Tyneside telefantasy

Here’s a rather belated write-up of my visit to Newcastle for the Alien Nation conference. As I mentioned in my previous blog post, I’d been feeling quite nervous about presenting my thoughts on Doctor Who to an audience of experts. By Tuesday, as I got on my train, I was a bit more confident.

I was on a panel with Tom Steward, Claire Jenkins and Julian Chambliss, who had travelled over from Orlando, Florida (naturally, it rained all of the time he was here). My co-panellists were all great and I was reasonably happy with how my presentation went. Unfortunately, we’d been asked at short notice to reduce our papers to 15 minutes, and I had to skip over a lot of my carefully constructed prose! Luckily, two academics I respect greatly, David Butler and Andrew O’Day, spoke to me enthusiastically afterwards and asked me to send my paper to them. That was particularly encouraging and it was great to talk to them.

It was excellent too to meet a number of people who I’ve enjoyed chatting to on Twitter. John Williams, Ian Greaves, Frank Collins and Dave Rolinson were nice enough to invite me along to dinner with them on Wednesday night and I had fantastic time of talking over much-loved television programmes and toasting Frank Marker!

The next day, I decided to do some sight-seeing before I got on my train home. Newcastle is a very beautiful place, reminiscent of Edinburgh in some ways but without the sinister aspect of that city. As I walked around in the sunshine,I decided this was somewhere I needed to come back to for a holiday. Everyone I met was friendly and I especially fell in love with the quayside area. I even got time to stop at the Literary and Philosophical Library and I spent a happy hour in there reading Darwyn Cooke’s The Hunter. The Lit & Phil is a fantastic archive, with a specialist music library. I hope to do some resarch there in the not too distant future!

The politics of Pertwee

This week, I’m presenting a paper at the Alien Nation conference at Northumbria University. I’ve been alternately excited and nervous about this, but now that I’ve got my paper written and my Powerpoint presentation sorted out, I’m really looking forward to it! (you can read about my paper here)

The programme of speakers is great, and I’m looking forward to meeting some academics face-to-face who I’ve previously only chatted to on Twitter! If you’re interested in science-fiction and telefantasy, Cathode Ray Tube is live blogging the event.

My friend Paul very kindly did some screen captures for me yesterday, and I’m so pleased with them I thought I would reproduce a few here. Think of it as a trailer for my paper!

Inferno

The Curse of Peladon

The Green Death

Peter Davison in New Tricks

Every so often, Roisin and I will start making a list of people who should guest star in New Tricks. We’re cool like that. Patrick Stewart’s usually top of the list, followed by Rodney Bewes (I know, it’ll never happen) and Dennis Franz (I wish that would happen). Peter Davison usually gets mentioned at some point so we’re both very pleased to see that he’s guesting in tonight’s episode!

Apparently, Paul McGann’s in one of the later episodes in this season as well. I wonder if there’ll be any more Doctor Who connections?

Doctor Who series 6 (part two)

Tom Steward blogs at Watching TV with Americans.

The Impossible Astronaut

Anticipation ran high for this opening two-parter following publicity images of Matt Smith in a Stetson on the American frontier and an internet prequel featuring a 1969 Richard Nixon recording strange phone calls from a frightened child. The stage was set for a fun western-themed story along the lines of the William Hartnell serial The Gunfighters, and a return to the historical (which the previous season had veered towards with Vincent and the Doctor) populated by some fascinating figures (Nixon, Armstrong) and culturally cataclysmic events (the Moon landing, Watergate).

To paraphrase an expression popular in America in 1969: ‘they blew it!’
Writer Steven Moffat was completely uninterested in the period he had perfunctorily plonked his story in, giving viewers scant historical context save for a few garbled soundbytes about Nixon’s legacy, and paying only saliva service to the western setting and iconography, with the shot of The Doctor as a cowboy reclining on a Cadillac (somehow) shorter in the final edit than in the 60-second trailer.

So many precious minutes were wasted on a comically lukewarm opening montage of The Doctor getting into various bawdy and slapstick scrapes throughout history. I hope these vignettes will be followed up on in the latter half of the series but suspect they’re frivolous window-dressing for Moffat’s inability to give us a coherent introduction to his stories.

