Linkblogging For 25/11/08
Just a few quick links today. Please note there will be no linkblogging tomorrow. The last issue of Batman RIP is out tomorrow in the US, but not til Thursday in the UK. While I don’t normally avoid spoilers – if something can be spoiled by knowing the ending, it’s usually not worth it – this is a bit different, as it’s a story that’s kept me on the edge of my seat for more than two years now, and I want to see how Morrison ties it up without hearing the ending somewhere else first. So I shall be avoiding most of my usual net haunts tomorrow, and unable to find anything to link to, until I can get my copy.
Anyway…
Gavin Burrows, who you may recognise from his comments here, has a good post up on Dylan’s John Wesley Harding.
Alex Wilcock has a post up about Labour’s disgraceful, criminal treatment of mental health services, as well as their attitude toward the poor. Wilcock doesn’t really go far enough – anyone who thinks that Labour have any concern at all for the disadvantaged, remember that Labour have cut, on average, two mental health beds per day since they came into power. I could rant for hours – days – about the disgraceful state of the mental health system in this country, about how it demoralises staff until they quit like I did, or until they become ill themselves, about how it fails patients, who get kicked out as soon as they’re semi-coherent in order to free up the bed, only to return a few weeks later, and about how it puts patients, staff (such as my wife) and the general public in danger to save a few pennies… Wilcock’s points about the current benefits system are entirely correct too…
An interesting thing at Scientific American about the converse of quantum tunneling…
And Tim O’Neill at the Hurting is doing a great series of posts on comics culture in the early 90s and the Death Of Superman storyline. I only have a URL for one of them in my buffer, but you should be able to get to the rest from there.
Ten Years On – The Time Warrior
I actually only noticed today that many of the stories I’m choosing for A Doctor A Day fall close to important anniversaries for the show – The Invasion was shown over the fifth anniversary, the Five Doctors was shown for the twentieth anniversary, Remembrance Of The Daleks was the start of the twenty-fifth year of the show (and also started broadcasting on the even more important date of my tenth birthday), and today’s story, The Time Warrior, was broadcast just a couple of weeks after the tenth anniversary (which came halfway through The Green Death, another really good story). An odd, and unintended, coincidence – especially when you consider that the two stories I’m looking at that don’t fit this pattern – Destiny Of The Daleks and Timelash – are the ones that are generally considered ‘a bit crap’. Possibly the quality of Doctor Who stories goes in regular cycles, or possibly I’m inferring too much from a tiny and biased sample. You decide…
The Time Warrior was the last story of Jon Pertwee’s penultimate series as the Doctor, and is one of his very best. Pertwee was the second longest-serving Doctor, after his successor Tom Baker, but his five years with the show are not generally regarded as a highpoint (and I must admit that while I try not to defer to popular opinion, he ties with Sylvester McCoy for last place in my personal rankings of the seven original Doctors). In part this was because of the format, imposed by the outgoing production team at the end of Patrick Troughton’s tenure, with which Pertwee’s Doctor was lumbered – stuck on Earth without the ability to operate the TARDIS for most of the first few years of his stint as the Doctor, as Terrance Dicks, the script editor of the time, noted, this only left two stories – the alien invasion and the mad scientist – open for the show.
But also, Pertwee’s Doctor was too much the man of action, and the show in this period owed far more to the contemporary ITC adventure series like Jason King and Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased) (and also to The Avengers, a wonderful non-ITC show of the same ilk, co-created by Sydney Newman before he worked on Doctor Who – Pertwee’s character may have dressed like Peter Wyngarde, but his lines could easily have been spoken by Patrick McNee). Doctor Who at its best was always an innovative show – and it always had the potential to do literally anything – and so to see it following the lead of other, less interesting shows is somewhat depressing.
To make matters worse, most of Pertwee’s scripts were extremely average, and while script editor Terrance Dicks (we will talk more about the importance of script editors to Who tomorrow) was probably the strongest script editor the show ever had as far as plot went, he was not so hot on punching up dialogue, and was infuriatingly sexist, so when given a dull runaround by, say, Terry Nation (of whom more also tomorrow) it would turn into a dull sexist runaround but with a beautifully crafted plot.
There were exceptions to this, though, especially in Pertwee’s later series. The Green Death, the story directly before this one, is one of the best of any era, and everything written by Robert Holmes, who wrote this story, is golden – Holmes was as good a writer as people seem to think Stephen Moffatt is, writing chilling horror and music-hall patter with equal facility.
