But this is just the start.
ideas are icepickproof
Friday, 11 February 2011
Wooooo Hooooo!!!!!!!
Mubarak falls! The bloody dictator ruled for 30 years, backed by and representing neoliberalism and Western imperialism. The bravery, determination, organisation and moral force of the Egyptian people brought him down in just over 2 weeks. This leaves the torturer Suleiman in power, backed by the military...
But this is just the start.
But this is just the start.
Tuesday, 8 February 2011
Life and Taxes
Here is George Monbiot, on possibly the most scandalous domestic story of the year (which, in the age of the ConDems, is really saying something). Please read this. In a sane country, this issue would trigger an Egypt-style revolt. It's essentially a government conspiracy to help massive corporations and banks (you remember how helpful they've been to the world in recent years?) defraud the country of perhaps unprecedentedly vast amounts of money. It may even amount to the effective abolition of taxation upon the wealthiest organisations in society.
Here's a sample:
I simply cannot help thinking about 'The Sun Makers' when I read this. One of the most hilarious myths in Who fan culture is that 'Sun Makers' is a right-wing allegory about the horrors of the big state and punitive taxation. This is to misunderstand the story but also, more important, it is to buy into one of the centrepieces of reactionary ideological bullshit pervading our culture: the idea that conservative politics is about the liberty of the individual while socialist politics is about the power of the state.
The truth is, conservatism needs the state. It loves the state. The core of conservatism is the ideological commitment to using the state to further the direct interests of big capital. Conservatism understands, even if many so-called socialists don't, that the state is theirs. It's an emanation from the capitalist system. Law, order, the courts, the police, the government... they're there to protect private property, to guard the people who own it all from the people who own relatively nothing. It's an apparatus of force and coercion, built to enforce the dominance of the people who own and control the means of production.
Liberals and professional Labourists are eager enough to use the state to enforce the rule of the capitalists, to promote the interests of business, etc. But conservatism sees this as its sacred mission... and, since the age of neoliberalism was ushered into practice by Pinochet and Reagan and Thatcher, they see it as the very least they can do. Conservatives now, and our own government is an example par excellence, wants to wage all-out class war on behalf of the very biggest and the very richest. They are engaged in smash and grab policies, designed to sell off everything that isn't nailed down... and then prize up the nails.
In 'The Sun Makers', Robert Holmes is not just satirising "the UK tax system", as fan guidebooks usually inform us. He's satirisng the symbiotic link between the state and big business. Yes, the Collector's personal guard are called the "Inner Retinue" (which sounds a bit like "Inland Revenue"... thus implying that the Vat man is a bit of a brutal thug, geddit???) and there are are corridors called the P45, etc. But all this occurs under the absolute domination of an organisation called "The Company", run by a guy in a pinstriped suit, who is clearly doing this for the profits. Where do the profits come from? From the ludicrously exorbitant taxes (i.e. "breathing tax") paid by the population to the Gatherer, who is the ultimate state official but is grovellingly subservient to his corporate master. So, the state gathers and the Company collects. Really, how much clearer could this possibly be?
It's sometimes objected that the society in the story is more like a Stalinist dictatorship... because it's got torture chambers, prison camps, a news service that broadcasts government propaganda and lots of bureaucrats. Well, the capitalist world has torture chambers, prison camps, utterly subservient news and bureaucrats aplenty. (Our leaders are currently trying to lever a torturer into power in Egypt who's been complicit with them in rendition flights, all in the name of stability.) Indeed, corporations themselves function on bureaucracy, misinformation, propaganda and absolutist pyramidal power structures. They are themselves command economies. Many of them are now bigger, in terms of GDP, that some nation states. And then there's the fact that Nazi Germany was a capitalist country (albeit one with heavy state involvement). And then we have endless examples of capitalists being more than happy to do lucrative business with brutal, repressive regimes... IBM in Nazi Germany, Murdoch in China, etc.
Neoliberalism uses the state as a way of distributing largesse from the poor and from ordinary working people to the rich and the corporations. That's our current government's project. One way of doing this is through taxation. Put very crudely, you raise taxes on the ordinary schmoes and lower them for the rich, or simply fail to collect them. Meanwhile, the government splurges money on protecting the interests of banks and big business, with bail outs from the treasury when they totter, or by selling off the public sector to them at knockdown prices and then continuing to use taxpayer money to prop things up when business ruins them.
This is what has happened in 'The Sun Makers'. The Company has, effectively, bought out the government... or merged with it to the point where they have become one... though, of course, the Collector reveals their intention to simply leave the humans in the lurch once they've made as much profit out of them as they can. They artificial suns will run down without Company maintenance and the humans will die. "We're all in it togther" in a nutshell. In the meantime, the humans work to provide the Company with surplus. They work in factories and foundries (obviously making stuff, which must then be sold on the intergalactic market) and, if they get sent to the Correction Centre for defying the Company, they end up working for free... a bit like the denizens of America's system of privatised slave gulags stuffed with the (mostly black) poor.
Of course tax is unfair and places a burden on 'the little guy', restricting her or his freedom. But don't join the Tea Party in protest. The problem is in capitalism itself, particularly now in its neoliberal phase. Regressive taxation is an inherent part of the capitalist state, and the capitalist state is now (more than ever before) being consciously turned into a system for providing the very richest, most powerful, least accountable private tyrannies on Earth with staggering largesse, all at the expense of you and me. And our kids. And our forests and climate and public services. At the expense of the poor, the vulnerable, the disabled, the depressed, the women who've been raped or are trapped in abusive marriages. At the expense of the drudges, the guys who work their lives away and, in the end, haven't saved enough to pay for a decent funeral. 'The Sun Makers' realises this. Perhaps Holmes was looking at New York City or Chile. Who knows.
I wish more people outside fandom were familiar with this story (why is it one of the few Tom Baker stories still not out on DVD?). It really is, despite its jokiness and shlockiness, quite a powerful diagnosis of where we are and where we're headed. It's not "anti-tax", it's anti regressive taxation, taxation that leaves the Company untouched while filling its coffers with the fruits of the labour of the many. It's against the state that stifles individual liberty, not by failing to reward enterprise and initiative, but by forcing people to pay through the nose for the privilege of not starving to death because no corporation will stoop to buying their labour. It's against a system that can build mini-suns but can't (or won't) give working people a decent standard of living. It's against a system that asks you to "Praise the Company!" as though its a deity or a force of nature. It's implicitly against Cameron and his band of zealous market fundie class warriors.
The problem with tax is not that it hinders wealth creation by punishing those whose dynamism breeds success. (Is any theory in human history now more discredited than "the trickle down effect"?) The problem with tax is that it constitutes a system of exploitation within a system of exploitation. It nickels and dimes everybody who isn't vastly wealthy in order to fund states that then feed the rich who sit with their mouths open like baby birds in a nest. And the rich are usually rich in the first place on the profits from industry (i.e. value created by workers) or from speculation with hallucinatory money that exists only in financial markets. You can't reform that away. Ed Labour, if it gets in, will just be a slightly kinder version of the same thing. Surely, nobody can doubt this... what with Tony Blair still poncing around the globe, spending his blood money and backing New Labour suits like Ed's brother?
In other words, the way to tackle the outrageous business going on in that Monbiot article is not tut about this bunch in government and try to curb them (though I don't discourage you from doing so). We need to take a leaf out of Citizen Cordo's book. Let's not jump. Let's have a jelly baby instead. And then lets remember that, as the Doctor says, "human beings always have to fight for their freedom" and we have "only our claims" to lose.
Here's a sample:
At the moment tax law ensures that companies based here, with branches in other countries, don't get taxed twice on the same money. They have to pay only the difference between our rate and that of the other country. If, for example, Dirty Oil plc pays 10% corporation tax on its profits in Oblivia, then shifts the money over here, it should pay a further 18% in the UK, to match our rate of 28%. But under the new proposals, companies will pay nothing at all in this country on money made by their foreign branches.Now, being an utter nerd, there's always a little bit of my brain at the back (not as little or as far back as it should be) that is thinking about some film or TV series or book with monsters in it.
Foreign means anywhere. If these proposals go ahead, the UK will be only the second country in the world to allow money that has passed through tax havens to remain untaxed when it gets here. The other is Switzerland. The exemption applies solely to "large and medium companies": it is not available for smaller firms. The government says it expects "large financial services companies to make the greatest use of the exemption regime". The main beneficiaries, in other words, will be the banks.
