Unhappy Soldiers (The 1917 Zone - Part 2)

On 'The War Games'. From the January 2012 issue of Panic Moon.


The last Doctor Who story of the 1960s is the high point of the show’s attempts to engage with the radicalism of that era. It was made just as the worldwide protests against the Vietnam war reached a crescendo. It’s been called an ‘anti-war’ story, but this is wrong. It’s an anti-imperialist story and, up until the last episodes, it supports revolution.

Pacifism is not advocated. Carstairs uses his pistol to protect the Ambulance and the Doctor never bats an eyelid. The Resistance kill guards all over the place. The Doctor’s aim for much of the story is to raise an army to fight the aliens. 'The War Games' supports revolutionary violence.

The violence that 'The War Games' condemns is that of imperialism. The aim of the aliens is conquest. That’s all that lies beneath everything that goes on in their War Zones. Meanwhile, ‘Butcher’ Smythe and von Weich amuse themselves playing Risk with human lives. It goes beyond noticing that top brass can be callous. The British and German commanding officers have more in common with each other than with their men. They are fundamentally different – alien – to the grunts whose lives they control and squander. They report to the same system of aggressive expansion, and both keep their communication devices hidden behind portraits of their monarchs. Under patriotism, imperialism lurks.

This is really about class. The generals are one class, the soldiers are another. Carstairs and Lady Jennifer are posh but, otherwise, the soldiers in 'The War Games' are the workers (and peasants) of the world. They’re pawns on the board of the ‘great game’. The map of the War Zones even looks like a game board. Those soldiers who throw off their mental processing (ie the ideology of their rulers) start cooperating across lines of nationality and race. Russell looks like he comes from a British imperial war of the 19th century, but he treats Harper, a black man, as a trusted ally. They even start to overcome sexism. Zoe lectures Arturo Villa about tactics and forces him to listen. Kidding aside, Jamie supports her. When the soldiers fight together instead of against each other – like Jamie and the Redcoat with whom he’s imprisoned – they can end the war. That’s why the First World War Zone is constantly referred to as “the 1917 Zone”, because it was in 1917 that a revolution in Russia started a chain of events which lead to a revolt against the Kaiser and the end of the slaughter.

Terrance Dicks’ story about people on a game board (which he tells repeatedly) probably got inflected with revolutionary politics via ex-communist Malcolm Hulke. 1968 re-radicalised him, it seems. However, in the end, although the Doctor’s vanguard conquers the imperialist stronghold and stops the war, they don’t take over. Instead, the Doctor calls in the ‘good’ establishment to clear up after the ‘bad’ establishment. The Resistance will end up back in their ‘real’ wars, their minds wiped of the internationalism and solidarity they learned through struggle. Dumped back in Scotland in 1745, his memory altered, Jamie goes back to attacking Redcoats rather than teaming up with them.  In fairness, he is ousting an invader, but this turnabout still highlights faultlines in the radical subtext. The Resistance is never a mass movement. There’s elitism in the idea that only a superior few can see through the brainwashing. The Doctor’s aim turns out to be reformist rather than revolutionary. He collaborates with the forces of law and order to curb the worst excesses and then put things back the way they were. So Russell, for instance, will go back to his imperialist war without any memory of his alliance with a black comrade.

All the same, this story remains remarkably radical in its portrayal of war as a great conspiracy of conquest, perpetrated by a cynical ruling elite to whom all generals on all sides belong, reliant on the brainwashing of the ordinary soldiers who - if they only realise it - can stop the whole thing by cooperating in revolution. Perhaps this sort of thing was only possible in 1969. Perhaps.

Great Disguiser

It's been bad lately.  Loads of great actors have passed away.  Freddy Treves, Peter Halliday, Dennis Chinnery.  In non-Who-actor news, Nicol Williamson.

And now... Philip Madoc.

This is genuinely hard for me to take in.

Philip Madoc was a great actor.  An actor who could bend his whole shape into the character he was playing.  An actor who could move like an entirely different person from role to role... and watch the way he moves.  Solon moves in an entirely different manner to Fenner, who moves in an entirely different manner to the War Lord.  And he was a great vocal actor, able to give every character his own vocal rhythm and tone.

His performance as Solon in 'The Brain of Morbius' is burned into my memories of childhood.  I imagine that's true of many of us Who fans who grew up in the VHS years.

And there's the slimey, posh, ruthless spiv Brockley in the film version of Dalek Invasion.

Later, of course, (later for me, I mean) there was the War Lord.  A totally different entity to Solon.

Solon is flamboyant, jittery, vain, pompous, self-consciously machiavellian (to his own immature delight) and deeply inadequate as a person.  Madoc's performance always dances just on the knife edge of comedy without ever quite tipping over.  Solon is the quintessential jumped-up and zealous servant.

The War Lord, by contrast, is cold, introverted, calculating, quick, almost feline.  The mask of control occasionally slips, showing glimpses of the sociopath beneath.  The quintessential tyrant.  And yet, he is human.  Look at the way he shows quiet outrage over the murder of his incompetent compatriot, the Security Chief.  Look at the little moment, after the Time Lords have tortured him into compliance with their court, when he regains his dignity by straightening his tunic before he turns back to face them.

And then there's the weary, doubtful, morally-queasy yet cowardly Fenner.  Madoc's performance radiates lip-chewing ambivalence and tired timidity masked by the persona of the cynical old pro.  I, personally, am glad he didn't get the role of Thawn.  His Fenner is more interesting.  He gets to spar with Tom Baker over the word "progress".  He gets to look embarrassed when he's left at the mercy of the natives that, quite understandably, hate him.

These are, undoubtedly, among the finest guest performances in Doctor Who.  Including Fenner.  (We'll just gloss over Eelek in 'The Krotons'.  It's fine.  He does what needs to be done with what he's got.  The essence of professionalism.)

But he's also burned into my memories in another way.

In the early 90s he toured with the RSC in Trevor Nunn's legendary production of Measure for Measure, alternating with a stage production of The Blue Angel, based on the 1930 von Sternberg movie which starred Marlene Dietrich.  Madoc played the Duke in the Shakespeare and Professor Raat in The Blue Angel.

I won't go into the details of the productions.  The point here is that the Measure for Measure was the first live Shakespeare I ever saw.

Madoc's Duke was amazing.  He's still the benchmark by which I judge the character.  When I read the play, I hear the Duke's lines in Madoc's voice.  I can precisely recall the way he inflected certain crucial lines.  I can exactly recall the way he modulated his characterisation between empathy, judgement and detached, almost clinical, interest... invoking the psychoanalysts of the Freudian Vienna in which Nunn had set the play.

And I - the fanatical young Doctor Who fan - didn't recognise him.  (I wasn't, at that point, the type to be much interested in the names of actors.)

It wasn't until I next watched my edited-down VHS of 'The Brain of Morbius' that I realised I'd seen Professor Solon in the flesh.

He'd fooled me.  Me, who'd watched him transplant the brain of a war criminal about a thousand times.

That's acting.

Panic on the Streets of London...

The January 2012 issue of the extremely good, fetchingly illustrated, conveniently pocket-sized and infeasibly cheap print fanzine Panic Moon will be released soon and is now available for pre-order. Click here.

This month the Editor has taken the existence of the publication very much into his hands and granted me even more space than usual.  I have no less than three pieces in this forthcoming issue, looking at 'The Macra Terror', 'The War Games' and 'Invasion of the Dinosaurs'.

I see all these stories as milestones in Doctor Who's engagement with the radical movements and ideas of the 60s.  'The Macra Terror' is a much-misunderstood starting point which came just before the protest movements peaked, 'The War Games' a subversive high point which came just after the ferment of 1968 and 'Invasion of the Dinosaurs' marks the ambivalence and disillusion brought by the subsequent downturn in struggle.

