Beyond Redemption

I think there is something inherently dodgy about the notion of 'redemptive readings'.  It seems to imply a determination to look at a text in a positive way that is at odds with what could be called 'proper scepticism'.  This objection is itself open to the objection that it's silly to approach a piece of entertainment product with 'scepticism', especially when it is part of a series of which one is supposedly a fan.  But, this loses sight of context and agency.  There are various ways of choosing to watch the same thing.  When you sit down to enjoy an episode of a show you like, for fun, you're a bit odd if you're not expecting, hoping and trying to like it.  When you're watching it with the express intention of analysing it and then writing about what it means, proper scepticism becomes appropriate.  Trying to like what you're watching becomes a somewhat iffy strategy in that context.  Besides, doesn't the necessity of trying to find ways of praising what you're analysing tell us something in itself?  This muddle also loses sight of the distinctions that are always to be found within the concept of enjoyment, distinctions that are all too often spuriously aggregated.  You don't have to think something is politically or morally correct in order to like it (though, in practice...).  No more do you need to think that something is aesthetically sophisticated or beautiful in order to relish its aesthetic.  Conversely, you may dislike a beautifully made piece of art which offers praiseworthy political or moral analyses.  Or you may take enjoyment from the act of hostile reading itself.  I, for instance, very much enjoy hating and criticising certain things, and I don't see anything wrong with this.

This is by way of a preamble to talking about 'The Two Doctors', which has been subject to an attempted rehabilitation from the charge of being reactionary on the issue of race.  The re-evaluation of the story has been pioneered and best expressed by Robert Shearman in About Time 6.  The essence of his argument is that the Androgums are a comment on the concept of the monster as employed by Doctor Who.  They are characterised as generic monsters but it is disarming when people treat them as such because they do not look like monsters.  They are treated the same way as the Sontarans - all of them racially evil and hateful - but, because they do not have potato-heads or eye-stalks, this poses a problem.  We notice the inappropriateness, even tastelessness, of generalising about the evil of an entire race when they look like us.  We don't blink when the Doctor describes the entire Jagaroth race as vicious and callous but it bothers us when the same racial villainy is implied about aliens who look human.  Philip Sandifer recently summarized and expanded the case admirably, here.

I'm enormously tempted by this reading... and, maybe, if I'd approached 'The Two Doctors' with the express intention of finding a 'redemptive reading', I would've happily seized upon it.  Apart from allowing me to enjoy 'The Two Doctors' (a story that, in many respects, I rather like) with a lighter heart, it would also address an issue that I have criticised in Who in the past.  The issue is best demonstrated in 'Resurrection of the Daleks', in which the Doctor appears blithe about slaughtering Daleks using biological weapons but cannot make himself gun down Davros because he's a humanoid (just about).

However, with all due respect to Shearman (which is a lot of respect), I think the 'redemptive' argument for 'Two Doctors' misses something very important: the Androgums are - in a way - made-up and costumed as monsters.

They are the jumbled ethnic 'other' as monster.

They are clothed in garb that is inflected with the 'ethnic' and/or 'exotic' and are given physical characteristics - red hair, heavy features, florid complexion, warts, etc - that directly connect with very old stereotypes that have been used against several groups to indicate lowness from birth (in very much the same way that David Lynch's movie version of Dune had recently used similiar characteristics to represent the Harkonnen kinship group as biologically evil).

To be sure, the Androgums are not consistently reminiscent of any particular group of stereotypes.  To a certain extent they chime with stereotypes about Scottish people (think, for instance, of the roughly contemporaneous MacAdder from Blackadder the Third... a violent, lecherous, orange-faced, ginger-haired lunatic).

Similar stereotypes - red hair, violence, dissoluteness, primitiveness - have long been used in the representation of the Irish and Irish culture.  There is also something reminiscent of the Arab in the Shockeye mix.  He seems to be wearing a hat that is somewhere between a turban and a 'Tam O'Shanter'.  He wears harem pants under a decoration hanging from his belt that is halfway between a plaid (it's hard not to see an echo in Jamie's tartans) and a rug.  He has a curved, scimitar-like blade.

