TARDIS Eruditorum: An Unauthorized Critical History of Doctor Who Volume 7: Sylvester McCoy

Table of Contents

A Mad Man with a Blog (Introduction)

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea: Knights of God

The Evidence Was Not As I Remembered (Time and the Rani)

That’s It, I’ve Been Renewed (Paradise Towers)

The Late 50s! The Time Before Burgers! (Delta and the Bannermen)

Time Can Be Rewritten: The Fires of Vulcan

1987’s Just the Isle of Wight (Dragonfire)

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea: Marvelman

I Won’t Explain Its Secrets To You, And Its Philosophy of Movement (Remembrance of the Daleks)

When Was The Time War?

Put Life Into Anything Made of Plastic (The Happiness Patrol)

Cybermen Even (Silver Nemesis)

Rewrite History, Not One Line (The Greatest Show in the Galaxy)

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea: Press Gang, Doctorin’ the TARDIS

A Good Wizard Tricked (Battlefield)

Puny, Defenseless Bipeds (Ghost Light)

Take Hitler and Put Him in the Cupboard Over There (The Curse of Fenric)

Run For Your Life! (Survival)

Is Ace Queer?

Time Can Be Rewritten: Thin Ice

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea: Star Trek: The Next Generation

Time Can Be Rewritten: The Algebra of Ice

You Were Expecting Someone Else: Doctor Who in Video Games

You Were Expecting Someone Else: The Doctor Who Magazine Comics

Time Can Be Rewritten: Titan’s Seventh Doctor Comics

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea: Casualty

Then Suddenly, One Year, There Was No Spring (Timewyrm: Genesys, Timewyrm: Exodus, and Timewyrm: Apocalypse)

If You Were That Old, And That Kind (Timewyrm: Revelation)

Relics From the Old Time (Cat’s Cradle: Time’s Crucible)

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea: Snow Crash

All Grey And Misty (Cat’s Cradle: Warhead)

My Colossal Scheme Remains As It Was (Nightshade)

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time For Tea: Sandman

For the Sake of an Angel (Love and War)

Is it Always as Dark as This? (Transit)

One of His Funny Turns (The Highest Science)

We Call It (The Pit)

Are You Making All the Right Moves? (Deceit)

Those Monsters Were Faked (Lucifer Rising)

Before Light and Time and Space and Matter (White Darkness)

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea: Dark Season and Century Falls

We Must Look Like Insects to You (Birthright)

We’ll All Die of Sunburn on a Cloudy Day (Blood Heat)

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea: rec.arts.drwho

They’ve Made Me a Goddess (The Left-Handed Hummingbird)

This Was Altogether Impossible (Conundrum)

Outside the Government: Dimensions in Time, More Than 30 Years in the TARDIS, and The Dark Dimension

I Just Do the Best I Can (No Future)

I Am Perfectly Aware That Sherlock Holmes is a Fictional Character (All-Consuming Fire)

Time Can Be Rewritten: The Shadow of the Scourge

Vampires in the Stories are Just Pale Imitations of the Real Thing (Blood Harvest)

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea: The X-Files, Ghostwatch, and Twin Peaks

I’m Sorry Sir, You Have No Security Clearance (First Frontier)

Roundsomely Layered on the Bone (Warlock)

Like I Could Run Forever (Set Piece)

Has it Taught You Wonderful Things? (Human Nature)

Time Can Be Rewritten: Continuity Errors

I’m Not Paid to Have Opinions, Sir (Original Sin)

He Slipped in the Bilge Water (Sky Pirates!)

What More Could a Renegade Wish For? (Head Games)

The Greatest Specialist in Time-Space Exploration (The Also People)

Outside the Government: Downtime and The Airzone Solution

Surrender to the Glory (Shakedown)

Some Planet Called America (Warchild)

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea: ReBoot

Let Your Mind Wander When You’re Handing it Over (SLEEPY)

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea: Babylon 5

Time Can Be Rewritten: Happy Endings

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea: Sliders

The First Settlers Called it the Crystal Feast (Christmas on a Rational Planet)

The Select Few, All With Their Stories of the Doctor (Return of the Living Dad)

What the Rest of Us Do (Damaged Goods)

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea: Springhill

A Weapon, Just to Bring You Down (So Vile a Sin)

You’ve Got Some Battle Scars There (The Room With No Doors)

Absolutely Gobsmacked That I Did That: An Interview With Kate Orman

The Leaves on the Trees are Bright Silver (Lungbarrow)

Is He Half-Woven on His Mother’s Side?

Outside the Government: Oh No It Isn’t!

Now My Doctor: Sylvester McCoy

Acknowledgments

This has been a particularly harrowing book to get together, and so I should first of all thank my infinitely patient Kickstarter backers, who endured it alongside me, and who it is my sincerest pleasure to finally give this to.

Beyond that, the usual suspects: Jane Campbell once again whipped the prose into shape. James Taylor once again put it into an absolutely gorgeous package. (That stereogram!) Annie Fish contributed a fantastic guest essay. And the readers and community around my website, Eruditorum Press, helped me develop these ideas and kept me raptly interested as I posted my way through these essays.

On a more personal note, I would like to thank my family: Jill, Anna, and Penn, whose material and emotional support made this book possible.

And of course, thank you, dear reader.

A Mad Woman with a Blog (Introduction)

Why hello there! It looks like you bought a copy of the seventh volume of TARDIS Eruditorum, which I, as the writer, thank you for, because that probably means you have given me money. (If you haven’t given me money and downloaded this off the Internet, on the other hand, I hope you enjoy it and will consider not stealing future volumes, and/or buying a legitimate copy of this one.)

