A truth that's told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent.
As you'll both no doubt remember, last year I wrote a brief, almost-weekly, opinion column for the sprightly new Doctor Who themed website entitled Doctor Who Archive. I put a lot of effort into each of the essays and - despite a few typos - was really pleased with the results.
The Doctor Who Archive renamed itself as Doctor Who Worldwide at some point and shifted all its old content, including my articles, across to the new platform in the early cracked and glistening moments of 2014.
About an hour ago I discovered, totally by accident, that Doctor Who Worldwide has been offline for a fortnight. Technically speaking, this means that my articles are now out of print. As a consequence, all the copyrights to the writing I produced for Doctor Who Archive have now returned to the original author: that is to say, me.
I'm publishing, in chronological order, the five essays I wrote for Doctor Who Worldwide in order to assert my ownership of the work and hereby confirm that I'm reclaiming my copyright of them.
They're quite lively. Tuck in.
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Easter Eggs and Trap Doors
You aren’t seeing what you think you’re seeing.
On Saturday, a game disguised as a trailer arrived and small
sections of the internet melted.
Again. You have to wonder whether
or not it’s really a great idea for the BBC to be scheduling these Pavlovian promotionals
before Atlantis, after all they’re
supposed to be floating, rather than flooding it. Doctor
Who and Atlantis have had a tricky relationship since The Underwater Menace, so sinking it once again shouldn’t be
unexpected. What are we on now? Is it four or five times? Do hashtags even count? Kronos only knows.
The trailer that isn’t really a trailer triggered cyber-explosions
running the emotional gamut from euphoria to caps-lock, making Twitter and the
various forums look like the opening napalm blasts from Apocalypse Now performed in text. Within minutes the whole thing was being
vivisected by pro-am soothsayers, certain that The Day of the Doctor's DNA would be salvageable from images frozen
like mosquitoes in amber. It’s how we
brought back the dinosaurs after all.
3D works by tricking the brain into thinking
it’s seeing something that it isn’t. An
awful lot of Season Five, and Steven (“Don’t even blink!”) Moffat’s work in
general, relies on a similar prestidigitation.
Occasionally these moments appear as written versions of optical
illusions, the type of thing that looks like an old lady one way up, Batman
kissing a candle the other. Moffat often
only shows the audience one interpretation, keeping the alternate slightly out
of sight for the time being, before revealing it with a flourish of Murray
Golden glitter, but not always. Season
Five examples include what happens in the corner of your eye when it isn’t
leaking dust, perception filters, Amy’s Choice, missing doors, the Pandorica
and so on.
This carried on into Season Six with Amy herself, the Flesh
in general and the Silence in particular.
Things weren’t what they appeared to be.
Sometimes these moments of bait and switch are planned – like the wrong
jacket in Flesh and Stone - and
sometimes they’re trap-doors written into the architecture of the arc
structure; escape hatches to be employed at a later date if required. Eventually, we’ll find out who said that
silence will fall, but what about the scorch marks on Amy’s lawn? The Silent at the picnic? The future Ponds in Wales? The Matt-Smith-in-the-kitchen scare chord?
The Eleventh Doctor era got a special 3D cinema trailer that
dropped us down the rabbit hole – it ran before Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland but don’t read too
much into that – and was very similar in its own way to the latest one, at
least in its purpose. Both look very
lovely, have things floating around and feature flashes that are given more
emphasis than they eventually warrant, the Silurian face that isn’t a
Silurian’s face bursting through the turf, for example. It’s a distraction that pushes our focus, or
perception, in the wrong direction, giving the performers time to climb into a
gorilla costume. The new 2D trailer
features elements that would look lovely in 3D; Doctors who aren’t; loving
recreations of scenes that never happened, but look like they did; glimpses and
tiny moments that act like the fizzy chunks hidden in the stretchy pink bits of
Wham bars. The two trailers make for
interesting bookends to the last few years, even if just to show how very portentous everything’s become since the
TARDIS trashed that garden shed.
Recently, fan-baiting threats to change everything were
thrown amongst the conspiracy theories about missing episodes and Jon Pertwee’s
eyebrows. Rest assured that no single
writer’s bigger than the show. These
soundbites are only as scary as the kitling in Survival, and should be taken just as seriously. Likewise, the terror that Moffat’s going to
use The Day of the Doctor to fix the
regeneration limit issue is pointless. He’s
been wanting the job since before he was born; of course he’s going to do it.
Someone’s got to. There’s no way
a showrunner with the cojones to retcon
the entire series, undermining the last story to win a Hugo Award whilst doing so,
is going to miss out on an opportunity like this. Unlike some of the trap doors that seem to
have been left open by accident – and should probably be fenced off now, or
someone’s going to get hurt – this illusion has surely been planned since the
young Moffat first encountered The Deadly
Assassin, rather than after he finished writing The Snowmen.