We’re very lucky that Holmes was chosen to write this story, which introduced several new elements to the Doctor Who ‘mythos’ (if you’ll pardon the term), one of which was the new companion, Sarah Jane Smith.
Something that has been noted many times about Doctor Who is that almost every new female companion for the Doctor was introduced with “this one won’t be just a typical screamer to get rescued by the Doctor”, but almost every one of them was reduced to shrieking and being captured by villains within two stories. There were exceptions (Tom Baker’s companions mostly got away with having actual characters, and Ace never got turned into a damsel in distress) but normally their personalities got watered down horribly.
On the commentary track for The Time Warrior, Dicks claims that the format demanded the companions be ‘tied to railway tracks’, and that making the characters stronger when they were first introduced allowed this to be done without cheapening the characters – you knew they were strong, so they were then allowed to be weak. There is, no doubt, an element of truth to this. However, Dicks is also the man who replaced Doctor Liz Shaw after one series with Jo Grant, whose function was described *on screen* as ‘someone to wash the Doctor’s test tubes and tell him how brilliant he is’, and who says in the documentary on the Time Warrior DVD “Much to my disgust, feminism was coming along, you see…”, so I’m not *entirely* convinced by his arguments.
But with the character of Sarah Jane Smith, viewers were lucky enough to get a Robert Holmes script, and to get Elisabeth Sladen in the role. Sladen is an absolutely superb actress – easily the best actress ever to take a companion role in Who – and she managed to get enough of a sense of the character from the script that she managed to actually build a coherent character up for Sarah Jane, often in spite of later scripts, and became one of the best-remembered companions of the entire series.
The Time Warrior itself is a great romp, involving a Sontaran (their first appearance) crash-landing on Earth in the medieval period and having to kidnap scientists from the twentieth century using a time-displacement macguffin in order to repair his ship, and getting involved in a local conflict between knights, with the Doctor travelling back in time to sort it out along with a stowaway Sarah Jane. While the feel of the story is Ivanhoe-esque Boys’ Own adventure, the actual plot is closer to farce, being based around cases of mistaken identity, comic-relief absent-minded professors, and the Doctor dressing up as a robot and a monk. It also features one of writer Robert Holmes’ classic ‘double acts’, Irongron and Bloodaxe, who operate in classic Pete’n'Dud intelligent idiot/stupid idiot mode, and some of the overall best acting in the series.
The performances are helped by Alan Bromly’s direction. Bromly was, even at the time, considered an ‘old-school’ director, and in his work, even more than in Waris Hussein’s on An Unearthly Child, you can see the theatrical origin of much of the style of British TV drama. A much less visually imaginative director than Hussein, he just plonks the camera in one spot and sets up the shot, but he frames the shots so well – and more importantly casts actors so perfectly in their roles – that the effect is like watching an extraordinarily good stage performance.
But a Doctor Who story would be nothing without the central performance, and it’s here that The Time Warrior really shines, with Pertwee given one of his rare opportunities to get his teeth into the role. While Pertwee is generally a rather hammy performer (not that there’s anything wrong with that in Who) there are some great little moments here, like when he leans back and considers whether to report Sarah Jane to UNIT, where it’s no longer funny old Jon Pertwee out of Wurzel Gummidge up there, but it’s the Doctor. Pertwee shows here just what he could do with a good script, and it’s a shame that, like Colin Baker later, he was so rarely given the chance to do that.
The Time Warrior is available either as a single DVD or as part of the Bred For War box set (containing all the Sontaran stories at a reduced price, and well worth it even though none of those other stories match up to this first one). It’s also apparently available on iTunes, though why on earth anyone would want to pay Apple for a DRM’d video file that they can’t watch without running the risk of breaking their computer I’m unsure. However you get it, though, it’s a good, solid story at the upper end of the norm for Doctor Who – nothing earth-shattering, but thoroughly enjoyable, and it stands up surprisingly to repeated watching.
Linkblogging for 24/11/08
Just a quick linkblog today, as I’ve got some important stuff to do in the remainder of the night…
Bobsy from the Mindless Ones continues to interview a cold, heartless, remorseless child-murderer.
Tucker Stone continues to review old issues of The Brave And The Bold.
Charlie Brooker appears to be living my life.