The other major problem was the laboured and smugly self-conscious reference away from the episode’s self-contained storyline towards ongoing story arcs. This demonstrated a detrimental lack of faith in the effectiveness of the plot and seriously delayed its development, meaning that the action had barely got going before this first episode had ended. The murder of The Doctor by a mysterious being in a NASA spacesuit capped off a plethora of false starts, reducing the introduction of villains The Silence to a mere footnote, lacking the suspense or anticipation to help them reach their terrifying potential.

Fighting against the narrative first gear, Smith did a wonderful job conveying the melancholy wisdom of his future self (that boy can do old!) and his and Arthur Darvill’s (unfortunately clipped) character-crystallising exchanges were superbly witty and subtly executed.

Day of the Moon

Part two of this double-header clarified how Moffat’s oblique storytelling had become simply incompetent. Some narrative ellipsis was necessary in a story involving aliens that people forget once out of sight and to delay the resolution of a narrative mystery. However, the time ellipses in this episode spiralled way out of control. A three month gap between this and the previous instalment undermined the impact and purpose of the preceding cliffhanger. Further jumps in narrative continuity acted as smokescreens for the potholes in narrative cause-and-effect and plot development.

The episode’s opening montage was successfully exhilarating, largely down to the commitment of the performers and macabre twists in the telling rather than the tired content, a recycling of the ‘pretend death’ ploy which Moffat favours with incredulous regularity. This was epitomised by Karen Gillan’s near-asthmatic vocal performance following a chase across the desert, a tour-de-force typical of an actress who, like all great Doctor Who protagonists, can make you believe the unbelievable. The marks recording sightings of The Silence that cover the bodies of the protagonists like tattoos of hideous scars made for chilling viewing.

Though massively overdue, after the credits the show finally played its horror card, and very nearly took the haunted house. The visit to the creaky and creepy children’s home complete with abusive graffiti and deranged custodian was graceful in its slow and understated building of disquiet and fear. Again, most plaudits should go to actor Kerry Shale as the syrup-voiced Southern gentleman in mental distress Dr. Renfrew, whose trembling and traumatised appearance propagated the lingering feeling of unease. The episode (not for the last time this series) channelled The X-Files to gain legitimacy as TV science-fiction (particularly for American audiences who are simultaneously addressed here) but recognised only the superficialities (dark-and-smart outfits, magenta blue lighting), and barely qualified as pastiche.

Elsewhere, the history became pure pageantry, full of embarrassingly on-the-nose musical cues and dramatic ironies (‘say Hi to David Frost’) that compounded the thinly realised portrayal of the era. Smith continued to rally pluckily against the characterisation of The Doctor as a lothario, making clear to viewers through precise physical comedy his thoughtful interpretation of the character as sexually naive and alien to romance.

For a discussion of how this series-opener was shown on BBC America and spoke to American audiences, see the post from my blog here.

Doctor Who Series 6 (part one)

Last year, Squeezegut Alley was proud to feature Tom Steward’s reviews of Doctor Who. Since then, Tom has set up his own excellent television blog, Watching TV with Americans. I’m so pleased that he’s decided to share his thoughts on Series 6 – but be warned, he doesn’t mince his words…

Last year, producer Steven Moffat, actor Matt Smith and supporting cast, and a team of writers rescued Doctor Who from the oblivion of self-aggrandizing emo-babble it had sunk into under the influence of Russell T Davies and David Tennant, the latter episodes of their tenures having merely been offerings at the altar of its criminally overrated star. Though there were obvious shortcomings in the 2010 series, notably Moffat’s own haphazard and at times nonsensical storytelling, the overwhelming power of Smith’s innovative, committed and faithful performance, some engrossing one-off stories (not least Toby Whithouse’s pitch-perfect Vampires of Venice) and the restoration of a compelling three-way dynamic in the TARDIS did enough to suggest that the show could reverse the polarity of its demise.

 

A year later and it seems the show is in crisis again, with Moffat now an enormous liability to its future credibility. An out-of-control story arc threatens to overshadow the alchemy of the finest cast of regulars the programme has had in decades. Moreover, the decision taken by the BBC (publicised as Moffat’s choice but possibly catalysed by budget cuts) to broadcast the 2011 series in two parts starting respectively in April and November, has ended up an albatross around Moffat’s neck.