In the unlikely event that you have no idea what book you’re holding, let me explain to you, generally speaking, how this book works. First of all, here’s what it isn’t: a standard issue guidebook to Doctor Who. Yes, it contains individual essays on every Doctor Who story broadcast from the Sylvester McCoy era, and even more Seventh Doctor stories from other media. And those looking for the nitty-gritty facts of Doctor Who can probably get a decent sense of them by inference, but that’s not what this book is for. There are no episode descriptions, cast lists, or lengthy discussions of the behind-the-scenes workings of the show. There are dozens of books that already do that, and a fair number of online sites. Nor is this a book of reviews. For those who want those things, I personally recommend the Doctor Who Reference Guide, Doctor Who Ratings Guide, and A Brief History of Time (Travel)—three superlative websites that were consulted for basically every one of these essays.

Instead, this book attempts to tell the story of Doctor Who. Not the story of how it was made, or the overall narrative of the Doctor’s life, or anything like that, but the story of the idea that is Doctor Who, from its beginnings in late 1963 to… well, mid 1997 in the case of this book, but there’s more to come. Doctor Who is a rarity in the world—an extremely long-running serialized narrative. Even rarer, it’s an extremely long-running serialized narrative that is not in a niche like soap operas or superhero comics—both provinces almost exclusively of die-hard fans. Doctor Who certainly has its die-hard fans (or, as I like to think of you, my target audience), but notably, it’s also been, for much of its existence, absolutely mainstream family entertainment for an entire country.

What this means is that the story of Doctor Who is, in one sense, the story of the world from 1963 on. Politics, music, technological and social development, and all manner of other things have crossed paths with Doctor Who over the nearly fifty years of its existence, and by using Doctor Who as a focus, one can tell a story with far wider implications.

The approach I use to do this is one that I have dubbed, rather pompously I suppose, psychochronography. It draws its name from the concept of psychogeography—an artistic movement created by Guy Debord in 1955 and described as the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals. More contemporarily, the term is associated with writers like Iain Sinclair, who writes books describing lengthy walking tours of London that fuse his experience with the history of the places he walks, weaving them into a narrative that tries to tell the entire story of a place… and Alan Moore, who does the same thing while worshiping a snake.

Psychochronography, then, attempts the same feat by walking through time. Where walking through space involves little more than picking a direction and moving your feet rhythmically, walking through time without the aid of a TARDIS is a dodgier proposition. The easiest way is to take a specific object and trace its development through time, looking, as the psychogeographers do, at history, lived experience, and the odd connections that spring up.

And so this book is the first part of a walk through Doctor Who. The essays within it wear a lot of hats, and switch them rapidly. All involve a measure of critical reading (in the literary theory sense, not in the complaining sense) of Doctor Who stories to figure out what they are about. This generally means trying to peel back the onion skins of fan history that cloud a story with things everybody knows. But it also involves looking at the legacy of stories, which often means looking at that onion skin and trying to explain how it got there. No effort is made to disguise the fact that the first appearance of the Daleks is massive for instance, but on the other hand, this approach still looks carefully at what their initial impact might have been.

This approach also means looking at how a story would (and could) have been understood by a savvy viewer of the time, and at how the story can be read as responding to the concerns of its time. That means that the essays tend to be long on cultural context. And, in the end, it also means looking at how I personally interact with these stories. This book has no pretense of objectivity. It is about my walking tour of Doctor Who. I try to be accurate, but I also try to be me.

To fully grab the scope of the topic, in addition to the meat of the book, which this time includes not only all twelve televised Sylvester McCoy stories but a large swath of the Virgin New Adventures featuring him—there are four other types of entries. The first are the Time Can Be Rewritten entries. One peculiar feature of Doctor Who is that its past is continually revisited. The bulk of these came in the form of novels written in the ‘90s and early ‘00s, but there are other examples. At the time of writing, for instance, Big Finish puts out new stories every year featuring the first eight Doctors. These entries cover occasional highlights from such revisitations, using them as clues to how these earlier eras are widely understood.

The second are the Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea entries, which look at popular media and culture to build context for understanding Doctor Who. These entries usually crop up prior to the bits of Doctor Who they’re most relevant for, and provide background and points of comparison for the show as it wrestles with the issues of its many times.

Third, there are two categories of entries focusing on spinoff material: You Were Expecting Someone Else? entries, which deal with material like comics and roleplaying games, and Outside the Government, which deals with television spin-offs. These exist to give a broader sense of Doctor Who as a cultural object and, perhaps more importantly, because they’re kind of fun.

Finally, there are some essays just thrown into the book as bonuses. These mostly consist of me slogging my way through some established fan debate about Doctor Who and trying, no doubt fruitlessly, to provide the last word on the matter.

It’s probably clear by this point that all of these entries began as blog entries on my blog, also called TARDIS Eruditorum. This book version, however, revises and expands every entry, as well as adding several new ones—mostly Time Can Be Rewritten entries, but a few others.

To this end, I should thank the many readers of the blog for their gratifying and edifying comments, which have kept the project going through more than one frustrating stretch. I should also thank the giants upon whose shoulders I stand when analyzing Doctor Who—most obviously Paul Cornell, Martin Day, and Keith Topping for The Discontinuity Guide, David J. Howe, Mark Stammers, and Stephen James Walker for the Doctor handbooks, Toby Hadoke and Rob Shearman for Running Through Corridors, and Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood for the sublimely brilliant About Time series, to which this book is a proud footnote.

But most of all and most importantly, thank you, all of you. That means you, dear reader. I hope you enjoy.

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea: Knights of God

There’s a shift between the early and late 1980s that is difficult to articulate, but nevertheless crucial. The cultural moment of the late 80s—one that, in practice, extends a few years into the 90s—is clearly a vibrant one. To use TARDIS Eruditorum’s standard cultural metric of pop music, from say 1987 to 1990 you have The Joshua Tree, Straight Outta Compton, Disintegration, Pretty Hate Machine, Flood, and Violator. You’ve got the post-Watchmen rush of British talent into the US comics industry, the Second Summer of Love, a nice run of film with stuff like Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Tim Burton’s fir Batman movie, and Kindergarten Cop, and, for good measure, Doctor Who has a creative renaissance. The 1980s were always an era long on cultural potential, but where the 1960s and 1970s saw their cultural potential over-ripen and in their later years start to rot, the 1980s experienced a longer, slower gestation that reached its fullest bloom at the end.

