Long debate on Slugger O’TooleMark Devenport.

Feeling a little sorry for my rather naïve Greek friend who posted some kneejerk responses to my Macedonia piece over on Facebook and is now being taken apart by a former Macedonian government minister and the Deputy Assistant Secretary General of NATO…

I listened with great excitement this morning as the Japanese President of the International Court of Justice announced the ICJ’s ruling on Macedonia’s complaint that Greece had broken their 1995 agreement by vetoing Macedonia’s application to NATO in 2008.

It was a masterly takedown, as he ran over the points raised by the Greek side and demolished every single one. Bascially, Greece had undertaken in 1995 not to block Macedonia from joining international organisations under the name of FYROM, and had broken that undertaking in 2008, and no amount of obfuscation could really get over that fact.

The Greeks are claiming partial victory in that the Macedonian request to the court that it prohibit Greece from doing the same thing again was rejected. But the Court’s actual verdict offers them little comfort; it is clear that the ICJ expects Greece to do the right thing and allow Macedonia to join NATO (and, by implication, start EU membership negotiations):

…the Court does not consider it necessary to order the Respondent, as the Applicant requests, to refrain from any future conduct that violates its obligation under Article 11, paragraph 1, of the Interim Accord. As the Court previously explained, “[a]s a general rule, there is no reason to suppose that a State whose act or conduct has been declared wrongful by the Court will repeat that act or conduct in the future, since its good faith must be presumed”[.]

The Greek government at present is not in a strong position to do anything, but this is a very strong judgement, and one hopes that it will create space for some sober reflection in Athens. (Alas, NATO is not making optimistic noises.)

(See also the comments of Judge Sinna, who criticises his colleagues for not being harsh enough on the Greeks and uses such words as “synallagmatic”, “Berührungsangst” and “haptophobia”.)

A deft sketch of the changing relationship between the papacy and the city of Rome in the early second millennium, including the exile to Avignon. With reflections on the de Sade family and the (possibly) Jewish (anti-)pope.

I have been prodded – both by being on a radio panel discussion today and by the awesome Catie – to assemble some thoughts on the euro crisis and what it means for both parts of Ireland. There is a certain air of pessimism at present, driven largely by recent pieces in the Financial Times and the Economist predicting that the end is nigh and that the single currency is on the verge of breaking up. I must say that I am very sceptical of such reports. They seem to me a combination of wishful thinking from those outside the system who never wanted to see it get off the ground in the first place, deliberate spinning from those inside the system who hope that a sense of urgency may spur EU leaders into action, and malicious spinning from those inside the system who resent being marginalised by the process of resolving it. The fact is that while the costs of retaining the euro for now are huge, the costs of abandoning the project are almost literally unimaginable, and so far no government in the system has determined even that their own interests are in leaving, let alone that they wish to bring down the system. 

A good example is Friday's pair of pieces (1, 2) by the Economist's "Charlemagne" (Anton La Guardia) on the differences between President Sarkozy and Chancellor Merkel, which combines a detailed and forensic analysis of their recent statements with, in my view, an unnecessarily pessimistic take on the chance of their reaching agreement. Even the uninformed reader will be able to spot that there is not actually much substantive difference between the positions of Paris and Berlin on the way forward. In addition, La Guardia could have looked a bit more at the underlying dynamics – most importantly, Merkel and Ssarkozy actively want to reach a deal; and where there are differences between them, Merkel is likely to prevail over Sarkozy because she is is more widely respected in the EU, enjoys the paradoxical combination of a stronger domestic political situation and more serious domestic institutional constraints (thanks to the Karlsruhe constitutional court), and is basically a smarter and more serious politician than the French President. Next week's summits will inevitably declare success, because they always do, but I think it's more likely than not that there will be serious substance to that success.