There's loads of other stuff in the fanzine besides me, so don't be put off.

Empires Toppling

There is a long and venerable tradition in Doctor Who of portraying revolutions sympathetically.  It does this many times.  It isn't an unbroken run of support... but for every 'Reign of Terror', in which the French Revolution is given the full Baroness Orczy treatment, there is a 'Sun Makers', in which a full-scale workers' revolt topples a corporate tyranny.  For every 'Monster of Peladon', where reform is touted as a solution to chaos created by extremists on both sides (right-wingers in government and looney-left wingers amongst the miners), there is a 'Happiness Patrol' in which the Doctor and Ace encourage a united rebellion by factory workers, aboriginal aliens and dissidents.  Fantastical, they may be... but these depictions are also surprisingly candid about the amount of mess, pain and trauma involved in popular uprisings, while retaining a forthright sympathy.

As far as I know, this track record is unique amongst television programmes.

In light of interesting and inspiring things going on in the world at the moment, I thought it might be fun to post some of my favourite televised revolutions....


The Ood kick some sorry corporate ass.


Street protests, in which dissidents defy the security forces and trap them in the knots of their own ideology, kicking off a process that will lead to the fall of a brutal, repressive government and the attempted flight of a dictator.


The Doctor confronts a neoliberal hobgoblin and, with the vital help of the "work units"... sorry, I mean "the people", he foils a plan to put down a rebellion.  He confuses his pin-striped capitalist foe into submission by means of a growth tax leading to "negative surplus" (i.e. no profit). 


Sadly, the radical message of 'The War Games' sputters a little when the Doctor calls upon the Time Lords for help... but still, here we see "the Resistance" (a unified force of soldiers of all nationalities) storming the baddie's control centre and putting an end to their cynical, fake wars.

Solidarity!

The War News

The new leader of the War Lords, The War Ed, delivered his first speech as leader today, winning muted and embarassed applause when he said that "we have to face up to the fact that, in retrospect, the War Games were probably, well, er... perhaps, maybe, not all that totally a good idea... umm, sort of?"

His brother, The War Dave, looked all pouty and crosspatch and was seen to ask the senior War Politician sat next to him, The War Woman, why she was clapping when she voted for the War Games. "I'm clapping because I don't want the Time Lords to dematerialise me," she said, earning herself a curled lip and sneering glare from The War Dave.

Later today, The War Dave announced that he would be "stepping back from frontline War Politics" (apparently unconscious of the queasy irony of suggesting that he'd ever been on the "frontline" of anything, unlike loads of ordinary people that he helped send to kill and die) "to concentrate on sitting in the corner with my arms folded, sulking."

Troughtonite Revisionism

I reposted my Hartnell stuff from Timelash II pretty much as it originally appeared. I've rejigged the following Troughton stuff a fair bit, however, so you'd better read it all over again very carefully, in case you miss a syllable of my searing insight and sage wisdom.


'The Underwater Menace'

I could easily tear this story to pieces, yes? And feed the pieces to my pet octopus, yes??? But this story has sense of humour! I too have sense of humour!!!! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha haaaaaaaa!!!!!!!!

Look, if you think this story is any more silly than any other Doctor Who story... well, it isn't.

Look at the amount of thought that went into the costumes and sets. Polly spends a lot of the story with a detail from a doric column on her head! Look at the detail in which Atlantean society is depicted. There's a throne room, a temple, a lab, a hospital, a market... there are priests and acolytes, beggers and traders, slaves and workers, guards and orderlies... there are intimations of popular dislike for the forces of the state... Look at the variations in the personalities. Look at the way people change - from the king to the sadistic doctor to the disillusioned priest... And our heroes team up with two marooned sailors and a brave servant girl to form a little multi-ethnic band of rebels who instill industrial action... a strike that wins! And helps to bring down the government!

Yeah, I know... it's daft. But it's no dafter, fundamentally, than 'The Caves of Androzani'. Yes, 'Caves' is infinitely better in many ways... but that's not the point.

This has been called the Doctor Who version of Plan 9 From Outer Space... which is wrong, wrong, wrongarama. We laugh at Ed Wood movies because they're badly made. This isn't badly made. Actually - if you look at the verve and pace of Episode Three, the detailing of the designs and costumes, the wit of the dialogue, and the technical achievements - it's rather superbly made!

The great underwater strike ballot ballet is amazing for the time, given that they probably made it in the cupboard at Lime Grove in 14 minutes on a budget of 2 shillings and fourpence. Yeah, you can see the strings a couple of times... but so what? Would you've thought it was all real but for those glimpses of wire? Is it really - I'm saying REALLY - any more fake looking than the CGI in most Hollywood blockbusters? Does that really - I'm saying REALLY - look REAL? Nope, of course not. And in addition to looking unreal it looks plastic, computery, synthetic... whereas the fish people's underwater stuff looks physical, looks touchable, looks human. It's like Ray Harryhausen animation. It's obviously fake, but it has a beauty and a reality that goes beyond mere realism. It looks like its happening underwater! There are even bubbles! Yeah, they're some form of obvious effect - but they look fantastic anyway! And the amazing, defamiliarizing music! It's spooky, weird, discomforting. It screams MODERN in a sublimely 60s way... and I'm not talking about the naff version of the 60s that we're all supposed to laugh at now. I'm talking about the 60s way that still screams of daring and iconoclasm. This stuff was made by eccentric geniuses using old bits of tape! Give me this over all the boring, bombastic, synth-emo, film score pastiche, bow-wow bombast that Murray Gold can belt out. A thousand times, I say this.

Also, we laugh at Ed Wood movies because the deluded no-hopers who made and starred in them had no sense of the irony of what they were doing. Watch Episode Three (tragically, the only surviving episode) and tell me the cast didn't understand the irony of what they were doing... except that makes it sound like they're sniggering up their sleeves. And they're not. The disillusioned priest sounds genuinely disillusioned. The Doctor sounds genuinely appalled by Zaroff. Zaroff sounds genuinely mad. They're playing it straight, but within the confines of the outlandish, outrageous, daft, way-out adventure serial mode. The cast are pitch perfect. Also, they're clearly enjoying themselves. Watch the scene where Ben and Jamie pretend to interrogate the disguised Doctor in the market. How can you not share their pleasure at what they're doing?

Yeah, this recycles all the tropes of the Flash Gordon style B-serial... but without the glibber-than-glib characterisation, the swaggering jingoism, the cheaty cliffhangers. It does that B-serial thang... but with people who seem to think and feel, albeit within the confines of utter nonsense. But what is inherently trivial or stupid about nonsense? I reject that idea utterly. Nonsense can have integrity. 'The Underwater Menace' has oodles of integrity. The integrity of delight. If you can, without delight, contemplate Anneke Wills in a surgical smock, indignantly saying "you're not turning me into a fish!" to Colin Jeavons with huge fake eyebrows, then... well, may the wrath of Amdo engulf you.

And Zaroff is utterly priceless. I love the bit when the Doctor asks him (in a wonderfully patient voice) why he wants to blow up the world and he responds "you as a scientist ask me why?" as if the Doctor has asked him a self-evidently ludicrous question... and then there's the hysterical laugh that infuses his voice as he says "you demand? You demand?" at King Thous. It's a great performance. Of course, Zaroff is *just* a mad scientist. But so is Davros. So is Sharaz Jek.

I'm happy to read stuff into Who. It's one way in which I enjoy the texts and I refuse to apologise. But I'm quite happy to enjoy the supposed trash on this level too. Why not?

This story shows that even at its silliest, Doctor Who literally cannot help itself. It cannot help noticing the complications involved in how people feel about religion, socially useful myth though it may be. It cannot help noticing the contradictions involved in the scientific project in a world of power structures and apocalyptic weapons arrays, divided between a "West" and an "East" that blame each other for everything. It cannot help noticing that it is the product of an impoverished backwater that used to be an empire and still can't move on. It cannot help itself noticing oppression, tyranny and the power of people to combine to escape and/or defeat the rulers (though, sadly, the King survives and tritely mends his ways). It cannot help itself noticing the colour and texture and freedom of communal social life. It cannot help noticing the irony of its own status as a text. It cannot help itself being wonderful.