It will be noticed that all these stereotypes suggested by Shockeye represent groups - the Scots, the Irish, Arabs, etc - who have historically been victims of English/British imperialism.  As usual, the imperial culture derides, demonizes, vilifies and appropriates the culture of its victims.

Above all, however, if the Androgums recall any set of stereotypes, it is stereotypes about Jews... very, very old ones at that.

It's hard for us to imagine now but, when depicted on the Renaissance stage, Jewish villains like Shylock and Barabas would probably have worn ginger fright-wigs and huge comedy noses (which is disconcerting in the light of so much effort by more modern actors and producers to emphasize the complex and sympathetic aspects of Shylock). Here is some background, courtesy of Peter Ackroyd in his book Shakespeare - The Biography:

...we must never forget the stridency of the Elizabethan theatre.  Shylock would have been played with a red wig and bottle nose.  The play is, after all, entitled the 'comicall History'. 

... 

...the stage image of Jews essentially came from the mystery plays, where they were pilloried as the tormentors of Jesus.  In the dramatic cycle Herod was played in a red wig, for example; it represents the origin of the clown in pantomime.  It was the costume of Barabas in Marlowe's The Jew of Malta.  It is, in effect, the image with which Shakespeare was obliged to work.

Shakespeare refers somewhere to Judas as red-headed, something often found in Italian and Spanish art.  Judas was always painted as 'more Jewish' than the other apostles, for obvious reasons.  As Michaelangelo asks the Pope in that Monty Python sketch: "Are they too Jewish?  I made Judas the most Jewish."

Even hundreds of years after Shylock, Dickens was obsessing over "red-headed and red-whiskered Jews" in Sketches by Boz and The Pickwick Papers.  Here he is in Oliver Twist, likening Fagin to the Devil by emphasizing his red beard and toasting fork:

In a frying-pan, which was on the fire, and which was secured to the mantel-shelf by a string, some sausages were cooking; and standing over them, with a toasting-fork in his hand, was a very old shrivelled Jew, whose villanous-looking and repulsive face was obscured by a quantity of matted red hair. He was dressed in a greasy flannel gown, with his throat bare; and seemed to be dividing his attention between the frying-pan and a clothes-horse, over which a great number of silk handkerchiefs were hanging. 

Interesting that Fagin is cooking meat the first time we see him.  Also interesting that Shockeye too has a fondness for silk.

Shockeye - which, I can't help notice, doesn't exactly sound unlike Shylock - is greedy, gluttonous and cannibalistic, recalling many anti-Semitic stereotypes including the ancient blood libel, which asserted that Jews would use the blood of murdered Christian children to make their unleavened bread.  (It might be objected that since Shockeye and his victims are supposedly of different races, he cannot be called a cannibal, but this concentrates too much on the sci-fi rationales of the text and ignores the visual impact of a person preparing another person for butchery and consumption.)  Shockeye menaces Peri in a way that is half cannibalistic and half lecherous, hardly a million miles away from endless anti-Semitic tropes about Jewish men preying upon young gentile girls.

It's also worth noting that, in the story, the Androgums are shown to be playing both the Sontarans and the Third Zoners off against each other in an attempt to seize power themselves... exactly the kind of triangulating conspiratorial machiavellianism imagined by the forger of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, or by the Nazis, who fantasized that 'the Jews' were behind both capitalism and communism.

In light of all this, it is deeply unfortunate - to say the least! - that the Doctor should end up killing Shockeye with, of all things, cyanide gas.

