Geek Urban Myths: Better than real

And so comedian and Doctor Who fan Toby Hadoke today tweeted some news that broke my heart:

“As there are some who still don’t believe it: I’ve just received written confirmation that Harold Pinter was not in The Abominable Snowmen!”

Okay, some context: for years a story has done the rounds of fandom, that Harold Pinter was hired by the producers of Doctor Who, not as a lauded playwright but in his other role as a jobbing actor. Yes, the man who would go on to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature was employed to play a yeti-fighting monk. That is, frankly, an awesome story.

Only it’s not true. And I’m gutted.

It’s not that I want all geek myths to be true – I’m glad there’s not really a Munchkin suicide in The Wizard of Oz – but some make the world more interesting. I want Bob Holness to have played the sax solo on ‘Baker Street’; I’m kind of freaked out but intrigued by the idea that the CIA invented a nefarious arcade game. I wish Kate Bush had written a Doctor Who story under a pseudonym, and frankly it now doesn’t matter that Uncle Ben never said “With great power comes great responsibility” in the original comics, the phrase is now deep in Spider-Man’s bones.

Like any other culture, the geek community has evolved a mythology over time. Often that’s based on flat-out misinformation, but it catches on because a need is fulfilled – attaching names like Bush and Pinter to a show traditionally made on a shoe-string grants it a certain legitimacy and credibility; that’s why these stories find themselves embedded in fan culture. It’s probably worth noting that, when Neil Gaiman wrote for Who, his episode got its name from one of the show’s most notorious hoaxes. After all, reinventing mythologies is one of Gaiman’s great strengths.

All of which goes to show, sometimes it’s more fun to print the myth…

Superman, Orson Scott Card and Diversity in Geek Culture

It’s a strange thing, becoming estranged from your own sub-culture. Things happen within a close-knit community that once you’d be in the middle of, but now it feels like it’s happens to other people.

Problem is, sometimes those other people need support; that the stories and characters you love become tainted by association and bad decisions, that your community gets bruised and battered and threatens to tear itself apart.

So when DC Comics announced that their new Superman title would by written by outspoken anti-gay activist Orson Scott Card. As PR moves go, it’s been less than successful, almost immediately attracting a boycott. Do I think DC is fundamentally homophobic? No – I think they hired successful-writer-of-space-opera Orson rather than person-who-doesn’t-like-gay-people Orson, no malice intended. It’s a screw-up.

That’s the problem. And it’s bigger than Orson Scott Card.

Geek culture is often blind to the implications of the media it produces, which leads to things unravelling when people on the receiving end of those implications dare to point them out. Key flashpoints in recent years have been the treatment of women in comic books (with ‘Women in Refrigerators’ being one of the key tropes) and the grief black cosplayers get when they’re dressed as white characters. DC recruiting Card is just the latest controversy that exposes a prejudiced undercurrent in geek culture.

Part of me thinks it’s because of the small-c conservatism of the key geek texts – Superman was created in the 1930s, Lord of the Rings in the fifties, Doctor Who in the sixties, all products of eras with a less inclusive approach to society, their launch years coinciding with Kristallnacht, McCarthyism and Governor Wallace declaring “Segregation forever” in Alabama respectively. Of course their histories are going to have problematic moments; racist caricatures of Japanese soldiers during war time, a lack of decent roles for women or anyone who isn’t white. For the most part, the worst excesses of this get left behind as society moves on; unfortunately, alongside this, stories calcify around particular images and scenarios – they become iconic, in the positive and negative senses of the word.

The problem is, because geek culture holds true to these iconic texts, it creates havoc when, say, a film adaptation wants to beef up the roles of female characters or wants the next Doctor to be black. “That’s not how it’s always been,” comes the inevitable response, and so genres that should be dynamic in exploring possibilities shut down and remain dominated by white men. And while I’ve got nothing against white men (I am one), they don’t exactly give geek culture a multiplicity of voices. And where does that leave you if you’re not one of those voices? Do you get labelled a fake nerd because, say, girls can’t possibly be into comics?

This is where the ‘don’t change the icons’ excuse runs out, because the treatment of people outside the ‘mainstream’ of geek culture can be abhorrent. For a community that has historically been defined by standing on the margins, it’s capable of doing its own share of marginalising.