This is going to be a harder trick than simply making the
Statue of Liberty vanish, especially with the whole world watching and, in the
end, The Day of the Doctor might turn
out to be a fiddly, possibly slightly clumsy, sleight of hand, but it’ll
work. After all, something must be laying all these eggs.
You aren’t seeing what you think you’re seeing.
23 October 2013
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Nightmares With Glitter
Bafflegab! Everyone loves
it. You can’t say the same for Nightmare in Silver. According to a poll that I’ve just conducted
in my head, the recent remoulding of the Cybermen comes out slightly higher
than The Rings of Akhaten in the
category of ‘Favourite Story’. The
contentious bones in Neil Cross’ second script are very similar to the ones
scattered through Neil Gaiman’s, so we’ll have a look at that one and let
Murray Gold breathe a sigh of relief. For
now.
Neil Gaiman is probably the most important writer to be
involved with Doctor Who since
Douglas Adams was script editing it. The Doctor’s Wife, Gaiman’s first
script, won the Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation in
2011 and the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation the following year. This was despite being rewritten many, many
times and having to replace the planned monster with something that wasn’t on
display in an exhibition at the time; a jealous Ood turned out to be available
so they went with that. The story succeeds
despite being compromised and is obviously one that Gaiman had been dying to
tell since he was very, very small, a condition in writers that usually
produces something special.
This almost brings us to Nightmare
in Silver, but not quite.
Every Doctor Who script
acts as a skeleton but the producer and director decide what the beast actually
looks like. Sometimes the bones join so
perfectly they leave only a little room for misinterpretation: Midnight is a good example of a script
that’s been structured like this.
Another snag is that writing is solitary, whereas making a television programme
is collaborative. There’s many a slip
twixt pen and DVD rip, to coin a phrase. ‘Classic’
Doctor Who is full of these peaks and
troughs; every story is an unbalanced yin-yang of success and schadenfreude. With so many individual departments involved,
this can’t really be avoided. Don’t
forget that no-one ever set out to make a bad Doctor Who, although The Curse
of Fatal Death skates very close, and the Borad’s makeup is outstanding.
Obviously there are other matters to take into
consideration; Morgus’ fourth wall-shattering asides in The Caves of Androzani came from a misunderstanding between John
Normington and director Graham Harper. You
take a voluntary step onto dangerous ground when suggesting a Doctor Who story has been unsuccessful;
the quicksand is made of well-hidden subjectivity and, although it looks solid,
has claimed many well-meaning observations during the last half-century.
The difference between dialogue disaster and triumph can
often be down to line-delivery and can further be affected by whether
or not the actor’s comfortable with, or even understands, what they’re saying. The word ‘truth’ gets tossed around by
thespians like a Cyberhead at a Raston Warrior Robot staff outing, but if we
ignore the ‘fact’ that ‘truth’ is merely a matter of perception then we might
actually be onto something here. Of
course, any actor is going to find extracting something approaching ‘truth’ a
challenging proposal when confronted with a line like, “The backblast
backlash’ll bounce back and destroy everything.” This is traditionally the point to mention
Pip and Jane Baker but, in fairness, they wanted viewers to look up the difficult words and so were at least paving
the way with good intentions. Let’s
“prevent the catharsis of spurious morality” lest we find ourselves “involved
in a web of mayhem and intrigue.”
All of which bring us to Neil Gaiman’s ‘difficult second
album’, Nightmare in Silver.
Nightmare in Silver’s
definitely a failure, there’s no escaping that, but it’s possible that the
blame doesn’t entirely lie with the script – despite its flaws - as much as
first appears. There’s some abysmal
miscasting throughout for one thing.
Facts are thinner than opinions, but the script definitely started life
with the title ‘The Last Cyberman’
because a copy was discovered, like many other wonderful things, on the
backseat of a Cardiff
taxi. However, we don’t know how many
rewrites it went through, or at what point in the redrafting Angie and Artie
became compulsory components. Gaiman was
given the brief to ‘make the Cybermen scary again’, which shouldn’t have been too
much of a challenge going on previous work like Sandman. Later, in an
interview with the BBC, Gaiman admitted that he became “completely side-tracked
by a mad, strange romp.”
Doctor Who has a
reputation for being a notoriously punishing show to work on and, on top of
that, Nightmare in Silver was hugely anticipated
from the outset. Stephen Woolfenden was
allocated this story as his Doctor Who
directorial debut. Woolfenden began his television career doing second unit work;
one of his early jobs included Neverwhere. Having gained an awful lot of experience, he
moved into cinema, working as assistant director on David Yates’ Harry Potter films. Despite this, Nightmare in Silver doesn’t seem to know what it is. The tone fluctuates constantly but it’s hard
to pin down exactly why - and it’s too late to ask Dave McKean to stage a remount now. Matt Smith certainly gives the discordant ‘Mr
Clever’ moments his all but he’s on a hiding to nothing, for reasons we should
definitely bring up.