I'm not saying that Bob Holmes, or the make-up designer, or anybody involved was being deliberately anti-Semitic (or, for that matter, anti-Scots, anti-Irish, anti-Arab, etc). I don't believe that.  But the visual references got in there anyway.  These stereotypes - the red hair, the coarse features, the 'ethnic' trappings, the scimitar, the libels of blood lust and cannibalism, etc. - are so well established as signifiers for primitivism and inferiority in the cultural discourse of Western imperialist societies that they get rehearsed unconsciously, unthinkingly, naturally, as a matter of course.

Mind you, I do sometimes wonder if Holmes was deliberately drawing on the Jewish villains of the Renaissance stage.  Shockeye seems to have been meant to work rather like Shylock or Barabas, i.e. in the way Shakespeare and Marlowe were starting to re-use the old theatrical character known as the Vice. They both recoded the Vice - the stage embodiment of a vice or vices - in the figure of a villainous Jew... who nonetheless acted as a kind of dramatic highlighter, showing up the often less than pure moral condition of the gentiles around him. Shylock conforms to stereotypes, but his plight also shows up the materialism, hypocrisy and prejudice of the Venetians. Barabas is less complex, but even his outrageous villainy can be read as a satire of the emergent capitalist culture of the Christians around him.  Something similar is at work in Shockeye and, to this extent, I think Shearman and others have a point when they identify the Androgums as an attempt to interrogate some of the implicit values of Doctor Who.  Shockeye's behaviour seems - at least, at first - to show up the hypocrisy of the Third Zoners, the Sontarans, the Time Lords... not to mention the prejudice of the Doctor. Holmes really does seem to be doing this deliberately. Otherwise why go to all the trouble of having a scene where the Doctor is upbraided for not being progressive in his attitudes, right after he makes an odious remark comparing a minority to monkeys!

The Androgums seem to have been deliberately crafted as an exaggerated reflection of those they satirise. They are considered primitive yet consider humans primitives. They are power-hungry, as are the Sontarans. They assume the right to travel in time, as do the Time Lords. They are very much like Shylock and Barabas. They satirise a culture that despises them by sharing its values and turning them against those who have oppressed them.

Thing is... the production fumbles it. And fumbles it badly. The scene where Chessene can't help lapping up the gore shows that she's inherently, biologically, inescapably low and savage... thus justifying all the prejudice shown against the Androgums, removing any chance that they might represent a condemnation of slavery as lowering and degrading the slaves, announcing (in the, so to speak, authorial voice) that they deserve to be enslaved and/or killed, and so disspating any satire of the Third Zoners, Sontarans, Time Lords, etc.  So the Androgums end up working very much like Barabas (we're never meant to be in any doubt that he's worse than the Christians) and less like Shylock (who remains, until the end, irresolvably ambiguous).  After all, in 'The Two Doctors' even those 'generic' Sontarans are shown to be concerned with honour and to seethe at accusations of cowardice... noble attributes entirely lacking in the crude, philistine Androgums.

The story even compromises its own deliberate aim to poke at the meat industry. If the Androgums are meant to represent that aspect of humanity that is callous about farming and killing animals for food (which they clearly are - just look at the scene where Shockeye is 'tenderising' Jamie and saying that "primitive creatures don't feel pain the way we do") then this also is compromised by Dastari's specific comparison, when he says "and he calls humans primitives!" So even we heartless, meat-munching, human carnivores are better than Shockeye.

Moreover, the idea that, as generic monsters in human shape, the Androgums represent a rebuke to the assumptions of the programme is simply untenable.  The more one compares them to such generic monsters, the less of a fit they appear.  They are not generic monsters in their behaviour or outlook any more than they are in appearance.

Okay, since Grendel (no, the other one) many monsters have wanted to eat people... but this has hardly been a major preoccupation of monsters in Doctor Who, which has largely drawn its quintessential ideas of the monstrous from the nightmares of modernity (fascism, biological racism, industrial genocide, technological warfare, nukes, the autonomous product, etc).  And the Androgums are not just carnivores that prey on humans like, say, sirens or werewolves or zombies.  They are gourmands (their very species name is an anagram of this word), obsessed with food generally.  Since when has an obsession with culinary pleasure been a trait of the 'generic' monster?