Superman shouldn’t be about that. More than any other superhero, he’s the one who’s defined most purely by his desire to help and protect others. He’s the guy who gets between you and a killer robot. Or a slumlord. Or corruption or abuse or prejudice. Superman helps people. That’s his job. The key moment of All Star Superman, the best work on the character for years, isn’t a gonzo sci-fi concept, it’s Superman gently and simply talking a girl out of throwing herself off a building. If Superman can’t say “It gets better” then he’s outlived his usefulness. I don’t think he has, but that usefulness has to be more than him picking up asteroids.

I don’t think for one minute DC editorial would let Orson Scott Card use one of its titles to promote a specific political stance. That doesn’t matter. Homophobia has become the elephant in the room, and the fact that Card was even considered for the role, seemingly without anyone considering that it might just be controversial, is problematic. There are already very few black and female creators working in the industry; to pick an outspoken, homophobic author to write DC’s flagship character just adds insult to injury. What does it say to gay creators trying to break into the industry? Heck, what does it say to those who are already established?

Geek culture, in both professional and fan communities, needs to take a good look at itself. Questions of race, gender and sexuality need to be addressed, (and not just by a tiny minority) but more importantly, the community needs to show respect – respect for fellow fans, respect for customers, respect for those who will love Man of Steel this summer but don’t want to buy a comic because it’s written by a homophobe. This isn’t about ideology or politics, this is about humanity.

Superman was once used to fight the Ku Klux Klan for real. We forget the power of our stories; this current controversy acts as a reminder that these characters are important and have meaning for millions of people. Superman is about truth and justice; the moment his books work against that, it’s a problem; it’s even more of a problem that people remain blind to those problems.

Geek culture needs to lose its blinders and live up to its own ideals; needs to be less of a customer base and more of a community. How we go about that will be the real test of whether comic fandom deserves to survive the years to come.

Happy 49th Anniversary, Doctor Who

“To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence... When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”

C.S. Lewis, On Three Ways of Writing For Children

48 years ago, when the world was black and white and mist-shrouded, a new TV show, one that would go on to become my favourite, emerged into the public consciousness with the image of a sixties police box sitting incongruously in a junkyard. Doctor Who, for much of its history, has been a show aimed at children – for a while, adults claimed it, and expanded its horizons, but upon its relaunch in 2005, it was placed back in the hands of 12 year olds. Rightly so; this is where it belongs.

Meanwhile, I have a small army of Daleks on my coffee table and a Sonic Screwdriver sitting on one of my bookcases. I’m 36 now, by most standards I’m too old for toys, and yet it’s more complicated than that – Doctor Who exists, for many of its fans, in the memory of their childhood and as part of the mythology of childhood. Nowadays this is front and centre – the 11^th Doctor is as much a big kid as he is a scarily intelligent 900 year old alien – with plots revolving around children or their absence. It’s not so much that the adult world is impotent, but that the world of children is important and mythic on a level that the adults in the show can’t always understand. This is a show where the main character claims to speak Baby. Should I grow out of the show? Maybe it’ll happen, but I don’t feel the need to throw away my Gallifrey University t-shirt and start watching The Only Way Is Essex.

“I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which ‘Escape’ is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?”

JRR Tolkien, On Fairy Stories

Maybe there’s something else attractive about the show’s connection to childhood – the ability to look at the world in a different way for a while. The TARDIS Eruditorum makes the claim that Doctor Who is a show about running and escape, and while it’s not just about those, they’re sitting there at the very beginning: “Have you ever thought what it’s like to be wanderers in the Fourth Dimension? Have you? To be exiles?” the Doctor asks in the very first episode, “Susan and I are cut off from our own planet – without friends or protection. But one day we shall get back. Yes, one day….”

This makes sense – despite its original remit to educate children in such down to earth things as science and history, Doctor Who is fundamentally escapist, either making something magical or scary out of the ordinary – police boxes, shop dummies, DVD extras – or catapulting the ordinary into the depths of space and history. The first episode was delayed slightly because of the Kennedy assassination; Doctor Who was born into a world that could use a little escape. And there’s nothing wrong with that, because escaping from things that are constricting, imprisoning, stifling, is a positive thing – escape, make it to the brow of the nearest hill and see a whole new world laid out before you, one that you could previously only dream of because everyone told you your imagination was too silly.