Both Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffat started their
respective runs triumphantly. Davies had
planned his first album very carefully, releasing it gradually over three years,
like a treble-vinyl prog-monster covered in Hipgnosis. This meant he was able to suggest the
Toclafane as a replacement monster for Rob Shearman’s Dalek when the rights to everyone’s favourite Mark III travel
machines seemed to be an issue. Toward
the end of Davies’ run, the destruction of everything ever had become too small
and a type of armageddon fatigue set in, so he dialled everything right back
for the seemingly never-ending end of The
End of Time: Part Deux, turning the lights off one by one before leaving the
stage. In contrast, Steven Moffat was
already producing legendary prophecies nobody’d ever heard of by his second
series. This was the point when
plot-hole-filling prologues popped up and characters began telling the audience
stuff, rather than showing them, in a form of bafflegab that, no matter how
hastily composed, certainly looks good when it's drying on freshly-printed, individually-named,
script sheets. That isn’t to say that
the showrunner doesn’t know where he’s going – the whole Moffat era is almost
certainly laid out somewhere, with all of the important landmarks highlighted in
blue. After all, Nightmare in Silver reintroduced the Cybermen in a way that would
have alarmed some of the people watching, and that’s what it was intended to do
all along.
Neil Gaiman can’t help writing poetic dialogue, Ray Bradbury
was the same. Almost everything that ‘Mr
Clever’ says would sound utterly chilling in the privacy of a reader’s head and
it’s up to the director to make sure that the actor’s delivering difficult dialogue
like this in a suitable fashion. Some
actors read against the lines or underplay them, which can create a unique
frisson; not all dialogue needs to be naturalistic to be ‘truthful’. Unfortunately, this is the same half-season
that brought us Metebelisgate. Perhaps
there’s something distracting glittering in the darkness, who knows?
Recently, Gaiman has made it clear that he really, really wants
another chance. He’s publicly stated
he’s not worried about money and just wants to be able to spend more time
getting the bones of the script in a correct alignment. Seeing as he’s probably the most important
writer to be involved in Doctor Who
since Douglas Adams was script editor, this definitely sounds more like a
winning situation than another nightmare.
So, we have to ask ourselves, who wouldn’t
want that?
29 October 2013
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History Can Be Rewritten
Have you met Heisenberg?
He was probably a lovely fellow, I’m not sure. Came up with the idea that by observing
something you change it. Basically, the
observation of a thing is altered by the observer observing it, so you end up
learning more about the observer than the observed. Now that’s cleared up, let’s have a look at The Curse of Fatal Death. Are you strapped in comfortably? Then we’ll begin. Bwah ha ha ha.
It’s 1999 and Doctor
Who’s been dead for three years. We
thought he was done for back in 1989, but he sat up unexpectedly one evening in
1996 which scared the hell out of his friends.
The whole thing was an experiment based on notes left by Professor Solon
and didn’t really pan out. Since then’s
all been quiet. No twitching to speak
of.
The thing to remember about 1999 was that it was a party
year. The world was ending and everyone knew it – especially the people who
denied it. On the stroke of midnight
microwaves would fall out of the sky, airplanes would run backwards, video
recorders would work properly and the humble computer would elope with your
pets. All of this madness would occur as
a side-effect of the Millennium Bug bursting from its cocoon and chomping down
on humanity one face at a time (dependent on time-zones/professional
commitment, please take a number and wait your turn). The Doctor wasn’t going to save us. He was dead.
1999 was also the first year that the Baker Street Boys made
their officially-sanctioned Doctor Who
debuts. The BBC begrudgingly set up a
couple of memorial events for the Time Lord, both were televisual equivalents
of the ‘Penny for the Guy’ tradition: bright-faced young things wheel-barrowing
around a facsimile of a Famous Figure from History in an effort to raise money
for charity. Well, the analogy doesn’t
totally work. For a start, although the Doctor Who Night was more a bid to raise
ratings than cash and took place in November (missing the Doctor’s actual
birthday by ten days, but you can’t have everything), the charity one was
actually in March. Mark Gatiss penned a fictionalised recreation of How Doctor Who Came to Be (The Pitch of Fear),
starring himself. Despite falling foul
of censorship, it’s managed to generate a sequel that should be on the telly
any day now. Steven Moffat, on the other
hand, wrote The Curse of Fatal Death
which is very interesting indeed, although possibly not for the reasons that
you might think.
