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Doctor Who: Jackie Tyler Leaves the TV On
One of the most interesting things that the success of Doctor Who has done at the BBC is to rejuvenate the concept of hit broadcast drama. A hit means all the family watch, every family watches. Broadcast means that the primary means of getting to see the show is to watch it on a Saturday night. That is to say, it’s not just a show for people who carefully avoid whatever’s on either side of the few shows they like, and are otherwise away with their DVD boxed sets of American shows and their Xbox 360s. (People like me, that is, whose only broadcast fixtures right now are Veronica Mars and The West Wing, with nothing on terrestrial TV.) It’s also a show for people who leave the TV on all the time, tuned to BBC1 or ITV1. People like, as we discovered in the episode ‘Doomsday’, Rose’s Mum Jackie Tyler.
This is a significant change of direction for the BBC. Or rather a reversion to an ancient, and slightly forgotten, principle. For a while there, it looked as if the cutting edge of the Corporation had migrated to New Media. The prevailing wisdom was that families no longer watched TV together. This is simply not true. But the concept had gained a foothold, perhaps because those who look towards the future tend to think that future has already arrived, and because those that look towards the future in Britain tend to have a dystopian tinge to their thinking. In other words, the family is dead just like kids are running wild in the streets and the police are powerless to deal with them.
So it took a Russell to invest in the mainstream once more, to put the cutting edge in primetime, and not on a website, a mobile phone or a PC screen. (The series does those as sideshows, not the central gig.) To do that, he had to call upon what had previously made Doctor Who a primetime show. That is, a show unlike any other SF or fantasy genre programme ever except The X-Files (and that only in the USA). Buffy: never a primetime hit. Star Trek: never, in any incarnation. So there’s loads of humour, there’s a continual relevance to home and hearth, there are familiar recurring characters and familiar human relationships, and any big concepts are introduced lightly and simply.
Indeed, it could be said that if at the heart of science fiction is ‘cognitive estrangement’, that is: we’re way far from home and boggling at the huge new ideas we’ve been thrown into the middle of, then Doctor Who, particularly but not entirely in its new incarnation, isn’t actually SF. Because this is a cosy, familiar universe where Big Brother exists billions of years hence, where the cosmos was ruled by a bunch of British civil servants who use phrases like ‘face lift’ and where, by the look of the fashions, in the far future Top Shop is still in business.
(I would go on here about how the lovely new Battlestar Galactica has done something similar while also keeping big SF tropes going, but this is a blog, not a novel.)
Not that the rather craven phrase ‘it’s not SF’ has ever escaped Russell’s lips. Unlike those of virtually every other SF TV producer who craves such a mainstream audience, but runs a show about things the mainstream audience think they need a degree to understand.
The reception of this re-positioning amongst the Doctor Who fan community could generally be summed up as: ‘who cares as long as it’s a hit?’ Doctor Who fans now find themselves in the rather odd position of everyone once more knowing about the thing that used to be their terrifying and private love. It’s like Doctor Jekyll’s potion becoming available on the NHS. For a lot of fans, that was all they ever wanted. They are mainstream folk at heart, and this means that all has now reverted to being as it should be. (And who of us could say there’s anything wrong with that?) These guys are a bit suspicious of women’s ‘squee’ fandom, and other kinds of fandom that have evolved entirely within fanspace.
But for another group of fans, those who’ve always seen themselves as living outside the city gates of mainstream culture, it’s a more awkward proposition. Some of them accept the need for the changes, but look down on the audience they’re designed for: the mob need their bread and circuses. (Although ‘comic book guy’ in The Simpsons has the sublime disdain typical of our culture down to a fine art, part of the fan stereotype that nobody ever notes in comedy is that online we tend to talk like the members of a Victorian gentlemen’s club. One day I’m going to go on Outpost Gallifrey and declare my intention to travel around the world in eighty days. ‘I for one,’ someone will say, ‘welcome that’.)
Some of them campaign for things to be more like they used to be. These are the guys for whom the Dalek/Cybermen battle was the meaningful bit of ‘Doomsday’, and who ache that time was wasted on Rose and her family. Some of them think of the new series as a simple betrayal. All these sorts of fans are probably the DVD/Xbox 360 guys I mentioned above. They like their SF, not their British telly, and often not the non-SF bits of new Doctor Who.
The broadcast mainstream/narrowcast cult divide is something Russell Davies has always been aware of and interested in. In Bob and Rose, it’s not so much that he’s gay and she’s not, it’s that he knows catchphrases from The Simpsons and she’s never seen it. That doesn’t make her a bad person. (Were any of us thinking it did? Maybe a few of us in our more Fan Power moments. Maybe me at my most angry.) Her set of life choices never could make her a bad person. It’s a great example of what I’d call Russell’s central moral axiom: it’s not which faction you belong to, it’s what you do given that.
That section of fandom that regards ‘mundanes’ as lesser beings gets both rightly assaulted and also, perhaps surprisingly to those on the end of that assault, shown a lot of understanding in his work. Because here’s another of Russell’s axioms: taking any definitive stand makes you both a heroic upstanding individual and, also, suspect. Being too certain of anything, even something we’ve seen to be right and good in the context of the drama, is in itself wrong. Hence Prime Minister Harriet Jones, as utter an author point of view character as you’ll find anywhere, can suddenly be seen to be absolutely against our hero when she destroys the alien craft in the Christmas special. Hence Queen Victoria: hero and villain.