I adore this story. There, I'm out and I'm proud.


'The Macra Terror'...

...is, in its adorably schlocky way, a jumbled statement of the anxieties of mid-60s Britain. A world of holiday camps where the working classes went for sojourns consisting of enjoyable humiliation and cheerfully-totalitarian regimentation. (Thanks to Miles and Wood for saying smart things about the Butlins vibe.) A world in which a new generation were questioning the friendly platitudes of an older set who seemed, at times, like a benevolent and philistine dictatorship. A world conscious of prosperity built on North Sea gas, full of politicians appealing to "the spirit of Dunkirk", i.e. the paradoxical appeal to freedom through conformity, and prosperity built on the burning of toxic substances.

'The Macra Terror' is also the precursor to The Prisoner. Now, The Prisoner is altogether more radically odd and suggestive... and The Prisoner probably wasn't influenced by 'The Macra Terror'... but they're both expressions of similar things that were aloft in the cultural air... and, the fact is, 'The Macra Terror' got there first.

'The Macra Terror' is also the precursor to 'Gridlock', which is still the masterpiece of nu-Who. 'Gridlock' doesn't just slot in the monsters from the old story, it actually develops the ideas and ambitions of the older story. 'Gridlock' is a statement of the anxieties and absurdities of its times, just like 'The Macra Terror'. In both stories, the Macra are germs in the social wound, parasites on industrialisation, parasites on human effort and cultural malaise, embodiments of repressed knowledge.

It's telling that nu-Who is at its very best when also being most thematically faithful to the classic series. Both Macra stories illustrate that the show is at its best when it tries to do things that you don't see anywhere else, when it gleefully dives into semiotics, when it gives itself freedom to indulge in satire and metaphor, when it is unabashedly political and when it free-associates with language and ideas.

The Colony, unlike most of the bog-standard Troughton-era bases, is an entire world in miniature. The authority figure is not gruff and unstable... he's the soul of calm and courtesy. He's in just as much 'denial' as, say, Jarvis or Robson... but, in this story, so is everyone else. The base is under seige but, as Simon Kinnear once put it, everyone has decided to pretend it isn't happening.

The only man who admits what's going on is labelled a lunatic and subjected to trippy brainwashing. When somebody tries to defend him from the authorities, they insist that he's "as cheerful as any of us!" (not sane or harmless) as though cheerful acceptance is the only test of social acceptability.

Even those who see the Macra remain unsure about what they are, almost as if they can't bring themselves to see them properly. Are they insects, crabs or giant bacteria? Or all three? Even their name - evidence of real, free-associating thought on the part of the creative team - could be a riff on "macroscopic" or on Macrocheira Kaempferi (which is the latin name for the Japanese Spider Crab, the largest known arthropod). Of course, the latin for crab is "cancer"... which is kind of what the Macra are, a cancer in the body politic.

Further evidence of the linguistic cleverness is to be found in the name of the Colony's leader - he's "the Pilot", as though he's descended from the pilot of the ship that brought them, or the captain of the 'ship of state'. Of course, pilots just steer; they're not navigators. In the same way, the Pilot of the Colony doesn't decide for himself, he obeys Control. Which brings me to the near-constant riffing on the word "control". The word is used in all its senses - as a location (i.e. the Control room), as a state of being, as political power, as control over ones own mind, sanity, perceptions, etc. Sometimes each sense is used in the course of a single scene. And lets not forget that "control" is something you do to infections and infestations and pests.

Medok is the most Doctor-like character (hence his name?) in a story that sees the Doctor - gloriously - become a kind of instinctive, anti-authority troublemaker. Troughton's Doctor is at his most bewitchingly, lovably mischevious in this story. He walks into a world of neatness and insists on staying scruffy. He stays awake at Sleep Time. He breaks the rules on principle. He teases authority at every turn. He makes disobedience a point of honour and wisdom, stating his inherent distrust of all power as a kind of manifesto. He's an expert in confusion.

This story contains one of my very favourite Doctor-moments in the whole series, old or new. The Doctor, upon hearing some horribly happy little totalitarian work-ditty, groans and says "Did you hear that rhyme? The man who wrote that should be sent to the danger gang, not us!" It's utterly delicious. The Doctor as an ironic, sardonic enemy of both tyranny and the ugly aesthetic banality that accompanies it.


'Tomb of the Cybermen'

Here's what I wrote about it elsewhere:

"No attempt has been made to make this story make any kind of sense on any level, with the Doctor’s actions being so illogical and contradictory as to make him inexplicable. But I could live with that… were it not for the sexism and racism with which this story is larded. Victoria is the locus of a casual sexism in this tale that is noticeable even by the standards of the time. The main human villains, Klieg and Kaftan, are without context, provenance or proper ethnic identity – they are just foreign, in the most generic way possible. Toberman – the only black man in the story – is a semi-mute, backward, violent lummox. The other humans may be foolish but they’re all essentially well-meaning and sane – presumably because they’re all Western and Caucasian. This is all the more unforgivable because other Cyberman stories from the same era (i.e. ‘The Tenth Planet’ and ‘The Wheel in Space’) manage not to connect non-Caucasian ethnicity with evil."

This stands.


'The Dominators'

I'm very conflicted over this one. The political subtext is reactionary bordering on offensive... which put this into my list of top 10 hates.

But... I'm very tempted to feel that everything else about the story is so bad it goes all the way round and comes out at good again. The Quarks are so ridiculous they become charming, the Dominators are so extravagantly unpleasant and stupid that they become an unwittingly great pisstake of all fascists (using the term loosely, in the manner of Rik from The Young Ones), the Dulcians are so hilariously rubbish they become endearing, the plot is so aimless and repetitious that it starts to look like a deliberate tactic to make a statement about the futility of all action. So bad it's good? It's almost so bad it's Sartre!

And - perhaps best of all - we have a heroic, brave, inquiring, sardonic, witty guest hero... who is tubby and balding, has a stupid name and is shown to fail with girls.

Even the politics can be viewed another way, if you squint determinedly. One way, it's a sneering attack on pacifism and any notion that rational debate and humane scepticism is how to confront aggression... another way, it's about fuddy-duddy oldsters who sit back and let fascism win while the kids fight it out. Totalitarian militarism confronts bourgeois complacency and the two tesselate perfectly... meaning that only the youngsters throwing stones can save the world.

I'm confused now.

(A poster at Gallifrey Base - who goes by the semi-accurate handle of 'Mickey the Idiot'... his name really does appear to be Michael - posted this interesting observation about this story:

"I really like some of the design of it. Discussing this recently, the idea occurred to me that it's really about a Classical Art planet being invaded by a Modern Art planet. Maybe sometime the story isn't just what's in the script? Turn off the sound and it's all about a race of Ancient Greeks who believe in proportion, the Golden Section, and how their life gets turned around when Pop Artists with Brutalist shoulders introduce them to the Machine Art of Eduardo Paolozzi."

Brilliant!

Yet another poster at Gallifrey Base raised Gareth Roberts' famous and 'controversial' comments about this story and asked - rhetorically, I imagine - what those who dislike this story's politics think should be done to combat people like Al-Qaeda.

Personally, I think this is a rather tenuous analogy. I mean, I must've missed the bit in the televised story where it comes out that the Dulcians had been arming and funding and training the Dominators for years in order to set them against a rival planet. Maybe it's in Ian Marter's novelisation which, I confess, I haven't read for ages.)


'The Mind Robber'

Just one of the best things ever, this story is a gloriously trippy metafictional journey into Doctor Who's own status as a text.

