The Very Fluffy Diary of Millennium Dome, Elephant

Day 3249 (Part Two): DOCTOR WHO: The Doctor Dances: Everybody Lives, terms and conditions apply, there IS a War on!

2009-11-27T00:00:00.005Z

Monday:

Are you ready to get fully sonic-ed up? The World may not END when "The Doctor Dances", but I'm not so sure about letting Daddy Richard SING!

Still, no rest for the wicked and no pauses for sticky buns as we carried straight on with our celebration of Doctor Who's anniversary, with the Grand Moff giving it both barrels in part two…

Is it just me or is there some kind of subtext going on here?

Oh all right, the text is hardly that sub: dancing is sex, and the key to this episode is admitting that you "dance".

Key developments occur with each of the Doctor's admissions to Rose that he actually does have an emotional side, even a sexuality: Jack rescues them from the hospital as the Doctor takes Rose's hand to dance; the Doctor asks the universe to "give him a day like this" but he earns it when he shows Rose that he's "got the moves"; the episode concludes with him finally telling Rose he can dance and he ends up with the girl in his arms.

And arguably while he keeps up his jealousy of Jack – his Captain envy – and his refusal to admit it, the situation gets worse and worse, with the Child appearing, and then pursuing them – even though a wall – and then the other gas-mask Zombies closing in right as the sonic-off reaches its height. Fortunately, Rose remains level headed enough to take them down a peg – and floor – getting them out of one tight spot and into the locked room where they can start to, um, unbutton.

That keeping sexuality a secret causes damage is made explicit in several key scenes. Consider the moment where Nancy gains power over bullying Mr Lloyd when she reveals that she knows that the extra cuts of meat are a result of his having an affair with the butcher.

That's quite a nasty scene, and certainly drains our sympathy for Nancy – odd how Nancy the thief is sympathetic where Nancy the blackmailer is not when her motivation, feeding the street kids, remains the same – especially when we learn that she has her own sexual secret.

But it serves the purpose of flagging up the fact that the mores of World War II Britain were not exactly the same as those of the Twenty-First Century audience. (Actually, there was a certain amount of tolerance: there was a war on, you could die tomorrow, people made allowances. Nevertheless, Mr Lloyd is clearly not in a position to be more open about it.)

And it's also necessary to remind us that Nancy is not whiter-than-white, because it has to be credible that she has been lying throughout the story.

Despite the near paranoid paroxysms that the Internet message boards go into over the "gay agenda", it appears more common to be bi-sexual in this series: Jack is bi (or indeed "omni", as the publicity always puts it), Ianto (mostly Torchwood, but "The Stolen Earth"/"Journey's End", too) has a Cyberwoman as a girlfriend before he has Jack as a boyfriend; Mickey Smith is exclusively straight but the alternative-universe Ricky Smith may not be… at least not until someone had the script for "The Age of Steel" changed. And that's just the companions!

Characters like the Cassini "sisters" in "Gridlock" or Yuri's brother and his (never seen) husband in "The Waters of Mars" are in same-sex relationships now but we can only infer that that makes them gay not bi. (In fact, being exclusively gay is probably even less likely in the year Five Billion than it is in the Fifty-First Century.)

So Algy is the only explicitly exclusively gay character in the new series – Jack establishing that Rose won't be able to distract him tells us that Algy does not fancy girls.

(The Doctor tells Donna that she isn't in with a chance with Davenport the footman in "The Unicorn and the Wasp" but this is just his inference… well, probably, unless he's doing that "psychic" thing that the eighth Doctor did all the time in the TV movie.)

It's nice that this reveal comes just after, and very much undercutting, the big, "hero" music as Jack, Rose and the Doctor march out to the bombsite to face the final challenge.

You can compare all this with that other World War II-set story about repressed sexuality: "The Curse of Fenric". As the story that sees Ace maturing from a girl into a woman, and considering the repercussions of mother and baby, she does get to distract the guard – or at least boggle his brain with ur-sexy sounding technobable. Dr Judson and Commander Millington exist in a state of mutual blackmail over a homosexual past. And of course Miss Hardaker implicitly – explicitly in the novelisation – has had experiences at Maiden's Point that lead to her puritanical warnings and harsh treatment of Jean and Phyllis which in turn leads to their deaths and her own by vampirism, which itself is often a metaphor for sex, disease and death.

In another parallel, "Fenric" also features a character – Reverend Wainwright – who has lost faith in the future. Here this falls to Nancy as she starts to go into culture-shock at all the things she's seen. Rose's quiet confidential admission that the British win the war is heart-warming in the face of Nancy's entirely credible belief that the future belongs to the Nazis. Certainly better than the "mouse in front of a lion" speech forced into the Doctor's mouth in the previous episode. That would be a mouse that ruled an Empire covering a quarter of the planet then, would it?

This is some more of the egregious British national-mythologizing among several of the Pertwee-esque lectures delivered alongside "nothing in the world can stop it", "there isn't a little boy in the world" and "don't forget the Welfare State".

And surely the Welfare State was Lloyd George and the previous War; the Doctor must be confused or he's thinking of the National Health Service (introduced as all parties promised following World War II).

In fairness, there is the odd anachronism here and there – Mr Moffat himself has owned up to open reel tapes being a bit previous for 1941, though a wax cylinder might have seemed ludicrously antiquated compared to the "classic" spooled tapes image, and anyway isn't it actually a shout-out to all those fans who used to record their Doctor Who soundtracks from the telly?

In spite of perhaps the silliest sonic-screwdrivering yet – "setting 2428D" reattaching barbed wire; he must be taking the rise, surely – this is a story that relies on the Doctor using his wits to solve the problems presented to him.

"Go to your room!" is brilliant. It resolves the cliff-hanger in a totally believable way that you are left wishing you'd thought of. And entirely coincidentally – or so it seems until you realise all the gas-mask zombies are linked; that tipping their head on one side thing that they all do is really effective at conveying that – it also solves the parallel cliff-hanger of Nancy and her late brother, and – even better – unexpectedly sets up a peril later in the episode. Compare it with another "instant solution" cliff-hanger resolution like the "zap… you're all dead" opening of "The Age of Steel" and this is light-years ahead.

Like any good mystery, once the answer is revealed you can go back and see all of the clues along the way: the Om-Com (Omni-communication?) explanation of how the Child talks through fake telephones and wind-up toys was a clear sign that he's using the same technology as Jack; the nanogenes were literally waved under our noses again this episode as the Doctor reprises Rose's hand repairs; and of course "are you my mummy" over and over and over so you forget that it's the important question of the story.

The space junk being an ambulance is a lovely touch, reminiscent of classic sci-fi tropes where the most innocuous of future technology can cause untold damage just by being left carelessly in "primitive" cultures. And memo to the TV movie: this is how you use an ambulance in Doctor Who.

Jack – who is redeemed in this story by learning a lesson about courage and responsibility (Oh No! cries Alex. It was the Pertwee homilies!) – should, of course, have spotted Rose as a ringer way earlier when she failed to rise to his comment about the Chula warship he was selling being the last in existence, what with the real last Chula warship in existence being the one that they were standing on!

But you are able to watch the Doctor putting the clues together as he finally works it all out – the nanogenes being the cause and Nancy herself being the solution. Lovely too the way he prompts Rose so that she is able to work it out as well. A subtle rebuke to Captain Jack: almost saying "my companions have to be good enough to spot this sort of thing".

Does everybody live?

It's repeatedly been pointed out that they're in the middle of World War II; there's quite a bit of non-nanogene related death going on all around them (assuming you don't argue that the nanogenes don't kill anyone, at least not any more than the Doctor kills Donna in "Journey's End"). But we see the Doctor control the re-programmed nanogenes and release them – he's says he's told them to turn themselves off when they're done… but define "done". He could, just about, give them one day to fix all the humans. Not just the gas-mask zombies. All of them. So maybe, for one day in 1941, literally everybody lives.

He really does deserve more days like this. But it's good to see the ninth Doctor, the damaged Doctor, getting one really good day this close to the end. He's finally learning to live again. Just in time to die.

Next Time…With hindsight, is nobody just the slightest bit suspicious that Torchwood appears to have taken an extended vacation just at the point where a lady Slitheen takes over the mayoralty of Cardiff and the TARDIS parks exactly on top of their Hub? Oh never mind. Marvellous Margaret is back for dinner-a-deux in "Boom Town".

Day 3251: Mr Balloon Makes Himself Look a Total Burka

2009-11-26T11:30:00.001Z

Wednesday:

Are the Conservatories about to come out against Faith Schools? I think not. So what was Mr Balloon doing raising SINISTER SUSPICIONS and AIRY ALLEGATIONS at Prime Monsters Questionable Time about two schools that JUST HAPPEN to be supported by an ISLAMIC foundation?

Mr Balloon's "question" was whether the Government's anti-extremist fund was being used to, er, fund extremists.

But where was his EVIDENCE?

As his BBC chum Mr Nick "mate of Dave" Robinson spun it, some of Mr Balloon's facts were less than accurate. There's a word for facts that are less than accurate. And it ISN'T "facts".

So are we going to be having Government by WILD ACCUSATION and WITCH HUNT now?

Listening to the radio coverage on PM yesterday, you would have thought so. First up was Mr Michael Borogove, gyring and gambling around the truth. Told that there were in fact some letters from the schools and their trustees flatly denying his claims, he dismissed these with a wave of "well I haven't read those" and carried on making his point as though his TOTAL LACK of EVIDENCE trumped the evidence that he hadn't bothered to read. And yet, he got away with it.

Next up to bat was Schools ~~Bully~~ Secretary Mr Balls. Asked about these allegations, he replied that yes when they had first been raised two years ago, the schools were inspected and found to be fully compliant with the requirements on "spiritual development".

Yes, okay, you may shudder at the idea that your children's school has ANYTHING to do with "spiritual development" (assuming that doesn't mean an illegal still in the chemistry department!) but nevertheless that is surely the end of the matter: there was a question raised, we inspected the schools, it was shown that there were no extremists brainwashing youngsters using the language lab. Job done.

Let me just repeat this point, because it's quite IMPORTANT. These are NOT two "opinions" with equal right to be heard. Mr Borogove is making an assertion; he has NO evidence. Mr Balls is reporting the results of an investigation; he DOES have the evidence.

And yet, it was Mr Balls being given a hard time, as the presenter repeatedly jabbed a finger at him crying "witch, witch, witch!" Or something like that.

By the end of the day, though, the Conservatories were apologising – or at least UNpologising – for talking a load of total HONK.

The Newsnight Show featured Mr Paul "Not Very" Goodman going quite PINK in the face with the force of his unpology, as he explained that even though Mr Balloon had been completely wrong about all the facts, he had raised a very, very, very important point and so should be made Prime Monster.

"I can see you're not going to answer my questions…" said Mr Paxo turning away.

"I HAVE answered them!" squawked the Conservatory, "AND one of your questions was WRONG!"

"No you haven't," said Paxo and visible muted the mike.

Mr Michael Borogove was no longer giving interviews, and was last seen in a head-to-toe tea-towel standing four steps behind Mr Balloon and keeping his mouth shut.

.

Day 3249 (part one): DOCTOR WHO: The Empty Child: Are You My Daddy?

2009-11-26T00:00:00.001Z

Monday:

It was the forty-sixth anniversary of Doctor Who first being on the tellybox, so what better way to celebrate the start of a new era than by going back to the first story from the man who'll be at the head of the NEXT start of a new era. We welcome our new Grand Moff with his 2005 Hugo A Go-Go Award Winning "Empty Child".

Rose Tyler, wearing a Union Jack tee-shirt no less, hanging from a barrage balloon over London, the classic skyline of St Pauls surrounded by flames but unbowed, as the Luftwaffe bombers scream towards her. The show has done bigger spectacle since then, for which read "more CGI", but no one has managed to top that image for iconic status or sheer summing up of everything that is Doctor Who: the juxtaposition of the history, the terrifying, the slightly-ironic British pride, and the just plain bonkers.

In its use of London as icon, and history as icon, this is everything that the Twenty-First Century Doctor Who has been about.

But there is a world of difference between the ways Russell Davies and Steven Moffat write: Russell writes for characters, never mind whether the story around them actually makes any sense, the emotional trajectory is always true and very often enough to carry you through with him; Moffat has a natural ear for dialogue, putting witty and occasionally painfully-true sentences into the mouths of characters. The opening banter between Rose and the Doctor, Earth and milk and cows derailing the discussion of the plot, is brilliant. We've seen ("Rose", "The End of the World") how Rose winds the Doctor up and then has to defuse him; intriguingly, Moffat reverses their normal relationship and has the Doctor winding Rose up with his refusal to scan for alien tech and then defuse her with casual remark about her tee-shirt.

But ultimately he writes people as parts in intricate jigsaws of plot. The flag tee-shirt will be referenced repeatedly throughout, and is, of course, putting a marker down on some of the episode's more, er, jingoistic speeches. The "scan for alien tech" is not just to set up the reverse gag with Captain Jack when he appears, but to flag up the plot resolution (it's all down to alien tech) and why Jack (who is using the same alien tech, remember) doesn't detect it. Moffat's stories are carefully strung together so that they appear baffling at the outset until, like Holmes explaining a deduction, he unravels it all at the conclusion; in a way it's a marvellous sleight of hand.

Here, the opening moments present us with "something mauve and dangerous and thirty second from the heart of London". Everything that follows seeks to distract us from that one crucial development – child zombies, barrage balloons, TARDIS telephones ringing, starving street urchins, roguish conmen, invisible spaceships, mysterious hospitals – but the resolution is in fact quite simply that something mauve and dangerous hit the heart of London. In fact almost all of those distractions are, with hindsight, entirely logical consequences, within the scheme of the story, of that first impact.

I'm emphasising this up front because watching "The Empty Child" without having seen "The Doctor Dances" is baffling, it is intriguingly genius-level baffling.

The Doctor talks to a black cat. Telephones that ring when they shouldn't, not to mention toys that play when they shouldn't, appear spooky and eerie. Nancy seemingly demonstrates the ability to appear and disappear at will. So does the Child, vanishing from the Lloyds' front step before the Doctor can open the door, and he'll do it again next episode. (So too, in fact, does the Doctor. Twice: sneaking up on Nancy as she hides provisions in an old train – which is plausible, there is time while she is tucking them away – but also materialising at the dinner table and taking two slices – which ought to be impossible; one of the children really must have seen him come in, and yet they all jump.)

This is a ghost story more than it is science fiction: the little corpse-boy haunting the bombsites and battlefields.

Gothic pile Albion Hospital rises out of the mists – gorgeous crane shot and gleam of gold on the black as the Doctor rattles the chains on the gates and pulls back to reveal the name – and, thanks to it being a re-use from "Aliens of London", succeeds in appearing to haunt its own future. Doctor Constantine – and there's a name with resonance for the supernatural – appears to have stepped straight out of an M R James, the wise old man who just has time to explain the plot before succumbing to the terrible… something. Here he gets to tell and show. Which is nice.

As is typical of the 2005 season, the colour palette plays an important role in the visual. Inside at the Lloyds' house, and in the underground club that the Doctor enters for that matter, all is warm and brown, homely and reassuring, even the hospital is a muted brown magnolia; outside is cold and grey and blue, all adding to the theme of the Empty Child being, as the Doctor puts it, the little boy left out in the cold.

(The artificial mystery of Nancy introducing Constantine as "the Doctor" is a rare bum note for me – the Doctor looks puzzled, even concerned and of course it sets up the possibility of a multi-Doctor crossover, which all evaporates in practically the next scene. Makes you wonder why he did it, other than to tease.)

Contrasting all this is the ultra sci-fi world of Captain Jack Harkness, (and doesn't John Barrowman just look so dashing!): his space-ship (invisible on the outside, Millennium Falcon on the inside), his tractor beam, his nanogenes, his wrist-thingie (later revealed as a Votrex manipulator), and note the contrast between the Doctor's high tech opera glasses and Jack's higher tech binoculars… it's all terribly, and quite deliberately, Star Trek; hence Rose suddenly going all "Spock" on us, presumably. And it's another sleight of hand, all this chrome and tech makes us overlook Jack's connection to the main plot. (Not to mention the actual explanation, but I'll not get ahead of myself.) He seems like another intruder into the ghost world, the way the Doctor and Rose are. And it's terribly clever, making the sci-fi elements seem out of place; like Jack's spaceship hanging in front of Big Ben with the cloaking device off, it's hiding in plain sight. Only in the climax do we discover Jack's connection: he is the one who set all these events in motion.

Eccleston is really rather good in this, delivering the deadpan comedy of the Doctor's realisation of just where and when he is as easily as he handles the mix of badinage and seriousness with the starving children.

"I don't know whether it's Marxism in action or a West End musical, but it's brilliant." Is this a timey-wimey continuity error in the universe itself, somehow taking the rise out of Barrowman's "I'd Do Anything" career before it happened? Interesting to see how the kids' reaction shots show them as baffled by this joke for the grown-ups too.

And Chris takes one on the chin – or rather nose and ears – in service of a child's pleasingly simple joke about his appearance.

Billie Piper delivers the goods as Rose again, though she is – possibly – at her most dizzy blonde of the year, first distracted about her tee-shirt, later literally swooning in Captain Jack's arms. "I fink you were just speaking there," is either Rose totally losing all the intelligence that made the Doctor interested in her to begin with or… she's being very clever indeed, because she knows she has nothing with which she can pay Captain Jack so she's stalling him until he can get her to the Doctor. Or am I overdoing on retcon?

Hand-in-hand with the episode's intricate clockwork – yes, I realise that's much more Moffat's next story – comes an ease with continuity links.

Talking to that cat, early on, the Doctor casually refers to "nine-hundred years of phone-box travel". Superficially agreeing with the "nine-hundred years old" that Russell has been using since "Aliens of London", this may actually be Moffat slyly correcting that with the addition to the Doctor's age of the however-many years he lived before taking off in the TARDIS.

On the other hand, placing Captain Jack as a Time Agent from the Fifty-First Century is clearly a cock-up if it's meant to be a reference to "The Talons of Weng-Chiang". Magnus Greel – masquerading as Weng-Chiang, as if you didn't know – refers to Time Agents, and fears that the Doctor may be one. But he is (a) paranoid and (b) under the insane delusion that his time cabinet – the one that has shredded his own DNA – will be the basis for human time-travel built on his work. Yes, a century is a very long time and so someone else could coincidentally come up with real working time travel inside a hundred years, but the Doctor refers to Greel's time as a scientific Dark Age which surely militates against that.

I much prefer Alex's solution: the Time Agency does not originate from the Fifty-First Century, but instead they are using the very Dark Age of Greel and his contemporaries as camouflage. Where would you look for time travellers? Certainly not in a century where they're using the cerebral cortexes of pigs to power their toys and they think double nexus particles are still really neat.

Finally, in the brief but excellently played exchanges with Richard Wilson as Doctor Constantine, Constantine refers to himself as having been, before the war, a father and a grand-father and that now he's only a doctor; and the Doctor concurs. It's particularly good because, this late in the season, we're now familiar with the Doctor's trauma from losing all his family, but he's able to play it relatively evenly as though it is now, perhaps thanks to Rose, no longer such a torment to him.

So… by the end of the episode, we think we've solved several of the initial mysteries: what was that thing that the Doctor was chasing in the pre-titles, why is everyone afraid of being touched by the plague child, who is Captain Jack… But we're fooled again! Actually we know nothing and there's a crowd of gas-mask zombies closing in on our heroes, mirroring the Child himself closing in on that nice Nancy that the Doctor met, and the world of science and explanations looks like it's more in danger of caving in than ever.

And, for bonus brilliance, Moffat has got them to not step on his cliff-hanger and move the "Next Time" trailer to after the end titles – something that they will do for every two-parter going forwards.

Next Time…Well, I feel I ought to wait until after the titles, but… Squareness guns, lullabies, distracting the guard, Glenn Miller, and one galloping great euphemism: the pieces may look unexpected but they all fit into place when "The Doctor Dances".

Day 3250: Sixty-Two BILLION Pounds in Brown Envelopes, please

2009-11-24T18:30:00.001Z

Tuesday:

Suppose you're running a business and it is time to prepare some accounts. Things are looking a bit TIGHT, so here's a trick: borrow a load of CASH from a friend of yours and give it back after the accounts are done. That way, if suppliers look at your balance sheet, they'll see that you have plenty of money to keep paying your bills and so will carry on giving you credit.

There's only ONE small snag – it's TOTALLY a fraud.

So how did the Government get away with doing EXACTLY THAT for those banks that we own: RBS and HBoS?

It's not even as though they WEREN'T drawing up accounts, because right in between the Bank of England suddenly going all "The Bank that Likes to Say Yes" and the money getting swiftly bunged back, Lloyds TSB were persuaded to buy the "strangely having plenty of cash on fluffy foot" HBOS group. So they MUST have prepared some accounts – it's the LAW you have to when you do a MERGER.

So you can understand that the Lloyds shareholders may be feeling a tiny bit deceived, not to mention slightly cross now that THEIR bank has gone swiftly down the plughole too.

Shouldn't someone ought to have at least MENTIONED it? Shouldn't the auditors have said: aye aye, what're all these piles of cash and an IOU to King Mervyn doing tucked down the back of the boardroom sofa?

This looks EXTREMELY DODGY – on the one fluffy foot, the Government were reassuring us that the British Banks were terribly well placed to weather the economic tsunami and that this was a terrifically good deal for the Lloyds shareholders, a once in a lifetime opportunity to buy a lovely bank. And all the while the OTHER fluffy foot was busily shoving more and more bundles of used tenners into the dyke in the hope that no one would notice!

Oh, and another thing: don't we also have some kind of TREATY OBLIGATION to ask the European Union if it's okay with them before we hand out megabucks in STATE AID to AILING INDUSTRIES? Aren't they going to be slightly cross with us? Fortunately it's not like the British EU Commissioner was in charge of Trade and Industry at all…

Oh…

Well, I do hope this doesn't mess up any important new job she might be up for.