Knights of God, which ran in 1987, airing the day before the episodes of Season Twenty-Four of Doctor Who, is clearly a part of this—a sudden flowering of the mostly dormant form of British children’s television. Which is interesting, as it was held back by two years and actually belongs to 1985, a very different era of television. And yet the delay is in many ways absolutely perfect—something that would have been a few years ahead of its time instead ends up being an iconic example of its time.

It’s not that the mid-80s were devoid of good British children’s television—Box of Delights dropped at the end of 1984, after all. But other than having Patrick Troughton in them, the two shows could scarcely be more different. Box of Delights is a short adaptation of a venerable children’s book—a smilingly conservative bit of popular culture that doesn’t want to ruffle any feathers. Knights of God, on the other hand, is an unexpected return of the sort of brash and unapologetic mode of Children of the Stones.

But, crucially, it’s not a return in any sort of retro nostalgia sense; Knights of God is not a revival of the mid-70s’ gothic aesthetic. Instead it’s a long overdue model for how to make children’s television that deals with the aesthetic concerns of the 1980s—one of many challenges that Doctor Who failed to rise to in the early 1980s. It’s worth turning our mind back to the last time we focused on children’s television, where we noted the specific challenge how to make children’s science fiction in an era where adult science fiction was dark and weird like Max Headroom, but we can just as easily look to Dune, which, after all, was made at about the same time as Knights of God.

It’s not, obviously, that children’s television can’t be dark. Indeed, for the most part good children’s television is defined by an aggressive darkness—again, Children of the Stones comes to mind. Rather, it’s that in the end children’s television tends to be about making the bewildering understandable, which means that while estrangement might be a tool along the way—indeed, a very important tool—it’s rarely the endpoint in the way that it is for, say, David Lynch, or indeed for much of the vibrant popular culture of the period. (Go look again at that list of albums in the first paragraph.) Part of the cultural ripening of the 1980s was that the ostentatious gaudiness of early-80s approaches steadily gave way to a sort of angry depression. And 1987, with Thatcher’s third election, is certainly a key date in that progression.

Enter Knights of God. On the one hand, it’s a searing, angry dystopia positing a fascist futuristic Britain in which the north and Wales have been brutally subjugated by the eponymous Knights of God. It’s not the sort of actively weird estrangement of, say, Max Headroom, but it’s vividly unsettling in precisely the way Box of Delights is not. The opening shots of the credits sets the tone well: a burning Union Jack and an ominous fleet of helicopters flying toward the camera. And the plot has similarly pointy sharp edges. The regions of Britain to hold out against the Knights of God—Wales and the north—are the same ones hit hardest by Thatcher’s tenure. All of this points towards a venomous piece of disillusioned dystopia.

On the other hand, the basic plot—a young boy discovers he’s the secret king of Britain and goes through some Arthurian symbolism in the course of overthrowing the Knights—is fairly standard light reskinning of an existing mythology stuff that one would expect to populate a lot of children’s television, and with a distinctly nationalist tone that’s closer to a natural ally of fascism than the show would like to pretend. So while there’s a willingness to be edgy, there’s still a clear instinct to be comfortable and familiar as well.

So far this isn’t anything new, though it is something about which we’ve found much to respect in the past. Freely mixing edginess and familiarity has basically been Doctor Who’s M.O. from the start. More broadly, what Knights of God is doing by mixing fascist dystopia and Knights of the Round Table is the sort let’s mix two sets of narrative codes approach to storytelling that Doctor Who started doing reliably and well in the Tom Baker era. It’s an approach that has fueled most of the best Doctor Who stories since that era too, if we’re being honest.

But in this case there’s a tough spot—the basic fact that disillusioned and dystopic depictions of fascist Britain and a King Arthur adventure aren’t just two different sets of narrative codes, they’re two different sets of narrative codes that actively jar at best, and at worst go together in the wrong way, with the nationalist tone of the mythology making it an allegory about evil fascism being defeated by cuddly fascism. Much like panto and a dramatic piece about domestic violence and its aftermath turned out to combine with spectacular lack of success at the dawn of the Colin Baker era, this combination risks being really unpleasant and uncomfortable.

But let’s think for a moment about why The Twin Dilemma was so bad—indeed, why much of the Saward era was problematic. The trouble was that Saward had an unfortunate tendency of flaunting his supposed edginess in a way that badly overestimated just how edgy he was being. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that all of the problem with The Twin Dilemma comes down to this, but certainly a part of it is that the show is clearly going. Oh look, we’ve got a violent and unpredictable Doctor, isn’t this dramatic? while the audience is going, You have a man in the worst coat ever made in a story about a giant slug with a deely bopper, and so having him try to strangle a woman isn’t dramatic, it’s just horrid. That is to say, The Twin Dilemma swings for drama and hits stupid panto, which is bathetic.

Knights of God makes a savvy move to avoid this. For the most part, it’s content to act like children’s television. It never over-emphasizes its darkness or strains to wring added drama from proceedings. Instead it plugs along as a lightly remixed Arthurian adventure and allows the bits of it that are more serious and unnerving to cut against that. It’s a small but significant thing. Instead of aiming for drama and ending up a bit silly, Knights of God purports to be light children’s entertainment and then goes further than it should for that.

This is a good general principle to hold to when crossing genres, particularly those of differing levels of seriousness: it’s better to have hidden depths than appear oblivious to your own shallowness. And it’s a lesson that Andrew Cartmel is going to quickly start applying to Doctor Who over the first stretch of this book. Indeed, this can fairly be described as the basic approach of the Cartmel era. It goes back to making stuff that feels like children’s television, but constantly bristles with deeper implications. This isn’t just children’s television that works for adults too, but something more fundamental. The depths are visible, if not always entirely understandable, to children, and the show is far more compelling for it.