Moreover, the Androgums are more even than just amoral gourmands.  They are ideologically devoted to the maxim that "the gratification of pleasure is the sole motive of action".  They are remorseless nihilists; parodic hedonists.  They cleave to the definition of the ethics of Satanism offered by Aleister Crowley: "do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law".  They are, in a sense, Satanists.

Added to this is their status as slaves.  Since when has the 'generic' Who monster been a slave?  Since when has the 'generic' Who monster been generally considered, by all other characters, to be inherently inferior and in need of genetic enhancement?  On the contrary, the more usual strategy in Who is for the villainous monsters to be the ones that think that way about everybody else... which, as noted above, would mean that 'Two Doctors' pulls off a nice bit of satire by ultimately painting the Third Zoners and the Doctor as akin to Daleks, were it not for the fact that the text backs them in their assumptions about the Androgums!  It'd be like if the Thals turned out to be evil at the end of 'The Daleks', or all Silurians were shown to conform to Miss Dawson's prejudices, or the Mutts in 'The Mutants' really were mindless and infectious brutes.

Jews, on the other hand, were a bullied, subjected, exploited and constrained people for centuries in Christian Europe.  And, at the same time, centuries of official Christian church-sanctioned anti-Semitism in Europe equated the Jews, either directly or as allies, with the Devil - as did Dickens (see above).  The Androgums are far from a perfect fit with anti-Semitic stereotypes... but they fit them much better than they fit the behaviour patterns of the standard Doctor Who monster.

In order to interpret the Androgums as a satire on the concept of the monstrous in Who, one must also - for instance - see the Celestial Toymaker the same way.  One must be able to see him simply as a humanoid who displays the villainy of a monster, thus satirising the usual assumption that a monster looks monstrous.  However, as has been irrefutably argued by Philip Sandifer (here), the Celestial Toymaker carries unavoidable connotations of China and the Chinese.  I don't think you can argue that he is the racial 'other' construed as monstrous without also having to concede the same about the Androgums (with the caveat that they are far less straightforwardly about one specific group).

Most damaging to the Shearman/Sandifer reading is the scene where, upon her death, Chessene reverts back to her 'true' form, the original self from which she was unable to escape even with those genetic upgrades.  Her racial biology trapped her into villainy.  This is not only the crudest kind of biological determinism, it also destroys the idea that the Androgum's human appearance makes their status and treatment into a mordant comment on Doctor Who's usual way of demarcating the evil by way of alien ugliness.  Chessene's 'true' and underlying alien ugliness reasserts itself at the end.  Her evil inner core is thus represented by the red eyebrows, the heavy features, the warts... just as it was earlier represented by her inability to resist tasting the sacrificial blood of someone outside her own race.  Even if you don't buy the connections I've drawn between these features and anti-Semitic stereotypes, it remains impossible to argue that the Androgums are not visually represented as monstrous.  If anything, their monstrousness is more clearly and deliberately visually represented than that of the 'generic' monsters they fail to resemble.  Chessene is the test case.  When she looks more or less exactly the same as Dastari, she is treated more or less exactly the same.  Her false 'human' appearance (apparently good) is explicitly contrasted with her 'true' Androgum appearance (bad).  The moment of her reversion from the former to the latter is also the moment when her irredeemable monstrosity is finally revealed.

In this moment, her racial 'otherness' is her evil.

Behind the Times

Doctor Who was (and is) frequently racist in its representations.  Probably no more or less than most other cultural products of our society, but nonetheless...

Now, to deal with the banalities first, I don't accuse anybody involved in making the show of being deliberately racist.  I don't generally know much about their opinions.  When you hear about their views, you tend to hear that they were liberals or soft-lefties.  People reminiscing about working with Hartnell tend to raise his right-wing opinions on race (and other things) as though they were considered unusual.  And that's not the issue anyway.  I'm not interested in making personal attacks on this or that writer or producer. 