.

Day 3241: DOCTOR WHO: Water Water Everywhere… and not one drop…

2009-11-17T00:00:00.000Z

Sunday:

Scary stuff! The sun had gone down and Daddy Alex closed the curtains and we all huddled up on my sofa while Daddy Richard poured out the Evian that his mummy had provided.

Yes, it was time for Water of Mama's!

…

…oh, please yourselves.

So the 'scariest Doctor Who ever' turned out to be the Time Lord himself, as the payoff for all of those 'aren't I awesome' moments finally arrived with David Tennant's tenth Doctor finally going completely berserk.

"The Laws of Time are mine," he said, going Mister Master on us, "and they will obey me!"

Funny how Lawrence Miles once said if the Doctor decided to destroy the cosmos, the Master would have to return to save it. More on that story later, as they say.

But first, "The Waters of Mars" did not disappoint.

It lived up to its "beginning of the end" tag line and (unlike "Planet of the Dead") it was about water and it was about Mars. Although what it was really about was the Doctor breaking the Laws of Time. Rather brilliantly, it takes what many people have seen as the worst of the new series – the Doctor's spiralling god-complex – and faces up to the fact that it would be a terribly bad idea. In a way, it is the series making explicit John Nathan Turner's injunction to Andrew Cartmel against turning the Doctor into "god" (or even just "a god").

Finally we get to see under the mask of this Doctor. The sixth Doctor was brusque because he cared too much; the ninth was downright rude because he was so damaged; but the tenth Doctor is the way he is because he is utterly terrified of death.

The fear of death is often said to be what drove the expression of the Doctor's dark side, the Valeyard, and remember that, with his tenth regeneration, the Doctor is drawing nigh to that point "somewhere between his twelfth and last", he is genuinely becoming old.

This, in fact, perfectly explains his trying to bring Astrid back from beyond, his devastation at the Master refusing to regenerate and above all his appalling treatment of Donna in "Journey's End": even over her protests, he would rather see a lobotomised Donna-shaped puppet walking about alive than face up to her real, actual death.

And of course it is death that breaks him here: hearing the sound of dying as he tries to walk away from it is too much for him, which is why he finally goes completely over the edge.

This perfectly capitalises on David Tennant's full-on boggler-boggler interpretation of the role and gives him a good opportunity to get his acting chops on, at the same time allowing him to effectively comment on his own over-the-topness, particularly in the appalled realisation of Adelaide's suicide and that he has caused this himself and then the absolute terror as he starts to hallucinate death portents, in this case Ood Sigma in the role of Ghost of Christmas yet to come (though Christmas Coming Soon might be more appropriate).

But he's also capable of a quieter performance, as when brooding over the need to leave once he knows where and when he's ended up, even as he finds excuses to stay. His "consolation" of Captain Brooke, his bitter regret in the airlock when he tells her she has to die, these are the real Tennant moments.

But David, much as we love him now he has his shtick totally under control, has nothing on the multi-faceted performance of Lindsay Duncan as the companion for this special, Captain Adelaide Brooke, heroine of the first human colony on Mars, where we also get to do this year's "celebrity historical" with the charming twist (even if "Confidential" insisted on hammering the point home) that the "celebrity" in question is from the future.

Adelaide is both hard as nails, no compromises mission commander, not entirely above bearing a grudge (it looks like her second in command, Ed Gold, may have dumped her at some point) but completely focused on the job, yet at the same time a romantic who has followed her dream into space, inspired by a Dalek not to hate but to explore and wonder. She can be extremely clever, seeing through the Doctor like glass, and also vulnerable and frightened when she gets the truth out of him, though she'd never let her crew see that. And she is resolutely humanist, her defining character being a rejection of any destiny but the one she makes for herself: when the Doctor tells her she's doomed to die, she determines to find a way out for herself and her crew; when he breaks Time to save her, she still refuses to live at the whim of a capricious god and would literally rather die than face a universe under the Time Lord Victorious.

In fact, as Alex points out, she kills herself twice – once with the base nuclear self-destruct and then again with her gun – and it's for the same reason: the Doctor saves her, she says that he's wrong to break the Laws of Time, he goes into a big self-justifying diatribe, she quietly pushes the button. She tells him he's wrong and he ignores her, so she kills herself; no second chances, she's that sort of a woman.

So we have a Doctor gone mad with power and a companion who kills herself to make a point about free will. It's not the cuddliest of Sunday evening's family viewing, is it?

Anyway, these "fixed points in time" – how do those work, exactly? Adelaide was somehow always supposed to die on Mars on 21 November 2059. But we're told that she was inspired to sacrifice her entire life, driven to go to Mars, by seeing a Dalek during the events of "Journey's End". But "Journey's End" is pretty much the definitive example of history being in flux: Dalek Caan went back into the Time War and changed history so that Davros escaped.

Do we infer, then, that something else should have happened in 2009, elbowed aside by Davros changing history, and whatever that was it would have inspired her?

More importantly, if the Doctor's gone and broken a fixed point in time and there's something as dangerous as an "ordinary person" alive in the world when they shouldn't be, shouldn't that mean that the Reapers from "Father's Day" turn up to start eating everyone?

Is it enough that Adelaide, like Pete Tyler before her, kills herself before the paradox of her survival can damage Time? What about Yuri and Mia? The Doctor, in his monomania, might refer to them as "little people" but he's gone bonkers and surely that's not how Time regards them. Or is it that Lawrence is right again and the Laws of Time are physically embodied in the Time Lords, or now entirely in the Doctor, and if he wants to bend them right out of shape then he can, even if he goes round the twist with 'em, so there's nothing the Reapers can do about it.

Oh, and time is clearly so much in flux that according to the biography websites flashed up, Adelaide manages to be born in 1999 and yet be aged 10 during the Dalek Invasion in 2008… oops!

Clearly someone was confused and forgot that since "Aliens of London" all "contemporary" stories (with the possible exception of "Planet of the Dead") take place in the year after they are broadcast: "Aliens of London” establishes – on the missing person posters for Rose – that "Rose" is dated March 2005, and therefore "Aliens of London" is March 2006; all further stories with Jackie must take place after this, or she wouldn't have thought Rose away for a year, so "The Christmas Invasion" cannot take place earlier than December 25th 2006; this means that "The Runaway Bride" must be no sooner than Christmas 2007, because even if Donna doesn't remember last year's invasion, the Doctor does refer to it as last year, and the presence of the Christmas Santas reinforces this; Wilf, Donna's granddad as it turns out, appears in "Voyage of the Damned" and refers to the previous perils being why London is empty at Christmas so again, it must now be 2008; "Turn Left" just reinforces that "Voyage of the Damned" takes place before the Adipose affair of "Partners in Crime"; and finally in "The Sontaran Stratagem" Wilf recognises the Doctor from Christmas past so it must by then, and for the Dalek Invasion of "The Stolen Earth", be 2009.

"Base Under Siege" is one of the classic Doctor Who set ups, ever since, well, "The Moonbase", and indeed "The Tenth Planet" before it, and this was one of the best. The "Monsters of the Week", the water zombies or "Flood" were visually impressive, great make up, love their signature dribbling water, even as they merrily defy physics all over the place. I don’t care if the human body is 60% water, you cannot spray those kinds of volumes out of you without turning into a shrivelled up husk. We resort to simply creating matter out of nowhere. Still, as unstoppable elemental forces – even ones that cheat – they did exactly what was required of them, stalking, killing and subsuming each crewmember in turn. Each possession was different, too – the first, Andy, being kept from us as much as possible; the second, Tarak, kneeling before Andy as the Doctor and Adelaide see what is done to him; the third, Maggie, being slightly in sight and yet not, constantly returning to a slightly glimmering, tantalisingly out of focus shot, she's normal… and then she's not; the fourth, Steffi, being the most chilling as she knows what is about to happen and puts on the message from her daughters as she is killed; the fifth, Roman, coming from "just one drop", proving the danger is as extreme as the Doctor warned and a Russell Davies signature teardrop again; finally, Ed, getting it – like all good horrors – just as it seems he's going to rescue them all, and him preferring to go out in a blaze of glory.

Equally, the self-sacrifice and explosion of the shuttle were only the most blatant of the episode's references to "The Ark in Space", well known to be one of Russell's favourite stories.

"The Flood" is a reference too, not just the name given to the monsters here, but also the title of the final "Eighth Doctor" strip in Doctor Who Magazine. Given the "beginning of the end" tagline, that doesn't seem so coincidental.

There was some nice future-history of the kind that the series used to do in the Troughton Era, from the team that have studiously avoided all but the nearest of near-future settings: global warming and petrol apocalypse don't sound too inconsistent with the kinds of disasters that Ramon Salamander saved the world from with his Suncatcher and Kneetrembler devices in "The Enemy of the World". Though, of course, a collapse of civilisation in the early 21st Century is very New Adventures too. And the subtle implication that the planet might be divided between World Zones and Independent States could be a go at retconning in the power blocs of "Warriors of the Deep" too.

And of course, the mother of all references: the wise and noble race who lived on Mars and built an empire out of snow. Out of "snow"? Cue a hundred YouTube videos opening with that quote before cutting to a montage of Ice Warrior shenanigans over dubbed with "Frostie the Snowman" or "Walking in the Air".

In "The Curse of Peladon" the Doctor was revealed to have prejudged them, but here he seems to have a respect and regard for them and their history.

Ah, Ice Warrior history: this one's a bit tricky. The original Ice Warrior, Varga, was thawed out of a glacier sometime in the future (I favour 5000 AD ish, because it ties in with the "Ice Age in the year 5000" from "Talons of Weng-Chiang") but he has apparently been frozen there since the last Ice Age so therefore at least ten thousand years. By the time of the Galactic Federation (conventionally dated to 3999 AD, though Tat and Larry make a case for it being pre- Earth Empire, 23rd Century; later than this in either case) the Martians are no longer from Mars.

But in between these, there is "The Seeds of Death" in the typically-Troughton 21st Century, which sees an Ice Warrior fleet attempt to invade Earth, starting with biological attack using the eponymous seeds to lower the oxygen content of our atmosphere.

We can be reasonably sure that that story takes place after 2070 AD, because of "The Moonbase". In "The Moonbase", definitively dated to 2070, weather control is done from the Moon using a Gravitron, whereas "The Seeds of Death" includes a visit to the London weather control bureau, so clearly "Seeds" takes place either before the Gravitron is installed or after it becomes obsolete.

Besides which, if there had been a T-Mat link to the moon in "The Moonbase", then the story would have ended about two weeks earlier.

The New Adventures dated "The Seeds of Death" to about 2089, and expanded on this with a future history that saw a nasty little War of the Worlds around the turn of the 22nd Century (they drop an asteroid on Paris; we T-mat in and obliterate their homeworld).

So why is there no one – apart from nine unlucky humans – living on Mars in 2059?

(Mind you, you might ask why they are armed if they don't think there's anyone living on Mars.)

However, a couple of possible retcons spring to mind: firstly, the Ice Warriors on Mars are known to be dying out – that's why they launch their invasion in "The Seeds of Death" anyway – so perhaps they have retreated to the polar Ice Caps and are far, far away from Bowie Base One.

Alternatively, they may have already abandoned Mars and be surviving in their fleet in space until some critical development forces (some of?) them to attack the Earth, perhaps while others leave to found the New Mars that will be their homeworld for the Peladon saga.

Or, possibly most ironically, the Ice Warriors themselves are entombed in that glacier under Bowie Base One and the Flood far from being their enemy is some kind of genetically engineered alarm clock designed to possess anyone coming close and use them to wake up the race for real. Several commentators have remarked, as did Alex, that the cracked skin around the mouths of the Flood's victims is very like the appearance of the Ice Warriors' mouths under their helmets, so maybe the Warriors themselves are carriers of the Flood.

In fact, in any of these cases the attack in "The Seeds of Death" could be seen as a Martian retaliation for setting off a nuke on their home planet.

Of course, "Seeds of Death" sees Earth water as toxic to the deadly Martian seeds… so that's either a flagrant contraction of the "just one drop would infect Earth" that we see here, or rather blackly ironic.

It's been too long since "Planet of the Dead" but "The Waters of Mars" was worth the wait, vastly superior to the desert runaround, it both told an important story of its own, beautifully moving in its quieter moments, and prepared the way for a genuinely big conclusion to the whole tenth Doctor story, indeed the whole of Russell Davies' Doctor Who with some brilliant lines along the way:

"State your name, rank and intention" "Errr, the Doctor… Doctor… fun?"

rather sums up the series' mission statement, while

"Who's going to save you?" "Captain Adelaide Brooke"

is the perfect defining moment for Doctor and companion.

Mind you, the "funny robot" – not actually cute. The design drawing shown in "Confidential" was much better, but not how it ended up, perhaps because Wall-E got there first.

Next Time: Will the Doctor Live or Let Die? Will it scare the Living Daylights out of him? Or will he see his Licence Revoked? Look, basically Millennium is too excited for words because James Bond himself, Timothy Dalton, really is a Time Lord and this really is "The End of Time"

Day 3238: Mr Mark Reckons named 65th most powerful person on Earth

2009-11-12T11:00:00.001Z

Thursday:

The new 2009 Forbes Power List has been published and the two persons from Great Britain on the table of the World's 67 most powerful people (apparently one for every one-hundred million humans) are the Prime Monster Mr Frown and our very own Mr Mark Thompson!

I've got that right, haven't I?

Clearly, it really WAS a VERY GOOD blog post.

OBVIOUSLY this is only the list of the most important HUMAN BEANS. I eagerly… and modestly… await the list of the World's most important ELEPHANTS…

…still waiting…

…still waiting…

…still waiting…

.

Day 3229 (again): THE PRISONER 42nd ANNIVERSARY: The Schizoid Man

2009-11-11T15:00:00.002Z

Tuesday:

Time in the Village is meaningless; time in Daddy's reviews doubly so, so I shall time-warp you back a week. And speaking of doubles…

information
No more psychology, no more "don't damage him", now the Village really starts messing with heads, in this classic "double agent" ploy with a cunning double-bluff twist. Is salvation all in the mind?

The Prisoner wakes up to find that he is now left-handed, moustachioed and Number 2's new best friend, Number 12, brought in on a special assignment to break a particularly recalcitrant prisoner to whom he bears an uncanny resemblance: Number 6.

This new Number 6 – in the end he turns out to be an agent calling himself "Curtis", so I shall refer to him as that throughout to try and cut down the confusion – immediately suggests that this is all a plot to break down his identity so that in the end he will tell all. Which, in a way, it is.

Curtis then proceeds to best the Prisoner at all his favourite pastimes: shooting, fencing, fisticuffs. Not surprising, really, when the Village's crude electric aversion therapy has him thinking he has to use his weaker left hand. Number 2 tries torturing Curtis with the Mind Rubbers while the Prisoner looks on. But then the Prisoner thinks of a better idea: he's been working with another Villager, Alison, on a mind-reading act, and he's sure that she will be able to tell who's who, as only the real Number 6 is "simpatico" with her. Naturally he flunks the test and Number 2 tells him it was a very silly idea and that he's only reinforced Number 6's sense of identity.

Alison, of course, is betraying him, but inadvertently she also provides his way out: another of her hobbies, photography, provides the evidence that too much time has passed, and with the illusion slightly cracked, he starts to regain his memories. One zap from a faulty standard lamp and he's regained his proper handedness too, and can cheerfully beat the truth out of Curtis. Then, when Rover helpfully eliminates his double, it's time to turn the tables on Number 2, as the Prisoner pretends to be Curtis and hopes to get the next chopper out of there.

There's just one snag: while Alison could tell the real Prisoner by instinct, Number 2 could tell the real Curtis too, and the Prisoner ends up going nowhere.

what's your number, please
Things have clearly advanced in the Village, and they are now willing to start using rather more invasive techniques to break the Prisoner, here physically conditioning him; he, however, presented with an opportunity, is still trying to escape, something he will try only once more before "Fall Out". For these reason we see this as the start of the four-story "second phase" of the Prisoner's battle with the Village, and hence after any of the "first phase" stories that we've watched so far.

The other stories from this part of the series are "The General", "A, B & C" and "Many Happy Returns"; why do we make this one first?

Well, "Many Happy Returns" is another "game changing" story, like "Free For All" and, as we'll see, after that the Prisoner has good reason to redirect his efforts from escaping to destroying the Village. Therefore we shall make that the last one of this sub-sequence.

"The General" and "A, B & C" are clearly linked as they both feature Colin Gordon as Number 2 and – uniquely – the opening exchanges of "A, B & C" are amended to "I am Number 2" instead of the more usual "I am the new Number 2". This, more than anything else, suggests that those episodes, even though they were originally shown weeks apart and in the "wrong" order, are not just connected but consecutive.

"The Schizoid Man" mainly stands alone. Things get more complicated if you take into account the dates… but only if you are going to take any calendar in the Village at face value (as if you can take anything at "face value" in "The Schizoid Man"). If you did, then this story starts on 10th February, after which the Prisoner spends several weeks being brainwashed and re-educated to be left-handed before waking up on… 10th February again. The fact that he's not surprised by this suggests that every day in the Village is 10th February, or at the very least he's used to dates being arbitrary. The fact that these dates flatly contradict the dates in "Many Happy Returns", the only other episode with dates, just adds to the impression that the calendar is pretty useless for "dating" the episode.

However, at the conclusion the Prisoner – trying to bluff his way out as "Number 12" – has a striking exchange with Number 2.

Number 2: "the General isn't going to have you shot"

The Prisoner: "we'll see when I make my report to him"

Number 2 [puzzled]: "that's a rather odd thing to say"

The implication being that the General isn't a person, but also that the Prisoner hasn't considered this possibility. Now, as it happens – spoiler alert – that's not the sort of mistake the Prisoner would be expected to make after the events of "The General". So we can arrive at an order for these stories that goes: "The Schizoid Man" (which is before) "The General" (followed by the same Number 2 in) "A, B & C" and (concluding with the last great escape story) "Many Happy Returns".

the new number two
An astonishingly young Anton Rogers here plays Number 2 as an ambitious young turk, clearly on the up and clearly out to make a name for himself by breaking the unbreakable. He's very gung ho, and "into" his role in the scheme here – and interestingly it isn't his scheme (compare with Leo McKern's Number 2 failing in "The Chimes of Big Ben" and being told "it was a good idea").

This Number 2 is a more than competent actor – but then spies have to be, don't they – putting on a matey, clubbable persona for his interactions with the-Prisoner-as-Number-12, seemingly capable of improvising quickly within character around "Number 12's" attempted proof with the Alison, first looking nervous about the suggestion, then berating "Number 12's" stupidity when it "goes wrong".

In character, he's contemptuous of pen-pushers and their pensions, and occasionally witty – his suggestion that once he's finished "he won’t know whether he's Number 6 or the cube root of infinity". But he clearly likes things to be ordered and predictable, and gets angry when they don't go to plan: when the Prisoner disappears in the night, and again when it seems his extremely valuable prisoner has been accidentally Rovered to death. Defeated, though, he seems relatively phlegmatic.

Having said that, the "going wrong" is clearly scripted, and he's much less good at covering up his growing suspicions when the Prisoner missteps in his bluff as Curtis.

There are a few moments, his reflective "old man" interactions with the Prisoner when he believes him to be Curtis, that seem written for an older actor, one who could have spent a few years knocking around a bit and be a contemporary of someone of McGoohan's age; interestingly he starts to be more matey – more "in character" again – once he starts to doubt that this is Curtis, and he starts to throw in test questions.

Ultimately, he's just not very interesting, a high-flyer fast tracked from middle-management perhaps, but not a power in the way earlier Number 2's have been. To be fair though, having two Patrick McGoohans on the screen is enough to force any number of people into the background.

follow the signs
To start with the crushingly banal: 12 is 6's Double.

What is more interesting is that under all this, Number 2 makes a significant victory as for most of the episode the Prisoner actively asserts that he is Number 6.

"I am Number Six," he says, "it is you who are doing the claiming!"

What he should say, of course, is that the other man may claim what he likes, but he is a free man.

And we have Alison, Number 24, who is 12 doubled too, though unusually for the Village she gets called by name. She is also the first pretty woman we've seen whom the Prisoner hasn't rejected or chased away. In fact his relationship with her is surprising in several ways: friendly, almost paternal, he doesn't just seem relaxed in her company but used to it, as though they've been friends now for some time. This might suggest a longer than usual gap between the last episode (in our case "Free For All") and this one during which he seems to have not just settled down but actually started to engage in an almost normal social life in the Village.

I'd suggest that this is a consequence of his total failure in "Free For All": he's realised that his "run like the blazes, first chance I get" approach is getting him nowhere and costing him a lot, so he's paused for a reassessment.

But trust from him is unusual, especially of a woman. It would certainly be in keeping with the Village's tactics over the last several episodes (as we watched them) to have deliberately introduced a young woman to him as either part of this specific scheme or their longer term plan to exploit his chivalry but, for the same reason, it seems to be highly out of character for him to have taken to trusting her.

What seems most likely is that he comes to trust her because he believes he's found an empirical test of his instinct to trust her: their uncanny trick with the Zener Cards.

Remembering that it's the Sixties and mind-over-matter is "in", for the purposes of this episode, the possibility of a mental "rapport" or "link" between two people is treated as, if not an out-and-out fact, certainly a reasonable possibility. It's not a straight acceptance of telepathy; the Prisoner himself says it's more complicated than that, and it's more implied that they are – subconsciously – tipping each other off with non-verbal clues and body language, as in the moment where he turns with his lighter ready for the cigarette she has prepared behind his back.

This then is his test, a much more complicated version of what he tried in "Checkmate": he believes certain things about Alison, and some of those are supported by the way she seems to respond to him, so he therefore believes other things about her too.

It's never actually clear whether they've corrupted her, probably while zapping the Prisoner with electric sticks, or if it was a set it up from the very beginning. She could have been selected (with or without her knowing it) on the basis of a particularly empathic personality or suitability to form a bond with the Prisoner or her entire mind reading act could be, well, an act.

