Day 4688: Millennium’s Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Top Trunks #01: ACE

Friday:

Age: 16
Stories: 81
Awesomeness: Dalek Killer
Cuddles: In Leather
AKA: Sophie Aldred

Day 4411: DOCTOR WHO: Oh Happy Day

Monday:


Today is the Twenty-Seventh Anniversary of the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster; it is Two Hundred years since the publication of Pride and Prejudice (no Zombies); and Daddy is One Hundred and Forty-Seven Billion, No Millions, Fifteen Thousand and Sixty years old. (Adding up on my flappy feet, I MAY have lost count.)

Better bung on "The Happiness Patrol"!

Given the set-up, the only way "The Happiness Patrol" could end is with Margaret Thatcher-analogue (certainly in the performance if not necessarily in the script) Helen A in tears.

But do we want to see the Doctor make the villain cry?

And only a few years later, the real world would see virtually the same woman in tears as she left Downing Street. Did we gloat? Did we "dance on her grave"? Or did we feel sympathy for the monster?


This isn't a question of whether Helen A deserves to be overthrown and punished for her acts. She is clearly depicted as responsible for murder, both indirectly as the one giving orders to the Happiness Patrol and directly when she pushes the button for the fondant surprise. Her government's policies kill people for being sad and twist the lives of everyone else by enforcing false happiness.

It's important that we recognise that, in spite of Sheila Hancock's gleeful caricature, this is a very standard Doctor Who Nazi allegory: the uniforms may be pink rather than black but the M.O. is identical, from the "othering" of a minority (with the "smile" badges to reward conformity, so reminiscent of yellow stars and pink triangles), through the keeping of lists and records, to the state control of economic assets. Even the expressionist sets are making us think of 1930's Germany, and all the face-paint is very "Cabaret".

The simple conflation of Mrs Thatcher's Conservative governments of the 1980s and Nazism was an easy cliché of the decade (much as the "more right wing than Thatcher" smear is the cry of the current generation against the Coalition, to which one is inclined to say: "you should have tried living in the '80s"). But were they really Nazis?

Is it legitimate, even in exaggerated satire, to equate the Thatcher governments of the 'Eighties with the Nazis? The evidence is mixed (and it's troubling that there's even the possibility of a "yes").

Of course we recognise that "Nazi" and "Commie" are debased terms, used as insults and as opposites by the sort of people who assume that Communism and organised Labour and "left wing" are virtual synonyms and therefore by extension "Nazi" must be the right wing equivalent, when in fact (read your Orwell) there is very little difference between the two apart from some emphasis on the cult of personality, and identification of who is to blame for the economic condition of the workers. Communism and Nationalism are both working-class based mass-movements prone to violent collective action against the perceived "other" and, like any human organisation, subject to subversion from within by a ruling elite with their own agenda.

(Note on Orwell: our set-top-box is set to record every Saturday play, because we're very Radio 4 and every now and again there are ones we actually want (James Bond). But of course this week it didn't record one we really wanted, a rather good adaptation of "Animal Farm"… Because, obviously, for this one week the EPG read "The Real George Orwell" rather than "Saturday Drama". Humbug. Time to try the iPlayer.)

In contrast, the Thatcher governments sought to disperse economic (although not social) power as widely as possible, through programmes of privatisation, council house sales, tax cuts and market liberalisation.

Certainly, it was a brutal and unforgiving period – far more so than the Coalition have been – with large tranches of British industry forced out of public ownership and allowed to go bankrupt with little or no safety net for the communities left scarred and blighted as a result. Economically, though, this de-nationalisation is the exact opposite of National Socialism. Thatcherism as a theory supposedly venerated the individual as opposed to the fascist ideal of stronger together. The Lady was both more complicated and more simple – I think she venerated both, but only “together” in terms of nationalism (remember, she made Britain the most centralised state in Europe). Ultimately she replaced her worship of "the market" with frothing Europhobia, the jingoistic last resort, as it were. The same tension between atomised markets and protective nationalism tears at the Tories today.

The Falklands War, while easily classified as Imperial – and the signature engagement, the sinking of the Belgrano, was a war crime under Britain's own rules – but was also unsought and in defence of self-determination against an invading dictatorship. Not that Lady T was ideologically opposed to all dictators, as testified by her closeness to General Pinochet (tying herself to "routine disappearances" as in the show; nor should we forget the "shoot-to-kill" allegations of "Death on the Rock" and other rumours.)

There was a definite use of "othering" by the Conservatives of the 'Eighties, but their principal target was the Trade Union movement, infamously described as "the enemy within" by Mrs Thatcher, and subject to brutal repression whether by proxy at Wapping (1986) or in the year-long miners' strike. (1984-5).