Indeed, this approach is more compelling than the maturity in play even in the Colin Baker stories that worked. As an adult I can see perfectly well that Vengeance on Varos is brilliant and satirical, but as a kid this was largely invisible to me. Whereas I knew that stories like Survival or Ghost Light had things going on that I didn’t quite understand, and they were altogether more compelling for it. Knights of God isn’t a show I saw as a child, but it has that same approach down where it’s clear that there’s something bigger and darker lurking about in the subtext.

Ironically, the trick to hinting at these depths is to have actors who don’t play towards them. Knights of God does this well, casting actors who are both experienced with children’s television and skilled at drama. Gareth Thomas, Patrick Troughton, John Woodvine, and Julian Fellowes are confident enough in their acting ability to play their scenes as straightforward drama. Woodvine occasionally stops to gnaw gently upon the scenery, but his overacting remains firmly within the range of what is normal for children’s television villains, and if you can’t have a light scenery snack when playing a fascist dictator when can you? Generally speaking, however, the actors neither overstress nor undermine the serious portions of the show. This lets the larger darkness of the series lurk about the edges, having been given enough room to exist and thrive by the actors’ seriousness without being foregrounded.

It’s not a foolproof strategy. The problem with hidden depths is that they often end up being rather shallow, or even glib. For all that it’s compelling, for instance, Knights of God trends uncomfortably towards a dictatorial monarchism of its own in its endless focus on how a good king will rise up and rule everybody wisely and justly. There’s something off about the ethics of the show—something that stems in part from its hopelessly compromised relationship with nationalism, but also from the fact that there’s something wilfully facile about positioning children’s adventure stories as a valid opposition to fascism.

There is, in other words, still that lurking problem of bathos. Foregrounding the lighter half of the juxtaposition reduces the danger and makes for something compelling, but there’s still, at the end of the day, the problem that children’s television is limited in its capacity for the avant garde or for serious social commentary. There’s a constant danger of glibness. Or perhaps even worse, there’s a slight inevitability of glibness. No matter what you do with it, the uncanniness that is so compelling within this approach remains a weakness as well.

But equally, this fusion opens doors that other approaches just can’t touch. There’s something about pitting Arthurian legends against a stand-in for Thatcherism that is compelling. (Indeed, some of that is the very nationalism that poses a problem: there’s power in an opposing myth of what Britain is.) If it lacks virtue as a fully functional piece of serious thought about political issues, well, fine, but this doesn’t make what it does offer any less potent. So much of pragmatic politicking these days hinges on the realization that people think about the world narratively. And children’s television has access to a set of narratives that are deeply powerful. The iconography of children’s stories makes up for its lack of seriousness in its ability to be haunting and striking.

And beyond that, what good are our childhood mythologies if they cannot be pitted against our adult demons? We do not need King Arthur to defeat Margaret Thatcher any more than we need him to defeat the schoolyard bully. That’s not his purpose or his value. Our imaginary heroes exist to defeat the imaginary dimensions of these things. And children’s television is unique in its ability to make use of that. Children’s television that thinks to turn that tool towards things not normally confronted by imaginary heroes is a striking idea worth taking seriously. Imperfection is not the opposite of good.

And Knights of God is good. It’s very good, in fact. It’s gripping, it’s well-made, it’s well-acted. It’s the sort of show that worms its way into your consciousness as a kid. And, for our purposes most importantly, it’s a show that demonstrates how Doctor Who could be that while still making a real, material social engagement. It is, to put it another way, a map of alchemy.

It’s fitting, then, that this is the last television appearance of Patrick Troughton. Not the last thing he filmed, but the delay from 1985 to 1987 meant that it was the last thing to air that he appeared in. And this seems a good place to end—with a final nod to the man who did so much to map out the alchemy of Doctor Who. Here, for the last time, he gives a sense of what Doctor Who could be. And twenty-four hours after the first episode of it aired, we’d have a chance to see whether the new regime could make it work.

The Evidence Was Not As I Remembered (Time and the Rani)

It’s September 7th, 1987. Rick Astley is at number one with Never Gonna Give You Up, which is easier to make jokes about when you have hypertext than it is in print. It remains there for three weeks before being unseated by M/A/R/R/S with Pump Up The Volume/Anitina (The First Time I See She Dance). Also in the charts are Michael Jackson with Bad, Madonna with Causing a Commotion, U2 with Where The Streets Have No Name, and The Pet Shop Boys and Dusty Springfield with What Have I Done To Deserve This.

In real news since Colin Baker went down in a hail of carrot juice: British Gas and British Airways both go public. The highest ever audience for a British television drama tunes in for a grimly depressing EastEnders Christmas episode. Kurt Waldheim is barred from the United States, Klaus Barbie goes on trial in Lyon, and Rudolf Hess dies. Thatcher wins election to a third term, but we talked about that last time, and the Docklands Light Railway opens in London. In the papers the entire Spycatcher affair rumbles on, with The Daily Telegraph being sued in an attempt to block them from publishing details from the book, and Jeffrey Archer wins a libel trial against the Daily Star. He will go on to lose a perjury trial over his actions in the libel trial. Oh well. During this story, meanwhile, Pat Robertson announces that he’s running for President, Spycatcher gets published in Australia, and Star Trek: The Next Generation premieres. That gets a Pop Between Realities later, but it seems worth mentioning now.

Speaking of television, Sylvester McCoy makes his debut as the Doctor in Time and the Rani. Time and the Rani, obviously, is not very good. We might, if we wanted to, suggest that this was some sort of major problem that damaged the series and screwed over the rest of the Sylvester McCoy era, but let’s face it, it wasn’t. Ratings dropped after the first episode, but recovered healthily over the remainder of the season such that it’s difficult to blame Time and the Rani for any long-term damage to the show. It had already suffered fatal injuries. This was just one final kick to the stomach.