That, in effect, says that even the authorial point of view is suspect. That one’s own moral choices must be examined and interrogated continually. That you are not the hero just because you’re the one telling your own story. It’s a very Christian trait. I hope that if this most joyously atheist of writers is reading this, he takes that for the compliment it’s meant to be.
Oh, and there’s cognitive estrangement for you too. Interrogating one’s own volition isn’t exactly mainstream thought these days.
I’d guess he keeps coming back to that principle for a reason other than a moral one. Drama isn’t your puppy, it’s a tiger. It’s not meant to make you comfortable. It’s meant to make you feel alive. As I found out when The Second Coming bit me on the arse and made me realise that, like a lot of people I don’t respect, I can think something is blasphemous too. Russell doesn’t regard his own faction as immune from this examination and interrogation either. Bob and Rose, for daring to say the gay community had its own bigotries and hatreds, made the man who wrote Queer as Folk a bit of a pariah amongst his most obvious audience.
So there he is, look, outside the gates of his own city, with you and me and all the people who don’t do broadcast TV. But he does broadcast TV. He is the writer he is because, like me, he goes and drinks in that city and stays with friends there and sometimes enjoys it so much that he doesn’t come back to his little shack outside the gates for days. But the little shack has been home since childhood and will always be.
All this is leading up to me talking about my favourite episode of Doctor Who. It’s one that the general public and the fan consensus disliked equally, considering the Audience Appreciation Index and the online polls. And that shouldn’t be such a shock, because, to the comfort of Who fans, fan reaction is, in general, only an underlined version of what the mainstream is thinking.
My favourite episode of Doctor Who is ‘Love & Monsters’, the One With Peter Kay. It broke format and that’s always fun, but what was stunning about it was its depiction of fan culture as a vital, gorgeous, force. Elton’s folk, the ‘fans of the Doctor’, were diverse, artistic and creative, supportive and loving.
Some of the criticism the episode got is because the dark side of that culture showed up, in the form of the villain Victor Kennedy, selfishly trying to own the thing he loved, bullying other fans. Some of the criticism is because the fans looked like outsiders, were not laid back, utterly mainstream ‘normal’ people. Some of the criticism, and okay, maybe there’s some validity to this one, is because you can’t celebrate a rebel culture while at the same time trying to legislate on what parts of it are good and bad.
But these doubts are mostly wrong-headed. It’s as whole-hearted a celebration of a way of life as any the writer who always interrogates that which he loves has written. Look at that radical final line: this life of odd dislocation from the mainstream, of very personal and difficult moral choices, isn’t just different: ‘it’s better’. It’s better.
You wouldn’t even hear that on Veronica Mars. (Although the episode ‘Drinking the Kool Aid’ nearly said it out loud.) Only someone who knows the mainstream, who writes for broadcast, entirely has the moral right to say it. And I’m very glad he did.
As Leonard Cohen once put it about his own outsider status in the celebrity world, the distance between Manhattan and Berlin: ‘I’d really like to live beside you baby. I love your body, and your spirit, and your clothes. But you see that line that’s passing through the station: I told you, I was one of those.’
Announcements:
ITEM! This year’s Faringdon Arts Festival was excellent, and attracted a large audience. It’s growing every year. Dave Price brought his excellent fan-made Dalek along and exhausted himself giving delighted children Dalek rides all day on Saturday, and deserves much applause. The Society for Creative Anachronism also put in hard work to great effect. Some photos from the Friday night are here:
http://www.digitalcane.co.uk/gallery_29161.html
And you can still book for the following FAF events: ex-Squeeze singer Glenn Tilbrook in concert with his band The Fluffers (29th July, £15) and a dinner event with impressionist Rory Bremner (15th September, £45), details from 01367 243663.
ITEM! Anyone in the neighbourhood of Oxfordshire or Wiltshire who’s about on the night of Thursday August 3rd might like to pop along to my wife’s first professional gig as part of a band, at the Portwell Bar in Faringdon, from 8.30pm.. Admission free. They play country rock/folk covers and soon some of their own material, and still seek a name. Suggestions might be fun.
ITEM! The lovely Nick Pegg, who pilots a Dalek on TV’s Doctor Who, is also a professional writer of pantomimes, and has several out this Christmas. I can thoroughly recommend them. Patrons of the Harrogate Theatre in Yorkshire will be treated to Sleeping Beauty:
www.harrogatetheatre.co.uk/ht05/production.asp?prodID=112
The Queen's Theatre in Hornchurch, Essex (on the District Line) will be presenting Jack and the Beanstalk:
www.queens-theatre.co.uk/jackandthebeanstalk.htm
While north of the border, the MacRobert Theatre in Stirling offers Aladdin:
www.macrobert.stir.ac.uk/MACROBERT/whatson/index.htm (Click “live” on the blue bar, and then on the next page click the little blue box that says “Christmas”.)’