Her government's treatment of gay people – ostensibly the metaphor of "The Happiness Patrol"; happy = gay, geddit – was more mixed, ranging from the robust response to the emerging AIDS crisis to riding the anti-Sixties backlash and moral panic that culminated in Section 28. The '80s were when the gays suddenly became a major political issue (used to bash left and liberals, and simply bash gays). But at the same time Thatcher's rhetoric of individual freedom was being taken seriously by some people – even when her actions showed it as empty words. It was an era of transition, when gay rights had to be fought for, but when the groundwork was laid for the rights being won in the 'Nineties and 'Noughties and still today. When stereotypes were still seen all over the TV, but new and positive portrayals were just starting to emerge. Then (as now) the loudest anti-equality voices were religious and small-c conservative fringe, the James Andertons and Mary Whitehouses, and a vocal minority on the Conservative backbenches. That's not to excuse a government that went along with it.

I started off this section assuming that it would be easy to disprove, but I find more and more that the Conservatives were all too willing to use the techniques of the Nazis to protect their rule through "divide and conquer". It seems more that it was the British people who were becoming more liberal through the 'Eighties and that the government (of the minority) was reactionary against that.

And I wonder what I'll think looking back on the Coalition years from a similar perspective when Twenty-Forty comes around. That "othering", that scapegoating rears its ugly head once more, whether it is the culture of blame the bankers (all too reminiscent of the "Zionist conspiracy" accusation) or the Prime Minister's recent speech on Europe raising the old Tory xenophobia. Or the way both Labour's Liam Byrne and the Conservative's George Osborne have picked on benefits claimants (whether your language is "workers v shirkers" or "strivers v skivers", it's equally objectionable).

Most of the time, "Nazis = bad" goes as an unchallenged assertion in Doctor Who. The Daleks, for example, are virtually evil by definition because they are the Space Nazis. In fact, by deconstructing the Nazi iconography, "The Happiness Patrol" makes one of the better cases for why Nazis actually are bad.

Almost every Doctor Who story – almost every melodrama, in fact – contains a cathartic moment (cathartic for the audience anyway) where the villain gets dealt their – usually-fatal – just deserts. This can be horrific, or occasionally comic, and often with a sense of poetic justice.

"Monsters" tend to be exploded (Daleks, Cybermen, Sontarans), melted (Ice Warriors, Giant Robot, Terileptils, Haemovores), buried (Silurians, Sea Devils, the other Silurians) or just plain deactivated (Yeti); while the human or humanoid "villains" are more likely to either have their allies turn on them (especially if played by Kevin Stoney or Roger Delgado!) or the Avengers stand-by "killed with their own weapon" (Harrison Chase and his fertiliser machine; Styggron and his virus; in this very story, the Kandy-Man is melted by his own boiling sucrose). Arguably Davros achieves both at once.

What we don't often get is the sense that it is traumatic for the losing villain, that they are hurt, upset. Death – ironically – makes it easier by never giving the baddies the chance to react to their own defeat; by never expecting us to have to empathise with them.

Empathy is terribly important in "The Happiness Patrol". It is empathy that enables us to feel sad when sad things happen to other people. We understand Susan Q's despair because we can share Ace's empathy for her. Even when it is clear Ace doesn't understand her friend's thoughts and feelings she can still share the pain they cause. In contrast, it is the lack of empathy that allows Helen A to do terrible things.

What, then, are we to make of the Doctor, who can reduce a woman to abject weeping and just look on?

And bear in mind, this comes in a story between one where the Doctor talks an intelligent alien into suicide and another where he pushes another woman over the edge into madness and self-immolation.

The Doctor in this story is not human, barely even a life-form, more a force like Nemesis (see also the subsequent story). That makes him powerful, but it makes him cold. He breezes through the story, quite casually taking everyone's world apart – whether it's playing mindgames with the Happiness Patrol or gluing the Kandy-Man to the floor of his own Kandy Kitchen (though imagine if the Doctor had kneecapped Priscilla P with her own fun-gun instead of similarly incapacitating the Kandy-Man with his own lemonade...)

Ironically, his most famous line from this story "Look me in the eye; end my life" is about as bald a statement of the power of human empathy as you can get.

Here, he's like a djinn, answering Ace's wishes. Ace, remember, started this story wanting to make the Happiness Patrol, and Helen A's regime "very unhappy". It's almost as though he's taking her to face these things and using her response to judge whether or not to topple this week's empire. Telling, if that's so, that he got rid of the more mature (!) Melanie and took the black-and-white opinions of the teenager instead.

At the end, Ace confronted by Helen A in grief actually asks the question on the audience's behalf: "isn't there something we should do?"

The Doctor's reply is up there with the end of "The Family of Blood" for his most wrath-of-god harshness: "'Tis done".

Ace has got what she – and we the audience – wished for, but, being very human, she's not happy about it.