'Robber' picks up the Troughton era handbook for writers, stamps on it, scrawls insulting and anarchistic slogans upon its pages, rips it up and sets fire to the pieces. There is no isolated base, no croaky computer, no catalgue of disposable characters who are laser-beamed to death, no unstable authority figure, no creeping infiltration, no standard fight sequence for Jamie, no scene where someone goes into a bonkers tirade and storms out of a control centre... instead we have a deeply trippy ride through sheer weirdness; a totally unpredictable variation of content, style and pace from episode to episode; an intelligently created elllision of symbolism and literalism; a classic surreal quest narrative drawing on Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland yet beholden to neither.

The Doctor and his friends leave their universe and enter a non-spatial, non-temporal buffer zone... and this buffer zone is a world of fiction. An empty nothingness until imagination works upon it, it soon fills with robots and unicorns and princesses and forests of words.

They've landed in a metaphysical space instead of a physical one, and the threats they encounter are metaphysical too - they run the risk of being translated into other identities, of losing their faces, of being turned into bit players in other people's stories, of being made into fiction themselves (which, as this story constantly reminds us by constantly saying the opposite, they already are).

They are stalked by the ultimate variety of faceless, functional, baddie goons: toy soldiers. As if to swipe at the mechanical nature of so much scriptwriting, these goons have got dirty great wind-up keys sticking out of their backs. In this story, the ultimate threat is to become the functional plaything of the desperate hack writer. The soldiers not only hunt our heroes, they also represent what our heroes are threatened with (both literally and figuratively): being clockwork cyphers who just 'go' when the lazy writer winds them up and sets them off.

And this is the central threat, even of the somewhat contrived Earth-invasion plot that surfaces towards the end. Mankind would become fiction. Ironically enough, via the creative imagination, we'd all be stripped of our free will. We'd be crushed inside the pages of a book by a domineering Master Brain that controls even the writer with a stentorian bark that is channelled through his own mouth. That's what it would be like to be a character in someone else's book, or a fact pushed around by someone else's editor, or a mortal pushed around by a god (which is exactly what a writer looks like from the point-of-view of a character).

This is Doctor Who investigating its own nature as part imagineering stream-of-consciousness fantasy, part lumbering and mechanical genre hack-work. This is Doctor Who investigating its own origins in myth and legend, in children's fiction and historical romance, in satire and allegory. The Doctor wanders around in a pseudo-Narnia. The Doctor solves the kinds of puzzles to be found in kid's annuals. The Doctor becomes Perseus. The Doctor co-writes a face-off between a succession of heroes and villains who are part historical reality and part fictional confabulation (Blackbeard, Cyrano, etc). And the Doctor meets Gulliver.

It cannot be an accident that Gulliver is one of the Doctor's own antecedents in fiction: a restless traveller who finds himself banked on foreign shores where he encounters strange people and uncanny creatures representing human foibles and political follies. Swift's story is often mistaken for pure escapism for kids, but is packed with the bitterest and darkest satirical comments on human politics and behaviour... very much like Doctor Who, though ironically enough not for most of the Troughton era up until this point.

Perhaps, above all, the thing to admire most about 'Robber' is that it triumphantly makes the best of its behind-the-scenes problems. An extra episode needed at the last minute? Just get Derrick to write a new Episode 1 featuring only the regular cast! Result? One of the most unusual and sinister openings of the show's history. Frazer's got the lurgy? No trouble, just write a temporary change of actor into the script! Result? One of the most amusing, memorable and strangely unsettling events ever depicted by the series.

Now that, we must surely all agree, is the sheerest of sheer class.


ADDENDUM:

It occurs to me that 'The Mind Robber' can also be read as being about aliention and reification in the Marxist senses of those words.

The Master of the Land of Fiction is clearly offering the Doctor a job when he asks him to take his place. He even refers to it as a "responsible position". He (the Master) is clearly the servant or employee of the Master Brain. He was also a paid employee of Ensign magazine, churning out thousands and thousands of words for them to print and sell. In other words, he was (and still is) a worker. He toiled to produce a product, was paid a wage and (presumably) watched as others pocketed the profits. Whatever the Master Brain (and the power it represents) gets out of running the Land of Fiction, the Master clearly doesn't see any of the coin.

You can argue about whether writing stories constitutes "socially necessary labour" (I'd say that it does, personally... human culture is in many ways based on stories and it's pretty clear that we need them in order to be fully human... they're part of what the young Marx called our "species-being"... which is something that the Land of Fiction implies by its very existence) but clearly the Master spends much more time than he really needs to churning out all those words. His labour creates a surplus which is pocketed by the publishers... or a profit of some kind that is taken by the Master Brain.

Moreover, the necessities of the market demanded that he write a certain type of story, commercial adventure stories which may not really express his full creativity. (Certainly, the story as a whole strongly hints at a feeling that trite adventures involving handy swords and with-one-bound-he-was-free endings are highly unsatisfactory. It hints at this in an ironic and self-aware way, as it must.) Similarly, in the Land, the Master tries to construct a story about the Doctor and his friends that pleases the power he serves... a story that the Doctor resists being a part of, partly by rejecting handy swords.

On Earth, his stories would have risen up to confront him as a vast block of printed type, as piles of magazines, as things outside of himself or his control... that's what happens when workers make things under capitalism. They are not expressions of his creativity exercised for its own sake; they are not the produce of an unexploited person and a free producer... unless the person happens to be lucky enough to be a financially independent artist or something like that. Similarly, the work he does in the Land is not an expression of his unalienated self-expression. He works for the Master Brain and works to produce the effects it desires. (You could almost see the Master Brain as a personification - thus a reification, in the Marxist sense - of the market itself, which is so often treated or spoken of as a kind of infallible god which should be allowed to rule society for our own good.)

In short, the Master fits (broadly) the Marxist picture of the worker who is alienated from his species-being and from the products of his labour.

He is clearly a slave to the Master Brain. As such, he's really as menaced by the Land of Fiction as the Doctor. He is confronted by products of human intellectual labour in the form of books, characters from books, characters from folklore (the telling and retelling of legends is a human production as much as anything else), wind-up soldiers, etc. In the Land, words (themselves human productions) confront humans as things outside of human control, as trees and forests. Books - commodities produced by labour - attack and threaten to swallow you. If that isn't a way of depicting alienation, of humans estranged and menaced by the products of their own labour, then I don't know what is.

Capitalism materialises the labour of humans into commodities with use-values and exchange values (i.e. books and magazines), thus reifying human labour time. The Land of Fiction takes it further, continuing the process of reification until the characters (themselves commodities and products of labour) are fully materialised, to the point where they walk about and speak for themselves. Again, alienation is depicted when the product of human labour materialised in the form of the Karkus attacks the Doctor and Zoe.

Alienation appears in another way when Zoe and Jamie are "turned into fiction" and appear before the Doctor as blank, empty cyphers who get stuck in the grooves of their dialogue. They've been alienated from their human nature by being made into a commodity (fiction being a commodity, remember). They start behaving like stuck records, like people on an assembly line suffering from line hypnosis.

All this might seem like a helluva stretch... but you have to bear in mind that all the books alluded to, all the legends invoked, all the proverbs cited, all the characters who appear in the story... they're all products of human labour of one form or another.


'The Invasion'

Easily the best ever televised Cyberman story, because it largely sidelines the Cybermen and concentrates on a human villain who is both well written and well acted.

The implication that the Cybermen fit neatly into Vaughn's worldview because he's capitalist who believes in standardisation, technology and quasi-fascist leadership (and a megalomaniacal psychopath) is kind of prescient of the modern analysis of the corporation to be found in the work of people like Joel Bakan. Again, Simon Kinnear said some very clever things about the corporate way in which the Cybermen behave in his article 'Money, Money, Money!' (DWM 410).