But the implication of the cigarette moment, and later her telling "Curtis" that she wouldn't do it again clearly knowing that this is the Prisoner pretending to be Curtis, is that the link is in some way genuine and that it was the scene in the Green Dome, where she miscalls four out of five of the Prisoner's cards and then aces Curtis's run (easily done with a doctored deck and a memorised sequence, or prearranged signals between Curtis and the stooge or even a cunningly placed mirror or two), that was faked.

Which makes this another "win" for the Village in their longer term game: they've taken something genuine and used it to create more distrust in him generating further alienation.

One of the classic "Prisoner puzzlers" is why Rover kills Curtis. Both men, superficially identical, give the correct password but the village Guardian murders one of them, fortunately the "right" one. Why?

Alex half in jest suggests that it's because Rover is really pissed off: he's just been set off in pursuit of an empty Mini Moke, the guard dog literally chasing cars, the first time he's actually seen to make a mistake, and wants to take it out on someone.

My suspicion is one of logic: if both "Number 6's" have the password then Rover can infer that Curtis has broken and betrayed the Village. Punishment is swift, as the Judoon might put it. Or maybe Rover thinks it's the Riddle of the Osirians: one of these mummies always tells the truth and one is lying; since the Prisoner always tells the truth he gives the right password, but since Curtis is always lying… Of course, the Prisoner then convinces Number 2 that Rover has just assassinated their top prize and Number 2 orders the Guardian recalled immediately. You can, if you like, imagine Rover bouncing up and down in impotent fury confined to his lava-lamp for the rest of the story.

As for picking the right one to squish, well that's not hard: the Prisoner and Curtis may look identical to us, but who is to say how Rover perceives them? It might "sniff" DNA, or "taste" the electrical activity in their brains. As a semi-mystical blob of "the Unknown", it might as well see "souls" for all we know.

If there is a problem, it's the way that Curtis collapsed like a wet paper bag five minutes earlier: he goes from smug control to punch up to quivering wreck in the space of a single scene. Dramatically, after his confident self-assurance in the role of "Number 6", this makes no sense at all. Of course, metaphorically the Prisoner has, like Austin Powers, recovered his "mojo" and Curtis folds before it; in the episode's own language, and as flagged up earlier by Number 2's Haitian controller, the Prisoner has reclaimed his "soul" along with his right hook – ironically his soul is restored rather than stolen by a photograph.

who is number one?
Once again, Patrick MGoohan shows why this series really is all about him. Here he gets to play ego and super-ego to himself.

(Which means Rover as the id – a great big blobby death-wish, a formless beast driven by emotions, anger, lust, fear – is surely just as obvious, not least when "the id" finally – not to mention literally – does what it always wanted to and overwhelms "the super-ego".)

Oh, come on, all that "subconscious connection" stuff and you're not thinking Freud?

McGoohan as Curtis is both exaggerating and commenting on the Prisoner's usual mores and morals: when he's in control he is more arrogant, more obnoxious, more in control; when he loses it, he is more pathetic. Meanwhile McGoohan as the Prisoner struggles to realise his proper self until he confronts and overcomes his remembered trauma. Only by integrating the two – "becoming" his other self – can he escape from his imposed reality. And of course he hasn't integrated himself, which is why he doesn't get away.

"The Schizoid Man" would be a very clever twist on an almost clichéd spy drama trope: the doppelganger. But McGoohan's almost self-satirising performance lifts it to be a superb episode of "The Prisoner" as well. A series that screams "Who are you" from its opening titles really has to analyse its lead character.

Or perhaps it's just an excuse for McGoohan to be both characters in the punch-up for the trailer.

next time…
That would be telling.

Be seeing you.

Day 3235: Mr Frown – an apology

2009-11-09T13:00:00.002Z

Monday:

That so-called “newspaper”, “the Scum” has found a whole NEW way to be OBSCENE. They’ve taken the hurt and anger of a grieving mother and USED it, used HER, as an excuse to attack the Prime Monster… for his HANDWRITING.

We KNOW that Mr Frown cannot see from one eye and has problems with the other. We KNOW that fiddly handwriting is DIFFICULT for him. Nevertheless, he – quite RIGHTLY – takes the trouble to PERSONALLY write to the families of each fallen soldier.

You can UNDERSTAND Mrs Janes’ anger. But what does “The Scum” get out of it?

Is it their point to criticise Mr Frown for not thinking much of the soldiers whose lives are lost in Afghanistan? That seems to be a particularly CRUEL twisting of the facts: he does something that is personal and unmediated – un-SPUN – and for him actually quite physically difficult. It would not be the same if he got someone else to write it, or to check it or, worst of all to TYPE it – yes, I know that’s what Mrs Janes asks for, but she is angry and hurting and being used.

Is it a legitimate question about Mr Frown’s Afghanistan policy, a policy that looks increasingly difficult to UNDERSTAND let alone support, in the light of the election fiasco? “The Scum” certainly don’t seem to be addressing any of the REAL issues: are we helping or hindering the Afghan people; does this “war” (or “occupation” really) make Great Britain safer or in fact more dangerous; can we actually WIN against the Taliban without TALKING to them; do our soldiers get the support and equipment that they need to do the job we ask of them?

So is it just MOCKING someone for making a spelling mistake? (And in fact, Mrs Janes criticises his spelling of “comfort” claiming Mr Frown wrote “cumfort” when clearly it actually a POORLY-FORMED first letter “o”, not a misspelling.) Because surely there would never ever EVER be a TYPO in the pages of “The Scum”? Oh wait…!

It is a TERRIBLE SHAME that Mrs Janes has felt insulted by what was meant to be a gesture of comfort. You can see how it must be awful for her, and how she could react with ANGER to even a kindly meant letter. Mr Frown has now phoned her to apologise and I hope this helps her pain.

I wonder though that “the Scum” does not feel the urge to apologise too. Because they’ve only made things worse not better.

PS:

In best Doctor-Who-companion style, Daddy Richard has twisted his ankle. It has BALLOONED up like… well Mr Balloon’s opinion of himself, and all he can say is: “Dear FLUFF, how did Auntie Jennie stand the PAIN!”

.

Day 3229: Dave the Cave – Mr Balloon versus Lisbon and the Truth

2009-11-05T16:00:00.005Z

Tuesday:

The Conservatories have made a GREAT DEAL of political capital out of their FALSE claim that the other parties promised a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty and then reneged.

Let's be quite clear: in 2005, NOBODY promised a vote on the Lisbon Treaty, because in 2005 the Lisbon Treaty DID NOT EXIST!

But in 2007, Mr Balloon gave you a "cast-iron guarantee". Mr Balloon is the ONLY one to break his promise.

So it seems only fair that he should be completely made to pay that capital back, and to admit that he was a lying liar all along.

In fact, since it appears that they campaigned on a totally false manifesto for the European elections this year, shouldn't ALL of their MEPs resign with immediate effect?

But DID Mr Balloon admit it? My fluffy bottom he did!

Here's what he had to say for himself:

"Ladies and Bullingdon Clubbers, Proles, Earthlings.

"Yesterday in the Czech Republic, a country far away about which I now care very little, President Santa Klaus signed the Lisbon Treaty and dropped me right in it.

"I know that I promised you a referendum on this treaty. But I'm not going to give you one.

"Why not? Well, let me ask you this: when is a Treaty not a Treaty? When it's a right royal pain in my ass…umption that I will be next Prime Monster.

"Remember, as Humpty Dumpty* once said, 'When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.'

"So when I say 'Treaty' I don't mean 'an agreement between nations' I mean 'something in the future, the vague threat of which we can use to frighten you into voting for us', and when I say 'cast-iron guarantee' don't mean 'a promise I will absolutely keep' I mean 'whatever will get me in the paper'.

"You see? No?

"Okay, I know, from the many public meetings I've held around the country milking this issue, that many of you will resent the fact that I am going to fold at the first difficulty and break my cast-iron promise.

"So let me make it clear that it is definitely NOT MY FAULT – no, it's Lord Blairimort and Mr Frown! They're the ones who promised you a referendum. So it's their fault.

"And the Liberal Democrats, they totally betrayed you too.

"Let me make that even clearer: ANYONE who promised you a referendum – even if it was on a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT treaty – THEY let you down; ANYONE who promised you a referendum – even if they actually voted FOR a referendum, just not the one very specific and pointless one that I wanted – they BETRAYED you.

"But not me. I offered you a SPECIFIC guarantee of a referendum on THIS specific treaty. And I'm not going to give you one. But that's not BETRAYAL; that doesn't count.

"Of course I wanted a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. But now I'm not going to give you one.

"I've argued for it, but I'm not going to give you one; campaigned for it, but I'm not going to give you one; put it front and centre in our European election campaign, but I'm just not going to give you one. We have voted for it in Parliament. But YOU won't get a vote, because we won't give you one.

"I've banged on about the Prime Monster and his broken promise at every opportunity. So now I've broken mine too.

"I believe it ranks alongside the expenses scandal as one of the reasons that trust in politics has broken down. And that's why I can happily break my word, content in the knowledge that you should never have trusted me anyway!

"I always said that if this happened, I would set out immediately how a Conservatory Government would respond. And if you give me five more minutes, I can see what Mr Vague has scribbled down on the back of this fag packet.

"Ah yes, let us offer you some PLATITUDES instead.

"FIRST! If we win the next election, we will amend the European Communities Act 1972 to prohibit, by law, the transfer of power to the EU without a referendum.

"Of course, if MY Government can amend the European Communities Act, then any future Government could amend it back again. But hopefully you won't notice that.

"This is a major constitutional development.

"Of course, we are opposed to a Written Constitution. So, as usual, this promise isn't worth the paper it's not written on.

"SECOND! Instead of a referendum, I promise you we will NOT be having a referendum.

"I just don't think it's right to concoct some new pretext for a referendum simply to have one for the sake of it.

"That wouldn't survive serious scrutiny. Like most of my ideas.

"A made-up referendum might make people feel better for five minutes… because they'd use it to vote against an unpopular Conservatory Government. But my job is on the line… er… is to put together a plan that lasts five ~~minutes~~ years, and I don't think a phoney referendum should play any part in that. At least, not any more, now we've lost the chance of hawking a Lisbon vote on you.

"Let me repeat: a Conservative government will guarantee a referendum if there is any attempt to transfer further powers from Britain to the EU. Just like we did when Mr Grocer Heath took us into the EEC, or when Queen Maggie signed the Single European Act or when Mr Major-Minor signed the Maastricht Treaty… oh for fluff's sake…

"THIRD! As well as making sure that further power cannot be handed to the EU without a referendum, we will also introduce a new law, in the form of a United Kingdom Sovereignty Bill, to make it clear that ultimate authority stays in this country, in our Parliament.

"This is not about Westminster striking down individual items of EU legislation. It's about inserting MEANINGLESS and UNENFORCEABLE clauses into legislation that will do nothing but irritate our European partners and undermine our negotiating position in Europe – after all, why will anyone take our contribution seriously if we are CONSTITUTIONALLY saying 'but all that only applies to you not us'

"These changes would ensure that the breach of trust committed by this Labour Government could never happen again.

"Those two words - never again - will be on our leaflets.

"And also in all the leaflets of our opponents, as in: 'You can NEVER trust the Tories AGAIN'

"We will make sure that the British people remember who it was that broke their promise – ~~Labour, and who it is that will stop this happening again~~ – the Conservatories.

"But these measures are all about distracting you from my BIG BROKEN PROMISE.

"They don't deal with the problems we are facing today, which will now be made worse by the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty.

"In essence, these problems boil down to… Barry Legg, Bill "Petty" Cash and Daniel Hangman.

"A Conservatory Government will address some of these problems… by giving jobs to these malcontents and blowhards that will shut them up. At least for a bit.

"A Conservatory Government will grovellingly fail to obtain THREE specific guarantees from our European partners.

"First, social and employment legislation.

"We will want to negotiate the return of Britain's opt-out from social and employment legislation in those areas which have proved most damaging to our economy (or at least most damaging, aside from the massive recession caused by rich greedy bankers), for example the aspects of the Working Time Directive which are causing real problems for our Fat Cats and Slave Drivers. Er.

"Second, we will negotiate over the Charter of Fundamental Rights. Because I for one have no understanding of what "fundamental" means. And who in Great Britain could possibly want human rights? Never mind that signing up to the European Declaration of Human Rights is a PREREQUISITE for membership of the Union… what pinko came up with these so-called "rights" anyway? What do you mean, Churchill?

"The third area where we will negotiate for a return of powers is criminal justice.

"Remember, we voted against the European arrest warrant and if we'd had our way, the 7/7 bomber could have got away to Italy and, and… has Mr Vague checked all this?

"Anyway, we can't go letting the people of Iceland sue our banks for just bringing down their economy, can we!

"I recognise that these are highly complex areas, where we need to think through the practical details with great care. And I'm confident that when it turns out all THESE promises turn out to be as worthless as my cast-iron guarantee of a referendum on Lisbon we'll have found another way of blaming someone else, probably a faceless, nameless Eurocrat who I can make up on the spot.

"So, yes, I believe we will be able to negotiate our way out of a paper bag. And if you believe this guff, then I believe that you will believe anything!

"In conclusion: People are fed up with the endless lies and spin, they just want to know what we can achieve and how.

"Well WHAT I can achieve is being Prime Monster, and HOW I can achieve it is… with MORE lies and spin!

"That's what this is all about.

"And never mind giving the British people a policy on Europe that they can actually believe in."

*PS: HUMPTY DUMPTY

'You seem very clever at explaining words, Sir,' said Alice. 'Would you kindly tell me the meaning of the poem called "Jabberwocky"?'

'Let's hear it,' said Humpty Dumpty. 'I can explain all the poems that were ever invented – and a good many that haven't been invented just yet.'

This sounded very hopeful, so Alice repeated the first verse:

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

'That's enough to begin with,' Humpty Dumpty interrupted: 'there are plenty of hard words there. "BRILLIG" is that BRILLIANT moment when a cad is caught full in the headlights – the time when you begin BROILING him for dinner.'

'That'll do very well,' said Alice: 'and "SLITHY"?'

'Well, "SLITHY" means "lithe and slimy." "Lithe" is the same as "active." You see it's like a portmanteau – there are two meanings packed up into one word.'

'I see it now,' Alice remarked thoughtfully: 'and what are "TOVES"?'

'Well, "TOVES" are ConservaTOVES: they're something like badgers, because they look they look fluffy on top – but something like lizards, as they have a nasty underbelly – and something like corkscrews, for the way they twist their words around and around.'

'They must be very untrustworthy creatures.'

'They are that,' said Humpty Dumpty: 'also they make their nests in the Sun – also they live on cheesy publicity.'

'And what's the "GYRE" and to "GIMBLE"?'

'To "GYRE" is to go round and round like a gyroscope. To "GIMBLE" is to make holes like a gimlet.'

'And "THE WABE" is the current affairs, the news and what have you, I suppose?' said Alice, surprised at her own ingenuity.

'Of course it is. It's called "WABE," you know, because it goes a long way before it, and a long way behind it…'

'And a long way beyond it on each side,' Alice added.

'Exactly so. Well, then, "MIMSY" is "flimsy and miserable" (there's another portmanteau for you). And a "BOROGOVE" is a thin, shabby-looking, rampant egoist who conceals their more frothing tendencies in service of their ambition - rather like Mr Michael Borogove, that is: a respected members of the Shadow Cabinet or "tit"'.

'And then "MOME RATHS"?' said Alice. 'I'm afraid I'm giving you a great deal of trouble.'

'Well, a "RATH" is a sort of green pig, a different sort of rampant egoist, one quite unable to contain their volcanic fury or "wrath": but "MOME" I'm not certain about. I think it's short for "from EU" – meaning that they'd lost their only policy, you know.'

'And what does "OUTGRABE" mean?'

'Well, "OUTGRABING" is GRABBING at the headlines to express (most probably faux) OUTRAGE, something between bellowing and whistling, with a kind of sneeze in the middle: however, you'll hear it done, maybe – down in the Millbank studios yonder – and when you've once heard it you'll be QUITE content.'

(with some apologies to Mr Charles Lutwidge Dodgson)

Day 3227: Postman Pot

2009-11-03T12:00:00.001Z

Sunday:

We know a SONG about this, don't we children:

"Postman Pot, Postman Pot, Postman Pot and his black and white… opinions about drugs policy…"

Minister for Misuse of ~~Science~~ Drugs, Mr Alan Johnson and Johnson must be wishing for a No More Tears formula today, or at least a no more RESIGNATIONS one, as by firing the Nutty Professor, he has gone from being next leader of Hard Labour to merely the next failed Home Secretary faster than it takes to say "My word, how very RED-in-the-FACE you've gone, Mr Johnson and Johnson; have you taken any DRUGS for that?".

The root of Mr Johnson and Johnson's problem is NOT that the Nutty Professor has criticised his policy; the problem is that the POLICY makes not the remotest HOOT of SENSE, and he knows it, and everyone else knows it and he KNOWS that everyone else knows it.

I am reminded of the story of the EMPEROR with NO CLOTHES ON. And what was the MORAL of that story? Yes, the little boy who pointed out that the Emperor was in the nuddie got taken away to Guantanamo Bay and tough new laws enforcing Imperial Attire were enacted, because pointing out that people in power are fluffing idiots is never a healthy career option.

Increasing penalties, spending millions on police snatch squads, re-classifying everything as Class-A triple-star with skull-and-crossbones and dagger-dripping-with blood, these are all the clear signs of someone who is SOFT on drugs.

Yes, SOFT – the Government's "war on drugs" policy is the SOFT option, it is easy, lazy pandering to headlines in the redtops, and it causes HARM, it unnecessarily criminalises a whole generation, it encourages robbery and burglary, it wastes police resources, it puts people at risk from impure sources of supply, it supports a culture of violent criminal gangs both here and in poverty-stricken parts of the planet (usually countries that, by an astonishing coincidence, regularly get bits of their territory EXPLODED by Americaland).

It is, on the whole, EXTREMELY stupid and, yes, SOFT.

The TOUGH stance on drugs is tackling the problem head on.

What IS the problem? The problem is that for some unearthly reason politicians and meeja curtain-twitchers think that it is ANY business of theirs what other people choose to do with their bodies.

This is where the HORSE RIDING comes in.

Horse riding is a VERY, VERY slightly dangerous activity that people choose to participate in. We don't ban it. In fact, people would probably think of it as HEALTHY and FUN because of the associated physical exercise, fresh air and social interaction. And yet people can and do get killed doing this.

And so I present you with the rave.

Was the Nutty Professor RIGHT to compare "tragic accidents involving harmless innocents" to the deaths of "drug-taking-fiends" who go "raving" on "ecstasy" (©all newspapers)?

Well, what are the numbers:

About two-and-a-half million people regularly go horse riding.

About half a million people regularly take ecstasy.

If there's about TEN deaths a year attributed directly to each activity – as the Nutty Professor claimed – then you can do the maths: it works out that horse riding has a risk of death of 0.0004% (or four in a million) and ecstasy taking has a risk of death of 0.002% (or twenty in a million).

So (tabloid speak again) ecstasy FIVE TIMES more DEADLY than Horsies! Or, more rationally, you are actually QUITE UNLIKELY to die of either.

The POINT, as made in this study, is that the meeja OVER-REPORT deaths attributed to "drugs" and in particular ecstasy in order to PORTRAY "drugs" and in particular ecstasy as an EVIL COCKTAIL of DEATH, with your average teenager playing Russian Roulette every time they pop a party fun pill.

The truth is, you are far more likely to drop dead of PARACETEMOL.

In fact the BIGGEST killers appear to be Diazepam and Temazepam ("The Housewife's Choice") but nice Middle-Class ladies numbing themselves into oblivion don't seem to be on the Daily Fail's agenda. Odd that.

And any examination of the HISTORY of drug policy in Great Britain would suggest that more than likely it was MEEJA-DRIVEN moral panic that CAUSED the explosion of first heroin then other drug abuse by going all "moral high ground" on the doctors who were actually TREATING the at-the-time actually VERY SMALL number addicts back in the Sixties.

So, to return to the Emperor with No Clothes On, the Nude Secretary – do not SHUDDER; even Mr Johnson and Johnson has an, er, Johnson – he says:

"You cannot have a chief adviser... campaigning against government decisions."

Was the Nutty Professor WRONG to speak up when he disagreed with the POLICY? Should he have kept QUIET, not published his piece about the relative HARM?

NO.

As a scientist, he has an absolute moral DUTY to present his findings, whether they support the policy or not; whether they support his OWN beliefs or not. It is actually VITAL to the scientific method that ALL results are presented, otherwise you introduce BIAS into the shared pool of data

This is in DIRECT contradiction to the OPERATING systems of Hard Labour.

Their MP Mr Tom Price, appearing on the Westminster Hour, went as far as to utter the STAGGERING suggestion that independent advisors should be bound by collective responsibility.

The Labour Party, it seems, have come up with a new DOCTRINE for independent advisors: "ministers decide and advisors AGREE".

As Dr Woo once said: "the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common: they change the facts to fit their opinions".

Whether Mr Johnson and Johnson is very powerful of very stupid, I will leave it up to you to decide, but if we can't face the facts, we can never see it: the "War on Drugs" has been a TOTAL FLUFFING FAILURE.

PS:

My favourite comment, though, must be that of Mr Stephen of the Glenn:

"New Government Science Policy: Anyone who claims that the Earth is NOT the CENTRE of the Universe will be taken to the EDGE and thrown off!"

.

Day 3222: THE PRISONER 42nd ANNIVERSARY: Free for All

2009-10-31T00:00:00.000Z

Tuesday:

For obvious reasons we actually watched this on WEDNESDAY, just before Mr Andrew Britain's History of Marrmite. It's a jumbled up, reactionary, aren't-they-all-just-the-same view of politics… and so is "Free for All".