Of course, that empathy with Helen A's grief is what makes Ace a better person. And we, the audience, are being asked to be like Ace, not the Doctor.


Next Time... going backwards... It's Melanie Bush. Played by Kate O'Mara. I'd say you have to see it to believe it, but frankly credibility doesn't really come into it. It's time to mount a defence of the indefensible and the strange matter that is "Time and the Rani". Shut your Tetrap! I only arsked!

Day 4383: DOCTOR WHO: Ghost Light

New Year's Eve:

To describe "Ghost Light" as Marc Platt's finest hour (all right, ninety minutes) seems very unfair.

He's a brilliant writer who has gone on to provide us with such highlights as, in novels, the bookends of the mythic arc of the New Adventures – "Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible" and "Lungbarrow" (from which "Ghost Light" was first derived) – and, on audio, the poignant definitive origin of the Cybermen story in "Spare Parts" and the extraordinary alternative first Doctor of Geoffrey Bayldon in "Auld Mortality" and "A Storm of Angels", and, as they say, many more.

And yet it is.

Serendipity lends a hand, of course.

It would have been a great disservice to "Lungbarrow" to attempt it when it was unfilmable on 1989's Doctor Who budget. Maybe even on 2012's budget, unless you want to see the House of Lung as Cardiff's Temple of Peace. Instead we benefit from the sort of Victorian costume drama that the BBC had always done well, right at the end of the era of the studio-based three-camera drama, with John Birt closing in – and closing down – all the bits of the BBC that let them do this sort of thing at the drop of a hat.

The translation to Ace's past rather than the Doctor's serves it better as a part of the Season Twenty-Six arc. Filmed as the last Doctor Who television serial produced in the Twentieth Century, juggling of broadcast order meant that dealing with a haunted house in Ace's past in "Ghost Light" became a prelude to dealing with the evil god that haunts her present in "The Curse of Fenric" rather than a follow-up, thus immensely strengthening her story and darkening the Doctor's motivation.

And you get a cast to die for: Ian Hogg relishing it to his whiskers as Josiah Samuel Smith; Sylvia Simms as hard-as-nails Mrs Pritchard, endlessly watchable and seemingly everyone's enemy; John Hallam as Light in an era of fey angels – see also Peter Capaldi's Angel Islington in "Neverwhere" – shading his otherworldly camp from harmless confusion to apocalyptic sneer; Michael Cochrane deliciously demented as Redvers Fenn-Cooper, the finest explorer in the Empire, lost in his own mind; John Nettleton taking the character of Reverend Matthews, who could so easily have been a cypher, a caricature creationist, and making him seem first the villain and then the victim of the piece; Carl Forgione as Nimrod, the one character allowed much dignity; Sharon Duce who is both funny and touching as Control struggles up the social and evolutionary ladders on her quest to be a "ladylike".

Even a minor character, such as Mrs Grose (Brenda Kempner, to whom I always do the disservice of expecting her to be Pam Ferris) is vividly alive: the way she inhabits exactly the role we expect of her could easily be a cliché, except... the clichéd bits – all the "my dear"s and the "no one in their right minds would stay in this house after dark"s – are surrounded by genuine warmth towards Ace and the day maids and perplexity when Matthews unexpectedly arrives before the "dark" house has awoken. And who's to say that – in this madhouse of mesmerism – she hasn't been programmed by Josiah with the stock Victorian clichés to keep her from thinking too much about her employer's goings on. It would certainly explain why she hangs around keeping a house that appears empty during her working hours. And it's not like he hasn't hypnotised everyone else!

So "Ghost Light" is exactly the kind of thing that the BBC was in the right place to make, at the right time and with all the right people.

But even watched "cold" today, out of context and twenty years later, it is still brilliant television. The severe editing of the Cartmel Era left several stories with key scenes on the cutting room floor – see the extended editions of "Silver Nemesis", "Battlefield" and "...Fenric" if you want to know what's going on – but alchemically turns "Ghost Light" into a puzzle-box of delights.

Possibly the most text-dense production ever – snatching the title from "Dragonfire" at the last minute – you can just spend the whole running time spotting which line comes from CS Lewis, which reference is to Conan Doyle, which character belongs to Henry James, and arguably it spawned a whole sub-genre of Doctor Who fiction: the "can you spot all the references" novel (pick up a copy of "Iceberg", "War of the Daleks" or "Christmas on a Rational Planet" if you want to play along. But only "Christmas on a Rational Planet" if you want to read a novel).

But this is far more than just a game for Time Lords. Those references – even, perhaps especially, the Douglas Adams nod (he's the answer to "Who was it who said Earthmen never invite their ancestors around to dinner?" of course) – are all calculated to place you at the heart of the great Victorian debate that began with Darwin.

