib Dem Holy Grail’)” – which is almost at the Twitter limit on its own, and I came up with several suggestions, all of them improbably under 140 characters. Search the thread for what I said there, but my suggestions fell into two categories. Most of them were after something that gets Lib Dems nodding, but puts some people off – because if you can’t disagree with it, it doesn’t mean anything important or different – and the last one, which wasn’t very good, was trying to think of ‘the sort of thing you might say in conversation, rather than in a speech or a slogan’:

“Liberal Democrats: the party that says sex is all right.”

“Liberal Democrats. For people and things the Daily Mail doesn’t like.”

“For government by the Daily Mail, vote for the other two. To tell the Daily Mail to fuck off, vote Lib Dem.”

“We won’t boss you about. We want to give you a leg up and pull some barriers down so you can live your own life the way you choose.”

And the Labour Party’s core message – which you’ll be seeing an awful lot over the next year – is blatantly:

“We’re shit, and we know we are, but, ooohh! The Tories! Scary!”

And another new one I’ve just thought of, this time a bit less positive:

“Can’t afford Labour? We won’t boss you about. We won’t knacker the environment. & we won’t waste your money on nukes, invasions or ID cards.”

That’s not a million miles from the Nineteenth Century Liberal Party’s “Peace, Retrenchment and Reform,” is it? Which reminds me that, particularly these days, I should probably add something populist about cleaning up politics, given we’ve been talking reform for a hundred and fifty years…