Day 2974: DOCTOR WHO: The End of the World

Saturday:


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

Hang on, that's not right…

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

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

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

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

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

It is all nonsense, of course.

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

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

DOCTOR: ...including the Daleks.

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

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

COMMANDER: The fifty-seventh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Day 2972: Pilots of the Future?

Thursday:


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

Dare... to be different

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


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Day 2970: Conservatory Local Plans mean MORE Centralisation

Tuesday:


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Other aspects of the new Conservatory wheeze include:

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

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

Obviously these are LIBERAL DEMOCRAT ideas.




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

Friday:


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

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

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

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

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

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

Will they BOJO!


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

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

Or, more succinctly:

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

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


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Day 2965: Lincoln Memorial - a late Frost/Nixon

Thursday:


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

Why's it not called NIXON/FROST?

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

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

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

PS:

Happy Darwin Day!

Day 2963: When Sorry is the EASIEST word to say

Tuesday:


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

WUNCH of BANKERS!

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

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

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

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Day 2959: M M Murder

Friday:


Number of people DEAD as a result of the Jonathan Woss / Russell Brand-name telephone titter: NIL.
(Daily Mail leads campaign AGAINST BBC)

Number of people DEAD as a result of measles due to the fall in MMR vaccinations: NOT NIL.
(Daily Mail leads campaign FOR measles)

The Daily Hate Mail: we kill people to boost our profits; trust US over the BBC or your house price will fall!!!!!!!!!


Fluffy Footnote: anyone at all familiar with where the Daily Mail's support lay in 1938 will know that accusing the BBC of using "informants" to oust Ms Thatch is IRONIC: a clear case of the pot calling the kettle… a term of racist abuse.



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Day 2949: Clogg – The Crisis in the Economy IS a Crisis in our Politics

Tuesday:


We enter the Portcullis House of Her Majesty’s newly-renamed Cashpoint Fortress of Westminster, where Daddy Richard’s civil liberties are again slapped in the face and his face is slapped all over the LASER DISPLAY MONITOR of the new security system, so that his digital identity can be recorded in yet another Government DATABASE*, there to be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, referenced, cross-referenced, sold to the highest bidder, sent to the lowest common denominator, and ultimately lost on a government memory-stick on a train somewhere between Paddington and Swansea.

Appropriately, we were there to hear Mr Clogg address Charter 88 (now Unlock Democracy) for their 20th anniversary get-together.

Mr Clogg's Charter

Introduced by Baroness Helena Kennedy, styling herself a “Liberal Socialist”, and with a reply from Dame Ferdinand Mount, bigging up Mr Balloon’s PR pose as a “Liberal Conservatory”, Mr Clogg spoke for quarter of an hour about the INTERTWINE-ED-NESS of Great Britain’s current economic crisis and the wretched state of Great Britain’s political settlement.

He began with an apology, an apology because of his pessimism about our current situation in spite of all the achievements that Charter 88 has, er, achieved: the Human Rights Act (under pressure as it is); Freedom of Information (much a the Government tries to twist its way out of it); Devolution to Scotland and Wales (well that seems to have worked out). Mr Clogg praised them for their stubbornness, their resilience, their sense of purpose, their sense of mission.

But, he said, for all the steps forward there had been too many steps back.

The mass CRIMINALISATION of our society, with Hard Labour Government making on average another TWO things illegal EVERY SINGLE DAY.

The lopsided, partial, unfair electoral system that gives untrammelled unaccountable power to a Government with the support of less than a quarter of the eligible voters.

And the advance of the surveillance state, the DNA databases and I.D.iot card schemes that no one ever asked for and that even this week the Government is looking to allow further pooling of data in spite of their notorious inability to keep it secure.

The opening sentence of the 1988 Charter, “We have had less freedom than we believed”, is truer now than in 1988, he said.

But what are we doing worry about “the constitution” when there’s an ECONOMIC DISASTER overwhelming us!

Well, says Mr Clogg, the manner in which we have MISMANAGED the economy is DIRECTLY linked to the way that we have conducted our politics.

The “Winner takes All” culture leads directly to “Boom and Bust”. The system that gives the government an unrepresentative majority allows it to BLUNDER ON without accountability or proper oversight or the need to listen to voices like Mr Dr Vince “the Power” Cable so that it is BOUND to make STUPID decisions. And a centralised, over-mighty executive is more susceptible to being captured by VESTED INTERESTS, like the way that the City of London has ruled the British Governments of either colour for the last TWENTY YEARS.

(Do you see how he tied that in to the Charter ’88 anniversary there!)

This is a crisis that rests on the POWERLESSNESS of the British people. The self same complaints, voiced by the people who talked to Baroness Helena on the Power Commission, the same anger, the same fury even about the way they are left out of decision making by politicians could be said about the way that the banking system didn’t hold the people in charge to account and let them spiral right OUT OF CONTROL.

And, going all YODA for a moment, Mr Clogg explains: POWERLESSNESS leads to ANGER and ANGER leads to QUESTIONING OUR LIBERAL DEMOCRACY and QUESTIONING OUR LIBERAL DEMOCRACY leads to EXTREMISTS.

Every crisis is seen as an opportunity by the extremists, the populists, the xenophobes and the bigots, thriving on people’s fear and offering the quick and easy-seeming answers, assigning blame rather than taking action, advocating insularity that (as we saw in the Great Depression) makes matters WORSE not better.


Fortunately, there is a “but”!

Dame Ferdinand, in replying, quoted LENIN (typical Conservatory!) saying Mr Clogg had “pessimism of the intellect, but optimism of the will”.

“But” said Mr Clogg, the very crisis that exists ALLOWS us to think the radical things, to consider the impossible. As we nationalise banks willy-nilly, as we hand out billions to the car industry, as we RE-WRITE the whole way that Capitalism works… let us take the opportunity to re-write the way we do politics as well.

And these things go fluffy-foot in fluffy-foot!