But that's not the end of it. While big business will be exempt from tax on its foreign branch earnings, it will, amazingly, still be able to claim the expense of funding its foreign branches against tax it pays in the UK. No other country does this. The new measures will, as we already know, accompany a rapid reduction in the official rate of corporation tax: from 28% to 24% by 2014. This, a Treasury minister has boasted, will be the lowest rate "of any major western economy". By the time this government is done, we'll be lucky if the banks and corporations pay anything at all.
I simply cannot help thinking about 'The Sun Makers' when I read this. One of the most hilarious myths in Who fan culture is that 'Sun Makers' is a right-wing allegory about the horrors of the big state and punitive taxation. This is to misunderstand the story but also, more important, it is to buy into one of the centrepieces of reactionary ideological bullshit pervading our culture: the idea that conservative politics is about the liberty of the individual while socialist politics is about the power of the state.
The truth is, conservatism needs the state. It loves the state. The core of conservatism is the ideological commitment to using the state to further the direct interests of big capital. Conservatism understands, even if many so-called socialists don't, that the state is theirs. It's an emanation from the capitalist system. Law, order, the courts, the police, the government... they're there to protect private property, to guard the people who own it all from the people who own relatively nothing. It's an apparatus of force and coercion, built to enforce the dominance of the people who own and control the means of production.
Liberals and professional Labourists are eager enough to use the state to enforce the rule of the capitalists, to promote the interests of business, etc. But conservatism sees this as its sacred mission... and, since the age of neoliberalism was ushered into practice by Pinochet and Reagan and Thatcher, they see it as the very least they can do. Conservatives now, and our own government is an example par excellence, wants to wage all-out class war on behalf of the very biggest and the very richest. They are engaged in smash and grab policies, designed to sell off everything that isn't nailed down... and then prize up the nails.
In 'The Sun Makers', Robert Holmes is not just satirising "the UK tax system", as fan guidebooks usually inform us. He's satirisng the symbiotic link between the state and big business. Yes, the Collector's personal guard are called the "Inner Retinue" (which sounds a bit like "Inland Revenue"... thus implying that the Vat man is a bit of a brutal thug, geddit???) and there are are corridors called the P45, etc. But all this occurs under the absolute domination of an organisation called "The Company", run by a guy in a pinstriped suit, who is clearly doing this for the profits. Where do the profits come from? From the ludicrously exorbitant taxes (i.e. "breathing tax") paid by the population to the Gatherer, who is the ultimate state official but is grovellingly subservient to his corporate master. So, the state gathers and the Company collects. Really, how much clearer could this possibly be?
It's sometimes objected that the society in the story is more like a Stalinist dictatorship... because it's got torture chambers, prison camps, a news service that broadcasts government propaganda and lots of bureaucrats. Well, the capitalist world has torture chambers, prison camps, utterly subservient news and bureaucrats aplenty. (Our leaders are currently trying to lever a torturer into power in Egypt who's been complicit with them in rendition flights, all in the name of stability.) Indeed, corporations themselves function on bureaucracy, misinformation, propaganda and absolutist pyramidal power structures. They are themselves command economies. Many of them are now bigger, in terms of GDP, that some nation states. And then there's the fact that Nazi Germany was a capitalist country (albeit one with heavy state involvement). And then we have endless examples of capitalists being more than happy to do lucrative business with brutal, repressive regimes... IBM in Nazi Germany, Murdoch in China, etc.
Neoliberalism uses the state as a way of distributing largesse from the poor and from ordinary working people to the rich and the corporations. That's our current government's project. One way of doing this is through taxation. Put very crudely, you raise taxes on the ordinary schmoes and lower them for the rich, or simply fail to collect them. Meanwhile, the government splurges money on protecting the interests of banks and big business, with bail outs from the treasury when they totter, or by selling off the public sector to them at knockdown prices and then continuing to use taxpayer money to prop things up when business ruins them.
This is what has happened in 'The Sun Makers'. The Company has, effectively, bought out the government... or merged with it to the point where they have become one... though, of course, the Collector reveals their intention to simply leave the humans in the lurch once they've made as much profit out of them as they can. They artificial suns will run down without Company maintenance and the humans will die. "We're all in it togther" in a nutshell. In the meantime, the humans work to provide the Company with surplus. They work in factories and foundries (obviously making stuff, which must then be sold on the intergalactic market) and, if they get sent to the Correction Centre for defying the Company, they end up working for free... a bit like the denizens of America's system of privatised slave gulags stuffed with the (mostly black) poor.
Of course tax is unfair and places a burden on 'the little guy', restricting her or his freedom. But don't join the Tea Party in protest. The problem is in capitalism itself, particularly now in its neoliberal phase. Regressive taxation is an inherent part of the capitalist state, and the capitalist state is now (more than ever before) being consciously turned into a system for providing the very richest, most powerful, least accountable private tyrannies on Earth with staggering largesse, all at the expense of you and me. And our kids. And our forests and climate and public services. At the expense of the poor, the vulnerable, the disabled, the depressed, the women who've been raped or are trapped in abusive marriages. At the expense of the drudges, the guys who work their lives away and, in the end, haven't saved enough to pay for a decent funeral. 'The Sun Makers' realises this. Perhaps Holmes was looking at New York City or Chile. Who knows.
I wish more people outside fandom were familiar with this story (why is it one of the few Tom Baker stories still not out on DVD?). It really is, despite its jokiness and shlockiness, quite a powerful diagnosis of where we are and where we're headed. It's not "anti-tax", it's anti regressive taxation, taxation that leaves the Company untouched while filling its coffers with the fruits of the labour of the many. It's against the state that stifles individual liberty, not by failing to reward enterprise and initiative, but by forcing people to pay through the nose for the privilege of not starving to death because no corporation will stoop to buying their labour. It's against a system that can build mini-suns but can't (or won't) give working people a decent standard of living. It's against a system that asks you to "Praise the Company!" as though its a deity or a force of nature. It's implicitly against Cameron and his band of zealous market fundie class warriors.
The problem with tax is not that it hinders wealth creation by punishing those whose dynamism breeds success. (Is any theory in human history now more discredited than "the trickle down effect"?) The problem with tax is that it constitutes a system of exploitation within a system of exploitation. It nickels and dimes everybody who isn't vastly wealthy in order to fund states that then feed the rich who sit with their mouths open like baby birds in a nest. And the rich are usually rich in the first place on the profits from industry (i.e. value created by workers) or from speculation with hallucinatory money that exists only in financial markets. You can't reform that away. Ed Labour, if it gets in, will just be a slightly kinder version of the same thing. Surely, nobody can doubt this... what with Tony Blair still poncing around the globe, spending his blood money and backing New Labour suits like Ed's brother?
In other words, the way to tackle the outrageous business going on in that Monbiot article is not tut about this bunch in government and try to curb them (though I don't discourage you from doing so). We need to take a leaf out of Citizen Cordo's book. Let's not jump. Let's have a jelly baby instead. And then lets remember that, as the Doctor says, "human beings always have to fight for their freedom" and we have "only our claims" to lose.
Sunday, 30 January 2011
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!
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!
Friday, 14 January 2011
Do Panic
The new edition of the fanzine Panic Moon is just out...
...featuring two little articles by myself, in which I ponder 'The Mutants' (soon to be out on DVD) and 'The Seeds of Doom' (out recently).
But don't let that put you off, there's plenty of other stuff... including a very interesting article by Oliver Wake (also the Editor) about Don Taylor, Sydney Newman's first choice to be Who's producer.
Details here.
...featuring two little articles by myself, in which I ponder 'The Mutants' (soon to be out on DVD) and 'The Seeds of Doom' (out recently).
But don't let that put you off, there's plenty of other stuff... including a very interesting article by Oliver Wake (also the Editor) about Don Taylor, Sydney Newman's first choice to be Who's producer.
Details here.
Friday, 24 December 2010
Jack's Alternative Xmas Playlist (and other stuff)
Hate Christmas movies? Unable to stomach their revolting mixture of exhausted iconography and sentimental platitudes? Tempted to suspect that most Christmas movies and/or TV specials are so staggeringly bad that they must be fiendishly disguised satires, made by people who secretly consider their viewers to be dribbling simpletons? Unable to get excited about the prospect of watching yet another adaptation of Charles Dickens’ second worst novel? Wondering if this year the makers of EastEnders will achieve what is clearly their dearest desire and start a wave of Christmas Day suicides across the nation? Dreading the prospect of all the ordure adumbrated above yet simultaneously unable to contemplate surviving the “festive” season without the merciful presence of the gogglebox? Tired of rhetorical questions?
