Day 2995: DOCTOR WHO: The Unquiet Dead

Saturday:

We could have done this one last week too, you know! Daddy has got DOCTOR WOO on my iPhant, so at conference, late at night, we were able to snuggle round the telephone and watch tiny little Dr Who and tiny little Rose and tiny little Mr Dickens…

But then we got our copy from the Doctor Woo DVD files so we watched it again this week too. Honestly, with all this watching Doctor Woo all the time we are starting to look like BBC3's target audience. BBC4 will get JEALOUS!

Of course, they never expected to do Christmas, so this is the ninth Doctor's Christmas special, three months late.

And for all that it's dressed up with pseudo-scientific explanations, this is very much a ghost story, in the traditions of the BBC's MR James adaptations and, dare I say it, Dickens himself. Now, admittedly, I was less impressed by writer Mark Gatiss's "Crooked House" pretentions over Christmas 2008 than certain Grauniad previewers – who gave him pick of the day three days running – but earlier work such as New Adventure "Nightshade" and "The League of Gentlemen's Christmas Special" show that it's certainly a genre in which he can excel.

Ironically, though, the most "ghostly" sequence has nothing at all to do with the plot, because it's this week's "Bad Wolf" reference, the point at which people started to go "aye, aye, there may be something to this", expressed as Gwyneth's disturbing premonition. It's an incredibly effective scene and unusually long for what is no more than two people standing and talking. And then the Doctor pops up at the end and makes you jump!

The episode also looks very different. After the warm colour palette of "The End of the World", Euros Lyn, who directed both episodes and will go on to be a behind-the-camera star of 21st Century Who, choose to emphasise the ghostliness with lots of blues and even green lighting in the TARDIS console room, and contrast it with vibrant living reds in the theatre, say, or Sneed's parlour. Notice also the way that the morgue feels like it's in the depths of the Earth so cold is the light, and the purple feet of one corpse just add to it. And then the Gelth Ambassador turns from ethereal blue to infernal flame… The whole piece comes across as a visual fanfare.

And opening with a whopping great close up of the gas being lit is great visual clue too.

Being as it's Euros, TARDIS travel is much choppier, with the Doctor and Rose ending up flat on their backs, though laughing about it. He does the same thing again in "Tooth and Claw", though shows them actually falling over that time, so it's much less, er, post-coital. However, the Mill's special effects of the TARDIS in the time tunnel are, rather marvellously, done so as to show the Police Box looping the loop just before we cut back to the Doctor and Rose on the floor. So obviously that's what they're doing down there.

This is, incidentally, the point at which we should realise that the time tunnel is colour coded: red for forwards in time, blue for backwards. This is a lovely touch and very nearly right. But, unfortunately, backwards.

Travelling forwards in time is effectively slowing yourself down relative to everyone else – one second for you equals a hundred years for the rest of the universe. The effect would compress or shorten the wavelengths of light waves as you perceive them reaching the TARDIS because more of the waves have time to arrive (from their point of view) in the time (from yours). Because more waves have time to arrive, this shortens the distance between the waves, i.e. the wavelength, turning red into blue.

I think this works in "real" physics too. If you actually wanted to travel into the future (faster than you would anyway), one way would be to take advantage of relativity. Travelling close to (though never faster than) the speed of light has the time dilation effect known as the twin paradox where the rest of the Universe ages more than you do because of the way that time and space bend. At the same time length contraction foreshortens all the wavelengths, blue-shifting all the light.

Travelling backwards in time would, of course, have some very peculiar effects, but assuming you still can experience visible light then in all likelihood it would also be blue-shifted as you go backwards because it's not the direction but the temporal velocity that would affect the colour. You would want to be going backwards at a rate faster than one second per second so, again, more light waves have "time" to reach you than "normal", and getting more waves means a shorter wavelength which is the same as bluer light.

To get redder light you would have to be travelling through time "faster" than normal, that is to say you be in "Blink of an Eye" accelerated territory.

Having said all that, the TARDIS travels though an engineered dimension called the Vortex so for all I know it comes with built-in traffic signals courtesy of the "Fairy-Lights of Rassilon".

There's also a tiny blooper in the opening TARDIS scene, incidentally, but it comes so soon in the episode that it gets me every time.

"Hold that one down," says the Doctor.

"I'm holding this one down," replies Rose.

"Then hold them both down," snaps the Doctor.

What Billie should have said was: "I'm holding this one down".

(i.e. the way she says it, it sounds like her reply is "I am holding down the button you want me to" rather than "I can't because I'm holding a different button down".)

Think of it as the grain of sand in the oyster though, because Billie's performance is so lovely in this episode it's hard to criticise. The perfect delivery of her first step into the past; the wild-child sauciness of her conversation with Gwyneth; her delivery of the word "gazebo". It's easy to forget just how good Billie was as Rose in these opening episodes and how much of the series' subsequent success hung on that. As the (ghastly phrase) audience identification figure, she is the one who draws us into this series, convinces us that this story is going somewhere and binds us to it.

"The Unquiet Dead" is also the first episode with a genuine "guest star", in the person of Mr Simon Callow as, of course, Charles Dickens. Obviously everyone wants to be a guest star in Who now, but then it was a big thing to get an actual "name" and the press made a lot of it. It's a lovely understated performance, all soft regrets and blustering insistence on his certainties, only becoming hootingly Dickensian when Dickens is on stage "in character" as it were. The moment in his carriage where the Doctor, on finally realising who he is, goes all fanboy and he is flattered into assisting this stranger is both hilarious and charming. And the way that, as the evening goes on, he gets gradually more drunk as his way of coping with each new revelation is a nice and also credible touch.

That's not to say that you should overlook Alan David as the ungodly Mr Sneed, whose black sense of humour– "the stiffs are getting lively" or "maybe the bishop will do us an exorcism on the cheap" – carries much of the early part of the episode. He's one of those characters with a modern sensibility dropped into a past era so as to comment on the conventions of the time. He's also really good fun, and if you watch his scenes with Chris Eccleston, you can see that the Doctor really enjoys his company too, even though he has effectively just tried to murder Rose.


One thing that strikes you about the first (television) series of Doctor Who this millennium is the distinctive voice of each of the other writers. This is clearly before Doctor Who mutates into "Russell T Davies Doctor Who", and it's much the better for it. The writers who are chosen to contribute are all steeped in the lore of the series, but also with their own TV credentials and the cohunes to stick their ground.

Now in his big book of Doctor Who, "How I Did It!", Russell asserts that he could have claimed a co-writer credit on many of the "non-Russell" stories, and "The Unquiet Dead" in particular. And yet the story is so distinctly un-Russell that you have to say Mark deserves his name in lights this week. There's a much darker humour, just enough of a whiff of Royston Vasey to be enjoyable without being overpowering. There's an interest in Dickens as a person, not just as a celebrity (I'm looking at you, "The Shakespeare Code" and "The Unicorn and the Wasp"). There's an interest in the mechanics of Time Travel, without it being in the geeky Steven Moffat way, with the Doctor explaining both that time can be flexible, rewritten, and that Rose is wrong in the (surprisingly common) misconception that she can't die just because she's time-travelled to before she was born. There's an obvious love for the story implicit in Doctor Who continuity. Throwaway references to "The Myth Makers" and "The Talons of Weng-Chiang" rub shoulders with directions to the TARDIS wardrobe that could come from "The Invasion of Time" or "Shada". And, of course, there's a very trad Doctor Who explanation for "the sight", casually slipped in alongside the "ghosts are aliens" malarkey, which sets up a whole lot of future continuity too. Russell, it has to be said, probably wouldn't bother with an explanation at all… which is fine as far as it goes but just look at the storytelling opportunities – not to mention career for Eve Myles – that have arisen out of that explanation.

All of which means that the creator credit for Torchwood really goes to… well, Nigel Kneale, actually, because if the whole "rift" idea is chloroformed and stuffed into a hearse from "Image of the Fendahl", then Chris Boucher was himself just lifting his explanations of ghosts and psychic phenomena and hitching a lift in the dead body of Kneale's earlier "The Stone Tape".


Alex has pointed out another way in which it is different, though, and that is in its attitude to strangers. A theme that runs though the first season – through Rose's mixed-race relationship with Mickey; to the way that her DNA mixes with the Dalek's to make it morally "better"; to Captain Jack's "dancing"; to Margaret Slitheen "going native" in Cardiff – it's implicit that mingling is good. The Doctor expressly notices that something is wrong with the Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire because it's just humans and no mixing with aliens.

In this episode, offering to share the planet with aliens turns out very, very badly.

This, of course, would be the point where Lawrence Miles infamously went off the deep end. To be fair to him, the Gelth do claim to be seeking asylum; their claim is bogus. This makes them entirely literally "bogus asylum seekers" in the ugly headline hate-figure tag especially current at the time.

But to be fair to Mark Gatiss too, this is Doctor Who so the Gelth have almost got to turn out to be monsters or there's no dramatic last act. In fact, aliens are invading Earth all the time in this series, but they usually go for brute force or some over-complicated scheme to try and seize the planet. Or, in "The Sontaran Stratagem" both. It's rare – and therefore more original and interesting – for them to lie to get their way.

And the whole moral debate – the Doctor comparing giving the Gelth dead human bodies to recycling – would be much less interesting without that lie.