That is almost certain to mean a proposal for institutionalised fiscal governance for the 17 countries in the euro-zone – a surrender of national sovereign financial powers to some Brussels-based institutions. The big concerns there are going to be the extent to which such a process can have democratic oversight, and the role for the 10 (soon 11) member states who don't use the euro as their currency. David Cameron appears to have decided that British interests are to have a fiscal union without the UK in, and if so he is likely to get that. But the UK and the other 'Outs' will certainly be marginalised from the debate; as the Economist's "Bagehot" (David Rennie) has reported, if the British demand anything much in return for their consent to a treaty change which does not directly affect them, the Germans will reluctantly (and others less reluctantly) move to a new treaty with no British involvement at all.

From the Irish perspective, this is all pretty significant. Irish fiscal sovereignty has already effectively been outsourced as a result of the crisis; the new EU architecture offers not a means of regaining it, but an opportunity to at least fight for some openness and transparency (perhaps even democracy!) in the new structures. I doubt that Irish officials will have the stomach for such a fight. I have been told by one senior source that Ireland's red line is to retain its right to set a low level of corporation tax, and pretty much all other concessions may be made with that goal in mind. (Has that been a matter of public debate in Dublin?)

Northern Ireland is a marginal region, on the frontier of the euro zone, in a state which will have little input into the debate and whose neighbouring euro-users will not be arguing for Northern Ireland's interests either. Northern Ireland's three MEPs, whose positions I respect and who have all been personally helpful to me on various issues, are Eurosceptics and so will also be outside the political mainstream on this. There is a role for civil society to get a bit more involved in European issues, for the Assembly to start taking a stronger interest in Brussels, and for the Executive to start liaising with other regions which are in a similar situation – the likes of Skåne, or Karlovy Vary.

There is a bit of a silver lining. The crisis has directly resulted in Belgium finally forming a government, almost twenty months after the last one resigned; bow-tie-wearing Francophone Socialist Elio Di Rupo is to take office as our new Prime Minister tomorrow. And later in the week, Croatia will sign its accession treaty to become the 28th member state, a significant reminder of the EU's origins as a mechanism for continental conflict resolution, and of the importance of the EU in removing war or the threat of war as an element of forward planning for its member states. That will be a great moment, particularly for chief negotiator Vladimir Drobnjak, who has been managing the process for most of the last decade, and a chance for the EU as a whole to cheer rather than sigh; it is a club that people still want to join.

Latest of the Serpent Crest series of Tom Baker audios, with the Doctor and Susan Jameson's Mrs Wibbsey trapped in an underground cavern filled with treasure and a boy called Aladdin (who appears to be the same boy from the two previous audios and is certainly also played by Guy Harvey). It's a bit of a run-around tale, whose most interesting idea is the Doctor's scarf coming to life and acquiring the voice of Andrew Sachs, with bonus sexism directed against Susan Jameson’s character, and need not detain those who have not yet got into this series. I have better hopes for the coming Big Finish audios with Baker reunited with Louise Jameson and Mary Tamm.

My interest having been piqued by my investigation of the career of Fiona Gaunt, I have been watching the 1973 BBC sf drama Moonbase 3 over the last week – all six episodes are on Youtube, though in fact I have been downloading them and watching them on the infamous Android on the way to work.

Moonbase 3 is very nearly a Doctor Who spinoff. Created by Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks, with numerous familiar faces and names on the credits, it is set thirty years in the future, a European moonbase in 2003, mainly staffed by Brits with a few comic foreigners, but with headquarters in Brussels, answerable to the Assembly and paid in Eurodollars. Letts and Dicks wanted to make a series with as few counterfactual elements as possible, and unfortunately that really leaves only two plots – crew member puts everyone in danger, or natural forces put everyone in danger. In the first three episodes the crew member who causes problems is a well-known Doctor Who face – Michael Wisher in episode 1, Peter Miles in episode 2 and Edward Brayshaw in episode 3. I am afraid I had stopped concentrating when we had much the same plot again in episode 4, and was mildly wondering how far Doctor Smith, the moonbase psychologist (played by Fiona Gaunt) who seems to have the idea that you cure crazed crew members by snogging them, would be prepared to go for the good of her team.