Vaughn is almost a personification of the corporation. He controls politicians, puts computers to work answering phones, exploits the labour of scientists, employs muscle when necessary (in the real world, corporations don't need private armies... they're quite happy to use the public-funded armies of the nation states in which they live as their hired muscle), smiles and charms and lies his head off. Moreover, he has neither body to punish (bullets don't hurt him) nor soul to damn.

Sadly, this story continues the trend of having the Doctor cosying up to human establishment figures. Also, Isobel is absolutely hateful. Still, nothing's perfect.


'The Krotons'

Very good, on the whole. This is Troughton's version of 'The Savages', only less po-faced. Mind you, Bob Holmes hasn't quite found his leavening wit or his gift for characterisation yet... but he's already showing an instinctive grasp of what makes the show tick.

'The Krotons' is a politico-mythic fable with a satisfying mix of adventure and high-concept ideas. Crystalline aliens that can dissolve into a liquid suspension - how cool is that?

David Maloney's direction is excellent, filled with imagistic concepts that heighten the drama and enrich the ideas. The dot pictures that resolve into the Doctor's face; the fish-eye lens; the moment when the chain snaps, etc.

This is a very 60s production concerned with themes of obedience or rebellion against authority, the control of education, the rationing of knowledge, student revolt, the utilisation of talent by power that views humans as resources and nothing more. It's easy to see why, in 1969, someone with satirical and political sensibilities would be writing about angry students rebelling against faceless authorities that control information and ruthlessly supress dissent. It is this very satirical and political sensibility that will, once melded with an emerging feel for characterisation and dialogue and humour, see Holmes emerge as the greatest Who writer.

For now, 'The Krotons' is probably the most direct engagement with the revolutionary mood at the end of the 60s yet found in Who... of course, 'The War Games' is not far away.......


'The Space Pirates'

Why is story so often forgotten? Or used as an example of how even Almighty Bob started badly? Two obvious reasons:

1. The only episode we still have happens (natch) to be the crap one. The Doctor’s hardly in it and Caven – the superbly vicious villain – isn’t in it at all. It’s mostly comprised of scenes in which the moronic Space rozzers trade insults with the irritating Milo Clancy. Rubbish American accents abound. Moreover, two of the episodes for which we now only have audio (1 and 6) are highly visual and do not work well on CD, even with Frazer Hines’ helpful commentary. Thank you once again Pamela Nash.

2. No monsters. It’s been the downfall of the reputation of many a good story.

And ‘The Space Pirates’ is a good story. One of the better late-Troughtons in fact, and infinitely more enjoyable than many a highly praised base-under-siege runaround. Compared to the story that came before it - Brian Hayles oddly uninspired ‘Seeds of Death’ - ‘Space Pirates’ shines like polished argonite.

Hermack and Warne are militaristic, organised, square-jawed, macho/camp representatives of officialdom. Like most such people in Robert Holmes’ world, they are clueless dorks. They’re more than just a narrow mickey-take of Star Trek. Apart from anything else, as far as most Brits were concerned, Star Trek hadn’t been invented yet. Even if Holmes had seen it, his Space Corps bods don’t act or speak like Kirk and his mates. In fact, when Hermack (old hammy Brit) booms chummily to “Ian” (respectful American subordinate), it’s more like Picard and Riker... but, tempting as it may be to credit Holmes with the astonishing feat of satirising TNG twenty years before it was created, I don’t think this can be anything but coincidence. No, the Space Corps wallies are prototypes of a classic Bob Holmes riff: the authoritarian control freak who fails to control anything and gets all his guesses wrong. The way in which the representatives of law and order are depicted as dumb time-wasting losers, while all the real thinking and constructive action comes from the Doctor and the raggedy old-timers, is quite delicious.

Is it a space Western? Only partly. In fact, only the character of Milo Clancy bears much resemblance to anything to be found in Westerns. He’s an old-time prospector; he dresses and talks like one. Too much like one, in fact. Supposedly, Gordon Gostelow even changed loads of the dialogue to sound more yee-har, howdy-ma’am, what in tarnation, darn-tootin’ cowboyesque. I’m sure we’re all grateful. If Dudley Foster had gone by the Gostelow Method, Caven would’ve had an eyepatch, a parrot, a wooden leg and would’ve said things like “Ha-harr, splice the mainbrace Mr Dervish, ye scurvy swab, or I’ll send ye down to Davy Jones’s locker!”.

Which brings us to what the story is really about… Pirates! In fact, there’s a fairly big clue to this in the title. All the same, many people miss the fact that this is, fundamentally, a pirate story. Caven is far more like a Blackbeard archetype than a cattle rustler. Argonite might be like Californian gold… but it could just as easily be pieces of ate. The space pirates go about “preying on defenceless cargo ships” rather than sticking up interstellar mail trains or robbing galactic banks. Hermack and the Space Corps are far more like 17th century British Naval officers, patrolling the Caribbean waters on behalf of His Majesty’s Revenue, than frontier lawmen. (Here, I acknowledge a direct debt to Miles and Wood.) By understressing these links to the pirate genre - and by not being as thunderingly literal as, say, Douglas Adams – the story scores big points.

Also, we see in ‘The Space Pirates’ the first twitchings of Bob Holmes’ liking for vast, implied backstories and backhistories. He hasn’t yet got the economy of his later work, in which he can conjure up colossal swathes of off-screen history and context in just a few lines… but it’s a start.

But the best thing about this story, as we might expect from Holmes, is the characterisation. It’s very strong indeed. Caven is brutal and ruthless but also loquacious and cynical. He has some great moments ridiculing the orthodox morality of others. Dervish has been blackmailed into complicity; he has a conscience but lacks courage. Unlike the gutless Fewsham in ‘Seeds of Death’ he doesn’t suddenly grow a backbone when the script requires it. The astoundingly thick, pompous and inefficient Hermack is Holmes’ earliest foray into parodying the sheer uselessness of authority figures… but even he is more than just a caricature. He flirts confidently but unsuccessfully with Madeleine, showing that he was meant to come over as both vain and inept. Milo – though irritating, owing to Gordon Gostelow’s silly performance – is an appealing character: a benign but cantankerous old refusenik who will not respect authority. Madeleine Issigri has believable motives. The scene in which she learns that her father is still alive is highly affecting, as is the scene in which Milo tries to reawaken Dom Issigri’s memories of their shared past.

That’s a key success of this story. The central guest characters (beyond the Space Corps buffoons) seem to be people with pasts, with shared histories about which they can reminisce, with emotional links to each other, with memories, with feelings. For once, there is real pathos underlying the usual capture/escape/corridor shenanigans.

Even Zoe is in character this week. She’s a savant from a futuristic technocracy… so she’s as good with science and technology as the Doctor but doesn’t know about candles.

Okay so there are some rubbish lines (“he’s liable to explode like glyceriltrinitrate!”) but there are also some marvellous ones. “You mean I’m disqualified?” sneers Caven when Sorba complains about him shooting a man in the back, “Don’t you want to play anymore?”

The single worst thing about the story is probably the ending. We are denied a tender scene in which Maddy is reunited with her father; instead we get a naff gag and everybody guffaws like they’re on Scooby-Doo. Or drugs. For ages. Of course, these days we’d get a ten minute reunion scene during which Murray Gold would do everything to make us cry short of actually coming round to our homes and squirting lemon juice into our eyes.

My favourite thing about the story? Hermack’s call sign: “V-Master”. I always think it sounds like one of those gimmicky food slicers that are advertised on early morning Sky TV. You know; the ones that people buy for twenty quid, use once and then stick at the back of the kitchen cupboard for a decade before they throw them away. A bit like one of those newfangled solar toasters.