Okay then, here’s Jack’s Alternative Christmas Playlist....
The Lion in Winter (1968)
Christmas is a time for family arguments. You know how it is, everybody stuck together, desperately trying to get on and have fun… it’s a recipe for disaster. But nobody had a Christmas quite like the Plantagenets’ in this film.
Katherine Hepburn and Peter O’Toole are the warring married couple, King Henry II and his older Queen Eleanor, who spend Christmas 1183 tearing great lumps out of each other with a non-stop mutual barrage of staggeringly vicious barbs, taunts, insults, paradoxes and lies. Add their three ruthlessly ambitious sons to the mix – the brutal Richard (Tony Hopkins), the cold-blooded Geoffrey (John Castle) and the cretinous John (Nigel Terry) – and Christmas (which comes complete with hilariously anachronistic trees and wrapped presents) becomes an excruciating familial apocalypse of plots, schemes, murder attempts, humiliating revelations and heart-shredding passions.
Ultimately, this film is only superficially about a struggle for the crown. The crown, the lands, the money, the power… these are the playing pieces in a game that is really about a family eating itself alive over lost love, sour love, delusional love, destructive love and the lack of love. When Kate Hepburn’s Eleanor says that “we” are the cause of history, she doesn’t mean royalty, she means we humans. At the season of love, as she watches her family attack itself, and watches herself join in, she wonders aloud why they can’t just love each other. “We have so much to love each other for,” she says, “we have such possibilities.”
It may be Albee-lite (and Anouilh-liter) but it’s still amazing, moving stuff, entirely uncontaminated by sentimentality… and guaranteed to put your own family squabbles into some kind of perspective.
Shooting the Past (1999)
Stephen Poliakoff’s masterpiece (from before he turned into an utter wanker) begins with Christmas lights. Christmas is something happening in the outside world. Within the peculiar space of the Falham Photo Library, time works differently, as does value and history and emotion. The modern world (in the form of an American corporation) buys this little island and starts to invade it, planning to sell it off and turn it into some piffling corporate ballsup… their interest in the gigantic library of old photos being precisely zero. Until, that is, they start to be absorbed into the alternative world of the photographs and their off-kilter guardians.
Tim Spall delivers his greatest performance as Oswald Bates, an unhappy and heroically annoying man who has been left behind by modernity, who wants to live within his photos and his own thoughts, away from the crass commercialism and humourless dedication of the professional and the self-professedly ‘real’… none of which has as much human reality as the tragic and resounding stories to be found in the still and sepia past.
Die Hard (1988)
Holiday carnage. Bells jingle and Christmas songs tinkle as people are eviscerated by sprays of bullets and their corpses are arranged wearing Santa hats.
Whether they knew it or not, in Die Hard, Hollywood created a sort-of-anti-capitalist revenge fantasy. The Japanese corporate boss asks Rickman (who has invaded his skyscraper with a gang of armed men) if “this is all about our project in Indonesia?” before protesting that they (i.e. his corporation) want to develop not exploit that region. Rickman says, apparently sincerely, that he believes this. Thing is… this is 1988… and they’re setting up in Indonesia… which means they’re in business with General Suharto, who was responsible for arguably the worst act of genocide committed in the 20th century apart from the Holocaust. Said corporate boss later ends up with his brains splattered all over a set of glass doors, which is very satisfying; you don’t often get to see corporate imperialists get exactly what they deserve in a big-budget Hollywood actioner. What’s happening here, you see, is that the Nakatomi Corporation is being confronted by its own values; Rickman and his gang turn out to be ruthless thieves rather than ideological enemies… though, having said that, the film’s beef with capitalism seems to be that sometimes there are Japanese capitalists who come over to America and lure married American women away from their wifely duties with promises of careers, independence, executive bathrooms and Rolex watches. At the end, Mrs Bruce Willis has to symbolically sacrifice her Rolex watch and reassume her clean-cut hubby’s name in order for him to finally defeat the beardie foreign baddie.
The film is also a pioneering gay romance, depicting the mutually-supporting and fulfilling love that blossoms between two men. At the end of the film, Willis gets to consummate his over-the-radio relationship with beat cop Richard Veljohnson in a hysterically romantic clinch, accompanied by music that sounds almost like that bit of Tschaikovsky that lovestruck couples in films always hear when running towards each other on beaches. Veljohnson (who has been deskbound after accidentally shooting a kid) gets to regain his male potency and ‘climaxes’ by emptying both barrels (so to speak) into one last terrorist, thus proving that Willis’ love has made him whole again… or whole enough to kill someone… which is this film’s idea of the highest male self-expression.
Joyeux Noel (2005)
One of the problems the people running World War I (on all sides) continually had to face was the sheer reluctance of their troops to kill the ‘enemy’. They would deliberately fire above the heads of the opposing soldiers, etc., behaviour that had to be stamped on ferociously. Everyone knows about the Christmas truce of 1914… well, this moving film depicts that truce and its consequences, from the perspectives of the French, British and German soldiers themselves. We see not only the eagerness of the ordinary soldiers to stop killing each other, and their fraternisation, but also the horror at this behaviour evinced by the generals. We see a Bishop preaching the virtue of killing Germans to British troops… after the soldiers of all nationalities held mass together in Nomansland.
Brazil (1985)
First, let’s go through what it isn’t. It isn’t set in the future. It isn’t set in a totalitarian society. It’s set now (we’re still “somewhere in the 20th century”). And it’s set in our world.
Ducts and pipes and paperwork and the 1940s still dominate our world; our world abducts and interrogates and tortures people; our world is run by family men who love their children and give their workmates Christmas presents and file reports on how many dissidents they’ve interrogated this week. Our world is still a stifling miasma of filing cabinets and sociopathic bureaucrats and malfunctioning technology. Our world is still a place where the surface glitz of wealth and commercialism covers reservoirs of corruption, confusion, incompetence, cruelty, systematised madness and emotional frustration. And this is never truer than at Christmas, which is when this story is set. The shopping malls and fake snow and gift wrap are the garnish on a state gone mad. You feel that this place always pretends to be in the middle of festivities. One gets the sense that it’s always Christmas where Sam Lowry lives, which brings me to…
Death in Santaland (2007)
Jon Ronson visits North Pole, Alaska, where every day is Christmas Day. While retaining his customary air of amiable innocence, Ronson reveals this concept to be every bit as ghastly as it sounds. A place invented solely for the Christmas industry, the decorations stay up all year long. Ronson perambulates his way through this horrifying tinsel-laden dystopia, becoming increasingly incredulous.
The adults here all claim to really believe in Santa – even to the point of going into denial about their local Santa Claus (name legally changed to Kris Kringle, god help us) being killed in a car accident. Meanwhile, the local school kids are dragooned into answering the thousands of letters that arrive addressed to ‘Santa, North Pole’, like unpaid elves in a festive sweatshop. The teenagers, driven to distraction by the lunacy around them, carry guns and plot school massacres. To we Who fans, it might recall ‘The Happiness Patrol’.
In any case, if you want a window into the planned neo-liberal millennium, look no further. Schools voluntarily training dispirited children in the ideology of consumption and P.R., populations of happy drudges smiling through the crushing alienation, communities enslaved to consumer tat and mindless kitsch, people driven mad by the banality… and anybody who dares to notice the madness dubbed a freak. Watch this and save yourself the trouble of having nightmares brought on by too much accelerant-steeped pudding.
What Would Jesus Buy? (2007)
Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping Gospel Choir tour just-before-the-recession America, hoping to cure people of their addictions to credit and consumerism, exorcise the sweatshop-running demons of Starbucks and stop the ‘Shopocalypse’ – a term of Rev. Billy’s own devising that the vacuous, tittering TV News anchors (who treat this particularly astute brand of satire/performance/comedy/activism as nothing but a jokey novelty) are unable to pronounce.
On his way through the privatised, mall-dominated USA, littered with monolithic cathedrals of consumption, the Reverend Billy gets himself arrested for declaring that Mickey Mouse is the Anti-Christ, sets up a booth on the streets for taking people’s ‘Shopping Sins Confessions’ and exhorts congregations to hold up their credit cards (“magnetic strip facing Reverend Billy”) and tear them up.
(As you can tell, this protest has religious overtones… but that’s okay with me. Reverend Billy prays to “the Fabulous Unknown”, which I believe in. And, in any case, I’m sick of being told - by supposed progressives - that the biggest problem with America is its religiosity and that the American faithful are all right-wing, which is bullshit. The left-wing Christians just don’t own megabuck media churches. Besides, religion is the spirit of a spiritless situation, etc., etc.)