Laurie at Liberal Conspiracy has a fine post on Reclaim The Night and how men may also feel much the same way as women do about walking the streets alone. I’m usually in at least two minds about this kind of argument – it seems to me to sometimes deny the difference in experiences between groups with and without power. Having said that, Ms Penny’s feminist credentials are impeccable, and the article does ring true emotionally with this particular intimidating-looking straight white male who cringes whenever he goes past a gang of lads half his age… just be aware that I may just be linking to it because of my privilege or something…
And to finish with, another great post from the Mindless Ones, this time on Kraven
Five Years Later – The Invasion
The Cybermen were introduced in the same storyline as the Second Doctor (The Tenth Planet, in which William Hartnell regenerates into Patrick Troughton towards the end of the story) and the two went together from then on. In his three years as the Doctor, Troughton did four further Cybermen stories, and when Troughton left the show, the Cybermen went too, only making one lacklustre appearance between 1968 and 1982 (the point where the production team started plundering old stories on a regular basis).
The Tenth Planet also set the scene for Troughton’s era in another, unfortunate way – the last episode (featuring the regeneration scene) was burned by the BBC to save storage space and only exists as an audio recording made off-air by fans with tape recorders. This, alas, happened to the vast majority of Troughton’s stories, with barely any surviving intact. (The institutionalised Philistinism at the BBC at that time was astonishing. They also destroyed live footage of the Beatles, classic sitcoms like Hancock and Steptoe & Son and even their coverage of the Moon landing. Because no-one could ever want to watch those things again. ITV were as bad back then, but at least they were a commercial organisation, not a public service broadcaster).
The Cybermen were a perfect fit for Troughton’s Doctor as well. Created by Kit Pedler (one of the many ‘idea men’ employed by the show over the years who were great at high concept but rotten at writing, qv Nation, Terry) they were an embodiment of Pedler’s technophobia – Pedler fearing that pacemakers and transplantation would soon lead to human beings becoming nothing more than robots.
This technophobia might seem an odd component for a Doctor Who story – after all, the series’ protagonist is a scientist with a hugely inquiring mind, and one early proposal for the show which had featured the Doctor disliking technology had been rejected by Sydney Newman because he “didn’t want the Doctor to be a reactionary”. But while the Doctor is a free-spirited inquisitive investigator, the format of the show is of necessity a more conservative one than its lead character would suggest. If you’re doing an adventure story in the SF genre, you’re going to end up with lots of evil mad scientists, nuclear explosions, robots running amok and so on. At some point, even the most technophiliac protagonist is going to come to the conclusion that maybe there are some things with which man should not meddle.
With later Doctors this attitude would be refined, so that more specifically there are things with which man should not meddle (BTW, apologies for the sexist nature of the cliche) – The Doctor is allowed to meddle all he likes, and so are the Time Lords, should they wish to – but Troughton’s Doctor presents what now appears a contradictory figure – one who’s instinctively progressive, liberal, and anti-authoritarian (another way in which the regimented, controlled, Cybermen provide the perfect nemesis for him), but who’s seen enough damage caused by technology that he’s lost any faith in its ability to do anything other than destroy. This actually places him (oddly for a man who finds himself allied with the military on more than one occasion) in close ideological sympathy with the hippie movement, many of whom also mistrusted technology for roughly similar reasons (napalm, DDT and the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation not giving science a particularly good image at the time).
While many of Troughton’s stories follow a predictable pattern – an isolated base under siege from some monster or other (one gets the feeling the production team had seen The Thing From Another World and decided just to do that over and over), The Invasion, Troughton’s last Cybermen story, departs from this formula only to set up another formula, one which would be followed for most of the next few years.
The formula – Earth in ‘the near-future’ (ie ‘the present day’ but with a little fudging ) gets invaded by some ‘orrible monster or other, aided by a human (or humanoid) ally on Earth, who the monsters double-cross as soon as the ally has completed his side of the bargain, before the invasion is repelled by UNIT (a multi-national armed force set up by the United Nations) with the help of the Doctor – quickly became even more tiring than the base-under-siege stories had, but here it’s a breath of fresh air, leading to some fantastic moments. The shot of the Cybermen marching down the steps in front of St Paul’s Cathedral is still one of those images that can send a shiver up the spine. And Tobias Vaughan (the head of International Electromatics, the Cybermen’s front company on Earth) is suitably creepy, thanks to a wonderful performance by Kevin Stoney.