The young(er than he is now) Mr Moffat was carving out a
career as a TV Professional (apart from Press
Gang he was mostly known for writing sit-coms like Joking Apart and Chalk at
this point, Coupling was still in the
future) and had been noticed by Comic Relief’s co-founder (and Blackadder co-creator) Richard
Curtis. Curtis asked Moffat to write a
spoof version of Doctor Who for the
1999 telethon.
Bear in mind warnings about the Millennium Bug were
everywhere and that the Doctor wasn’t coming back and you’ll have an idea why
Steven Moffat wrote The Curse of Fatal
Death the way he did. Back in 1999 Doctor Who wasn’t cool, not like
now. The BBC regarded it as a bit of an
embarrassment to be fair: Confessions of
an Anorak, anyone? Trailers that ran
for repeat seasons quite explicitly mocked the show – even the one for the Doctor Who Night itself is an exercise
in nostalgia, concluding with a balding, middle-aged fan hiding behind a
sofa. Moffat had contributed to articles
and fanzines about the show, but always careful to be highly critical of
it. He’s apologised since but you can’t
blame him for appearing in the role of Celebrity Enthusiast rather than
fan. Moffat was (and is) a winner and Doctor
Who was largely perceived as being something for weird cagoule-wearing
losers with poor social skills and scary bedrooms. Had the delightful picture of a young Moff
engrossed in An Exciting Adventure with the Daleks gone public, it would have
been like a silver bullet to the werewolf… of his career…
Nope, that sentence got away from me.
Nope, that sentence got away from me.
The Curse of Fatal
Death was designed to be a vehicle for Rowan Atkinson, a sort of Blackadder Who. Atkinson could cherry-pick projects and
there’s very definitely the sense that he didn’t take this role on just as a
favour for a mate. Atkinson put a lot of
thought into how he’d handle the Doctor and that shows in his performance. The other performances are a bit haphazard to
be fair, but the script doesn’t help.
Julia Sawalha is playing herself because Emma is a mostly just a cipher
– a still-formulating splodge of ideas through which Moffat can flirt with his
wife and alarm fanboys. Jonathan Pryce
really tries as the Master, but Moffat has no respect for the character and mostly
writes him as a villain far more suited to pantomime than he’d ever been
before. Someone’s memory was cheating.
The thing is, despite all the self-deprecating bluster and
protestations of cool, there’s no way that Moffat didn’t do a little dance when
he got this job. Atkinson might’ve put
some thought into how he’d play the Doctor, but that was nothing compared to
the months of solid, imaginative problem-solving that the boy from Paisley invested in the formative years lying like a
rickety rope-bridge between discovering Target books and discovering girls.
So, what happens when we observe The Curse of Fatal Death?
What do we see? Lots of
jokes? Yes, and good ones for the most
part. An almost post-modern referencing
of the inherent elements and tropes that don’t work when referenced? Yes, that’s there, but it’s just Monty Python
via Douglas Adams so don’t feel too smug.
Eh? I’ll explain later. Sexuality?
Buckets of the stuff. The problem
is this is all just distracting surface polish.
The really important stuff is how it ends. Moffat might have handed in a script that
fulfills its brief as a skit (it’s not a sitcom, sorry DWM, that’s a retcon too
far) but it’s actually a lot cleverer than that. The
Curse of Fatal Death contains everything Steven Moffat wanted to say about Doctor Who. Everything.
As far as he was concerned the show was dead and the world was going to end
in a confusing flash of mandibles in a few short months. And so, for the first time, he wrote the
final Doctor Who story.
Ignoring the time paradox business because it’s just Moffat
showing off, let’s look at the three main characters: the Daleks, the Master
and the Doctor. Moffat’s great at
writing dialogue, although not always at writing dialogue that can be read out
loud. His style is very much l’esprit de l’escalier: all the
idealised witty stuff that you’d have come out with if reality had the decency
to be more like movies. This is part of
the reason why Moffat can’t write Daleks and avoids doing so at every
opportunity, he finds them boring.
You’ll notice that every time they’re contractually obliged to crop up during
the Matt Smith tenure Moffat’s tried desperately to make them more interesting:
bigger, colourful, stone, zombies, Jenna Louise Coleman. Conversely, Moffat thinks the Master’s an
idiot and treats him accordingly. It’s
what he does with the Doctor that’s worth looking at.
Moffat deliberately works through the final regenerations:
Atkinson is the Ninth Doctor, Richard E. Grant is the Tenth, Jim Broadbent is
the Eleventh and Hugh Grant is the twelfth and final – making the Joanna Lumley
Doctor the start of a new cycle and an end to the old one. It’s more sleight-of-hand and it should be
apparent to anyone whose being paying attention that this is the blueprint to
Moffat’s run le grande fromage of Doctor Who.
It’s also worth remembering that Moffat’s a winner, maybe
we’ll come back to that in more depth another day (along with Murray Gold); he’s
yet to pull off his greatest victory.