Disneyland (corporate sociopathy expressed as architecture) gets invaded by the choir. Wal-Mart gets a trouncing. Roast in Hell, Penn & Teller. (Pardon me, but I can no longer say the words “Wal-Mart” without also saying “Roast in Hell, Penn & Teller”.)
On our way with him we encounter shop assistants who’ve been spat on by old ladies because they’ve run out of X-Boxes, miniature dogs with their own Christmas wardrobes and more evidence of a culture driving itself insane with the worship of stuff. Meanwhile, the antics of the Reverend and his choir are as amusing and moving as their chosen foe (Christmas capitalism gone mad) is terrifying.
A Life in Pieces – with Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling (1990-91)
Also terrifying (to me) is the realisation that it was twenty years ago… that’s TWENTY YEARS AGO… that I was first paralysed with laughter watching these twelve short interviews with the inimitable Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling.
In each interview, the heroically straight-faced Ludovic Kennedy presents Sir Arthur with a chosen gift and then quizzes him about his life. The various gifts (the first is a partridge in a pear tree… and I’m sure you can guess the rest) start Sir Arthur off on a number of interesting reminiscences. The three French hens remind Sir Arthur of his days in Brussels, attempting to devise the “Single European Hen”. The five gold rings remind him of when he ran for Barbados in the 1936 Berlin Olympics at the special request of Hitler (whom Sir Arthur remembers as “not the practical joking type”). Nine drummers drumming gets Sir Arthur started on how he was recruited as a “deep level mole” at Cambridge. The ten pipers piping remind him of his former friend Peter Piper, who was such a cricket enthusiast that he actually took a group of crickets on tour so that paying audiences could hear them rubbing their legs together. And so on, through such topics as cannibalism, the use of goats to raise children and secret farming.
As for Christmas itself, well Sir Arthur thinks it was “great fun in the old days when it was just an orgy of commercial excess, but now I find that people are tainting the whole thing with a lot of religious mumbo-jumbo.”
*
But what about Christmassy Who, you ask? This is supposed to be a Who blog, isn’t it?
Oh, okay. But I’m not enthusiastic. I mean, look at the forthcoming Christmas Special. A version of A Christmas Carol. Hmm. Written by a man with all the political savvy of Jan Moir and all the genuine progressive feeling of Vince Cable. C’mon, it’s bound to be shit. Alison Graham (absolutely no relation of any kind whatsoever, I hasten to add) has already given it a rave review, which is never a good sign.
A Christmas Carol (the book, I mean) is already a problematic text. Yes, there are wonderful bits where Dickens has his spirits inveigh against “the insect on the leaf proclaiming there is too much life amongst his hungry brothers in the dust” and revealing the huddled symbolic children Ignorance and Want… but, ultimately, it’s just a plea for capitalist bastards to be bit nicer to their staff and make charitable donations. After all, when Dickens warns that Ignorance and Want will bring downfall if ignored, this is a warning that he wants his world – the bourgeois Victorian imperial world – to heed and profit from.
That’s why I love Blackadder’s Christmas Carol, which ruthlessly inverts Dickens’ tale and, in the process, undermines his every sentimental bromide and his every hypocritical appeal to the goodness of the Victorian bourgeoisie. Ebeneezer Blackadder, at the end of the story, is the kind of successful Victorian gentleman who really made that era… it’s just that, in reality, people like him knew how to talk the charitable talk and lecture the poor on morals. (I only failed to include Blackadder’s Christmas Carol above because everyone’s seen it 48 billion times.)
Of course, Who has done a (sort of) version of this story before. Let the Ghost of Series’ Past transport you back to 2005, to the third episode of the first season of RTD’s glorious revival, ‘The Unquiet Dead’. Sadly, what Elton and Curtis did knowingly and with irony, Mark Gatiss did apparently accidentally and in all seriousness. By the end of this wretched episode, we are actually supposed to be inspired by Dickens’ transformation from a miserable old sourpuss into a newly-invigorated happy-chappy… but Dickens’ life-changing encounter with festive spirits is somewhat different to Ebeneezer Scrooge’s. Where Scrooge learns that charity is a moral obligation and empathy a human benefit, Dickens learns that empathy and kindness towards those who are desperate is dangerous folly, to be resisted on pain of self-destruction.
It’s perhaps unfair and unreasonable to be too harsh. After all, every single televised Christmassy Doctor Who story (with the exception of the largely enjoyable ‘Christmas Invasion’) has been scarcely-endurable ordure.
I don’t normally *do* Big Finish here, but I’ll make an exception because they’ve managed a bit better.
Rob Shearman’s ‘The Chimes of Midnight’ is a lovely, angry Christmas ghost story with dialogue that – in places – is so calculatedly absurd and so laced with inner savagery that it verges upon the Pinteresque. A story of servants as endlessly-usable chattels in the service of a cynical master that needs to feed on them to survive. While one might kvetch over the idea that a drudge’s life is made bearable by simply knowing that she has the respect of one member of the middle classes, this doesn’t really matter all that much because, like much of Shearman’s work, this is less political than it is a meditation on parents and children. The relationship between Charley and Edith is clearly the embodiment of a longed-for motherhood… and the presence that becomes the Doctor’s antagonist is a child that demands life at the expense of parents it feels entirely entitled to abuse.
And then we have Marc Platt’s mighty ‘Spare Parts’, which is easily the finest Cyberman story made in any medium and also manages to be an emotionally haunting Christmas story of families gathered around scraggy old fake trees, while outside the cold draws in… and in… and in… Politically, Platt’s story flirts with the Trekish mistake of making the emotionless cyborgs into an expression of collectivism (with Thomas Dodd as the dodgy but preferable embodiment of free enterprise)… but it isn’t long before the story has a crowd of ordinary people protesting outside the palace, resisting police brutality and opposing a People’s Committee that has become a tyranny. If the Committee are “the champions of the proletariat” then it’s only in the same way, and to the same extent, as Stalin.
Gareth Roberts’ and Clayton Hickman’s ‘The One Doctor’ is a thoroughly enjoyable bit of space comic-opera, as long as you don’t start sharing their impression that they’ve satirised anything… and as long as you don’t worry about the fact that so much of it seems so reminiscent of the second season of the Hitch Hiker’s radio series.
Of course, there’s always one at every Christmas party isn’t there… one that spoils things for everybody else. In this instance, it’s Jonathan Morris’ ‘Flip-Flop’, a revolting Daily Mail-ish parable about the horrific dangers posed by dishonest, power-hungry immigrants. The immigrants in question are (adding insult to injury) giant slugs with bad eyesight and a wheedling, faux-humble Uriah Heapesque manner. They complain of prejudice and discrimination, explain that no human can comprehend their “ethnic experience”, call themselves a downtrodden minority despite covering nine tenths of the humans’ planet (“being a minority is a state of mind”) and, all the while, they’re scheming to take over and make the humans their slaves… which is achieved – and the story is quite explicit about this – through “positive discrimination”. The alien boss is called the “Community Leader”, which is one of those terms that tabloids use whenever they want to preach to Muslim communities about how they should do more to combat ‘extremism’. The aliens even want to ban Christmas. I fucking ask you.
I’m not saying anything about Jonathan Morris. I don’t know the man or anything about him. He might be the cuddliest pro-immigrant liberal there is for all I know. But ‘Flip-Flop’ is an egregious piece of shit and everyone involved in making it should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.
Besides, the time travel paradox doesn't work because the Doctor, Mel, Stewart and Reed don't bump into alternative versions of themselves when they go back to the night of President Bailey's assassination. So there.
*
Actually, I’ve been a bit hard on televised Who. I forgot about one story. It’s isn’t a “special” and it wasn’t broadcast on the 25th December… but it’s certainly a bit Christmassy and is one of the best episodes of the 21st century series. I’m referring, of course, to RTD’s miraculous ‘Turn Left’. Not only is it a reworking of It’s a Wonderful Life (with Rose earning her wings by giving Donna a chance to see what the world would be like without the Doctor) but it also has an entire ‘act’ set at Christmas. Donna and family spend the holidays in a hotel room, waited on by a maid who, it is implied, is a foreign worker. From their holiday retreat, the Nobles (who are really the commoners) witness the explosion that destroys London and turns them into refugees.