Here's Daddy:

information
Written by "Paddy Fitz" aka Patrick "Paddy" McGoohan, and make of the Fitz what you will, "Free for All" sees the Prisoner enter its "barking mad" phase. It is election time in the Village, and Number 2 persuades the Prisoner to run against him for the job of chairman with a promise that if he wins "Number 1 will no longer be a mystery" to him.

This turns out, like all too many "campaign promises", to be rather more nuanced in outcome than the Prisoner might have hoped.

(He ends up essentially alone in control – see if you can work out where this is headed.)

"Do you intend to run?"

"Like blazes, first chance I get."

He should have stuck to his first answer; agreeing to this election may have been a bad mistake. First he is shocked to see that the Villagers already have anticipated his decision and his campaign posters are ready instantly, even if they react to his manifesto for freedom with hilarity. Then he is invited to the formal final meeting of the outgoing committee who blank-facedly refuse to answer his questions before a maniacal Number Two 2 orders the Prisoner sent for testing as punishment for this "breach of etiquette".

"Testing" involves a nice cup of – laced – tea with a kindly Civil Servant who more than a little resembles Michael Palin's character in "Brazil". After which, a blissed out Prisoner finds himself mouthing the nostrums of the Village and winning the approval of the crowd.

With everything going his way, the Prisoner seems to become more and more distressed: trying his crudest escape attempt yet – by boat, see my remarks about the sea last time – getting dragged back by Rover; turning to drink, finding an apparently garrulous Number 2 in the hidden drinking den, only to get another dose of the Village's brain juice instead of a slug of the good stuff. Each of these humiliations sees him returning to Village double-talk even stronger than the last.

Victory, when it comes, is a landslide, with even Number 2 throwing in the towel, pinning on the rosette, and handing over the control room in the Green Dome. But being able to push the buttons doesn't really mean he's in control. Step forward the real new Number Two to, literally, slap him down.

"Will you never learn?"

Even without mentioning the surreal discovery of four be-sun-glassed Villagers sat around watching Rover like a television or a guru, you have to ask yourself: "what the Hell does all that mean?"

what's your number, please
This isn't, obviously, the first time that the Village messes with the Prisoner's head, but here they stop pussy-footing around with psychology and start using chemicals, drugging and brainwashing him at least twice. This is a marked step up from their previous practice, even if they insist that they don't want to "damage the tissue".

For his own part, the Prisoner also escalates things, trying to seize control so that he can free all the Villagers, not seeing that there's an obvious contradiction in that:

"Obey me and be free!"

And clearly "Free for All" is a major turning point. It was certainly an important episode to McGoohan.

For these reasons we put "Free for All" as the climax of the "early" or "trying to escape" phase of the series.

Elections have been referred to before but clearly there haven't been any, so we can guess this is a later story than "Arrival" which doesn't really help us, but also "Dance of the Dead" where Number 2 says "we're democratic, in our way".

There's a bit of a puzzle: in "Dance of the Dead" the Prisoner doesn't recognise the Town Hall; yet in "Free for All" he doesn't seem to know where to find it – going to the "Free Information" board in order to look it up. These seem contradictory; I'm going to say that it seems slightly more likely that he learns of the Town Hall in "Dance of the Dead" but, since it won't let him in except under special circumstances, he doesn't bother to work out the direct way there from his residence (he follows Number 42 there from the bandstand and later Number 2 takes him there from the beach). Or maybe it moves about.

We're also told the elections are annual so, big assumption that that's not a lie, we say that he's been in the Village less than a year.

In his address to the crowd, the Prisoner promises (among other things) to discover who are the watched and who are the warders. To me, that seems like an acknowledgement of his defeat in "Checkmate", an admission that he needs to find out from control because he can't work it out for himself. Couple that with the Count in that story chiding him for not realising that some of the "prisoners" are actually guards and we infer that "Free for All" must follow "Checkmate".

Then there's the Prisoner's reaction to women, clearly well documented by now as Number 2 refers to knowing his prejudices when assigning Number 58 as his election staff. Previously we've seen him faced off with a woman who is in charge ("Dance of the Dead"), a woman who follows him around ("Checkmate"), and a woman who deceives him ("The Chimes of Big Ben"). And now we complete the picture with one who does all three.

the new number two
Ah, now this is a tricky one. There are in fact two possible candidates for who is this week's Number 2: Eric Portman who's in the titles, wears the badge and is the Prisoner's rival candidate in the election; and Rachel Herbert, the crazed-seeming maid-cum-lady-driver whose badge reads 58 until she discards it at the end leaving herself with Number 2's rosette and indeed Number.

Was she really Number 2 all along?

She is obviously right at the centre of the plot, watching the Prisoner from up close and subtly driving him (and sometimes not-so-subtly: how did someone "new" know about Number 2's secret drinking den, then?). He knows, because by now he's totally paranoid, that "Number 58" is a spy, although it doesn't seem to occur to him that she might in fact be the boss. Her made-up-sounding foreign language is a clever blind: it's so grotesquely over the top that it throws off his critical thinking. It's a stunning performance, all wide-eyed and childlike enthusiasm, making her sudden turnaround all the more impressive, stunning even when you know it's coming.

And at the end, she is a strong and powerful figure, dominating and patronising the Prisoner, positively regal in the reveal of her stood in control with the Number 2 rosette proclaiming her true identity, almost up there with Mary Morris.

Contrast that with Eric Portman's more world-weary figure. Now a lot of that will be part of the "act" – most obviously made clear in the magnificent "drinking den" scene.

But there are other scenes where he is not putting on a show for the Prisoner, where he seems nervous and under pressure, notably when taking instructions over the phone. We infer that it is Number 1 on the line, though it's not the big red "Number 1-phone" we see later, so it's not impossible that it's Number 58 aka the real Number 2 giving him his orders.

When in the Council Room he condemns the Prisoner for "testing", he becomes frenzied, almost unhinged, repeatedly banging his gavel as he sends the Prisoner down, down, down. It can't all be an act as he's later, over the phone, chastised for it and apologises.

follow the signs
I have to admit, I find "Free for All" a very difficult episode: it looks very much like it ought to mean something more, but that meaning persists in slipping through my fingers.

On a superficial level, what, exactly, does the Village get out of this exercise? Is it simply trying to put him under so much stress that he cracks? Do they think that proving some abstract point about the nature of democracy versus government will tip him over the edge?

And yet surely he cannot be so naïve as to believe that a prison, no matter how psychedelic the conditions, would actually have a system in place for one of the lunatics to take over the asylum? He must realise that this is all a ploy. Is he genuinely just playing along while waiting to think of a better plan? It's hard enough trying to spot where he's under the Village's brain control and where he's coming out of it again.

This lack of proper plot logic tends to sharpen the crudity of the allegory, make me less willing to forgive something that is trying so hard to be clever that it may just end up being very dumb indeed.

Alex, too, finds it a really weird mix, primitive and advanced at the same time. Bits, like lady Number 2's somewhat crass "my regards to the homeland" (reminiscent of the "my new masters" remark in "Arrival"), seem to be unpolished, first ideas about how this works; but there are other bits, like gentleman Number 2's sly encouragements as the Prisoner harangues an unmoved crowd, that are far more sophisticated.

"Free for All" has the word "allegory" loitering like an enormous neon elephant in the room. The need to make a point heavily outweighing any request that the plot make coherent sense.

Our "everyman" hero goes into politics to try and make things better for everyone, but ends up looking and sounding just like the regime he seeks to replace; once he is in power he discovers he is a powerless as he was before. Is this profound or profoundly naïve?

Remember, when McGoohan says this is how things work in the Village, he's not saying this is how they work in the World; he's saying this is how they work in a World that is wrong.

You can't just dismiss this as unsophisticated political analysis: it remains true today that this view of politics is held by a great many people and leads to alienation and extremism.

The Prisoner's democratic victory is overturned by apathy – the Villagers worshipping Rover – and by violence – the mechanics who beat him up. That's not just a crude reference to the way German democracy fell to Hitler, but also a warning.

Along the way, there's a sly pop at the press: every question is answered "no comment"; every answer turned into rhetoric for the status quo, except when the Prisoner says "mind your own business" which is rendered as "no comment". Identical twins 116a and 116b appear as the press-photographer and newspaper boy, while the journalist himself is 116, perhaps suggesting they are all just drones or perhaps prefiguring the Village council, alternating men in stripy tops and women in single colours, all numbered 2a, 2b, 2c and so on. (And the council chamber is a sight: like a rocket silo, with the Prisoner on a dais in the middle surrounded by the silent, unresponsive council, while Number 2 in person sits, gavel in hand, at the big desk in front, though behind him raised up is a throne on which sits a tall pyramid surmounted with a glowing eye like an Illuminati symbol standing in for Number 1.)

The Prisoner retains our sympathy throughout, driven to run away, driven to lash out, driven to drink it's clear that it's "the system" (here represented by spy-thriller tropes of drugs and brainwashing) that is warping his character. If anything, that is a plea for greater understanding of our elected representatives, not condemnation of them.

Nevertheless, it would be true to the series to say that democracy cannot represent the individual. No matter how we vote – Labour, Liberal, Conservative, None-of-the-above – we cannot all win simultaneously; there has to be compromise and sharing or someone loses.

There's an argument, a big argument, to be had about how much we share power: that is, how much power we allow, say, the government to have. When government takes more power, does that mean more or fewer people are winning? But that isn't the argument here. The Village and the Prisoner both have extreme positions: the Prisoner doesn't believe in compromise; the Village doesn't believe in sharing

who is number one?
It has to be Eric Portman for the character arc he plays, starting off the undisputed master of the Village, keen to have an opponent in this election because, as the Prisoner puts it, everyone votes for a dictator (in the end, everyone does) through the funny cruelty of him egging on his opponent's speech, down through the madness of the Council to the final helicopter departure, knowing that he is playing the role of someone playing a role.

We return to that scene in the cave where he pretends to be a broken old man, sharing little secrets and indiscretions, telling the Prisoner there's no surveillance. And the fool believes him. And then, with Prisoner mickey-finned on the floor, he sloughs off his avuncular, drunken persona as easily as he shrugs off his blanket. As Alex says: both actions leave him "cold".

Oh, and he's developed the ability to teleport. He speaks to the Prisoner on the telephone and appears on the television clearly at home in the control room in the Green Dome. But the instant the Prisoner hangs up on him, he's at the door, the Mountain coming to Mohammed.

next time…
That would be telling.

Be seeing you.

Day 3221: Conservatories – if they had a PLAN they might be DANGEROUS

2009-10-30T00:00:00.001Z

Monday:

The Conservatories were made by Maggie
They revolted…
They evolved…
Now, they look human
There are many copies…
…but only one brain cell
And they have a plan.

Fortunately, any plan that involves putting Master Gideon in charge of the economy really ISN'T a very GOOD one, as he demonstrated again this week by successfully outraging the City AND everyone else at the same time with his silly ban-the-bonuses scheme. For starters, why target the HIGH STREET banks, when the really OBSCENE bonuses are paid out to the City wheeler-dealers in MERCHANT BANKS? Does Gideon even know the difference?

Nor do Master Gideon's figures appear to add up. When the Centre for Economics and Business research are suggesting that the total bonus pot will amount to (a still pretty whopping) six billion quid how does restricting the cash payment produce a much MORE whopping TWENTY billion extra for business?

Anyway, paying out SHARES – instantly convertible into cash for anyone who, oh I don't know, WORKS on the STOCK EXCHANGE – does NOT promote a LONG TERM interest in the bank's wellbeing. What you actually need to do is to reward people with share OPTIONS, that is to say a plan where they will get some shares in the FUTURE, maybe three or five or ten years time, so it is in their own interest to stick around and make sure that the bank makes a lot of PROFIT in those years and doesn't take any ludicrous RISKS or they won't get their money.

And, slightly more esoterically, paying out bonuses in shares rather than cash does NOT amount to "free money" – the value of those shares has to come from SOMEWHERE, they aren't just magicked out of the air, and in this case it comes from depleting the value of all the OTHER shareholders' shares. Or more specifically, since WE own those banks, OUR shares; Master Gideon wants bonuses to come – once again – out of the taxpayers' pockets.

But REALLY bonuses are only a SYMPTOM of the problem. People get very CROSS about them because they look so huge and unjustified – mainly because they ARE huge and unjustified – but the real problem is the culture in the City that is all about making a FAST BUCK, profiteering at the expense of investors and taxpayers off of the implicit Government guarantee that if their risks go belly up, the Treasury will foot the bill.

Or, as Mr Vince "the Power" Cable put it:

"These bonus proposals are short term, stop gap solutions designed to stem
public anger but which fail to get to the heart of the problem."

So, as long as Master Gideon, the Conservatory Shadow Minister for Adding Up, is – like the CYLONS – unable to count past twelve, you wouldn't want to put any LONG TERM investments on the Conservatories, would you?

But, look out! Here comes Mr Tim Montgomery, of Conservatory RestHome, hoping to paint the town blue for a generation.

How is this Thousand Year Reich to be achieved?

He has a three stage scheme:

First, to recruit a broader coalition of support, which he compares to the "Reagan Democrats", by appealing to the aspirational working classes and to the people he calls "values voters", i.e. the socially concerned middle classes or "Liberal Democrats" as they are often called. The key to this is "tax relief for the lower paid" which means poaching Lib Dem tax policy – as well as Lib Dem voters – because clearly Gideon isn't going to think up a winner on his own. He's not even ashamed to say it's to try and turn votes, rather than out of any sense of fairness or rebalancing the tax system.

The second stage is "creating conservatory institutions" by which he means Mr Michael Gove, the Curious Cove's, wheeze to create independent schools for ~~indoctrinating~~ I'm sorry educating hundreds of thousands of voters in the right way. Nice.

And stage three is "disabling hostile media institutions" which means breaking up the BBC and bankrupting the Grauniad.

The fundamental DOUBLE-THINK of two-faced Conservatoryism shines through. He almost admits as much himself:

"We made the point (sometimes too often) that there was nothing incompatible between a tough approach to immigration and a generous policy towards the poorest people of the world. Nothing incompatible between support for traditional marriage and a respect for gay couples. Nothing incompatible between investing in our own defence and worrying about the arms trade".

Or, as Mr Jeremy Hardy once put it, nothing incompatible between singing hymns to Mr God in church in the morning and dancing naked for a Black Sabbath to Mr Satan at midnight, and I see no contradiction in that.

But in spite of that, you can't REALLY fault the first one, since building a bigger coalition is something that all of us in SERIOUS political parties try to do. But two and three seem to me to be deeply scary and authoritarian things to be planning.

Obviously it was the JESUITS who said "give me the child and I will give you the second-, third- or fourth-term Government" and they were WELL KNOWN for their fluffy Liberal decentralization… or indeed NOT!

And while it's LONG been debated whether the is an intrinsic BIAS at Auntie Beeb – with the answer being whoever is in Government thinks the Corporation is biased against THEM – the idea that there is an institutional left-wing tilt to the PRINT media is well beyond PARANOID and off into MONOMANIA.

Is it REALLY the case though that the next election will be as he puts it a "REALIGNMENT ELECTION"?

It seems to me that there WAS a fundamental realignment in 1979 – look at ME with the ancient history! – when power moved from Big Unions to Big Finance. The state shifted her favours from large, heavily industrialized and nationalized sectors to City-based gambling. PEOPLE didn't really get a look in.

Queen Maggie expressed it as a "home owning democracy", and the emphasis was definitely on "owning". The "new coalition" promised oodles of wealth – an economic miracle – but it was a SILLY promise based on a FIB because it was all built on BOOM and BUST as we KEEP finding out to our ever-mounting COST.

That "ruling coalition" (between the City and the Civil Service) has been in charge ever since, even if the name on the brass plate at Number Ten keeps changing. Replacing Mr Frown with Mr Balloon won't make a JOT of a difference, and the bonuses will KEEP ON being paid.

That's why we need a REAL realignment, one that smashes up the cosy club, and cuts the city and the state OUT.

That's why we need the Liberal Democrats.

.

Day 3218 (again): THE SARAH JANE ADVENTURES: The Mad Woman in the Attic

2009-10-29T14:00:00.001Z

Friday:

It's all TERRIBLY exciting this week, as Dr Woo himself will be dropping by for his old chum Best-friend Sarah's wedding to that rotter from the adverts who doesn't pay to be privileged!

By way of a TRAILER, here is a flashback to last week's carnival ride of JOLLY DESPAIR! Here are Daddy Richard's thoughts:

Apparently, this two-parter has earned the joint-highest appreciation index to date, a well deserved reward for writer Joe Lidster. Joe, who wrote this and the memorable episode "A Day in the Death" from Torchwood's second season, seems to be cornering the market in "regrets": a signature style is a tragic figure looking back, with flashbacks, on the disastrous decision that brought them to their current, usually dreadful, pass.

In this case, rather shockingly, it's one of our youthful heroes: a now-aged and abandoned Rani looks back on an empty life from the year 2059. This is heady stuff for a children's show.

We all have days when we are frustrated or belittled by our nearest and dearest, when we find their enthusiasms exasperating, or when we mistake their interest in someone else for excluding us. I dare say many of us have even wished to be left alone once in a while. WE don't really mean it, but what if someone granted that wish. That's the concept behind this week's story, almost fairy-story-like in its simplicity.

The framing device, set in the future, sees a local teenager, Adam, come exploring Sarah Jane's abandoned old house, only to discover the self-styled "mad old woman of Bannerman Road", namely Rani Chandra, alone in the attic.

She tells him the story of she's been alone since an ill-starred day fifty years ago, and we follow her through all the simple things that she – and in fairness her friends too – got wrong. Luke and Clyde are chatting online with Maria in America: they don't fail to include Rani but enthuse too much to her about the "brilliant Maria" so she feels left out, with an underlying sense that she feels second best, like she's Maria's inferior replacement (which is a clever riff on the "new girl coming into the show" to generate extra empathy with the audience who may also be feeling that she "took Maria's place"). When Sarah Jane pooh-poohs her suggestion for an investigation – typically in character for no-nonsense Ms Smith, and also typically in character she later recognises she's been dismissive – then Rani steals off for an adventure of her own.

Lured back to her old home town of Danemouth by an e-mail from her one-time friend Sam, a lonely orphan who has recently stopped communicating with her, she agrees to investigate a "demon" haunting a closed down funfair. Rani rightly deduces that the demon is actually a lost alien, who turns out to be a girl called Eve who is being looked-after by the caretaker and her mysterious Ship, who appears to speak from mirrors (yes, just like the Magic Mirror in the Disney "Snow White"). What Rani fails to realise is that Eve has dangerous powers which she cannot properly control, and Rani's interference threatens to unleash them.

There is an interesting moral question that's not really picked up on but it informs the feel of the whole show: Eve takes people who are homeless, lonely and makes them happy though playtime. But it takes their will away. We would label that "bad" but it's not her intention, and – if she's a utilitarian – she may well not even see it that way.

What is particularly wonderful here is the way that the story properly grasps the series' central idée fix that "the universe is wonderful and terrible at the same time". Eve is both wonderful and terrible, neither she nor her Ship are actually evil, but they do have, as I say, an alien morality that skews nicely away from what we might expect; they are literally fey, like fairy-folk they are perilous for mortals to be near. And for once you can understand why anyone would want to be in this world of prophetic time-seers even with all the danger that comes along with it.

Given that the title itself is a literary reference (to Mrs Rochester in "Jane Eyre", or possibly to the "Cracker" episode of the same name), there's some pretty heavy referencing going on: Eve comes from a race of time-sensitives (see "Warrior's Gate") who were caught up in "a war" (obviously the Time War, see in particular "The Unquiet Dead") and faced "extermination" (guess who!). And that's even before we get to the flashback clips (a device which itself is a reference to "Mawdryn Undead" and many others) where we get to see – whoo hoo – actual old Doctor Who clips from the third and fourth Doctor eras. And of course "he is returning" and "the darkness" allude to the prophesies in Doctor Who's 2008 series (go directly to "The Fires of Pompeii") or maybe the similar prophesy in "Planet of the Dead" – the clip from "Planet of the Spiders" is also a visual reference to "there is something on your back".

Meanwhile, Harry, the fairground caretaker, is played by Brian Miller, aka Mr Lis Sladen, who last appeared in Doctor Who (alright Doctor Who proper) in "Snakedance", also playing a Carnival worker. So that's a reference too.

And, getting self-referential, the conclusion sees Eve's new family taking a familiar shape – but, as Alex remarks, if Eve is Rani, Harry is parent-figure Sarah, computer-in-the-wall Ship is Mr Smith and fish-out-of-water orphan Sam is Luke, then where is their Clyde analogue?

Showing Sarah her future is a great idea, and knocks her back just the same way that seeing her past did in last season's "The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith". It's almost a pity that the pay off will come almost immediately, as it might have been nice to have that hanging over us for a little longer.

On the other hand we do get the final resolution of the long-running "K-9 in a cupboard" plot, releasing the tin dog to take a bigger part in the adventures now that the BBC have permission to do so, it would seem. "So you'll be staying," says Mr Smith. "Oh good." Brilliant.

If anything there is too much good material, as it does slightly squeeze out a decent resolution. The major twist, that Ship deludedly grants Rani's unintended wish, and strands her in a world without Sarah-Jane, comes too close to the end, meaning the "I'm really here to set things right" resolution is rushed, almost as an afterthought.

If I might propose a solution, I'd have used a little non-linear story-telling: bringing the twist up to the front of the story and having Adam trying to get old-Rani to tell him the background. If we start with the illusion that Ship is malevolent, then the twist becomes that she's actually just as hurt and confused as Eve. Adam could then explain this to old-Rani who from that realises who he must really be.

We finish with "mad woman in the attic" Rani being replaced by "happy granny surrounded by family" Rani, which is another of the series' touchstones – the need for family. This too is rather more fairy-story than science fiction, the idea that timelines can be casually rewritten like this not really being in keeping with the Doctor's usual philosophy. (And it doesn't bear too close an examination in logic either; given that we can reasonably expect Sarah-Jane and gang to save the world again in the not-too-distant future, having Ship edit them out of existence would surely mean old-Rani wouldn't have a planet to stand on!)