“Fairy tales are more than true — not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.”

Neil Gaiman, riffing on a line from GK Chesterton

Yet imagination has dark corners – the monster under your bed, the bogeyman in your closet. Those are childhood fears, of course, but they eventually give way to other concerns – illness, redundancy, the breakdown of relationships. These are the monsters we fight, metaphorically, and a show like Doctor Who, that was slammed for its portrayal of monsters but that came out the other side, helps give us the metaphorical tools to fight back. We know there are bad things out there, the problem is not giving in to pessimism and despair and the belief that the monsters are all-powerful. Sometimes it’s important to see them beaten, to watch them fall and know that victory is possible.

But wait, it’s about more than just proving that monsters can be beaten – Doctor Who suggests that monsters can be beaten, not by bullets and bombs, but imagination, intelligence and laughter. It’s not enough to prove that your enemies can be defeated; you have to be able to live with that victory without becoming a monster yourself. If Doctor Who can promote the idea that picking up a book is better than picking up a gun – or, say, an abusive text message – then it’s served a noble purpose.

And so I’ll figure out a way to celebrate the birthday of my favourite show, and I’ll look forward to new episodes, because there’s nothing else like it on TV. It’s the glorious story of a madman in a box, and I love it: Happy Birthday, Doctor Who.

Happy Birthday Paul McGann: A Tribute to the Eighth Doctor

The nineties were a liminal period for Doctor Who. The TV series had been cancelled in 1989, ending a twenty-six year run of stories that formed the bedrock of the show’s mythos. The heart of the Doctor Who shifted – from being something produced by the BBC to something over which fans had an unprecedented ownership; from a TV series to a series of novels, comics, fan videos, audio adventures… Doctor Who didn’t die in 1989, it exploded into a hundred facets. It’s up to fans to put those facets together in a way that suits them.

All of which means that the Eighth Doctor is, appropriately, a liminal Doctor. Unlike all the others, he appeared on TV only once – in a 1996 TV movie co-produced by the BBC and Fox TV in the States. And it’s odd viewing – the plot’s a mess, but it has production values that the original series would have killed for; it passes the baton from Sylvester McCoy to Paul McGann but never quite feels like it’s part of the same series. McGann’s the official Eighth Doctor, but his one TV adventure introduces stuff that everyone now feels free to ignore.

So let’s focus on what the TV Movie gets right – it cast Paul McGann. Of all the Doctors, with the possible exceptions of Smith and Tennant, McGann is the one who nails it from the start. Say what you want about the rest of the Movie, there are at least two scenes where McGann shows he can line up with the other Doctors.

The first is a scene where he’s describing Gallifrey, an alien planet with a beautiful sky, an image out of a fantasy novel, but then he stops…

…To announce that his shoes fit.

It’s the sort of moment Doctor Who does well – contrasting the extraordinary and mundane and finding the value in both. It’s a key aspect of the show – the universe is an amazing place, but so is an Earth full of shoes and chips if you look at it from the right perspective.

The other scene is a typical escape-from-the-cops moment. The TV Movie gets accused of being too ‘American’ at times, which always seems to be a strange criticism to me, but given the chance to take a gun and escape from the police, the Doctor somehow manages to escape by taking himself hostage. It’s a funny moment, shows the Doctor’s uniqueness and humanity and gives him a place in a world of cookie cutter action heroes.

Ultimately, the TV Movie didn’t lead to an ongoing series as hoped. It would be easy to see it as a false start, but that’s not fair to McGann – he’s continued to play the role, and play it well, in Big Finish audio adventures, and the Eighth Doctor continued in books and comics. It gives us a Schrodinger’s Continuity explanation of how the dashing, enthusiastic, joyful Eighth Doctor became the broken, PTSD Ninth, a story that hasn’t been nailed down yet and probably never will. The Eighth Doctor is now an emblem for the sixteen years the Doctor Who wasn’t a regular BBC TV production – maybe it’s appropriate that Eighth Doctor spin-off media keep playing with the concepts of amnesia and alternate timelines and reinvention (check out Paul’s costume in both the pictures in this post – both are official. Or maybe ‘official’).

And so thank you Paul McGann; for creating a great Doctor straight off the bat, and for continuing to support the series as your take on the character continues to evolve. Because that’s what Doctor Who is all about.