'The War Games'

Somebody on the DVD documentary calls this a "light anti-war story" or something. But I don't think its an anti-war story at all. After all, the Doctor is perfectly happy to let Carstairs shoot people all over the place in order to protect the Ambulance, or for the Resistance to fight and kill the guards. His explicit aim is to organise the scattered Resistance groups into an army with which to fight the aliens. But this is not only (usually) self-defence, it's also revolutionary violence. It's war against the aggressor and/or against the system that runs the war games. This isn't an anti-war story; it's an anti-imperialist story.

Here's what I wrote about this story as part of a different post:

"Soldiers are workers... The guys at the front, bearing the brunt, are usually not (for the most part) the sons of privilege. The cannon fodder is drawn from the ranks of the poor and propertyless. On the ground, the Iraq war was kids from American urban wastelands devastated by domestic neoliberalism vs. reluctant Shia and Kurd conscripts. ‘Twas ever thus. And the soldiers we meet in ‘The War Games’ are clearly workers (or peasants). Okay, Carstairs and Lady Jennifer are posh, but the rest of them are common as muck.

From bluff Yorkshireman Russell to the defiant black Northern soldier Harper, the kidnapped soldiers are the workers of the world. They’ve been duped and brainwashed by their cynical leaders. They’re pawns on the chessboard of the ‘Great Game’."

...the 'Great Game' that we're still playing over control of Central Asia, the Middle East and the attendant advantages in access to fuel wealth... as the tortured and slaughtered people of Afghanistan can testify...

"And the players of the game? The English General Smyth (“the Butcher”), the German von Weich, the Confederate (also von Weich – are they clones? ...well, the Generals are all the same!) who sneeringly calls Harper 'boy'… The commanders on all sides are actually allies in a conspiratorial abuse of the workers who are fooled and forced into fighting each other for no reason but to further imperialist ambitions. The real war is the war waged by the rulers against the people.

But the people see through the conditioning (or some of them do – Lenin would’ve probably called them a vanguard) and form the Resistance. Black and white, all nationalities… even Arturo Villa joins his bandits to the cause. Scared kid Private Moor saves the day by fragging the officer. Jamie and the Redcoat with whom he’s imprisoned join forces despite their natural mistrust and escape together. In the end, the War Games are stopped by this international union of soldiers in revolt.

And when was this made and shown? 1969. The year that the worldwide anti-Vietnam protests reached a crescendo."

(Wise words from me there.)

The late 60s were indeed revolutionary times. In '68, the Tet offensive saw American imperialism in Vietnam on the defensive... students tore up Paris, French workers held a general strike and then a wave of workplace occupations... strikes swept Britain... the black American olympians turned their backs on the Stars and Stripes and gave the black power salute... West German students marched with pictures of Rosa Luxemburg and Hungarians rebelled against Stalinism... anti-war protestors lay siege to the Democratic conference...

How does ex-communist Mac Hulke respond to all this? We'll never know, but it seems possible that his lefty sensibilities infected Terrance Dicks' story about people put on a game board (one of Dicks' favourite stories). 'The War Games' is certainly the most direct response to the times, after a reactionary run at it in 'The Dominators' and an oblique take on student revolt in 'The Krotons'. It's also the most radical. Even the Doctor goes back to being (at least partly) the old anarchic trickster (bluffing Gorton, fooling the War Scientist, etc) and then organises a guerilla war against the imperialists!

No more deluded by reaction
On tyrants only we'll make war
The soldiers too will take strike action
They'll break ranks and fight no more
And if those cannibals keep trying
To sacrifice us to their pride
They soon shall hear the bullets flying
We'll shoot the generals on our own side.

Some more things I wanna mention:

Smythe keeps his evil, secret, alien communication screen behind a portrait of King George. Von Weich keeps his behind a portrait of Kaiser Wilhelm.

"I believe they call it the 'war to end wars'" says the Doctor. The same dishonest rationale is hinted at by the War Chief later in the story.

The fog of war. The soldiers get engulfed by a fog or mist when they try to stray beyond their set boundaries. It causes them anxiety, befuddles and confuses them.

The semiotics of spectacles. Distorted eyes, distorted vision of the world. Desk-bound bureaucratic murderers like Himmler. Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four in which he describes the party man with the spectacles that catch the light and make him look like he has blank discs for eyes.

Court Martials like the one Smythe conducts actually happened. A lot.

Jamie teams up with a redcoat... but goes back to attacking them on sight once the Time Lords have wiped his memory. He has lost the things he learned through struggle. And the Doctor laughs. Mind you, the English bastard does try to shoot him in the back... and Jamie has the right to chase the invader out of his country.

Ransome. His big gripe with war is the paperwork. And the subalterns who don't fill in the forms. "Do you realise," he tuts, "in the last push, we lost 10,000 shovels." I wonder if they 'lost' anything else in the last push?

As a depiction of imperialism... isn't it all a bit conspiratorial? Vulgar Marxism? Well, as someone said, vulgar Marxism explains most of what happens in the world. And Rumsfeld's "stuff happens" is an even less acceptable diagnosis of reality.

Rumsfeld wore glasses, didn't he. And Cheney. Might explain Hitchens. Brainwashing. "You heard the evidence my dear, it's all proved... I'm afraid he has got WMD and is in league with bin Laden."

The vertigo of anachronism. Romans charge you... and it's scary because you can't wind the car up fast enough.

The scene where Smythe and Von Weich play Risk with counters and a board, laughing as they joke about turning each other's flanks. Of course, they're laughing about sending men to kill and die. But then, people like that do.

The anti-imperialist struggle even involves in a lecture to Pancho Villa about the equality of women.

The Doctor bursts into the op-art Hell of the Interrogation Room and says to the guard "Don't you point that thing at me!" Outrageous, glorious little bastard!

We really should see the human soldiers team up with some alien guards who realise that they are exploited too.

Beyond all this metaphor stuff, nice though it is, the end of this story makes you think to yourself "...but they'll end up back in the wars they came from when they get sent back home..." which leads to the further thought "...so are the people sending them to fight the real wars any better than the War Lords?... or the Time Lords?"

The Time Lords are utter hypocrites to mindwipe Jamie and Zoe (and, by implication, Carstairs, Russell, etc). They've condemned the "brutal methods of mental processing" used by the War Lords, but then proceed to mentally process people themselves. But the liberals are always the murky reflections of the fascists... and imperialism is the process within (or effect of) capitalism that reveals the fundamental connection between them. At the Nuremburg and Tokyo tribunals, where "liberal" and "progressive" and "democratic" values passed judgement on the relics of defeated fascism, Nazi or Japanese war criminals were absolved of guilt (or simply not charged) over crimes that the Allies had also committed, i.e. horrific bombing of civillian population centres.

We run into problems for the anti-imperialist theme precisely because the Doctor's ultimate aim in the story is reformist, i.e. to put things back the way they were but with the worst excesses curbed, for which he needs to collaborate with Power. The abducted humans can't simply take over the War Lord's planet and rule it themselves (for some reason), so they need to be restored... but, of course, this means restoring them to the world that was sending them off to kill and die, the world that resembles the War Games near exactly. Reformism in a nutshell. But, by the end, the Resistance has won by itself. It has stopped the war and taken over the control centre... though the logic of the story makes this a coup by a small band rather than a mass movement. All the same, it always seems to me that the humans would probably be better off staying put than going home. But that doesn't get Troughton regenerated, does it?

You could interpret the Doctor's plea for the Time Lords to get involved and help people as being congruent with the position of the "humanitarian interventionists", you know, people like Nick Cohen and Hitchens who think you can expect British and American imperialism to work for humanitarian ends... but for that analogy to work, the Doctor would have to be making his plea to the War Lords, not the Time Lords. See the problem? Stitch that, Euston Manifesto.

The first new face the Time Lords offer him appears to be Karl Marx.

That is all.

Vive la Resistance!

Workers of the Whoniverse

(This was originally written for May Day.)