But the fifth episode, "Castor and Pollux", seemed to me to achieve something rather impressive dramatically. The number three on the base (Barry Lowe, played by Tom Hill – or is that the other way round?), who has functioned as a slightly reticent viewpoint character for most of the series, is in grave personal danger in an incident which combines details of Neil Armstrong's docking problems on his first space flight and the Apollo-Soyuz mission which was then in the early stages of planning; personal and international politics interfere with the Moonbase's planned rescue mission. Because the show had had little compunction about killing off apparently important characters in previous episodes, I was on the edge of my seat yesterday as I watched it on the train. The technical effects are good as well.

Sadly, the sixth and final episode, "View of a Dead Planet", brings out all the series' flaws and more. Michael Gough turns up on the Moon as a venerable scientist predicting imminent doom for the Planet Earth, which indeed appears shortly afterward to have come to pass. I found his character's unpleasantness unattractive and unbelievable, and the reactions of the Moonbase crew to him and then to the awful situation simply implausible and uninteresting; On The Beach it ain't. There is also a nasty sexual assault subplot (analysed in brutal but fair detail here). Writer Arden Winch never did any other sf as far as I know. But it's not all his fault; the whole thing felt frankly under-rehearsed. It is particularly shocking because director Christopher Barry is generally much better (though it should be added that his most recent Who at this point was The Mutants, which is definitely his nadir). I wonder if cast and crew, knowing that the series was cancelled rather than becoming a new grownup Doctor Who, had simply lost their motivation?

Anyway, it's worth watching to get a sense of where BBC sf thought it was going, ten years after the start of Who and five before the start of Blake's 7. (There is one Asian staffer in three episodes, and we see the head of the Chinese moonbase as well; there are a number of women in the team, including one research scientist in episode 3 and Fiona Gaunt's psychologist.) Apart from the fifth episode, I also enjoyed the second, "Behemoth" by John "Colditz/Secret Army" Brason. And you can see them all for free.

Episode 1: Departure and Arrival (9 September 1973): 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Episode 2: Behemoth (16 September 1973): 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Episode 3: Achilles Heel (23 September 1973): 1, 2, 3, 4
Episode 4: Outsiders (30 September 1973): 1, 2, 3, 4
Episode 5: Castor and Pollux (7 October 1973): 1, 2, 3, 4
Episode 6: View of a Dead Planet (14 October 1973): 1, 2, 3, 4

Edited to add: I happened to watch a contemporaneous episode of M*A*S*H this evening (2.4, “For the Good of the Outfit”, first shown 6 October 1973), and was really shocked by how much better it is.

I've spent the last week or so listening to Caroline John's reading of Elisabeth Sladen's autobiography, billed as being unabridged (and at over 13 hours of talk time I can believe it). I liked it very much; Sladen comes across as a modest person, driven by her instinctive desire to be an actor, prepared to tell of her own bad experiences as well as the good – a run of difficult directors in the Pertwee era, health problems while filming both Dimensions in Time and School Reunion – but generally enjoying the process of recounting her career highlights and making the reader/listener enjoy the process as well. I have noted one particular point on Who history which the autobiography illuminates a bit, and no doubt there are others. It's a shame that she doesn't find time to talk about her role in Big Finish's audios more than a couple of passing mentions, and of course it's a bigger shame that she wasn't able to finalise the text and see the book into print herself. There is a moving foreword by David Tennant (which he reads on the audio version) and an afterword by her husband and daughter Brian and Sadie Miller, read with understandable emotion by Brian Miller on the audio. Caroline John isn't of course the right voice for this – we won't hear that voice again – but makes a decent fist of it. Recommended for Who fans.

This is a collection of essays, including many important manifesto pieces from the key historians themselves, T.W. Moody, Robin Dudley Edwards, F.S.L. Lyons, Roy Foster, Ronan Fanning, etc, on Irish historical revisionism, which is a rather loose and ill-defined shorthand for the notion that the Irish historians of the mid-twentieth century deliberately intended to undermine the received myths of Irish history, and then the debate that ignited in the late 1980s as to whether or not this project was evil and wrong.