You see, Moffat’s going to attempt something spectacular pretty soon, especially
if The Curse of Fatal Death is
anything to go by. You may have noticed
that the show’s bigger than it has been in a very long time. Blimey, it’s almost fulfilled the dream of
every starry-eyed British pop culture export since the Beatles and made it big
in America.
Moffat’s gone back in time to the very beginning, brought
the architect a nice meal, and made one of his own characters responsible for
the Doctor’s TARDIS selection (so, that’s another of the Doctor’s wives we
aren’t allowed to talk about). With the
introduction of John Hurt’s Doctor, whoever he is – it’s still a long way until
the Big Birthday Beano at the time of typing - we’re solidly back with Moffat’s
long game. Peter Capaldi is the Final
Doctor. Moffat is about to wrap all the preceding
years since 1963 as a retconned backstory to the tale he’s been spinning since
he took over, because, for the second time, he’s writing the final Doctor Who story.
Or, he was the last time we looked anyway…
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Gold Reign Falls
(the Like Silence dub mix)
Humanity was first warned about sprouts a little over (or
under – I hate maths) five hundred earth years ago. The plague seems to have been initially
triggered in the Netherlands
by some type of Ergonomic interference although sources are unreliable, and
probably written in code. The terror
arc’d out across the rest of Europe over the centuries, eventually reaching Britain
where they made their terrible way onto my plate every Christmas. There they would squat, reeking gently of
swamp gas. As I understood it, if these
hideous grotesqueries weren’t ingested then a black planet would fill the sky,
crops would fail, humanity would tumble into the gutters like autumn leaves and
there wouldn’t be any ice-cream ever again.
Over time, I managed to negotiate the ritual vegetable consumption down
to a single green, eldritch unmentionable.
Once the foetid cabbage god had been appeased, I was allowed to leave
the table and spend a melodramatic forty-five minutes dry-heaving in the corner.
I recently conducted a poll in my head in which Nightmare in Silver came out slightly
above The Rings of Akhaten in
popularity. Consequently, I approached
rewatching the episode with as much trepidation as anyone with an itchy eye but
no gloves should approach a ghost pepper - a foodstuff that has an entire
Wikipedia subsection devoted to its ‘Use as a Weapon’. These bottom-of-the-chart stories contain an
interesting similarity other than both being written by Neils.
Neil Gaiman and Neil Cross have both made a success of
themselves outside of television and although Cross hasn’t made quite the same
impact that Gaiman has, they’re both seen as novelists, are very obviously fans
of Doctor Who as a series, the
writings of H.P. Lovecraft and the comics of Alan Moore. However, at the time of typing, Cross has had
more hits in television than Gaiman, acting as lead writer on Spooks and showrunner for Luther amongst others. Cross stated in Doctor Who Magazine’s preview
of The Rings of Akhaten that he had
made sure the BBC were in no doubt that he was enthusiastic about writing for Doctor Who and eventually managed to
land the scripting duties on Hide, which
was filmed earlier and shown later.
According to Cross, Steven Moffat asked if he’d be interested in writing
another script, a really big one this time.
At this point I’m going to mention The
Power of Kroll, just to make sure that someone has.
The Power of Kroll
shares some unexpected commonalities with The
Rings of Akhaten, including a production team pushing a writer for the
biggest monster ever – an eighth wonder of the world, if you will – and both
scripts containing bait-and-switch versions of the Big Bad. (‘Big Bad’ as a euphemism for ‘Monster of the
Week/Season’ was first coined, of course, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a series that not only influenced the new
Doctor Who but also contained an
all-musical episode, Once More, with
Feeling, which had been a huge critical success.) The monsters in both stories are let down by
the effects but there’s nothing wrong with thinking large. Well, I say that, but we haven’t got to the
music yet.
The first version of Hide
that Cross handed in was apparently more of a small-scale ghost story and
turned out to be a lot cheaper than required.
It seems that budgets are allocated on a story by story basis now rather
than stretched over a whole series like last century. This is speculation because I hate
maths. The temptation’s always going to
be to fatten up the first stories and let the later ones fend for themselves in
prehistoric Heathrow where they fight over the remaining scraps of cash like
feral dogs. Because Cross had turned in
a script that was seen as too frugal, I guess he’d entered bean-counter
territory, where if you can make an episode for fifty magic beans then you only
need fifty magic beans to make an episode.
Conversely, if you’re trying to make a really big story then it’s
probably not a good idea to spend more magic beans on minstrels than usual just
because there seem to be a lot of unused costumes in the dressing-up box.
Writers love words: words build reality. Producers also love words: words use up fewer
magic beans per hour than recording studios.