This is oddly liberating. For five seasons—arguably for nine—every bad story has required some larger contextualization in terms of the failings of the production team and some exploration into what specific role the offending story played in the downfall of Doctor Who. But here we’re free from that! It had nothing to do with the downfall of Doctor Who. There’s nothing left to explain here—we’re on a twelve-story run of bonus stories. The show is doomed, nothing save maybe for realizing that they could have promoted Remembrance of the Daleks as a stunning rebirth of the franchise could possibly have saved it, and we’re free to simply enjoy the steady improvement the show undergoes and the fact that it very quickly becomes better than it’s ever been before.

So, yes, Time and the Rani is rubbish for all the reasons you expect it to be rubbish, most of which are writers Pip and Jane Baker, but really, who cares? Not only does it not matter for once, what’s bad about this story isn’t even one of the most interesting things about it. What’s interesting about it are, frankly, the myriad of casually good things.

On a technical level, at least, this is much more solid than the show has generally been managing. This, in many ways, is part of an improvement that began with Trial of a Time Lord. The decision to switch entirely to video gives rise to a newfound unity in the look of the production. It also coincides with a willingness to use locations better and an increased savviness in camera placement and movement such that the flashes of brilliance that characterized Camfield or Maloney or Harper stories in the past suddenly become the norm. Time and the Rani is full of terribly clever bits like a cut from a bomb being disarmed to the Doctor accidentally blowing up a piece of equipment that leave the viewer momentarily believing the bomb went off. No, this isn’t going to win any Oscar for cinematography, but compare it to Timelash and its virtues are evident. Director Andrew Morgan gives his shots and editing a sense of physical space, using the distance between characters as part of the visual storytelling and moving characters around the set instead of leaving them in static lines across the screen as though they’re standing on stage.

Moving on, then, the writing. For all of its flaws, let’s not forget that this story had a genuinely massive mountain to climb in terms of writing. First stories for a Doctor are always tough, with the lead feeling his way into the part, generally hamstrung by a bunch of stupid post-regeneration trauma comedy. But in this case, with McCoy’s hiring happening barely a month before production, the situation was particularly dire. As good an actor as McCoy is—and we’ll talk about that in a minute, his opening scenes are tough to watch.

It’s to their credit that the Bakers come up with a good solution to the problem. If the Doctor isn’t going to be up to snuff in this story then pair him with Kate O’Mara’s Rani, a character who had already acted Anthony Ainley’s Master off the screen in her last appearance. And on top of that, cover up his first two episodes with the brilliantly ludicrous conceit of Kate O’Mara impersonating Bonnie Langford. Which is a genuinely clever way of papering over that crack. It’s notable that Time and the Rani doesn’t really start to drag until after the Rani’s ruse is exposed. The wheel-spinning of the first two episodes is genuine, but to be honest, Tat Wood’s declaration that episode one is the single worst episode of Doctor Who ever is simply bewildering. Much worse, for my money, is episode three, in which all pretense of comedy is drained away and we watch a still-not-quite-there Sylvester McCoy in a turgid Pip and Jane runaround through a quarry.

Yes, the Rani has flaws as a character and is at times annoying in her vapid campness. But Kate O’Mara can anchor a scene capably—indeed, she makes a fair meal out of some painful dialogue here. As bad as this story is, it ran the risk of being incoherent and having nothing at all to hold it together if they forced McCoy to the center too early. The decision to have this be Kate O’Mara’s show first and foremost steadied the ship considerably and gave McCoy the space to start to feel out his character while the episodes are carried by a rock-solid gag.

And McCoy, let’s be clear, is quite good here too. The usual (and utterly wrong) brief about McCoy’s three years are that his first season involved a lot of clowning around and then he settled down. This is based on two things, neither of which have a lot to do with his actual stories. The first is the fact that one of McCoy’s pre-Doctor Who jobs was as a physical comedian in roadshow comedy. The second is that, starting with Season Twenty-Five, the series takes a somewhat darker and more serious turn, and as a result everything prior to that turn is automatically relegated to being silly, which is, as ever, a bad word in Doctor Who circles.

In truth, both judgments are thoroughly off-base. Season Twenty-Four has some comedic stories, but with the arguable exception of Time and the Rani—and let’s face it, the Bakers weren’t trying for comedy—all of them have serious undertones. As for McCoy, well, this is a complete misunderstanding of him. Yes, he was a physical comedy clown. In the Ken Campbell Roadshow. But this is also the guy who did a nine-hour staging of Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus! trilogy. Clearly this is not quite as straightforward a career as stuffing ferrets down his trousers makes it sound. And that’s ignoring the fact that this wasn’t even McCoy’s first stab at a serious performance.

It is true that McCoy’s earliest training was in stage shows played to potentially indifferent or hostile audiences, and that he as a result internalized the crucial skill of being willing to do absolutely anything to win over an audience. It’s arguable that this leads to his one real failing in the part—his marked weakness in scenes in which he has to be angry or over the top—but for the most part it’s to his credit, keeping his Doctor constantly animated and active. Indeed, the more brooding, dark elements of his character that later come to define him are only really possible because of this aspect of McCoy’s performance. The skills he honed getting indifferent and intoxicated audiences to keep being entertained are the same ones he later uses to get away with the more somber Doctor he plays.

What’s interesting, then, is that McCoy, over the course of Time and the Rani, shrinks into his role. Or, perhaps more accurately, he fills the space he’s given with increasing thoroughness. He starts, unsurprisingly, with a broad and comedic scope, but between having Kate O’Mara vamping her way across the first two episodes and, I think, a growing realization that the part calls for something smaller, he draws inward. He learns quickly how to play the part so as to suggest hidden depths. Again, there’s an odd way in which the Bakers’ script benefits him here. The script spends two episodes with a lot of the plot hinging on the details of what the Doctor is thinking, which means that McCoy gets the opportunity to work at implying a vast and incomprehensible amount of thought under the surface.