As Simon Kinnear pointed out in DWM 410, although ‘Turn Left’ is “not per se a story about recession, the parallels – unemployment, homelessness, a military presence on the streets – are exactly what scaremongering media pundits are anticipating is going to happen this summer.” He was writing in early 2009. Things aren’t quite as bad here yet as they get in ‘Turn Left’, but..
Well, there you have it. Bah humbug, Changealujah, Seasons Greeblings, and a very Merry Christmas to all of you at home.
Okay then, here’s Jack’s Alternative Christmas Playlist....
The Lion in Winter (1968)
Christmas is a time for family arguments. You know how it is, everybody stuck together, desperately trying to get on and have fun… it’s a recipe for disaster. But nobody had a Christmas quite like the Plantagenets’ in this film.
Katherine Hepburn and Peter O’Toole are the warring married couple, King Henry II and his older Queen Eleanor, who spend Christmas 1183 tearing great lumps out of each other with a non-stop mutual barrage of staggeringly vicious barbs, taunts, insults, paradoxes and lies. Add their three ruthlessly ambitious sons to the mix – the brutal Richard (Tony Hopkins), the cold-blooded Geoffrey (John Castle) and the cretinous John (Nigel Terry) – and Christmas (which comes complete with hilariously anachronistic trees and wrapped presents) becomes an excruciating familial apocalypse of plots, schemes, murder attempts, humiliating revelations and heart-shredding passions.
Ultimately, this film is only superficially about a struggle for the crown. The crown, the lands, the money, the power… these are the playing pieces in a game that is really about a family eating itself alive over lost love, sour love, delusional love, destructive love and the lack of love. When Kate Hepburn’s Eleanor says that “we” are the cause of history, she doesn’t mean royalty, she means we humans. At the season of love, as she watches her family attack itself, and watches herself join in, she wonders aloud why they can’t just love each other. “We have so much to love each other for,” she says, “we have such possibilities.”
It may be Albee-lite (and Anouilh-liter) but it’s still amazing, moving stuff, entirely uncontaminated by sentimentality… and guaranteed to put your own family squabbles into some kind of perspective.
Shooting the Past (1999)
Stephen Poliakoff’s masterpiece (from before he turned into an utter wanker) begins with Christmas lights. Christmas is something happening in the outside world. Within the peculiar space of the Falham Photo Library, time works differently, as does value and history and emotion. The modern world (in the form of an American corporation) buys this little island and starts to invade it, planning to sell it off and turn it into some piffling corporate ballsup… their interest in the gigantic library of old photos being precisely zero. Until, that is, they start to be absorbed into the alternative world of the photographs and their off-kilter guardians.
Tim Spall delivers his greatest performance as Oswald Bates, an unhappy and heroically annoying man who has been left behind by modernity, who wants to live within his photos and his own thoughts, away from the crass commercialism and humourless dedication of the professional and the self-professedly ‘real’… none of which has as much human reality as the tragic and resounding stories to be found in the still and sepia past.
Die Hard (1988)
Holiday carnage. Bells jingle and Christmas songs tinkle as people are eviscerated by sprays of bullets and their corpses are arranged wearing Santa hats.
Whether they knew it or not, in Die Hard, Hollywood created a sort-of-anti-capitalist revenge fantasy. The Japanese corporate boss asks Rickman (who has invaded his skyscraper with a gang of armed men) if “this is all about our project in Indonesia?” before protesting that they (i.e. his corporation) want to develop not exploit that region. Rickman says, apparently sincerely, that he believes this. Thing is… this is 1988… and they’re setting up in Indonesia… which means they’re in business with General Suharto, who was responsible for arguably the worst act of genocide committed in the 20th century apart from the Holocaust. Said corporate boss later ends up with his brains splattered all over a set of glass doors, which is very satisfying; you don’t often get to see corporate imperialists get exactly what they deserve in a big-budget Hollywood actioner. What’s happening here, you see, is that the Nakatomi Corporation is being confronted by its own values; Rickman and his gang turn out to be ruthless thieves rather than ideological enemies… though, having said that, the film’s beef with capitalism seems to be that sometimes there are Japanese capitalists who come over to America and lure married American women away from their wifely duties with promises of careers, independence, executive bathrooms and Rolex watches. At the end, Mrs Bruce Willis has to symbolically sacrifice her Rolex watch and reassume her clean-cut hubby’s name in order for him to finally defeat the beardie foreign baddie.
The film is also a pioneering gay romance, depicting the mutually-supporting and fulfilling love that blossoms between two men. At the end of the film, Willis gets to consummate his over-the-radio relationship with beat cop Richard Veljohnson in a hysterically romantic clinch, accompanied by music that sounds almost like that bit of Tschaikovsky that lovestruck couples in films always hear when running towards each other on beaches. Veljohnson (who has been deskbound after accidentally shooting a kid) gets to regain his male potency and ‘climaxes’ by emptying both barrels (so to speak) into one last terrorist, thus proving that Willis’ love has made him whole again… or whole enough to kill someone… which is this film’s idea of the highest male self-expression.
Joyeux Noel (2005)
One of the problems the people running World War I (on all sides) continually had to face was the sheer reluctance of their troops to kill the ‘enemy’. They would deliberately fire above the heads of the opposing soldiers, etc., behaviour that had to be stamped on ferociously. Everyone knows about the Christmas truce of 1914… well, this moving film depicts that truce and its consequences, from the perspectives of the French, British and German soldiers themselves. We see not only the eagerness of the ordinary soldiers to stop killing each other, and their fraternisation, but also the horror at this behaviour evinced by the generals. We see a Bishop preaching the virtue of killing Germans to British troops… after the soldiers of all nationalities held mass together in Nomansland.
Brazil (1985)
First, let’s go through what it isn’t. It isn’t set in the future. It isn’t set in a totalitarian society. It’s set now (we’re still “somewhere in the 20th century”). And it’s set in our world.
Ducts and pipes and paperwork and the 1940s still dominate our world; our world abducts and interrogates and tortures people; our world is run by family men who love their children and give their workmates Christmas presents and file reports on how many dissidents they’ve interrogated this week. Our world is still a stifling miasma of filing cabinets and sociopathic bureaucrats and malfunctioning technology. Our world is still a place where the surface glitz of wealth and commercialism covers reservoirs of corruption, confusion, incompetence, cruelty, systematised madness and emotional frustration. And this is never truer than at Christmas, which is when this story is set. The shopping malls and fake snow and gift wrap are the garnish on a state gone mad. You feel that this place always pretends to be in the middle of festivities. One gets the sense that it’s always Christmas where Sam Lowry lives, which brings me to…
Death in Santaland (2007)
Jon Ronson visits North Pole, Alaska, where every day is Christmas Day. While retaining his customary air of amiable innocence, Ronson reveals this concept to be every bit as ghastly as it sounds. A place invented solely for the Christmas industry, the decorations stay up all year long. Ronson perambulates his way through this horrifying tinsel-laden dystopia, becoming increasingly incredulous.
The adults here all claim to really believe in Santa – even to the point of going into denial about their local Santa Claus (name legally changed to Kris Kringle, god help us) being killed in a car accident. Meanwhile, the local school kids are dragooned into answering the thousands of letters that arrive addressed to ‘Santa, North Pole’, like unpaid elves in a festive sweatshop. The teenagers, driven to distraction by the lunacy around them, carry guns and plot school massacres. To we Who fans, it might recall ‘The Happiness Patrol’.
In any case, if you want a window into the planned neo-liberal millennium, look no further. Schools voluntarily training dispirited children in the ideology of consumption and P.R., populations of happy drudges smiling through the crushing alienation, communities enslaved to consumer tat and mindless kitsch, people driven mad by the banality… and anybody who dares to notice the madness dubbed a freak. Watch this and save yourself the trouble of having nightmares brought on by too much accelerant-steeped pudding.
What Would Jesus Buy? (2007)
Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping Gospel Choir tour just-before-the-recession America, hoping to cure people of their addictions to credit and consumerism, exorcise the sweatshop-running demons of Starbucks and stop the ‘Shopocalypse’ – a term of Rev. Billy’s own devising that the vacuous, tittering TV News anchors (who treat this particularly astute brand of satire/performance/comedy/activism as nothing but a jokey novelty) are unable to pronounce.
On his way through the privatised, mall-dominated USA, littered with monolithic cathedrals of consumption, the Reverend Billy gets himself arrested for declaring that Mickey Mouse is the Anti-Christ, sets up a booth on the streets for taking people’s ‘Shopping Sins Confessions’ and exhorts congregations to hold up their credit cards (“magnetic strip facing Reverend Billy”) and tear them up.