In fact, all the performances are top-notch – Troughton is always great as the Doctor, and might be my favourite were more of his shows to survive (I always think of Hartnell, Troughton and the two Bakers as embodying the Doctor in their performances – everyone else is, at best, an actor playing the part of the Doctor, albeit sometimes playing the part very well), but Nicholas Courtney is great here as the Brigadier (in his second appearance – his first since being promoted from Colonel), and Peter Halliday is marvellous as the thug Packer, displaying an almost sexual excitement at being able to hurt people, and a childlike petulance when this pleasure is postponed.
There are tons of great moments in the story – my favourite is when for once one of the Doctor’s female companions gets to act like an intelligent human being, when Zoe destroys a computer by speaking an ALGOL program at it (and anyone who thinks this is unrealistic has never worked in IT – it seems to me *entirely* believable that a multinational computer company would develop a more sophisticated voice-recognition and natural-language parsing system than any yet invented, yet forget to block execution of arbitrary code by non-privileged users…) – and it’s visually gorgeous, thanks to director Douglas Camfield (and thanks to cutting corners where necessary – having Vaughan’s offices in different parts of the country be identical *almost* works as a reason to save sets).
However, like many of the early Whos, The Invasion is overlong at eight episodes – the first four of which don’t even feature the Cybermen at all. Several times in the DVD special features, people mention that the original synopsis by Kit Pedler only had enough material for a four-parter, and it does show. While I’m no fan of the one-shot episodes of nuWho, I do think that six episodes is the absolute longest a Doctor Who story should be, and even six-parters often felt padded. There’s only so many times the Doctor’s companions can be kidnapped, rescued, kidnapped again, escape, get exposited to, get into cases of mistaken identity etc in the average storyline (although at least this one features helicopters and boats in which to make daring escapes, rather than the ciched corridors so beloved of those who make fun of the show without watching it).
However, this very nearly *is* a six-parter – two of the episodes were ‘lost’ (the BBC’s euphemism for ‘set on fire’) – but the audio tracks were recorded by fans, sat by their TVs with tape recorders, and in an experiment for this DVD those two episodes were animated by Manchester cartoon company Cosgrove Hall (makers of Dangermouse, Chorlton and the Wheelies and the two Discworld cartoons among others).
While the results are TV-style limited animation rather than the full animation I would prefer, and obviously miss the physicality of Troughton’s performance in particular (the man had the best eyebrows since Alistair Sim), they work surprisingly well, and are certainly less jarring than the more common fan method of watching a video made up from photos taken on-set combined with the soundtrack. It’s a shame the DVD hasn’t sold especially well, as I’d like to see more of these done (especially as, since the animation’s all done on computer, a lot of the material that would be needed for other stories has already been created so the cost would be lower), but it doesn’t seem very likely at present…
Albums You Should Own – Del And The Boys
I know exactly at what moment I tired of irony in my music for good. It was in 2006, at a small festival of acoustic music, and I was watching Hayseed Dixie.
I’d quite enjoyed their album, which consisted of bluegrass-tinged performances of hard rock songs, especially those of AC/DC, and thought for a joke band they were quite fun, but I found their live performance horrifying. While they were quite reasonable musically, their entire act was based around mocking ‘rednecks’ (in other words, working class people), performing in dungarees and essentially acting like Cletus from The Simpsons.
This wouldn’t have been so bad had I not seen the Del McCoury band earlier that day. Del McCoury is one of the bluegrass greats, and one of the two or three people who originated the type of music they were mocking, and the difference in the performance was staggering. The Del McCoury band were polite, well-spoken (with strong Kentucky accents, but still well-spoken), dressed in very formal suits, and very disciplined and dignified. It was rather like watching Paul Robeson and then seeing a blackface minstrel show immediately afterwards, and it left me feeling rather soiled – Hayseed Dixie weren’t even a caricature, they were a caricature of an inaccurate stereotype.
Luckily, McCoury himself gave a much better performance, and gained at least one fan that day, and since then I’ve picked up a couple of his albums, of which my favourite is Del and the Boys.
I know many people automatically dismiss country music – and with good reason, as anything that has appeared on US country radio for at least 35 years is the worst kind of pabulum. I’d rather be boiled alive in a vat of my own excrement than ever listen to an album by Shania Twain or Doug Supernaw or their ilk. But real country music – the tradition that runs from Jimmie Rogers through Hank Williams and Bill Monroe to Johnny Cash to Steve Earle, the anti-authoritarian, blues-based, folk music of the rural poor – that music is as good as anything out there. (Jon Swift recently posted a satirical ‘handy guide to pro- and anti-American things’ which had Hank Williams Sr in the anti-American column and Hank Jr in pro-American. That pretty much sums it up).
