Day 3501: DOCTOR WHO: Amy's Choice

Monday:


Well, with this now available on shiny silver disc and shiny blu disc, it's way past time Daddy Richard got the last of his reviews of this year's Doctor Woo done.

It's DEFINITELY the best episode for ELEPHANTS.

Dr Woo says Amy's got all ELEPHANT-y; then he mentions an ELEPHANT in the room (it's Mr Rory's pony elephant tail) and there's even a BOUNCY ELEPHANT in the playground. Tops for elephants!

I have to warn you, though, there's a HUGE twist, which Daddy is going to blow in about three paragraphs, so if you're at all SPOILERPHOBIC: look away now!

This has to be a candidate (up against "Vincent and the Doctor") for best story of the season, cleverly interweaving a two-for-the-price-of-one pair of adventures, one inside and one outside the TARDIS, one in the Doctor's world and one in Rory's. It's a thinking story, and as such it may not quite win the kids over immediately in the way that colourful Daleks can, but, as with stories like "Kinda", "Warrior's Gate" or most obviously "The Mind Robber", it may be one to come back to again later.

And of course, it's how to do "Fear Her" and do it right.

Toby Jones as our host the Dream Lord brings a delicious mix of bitterness, melancholy and whimsy to what is, let's say it, a dream of a part. Two parts god to two parts Mephistopheles to one part evil House Elf, he's the best of many, many brilliant things here.

Watched the first time, he's both a diabolical adversary with a witty line in repartee and an intriguing puzzle to figure out: the Doctor knows who he is, so who is he? The Master of the Land of Fiction? The Celestial Toymaker? One of the Guardians? Penry, the Mild-Mannered Janitor…? Something even more fanwanky? Actually, no.

Watched a second time, knowing that he's the Doctor, obviously he's the Doctor, of course he's the Doctor, then he's a devastating critique of our hero's insecurities and self-doubts.

His first appearance is in a dishevelled version of the Doctor's own get up, mocking the Time Lord for his quirks, mocking him for his bow tie as he stands there in a bow tie. It transforms the Doctor's repeated catchphrase that "bow ties are cool" from self-confident assertion of style to repeated self-justification in the face of worrying he looks like a tit.

Then look out for the way that the Dream Lord reveals some of the Doctor's other traits too. He appears as "lord of the manor", a sure sign of the Doctor's Time Lordly arrogance, and as a "butcher", hardly insignificant. And as for the brief glimpse he affords to Amy of himself in his louche dressing gown… well, let's just say that the Doctor's thoughts about her might not be quite so pure and innocent as we might otherwise suggest.

Alex points out how in Rory's dream world, Rory gets to be a proper doctor and the Doctor is relegated to his junior. Except then the Dream Lord enters and promotes himself to consultant, as something nasty in the Doctor's subconscious pulls rank on Rory once again.

He also gives himself away twice. Once in each dream. The Doctor only spots the second time.

In Upper Ledworth, in the butcher's shop the Doctor bolts the door to stop the possessed old-folks getting in. The Dream Lord cheerily unbolts it. He clearly, unambiguously affects the physical world, thus proving it to be a dream. Sadly the Doctor's too busy trying to stay awake to notice.

In the TARDIS, he physically affects the console, releasing them from the grip of the "cold star". Only this time the Doctor does realise the discrepancy and hence blows up the ship, ending the second dream too.

He's almost a metaphor for Brecht's "estrangement technique", constantly drawing attention to the unreality of the situation to try to teach the Doctor to think, to realise that "reality" is as much a "constructed object" and is a changeable as these dream world. Essentially, he's the living embodiment of "history can be rewritten". Mind you, if it is Brecht, it's Brecht staged for the TARDIS crew, with us watching them watching the Dream Lord. The fourth wall is alluded to but never actually broken. It's a play within a play that can have its postmodernism and eat it.

Is there any way that we can say that the Dream Lord isn't the Valeyard?

I mean obviously, putting them into a lethal dreamworld powered by their own darkest thoughts, he's clearly the "despair squid" from "Red Dwarf's" "Back to Reality". The Doctor even quotes the title of that episode the first time they "wake up" in the TARDIS. As Timothy Spall might say: "it's a clue, that; it's a blatant clue".

But as a distillation of every dark thought that the Doctor ever had, he's definitely got the Valeyard's job description.

Notice how the Dream Lord takes the Doctor's characteristics and twists them while remaining essentially true to his nature: the "student chic" becomes decidedly un-chic chic; the cleverness becomes the condescension of a know-it-all; charisma becomes weaseliness and improvisation becomes manipulation; the Doctor's wit, humour, desire to explain become sniping that is positively snide…

"Ask me what happens if you die in reality… you die, idiot, that's why it's called reality."

…And then remember that the Valeyard, tall, gaunt, pale, dressed in unrelieved black and yet still a one for the grandiloquent turn of phrase – "sagacity" – stands as an imperfect mirror to the flamboyant, bombastic, larger- not to mention louder-than-life and altogether alliterative sixth Doctor.

Alex suggests that unlike the Valeyard, the Dream Lord doesn't have "agency", essentially he's just a symptom of the magic fairy dust, not a being in his own right.

Yet he seems perfectly sentient. He's capable of being surprised by the Doctor, which suggests a degree of independence. If his objective is to keep the Doctor and companions trapped in their dreams, does that not leave him taking over the Doctor for the remainder of his lives? And, without getting too much into "The Trial of a Time Lord", the existence of the Valeyard as a separate entity required "special conditions" too, not least access to the "dreamscape" of the Time Lords' Matrix. In the sand dunes, where the Valayard makes his big speech (oh you know the one; it's the "Catharsis of Spurious Morality"), he flits from point to point, his presence discontinuous but his speech carries on without missing a beat. Just as the Dream Lord does around the console room. The Trial, with its visions of past, present and future, is modelled on "A Christmas Carol" where the visitations of the Spirits pass in a single night, again suggestive of dreams.

And, while I do realise that it's a visual metaphor, the brief moment at the end of the Dream Lord reflected in the console presents the possibility that he persists, at least if no more than in the Doctor's mind.

The disturbing possibility occurs that the Doctor may, in fact, have engineered the entire scenario, set this all up in order to "sort Amy out". The appearance of the Dream Lord's face there not as a reminder that he must still exist, suppressed, within the Doctor's psyche, but as a glimpse of guilt for having done it all deliberately. Then the much-derided magic space pollen may have been as much his excuse for all that just happened as it is the writer's.

It's not beyond the eleventh Doctor to be that manipulative, as we have seen at the end of "The Eleventh Hour" and will see again at the end of "The Big Bang".

Because really this story is really about the Doctor's choice, how his subconscious (or conscious?) is given an opportunity to make Amy pick Rory or rather to make her realise that she has already picked Rory.

So the title is a bit of a cheat. To suggest Amy has an actual choice – between the Doctor and Rory – was only ever going to be true if they both loved her back. In which case, Jennie would be perfectly correct when she says: "well why can't Amy choose both?"

But the Doctor doesn't love Amy. The Doctor loves Rose.

He loved Rose for the best part of two lifetimes and we've no particular reason to think he's stopped. It's almost been a bit shocking – if you take away the all-change attitude in the producer's chair – that he hasn't mentioned her, hasn't even alluded to her all this season. And it's not like she wasn't the last person her saw before crashing his TARDIS into Amy's garden shed, so she's hardly out of his mind, unless the regeneration "healed" those particular synapses too…

He sees Amy as a "companion". It's rather lovely at the end to see that he picks companions who are bright and shining people to compensate for the sense of darkness in his own soul. That's such a good and obvious explanation, so much better than ones we've had before: it's not just about him enjoying the Universe by sharing their wonder at the newness, it's not just about him needing someone to stop him, it's about him wanting to be around people who will make him a better person. It may also help to explain, if not excuse, his behaviour towards Martha.

But it does mean that for him there's a jarring mismatch between the way he sees his friends-who-share-the-TARDIS and the sort of people he might flirt with (see Todd in "Kinda" or Jabe in "The End of the World" if you think he's above flirting!). This may in fact be the biggest character flaw revealed in an episode that is all about the Doctor's character flaws.

Or to put it another way: how can you expect anything other than a great big "fail" from the Doctor in an episode where his idea of sorting out relationship issues is to come up with a warped version of himself to inflict hell on all concerned? Isn't the whole point of this story that the Doctor is so screwed up he can't even talk to his best friends without rendering them all unconscious first?

And of course, it's worth remembering that the TARDIS crew are saved by rejecting both choices, rejecting the false idea of choice altogether.


The episode manages to contrive the impression of a "bottle show", one all made on standing sets and with few more than the regular cast, which is of course only half true: specifically the half set aboard the TARDIS. Well, all right, it's all really set in the TARDIS, but I mean the half in the TARDIS-dream. And yet, there's actually quite a lot of location footage and quite a lot of stunt work and quite a large cast of extras in the Ledworth scenes: not just a regular army of old people possessed by the Eknodine – a superbly spooky effect, by the way, the eye, another eye like the Atraxi and after the significance of eyes in the Angels' story, emerging from the mouth making them seem much more "hollowed out" than any Slitheen skinsuit – but also quite a lot of people who the Doctor rescues in the minibus before dropping them off to take shelter in the church, and a good few children, last seen playing in the castle grounds.

It may be off-screen, but how many Doctor Who stories get away with slaughtering a dozen children? Oh yes they do – just count the piles of ashes. And they say Torchwood's "Children of Earth" is grim.

The "Day of the (nearly) Dead" sequences, as zombie OAPs attack with various unlikely garden tools, are both disturbing and hilarious. Rory shows his special charm as he can't quite bring himself to club an old lady until Amy orders him to do it. (Add to that his sweet apologies when he repeatedly bumps her sleeping body up the stairs. And then he goes and drops her head!)

It was a shame that we didn't see Annette Crosby or Arthur "Cully" Cox from "The Eleventh Hour" again, which would have added a touch of verisimilitude to the dream-Ledworth's continuity – but Alex was particularly pleased to see once-upon-a-time Aggedor Nick Hobbs as elderly Mr Nainby. "Aggedor's the one who growls when he's thrown off the dormobile!" he says delightedly.

It's possible that the name of the home where the unnaturally-long-lived oldies reside, "Sarn", is another clue, being as it's also the name of the planet in "Planet of Fire" where you can find a longevity-inducing volcanic gas.

The twittering of birds as the Dream Lord shunts them from one version to the other seems to be a misdirect to make the Ledworth world seem the more real one – after all, they hear the birdsong in the TARDIS too. But then, almost magically, the rain in Ledworth turns to snow, as though the cold from the "cold star" is bleeding through from the TARDIS-dream to the Ledworth reality too.

Of course, it's not a "cold star at all; it's an accidental bit of precience, as it's the CGI sun from "The Big Bang" with the yellow taken out.

This blending of dreams and reality is, of course, where the episode perfectly captures the essence of "fairy story" where Stephen Moffat has said he sees the series as being. The inherent warning to "be careful what you wish for", the way that things which seem too good to be true really are, the way the "bad fairy" is vanquished by trusting to what you believe, slaughtering the cute kiddies: these are all very Grimm tropes.