What's interesting too, is that no one is entirely proved right in this story. The Doctor admits it's all gone a bit wrong when the Gelth betray him, but Rose also gets taken down a peg or two when Gwyneth tells her it's clear in her mind that she thinks the maid is stupid.

Besides, the Gelth are, obviously, "Gas" mixed with "Stealth". And "angels" that "descend" are demons.

How much of the Gelth's story is true? It looks very likely that the answer is none of it. Through Gwyneth, they can read the Doctor's mind – we see that she can read his mind in the moment when she offers him tea "with three sugars, just how you like it" – and the whole of that extended "Bad Wolf" scene helps to set this up. They've told Gwyneth that they are angels. They tell the Doctor that they are victims of the Time War – you know, that Time War that he's feeling god-rendingly guilty about. Neither claim is any more credible. They are just pushing exactly the buttons that they know will play upon the sympathies of whomever they are talking to.

Which means we don't actually learn more about the Time War.

What we have is a piece where characters have different facets to them and actually develop, even though a lot of them still end up dead; where the plot is actually as important as the people in it, rather than just being a shop window for Russell's trademark character-shtick; where there's an actual science-y fiction-y explanation rather than "it's aliens/the future so we can do whatever we want". In short, one accidental political lapse aside, it's close to a perfect episode of Doctor Who.

In summary: when the TARDIS dematerialises there is a CGI swirl of displaced snow that had gathered on its Police Box exterior. Never mind thousands of flying Daleks or the Devil, that should be the definitive effect of new Doctor Who.

God bless us every one.


Next time: Harriet Jones, Flydale North… nope, no idea who you are. Time for the first really controversial episode. Farting aliens take over the government of Britain and restage "Pigs in Space". BONG! It's "Aliens of London"

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Day 2994: Vote Mr Balloon to be In Europe but Sitting At the Back with the Nutters

Friday:


Mr Andy writes a timely reminder of just what kind of FRUIT-LOOP it is that Mr Balloon is getting into bed with (though obviously NOT in the way that "will lead to the downfall of civilization")

Currently, Mr Balloon's Conservatories are members of the centre-right or "Christian-Autocrat" aligned European People's Party, motto: "Europe's Driving Force". But Mr Balloon doesn't WANT to be a "driving force" in Europe. In fact he wants to climb OUT of the driving seat and into the back with the MAD OLD GRANNY who keeps shouting "it's all the fault of those {delete as applicables}…"

European President, Mr Manual Barometer, has spoken of his regret that Mr Balloon is leading his men into the WILDERNESS.

And Liberal Democrat equalities spokesperson Ms Lynne Featherweight has written to the Conservatories asking them to reconsider whether they really, really, REALLY want to be allied to these sort of opinions.


The European People's Party is, currently, the largest bloc in the Union Parliament having, at least until the elections in June, 288 of the 785 members (or 37%).

For a bit of perspective, the EPP comes ahead of the Party of European Socialists (including the VERY not-Socialist Hard Labour Party) with 215 seats (27%) and the group that the Liberal Democrats belong to, the Rebel Alliance. Er, sorry, the Alliance for Liberals and Democrats in Europe, with 101 MEPs (13%).

The remaining seats are held by the Greens, the ironically-named United Left splinter party and the National Conservatives with about forty seats each. And Mr Robert Killjoy-Sulk sitting on his own at the back.

27 MEPs are British Conservatories, by no means all of whom are eager to leave the EPP. Depending on how many of the LUNATIC FRINGE he can persuade to join his gang (and how many of his OWN Conservatories he can carry with him), Mr Balloon will probably be joining the FRINGE PARTIES on about forty seats too.

So Mr Balloon is planning on moving from the LARGEST party in the Union to being the SMALLEST.

For a man who CLAIMS to be "ready for power", he certainly seems to be BACKING AWAY from the centre of the action going, "ooh no, don't ask me to actually take responsibility for leading".

And what sort of a MANIFESTO is he going to offer to the British People at the European Elections this year, anyway? A DISHONEST ONE, that's for sure.

After all, he can hardly spell out the TRUTH can he:

"Dear Voter, I'm currently the leader of the Party with MOST British MEPs and we're a BIG PART of the group that's been DRIVING the European Union, even though I keep telling you that I'm against everything that the Union are doing and that I am therefore supporting. Er.

"But give me your vote and I'll SURRENDER any influence and guarantee NO CHANGE to European policy because I'd rather hang out with a bunch of HOMOPHOBES than step up to the task of actually making a difference. And as for Global Warming… just remember, as they say in Poland, Vote Blue; Deny Green.

"Luv from Mr Balloon."


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Day 2992: Mysteries of Doctor Who #18: Do the Cybermen have invisible planets?

Wednesday:


Because on the face of it, they certainly seem to.

Planet #1: Mondas, aka Blowy-uppy-world.

Mondas, I don't like Mondas, I'm going to burn the whole planet down. Though, ironically, that's what they try to do to Telos, and only blow up Mondas by mistake.

In "The Tenth Planet", astronomers from Earth SUDDENLY spot a ruddy great planet barrelling down on us. Now, even though this was set in the DISTANT FUTURE of, er, 1986, and therefore before Mr Lembit had got all shouty about asteroids, a planet the size of Earth (which, by definition, Earth's TWIN planet would be) ought to be visible for millions of kilometres. You know, like Mars and Venus are. And yet this comes as a total surprise to people who are running a SPACE PROGRAMME and therefore jolly well ought to know. Flying a rocket isn't just Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre, you know.

And yet somehow, Mondas just "appears" from nowhere.

Planet #2: Telos, aka Freezer Empire (catchy advert: "Mum's Gone to Telos")

Although Dr Who returns there in the DISTANT, er, PRESENT DAY of 1985 for the "Attack of the Cybermen", the Cybermen's home from home – or rather tomb from tomb – is first visited in "The Mummy". Er, what? No, you see, "The Tomb of the Cybermen" is basically a retelling of the Mummy legend, with Telos as the Egyptian desert and Cyber-control as the lost pyramid. The hieroglyphs, sorry "logic-symbols", are the big give away. Oh, and the lumbering Undead rising from the tomb to exact their curse on whomsoever should disturb their eternal slumber. Anyway, this, in and of itself, relies on Telos being a "lost planet", somehow difficult to find. Invisible even.

But then to compound that, there's the evidence that Telos is actually IN our own Solar System. To reprise the whole Planet 14 debate: all of the mighty Trout, Mr Dr Pat's, adventures with the Cybermen are set in the Solar System and in the 21st Century (or late 20th), and all of them make it pretty clear that the Cybermen do NOT have interstellar technology and desperately need to conquer the Earth as their only hope of survival. Well, they all do so long as you accept the allowances you have to make if you're to make ANY sense of that one written by Mr David "I wouldn't know the difference between a Galaxy and a Finger of Fudge" Whitaker. Given that going cryo is their very-last-throw-of-the-dice option, that would suggest that the oh-so-difficult-to-find Telos is right here in the Solar System. Which would have to make it even more difficult to detect.

So ARE they invisible?

Well, there IS another possible explanation, although it's a bit "Star Trek".

The alternative is that there is some kind of WORMHOLE near to where the Earth orbits the Sun. And Mondas fell through it.

This isn't QUITE as unlikely as it sounds, at least not in the Doctor Woo universe. There's at least one occasion when a pretty ordinary Earth spaceship (i.e. one of the ones that THAT stock-footage from NASA can double for) manages to accidentally get lost in another star system. Admittedly that's "The Android Invasion" aka "The One with the Spoiler in the Title" (or more precisely "The One with the Spoiler in the Title that doesn't have Daleks in it"). Nor is it unknown for planets to apparently wander in and out of the Solar System – Voga in "Revenge of the Cybermen", Vulcan in "Power of the Daleks", arguably the Moon in "…and the Silurians" – so there's a least a chance that trans-galactic billiards is on the cards.

And of course, the whole of Torchwood is based on the idea that there is this space-time rift to anywhere that just happens to have a back door in Cardiff.

Actually, the Torchwood Rift (or GIANT ANTI-PLOTHOLE as it is called) ought to be a tiny wee crack in the Universe (what with the Gelth specifically NOT able to come through in numbers) rather than the bleedin' enormous demon-disgorging dimensional doorway that it is used as whenever the plot calls for it to be the Hellmouth this week, but N E Waaaaaay.

It's been put forwards by others that the REASON the Earth keeps getting invaded in the 1970s and/or 1980s (your UNIT-dating mileage may vary) is because there is some STRATEGIC value to the planet beyond the prettiness of its oceans and the nice view towards Alpha Centauri. A convenient hyper-space by-pass to the Oseidon system (or wherever) would certainly be that.

Mondas popping back thorough the rift would satisfy the "suddenly appearing from nowhere" criterion that "The Tenth Planet" sets up; and if Telos is at the other end of the rift, especially if the other end isn't fixed (yes, just like that one with the Ferengi) then that would make it the "lost city/planet/tomb" for which Professor Parry's team had to scour the universe. (Even though they seem ill-equipped to scour a BATHTUB!)

But that's not really "drifting to the edge of space" is it. It's rather more "blimey, where did the sun go?" and "where's parallel Professor Richard to tell us that WE'VE moved and not all these new planets" to be honest.

No, the wormhole explanation won't do.