ITEM! The writers and editors involved in the production of the new Doctor Who short story anthology The Centenarian have started a blog about the process. I for one welcome it:
http://thecentenarian.blogspot.com/
ITEM! Chris Roberson, who always seems to find these cool clips, directed me to this hilarious revoiced Darth Vader, which is a work of genius:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6A0rwG39Jzk
ITEM! And for those of you who don’t like emo in your Who, here’s an alternative, and very funny ending, to ‘Doomsday’:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3F0qUmeRI7E
This is a significant change of direction for the BBC. Or rather a reversion to an ancient, and slightly forgotten, principle. For a while there, it looked as if the cutting edge of the Corporation had migrated to New Media. The prevailing wisdom was that families no longer watched TV together. This is simply not true. But the concept had gained a foothold, perhaps because those who look towards the future tend to think that future has already arrived, and because those that look towards the future in Britain tend to have a dystopian tinge to their thinking. In other words, the family is dead just like kids are running wild in the streets and the police are powerless to deal with them.
So it took a Russell to invest in the mainstream once more, to put the cutting edge in primetime, and not on a website, a mobile phone or a PC screen. (The series does those as sideshows, not the central gig.) To do that, he had to call upon what had previously made Doctor Who a primetime show. That is, a show unlike any other SF or fantasy genre programme ever except The X-Files (and that only in the USA). Buffy: never a primetime hit. Star Trek: never, in any incarnation. So there’s loads of humour, there’s a continual relevance to home and hearth, there are familiar recurring characters and familiar human relationships, and any big concepts are introduced lightly and simply.
Indeed, it could be said that if at the heart of science fiction is ‘cognitive estrangement’, that is: we’re way far from home and boggling at the huge new ideas we’ve been thrown into the middle of, then Doctor Who, particularly but not entirely in its new incarnation, isn’t actually SF. Because this is a cosy, familiar universe where Big Brother exists billions of years hence, where the cosmos was ruled by a bunch of British civil servants who use phrases like ‘face lift’ and where, by the look of the fashions, in the far future Top Shop is still in business.
(I would go on here about how the lovely new Battlestar Galactica has done something similar while also keeping big SF tropes going, but this is a blog, not a novel.)
Not that the rather craven phrase ‘it’s not SF’ has ever escaped Russell’s lips. Unlike those of virtually every other SF TV producer who craves such a mainstream audience, but runs a show about things the mainstream audience think they need a degree to understand.
The reception of this re-positioning amongst the Doctor Who fan community could generally be summed up as: ‘who cares as long as it’s a hit?’ Doctor Who fans now find themselves in the rather odd position of everyone once more knowing about the thing that used to be their terrifying and private love. It’s like Doctor Jekyll’s potion becoming available on the NHS. For a lot of fans, that was all they ever wanted. They are mainstream folk at heart, and this means that all has now reverted to being as it should be. (And who of us could say there’s anything wrong with that?) These guys are a bit suspicious of women’s ‘squee’ fandom, and other kinds of fandom that have evolved entirely within fanspace.
But for another group of fans, those who’ve always seen themselves as living outside the city gates of mainstream culture, it’s a more awkward proposition. Some of them accept the need for the changes, but look down on the audience they’re designed for: the mob need their bread and circuses. (Although ‘comic book guy’ in The Simpsons has the sublime disdain typical of our culture down to a fine art, part of the fan stereotype that nobody ever notes in comedy is that online we tend to talk like the members of a Victorian gentlemen’s club. One day I’m going to go on Outpost Gallifrey and declare my intention to travel around the world in eighty days. ‘I for one,’ someone will say, ‘welcome that’.)
Some of them campaign for things to be more like they used to be. These are the guys for whom the Dalek/Cybermen battle was the meaningful bit of ‘Doomsday’, and who ache that time was wasted on Rose and her family. Some of them think of the new series as a simple betrayal. All these sorts of fans are probably the DVD/Xbox 360 guys I mentioned above. They like their SF, not their British telly, and often not the non-SF bits of new Doctor Who.
The broadcast mainstream/narrowcast cult divide is something Russell Davies has always been aware of and interested in. In Bob and Rose, it’s not so much that he’s gay and she’s not, it’s that he knows catchphrases from The Simpsons and she’s never seen it. That doesn’t make her a bad person. (Were any of us thinking it did? Maybe a few of us in our more Fan Power moments. Maybe me at my most angry.) Her set of life choices never could make her a bad person. It’s a great example of what I’d call Russell’s central moral axiom: it’s not which faction you belong to, it’s what you do given that.
That section of fandom that regards ‘mundanes’ as lesser beings gets both rightly assaulted and also, perhaps surprisingly to those on the end of that assault, shown a lot of understanding in his work. Because here’s another of Russell’s axioms: taking any definitive stand makes you both a heroic upstanding individual and, also, suspect. Being too certain of anything, even something we’ve seen to be right and good in the context of the drama, is in itself wrong. Hence Prime Minister Harriet Jones, as utter an author point of view character as you’ll find anywhere, can suddenly be seen to be absolutely against our hero when she destroys the alien craft in the Christmas special. Hence Queen Victoria: hero and villain.
That, in effect, says that even the authorial point of view is suspect. That one’s own moral choices must be examined and interrogated continually. That you are not the hero just because you’re the one telling your own story. It’s a very Christian trait. I hope that if this most joyously atheist of writers is reading this, he takes that for the compliment it’s meant to be.