I come at it with a natural bias towards the revisionists. To me, the anti-revisionists seemed to be arguing that Irish history is best written as part of a Nationalist agenda, and to wish to close off certain topics from discussion – such as the relations between the Pale and England, or the wider Gaelic allegiances between Ireland and Scotland, or the individual failings of iconic Nationalist figures. It also seems to me that better history is written with an open and enquiring attitude, that one reaches the Truth by considering the Facts, rather than considering the Facts in the light of one's own revealed Truth.

My introduction to this entire question was a public seminar given at UCD in 1987 or possibly early 1988, where the panellists (I cannot now remember who they were) gave a reasoned explication of the so-called revisionist approach, and were heckled from the audience by an American who said, at great and tedious length, that it was disappointing and insulting to the Irish Nationalist tradition among the diaspora if it was now to be undermined by West Brits at home. I cannot remember who he was either; I do remember that he was counter-heckled by another member of the audience, very elderly, barely coherent and very angry, who ended up shouting "How are your hæmorrhoids???" This was Professor Robin Dudley Edwards, who as it turned out had only a few months to live.

Another seminar which I missed was in Cambridge at about the same time, where Brendan Bradshaw gave his detailed and expert critique of Stephen Ellis's take on the Elizabethan era, here published as one of the anti-revisionist pieces. It is by far the best of them as well, which is reassuring as I have tremendously fond memories of Bradshaw as a person (and indeed I asked him to marry me; but he was busy on the day we had chosen); I disagree with him on the central question of the moral obligation of the historian to support the Irish Nationalist project, but he lands some very effective blows on the details of the Elizabethan era, on the wilful disregard of British/English state violence against the Irish people by 'revisionist' historians, and on the true legacy of Herbert Butterfield (a point where he is clearly right and editor Ciaran Brady, in his introduction, clearly wrong). The other pro-Nationalist and anti-revisionist pieces are either petulant or (Seamus Deane's "Wherever Green is Red") incomprehensible. Two of them take my own father to task simply for recording his strong impression that treating the Northern Ireland problem as an issue or relations between two communities, rather than as one of Irish nationalism fighting off British colonialism, had become the academic mainstream.

It has to be said that the anti-revisionists have one killer argument, which is that the revisionist historians, concentrating on documentary (and therefore largely administrative) history ended up producing work that was not very exciting. But it provided the foundations for much else besides, including the expansion of Irish historical research into economics, women's studies, and archaeology. In any case, the book essentially reflects a political argument which has now been resolved, by synthesis as much as anything. In the days when the Troubles were still going, it seemed important to some to assert the primacy of their own Truth, if necessary by shouting in a louder voice. This book was published in 1994, which was the year of the first IRA ceasefire, when the peace process started to open up other possibilities. It feels much more antiquated than a mere seventeen years ago.

I was very intrigued by this passage from Elisabeth Sladen's autobiography (this is my transcription of the audiobook read by Caroline John, so the punctuation of the original may be different):

Katy Manning, who played Jo Grant [from 1971 to 1973], was leaving, and so Barry [Letts, the producer] had been quietly auditioning for a new companion. Eventually they thought they'd found the right girl, so they signed her up and began rehearsals. I can't tell you who she was; I don't think that would be fair. But I can say she didn't get on with Jon [Pertwee]. It just didn't work between them apparently.

…and that was the problem with this girl. Evidently she was quite big, by which I mean, very busty. If you're spending half a show running along dark tunnels, that's going to pose one or two problems. More importantly, I don't think it's unfair to say that the Third Doctor's character is exactly the sort who thrives on being surrounded by smaller women. Jon loved Katy because she's mad as a hatter, warm and funny, but crucially, she's little. And I think Jon was the same as his Doctor in that respect; his personality, his very being, responded differently to having smaller girls around him. So it didn't work out with Katy's replacement. They paid her off, and started again.