By the end we routinely get moments that seem like what we all remember McCoy’s Doctor as being. Like the moment when he muses over what the Rani’s control over the universe would mean, commenting that, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Louis Pasteur, Elvis, even Mrs Malaprop will never have existed, is telling for its lack of bluster. It’s not delivered as a furious rejoinder to the Rani, but rather as though the Doctor is thinking through her plan and naming the first consequences that come to mind. Even much earlier, when the Doctor refers to that sad skeleton, the line is so strange in the particulars of its empathy as to suggest a Doctor who is simply imagining the world in a very different way than his predecessor ever seemed to.

The other thing to note is that for all the script’s flaws, like Bob Baker and David Martin before them, the Bakers do tend to have interesting ideas clanking about underneath all the rank incompetence at basic storytelling. The line that the barrier to understanding time is empirical thinking is deliciously suggestive, even if the Bakers don’t do anything at all with its implications.

These are, of course, all small things in the face of a story that is pointedly not good. But it is, I think, more sensible to look at this as the first step in a necessarily gradual process of improvement. It’s simply not possible to go from being the sort of show that does Trial of a Time Lord to the sort of show that does Remembrance of the Daleks in a single bound. That Doctor Who got there in just four stories is remarkable, and the fact that it’s not good yet after one story can’t be taken as grounds for criticism.

If we’re being honest, much of this story’s reputation comes from the circumstances surrounding its original airing. Watched without knowledge of the future, it was a terrifying moment of, Oh God, here we go again. But again, we don’t have to do that anymore. We know the series gets better, and so we can afford to look at this story in the context of that improvement. Its innovations are incremental, but they’re important ones that have a huge impact later on. Its flaws are massive, but they’re holdovers from an era that is already almost completely shoved out the door. Watched in the context of Doctor Who’s larger history, this is clearly more the beginning of improvement than it is a continuation of problems.

That’s It, I’ve Been Renewed (Paradise Towers)

It’s October 5th, 1987. M/A/R/R/S are at number one with Pump Up The Volume/Antina (The First Time I See She Dance). A week later The Bee Gees unseat them with You Win Again, while Erasure, Billy Idol, Bananarama, George Michael, and Pet Shop Boys also chart. As do The Sisters of Mercy, with This Corrosion, making this arguably the peak of gothic rock as a cultural force. Clearly a good omen for Doctor Who.

In real news, the south of England gets whacked with what is functionally a hurricane, killing twenty-three people and knocking out power across the region. The New York Stock Exchange jumps off a cliff to the tune of 22.61%, leading to similar fun on the London Stock Exchange. And Robert Bork’s nomination to the US Supreme Court is rejected. Unsettled times and gothic rock. Clearly a good omen for Doctor Who.

By most reckonings Paradise Towers does not fit the bill. Most reckonings are flatly wrong. I say this to make it clear that this is not one of my redemptive readings, as that phrase implies that there is something about the story requiring redemption. This is simply brilliant. Paradise Towers fits very smoothly into a lengthy tradition of literature and thought about housing. If we were to sketch a quick history of this, it would go something like this.

From the 1950s through the 1970s there was a bizarre little fad in architecture called Brutalism. You know the type of building—those horrific piles of angular concrete that scream out the era of their production like the muted eyesores they are. In practice brutalism marks the death throes of modernism. Modernism is a term that is perhaps even more devalued than postmodernism, which is an impressive feat when one stops to think about it. But for our purposes, the two most important things to note about modernism is that it aggressively rejected tradition, and yet it still put an enormous premium on notions of form and structure. If you want to boil it down to two maxims, you could do worse than Ezra Pound’s make it new and William Carlos Williams’s no ideas but in things. And these twin poles caused it to eventually fall awkwardly between both the right and the left. The right hated it because it was too non-traditional and because Hitler hated painters who were better than him, which is to say, virtually everybody. The left, on the other hand, noticed that an alarming number of modernists turned into fascists who were, after all, equally fond of throwing out the established order of things and replacing it with a rigidly designed new system. For instance, Ezra Pound.

After World War II, however, modernism broke out in architecture in a big way. The post-war fascination with technocracy and the sudden availability of lots of modernist architects who’d fled the Nazis meant that everybody wanted to do big urban renewal projects with grand designs and visions. Hence the rise of brutalism. The archetypal products of this were usually called housing projects (as in living in the projects) in the US, and in the UK they’re known as council estates (as in the backronym of chav as council housed and violent). That is to say, government-subsidized affordable housing.

Generally speaking, this went badly. The standard example is Pruitt-Igoe, a shoddily constructed block of housing that quickly degenerated into a crime-ridden nightmare and was demolished less than twenty years after its construction. The two extremes of this form a clear snapshot of this sort of modernism. On the one hand, Pruitt-Igoe was an unmitigated disaster of a construction. On the other, it was built by respected architects and was an acclaimed piece of architecture. The contrast led to the ironically derogatory phrase award-winning design to refer to something beloved by architectural critics and thus, by implication, almost certainly a piece of crap in practice.

For those who have been following the blog for a while, you may recall that we briefly dealt with J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition just under a year ago. Ballard, in his time, was one of the more scathing critics of this sort of modernism, and indeed, one of his better books was his 1975 novel High-Rise, about a modernist apartment block falling into a raging internal civil war. (It’s even got a key scene at the swimming pool.) This sort of thing was very much in vogue in the 1970s—a criticism of the technocratic structures that underlay modernism and of the fetishistic worship of spectacle that they entailed. It was a major theme of the early Pertwee era, with its initial anxieties over technocratic structures giving way to an embrace of glam. After which Ballard and his ilk kind of fell out of fashion.