Oh, and there’s cognitive estrangement for you too. Interrogating one’s own volition isn’t exactly mainstream thought these days.
I’d guess he keeps coming back to that principle for a reason other than a moral one. Drama isn’t your puppy, it’s a tiger. It’s not meant to make you comfortable. It’s meant to make you feel alive. As I found out when The Second Coming bit me on the arse and made me realise that, like a lot of people I don’t respect, I can think something is blasphemous too. Russell doesn’t regard his own faction as immune from this examination and interrogation either. Bob and Rose, for daring to say the gay community had its own bigotries and hatreds, made the man who wrote Queer as Folk a bit of a pariah amongst his most obvious audience.
So there he is, look, outside the gates of his own city, with you and me and all the people who don’t do broadcast TV. But he does broadcast TV. He is the writer he is because, like me, he goes and drinks in that city and stays with friends there and sometimes enjoys it so much that he doesn’t come back to his little shack outside the gates for days. But the little shack has been home since childhood and will always be.
All this is leading up to me talking about my favourite episode of Doctor Who. It’s one that the general public and the fan consensus disliked equally, considering the Audience Appreciation Index and the online polls. And that shouldn’t be such a shock, because, to the comfort of Who fans, fan reaction is, in general, only an underlined version of what the mainstream is thinking.
My favourite episode of Doctor Who is ‘Love & Monsters’, the One With Peter Kay. It broke format and that’s always fun, but what was stunning about it was its depiction of fan culture as a vital, gorgeous, force. Elton’s folk, the ‘fans of the Doctor’, were diverse, artistic and creative, supportive and loving.
Some of the criticism the episode got is because the dark side of that culture showed up, in the form of the villain Victor Kennedy, selfishly trying to own the thing he loved, bullying other fans. Some of the criticism is because the fans looked like outsiders, were not laid back, utterly mainstream ‘normal’ people. Some of the criticism, and okay, maybe there’s some validity to this one, is because you can’t celebrate a rebel culture while at the same time trying to legislate on what parts of it are good and bad.
But these doubts are mostly wrong-headed. It’s as whole-hearted a celebration of a way of life as any the writer who always interrogates that which he loves has written. Look at that radical final line: this life of odd dislocation from the mainstream, of very personal and difficult moral choices, isn’t just different: ‘it’s better’. It’s better.
You wouldn’t even hear that on Veronica Mars. (Although the episode ‘Drinking the Kool Aid’ nearly said it out loud.) Only someone who knows the mainstream, who writes for broadcast, entirely has the moral right to say it. And I’m very glad he did.
As Leonard Cohen once put it about his own outsider status in the celebrity world, the distance between Manhattan and Berlin: ‘I’d really like to live beside you baby. I love your body, and your spirit, and your clothes. But you see that line that’s passing through the station: I told you, I was one of those.’
Announcements:
ITEM! This year’s Faringdon Arts Festival was excellent, and attracted a large audience. It’s growing every year. Dave Price brought his excellent fan-made Dalek along and exhausted himself giving delighted children Dalek rides all day on Saturday, and deserves much applause. The Society for Creative Anachronism also put in hard work to great effect. Some photos from the Friday night are here:
http://www.digitalcane.co.uk/gallery_29161.html
And you can still book for the following FAF events: ex-Squeeze singer Glenn Tilbrook in concert with his band The Fluffers (29th July, £15) and a dinner event with impressionist Rory Bremner (15th September, £45), details from 01367 243663.
ITEM! Anyone in the neighbourhood of Oxfordshire or Wiltshire who’s about on the night of Thursday August 3rd might like to pop along to my wife’s first professional gig as part of a band, at the Portwell Bar in Faringdon, from 8.30pm.. Admission free. They play country rock/folk covers and soon some of their own material, and still seek a name. Suggestions might be fun.
ITEM! The lovely Nick Pegg, who pilots a Dalek on TV’s Doctor Who, is also a professional writer of pantomimes, and has several out this Christmas. I can thoroughly recommend them. Patrons of the Harrogate Theatre in Yorkshire will be treated to Sleeping Beauty:
www.harrogatetheatre.co.uk/ht05/production.asp?prodID=112
The Queen's Theatre in Hornchurch, Essex (on the District Line) will be presenting Jack and the Beanstalk:
www.queens-theatre.co.uk/jackandthebeanstalk.htm
While north of the border, the MacRobert Theatre in Stirling offers Aladdin:
www.macrobert.stir.ac.uk/MACROBERT/whatson/index.htm (Click “live” on the blue bar, and then on the next page click the little blue box that says “Christmas”.)’
ITEM! The writers and editors involved in the production of the new Doctor Who short story anthology The Centenarian have started a blog about the process. I for one welcome it:
http://thecentenarian.blogspot.com/
ITEM! Chris Roberson, who always seems to find these cool clips, directed me to this hilarious revoiced Darth Vader, which is a work of genius:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6A0rwG39Jzk
ITEM! And for those of you who don’t like emo in your Who, here’s an alternative, and very funny ending, to ‘Doomsday’:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3F0qUmeRI7E
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"Love & Monsters" isn't my favourite, but it's very near the top of the list. Marc Warren and Camille Coduri are fantastic, it's full of lovely ELO, and Victor Kennedy is an excellent satire on certain types of fan.