Instead, let's pretend that the Cybermen behave logically like they claim they do (but DON'T!) and look at this that way.

This whole problem starts with Mondas becoming increasingly uninhabitable as it drifts away from the Sun. The Mondassians have got time and technology on their side, but otherwise they're more STUFFED than I am.

We know that their EVENTUAL solution was to turn themselves into friends of Dorothy. (OK, so the straw cybermen and the cowardly cat-monster Mondassians were even less successful…) But what else might they have considered?

Well, large scale INSULATION of the planet might be a good idea. Your main needs are to keep the atmosphere in and to keep it warm: what you want is some sort of dome over much if not all of the planet, an artificial sky that is reflective on the inside to retain as much heat as possible and is totally black on the outside to absorb any warming sunlight that manages to fall upon it.

Entirely as a BY-PRODUCT of that technology, you've built a great big NINJA COSTUME for your planet, rendering it difficult if not impossible to see.

Of course, returning to the environs of the Earth, such a shroud would result in the REVERSE problem, runaway global warming. And we already know that Mondas suffers from overheating. The Cybermen would need to pretty quickly disassemble their planetary blanket… hence apparently materialising out of nowhere!

That's Mondas explained… what about Telos?

Well, ask yourself about the native Telosians, the Cryons who we meet in "Attack of the Cybermen", a species so evolved for sub-zero conditions that they VAPORISE at room temperature. And yet, humans appear able to wander about on the surface of their home planet without instantly turning to popsicles. So, what, the Cryons invented the freezer BEFORE they evolved? It seems a little unlikely. Obviously, something has happened to CHANGE their planet – and what more obvious a change than the invasion of the Cybermen.

Actually, even this doesn't really make total sense. We're supposed to believe that the Cybermen invaded Telos to take advantage of the Tombs… so the giant fridges must have been there before them… so they can't have been built BECAUSE of the Cybermen. But let's take a little CREATIVE licence. Say the Cybermen invade Telos just because. After all, it's a planet and their own world, Mondas, is currently on an apparently one-way trip to deep space doom. But the Telosian weather is routinely what we call "a bit nippy" or even "quite brisk". And yet fortunately the Cybermen just HAPPEN to HAVE the technology to hand for exactly these circumstances: they adapt same techniques they used on Mondas and set about adjusting the Telosian climate to be a bit more to their liking. And, as the temperature rises, the Cryons are forced to build refrigerated cities just to survive the Global Warming.

In this sense, Telos is twin-of-terraformed into a planet with Earth-like surface conditions (and quarries) encased in a black light-absorbing suit making it vanish. The only way to detect it would be by calculating the effect that its gravity has on the surrounding system… enter the Brotherhood of Logicians with their "mass intelligence" able to put in the thousands of man hours of calculations needed to locate the lost planet.

On the other fluffy foot, ASTROLOGY rather than astronomy would be more in keeping with the whole "ancient curse" vibes. And the Cybermen ARE the astrologers of the Doctor Who Universe.

After all, their plans begin with the movement of the planets ("The Tenth Planet"), before progressing to the Moon ("The Moonbase"), a nova in another galaxy(!)… oh all right, meteorites ("The Wheel in Space"), a planet of gold ("Revenge of the Cybermen") and finally turning into a falling star themselves ("Earthshock"), even if they wind up chasing a "magic comet" ("Silly Nemesis").

Of course an INVISIBLE planet would turn an astrological chart to gibberish… if it wasn't gibberish ALREADY! Maybe that is why all of the Cybermen's schemes go wrong.

"Your Stars for Today. Telos: a tall/short dark/fair young/old stranger will be important to your plans. Maybe don't bother going out."



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Day 2990: How I bottled out of asking Mr Vince if he was going to slash higher education and the army

Monday:


As I said, I was LATE for my interview with President Ros because I was in the main hall listening to the speech of our Treasury Spokesperson, Mr Vince "the Power" Cable, and could not tear myself away.

I came away with the distinct impression that our SAINTED Shadow Chancellor was carefully and quietly laying the groundwork for announcing strategic cuts in government spending. Or more bluntly, warming up the sacrificial knife and letting some of the sacred cows know they have an appointment…

Specifically mentioned were higher education and the armed forces.

The suggestion that we cut the size of the army is quite BOLD. "Courageous", Sir Humphrey would say. It is certainly a stick that the Conservatories, with their jingoistic hats on, would use to beat us with.

It is certainly the case that we have been asking ridiculously too much of our armed forces. Hard Labour got us into one completely unnecessary war that has made the other possibly necessary war much, much harder to fight.

The difficult question here is one of RESPONSIBILITY. Mr Clogg has spoken of a world where intervention is possible. But who's going to do the intervening – for all that it should be under a blue flag with a UN mandate, SOMEONE has to provide the boots on the ground. And if Great Britain is going to do less, that means either we're asking someone else to do MORE (and see how difficult it is to do that even among friends in Europe), or LESS is going to be done. We – the civilised world – are already walking on by while Darfur and Zimbabwe go to hell in a handcart. How many other places will we let slide into anarchy or, worse, the grip of someone like the Taliban who we end up having to fight in the end anyway?

I'm not against us bringing home our troops, putting right the shocking state of their homes here in the UK and using our army to defend us rather than supporting the failed policies of a President who is now history.

But it's never as easy as JUST saying: "right we'll come home now".

Mind you, for a Liberal Party, particularly a big soft fluffy liberal party like ours, saying "less war" is going to be much, much less of a problem than saying "less education".

Even raising the QUESTION of whether sending 50% of all young people to university is a good idea could be seen as retrograde, anti-opportunity, even… CONSERVATIVE.

But let's just try and look at this PRAGMATICALLY for a moment. We USED to have a system where we offered a free university education of exceptional standard to a smaller number of people, ideally those who would benefit from it the most, though in practice this was mixed to a greater or lesser extent with those who could afford to buy their way in too. A university education BECAUSE it was rare offered you a step up into the best opportunities.

By vastly expanding the pool of graduates you also reduce the SCARCITY value of BEING a graduate – you transform the degree from a course of study for those who it will benefit into a pass/fail test that divides the nation into two: those who'll get the jobs and the rest. Because if a degree is no longer the passport to top earnings, it has become – even worse – a necessary hurdle to ANY earnings. Congratulations, you've just re-invented the 11+ as the 18+.

And then you've got to PAY for it all, for all those extra places studying, which needs more lecturers and accommodation and facilities, and you're talking two three times as much money, so where's it going to come from? Well, you end up mortgaging your children's future in order to have THEM pay for what you got for free. And for how much? Three thousand pounds? Five thousand? Ten thousand? So now only those who can AFFORD it will take the chance and that means the ones who's parents are already in the well off half and social mobility is killed stone dead. Well done, Hard Labour, good luck with pulling that ladder after you.

But… but, but, but. Who am I to say that it ISN'T an opportunity, and people ARE still clamouring to get in to university, even if it means taking up the offer of eternal debt in exchange for a graduate salary.

I THINK we would be better off with a RANGE of opportunities, founded on a good education to 18 but with different paths after. But that's merely what I think.


Anyway, we did an INTERVIEW with St Vince, and THAT is what I SHOULD have asked Mr Vince about when I had the chance. But I bottled it. Come on, this is Saint Vince and we are very much on the same side – I don’t want to be putting my big fluffy foot in it asking something awkward about fundamental policy changes.

So I asked him about the Euros and about the Post Office instead. These were clearly less stupid questions than last time we interviewed him and I asked if he wanted to carry on being Deputy Leader (answer: yes) even if they weren't the real questions I should have asked.

The point about the Euro is that the currency MAY get blown to pieces if PROTECTIONIST pressures get too great; however it MAY end up being stronger if it becomes a reserve currency – which isn't one you keep on the bench just in case but is actually one that people buy up to shore up their OWN reserves. I had hoped that St Vince would use his FAMOUS POWERS of PROGNOSTICATION but he was not to be drawn so easily.

Admitting that either of those things COULD happen, he did say that the single currency would come under a lot of pressure as the recession affected countries, especially Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain which are known to have weaker economies, compared to Germany. (Mind you, we're ALL weaker economies compared to Deutschland!) This was the first SERIOUS test of the new currency, he pointed out, and the first time in a decade that the Eurozone has faced a recession. Fortunately, he felt that it was UNLIKELY to break the currency.

On the other fluffy foot, he also thought that a very serious currency crisis like this revealed to people just how VULNERABLE we have let ourselves become by staying outside.

On a more positive note, after the crisis has passed he thinks that that will be a good time to reassess our entry into monetary union. Obviously, he restated all the usual caveats about "at a rate that is sustainable" and "not without a referendum". But he clearly felt that a good part of the case FOR the Euro would have been made if it weathers the banking apocalypse (and another good part will be made if it weathers it BETTER than the New Pound, the noble traditional currency of Great Britain since, er, 1971).

Post Offices are topical, thanks to Lord Mandelbrot, and also of great interest to any local community where their Post Office is threatened with closure. And also Daddy had written some really good questions about them earlier.


So I asked whether the bottom of a huge stock market crash wasn't a STUPID time to be considering a privatisation, and shouldn't we be trying to get some more competition into the business rather than just an under the counter deal with one private firm?

Mr Vince agreed that now was, as he put it, perhaps not the best time to get best value for the shares.