The show started nearly 50 years ago... so a lot of it is old, dated, the product of vanished days.  This is often raised by fans who see the problems in certain Who stories but, understandably, are eager to defend them.  Nobody wants to feel that something they love is tainted by racism - that terrible bogey word that stops people thinking clearly because, like so many important words, it's been systematically stripped of its context and has become a Bad Thing that menaces society from without.

I 'get' this desire to explain away racist representations in stories we love.  I get it totally... but I'm against the giving out of passes on the grounds that something is 'of its time'.

E. P. Thompson - in a very different context... in his book The Making of the English Working Class - coined the phrase "the enormous condescension of posterity", to refer to the oblivion into which the struggles of ordinary people get consigned by bourgeois history.  It's a great phrase (which I have previously and idiotically attributed to Christopher Hill!) which expresses something about what is arrogantly forgotten when you invoke 'the times' to excuse reactionary representations.


Cyber-Race

In the Hammer film, The Mummy, George Pastell plays the sinister Egyptian who brings the Mummy back to life, which chimes with his role in 'Tomb' (and also with the character Namin in 'Pyramids of Mars', another story in which genre semiotics transmit a representation of 'foreign' cultures as sources or vehicles of sinister, uncanny forces which threaten white Westerners).  As I've argued elsewhere, 'Tomb' is racist largely because it is a reworking of the 'Curse of the Mummy's Tomb' type story.  Klieg is the guy who tries to resurrect the Mummy in order to use it.

Those kinds of stories - gothic colonialist fiction of the 19th century which found its way into 20th century pop-culture via movies - carry certain kinds of baggage with them because they stem from British imperial engagement in Egypt. They're about Brits breaking into Egyptian tombs, finding Egyptian mummies, being cursed by Egyptian curses as punishment. They express - quite unconsciously I'm sure - a certain anxiety about colonialism. Beneath the surface they seem to whisper 'we're barging around where we shouldn't be and we're gonna pay for it'. But inherent in such anxiety is fear of the colonised people and their culture. They and their culture becomes a vehicle for the uncanny, the inexplicable, the terrifying, the punishing. As in so much hauntology, it's 'the return of the repressed', repressed guilt in this case, transfered or projected onto the victims. This is the essence of imperialist fiction. Blame the victims. The Indians attack the wagon train, etc.

Now, if you give 'Tomb' a pass for its implicit racism, how then do you praise 'The Tenth Planet' for having an entirely competent, senior, unstereotyped character who just happens to be black? You have to keep 'the times' in mind, but they don't negate contemporary judgements.

Secondly, the usual assumption is that the "times" in which we need to judge things were worse than ours, less enlightened, etc... which is pretty tricky. True in some ways, unwarrantably self-congratulatory in others. And much of the radical struggle of the past is forgotten (or subjected to something like that "enormous condescension" that Thompson was talking about). So, we should be wary of assuming that 'the times' would provide an excuse anyway.

'Tomb' was broadcast in 1967.  To give it a pass on the racism charge because it's 'of its time' is to make the assumption that people in the past were less morally or intellectually sophisticated than us... that you can characterise 'the times' as (ha!) 'dark ages' compared to ours. When you consider the huge strides being made, through the struggles and protests of millions of ordinary people, in 1967, the idea that we have to make allowances for 'the time' starts looking pretty arrogant of us.  We have to effectively cede 'the times' to people like Enoch Powell, whose 'Rivers of Blood' speech was made the following year, rather than claiming 'the times' for the people fighting bigots like him.

