A Perpetual Outsider Writes...

  Some brief thoughts on The End of Time Part One; a full review can wait for Part Two next week. 

  In 1964, Moris Farhi was invited to submit a sample script for a Doctor Who story.  Instead, he wrote all six episodes of his proposed tale, Farewell Great Macedon.  The story was never made, but the scripts have now been published by the makers of the fanzine Nothing at the End of the Lane.

  Reading the scripts makes for an odd experience, as they have not had the benefit of the process of editing and redrafting that televised episodes have undergone.  The regular characters are well-realized most of the time, but occasional lines seem out of character (although this could happen even in transmitted episodes – see Ian’s line about his “pants” (by which he means his trousers) in The Web Planet).  Moreover, there are a number of anachronisms here that David Whitaker might have removed.  Some, like the changes of the dates of the deaths of Alexander the Great’s retinue, are justifiable on the grounds of poetic licence.  Less acceptable are ancient characters continually speaking of “scientists” and the TARDIS crew giving Alexander a watch and a modern compass, undermining the early programme’s insistence that history can not be changed.  This would be less noticeable were it not a key theme of this very story!

  A bigger problem comes with Alexander the Great’s character.  While he is portrayed as a rounded figure, an idealist with a short temper and a fondness for wine, the author is clearly besotted with him and moreover is intent on using him as a mouthpiece for anachronistic ideas, particularly when he starts protesting about racial intermarriage leading to lynching, a concern from the south of the USA in the sixties rather than the ancient world.  As Philip MacDonald points out in his review, the real Alexander was a tyrant and slave-owner; it is hard to see him as a spokesman for universal freedom and brotherly love.  Moreover, even assuming for the sake of argument that Alexander’s conquests were motivated purely by the desire to spread Greek freedom and democracy across the world, the script refuses to question whether this dream is attainable or even desirable.  To be fair, we in 2009 have the advantage of being able to look back at Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq and see how such a policy has failed, examples that would not have struck Farhi in 1964 (although he might have pondered the ultimate failure of the French Revolution to spread its ideals).

  Away from such thematic concerns, the plot is solid, but a bit hard to get into.  The early episodes are rather slow and the TARDIS crew only real get involved in events in the second half of the story.  Even then, key incidents occur without their input or even their presence.  Typically for the time, there are many long dialogue-based scenes which can get a bit tiring, especially as they often lack the poetry of The Crusade; then again, maybe the script suffers from not having actors to bring the dialogue to life.  With four regulars and nine main guest characters, it is perhaps not surprising that some characters, particularly Ptolemy and Glaucias remain ciphers.  Furthermore, there is no mystery to maintain the audience’s attention.  We now from the first episode who the villains are and what they intend to do; the only question is whether they will succeed.  There is also a lack of humour, although that is less surprising for a season one story and the Doctor’s fire walking scene has comic value.

  Despite these faults, Farewell Great Macedon could have been a strong story after a little editing.  However, in retrospect, it is perhaps unsurprising that it was not made, as it shares some similarities to finished season one stories.  Like The Aztecs, it focuses on changing history, with one or more of the regular characters trying to ‘improve’ on what really happened.  Like Marco Polo, there is a linear plot about an assassination attempt on a famous ruler with the regulars blamed.  From this point of view, Farewell Great Macedon benefits from being published some (considerable) time after those stories, when we have had time to grow nostalgic for something in a similar vein.

  While I had mixed views about the story itself, I have no uncertainty about the production of this particular volume.  Clearly a labour of love for all involved (for copyright reasons, this book is not for profit), it features cleverly faked telesnaps and Radio Times listings for the story and several interesting reviews by fans, as well as a short essay on the historical Alexander the Great.  However, I was uncertain as to why the Time Team were included, given that their self-proclaimed mission is to watch all of Doctor Who “in order”, something they clearly were not doing with this story.  There were a few typos and mistakes, inevitable in a non-professionally produced work, but overall the standard is very high.  My main quibble is that the authentic reproduction of the scripts leads to a very tall book.  I have widely-spaced shelves, but this is too tall to be shelved upright!

  Also included is The Fragile Yellow Arc of Fragrance, another unused Doctor Who script by Farhi, but this time only one episode long.  It is a rather unusual story and it is easy to see why David Whitaker rejected it, as it reads more like a World Distributors annual story than a made television story.  Set on a planet where people commit suicide when their hearts are broken, most of the story (which threatens to have a plot, but never quite manages it) involves the Doctor explaining how the TARDIS works.  Reading this, it is quite clear why the series itself tended to avoid such explanations.  While eschewing the technobabble that would blight the programme from the seventies to the present day, it is banal to the point of absurdity, not to mention scientifically laughable.  It is not surprising that David Whitaker and Moris Farhi came to a mutual decision that Farhi would pitch for a historical story instead.  However, it does provide additional insight into the thinking processes of the production programme on Doctor Who’s first season, by showing what they avoided.

Last week I watched Dreamland, the BBC’s on-line, animated Doctor Who serial. It was quite good, considering the limitations it was under. Not ground-breaking, but fun and with a welcome absence of exaggerated emotional scenes (although there was still some pompous moralizing – the new series is actually worse in this regard than under Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks, although no one seems to have noticed). It was nice having a little chunk of new Who every day.

However, just once I would like to see a paranoia story in which it is the USSR kidnapping peace-loving aliens and stealing their technology, not the USA, just for a change. These days the USA serves the same role in European fiction (and, indeed liberal American fiction) as the Soviet Union did in the Cold War.

I have just finished watching The Gift, the last story in this year’s season of The Sarah Jane Adventures. So, Clyde’s cynicism, otherwise known in this context as xenophobia, was proved right. Trusting aliens is wrong, apparently. I bet Lawrence “The Unquiet Dead is racist” Miles loved that.