Though he slightly evaded the rest of the question, not actually dodged more of a weave past: he said that as liberals we supported the idea of liberalisation in the postal industry, but that it shouldn't be reduced to "cherry picking" the best bits and leaving the universal delivery to the state. But he moved quickly on to critiquing Lord Mandelbrot's proposals, saying that we have laid out a number of key tests for the legislation when it appears – will private companies have to contribute to the universal service obligation; will postal workers participate in a John Lewis-like workers partnership; will the Royal Mail be kept as a public body; will the private investment be used to support the Post Office network. He reckoned that actually Lord M will fail one or more or all of these tests and that we will be opposing the legislation. Still, it is good to keep an open mind first.

He also suggested that competition is difficult because the sorting and distribution is a natural monopoly, though for myself I am not sure that that is true, or at least not any more true than it is for the supply of telephone services because the wires form a natural monopoly. Unless I'm wrong, wasn't British Telecom one of the more SUCCESSFUL privatisations introducing competition into the whole telecom industry?

Anyway, those were my questions.

Far more interesting was the conversation we got into about BLOGGING, and why Mr Vince doesn't do it – mainly time – which also linked up with Auntie Alix's questions about targeting, and the advice he had for Jo Crispy-Strips about how to get elected. (Which was: keep on slogging, you'll soon learn that a few good speeches aren't remotely enough and you'll need a lot of hard work and a lot of good canvassing information and most importantly a team). AND then Lady Mark went on to talk about how Mr Vince had been doing a lot of visits to local parties and "not just the glamorous ones". (The trick is to ASK, folks!)

Lovely Jenny asked a much more interesting question about bees; the Lady Mark asked for investment advice; fragrant Mary asked about the unfairness of the local government grant to "leafy suburbs"; the Tin Man asked for a Heart; Daddy Richard asked for a Brain and you were there and you were there and oh! It was such a strange dream…


For better accounts than mine, look to our other star panellists:

Award Winning Auntie Alix

Deeply diverse Ms Jo Crispy-Strips

Trembling Fangirl Jennie

The Honourable Lady Mark (parts one and two)

Fragrant Ms Mary Reidmyday

And Scarier Mr Andy Hinton (parts one, two and impressively three)


Star Prize, though, goes to Auntie Helen for the World’s longest 12 second video.

Cable Guys (and Gals)

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Day 2988: If your local party is a bit rubbish… who you gonna call? – Millennium Elephant meets President Ros Scott

Saturday (again):


All right, so I arrived LATE for this interview. It's a LONG way up that spiral ramp to the auditorium in the Harrogate Centre and my fluffy legs are only LITTLE, so it takes AGES to get all the way back!

Anyway, the Fragrant Ms Mary Reidmyday and Mr Costigan Quist have already given you the low down on what happened when they along with lovely Jenny and Auntie Helen and (yes, yes EVENTUALLY) my fluffy self got together for an interview with Ms Baroness Ros Scott, who looked resplendent in the newly minted Presidential diamante conference-badge lanyard. (Apparently Mr Hugs has yet to hand over the Presidential Tiara.)

The Committee for the Return of the Presidential Tiara

So, I am talking instead about one thing that came up, but that seems to have been a growing notion that spread over the course of the conference from our meeting with Governor Dean and into our conversation with St Vince of Cable too – in a word: targeting.

In slightly more words: because we have limited resources we have to chose most carefully where to put them, therefore we lend our support to places where we have the best chance of winning, whether at local or parliamentary or even European level. It's a strategy known as Rennardism and Lord Rennard, the Party's Chief Executioner Executive has been renamed after it. Er, I think. It has had, as Mr Vince pointed out, enormous success, resulting in the best Liberal representation in Parliament in a Century.

On the other fluffy foot, Governor Dean's whole strategy, the Fifty State Strategy, is about reaching out to BEYOND the places where you can win. The reasons are TWOFOLD.

Firstly, your support does NOT end at the boundaries of your winnable constituencies. Targeting, though, abandons those voters, leaves them out in the cold almost. A Fifty-State Strategy lets them feel a part of the victory, and more than that it lets them know that they are not alone out there. By empowering small networks in places where you are not strong, you provide not just comfort to your own supporters but visibility among supporters of other parties and of none. The more people who at least KNOW someone who will say "I'm a Liberal Democrat! I'll have a Babycham!" the more CREDIBILITY you have when you claim to be a NATIONAL PARTY.

Secondly, for new members, at the moment, it's a LOTTERY. If you are lucky, you find a local party that is a strong and coherent group, where you can make friends, have fun, a good old chin-wag and learn about liberal democracy and feel supported. If, however, your scratch-card comes up blank, then you find little more than a stack of Focuses and a begging letter signed by Lord R.

Mr Vince said himself that the BEST thing about the Liberal Democrats is the REALLY EXCEPTIONAL PEOPLE.

BUT… you need to FIND those people. Getting elected is DIFFICULT and HARD WORK. Governor Dean told us that the PERSONAL CONNECTION was the most important factor in winning an election. But you need to be making that connection to several thousand homes just to be a councillor. That needs a TEAM effort.

So the VITAL question that seemed to be coming through from the conference was this: Are we, as Liberal Democrats, losing vital support because the people who WANT to find us, can't?

And what do we do about it?

President Ros certainly seemed AWARE of the question, and had SOME answers – she talked about developing a policy network that could involve people more directly in formulation of policy; while at the same time saying that Cowley St couldn't (and SHOULDN'T do it all) and that regional parties had to take some responsibilities.

We want to use our resources SMARTER. Obviously we want MORE resources too – Mr Costigan asked Ms Ros about that, and she said that we need to ask. We need to act more like a CAUSE or CAMPAIGN rather than a political party. We need to ask for money FOR something, not just "the Party". And we need to be less EMBARRASSED about asking. But basically we need to ask.

But President Ros also thought that we should be using our resources BETTER – we have a smaller membership than the other two parties, but often a better educated and more motivated one: the skills are out there if we can find them. (Another "find the people".) And there is a good deal of unnecessary duplication of effort that we should try, where possible, to trim.

But that's not the answer to the question, is it. It's the BEGINNING of an answer, it's at least a recognition that there IS a question to answer, but it's not getting us all the way there.

How do we, without compromising the investment in target seats, reach out to our own "Fifty State Solution"?

If only there were some NETWORK or connection that we could make… hang on…

If you are READING this then you and I are connected via the Wibbly Wobbly Web. You are an Internet Person, and probably a bit of a Liberal One too. And therefore QUITE SMART.

But the Internet alone can't do it. At the Lib Dem Voice fringe event, Ms Karen from the Obamamaniacs (or Barry O for America Campaign as it was formally called) talked about the success of the Internet in the Presidential Election, but also said how they never wanted it to be too good – they didn't want the voter to think "well, I've really enjoyed the website and now I've 'done' Barry O for President". They wanted the voter to get up from behind the screen and go out and DO something. Vote, mainly, but delivering would be nice too.

So think. How do we capitalise on the connection that we already have? How do we build on it to make a Liberal Network that CAN reach those liberals out there, and how do we get them MOVING?

How do we find them, the ones Mr Vince called the REALLY EXCEPTIONAL PEOPLE.










Don't just sit there! Get on with it!!!

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Day 2988: For the Purposes of this Interview, I shall be a Donkey - Millennium "Donkey" Meets Howard Dean

Saturday:


You cannot have helped but notice that the Democrats of America have recently won a significant victory. The Internet plaid a big, big role in this victory, with Barry O drawing in 13 million supporters and over five-hundred million dollars through his website.

So we were very privileged to ask the advice of the man who very much led the way with his own campaign grass-roots campaign in 2003 and as chair of the Democratic National Committee: Mr Governor Howard Dean.

Howard Dean, pictured here with Lib Dem Bloggers and a "Donkey". Yes, I'm a Donkey.

I was joined for the interview by Ms Helen and Ms Alix, along with Daddies Alex and Richard.

To warm up, I welcomed Mr Howard to the Liberal Conference and asked what the word "Liberal" meant to him.

Ms Helen asked about the Internet and campaigning. Describing the Internet as "the most democracy oriented invention since Gutenberg", Mr Howard was quite modest, and when he talked about how the Internet has changed people's engagement with politics in America, he said that it was the people writing the blogs and the websites that had done the changing – he and President Obama were just the ones who were quick to recognise that change and to adapt to it.

He spoke of the Internet as the tool that is EMPOWERING a new generation: "Where we had a million people march on Washington, you can send a million e-mails to congress (and crash their mail-server!)" he said. At the same time it opens up new ways to COMMUNITY politics, forming new links between local people and groups.

But more than that, the Net is also the best possible way to reach out to people in authoritarian regimes, in places like China or Iran, and bring them a fresh take on democracy.

Should we be talking to activists or to undecided voters, Ms Helen wanted to know.

"Neither," said Mr Howard, "You need to be CREATING activists."

Many more young people are travelling and serving their country in diverse ways today but what they don't do is connect that to POLITICS. Politics MATTERS, said Mr Howard, and not just to old Fuddy-duddies. It is the role of bloggers – that's ME and YOU! – to get our generation engaged and involved in politics.



Daddy Alex asked his "how are you different in one line" question. In an interesting reply-that-wasn't-entirely-a-reply, Mr Howard put forward the idea that the message relates more to the CAMPAIGN rather than the PARTY: for instance "change" was their message this time, and very successfully.

