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…

Delia Derbyshire Day

In 2007, the taped archives of one of the most influential figures in British electronic music were delivered to Manchester University in cereal boxes. It was an inauspicious arrival for the legacy of a relatively unsung hero of British culture, although not unprecedented; even an attempt to get her a co-creator credit on her most famous work was foiled by bureaucracy. That’s why today’s Delia Derbyshire Day events are necessary; her work with electronica was incredibly influential and it deserves to be celebrated.

However, while Derbyshire may not be a household name, there’s a good chance you’re familiar with her work, particularly if you’re from the UK.

Because she’s responsible for the Doctor Who theme tune.

She didn’t compose it (that was Ron Grainer), but Derbyshire’s work is key to the theme’s success. Frankly it sounds like nothing else today, let alone on a cold winter in November 1963. The more bombastic arrangements of the relaunch obscure some of the tune’s weirdness – perhaps that’s in line with depicting the Doctor as a more obviously heroic character, rather than William Hartnell’s unpredictable, unnerving portrayal. The Derbyshire arrangement is scary; not too scary, of course, but disconcerting, promising something alien emerging from the dark. And yet it’s also futuristic, in the sixties sci-fi sense of the world. It’s a soundscape as much as a tune, and you can’t quite identify what instruments or gadgets are being used.

I remember worried internet discussions in 2005 – would Russell T. Davies use the police box? The Daleks? The theme tune? In retrospect it’s unthinkable; the theme tune is a fundamental part of the show’s DNA. When the writers wanted to illustrate the madness of the Master, they had John Simm tap a four-beat rhythm on a table. It was meant to represent the double heartbeat of a Time Lord, but let’s not kid ourselves, it was the bass line for the best theme tune on TV. And much of that is thanks to Delia Derbyshire, who created something that so inhabits a show that it leaks into the fiction.

With 50 years of hindsight, it’s hard to imagine Doctor Who as a newborn programme, with no history or legacy or reputation, no rabid fanbase to fight its corner. It was the new kid on the block, and in an era of casual, institutional racism and sexism, it’s a story in itself how Doctor Who was put together by ‘outsiders’ – a female producer, for instance, and a gay, Indian director. It’s a weird mix of the reactionary and the progressive, which mirrors some of the early themes of the show – Derbyshire falls firmly into the progressive camp. Sure, she’s best known for Doctor Who, but she worked with Paul McCartney, Pink Floyd and Yoko Ono. A fantastic theme tune would be achievement enough, but Derbyshire’s legacy is more expansive than that. It’s good to see Band on the Wall bringing that to a wider audience. Let’s hope it gets Delia the recognition she deserves.

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 Matt Smith: Why I Love the Eleventh Doctor

Matt Smith has, I think, become my favourite Doctor.

I wasn’t sure at first, when he was first announced. He seemed a bit too young, and something of an unknown quantity – sci-fi fans, ironically, can be somewhat conservative when it comes to their franchises. However, I was won over by the line “fish fingers and custard”.

See, this announced the arrival of the 11th Doctor, a shibboleth between him and his best friend, and his entry into the ‘dark fairytale’ of the Steven Moffat years. This is a Doctor who’s an archetype of the show’s role in pop culture – children are scared and need someone to deal with the monsters under the bed, and along comes a Doctor to play that role. I don’t think it’s coincidence that the 11th Doctor has a rapport with children. After all, this is a character who’s only just been reborn.

See, the 9th and 10th Doctors were part of a giant plot arc – the Time War, how the Time Lords became corrupt, what this meant for the Doctor. It was a good story, but one that demanded resolution – the 10th Doctor was going down a dark path – so when David Tennant left and Matt Smith arrived, it signalled a new direction.

And so this is a different Doctor – younger, less hubristic and more bumbling. Heck, more nerdy – he gets excited about bowties and ridiculous hats. And, when threatening an army of monsters, he drops the mic. That would never happen to 10. He’s a hero for everyone who’s a little clumsy, child-like and socially inept, because while those traits could leave him as a sitcom caricature, he’s also the smartest guy in the room and, when he gets quiet, incredibly dangerous. That contrast between the eccentric boffin and the destroyer of worlds keeps things interesting. It also means he can do some pretty nasty things and get away with it.

But that’s why I like him. He may be a bit manipulative at times, he may keep secrets, but he’s still fundamentally loveable. Check out the moment when he tells a bedtime story to a little girl, just before he goes to his death – he’s torn between dying with regrets and celebrating all that he’s seen. It’s a wonderful moment, and Smith pulls off the tension of being an old man in a young man’s body. You look at him and you can believe he was once William Hartnell. And that’s why he’s a great Doctor.

Happy birthday Matt.

More Eleventh Doctor posts here and here.