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Encountering JRRT, but in a different way.
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Curing procrastination.
Game of Thrones, Episode One
So, for those of you who have seen it, what did you think?
The show seems at present to be very much the Sean Bean / Eddard Stark story, along with his two younger, brighter children (I mean Arya and Bran, very effectively portrayed by Maisie Williams and Isaac Hempstead-Wright; Rickon from the books is abolished), and then the parallel story of Emilia Clarke/Daenerys over the ocean. This obviously means downplaying some of the other viewpoint characters, but really these are the most interesting ones, apart from Tyrion who we don’t see a lot of in Episode One (though Peter Dinklage shines in every scene). It is precisely the centrality of the kids that makes me wonder about the target audience; Martin’s books are not children’s books, and the TV version is definitely not a children’s programme, so I wonder if adult viewers will really be able to identify with the smaller people.
As I said at the top, I liked most of the adaptation in terms of how it brought the book to life for me, but the Wall/Jon Snow/Catelyn subplot didn’t quite seem to me to come off. Michelle Fairley’s chemistry with Sean Bean is a bit variable (by contrast, she’s much better with their supposed children, which is just as well, considering). Richard Madden is even more of a cipher as Robb Stark than the original character is in the books. And I know that the Northern Irish climate is to blame for this, but the Wall didn’t quite seem cold enough to me (other than that, the show looks absolutely gorgeous).
On the plus side, the Daenerys/Viserys/Drogo realisation is fantastic. Again, I have the advantage of knowing what is to come, and that Daenerys’ rise will be a contrast with the fall of all the Starks and Eddard in particular. If I didn’t know that she has better times ahead, it would be quite hard to tolerate the way in which she is used as a piece of dynastic meat by her brother and the man she is forced to marry, even more viciously on the screen than in the books.. Emilia Clarke is effective and memorable as the sacrificed virgin; I hope she’s able to keep it up when she becomes the warrior witch-queen.
I also liked the music, and the opening titles, showing the interlocking primitive politics of the kingdom as clockwork mechanisms, are at least memorable even if not quite technologically correct. And I’ll watch the next episode, of course.
Whoniversaries 18 April
18 April 1928: birth of David Whitaker, the first script editor of Doctor Who (from An Unearthly Child to The Dalek Invasion of Earth) and writer of The Rescue (1964), The Crusade (1965), The Power of the Daleks (1966), The Evil of the Daleks (1966-67), The Enemy of the World (1967-68), The Wheel in Space (1968) and The Ambassadors of Death (1970); also of the 1965 stage play, The Curse of the Daleks, and of two of the first three novelisations, Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks (1964) and Doctor Who and the Crusaders (1965).
18 April 1929: birth of Peter Jeffrey, who played the Pilot in The Macra Terror (1967) and Count Grendel in The Androids of Tara (1978).
18 April 1930: birth of Angus Lennie, who played Storr in The Ice Warriors (1967) and Angus MacRanald in Terror of the Zygons (1975).
18 April 1956: birth of Eric Roberts, who played the Master in The TV Movie (1996).
18 April 1971: birth of David McDonald, better known as David Tennant, who played the Tenth Doctor from 2005 to 2010.
ii) broadcast anniversaries
18 April 1964: broadcast of “The Temple of Evil”, second episode of the story we now call The Keys of Marinus. Barbara defeats the evil bottled brains.
18 April 1970: broadcast of fifth episode of The Ambassadors of Death. The Doctor blasts off to investigate the Mars probe for himself.
18 April 2010: broadcast of Victory of the Daleks. WOULD YOU LIKE A CUP OF TEA?
iii) date specified in canon
18 April 1906: the San Francisco earthquake, as featured in Andy Lane’s extraordinary 1994 novel, All-consuming Fire.
An awful lot of birthdays today, David Tennant being the last but not the least. If you want your child to be involved with Doctor Who, perhaps you should plan a hot date with your partner around 18 July…
Gibbon Chapter XLIX: Iconoclasm, Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire
This chapter has three parts: first, the growth of the controversy about the use of icons in religious worship, and how this drove a wedge between the Pope and the Empire; second, the rise of Charlemagne and the re-foundation of the Western Empire; and third, the subsequent re-foundation of the Holy Roman Empire and a brief sketch of its history, finishing by contrasting the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV, at his coronation in 1356, with Augustus, who started it all. I must say I found it a really enlightening chapter; I had had no idea that it was iconoclasm that made possible the rise of the Carolingians and brought an end to the Byzantine presence in Italy. (Is that still the received scholarly wisdom?)
See also my reflections on Gibbon’s anti-Catholicism, Pope Joan, and scholars and gentlemen.