But far more important than MESSAGE was making a CONNECTION to the voters. It's important to go knocking on doors, but it's even more important to go back again and again. An activist knocking on a hundred doors in a weekend is only so good unless they are going to go back the weekend after and the weekend after that and knock on all those doors AGAIN.

That is how you build up the relationship. It doesn't have to be the candidate in person, so long as it is the same face popping up so that the voters can see a relationship, and see how that leads to RESULTS.



Ms Alix talked to Mr Howard about the Fifty-State Strategy. To her, that seemed the exact opposite of the way Liberal Democrat targeting seems to work.

Mr Howard agreed that too much targeting could be a MISTAKE. You risk writing off whole sections of the nation or, as he put it in the most CRUCIAL remark:

"You cannot be a national party if you don't campaign everywhere in the nation. You'll never get someone's vote if you don't ask."

It doesn't mean devoting EQUAL resources, but it does mean devoting SOME resources to places where you are not (yet!) going to win. For what might be a relatively small investment you can have regional co-ordinators to link up activists and give people a "go to" place to find Liberal Democrats.

Speaking from the American perspective, he said how important it was that through President Obama's campaign people had become able to stand up and say "actually, I'm a Democrat" throughout all of America. We Liberal Democrats need to achieve the same thing here, so that peole can stand up and say "I'm a Liberal Democrat" and their friends will think, well actually it's okay to be a Liberal, and maybe the Liberals AREN'T all bad/irrelevant/gone the way of the dodo.


It was a real pleasure to meet the man who could have been the man who could have been the President. And he gave us a lot to think about.

And now we must dash away to hear him speak in the main hall!

PS:

We DID try to tempt him into telling us what he thought about the OTHER political parties in Great Britain. But he was very DIPLOMATIC.


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Day 2986: A Quantum of Easing

Thursday:


“Now, pay attention, 007! If you press this button, you’ll engage and then fire the Economic Ejector Seat, blowing the top off the Bank of England and shooting seventy-five billion pounds up your… fiscal rectitude…”

So, how does this “Quantitative Easing” thing work?

Well, imagine you’ve got seventy-five billion pounds… THAT’S how it works.

But this ISN’T like Zimbabwe or the Weimar Republic where they just printed money in order to pay its bills. Oh no! Here, the Bank of England is printing money to buy back the government’s I.O.U.s that they issued in order to pay their bills. Hang on, how does this work again?


Suppose you had ALL the sticky buns in Great Britain. Just suppose. [Sighs] Sorry. Back with you. Let’s say that all those sticky buns cost a billion pounds. Then suppose the Government creates a billion pounds out of nothing, just to spend on sticky buns. But you’ve still got THE SAME NUMBER of sticky buns. So now your sticky buns cost TWO billion pounds and you’ve invented HYPER-INFLATION.

On the other fluffy foot, people OUTSIDE Great Britain looking in will see this billion pound mountain of sticky buns and say, ah ha! That is worth quite a lot of Euros or a bit of a stack of Dollars or two-thirds of a Triganic Pu! But then the Government says abracadabra it’s now a two-billion pound mountain of sticky buns. And everyone else says, er no that’s still quite a lot of Euros or a bit of a stack of Dollars or two-thirds of a Triganic Pu; we’re just going to give you LESS of OUR currency for YOURS thank you very much. And you’ve invented a RUN ON THE POUND as well.

Good going, so far.

Fortunately, however, the REAL value of Great Britain is quite a lot MORE than a billion or even seventy-five billion pounds. In fact, the Bank is only magicking up a bit under 4% of our GDP (which is how you measure total sticky bun production).

That MIGHT cause a little bit of inflation… but that might just cancel out the DEFLATION that’s threatening at the moment. And anyway, Government’s think they know how to DEAL with INflation: they put the interest rates back up.

It MIGHT cause a bit of a fall in the pound. But the pound is already quite suppressed because there’s a CYCLE to this. The way the VULTURES circle the World Economy began with Americaland, and the dollar fell – remember that from early LAST year? – and then came to Great Britain and the Pound fell, and it will probably be the Eurozone next and the Euro will shift down in value, cancelling out it’s previous gains over the pound. And a falling pound HELPS our exports, as we found after the ERM fiasco. Though that is dangerously close to PROTECTIONIST thinking; remember it HURTS imports too, and world trade depends on BOTH import and export to really work.


So it’s SORT OF borrowing from the FUTURE. The Bank invents money NOW to buy the Government bonds; but when the economy is right again, they SELL the bonds back and vaporise the money again. We pay “interest” in the form of inflation and the cost is our money becoming worth a bit less.

But is it going to work?

No. Because it’s a sort of short term CONJURING TRICK, and you can’t keep doing it or the economy goes completely Mugabe.

We need to stop BORROWING to patch up the failed economy of the last few years and start BUILDING the economy of tomorrow.
Now, we’re off to Lib Dem Spring Conference. I wonder what Mr Clogg and Mr Cable will have to say about that…

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Day 2985: Humility or Humiliation?

Wednesday:


So, it was Mr Frown's big day. He got to address a joint session of both houses of Americaland's congress. This is, apparently, an honour previously only bestowed on two MANIACS, a NOTORIOUS DRUNK and the man who managed to lose a general election despite polling the most votes Hard Labour has ever won.

So he was understandably PEEVED that Chancellor Sooty had another of his inconvenient bouts of HONESTY and said that maybe a little HUMILITY was called for, and maybe the Government should admit to getting a few things WRONG.

"Will I ARSE!" was Mr Frown's reply.

…I PARAPHRASE! Speaking on the The Today Programme, what the Prime Monster ACTUALLY said: "There's always a need for humility and there's always a need to accept collective responsibility."

Before going on to say: "I'm just not going to accept that any of this is MY responsibility." Okay, I made that up too, but it was the ESSENCE of his reply.

"I don't think I would run away from responsibility for what happens," he asserted. Before doing EXACTLY that, blaming the banks, the world economy, the Secret Conspiracy of the Illuminati and the DOG for eating his homework.

"No, no, the sub-prime mortgage lending happened in America, not here," said Mr Frown; "and I think you'll find that ABM Amrose, that was in Holland, not in Great Britain at all. You're not pinning THIS one on me, sonny."

Well, I seem to recall that the Northern Rock – or Northern On the Rocks – managed to gamble and lose on the money markets with no help from anyone. Their business plan relied on cheep lending always being available, overlooking the most basic "interest rates can go up as well as down" rule of banking. And the Halifax managed to get quite heavily into its own sort of sub-prime lending, as the British property market went through the stratosphere like an overheated balloon… right up to the point where the bubble, and the balloon, burst.

But setting aside the geographical quibbles, is it not the case that Mr Frown WAS the man in charge of the economy for the last DECADE? Wasn't he terribly, terribly PROUD of this fact? More to the point, didn't he spend much of that time courting, wooing, positively sucking-up-to and encouraging the banking sector to do pretty much all of the things that got it into so much trouble?

The CULTURE of banking in Great Britain is defined from the top down. It's a culture FERMENTED by the Hard Labour attitude of "being intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich". And it leads to the sort of WILLY-WAVING where "Fred the Shred" is egged on to buy a busted bank just so that he can shout: "Phwoar! Just look at the size of my… pension!"

Later Lord Mandlebrot appeared on the Newsnight show. He was in Washington at the Ambassador's reception – mmm, nice chocolates – but his shadow was able to join Mr Paxo in the studio to defend the Hard Labour record on regulation. Great Britain, he told us, had had excellent regulation, but it was overwhelmed by an unprecedented event. And the airbags worked perfectly until the car crashed too.

Mr Frown does not suffer from an excess of humility. HUBRIS, on the other fluffy foot…

It we are going to LEARN anything from where we've got to after the last ten years, if we are going to build a BETTER FUTURE from the rubble of the economy, then we've got to face up to the mistakes that were made. Too much easy borrowing; too little restraint; too much money spent on useless things, from management consultants to middle-eastern wars; too little investment in returning opportunity to ordinary folks.

It's no good living in DENIAL – you only get BITTEN by de CROCODILES.

It's a pity Mr Frown didn't say THAT to the US Congress.


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Day 2983: …then Get Off your Fluffy Bottom and DO something, Mr Brooker!

Monday:


It seems that the Grauniad's resident misanthropic television critic has reached the limits of human endurance with the Hard Labour Government, resulting in THIS warmly-received splenetic diatribe against the politicos of the ruling classes. Or rather against ALL politicians of every stripe.

But here's my problem: if you're fed up with the way things are, you've got two choices. Either, one: play by the rules, join a political party that WILL make a difference and change the system; or, two: organise a revolution.

Anything else is just "shootin the breeze" as the ELEPHANTS of EVIL in America would put it.

Do not get me wrong, we love Mr Charlie. And it is a GREAT rant. And, frankly, who amongst us could read Mr Jack Man O'Straw, the Sinister Minister, claiming that BLACK IS WHITE without wanting to run him down on the next ZEBRA CROSSING.

But if you don't follow through with action, it doesn't achieve a single darn thing.


Let's diagnose the problem.

Symptom: politicians don't need to pay any attention to what the general public want.

Cause: we have a political system that hands 100% absolute power to the winner of a very small number of marginal seats, meaning that the parties are forced to converge on very narrow policies to satisfy the voters in those marginals and so long as they do that can do any other darn thing they like.