As we bring greater accountability to Government, we can reform the City of London.

As we introduce fair elections so everyone has an equal voice, not just the vested interests, we can design an economy that caters for the needs of everyone, not just the best off.

As we open up Government to supervision by its citizens, and roll back the intrusive, unwanted surveillance state, we can open up companies to greater participation by their employees, and free the innovative spirit of Britain.

And as we make the MUCH-NEEDED reform to the House of Commoners and House of Lords Club, we can reform the short-termism of the “get rich quick” “something for nothing” culture and invest for a sustainable, prosperous, green future.

PS:

*Government efficiency being what it is, we expect that the database in question is either NHS Connecting for Health or ContactPoint.

PPS:

Mr Clogg also said that Unlock Democracy nee Charter ’88 should continue to badger, hector and embarrass politicians into working together. He said he had started his leadership by trying it: he wrote to Mr Frown and Mr Balloon about the possibility of organising a Constitutional Convention.

Mr Frown, he said, brushed him off saying: “all my reforms are perfect already”

Mr Balloon, though, was enthusiastic: “yes, yes, yes, let’s gang up on Gordon”

But then Mr Clogg spotted Conservatory Mr Davis David in the audience...

Politicians working together
(yes that IS Mr Davis David)

...and Mr Clogg welcomed his presence as a sign that politicians could work together to fix politics!

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Day 2946: DOCTOR WHO: Rose

Saturday:


With no PROPER series of Doctor Who on the telly this year, I had already decided that I would be getting Daddy Richard to go back and write reviews of all the stories that he missed out (because I hadn't started writing my diary yet!) when what should come along but The Doctor Who DVD files*.

Part one takes back to the very first adventure (well since I arrived, anyhoo) where Mr Dr Chris met Ms Billie Piper and everything changed!

The first thing to say about "Rose" is that it was and remains a cracking piece of television.

It's all but impossible to review this "as if it was on the night". We know now what we didn’t then, that the series would be a huge success, reshaping the whole idea of modern television, spawning a slew of imitators ("Robin Hood", "Primeval", "Merlin", "Demons") none of which can quite get the mix right in the way that "Rose" and all the Doctor Who that followed has done.

And yet, even standing on its own, "Rose" is really good. The pace is astronomical: never mind the time-travelling alien, we learn about Rose's whole life, her mother, her boyfriend, the inadequacies of her relationship, her unsatisfying life… and that's all in five minutes without dialogue.

In 1996, Paul McGann starred as the Doctor in what has come to be known as "the TV movie", or "Enemy Within" or "Grace 1999" though we prefer to call it "Time Waits for No Man" (which, at least, was on all of the advertising). As a "back door pilot", and an attempt to relaunch "Doctor Who" for a new audience, it did just about everything possible wrong: we start with the Doctor (the unknowable alien) as our central figure; we start inside the TARDIS (the impossible space-time craft) we start, in other words, just about as far away as possible from anything that might be recognised as the "real world", whatever that might be!

(And that's without mentioning the great galloping mouthfuls of infodump that Paul has to speak over the opening of the show, followed by brief appearances by the (old) Master and the Daleks as though they are supposed to mean something to the viewer. Though if you think that's bad, just wait for the bit where the Doctor gives Grace the entire potted history of himself, his ship and his enemy the Master in two sentences. Which is even more of a shame coming as it does right after the best line in the thing! (The one about shoes, obviously). Look, I'll be more positive about it if I ever review it!)

"Rose" gets it right by doing the complete opposite.

Actually, "Rose" gets it right because it's written by someone who has a grasp of how real people behave, how they talk and the sort of things they talk about. The recurring motif of "chips" as a metaphor for "ordinary human life" begins here. Where the McGann movie tries to thrust all of the answers at us, "Rose" reduces the key facts to one succinct exchange:

Rose: are you alien?

The Doctor: Yes. Is that okay?

Having begun with the assumption that we – like Rose Tyler, everyday shopgirl – know nothing about the Doctor, we follow her discoveries as he appears out of nowhere, rescues her from freaky walking dummies and then blows up her job. Is he a good guy or a bad guy? There's this blue box thing that we see a couple of times, and the camera seems to dwell on it like it's important, but what's that all about?

There are four moments where the plot – and the pounding incidental music – pause to highlight each crucial development.

After escaping from Henrick's basement the mysterious stranger shoos Rose away almost contemptuously, go back to your little life while I deal with the monsters. And he shuts the door on her.

And then, in the pause, he opens the door again to say:

"I'm the Doctor, by the way. Pleased to meet you, Rose Tyler. Run for your life!"

And then the music restarts and Rose scampers away, half turning to look back at the shop and then – and I like this – looking away so she actually misses the moment where Henricks (i.e. Harrods) explodes. (Blowing up a major London landmark on your first day out? Start as you mean to go on, I suppose.)

The next moment, the next point of transition or revelation if you like, is outside the TARDIS. Having just, literally, walked Rose though the plot, disguising the exposition as a walk in the park, and tossed in a couple of references to the war that's going on around us (it seems like an incidental detail at the time; oh how unprepared we were for the hugeness of things), but then the Doctor pauses and sets out what is probably the manifesto for the series emotional content.

He tells Rose that he feels the turning of the world.

It's the flip-side of what Paul Cornel will later describe as "burning at the centre of time"; it's the thing that sets him totally apart form everybody else. In fact we will learn (as soon as next week) that there aren't even any more of his own kind any more. The message of this scene isn't "I'm different" or "I'm scary", it is "I'm, lonely; utterly, utterly lonely".

We'll come back to this central emotion over and over again as the series goes on, and it's a brilliant conceit, actually, giving us a new dimension to a heroic character, like the way that Star Trek II turns about Kirk's emotions on getting older. And it's a continuing character thread because we know that change is in the DNA of this series: that companions, even Doctors, come and go. And so it seems completely natural and honest that the Doctor would miss them more and more. In fact, the surprise is that it hasn't been played more in the series' past, what with it going back all the way to the first Doctor losing his granddaughter Susan, and we see his loneliness several times, when Ian and Barbara leave and again when he thinks Steven has deserted him.

