Albums You Should Own: Watertown, Frank Sinatra
If ever I’m asked why I think hipsters are wankers, Watertown is exhibit one.
Watertown is an album whose good qualities are absolutely self-evident. Anyone with ears – and I do mean anyone – would have to admit this is a very good album. In terms of thematic unity, quality, and feel, this site easily with the first four Scott Walker solo albums, Pet Sounds, Astral Weeks and the first couple of Leonard Cohen albums. While it was never a hit, it’s not like Sinatra is a horribly obscure artist, and so by rights this should, at the very least, be one of those albums that get ‘rediscovered’ by that weird coalition of hipsters and Mojo-reading dadrock lovers that brought Nick Drake, Big Star and Pacific Ocean Blue out of obscurity.
But the difference is that all the music I’ve mentioned above is essentially juvenile, and therefore ‘cool’. The concerns of, say, Pet Sounds, magnificent as it is, are those of a teenager – does she really love me? How can I balance what I want with what my parents say? Do I really love her? And teenage angst is cool and romantic.
Even Sinatra’s own earlier work – say Sings For Only The Lonely, no matter how downbeat, are the loneliness of a rinky-dink, shooby-dooby-doo swell kinda guy man about town, sat depressed in a New York bar at midnight with his suit disheveled and his tie hanging loose telling the barman about the one who got away.So they’re OK.
They’re safe.
Watertown on the other hand is different. It’s a concept album, like many of Sinatra’s early albums, but this is a specially-composed song cycle, and it’s told from the point of view of a middle-aged divorcé trying to bring up his two kids as a single parent in a small town, reflecting on his wife’s adultery, constantly reliving the last moments of his marriage, and trying to find a way to make it not have happened.
Where’s the fun in that?!
Actually, before I continue, I’m going to put in a Spoiler warning, because this album does have a plot, and a twist in the tale, and all those kind of things, and it really is best experienced without knowing much more about it. If you haven’t heard the album before, and you have any respect for my opinions whatsoever, go and buy it. The CD is out of print and is apparently selling for sixty quid on Amazon UK (but I’m not selling mine), but Amazon US has it for sale as MP3s for $9.99 (you could save nine cents if you wanted by not bothering with inessential CD bonus track Lady Day). Go and buy it, and listen to it, now.
Then do like I just had to, having listened to that album once already while writing this, and have a little cry on the shoulder of your spouse or closest approximation thereto.
Finished? Eyes dry? Then I’m going to start talking through this track by track. I’ll be talking mostly about the lyrics, but the music (by Bob Gaudio, produced and arranged by Gaudio and Charles Calello) is absolutely astonishing. Gaudio was the principal composer for the Four Seasons, and you can definitely imagine that other Italian-American Frankie singing these melodies, but he keeps carefully within Sinatra’s notoriously limited range, allowing Sinatra to do what he did best, just act the role in that gorgeous voice.
In fact, the album Watertown resembles most in this respect is Macarthur Park, Jimmy Webb’s suite of songs for the similarly-limited Richard Harris – but of course Harris didn’t have Sinatra’s voice, or his musical sensibilities, and while Webb’s songs were great, they were nothing compared to these. And Sinatra here has the advantage that every track here is sung from the point of view of the same character – it’s one half-hour monologue, not a series of sketches.
Gaudio and Calello also do a marvellous job of orchestrating the album as a whole, with leitmotifs recurring throughout – the high, slightly out of tune piano chords, the drums emulating the rhythm of the train – giving the whole album a unified theme like no other album in popular music outside possibly Smile.
The lyrics, meanwhile, were by Jake Holmes – a very strange figure from whom Led Zeppelin stole Dazed And Confused, and who later wrote the Be Who You Can Be In The Army jingle, but who had just finished collaborating with Gaudio on another astonishing album, the Four Seasons’ Genuine Imitation Life Gazette, which I wrote about here. Astonishingly, Holmes was only thirty – younger than me – when he wrote these astonishingly mature lyrics.
The album itself was (like that other great narrative concept album Arthur by The Kinks) originally intended to have a TV special attached to it which never materialised, and the opening track, Watertown, is clearly the music for the opening credits. Starting hesitantly, with a slightly out-of-time bass, we get a portrait of a small town from a distance, slowly zooming in (and it’s so cinematic I can see precisely the shots in my head, and I’m not a visual person) on one man standing alone in a train station.