Solution: change the system. Change it so that more or at least most of the seats have a meaningful contest. Make it so that MPs have to DO SOMETHING to justify the vote of their electors.

Snag: but that's so BOOOOOOORING, much easier to wail and yell and throw our dummies out of the pram about how corrupt and venal and just so HUMAN our representatives are.

If you say all politicians are the same, that ANYONE who goes into politics is therefore the same… then no one is going to go into politics to CHANGE things. And that only helps the BAD ones.

Let's just take a moment to compare the reception in Chatter-ista-land of two articles about British Freedom: Mr Huhney-Monster's FREEDOM BILL, and the Sinister Minister's DOUBLETHINK. Clearly, not ALL politicians are the same.

Look, if the Liberal Democrats actually WON an election, I really cannot GUARANTEE that we would be better than Hard Labour or the Conservatories. I know that we wouldn't be corrupt or venal in the same way… but I'm sure we could find new and exciting ways of our own to be corrupt and venal. That's the problem with absolute power, after all.

But we WOULD put a system in place that would change the balance of power between people and politics. We WOULD be the answer Mr Charlie's problem.


Here is the problem for the Liberal Democrats. We WANT to be different. We WANT to be iconoclastic, to change the system, break apart the old cosy consensus where a pathetic "opposition" permits Hard Labour ministers to block legitimate inquiries into disastrous and unjust policies that resulted in literally murderous repercussions with a casual "well we're not telling, so ner".

On the other fluffy foot, we ALSO want to be ELECTED. It's kind of NECESSARY if you want to stick within the rules of our democracy, even if your aim is to win the power to CHANGE those rules.

But playing by the rules means being part of the system. And that means that we're going to get slandered with the "oh, you're just like all the other politicians" label. Because otherwise, we get slandered with the "gaffe" label.

If you step outside the conventional – even SLIGHTLY, by maybe suggesting it's okay to not believe in Mr God, or that aspiring to virginity until marriage is a tiny touch out of date, or that maybe asteroids are worth thinking about – then you are "gaffe prone" or "a figure of fun". (And goodness knows how the meeja would cope with someone who had a REALLY alternative lifestyle – polyamory, anyone? Transvestism? Nudism? Train-spotting?)

In fact it's true of the WHOLE PARTY. We're a bit UNCONVENTIONAL – so we're told we lack CREDIBILITY.

The MEEJA is the key to this – and, I'm sorry to say, Mr Charlie works in the media.

I do so WANT to think: "well, Mr Charlie is great and it's his JOB to write articles, so this is his way of doing his bit. And the problem is the droning mass of the do-nothing brigade, all those fawning midges on Comment-is-Free-ish-subject-to-moderation, you might call them the INSECT-IGENSIA."

But the Grauniad SUPPORTS this Government. They urged people to VOTE for it at the last election, even AFTER we all knew that Iraq was a LIE. They will probably urge people to vote for it again.

(It has been suggested that they might switch their support to Mr Balloon's Conservatories. Which is even WORSE. Because it is just another run around the game of BUGGINS' TURN, that keeps the Tweedle-Tories, Dum-and-Dumber, in power.)

The Grauniad runs SPIN for this Government, the Grauniad undermines alternatives and lives in DENIAL about the true depths of Hard Labour's crimes.

They are like all those increasingly-desperate Labour backbenchers who pretty much campaign on the slogan: isn't this government dreadful – vote Labour; it's the only way to stop these bad-words!

So how CAN you be against the LYING LIARS when you are a PART of the very system that keeps them there?

If you mean it, Mr Charlie, if you really, really mean it, then you're going to have to say to the QUISLING bosses of the Grauniad, I'm sorry it's Labour or me. Tell them that either they unequivocally denounce the Government, the Labour party, Ms Pollyanna Toytown, Ms Jacuie Hashley and all the rest. Or quit.

Otherwise… you're just another politician.

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Day 2974: DOCTOR WHO: The End of the World

Saturday:


Well, so much for doing THAT on a weekly basis! Anyway, this week we were all much cheered when our subscription to the Doctor Woo DVD files finally arrived! Hooray! So I have settled my Daddies on the couch again and put on episode two… "The Cave of Skulls"

Hang on, that's not right…

I suppose the first and most obvious thing to say is that this doesn't mess with the established continuity. Well, okay, it does but not really.

Let me explain: the "traditional" view says that the Earth is destroyed in the year ten million or so (as seen on-screen in Billy Hartnell false-ending-fest "The Ark"). "Frontios" with Peter Davison's Doctor is dated to the same era, largely because it too has a huge "Ark" spaceship, and from the description of the colonists as "fleeing from the doomed planet Earth" (as Turlough tells us with much relish).

Some people – naming no names, but they wrote "About Time" – seem to have invested rather too much in this, in fact, since some of their more outré theories hinge on the similarity between this span and the Doctor's rant about "ten million years of absolute power" in "Trial of a Time Lord". This is reinforced by the "Time Parameter Exceeded" warning from the TARDIS console in "Frontios", as though the post-End-of-the-Earth period is particularly perilous for Time Lords.

Time Lord history and Human history, they both last exactly ten million years, eh. Nudge nudge, wink wink, say no more. Although to give them credit they also admit it could all nothing more than humanoids having a love of large base ten numbers.

Even so, this does leave them tying themselves in knots to explain that the Earth only seems to be (in Han Solo's words) totally blown away in the course of "The Ark". Actually, they claim, it's just a bit singed, and the National Trust put it right.

It is all nonsense, of course.

This whole theory is based on a few lines of dialogue in "The Steel Sky", aka part one of "The Ark", which I reproduce here, half-inched from the Doctor Who transcripts project:

We rejoin the Doctor in conversation with the leader of the Ark's crew of Guardians, discussing the Doctor's recent travels.

DOCTOR: ...including the Daleks.

COMMANDER: Nero, the Trojan wars, the Daleks! But all that happened in the first segment of time.

DOCTOR: Segment? Er, to use your phrase sir, what “segment” are we in now?

COMMANDER: The fifty-seventh.

DOCTOR: Good gracious! We must have jumped at least...ten million years, hmm!

The first thing you notice is that he says "at least ten million", an "at least" which surely throws any sense of "exactitude" right out the window.

Anyway, that the "first segment" spans at a bare minimum The Trojan War ("The Myth Makers") in c.1200 BC (ish – if it happened), Nero ("The Romans") 64 AD (as dated by the Great Fire of Rome which happens in part four), and the Daleks, possibly the Dalek Invasion of Earth (guess the story) in 2150 (A!D! if in Technicolor) although it's as likely to mean the Daleks' Master Plan (guess the story again) in 4000 AD.

That might seem to imply "segments" of five to ten thousand years at least, though that would only place the 57th segment as far forward as 570,000 AD, a long way short of 10,001,965 AD (i.e. ten million years from their last stop: Wimbledon Common to collect Dodo at the end of "The Massacre"). But really, what is there to say that the first segment ends anytime soon after the Daleks' Master Plan? Or, for that matter, what is there to suggest that segments have a fixed span anyway? You could as easily suggest, based on the Doctor's wittering about us spending a million years as downloads and a million years evolving into clouds (in "Utopia"), that the "First Segment" lasts from the evolution of Homo Sapiens some 3 million years ago until the evolution of our first successor species in the year 0.1/Semiquaver/8…

Oh yes, quite how we get from "Fifty-Seventh Segment" to "5.5/Apple/26" is harder to explain… if 0.0 to 0.1 is the First Segment, maybe… but that only puts us in the Fifty-Sixth… well, it's close.

…anyway, the point is we have no idea how long a "Segment" is supposed to be, or how they relate to how we recognise time. And – more importantly – neither does the Doctor.

The first Doctor was the most notorious for not having any clue as to where or when his erratic time-machine had taken him. Take this exchange from "The Dalek Invasion of Earth":

IAN: Doctor, I don’t understand this at all, we saw the Daleks destroyed on Skaro, we were there!

DOCTOR: My dear boy, what happened in Skaro was a million years ahead of us in the future. What we’re seeing now is about the middle history of the Daleks.

A million years? "Planet of the Daleks", set in the twenty-sixth century, reports the events of "The Daleks" as history, indeed almost legend, to the Thals. So "The Daleks" cannot be more than a few hundred years, if that, in the future of "The Dalek Invasion of Earth", certainly not a million.

Clearly, when pressed on a question, if he doesn't know the answer, he's most likely to just make something up.

So frankly, even if he hadn't given himself 4.99 billion years of wiggle room in the form of that "at least", then we cannot place any reliance on his dating "The Ark" to the year ten million, while contrariwise Mr Eccleston's know-it-all New-Roman-Empire incarnation is not only capable of steering the TARDIS (usually) but has an actual destination in mind.

In short, five billion years in the future and while the intergalactic set are mingling aboard Platform One, the Guardians (slightly out of shot) are shipping out all the rest of the people and animals aboard their fleet of interstellar Pickfords. This, in fact, almost makes sense: if the Ark (or Arks if you include "Frontios") are lifeboats from a flood then it makes sense that this was a relatively sudden but predictable calamity that they were warned about (like the National Trust's money running out) rather than the long, long expansion of the sun we would normally expect. And when Rose asks "What happened to all the people" the Doctor replies "all gone."