Douglas Adams said a very sensible thing about comedy in Doctor Who, along the lines of just
because the script’s funny that doesn’t mean anyone should play it less than straight,
which also applies to pop-culture references.
In a recent interview Cross mentioned his love of anti-heroes, specifically
Han Solo, though he obviously also likes Harrison Ford’s other work. The
Rings of Akhaten sneaks in two references to Blade Runner and, cleverly, one reference covering two Indiana
Jones films. The magic beans swapped for
the speeder bike reference might have been better put toward bigger green
curtains for Matt Smith and Jenna Coleman to shout at.
Neil Cross and Matt Smith both come out of The Rings of Akhaten with their dignity
nearly intact. Let’s look at the good
things in the episode next; we’ll come back to the music when the rest of the
plate’s clear. The whole pre-title
sequence moves at a thunderous pace.
Although the guest acting felt a bit clunky on first viewing it’s really
emotional shorthand, relentlessly propelling the story forward. (Also, being-attacked-by-inanimate-object
acting must be a challenge in the wake of Leslie Nielson’s
Lieutenant-Frank-Drebbin-versus-Towel masterclass.) I can remember reading Doctor Manhattan’s
beautiful speech at the end of Watchmen’s
ninth issue back in 1987. It’s not
impossible that I might even have bought my copy in the same Bristol comic shop that Neil Cross got his
from. Smith and Coleman are really good
throughout, the aliens do what they need to do, the Vigil (cousins of the
Cenobites, perhaps?) are genuinely creepy when they first appear and young
Emilia Jones carries off a difficult role nicely. Nobody mention The Snowman.
Production-wise that about wraps up the good things but
before we get to the music let’s look at the script. Cross really tries some gutsy stuff
here. It takes a certain amount of bravery
to bring elements of The Golden Bough, Sir James George Frazer’s seminal
history of mythology and religion, to a mainstream BBC1 Saturday audience. Alright, it’s via The Wicker Man, but Cross is mining the same sources for a slightly
different result. This isn’t how the
original religion survived; this is how it’s become absorbed and changed; the
Queen of Years isn’t called ‘Merry’ by accident. In a lovely moment, Cross has the Doctor
acknowledge that whatever your stance, it’s still a nice story. On top of this, Cross admitted he was very
purposefully referencing the works of Lovecraft and basically wanted the Doctor
to be arguing with Grandfather Cthulhu at the climax.
On my reluctant rewatch, I was surprised to find that things
actually move along quite nicely up until Clara encourages Merry to forget her
performance anxieties and sing, sing, sing.
As Merry skips off to rejoin her scarlet-robed minders the soundtrack
suddenly seems to break out into a version of Raindrops Keep Falling on my
Head. Up until that moment the music’s
fine. The episode starts with the
Specials’ Ghost Town, which is a marvellous song and nicely symptomatic of
what’s going wrong here.
When it began, Doctor
Who sounded like nothing on Earth: Delia Derbyshire’s groundbreaking
reimagining of Ron Grainer’s theme was as unsettling and otherworldly as
anything Erich Zann strangled out of his violin. The first decades of the show used
experimental pieces and composers: Tristram Cary was a pioneer of musique
concrete and provided some immensely effective and alternative music for the
show, saloon ballads notwithstanding; Carey Blyton made startling use of
crumhorns; Malcolm Clarke made valves scream while Geoffrey Burgon scored the
Douglas Camfield stories that the otherwise ubiquitous Dudley Simpson… didn’t…
work on. Doctor Who’s early musical pioneers deserve a decent examination,
if just to see why their work has dated more favourably – perhaps - than the
composers who filled in after the final season of Simpsons ceased broadcasting.
Murray Gold was invited aboard Doctor Who by Russell T. Davies.
The two had crewed together on both series of Queer as Folk, The Second
Coming and later Casanova, so
this was to be expected. Gold’s early
work on Doctor Who really shows him
grow in confidence and range as a composer very fast, though, having said that,
he should really have disembarked with the rest of the Tenth Doctor’s team and
made room for someone fresh. Since
Steven Moffat took the helm, the music has become closer to a series of stock
phrases than specifically commissioned new works. The afore-mentioned Ghost Town by the
Specials, is actually a piece of social commentary that just happens to also
sound a bit spooky.
It’s hard to see how any composer could maintain a
consistent level of high creativity over an eight-year period and, perhaps,
we’ve entered the age where the music is largely being written with a focus
more on the CD or eventual Prom. There really
should be a better reason for playing the Dream Lord’s theme throughout The Name of the Doctor’s prologue, Clarence and the Whispermen other than
just because it’s creepy. It feels sometimes
that the music acts as an audio description of the action rather than adding any
complimentary timbre to it.