The only song on the album not sung from the perspective of our narrator, this is the establishing shot before the main story starts, but even here, the narrator’s voice breaks in, and is singing to someone – “It’s gonna be a lonely place/without the look of your familiar face”, and immediately after we get hints that maybe the narrator isn’t to be trusted (“But who can say it’s not that way?”) before woodwinds, bass and arpeggiated guitar take us out over a train sound that is, in context, much sadder than the one at the end of Caroline, No.
Goodbye (She Quietly Says) is a wonderfully sparse, distanced description of a relationship breaking up (“Just two always-strangers avoid each other’s eyes/One still make-believing, one still telling lies/She tells me that I’m not to blame but when I ask the reason why/She reaches out across the table, looks at me and quietly says ‘goodbye’”).
I’ve read some interpretations of this song which suggest the woman in it is actually dying, not just leaving our narrator (which puts a whole new spin on the last song) but it’s too mundane for that. It’s the ‘always-strangers’ that gets me, here. The narrator, who is never named, clearly adores his wife Elizabeth beyond all reason, but doesn’t actually know her at all.
For A While is, in the context of this album, almost a cheerful song – “Lost another day, turned another way/With a laugh, a kind hello/Some small talk with those I know/I forget that I’m not over you for a while”. Musically, this sounds quite a lot like some of the waltzes Brian Wilson was doing around the same time, like Time To Get Alone – all light and breezy. Sinatra genuinely sounds like he means lines like “Days go by with no empty feeling/until I remember you’re gone”. It’s also the first song to be addressed, as most of the album is, directly to his lost love (incidentally, if you *do* want to argue that she’s dead rather than just having left him, this is an important point – the song about her leaving is told abstractly, not to her as a listener. Possibly because our narrator doesn’t want to face knowing that she knows it’s not true?)
Michael And Peter is a letter to Elizabeth about their two children (“Michael is you/he has your face/he still has your eyes/remember?/Peter is me/’cept when he smiles/And if you look/at them both for a while/you can see/they are you/they are me”) and about the mundane details of everyday life (“I think the house could use some paint/you know your mother’s such a saint/she takes the boys whenever she can/she sure needs a man” – and what does THAT say about the relationship, that the mother-in-law is still helping out her son-in-law, while her daughter is God knows where?). Constantly skirting around the problems he’s having, we still have hints that something’s not right in this narration “As far as anyone can tell, the sun will rise tomorrow”, “You’ll never believe how much they’re growing”, “Guess that’s all the news I’ve got today/Least that’s all the news that I can say”
I Would Be In Love Anyway is one of the most conventional songs on the album. The main message is that even though their marriage has ended, it was worth it (“If I lived the past over/saw today from yesterday/I would be in love anyway”) and once again we have the recurring themes of the lack of communication between them, the narrator’s unreliability and general inability to talk (“Though you’ll never be with me/And there are no words to say/I would be in love anyway”).
The thing I’m not getting across here is that this is, by this point, a fully-rounded character, who isn’t even aware of everything he’s telling us – “If I knew then, what I know now/I don’t believe I’d ever change, somehow”. Yes, he’s saying that he’d still love her – that he *DOES* still love her – no matter what, but he’s also saying *he won’t ever change and has never changed*. She changed, and grew up, and he didn’t. And the poor man doesn’t even realise it.
Elizabeth is just a fairly standard song of lost love sung to the person lost, one of the comparatively weaker songs on the album, although the narrator’s view of his wife as a fantasy, a dream, and the utter lack of detail about her other than her name, is telling. And “Dressed in memories/you are what you used to be” is simultaneously beautiful and creepy as hell.
On the other hand What A Funny Girl (You Used To Be) says *far* more about his wife’s character. “You always had a thousand things to do/Getting so involved in something new/Always some new recipe, the kitchen always looked like World War Three/What a funny girl you used to be”. “You’d fall for lines so easily, whatever they were selling, you’d buy three”. Suddenly, for the first time on the album, the ex-wife is a character, and we can see that someone so full of life and energy could never, ever have stayed with someone so fundamentally conservative (not to mention patronising – he almost sounds more like her father than her lover. This is especially worrying when you factor in the lines a few songs earlier about how her mother ‘needs a man’). He’d never understood that the things he loved most about her were precisely those things that meant they could never stay together.