So it's only now, after introducing the Doctor and then giving us his emotional core, that we move to the biggie: the ventral point of the series that is "Doctor Who".

The reveal of the inside of the TARDIS, including that quote, is one of the perfect moments of television.

We know – we know because we were fans, or we know now because there's no one left in Britain who doesn't know – that it is bigger on the inside than the outside. But not really since "And Unearthly Child" in foggy November 1963 has the full stunning impact of the Doctor's just impossible machine been so hammered home. To Rose it is no more than a "blue hut", so when she runs in, convinced that the plastic monster that's after them will get them, she cannot believe it. And we don't see what she sees, only her against the interior doors and a sense that it doesn’t match the outside. And then she staggers back out and, in spite of the danger, has to gawp round the outside again to convince herself of – and tease us with – the fact that it is small. And then we see the inside. The full glorious slow crane shot. And the haunting Time Lord theme. It's a small still point to say: "look, this is something wonderful".

And then the pace cranks back up again, and Rose says something very human about Mickey, asks whether he's dead, and we're off again on the madcap chase across London to the Nestene Consciousness.

Almost without noticing, that still point has bridged us from Rose's world into the Doctor's.

The final moment comes at the end, obviously.

"Oh, did I mention it also travels in time."

Having teased us with an almost TV-movie-like "no I'll stay behind" moment, the Doctor returns to play his trump card. And Rose's slow-motion run towards the waiting doors speaks for all of us who by now, after the last forty-five minutes want to run away into this world of wild adventure.


"Rose" isn't completely perfect, of course, just very nearly. Ironically, it seems to be Eccleston who has the most wonky moments as he tries to do light and frothy and seems to be pushing it just a bit too hard. But then he'll do something completely brilliant, like the way just after he leaves Rose after the "turning of the world" and his face goes totally dead, like he knows he's just turned his back on life. So with hindsight it's difficult to say that it's Chris acting badly when it appears more likely that it is the Doctor who is acting, acting "normal", and doing it badly.

And Noel Clarke hasn't yet found his feet as Mickey, though in fact he is hilarious as the Auton Mickey (and doesn't it speak volumes about Rose's relationship that her boyfriend is replaced with plastic and she doesn't even notice! "I'm sorry, were we talking about me for minute there," she asks with total unselfconsciousness.) And actually, there's something slightly more endearing about the "wet" Mickey, something that isn’t as damaged as the one who he becomes later, defeated in love by a man with a time machine.

Not all the humour works. If your upset by a burping wheelie bin, then you've got no soul, but Auton Mickey's p-p-p-ppizza is a bit forced, and perhaps surprisingly "he's gay and she's an alien" seems a bit flat on re-hearing it. Having said that, the show would be nowhere without humour, and where it works, it's often priceless. ("It'll look like a transmitter: round and massive. It must be totally invisible." Rose just stares… etc!)

And you have to admit. the Auton Invasion at the climax does appear to consist of an attack on one shopping centre. Later, "Love & Monsters" will try to retcon this; and future episodes will get better at achieving a sense of true scale to planetary invasions. (Let's be fair and say that the series' success will let the producers demand the resources to achieve this properly.)

In spite of all that, though, this is really one of the best "invasion of modern day Earth" stories, because the invasion itself is almost incidental; it's about the ordinary people caught up in the Invasion. Some later stories will lose that, focusing instead on the bizarre and extraordinary people at the expense of the real. (Hands up the students of the Rattigan academy for not being audience identification figures!)

From here, Doctor Who is going to be utterly transformed into a huge, huge monster of a television show, its key episodes becoming must-see event telly, even its behind the scenes events becoming headline news. With that will come an urge to make the episodes bigger, glossier, louder, starrier. That hasn't happened yet, and in a sense that makes "Rose" a more naïve version of the series to come, and perhaps a better episode because of it.

"Rose" remains a terrifically good piece of television because everyone involved has put all that they could into making it not bigger and better than anything we've seen before, but just right.

*Now you might call this yet another part-work that mugginses sign up for, but I say think of it as an exciting new way to keep the money circulating and the credit crunch at bay while getting even more Doctor Who DVDs!

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Day 2945: Peter Vain fights for social justice and the vulnerable (i.e. him)

Oh, Mr Peter Vain, how we have missed you… like a heliotrope-hued hole in the head!

Has losing his cushy ministerial job… and his OTHER cushy ministerial job… cured him of his magenta-manicured megalomania and made him a better person? Let us see…

No sooner has he been found GUILTY of "serious and substantial failures" to report the thousands of pounds donated to his brilliant total success doomed campaign to deputy-lead Hard Labour, than up he pops in the Grauniad to document his STRUGGLE to clear his name.

A clue for you, you old firebrick-brushed fraud: it's a struggle BECAUSE you are GUILTY!

"Not a penny went to me, not a penny came from taxpayers…"

…he begins. Oh dear, that is two errors in two clauses, this does not bode well.

"Not a penny went to me": it was spent on YOUR campaign, Mr Vain. It was spent with the intention of YOU being the beneficiary… even if your humiliating second-to-bottom place may suggest that it was a complete waste of money.

"…not a penny came from taxpayers": well it DID, because EVERY person who donated money to your campaign has to have been a payer of UK tax (or you are in ANOTHER whole heap of trouble… just ask Mr Wendy/Ms Douglas Alexander). What you MEAN is that your little vanity project was not funded from general taxation, the taxes that we pay to the Government for, well, all the OTHER vainglorious schemes that they inflict on us.