The Del McCoury band are a family – McCoury and two of his sons make up three-quarters of the band – and they stick very much to ‘traditional’ bluegrass (traditional in quotes because the form is only about 60 years old). The line-up has no rhythm section, consisting of guitar, mandolin, banjo and violin, and the harmonies (which are superb) are all high, keening bluegrass harmonies. But within that traditional sound, there’s a wealth of different possibilities which the band remain open to.
The first song on the album is a testament to that – a cover of Richard Thompson’s classic 1952 Vincent Black Lightning with Thompson’s rippling guitar arpeggios turned into furious mandolin picking. The song’s done entirely straight (apart from changing the destination to which ‘they did ride’ from Box Hill to Knoxville), and it’s an adventurous choice for a country band, but it works perfectly in this style.
Much of the album’s subject matter is more traditional country-music fare – it’s bad when your dad’s dead, it’s also bad when the woman you love cheats on you, it’s not much good when you’re alone and heartbroken, it’s lonesome when you’re far away from Kentucky and that bluegrass home of yours, and Jesus is better than a life of sin and debauchery. But the difference is that unlike much commercial country music, these songs don’t appear to have been written in order to appeal to a demographic, but from the heart.
The religious songs, for example, aren’t the insipid pap memorably parodied in South Park’s last funny episode a few years back (“I want you Jesus, baby/Why you cryin’ Jesus baby?”) but are very strong songs. All Aboard is a blazingly fast, almost screamed, exhortation, a combination of those two country music staples the gospel song and the train song (“And the train keeps rollin’/And the world keeps turning/All aboard/everybody’s gotta get on board”).
The strongest song by far on the album though is another of the religious songs, Recovering Pharisee. This song is almost unique in American popular Christian music (at least that I’ve heard – it’s far from my favourite genre, as you might imagine) in actually dealing with the hypocrisy of the singer:
I’m a Pharisee in recovery
With new eyes I can see the great sinner in me
It’s the way of my human heart to confess other people’s sins
Reluctant to accept my part and the deeper problem within
Whether you agree with American revivalist religion or not – and I don’t think anyone will be hugely surprised that I don’t – it’s encouraging to hear someone trying intelligently to deal with the idea of failing to live up to their own moral standards, rather than just judging other people.
The highlight of the album is probably the instrumental Goldbrickin’, which is a roaringly fast showcase for the band’s picking and fiddling skills, and without the vocals it’s apparent how close this music is to traditional English folk music – that track could easily be on an album by Waterson: Carthy or a similar trad-folk band.
This music is definitely traditional country music, and definitely deals with traditional country-song concerns, but it’s from the heart, and played by musicians with tremendous skill and enthusiasm, and I can recommend the album to absolutely everyone.
Doctor Who In An Exciting Adventure With Some Cavemen, or Nothing At The End Of The Lane
For a great televisual institution, Doctor Who did not have the most auspicious of starts. The show was not created by a single auteur, wrung from the sweat of the brow of a tormented genius, but was instead created by a huge committee of people, who were looking for a children’s show to go on between Grandstand and Juke Box Jury. Rather than coming to someone in a flash of inspiration, the first episode was the product of months of discussion and meetings, and endless documents passed back and forth between executives.
In the end, the script for the first episode, credited to Anthony Coburn, was in reality in more-or-less equal parts the work of Coburn, BBC Head of Drama Sydney Newman and staff writer CE “Bunny” Webber, with significant input from producer Verity Lambert and some ideas from director Waris Hussein.
This matter of credit is actually quite important – scripts for Doctor Who remained copyright to their writers, so while the character of the Doctor himself belongs to the BBC, the name TARDIS, created by Coburn, belongs to Coburn’s estate. Similiarly, writers Terry Nation and Kit Pedler retained ownership of the Daleks and the Cybermen. When one sees how the BBC has managed for decades to create the show despite this multiple copyright ownership, the arguments made by DC and Marvel comics about creator ownership become far weaker.