What’s Now Is Now is… Christ, this is just the most astonishingly upsetting song ever. “Some day I know you’re gonna find/Just one mistake is not enough to change my mind/What’s now is now and I’ll forget what happened then/I know it all and we can still begin again”. The song is all about him forgiving her for her adultery – and assuming that the reason she’s left is just because she thinks he won’t forgive her, or that she thinks the people around will disapprove. He thinks she’s *run away from him*, rather than having grown away from him. The turning point of the song: “Now that you know how much I understand/You have no reason to be gone”.He’s talking about how much he understands, how much he knows, but he doesn’t have a clue. The poor, poor man…
She Says… and he’s actually got a letter back from her. And she says she’s coming home! So why is the song all minor chords, and why do we have a creepy chorus of small children singing “so she says” at the end of each verse?
The Train And we’re back where we started. “And now the sun has broken through, it looks like it will stay/Just can’t have you coming home on such a rainy day”. “This time around you’ll want to stay/Cause I’ve had so many nights to find a way” “Pretty soon I’ll be close to you and it will be so good/We’ll talk about the part of you I never understood” Just like at the beginning, he’s waiting at the train station. This is where we came in.
Except… when we came in, it was the morning. And now “the kids are coming home from school”.
And “I wrote so many times and more/but the letters still are lying in my drawer”.
He’s been standing there in the rain all day, waiting for her, because of a reply he got to a letter he never sent…
the passengers for Allentown are gone
the train is slowly moving on
but I can’t see you any place
And I know for sure I’d recognise your faceAnd I know for sure I’d recognise your face…
And the album ends there, with the train pulling out in the fade.
And now, after having listened to that album three times during the writing of this, I’m going to have to dissolve into a quivering mass of sobs. Goodnight…
QOTD, via Roz Kaveney
There’s this thing I call competence cascades, whereby if a fandom encourages skillsets people acquire those skills and then the whole thing escalates — one of the examples is monster makeups. And he said, “of course, one of those skills is the ability to navigate corpuses of work.” Back in the early eighties I’d invented the concept of the Big Dumb Object, the setting that’s also a plot macguffin and also creates the mood of the story, things like Rama or the Ringworld, so on this train journey he said, “oh, you might as well call them Big Dumb Narrrative Objects, like the DC and Marvel Universes.” And then he said, “of course, I suppose by now the DC and Marvel Universes are the largest narrative constructs of human culture.” “By George,” I said. “I think you’re on to something there. I might write a book about that sometime, unless you regard that idea as totally yours.” He said he’d never be interested in doing that, so he was fine. And Superheroes is the book. You see, what Sturgeon’s Law that 90% of everything is crud fails to pick up on is the fact that the crud, that 90% is what the 10% grows out of, like manure. Good stories are often arguments with bad stories.
From here
ABC (Andrew’s Book Club) 5 : The People’s Manifesto by Mark Thomas
I’m a little behind with these ABC posts. Even not counting the various Doctor Who related books I read in February, which I’m not going to blog about because I’ve submitted a story to Big Finish’s Short Trips (the series many of those books were in) and so don’t think it ethical to review them, I’ve still got four books to talk about
The first and shortest of these is The People’s Manifesto.
Last year, the comedian and anarchist political activist Mark Thomas toured the country with a simple show. Members of No2ID would, every night, ask members of the audience to write down ideas for a ‘people’s manifesto’ – changes the general public would like to see made. Thomas would then weed out the duplicates and insane entries, talk about the rest on stage, and get the audience to vote on which idea should make it into the manifesto.
Some of the ideas that *didn’t* make it are personal favourites of mine. I especially like:
Mayonnaise should not be used as a moisturiser for sandwiches. It has no nutritional value and is the work of the devil, whose real name is Hell Man.
But I also have a soft spot for disguising leopards as foxes ‘to fuck up the gentry’ and severing Noel Edmonds’ head and placing it in one of 22 sealed boxes…
The forty ideas that made it can roughly be split up into a few categories. There’s general anti-politics whining, by far the least interesting part of the book. Saying “MPs should be given a loan like students, rather than wages, which they have to pay back when they leave office” isn’t even especially funny, let alone practical. Then there are a lot of ideas which are actually mainstream among the left but which would probably never be implemented – Tobin tax, a levy on private hospitals that use publicly-trained staff, making manifestos legally binding, maximum wage, drug legalisation, giving women in Northern Ireland abortion rights, that kind of thing.