And yet, ironically, this is also the story that has the harshest words to say about believing life is like a fairy tale.

"What's the good of you, then?" Amy protests when the Doctor admits that he doesn't save everybody every time.

It's the cry of the little Amy who still keeps all of her childhood dolls and drawing of the raggedy Doctor, who still plays dressing up games, who could never bring herself to grow up, because growing up means leaving the fairy tale world and facing the harsh world of no happily ever afters.

In a sense she accepts marrying the man she loves, but still rejects the fairy tale ending of the wedding dress. In a way, that leaves Amy's Choice unresolved, and quite right too. In traditional drama, the midpoint – as this is – of the "dramatic W" should see events build to an anti-climax, which leaves tension unresolved until the true climax at the end. And Amy's Choice will remain unresolved until the end of the season, which this episode strongly foreshadows.

Final thought: In one dream, Rory dies. In another dream, the TARDIS explodes. And then they all wake up. I'm just saying.


Next time… You can thank your lucky (cold) stars that I've already done Master Chibnall's festival of all things Pertwee, and we can move straight along to a review of the whole season.

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Day 3495: Nine Good Things About Saying YES to AV

Tuesday:

1. It recognises that our VOTING SYSTEM is BROKEN

2. It gives MORE POWER to voters

3. It lets more people feel that they have an MP they voted for

4. It lets people choose HONESTLY with no tactical voting

5. It gives voters a choice between PEOPLE not PARTIES

6. It makes politicians talk to people who aren't in their "base"

7. It makes politicians talk to each other, encouraging grown-up politics

8. As far as what the voter has to DO goes, it's exactly the same as voting with STV

9. It's on offer and STV isn't


The time for grumpy acceptance is over. Let's stop looking for the ways that the glass is half empty and start looking at how it is half full.

The AV referendum ISN'T about getting proportionality; it's NOT about Fair Votes. So let's stop COMPLAINING that it isn't what it isn't.

But what it IS is about giving more POWER to voters, and showing more TRUST in voters.

Honestly, the First Pass the Port crowd are going to be campaigning on a platform of "we don’t trust you to count up to five". Do you REALLY think that that's an unbeatable message?

Liberal Democrats DO trust people; that's why we're going to ASK them what they want (and that's why Hard Labour's so-called offer of instant AV with NO referendum was really toe-curlingly EMBARRASSING!)

Anything that moves away from tactical voting is GREAT. At the very least we can see who the voters REALLY want to vote for by looking at their first preferences and that might give a real boost to the Parties that currently have no representation at all. And that's got to be a boost for democracy. People can vote for real policies that they want. People do NOT have to vote for EVIL parties as a "protest" vote.

Anything that moves away from LISTS imposed by parties is GREAT. AV is about choosing YOUR OWN list of people and the order that they stand in, not one imposed by anybody else. And that's why the second preferences and third preferences… and LAST preferences… also tell us the sorts of people that people want in Parliament. And remember, First Pass the Port is a closed Party list system with a list of ONE. (That ISN'T true for AV – you probably won't, but you CAN have more than one person standing from one Party… or you could, entirely hypothetically, have two people standing for "the Coalition"… and people can choose between them for themselves.)

And anything that moves away from the status quo is more than GREAT it is FANTASTIC. We KNOW that people want CHANGE; they VOTED for CHANGE at the general election, and – no matter how queasy the public might be feeling about the Coalition… no matter how queasy some of US might be feeling about the Coalition – change is what they got: a different kind of government that NO ONE quite understands yet.

It's EASY to be FRIGHTENED of change. It's EASY to listen to all those voices saying how all sorts of scary and nasty things are BOUND to happen because of what the Coalition is doing. It's EASY to LOOSE FAITH in people.

Because change is HARD. Freedom is HARD. Being a Liberal is HARD.

The EASY thing to do is to promise to wrap everyone up in cotton wool and tell them fibs about how everything is all going to be all right; the really difficult thing is to tell them that THEY have to make the choices and then to TRUST them to make the choices and to FOLLOW the choices that they make.

And yes, that means following their choices when people give the Conservatories SIX TIMES more seats than us, or rather when they give the Conservatories ONE-AND-A-HALF times as many VOTES as us. More people voted for Conservatory policies so, grit your teeth people, Conservatory policies ARE going to happen.

Sometimes you just have to hold hands with the CAT-MONSTER and hope that it doesn't BITE OFF anyone's head!

If you don't want that to happen AGAIN… tough. The only way to prevent Conservatory policies EVER happening is to institute a socialist dictatorship, and we KNOW how successful THOSE are. If you believe in co-operative politics, then SOMETIMES the Conservatories are going to have to get a go.

But if you want to make sure that they have to BEHAVE, that they have to PLAY NICELY and JOIN IN with everybody else… well THEN you have to support a change in the voting system.

It WON'T stop things being horrid – but that's because the economy is bad-worded beyond repair – but it will start to heal our democracy.

So enough with the blubbing over STV.

Let's go out and WIN this!

PS:

I wrote this BEFORE seeing that Mr Fred Carveup had posted quite the opposite view on the Liberal Democrat Voice. Great Minds, it seems, think completely unalike.

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Day 3493: Sherlock aka Elephentry, Dear Watson

Sunday:


"Sherlock" is a new series from the BBC based on the famous novels of Mr Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: "The Adventures of Professor Doctor Who, er, Challenger, er, What?"

It's a really classy looking production, sharply directed and edited, beautiful and clever to watch, and with an excellent cast: Mr Benedict Cucumberpatch emptying the cabinet of quirks as the original maverick detective and Tim from the Office stoically baffled as Dr definitely-not-his-boyfriend Watson.

But the trouble with writing for a genius is that you don't get any excuses.

So it's inexcusable when Mr Sherlock is slower than the audience.

He really SHOULDN'T fail to deduce that the killer is a cabbie at the point where he's extemporising about "being invisible in a crowd" and "hunting in the city streets". After all, his Eighteen-eighty incarnation worked it out! And so did Daddy. Mind you, it was probably the director's fault that the moment was intercut with enough TAXICABS to make it so BLINDINGLY OBVIOUS!

Nor should Mr Sherlock be so STUPID as to start deducing OUT LOUD who's just shot the killer dead, and then have to say "oh just ignore me"; not after all the trouble you've gone to to establish his internal monologue by clever means of on-screen text: surely, Mr Sherlock should SILENTLY deduce that it must be Watters and THEN say to Lestrade "I have absolutely no idea"!

And, of course, you really SHOULDN'T have the "master of observation" repeatedly overlook the obvious when Mrs Hudson is trying to tell him about the taxi that is waiting for him, and the killer is standing RIGHT THERE. Yes, yes, it's very funny, just like all those times Dr Woo ignores K-9 when he has a vital warning or clue, but Mr Sherlock is NOT Dr Woo… oh.

You could really tell that this was a realisation by the Mister Moffster, the man who is currently behind Dr Woo. A lot of the great detectives mannerisms were VERY Dr Woo, although actually rather more Mr Dr David than Mr Dr Matt – particularly the "wooo, she was sooo brilliant" bit, but also a lot of the "I don't mean to be rude but I'm more intelligent than your entire species put together" was doing the "rude and still not ginger" Doctor. Mr Sherlock describes his rudeness as being a sociopath not a psychopath – though in fact the words have the same meaning, and "sociopath" is just what you call a "psychopath" when you don't want to annoy them – but really, his obsessive observation, high-functioning intellect, and lack of social awareness rather place him somewhere on the autistic spectrum but I guess that doesn't sound sexy enough for television.

The brilliantly clever direction is, I had to admit, clearly school of "Hollyoaks". No, I'm talking about the use of onscreen text for text-messaging and visualising train of thought, not the "oh she's a sister"/"oh you're his brother" school of… hang on, they did those too.

Thankfully we guessed that Mr Mark Gatiss was laying it on so thick was because he was going to turn out to be brother Mycroft and not Mr Professor Moriarty. Because casting yourself as brother Mycroft would self-indulgent enough, Mr Executive Producer, but the thought – that you were CLEARLY trying to double-bluff us into thinking – that you could be Mr Professor Moriarty sends shudders up the spine. And not in the GOOD way!

As it happens, we'd just found ourselves wondering how Mr Martin Freeman could actually DO acting, when he is blessed or cursed with such a totally "everyman" face, only then we saw him in a scene with Mr Mark Gatiss and thought: oh yes, he IS doing proper acting, and doing it brilliantly; you can see it compared to "that thing that Mr Mark Gatiss does".

Tell me this: how is it possible for Mr Mark Gatiss to do "that thing that Mr Mark Gatiss does" when he's just STANDING THERE? I don't know, but he did it and booted all sense of naturalism right out of the window for a good few minutes.

It isn't as though he can't DO acting: there are LOTS of other characters from "The League of Gentlemen" that he can do, to start with, and they managed to wring a decent performance out of him in "Poirot", but most of the time he just wants to do "comedy sinister toff". Well I say "sinister"; he's about as threatening as air. And I say "comedy"; it's just not funny…

But that visual "trick" of placing "post-it notes" of Mr Sherlock's thought processes over the "real" picture is reminiscent of the "the Doctor working it out" sequence from Dr Woo's "The Eleventh Hour" (where a rapid sequence of stills tracks the Doctor's mind's eye as he goes back over what he's seen). Although it's also reminiscent of Mr Guy Ritchie's technique of having HIS Mr Holmes play out a fight-scene in his head to work it all out before implementing it in a flash.


A lot of this episode, "A Study in Pink", comes direct from the original "Holmes meets Watson" story: "A Study in Scarlet", including the horrible history repeating itself of Mr Watson being returned from the war in Afghanistan; occasionally inverting it as with the "Rache/Rachel" clue – in the Conan Doyle version: Lestrade wants to look for a Rachel, but Holmes identifies the word as German for revenge; this time around Holmes identifies and rejects the German possibility and reverts to the incomplete name.

The Mister Moffster is QUITE RIGHT to bring Mr Sherlock right up to date. The Holmes adventures were never written as a period piece, but were always "cutting edge". The character is genuinely timeless, as Mr Basil Rathbone demonstrated by bringing him forwards to fight Nazis in the Nineteen Forties. Indeed most Holmes adaptations up to that point WERE contemporary rather than historical; it's only later that the whole Victorian setting became a part of the fixtures.

And most of the updating works. Daddy laughed out loud at the self-aware silliness of "the three patch problem". But not all.

When it comes to the KILLER, Mr Jeffthecabbie, the fatal aneurism and the belief that Mr God loves him and his helping him beat the odds both come from the original Conan Doyle; but by getting rid of the "Study in Scarlet" backstory – and, to be fair, all that stuff about MORMONS that is probably racist or something – it turns the character into that most TAWDRY of modern TV TROPES: the motiveless serial killer. Who then sort of has a motive that he's taking revenge (even though "rache" was a red herring) for being dying by "outliving" the people he kills. And sort of has another motive that he's being paid to bump off people at random to give his sponsor a cheap thrill (or was there some connection between them after all, that Moriarty wanted them all dead?).