While Newman is often credited as the major creative force behind Doctor Who, Lambert and Hussein were both pivotal in creating the series’ early feel. As the youngest producer and director working for the BBC at the time, and the only female producer and only Asian director, it is perhaps unsurprising that what they produced would be somewhat different from the rather staid typical BBC children’s programme. What *is* surprising , though, is that at least the first episode is quite an astonishing piece of drama.
The first episode is an absolute masterclass in TV, managing to be quite unlike anything else broadcast before or since. Every element of it is near perfection (and in fact the pilot version, before Sydney Newman toned some elements down, is even better), but it manages to be genuinely unsettling and straddle several different genres without the viewer even really being aware that this is what is going on.
The plotline actually has some incredibly sinister overtones for the first three-quarters of the episode – two teachers become concerned about one of their pupils, who is incredibly bright, and who seems to know more in some areas of science and history than her teachers, but who behaves very oddly, almost autistically at times, and who seems frightened of saying anything at all about her home life. The teachers follow her ‘home’, which turns out to be a telephone box in a junkyard, barely big enough for one person to stand up in. The box is locked, and the key is in the possession of a sinister, possibly dangerous old man.
The viewer’s expectations have already been subverted a couple of times within the first fifteen minutes – first from being mildly scared *by* Susan, the girl, (the title of the first episode is An Unearthly Child, and she has more than a little of the Midwich Cuckoos about her) to being scared *for* her – she’s being locked up by this terrifying old man, and there is more than a hint of abuse. This is very strong stuff for a programme aimed at 8 – 12 year olds, and it also means that we’ve gone from one kind of story to a very different kind.
Then the rug is pulled out from under us again, when the teachers burst into the phone box to discover… it’s a gigantic spaceship. Even watching this now, forty-five years on, when Doctor Who is a National Treasure, it’s still a shocking moment. But at the time, when no-one knew what to expect, it must have been absolutely astonishing.
It’s impossible to overstress how well-constructed this first script is, because it’s actually playing two separate games of misdirection with us. The first, and most obvious, is the repeated misdirection about what kind of story we’re watching; but while it’s doing that, it’s also setting up the protagonists for an entirely different kind of story again – the ongoing serial that Doctor Who would become. Ian and Barbara are a science teacher and a history teacher, respectively, not just because they’re random subjects Susan can be seen to know about, but because science and history are the two subjects most likely to be necessary to explain things to viewers in a time-travel show.
On top of that, the first episode is a masterclass in a forgotten art – the art of television. Television, at least in Britain, used to be a very different artform than it is today. The way the filming was done (multiple cameras, all done in the studio rather than on location, filmed in close to real-time) encouraged an aesthetic that was closer to theatre than to film, and this persisted long after the technical limitations had been lifted, at least until the mid-1980s. A lot of the criticisms raised against the ‘classic’ series come from people who are seeing the show with eyes that are adjusted to modern TV, which sees the Hollywood blockbuster rather than the RSC as the model to follow, but the ‘wobbly sets’ (which never actually did wobble, but do look cheap to modern eyes) are no more a hindrance to suspension of disbelief than having a cardboard tree in the middle of the stage in a production of Waiting For Godot – it’s an artistic suggestion of reality, rather than an attempt at accurate reproduction of the real world, and should be seen in that light.
(Actually, I can think of one feature film that works in this way – Terry Gilliam’s Jabberwocky. It’s probably no coincidence that Gilliam and most of his cast had come from TV rather than the cinema).
So we have smooth, rolling, swooping camera movements, rather than cuts between stationary shots, as the norm – some of Hussein’s choices for camera placement and movement almost remind one of Orson Welles (although he was possibly *too* imaginative at times – I suspect one reason the pilot was reshot is that the camera movement meant it was often slightly out of focus) – and we have William Hartnell’s extraordinary performance.
Hartnell often gets overlooked by Doctor Who fans, dismissed because he occasionally flubbed his lines (no more so that any other actor would, working on the schedules he was working on, with little rehearsal and no opportunity for retakes – these shows had half an hour or an hour recording time for twenty-five minutes of screen time), but he understood acting for TV in a way that very few people before or since had. Just as an example, watch his use of his hands – they’re constantly fluttering about near his face, or playing with his lapels. Hartnell understood that on TV – especially on the small screens of the time – body language in long shots just gets lost. On the other hand, a lot of TV is shot in close-up, so if you want to use body language in your performance at all, it’s best to have all the expression be as close to your face as possible. It’s an unusual technique, but it’s one that works incredibly well.