Vanity project, Mr, er, Vain? Yes! Given that, of the six candidates, five of them – you included, Mr Vain – were standing on virtually identical manifestoes… given that the PRIZE for winning (for anyone other than Mr Frown's heavily tipped preferred candidate of Postman Pat) in this little exercise in throwing a "FAUX-democratic" bone to the recently-deprived-of-a-proper-leadership-election-by-Mr-Frown's-ascension members of Hard Labour's proletariat was a TOKEN job and a LOLLIPOP… given that it wasn't about EITHER power OR policy… it is a BIT difficult to characterize this INTERNAL Hard Labour JOB INTERVIEW as an exercise in the VITAL POWERS of democracy.

It really was more about buffing up your brown-basted ego, wasn't it, Mr Vain.

And of course it was a much, much bigger waste of money than any of the other candidates because Mr Vain raised far, far MORE money than any of the other candidates: in fact his £180,000-£200,000 in donations is more than half as much as the about £370,000 raised by ALL the other candidates PUT TOGETHER.


Mr Vain's self-justifying non-apology continues, between bouts of maundering self-pity, with efforts to throw mud at other Parliamentarians, muddy the waters of political accountability, excuse Hard Labour for making bad laws and finally abandoning the Rule of Law altogether!

First the muck-raking:

"This year alone between February 20 and June 30 there were 172 donations, totalling £783,574, which were reported up to seven years late by MPs, including the Tory leader, David Cameron, the Liberal Democrats leader, Nick Clegg, and the now the London mayor, Boris Johnson."

This is an INFURIATINGLY UNSOURCED accusation, both in the Grauniad and on Mr Vain's own web page – have these people never HEARD of HYPERLINKS?!? – because I should really like to know how MANY of the six-hundred-and-fifty-plus MPs are included in this report.

Because you see, it is a bit DISHONEST to mention a REALLY BIG number and then a REALLY LONG time to be late and then CHERRY-PICK just three names to blame. He makes it LOOK like Mr Balloon, Mr Clogg and Bojo the Clown have had it away with quarter-of a million a head. Or even THREE-quarters of a million EACH.

Taken as an average, those 172 late declarations out at £4,556 each – which is a tidy sum, but not in remotely the same league as Mr Vain's £100,000 blooper. Whereas the way Mr Vain makes it come out, it looks like he's only doing what others have done.

There might be some case for complaint that the treatment of different people under this law does not seem to be proportionate, and certainly it's fair to wonder why the Baronet Oboe seems to have avoided even so much as a trip to the naughty-step.

But even if smearing your political opponents with "THEY DID IT TOO, N'YER" wasn't deeply UNATTRACTIVE, the idea that a new law is a BAD law because it has caught lots of people seems… BIZARRE rather underdescribes this conclusion.


Anyway, next on to buck-passing:

"We need to be able to share the responsibility of complying with the current complex rules. Busy MPs (in my case also holding two cabinet jobs at the time) should be able to appoint compliance officers – especially for internal party campaigns – with similar legal obligations to agents in public elections."

This is INTERESTING – to say the least – because according to the Electoral Commission, the MAIN reason that Mr Vain got away with not going to PRISON was because

"…regulated donations were not reported to the Commission on time. However, they have said that Mr Hain was not the person responsible for reporting the donations, and that it is not possible to prove that anyone else involved with his campaign was responsible."

If anything, surely this means that reform ought to be the EXACT OPPOSITE of what Mr Vain suggests, pinning the responsibility MORE FIRMLY to the individual MP, not less. Yes, of COURSE she or he should be allowed to employ a compliance officer (or bookkeeper) to keep track of the paperwork. Goodness, the House of Commons could even afford to PAY (yes, shock, horror, etc). But the RESPONSIBILITY should never be palmed off on a civil servant or functionary.


Then we have the covering of Mr Frown's bottom:

"this experience has underlined to me just how vulnerable all those in public life are, thanks to the unintended consequences of what was well-meaning legislation by Labour to clean up political funding under the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000."

There's almost TOO MUCH here to cover. I mean why limit the victims of "unintended consequences" to those in public life. There are plenty of examples of private citizens (or indeed NATIONS, if you happen to be Iceland) being victimised by Hard Labour's unstoppable torrent of "well-meaning" legislation.

And what exactly is the meaning of "well-meaning"? Because under the circumstances, and given Mr Vain's "examples" above, "well-meaning" seems to be meaning "meant to get the Conservatories".

How DEEPLY EMBARRASSING for Hard Labour to discover that their own members were as venal and untrustworthy as the Conservatories. Only, it turns out, the Hard Labour CANNOT be embarrassed. How else can you explain Mr Vain's unspeakable GALL?!


And so finally, away to La-La Land:

"But my fundamental conclusion is also that the police should never have been brought into politics as this flawed legislation (repeated in the new bill) has done."

As one of the commentators remarks, someone really OUGHT to pass that memo on to the Hopeless Secretary, Ms Jacquie Spliff.

But HONESTLY, if that's your fundamental conclusion then your fundamental conclusion is that politicians should be ABOVE the LAW! (How can I claim to be surprised that a Hard Labour apparatchik thinks this way!)

As a CONCLUSION, that certainly has FUNDAMENT in it.

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Day 2942: Doctor Who 45th Anniversary – Why Was 2003 Brilliant?

It's the beginning of the end for the BBC books, as Sabbath blows the universe to smithereens and the Doctor, Fitz and Anji go galumphing through the alternatives, while the Past Doctor range takes to crossing over Doctors and slaughtering companions, though none of it will count after "Someplot Never" timewipes the lot.

Fortunately the DVD range gets into its stride, with ace releases for "Fenric", "Talons" and, best of all, the stunning CGI Dalek saucers in "The Dalek Invasion of Earth".

But the one Daddy's NEVER going to pick is…

Doctor Who – Zagreus

"Ugh! It looks like Wales!"

Bloated, self-indulgent, canon obsessed, stuffed with in-jokes (yes, like that one about Wales) and, yes, yet another attempt to "explain" the self-destruction of 1990's Doctor Who's continuity (without admitting it's because they couldn't bring themselves to play together nicely)… all these things can be fairly said of the show's Fortieth Anniversary story.