Anyway, Mr Jeffthecabbie's modus operandi is to point a (fake) gun at his taxi passengers and make them chose one of two pills, one of which is poison.

It's been widely suggested, by everyone from Daddy Alex onwards, that BOTH pills are poison and Mr Jeffthecabbie has taken an antidote or built up an immunity over many years, what you might call the "Princess Bride" solution.

Others have taken the analysis of language used by Mr Jeffthecabbie – make the RIGHT choice, get the RIGHT pill and you live, did you get it RIGHT – to infer that our cheeky killer is trying to Derren Brown his victims into picking the poison pill. (It's almost impossible to see how this could have been done WELL – it certainly wasn't done by the banal conversation between killer and detective that we saw. Perhaps a direct to camera monologue by Mr Jeffthecabbie, perhaps scripted by the REAL Derren Brown, making the viewer take the Mr Sherlock role, and leave you with a lingering shot of the two pills and deciding for yourself which you would chose…)

Or possibly he was genuinely just NUTS. And LUCKY.

Irritatingly, the play doesn't bother to give us an answer.

And it would have been so easy: it would have been nice to have Mr Sherlock SAY that "obviously" both pills were poisoned.

Or, uncomfortable as it might be to see Mr Sherlock using TORTURE – crude infliction of pain; it OUGHT to be beneath him – you could definitely see him ruthlessly saying: "well, you're dying anyway and I've got to know if I'm right…" and forcing the pill into Mr Jeffthecabbie's shocked mouth. Which would be a "modern updating" of the "he tries the pills on a dog" of the original.

When he gets up and walks away from the poison pill game it's BRILLIANT. But then Mr Jeffthecabbie tries to talk him into taking the pill anyway: "because he's got to know if he was right", which is a dreadful misreading of the character of Mr Sherlock.

I mean, if he genuinely WAS a sociopath (which he isn't!) then "playing the game" is exactly what he WOULDN'T do, anyway.

But at this point Mr Sherlock is ABSOLUTELY NOT going to risk his life on a game of "who's got the biggest swinging BRAIN" by taking the poison pill for one very good reason: Mr Jeffthecabbie has just giving him a MUCH MORE INTERESTING PUZZLE.

Now it COULD be a mistake on the part of the crazy killer.

Seriously, if Mr Sherlock's only reason for playing the game is that he's BORED, then saying to him "there's a name but I'm not going to tell you" is EXACTLY the wrong thing to say! Woo, look, great big mystery. But still, life's so dull isn't it. I mean REALLY???

But then Mr Sherlock goes and gets TEMPTED so it's clearly a mistake on the part of the WRITER.

So let's address the writing.

One hugely significant thing missing from the show – one that might, ironically, have helped the writer avoid his usual habit of making the male lead a gawky self-parody and the female lead into a Sue Virtue analogue – is the almost complete lack of WOMEN. Or "women who aren't dead" anyway. Yes, there's a token lady police officer, who is mean to "our hero" when he outs her liaison (wrong in SO many ways) with the police pathologist. But she's not really an IMPORTANT character, is she. And brother Mycroft's airhead assistant barely counts as a character at all. And all the other women are DEAD.

Yes, of course, the ORIGINAL Holmes adventures tend to be a little, you might say, "female-lite"; but THEY were written a hundred and twenty years ago by someone who had never seen Sarah Jane Smith. What is Mr Moffat's excuse?

But there is, if possible, an even BIGGER absence. By throwing away the backstory, that tedious second half of the novel, you are also throwing away Mr Sherlock's METHOD.

Detection by logical deduction depends on pattern-spotting. Holmes EXCELS at this because he has trained himself to the peak of observation (except where Mrs Hudson is concerned, clearly) and is a genius at making connections.

It's a "unique selling point" that hasn't really been matched since: Poirot uses his "psychology"; Colombo a sort of dogged determination; Morse seems to wait until all the other suspects have been killed off and whoever's left is the killer; Wallander may or may not solve the crime, I'm just too depressed to find out… but Holmes's one-man CSI trick of spotting the tiny but significant details and extrapolating meaning from them is unbeatable because it's basically REAL police work but with a superpower that lets him do all the hard dogsbodying of real police work in an instant.

In "A Study in Scarlet" he solves the case by working out what the connection IS between the two dead men and the killer; that's the whole point of the second half of the book. By getting rid of that connection you lose the heart of the story. It's not just BORING that Mr Jeffthecabbie is a serial killer; it misses the whole POINT.

Which is why the ending suddenly becomes rather contrived, relying as it does on the so-called genius serial killer NOT turning off the mobile phone that he knows can (and indeed DOES) lead his pursuers right to him but instead deciding that the most larks would be to abduct the person who's close to catching him from under the noses of the police. Like you do.


Don't get me wrong. "Sherlock" is a work of GENIUS. But that genius was Mr Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Holmes and Watson are brilliant characters in their own right, and they are brilliantly realised by two hugely talented and charismatic actors. Holmes method of deduction is a brilliant hook to hang the detective stories on, and the story is vividly brought to life by clearly extraordinary and inventive creative people.

And so much of the writing, the characterisation, the nods to the source material, is spot on. There is a sense of humour and friendship and even reality to the proceedings that leavens some much-needed light through the darkness of a very dark story, in a way that, for example, the recent troubled "Luther" did not. (Yes, I said some nice thinks about "Luther" and the very next week they LITERALLY had a woman in a fridge. Sigh. Sorry.)

It's clearly a huge hit with the viewers and the critics and Twitter seemed alive with positive responses last night. And we'll definitely be watching again.

We'd just rather there were fewer of the, er, elementary mistakes.

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Day 3490: Popping the Question

Thursday:


"Do you want the United Kingdom to adopt the 'alternative vote' system instead of the current 'first past the post' system for electing Members of Parliament to the House of Commons?"

Yes!

By which I mean: No! Not really. I want STV (Single Trunk Voting) not AV (Awful Voting). But that's not on the cards and this is a change at least vaguely in the right direction and better than a poke in the button eye, the like of which cannot be said of First Pass the Port, so grudgingly and grumblingly, oh all right then.

Next!

Day 3487: A Blog for Florence and Precious Mhango

Monday:


Tonight (5.30-7pm) there is to be a VIGIL in Glasgow by people who want the British Government to behave like this is a CIVILISED country and allow a family from Malawi to stay here rather than deporting them to face separation and misery. Auntie Caron is among those attending and I will be there IN FLUFFY SPIRIT!

Glasgow is happy to welcome to Ms Florence and Ms Precious and we all should be too.

There are LOTS of good reasons for letting them stay, but I only need ONE: Great Britain is BETTER because people want to come here.

People want to come here because we have VALUES, values of generosity and hospitality to those who are in need, values of welcome to those who want to contribute to our society.

Let's not make this a mean and nasty place.

Please lend your support as well.

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Day 3481: Hard Labour Gets an "F"

Tuesday:


So Harriet the Harminator suggested that Hard Labour's Election Campaign be brought to you by the letter "F"*.

Oh, how quickly Hard Labour went from DOWNING STREET to SESAME STREET.

Let's look at all the MUPPETS: there's Oscar the Grouch in Number 10; his predecessor as self-styled superstar Miss Piggy; the Millipede podlings are so Bert and Ernie; Lord Prescott of Flummery just IS Cookie Monster; and Mr Mandelbrot is the Count Von Count. At least I THINK they said "count"!

And… HOLY CREPE SUZETTE is that Lord Mandelbrot appearing as the Prince of Darkness in his own fairy tales???

Once Upon a Time…



[Rubs button eyes!]

The King Who Couldn't Smile…



If REALITY has a FOURTH WALL I think it's just been BROKEN!


Yes, this is the news – if you can call it "news" when we've already read all of this in Mr Andrew Yawnsly's "The End of the Party" – from the former First Lord of Everything Else that all was not cute and fluffy in the Hard Labour bunker.

Other "revelations" include that Captain Clegg told Mr Frown he had to go, and that Lord Blairimort thought Mr Frown was "mad, bad, dangerous and beyond redemption".

Lord Blairimort himself – busy between bouts of getting paid millions of pounds writing his own book, "The Journey" (no doubt destined for the "romantic fiction" shelves) – is said to have been FURIOUS at being GAZUMPED by his former spin doctor and is alleged to have tried to pull strings to get Mr Mandelbrot's book dropped, thus totally disproving any stories about him STEWING in IMPOTENT FURY and then DOING NOTHING.

None of which has prevented the Former First Fractal from getting his retaliation in first in "The Times". We can't link to his serialisation because it's behind the firewall; that's not Murdoch – it's the flaming River Phlegethon that wards entry to the Seventh Circle of HELL!

Lord Blairimort's OTHER hired killer media spokesperson, Mr Alistair Henchman, has been QUICK to open his OWN diaries claiming that these REFUTE the word of the Dark Lord. These of course would be the same diaries where the entry for 24 September 2002 reads:

"absolutely did not sex up any dossiers today"

So, a totally credible historical document there, I think we all agree.

And I am SURE that Lord Mandelbrot will have appreciated the suggestion that he should have cleared his diaries past Mr Henchman before publication in the spirit in which it was offered.

Of course, the MAIN fallout from these radioactive reminiscences has been the response from all the candidates to inherit the Crown of Frown (slightly dented; it may have been thrown across the room). Finally, the infamous five have something to unite them. As well they might. After all, as Mr Yawnsly himself points out, they're all implicated up to their eyebrows.

Well, except from Ms Diane Abbott-and-Portillo. Though as Hopi Sen – the "Iain Dale you've never heard of" of the Labour movement – puts it:

"She was not up to her neck in the battles of the Blair-Brown era […] She was up to her neck in the battles of the Kinnock era instead."

That's "hypocritical", "fratricidal" and "past it", all in one put down; finally someone on the left with a grasp of "economy".


I really AM going to have to stop shooting these fish in a barrel and talk about some of the RUBBISH things that my own side are doing – stares hard at the Home Office, and the gap where funds for the Green Investment Bank are supposed to be, and the VAT rate – but you just CAN'T pass up material like this!

PS:

*Insert your own jokes here. Mr Alistair Dalek certainly did.

.

Day 3478: DOCTOR WHO: A Fishy Tale

Saturday:


For anyone NOT watching the World Final of Footballing (if you're Spanish) or Kick-Boxing (if you're Dutch) – i.e. Generation "SQUEE!" – this weekend was VAMPIRE weekend, with the release of the latest in the TWIGLET saga…

…personally, I don't understand why "wait till you're married then he kills you" is a more CHRISTIAN message than Harry Potter's "love is better than power and murdering people tears your soul apart", but apparently angsty vamps go down very well with the League of Abstinence…

…so this seems like the right weekend to make Daddy do the Vampires of Venice review! Now available on shiny silver disc AND shiny blu disc, too! The, er, episode, not Daddy's reviews… RUN VT!