But in fairy-story logic, this is just right: the ill-starred wish gets you into trouble and the selfless act gets you out again, which is just what happens here. Even if the order is a bit muddled.

Next time… Something old, something borrowed, something blue… that'll be the TARDIS, then. He is returning! But is the Trickster really giving away the bride at "The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith".

Day 3218: Why are people allowed to tell lies in newspapers?

2009-10-26T12:50:00.003Z

Friday:

Well, I know: freedom of speech. But FACTS are FACTS. Surely freedom of speech is freedom to voice OPINIONS, where there are different ideas about things where there is NOT a known answer, like politics or who makes the best sticky buns.

It's not the freedom to make unfounded assertions that contradict known evidence.

And yes, I know some people say that there are NO facts at all, only points of view, but that's just a RUBBISH idea.

Look, I am nine: some things are RIGHT and some are WRONG.

And telling lies is WRONG.

So, Ms Jan Moir.

A week ago, Ms "Grimpen" Mire put poison pen to paper to write the article that has received more complaints than any other in the last five years. I'm sorry, I'll read that again: the article that has received more complaints than EVERY other in the last five years, added together.

A lot of people, including me and my daddies, were quite sad to hear about the sudden death of a nice young man called Mr Stephen Gately.

Ms Mire, was NOT upset – she saw an opportunity. She "wrote" [Daddy suggests the verb "daubed"] an article for her "paper" – for which she was presumably paid money – in which she not only indulged her own rather sickening fantasies about the possible deaths of other much-loved famous people, like Mr Robbie Williams or Ms Kylie Minogue, but also described Mr Gately's life as "sleazy" and his death as "unnatural". She also, with spectacular ill-grace, accused the poor boy's grieving mother of lying.

Can you imagine for just one second how that poor mummy must have felt?

The terrible news that she's lost her little boy, then the horrible human thoughts set in that something horribly horrible – drugs? murder? naughty games gone wrong? – something must have happened, then – guilty relief – the expert in charge tells you that it was a tragic tragic accident, a heart condition, the sort of "ordinary" disaster that out of the blue affects a small number of people every week. And THEN this horrible woman starts flinging the dung around, like she's picked up every evil rumour and bad thought that has floated like scum across the surface of the Internet and gigglingly printed them up like they mean something.

Can you imagine how Mr Gately's husband must feel about this? Practically airbrushed out of the coverage of the funeral already and then smeared with the implication that he went off to bed ("I've got no proof but not alone fner fner! By the way, I don't even have to underline the prurient assumption that that's BAAAAAD!") leaving his hubby to die on the couch.

What a horrid thing to do.

What I want to know is WHY, why would we even LET someone like that print a load of lies in a newspaper?

It is NOT an "opinion" to claim "there was nothing natural about this death". That is a statement about the facts: either poor Mr Gately died of natural causes or he didn't. The coroner said that he did. Ms Mire had NO grounds for questioning or challenging that assessment. So her article is just a LIE.

Now, she has written a "response" [Daddy suggests the noun: "screed"] to all the complaints.

She unpologises for the TIMING of her article, but not for the blatant LIE.

And then she tells ANOTHER lie:

"If he had been a heterosexual member of a boy band," she asserts, "I would have written exactly the same article."

Exactly the same? EXACTLY the same?

So after the sudden unexpected and tragic death of a HETEROSEXUAL young man, she would have written that: "it strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships"?

It would have been BIZARRE NONSENSE to have written any such thing.

But more than that, while I would suggest that it would still be a really PRETTY STRANGE thing to say even if she had changed the wording to "the happy-ever-after myth of straight marriage", I do not for one picosecond believe that she WOULD have drawn such a conclusion from a tragedy involving a "nice straight boy".

To suggest that the first article made no link between Mr Gately's sudden death and his sexuality is A MONSTROUS FALSEHOOD. The first article doesn't say anything BUT "he died because he was gay".

Snide little innuendoes are laced throughout the piece, all with the same undercurrent:

"Healthy and fit 33-year-old men do not just climb into their pyjamas and go to sleep on the sofa, never to wake up again" …unless they're gay.

"if we are going to be honest, we would have to admit that the circumstances surrounding his death are more than a little sleazy" …because he was gay.

"Yet the recent death of Kevin McGee, the former husband of Little Britain star Matt Lucas, and now the dubious events of Gately’s last night raise troubling questions" …about them both being gay.

And NOTHING links the tragic suicide of lonely Mr McGee to the tragic accident of happily-partnered Mr Gately EXCEPT that they were both gay.

(One could just as easily link Ms Mire herself to any notorious heterosexual suicide, with equal lack of any real meaning… for the most ludicrous possible example: "the death of the German Reichsfuhrer, the former longtime companion of German model Ms Eva Braun, and now the dubious events of Ms Mire's last article raise troubling questions". It doesn't MEAN anything because there is NO real connection – apart from them both receiving the support of the Daily Fail – just the SINISTER SUGGESTION of one put in your head.)

To deny that she used homophobic words is almost MORE wicked – it is the "I didn't do anything wrong!" barefaced deceit you might expect from a naughty little girl caught with her hand in the cookie jar. In anyone over the age of FOUR it is CONTEMPTIBLE.

I don't think lies like that should be allowed.

Newspapers have ENORMOUS power, but are accountable to practically no one.

Now there's a very simple and easy comparison to make: the BBC.

Ahh, you might say, but the BBC gets public money and the Daily Fail is a private company. OK, in that case the Daily Fail can pay me back my share of EVERY PENNY that it got in advertising. Because I had no choice in them getting that money, so they owe me – either accountability, or I'll take the cash.

Yes, that would be fair: either you can sign up to an accountable oversight commission, and that probably means a PARLIAMENTARY one – yes, I'll take MPs over journalists any day of the week – or you are banned from taking advertising.

So, last year, on the BBC Radio Two, Mr Russell Brand and Mr Jonathon Ross caused offence to a great many people when they made some silly rude phone calls to Mr Jonathan Sachs. (Not to be confused with Mr Andrew Sachs, the Chief Rabbi.)

Egged on by – of all papers – the Daily Fail, a record number of people (over forty thousand) complained. Mr Russell lost his job. The person in charge of Radio Two lost her job.

This year, in the Daily Fail, Ms Mire has caused offence to a great many people by telling a vicious lie.

Egged on by absolutely nobody, a record number of people (over twenty-five thousand) have complained. So, Ms Moir should lose her job. The person in charge of the Daily Fail should lose his job. Both of them, in fact.

No other outcome would be JUST.

PS:

I am indebted to Mr Stephen of the Glenn and the Cardiff Blogger for reading the Daily Fail so that we don't have to.

.

Day 3215 (again): THE PRISONER 42nd ANNIVERSARY: Checkmate

2009-10-23T00:00:00.001+01:00

Tuesday:

My Daddies have been watching telly again. This week, Mr McGoohan spends all his time OBSESSING about who is BLACK and who is WHITE. And do you know what? By the end of the show he is mistaken for one of the FASCISTS!

Funny the things they allow on television, isn't it?

information
If you think of the Prisoner, you think of playing chess with living pieces, and that means that you're thinking of this one.

Has the Prisoner found an ally? Is it the Count or the Queen or the Rook? And is there any way of telling?

The show opens with Rover. It bounces down the road, round corners and under arches, as though they decided that if the robot wasn't going to work they'd just defy the laws of physics in order to make that weather balloon seem alive.

All the Villagers freeze when they hear Rover approach, all except one, who we later are told used to be a Count. The Prisoner follows him, and discovers the chess game where he is persuaded to play as Pawn to the Queen. Suddenly, the game is disrupted when one of the Rooks decides to make up his own moves.

With the game over, the Prisoner talks with the Count who suggests that one can tell guard from prisoner by their manner. Thinking that this might just work, the Prisoner set out to take charge of a band of escapees…

there's been a slight misunderstanding
I've come to the conclusion that this should have been the third episode, not the fourth, and we should have watched it before "The Chimes of Big Ben".

Alex disagrees. He felt that, having a more complex plot, this episode feels like it has gone deeper into the Village and deeper into the Prisoner, and for that reason thought it was right to be placed fourth.

The thing that started me thinking this way is the Prisoner's brainwashed, puppy-dog love interest – at least she's interested in him. She is Number Eight, but in "The Chimes of Big Ben", the woman who says her name is Nadia is introduced to us as the new Number Eight.

On its own, that's hardly conclusive; each week there are new people with numbers we're seen before. This week Number 42 is a male gardener, for example. But the very fact that the newness is emphasised in this case could be seen as significant.

So I reassessed our reasons for putting "Checkmate" fourth.

Previously, our assumption was that the Prisoner was morenaïve in "Chimes of Big Ben" and that the betrayal at the end of that episode sets him looking for how to spot who is on which side.

That isn't really what happens, though. The idea to start trying to spot warders is actually put into his head by the chess-playing Count.

So what if it's the other way around: the Prisoner demonstrates a sharp distrust, indeed thinly-veiled contempt, to everyone in "Chimes" and in particular his paranoia about trusting the "new" Number Eight is much, much higher that it is of the Number Eight in this episode. It takes nearly killing her twice to even garner a wary trust from him. And of course they are pushing at his resistance to female company, trying to break into his gallantry response which feels more like a development on the "thrusting a woman upon him" ploy tried here in "Checkmate", a ploy which seems like a crude, backwards step, in comparison.

Other evidence: in "Checkmate" he recruits several allies; in "The Chimes of Big Ben" he tries to keep knowledge of his latest plan to the barest minimum and his escape attempt gets much further, or at least appears to get much further, even if it's finally revealed the furthest he got was the next cove.

And in "Checkmate" the Village is foolproof, they beat him by the very nature of their set up, they don't need to even try; contrast that with "The Chimes of Big Ben" where, although they nearly succeed, it's also the first time that the Village really overplay their hand, by strongly hinting – through the presence of the Prisoner's boss – that they are "our side's" Village.

You might feel that the escape plot here is more cunning than the build a boat-disguised-as-a-piece-of-art plot in "The Chimes of Big Ben" because of the clever "identify the guards from the guarded" element, and there's merit in that. But I'd say that the actual escape plan – "build a radio, contact the outside world and get rescued" – is an only-slightly-more-complicated reprise of the "get a message out; get rescued" ploy of "Dance of the Dead".

In fact, I realise now that there's also a nice bridging element to the "build a radio, get rescued by a ship" plan that connects the "find a radio" part of "Dance of the Dead" to the "build a boat" part of "Chimes": it's as though the "your world is a dream" conversation with Mary Morris's Number Two in "Dance" convinces him that the sea is the Village's weak point and he obsesses about what might be "out there": hope. That may, in fact, be a clever ploy by Number Two: surely Rover is better equipped to patrol the sea than the mountains, and the open ocean is surely more exposed to surveillance and radar than the mountains where there are places to hide (though of course there are also places to hide cameras too).

Equally, the Rook is almost "offered up" to the Prisoner as just the person he needs, the one with the technical skill required to make a radio. Coming after "The Chimes of Big Ben", where he's offered just the person he needs, the one who knows the location of the Village, you would have thought he would be much more suspicious of that. With "Checkmate" coming first, he might believe that useful people can be found, he just needs to treat them in the right way.

The Rook's claim to have been in the Village for "months" maybe longer doesn't really help us, but the Count remarks that the Prisoner must be new here, if he's not worked out that some of the guards pretend to be prisoners.

Finally, there's the "power scale": as time goes by, the Prisoner grows in strength and Number Two steadily weakens. By that measure, "Checkmate" has to be the earlier episode.

The Prisoner here thinks he's in charge, doing well, outwitting the guardians, so at the end he almost blows a fuse when he's beaten, showing temper and pointlessly smashing the television through which Number Two is taunting him before resorting to roughhousing with the Village crew.

In "The Chimes of Big Ben", he's almost worse when he nearly comes to cracking at the thought that maybe, just maybe, it's his own side that's done this to him. But he doesn't crack, and he comes through it stronger, and is able to walk away from Number Two and Number Eight with a phlegmatic shrug.

In contrast, Leo McKern's Number Two is, as I've remarked, teetering on the edge of a nervous breakdown, whereas no such weakness afflicts this week's master of ceremonies…

the new number two
Peter Wynguard, normally known as the High Lord of Louche, here turns in a tightly restrained performance, powerful, unemotional and totally evil.

His delivery of the opening lines in the title sequence is Olympian, not quite so knowing as Mary Morris, but detached and cold.

He is an aesthete: immaculately manicured and impeccably polite, but he doesn't even push his own control desk's buttons with his fingers, preferring to use his brolly. And likewise he prefers to push the Prisoner's buttons indirectly, showing him a little thing here a little thing there.

There's a very Eastern, Zen attitude to him: he doesn't so much try to break the Prisoner as allow the Prisoner to "come onto the punch", to break himself. Perhaps this is what is being flagged up by the unexpected moment of him sat, apparently meditative, then suddenly exploding into a karate chop.

He makes no effort to resist when "captured" by the Prisoner and his band of would-be escapees, if anything he's disappointed at the lack of originality, meekly surrendering to being tied up, probably because he already knows it's all a sham. His explanation to the Prisoner that "I hate to disappoint you, but the Polotska's our ship" is patronising and paternal; his expression becoming a slight moue of nausea on seeing the Prisoner's fisticuffs. And then evil glee on unleashing Rover.

As the master chess-player from behind the scenes, one is left to wonder whether the presence of the butler at the chess match isn't a clue that although the moves are dictated by Number 100, the real opponent isn't a remote Number Two.

follow the signs
The one thing this isn't is a crude "life is a game of chess" metaphor. Chess is a game of pieces that move in predictable and controlled ways; "Checkmate" is patently rejecting that model: we are not pieces that you can push around; the Village's brainwashing and aversion therapy don't actually work – the "love" they create is hollow and ultimately hurtful; their deprogramming of individuality even less successful.

It's clear that the Village's masters, typical of Sixties authority figures, buy into all sorts of control crap, whether it's the behavioural determinism of B. F. Skinner seen here or the RAND Corporation's Game Theory efforts which "proved" that America had "won" the Vietnam War by the end of the Nineteen-Sixties.

Skinner took the work of Pavlov (who in fairness only experimented on animals) and applied it to people. He didn't actually advocate torturing them to make them behave better: his ideas of positive and negative reinforcement were about encouraging "right" behaviour be either giving a reward (positive) or taking away a discomfort (negative). But his work does tend to lead directly to "A Clockwork Orange" (and, obviously, what is seen here in the Rook's "hospital treatment").

Wikipedia quote him as saying:

"When Milton's Satan falls from heaven, he ends in hell. And what does he say to reassure himself? 'Here, at least, we shall be free.' And that, I think, is the fate of the old-fashioned liberal. He's going to be free, but he's going to find himself in hell."

To which the old-fashioned Liberal in me tends to reply: "well at least it won't be you making life hell for me, you demented control freak!"

Of course, the real aversion therapy is to make the Rook distrust all authority figures, and in particular the Prisoner.

The reveal of the Rook is done almost like the twist in a Whodunit except without setting up that something had been "dun". The structure of the piece ought to lend itself to a few moments of questioning: could it have been the Count? Could it have been the Queen? Could it have been Penry, the Mild-Mannered Janitor? But there's literally no time between the Prisoner realising that he's been betrayed and the "outing" of the betrayer.

It's also an interesting moment of commentary on the unreality of television. The Prisoner's response to Number Two's big reveal, as I've already said, is to snatch up an ashtray and smash in the television set – as though he's under the impression, often fostered by television, it must be said, that Number Two is looking out at him from the same set, as though it's an Orwellian televiewer. But of course it's not, and we see, from Number Two's perspective, that he can still watch what is going on.

What is almost as interesting is the way that the Queen, Number Eight, just drops straight out of the plot. Initially she's ambiguous – and almost funny with the exchange: "I've often helped other people's plans." "Then why are you still here?" "Well, none of them succeeded!" – and there's a vaguely interesting idea about monitoring her emotional state as a new way of keeping tabs on the Prisoner. Alex, however, is most disparaging about the way that cod Sixties behaviour modification psychobabble suddenly works perfectly when it needs to create the lurve. Given that the whole thrust of the series is about individualism – not to mention "brain-zapping BAD!" – and that this show in particular seems to be debunking classical (Pavlovian) conditioning, it's just a bit of a switch.

So we get a slightly disjointed "thrilling" chase with the Mini Mokes, disjointed because it's not sure whether it's interested in her pursuit or what the Prisoner is really up to and tries to do both at once. Then there's a toe-curlingly cringe-worthy sequence where she makes him cocoa and he tries to be nice about it. And then he's mean to her on the beach, finally snapping and shouting at her. But once he's taken away the magic emotion-chip pendant, she's just gone. Did they have some spare plot left over from an unmade episode that they wanted to use up?

It is, surely, a small gag though that the Prisoner adopts the role of Queen's Pawn (also the working title of the episode), as it's a sign that he is, or was, Oh Her Majesty's (Secret?) Service. Mind you, the title, "Checkmate", is a bit of a rough pun, too, as the Prisoner must literally "check" who his "mates" are.

Which brings me back to the episode's theme… Some of the Villagers wear white Number badges; some of them wear black ones. The suggestion, possibly facile, is that the producers originally thought that the inmates could wear the white and the guardians the black, until they realised that made it all too obvious when someone was a double-agent. So they muddled them up.

In essence, though, this story is supposed to be about un-muddling the badges, telling who is black and who is white. In that sense it is about real life, it's about the value judgements we make, often instinctively, about the people we know, how we pick those who are going to be friends and those who are not. It is well known that humans prejudge each other very quickly based on body language, and that is what is going on here: the Prisoner is reading people's body language… and prejudging them. Which, obviously, is why he messes up.

who is number one?
This week I want to promote a minor piece: Ronald Radd as the Rook, even though he's only another pawn in the end.

With huge, almost elemental forces of McGoohan and Wynguard moving around him, he remains the essentially human element at the heart of this story: he's the one who sweats; he's the one who does the actual work of making the radio; and he's the one who shamefacedly appears next to Number Two having sold out for all the wrong reasons.

While the Prisoner is chatting merrily with the Queen, it's the Rook who demonstrates true individuality by breaking rank and rules to stride across the board, putting himself in charge. He's punished for that, tortured for that. Which is a quintessentially human outcome.

next time…
That would be telling.

Be seeing you.

Day 3215: Electric Dreams

2009-10-22T13:50:00.000+01:00

Tuesday:

Pardon my Eighties flashback, but: "I like driving in my car" PLUS "Together in Electric Dreams" EQUALS have the Chinese found a way to Save the World, with a new electric car that can, allegedly, do 250 miles on one charge and up to 100mph?

Shouldn't we be checking this out with some urgency, 'cos if it's TRUE then it will be a BIG HELP towards cutting CO2 emissions*.

Just as importantly, isn't this EXACTLY the sort of thing that WE should be making? New car plants PLUS zero-carbon cars EQUALS hello new economic miracle. And that's VERY Eighties!

(*so long as you remember to use renewable for GENERATING your electric battery juice!)

PS:

Bless the BBC for their up-to-date-i-tude, but here is the Grauniad with the same story six months earlier.

And here is Treehugger at the launch a year before that!

Look, if we've KNOW about this super-whizzy long-life battery for THAT long, why the FLUFF are we not URGENTLY tooling up to match the technology?!?!?!

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Day 3213: New Words: UNPOLOGY

2009-10-22T00:00:00.002+01:00

Sunday:

unpology (ŭn-pŏl'ə-jē): noun (pl unpologies)

1. a written or spoken statement to be used where convention or legal instruction would require a statement of regret for fault or failure

2. an insincere expression used to accentuate positive aspects in order to downplay a negative verdict and avoid admission of guilt or contrition

3. (colloquial) any New Labour ministerial statement not previously trailed in off-the-record briefings, selected newspapers or on the Today programme

viz: former Second-Home Secretary, Ms Jacqui Spliff, made an unpology in the House today in response to the findings of the Commissioner for Standards.

see also: Blairgerism

Here is the FULL Hansard transcript of what Ms Spliff had to say for herself:

I am grateful to the Committee on Standards and Privileges for its consideration of the detailed report from the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards following his seven-month investigation. I want to apologise unreservedly to the House, as I have to my constituents, for wrongly claiming for the cost of films alongside my broadband and cable connection. This claim should never have been made and, as the Committee notes, I paid back the claim in full as soon as it was brought to my attention.

On the issue of second home allowances, the commissioner and the Committee recognise that my London home is indeed a home. They dismiss the most usually repeated newspaper descriptions of my living arrangements, and I welcome this judgment. As the report makes clear, I sought and received written advice from the parliamentary authorities that supported my main home designation and, indeed, I spent more nights in London than in Redditch for three of the four years in question. I have never flipped my designation and I own only one home.

The Committee recognises that there is no evidence that the taxpayer would be any worse or any better off as a result of my having made a different decision. However, in retrospect the commissioner concludes that I should have used my discretion to change my main home designation. I accept the Committee’s conclusions and I therefore apologise to the House. I want to say sorry, too, to my constituents. They are my No. 1 priority, and for too long this investigation has overshadowed the work that I do for them.

So, for starters, she apologises UNRESERVEDLY for the wrongly claiming of the cost of films, and then RATHER LESS SO for the Second Home Allowance.

It should be remembered that the Commissioner for Standards, Sir Paul Lyon, UPHELD the complaint that Ms Spliff had wrongly claimed for, er, pay-per-view movies and ALSO UPHELD the complaint that she had had it away with over a hundred grand by wrongly designating her sister's spare room as her "main home".

So why the equivocation?

The report – she says – makes clear, she sought and received written advice.