And yet, it's also rather magnificent.

Made to wait eighteen months after the apocalyptic cliff-hanger ending to the awesome "Neverland", and at the end of Big Finish's widely praised "villains" quadrille ("Omega", "Davros", "Master"…), fans' expectations could not have been higher. So OBVIOUSLY it's the JAR JAR BINKS.

But there's still much to love here: no fewer than five (yes FIVE) former Dr Whos, with they and their companions all in tumbled jumbled-up roles: Mr Dr Colin as a vampire, Mr Dr Peter as a vicar, Mr Dr Sylv as Walt Disney(!) Winkle, Ms Nicola Bryant as a mad professor, Ms Bonnie Langford as Goldilocks (with Ms Sophie Aldred and Ms Lisa "Benny" Bowerman as the animatronic animals) and an almighty villainous turn from Mr Nick "the Brigadier" Courtney.

And it may be a total fanboy moment… but the cliff-hanger ending to Part Two is just brilliant, the discordant horns of the Dark Tower telling we are returned to the realm of "The Five Doctors"…



We're on Gallifrey for one last time (well, barring the eighteen-part spin off series with Ms Lalla and Ms Louise, of course) so OBVIOUSLY there's a traitor in the Time Lords' ranks who's behind it all, but never mind that. In fact, never mind that the plot makes little or no sense whatsoever. This isn't, for once, about the story, it's about getting all these people who we know together because we love their company. And funnily enough, after Mr Dr Paul spends ages shouting away all on his own, it's only when he meets up with all the others that he realises that being Dr Who can be FUN!


Zagreus is available to buy on CD or to download as a podcast direct from Big Finish.

If you've never listened to a Big Finish adventure before… for goddess' sake don't start here; get "Jubilee" instead!


And then, in September, there is THAT news from BBC Death Zone Wales…

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Day 2941: Fatman Returns

Monday:


Starring Mr Balloon as "The Penguin"

And Mr Lord Mandy Mandelbrot (and his nine lives) as "The Catwoman"

Conservatory Central Office, in association with Saatchi and Saatchi present a Grant Schaps Film: Mr Kenny "Fatty" Clarke is FATMAN in…

"Fatman Returns"

Also starring Master Gideon Oboe as "The Ice Princess"

And, in especially large letters at the end, Mr Christopher Walken as "Lady Thatcher"

PS:

The press release says they've "agreed to disagree" on Europe… so actually everyone is playing TWO-FACE!

PPS:

Master Oboe has just been on the RADIO to explain that it's all HIS idea!

Oboe: Please, mister, will you do my homework?

Fatman: Certainly, little boy. Now… would you like some cigarettes?

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Day 2938: New Runways

Friday:


New York: and HEROIC Captain Chesley Sullenberger proves that you don't need a third runway.

Meanwhile, London: and Mayor Boris the Clown swears to fight the third runway all the way…

…am I the only one who sees Runway Three rearing up, Mothra-like, and roaring at the City only for Godzilla-sized Bojo to come blundering into battle:

"I… I… I… blimey! Gosh, that's bit fierce! I… oops, crikey! I've squished Camden…"

Maybe not.

Anyway, Secretary of State for CATTLE CLASS, Mr "Buff" Hoon, announced that we will be having a third runway no matter what anyone else thinks because in spite of the economy grinding to a halt and in spite of London already having five airports there is still an urgent need for even more capacity so that bankers can flee the capital for the length of the financial downturn. Er…

Anyway, this, he told the House of Commoners, is vitally important to every single one of us in the country. Which is why Mr Frown has decided that he should make the decision entirely on his own and not let anyone else have a vote on it.

There will, however, be STRICT monitoring and controls so that we know that the environment is being completely stuffed protected and that the Government are breaking their own rules again keeping their promises.

And everyone will be asked to HOLD THEIR BREATH while going through the airport so that the CO2 emissions don't go stratospheric!

You know, there's something DISTINCTLY ODD about these runway plans: you know, the way that Runway Three is only HALF the length of numbers One and Two… and yet the proposed extension to the Heathrow boundary has these STICKY-OUTY mysteriously runway-shaped bits at either end… almost like there's room to EXTEND runway three even further.

Goodness but no one who wants to extend an airport could ever tell fibs about their long term plans!

Mind you, have you noticed how they appear to be building over not just three inhabited villages but also two motorways? I wonder how the A380 Double Dumbo Jet is going to cope with the variable speed limit on the M25?!

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Day 2937: BCNU

Thursday:


Nevermore an Orange Alert; Mr Patrick McGoohan has finally left the Village.

Mr McGoohan was one of those legendary iconic figures, like Sir Christopher Lee or Dame Patrick Macnee, someone you just expect to go on forever, and the World is a profoundly poorer place for no longer having him in it.

We celebrated his life by watching the Prisoner episode: "Dance of the Dead". It just seemed appropriate.

The Prisoner isn't really about the story. It's not for understanding; it's for THINKING ABOUT. And it asks some pretty difficult questions about the important things like DEMOCRACY and FREEDOM and RULES.

There are seventeen episodes of The Prisoner, ranging from fairly perplexing to downright dribbling, and from spy-a-rama to Western to Fairy Story, but there are FOUR of them that are the heart of it:

"Arrival", the series prospectus or possibly just the longest possible version of the famous title sequence; "Dance of the Dead"; "Free for All"; and "Once Upon a Time".

There IS a mundane explanation, an "answer" if you like to the question of The Prisoner: why did Agent John Drake resign? If you don't already know, it's… at the bottom of the page*

Or there's the semi-crass "psychological" view that it's all inside Mr McG's head. Not for nothing are the number "1" and the perpendicular pronoun "I" almost identical.

But that's not what is IMPORTANT.