But in the 1980s this line of thought experienced a revival as, under Thatcher, urban renewal became chic again, this time in the name of redevelopment for major corporate clients. In the UK the major example is the London Docklands, which went from a working class area of London to a herd of glass and steel white elephants. (Now we’re well into East London Redevelopment Act II: Olympic Boogaloo.) Like the first wave of modernist redevelopment this was based on the idea of fixing the bad areas of the city. Unlike the first wave, instead of fixing them by providing decent housing for the people who lived there, this wave sought to price them out and get them to move somewhere—anywhere else.

This led to the rise of a second wave of concern about modernism and its effects on ordinary people. But this second wave had some interestingly different concerns. Where the first wave had mostly been critical of the way in which totalitarian modernist visions crushed individuals and led to depraved social conditions, the second wave was interested in finding an alternative to the totalitarianism. The alternative of choice has generally been community-based strategies, in which local community groups band together to produce their own cooperative solutions to their problems, developing functional structures around their behavior instead of imposing them from above. Much of the sharpest opposition to austerity programs in the UK has come from these perspectives—ones that heavily inform the political thought of Rowan Williams as well, and, for that matter, of Barack Obama, whose role as a community organizer basically meant doing this stuff.

This second wave is, indirectly, a big influence on this blog. One of the people to come out of the late 80s’ critique of modernism was Iain Sinclair, a brilliantly obscurantist chronicler of the material East London who, in turn, became a mid-career inspiration for Alan Moore, whose work has increasingly combined Sinclair’s psychogeography with Moore’s fascination with Ideaspace, tracking the imaginary geographies of things—an idea that led directly to my discarding the physical geography entirely and taking an idle stroll across an entirely imaginary landscape of memory. And Moore’s more recent work—particularly his sprawling and self-professedly modernist novel Jerusalem—has focused very explicitly on the failing council houses of his native Northampton and the practical lives of the impoverished in his own community.

Paradise Towers fits completely in this tradition. Kroagnon, the Great Architect who despised how people ruined his perfect designs, is a straightforward parodic critique of the modernist architect. The devolution of Paradise Towers from beautiful planned community to urban warzone is right out of Ballard. The equivalence between Kroagnon and zombies is a flat-out lift from Romero’s Dawn of the Dead and its mall setting. Paradise Towers, through and through, is a contribution to this tradition of thought.

Tat Wood, in About Time, notes that it is the first story in some time to have no references to previous stories. This is a telling detail that explains at least part of why the story is unloved. The fact of the matter is that Doctor Who has, for several years now, been catering primarily to an audience of fans. Fandom is an exceedingly middle class practice, based as it is on a surplus of leisure time and the disposable income to fritter away on Dapol action figures, Target novelizations, trips to conventions, and other such commercial product. This fact is largely responsible for the maddening sociopathy of mainstream science fiction fandom—it’s a self-selected group of reasonably affluent people focused on capitalist production. They are myopic by design.

A story about modernism and council estates is, in other words, utterly removed from anything that a fan in the Ian Levine model would ever care about. And to be frank, large numbers of people who talk about Paradise Towers simply don’t seem remotely aware of the larger literary tradition it fits into. They treat it as a naff runaround with silly concepts. And this inevitably makes it look like a much, much weaker story than it is. Which is fine—Tat Wood’s observation of the way in which it breaks from past stories by not catering to fans is telling. This isn’t a Doctor Who story for Doctor Who fans. It’s a Doctor Who story for the British public—an attempt to think of Doctor Who as an alternative to Coronation Street, which, notably, the BBC was putting it up against in a fairly blatant attempt to kill it off. (Michael Grade famously proclaimed that nobody watched both shows, an impressive misreading of Doctor Who fandom.)

To put it another way, Paradise Towers marks a return to a very old conception of what Doctor Who is based on the bygone utopian models of what the BBC is. It’s a story that is simultaneously tackling issues of concern to working class segments of society and framing them in terms of a larger and highbrow philosophical debate—in other words, it has something to say to large swaths of British society and that, more importantly, speaks to them as part of a unified whole. This used to be what the BBC was about and what it was for. This used to be what Doctor Who was for. About the only people really excluded from the audience to whom Paradise Towers attempts to be relevant are sad sack anoraks. Unfortunately, they were the only audience left, but that’s neither here nor there.

There is, however, a pesky set of grounds for criticism. This is ostensibly trying to go for Ballard-esque 2000 AD-inflected dystopias of street gangs and cannibal old women running around a council estate. Unfortunately, it looks like a children’s panto. This is somewhat dissonant, in much the same way that that claim is somewhat understated. But most of the criticisms of it miss the point. The usual line of critique is that Richard Briers as the Chief Caretaker overacts. Which, yes, he does. The thing is, everyone overacts. It’s one thing when there’s one jarring note in the acting that skews a production. But here the entirety of the acting is skewed in the same direction. The Kangs are too old to be a child street gang and don’t so much act like a street gang as like a childish approximation thereof. The Rezzies are over the top. Pex is a completely inadequate parody of an action hero. And yes, Richard Briers is channeling his inner John Cleese in portraying a fascist authoritarian.

But look at that list—everything is pushed towards a broad and theatrical sort of children’s television. Paradise Towers isn’t a Ballardian dystopia screwed up by bad acting. It’s a Ballardian dystopia performed as broad-stroked children’s television. It is, in other words, a completely consistent genre fusion in which one of the genres is postmodernist social commentary and the other is low-rent children’s television.

Of course, fusing two flavors together is not an inherently good idea. But in this case there’s a pleasant logic to it. Both children’s television and Ballard have a strong commitment to a sort of wild excess. They are considerably closer than they might appear. The only reason to fault this, in other words, is if you really think that the discussions of anal sadism are the whole point of The Atrocity Exhibition. If, on the other hand, what you favor is its inventiveness and its sense of manic glee, Paradise Towers will be right up your alley.

And more to the point, Paradise Towers is a riff on what is, in 1987, a twelve-year-old book. It’s not like High-Rise is brand spanking new and innovative anymore. A piece that just wallows gleefully in the sick and twisted nature of High-Rise is going to be little more than Vengeance on Varos without as much self-awareness. On top of that, it was never going to work on Doctor Who, both because the BBC was never going to let outright Ballard go out under the Doctor Who banner, even in a later timeslot, and because Doctor Who was never going to be able to afford it anyway.