Overall, I found this season disappointing. I believe Tom Baker once said that Doctor Who is a children’s programme, but not a childish programme. That has mostly been true of the first two seasons of The Sarah Jane Adventures, but this year it felt like we crossed the line to childishness too many times. Mona Lisa’s Revenge was a good idea wasted by silly execution and The Gift was too stupid for words, especially “They farted themselves to death.” The Eternity Trap was dull and The Mad Woman in the Attic was worthy, but a little lightweight. The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith was quite good, but the Doctor’s guest appearance was pointless and the Trickster is becoming a boring foe, leaving Prisoner of the Judoon, a trivial but fun runaround, as perhaps the best story of the season.

  A few thoughts on the Doctor Who Magazine survey results.

  Hooray!  An old Who story (The Caves of Androzani) topped the poll!  In fact, six of the top ten stories were old Who (although I have never understood the appeal of number 3, Genesis of the Daleks).  It is also interesting that season thirteen beat season fourteen to the best season spot, and that seasons thirteen, fourteen and seven beat all the new Who seasons.  Season five is still over-rated (I find it the weakest sixties season, not the best) and seasons twenty-nine and thirty are very over-rated.

  Quite a few new Who stories ended up in the bottom half, although not always stories I dislike.  Fear Her (192 out of 200) is still unjustly hated – it’s The Gunfighters of the twenty-first century.  Alas, the Williams and Hartnell eras did badly (I suspect that the Williams revival was limited to certain fanzines, not fandom as a whole), which still makes me feel out of step with fandom.

  People really do like the rubbish that was The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End (unlucky for some, number 13).  Strangely, I have met hardly anyone in the real world who actually likes the thing.

  The results broken down by demographic were interesting.  The under-eighteens unexpectedly put the ten episode, black and white, monster-less The War Games at number 7, while fans since 2005 put the missing The Power of the Daleks at number 8.

  I have just finished About Time 3, the second, expanded, edition of the multi-volume Doctor Who guide.  At 507 pages (including 22 pages of end notes) it is the longest About Time volume by some margin.  Billed as an expanded edition, large parts of the book have been completely rewritten, most notably the analysis section (my favourite part of the books, indeed, the main reason I bought them), which is practically a new book in itself (there are enough differences to justify keeping the first edition too).  There are also some new essays.

  For those of us with the first edition, fun can be had spotting where Tat Wood and Lawrence Miles disagreed by comparing the first edition (written by both) with the second (Wood alone).  Doctor Who and the Silurians gets a more positive review in the new book; The Dæmons, and many more, gets a more negative review.  Not for the first time when reading these books I find myself asking whether Wood (and Miles) actually like Doctor Who,so withering can the criticism be at times.  Incidentally, the use of the first person plural now that Wood is writing alone is very odd (About Time 6 had the same fault).

  The book’s strengths and weaknesses are those of the whole series.  The analysis of the cultural background to each story is detailed, the reviews often produce original insights and the lists of narrative flaws are unforgiving.  The essays (not all located where they were in the first edition, which causes problems with the cross-referencing in other volumes) are sometimes interesting, but occasionally meander without reaching a firm conclusion.  The analysis sometimes drifts into ‘you had to be there to understand’ statements, most notably in the essay ‘Was 1973 the Annus Mirabilis?’

  There seemed to be a lot of typos, grammatical errors and the like, and something goes wrong with the footnotes around note 100 and again at the very end.  There are still clever-clever remarks that do not seem to mean anything, such as the assertion that “the whole anti-slavery campaign… was to the Napoleonic wars what Palestine was to the Cold War”.  I know a bit about the periods in question and I still do not have a clue what Wood is on about here.  I also wonder how many times these volumes have claimed that something is “the most inevitable film/TV programme/book of 19—”

  The subject of errors leads me to the perennial criticism of these volumes, namely the number of factual errors.  Some of those in the first edition have been corrected, but many new ones have been added.  As this is a book that spends a large amount of time pointing out other people’s mistakes, it seems only fair to join in.  For reasons of space I will limit myself to a few choice examples.  Page 387 still confuses classical and Keynesian economics and adds a splendid new blunder: “[the Liberal Party was] formed from the wreckage of the Whigs caused by Gladstone’s position on Home Rule for Ireland in the 1850s”.  There is so much wrong with that statement that it is difficult to know where to begin (it was the Liberal Party, not the Whigs that was divided over Home Rule, and that was at the end of the nineteenth century, not the middle).  I have never seen anything confirming Wood’s suggestion that Nixon caused the Yom Kippur War.  The General Strike apparently happened in 1929 on page 322, but by page 384 it has been restored to its correct date of 1926.  I might add that ‘sharon’ is not the Hebrew word for desert, but the name of a fertile plain near the Mediterranean.  I do not know whether Alexandra, whoever she might be, had a valuable library, but page 335 presumably means to refer to the Library of Alexandria.  A mistake in the French on page 399 renders the Sontarans stink-less instead of fearless.  Finally, it is not exactly an error, but in a series of books so anti-American in many ways, it is odd to see Americanisms like “British Social History 101” (on page 101, appropriately).

  Despite all my sniping, this is another extremely enjoyable and thought-provoking work from Mad Norwegian Press, and I look forward to the projected seventh volume, covering what Wood insists on referring to as “the Welsh series”.

  I watched the first episode of Doctor Who and the Silurians again last night. I reviewed the story at length here (one of my better reviews, I think), so this is just a quick observation.

  It struck me that aside from less than ten seconds of monster action in the opening and closing scenes, this episode consists almost entirely of men in suits talking. Mainly about particle accelerators and nervous breakdowns. There is a bit when the reactor nearly goes critical, but it is all handled in dialogue – no sirens and flashing lights.