The Victorian speech thing made me chuckle. It's funny 'cos it's true.
Ta.
Love and Monsters is my favourite too. I identified with LINDA because I'm in a group like that. Our reason for getting together (an actor) has changed and we have diversified into such things as movies, reading fiction, writing novels, music and advising on problems.
Any more news on Robin Hood?
Fluff
I'll be blogging about Robin again when the start date for the new series is announced. My work there is done. It's going to be a really good show.
That video clip is brilliant!
I loved Doomsday so very much, for the Daleks and Cybermen but also for all the 'soap opera' stuff (which may be why your New Adventures novels in the old days got me into that particular book series) that a lot of fans seems to dislike. Simply heartbreaking!
Good essay by the way. I liked Love And Monsters as well, but the Abzorbaloff got on my nerves. If Victor had stayed humanoid it worked have worked better for me.
Have you been enjoying Veronica series 2? I shall say nothing of spoilers, as usual.
My strongest memories of Doctor Who as a kid was rushing home to watch it because traditionally Saturday was a day spent at my nana's who only watched ITV. It would get to a certain time and our side of the family would get up en masse, say our good-byes and flee homeward in time for some grub and for me to take up my position stood in the kitchen with the door ajar ready for the programme to start (yes I am a cliche behind the sofa type but I don't care) until I was "trained" to stay in the same room as the TV to watch it. (I know I've spoken to you about this at events and I'm sure you're still slightly stunned. Haha!)
Now, although it may not clash with particular favourite episodes, my warm snugly moments watching the show all relate to the weekends I am at my mum's and my niece is staying over. Everything once again builds up to Doctor Who. Meals and baths are out of the way, snacks are provided and we sit together on the floor in front of (but not too close to) the television. I almost forget to take in the episodes we watch together properly because I am trying to gauge her reaction. I love the way she starts out sat in front of me then as the episode progresses she ends up sat behind me but she's not hiding, oh no! She's far too big now to be hiding! Haha! I think my favourite of these moments was watching The Empty Child on the morning of her birthday party (the only one we didn't let her watch as broadcast). She was so engrossed she got her breakfast down her party dress and despite her protests of not being scared so couldn't have been sat any closer to me unless she endevoured to climb inside my skin!
Given the opportunity I'd like to thank Russell T Davies for allowing me the opportunity to share Doctor Who with my niece. This weekend in the absence of the series on the television we have watched Bad Wolf/Parting Of The Ways (because Christopher Ecclestone is "her Doctor" and believe me the fact she has a Doctor still makes me emotional) and Earthshock because we've been looking through all my Doctor Who books at bedtime and she's quite partial to numbers 3, 5 and 7 so far! I'm sure she must confuse the kids in the playground at school because when they play Cybermen and run around yelling "Delete" she probably throws in the occasional "Excellent!"
Love and Monsters was a fabulous episode. It reminded of some of the really excellent fiction that used to turn up in Doctor Who magazine when I first started buying it. I love the fact that the Doctor is hardly in it, yet he's central to the characters in the episode. And LINDA is a great reflection of my early Beatle fandom experiences. There we were a bunch of penpals who got together through the love of the Fabs and then slowly introduced each other to Led Zep, The Bonzos, T Rex, Bowie, The Kinks and more... Perhaps this is why the more insular fans get on my tits.
I felt Doomsday was about ten minutes too long, but only because of the angsty ending. Ending it at the point where they were both leaning against the wall each in a different world yet still connected, and then having the Doctor have a quiet contemplative moment in the Tardis would have done it for me. In fact I can guarantee it would have left me in a girly puddle of tears. Ah well, it was a great end of the series overall. (Still can't get over my niece actually gleefully cheering the arrival of the Daleks at the end of the previous episode!)
In a side note, Vicki (my niece) seemed highly amused that the kids in the garden that backs onto ours were playing Doctor Who today. I supposed she thinks of it as our little private fandom, not realising that other people like it just as much. In fact today she proudly informed me that because she liked to watch Doctor Who that meant she was a Doctor Who fan, and then she asked if I was one too! Bless! (I think the neighbouring kids only started playing Doctor Who because they heard us re-enacting bits of Parting Of The Ways on Saturday evening - though why I had to be the Emperor Dalek and quite how the sonic screwdriver had morphed into a squeezy bottle full of water I can't work out. It was fun though...soggy fun, but fun!)
I'd never even noticed how little "appointment" television I watch nowadays. In fact I think currently there's only Top Gear which is about to start on BBC2 that I have to be in front of the telly for. (Because Doctor Who and CSI have finished, and I wasn't able to get too invested in The West Wing lately due to being in Liverpool and not in charge of the remote on most Fridays!) Actually I don't watch that much broadcast TV full stop.
That was a really great essay Paul- I am so pleased that you have this blog, as it's such a nice way to hear intelligent thoughts about the kind of things my friends usually slag me off (lovingly) for taking too seriously. It's good to know that other people out there take television series seriously too, especially when they can do so without abandoning their sense of humor.