So while this episode's story, as far as it goes, sees Carnival Time in The Village, with the Prisoner allowed to dress in his old suit to go to the ball, only to wind up on trial for breaking the rules and pursued by the mob, it's not ABOUT that. It's about the images along the way, and these are only a few of them:

The Prisoner thinks he can make friends with a cat, the cat who walks by herself, only to learn that she is Number Two's cat.

Slipping out of the Carnival that he has rejected, he borrows a scientific coat as disguise so he can explore the (previously off limits) Town Hall. He thinks he's being very clever but, ooh, he's "putting on a costume" after all.

Asked about the promised cabaret, Number Two replies bluntly: "you're it" (and later the Prisoner is "it" again in a LETHAL game of chase).

And in the trial, the three judges (French revolution style) are Good Queen Bess, Emperor Nero and Napoleon. Cleopatra is a witness. Wondering why only the sympathetic prosecutor, Bo Peep, is not dressed as a monarch, we realise that is fact she is: she's Marie Antoinette, and she's "dressing up".

And escaping from the murderous Villagers (who then merely lose interest in their "justice") the Prisoner thinks he's found the telex machine from Number One. He smashes the machinery to stop it… and then it starts working again. Because you can't smash the machinery of The Village.

"The Prisoner" was very much the signature piece of Mr Patrick McGoohan. It is almost unique, and sometimes very difficult. But, like the grit in the oyster, it makes for a more marvellous World.


Who was Number One?

You were, Number Six. You were.





*But then I would have to shoot you!

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Day 2936: Is it just me or are the banks taking over the government?

Wednesday:


Call me old fashioned, but I thought that the banks were now owned by US (i.e. the Great British taxpayer).

But it seems that the directors of OUR banks think that they're going to carry on treating us with the same amount of CONTEMPT with which they usually regard their shareholders.

Far from accepting that they've trollied the economy and now ought to JOLLY WELL DO WHAT THEY ARE TOLD! and help put things right again, it appears that they have to be BRIBED to lend money.

And the Hard Labour Government are so CRAVEN that they'll cough up!

As Mr Dr Vince "the Power" Cable says:


"…the Government seems to lack the bottle to break the banks' lending strike."

The nub of Lord Mandy's wheeze is that he will put up the cash to cover any debts that go bad. So the bank can go ahead and loan out the money, and if the debt goes bad then WE will pay up.

Some people might think that this means that we take all the risk and the bank takes all the reward… and they'd be right!

Of course, the POINT of the plan is to get the banks to do EXTRA lending. But do you think that the crafty bankers are going to go along with that? Or do you suspect (as I do!) that with the right fluffy foot they will extend shiny new loans to get the benefits of the Governments free cash offer, while with the left fluffy foot they are foreclosing on as many loans NOT covered by the guarantee as they can get away with. Net effect: little or no new lending (so no boost to the economy); bankers get mink-lined one way bet.

(Did I say "mink-lined"? "Oooh, that's real cat, Mr Lord Mandy!")

That's the BAD news; the WORSE news is that this is exactly the same as the Conservatories plan. So we know it's not going to work!

Actually, the Conservatories have a fancy claim that THEIR scheme wouldn't cost the taxpayer any money, because they would allow the bank to charge a FEE for the guaranteed loan. Or "charging a higher interest rate" as we used to call it before suggesting that putting up interest rates during a credit crunch became an obvious sign of being a MORON.

Which reminds me… Mr Lord Mandy's new announcement has left young Master Gideon Oboe reduced to whinging that "Hard Labour stole my loan scheme". Welcome to OUR world, Lib-Dem-Policy-stealing Tory-boy!


And now, to add further evidence of a banking takeover, Mr Frown's appointed replacement at the Cabinet table for Lord Pigby Jones is to be… yet another merchant banker.

Never mind poacher turned gamekeeper, surely this is letting the lunatics take over the asylum!


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Day 2935: Dates for Your Diary

Tuesday:

1.

According to the BBC, Monday the 23rd of March will see the release of a long-awaited new album from the Pet Shop Boys, to be called "Yes".

(Presumably to be accompanied by an even-longer-awaited* new album from "Yes" called "Pet Shop Transcendental Unicorns and shstuff").

The album will feature Mr Jonny Marrmite. Which isn't as funny as if it featured Mr ANDY Marrmite. But then HE's in Mr Kevin Space-age's new play, so go figure!

2.

Ms Lynne Featherweight posts to tell us the excellent news that Tuesday 24th of March will be Ada Lovelace day.

In case you don't know, Ms Lovelace, aka Ms Ada Byron, was the daughter of Lord Bonkers… no, sorry, that's daughter of bonkers Lord Byron. And also she helped Mr Charles Babbage develop the first computer.

According to Mr Lawrence Miles, not only did she actually do most of the workings out, but she was in fact helping the British Secret Service mount an attack on that loveable time-travelling voodoo-cult Faction Paradox! But according to "In Our Time", her life was actually MUCH WEIRDER!


*, technically, the Yes album "Live at Montreaux 2003", released in 2007, may be more recent than Pet Shop Boys Fundamental, released in 2006, but that's cheating… the clue is in the title.


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Day 2932: Dr Pax… on Ice!

Saturday:


We get a TWEET that Mr Dr Pax is off to the 1st London Ice Sculpting Festival… so we set off to see him putting the Icing on the Cake!

Start Frosting

Early Ices

But WHERE was he???

We looked ALL DAY… but no sign!

Is he over here?

Is he over there?

Has anyone seen him?

Let's ask Security!

You don't think he's been… frozen in ice!

Not N…ice!

Oh no! How will Ms Featherweight update her blog now!


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Day 2925: DOCTOR WHO: The Next Doctor… is Mr Dr Matt

Saturday:


Oooh, what a DISASTER! A whole half hour of this year's Doctor Who Christmas special accidentally deleted, meaning they had to broadcast the REAL Next Doctor as "Doctor Who Confidential"!

Here is a publicity still of the new Dr Who…

the Doctor in Twilight

…and here is another one.

the Doctor in Sulk

Er.