 

This re-structuring of the season narrative was welcomed in many quarters, especially by those hungry to see Doctor Who episodes dispersed across the year as it was in its heyday in the 1960s and 70s. It tantalised viewers about the possibility of a mouth-watering cliffhanger between the first and second halves to rival Second Doctor Patrick Troughton tumbling through the time vortex with his future hanging in the balance at the end of The War Games.

 

But Moffat’s failure to deliver this cliffhanger and offer only a fairly underwhelming resolution to an increasingly tedious narrative mystery (the identity of overused shady sidekick River Song) has left even the most diehard fans of Moffat’s delay tactics cold. The majority of this initial seven episode run have been write-offs, none more so than Steve Thompson’s unmitigated dud The Curse of the Black Spot. It could just be that viewers are feeling frustration and boredom rather than the intended anticipation, with the four-month mid-season break looking more and more like the perfect excuse to abandon the show permanently.

 

It must be a real kick in the teeth for Smith and co-stars Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill, who have nailed the relationship between their characters so acutely, to be fobbed off with a litany of laughably portentous speeches and self-consciously wacky vignettes. I feel particularly sorry for Darvill who, having brought back a homosocial dimension to the interaction between the Doctor and his companions not seen this successfully seen the Second Doctor’s gentle sparring with highlander Jamie McCrimmon, is made to die onscreen every week, in a bizarre script editing oversight. Smith’s extraordinarily accomplished, restrained and mature realisation of the TV Timelord is continually sabotaged by writers’ insistence on making the Doctor either zany or shouty and forcing uncomfortable vaudeville and melodrama out of one of the most subtle and multi-faceted performances on television in recent years.

 

However, this indomitable cast regularly shined through the treacherously weak material. Smith continued his notable evolution into the most mysterious and manipulative Doctor since the horribly underrated Sylvester McCoy, adding refinement to his physical comedy (in a manner becoming of Troughton himself) and remarkable sagacity to his portrayal of a 900 year-old man (even more so when playing his 200 year-old senior). Gillan now seems utterly assured in the role of Amy Pond and adds real grit to the show’s various peril and pursuit sequences, salvaging some episodes with her breathless authenticity as a woman in unthinkable danger. Darvill’s lovable cowardly custard Rory, the Scoobyless ‘Shaggy’ in the Doctor’s Mystery Machine, has developed effortlessly into the moral and emotional centre of the programme, still a vulnerable man but one who tirelessly fights injustice with compassion.

 

But clearly the lessons of the last series have not been heeded. The one-off stories, unfairly regarded as ‘fillers’, were the undoubted strengths of the 2010 batch of episodes, challenging both writers and actors, whereas the ongoing storyline (or ‘arc’) episodes were far more inconsistent. Now the arc episodes fill in the gaps between the only proper stories left in the programme.

Alien Nation conference

Following on from yesterday’s post, here are some more details of the Alien Nation conference I’m speaking at in July. I’m really excited about it – the panels are interesting and varied, there’s a lot of academics attending that I’m excited to meet, and there’s a screening of Ghostwatch in the evening! I’ve heard that Newcastle is a lovely place too, so I’m looking forward to exploring it in my free time. I’ve reproduced my abstract below the poster, to give you an idea of what I’ll be discussing…

‘Having a conversation with Tse-Tung’: the politics of Pertwee

The Barry Letts-produced era of Doctor Who (1970-74) is commonly regarded as the most politically committed of the show’s history, using the Doctor’s exile on Earth to address contemporary social and environmental concerns. James Chapman has suggested that, in this period, ‘Doctor Who was at its most critical of British society’.

By looking at moments from Inferno, The Curse of Peladon and The Green Death, I ask how each serial articulates political thought, and with what success. I am particularly interested in the shifts that occur in the representation of regular characters (the Doctor, his companions, the UNIT family, the Master), and their relation to the recurring archetypes of this era (regional bumpkins, military personnel and civil servants). How do humour, allegory and stereotype contribute to the show’s political vocabulary? And, given the multi-story format of Doctor Who, how coherent a political statement can we expect from any given era of its history?