About "Love and Monsters," which was the last episode of Doctor Who I was able to see on the BBC (sob), I agree that LINDA was a beautifully done group, and I liked that Russel was unafraid to confront the less loveable aspects of fandom. I adored seeing more of Jackie, and seeing her so sad and missing her daughter definitely made me a little bleary-eyed on behalf of my own mum, who quite missed me over this last year. I mean, I really, really adored all those scenes-- they made me laugh out loud, and touched me at the same time, which is absolutely an example of Doctor Who at its best.
What I didn't like, however, was the strangely panto villain, and the decision to only half ressurect Ursula as a paving stone. If there's one thing you can usually count on Doctor Who for, it's creating intensely loveable one-episode characters and then absolutely gutting you by having them die in the most incredibly noble way-- your own Father's Day is a brilliant example of that tradition at its most devastating. So it was hard for me to see these great characters denied a death of dignity and signifigance, and even harder to see Shirley Henderson, who I love, half-resurrected and only to be used as an uncomfortable punch line at the episode's end. I think had she died completely, been resurrected completely, or had Elton ended up a paving stone and still felt that following the Doctor was better than a regular life, the episode could have worked very well for me. As it is though, I felt like the truly excellent characters, and the lovely depiction of their emotional journey throughout the episode, were somewhat betrayed by the half-hearted panto-humor of the end, and the Absorbaloff.
Terrific comment - I more or les agree with every word and have blogged it (how meta can we get here?)
The YouTube vid is also rather wonderful! A nascent Terry Gilliam there..
Totally fabulous post. Families stopped watching TV together because nothing was provided that a whole family would enjoy. That's changed now, thank goodness.
I agree with practically everything you say.
I do actually have vague memories of watching William Hartnell, and only ever watched the programme again when Tom Baker took on the role. When he left, so did I. Sharpish!
But the current series is THE best ever. It's strength for me (and you cover this point about appealing to the viewing public and not just the sci fi guys), is it's return to planet Earth. Exactly where Willaim Hartnell planted his Tardis all those years ago. And yes, the Cybermen for me were secondary to the Tyler family.
Also agree about "Love and Monsters". When it started I thought "Oh no, this is the obligatory comedy episode". Like the singing Buffy episode, or the Bizarro Superman imaginary tale. But no. It turned out to be a classic. And my 7 and 9 year old neices agree. (Although I hope they didn't get the hilarious sex life joke!)
I'm on the edge of my seat waiting for Robin Hood. No doubt it will have its critics; Michael Praed and Richard Greene set the bar very high. (There has NEVER been a really satisfactory American interpretation). But it sounds like the BEEB have got the right idea.
Cheers for now.
ian g.
I very much like the approach of this new series, but I found Love & Monsters not to be that engaging. I think outside of a fandom perspective, perhaps the episode doesn't play that well, whereas other stories in this season are wowing people with their energy, inventiveness and the quality of the Doctor and Rose as characters. Also I hope Series 3 finds some fresh directions. I think the exit of Rose is about the right time as that storyline has been feeling that it may be running out of juice. But what a combination it was. I really hope the production team and writers keep moving the programme in fresh directions. It's cool seeing Daleks and Cybermen, and K9, but please not too much from the old series. I think Star Trek TNG was very clever to build on the Original crew stuff without being held back by it. Also the new Dr Who is successful because it works on many layers and maybe non Sci Fi/Fan type people can just enjoy it as a good bit of telly. Which is how it needs to be IMHO.
Hi Paul,
A nice piece. Overall I agree about 'Love and Monsters' (I described it as Russell's love letter to fandom). The reason I have reservations about it is not because of the content but because I think the execution of the ending was fluffed - it looked cheap and very 'bad Colin Baker' - and ended up crossing the line into 'silly' as a result.
Another 'Veronica Mars' fan! They keep turning up out of the woodwork (by the way, in case you are interested, we picked up a copy of the DVD boxed set earlier in the year when we were in the states and it is Region free - so it will play on a region 2 player).
(I wanted to introduce myself to you at the Clarke Award ceremony this year but alas it got very crowed very quickly!).
I'm watching Veronica 2 as broadcast (just saw Joss' cameo), and am loving it. Some moments of it finding its feet, but part of the joy of that series is wondering what's meaningful and what's not, and they love their recurring characters and sense of world. Anne-Marie, that's lovely! A mate of mine's kid, I heard last night, just chose to stay in and re-watch Who rather than go and play with the girl next door. 'Careful,' I said, 'Doctor Who fan of the future.' I loved the paving stone bit, Maggie, because now they're the ultimate outsider couple, and how many of those do we know from fandom, people of all kinds who've found love outside the mainstream? (I include myself here, though in my case she's more of a lovely yellow brick road than... okay, let's not go there. Oz, I mean.) Richard Carpenter's Robin of Sherwood set the bar really high, and wisely Dom and the gang are doing their own kind of Robin and making that the new marker.
Chris, you should have grabbed me at the Clarkes, but it was a scrum! Hmm... multi-region, eh?
How about 'Love & Monsters' for the name of Caroline's band?
It’s like Doctor Jekyll’s potion becoming available on the NHS.
This is the perfect description of how odd having Who return to the mainstream feels.