(As you can tell, this protest has religious overtones… but that’s okay with me. Reverend Billy prays to “the Fabulous Unknown”, which I believe in. And, in any case, I’m sick of being told - by supposed progressives - that the biggest problem with America is its religiosity and that the American faithful are all right-wing, which is bullshit. The left-wing Christians just don’t own megabuck media churches. Besides, religion is the spirit of a spiritless situation, etc., etc.)
Disneyland (corporate sociopathy expressed as architecture) gets invaded by the choir. Wal-Mart gets a trouncing. Roast in Hell, Penn & Teller. (Pardon me, but I can no longer say the words “Wal-Mart” without also saying “Roast in Hell, Penn & Teller”.)
On our way with him we encounter shop assistants who’ve been spat on by old ladies because they’ve run out of X-Boxes, miniature dogs with their own Christmas wardrobes and more evidence of a culture driving itself insane with the worship of stuff. Meanwhile, the antics of the Reverend and his choir are as amusing and moving as their chosen foe (Christmas capitalism gone mad) is terrifying.
A Life in Pieces – with Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling (1990-91)
Also terrifying (to me) is the realisation that it was twenty years ago… that’s TWENTY YEARS AGO… that I was first paralysed with laughter watching these twelve short interviews with the inimitable Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling.
In each interview, the heroically straight-faced Ludovic Kennedy presents Sir Arthur with a chosen gift and then quizzes him about his life. The various gifts (the first is a partridge in a pear tree… and I’m sure you can guess the rest) start Sir Arthur off on a number of interesting reminiscences. The three French hens remind Sir Arthur of his days in Brussels, attempting to devise the “Single European Hen”. The five gold rings remind him of when he ran for Barbados in the 1936 Berlin Olympics at the special request of Hitler (whom Sir Arthur remembers as “not the practical joking type”). Nine drummers drumming gets Sir Arthur started on how he was recruited as a “deep level mole” at Cambridge. The ten pipers piping remind him of his former friend Peter Piper, who was such a cricket enthusiast that he actually took a group of crickets on tour so that paying audiences could hear them rubbing their legs together. And so on, through such topics as cannibalism, the use of goats to raise children and secret farming.
As for Christmas itself, well Sir Arthur thinks it was “great fun in the old days when it was just an orgy of commercial excess, but now I find that people are tainting the whole thing with a lot of religious mumbo-jumbo.”
*
But what about Christmassy Who, you ask? This is supposed to be a Who blog, isn’t it?
Oh, okay. But I’m not enthusiastic. I mean, look at the forthcoming Christmas Special. A version of A Christmas Carol. Hmm. Written by a man with all the political savvy of Jan Moir and all the genuine progressive feeling of Vince Cable. C’mon, it’s bound to be shit. Alison Graham (absolutely no relation of any kind whatsoever, I hasten to add) has already given it a rave review, which is never a good sign.
A Christmas Carol (the book, I mean) is already a problematic text. Yes, there are wonderful bits where Dickens has his spirits inveigh against “the insect on the leaf proclaiming there is too much life amongst his hungry brothers in the dust” and revealing the huddled symbolic children Ignorance and Want… but, ultimately, it’s just a plea for capitalist bastards to be bit nicer to their staff and make charitable donations. After all, when Dickens warns that Ignorance and Want will bring downfall if ignored, this is a warning that he wants his world – the bourgeois Victorian imperial world – to heed and profit from.
That’s why I love Blackadder’s Christmas Carol, which ruthlessly inverts Dickens’ tale and, in the process, undermines his every sentimental bromide and his every hypocritical appeal to the goodness of the Victorian bourgeoisie. Ebeneezer Blackadder, at the end of the story, is the kind of successful Victorian gentleman who really made that era… it’s just that, in reality, people like him knew how to talk the charitable talk and lecture the poor on morals. (I only failed to include Blackadder’s Christmas Carol above because everyone’s seen it 48 billion times.)
Of course, Who has done a (sort of) version of this story before. Let the Ghost of Series’ Past transport you back to 2005, to the third episode of the first season of RTD’s glorious revival, ‘The Unquiet Dead’. Sadly, what Elton and Curtis did knowingly and with irony, Mark Gatiss did apparently accidentally and in all seriousness. By the end of this wretched episode, we are actually supposed to be inspired by Dickens’ transformation from a miserable old sourpuss into a newly-invigorated happy-chappy… but Dickens’ life-changing encounter with festive spirits is somewhat different to Ebeneezer Scrooge’s. Where Scrooge learns that charity is a moral obligation and empathy a human benefit, Dickens learns that empathy and kindness towards those who are desperate is dangerous folly, to be resisted on pain of self-destruction.
It’s perhaps unfair and unreasonable to be too harsh. After all, every single televised Christmassy Doctor Who story (with the exception of the largely enjoyable ‘Christmas Invasion’) has been scarcely-endurable ordure.
I don’t normally *do* Big Finish here, but I’ll make an exception because they’ve managed a bit better.
Rob Shearman’s ‘The Chimes of Midnight’ is a lovely, angry Christmas ghost story with dialogue that – in places – is so calculatedly absurd and so laced with inner savagery that it verges upon the Pinteresque. A story of servants as endlessly-usable chattels in the service of a cynical master that needs to feed on them to survive. While one might kvetch over the idea that a drudge’s life is made bearable by simply knowing that she has the respect of one member of the middle classes, this doesn’t really matter all that much because, like much of Shearman’s work, this is less political than it is a meditation on parents and children. The relationship between Charley and Edith is clearly the embodiment of a longed-for motherhood… and the presence that becomes the Doctor’s antagonist is a child that demands life at the expense of parents it feels entirely entitled to abuse.
And then we have Marc Platt’s mighty ‘Spare Parts’, which is easily the finest Cyberman story made in any medium and also manages to be an emotionally haunting Christmas story of families gathered around scraggy old fake trees, while outside the cold draws in… and in… and in… Politically, Platt’s story flirts with the Trekish mistake of making the emotionless cyborgs into an expression of collectivism (with Thomas Dodd as the dodgy but preferable embodiment of free enterprise)… but it isn’t long before the story has a crowd of ordinary people protesting outside the palace, resisting police brutality and opposing a People’s Committee that has become a tyranny. If the Committee are “the champions of the proletariat” then it’s only in the same way, and to the same extent, as Stalin.
Gareth Roberts’ and Clayton Hickman’s ‘The One Doctor’ is a thoroughly enjoyable bit of space comic-opera, as long as you don’t start sharing their impression that they’ve satirised anything… and as long as you don’t worry about the fact that so much of it seems so reminiscent of the second season of the Hitch Hiker’s radio series.
Of course, there’s always one at every Christmas party isn’t there… one that spoils things for everybody else. In this instance, it’s Jonathan Morris’ ‘Flip-Flop’, a revolting Daily Mail-ish parable about the horrific dangers posed by dishonest, power-hungry immigrants. The immigrants in question are (adding insult to injury) giant slugs with bad eyesight and a wheedling, faux-humble Uriah Heapesque manner. They complain of prejudice and discrimination, explain that no human can comprehend their “ethnic experience”, call themselves a downtrodden minority despite covering nine tenths of the humans’ planet (“being a minority is a state of mind”) and, all the while, they’re scheming to take over and make the humans their slaves… which is achieved – and the story is quite explicit about this – through “positive discrimination”. The alien boss is called the “Community Leader”, which is one of those terms that tabloids use whenever they want to preach to Muslim communities about how they should do more to combat ‘extremism’. The aliens even want to ban Christmas. I fucking ask you.
I’m not saying anything about Jonathan Morris. I don’t know the man or anything about him. He might be the cuddliest pro-immigrant liberal there is for all I know. But ‘Flip-Flop’ is an egregious piece of shit and everyone involved in making it should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.
Besides, the time travel paradox doesn't work because the Doctor, Mel, Stewart and Reed don't bump into alternative versions of themselves when they go back to the night of President Bailey's assassination. So there.
*
Actually, I’ve been a bit hard on televised Who. I forgot about one story. It’s isn’t a “special” and it wasn’t broadcast on the 25th December… but it’s certainly a bit Christmassy and is one of the best episodes of the 21st century series. I’m referring, of course, to RTD’s miraculous ‘Turn Left’. Not only is it a reworking of It’s a Wonderful Life (with Rose earning her wings by giving Donna a chance to see what the world would be like without the Doctor) but it also has an entire ‘act’ set at Christmas. Donna and family spend the holidays in a hotel room, waited on by a maid who, it is implied, is a foreign worker. From their holiday retreat, the Nobles (who are really the commoners) witness the explosion that destroys London and turns them into refugees.