My paper proposes that the detail of textual moments in Doctor Who can illuminate, and complicate, political readings of the programme as a whole.

Garrett Books

An esteemed academic once shocked me by stating that Amazon had made second-hand bookshops obsolete.

We were at a conference in Edinburgh, and I’d happened to show him the swag I’d picked up from Armchair Books that day (biographies of Maurice Chevalier, Robert Mitchum and John Ford, in case you were wondering!). I argued the point with him and I’m pleased to say he conceded. Still, I’ve never really trusted him, or his work, since.

I’ve spent a good deal of my life browsing the shelves of second-hand bookshops looking for treasures. As a child, I was an omnivorous collector. I’d constantly be seeking that elusive edition that would complete a set of Enid Blytons, or for the photographic covers depicting Ian Carmichael as Bertie Wooster. I was a Sherlock Holmes completist and, at one time, I would buy any edition of Conan Doyle’s stories that I could lay my hands on. I must have had 50 variants of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes alone.

That desire to accumulate has died somewhat, partly due to living in a small flat. Still, I’m an inveterate book-browser and my eye always strays to certain sections of a shop first. These days, I always hit the ‘Crime’ section first, on the lookout for Ross Macdonald paperbacks with interesting covers! What I said to that wrong-headed academic still stands – the second-hand bookshop always surprises you, leading you to unexpected places and enriching you in a way that a search engine simply cannot.

Bookshop owners are experts, labouring for the love of their wares. I’ve met some Bernard Blacks in my time, but the majority love to chat about your purchase or point you in the direction of something special. For me, browsing has always been as socially stimulating as it is intellectually.

Given all this, I’ve always been disappointed (and a little ashamed) that my town, Leamington Spa, hasn’t had a second-hand bookshop. There used to be two: the wonderfully titled Books Do Furnish a Room (where I once got some bound Strand Magazines containing The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes for £7) and the fondly remembered Portland Books. Both closed down years ago, and they left a void. Waterstones and Oxfam Books just don’t count.

So I was overjoyed when I discovered that Garrett Books had opened up on Clemens Street. Roisin and I have visited a couple of times, and I’ve taken a friend there as well. I’ve never walked away empty-handed, and most excitingly of all, they have a very well-stocked comics section which has added a few gems to my collection!

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What’s clear is that Garrett Books have a real interest in becoming part of the community. Inside the door, they’ve set aside space for local artists to display their work and there are plans to hold poetry readings and possibly gigs there too. They’ve got a couple of sofas for you to relax upon, and they serve tea, coffee and cake so you can refresh yourself after a browsing session. Most winningly of all, there’s a baked potato stand out front. I had one last time I was there and it was delicious (cheese, beans and Peri-Peri sauce, YUM!).

I’m so pleased to see them there and I hope they prosper. Leamington needs a place like Garrett Books and Clemens Street really benefits from their presence. Long may they last. I’ll see you down there next weekend for a spud, alright?

Drawing the Brig

Blimey, it’s been a long time since I’ve blogged. March was a funny month – I’ve been trying hard to meet PhD deadlines, as well as doing some web writing for my university and trying to secure further work to keep me going until I submit my thesis.

In the past few weeks, I’ve also been feeling the need to do some drawing. When I was young, I used to spend hours filling sketchbooks with comic strips. It’s a habit I’ve fallen out of, and I’m a far less confident draughtsman these days. Still, yesterday I got Ego and Other Tails by Darwyn Cooke out of the library. I’d loved Cooke’s art on New Frontier and it inspired me to get out the pens this afternoon.

You might have noticed there was no tribute to Nicholas Courtney on my blog. I did try, but it was difficult to put my fondness for my favourite Doctor Who character into words.

As a first effort, I’m fairly pleased with this. I think the likeness is OK – now I just need to get more confident with shading!

Doctor Who and the Evil Crochet Genius

I know that a few of my readers will like these! Evil Crochet Genius has made a complete set of 11 Doctors, which you can see here. I’m especially impressed with the likenesses of William Hartnell and Colin Baker. Love those question mark collars…

Dandies and clowns

I’ve started following a brilliant tumblr called Whofix, which posts funny photos and scans related to all things Doctor Who. I couldn’t resist reposting these two gems:

Marvellous.