Mr Cornell,
Having read your most recent missive I feel I must concur most sincerely. It is my fervent wish that, by simultaneously producing the least "SF" SF televisual show and letting it be deemed SF, Mr Davies may persuade a wider audience of the merits not only of "Doctor Who" but of SF on a broader scale. I for one welcome that.
(New catchphrase for the month, I feel :) )
I think I might be unusual in not rating "Love & Monsters" DW's "Best/Worst. Episode. Ever." - I just (just!) think it's very good. Melancholic thought, though, that these days I imagine more people go online and join forums than meet in person. If LINDA had been an online group, they'd all have been talking at cross-purposes and they'd have been a lot angrier.
Would Caroline's band want to do as many bands do and take their name from the title of a song? Jethro Tull, in their folk-rock years, came up with "Acres Wild" and "Velvet Green", which might do. (They also came up with "The Mouse Police Never Sleeps", but I don't see the band going for that one somehow...)
I will put those ideas to Caroline. Someone should call their band Love and Monsters. And Mouse Police!
1. How do you feel about the decision to exclude the Friar Tuck character from the Robin Hood legend? The BBC seem to feel he was a "Billy Bunter" style character; an object of fun. But he has ALWAYS been treated with affection and respect in equal measure for his swordsmanship and knowledge of the Law.
2. In recent years the legend has been enriched by the introduction of a black character into Robin Hood's "merry men", (Nasir in 1984s "Robin of Sherwood", Nazeem in "Prince of Thieves", Kemal in 1997s "New Adventures of"). Will there be an equivalent character in the new BBC series?
Best wishes
Robin.
I must admit I hadn't thought of that metaphor, and it does help contextualizing the choice. I still don't love it, but I feel a bit better about it now that I can see it wasn't just a gag.
More importantly however, Happy Birthday! I hope you're doing something really stellar, like going to a joust with your wife, and making bets (bad ones) on who's going to win it with your mates down in the pub.
I really enjoyed Love & Monsters - Marc Warren was fantastic and anything that majors on Mr Blue Sky by ELO is bound to be fab - but I haven't made my mind up yet about my favorite episode, I also really enjoyed School reunion and the last two.
I did like that alternative ending - very Pythonesque. And i also liked the rather camp Newman and baddiel dialogue between the Daleks and Cybermen.
---------------------------------
Dalek: You see that globule of spit on the floor?
Cyberman: Yes.
Dalek: That's your Cyberleader, that is ...
---------------------------------
More important is the fact that the Doctor is compelling viewing again and that it has brought quality family drama back to the mainstream.
Saturday night watching the Doctor has become a family event in our house and my younger two are every bit as excited as I used to be on a Saturday evening. (They really should bring back those Pink panther cartoons beforehand as well ;-) )
Apart from The West Wing and some of the new comedies like Green Wing there isn't much on the TV that is a 'must watch' nowadays.
Glad to hear the Festival went so well. Howabout 'The Follies' as a band name - a bit Faringdon, a bit folkie, a bit rock 'n' roll ...
Robin, that's a bracing mixture of wait and see and it's not my job to comment. It's not my birthday until midnight, so no gifts as yet! Caroline's out at rehearsal, and may come back with a decision on that band name. And it's weird, but, didn't we all want the Daleks to win? 'So,' said my wife, 'you're rooting for fascism over cold emotion?' I could only mutter than Daleks are more fun.
Understood. And certainly not my intent to put you on the spot.
Cheers for now.
Robin and all the merry (sleeping) men of sherwood.
I always relate to people by their avatars, so now I feel like I'm getting mail from the ITC Robin Hood. My mental picture of the sleeping Merry Men was in black and white.
Great post, Paul. I find those "Doctor Who"-is-now-mainstream moments both strange and endearing - hearing a young girl nag her mum to be allowed to watch the DVDs of Doctor Who again, mentioning that there's a new series called "Torchwood" to a casual aquaintance and them going "Oh, yes, that's what destroyed the Sycorax in Doctor Who, wasn't it?" and so on.
Happy Birthday, by the way!
In many ways i felt that 'the Girl in the Fire Place' was the best episode this year and in fact if it had been told with the Love&Monsters style, i.e we only see Doctor Ten when she sees the Dr, it would have been truer to the concept and even better.
For me the problem with Love&Monsters was partly a continual frustration, that in a series that reintroduced Sarah Jane, there was, in keeping with 'Rose' no mention of previous Doctors. All the time he spent at UNIT and theres not one photo lying around. In fact i was surprised Doctor Nine got a mention.
That and the continual linear nature of a time traveler. The Doctor was there when his mum died, ok, but of all the Doctors in all of time, iot was this one, and when did that happen exactly?
That comment about fans on message boards talking like they're in a Victorian gentlemen's club was so true it had me bursting out laughing.
LOL how did that even start out!?
jack.
What a lovely article, and an insightful argument, though I don't go with every word (people like you and Russell raving about Battlestar Galactica keep encouraging me to give it a try, but its 'US navy in space' feel still leaves me cold. What's the secret?). The Victorian gentlemen's club made me smile; is that because so many of us were kids who read a lot, or because that's how the Doctor always spoke? And if so, in a couple of decades' time, will the dividing line between fans who've grown up and joined 'fandom' be between those who sound a bit matily Mancunian and those affecting a bit of Mockney? "Doctor Jekyll’s potion becoming available on the NHS" made me laugh, too. You're not immune to Victoriana yourself.