"C" is for fish, as the old pun would have it, and the first thing we see in Venice is the carved curved fish that forms the monogram "C" for Calvierri on the back of Signora Rosanna's throne. Essentially, the "answer" is right in front of you in that first image: this is, of course, a school of fish. And then the rest of the episode is a huge exercise in misdirection.

And jolly good fun it is too.

Almost in spite of the arc-ish framing device of taking Rory and Amy on a "date", almost in spite of the intruding mentions of cracks and silences, it feels the most simple and self-contained story so far.

(I'll allow "The Beast Below" on a challenge if you want, but to me that feels very much continuing Amy's story rather than wholly a story of its own, while of course the Mark Gatiss episode is obviously no more than laying the groundwork for revamped Dalek escapades and as I said before "Time of Angels"/"Flesh and Stone" feel very much parts four and five of "Doctor Who and the Cracks in Time".)

The teaser clip shown on Jonathan Ross was rightly picked from this episode, showcasing the brilliance of Matt Smith as the Doctor as he is surprised and delighted by the "creepy girls with no reflections" and tosses in a fanboy-pleasing glimpse of William Hartnell on the Doctor's library card. (Yes, Alex and I were those fanboys.) I would contrast the Doctor's scampering glee at real living vampires, cavorting around them as though his body is going out of control along with the words coming out of his mouth, with his "woah, aren't you magnificent" reaction to the real living werewolf in "Tooth and Claw".

Helen McCrory as the wicked but tragic Rosanna is a captivating central performance, often holding the eye with her stillness – sitting in her throne, kneeling and "rehydrating" from a chalice: these moments are almost tableaux. And for all of her vampire trappings, she is really much more of a fairy-tale wicked queen, holding the city in thrall by her magic and putting the girls under her spell. Even the "glamour" of her perception filter – revealing the ugly witch underneath – fits. Mind you, "ooh grandma what big teeth you have" is also there in the mix.

She has some marvellous confrontations with Matt's Doctor. There's a lovely, almost flirtatious sense that the two of them are of an age, and that their age is ancient, particularly in the moment where she offers the Doctor an alliance with the hint that it may be of the matrimonial variety. "Think of the children," he whispers.

As a "grande dame" of Venice she is reminiscent, if not quite so grand, nor quite so dissolute, of the character Miss Eleanor Lavish from the early Paul McGann Big Finish Adventure "The Stones of Venice" by Paul Magrs.

("The Stones of Venice" is almost literally three parts lush, elegiac tragedy to one part "oh, they live". Yes, another Paul Magrs where he muffs the ending: he may be a genius and a lecturer in creative writing but you do occasionally want to bang him over the head with a book on "how to write". Funnily enough, it also features a breed of fish-men living below the canals and finishes with the city being cursed to sink below the waves. In honesty, though, they could hardly be more different: "Stones of…" is a lament for lost love, and the foolish and selfish things that people do even when it can and does lose them the most important thing in the world, with a heartbreakingly beautiful performance from Michael Sheard as Duke Orsino. Oh and never mind what Wikipedia says about essays by John Ruskin, "The Stones of Venice" is also the title of an episode of "Jason King" guest-starring Roger Delgado and don't think Magrs wouldn't know that.)

Meanwhile Alex Price, who's been voicing the Doctor Who Confidentials this year, has (forgive me) a whale of a time playing evil mummy's-boy Francesco. (Although since his appearance as a ghost in season one of Toby Whithouse's "Being Human", we ended up calling him "fish-Gilbert"; Gill-bert groans Alex).

Oh, and I must say I do like Simon Gregor as the obviously all-too-human Steward of the House of Calvierri who does a lovely boggle-and-recover when the mistress turns into a giant fish in front of him and is last seen skipping town dragging a sackful of looted gold.

The visuals are gorgeous, too. Yes, even the silly fish.

They've gone for a much more muted colour palette, lovely pale marble of Venice, a lot of sea greens, obviously, but perhaps more daringly some fluorescent purples as the Doctor waves around his ultra-violet light stick.

The "vampire girls" of the Calvierri school have a real "Hammer" vibe going on – I mean big blousy "Hammer Horror" dresses, emphatically not MC Hammer big trousers. As the Doctor says, fish from space have never looked so buxom. Those vampire teeth are a bit of a triumph, too, though I'm fairly sure they would leave rather more of a hickey than the traditional two puncture-wound bites that we see on Amy's neck with the Doctor sonic-ing them closed. And do fish really have teeth like that? ("Don't tell him Pikes," heckles Alex. "Stupid boy.") Oh but if I'm being picky… having gone to the trouble of explaining all the vampire attributes via the technobabble of the perception filter… suddenly we get vampire girls floating outside the window. Are they flying fish now?

Of course, if they'd surprised us with a reveal that the house was now under water, they could have used that scene to establish that Rosanna can sink the buildings of Venice into the lagoon one by one… oh, who cares, it's just a magnificent image, isn't it.

Trogir in Croatia, allegedly built by the Venetians, is a real find, standing in for Venice without any of that intrusive modern tourist tat. Incredibly, the ability to do this and the Van Gogh episode in the same location turns what might have been an indulgence into an economy measure and gives the series a more globe-trotting feel all in one. And, as mentioned under "Vincent and the Doctor", the illusion is greatly helped by not slamming the two location episodes in side-by-side.

This is, incidentally, one of those rare-for-the-new-series episodes set in the past without a celebrity (or at least "famous event" e.g. coronation and/or volcanic eruption) tacked on. I'm thinking that "Father's Day" and "The Next Doctor" would be the others, though Alex makes the point that "the Eighties" and "the Victorians" almost count as the celebrity guest on their own, and likewise "Human Nature"/"The Family of Blood" and "The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances" each evoke a World War.

Instead, Alex says "Daleks in Manhattan"/"Evolution of the Daleks"; I tentatively suggest either the Empire State Building as the "celebrity" or perhaps the Depression Era as the famous event, but he's almost certainly right: that one is much more about exploring a part of history we're unfamiliar with… at least until Dalek Sec starts exploring new careers as a hat…

That sense of exploring the unknown led Alex to feel that the nearest new series equivalent – in big frocks in European history – was actually Steve Moffat's "The Girl in the Fireplace", another story with disguised invaders as well. I'd have called that one a pretty obvious "celebrity historical", but Alex is right to say that, at least in Britain, Madame de Pompadour is one of the least famous "famous people" that the series has featured. After all, she was only responsible for bankrupting the country by starting a protracted, unwinnable war and then spending vast sums of money on a lavish royal court while the economy went down the Seine. After her came a revolution involving lots of cuts. If only I could make some kind of topical political comparison.

Really, if you want the true historical experience you have to look to the "classic" series. Here, the grande dame villainess, the medieval history, the location somewhere on the continent and the appearance of William Hartnell, not to mention the touch of light genocide at the conclusion, all give the story a feel of the "The Massacre". Though course the one story it's most like, with its aliens masquerading as local superstitions, sword fights, location filming and Italianate setting, is "The Masque of Mandragora".

And sure, in a year or so, no doubt we will look back at the CGI canals and scoff, but on first viewing they look "really there" good enough.



"Vampires in a school setting" almost seems to be writer Toby Whithouse having another go at the story he wrote for Russell: "School Reunion".

So perhaps that is why "The Vampires of Venice" is the most Russell-ish entry of Steve Moffat's series so far. And perhaps that is why, in spite of its flaws (and I'm coming to those) it feels so warm and welcoming after the cold logic of Moffat's precision-engineered puzzle-boxes.

Let's just have a quick look at those Russell tropes on show:

• an animal-based alien (space-cats, space-bats, space-rhinos and space-spiders are now joined by space-fish);
• refugees fleeing from a terrible something (for "Time War" read "the silence");
• the lead villain is an empowered woman (see also the Lady Cassandra, Margaret Slitheen, Yvonne Hartman, the Empress of the Racnoss, Miss Foster, Mercy Hartigan etc);
• and the Doctor saves the days by performing some extraordinary physical stunt in order to thump the technology till it breaks do something technobabblingly-clever to the technology… till it breaks (almost more examples than you can list starting from "The End of the World", but see in particular: "The Idiot's Lantern", "Evolution of the Daleks" and "The Next Doctor" – "The Next Doctor" doubled for the applause at the end).

This does also mean we get some of the "School of Russell" plotting as well.

Two of the most egregious moments stand out: Francesco the Fish-boy's unexpectedly explosive reaction to direct sunlight; and the Doctor's over-the-top heroics (literally over the top as he scales the roof) at the conclusion.

The problem with Amy blowing up Francesco is not just because it comes out of nowhere nor the blink-and-you-missed-it "explanation" that she's using a hand-mirror to reflect the sun, but that it appears to contradict most of the rest of the story. The fishy-people are clearly photophobic, but it's not ever established that it's to the point of spontaneous combustion! They do manage to stand in direct sunlight at other points (if nothing else, Madame Rosanna's final dive into the water is achieved without blowing up the wharf) and there's no reason to think Amy's mirror is a magnifying one (in fact, we don't do a "Chekov's gun" to establish the mirror, either) so why the sudden incendiary insanity?

Meanwhile, the Doctor saving the day at the end is one of those naughty moments of "if he does something spectacular enough maybe you won't notice that all he's doing is pushing the 'plot off' button".

It's almost by-the-by that if what the Saturnynians' device does is create an earthquake that will trigger a tidal wave that will drown the city, then just putting a spanner in the works won't actually fix that – the earthquake happens, so the tsunami has been triggered, you can't un-drop the bomb. But Doctor Who is always doing that sort of thing, and at least Matt Smith acts the Doctor's reaction as "wow, that actually worked!" rather than, naming no names, "yes, mortals, you may applaud my crowning moment of awesome".

No, the problem is that bonkers spectacular villainy like this does not fit with the rest of the episode. The fact that the device exists at all is pretty much pulled out of the air; disappointingly it's not really any more than an "end-of-level challenge", just there to provide the episode with a conclusion because forty-five minutes are up.

Rosanna has been demonstrating a careful, cautious step-by-step subversion of Venice, and so far she's got five girls. And now she plans to sink the city? Why not just run away to start again somewhere else? After all, that's how this began when she and the boys escaped from Saturnyne. Rosanna's flight could have led to a chase through the watery catacombs, perhaps, with the threat of the piranha-like boys in the water at every step. Even the "she slips and falls" cliché would have made for a more original ending than what we got.

If Rosanna had expressed any weariness at the slowness and the effort of her plan, the fact she's clearly bleeding herself in order to transfuse the girls (hence all the "rehydration"), then her suddenly going nuts and pulling the doomsday lever – not to mention her suicide at the end – might make some character sense.

It also makes her last accusation at the Doctor, that he's responsible for two genocides now, a lie. Not that lying to wound is out of character. But he's in no way responsible for the extermination of the Saturnynians. Arguably they were extinct from the moment they arrived on Earth anyway, as even if Rosanna's plan had worked, the next generation would have been hybridised with humans. And at the end, at least before momma goes swimming with the fishes, their position is really only as bad as when they first arrived.