Then there are the ideas that just attack an annoying thing, whether that be forcing the Daily Mail to print “The newspaper that supported Hitler” on its masthead or forcing people who let their dogs foul the street to wear the dogshit as a moustache for the rest of the day. My two favourites in this category are introducing fast lanes for pedestrians (after taking TWENTY! FUCKING! MINUTES! to get from one end of Market Street to the other yesterday thanks to all the people who’ve apparently forgotten how to walk properly, I’ll vote for any party that offers to bring this in) and everyone being given a ‘fuck it’ day every month, when they can just phone into work and say they can’t be bothered working.
And finally there are the surrealist or joke ideas – some of which (“Anyone who supports ID cards should be banned from having curtains” or “Anyone found guilty of a homophobic hate crime should have to serve their sentence in drag”) make some attempt at solving real-world political problems, while others (“Goats are to be released on to the floor of the House of Commons (no more than four); MPs are forbidden from referring to them ever”) .
While the book is well written – and absolutely hilarious at many points – it’s also depressing. And this is because even though the policies are a mixture of Guardian leader column and student Rag Week whimsy, they’re much more sensible than the policies of the two main parties at the moment.
If we *HAVE* to have stupid, unworkable laws, thought up in five seconds, I’d *far* rather they involved MPs having to ignore goats than that they be tyrannical nonsense like the recent Digital Economy Bill. I’d rather those with ‘nothing to hide’ never *could* hide while the rest of us were left to get on with it than have ID cards enforced on the lot of us. And if we have to have an economic policy put together by people with no understanding of economics, I’d rather it be one that attacks the banks rather than one that attacks the poor.
Because all these policies – workable and unworkable, sane and goat-based – all of them at least reflect things that some real people care about, whether that be *NOT TAKING TWENTY SODDING MINUTES TO GET DOWN MARKET STREET I MEAN SERIOUSLY TWENTY MINUTES FOR GOD’S SAKE* or speculators making money from causing currency crashes. They’re all at least *attempts* to solve real problems for real people, unlike things like the Digital Economy Bill (which no-one except a few record executives wants) or the law criminalising ‘extreme pornography’, or being forced to let people at airports look at naked pictures of you.
No-one wants those things. No-one asked for them. No-one’s life – not one single person’s – would be one iota the worse for their removal, and yet no matter which of the two major parties forms a government, we’ll have another five years of more of that.
Those things, the *truly* surreal, unworkable, impractical, insane ideas, came from ‘respectable’ ‘moderate’, god help us even ‘progressive’ politicians. People who are *paid* to do this. People who have been *voted for*, and who get taken seriously by Jeremy Paxman rather than just being pointed at and laughed at in the street for being the bumbling incompetent buffoons they so clearly are.
Goats in the commons are sensible in comparison.
Doctor Who: The Beast Below (Second Verse Same As The First…)
So to a large extent I could repeat last week’s post about the show as my review of this week’s.
After two weeks, it now looks like MoffWho will be, more or less, a series of remakes of the Welsh Series as if they’d been written by a competent writer. Not, necessarily, a *good* writer, but a competent one, which is, to be frank, more than we had for most of the Welsh Series so far. In this case, what we had was What If… The Long Game Had Been Better Than It Was And Had Those Creepy Puppets In Coin-Operated Booths From Old Fairgrounds In It?
Along with that, of course, we *also* had the second trip for the Doctor with his new companion being to a future spaceship with people from Earth who’ve escaped its destruction and a woman who, thanks to rejuvenating treatments, had lived a long, long time. (And next week we’re getting the Celebrity Historical By Mark Gattis. It seems we’re following the template of Davies’ first series exactly).
And it’s all seeming a little… calculated. We’ve got Moffatisms (cute little girl scared of common childhood fear) coupled with Davies’ series structure, mixed in with some of the more annoying Welsh Series aspects (we did *NOT* need another monologue about how special the Doctor is, especially in a story where the companion solved the problem).