Happy Birthday Sylvester McCoy & Sophie Aldred

They say that ‘your’ Doctor is the one you watched when you were twelve, old enough to be a fan and young enough to not be cynical. I’m not sure if this is exactly my story, as I came to Doctor Who through the books, but it’s true to say that Sylvester McCoy is ‘my’ Doctor.

This is ironic, because Sylvester’s era seemed almost deliberately designed to not be particularly new-viewer-friendly. The show was falling out of favour at the BBC and so the McCoy years weren’t blessed with intensive advertising or Radio Times covers. The show was moved from Saturday nights into a kamikaze head-to-head battle with Coronation Street, and so the era was perhaps the moment that Doctor Who became a genuine niche interest rather than something aiming for the mainstream.

Now, the reason I came to Doctor Who through the books rather than the TV show itself was that I visited my grandmothers on Saturdays and had no control over what was seen on television. Therefore, when Doctor Who shifted to a midweek transmission, I was probably one of the few viewers they actually gained, with me watching Sylvester’s debut on a battered portable television in my bedroom.

Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred (who played Ace) deserved better than that. Their era was one that started redressing production issues that had been made recently, moving away from continuity porn and sequels to episodes made twenty years ago and towards a darker, more imaginative universe.

This is evident in the persona of the Seventh Doctor. Although the Sixth is often thought of as the ‘difficult’ Doctor, the Seventh is an altogether scarier prospect, one that will burn down your world in a single night if it’ll serve the greater good, one that will help you become the person you could be but not without inflicting a far amount of emotional agony along the way.

This is the strange thing about the relationship between the Doctor and Ace. He’s recast as an almost mythic figure, facing off against ancient gods in a twisted circus, playing chess against cosmic evil and winning through a tricks terms gambit. He’s teamed up with a working class girl from London with mummy issues and a lack of direction.

In a way it’s similar to the template used in 2005′s reboot, but while Christopher Eccleston’s Doctor was a broken survivor, Sylvester’s Doctor was at the height of his powers, delivering what could have been seen, at the time, as conclusive victories against the Big Two monsters of Doctor Who’s history. This Doctor wasn’t messing around.

We see this most clearly at the climax of ‘The Curse of Fenric’, where Ace’s faith in the Doctor is preventing the villain’s defeat. The only way to win is for the Doctor to emotionally destroy her… And he does.

It’s a stand-out moment for the era, because we already know that the Doctor can be a ruthless manipulator, and that Ace has a world of her own issues to face. It turns out that the Doctor was lying to her, that his dismissal of his friend was all a lie, but there’s enough suspicion cast to make us ask the difficult question – what if he wasn’t lying?

It’s an elephant in the room, and it almost seems like it’s a character flaw crying out for a resolution it never received, on TV at least. And maybe we don’t want it to happen, because while he can be a nasty piece of work, the Seventh Doctor is also incredibly liveable and oddly human. He hates burnt toast and bus stations – don’t we all?

I also like the fact that the McCoy era includes the first mention of Elvis in Doctor Who. It’s almost an accidental mission statement for the programme, drawing on new influences like graphic novels and jazz, rather than complacently being influenced simply by the grand history of the longest running TV show in the world.

The show was suddenly growing up again, realising that there’s a bigger world out there. In that sense, it’s probably appropriate that Ace’s growth from a frustrated, damaged teenager to a confident young woman is the key character arc of the final seasons of the classic series. There’s a moment in ‘Survival’ when it appears that the Doctor is dead and Ace holds his umbrella and wears his hat. She’s ready to take over from him, or at least try, and in a story that’s all about her growing maturity, sexual and otherwise, it’s an important moment.

And so maybe it’s significant that this era was when I joined the show proper, when I made a transition in my fandom. It’s an era of growth and change, one that ironically saw the TV series cancelled but that also saw it evolve into books, comics and CDs. It was the seeds planted in the Sylvester/Sophie years that enabled the 2005 relaunch to stand a fighting chance, with writers cutting their professional teeth on the New Adventures books and building on themes that would later emerge in the new series.

Back when I was young, it felt like the Seventh Doctor era was an ending. Instead it turned out to be a glorious transformation.

Happy birthday, Sylvester and Sophie.