There was lots of casual racist stereotyping when 'Tomb' was made, but there was also the civil rights movement, Black Power, Martin Luther King Jnr., Malcolm X.  There were also millions of people fighting racism, protesting against various forms of institutionalised discrimination, struggling for equality and dignity.  So maybe, looked at another way, 'Tenth Planet' was a little more "of its time" than 'Tomb'! We should give 'the times' their full credit, which is to say that we should give the people of 'the times' their full credit.  This also helps us avoid the smugness inherent in shows like Mad Men, which looks upon the past as a time of crude backwardness compared to our auto-putative present-day olympian liberal enlightenment (while also, by the way, hypocritically sniping at old-style sexism while constantly using its actresses to titilate the audience).

'The Tomb of the Cybermen' is a cultural artifact from a declining imperialist society which represents vaguely-defined Eastern and/or dark-skinned generic 'foreigners' in a negative way (i.e. as fanatical, calculating, deceptive, callous, megalomaniacal, violent, ruthless and/or stupid) in contrast to a host of Brits and Americans who are depicted as essentially well-meaning and some of whom end up the victims of the foreign baddies.  But, just as we'd be wrong to glibly label the 'time' which produced it as backward, we'd also be very wrong to think that our own 'time' is that superior.  Britain is still, after all, a declining imperialist culture with a society massively deformed by racism of various kinds.


Disliking the Unlike

Who frequently challenged - or thought it challenged... or set itself the task of challenging - racism.  It first explicitly set itself such a task in only its very second story, 1963's 'The Daleks'.

Now, 'The Daleks' is a weird one. Looked at one way, the Daleks are Nazis (as externally crippled as they are internally), irrationally trying to destroy the Thals simply because they're different. This is very simplistic. We can't, for instance, equate the Thals with the Jews because the Thals really were the armed and violent enemies of the Daleks, whereas the idea of Jews as hostile persecutors of Germans existed only in the febrile Nazi fantasy world.

Also, as a diagnosis of racism it is very stupid. Racism isn't just fear of the different or the stranger. Indeed, 'The Daleks' makes it clear that it's more than that, despite Ian's speechifying. For instance, as well as making the Daleks and Thals opposing sides in a war that virtually destroyed the planet, the story also has their mutual welfare impossible because of the Daleks' need for radiation.

Besides, the deeper causes of racism (i.e. slavery, imperialism, social inequality, divide-and-conquer policies by elites) remain untouched by the story.

On the other hand, you can look at 'The Daleks' as a story about the evil troglodytes (the Daleks are very deliberately made into diminutive underground dwellers) who persecute the virtuous, noble, enlightened, tall, Nordic types.. i.e. as the Wagnerian, anti-semitic version of Norse mythology. Unpleasant as it may be, the story makes much more sense that way (purely as a text, I mean).

How did this happen? Perhaps because the story is so indebted to Wells' The Time Machine, which is itself indebted to this fusion of Norse myth and Wagnerian opera. (Well, I think the story is more indebted to the George Pal movie than to the actual book... but the movie carefully removes Wells' subtext about the class struggle, thus making the Blondes-persecuted-by-evil-trogs side of things even more obvious.) 'The Daleks' even makes the nasty underworlders into scientists and technicians, which is an Age-of-the-Atom/B-movie reiteration of the Niebelungen/Morlocks as industrious villains, working at fiery forges.

I think it's rather telling that an attempt at a moralistic allegory about racism, from a liberal perspective, degenerates into (at best) a silly parable about inherent xenophobia or (at worst) an accidental social-Darwinist tale with quasi-fascist undertones.


Sacred Bob, 'Talons' and Fish

It's essential to understand that a story can be racist in its representations without either containing any explicit, ideological racism, or being deliberately written with a racist message. Hence, 'Talons' and 'Two Doctors', both of which are problematic texts for anyone bothered by racist cultural representations.  (Parenthetically, I've recently encountered someone who manages to remain unconcerned by racist cultural representations via the simple expedient of disbelieving in their existence... which would be admirably bold if it weren't so obnoxious and idiotic.)