One might also ask, if mommy was so keen on repopulating her race, why was her son stomping around the place with his grumpy-face on, when he should have been pretty permanently locked in the boudoir with one or more of the buxom fish-from-space girls? And why only one son? It's not like Rosanna doesn't have perception filters to spare, as she's clearly handing them out to her "gels".

Come to think of it, why can't Rosanna's ten thousand male offspring carry on the hybridising process for themselves? It can hardly be that only the female Saturnynians are intelligent – I mean Francesco is a bit thick but…

What does actually happen to the surviving male offspring? It's just a thought, but these are not the first "water vampires" that have appeared in Doctor Who. In "The Curse of Fenric", the Ancient One is said to have passed through Venice following the path of the trader who took the flask from Constantinople. It's almost tempting to wonder if the Haemovores didn't pick up some Saturnynian traits then.


Where Toby Whithouse's first Doctor Who script fell down was that while "School Reunion" featured a strong, and much admired, emotional "b-plot" for the Doctor – meeting Sarah Jane and what this means about the way he treats companions, the effect he has when he leaves them behind – the nominal "a-plot" – all that sub-Logopolis business with batty Krillitanes trying to hack the operating system of the Universe – was treated as little more than a throwaway framing device.

If anything, "The Vampires of Venice" has the reverse problem (making it much less of a problem): the main story about the vampires is actually treated as the main story, while the emotional sub-plot about the Amy / Rory / Doctor non-love triangle is given little more than a nod in passing. Amy as good as says "let's not do this plot this week", passing the buck to Simon Nye's "Amy's Choice", and then she and Rory get on with enjoying Venice.

Actually, watched again, it's nice that you can see that Rory does get it; he's genuinely "woo Venice!"; he understands and shares Amy's excitement in time-travel in a way that, say, Mickey Smith really, really didn't.

Alex points out the comparison with "The Girl in the Fireplace" again, saying that Rory gets the advantage of actually wandering around in history, seeing all the frocks and monsters, where Mickey gets left behind on a spaceship to be probulated while the Doctor gets the girls and the frocks and gets to disparagingly compare him to a horse.

Whereas it seems clear that the Doctor likes Rory, and probably for exactly the reason that Rory shows signs of being companion material. Notice that every dig the Doctor makes seems to be accidentally (unlike the ninth or tenth Doctor's deliberate sniping). And he's going to quite a lot of trouble to make sure Rory has a happy life with Amy and it's not just for Amy's sake. We will see later ("The Pandorica Opens") that the Doctor thinks of Rory as someone he has lost, not just someone Amy loses.

These are nice character notes, so it's a shame to undermine them with silly "yours is bigger than mine" jokes. And then Francesco gets to symbolically castrate him by chopping his weapon in half in the sword fight at the end! Having Amy save Rory is empowering for her, but much less so if you've just made her boyfriend look like a dipstick.

And as for the Doctor emerging from the stripper-gram cake… as the man himself says: "there are some things that just sound better in your head…"

I'm slightly in two minds about Rory's "you make people want to impress you" speech, though. It's a good speech, a strong and true accusation to throw at the Doctor. In the excitement of the conclusion, the Doctor throws the speech back at him: you've gone from "you make people dangerous to themselves" to "we won't leave you to die" as though this doesn't entirely prove Rory's point.

But on the other hand, does Rory know the Doctor well enough yet to make that accusation?

"The Eleventh Hour" is the only other time they've really met – no, Amy's cosplay games really do not count – and while it may not strictly be an "everybody lives" (Patient Zero probably slaughters the other patients in the coma ward, and is himself executed), no one else who meets the Doctor dies. Rory and Amy only end up in peril because Patient Zero happens to have come back to the hospital; the Doctor didn't actually send them into harm's way (for once). So although the accusation is true, I'm just not sure how Rory gets there so soon.

Having said that, in the context of a story about people being turned into something they're not against their will, it's an interesting time to flag up the way that the Doctor changes the people around him too.

Ultimately, "The Vampires of Venice" appears to be a proof that Russell was right, and that feel is more important than plot. The Doctor versus vampires in Venice feels right, no matter what hand-waving over the details you need. We invest in this idea emotionally and it rewards us with a story that starts with vampires (who want to drain our blood and turn us into things like them) who turn out to be aliens who turn out to want to drain our blood and turn us into things like them, so they are vampires after all. And they're in Venice.

Which, let's face it, is pretty cool.

Then there's just a moment at the end when Venice falls silent, and it's truly chilling. All the more so in retrospect, knowing that it won't be explained and is still hanging over us.

Next Time… ♫ Cold stars shining, frozen above you… ♫ In the future Rory whispers "I love you"… ♫ Birds twitter in the sycamore tree… ♫ Dream a little dream of me… ♫ Adventures with the Doctor or Happy Ever After with Rory? That's "Amy's Choice".

Don't sing, Daddy! DO NOT SING!

[silence falls]

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Day 3477: An Education

Friday:


Poor Mr Michael Borogove! He once said he would willingly give up his seat in the Cabinet so that Mr David Laws could get a place. Looks like this might be his opportunity…

It's been a bit of a week for the schools minister, cutting this, cocking-up that, and now getting a pasting from Hard Labour's Mr Bully Balls in a rant about all those cancelled school repairs.

What no one seems to have asked, though, is WHY, after thirteen years of "Education, education, education", do we still HAVE one in five school schools in desperate need of rebuilding?

If it really MATTERED to Hard Labour… why hadn't they done it already?

Of course, the funny thing about the "Building Schools for the Future" program is that it was a scheme to rebuild every single school in the country. Every single one.

Were they really ALL about to fall down where they stood, or was there some hint that this might in fact have been an enormous VANITY PROJECT on the part of a certain senior government figure known only as the then Chancellor who wished to remain anonymous? So long as he got all the credit. And none of it went to Tony.

Mr Bully Balls says that these cuts to school rebuilding are to be recycled to fund Mr Borogove's "unfair ideological experiment", as though there's nothing "ideological" about rebuilding every school in the country whether they want it or not.

How can these cuts fall "unfairly" on Labour constituencies? Why surely only if the building programmes had been unfairly dolled out to Labour constituencies in the first place.


Look, you do have to admit that Mr Borogove's Free Schools ideas are a bit WACKY! Just at the time when his Conservatory Chum Mr Eric "In a" Pickles has been saying local authorities should save money by pooling their support services, Mr Borogove is saying that schools should GIVE UP pooling of support from their local education authority and go it alone.

Still who said ideology had to be consistent so long as local authorities are getting less power – passing it down to schools, handing it up to efficiency savings, what's the difference?

But it's hardly fair of Hard Labour to criticise him for THAT. After all, letting parents and businesses set up "Free Schools" is not that different to Lord Blairimort's City McAcademies with the Christian Fundamentalists filed off.

Nor am I completely convinced by shrill protests that parents setting up new schools will be "taking away money from existing schools". Um, yes, but they'll be taking away PUPILS as well, won't they? Wasn't that kind of the POINT of Hard Labour's own choice agenda – money follows the pupils: bad schools get fewer kids get less money. Or is Mr Balls condemning the education policy of, um, Mr Balls?

I've said it before and I'll probably say it again: you can have CHOICE or you can have EFFICIENCY but you can't have BOTH. A perfectly efficient education system has exactly as many places for pupils as there are pupils. So imagine you are the last pupil to be placed: there's only going to be one place left – so you can't have a CHOICE.

Or if everyone's going to have a choice, then you have to have some spare places left over, and that's just not efficient.

And frankly, who WANTS to be perfectly efficient, anyway? Oh yes, sorry, worst recession ever blah blah blah, stick with the programme.


Hard Labour are really keen as mustard to pretend that we DON'T have to try and fix this great big hole that they've whacked through the bottom of the economy as though the cold waters of an over-extended metaphor were not already flooding in.

They want to say that the Coalition are offering a FALSE DICHOTOMY between cuts now or ruinous economic consequences.

But actually that's a FALSE false dichotomy.

For every year from 2001 onwards, come rain or shine, Mr Frown SPENT more than he RAISED in taxes. For every year, good or bad, he INCREASED the amount that we borrowed.

It's no GOOD saying: "It's not our fault, it was the bankers!" Sure, at the end, the bankers really blew the roof off, but we were on the road to ruin LOOOOOOONG before that.

(And it's not like Hard Labour policy – being "intensely relaxed" about the City getting "filthy rich" – contributed NOTHING to the whole "bet the farm on red and let her riiiiide!" attitude…)

We really DO have to do something about this, and BEFORE the election, even Hard Labour admitted it.

But now, every cut is a BAD cut, every choice is the WRONG choice. The escalating whines of "we wouldn't have done it like that" are only exceeded by the deafening silence about what they WOULD have done instead.

Hard Labour did actually LOSE the election and it would show a little GRACE if they would just accept that people chose austerity NOW rather than running up more DEBTS for LATER.

Instead, this refusal to accept that Hard Labour's policies have been REJECTED by the voters is making them sound like SPOILED BABIES.

Worse, when voters vote "YES" to "time for a change", it means "leave it the way it was" is really NOT a credible alternative. Which means that Hard Labour haven't actually GOT any policies at all.

At least not beyond spitting "TRAITOR!!!!" at the Liberal Democrats in a way that confirms everyone's suspicions about why we SHOULDN'T have had a coalition with selfish deluded THEM!

Mr Balls may THINK that brazenly honking about how "Mr Borogove will DECIMATE the education service" SOUNDS good, but it just doesn't make SENSE!

"Decimate" means "reduce by one tenth" (yes, I've seen "Last of the Time Lords"), and that's merely the LEAST of Mr Borogove's options.

Hang on, I'm not helping…


I think it would be a good idea to lower the rhetoric on BOTH sides a bit.

If the Coalition could maybe agree to STOP saying how Labour "spent all the money" and "there's none left" every five minutes, perhaps Labour could agree that they will stop saying that every SINGLE thing the Coalition does is BOUND to cause a double-dip recession and sixty-million people in perpetual unemployment.

Not least because what's the POINT?

I'm sure it makes THEM feel a lot better about being such BAD LOSERS, but it won't benefit them at the election in five years: if they're right they'll win anyway, and no amount of "we told you so" will make them look anything other than SMUG about the misery of people they're supposed to represent; if they're wrong, they'll no doubt deny everything anyway. And in the meantime, all they're doing is spreading fear and misery.

So let's all just drop it.

Then Labour could go away and have their leadership contest and actually decide some POLICIES; and the Coalition can have some time to see if the policies THEY are trying are any good or not.

And then we might ALL learn something.

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Day 3464: DOCTOR WHO: The Big Finish? – no, wait, that was Press Gang…

Saturday:


Once upon a time there was a story about stories. You've written yourself into a box. Cracks in the plot. That's just a fairy tale. Who isn't? A man is the sum of his memories; a Time Lord even more so. I hate repeats. And then she woke up. And you were there and you were there… Remember this because it's important, I am most definitely a madman with a box. Did I tell you I stole it? You're "Father Christmas", "The Wizard of Oz" and "Scooby Doo". He's my imaginary friend. Who is real. Let. There. Be. Light.