Here is what that advice from the Department of Finance and Administration actually said:

"I can confirm therefore that the location of a Member's main home may not always be where their family reside. I agree with your assertion that is reasonable to continue to claim the allowance against your constituency home given your ministerial responsibilities require you to spend the majority of your time in Westminster"

But that advice was in reply to HER writing a letter to them saying (basically): "look, I've been told that I don't have to count where my family live and spend all their time as my main residence, so if I continue to claim that this spare room is my main home, that's okay isn't it?"

So essentially, the "advice" reduces to "if you say so"!

She goes on: "indeed, I spent more nights in London than in Redditch for three of the four years in question"

But that's not STRICTLY true, is it, at least not within the tolerances of MATHEMATICS.

What the Standards Committee says (point 12) is:

"On the evidence available, the Commissioner has concluded that Ms Smith spent more nights at her London home than at her constituency home between 11 May 2005 and 27 June 2007. He has also concluded that Ms Smith spent more nights at her constituency home than at her London home between 28 June 2007 and 31 March 2009."

So that's two years and nearly two months spending more nights in London and one year and seven months spending more nights in Redditch. Which is a LOT nearer to TWO and TWO than it is to THREE and ONE.

And then she adds: "I have never flipped my designation and I own only one home."

Weeeeeelllllllll…

You see, when Ms Spliff was first elected, she quite naturally designated her home in Redditch as her "main home". All fair there. In 1999 she became a minister. Yes, I know, but she did. The RULES then in play said she HAD to re-designate her London home as her main one. Okay, fair play, can't say that's her fault. But then in 2004 that rule was cancelled and she had the CHOICE to re-re-designate BACK to how it was to start with. And she didn't.

So although she didn't take any ACTION to "flip" her house, the EFFECT is the same; if she had not been a Minister, she WOULD have had to have "flipped" to be claiming what she was from 2004 onwards. As the Standards Commission says, other than becoming a Minister, NOTHING changed in Ms Spliff's circumstances, so how other than a "flip" can you describe her choice to stick with the re-designation?

Because more than anything else, it's OBVIOUS that the WHOLE POINT of scrapping the "Ministers have to declare their London home as their main home" rule was because it was clearly SILLY in the case of people like Ms Spliff. Giving her the CHOICE was an act of TRUST that she would properly declare the secondary home, NOT an invitation to maximise her allowances. It was an act of trust that she BETRAYED.

She does, kind of, sort of, reluctantly come to the word "apology" at the end of her statement, although her acceptance of the Commissioner's findings comes heavily framed with an "however" and an "in retrospect", but before that she plays her ultimate "Get Out Of Jail Free" card:

"The Committee recognises that there is no evidence that the taxpayer would be any worse or any better off as a result of my having made a different decision."

Ummm. Sort of. They do and they don't. Point 34:

First they say:

"If Ms Smith had nominated her Redditch home as her main home, she could not have claimed for the rent she paid to her sister because the House rules prevent a family member from benefiting from allowances."

Which seems pretty plain and simple: Ms Spliff got the homes the wrong way round; declared the other way around she could have claimed nothing; ergo the taxpayer was stung for the WHOLE WHACK, was out of pocket by over a hundred grand. Thank you. We'll take a cheque.

BUT, then the Committee goes on to say:

"However, she could have bought her own home in London; she could have rented a home in London from a non-relative; or from June 2007 she could presumably have used a taxpayer-funded grace and favour residence in central London, as many previous Home Secretaries have done. Any of these courses could have resulted in a different claim on Additional Costs Allowance"

She could also, presumably, have been kidnapped by space-aliens, taken Holy Orders and retreated to a Convent, or been elected Queen of the Mountains of the Moon.

Is it REASONABLE to think that ANY of these things might have happened? Or are we ACTUALLY saying that we can't work out how much the public purse has lost because the former Home Secretary might have found some OTHER way to diddle the taxpayer?

You have to ask, who signs off on this sort of TWADDLE? Who takes a fairly clear-cut double-barrelled guilty verdict and says there are "mitigating circumstances". And, in fact, who therefore concludes that the appropriate punishment for someone who has, let's just say, "inappropriately acquired" over a hundred thousand pounds of other people's money is a few grudging words of mainly self-justification?

In short, just who ARE the Standards and Privileges Committee, anyway?

Well, in accordance with Standing Order 149 para (2): "The committee shall consist of ten Members, of whom five shall be a quorum", there are ten members of the Standards Committee, five of whom are members of Hard Labour and five of whom are not.

Interestingly, though, not all of them were PRESENT when the report on Ms Spliff went through.

The meeting to decide on their response took place on the afternoon of 22 September. That's slap in the middle of the Liberal Democrat Autumn Conference, which I'm sure is a HUGE COINCIDENCE.

Nevertheless, a glance at the MINUTES of the meeting reveals that PRESENT for this discussion were:

Mr Kevin Barron (Hard Labour)
Mr Andrew Dismore (Hard Labour)
Mr Chris Mullin (Hard Labour)
Mr Paddy Tipping (Hard Labour)
Dr Alan Whitehead (Hard Labour)
and
Mr Greg Knight (~~Hard Labour stooge~~ Conservatory – no, be fair, you can't blame him, outnumbered five to one and they'd have been quorate even if he'd refused to attend)

Meanwhile, NOT present were:

Mr Sir George "Very Old" Young (Conservatory)
Mr Nicholas "Bunter" Soames (Conservatory)
Mr Elfym Llwyd (Plaid Cymru)
Mr Nick Harvey (Liberal Democrat) – away at the Party Conference, what a coincidence.

And at this point I have to say: is it just ME or is that starting to look just the TEENIEST bit PARTISAN? And perhaps just the TINIEST bit SUSPICIOUS?

Maybe it's COMPLETELY INNOCENT, maybe it just LOOKS bad, MAYBE.

But – at a time when Parliament is in the LOWEST of esteem and when MPs' expenses are under the TIGHTEST scrutiny – would it not have been at the very least BEST PRACTICE to make sure that the opposition Parties were all present and correct when deciding the fate of a senior Government THIEF. Er, member.

There's a PRICE for this sort of behaviour. You can't just "stitch things up" any more, you can't just "play the game"; Jacqui Spliff may have begrudged the House of Commons even a small sign that she was sorry, but mouthing the words in Parliament isn't enough when it looks like you are getting away with daylight robbery.

People are angry about this, FURIOUS in fact.

For Ms Spliff, the backlash has begun, with over six thousand Redditch voters telling her to get gone and the campaign is already rolling to stop her receiving an undeserved peerage as a reward for failure.

Or as Liberal Democrat Peer Lord Oakeshott put it: "Shamed MPs should not stroll into the House of Lords."

But for the rest of us, the price will be paid in the years to come, because people have lost their FAITH in politics and they don't care enough anymore to demand more of their Government. If we end up electing the next truly GHASTLY Conservatory regime it'll be because most people are more interested in seeing the current bunch of crooks and shysters ejected than in holding the next lot to account.

I believe that we deserve BETTER than that. I believe that we can have a world that is actually pretty GREAT, and we don't need EITHER Hard Labour OR the Conservatories bossing us around and ripping us off.

And I make no unpologies for that.

PS:

And, tragically, Ms Spliff has immediately LOST her title as MOST EGREGIOUS UNPOLOGIST of the YEAR to Ms Jan Moir of the Daily Fail. More on THAT story later…

.

Day 3211: THE SARAH JANE ADVENTURES: Prisoner of the Judoon

2009-10-21T00:00:00.003+01:00

Friday:

Hooray! Best-friend Sarah-Jane is back! There may be no FULL series of Doctor Who this year, but with fifty minutes of Adventures each week this season, I feel like these are like PROPER Doctor Who stories now!

Daddy is saying something about it being "just like in the Peter Davison era"… shut UP, Daddy, what would YOU know about it?

This week: Rhinos are STUPID. Well duh!

Also, don't forget to tune in to the "Spot the Blathereen" game on the website for more proof that POSTIES are EVIL!

Now, I suppose I OUGHT to let Daddy say something…

Another cracking start to a series: funny, exciting, full of ideas. And it's been years since Sarah-Jane was possessed; here Lis Sladen shows how it should be done, turning in a performance that is cheeky, even saucy at times and with a gleam of wicked fun in her eye, and yet also channelling real anger and evil when called up to end the world.

Publicity stills in the RadioTimes of our alien villain-of-the-week led us to dub this one "The Judoon versus the Jem'hadar", but new alien Androvax the Annihilator, a Veil lifeform and the eponymous prisoner, proved to be much more interesting. His method of possession – "stepping into" his victims – was a rather swish effect, and his telltale forked tongue flickering from his victims' lips was just brilliant. And, goodness gracious, a villain with a motivation – so what if it's the old "my world was destroyed so I will take revenge on the entire universe!" shtick; it gave him a little bit of depth, and Lis was able to play with that, that hurt underneath the spite driving the wickedness, to great effect.

It's just a pity that he's (another sci-fi cliché) "last of the Veil" as they'd make cool recurring villains. Obviously he's a genocidal nutter, so it would be wrong to hope that he escapes again…

Opposite Androvax, on the side of Law and Order – or at least the side of stomping about causing chaos – is new Judoon hero, Captain Tybo.

Tybo takes those moments from "Smith and Jones" that show that the Judoon can be funny and really runs with them. He's hilarious, and yet totally in character, and actually smarter than he's given credit for. Even Sarah-Jane pigeon-holes the Judoon as "a bit thick", and yet Tybo wins us over from practically his first appearance, because even while he's being bloody-minded about it and shooting up everything in sight, he's also struggling to get on with his job while barely recovered from being whacked over the head with an iron girder. Bloody-mindedness or dogged determination: his unswerving law-abidingness is actually quite a worthy trait. And for all that he's hidebound to follow any rule he sees, from "No Unauthorised Admission" to "Pay and Display" with equal intransigence, he's actually quite adaptable, and he does "get his man". He's unswervingly polite too, always thanking people when they obey his (okay usually barked, usually delivered at gunpoint) orders; as role-models go, I can think of worse, and I wouldn't object to a few kids playing "Captain Tybo" in the playground. His final line to the kids, commuting their "death penalties" to "being grounded" surely shows that he has a sharp line on what's really going on as well.

Kudos has to go to Paul Casey who has to perform some rather complex mime and to Neil Gorton for making such a brilliant, flexible, mobile prosthetic Judoon head who between them bring Captain Tybo to life and make him feel completely real. And of course Nick Briggs, too, for giving up his larynx to give Tybo his voice.

Nothing quite tops the hilarity of Judoon driving, though. "I am trained in all pursuit vehicles!" Tybo insists before lurching off in a "commandeered" police Landrover. And when Androvax' spacecraft lurches off into the sky at the end, we remarked: there's a Judoon driving that, isn't there.

Slightly less hilarious was the "comedy" subplot involving Rani's parents getting themselves caught up in Judoon shenanigans. Although there were elements of farce in the "ooh, Rani mustn't let Mum and Dad see her with an alien" ducking behind pillars and near misses, the timing was never sharp enough, nor was there any real sense of "disaster" if they actually did collide; this is all far more Secret Seven than Buffy the Vampire Slayer, after all – we're not going to end up with emotional meltdown. Nor was the "lets humour the parents" ending entirely in keeping with the show's overall message of "there are wonders out there if you're willing to look".

And besides, we've seen this done before and done infinitely better on November 23rd 1963, when Susan was the one who understands and accepts the "unearthly" and it was Ian and Barbara who went into "can't cope" mode. And it's done without compromising the dignity of the teachers, which doesn't just help them as characters, but also makes the alien more alien, (and less "panto").

I think they just about got away with the coincidence of Sarah-Jane getting possessed on the very day she has just visited the very nanobot laboratory that villainous Androvax needs to work his dastardly scheme. Swarms of tiny little dots being quite handy for the effects guys, these miniature monsters actually worked rather well as a threat, particularly the 'peril' moment where they eat through some fire doors to get at Clyde and Rani, leaving a delicious bite-hole in the woodwork. It would have been nice at the end though, if when they'd all switched off they'd left some sizable bite-marks removed from the building too.

Oh, and under the microscope molecule-sized robots really don't look like cute beetles with chomping mandibles.

For the regulars, it was a good week to be Clyde, who pretty much took the lead here, coming up with the ideas and generally keeping things moving – even while claiming to be no more than "one-liners guy". Not a bad week for Sarah's adopted son Luke either, who gets to be rather brilliant in talking Mr Smith out of self-destructing and disabling Androvax ship after one glimpse of the blueprints, plus psychoanalysing the villain into surrender: not a bad week's work at all. Which just leaves Rani to be a bit wet.

I don't want to get too into the gender politics of it, but for a series that is normally chock full of positive female roles, this week had Sarah-Jane turned "evil", Rani's Mum doing something dappy, and Rani herself reduced to tailing Clyde and Tybo and hiding whenever her parents appear.

On the other hand, where Captain Tybo was generally portrayed as dim (albeit with undertones), Rani's father Haresh, who is also remember their headteacher Mr Chandra, was reduced to pure comic relief and the only person her Mum could get one over on. Including making him literally wetter than his daughter.

The "fifth" regular is obviously the multi-talented Alexander Armstrong, also returning to BBC1 in the brilliant sketch show he shares with Ben Miller ("face the front!") and probably still to be seen on BBC4 or BBC HD as Clive Sinclair in tragic-comedic Eighties microcomputer biopic "Micro Men" ("there's even a bloody game about me trying to get a bloody knighthood!" "you might want to read this" "ah… apparently, I've been offered a knighthood"). It's only a shame he wasn't guest presenter of "Have I Got News For You" on Friday as well.

Alex remarks: I do hope Sarah-Jane remembers to cancel the self-destruct properly because he was left thinking about it on a three-second countdown. Oops!

Next time: Oooh, looks like spooky goings on! Make a wish! A haunted house and a crazy old lady… that can't be Rani can it? Is she… "The Mad Woman in the Attic"?!

Day 3210: The Vince and the Paupers

2009-10-20T11:50:00.002+01:00

Thursday:

At the risk of incurring Auntie Jenny's FANGIRL-ENVY, I've been to see Mr Dr Vince "the Power" Cable.

He was here in Tower Hamlets to boost the local party and particularly our excellent candidate, Mr Ajmal Masroor.

Bethnal Green, currently fiefdom of Mr Gorgeous Pussycat George, leader of the Respect-the-Leotard Party, is one of the most deprived Boroughs in the country and yet it lies directly between the glittering riches of the twin towers (of wealth) that are the City and Canary Wharf or, as Mr Professor Tolkien might probably not have put it, Minus Morals and Minus Money.

And now, young Jedi...

Mr Dr Vince explained a bit of how the economy has had a massive HEART ATTACK, and how the treatment was massive injections of medicine, or "MONEY" as it is called in banking circles.

The GOOD news is that the patient survived.

The BAD news is that there is a lasting legacy of damage done.

For a start, there's the legacy of rising unemployment, expected to top three million and particularly impacting young people and ethnic minority men.

Then there's the legacy of bad banking, with good businesses unable to get credit because the Smaugs in the City want to sit on their hordes not invest them: for example, the RBS or Royal Bank that WE Saved, is actually lending LESS in the last few months.

Asked how it is that collapsed banks have the wherewithal to pay out bonuses, he said that they shouldn't be. These bonuses are just jarring. Clearly there are two different types of banks: the plain and simple cases like Northern Rock, like HBoS, where the taxpayer has stepped in and rescued them. Clearly they shouldn't be in any position to do this. But then there are also the other sort of banks, including Goldperson Sachs who have caused such a fuss this week, who have not been saved DIRECTLY but have nevertheless benefitted SUBSTANTIALLY at the taxpayer's expense: from the perception that – post Lehman Brothers – no matter how badly they fluff up, Governments will be forced to bail them out rather than risk another atom bomb type blast wiping out what's left of the world economy; to all the money they are making by brokering and marketing the very I.O.U's that the Government has had to issue to pay for rescuing the OTHER banks. It's just WRONG that they be allowed to operate on this basis.

"The banks know they can't fail so they take excessive risks," protested one member of the audience, "and then they pay bonuses based on one year's performance that reward those very risks!"

"You've correctly recognised the problem," said Mr Vince, sagely. This is the very problem that the G20 drew up new rules to address… it's just Mr Frown's Government that is being slow to do anything about it!

Which of course brings us to the legacy of wrecked government finances, with income right down and spending on benefits spiralling up, which is why it is so necessary for a proper PLAN with key objectives of preserving frontline services, the things that Government MUST do, while cutting back on the things that Government should NOT be doing which in the short term means things like not replacing Trident, but also continuing cuts like cutting benefits for people earning fifty-or-more thousand pounds and then more painful things like looking at freezing public pay.

But he also wanted to be POSITIVE, to note that even if Hard Labour have smashed the economy, there are still things we can do to rebuild, starting with an urgent programme of building much-needed social housing.

At a time when much of the building industry is actually being mothballed and leading to unemployment, there is also a chronic shortage of affordable and Council homes. Obviously, we should be bringing these two together, fixing two urgent problems at once. And many building firms have found themselves with large empty blocks of flats, costing them money to keep empty: we should be able to acquire these and take over them for social housing.

At the same time we need a focus on young people because they are being hardest hit by the recession, and we have to avoid another "lost generation", like the people failed by the Conservatories in the Nineteen-Eighties. Instead of squandering ten billion pounds on a VAT cut, most of which has just disappeared, we would have put that money into guaranteeing young people a job within ninety days.

I piped up with a question about Mayor Bojo the Clown's new above-inflation hikes in tube and bus travel for Londoners: is this DAMAGING during a recession or a NECESSARY investment?

Mr Vince admitted that there was a bit of a "torrid" time ahead for public transport: it needs a lot of money investing in it, and where is that money going to come from? We supported the principle of Congestion Charging at the time it was introduced, and we support Crossrail, so long as it stays within its budget, because it's a good project.

I think that was a qualified "yes" to "necessary investment", though I'd add that Mayor Bojo would have less of need to hike the Central Congestion Charge by 25% if he wasn't simultaneously abandoning the Western Extension.

Mr Ajmal also reminded people of the suggestion from our London Assembly members to adopt a system like they have on the continent where if you bleep your Oyster Card for ONE bus or tube journey, within a limited time if you change to another bus, or from DLR to tube or the like, you don't get charged for a SECOND journey when you've really only made the one.

The audience actually seemed quite KEEN on the idea of the "mansion tax", perhaps easy to see why when our society is becoming increasingly UNEQUAL, unequal in income AND unequal in wealth. One of our key proposals, Mr Vince reminded everyone, is to lift a great many people out of tax, and to cut taxes for all lower and middle income earners, by shifting the burden of tax to those who can afford to pay more. At the moment, even a relatively modest family home can cost seven or eight hundred thousand pounds but will pay the SAME in Council Tax – tax band H – as a thirty MILLION pound mansion. When most countries, and even American cities like Washington and New York, have a property tax of this kind, so it's not exactly cruel and unusual punishment.

"Should you have told the rest of the Shadow Cabinet, though?" someone asked.

"Ah, well, yes it would have been desirable to have gotten my colleagues on board, and I've apologised to them for that," he admitted.

He didn't JUST want to talk about the economy, though, and he wanted to add some words about our distinctive Liberal Democrat PRINCIPLES.

Civil Liberties is central to our beliefs, and that's why we were first to oppose the I.D.iot cards, first again to stand up against ninety-day detention without trial, and first to oppose the abuses of anti-terrorism powers.

He told us a little story: in his constituency of Twickenham, aircraft noise from Heathrow is a big issue. So Mr Vince recently went with a party of entirely-respectable middle-aged persons to throw PAPER PLANES at the Ministry of Transport as a protest. But before they could launch these "missiles", a police inspector turned up and told them they had five minutes to clear the street before he invoked the Terrorism Act!

We're also INTERNATIONALIST by nature; we opposed the invasion of Iraq because it was ILLEGAL under international law. Now there is Afghanistan. At the time of the attack to deal with the Taliban government and their support for Al Qaeda terrorists, we AGREED with that necessary, proportionate and finite action. But now we have to question whether there is any proper PLAN to what we are still doing there and, if there is, how we are supposed to achieve it, and if our soldiers have the equipment and supplies they need to do what we ask. Because the alternative is that we are now trapped in an open-ended commitment to support a corrupt undemocratic government that is in power on the back of a fixed election.

One thing that was interesting was that the audience, a relatively even mix of people from different ethnic backgrounds, were more concerned about Iraq… and IRAN… than they were about MPs' expenses; the one question on the expenses scandal seemed to draw little interest (though there was laughter in response to Mr Vince's remark: "I saw I was on the list of 'angels'; looking at who else was on the list, I thought 'the criteria for admission to heaven have been relaxed a bit!'."), whereas there was much discussion of human rights abuses from Afghanistan to Burma, from China to Palestine.

The third principle Mr Vince chose to emphasis was ANTI-RACISM. He remembered his late wife, who was coincidentally Asian, and how at the time of Mr Enoch Powell's speeches she had to stay off the streets for safety. He also remembered that, even though he had been in the Labour Party at the time, it was always the LIBERALS who stood up for minority rights. We've made a lot of progress since then, but prejudice still remains and that's why we see the rise of the British Nasty Party and their ilk. Liberal Democrats believe that it is our DUTY to take them on, and where we take them on – like we did this year in Burnley – we BEAT them.

We finished with a question about why he ruled himself out of the leadership after Sir Mr the Merciless resigned.

"Well," he said, "I didn't rule myself out; I was ruled out. My colleagues said that they felt, after what happened to Ming, that they wanted someone from a new generation, and I might have thought that I was doing a perfectly good job running the party, but that was the choice that was made."

I think we all know that for all that he was VERY good as acting leader, he did have that magical aura of protection in the word "acting" that would have vanished quickly if he'd gone from acting to actual. But I thought that that was interesting because I had not heard the story told that way before. A tinge of regret? Perhaps.

.