I suppose he could have added: "they're just down there" points "you can wave if you want."

All of which discussion takes us up to the end of the pre-title sequence.

The main thing to notice in the rest of the episode is the way the Doctor's attitude does a 180 flip: at the start, he's full on channelling Russell "positivism" Davies, complaining that humans do nothing but worry about the planet being destroyed, when they never even consider that they might survive. But by the end, he mournfully saying how we never consider that one day it'll all be gone, even the sky.

But there's a reason for this, because what we're actually doing is uncovering the character of the Doctor. In the process we learn that what he never considered, that Gallifrey might one day be gone, has in fact come to pass. "There was a war, and we lost."

Say "Last of the Time Lords" to any Doctor Who fan during the, er, sixteen-year temporary pause between seasons twenty-six and twenty-seven and you'd have been met with something between derision and outright hostility, as this was the title attached to the increasingly-ludicrous "Doctor Who movie" project from Coast to Coast aka Green Light (not to be confused with the actually-ludicrous "Doctor Who TV movie" starring Paul McGann). With a plot that allegedly involved all the worst possible continuity clichés (no, it's really not to be confused with the "Doctor Who TV movie" starring Paul McGann), and of course the biggest cheesiest sci-fi cliché of them all, the "last survivor of a doomed race", or "Superman" cliché.

To be fair, Doctor Who has flirted with this one before. The Third Doctor encountered the Last of the Dæmons (and, arguably, the Last of the Uxarians); the fourth took down the Last of the Osirans and the Last of the Jagaroth (though the Fendahl was – pretty much by definition – its own "Last of…"); while the fifth Doctor even travelled with the Last Daughter of Traken. Kwundaar help us.

What they all had in common (well, probably excluding Nyssa) was that they were all bonkers.

In the hands of Russell Davies, though, this madness itself becomes an exploration of the loneliness brought on by being the last of your kind. The ninth Doctor is clearly suffering from survivor guilt, to the extent that at times he appears to have a death wish. You have to ask yourself if his confrontation with the Nestene Consciousness last time wasn't supposed to end with him thrown into the Nestene's pool of boiling liquid which, thanks to his anti-plastic, would end up killing both of them. Rose swinging to the rescue thus saved him both physically and spiritually.

Interesting also to note that when they get into an argument it is again Rose who pulls them out of it. In "Rose" the argument was about his failure of concern over Mickey, where he gets into a right defensive strop because he forgot – twice – that Mickey might be dead. Rose deflects that row by asking him about his beloved police box. "It's a disguise" he says, and he's so chuffed. This week, Rose can't cope with the culture shock / future shock of all the alien guests (not to mention Cassandra) and then learns that the Doctor's machine has been "messing with her head" – another example of the Doctor failing to get human psychology. So Rose makes her "don't mess with the designated driver" comment (which actually reemphasises, but deflates, her realisation of the physical dependence she has on him, the realisation that started her panic in the first place as she talked with Ruffalo the plumber) and then gets him onside by talking technology again. Showing that she gets him even if he doesn't get her, yet. Which is quite a contrast to the way she was treating Mickey, if you think about it.

But it's a very human relationship, the key quality to all of Russell's writing, of course. And a very much more credible one than most of the "what's happening, Doctor" relationships that companions have had down the years.

What we begin to see is the idea that the Doctor might be a very damaged individual, that the wild-eyed boggling might, this time, be covering up something deeper and darker. This is where Chris Eccleston's ability to turn on a sixpence from goofing to deadly serious really comes to the fore, and becomes the bedrock that this reinvented series rests upon.


What is really odd is that this character story was billed as a visual spectacular. With hindsight, Russell's "we did it once to prove we could; never again" looks laughably naïve. They did it once and proved only that they would have to do it again and again and get bigger and better every time. And in fairness they have. "The End of the World" doesn't look spectacular now. No, that's not quite fair: the Earth exploding is still spectacular and Cassandra is a work of genius. On the flip sip, those giant fans never impressed anyone. But what "The End of the World" did was to set the baseline for the sort of visual riot that we now expect Doctor Who to achieve. And equally, we've never had quite that big a mix of aliens since, either – the planned crowd scenes at the Shadow Proclamation for "Journey's End" tragically being lost for budget reasons. But while the Trees, Jabe Lute and Copper, are truly well realised – and our first sight of the go-to guy for New Who monster suits, Paul Casey – and the Face of Boe is a mightily imposing prop worthy of being reused, the other aliens are a bit… stand at the back and hope no one looks too closely. The future, it seems, is either blue or wicker. At the time we were amazed, but once you've seen an asteroid full of Sycorax or a platoon of Judoon on the Moon, they all begin to look a little bit "school play".

What that actually means is that we can see the underlying story much better now, without all the "oohs" and "ahhs". (Though with a few "gosh, CG has come on a lot since then"s.)

And what we see is, another Russell Davies trope, it's all about the women.

There's Jabe, of course, the forest princess, beautifully played by Yasmin Bannerman as smart but naïf, flirtatious but slightly coy, and a little bit in love with the Doctor. Basically, she's Rose. And their gentle flirting makes her eventual sacrifice for him all the more tragic.

Mind you, the Doctor's remark of "Jabe you're made of wood", really deserves a putdown reply of "Doctor, you're made of flesh", not least since the ignition point of wood is about 600 C, while a mere 250 C is enough to incinerate a human body. Though of course since Jabe is flexible enough to walk and talk we should probably assume she's a bit more complicated than your basic tree. We still have to put the Doctor's spontaneous non-combustion down to Time Lord powers™ though.

And on the flip side, there's Cassandra, an admixture Zoë Wanamaker’s delicious performance and the CG alchemy of the Mill. Cassandra gets all the best lines because in spite of being a monster (she's horribly racist even before she tries to murder everybody) she's also very witty.

She also verges on the sympathetic for brief moments, particularly when she looks down at Earth and sees where she used to live. But then she's into the xenophobic rant and Rose has a huge go at her for "nipping and tucking" away all of her humanity, that clearly hits home. (And that's obviously the moment when Cassandra decides to kill her – leading to the fabulous "sun-filter descending" peril. And the Doctor told Rose not to go starting any fights.) And so you forget that she – like the Doctor – is actually very, very lonely.

Cassandra, the Last Human, she is a "Last of…" as well and she has the madness too, expressed in her egregious desire for thinness.

She – quite literally – breaks all the rules. Platform One bans weapons, religion and teleportation. Clearly her spiders are weapons, and she brings her teleport device aboard too. But also, her catspaws are the Adherents of the Repeated Meme, and if adherence to a repeated meme isn't a definition of religion, I don't know what is.

(More prosaically, the Adherence of the Repeated Meme are, acronymically, Cassandra's A.R.M.s. Although, Alex points out that a repeated meme is me, me, me, me, me, me… and we’re back to Cassandra.)

Perhaps it's vanity or perhaps it's a stubborn unwillingness to accept that it's time to leave the stage, a refusal to lie down and die. It's obvious that she, in her frame, is a mirror for the Doctor himself. And maybe that's the source of his unforgiveness: everything has its time, he says, and everything dies – so why aren't I dead, is the subtext.

It's hard to think of another Doctor being quite so… brutal as the way the ninth allows Cassandra to die.

(OK, hindsight can be unkind too – just ask Nicola Bryant on seeing how part fourteen of "Trial…" retconned Peri's fate to worse than death – so we now know, of course that Cassandra didn't die but we don’t know that, and importantly neither, at the time, did the Doctor.)

So the episode that began with the Doctor showing off, being upbeat about the future or deceiving himself to his new chum, ends with him being honest (if suicidally depressed) with someone who is now his friend. And, again very Russell, chips.

Next time: What Phantasmagoria is this? No, Mr Gatiss, that was your Big Finish CD. This is the one with gas and ghosts and a gross misunderstanding from Lawrence Miles. What the Shakespeare? It's "The Unquiet Dead"

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Day 2972: Pilots of the Future?

Thursday:


Excellent news! The European Space Agency is to invest in this THRILLING new British Rocket Ship project!

Dare... to be different

That's eight shillings well spent, I'm sure you'll agree!


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Day 2970: Conservatory Local Plans mean MORE Centralisation

Tuesday:


More BLACK MAGIC from Ms Caroline Spell-person, Conservatory spokesperson for turning local councillors into eunuchs, with her plan to "give more power to local government" by, er, taking their powers away and giving them to mayors.

This promises to do the OPPOSITE of what it says on the tin.

The proposal to increase accountability will actually DILUTE it; the promise to return power to people will really move power IN to a new centre that is less representative and more remote; the plan to free local government from central government control will, in reality, SHACKLE local councils even further.

In short: a perfect example of how the Conservatories have adopted Hard Labour SPIN techniques (aka Newspeak).

First, accountability: where you might have three councillors representing one ward, a mayor represents the whole borough, town or even city – it's difficult to see how one mayor would have as much time for each constituent as a score of councillors. And the London Mayor has shown how totally unaccountable he can be, with Hard Labour's Mayor Ken and now Bojo the Clown cheerfully batting aside or laughing off any attempt to question them or their various cronies who have come under suspicion of corruption, racism or old-fashioned incompetence.