In short, the Mister Moffster didn't muff it!

But that's just what I think. Over to Daddy…

"Just this once, everybody dies. Hang on, I can fix that."

With "The Big Bang", Steven Moffat, ironically (or not) the man described as "Mr Story" compared to his predecessor "Mr Emotion", has given us an episode that asserts the supremacy of story-telling by making us feel the importance of story.

The entire Universe is destroyed, all the stories have been wiped. But by an incredible stroke of fortune the Doctor just happens to have about his person an enormous video recorder containing the last copies of all the missing stories. Now, if he can only find a way to play it back…

Yes, extrapolating the Universe from a few billion atoms (closer to many trillions, actually) is Douglas Adams and the fairy cake all over again. But it's no use complaining: way back in 1965's "The Chase" (yes, that other epic story featuring the Daleks that concluded on a 26th June) we learned that events are recorded on "light neutrons" and can be played back on the Doctor's big time-telly, so it was already canon.

And the price of getting the Universe back? It costs the Doctor his very existence. Except he's a wily old man, and can wriggle out of his fate by turning himself into a story.

But that was in the canon too.

In "The Time of Angels", an angel in a recording can come right out of a television screen; in "Flesh and Stone" the threat is that an angel in Amy's imagination will come right out of her head.

And in "The Big Bang", the Doctor does exactly that. (So the Doctor becomes an angel(!))

Because the idea is that ideas are more powerful than any mundane physics.

To underline it all, Rory becomes a legend as well, spending nearly two thousand years guarding Amy in the Pandorica and getting his story told on the museum wall (voice-over by Mr Briggs, I think). (As Mr Moffat puts it in "Confidential": as apologies for killing someone go, mowing the lawn isn't going to cut it.) Alex said that the Doctor still referring to Amy as "the girl who waited" is a bit harsh on the Auton… but that was before he called Rory "the boy who waited" too. This is a beautiful little side-story, and rewarded with the wedding where he's returned to his old self but then remembers who he became – you can hear him saying "I was plastic and he was the stripper at my stag night" in the background.

Arthur Darvill is magnificent playing the two Rorys, whether it's with great charm in the lighter moments ("Respect the plastic", "No, too fast"); or with gravitas for the serious commitment ("Why do you have to be so… human?" "Because right now, I'm not"); or with just a roar for the absolute moment of awesome ("Your girlfriend's not more important than the whole Universe–" [punch] "SHE IS TO ME!").

And Rory is a proper member of the crew at the end, no longer a hanger-on, but deciding equally with Amy that their place is in the TARDIS. Please, please put his name in the titles by Christmas!

But the real story is the story of Amy, the fact that the Doctor actually if accidentally destroyed her Universe by being late. He puts it right by seemingly stepping into the crack in Amelia's wall – becoming, as he foresaw in "Flesh and Stone", the complicated space-time event that seals the crack – and in doing so he un-writes history, undoes his mistake of wrecking Amelia's life by returning it all to her.

(Although, if you want to go all metatextual: Doctor Who went away in 1989 and its return was announced in 2003, fourteen years later, just as Amy's travels in the TARDIS begin fourteen years later. Oh it's a coincidence. Except in "The Big Bang" the Doctor turns up in 1996 for "twelve minutes" before being killed off. Who says Paul McGann doesn't count?)

Karen Gillan looks awesome when the Pandorica opens to reveal that she's taken the Doctor's place inside. And yet it's the quiet moments of her tears that really get you. A tear for Rory, when she sees what he has done for her. And her tears at the wedding, structured to reverse the tears for a happiness she does not understand when she begins to recognise Rory in "The Pandorica Opens", tears for a sorrow for the loss of the Doctor she cannot remember.

Alex calls it a very "Harry Potter" story: she's "the girl who waited" instead of "the boy who lived", the little orphan whose Aunt never told her what really happened to her parents, who grows up to meet a wizard and discovers her own special magic.

So, anyway, we start with a riff on predestination paradox, or the bootstrap paradox – named for Baron Munchausen, another great storyteller, and his escape by lifting up his own boots – as the Doctor escapes from the Pandorica by escaping from the Pandorica and going back to effect his escape from the Pandorica.

Oh yes he does. Just because he gives the sonic to Rory doesn't mean he doesn't program it to release him; he might as well stand in front of the box himself. Of course, it's funny and smart and short-cuts a whole load of faffing about while Rory works out how to get the Doctor out of the Pandorica on his own (I'm just after the points for calling the resolution to the cliff-hanger). But it is still cheating.

Personally, I put it down to the TARDIS. I mean she's heroically sustaining the Earth and two thousand years of history, not to mention a two-second time loop with River Song in the console room, while literally burning herself up to do so, so what's one little time paradox to nudge the Doctor towards fixing everything?

We then get another one, where the Doctor arranges for Amelia to be at the National Museum in order to open the box. This writing of post-it notes to stage-manage the actions of past versions of people around him: it's both Benny's diary and the seventh Doctor's alleged modus operandi. (Alleged mainly in Virgin's "New Adventures" and other books, for example the short story "Continuity Errors" from Decalog 3. Whatever happened to the writer of that?)

Although actually, this paradox isn't actually a paradox.

Think about it: there's no reason why the Doctor could not have instead materialized himself in front of Amy's house twelve hours earlier and convinced her Aunt that he was there delivering two tickets to the National Museum as part of a schools' "history awareness" campaign, or something.

And in fact that's effectively what he's done. Just not necessarily in the right order.

Really, the paradox is a visual comment on coincidence in story-telling, in this case, the coincidence of Amelia happening to open the Pandorica at just the right time – that is within minutes of the moment when the Doctor pops up out of the past with River's time gizmo. It's the equivalent of the "clumsy juggler" act; it's Les Dawson at the piano; it's saying "look, as a writer I can arrange events to fit together however is most convenient, but look what happens if I exaggerate that to make it obvious what I'm doing".

Incidentally, how does little Amelia open the Pandorica? Does it open to a touch now? Did the Doctor reprogram it? I suppose it did start unlocking to receive the Doctor when the Doctor first found it; perhaps it's doing the same now it thinks it has to contain Amy. Or maybe it's just confused because that the person it's been trying to keep locked inside for two thousand years now appears to be on the outside.

And does Aunt Sharon suffer the "deleted from history" fate sometime before the museum closes? Or else, why are the staff not all looking for the little lost girl who doesn't answer the call to come to the front desk?

We get a third iteration of the paradox with the Doctor popping back to get Amelia a drink. Which he steals from her earlier self. Meaning she's only thirsty because she asked the Doctor to get her a drink. Alex points out that this is a "reverse Kronos": in "The Time Monster", the Atlanteans grow rich because their pet Chronovore is stealing from their own future; in "The Big Bang" Amelia makes herself thirsty because her friendly Time Lord is stealing from her own past.

Speaking of "stealing from the past", Alex was delighted to see a return of the second Doctor's "oh I should like a hat like that" obsession, first in the form of that fez and then in a top hat. Also, as the Universe collapses times and distances become shorter – nod to "Warrior's Gate" – and we head towards the Big Bang – shout out "Castrovalva". "We all wake up where we're supposed to be" is the conclusion of "The Three Doctors". The Void between Universes references "Inferno" and "The Time Monster" and many Russell episodes. River dating a Nestene with swappable heads (what, she's got Captain Jack's past as well now?) reminds us of Mickey the Auton's detachable bonce back in Rose. And "twelve minutes until the Dalek kills me" harks back to "twenty minutes to save the world" in "The Eleventh Hour".

Oh yes, "twelve minutes until the Dalek kills me": before we can even start to take the Doctor's new blasé attitude to linearity for granted, it only goes and kills him!

The exterminated Doctor zapping into existence at the top of the stairs is a perfect slap down to the Doctor's apparating/disapparating antics, his popping up and down in his fez like a latter-day Fenella the Kettle Witch. (Which would make the Cyber-leader and the Skittles Daleks into Chorlton and the Wheelies… let's not go there.)

It says "mess with Time too much and Time will mess with you right back".

But again, it's also Moffat commenting on his own story-telling: just as he's done explaining to you the temporal shenanigans of the opening minutes by playing them again from the other angle, he repeats the same gag: again, the Doctor pops back from the future but this time it's not to handily pass on a clue to the guys still stuck in the past. This time, he's been brutally murdered. And worse, he's cynically manipulating them into using his own murder to distract the murderer from what he's really doing.

It makes River's cold-blooded execution of the Dalek seem positively fluffy if you think about it.

(Incidentally, I vastly preferred River in this two-parter to her previous appearances. There's been much less of the smugness, much more of a feel that she's a genuine match for the Doctor, with both the compassion and the steel underneath to equal him. Though it is, er, possible to remain slightly more disparaging of the character, as in: "this is what happens when "the straight writer"™ tries to cross Captain Jack with Iris Wildthyme. Oh dear.")

Of course it had to be a Dalek. The idea of "story" demands that it be a Dalek, because the Daleks and the Doctor are inextricably linked in the crucible of the story. I loved the Daleks fossilised in time; that was great. The new-look Dalek redone in stone was a huge improvement, so it must be something about those plasticky colours that just fails them.

Alex winced that the Daleks got completely wiped out again, but you know… along with everything else. That's practically a score draw for them.

And hey, finally one of the buggers manages to kill the old sod. Pity the whole thing got time-reversed. Honestly, some days you just can't even happen.

Time for a couple of quibbles.

What was the point of introducing the Blinovitch Limitation Effect – shorting out the time differential between the two sonic screwdrivers, for those who don't speak geek – if you then ignore it in all the Amy patting Amelia action (accepting the fact that exploding seven-year-olds are not going to get on the BBC at Saturday tea-time)?

And why didn't we get a proper answer to "why is a duck pond if there aren't any ducks?" It was important enough to be flagged up a couple of times in the series. Yes, I get that it's a clue (either actual or allegorical) to the way things from Amy's life have disappeared leaving traces, but it would have been nice to spell it out in the Doctor's "final conversation" where he points out the obvious fate of Amy's parents.

But then, I've had to reassess my understanding of what it means to fall into one of the "cracks in time": the Doctor at first describes this as being "erased from time", that you "never existed". Clearly, that is not what happens at all. Later, the Doctor calls it "falling out of the Universe" and that is much closer to what appears to happen.

Here's how it seems to me: if you fall into one of the cracks, or rather fall out of the Universe through one of the cracks, your physical history, all the things that you have done, remains intact, but the memetic content, the bits of information that let other people understand and remember your actions, that is what gets erased.

In short, falling out of the Universe deletes your story.

This, very neatly, explains away all of my concerns about time paradox plot holes caused by people being erased from time. Take the ever multiplying Clerics paradox: Marco wanders into the crack and is erased; but if Marco never existed, why didn't Father Octavian bring Julius along to fill the place Marco would have taken? But then Julius wanders into the crack and never existed so why didn't Father Octavian bring along Pedro and so on forever. Answer, Father Octavian doesn't bring someone to fill the place Marco would have had because there was a person who filled that place, it's just that no one can remember who it was now.