This gives several more details than the hitherto received wisdom, which was simply that a different companion played by a different actress had been proposed but that the production team had not gone ahead with her. Now Elisabeth Sladen adds that i) the chemistry did not work between Ms X and Pertwee; ii) Ms X was well-endowed; iii) Ms X was not short enough (Katy Manning is 5'0" = 153 cm, Sladen was 5'4" = 162 cm.) So who was Ms X?

Andrew Pixley has been through the BBC's archives, and reports:

There's nothing about this in the production file on The Time Warrior – although other actors in the Pertwee era who were contracted and not used have their paperwork present in the files… Who else could be likely candidates without going through every actress personnel file in 1973? How about Susan Jameson, whom Barry Letts has mentioned often in interviews about wanting to cast? Nope. Or maybe Fiona Gaunt, who then turns up in Moonbase 3 which was made about the same time? Nope… would there in fact even be a contract issued for this unknown actress if regulars were contracted so close to (if not after) their start date?

I must say that just from my own experience it has been the exception rather than the rule that I turn up to work on my first day at a new job with the physical paper contract already signed. (Perhaps I am not careful enough.) So there may have been some word-of-honour understanding rather than a legal document.

Graeme Burk has done some more research:

We all know the story. Barry Letts cast an actress, initial work was done with her and then…she was dropped because she ‘wasn’t working out’. (Rumours abound that this means anything from she was terrible to she didn’t get along with Jon Pertwee to she got along a little too well with Jon Pertwee…) The identity of the actress has never been revealed, in spite of the fact that Doctor Who fandom has some of the best researchers on the planet. (They can find 40 year-old telesnaps but ask them to find an employment memo from 1973…hmph). Heck, I once tried to get the answer out of Terrance Dicks while we were both in a cab and very drunk, but he insisted that he didn’t know.

Even this year [2005] at the Gallifrey One convention, Barry Letts refused to name names, though he offered one tantalizing hint: the actress was bought out of her contract, which would have meant that she was paid for the entire season. This would have required approval from the Head of Serials and memos and such…and yet this has eluded our crack team of researchers.

Rather like determining the identity of Deep Throat there are some interesting theories. One theory goes that it was actress Fiona Gaunt, who played Helen in Letts and Dicks more adult (read: boring) SF series, Moonbase 3. Moonbase 3 and Season 11 of Doctor Who were being produced around about the same time, and being moved over to Moonbase 3 would mean that she didn’t necessarily get bought out of her contract per se, hence why no paper trail has emerged. And she was a dreadful actress (Moonbase 3 all but ended her television career).

My favourite theory was one that was conceived in a fit of silliness at Gallifrey last year: that they cast someone who’s now very famous. I mean, if you were Barry Letts would you really want to admit that back in 1973 you had originally cast Judi Dench as Sarah Jane Smith but sacked her?

I have reviewed the evidence, and I am pretty sure that Ms X must have been Fiona Gaunt.

Judi Dench is only 5'1" = 155 cm tall, so fails the criterion of Ms X not being short enough for Pertwee (quite apart from the fact that we are not meant to take Burk's proposal seriously). Tat Wood, in About Time Vol 3, suggests either Fiona Gaunt or Michele Dotrice, who fails on the same grounds at 5’2½” = 159 cm (and was in any case well established in Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em at this point). Susan Jameson might be a contender for Ms X on this score – she is 5'7" = 170 cm (of female Who companions, only the two Romanas were taller). But she would have had no problem with regard to her bust, as I think is clear from this still from her appearance in an episode of UFO.

I must say I am greatly enjoying her performance as a foil to Tom Baker's Doctor on the BBC audios by Paul Magrs – her portrayal of Mrs Wibbsey is almost the best thing in them.

I think that Letts' oft-repeated story that Ms X had been paid off must be a polite and tactical distortion of the truth – if it were literally true, Pixley and/or others would have found the paper trail by now. I believe that Fiona Gaunt was 'bought off' by Letts and Dicks giving her the female lead part in Moonbase 3. And while we cannot judge Fiona Gaunt's chemistry with Jon Pertwee, in my opinion she fits the other two criteria revealed by Elisabeth Sladen. Clive James described her as "a lushly upholstered young lady" in Moonbase 3