Whereas Doctor Who can nail low-rent children’s television in its sleep. And children’s television Ballard carries all of the frisson that Ballard could stoke in the 1970s. The dissonance between the story’s apparent mood and its actual content is substantive. Ballard was always trading on the tradition of the grotesque, which the overacting is still perfectly compatible with. The tension between what the show is about and how it’s being performed is tangible—which is to say that all of the grotesqueries are more noticeable through their absence than they ever could be through presence in 1987.

There’s also a pleasant charm to be had in the compatibility of the underlying messages. On the one hand the ending is a mawkish festival of but we need to put aside our differences and work together. On the other hand this is exactly how social alliances for the purposes of community organization work—people come together on the basis of shared goals like improving their living areas or not being murdered by evil cleaning robots. Yes, there’s the vague threat of bathos that risks making the serious and important point about what effective action in the face of totalitarianism is look like cheap sentimentality, but it’s a relatively minor risk. For the most part it comes off.

The easiest way to put this is that Paradise Towers gets away with being Ballard for kids. But this undersells what it accomplishes. It’s not just kid-friendly Ballard, it’s a new take on what Ballard is doing. The introduction of children’s television isn’t just a shift in audience, it’s a materially new perspective on the concepts that deserves to be taken seriously on its own merits and terms.

In the end, to criticize Paradise Towers we have to suggest that children’s television adaptations of Ballard that are about the failures of modernism is a bad thing. We can certainly make that case if we want to, but frankly, if that’s not something you’re interested in it’s not entirely clear why you’re watching Doctor Who in the first place. Doctor Who is the only thing on the planet that could ever pull off stories like this.

Is Paradise Towers flawless? God no. It’s a slightly lumpy thing, and it’s easy to see why some of the ten stories remaining in the classic series go over better. But it’s an astonishing thing, brilliant in ways that Doctor Who hasn’t been in years, trying some audacious and radical stuff throughout. It’s at once a clear return to the actual legacy of what Doctor Who used to be—its purpose, as opposed to its iconography—and a genuinely new take that’s bang on target for the year it’s airing in.

This is, in other words, it. The moment where Doctor Who turned it around. We’re now in an eleven story run where quality is the norm and disasters are an aberration, and, at a minimum, a ten-year run in which Doctor Who is consistently good with regular outbreaks of genius. We’re finally at a point where the show is not only brilliant again, but one where the trajectory from here to the present day is, save for one brief but calamitous downturn in the mid-90s, one of almost constant improvement.

Welcome back.

The Late 50s! The Time Before Burgers! (Delta and the Bannermen)

It’s November 2nd, 1987. The Bee Gees are at number one with You Win Again, but are unseated only a week later by T’Pau with China In Your Hand, which remains for the rest of this story. George Harrison, Rick Astley, George Michael, Fleetwood Mac, and Whitney Houston also chart, as do Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes with (I’ve Had) The Time Of My Life. This being spectacularly unpromising, we ought peruse the lower charts where The Smiths, Boy George, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Public Enemy, Suzanne Vega, and The Sisters of Mercy all appear.

In spoken-word news, eleven people are killed by an IRA bomb in Enniskillen. A worker revolt in Brasov, Romania takes place, another crack in the facade of Soviet Eastern Europe. London City Airport opens, and customs officers in Southampton seize over £50 million in cocaine. Also, the government announces that the Community Charge, also known as the poll tax, will be taking effect in 1990; this can only end well for Thatcher. Finally, a fire in the London Underground kills thirty-one people two days after the story ends.

While on television, Delta and the Bannermen. But let’s pause for a moment here and jump forward a quarter-century. In October of 2011 the American sitcom Community, beloved by American Doctor Who fans for an ongoing parody of Doctor Who within the show entitled Inspector Spacetime, aired an episode titled Epidemology. The conceit of the episode was that a Halloween party at the community college where the series takes place is infected with a disease caused by tainted army surplus rations that leads to a zombie epidemic. The episode is, in effect, a half-hour zombie film. In which the soundtrack—the iPod playlist that the Dean had been playing at the party—consists entirely of ABBA songs. The episode was enormously popular among fans of the show and critics, and is generally seen as one of the show’s finest hours. And rightly so—it’s clever, it’s funny, and it creates a coherent fusion of an unlikely and frankly completely mad set of ingredients.

Why, then, is Delta and the Bannermen, created a quarter century earlier, largely despised? It is, after all, a gritty action movie featuring a bunch of Kurosawa-homage mercenaries attempting an alien genocide that’s set in a Welsh holiday camp in the 1950s, features a bunch of aliens disguised as rockabillies, and features a soundtrack consisting of Keff McCulloch covers and pastiches of 50s rock music. And its title is a parody of a goth rock band for good measure. This is, on the face of it, the same basic concept of Epidemology.

The usual brief against this story, as with all of Season 24, is that it is silly. Doctor Who, apparently, is not comedy. This is a line of thought that plagued the Graham Williams era as well, and it was patently ridiculous then, based as it is on the false nostalgia for the past that willfully ignores the fact that Doctor Who was doing comedies in its first season. Much like Paradise Towers, it’s very tempting to accuse this story’s critics of being so invested in Doctor Who nostalgia that they’ve missed the fact that this, not Attack of the Cybermen or The Mark of the Rani, is what Doctor Who was actually like for most of its history. To criticize this story—or Paradise Towers before it, or, to a slightly lesser extent, Dragonfire after it—one has to accept a set of standards for Doctor Who other than it combined familiar elements in a new way that wouldn’t be possible on any show other than Doctor Who. And that’s been the reigning standard for Doctor Who for most of its history.

Throughout the Davison years I discussed a concept that, borrowing from Miles and Wood, I called heritage theme park Britain. This term apparently confused some