Hartnell’s Doctor is a much more sinister, mysterious figure here than he was even in the next few stories, with a genuine air of menace, but he’s also recognisable as the character who would appear on our screens for the next twenty-six years.
The other three episodes in the storyline – involving the TARDIS crew getting involved with a tribe of cave people trying to figure out the secret of fire – are much less interesting (though visually stunning – they’re just let down by the leaden plotting and dialogue. Watching them with the sound turned off is far more interesting), but even they have some genuinely creepy moments, like the Doctor considering cold-blooded murder at one point. The Doctor would be humanised by his time with Ian and Barbara, but he remained an alien, with alien morals and values.
And of course, it’s impossible to discuss the impact of this first Doctor Who story without mentioning the theme music, credited to Ron Grainer but in all important respects the work of Delia Derbyshire.Again, this music still sounds experimental and different *now* – the impact back then, before the invention of the synthesiser, of this electronic noise with its echos of Stockhausen and Varese, must have been phenomenal.
Even had Doctor Who not gone on to become the TV staple it did, this first storyline, and in particular the first episode, would still be an all-time classic of TV. In fact, in many ways, it was all downhill from here – I can’t think, off the top of my head, of another single episode of the show that stands up in the way this one does.
1963 was a revolutionary year in the world, but especially in Britain – the true start of ‘the sixties’, and famously the year sexual intercourse began, to quote a grumpy Yorkshireman – and An Unearthly Child is easily both as much a part of its era and as timeless as the Beatles’ first LP.
The Great Outdoor Fight – Webcomics And Slices Of Life
Chris Onstad’s webcomic Achewood is generally regarded as one of the greatest – if not the greatest – webcomics ever created. It’s certainly one of the few to have achieved any level of success while being closer in aesthetic to ‘art comics’ than to manga, and while dealing with subjects that have very little to do with the ‘geek’ interests that make up the subject matter of most popular webcomics. While most popular webcomics have to do with transsexual elves playing Playstation games while talking about Star Trek, or something, Achewood, insofar as it is ‘about’ anything, is about male bonding, and masculine friendships.
This, combined with Onstad’s odd aesthetic, can make it very difficult to get into – at its worst the strip can remind one of Kevin Smith at his most puerile, full of jokes about scrota and cruel humour at the expense of Philippe, the youngest character. The art is crude, and often any individual strip is as likely to leave a reader confused, wondering if it was any good or not, as it is to elicit a laugh.
However, the cumulative impact of several strips is impressive, and soon after starting to read through the archive you find yourself reading more, though unsure why. And a while later you realise that you love it, though you still couldn’t explain the appeal.
After a while, I realised that Onstad’s work reminds me, more than anything, of Dave Sim circa Guys (Sim’s own male-bonding story, which I plan to deal with in my next comic-based post), and that was also when I realised that Onstad is one of the first people to take full advantage of the webcomic medium’s potential for a different kind of storytelling – a kind that I’d previously only seen in Sim’s work.
Most comic stories (in Western comics – I know nothing of manga, and it may be that what I’m going to say is par for the course there, or that there’s some underground community of Indonesian cartoonists who’ve been doing what I’m talking about) tend to fall into two groups. They’re either totally self-contained stories, such as Jimmy Corrigan or When The Wind Blows or Transmetropolitan – stories that are a finite (though maybe quite long) length; or they’re what one might call serial fiction – self-contained stories about characters who are supposed to live through all the stories, but with each story essentially its own thing. You can read today’s Garfield strip without ever having read one before, and The Resurrection Of Ra’s Al Ghul doesn’t require you to have read Batman: Knightfall.
All these share one characteristic – they’re ‘stories’, with a beginning, middle and end, in a way that doesn’t happen in real life. Even in art comics there’s an imperative to smooth off the rough edges of life – Harvey Pekar’s tiny slices of life still don’t usually contain anything that’s not relevant to the anecdote.
There’s a perfectly reasonable artistic reason for this – if you read a comic and there’s no narrative thread, if there are elements that appear completely irrelevant, then you are probably going to wonder why they’re included. In real life, there are all sorts of loose threads hanging round – telephone calls that are wrong numbers, people you chat to one day and get the email address of, but then lose it before you get back in touch with them, things you meant to do but didn’t get round to. But you can’t include them in a self-contained story without that being the point of the story.