It's an exact reversal of Lawrence Miles' idea of turning people into "conceptual beings", that is beings with no physical presence who exists only as ideas; the crack turns people into purely physical beings, with no informational content at all.

It would turn you into a particularly horrible kind of ghost, one where you can experience the world around you but no one notices you are there. The Doctor appears to experience something like this as his timeline unwinds (with only Amy, her mind filled with the time energy of the crack, able to hear, but not see, him).

And he is rescued from this state when Amy (again because of her unique time-energy-charged memories) is able to reconnect his memetic self to his physical existence.

In this way, the reference to Professor Richard Dawkins isn't just a cheeky in-joke and reference to "Journey's End". In a history gone wrong, the rationalist sceptic is re-written as a believer, in stars of all things (so even in the wrong universe he's still right). But Richard Dawkins is also the man who first came up with the term "meme" as a way of describing the evolution of ideas, of stories.

To excuse the Doctor's earlier incorrect description, you can probably see that if you cannot remember anything that someone has done then it appears as though they never existed, particularly to someone from such a highly memetic culture as the Time Lords. Indeed, being the literal architects of "history", it may well be that being erased from "history" and being physically erased from space/time are as good as indistinguishable to them. So when the Doctor describes the effect of the crack as "never having existed" he's telling it the way he sees it, even if he's wrong.


So we come to the Universe's biggest ever reset switch – biggest ever because it applies at every single moment throughout history – which has been wittily described as a Deus ex Pandorica. Witty, but slightly unfair. The way to save the entire universe and the way to destroy the entire universe are of course identical: the notion that the TARDIS can pass through every point in creation simultaneously like a four-dimensional infinite improbability drive.

The real leap is that the Pandorica can suddenly be used as the universe's flight recorder, a literal "black box" that contains a "restoration field" that not only stops the occupant from dying, but can recreate exploded stars. Stopping you from dying is not actually unreasonable for a perpetual prison (and supports the idea that the Alliance of Enemies fear the Doctor dead more than they fear him alive – again, because if he dies he might regenerate into something that can get out of the Pandorica!)

I have to say there is a slightly wearisome aspect to the idea that everyone in the entire Universe is actually killed and then identical copies are created of them (or in some cases whole people who were erased are "written back in"). Now on the one hand you could accuse me of "molecular vertigo" (the fear of teleportation stemming from the idea that the "transporter" beam is a phaser at one end and a replicator at the other: it kills you and creates a copy who has your memories). On the other hand this is just about the largest possible example of actions that have no consequences, and we were supposed to have moved beyond that since Russell brought us New Doctor Who.

Perhaps I can suggest an alternative interpretation: the explosion of the TARDIS would be Universe-destroying; the explosion of the Pandorica would be Universe-creating. By having the two happen simultaneously (at every point at every moment in history) they cancel each other out. Who was it who said "supernova and black-hole at the same time"? Or was that "five minutes from Belgium"?

So what actually happens when the TARDIS explodes is that the ship creates a tiny "bubble Universe" (not difficult for a TARDIS – she's one herself) containing the Doctor, Amy and Rory and enough of an alternative Earth for them to sort out their business there.

Alex asks: if a TARDIS exploding can destroy the Universe so much that it never happened, then – what with the whole Time War – why hasn't this happened already?

Well, I answer, in the Time War, the Time Lords were around to fix things like cracks in the surface of the Universe, possibly by chucking in a "complicated space-time event" (or the Castellan). And actually, that sort of Universe-unravelling might have been the basis for Davros' whole reality bomb idea.

Alternatively, now that the TARDIS is the last timeship in the Universe, I suggest that the Eye of Harmony must be on board (notwithstanding "City of the Daleks"). And as the Eye of Harmony is probably the singularity from the first Big Bang, then the whole point of Rassilon nicking the thing in the first place was that it would be linked to every point in history. So an explosion of the TARDIS now would do what happens here.

Hmm, says Alex, but in that case, even if it's only this threat post-Time War, even if he's only just discovered it, wouldn't the Doctor still have to say "sorry, old girl, it's been a hell of a ride but I've got to power you down now so that can never not-have-ever-happened again!"

It's a valid point, because the Doctor himself acknowledges that they've only solved the symptoms of this current crisis: whoever was behind it, whatever "silence will fall" is supposed to mean, we don't yet know.

The suggestion, then, is that next year there will be an even more serious story-arc.

Of course, if you're going to talk story arcs then at some point you're going to have to mention Joss Whedon. Yes, there were Joe Straczynski's five-year "Babylon 5" or Steven Bochco's "Murder One" first, but those were one story apiece. What Joss does in Buffy the Vampire Slayer is set up multiple nested story-arcs: the first season deals with the conflict between Buffy and the Vampire Master; the first two seasons develop the Buffy/Angel relationship; the first three seasons lead up to the story of the Mayor.

(Alex remarked that like Joss's season four, the "big climax" is in the penultimate episode and this week is a quieter more thought-provoking, "Restless" type of episode, and I've been trying fruitlessly to find where I actually suggested Doctor Who should do something just like that.)

Do we hope to see the same sort of developing stories here, with Doctor Who's thirty-first season concentrating on the "cracks in time", but then its thirty-first and thirty-second dealing with "the silence" who or whatever that is or are; and maybe the thirty-first through thirty-third series exploring the history of the Doctor and River.

Or, is Moffat heading in a different direction completely?

Doctor Who always evolves. It is itself a meme. With William Hartnell it began as a "Lost in Space", with Ian and Barbara kidnapped by the titular anti-hero, but when they left it mutated into the story of the heroic Doctor's erratic travels; under Patrick Troughton it was a series of monster yarns and bases under siege; when Jon Pertwee arrived it became an ITC adventure serial, with alien invaders instead of "foreign" spies; and as Tom Baker took the helm it turned into an anthology of Hammer horror pastiches; and so on.

The teaser ending – a telephone call from "your majesty", an Egyptian goddess on the Orient Express… in space – suggests that Moffat has another classic English form in mind. The eccentric extraordinary agent with his gorgeous, capable – married! – sidekick, investigating the most outlandish of situations. Or, if I can put that another way:

"Mrs Pond… we're needed!"

I'd have to say I approve: it would give Moffat a whole rich new vein to rip off tap.

And he might even commission Alex's excellent "England Avenged". One of the authors of "About Time 2" would hate it, though.

The idea of the Doctor going on "missions" might sound like making one of the most anti-establishment characters a bit, well, establishment – Tom's Doctor always railed against the Time Lords when they sent him on their errands, and even the ultra-establishment Pertwee Doctor resented being given little things to do.

But John Steed was the most anti-establishment establishment man and if you could carry it off with the kind of insouciance, even playfulness of Patrick Macnee's performance – and if there's an actor who could do it it's Matt Smith – then it would add a sense of dramatic purpose and dynamism to the show.

You could even, with the bigger, overarching "season mission", just about have a passing attempt at an excuse for the Doctor still using his potential-Reality Bomb of a TARDIS: "I know it's a terrible risk, old girl, but before we both lay down to rest we have one last mission: find who did this and stop them ever doing it again!"

Unfortunately, the Doctor seems to find this only mildly interesting, preferring to go straight to "Woo hoo! Let's have fun at Christmas" instead.

I stand by what I said last time – the problem is one of escalation: how do you follow this?

In 2005, the Daleks returned and threatened to destroy the Earth a hundred thousand years in the future!

In 2006 the Daleks and the Cybermen returned and threatened to destroy the Earth in the Present Day er, one year in the future!!

In 2007 the Master returned and did destroy the Earth one year in the future and threatened the entire universe!!!

In 2008 Davros returned and threatened every Universe ever!!!!

In 2009 the Time Lords returned and threatened to destroy not only the Universe but all time so it never even happened!!!!!

And in 2010 that actually happened!!!!!!

Possibly, Steve has in mind an idea for "the Silence" (oh, I've sneaked in a capitalisation, like "the war" becoming "the War" becoming "the Time War") that will make it or them a new enemy worthy of seven exclamation marks. If not, sooner or later we are going to have to pitch the season finale down a little bit or invent a new form of punctuation.


Last thought: crudely put, Comic Relief skit "The Curse of Fatal Death" (author a Mr S. Moffat) begins with the Doctor messing with predestination paradoxes – nipping back in time later to arrange to avoid death-traps – before the Daleks turn up and take him prisoner – sticking him in a chair even though they have no need of chairs – and concludes with him building a machine to save the Universe which accidentally kills him. And then his companion impossibly wishes him back to life.

But that's fair enough, because "The Curse of Fatal Death" was written as a paean to Doctor Who, recalling the ludicrousness of some of the series' conventions fondly not mockingly, and asserting just how good an idea it was and how, however impossibly, it really should come back.

Anyway, it's nothing like "The Big Bang"; it's got the Master in it.

But then Doctor Who did come back.

And that is what is really at the heart of "The Big Bang" – rammed home with the image of the Doctor literally at the heart of the Big Bang: a celebration that you cannot kill an idea, and that deep down we want that impossibly silly wonderful man back.

"How could we forget the Doctor?" asks Rory for all of us when that big, borrowed, blue box re-materialises in the middle of his wedding.

So for all that the Doctor becomes god (as well as an angel), both the creator god who sets off the Big Bang at the start of creation, and the eternal sacrifice who surrenders his life to redeem everyone, this isn't about a man who "burns in the centre of time"; this is about a man who saves little girls from the cracks in their walls and dances at weddings… badly.



Oh, and I loved the final effect shot: the TARDIS taking off from Earth into space, into the time vortex which then turned into the opening (not the closing) title sequence as the end titles played over.

Next Time… Guess what ITV have planned for their Christmas Poirot? Classic timing again from the commercial channel. It's the Doctor on the Orient Express!

Actually, Daddy, before then you've got to go back and review "The Wampires of Wet Stuff" and "Amy's Choice"!

.

Day 3460: George… Don't do that!

Tuesday:


Yes, it's Master Gideon's first Budgie. Or, oh fluff! It's Master Gideon's first Budgie.


What did we think of the SPEECH? Well, the VAT rise (equivalent to a more honest 3½p on the basic rate) was no less painful for being predictable, and the squeeze on benefits makes even MY button-eyes water. And that's BEFORE cutting spending by a QUARTER.

And whose FAULT it is? Stand up Mr… oh wait he's not in the Chamber!

Yes, Hard Labour loser, Mr Frown, the man who only missed his Golden Rule target by HALF A TRILLION POUNDS didn't even turn up!


Am I happy with the Budget?

No.

You'd have to be MAD to be "happy" about a Budget that raises taxes, especially a regressive tax like VAT, and cuts spending at the same time.


Am I happy that we are cutting spending NOW, this year, when only a few weeks ago we were cautioning against that?

No.

We had to make concessions in the Coalition Agreement and this was the big one, the one the Conservatives would not give up.