Second, representation: a mayor (no offence to Ms Dorothy) is LESS representative of the community not more, because there can only ever be ONE WINNER. There's no way of having a PROPORTION of Bojo the Clown be Liberal while the rest is Conservatory (Red or Blue flavour). We've seen from London that even the BEST Liberal voices are shut out of the mayoral contest, and we're the THIRD BIGGEST party in the country – supporters of (No)Respect, UKPnuts or the Natural Law Party have ZERO chance of having their voices heard at local government level.

Of course, what the Conservatories have seen is that there are big benefits – TO THEM – in a winner-takes-all election, particularly one with such a huge electorate that their money can buy a significant strategic advantage. It pretty much guarantees that they or their identical twins the Red Conservatories of Hard Labour will be in. It's a step backwards to the old cosy consensus of two-party politics that has does so much to leave Great Britain in an economic DARK AGE.

The completely selfish attitude of the Conservatories was exposed most nakedly by Ms Spell-person herself on the The Today Programme, when she was asked why the change of heart from Queen Maggie's policy in the '80's of centralising every local government power she could.

"You've got to understand, the landscape of Local Government has completely changed: back in the Eighties there were far too many Loony Left Councils; nowadays WE control two-thirds of them."

So, er, you give the powers to Councils so long as the "nice people" are back in charge… and presumably take them away again if anyone else gets in!

And of course, because all their power has been taken away, local council elections now reflect the national political scene more than local issues – so the Conservatories control of councils is less about whether or not they are value for money (they aren't) and more a reaction to the fact we have a Hard Labour Government nationally.

But third, what about the MONEY? Mr Balloon says he wants to give people a referendum on the Council Tax if the rise is more than 5%. He says this will make Councils more responsive to people. But that's just not true.

I mean, on a superficial level, it will put them in fear of MISERS, certainly, but what about people who want the Council to SPEND MORE on meals-on-wheels, or lollipop ladies, or places for kids to hang out that aren't street corners, or health visitors or just filling in potholes in the pavement? Will they get to call a referendum if the Council Tax is too low? Clearly not.

But the REAL stealth tax here is that the BIGGEST CAUSE of Council Tax increases is… Central Government giving the council a low rise in its grant. With 75% of Local Government money in the gift of Whitehall – not to mention all the things that local government has to pay for but has no control over, like nationally agreed teachers salaries – all it takes is for a minister to make a small cut and the council is over a barrel.

Suppose we actually had inflation of 2%, the Bank of England's Government-set target (and remember it's higher for wages than goods, and that even as the recession bites it's still only fallen to 3% this month). Cutting the increase in central government grant from a raise of 2% to 1% means the local council has to put up the Council Tax by a whopping 5% just to stand still, and instantly put them in the "referendum DANGER ZONE"!

And we already know that the Conservatories plan to use this stick to control local councils. Mr Oboe's so-called FREEZE on Council Tax, a policy that will rewards Councils that are "good" (i.e. do exactly what they are told by CENTRAL GOVERNMENT) and penalises anyone who dares to do differently.


Other aspects of the new Conservatory wheeze include:

• Encouraging NIMBY-ism by abolishing regional planning (while, presumably, still retaining central Government's SHINY new QUANGO with powers to bulldoze anything they fancy)
  
  
• Giving local authorities the power to levy a business rate discount (how do you LEVY a DISCOUNT???), another example of only giving Councils the power to take less in tax; why not just let them control the business rate full stop?
  
  
• Requiring Councils to publish details of "perks and expenses" online – so this week Mr Balloon is in favour of openness about how the public money is spent… oh the IRONY of Westminster telling local government it should reveal it's expenses!
  

Giving Councils control of a FAIR local income tax, with the ability to adjust the rates themselves as they choose; returning control of business rates to local council control; allowing councils to share in the benefits of granting planning applications and rezoning decisions; putting the money back in the hands of real people, not some TV personality that you've parachuted in with his team of faceless, unaccountable "advisors" who really run the show… THESE are the ways that you return power to local government. Putting local schools and local health care back in the hands of local people, THESE are the ways that you restore communities and empower people.

Obviously these are LIBERAL DEMOCRAT ideas.




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Day 2966: X-Rated Phone Calls – Should the Mayor of London be treated more leniently than Jonathan Woss?

Friday:


A popular personality from BBC television programmes phones up a member of the establishment and delivers a tirade of abuse…

Obviously, Bojo the Clown going CHRISTIAN BALE on ultra-slimy Hard Labour stooge Mr Keith Vayse-Vase-or-Vose will do nothing but INCREASE the mayor's maddeningly unearned popularity… to the extent that when asked "who leaked the transcript of their private phone call" the "quo bono" question (that's LATIN for who gets the DOG FOOD!) means that the fluffy foot of suspicion should not JUST point to the Vase office.

But the REAL question is about the DOUBLE STANDARDS of the Meeja.

Will the Daily Hate Mail be mounting a campaign to have thousands of readers (who never HEARD the conversation) write in to City Hall and demand Bojo's head on a plate?

Will cat-monster-fancying former Conservatory Minister for Dungeons (and one time Bake-o-lite Girl) Ms Ann Widdy-one be appearing on Questionable Time to insist that sacking is tooo good for him?

Will mad Fart-for-the-Day contributor and celebrity vicar's wife, Ms Anne Hatpins be using her bully pulpit to call – more in sorrow than anger, of course –for the mayor to be incinerated in an enormous wicker Russell Brand?

Will they BOJO!


And anyway, since Bojo's complaint was: "I didn't bring my diary; you know I'm no good with details; and now you've told everyone that I had to keep changing my story to get the facts straight it's making it look like I was covering up that I tipped off Mr Balloon."

To which the obvious answer is: if you know you're no good with facts then wasn't it a bit STUPID to turn up without your diary?

Or, more succinctly:

Bojo: "you [expletive deleted] made [expletive deleted] me [expletive deleted] look [expletive deleted] like [expletive deleted] an [expletive deleted] idiot!"

Vose: "you don't need any help from me!"


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Day 2965: Lincoln Memorial - a late Frost/Nixon

Thursday:


You've probably already missed this, as my Daddies and I caught the last screening at our local flicks, but if you get the chance, see FROST/NIXON.

Why's it not called NIXON/FROST?

Maybe it's time, maybe it's his being dead, maybe it's the utter utter bad-word-ness of the Monkey-in-Chief, but at the end of the film, the power of this drama is that it allows you to feel sympathy for this man who broke the idea of America.

We can at least say this: he did wrong, but he did admit it.

(And yes, that's the irony-meter is pinging at the man who played Frost being the man who played Lord Blairimort the unrepentant.)

PS:

Happy Darwin Day!

Day 2963: When Sorry is the EASIEST word to say

Tuesday:


Oh, so the four senior bankers are "sorry" are they?

Not sorry for their business practices having got us into this mess, of course. Not sorry for their greed or megalomania. And certainly not sorry for all the innocent people who will lose their homes or their livelihoods because of the financial CHAOS that they have caused.

No, they're sorry that the "situation arose". Sorry for their shareholders. Sorry for themselves. Sorry that the value of all those shares that they should never have been given has fallen flat.

But not sorry enough to do anything about it, apparently.

Well "sorry" doesn't mean A SINGLE FLUFFY THING unless you put right the think you horlicksed up in the first place.

People say that there is a lot of BLAME to SPREAD around: why didn't the regulator stop them? Why didn't Mr Frown enforce the regulator? Why did Parliament make Mr Frown act? Why didn't all of us elect a better Parliament?

Well, BLAME doesn't work like that. It doesn't get LESS because someone else is also involved; it doesn't get THINNER the further you SPREAD it.

These people were SPECIFICALLY and PERSONALLY to blame for the harm this crash has done, and they personally benefited from doing that harm.

The punishment seems perfectly simple. They should be stripped of their assets. All of them. Let them live in Council Housing. And if there isn't Council Housing… well, these people were, apparently, community leaders. Let them see where they've LED!

As for their banks: we own the RBS now. We own the Northern Rock. We have a large chunk of the Lloyds/HBoS super-bank. They should all be broken up. Torn up. Take their assets, the physical buildings of their banks and their cash (formerly OUR cash) and split them into six hundred local banks, and then sell them to local councils or consortiums of local businessmen and unions. Have a local lottery and give away the shares to the winners. Apportion them by lot. Give them away to schoolchildren with a pint of milk; fluffy goodness knows schoolkids couldn't make a WORSE hash of running a bank.

Nobody above branch manager level would be needed anymore so they could all be SACKED. Save the billions in bonus payments and use that money instead to form a "rescue fund" to try and save as many people from losing their homes as possible.


You think I'm a bit CROSS? Of course I'm CROSS – there are times when THERE JUST AREN'T ENOUGH CAPITAL LETTERS!!!

WUNCH of BANKERS!

These smug bas...bad-words have destroyed lives with reckless abandon for their own enrichment and aggrandizement (of the WORST "my bank's bigger than your bank, I bought ABM Amrose" kind). With names like "Fred the Shred" they've even been PROUD of it! And the HARSHEST punishment they can get is A MILD WIGGING from a panel of MPs.

And I'm FED UP of the Liberal Democrats being "just another political party". Shouldn't we be tearing up the system? SHOULDN'T we be ENRAGED!

Let's see something REALLY RADICAL for once. Let's see some Liberalism RED in Tooth and Claw... and TUSK and FLUFFY FOOT!

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