As Simon Kinnear pointed out in DWM 410, although ‘Turn Left’ is “not per se a story about recession, the parallels – unemployment, homelessness, a military presence on the streets – are exactly what scaremongering media pundits are anticipating is going to happen this summer.” He was writing in early 2009. Things aren’t quite as bad here yet as they get in ‘Turn Left’, but..
Well, there you have it. Bah humbug, Changealujah, Seasons Greeblings, and a very Merry Christmas to all of you at home.
Friday, 10 December 2010
Resistance is Useful
There were violent clashes in London yesterday as protestors against the Dalek occupation attacked Daleks and Robomen on the streets.
What started as a peaceful and normal day, with Robomen performing their normal routine of rounding up prisoners to be sent to the new 'workfare' camp in Bedfordshire for lazy scroungers, quickly turned to turmoil when protestors - doubtless infiltrated by a hardcore of anarchists and outside agitators - launched an unprovoked attack on a Dalek ship innocently parked at the Chelsea Heliport.
Robomen were forced to 'kettle' the protestors when clashes erupted. Reports are that three Robomen have sustained injuries, and one Dalek was slightly scuffed when protestors viciously and thuggishly pushed it down a gentle ramp.
The Dalek Supreme commented today: "Of course, we support peaceful demonstrations... but any more will be met with immediately extermination."
What started as a peaceful and normal day, with Robomen performing their normal routine of rounding up prisoners to be sent to the new 'workfare' camp in Bedfordshire for lazy scroungers, quickly turned to turmoil when protestors - doubtless infiltrated by a hardcore of anarchists and outside agitators - launched an unprovoked attack on a Dalek ship innocently parked at the Chelsea Heliport.
Robomen were forced to 'kettle' the protestors when clashes erupted. Reports are that three Robomen have sustained injuries, and one Dalek was slightly scuffed when protestors viciously and thuggishly pushed it down a gentle ramp.
A Dalek defends himself against the unprovoked aggression of the
feral, anarchist, hoodie, chav scum, student layabout protestors
feral, anarchist, hoodie, chav scum, student layabout protestors
The Dalek Supreme commented today: "Of course, we support peaceful demonstrations... but any more will be met with immediately extermination."
Thursday, 9 December 2010
Economic Miracles
This is my Timelash II stuff on the subject of Graham Williams' tenure as producer... it's a bit thin because I've either posted about several stories from this era elsewhere or because I'm planning to. Also, to be honest, some of the stories simply don't yield much grist for my mill. That isn't to knock the Williams era, which contains some of the most politically interesting Who stories ever made (which is partly why they needed - or need - posts all to themselves). Notice, for instance, how the stories glanced at below seem obsessed with fuel, economics and questions of prosperity vs. austerity... s'what comes of making Doctor Who in the context of the late 70s I guess...
I've written about 'Horror of Fang Rock' here and 'Image of the Fendahl' here.
'The Sun Makers'
This is from elsewhere on this blog, but it's part of a wider article. I thought it could tolerate repeating... especially since 'Sun Makers' is a favourite of mine, for reasons which should be obvious. I don't think, by the way, that this story has ever been more relevant than it is now.
'The Ribos Operation' is examined in scarily extensive detail, here.
'The Pirate Planet'
There is a satirical aspect to Douglas Adams' debut Who story which anticipates the satire inherent in much of Hitch Hiker's... but whereas Hitch Hiker's presents a kind of farcical search for God and/or meaning in a universe of comic incompetence and small mindedness, 'Pirate Planet' seems more directly political in its preoccupations: at times its almost like Adams is having a go at imperialism through the analogy of piracy.
In 'Pirate Planet', Zanak is a culture of indolent and complacent and unquestioning people who kick jewels around their streets whenever their leader simply announces a new golden age and the mines just fill up again... and all because their world grabs others, crushes them, sucks them dry of their wealth and then moves on. The people don't know because they don't care to know. Rome never looks where she treads, as Kipling put it. You don't get political comment quite like that in Hitch Hiker's (at least not until Infinidim Enterprises arrive in the last novel); you're far more likely to get satire at the expense of bumbling bureaucracy and plodding literal mindedness (one of the preoccupations of 'Shada' a little later, once Adams has found his voice).
In 'Pirate Planet', a young man with lots of talent is writing his early, angry stuff... and instinctively fitting in with the ethos of a series that almost reflexively critiques Power in moral terms. Trouble is, Adams is rather too flippant to quite make this story work as a polemic... though he is plainly influenced by Bob Holmes' way of creating witty and knowing stories that let political comment ride along happily with jokes (i.e. 'Carnival of Monsters' and 'The Sun Makers').
Still, it contains one of my all-time favourite one-liners from Who. Asked if he thinks it's "wrong" for mines to just fill up with minerals all by themselves, the Doctor replies: "It's an economic miracle; of course it's wrong!"
Tom Baker (in one of his greatest late performances) both revels in the smartass comedy and latches onto the underlying seriousness of some aspects of the story. By doing so, he creates an opportunity for himself to turn his great 'angry scene' into a moment when, for all the multicoloured glitz and jokey dialogue, he portrays a man genuinely aghast at a crime almost too awful to comprehend. And it's riveting stuff.
'The Power of Kroll'
Robert Holmes might’ve been pissed off about having to write about a very big monster, but he was (apparently) even more pissed off about the treatment of Native Americans, racism and big business exploiting the environment. This could have been disastrous if it weren’t for the fact that Holmes is also intelligent about these things. Nothing is all that simple in this story.
The Swampies (or the People of the Lakes, if we’re being PC about it) are more than just victims. We are invited to sympathise with them and direct parallels are drawn with the plight of Native Americans when the Doctor calls their moon a “sort of reservation”. Now that their moon looks commercially exploitable, they’re liable to be forcibly evicted again. But, while clearly the victims of an historic injustice, they’re not portrayed as particularly virtuous or wise. Unlike the Kinda (who have the whiff of gift-shop dreamcatchers about them), the Swampies are flawed and naive. This is rather refreshingly unpatronising. Ranquin is a blinkered religious bigot who is not above using Kroll as a means of getting his own way. Nor is he above a spot of politically-expedient murder. He even has his own face-saving political myth about the Swampies leaving Delta-Magna of their own accord.
It’s interesting to see how Holmes deliberately makes the humans and the Swampies into mirror images of each other. Thawn and Ranquin are both the same kind of deceitful, callous, bullshit artists. Also, Fenner and Varlick are similar types. Both are happy to sanction killing when they disapprove of the victim, but neither is without conscience. They are both troubled by their leader’s behaviour but grumble and procrastinate while still obeying.
The treatment of racism is also intelligent. Thawn is clearly a racist but, when accused of hating the Swampies by Fenner, he denies the charge and simply restates his economic imperatives. This is right on the nail. The motivations behind all organised persecution of minorities is always fundamentally economic. The supposed ethnic and cultural difference of Africans was merely a pretext that was fashioned into a political ideology of slavery; the underlying motive was commercial. The supposed savagery and primitivism of Native Americans was simply an ideological justification for imperialistic conquest and theft. Modern racism has its roots in economics as much as in any deep-seated xenophobic impulse. Nobody in ‘The Power of Kroll’ mentions the fact that the Swampies are green (apart from the Doctor, ironically enough) but Thawn is constantly on about the fact that they’re in his way.
Meanwhile, the exploitation of the natural resources of the lake creates an unforeseen ecological effect; the awakening of Kroll is caused by the Refinery raising the lake’s temperature and shooting off orbit shots. I’d hesitate to call Kroll a metaphor for environmental disaster, but all the same… he is a runaway by-product of the refinery.
Also, the nonsense spouted by Ranquin and Varlick’s growing realisation that Kroll is nothing but a big animal, constitutes another poke at religion… though not without putting the Swampies religious narrative within a political context of oppression and alienation, and entirely without portraying them as inherently culturally backward. This guy was a natural radical, whether he knew it or not. To think he used to edit John Bull Magazine! (Sometimes I see strange similarities between Holmes and Orwell. Holmes was a copper, wasn't he? Just as Orwell was a colonial policeman in Burma.)