Ace may describe Light as "It's an angel, stupid," but there's really no question of to whom "Let there be Light" refers.

Evolution and God have always been at the heart of Doctor Who.

Evolution from before Regeneration, ever since "An Unearthly Child" which showed us the step change from "cave people" to "modern" humans and asks us to compare the same step change from Ian and Barbara to Susan (and it's surely no accident that "Ghost Light" uses the same metaphor in the person of Nimrod). The series has survived because it changes, leaving behind once-contemporary stable-mates and finding something new. From Sir Lancelot and Flash Gordon-style Saturday serial, to ITC spy-fi adventures, to Hammer Horror, to the quintessential Monty Python of science-fiction, to 'Eighties video-nasty, to graphic novel on the telly – and then into books and then into audio and then back to the television – into Russell Davies writing classic Northern soap mothers into a story about survivor guilt dressed up with some running around with colourful aliens, and then to Moffat using sit-com stylings to offer up puzzle-box plots about pride and paradox. And sometime soon, maybe 2014 after the eighth series, Moffat will move on and it will evolve again.

And God too has been in it from the very beginning, in the person of the Tribe of Gum's "Orb". Long before Moffat and Davies deified the Doctor – the lonely god – or before Cartmel asked if the Doctor could be God (and was told "no") but had him take down gods anyway, before Tom defeated Sutekh, before Pertwee took on the Devil, the series has over and again addressed questions of divinity, power and truth in religion ever since Barbara became a god in "The Aztecs".

(See also: "Who Died and Made the Dalek Emperor God?")

But don't think that it is as simple as saying "science is right / religion is wrong". I mean, it's fairly obvious which side Marc would be on in a fight, but this is far more thoughtful and subtle. What does for Light in the end is slithy toves and bandersnatches, Crowned Saxe-Coburgs and little Jackie Piper. Creativity – the power of creation – defeats Light. Light's catalogue is cold and dead, as lacking as his imagination. This is about the senselessness of making up a script and sticking to it in the face of all evidence and good sense.

Josiah's powers appear as so many tricks and misdirection: his night maids (Alex quite likes calling them ‘The Night Maid’, like ‘The Night Watch’ or indeed ‘The Nightmare’) emerge from hidden panels, he flourishes a pistol like a stage prop (see also "The Talons of Weng-Chiang"), and his hypnotism is of course a classic act. It's all a magic-show – another hint is Ace and Gwendolyn's transformation into David Devant eveningwear – but don't let that distract you from the fact that there are real powers at work here.

Sylv's style of acting is often (and unfairly) criticised – it's a very physical, a very theatrical style – but here his grizzling and physicality are transformative. There is a scene where he confronts Light and holds out a hand forming a fist in a warding gesture while hunching his shoulders and screwing up his face and voice. It conveys a sense that Light's very presence is – in the Lovecraftian way – slightly too much for our reality to bear, and that the Doctor is doing… something… to stop reality from being ripped away just by Light being here.

Even the ending, Light's firestorm redeployed to carry the stone spaceship on a new mission of discovery, is symptomatic of this ambiguity. Light's power in and of itself is neither good nor evil; it is the choice about how it is used in the hands of mortal, fallible creatures.

There is no one "truth" in this story. People who think that way – Light, Josiah – tend to end up broken when the blistering chaos of reality rolls uncaring over them. In contrast, Control, by the end of the story, is already surpassing Josiah and his "Victorian Values" in recognising that she has a responsibility to care for him, a hint of Dickensian social conscience there (and the answer to Dr Simeon's question "What's wrong with Victorian values" in "The Snowmen"). Nimrod – almost a hint of Asimov's Zeroth Law of Robotics here (see also “Robot”, before Asimov) – has recognised that loyalty to the planet supersedes his loyalty to "the burning one". And Redvers, who is insane by pretty much any measure, has constructed a view of the world that is not just consistent, but powerful and, in his own way, true.

And I'll say again that this is presented as a challenge for Ace, a quest, even, a quest in the Arthurian sense, where the physical deeds are secondary to the moral lesson. This is about her finding her truth, not about the Doctor just handing over the answers, imposing a "truth" on her.

All of which, of course, means I can no more tell you the "truth" of "Ghost Light" than explain why a butterfly is beautiful. You have to experience it.

(And be aware that when we tried this story to show a guest as an example of how much more than just a TV show Doctor Who could be… it unfortunately blew his mind!)

Roll up roll up for the End of the Series Show. Every viewing is different. Which is as it should be.

Awesome.

Next Time… going backwardsDoctor Who's most Thatcher-baiting, most Basset's Sweets-displeasing, and frankly gayest serial. I'm glad you're happy and I'm happy you're glad that it's "The Happiness Patrol".

And a very Happy MILLENNIUM BIRTHDAY New Year to everybody!

PS: this has been my 1400th diary!