I wouldn't say Love and Monsters was quite my favourite of the season (probably the final story, for the beautiful closing sequence and the inspired way to jog us all out of moping... Oh, all right, and the Daleks, obviously), but it's certainly one of the handful that blew me away. My other half loved it, too, though he sighs a little at how much I'm still playing ELO afterwards (did you see the concert on BBC4 last week? The continuity announcer introduced Don't Bring Me Down before it as "Elton's favourite". No explanation - she just assumed everyone had watched Doctor Who and would remember. Woo hoo).
Besides, on old Prof Quatermass' birthday, I'd say to anyone complaining that Love and Monsters isn't traditional enough: the end's borrowed from The Quatermass Experiment again. How trad is that? ;-) I suspect it may depend on whether you think the climax of that is about the 'monster' or about its appeal to humanity...
Watching the whole season with friends on Saturday, the expected slagging-off didn't materialise, though several people laughed that a fan group was entirely heterosexual. Possibly even our sole straight guest (I'll have to ask him).
Happy Birthday, Paul! On my behalf, please hoist yourself into the air by your arms and legs and give yourself an appropriate number of The Bumps, then go down the pub and buy yourself a pint :)
Thanks for posting your outlook on where Doctor Who and its fans are now, Paul. There's something about the way that the programme is constructed at the moment that makes it very difficult for me to 'take sides' against it, which can only be for the good. I know lots of people who find the new series too sentimental/plotless/what have you - but I've never yet found that my reservations about any aspect of the series have stopped me enjoying it.
Good news about your confidence in Robin Hood - and it's also good to see Peter Fincham giving it prominence in the press launch for BBC 1's autumn schedule today.
Love & Monsters was good. It might have been my favourite except that Doomsday got in the way, so too did School Reunion but the whole lot were beaten back my The Girl in the Fireplace.
At any rate L&M weren't at the bottom of my list, and I thought it was carried off wonderfully.
I do see what you mean though, there are some people who just cant understand that time has moved on. Yes we'd all be quite happy to watch a carbon copy of classic who (now which era do you define as classic..?) but I doubt non-fans would and if we were honest with ourselves would we really?
Like it or not we have moved on too. Its one thing to bung a DVD of Classic Who on and watch it (yes you know you notice the slow bits admit it) but turning on the TV to see something NOW means something, if its done well, that looks like New Who. And lets face it RTD and the team are doing it very well.
I find it somewhat frightening to go on to a fan site and find people posting that they wont watch the Christmas Special because of Ms Tate, or that Martha Jones might turn out to have baggage like Rose (I will miss Jackie probably more than I'll miss Rose (sorry Billie)). I mean if these people consider themselves fans where are we going.
Luckily the general public see the plus points to the new style; the heart that came with Rose's 'Baggage'; the faster pace (yeah OK the sonic screwdriver is getting more powerful than Master H Potter's wand); and the sheer ooomph that has been captured by RTD & Co.
So for those stuck in the 70's there are always DVDs and UK Gold, for everyone else there's BBC1 Saturday evenings (well there will be again next year)
Kev
What I disliked about "Love and Monsters" was that here several people were killed pretty nastily and it all lead up to an oral sex joke.
I had similar problems with the episode which guest starred queen Victoria, where you had Rose and the doctor behaving like it was all a big joke while people were slaughtered all around them.
Alex: well, Galactica is military SF, but that genre, in my experience, usually makes reference to, indeed revels in, all the grey areas of war. Perhaps you're thinking it's more gung-ho? I'll blog about Galactica sometime rather than go on and on here. And you're right, it was odd that all of Elton's people were straight, but given the paving stone, their relationships were definitely non-mainstream. Coz: I was deliberately not taking sides in the 'old fans want to take it back to the past' row, I see both points of view, and was presenting a new angle. Martin: that sucks.
I have to say that last remark leaves an unpleasant taste in the mouth.
No reason, I just have to say it.
Come again?
Look, if you chaps have got something to say, why not just spit it out?
I know, because it's impolite.
And relax.
phenomenal site! can't wait to dig through the archives...
(I'm an american, but I recently listed my favorite 50 shows of all time on my blog, and the good doctor finished 2nd..)
Greg
And what a lovely blog you have. Cheers.
Have you seen Life on Mars/what's your opinion of it, if so?
It just started showing here in the US of A this week, but I've heard lots of favorable words about it...should it be appointment TV?
I think you should give it a try, yeah.
It's been pointed out to me that this looks rather similar to your post. But I wrote that review before I'd seen your post (well, the important bits had been cobbled together, anyway) and your post says pretty much what I wanted to say far more succinctly.
That's a really wonderful review. We seem to have come to the same conclusions. Great stuff.
hello. my son is a huge Dr who fan and spent the xmas holidays entertaining me by informing me that 'when Jackie Tyler found out the doctor had 2 hearts she said "has he got anything else two of?!"' before pulling a comedy Norman Wisdom-type face.
can I ask which episode this clip is from as I have to see it for myself!
I *think* that's from 'The Christmas Invasion', when the Doctor's ill in bed, but I could be wrong. Just as well I monitor comments on ancient posts!