Meanwhile, we have Tom Baker giving one of his best performances. No, I’m serious. Is there any moment during his tenure more blissful than his deadpan inquiry to Thawn: “Will there be strawberry jam for tea?”. Watch the way he looks embarrassed when asked stupid (to him) questions about the refinery. Watch him glare at Thawn’s treatment of Mensch and smirk at Fenner’s unironic use of the all-purpose word “progress”. Then there’s the “aren’t you going to say ‘don’t make any sudden moves?’” scene. This Doctor is a bumbling fartaround, a dilletante, a muckabout, a sophomoric clown... but with a deep, ingrained sense of rage at injustice and cant and bigotry. He's a satirist of the powerful and callous; he allows the despicable to write him off as a looney. This is my Doctor. None of that lonely god rubbish. No burning at the centre of time like fire and ice and blah blah blah. Just a rogue radical, a wry scientist, an activist eccentric. He quite simply rocks.
Yeah, okay, the Swampies look stupid and their chant is rubbish… and yeah, the monster looks utterly fake… and yeah, Episode 3 is nothing but the stupid creeper-execution thing and loads of conversations about “viscosity levels”… but hey, it’s got Philip Madoc in it, for chrissakes!
And its heart and brain are both in the right places. It has possibly the most fair and unprejudiced portrayal of native, tribal people that I've ever seen in sci-fi. It attacks racism, capitalism, environmental destruction and religion... and from a radical challenge position rather than just a hand-wringing liberal critique. It contains none of the sentimentalised patronising attitude to be found in, say, Avatar (yeurch), while also containing ten times the anger.
I'm planning to post something seperate and self-contained on the subject of 'City of Death'.
I've written about 'Horror of Fang Rock' here and 'Image of the Fendahl' here.
'The Sun Makers'
This is from elsewhere on this blog, but it's part of a wider article. I thought it could tolerate repeating... especially since 'Sun Makers' is a favourite of mine, for reasons which should be obvious. I don't think, by the way, that this story has ever been more relevant than it is now.
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 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.
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 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.
'The Ribos Operation' is examined in scarily extensive detail, here.
'The Pirate Planet'
There is a satirical aspect to Douglas Adams' debut Who story which anticipates the satire inherent in much of Hitch Hiker's... but whereas Hitch Hiker's presents a kind of farcical search for God and/or meaning in a universe of comic incompetence and small mindedness, 'Pirate Planet' seems more directly political in its preoccupations: at times its almost like Adams is having a go at imperialism through the analogy of piracy.
In 'Pirate Planet', Zanak is a culture of indolent and complacent and unquestioning people who kick jewels around their streets whenever their leader simply announces a new golden age and the mines just fill up again... and all because their world grabs others, crushes them, sucks them dry of their wealth and then moves on. The people don't know because they don't care to know. Rome never looks where she treads, as Kipling put it. You don't get political comment quite like that in Hitch Hiker's (at least not until Infinidim Enterprises arrive in the last novel); you're far more likely to get satire at the expense of bumbling bureaucracy and plodding literal mindedness (one of the preoccupations of 'Shada' a little later, once Adams has found his voice).
In 'Pirate Planet', a young man with lots of talent is writing his early, angry stuff... and instinctively fitting in with the ethos of a series that almost reflexively critiques Power in moral terms. Trouble is, Adams is rather too flippant to quite make this story work as a polemic... though he is plainly influenced by Bob Holmes' way of creating witty and knowing stories that let political comment ride along happily with jokes (i.e. 'Carnival of Monsters' and 'The Sun Makers').
Still, it contains one of my all-time favourite one-liners from Who. Asked if he thinks it's "wrong" for mines to just fill up with minerals all by themselves, the Doctor replies: "It's an economic miracle; of course it's wrong!"
Tom Baker (in one of his greatest late performances) both revels in the smartass comedy and latches onto the underlying seriousness of some aspects of the story. By doing so, he creates an opportunity for himself to turn his great 'angry scene' into a moment when, for all the multicoloured glitz and jokey dialogue, he portrays a man genuinely aghast at a crime almost too awful to comprehend. And it's riveting stuff.
'The Power of Kroll'
Robert Holmes might’ve been pissed off about having to write about a very big monster, but he was (apparently) even more pissed off about the treatment of Native Americans, racism and big business exploiting the environment. This could have been disastrous if it weren’t for the fact that Holmes is also intelligent about these things. Nothing is all that simple in this story.
The Swampies (or the People of the Lakes, if we’re being PC about it) are more than just victims. We are invited to sympathise with them and direct parallels are drawn with the plight of Native Americans when the Doctor calls their moon a “sort of reservation”. Now that their moon looks commercially exploitable, they’re liable to be forcibly evicted again. But, while clearly the victims of an historic injustice, they’re not portrayed as particularly virtuous or wise. Unlike the Kinda (who have the whiff of gift-shop dreamcatchers about them), the Swampies are flawed and naive. This is rather refreshingly unpatronising. Ranquin is a blinkered religious bigot who is not above using Kroll as a means of getting his own way. Nor is he above a spot of politically-expedient murder. He even has his own face-saving political myth about the Swampies leaving Delta-Magna of their own accord.
It’s interesting to see how Holmes deliberately makes the humans and the Swampies into mirror images of each other. Thawn and Ranquin are both the same kind of deceitful, callous, bullshit artists. Also, Fenner and Varlick are similar types. Both are happy to sanction killing when they disapprove of the victim, but neither is without conscience. They are both troubled by their leader’s behaviour but grumble and procrastinate while still obeying.
The treatment of racism is also intelligent. Thawn is clearly a racist but, when accused of hating the Swampies by Fenner, he denies the charge and simply restates his economic imperatives. This is right on the nail. The motivations behind all organised persecution of minorities is always fundamentally economic. The supposed ethnic and cultural difference of Africans was merely a pretext that was fashioned into a political ideology of slavery; the underlying motive was commercial. The supposed savagery and primitivism of Native Americans was simply an ideological justification for imperialistic conquest and theft. Modern racism has its roots in economics as much as in any deep-seated xenophobic impulse. Nobody in ‘The Power of Kroll’ mentions the fact that the Swampies are green (apart from the Doctor, ironically enough) but Thawn is constantly on about the fact that they’re in his way.
Meanwhile, the exploitation of the natural resources of the lake creates an unforeseen ecological effect; the awakening of Kroll is caused by the Refinery raising the lake’s temperature and shooting off orbit shots. I’d hesitate to call Kroll a metaphor for environmental disaster, but all the same… he is a runaway by-product of the refinery.
Also, the nonsense spouted by Ranquin and Varlick’s growing realisation that Kroll is nothing but a big animal, constitutes another poke at religion… though not without putting the Swampies religious narrative within a political context of oppression and alienation, and entirely without portraying them as inherently culturally backward. This guy was a natural radical, whether he knew it or not. To think he used to edit John Bull Magazine! (Sometimes I see strange similarities between Holmes and Orwell. Holmes was a copper, wasn't he? Just as Orwell was a colonial policeman in Burma.)
Meanwhile, we have Tom Baker giving one of his best performances. No, I’m serious. Is there any moment during his tenure more blissful than his deadpan inquiry to Thawn: “Will there be strawberry jam for tea?”. Watch the way he looks embarrassed when asked stupid (to him) questions about the refinery. Watch him glare at Thawn’s treatment of Mensch and smirk at Fenner’s unironic use of the all-purpose word “progress”. Then there’s the “aren’t you going to say ‘don’t make any sudden moves?’” scene. This Doctor is a bumbling fartaround, a dilletante, a muckabout, a sophomoric clown... but with a deep, ingrained sense of rage at injustice and cant and bigotry. He's a satirist of the powerful and callous; he allows the despicable to write him off as a looney. This is my Doctor. None of that lonely god rubbish. No burning at the centre of time like fire and ice and blah blah blah. Just a rogue radical, a wry scientist, an activist eccentric. He quite simply rocks.
Yeah, okay, the Swampies look stupid and their chant is rubbish… and yeah, the monster looks utterly fake… and yeah, Episode 3 is nothing but the stupid creeper-execution thing and loads of conversations about “viscosity levels”… but hey, it’s got Philip Madoc in it, for chrissakes!
And its heart and brain are both in the right places. It has possibly the most fair and unprejudiced portrayal of native, tribal people that I've ever seen in sci-fi. It attacks racism, capitalism, environmental destruction and religion... and from a radical challenge position rather than just a hand-wringing liberal critique. It contains none of the sentimentalised patronising attitude to be found in, say, Avatar (yeurch), while also containing ten times the anger.
I'm planning to post something seperate and self-contained on the subject of 'City of Death'.
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