It is TRUE that we ALWAYS made it totally clear that fixing the deficit was a priority that overrode all other concerns but that we wanted to do so PRAGMATICALLY not IDEOLOGICALLY, and that the timing of cuts would be when it was right to do so.

And it is TRUE that on the "pragmatically test" the economy is doing VERY VERY slightly better and might be able to take it.

And also it is TRUE that the situation in the Markets – precipitated by the Euro crisis in Greece in particular – has become very much more urgent, meaning we need to show we are taking action to control our borrowing.

But we should honestly say that we HAVE changed our position on this. We have been persuaded that the Conservatories have a greater mandate to insist on their honestly held belief that cutting sooner is better. We have accepted that the BALANCE of RISK is that the danger of the markets running against us and driving up interest rates and driving down the pound is GREATER than the danger of a double-dip recession.

Remember: Macroeconomics isn't ROCKET SCIENCE – it's MUCH, MUCH MORE COMPLICATED than that!

(Seriously: we can get rockets into space almost every time, but no one knows how to get the economy to go consistently right. It's like steering a SUPER-TANKER by throwing FISH at the front end – sometimes it goes well, sometimes it goes badly and no one ever agrees on why. For that matter some people won't even agree on what "well" and "badly" mean!)

ALL Parties, Hard Labour included, said that there would be cuts, serious and deep cuts. It is HYPOCRITICAL of Hard Labour now to be throwing up SHOCKED MITTENS that anyone might actually DO the cuts.


Am I happy that Liberal Democrats are supporting a rise in VAT?

No.

Of course not. We warned of the Conservatory Tax Bombshell. We said "whenever the Conservatories have to raise taxes, they always choose VAT". Only last week I was protesting that an income tax rise would not just be FAIRER but would be REVERSIBLE – i.e. people could not just see the PAIN they had to pay to fix what Hard Labour did, they could share the RELIEF when the pain was over.

VAT is a regressive tax, whatever way you look at it.

Yes, it's true that FOOD is given a ZERO rate of VAT and that the cost of housing isn't VAT-ed either (rent is exempt and mortgage interest is "outside the scope" which means it's SO exempt that it's not even looked at when they think about things to exempt)

But, based on the Office of National Statistics "basket of goods" used for calculating inflation, food and housing together are only a FIFTH of household expenses.

Transport, clothes, furniture and other household stuff, "recreation and culture" (that's DVDs or the cinema to you and me – though also books which are let off), eating out, holidays… these are all VAT-able and will all go up in price.

(And we can probably expect them to go up in price by MORE than just the VAT rise because of inflation and to "round up" the price – you know, the way that £9.99 goes up to £10.99 not the £10.20 that the VAT rise necessitates).

As the Viz Top Tips say: "avoid the VAT rise – stop buying stuff!"

It's a jolly sight easier to "not buy stuff" if you are a rich family cutting out non-essentials than if you are poor family who couldn't afford non-essentials in the first place!

VAT is a BAD tax and we were against it.

But some battles you just lose.

We managed to get the Conservatories to increase Capital Gains Tax – not to 40%, but an increase, and I'm open to persuasion that the Treasury models showed that any greater increase would have brought in less tax.

We managed to get the Conservatories to increase personal allowances – not yet to £10,000, but as a first downpayment it's a start…

(…and yet already Hard Labour and their quislings are raising the ZOMBIE argument from its grave that a TAX REFORM doesn't help those who DON'T PAY TAX. Well dur! It's not SUPPOSED to! We want to make the TAX system fairer for those who DO pay tax; we want people at the bottom end not to have to pay tax at all. But people who DON'T pay tax we want to help by targeting spending, on education, on child tax credits, so that THAT reaches the people who need it…)

We managed to get the Conservatories to DROP plans to cut Inheritance Tax (the millionaire's tax cut) and to drop married couple's allowance (the ten quid bribe).

But I guess we just could not persuade them to raise Income Tax.

It's really the ONLY viable alternative to a VAT rise – no other tax raises as much money. And somehow Income Tax has become much, much more TOTEMIC. You KNOW what Hard Labour would say: oooOOOooo, WE never had to raise Income Tax in thirteen years, and NOW look what they've done!

(This of course is a LIE: Hard Labour DID raise Income Tax in the DISGUISED form of raising National Insurance. Same money, same effect on the taxpayer, different name. Of course the Tories couldn't raise THAT either, after all their "Jobs Tax" name-calling!)

I suppose you COULD raise taxes on business, but you know… RECESSION. Cutting corporation taxes will hopefully be a help in getting investment back into jobs, though as Mr Mark Reckons says, it could have been better aimed at SMALL businesses who are the backbone of Britain's economy.


Am I happy that benefits are targeted for eleven billion pounds of cuts?

No.

There's got to be some kind of SICK IRONY in breaking the link to the RPI (includes housing) cost of living for most benefits at the same time as we restore the link to earnings for pensions.

And I think announcing cap on Housing Benefit is gesture politics to placate the Daily Hate Mail. But I do not BELIEVE that the Hate Mail's stories of "illegal immigrants in million pound mansions" are anything more than anecdotes that are way way WAY outside the normal experience of benefit claimants.

And introducing medical tests for Disability Benefit seems a bit SUPERFLUOUS when there are ALREADY medical tests for Disability Benefit. Saving money by scaring people off is just BAD.

Is there FRAUD in the Benefit System? Yes there is. But far more overpayments are caused by ERROR because the system is so COMPLICATED. It would be a million times better to just make benefits SIMPLER and EASIER to get, and tell the tabloid press to GET STUFFED because we just ACCEPT that there will be a certain amount of money lost. Because no matter WHAT you do, a certain amount of money will be lost to people who are CLEVER because there will ALWAYS be people who are more clever than the people who operate the benefit system for the simple reason that the Government does NOT employ geniuses to run the benefit system. Or apparently even DESIGN the benefit system.

And anyway far more money is lost in VAT FRAUD than in benefit fraud, but that is lost to nasty scary gangsters who live in faraway places and are quite difficult to catch. Unlike Aunty Maude with her dodgy back.

But we HAVE protected pensions, the biggest part of the social security spend, and better than that, we HAVE restored that link with earnings, something Hard Labour promised by never found the time to deliver in thirteen years in power. And we HAVE done more for families with children.


So AM I happy with this budget?

No, again, no.

But "happy" wasn't on the table. Not after the worst recession in eighty years. Not after Britain had a longer and deeper recession than all the rest of the World. Not after thirteen years of Hard Labour. If you'd wanted "happy" you shouldn't have let Hard Labour spend MORE than they earned by at least 2% of GDP in EVERY year since the 2001 General Election.

Because THIS is the key graph of Mr Frown living beyond his means, as Chancer and then as Prime Monster:

Spendin'

You see the green line for receipts going up and down? THAT'S the "economic cycle": good years and bad years. Government spending should be averaging out on a line half way between the top and the bottom of those peaks and troughs so that over the "cycle" the government earns all that it spends, borrows a bit, pays it back.
Anything more than that and you are mounting up debts that you're not going to be able to repay. That's what they call a "STRUCTURAL" deficit, it's the borrowing when you should be repaying.

Look what Mr Frown did in his FIRST term, 1997 to 2001: receipts rise, spending falls; receipts fall, spending rises. That was FINE. That was the way to manage the economy PRUDENTLY.

Look what Mr Frown did in his SECOND term, 2001 to 2005: receipts rise, spending rises even further. That's a recipe for DISASTER.

Look what Mr Frown and then Sooty did in their THIRD term, 2005 to 2010: receipts collapse, spending goes through the roof. That's a CATACLYSM.


Hard Labour seem to think that "recovery" would have bailed them out of the trouble they've gotten us all into. But just look at the projection: the receipts recover according to the usual pattern of the economic cycle (in fact rather generously, there doesn't appear to be a downturn of receipts towards the end of the five-year period that the cycle seems to predict) but see how long it takes to bring down the massive overspending.

THAT'S why we have years and years and YEARS of painful careful management to come.

Hard Labour seem to think that now they are in Opposition all they have to do is point the finger and say: they're cutting jobs (that never existed); they're cutting training (that only hid the unemployed); they're cutting hospitals (that were imaginary, that we never funded, that we just MADE UP!).

Or as Harriet the Harminator hooted in her response: it's not fair, it's not fair, it's not fair, it's not fair, it's not fair, it's not fair, it's not fair, it's not fair, it's not fair, it's not FAIR!

The whinge of the biggest baby in Westminster.

And as for Mr Alistair Dalek (formerly Mr Frown's glove puppet Sooty) expressing DOUBT in the Government's growth figures… gasp… gasp… gasp… words just fail me!

It's just not good enough! What would THEY have cut? What were the cuts they SAID they were going to make? Why don't they have any kind of plan at all?

Don't give me this "it's all about shrinking the state" guff. If you REALLY think that the size of the State is "about right", then go ahead, make a case for the EIGHTY BILLION pounds in tax rises you need to pay for it all.

VAT up to 25%? 30%? 35%! It's still not enough!

Raise the basic rate of tax to 40% - DOUBLE IT! – you might just cover it.

That is the sort of scale of tax take you're talking about if you want to keep up this level of spending.

But don't pretend you can keep on spending money like your Sweden while raising taxes like your Texas. And don't lie to people that you can keep on borrowing forever. Mr Frown may have spent a decade with his fingers in his ears going "Lalalala I see no debt" and all the while mortgaging the future of his two young sons.

The WORST kind of lie is the promise to do something and then never doing it. Hard Labour came in by making a lot of promises that they broke. It's hardly surprising they went out making a whole lot more promise they knew they could never keep, and that the next government would have to break.

So yes, the Coalition will have to disappoint you about those free school meals that HARD LABOUR NEVER DELIVERED. They're not GOING to be delivered because LABOUR LIED.




So does that mean I oppose this Budget?

Sigh.

No.

Reluctantly. Grudgingly. With a heavy heart and drooping trunk, I have to support the Coalition budget.

For the sake of stability. For the sake of still HAVING an economy in five years' time. For the sake of getting SOME little bits of Liberal GOODNESS rather than 100% of nothing at all.

Because the alternative is Conservatory Budget untrammelled by Liberal Democrat fairness, based on tax cuts for the rich with no relief for the poor and nothing but contempt the public sector.

Or a Hard Labour budget that is based on AIR and FANTASY and would delivers us to the IMF (I can't even joke that it'd be Mr Phelps' Impossible Mission Force, because things would get so bad it'd have to be the International Monetary Fund to be the only ones who could save us).



As for what did I think of Master Gideon's SPEECH…

Well, here is the young Baronet at the Despatch Box, seemingly flanked by Captain Clegg and Mr Danny Champion of the World.

Slashin'

I say "seemingly" because in fact you cannot see where Mr Balloon is hiding. Yes, the Chancer of the Exchequer is sat right in the Prime Monster's lap. Or possibly, Mr Balloon has his hand right up Master Oboe's… VAT policy.

I THINK that expression may be what they mean by "fiscal tightening"…

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