2010 BSFA Award for Best Art
Just realised that I needed to catch the voting deadline for the BSFA awards, and I have hastily ranked the nominees for Best Art as follows, before scanning and emailing my ballot:
1) Ben Greene – ‘A Deafened Plea for Peace’, cover for Crossed Genres 21
2) Andy Bigwood – cover for Conflicts (Newcon Press)
3) Charlie Harbour – cover for Fun With Rainbows by Gareth Owens (Immersion Press)
4) Adam Tredowski – cover for Finch, by Jeff Vandermeer (Corvus)
5) Joey Hi-Fi – cover for Zoo City, by Lauren Beukes (Angry Robot)
6) Dominic Harman – cover for The [sic] Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut (Gollancz)
I don’t claim to have much aesthetic sensitivity in this area, and am impressed by Maureen Kincaid Speller’s analysis of the nominees in the course of which she comes to a completely different and probably more robust set of preferences.
(My votes in the other categories: Best Novel, Best Short Fiction, Best Non-Fiction. I never got round to listening to the podcasts, and have excluded one of the others, so my Non-Fiction ballot has votes for only three of the five.)
A History of the World in 100 Objects
Woke this morning in some discomfort due to minor but inconvenient medical complaint, and in the course of driving to doctor and then the pharmacy and then back home, I finished listening to the last few installments of A History of the World in 100 Objects, which has been my recourse when I run out of Doctor Who audios since I finished a rather unimpressive BBC history series on the British Empire four months ago.
A History of the World in 100 Objects is really excellent. A hundred thirteen-minute programmes – so 22 hours in total – each taking a single exhibit in the British Museum and telling its story. By concentrating on the material goods, Neil MacGregor, the British Museum’s director, is able to take us on a journey across cultures, taking them on their own merits, knocking down preconceptions and prejudices about pre-industrial and non-Western societies. He starts with an Egyptian mummy (as a methodological marker – the rest of the first tranche of programmes are about the stone age) and ends with a solar-powered lamp, reflecting on hos that is changing the world, especially the developing world. All of the programmes are excellent and it feels a bit invidious to single out any, but I felt MacGregor’s own excitement when describing two of the best-known items in the BM – the Rosetta Stone and the Sutton Hoo helmet, the latter of which features Seamus Heaney – an attractive feature of these programmes is the number and quality of the guest speakers, alternating between experts and celebrities (most of whom are of course experts in some way anyway). But really the whole set of audios is absolutely superb, and if you have the sort of lifestyle where the occasional thirteen-minute gap could be filled with some enlightenment about matters historical, you can’t do better than start with this. My only serious complaint is that it is now over and I’ll have to find something else to listen to.
Whoniversaries 17 April
17 April 1924: birth of Clyde Pollitt, who played a Time Lord (the Chancellor) in The War Games (1969) and The Three Doctors (1973).
also 17 April 1924: birth of Kevin Lindsay, who played Linx in The Time Warrior (1973-74), Cho Je in Planet of the Spiders (1974), and Styre/The Marshal in The Sontaran Experiment (1975).
17 April 1941: birth of Brian Miller, who played Dugdale in Snakedance (1983) and Harry Stevens in The Mad Woman in the Attic (SJA, 2009); is also married to Elisabeth Sladen.
ii) broadcast anniversaries
17 April 1965: broadcast of “The Warlords”, fourth episode of the story we now call The Crusade. Barbara escapes; Ian retrieves her, the Doctor and Vicki; and the time travellers depart.
17 April 1971: broadcast of second episode of Colony in Space. Jo talks to the colonists, and the Doctor talks to the IMC; and is threatened by the killer robot, again.
Delicious LiveJournal Links for 4-17-2011
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"it is my great regret to inform you that Atlas Shrugged: Part I is neither good nor good-bad, but bad-bad-bad-bad. I dreamed, not of sesame chicken, but of my own swift and merciful death, and that of the director, not necessarily in that order."
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Baby penguin being tickled. OMG teh cutez!
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The headline slightly exaggerates – she was basically doing work experience with her MEP. And I'm aware of at least one professional interpreter at the European Parliament with a serious visual impairment – an Irish bloke who sometimes gets the same train as me – and would not be surprised if there are many others. But in any case it's a nice story.
Heroes of Sontar, and The Sentinels of the New Dawn
Barely at the midpoint of the month and there are two new Big Finish audios to enjoy: the main range release brings the Fifth Doctor, Turlough, Tegan, and an older Nyssa together with abunch of Sontarans, and a Companion Chronicle has Liz Shaw timewarped in Cambridge.