I don't think Bob Holmes set out to do anything but play around with genres, stock characters and familiar associations... but the fact that he could play around with stock characters and familiar associations that carry racist implications (from things like Fu Manchu and Bulldog Drummond and popular stereotypes), possibly without ever realising how some of this stuff could be interpreted, says something about the culture that he was living in, and in which we still live. The stuff we take for granted and see as harmless can be as revealing as the stuff we revile.

We simply take it for granted when evil is depicted as emanating from Asian or African culture in 'Talons' or 'Pyramids of Mars'. We simply take it for granted that the base, impulsive, cruel, primitive Androgums are depicted in terms of racist stereotypes about heavy-browed, big-nosed, red-haired people. I don't think it means that Holmes was a racist, or that we are... but it does mean that we live in a culture that propagates and implicitly tolerates racist representations. But then, this is an imperialistic society, with a cultural inheritance from colonialism. What else can we expect?

I don't think the team who made 'Talons' deliberately sat down to take the piss out of the Chinese. Nor do I think they were ignorant. These are self-evident trivialities and one shouldn't have to even bother to say them.

I think the production team created a story that, like many stories during their era, was a reiteration/adaptation of classic, gothic genre fiction. They'd done Mary Shelley and Rider Haggard (via Hammer) and now they were doing Sax Rohmer/Conan Doyle (again, via Hammer). Thing is, the Fu Manchu novels are racist in their depiction of Chinese culture as a source of criminality, fanaticism, the uncanny, the decadent, the perverse, the sensual, etc. Orientalism; the cultural interpretation and representation of the East as defined by such alien traits, as antithetical to the West in sinister or enigmatic ways. This is a cultural facet of imperialism (and we are still an imperialistic culture... albeit not one generally involved in direct colonialism anymore). And you don't have to be a racist in a straightforward, ideological, explicit way in order to have imbibed some of these assumptions.

In fact, Holmes seems aware that he is skirting around racism in 'Talons'.

Chang is a 'yellow peril' villain, an embodiment of the guilty transference which leads to white colonial cultures creating nightmares about being preyed upon by evil orientals.  Chang abducts loads of young white women and takes them to be murdered, never expressing any remorse.  Moreover, Chang's abductions carry hints of the sexual.  There seems to be no reason, on the face of it, why he and Greel must acquire girls, still less "plump, high-spirited" ones.  Chang abducts a woman who is clearly implied to be a prostitute.  And so on.

But Chang  at least seems like a proper character, which is more than can be said for any of the 'foreign' villains in 'Tomb', or Namin in 'Pyramids'.  Chang is a man of personal dignity and great intelligence who plays the stereotypical 'Chinaman' and replaces his 'r's with 'l's for the delectation of an audience who are enjoying exactly the same 'othering' of the Chinese that the story trades in, with Chang's own collusion. Unlike Kaftan (Kaftan!) and Klieg, Chang has an origin, a context, a background, an identity. His racial predicament is contextualised within the British imperial system, with all the references to "punitive expeditions" and his veneration of "the Queen-Empress".

Holmes makes Chang decidedly more intelligent than many of the Westerners, uses talk of the Chinese being "mysterious" and "enigmatic" as a sign of Lightfoot's silliness, has an explicitly racist policeman, has Chang knowingly and covertly mock the racism of the music hall audience, has the Doctor asking if Chang is Chinese a few moments after Chang has said, drily, "I understand we all look the same", etc.

Also, the central evil in the story is a Westerner, a war criminal from an imperialist European power defeated by "the Filipino Army". The Filipinos are a people devastated by almost forgotten Western imperialist aggression. And Greel is implicated in war crimes common to both European and Asian variants of fascism.