Day 3208: THE PRISONER 42nd ANNIVERSARY: The Chimes of Big Ben

2009-10-20T00:00:00.001+01:00

Tuesday:

Yes, it's a week late – Daddy was kidnapped by the Village but I was able to disguise myself as a weather balloon and rescue him. Unless it was all a terribly bad-taste hoax to promote a new reality show: I'm a Former Secret Agent… Get Me Out of Here!

information
Trust, escape, deceit, betrayal. Business as usual in the Village.

The Prisoner observes the arrival by helicopter of the new Number Eight, and later Number Two invites him to watch from the Green Dome as she goes through the same disconcerting awaking that he went though in "Arrival", first finding herself in "her own home" and then discovering that it, and she, has been transplanted to the Utopian (literally "no place") Village.

Concerned that Number Two's methods may be driving her to suicide, the Prisoner agrees to a deal: he'll take part in the Village crafts contest in return for being given charge of her. She claims to know where the Village really is and, under cover of "joining in", together they plot an escape to London.

Only hearing the chimes of Big Ben will convince them they are safely home… but will it be safe to answer the questions about where they've been all this time?

what's your number, please
Well, this one is clearly not the second episode: the Prisoner is too settled in, too well acquainted with the ways of the Village, too chatty with Number Two to still be so very "new" here.

Watching the New Number Eight, Number Two asks: "it's just like old times. Do you remember your first day?"

This has to be some time since "Arrival".

But then he is still willing to believe that the Village is somewhere that he can escape from in something so mundane as a sailboat and he's in no way facing up to the full level of paranoia and doublethink that his captors indulge in. His boat-disguised-as-art-installation is hardly the most cunning of camouflage, and yet he is quite blasé about his success. Writing for the BBC website, Jonny Morris puts his finger on the nub when he asks: "why isn't he suspicious that no one is more suspicious?"

In return, the Village is still pussy-footing around putting the real pressure on; Number Two wants him broken, but not in pieces. Interestingly, this week brings forward the issue of the resignation again; interesting because Number Two is clear that it is only a minor mystery, but it is the key with which he will unlock the Prisoner's resistance: once he gives up that, the rest will follow.

We later get an answer but no details: it was a matter of conscience. We can probably assume that that answer is honest – it is only afterwards that the Prisoner rumbles the deception.

Early on, we are told that there is to be an exciting new competition, and that entrants will have six weeks before the exhibition. The Prisoner's escape attempt takes place the night after the prizes are given out, so at least six weeks have passed during the episode.

The journey to London is a matter of hours, of course; something that the Prisoner carefully checks using his borrowed watch, but arriving in London his bristly boss, Colonel J, tells him that he disappeared after his resignation and he's been missing for "months".

"Months" could be anything up to a year, but suggests probably less than "six months". Taking the "month-to-an-episode" assumption, that would mean "Dance of the Dead" takes place a month after "Arrival" and then "The Chimes of Big Ben" starts a month after that, and ends in the Colonel's office six weeks later, or two-and-a-half months since the Prisoner disappeared. That sounds just about right, maybe a little short.

The other reason for placing this story ahead of next week's "Checkmate" is that it makes sense that as a result of the double-cross here that he decides he needs a method to tell prisoner from warder, a plan he puts into action next time.

the new number two
This is the first of two (or three) appearances for Leo McKern as possibly the most well-remembered face of the Village's chairperson, certainly the one whose full-bellied laugh made it to the "Power Themes" version of the theme tune.

It's also the first glimpse we get that all may not be well in the Green Dome. For all his full-on fruity bonhomie and bluster, this Number Two is prone to fits of rage when the Prisoner lands a particularly successful moment of defiance upon him. He is no way in as much control as his predecessors from "Arrival" or "Dance of the Dead".

He often jokes with the Prisoner, loudly dictating pointed notes for the Prisoner's file, but it is an aggressive, probing, angry sort of humour, using wit as a weapon – what a pity it's such a blunt one.

He also admits that he too is a "prisoner": "We're both lifers – I know too much" he says, when the Prisoner challenges him on this. He makes out that he is accepting of this, making the best of a tight situation and living well as a result. But it seems he's also realising that he may only be a small cog in the machine, and outside of the Village not such a big fish after all. Number Eight's parting remark, "it was a good plan and you did your best", is more the sort of kind remark made to an unfortunate underling, than something you say to the boss.

He may also feel he is living on borrowed time: if he's given up the information he had, he can only hope to win a longer life by being useful, and his fate after what happens here therefore remains uncertain.

His philosophy is very SpECTRE: East West, mere points of the compass. Number Two presents a face of not caring which side the Village is actually "on"; he claims that it is a model for a perfect future world – again Utopian – and when both sides see what they've created there.

But this is also another sign of his insecurity: outside the Village, he is nothing, so he would deny that the Village can have and outside. Everything is to be within his ambit!

Thus asked what he wants, his answer: the whole World as the Village.

The Prisoner's typical response: then I want to be the first man on the Moon.

follow the signs
If you were going to write "The Prisoner" – and if you weren't bonkers in the nut the way McGoohan is – then "The Chimes of Big Ben" is almost certainly the episode you would end up writing. It is completely mundane, the most "spy drama" episode that the series comes up with: the "twist" telegraphed from practically the opening titles.

Obviously it's all been a set up, and obviouslyNumber Eight – another powerful but untrustworthy woman – was in on it from the very beginning. Is it a clue that where he discards his number at once, she keeps hers on, even on her swimming costume, even when ostensibly committing suicide? For the numerologists again, 8 is 6 and 2.

In the same vein, Number Two's notes for the file keep going in paragraph 42 – another 4 and 2 like last time, though his subsections go 2, 3, 4, 5 and then 1. If you don't know what that might mean, then go directly to "Fall Out", but don't expect to pass "Go"!

(Also, confusingly, this week Number 54 is a retired general – and he's definitely not a flirty maid!)

This week, the ultra-mild flirtation around the terms "Big Ben" and "Big Bill" is as close as we come to any romance but then the Prisoner is willing to compromise, to "deal" with the Village if he thinks a woman is in peril.

And the Village is definitely beginning to get to him. His automatic distrust of Number Eight when she arrives leads directly to him behaving towards her as the other Villagers behave towards him. And for the first time he fully accepts the Village's mark on him, telling her: "Sorry – no names. I am Number 6. You are Number 8."

For Number Eight, it's all been a consummate acting job on her part; that's why I refer to her as Number Eight, and not "Nadia" the name she gives to him, as though we can trust that. It's all just to get the Prisoner to trust her, not trust her completely but just enough so that she can prime him to expect the chimes of Big Ben. Those chimes are to make him feel that he's home, feel that he's safe, so that then he will answer the Colonel's question.

The irony, what little irony there is in this so straight episode, is that it nearly works, and it's only those very chimes that give the game away at the end.

who is number one?
You would expect it to be Leo McKern, but I'm actually going to give this week's episode to a scene-stealing turn by Kevin Stoney in a truly incredible moustache as the Prisoner's boss: Colonel J. If you've ever seen Danger Mouse, you'll remember the mouse detective's superior is a Chinchilla called Colonel K. That is exactly what Kevin Stoney's moustache looks like here.

It's a small part, but a vital one: this is someone that the Prisoner ought to trust, but his staccato questioning and over-the-top delivery, carefully reminiscent of Number Two, provoke enough distrust to send our hero right to the brink as he starts to realise, to draw on a movie parallel, just how deep the rabbit hole goes:

"Are you sure you don’t know about the Village? …Are you sure you haven't got a Village here? …I risked my life, and hers, to get us here because I thought it was different. It is different, isn't it?"

Or, if you prefer an Arnie metaphor to a Keanu one, he's the chap who turns up in "Total Recall" to warn that it's all a dream. Except he can't quite stop himself from perspiring.

next time…
That would be telling.

Be seeing you.

Day 3206: MYSTERIES OF DOCTOR WHO #21: Frontier in Space… What Happened Next?

2009-10-19T14:00:00.008+01:00

Sunday:

If the answer is "Planet of the Daleks" there's something wrong with the QUESTION!

Let us look at what has been going on: Space… the final frontier… these are the voyages of Dr Woo in a space-going prison flown by Mr the Master.

"Frontier in Space" is Mr Mac "the incredible" Hulke's contribution to the all-singing, all-dancing (well occasionally, during "Carnival of Monsters") Tenth Anniversary of Doctor Who, and is also the first half of an EPIC twelve episode cross-over adventure that sees the Master and the Daleks team up to actually not meet the Cybermen for contractual reasons.

…available now on DVD under an exciting "Dalek War" wrapper!

This double-story celebration of the series' greatest villains is a twelve-part homage to the mighty "The Daleks' Master Plan", Mr Dr Billy's great adventure that also took place over the course of twelve weeks, and likewise features a Dalek scheme to conquer the galaxy, this time with added beardy villainy, making this actually: "The Master's Dalek Plan".

Then as now, the "epic" was split into two distinct halves: one part written by Mr Terry National Lottery and the other by someone who could actually write. Er. The DIFFERENCE is that last time, Mr Terry came up with a title, some character names and the mystery space ~~elephant~~ element Terrynationerum later shortened to Tarranium before handing it all in a manila envelope to the series script editor and jumping into a taxi for Heathrow. THIS time, Mr Terry insisted on writing it all himself. Which he did… in 1963 when it was called "The Daleks". Still, you couldn't get DVDs in those days so a "remake" in colour was actually a rather SMART way for new viewers to see what they missed back in the beginning. (Also available as, er, "The Beginning".)

What I'm trying to say is this: "Frontier in Space" is actually really good. REALLY good. Especially if you watch it one episode at a time. Certainly it entails Dr Woo being locked up in a whole succession of prison cells, but it's actually all rather clever the way that it escalates the sense of galactic threat: first he's just put in a cell on a space freighter that's come under attack; then he's locked up on Earth; then he's locked up on the MOON; then he's handed over to Mr the Master… and locked up; then he's locked up by the alien Draconians; and THEN he's locked up on the Ogron planet and it turns out that the DALEKS are in charge! The President of Earth, the Emperor of Draconia, the Master, the Earth-Minbari War, er… all sorts of huge characters and huge politics are cleverly presented to us as Dr Woo struggles to get ANYONE to listen to him. Meanwhile Jo Jo Grant finally proves herself when her pluck resists the Master's hypno-powers.

All of this build-up leaves you as tightly wound as a spring, expecting a big, big, BIG conclusion.

And then you get Planet of the Daleks. I'm just saying.

But SERIOUSLY, at the end of part six, there's a bit of a MYSTERY as to what is going on. Dr Woo has used Mr the Master's own "fear box" to escape from his (most recent) prison cell, he has freed Earth leader General Williams and the Crown Prince of Draconia and seen that they escape but on trying to get back to the TARDIS (stolen in part one by the Ogrons) he runs into the Master and a large group of his gorilla-like hench-lifeforms. Mr the Master pulls a gun and SHOOTS Dr Woo…

What, as they say, happened next?

Well, what we ACTUALLY see is that Mr the Master is suddenly gone, the Ogrons are scattered and a sobbing Jo Jo – now armed with Mr the Master's gun – is dragging Dr Woo into the TARDIS.

What is MISSING is clearly the intervention of the Ogron Eater, a being known – for reasons I am too young and fluffy to understand – as the "Giant Ogron Bollock Monster". We've seen it once, in the distance, attacking one of Mister the Master's goons. Mr General Williams describes it as a large, aggressive reptile, which suggests that either HE has never seen a large aggressive reptile (unlikely; he's stood next to the Draconian Prince) or the DESIGNER wasn't paying attention.

We see another, or rather a huge mural of it, in the Ogron's shrine, and it's clearly SUPPOSED to be establishing something for a big reveal at the end… Chekhov's Giant Ogron Bollock Monster if you will… but that reveal never comes. Probably because Jo Jo turning into an enormous hairy testicle was considered UNBROADCASTABLE. (This IS thirty years before TORCHWOOD, remember.)

But that's clearly what was SUPPOSED to happen: with Dr Woo out for the count, Jo Jo grabs the "fear box" and turns on. SOMETHING appears, terrifying the Ogrons setting them running. Mr the Master is knocked flying; Jo Jo gets hold of his pistol; and he does a runner. The rest you know.

Well THAT was easy… for an encore I shall prove that BLACK is WHITE… or rather in COLOUR these days (and the restored episode three of Planet of the Daleks actually look really good, especially – to daddy's surprise – the ICE tunnels, where you would have thought black and white pretty much covered it, but in fact they look much better, with a kind of depth to the polystyrene set that the B&W flattens and deadens. Well done all round; hope they have the cash for the other episodes that need colour restored.)

But what is actually WRONG with Planet of the Daleks?

Well, actually, there's a list as long as my rather magnificent nose… starting with the TARDIS air supply, and "infected by the fungoids"; via some of Dr Woo's most patronising lectures ever; via some of Jo Jo's truly astonishing stealth in Dalek control (there's a Dalek looking RIGHT AT HER when she slips out of her hidey-hole) not to mention her hiding the Thals' explosives BEHIND A FROND; via some of the WORST space-dialogue in the history of this part of the space-galaxy(!); via some of the most WOEFUL glowing-eyes-in-the-jungle effects you ever did see outside of a Scooby Doo cartoon; via all the random invisible aliens, space-plagues, countdowns and other Flash Gordon plot coupons Mr Terry so loves to use; through to a conclusion involving literally dozens of tricky-action Dalek toys and a gallon of wallpaper paste that just cannot be described in polite company!

But what is ACTUALLY actually wrong with it is that it's NOT parts seven to twelve of the promised epic.

Let's flash back to "The Daleks Master Plan" again. With Mr Terry writing – or rather NOT-so-very-much writing – the first half, they could let Mr Spennis Dooner write what he wanted for the huge impressive conclusion and director Mr Dougie "Colonel" Camfield and script editor Mr Donald "this is" Tosh could make up what they wanted so long as they finished where he started.

This time out, Mr Mac writes a tremendous political thriller building up to the outbreak of all-out war with the Daleks poised to sweep in and conquer what's left of the galaxy and Dr Woo calling on the Time Lords themselves to intervene… and then Mr Terry writes an ordinary six-parter where Dr Woo is SURPRISED to find that there are Daleks on this Planet.

There's nothing to connect this to the bigger picture that we've just spent a month-and-a-half developing; this adventure is essentially self-contained and almost "small scale", with the big picture further undermined by the underwhelming revelation that the greatest Dalek army ever assembled (subject to Time War revision) consists of a mere ten THOUSAND of the metal menaces. Ten MILLION maybe, would be a threat to the galaxy – though it would make the concluding Icecano-gunking even more improbable a method of stopping 'em – but ten thousand? With Earth, Draconia, Sirius III and IV mentioned in "Frontier in Space" ALONE, that's only twenty-five hundred per planet (assuming the Ogron world can be counted as "under control" already!).

I know "one Dalek is capable of exterminating ALL!!!!" but really!

Half the problem is having the Thals in it AT ALL. Apart from anything else it makes doing Dalek history a REAL pain, as this bunch of wet warriors REMEMBER the events of "The Daleks", a story that finishes with, er, the death of all the Daleks.

The Thals come from the Planet Skaro, and have only recently (it's now the Twenty-Sixth Century) developed space flight. The Daleks ALSO come from the Planet Skaro – yes, that's the REAL "planet of the Daleks" – and have had space flight since at least the Twenty-Second Century when they invade the Earth (in, er, "The Dalek Invasion of Earth"). That's a technological head-start of at least FOUR HUNDRED YEARS.

It's not IMPOSSIBLE to imagine a planet with two competing civilisations each developing space travel… like Russialand and Americaland did in the 1950s and 1960s. But NOT if one of those civilisations is the DALEKS. That would be the "exterminate all other species" Daleks. Even if they have no sentimental reason to re-colonise their homeworld, wouldn't they at least have used their MASSIVE space superiority to BOMB the Thals into extinction FROM ORBIT?

(…like they ACTUALLY do to Earth in "The Dalek Invasion of Earth" and, well, Spiridon in, frankly, "Planet of the Daleks"!)

The solution is obvious: the party who have crashed on the "Planet of the Daleks" should NOT be Thals. In fact, they should be a party of humans and Draconians – following on from the end of "Frontier in Space", the Earth Empire and the Draconians should have allied themselves and sent out a force of scouts to search for the real enemy of both sides, now revealed to be the Daleks. Then, rather than references to "mythical figures" of Susan and Ian and Barbara it is Dr Woo's PERSONAL knowledge of Mr General Williams and Mr the Draconian Crown Prince that gets him in the team's good books.

This doesn't just tie IN with "Frontier in Space", but also ties UP the loose ends at the end – it neatly tells us that the Prince and the General DID escape, and that the Earth-Draconia War is OFF. By giving us a threat of ten (cough cough) million Daleks, enough to smash the Empires even if they DO unite, then the story gets bigger and becomes a vital race to give the new alliance a fighting chance.

Oh, and if the Dalek War has already started, then you can have the scout ships being SHOT DOWN by Dalek Saucers, rather than crashing. TWICE. (In the story as shown, we have to assume that the Thals have discovered space FLIGHT but not space LANDING; even then, it's an GINORMOUS coincidence that both rockets crash in the same small area of a rather large planet!)

You can even change the concluding moral homily from:

"when you tell your people this story, don't GLORIFY it; don't make it as an exciting space adventure in six weekly episodes…er…"

to:

"we haven't won the war; we haven't even won the first battle; we've just given ourselves a fighting chance…"

and by this you can imply that this is a small, but vital, skirmish part of a much larger, much broader history, consistent with the view from "Frontier in Space". (Plus get rid of more ghastly patronisation!)

Of course if you really, actually, desperately NEED to have the Thals in it… well, there's a solution to that too: you set the "Planet of the Daleks" actually ON the planet of the Daleks, namely Skaro, and the "random invisible aliens" turn out to be none other than the THALS themselves!

It would actually make more SENSE than that the Spiridons… er, Spiridonians… er, Spiridon-people have evolved/developed invisibility for no apparent (sorry, pun) reason.

The PEACE-LOVING Thals on a planet full of murderous (not to mention, post "The Daleks", vengeful and really quite p…ed off) pepperpots would need to find a way of staying hidden, and we already know that they have had some rather, er, peculiar evolution not to mention an affinity with drugs that affect radiation. Acquiring the ability to "fold" light around themselves would be a positive requirement and, frankly, not MUCH weirder than anything else that happens on Skaro.

It could also explain why Thal scientist Mr Codal knows what an "anti-reflecting light wave" might be!

Now, all you need to do is make sure that the designer doesn't install Dalek control panels with buttons that can only be worked if you have fingers (and not, say, sink plungers) and you're away!

PS:

Doctor Who's tenth anniversary came in the middle of the five year period when the series was produced by Mr Barry Letts, and we have heard from Mr Andrew and Mr Will that, sadly, he has passed away.

Mr Barry took over when Doctor Who was a series that had very nearly been cancelled at the end of the Black and White era, and along with his charismatic star, Mr Jon Pertwee, he turned it around and made it once again a National Institution.

Ideas and icons of the series introduced in his era have lasted through to today: okay, it's true that UNIT and Autons were ACTUALLY invented just before he took over, but they are closely associated with the show that he made, and you cannot deny him the creation of Mr the Master. The very shape of Doctor Who's future history, Earth's Empire, and its deep past, the Silurian legacy, were founded in these years, and even poorly regarded stories, such as "The Time Monster" (which, like "The Dæmons" before and "The Green Death" and "Planet of the Spiders" after, he covertly co-wrote), have left a legacy of powerful images, such as the god-like Chronovores or the TARDISes inside one another, which have influenced fans ever since, not least the great big lovely Welsh fan who – at least until Christmas – currently runs the show.

But more than that, the series that he inherited had become a shadow of the cutting-edge drama in space and time first developed by Ms Verity Lambert and Mr Sydney Newman, reduced to, a lot of the time, chasing monsters up and down corridors. Mr Barry put some HEART back into the series, introducing a thread of stories – like "The Curse of Peladon" or "The Green Death" – that were ABOUT something, and by having other stories – like "The Mind of Evil" and "Day of the Daleks" – play out against topical concerns about a possible World War Part III.

"Satire" today is often seen as just mocking and mickey-taking, particularly of those in power or the public eye, and we've rather lost the more important element of taking a critical view of society, even trying to correct it. It used to be the duty of the BBC to INFORM as well as to ENTERTAIN: Mr Barry clearly thought that that meant getting people to THINK, and that is a praise-worthy effort in itself.

I'm not going to say "rest in peace" because Mr Barry was a Buddhist. I'm not sure whether "come back soon" is appropriate either. Daddy Alex met him on several occasions and apparently he was lovely. Thank you Mr Barry.

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Day 3204: Nobel Peace Prize – Charlotte Gore Robbed Again!

2009-10-10T00:00:00.003+01:00

Friday:

Because, I mean Barry O is alright, but he’s not in Scary Charlotte’s league*, is he.

PS

*That’s probably the League of Extraordinary Gentlepersons, a spiffing comic and wacky movie with CGI** effects.

PPS

**That’s CGI as in “Charlotte Gore Isnotatory”. Obviously.

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Day 3201 (again): THE PRISONER 42nd ANNIVERSARY: Dance of the Dead

2009-10-08T00:00:00.007+01:00

Tuesday:

The 6th October is the anniversary of the Prisoner episode "The Chimes of Big Ben" so obviously my Daddies are watching… "Dance of the Dead".

Is it me or does this TV series MESS with your fluffy HEAD?!

information
The Village holds a Carnival and Ball, in fancy dress with dancing and a macabre cabaret. After a prologue sequence where the doctor uses crude brainwashing to try and get the Prisoner to talk, the story falls into two distinct parts: the day before the Carnival, a slightly more complex spy/escape drama, and Carnival night where things get really surreal.

The Prisoner: "I thought there was to be a cabaret."

Number Two: "There is. You are it."