And I’m still not convinced, *AT ALL*, by Moffat’s characterisation. He writes the Doctor as if he’s been given a description of what the character’s like, but without having ever seen an episode. Which is still an improvement over the previous series, which last I saw had no consistent idea of what the Doctor’s character was meant to be (unless, ‘unpleasant, annoying and prone to Kenneth Williams impersonations’ counts as characterisation). And in much the same way, Smith’s performance seems off. It’s definitely the same *kind* of character as the Doctor, but it’s not the Doctor I know. I’ve heard him compared to Michael Palin and Jim Carrey, and both of those seem apt at different points (he makes me think of Emo Philips myself, the way he gangles and folds himself up), and while I can see *some* people casting either of those as the Doctor, I wouldn’t cast either (though Palin might be interesting, thinking about it…)
And the worst thing of all is the fact that the dialogue is so reliant on cliche. Almost all the ‘witty’ lines were ones I could see coming from three lines earlier (“OK, the Doctor’s doing something ‘wacky’. That means the companion will say *this* confused line, which will allow the Doctor to make *this* reply. Oh I was right. Again.”) and some of the other stuff was frankly painful. I don’t care if “Help us, Doctor, you’re our only hope!” was meant as a post-modern ironic pop-culture reference or whatever, it’s still a terrible line.
And yet…
The plot only had the normal number of plot holes, the Doctor was shown as an actually decent person trying to do good, the dialogue was only not-very-good, rather than terrible, again the turning point was someone actually using their brain, and most importantly, *the story was based around an actual moral dilemma, and both the Doctor and his companion acted properly*. That dilemma was somewhat cheapened by the everybody-lives ending, but even that ending was set up from the very beginning, as a proper actual consequence of things that happened in the show – and brought about by an independent action of the companion, rather than just being Davies ex machina.
It’s still far from what I’d hope for in a series of Doctor Who, and it’s still problematic (and WHAT THE FUCK was Moffat thinking with the menacing black man in a hood? That’s NOT the kind of imagery you should be playing around with) but it’s better than anything from the five previous years, by some considerable margin, and I’m always willing to forgive the occasional lapses of a sinner that repents. I’m definitely going to watch at least the next few episodes, and I’ll see how it goes from there. I don’t love this – I’m not even sure yet if I like it – but on balance I don’t *dislike* it, and that’s a start.
Right?
A Favour For A Friend
My friend Tilt, who I’ve mentioned on here before and who occasionally comments, moved last year to California from Bradford. He’s currently trying to get registered to vote from abroad in the upcoming election, and – absolutely bizarrely – it appears that in order to get registered he needs to find *another* British ex-pat who’s willing to co-sign the forms, along with adding their passport number. Unless he can find someone else who no longer lives in the UK to sign, he won’t get to vote.
Now, this seems absolutely *stupid* to me, but I’m all too aware (having a USian wife) of the bizarre hoops people have to jump through for either country’s terrible immigration rules, and I’d like to minimise this in his case, so if any of my readers happen to be British ex-pats who’d be willing to help out, let me know.
(Incidentally, in case this makes a difference, while *I* am partisan in this election, I’ve never discussed party politics with Tilt, and do not have any idea which way he would vote. Our friendship is based more around discussion of music, vintage TV programmes, comics, and so forth).
Election-Free Linkblogging For 09/04/10
During this election I’m going to do at least one linkblog a week with no politics in it, in the hope that this plus the When Worlds Collide posts will stop this blog toppling over totally into politics-wonkery. With that in mind…
My third-round match in the Pop World Cup is up. This time I’m playing Stereo Total, but up against Ghana who’ve won both their previous rounds… (thanks to Tilt for suggesting these – I’d completely forgotten they were German, as they sound more French to me IYKWIM).
Quite possibly the best website ever – Michael Buble Being Stalked By A Velociraptor.
Andrew Rilstone has published a book of his blog posts about the Welsh Series. I read these as they happened – in fact Rilstone’s writing was what made me return to Doctor Who fandom in 2002ish after a decade or so away – and it was fascinating and heartbreaking to watch his initial huge enthusiasm for the Welsh show (as I had as well) collapse to rage and disappointment. I hope he includes his review of the “Eurovision Song Contest” Doctor-lite episode, one of the funniest things I’ve read on his site. Buy The Viewers Tale and Rilstone’s other two books here. (I’ll be buying at the end of the month)
I can’t remember if I’ve linked to Ben’s Prison Blog before, but I should have. Here’s his account of his involvement in a riot in the early 90s
And two great posts on Too Busy Thinking About My Comics – on endings to ongoing narratives and on Foggy Nelson and real heroism.