Anyway, Daddy Richard hasn't told you all about the Christmas Special yet, so this seems like an OPPORTUNE MOMENT to prod him into a seasonal review. Happy New Year…

Doctor Who has never had a moment quite like it. Of course, the series was never this big before, not even during the Dalekmania era or the height of Tom. The changeover from Chris to David, the only previous passing of the flame in the "new age", came in such a rush that it was done almost before we knew it was happening. So while the announcement of a new Doctor has, in the past, been newsworthy, it's never quite got to the level of receiving its own half-hour results show on BBC1. It's possible that whoever was named as the next Time Lord would have been a disappointment in the context of hype and adrenaline built up.

Am I disappointed? I confess that I am, a bit. I was rooting for Paterson Joseph, an actor who I feel has the charisma, the gravitas and the skin colour that the series needed at this point. Yes, skin colour – I don't think it would be tokenism to cast a highly respected not to mention abundantly talented actor who just happens to be black, but the number of Doctor Who fans on the forums wailing that you can't have a black Doctor strongly suggests that the series needed a good kick in the prejudices. (The same, incidentally, to all those saying you can't have a female Doctor.)

That's not to say there's anything wrong with Matt's work: having seen him in "The Ruby in the Smoke"/"The Shadow in the North" and "Party Animals" and on stage in "The History Boys" he's perfectly capable, even if – to my tastes – he didn't set screen or stage alight in the manner of a Marquis de Caribas or an Emperor Jones. But in a television era when Robin Hood (retired Crusader) has been recast as a twenty-something and Merlin (ancient sorcerer) has been recast as a twenty-something, the decision to have the Doctor (thousand-year-old Time Lord) recast as a twenty-something looks just a little bit… corporate.

Nor am I entirely sure where this leaves the future relationship between the Doctor and River Song: if she thinks that the tenth Doctor looked "so young", what's she going to make of this one? I suppose the obvious solution (if you're not in the "just drop the whole business" camp) is just recasting a young River Song for the other end of their relationship, so that she thinks of him as about her age and gets used to him getting older than her.

It's worth remembering though that Steven Moffat's Doctor was Peter Davison in the way that Russell Davies' was Jon Pertwee. We can hope that the Grand Moff's intention is to try to do the "old man in a young body" story that was intended by Christopher Bidmeed but to do it right.

On the other hand, as the idea begins to settle on me, I can start to imagine the scene where the tenth Doctor finally meets the eleventh and is mightily put out:

"Oi! I'm supposed to be the young and sexy one!"

You could almost see it in the Christmas Special, the naughtily-titled "The Next Doctor", when he meets David Morrissey's self-proclaimed Doctor. Morrissey looks like what we expect of a Doctor: energetic, intelligent and mature. The tenth Doctor clearly thinks the same way. He's thrilled (and that's a bit un-Doctor-like in itself, given the past representation of inter-incarnation meetings) to meet his future self, but can you also read it as l little bit of thinking "ha! I'm still the best!"

Along with, I suspect, many people, the Christmas setting and David Morrissey's slightly over-the-top performance and costume (as seen during Children in Need) led me into the trap of expecting this to be a television remake of Big Finish's "The One Doctor".

Obviously, it was actually Big Finish's "Minuet in Hell"…

{sound of tumbleweeds}

…well, thankfully it's not actually that either, since the real Doctor doesn't have amnesia (the eighth Doctor's congenital condition) and we don’t have to cope with ludicrous faux-Americans and Becky the Vampire Slayer plot.

But the central conceit – that a machine transfers the Doctor's personality to a mentally unbalanced individual – is pretty much the same, though thankfully handled far more sensitively and poignantly.

It seemed to me that the mystery of who is this "other Doctor" was resolved far too early, but on re-watching it turns out to be resolved almost exactly on the half hour. So in fact, "The Next Doctor" is really an old-fashioned two-part adventure, with the first half mainly concentrating on the "mystery" story, while the second becomes a more traditional clash with the Cybermen.

Admittedly, we spotted instantly that the "other Doctor" would in fact be Jackson Lake the moment that he was named as the first victim… "but no body was ever found", but then it was hardly supposed to be a Jonathan Creek puzzler. It's much more about the (real) Doctor's reaction to meeting what he thinks is his future self.

And of course it does actually make sense that he reacts differently to the bickering of his early self-meetings, because in a Universe with no other Time Lords he's delighted to realise that here is a way for him to not be alone; he can literally be his own best friend. And so he decides to play the companion and follow his future self around.

It is then so sad to watch his gradual disillusionment. The "other Doctor" is gradually shaded from over-the-top through trying too hard to ultimately a tragic figure in denial. So "our" Doctor has to prompt the "other Doctor" here and there; he has to ask about the "sonicness" of the "sonic screwdriver"; and then, when the Cybermen attack, he realises that he's got to do the saving, which leads to the stethoscope coming out.

He is very sad for the fate of Jackson Lake, as he explains to him that he's not the Doctor; but he's also sad for himself, alone yet again.

The dynamic between the two Doctors is terrific; with Morrissey and Tennant on screen together it could hardly be otherwise. The opening set piece, where they bond as the pair of them are dragged up a building and across a warehouse by a Cybershade (Cyber-doggie?) is hilarious and exhilarating. The moments where the Doctor explains the reality to Jackson Lake are quiet and intense, and you can see how both of them are damaged by the breaking of the magic. The sequence rescuing the children from the Cyber-headquarters, where the roles of Doctor and companion are reversed, allows them to re-bond as friends.

But the pair of them dominating the screen time like this does make this a rather male story. Velile Tshabalala's clumsily-named Rosita (another false clue that this was "the One Doctor" with faked companion) is relegated to a very tiny role, and rewarded for her bravery with the role of… nanny. Hmmm.