The Prisoner, dressed in his own suit, is put on trial by the Village. His crime: breaking the rules. His judges: Nero, Napoleon and Queen Bess. Number Two, dressed as Peter Pan, is his defender while his current watcher, a conflicted young woman designated 240 but dressed as Little Bo Peep, guardian of the Village's lost sheep we presume, is to prosecute. His only character witness, Roland Walter Dutton, a man who – like Cobb in "Arrival" – the Prisoner knew in his former life, has been lobotomised by the Village and dressed as a fool.

The verdict is, of course, guilty, and the sentence is death, with the Carnival-clad Villagers pursuing the Prisoner through the Town Hall in terrifying screaming hunt, only to apparently lose all interest once Number Two declares that the Prisoner is now "dead".

what's your number, please
As I said last week, The Prisoner defies conventional filing. Even the box sets have the running order different to the original broadcast dates and McGoohan himself only thought of seven of the episodes as "canonical" (this is one of them). So, picking your own running order is one of the games that the Prisoner plays with you. As with UNIT dating, there isn't a definitive "right answer" (answers are a prison for yourself), as different people will find different clues more or less important, but I'm happy to try and explain our preferred version as I go along.

What you can say is that episodes of the Prisoner fall into, roughly, three distinct "flavours": the Prisoner tries to escape but the Village beats him; the Village tries some wacky scheme to break the Prisoner, but he survives; the Prisoner takes on the Village from within and beats the system. What you can also see is that these "flavours" form an obvious hierarchy, and therefore running order of escape, survival, victory.

The most obvious "escape" stories, apart from "Arrival" itself, are "The Chimes of Big Ben" (usually shown second) and "Checkmate". "Dance of the Dead" fits this category too, however, because it has a more subtle escape attempt – or rather an attempt to summon rescue: the Prisoner, finding a dead man on the beach, seeks to make use of the man's body to float a message out to sea. We also include "Free for All" in this batch, even though it also includes "wacky brain altering techniques" and an attempt to "beat the system", because above all it is very obviously a victory for the Village. As a key turning point though, we leave "Free for All" until the end of this bunch, as you will see.

So we are happy to start from the idea that "Dance of the Dead" is one of three episodes that could be second, third or fourth in order. Choosing between these is down to a decision about the complexity of the Prisoner's escape plans and here, although subtle, his plan is relatively straightforward and requires little by way of planning. In return, apart from the doctor's peremptory, plainly unauthorised and frankly very crude brain-washing technique (at least compared to some of the more bogglingly outré things the Village will try later), the Village makes no overt or aggressive attempts to break the Prisoner. Indeed, Number Two seems most keen this week to get him to accept life in the Village, a mental softening up, in which she succeeds admirably, leaving him totally at a loss.

More mundanely, the Prisoner himself asserts baldly "I'm new here" on one occasion (though he will say this again in "Checkmate"); he claims he's never seen a night in the Village, so taken at his word this is his first nocturnal peregrination; and later says he arrived "quite recently" when asked by Dutton. Dutton himself says he has been in the Village a few months; there is a convention that each episode of "The Prisoner" represents a month of time that he spends in the Village, so this alone would suggest that "Dance of the Dead" has to be episode two or at latest three.

But beyond that, "Dance of the Dead" is best placed second because it is one of the key episodes in setting out McGoohan's manifesto for "what it's all about": "Arrival" may set up the Prisoner's situation, but "Dance of the Dead" is the case for the prosecution.

Number 240 spells it out quite early on: societies have to have rules, even if the rules are arbitrary or even unknown, and what we call "wickedness" involves a transgression of those rules.

The judges at the Prisoner's trial are, almost obviously, monarchs, dictators, monomaniacs even; they are the ultimate symbols of a legal system, a system of society, and at the same time the ultimate symbols of just how arbitrary that system can be.

It's not that the Prisoner doesn't have rules. As discussed last time, McGoohan's own strong views on sex and killing heavily influence his character. It's just that he insists on the right to apply only his own rules, not those that are agreed by "society", whether they are imposed by democratic or autocratic means.

Remember, anarchy doesn't mean without rules it means without rulers.

the new number two
Another way to regard the episodes is to compare the relative powers of the Prisoner, which rises over the series, with that of Number Two, which declines.

Here, Number Two is absolutely at her most powerful, totally in control, with a chatty, playful relationship with "Number One", or whoever it is on the other end of that telephone, exchanging pleasantries like they are not just old friends, but equals. Godlike, she observes the Prisoner on her big screens even at his most mundane moments, like his personal guardian angel. Or watchdog.

That she is, of course, a woman in this episode goes almost entirely without saying – certainly the Prisoner doesn't remark on it (no crass "a woman…?" Moonraker-era Bondisms here, thank goodness, though he is provoked to snipe "never trust a woman" when even the cat betrays him).

In fact it's an episode for strong female characters: as well as Number Two, there's Good Queen Bess and the Prisoner's watcher (and the Town Crier – later Nero – played by Aubrey Woods is the evilest Queen you ever did see), along with another Village supervisor who later turns up at the trial as Queen Cleopatra.

In fact there's a remarkably bitchy exchange between the Number 240 and Cleopatra, ostensibly both guards, when the Prisoner temporarily eludes the former's surveillance. "Shall I watch number 34 instead?" "No. He's dead."

It's a hint that, even this early on, the Village is not exclusively interested in playing with the Prisoner's marbles, but that anyone and everyone could be subject to suspicion, surveillance and scrutiny. It's not impossible that the entire affair this week is actually targeted at Number 240, to test her breaking points, not his, and finding her wanting. At the trial, she does break and the conclusion sees Number Two pass judgement on her, telling the Prisoner that she is no longer his watcher: observers of human nature cannot allow themselves to care.

There is one other "woman" here: that treacherous black cat. The Prisoner discovers her, apparently stray in the Village, and takes to stroking and later feeding her.

"I see you've found a friend," Number Two remarks.

In Kipling, the Cat Walks by him- (or her-) self and so should be a natural symbol for the Prisoner. That this cat turns out to be Number Two's pet is powerful symbolic subversion, as well as a cautionary lesson to the Prisoner. (Not one he learns immediately, either.)

follow the signs
Sometimes, of course, the signs are easy ones: the Carnival costumes are, transparently, reflections of the wearer's inner character: the arrogant doctor with the Napoleon complex becomes Napoleon; the flirty maid becomes the Virgin Queen, while Number Two, Peter Pan, is clearly Principal Boy. The Prisoner assumes, probably wrongly, that he is given his own clothes because he is still himself; but remember that Number Two's purpose is to realise the "death" of that "self", and he could as easily be dressing for his own funeral. Seen on the beach at the start of Carnival night, the Prisoner becomes "Mr Tuxedo", a figure in black, visually and metaphorically shadow to Number Two's Peter Pan.

That scene, that confrontation between Number Two and the Prisoner, is a favourite moment for Alex: Number Two, dressed in green, is like the Green Witch in the Narnia story "The Silver Chair", dismissing the Prisoner's "World" as "just a dream", explaining away each thing he calls to mind from his World as something lesser from her Village, saying he must be mad to believe a dream.

Once inside the Town Hall, of course, the Prisoner does – as Number Two remarks – pick himself a "costume" the {heavy sarcasm}totally convincing{/heavy sarcasm} disguise of a white coat and glasses.

The doctor's coat comes with a Number attached, 116 – that's two "1"s and a "6" which given the way these things work certainly looks like it should be significant.

Of course, you can drive yourself nuts reading the numerology into the Numbers. The flirty maid is Number 54, which is 5 and 4 or 9; and 9 is 6 turned upside down, and she does turn the Prisoner upside down when she becomes Good Queen Bess and has judgement over him. Number 240 is the Prisoner's watcher, but 2 and 4 and zero are 6 again. And the Village doctor is Number 40, so Number 240 is 2 and 40, as well.

Meanwhile, Dutton is 42, which is also 2 and 40 and again 4 and 2 is 6. But 42 or 042 is 240 backwards, suggesting he is her "opposite", not just that he's the one being watched, but that he is old, cynical, weary, even on the Prisoner's side where she is young, naïve, full of life and all its worries and an agent of Number Two. Victim and Villain? But see how they swap places by the end. Or it could all be a massive coincidence.

Dutton's "death warrant", incidentally, which the Prisoner gets hold of (again seemingly by lucky chance) is written out as his name, and not his number. A clue, if ever there was one, that this is staged for the Prisoner's benefit.

Dutton, although referred to on several occasions, appears in person three times in the episode: at the beginning as a zombie under the doctor's mind control and at the end reduced to an imbecile and dressed as Number Two's "fool". Between times, though, he is granted a brief "reprieve" in order to confront the Prisoner. Just at the moment where the Prisoner has set his dead messenger adrift, Dutton appears suddenly, out of nowhere, in the mouth of the cave on the beach (itself suggestive that there is a "back way" into the Prisoner's hide-away, and that his secret is not so secret after all). He stands, gaunt and accusatory, and says: "I wouldn't have expected it of you".

Now, interestingly, Alex thought "I wouldn't have expected it of you" meant "I wouldn't have expected you to be one of the warders" (because he sees the Prisoner cold-heartedly using somebody, literally some body); I on the other hand thought it meant "I wouldn't have expected you to kill someone" (because John Drake – and we might get into the whole "is the Prisoner "Dangerman's" John Drake?" question later in the series – John Drake never would).

This blurring of multiple layers of meaning is what makes the "Dance of the Dead" so good: it is a dance of meanings too.

The episode seems to take some pleasure in ascribing "life" or life-like qualities to machines while the Villagers remain "mechanical" throughout, even when we hear sounds of jubilation – say at the announcement of Carnival – the faces we see remain stony and blank.

It's as if the machinery of the Village is alive, just as (or perhaps as a pointer to the fact that) the living form part of the machinery of the Village.

Rover, for example, though it's impossible really to tell if Rover as realised on the screen is supposed to be a living thing or a robot creature as envisaged at the script stages. Here Rover seems at times to be almost toying with the Prisoner, cat and mouse on the beach at night, leading him on to where he wakes next morning to find that so so useful body, playfully delaying though not preventing him as he tried to pursue Number 240.

This pursuit leads Number Six to the Town Hall, and on trying to enter he is painfully repelled. Is there some kind of invisible force field across the entrance? Is he magically – or mystically – repelled by the idol inside? Or does it perhaps hit him with a mechanical boxing glove on an arm? A helpful passer-by describes the building as "fussy about who it lets in", as though the Town Hall can actually decide for itself, rather than it being some kind of programmed response, or keyed to those identity Numbers that everyone (the Prisoner excepted) wears.

Similarly, the Prisoner's television set hisses static at him like an angry cat when he tries to cover it with a cushion, a response that seems to give him extraordinary satisfaction.

Then there's the radio that he discovers among the possessions of the dead man. That he "discovers" or "is allowed to discover": we really can't allow for the possibility of coincidence under this Number Two. Given how… constructed the entire charade is for the Prisoner's benefit we may as well assume that the body and radio are left there for him to find. The radio itself produces a perplexing mix of channels, nothing to get a fix from, and then suddenly seems to be addressing the Prisoner directly:

"If our torment is to end, if liberty is to be restored, we must grasp the nettle even though it makes our hands bleed."

Is that a message directly for him? If so, what the hell does it mean? It certainly seems to prefigure the ending where the Prisoner realises that escape from this place is going to be a lot harder than he has so far imagined.

The final machine is the telegraph machine which he discovers hidden away in a secret room inside the Town Hall. His assumption is that this is how Number One conveys his orders to Number Two and the rest of his lackeys, and immediately rips out the machine's guts to stop it working, thinking he is scoring a victory. But then Number Two appears, along with Bo Peep, and tells him that the game is up, explaining a little of what she has done to him. And for no reason, the telex just starts working again, even though its innards are all over the floor, as if to underline that it's the process of the Village and there's just no stopping it.

By the end of the story, then, the Village have tied up any loose ends from the Prisoner's kidnapping in "Arrival" by allowing "his" dead body to be found. Implicitly, and referenced by the episode title, all of the Villagers have likewise become "dead" in the outside world, making the Village a private little Purgatory for all of them.

The Prisoner is damned and he's damned well going to stay.

If "Arrival" is a perfect piece of pop art symbolism all on its own, then "Dance of the Dead" is the episode that really opens up the series. When "Arrival" ends with Cobb remarking about his "new masters" you think that you may be getting a handle on how this story is going to work, uncovering the "secret architects" of the Village and foiling their evil plan (probably with exploding secret base™… hold that thought!). What "Dance of the Dead" does is shatter that illusion and, with its surrealism and open-ended mysteries, redraw the series on a much wider canvass.

"Dance of the Dead" is a difficult and complicated episode; at first (even second, third, fourth…) viewing it doesn't easily make sense. But tantalisingly it does offer answers, and because of that it rewards viewing again and again, growing with each new perspective as – fractal-like – you find more and more within. This was the episode we chose to watch in commemoration when we heard of McGoohan's death earlier this year, and it keeps drawing us back.

who is number one?
Without a doubt it is Mary Morris as Number Two, totally commanding and utterly in control. She so has all the answers, from the very titles when the Prisoner demands "Who is Number One?" and she laughs so knowingly, to the end where she bluntly tells him "how very uncomfortable for you!". She's less an antagonist, more a force of nature: you can see her has the goddess of this society, its rules and mores made incarnate. Or you can see her as the ultimate dispassionate observer, the one real outsider with perspective on the Prisoner's little world. Powerful enough to dominate even McGoohan she – quite literally – has the last laugh.

next time…
That would be telling.

Be seeing you.

Day 3201: No, Mr Oboe! Reading Mr Vince's Pamphlet does NOT count as having a policy!

2009-10-07T10:50:00.000+01:00

Tuesday:

Master Gideon has demonstrated a NEW talent: reading aloud. Who'd have thought?

A couple of weeks ago, Mr Vince "the Power" Cable put out a pamphlet spelling out some of the PAIN we will have to suffer because of Mr Frown's economic mistakes. He got NO COVERAGE.

Now, Master Oboe cherry-picks the passages that will play well to Conservatory Conference and he is treated as the New Messiah*.

In which case, I have here a novel called "Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol by Millennium Elephant" that I should like to sell you for a couple of million dollars please.

A public sector pay freeze; a cut in tax credits for people earning over fifty thousand… it all sounds EERILY FAMILIAR. Mr Dr Vince himself has already described Master Oboe's proposals as "Lib Dem Lite".

But surely the Conservatories have been announcing POLICIES GALORE all week. Just look at these examples…

Make the sick work!

Make the old work!

Make the public sector work… for LESS!

Make the bankers, er, not have to work… for MORE!

Hang on… is it just me or do the Conservatories STILL only have one policy? It's just the SAME policy over and over and over, going on and on and… oh corks!

When I see Master Gideon, I am reminded of James Bond villain Monsieur Le Chiffre. No, I realise that that is not a flattering comparison… for Monsieur Le Chiffre. But bear with me. I'm NOT saying that Master Oboe weeps BLOOD and has people TORTURED in his spare time. What I am ACTUALLY thinking of is the scene in the MOVIE of Casino Royale where Mr James discovers Le Chiffre's "tell": the baddie WINS the hand with three deuces, but – as Mr James explains – he only got the winning hand on the turn of the last card. Until that point, he had NOTHING.

Master Oboe's economic hand is JUST LIKE THAT.

Until the recession turned up, the Conservatories had NOTHING; they've been dealt a winning card by purest chance, and it tells us that their management of the government finances will be, at best, Casino Economics and at worst an arm-wrestle with a One-Armed-Bandit.

At the Liberal Democrat conference, just a fortnight ago, we were having debates and arguments and even out-and-out scraps about which of our MANY well-established, long-standing, democratically approved, POPULAR policies we could STILL AFFORD to place front and centre in a manifesto.

It was PAINFUL. It was DIFFICULT. It was what REAL "tough choices" actually looks like.

The Conservatories, by contrast, have NOTHING.

There are NO policies that they have had to say "we can't do that"; there were NO polices there in the first place.

(Well, with ONE exception and for fluffy's sake, Master Gideon is even STILL going to do THAT: giving a big tax cut to dead millionaires – something that will benefit only 3000 people, one of whom is of course the Baronet Oboe himself.

And, incidentally, if we're REALLY "all in it together", will Master Gideon be handing over his own inherited unearned windfall to pay down some of the Nation's debt? Well, let's just say I wouldn't take Monsieur Le Chiffre's bet on it!)

The STRENGTH of Liberal Democrat economics is that it is ADAPTABLE: if you want to make the tax system simpler and fairer you need to understand how it works, and that understanding means you KNOW what can and cannot be done when things get difficult.

The WEAKNESS of Master Oboe's position is that it is both REACTIVE and REACTIONARY – he responds to events rather than preparing for them; and his approach is to return to the failed dogmas of Thatcherism rather than grasping the progressive alternative.

Conservatories want to CUT investment NOW when times are bad. Cutting programmes that would help us build our way out of the recession is EXACTLY what caused the prolonged downturn of the early Eighties, turning a Winter of Discontent into a profound economic downturn that saw a million unemployed rise to THREE million unemployed and annihilated large chunks of Great Britain's industrial base leaving us dependent on the very MBaster…s of the Universe in the City who have so recently CRASHED and BURNED the economy all over again.

Liberal Democrats would invest NOW to save the economy, while controlling current account spending like payroll and pension costs. Investing in CAPITAL programmes doesn't just keep people in work (and never mind paying taxes, they will be buying goods which keeps OTHER people in work too) it is also an investment in readying the economy for more growth in the future, and it is only with GROWTH that we will be able to restore the balance between Government income and Government spending.

Conservatories insist that burden of closing the budget deficit should fall on public spending; they refuse to talk about the tax issue, apart from the big savings for those who inherit a fortune. It's a return to TRICKLE DOWN economics, where the rich get to "trickle down" all over the poor!

Only the Liberal Democrats will address the FAILINGS of the Tax System. Shifting taxation from the lowest earners to the highest isn't just FAIRER, it's GOOD economics – because you will have a larger number of people with a little more disposable income stimulating spending rather than saving, which is just what the economy needs.

What it comes down to is this: you have a CHOICE, a choice between one Party that has policies based on principles, that is willing to take decisions, even painful ones, to meet those commitments AND repair the damage Mr Frown has done to the economy and another Party that has wasted it's time coming up with bad policies for deregulation and millionaire-friendly tax perks and at the last minute written down someone else's ideas on the back of a (B.A.T) fag-packet.

You have a choice between Mr Vince, who can read the tea leaves and tell you which way the wind is blowing, and Mr Oboe who can only read Mr Vince.

*No, seriously he IS a very naughty boy!

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Day 3199: Substance Abuse in the Conservatory Party – Fatty Clarke speaks out!

2009-10-07T00:00:00.000+01:00

Sunday:

Or, as the former Chancellor, actually put it:

"We realise we have got to present some substance, a bit more seriously."

All right, maybe that's not QUITE as exciting as my headline, but everyone was EXPECTING Mr Andy Marrmite to follow up his question to the Prime Monster:

"So, Mr Frown… what pills are YOU on?"

With a question to Mr Balloon of:

"So, Mr Balloon… what pills are YOU on?"

Instead it was a terribly OLD-FASHIONED interview: Mr Marrmite asked perfectly reasonable questions… and Mr Balloon refused to answer them. He really DOES thinks he's Prime Monster already!

Nevertheless, a lot of Conservatories have complained about the unfair treatment showed to Mr Balloon.

With the Irish voting "yes" to Lisbon in their referendum – and both the Poles and the Czechs saying it's quite likely that they will ratify the treaty soon – Mr Andy wanted to know if Mr Balloon would give a guarantee that we will have our own referendum on the treaty? Like he promised?

Mr Balloon's answer to that question appears to be: "I'm not going to answer that question because even though the Poles and the Czechs saying it's quite likely they will ratify, they haven't ACTUALLY ratified and that gives me a gnat's whisker of breathing room that I'm going to cling on to because I don't actually know what to do when they actually do!"

Or, as Mr Marrmite FINALLY put it: "You SAY, you know you're giving the rhetoric of a referendum - I want a referendum - but actually when you look at the detail you're NOT offering a referendum."

"I couldn't have described it more clearly," admitted Mr Balloon.

So that's Mr Balloon's final word on the subject: he SAYS he's offering something… but he's NOT really.

But blow me if Mr Marrmite didn't have to keep asking him again and again and again in order to get there!

I mean, just because he's spent the last four years sneering that the Government promised a referendum and then didn't give us one (never mind that the Government promised a referendum on a DIFFERENT treaty, the Constitution which failed) it hardly seems fair to ask Mr Balloon if he's going to keep his own promise to hold a referendum on the Lisbon treaty, now does it?

I mean, if you are the sort of person to demand over and over a straight answer from the other Parties, then you really really shouldn't have to GIVE straight answers as well, should you?

I mean, boo hoo hoo, it's not FAIR!

Of course, Mr Balloon's problem is that, having convinced the slathering hordes to let him FRONT the Conservatories (mainly by jumping into bed with latter-day Nasty Parties from Eastern Europe and Royally pi…bad-word-ing off some REAL European politicians like Ms Angular Meercat and Monsieur Sarcastic, as Germany's Europe Minister spells out), most of them now WANT him to say that he will have Mrs the Queen break HER word, and go back on a Treaty that we have already signed even if it's already the law.

Unfortunately, it would be a bit DICEY for him to come out and SAY this.

That's why they've come up with this formulation of "we only have one policy at a time"… and of course we all know that at the moment their ONE policy is "tax breaks for dead millionaires"… no, that can't be right?

Seriously, though: less than a year away from possibly being the Government themselves, does it not strike anyone as a bit ALARMING that the Conservatories are essentially refusing to have a Plan B for something that is entirely foreseeable as happening before Christmas?

How exactly is this supposed to give us confidence that they are going to handle the country well through the tricky and unpredictable weather of the post-recession dark times?

Mr Balloon himself, of course, rises to the occasion by becoming petulant and whiny:

"I think people at home will also be wondering well are they going to ask me questions about anything else," he sniveled at one point.

To which Mr Andy could quite reasonably have replied: "Well, I can ask you another question when you give me an answer to this one!"

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