Some people think Doctor Who is inherently left-wing. This is bullshit. But… like much bullshit, there’s a fibrous grain of truth in there somewhere if you don latex gloves, break the crust and delve deeply enough into the contents of the pat.

Doctor Who started just before the worldwide explosion of dissent and protest that represents the real point of what is called (inaccurately) “the 60s”. It ran through the years of the Vietnam war, the end of the post-war economic boom, the worldwide wave of protests by students and workers, France in ’68, the Prague Spring, the height of the civil rights movement, the ascendancy (and murder) of Martin Luther King Jnr., the rise of the women’s movement and feminism, the rise of the gay liberation movement, etc. It ran during interesting times. It reflected the massive changes in social attitude that were transforming Western culture – how could it not, being a product of Western culture? It reflected something amorphous and overhyped (but real) that we call “the liberal consensus”, which is easy to take for granted now but which was a drastic change in the whole nature and consciousness of Western capitalist society, brought about by the struggles of kids, students, minorities, oppressed people and workers. It was, for the most part, shaped by creative people who were interested in their world and had a tendency to be open-minded, liberal and tolerant in their outlook, i.e. people like Barry Letts. And, later, it reflected the backlash against these changes which were lead, on this little island, by Margaret “Evil Edna” Thatcher, a backlash of which a younger generation of lefty/eco/liberals like Andrew Cartmel were strongly disapproving.

Moreover, the show was originally a product of a state-funded public service broadcaster that didn’t have to compete in the marketplace in order to survive and had a mandated role to reflect the entire nation. Beyond wanting there to be someone for the kids to identify with (and Dad to lust over) there wasn’t much time spent on demographics and other such marketing preoccupations (at least not compared to today). Reith may have been a reactionary old patrician, but Reithianism in the abstract is almost a quality-not-quantity ethic with paternalistic distortions. And the cheap-and-cheerful nature of the old series gave it a strange freedom, at least some of the time. The BBC always used the show as a cash cow, but it has only become so near-crucial to BBC prestige and revenue in recent years. And there is also the philistinism of management to remember – a BBC bigwig might send an angry memo to a producer if he thinks an episode is too scary for the nation’s chidlers while missing the fact that the same episode is sub-textually critiquing Western imperialism.

Given all this, and given the variety of writers who contributed to it over the years, it would be amazing if Doctor Who hadn’t occasionally aligned itself with workers – especially during times of heightened class struggle. After all, there were times during its original production run when even sobre and pessimistic people thought that youngsters, workers and radicals might change the world a very fundamental way. As it was, the struggles of such people heavily influenced mainstream culture, if slowly and unconsciously. In a time during which being a Maoist was to be mainstream in most universities, it’s no more surprising that the (presumably non-Maoist) makers of Doctor Who should have their hero claim friendship with Mao than it is that they should have him tripping through psychedelic surrealism (as in ‘The Time Monster’) despite not themselves being LSD users. Memes are bullshit, but ideas can be viral. When counter culture is strong and insurgent, it effects the mainstream… if only because the mainstream is heavily influenced by what is commercial and therefore tries to sell counter culture back to people when it becomes popular.

Frequently, Who will point out the corruption, callousness and brutality of masters, but they tend to be masters of slaves rather than of labour. Frequently, economic relationships are not depicted at all. When workers do appear, they tend to be stick figures in the background who are either irrelevant or need the Doctor to help them. Or they are ignorant, semi-comedy oafs. The best example of this is probably ‘The Green Death’, the culmination of the Letts/Dicks tendency towards right-on, tree-hugging, soft liberal/lefty polemics. The workers are portrayed as “funny little Welshm[e]n” who can be quite nice and kind at times, and who grumble at the nasty boss, but who also sneer ignorantly at the people with the real solutions: the middle class, University-educated, scientifically-trained, semi-hippy, right-on, soya-munching kids in the cute little commune. The other representation of workers to turn up like a bad penny is the “hotheads” thing. The Peladonian miners have legitimate grievances (the show is lefty enough to admit as much) but their sensible, moderate leader is the good guy while the radical amongst them is a “hothead” who descends into homicidal madness because he suspects that his comrades are being sold out. Meanwhile, the Doctor notes approvingly how the moderate miners’ leader stands shoulder to shoulder with the Queen and the High Priest (who have been oppressing his fellows) once they are threatened from outside. Yeurch.

When not being patronised and/or pitied, workers tend to be ignored. They just get left out, even when the show is at its most bolshy. We get a brief mention of “plebeian classes” on Gallifrey but we never see them. (This blog is named for these disdained, policed, strangely absent, seemingly vandalism-prone proles of the Doctor’s home world.) The show harps on about the evil of militarism, imperialism, fascism, racism and slavery. The show has some criticisms of organised religion. It frequently lashes out at the rich and the powerful. Sometimes it even takes on capitalism itself, situating evil forces within the context of business and corporate power. The show often seems to be sympathetic to revolution. The show has many nasty oligarchies felled by rebellion. All well and good. Inspiring even. But the rebels tend to be cookie-cutter resistance fighters rather than ordinary working people driven to revolt. Once in a while you get mention of a strike… with fish people on the picket line. There is a stripping away of wider context, even in some of the series’ most powerfully political episodes. You get sub-textual attacks on fascism… but you don’t, for instance, find any hint of it as a counter-revolutionary reaction against high levels of working class struggle (fair enough really – the Trotskyist analysis of fascism isn’t the kind of thing that keeps viewers glued to the screen between Grandstand and Juke Box Jury). Even some of the most angry attacks on capitalism lack any portrayal of workers, i.e. ‘The Caves of Androzani’.

But, as I said, occasionally a story comes along in which the workers are strongly present, in which they seem to be real people, to have a chance of winning (by themselves as much as with the Doctor’s help) and to have a chance of being a positive force, of changing the world. And it even happens occasionally in our dreary present. The series is today made by people who grew up watching it and loving it. Once in a while, even a New Labour-supporting writer with an O.B.E. and a future career in Hollywood will find himself writing a script in which an ordinary working woman stands up to the soldiers who are taking the immigrants away. Maybe it’s the influence of the old show working on his soul. Who knows?

And so… here it is, the Shabogan Graffiti guide to the three best Doctor Who stories that show the people who create all the wealth of society throwing off their (mental and/or physical) chains and fighting back.


'The War Games'

Soldiers are workers too. The guys at the front, bearing the brunt, are usually not (for the most part) the sons of privilege. The cannon fodder is drawn from the ranks of the poor and propertyless. On the ground, the Iraq war was kids from American urban wastelands devastated by domestic neoliberalism vs. reluctant Shia and Kurd conscripts. ‘Twas ever thus. And the soldiers we meet in ‘The War Games’ are clearly workers (or peasants). Okay, Carstairs and Lady Jennifer are posh, but the rest of them are common as muck.

From bluff Yorkshireman Russell to the defiant black Northern soldier Harper, the kidnapped soldiers are the workers of the world. They’ve been duped and brainwashed by their cynical leaders. They’re pawns on the chessboard of the ‘Great Game’.

And the players of the game? The English General Smyth (“the Butcher”), the German von Weich, the Confederate (also von Weich – are they clones? ...well, the Generals are all the same!) who sneeringly calls Harper “boy”… The commanders on all sides are actually allies in a conspiratorial abuse of the workers who are fooled and forced into fighting each other for no reason but to further imperialist ambitions. The real war is the war waged by the rulers against the people.

But the people see through the conditioning (or some of them do – Lenin would’ve probably called them a vanguard) and form the Resistance. Black and white, all nationalities… even Arturo Villa joins his bandits to the cause. Scared kid Private Moor saves the day by fragging the officer. Jamie and the Redcoat with whom he’s imprisoned join forces despite their natural mistrust and escape together. In the end, the War Games are stopped by this international union of soldiers in revolt.