By the way, for those wondering about PEP! 2, I’ve so far got articles in from Gavin B, Gavin R, David Allison, Bill (Plok) Ritchie and Colin (Colsmi) Smith, along with definite promises of articles from Debi Linton and Holly Matthies and possibles from Alex Wilcock, Richard Flowers and Alix Mortimer, and a comic strip and cover by Wesley (the cover shows Cerebus meeting a Clanger on the moon. You need to get this just for that). Should be at least as good as the last issue.
When Worlds Collide 2: Space-Opera
Plok has challenged me, among others, to come up with an idea for a space opera TV show that would be different from the usual nonsense that passes for SF on TV. Some of this may well tie in with some of the stuff I’m talking about in my Big Series Of Posts, so I’ve stuck it under that heading…
My idea is a simple one, which I think would actually make something interesting out of what has, until now, been a disadvantage of the genre.
The year is 2120, and we join a starship crewed by the usual multi-ethnic group, plus a couple of robots. They’re on a voyage to seek out new life and whatnot, and they’ve noticed what seem like transmissions from another planet. This will be the first time that Earth has ever come into contact with an alien species.
Except, when they arrive, they see that transmissions also come from humans.
Jump forward a hundred years. There’s now an interplanetary federation, but it’s based on something *REALLY WEIRD*. As far as anyone knows, there are only five inhabited planets in this galaxy. All of them are inhabited by humans. Humans who evolved on those planets. Every other life-form is different, belonging to totally different families, but on every planet the dominant species are human beings, who all appear to have come from different evolutionary lines, but converged so closely that they don’t even have the nose-wrinkle type differences we see in Star Trek, and can interbreed without problems.
And on every planet, at least some of the humans speak English.
This has, as one would imagine, caused a *huge* amount of speculation in that intervening time, but no-one’s been able to come to any reasonable conclusions. The fossil record on each planet shows a very obvious evolutionary path for humanity in each case, each planet has thousands of years of recorded history, each planet (as far as we can tell) only developed interstellar travel within the last century or so. The histories are all totally different except for the fact that on each the English language developed, on each humanity developed, and on each interstellar travel started around the same time.
This has led to a number of different factions being created, causing a period of immense political instability. Each planet has a faction of Originers, who think humanity started on their planet and was imported to the other planets. There are religious orders who use this convergence as the final proof of the existence of their God. There are von Daniken types who think humanity was planted on every planet by aliens, and others who use this as ‘proof’ that we’re living in a computer simulation. There are Chomskyite linguists who use the simultaneous development of English as proof of their hypotheses about inbuilt structures in the brain supporting a universal grammar, and other linguists who say “Oh, yeah, smartarse, so why do the people from the other Earth use the word ‘Sandwich’ when they don’t even have a place named Sandwich to name it after? That’s inbuilt too, is it?” The arguments over which planet gets to call itself Earth nearly cause three wars. There are David Icke types who believe that people from one of the other planets have been in control all along, and revisionist historians who point to discrepancies in the various historical records as ‘proof’ that one or other planet isn’t telling the whole truth about its space-flight history.
The debate over the different Earths and their relation to each other is the defining debate of the 22nd century in the way that Catholicism vs Protestantism dominated the 16th and 17th centuries or Communism vs Capitalism the 20th. For the next three or four episodes, we see how this plays out, jumping in in media res and following the diplomatic talks as for the third time in a hundred years a civilisation-destroying war over this is avoided.
And then we pick up signals. Obviously created by intelligent life. And they’re coming from within the same area that all the other planets are in. But when, expecting it to be yet more humans, a Federation ship arrives, it turns out that the lifeform sending the signals bears no resemblance to any life-form from any of the Earths, and nor does it speak English. In fact, it’s obviously an intelligent species – possibly far more intelligent than humans, but we have no idea how to communicate with it, or it with us.
What does its existence mean to us? What’s it going to do now it knows *we* exist? And what does this – this evidence that humans *aren’t* the only intelligent species – do to all those different factions and the increasingly fragile peace between them?
…
Linkblogging for 05/04/10
And a few links before I go to bed (Mark Thomas and When Worlds Collide posts tomorrow).
Jess Nevins rewrites the King In Yellow in the style of The Cat In The Hat
Rachel Zall on homosexual cooties
Lib Dems reviewing The Eleventh Hour – Millennium Elephant (and Daddy Richard), his Daddy Alex (with stuff about Quatermass and Harry Potter too) and Jennie
Dave Page talks about Manchester Lib Dems’ local election manifesto
And The Heresiarch sums up a lot of my own problems with the Singh libel case…
Doctor Who – The Eleventh Hour
A little under a week ago I sent in my entry for Big Finish’s short story competition – I’d written what I like to think is an excellent short story, where a brave, bright, but very little girl is scared by voices in her bedroom, which the only parental character mentioned in the story doesn’t believe exist, but the voices are made to go away through the intervention of the Doctor.