The Rings of Akhaten
script deals with huge themes including responsibility, religion, society and
individuality. An entire culture is
attempting to placate a destructive force so massive that if unleashed it could
destroy them utterly before heading off into eternity to feast on billions and
billions of worlds. Unfortunately, the
‘lullaby’ that never ends turns out to be the hymn from Gridlock fed through a West Ended Lloyd-Webbernator. Although it understands the theory, this doesn’t
carry any real emotional depth. I hate
maths almost as much as I hate sprouts.
And that’s the nub of the issue: the accursed sprout. The fact that I don’t like them doesn’t mean
that you won’t, and nor should it. You
might like nothing more than a starter of sprout, followed by a main course of
sprout curry, finishing with a dessert of sprout sorbet. Someone must.
If I offer any suggestions here as to how the music could be done better
then all they’ll do is expose my own, unique, preferences. Just because they work for me, doesn’t mean
they will for you. I’m giving ground
here, but only on the understanding that every element within a programme
should be working toward telling the story.
In The Rings of
Akhaten, the story is pushed apart in the middle to bunch up at either
end. This is to allow the music to take
centre stage. Judging by the special
effects, a lot of magic beans went into making this music sound… expensive. Matt Smith is forced to deliver a speech that
still required furious pruning to a wall, crying on cue to give the music a
push it doesn’t earn. That was never
going to work. It’s the wrong way round
for a start. As the old adages states,
if you notice it, then it’s not working.
Doctor Who fans will often
forgive these moments in stories aired in a year begin with 19. To try and find something positive to
conclude with, I’ll mention here that at least the Doctor’s speech doesn’t end
with the words ‘big’ or ‘boy’.
Maybe Murray Gold will pull something superlative out of the
sky from now on. Perhaps all the real
creative energy has been building toward The
Day of the Doctor. I really do hope
that’s the case. It’s always hard to
walk away from something you love doing.
But, even so…
Don’t you think he sounds tired?
14 November 2013
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| No Photoshop. |
The Time Cave
The Time
Cave’s a place to come
and study signs from the past. It’s made
up of hastily scratched ancient images dating back to a time before most of us
were exploring. The elders tell stories
of the speleologists who began carving out this glorious wound. Occasionally a pioneer will uncover a section
that was previously blocked; revealing things we thought were lost forever and
only knew from the covers of childhood books.
Sometimes people get lost in here, missing in unexpected flash-foods,
swept off in a cold rush to dark, distant depths of the system, the places that
no-one sensible ventures into. The Time Cave’s
full of skulls after all. Still, we’ve
signed the waiver form. Things like that
never happen to us.
For one of the most important pieces of television ever, The Chase gets a pretty rough deal. Unloved for failing to bloom into a
full-colour fleapit filler (and then not even having the decency to vanish,
like its larger, much-missed, younger brother) it’s regarded as a disappointment
by friends and family. The Chase is still one of the most
important pieces of television ever and we’ll get back to exactly why that is.
Over the years, the Time Cave
has grown to a nearly unimaginable scale.
The entrance, once basic and wide is guarded now and restricted. On special days during the year, to celebrate
a new discovery, the huge barriers are lifted open and everyone who wants to can
have a look for free. It’s not quite the
event that it used to be - a lot of potential visitors now prefer to watch
other people’s memories on their phones - but then again, it’s not quite the
cave that it used to be either.
The Chase contains
a lot of debuts: Peter Purves; Aridians; Steven Taylor; Mechanoids;
Shakespeare; someone else playing the Doctor as played by William Hartnell; the
Beatles; it’s the first time we see a Dalek at the top of some stairs as well
as marking the first appearance of a film Dalek, but let’s not go there. None of these are the most important thing
about The Chase. Some of them did influence moments that’ll be
important to your life in the next couple of days (although Doctor Who’s never managed to repeat its
one successful prediction of musical longevity, so maybe not that one). Leaving aside the most important thing again,
I should probably point out that The
Chase also marks America’s
first appearances: the superpower/world’s policeman gets its own historical
minisode and a brief present-day outing, triggering a nervous dance and lots of
clumsy foot stamping.
Years ago you could find almost everyone in here. Children would be running wild, excited yelps
bouncing off the rough walls while their parents watched, sometimes with a grin
but not always. Many of the children
took to making their own pictures on the walls, crude sketchings initially. As the decades slid past only the most
dedicated kept at it, whilst their peers drifted in other directions, and today
these individuals unofficially guard the Time Cave’s
entrance. Youngsters can still make
their own stories and drawings – there’s a special gallery section in the shop
– but only the Guards are allowed to add to the walls now, restoring old
pictures and slowly filling the empty walls of the unimaginable space. The shop gets bigger ever day. New stalls are being added outside, groaning
under the weight of merchandise. In
preparation for the biggest open day ever, a lot of people have been very busy. Crowd control’s already a nightmare.