And when was this made and shown? 1969. The year that the worldwide anti-Vietnam protests reached a crescendo.


'The Mutants'

Two words: Stubbs and Cotton. They’re a cut above yer usual sci-fi guards. Why? Because they behave like real people. Well, they behave a bit like real people (this is still Doctor Who after all). They call their boss “his nibs” when he’s not about. They grumble when the alarm goes off because they’ve got to cut short their tea break. They’re not idealised. Stubbs is prepared (though obviously not eager) to kill “Mutts” before he gets savvy to what’s really going on in the system he serves. For ages they’ve carried on standing their posts, despite casually saying that the Solonians should’ve been given their independence years ago when anybody bothers to ask them.

These are clearly meant to be normal working stiffs. Stubbs has a regional accent (a rarer and therefore more pointed detail back then) and Cotton is a black man with a Caribbean accent (again, a rare and pointed detail). The choice of a Caribbean actor (albeit a very bad one) to play Cotton is indicative (I don’t know if it’s specified in the script that Cotton should be a black man but it hardly matters). The Caribbean was a nexus point of empire – the natives were all but annihilated by Westerners and the islands were subsequently used as a crucial staging post of the slave trade. (Also, in the context of black slavery, the word “cotton” is itself redolent of many pertinent associations.) And it had to be a conscious anti-racist statement, in the early-70s context of racial strife and a resurgent National Front. Stubbs and Cotton are best mates, despite their ethnic difference. The sci-fi context makes them both “Overlords”, i.e. both defined by their common humanity… but they go on to redefine themselves as being against some of their fellow humans, i.e. the Marshal and what he represents. This is the key thing about them: in the course of a struggle against the forces of reaction, they undergo a change. They see and hear things that bring about their political awakening. They shrug off “false consciousness” as they fight alongside Ky and the other Solonians. Just as white and black workers can join forces, so can they join forces with colonial people that their own nation has subjugated.

Everybody knows that ‘The Mutants’ has things to say about apartheid, but mostly we nowadays think of apartheid in connection with the old South Africa. But Rhodesia was an apartheid state too. It had only been a self-declared independent republic since 1965 and, in 1972 was still run by the racist white-minority government of Ian Smith. It would not be until 1979 that pressure from nationalist resistance fighters and revolutionary guerrillas would force Smith to come to terms and hold proper elections, in effect granting “majority rule”. The Marshal is very reminiscent of Smith. He refuses to go along with the official policy of peaceful relinquishment devised by a crumbling system. He dreams of doing what Smith did, declaring independence from the Empire while retaining the minority rule of the “Overlords”.

In 1972, people could still see the turmoil in Britain’s colonies (or former colonies) on the TV news. A generation had lived through a process of imperial divestment, during which the British Empire dismantled itself because the Second World War had left Britain economically bankrupt. The Earth Empire in ‘The Mutants’ is clearly the British Empire (rather than the French or Portugese) because it is taking itself apart. Britain had little choice but to peacefully grant independence to her former colonies once they achieved non-communist “stability” because empire had become too expensive. France, by contrast, squandered lives and treasure trying to hold onto her possessions, only to be defeated at length… but in France in ’68, many students and workers and ordinary people had expressed their solidarity with those brutalised by their own country’s empire, which had once included what the French called Indochina… which had since become the target of another empire, and the focus of more protest.


'The Sun Makers'

Some idiot once wrote that, in this story, the rebels are worse than the baddies. I dunno what story he was watching, but it ain’t the one I know as ‘The Sun Makers’. The Others might be a motley and even unsavoury lot but they’re hardly as bad as the planet-enslaving Collector and his pet Gatherer. Mandrel makes nasty threats that he doesn’t try very hard to make good on. The Doctor, ever a keen judge of character, doesn’t seen worried by Mandrel even when he’s waving a red hot poker in his face. Leela has some choice words for them that are very pertinent. She calls them cowards and that, essentially, is the trouble with them. Mind you, you can’t blame them for running away from life in Megropolis 1.

Some other idiots have occasionally argued that ‘The Sun Makers’ is a right-wing allegory because it depicts a tyrannical state and rails against taxes. Well, that’s fine if you’re dumb enough to buy the bullshit lie that conservative politics really is all about defending personal liberty from big government and punitive taxation. In fact, ‘The Sun Makers’ couldn’t be clearer about its political sympathies (even if you stick your fingers in your ears during the playful misquoting of Marx). The tyrannical state in this story is the Company. They are effectively one, or the Company exercises such control that they might as well be. This isn’t a big state stifling the liberty of free enterprise and free consumers. This is a big state as a vehicle for corporate domination. The Company is a private concern, engaged in “commercial imperialism”. The Company has, essentially, carried out a hostile takeover of the government. This is one big state that’s been privatised.

The icons of modern conservatism (i.e. Reagan, Thatcher, Bush, Bush II) are usually, for all their populist anti-government rhetoric, ultra-statists. They might reduce bureaucracy here and there (usually by cutting public services, etc.) and deregulate business, but they always strengthen the state’s machinery of enforcement, regulation, control and surveillance of its citizens, i.e. the poor schmoes who do all the work get spied on and arrested more. Meanwhile, we have de facto economic planning in the hands of radically undemocratic and monolithic organisations. We just call them corporations, but they act like states within states. And they get more and more powerful all the time.

Was the Iraq war a state affair? Well, the costs were pretty much covered by the state (i.e. by the American taxpayer) but the opportunities and profits were tendered out to the companies that swarmed in like vultures. Neoliberalism wants to turn the state into a heavily armed enforcement service that monitors and controls and taxes the population while acting as a munificent pimp for corporations, farming out every other task of the state to them, garnished with massive subsidies (i.e. corporate welfare).

The state gathers and the Company collects.

This is pretty much what Bob Holmes wrote about in ‘The Sun Makers’. His income tax bill seems to have got him thinking about the future of neoliberalism. Strange but true. Maybe he was looking at Chile and General Pinochet’s great experiment in merciless Chicago school ultra-monetarism, which he inflicted on his people via brutal repression. How else did he manage to write a Doctor Who story in 1977 that can be read as a companion text to The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein?

But the key thing for the purposes of this little essay is the way the workers are portrayed as changing in the course of the struggle. The Others are clearly former workers who’ve opted out. Mandrel’s grade status and former workplace even become plot points. Cordo is the lowest of the low; a timid, despairing and bankrupt drudge, the son of a lifelong corridor sweeper. But they end up uniting across the grade barriers, across their former differences. The Others go from cowardly hiding and petty criminality to leading a general strike. Cordo goes from contemplating suicide to jubilantly leading a revolution. Bisham is an executive grade whose moment of curiosity lands him in detention; initially, he lies back and accepts his doom.. but he ends up uniting with B and D Grades to topple the government. The workers with hand and brain.

Okay, they need the Doctor to get them started, but in this story the Doctor is almost like a personification of Information itself. He tells them things. He makes them curious. He makes them angry. He poses the right questions. He turns off the gas that makes them anxious and passive (surely this is thematically linked to his taking over the TV station and the news service?) and thus gets the ball rolling. It isn't long before he wanders off with Leela and leaves the united workers to pursue the revolution on their own.

The Doctor’s role as catalyst notwithstanding, this is a full scale workers’ revolution. Moreover, it’s explicitly linked to industrial action in the scene where Goudry and Veet incite the strike. It’s idealised, sure, but the portrayal is not without sceptical irony or some healthy moral ambiguity. Mandrel’s former colleagues Synge and Hackett obviously join the revolution from fear rather than immediate enthusiasm (though they seem to end up happy enough to help), and Marn simply switches sides when she sees which way the wind is blowing.

And then we have the matter of the Gatherer and his little tumble... Well, you can wring your hands about him if you like. I have to do my own tax return so, frankly, I’m not feeling merciful.