It's a complex matter in 'Talons', unlike 'Tomb' which is really quite crude; but there are similar background reasons for the racism in both stories. Racial tropes piggyback their way in on the backs of the literary and cinema sources being raided and pastiched. In 'Talons' its largely 19th/20th century gothic/colonialist pop fiction, as in 'Tomb'.  But still, the story has no Chinese character who isn't a nunchuk-weilding thug, a snivelling dupe or a white girl-abducting svengali.  And the (very inauthentic) representations of Chinese culture make it clear that it's a source (or at least a vehicle) of the alien, the perverse, the cruel and the vicious. This isn't because Holmes was a racist but because he is creating a pastiche out of genre fiction that was written in the context of racist, imperialist cultural assumptions.

A lot of perfectly nice, liberal/lefty people can be found doing the same thing. Monty Python end The Meaning of Life with a legend asking for all "fish" to live together in tolerance, peace and harmony. The Pythons are/were all nice guys, liberals, etc. Yet take a look at some of the representations of black people in the TV series. There's one sketch in which the 'Batsmen' of the Kalahari play cricket against England and massacre the entire English team. Now, the actual 'Bushmen' are not murdering savages who slaughter white men with spears. The Pythons created that sketch out of racist associations (i.e. black tribesmen are primitive cannibals, etc) that they probably imbibed with the kind of fiction that they all grew up with, and which Palin and Jones later mercilessly parodied in Ripping Yarns.


Barabbas and Bananas; Shockeye and Shylock

In 'The Two Doctors', the Androgums are depicted as an irredeemably inferior and savage people. And this is also represented in racist terms.

For a start, there's the line about monkeys.  This is probably intended to tie in with the story's evidently-deliberate subtext about animals and meat; more broadly, the control of species for use by other species.  However, the line takes on different valences in a tale that slides into saying something about more or less 'advanced' races.  The intent is to push an anti-meat message - one could hardly call it a 'subtext' - by making the Androgums into the embodiment of that aspect of humanity that preys upon other living things.  But, as with 'The Daleks', while the intention is to create a finger-wagging moralistic message, the effect is reactionary.  The business with the monkeys is very clumsy, since it evokes very well-established and hugely unsavoury racist slurs.  The wider implication of the story is to imply that the Androgums are, by their very nature, incapable of moral or intellectual equality with superior peoples like Third Zoners, Time Lords, or even humans.

In light of the way they are characterised, it's all the more unfortunate that the Androgums are depicted as impulsive, base, reflexively cruel, red-haired, heavy-browed, big-nosed, warty, etc. These are racial stereotypes that have been used against many groups, most especially the Irish and the Jews.

Marlowe's Barabbas, for example (the well-poisoning, nun-slaughtering, machaivellian Jew from The Jew of Malta), would probably have been depicted on stage with a big, comedy false nose and a ginger fright wig... as would Shakespeare's considerably more complex and sympathetic Shylock, disconcertingly enough.

Interestingly, Marlowe's play can also be read as an incipient critique of the new, emergent capitalist society... and, in the course of the story, Barabbas' villainy lays bare the hypocrisy of the Christians around him... which chimes with 'The Two Doctors', in which the behaviour of the Androgums has the effect of highlighting the cynicism of the Third Zoners and the Sontarans... and even of the Time Lords!

So, do we see in Shockeye the re-encoding of the stage 'machiavel' of the English Renaissance theatre?  The 'Vice' who is relished for his own villainy but is also a kind of dramatic highlighter, showing up the (often less than pure) moral condition of the other characters?  Is, then, the unfortunate hint of partly-archaic anti-semitic stereotypes a kind of echo of Barabbas and Shylock?  I can't help noticing that 'Shockeye' does actually sound a bit like 'Shylock'.

Nobody seems willing to defend 'The Two Doctors' on the grounds that it's 'of its time'.  No racist TV conventions in the 80s then?  I think you'll find otherwise.  However, what's potentially more interesting is that one might be able to mount a 'defence' on the ground that, rather than being 'of its time', it's actually sorta 'of another time', namely the time of Shakespeare and Marlowe.  Of course, this doesn't ultimately excuse the production team of clumsiness in not noticing what they were saying, but it might just contextualise Shockeye enough to make him interesting again.