I thought it was possibly the best piece of fiction I’ve ever written, but ‘a bit Steven Moffat’, and it actually had a chance of winning.
All I could think, through the first ten minutes of The Eleventh Hour, the first episode of the new series of Doctor Who, as written by Steven Moffat, was ‘bugger’.
There are two things I want to make clear in this review before I go any further – two things which, unfortunately, due to the nature of online Doctor Who fandom, I need to say even though they really, really shouldn’t need saying.
The first is that even though I overall quite enjoyed the programme, I thought there was a lot to criticise within it as well, and in reviewing it I’m going to talk about those things. If you worry about someone ‘ruining your squee’, then please go away.
The second, and opposite, fact is that I have disliked the vast majority of what I have seen of the revived show as produced and written primarily by Russel T. Davies, and don’t really consider it to bear any relation to the programme I *do* like – but that I consider this a statement of personal aesthetic judgement about the programme, rather than a moral judgement about the programme’s creators or fans. In particular, I do not think Mr Davies is Satan, or that he wrecked the programme by allowing evil homosexualists into it, or that he is ‘destroying my childhood’ or ‘hating the fans’ or ‘stealing my programme and giving it to the mundanes’ or any of that nonsense. I just think he happens to be a writer/producer who is sincerely trying to make the best programme he can, but whose idea of a good programme is wildly at variance with mine. I also don’t think being overweight, gay or Welsh are, in themselves, reasons to attack someone. So if you wish to comment about how good it is that the fat taffy queer with his gay agenda has gone and given the programme back to the real fans, please go away.
Right, after that, with a bit of luck we might have got rid of the lunatics, and everyone reading this will be someone who regards Doctor Who as a TV programme, one to be judged by more or less the same standards by which one judges any other TV programme. So with that in mind, does Steven Moffat’s version of Doctor Who measure up?
Possibly the easiest way to look at this is to look at the things I didn’t like about Davies’ era, and see how Moffat’s version of the show compares to that. So the main things I didn’t like about Davies’ show were:
1) The morality of the show. It didn’t have any, and at times it seemed breathtakingly *immoral*, both in big ways (lionising Madame du Pompadour, one of the most disgusting individuals ever to have lived) and small (the bullying ‘let’s laugh at the nerdy nerdy nerds’ attitude of a good number of episodes). Both these, actually, are things that were more noticeable in Moffat scripts than others – but are still ultimately Davies’ responsibility as the person who set the tone for the show as a whole. My platonic ideal of Doctor Who would always side with the underdog, be that a slave being tortured to death in order to provide sugar for pampered French aristocrats, or a socially-awkward young man being mocked for enjoying science fiction DVDs.
2) The characterisation of the Doctor. The Doctor shouldn’t be a geek-chic indie kid generic hero who occasionally does something ‘wacky’, and nor should he be a lonely god who is the specialest person in the whole of special, but should be an intelligent, thoughtful, but fundamentally strange character.
3) The plotting. Things happening for a reason is nice, internal logic is also good. Davies ex machina less so.
4) Lack of imagination – everyone throughout history, whatever planet, in the year 200 billion or the fifteenth century, is exactly like people in early 21st century Britain. Big Brother and Britney Spears will be known until the end of the universe.
Looking at The Eleventh Hour in those terms, point one doesn’t apply – there is nothing horribly immoral in the story. It would be interesting if the Prisoner hadn’t been so obviously A Baddie – if there’d been a choice to be made between giving a possibly-innocent fugitive over or seeing Earth destroyed – but there was nothing actively immoral in there.
Point two I’m less sure on. Matt Smith is clearly a competent actor, but he didn’t seem especially Doctorish to me, and as Lawrence Miles pointed out, some of the lines would be easier to imagine coming from the mouth of Clint Eastwood than from Tom Baker. That said, he did save the world by actually thinking, and by noticing things, and that’s better than saving the world using handwavium. I’ll give him time.