In webcomics though, you can include those elements. Because they’re happening in some approximation of ‘real time’, and because the reader can go back and forwards through the archive at her own pace to find out if something’s a narrative strand or just a random occurence, you can build up a picture of an actual real life, loose ends included, without sacrificing narrative momentum or coherence.
Dave Sim managed something like this with Cerebus, which shares a number of other similarities with Achewood, because he had nearly 30 years worth of story to play with and knew so in advance, because he was self-publishing, and because he made sure right from the beginning that every single issue of his 300-issue narrative would remain permanently in print. In other words, because he was taking the same publishing strategy as webcomics.
But most webcomics still think in terms of fixed story ‘arcs’ with a beginning, middle and end, or in terms of single gag strips. The Order Of The Stick, for example, actually has ‘freeze panels’ at the end of every story ‘arc’ for the trade paperbacks. Achewood, more than any other that I know of, completely ignores conventional narrative structure in favour of ongoing, stream-of-consciousness rambling that manages to sum up what real people’s lives are actually like – even when those ‘real people’ are stuffed animals and robots.
The Great Outdoor Fight epitomises this – it’s simply a chunk of Roast Beef and Ray’s life, albeit one in which something important happens (they win The Great Outdoor Fight). There’s a definite narrative there – one of the longest Onstad has attempted – but there’s only a middle. It begins in media res with something that has little connection to the rest of the story (Todd asking Ray for six million dollars to start a company to make fake dog-penises to hang on the back of cars) and ends in mid-conversation at the victory party. It’s actually like following two people’s lives through a chunk of time – just a chunk of time in which something extraordinary happens.
I’ve talked mostly about the formal qualities of Achewood, but the book itself, The Great Outdoor Fight is quite a wonderful little thing in itself. As well as the story (which has been re-edited and reformatted to flow better as a continuous narrative, while leaving the original daily strips intact on the website) there’s a history of the fight itself from the 1920s on, profiles of some of the most famous winners, excerpts from a Great Outdoor Fight themed cookery book, a glossary of fight terms, and blog posts by some of the characters. All of this adds to the creation of an entire complex, dirty, messy real world – the profiles of the winners, in particular, are beautiful things in themselves, little perfect short-story miniatures told in just over a page of text each.
The Great Outdoor Fight, like Achewood as a whole, is violent, funny, at times confusing, thought-provoking, and ultimately life-affirming. Just like life itself.
Plans For The Site
Now I have a little more free time again, I’m going to start trying to do things on a more regular cycle on this site. As a result, I’ve decided that I’m going to have several regular features that will happen the same time every week.
Saturdays will be Comics Day – expect a review of The Great Outdoor FIght tonight.
Sundays will be Albums You Should Own – I’ll look at a new album every week.
Tuesdays will be A Big Finish A Week.
The rest of the week will be Misc – usually linkblogging, but with political rants, or sciencey things, or extra comics posts thrown in.
This week, as well, I’m going to do two posts a day. As it’s the forty-fifth anniversary of Doctor Who, I’m going to do a series of posts called A Doctor A Day. Every day from tomorrow through to Saturday of next week, I’ll look at one story by one of the original TV Doctors, and use that to talk about Doctor Who. As a result I won’t be doing a Big Finish A Week this week – I know there’s been too much Who content on here recently already. The stories I’m going to look at are:
First Doctor – An Unearthly Child
Second Doctor – either The Invasion or The Tomb Of The Cybermen
Third Doctor – either The Invasion Of TimeThe Time Warrior or The Green Death
Fourth Doctor – The Destiny Of The Daleks
Fifth Doctor – The Five Doctors
Sixth Doctor – Timelash
Seventh Doctor – Remembrance Of The Daleks
This is *in addition* to the other posts I’ll be making, so those of you who aren’t interested in Who will still have more posts you *are* interested in than recently…
Linkblogging for 20/11/08
Been a quiet couple of days as far as interesting links go, really…
Fred Clark argues that mass layoffs are a sin – can’t really disagree with him there…
Firedoglake have a post about the probable nominee for Attorney General in Obama’s government. Suffice it to say, no-one’s going to be pleased – he has been working with Chiquita banana, one of the biggest supporters of terrorism out there. Of course, that’s *right-wing* terrorism, which is different…
Lib Dem Voice have a post restating (as unfortunately these things need to be restated) parts of the case against capital punishment.
And Power Pop Criminals have the excellent four-volume “Yellow Pills” collection up for download…
leave a comment