The counter-balance, perhaps, is in another of Russell Davies' strong female villains, Dervla Kirwan as the very damaged Miss Mercy Hartigan. Miss Hartigan's unspoken but strongly alluded-to back story is really rather dark for a Christmas Day family romp. Her background certainly appears to indicate she has been used as a prostitute or, worse, an unpaid prostitute, possibly by the Victorian gentlemen on whom she eventually takes revenge.

"Another man come to impose his will on me in the night," she spits at the Doctor. Very dark, that.

(And Rosita, too, was caught by the Cybermen out on the streets at night… no doubt she was on her way home from a late-night tea-drinking club… ©Terrance Dicks.)

It's also been suggested that there's a bit of a phallocentric agenda behind Lake's fugue-state being driven by the kidnap of his son more than the murder of his wife, though Alex points out that in traditional drama any female character would be expected to care more for her children than her partner, so why not the same for a dad?

And is Mr Lake the first person in Doctor Who to be actually driven mad by the shock of blundering into the Doctor's world? Perhaps the mystery ought to be why don't more people suffer nervous collapse when monsters come stomping out of the night?

So, after a half-hour of psycho-drama, the second half turns back into modern Doctor Who, with a very Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom cyber-headquarters, and then a very big CG monster.

To be honest, I think that this was a really good Cyber-story, certainly the best of the 21st Century. Kidnapping children for child labour captures both the dark spirit of the Victorian age and at the same time is a very Cyberman thing to do: their lack of empathy means they see the practicality of using a cheap, disposable, otherwise-unwanted workforce without sentiment. And it adds a "the Cybermen will come and get you" horror frisson for the younger viewer that the slice-and-dice emphasis on conversion has somehow managed to fail to put across.

(And yes, sticking the Cyber-leader's brain on view a la Lumic Cyber-controller, was clearly supposed to remind you of that. Though when and why the Cybermen decided to remodel their Cyberleader escapes me; it's not like they could feel really bored while stuck in the Void.)

And then there's the Cyberking. (Playset available in toyshops by Easter, do you think?) Ooh, that's divided the fans: some of them hate it; others loathe it. Personally… I loved it.

In part, I think, it was a great relief that it wasn't a new rank of Cyberman. Cybermen have Cyber-leaders and a Cyber-Controller, but not a "king" with all the emotional overtones of fealty and chivalry that would go with. Magnificently silly, and terrifically realised, a giant walking Cyber-factory – a Cyber-wor-king if you see – was just the right sort of bonkers machine that the Cybermen would come up with.

This week's "thing to drive Lawrence Miles nuts": a mechanical leviathan rising from the Thames. Although in many ways the Cyberking, with honour guard of emotionless Cybermen, is the opposite of Larry's Sabbath-built, Babwyn-powered Jonah.

And Cybermen in giant robots was Big Finish's "Human Resources", of course.

It was also rather nice that Miss Hartigan's rage was just too much for the emotionless Cybermen to cope with (remembering "The Invasion" where they reacted badly to emotion too). Her plan to rule the world doesn't seem to have been very thought through, and surely asking for London's surrender before shooting great chunks out of it might have been an idea, but then that ties in with her being entirely fury and no logic at all.

Listening to the commentary, Russell suddenly came up with the idea that after her freed mind destroys the Cybermen and the Cyberking starts to topple towards the London crowds, the Doctor should appeal to Miss Hartigan to "save them". Julie Gardner was distraught that they hadn't thought to do that, but Russell then persuaded himself that it would have been too sentimental. I think that he's right; Miss Hartigan was too good at being bad to deserve a saccharine "redemption".

Surely, surely, though, this is the end of the Cybus Cybermen. The Doctor explicitly says that these are the last of them escaped from the Void during Davros's mad reality bomb attack. (Though how would the Doctor know? He looks like he's guessing.) Hopefully this is clearing the decks for the future production team.

(Equally, though, it's opening a loophole for some of those Daleks from the Genesis Arc to have escaped from the Void too…)

Overall, I thought that this was a terrific Doctor Who story, and the best Christmas present since "The Christmas Invasion". The pacing of the set pieces is spot on, unlike "The Runnaway Bride" where the best bit is the TARDIS/taxi chase early on, or "Voyage of the Damned" where they seem to spend forever on that metal bridge across the engine chasm. There are some truly gorgeous moments: the stand out being the cyber-attack in the graveyard, with the reveal of "other Doctor's" "TARDIS" running it a close second. The polar opposites of icy Cybermen and flame-coloured-dress-wearing Miss Hartigan provide just the right balance of enemies. And the plot benefits from the double-barrelled story keeping the momentum going after answering the question posed by the episode's title.

Of course, with my fanboy hat on (yes, we get hats, and badges and a special holographic membership card) with my fanboy hat on, I'd fantasized that we would get a cameo from Doctor eleven, the real next Doctor, at the end, perhaps seeing him watching as Tennant and Morrissey go off to dinner. Yes, I realise that they finished filming "The Next Doctor" in Spring, and Matt Smith wasn't cast until Autumn, but they could have filmed a tiny, tiny insert, couldn't they? And given that they could only hold off the actual announcement another ten days…

Next Time: With David Tennant filming his last stories in early 2009, by the time this is shown the tenth Doctor will officially be addressing us From Beyond the Grave™. So where else would he be but on "The Planet of the Dead".

PS:

It turns out that SIX MILLION people tuned in to watch the Doctor Who Do You Do You Are results show, making it SECOND most watched show of the day. ITV must be CRUSHED.

The MOST watched show was "Total Wetwipe", the Top-Gear-totty hosted gameshow version of It's A Knockout, clearly achieving this because of all those Doctor Who fans who rushed off to the Internet leaving the telly on.

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Day 2923: iPhant

New Year's Day My Ninth Birthday:


Hooray, I am NINE!

[R: He is eight; we have this every year...]

Today we will be mainly playing JAMES BOND using my NEW Hi-Tech device…

Maybe THIS will help me keep up with my Diary!

PS:

Happy New Year Everyone!

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