Point three – there was a plot. It made sense, and the only problems with it are of the ‘but that’s not actually how computer viruses *work*’ type rather than the ‘but none of that makes any sense at all, even a little bit, why did he even *do* that?’ type. The one question I have is why the coma patients were all saying “Doctor” – there was no good reason at all for this.
Point four – well, this one was set in present-day Britain, so hard to say on this.
So overall, it’s too soon to say if the programme will be better than Davies’ effort, but there’s enough evidence that it will to be cautiously optimistic.
There are quite a few downsides, though. In particular, the show seems ruthlessly designed for the ‘geek demographic’, from the steampunk TARDIS interior to the guest appearance by Patrick Moore to the bow tie. It seemed so blatantly targeted to a demographic that I don’t consider myself part of that I felt put off.
Also, the story was very much Moffat-by-numbers. As I said, before, I wrote something that I thought very ‘Moffatty’ this week, and it turned out to be very close to the first ten minutes of this story (in fact I think it was rather better – those of my friends I asked to critique it can feel free to disagree in the comments). But structurally, this was very, *very* close to The Girl In The Fireplace, and the characters of Amy and Rory are more or less identical to the characters of Sally and Lawrence from Blink.
Not only that, but a *LOT* of the script was predictable. Little kid asks “How do I know you’ll come back?” to which the reply is “trust me, I’m the Doctor’. I was actually muttering many of the lines to myself before they were said. To a large extent the script was comprised entirely of cliches. Certainly, if you’d asked me to write the story I thought Moffat would write to introduce a new Doctor, I would have written something close enough to this that you could believe they were different drafts of the same script.
So it was still far closer to being cult-TV-by-numbers than to being proper good TV. The ‘classic’ series (or ‘real Doctor Who’ as I think of it) was in some way trying to do the same kind of thing as (at different times) I, Claudius or The Beiderbecke Affair or Boys From The Blackstuff or The Clangers or The Telegoons. It was often not up to the standards of those programmes, but it was trying to compete with those things. This series is trying to compete with Primeval and Robin Hood and Ashes To Ashes – it’s trying to do one very defined kind of thing. As far as that goes, it does it very well, and is probably the best show of its type. But I’d far rather an ambitious failure than a middling success, and my first impression of MoffWho is that it’s the latter.
When Worlds Collide 1: Introduction
So some of you will have noticed the relative lack of discussion of things like comics and Doctor Who in recent weeks – it’s been all politics and links, partly because the election coming up has made things seem a little more urgent.
That’s going to change – I’m starting a second series of posts like my Hyperpost series. This is going to be called When Worlds Collide, and will cover the influences behind the gigantic novel I’m plotting out in my head. Over a series of a dozen or so posts, I want to talk about (amongst othes):
Final Crisis
Jack Kirby’s Fourth World Comics
The Invisibles
Zenith
The Faction Paradox books (including Dead Romance and Lawrence Miles’ Doctor Who books)
Manicheanism
Frank Tipler’s frankly bonkers ideas and the somewhat saner ideas of Max Tegmark
The Doctor Who stories The Tenth Planet, Dalek Invasion Of Earth, Inferno, The Deadly Assassin and Trial Of A Timelord
Alan Moore’s Doctor Who and Captain Britain comics
Peter Milligan’s Animal Man run (if I can recover the .cbr files from my trashed hard drive – I’ve never been able to track this down in paper form…)
The Prisoner
Basically, all these things share at least a few of the same handful of ideas, and I’m interested in why they should all keep getting mixed up together (even accounting for influence). Why do planets being moved out of position go so well with shadowy conspiracies? Why do stories about two conspiracies which are each secretly controlling the other tend to involve parallel universes? What happens when you try to tell the same story in two versions in parallel, as Morrison did with the Invisibles and JLA? Is there a difference between a computer simulation of the real world, a computer that knows everything about the real world, and the real world itself? Does evil really contain the seeds of its own destruction? Can one be a number *and* a free man?
These are going to be long posts – several thousand words each – and the first one will be up on Sunday, after tomorrow’s post about Mark Thomas’ People’s Manifesto. The first one will be a reply to plok’s latest challenge. Once these are done – once I’ve finished outlining these ideas, I will be doing two things. I’ll be starting the big novel, and I’ll also be creating a website for the universe it’s set in. That universe will be a collaborative one, and more people than myself will be writing on it.
This site has been a little dull for a while. That’s changing as of now.
(I also promise as of now to get *far* more involved in replying to comments…)
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