The Chase is also
notable for being the final episode of the original run of Doctor Who, Ian and Barbara return to London for some furious photo-bombing, taking
it with them as a souvenir. It’s the end
of alternating history and science field-trips, both the Doctor’s new chums are
now from times that see Hawkwind as Classical Music and there’s no going back
from that.
In the main section of the Time Cave,
the current mural’s nearly finished. The
suspicion is that it’ll link all the main images together in one huge frieze. The Head of the Guards has made it his life’s
work. He won’t say so in public but
inside he knows he’ll never top this.
Possibly no-one will. There’re a
lot of sections of wall still covered by curtains. Some observers have complained about ancient
originals being painted over in order to make the new vision fit, but that’s
the Head Guard’s right. The big
revelation is on the way. You can get in
for free but a lot of us have paid for a decent view.
The Doctor and the Daleks have been locked in a symbiotic
embrace - tearing chunks out of each other for our applause, amusement and
donations - since just after Christmas 1963.
The cinema was always going to be the arena this war in time ended up
in. The Daleks won the first bout convincingly;
the Doctor sending Van Helsing in to fight on his behalf was never going to
work. The second cinematic death-match
didn’t even mention the old wizard in its run-up publicity. Meanwhile, on smaller screens, writers and
alchemists have lost years hopelessly trying to recreate Terry Nation’s
lightning strike - Voord! Mechans! Cybermen! War Machines! Quarks! Krotons!
Weeping Angels! – totally without success.
Scientifically speaking, as it can’t be reproduced, it didn’t
happen. But that won’t buy you an
island.
Despite introducing motifs that are now taken as standard, this
part of the Time Cave’s one of the least popular; it’s
not easy to get into either. You enter
through a dip (mind your head) which opens out to an enclosed natural grotto
with smaller caverns leading off. It’s
lonely now, lonelier than usual anyway.
All the lights have been shifted to illuminate the flashier, iconic
images near the entrance where the main celebration’s taking place. This is an isolated section and very
old. Broken stelae litter the floor. It’s quiet in here and you can think. Lose hours.
Fail to notice the rising tide has cut you off.
The Day of the Doctor
is nearly on us. Once again it isn’t
quite what it appears to be. Recently, there’s
been a lot of talk online about the Doctor’s role as a policeman or soldier. Although he’s never been a pacifist – just
ask the French overseer brained with a shovel in The Reign of Terror – the Doctor’s relationship to authority is
complex. It would be far too sweeping to
say that in order to move the dance with America up to competition level, a
certain amount of militarisation needs to be involved but there’s definitely an
element of that creeping in. Steven
Moffat’s been cunning though: the War Doctor doesn’t count as a Doctor. He’s a pivotal plot-device lifted from The Myth Makers. Yes, there is a Doctor in the horse.
This War Doctor has been built in order to sneak the real Doctor through
cultural barriers.
The steady susurration of fan chatter has been rising
steadily during the week, like the water level in this part of the Time Cave. There’s no point shouting for help because
no-one’s really listening. The ceiling
is lowering itself down to meet you. The
lights begin going out.
The Day of the Doctor
is the third cinema battle between the Doctor and the Daleks. The title alone should tell you who’s going
to win this time. However, as with The Myth Makers, it won’t spoil the
story – that’s why there haven’t been any preview copies. The Time War is being fought worldwide
now. The dance wasn’t with America
at all – that was just distractingly fancy footwork. Moffat’s aimed much bigger than anyone
realised. If Saturday goes according to
plan, humanity’ll have a new hero. Now,
that’s audacious.
Keep treading water.
The noise is almost deafening.
Breathing’s becoming desperately urgent.
Ragged bursts that feel red break out into the growing darkness. Starting to feel light-headed, but that’s
because the remaining oxygen in this shrinking space is almost gone. The ceiling’s so close now that all the tiny
individual imperfections in the restoration are clear – you can actually see
through them, to the sweeping errors of the original strokes. Only two lights left.
It’s not likely that the Doctor will ever have this
opportunity to reach such a massive global audience again. Of course, neither will Steven Moffat. If either of them makes a mistake it’ll all
collapse. They both seem pretty
confident though. What about after the
battle’s over? How do you retain that
audience? How do you bring them back for
more? Easy. You end on a cliffhanger.
One light now and it’s flickering bravely. The sound is endless and everywhere but
through it the unmistakable concatenated drum-roll of heartbeats – lashing like
a trapped badger. The tide ripples,
black on blacker circles flip in time.
It’s like being hugged. The final
light goes out.
Speaking of cliffhangers, I still haven’t told you the real
reason why The Chase is one of the
most important pieces of television ever.
Deep breath. Close
your eyes. Here goes-
And then something grabs your foot.
21 November 2013
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| No Photoshop. |
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