Heroes of Sontar, by the reliable Alan Barnes, is the better story of the two. At first it seems a rather peculiar and not necessarily successful attempt at a humorous twist on the Sontarans, as a bunch of deadbeat veterans are sent on a mysterious mission to a planet deep in Rutan space. But this being Alan Barnes, all is not what it seems, and Janet Fielding and Mark Strickson in particular get some good moments as Tegan and Turlough as the Tardis team work out the awful truth behind the apparent absence of sentient life on the planet. Poor Sarah Sutton is not as well served as the older Nyssa, though she gets some sentimental moments with Tegan near the end, and I was not wild about the characterisation of the Doctor. But I was much more impressed by Barnes' ringing of the changes on the Sontarans here than by, say, Colin Brake's retake on the Judoon.
I was less wild about The Sentinels of the New Dawn by Paul Finch, which turns out to be a sort-of prequel to the Lost Story Leviathan, adapted by Finch from a script by his father Brian. Liz Shaw, having recently left UNIT, summons the Third Doctor to Cambridge to help her with a case of timewarping machinery which turns out to have political implications for the year 2014. It didn't especially grab me, though Caroline John is always good to hear; a slightly personal grumble is that I wish people who actually know Cambridge would write Liz Shaw stories – time travel experiments would surely be a bit more likely to be done at the Cavendish rather than at DAMTP as here, DAMTP not being well known for its experimental facilities (or indeed inclinations). Maybe things are different in the Whoniverse. (I recently became familiar with the term Brit-picking; is there a specifically Cambridge version of it which I suffer from?)
Industrial archaeology revisited
Last week I wrote of the abandoned steam tram line which passed through Sint-Joris-Weert. A little subsequent googling came up with these two picture postcards showing the two stations in operation, railway on the left, steam tram (with rails in front of it) on the right:
I can’t read the sign on the near end of the tram station – its inscription seems to start with ‘Ma’. The sign saying ‘Sint-Joris-Weert’ or possibly ‘Weert-St-Georges’ (or both) would have been over the front door.
I reckon that the upper picture is the earlier one, given that the road seems not to have been tarmaced and that there is no tree at the near end of the railway station – the tree is still there today (and I do mean today – picture taken this morning):
I notice also that the steeple of the tram station has been replaced by a smaller structure at some point.
Non-Belgians may be amused by the nature of the fast-food stall in front of the old tram station today, waiting to serve spectators at a bike race this afternoon.
April Books 22) Judgement of the Judoon, by Colin Brake
Another Ten-on-his-own Who novel, this time featuring a feud between crime lords on a spaceport, a petty thief recognisable by his skin colour, a seventeen-year-old girl detective (whose name is Nikki rather than Mary Sue), and on the plus side a Judoon commander who is actually allowed to develop a character. Rather minor stuff, frankly.
April Books 21) A Question of Blood, by Ian Rankin
Another excellent Rebus novel, let down a little bit by the end – the solution to one of the mysteries depends on someone simply by coincidence having been in the right place at the right time and then doing something rather unexpected conveniently for the plot, another mystery depends on the memory of one of the viewpoint characters and is revealed to us only at the very end though presumably the character in question has been aware of it all through the book. Also I now have spotted that whenever we start to hear in great detail about Siobhan’s (Rebus’s sidekick’s) observations of her surroundings, something ‘orrible is about to happen to her. But on the way there we have the usual brilliant interweaving of professional jealousies, moments of heroism, awful politicians (a recurrent Rebus/Rankin theme), music, and stories from various levels of society which intersect each other in unexpected ways. Pretty accessible to the newcomer as well, I would think.
April Books 20) Declare, by Tim Powers
I rather liked Declare. As a fan of both Tim Powers’ earlier work and of John Le Carré (though I haven’t read either for years), I was impressed both by the audacity of the one trying to write like the other, with added djinn (rather than gin) and by the fact that he pretty much succeeded in pulling it off. It added local colour that I read the passages set around the Soviet/Turkish frontier while myself on a business visit to a former Soviet state which unexpectedly turned out to include a reception at the residence of one of the Western ambassadors posted there. He captures the tone of the disheartened and disreputable spy thriller awfully well, with the added awful secret that is not merely national security but too dreadful to be told or even fully described (“Lovecraft meets spycraft”, though that tagline gives the incorrect impression that the style is particularly Lovecraftian). I should add, however, that I think Le Carré tends to do slightly better by his women characters than Powers has managed here. Not a quick read, but I enjoyed it.
Whoniversaries 16 April
16 April 1936: birth of Derrick Sherwin, script editor of Doctor Who from The Web of Fear to The Mind Robber (in 1968) and producer for The War Games (1969) and Spearhead from Space (1970).
16 April 1954: birth of Antony Root, briefly script editor of Doctor Who in 1981.
ii) broadcast anniversaries
16 April 1966: broadcast of “The Dancing Floor”, third episode of the story we now call The Celestial Toymaker. Steven and Dodo must deal with a not-very-threatening kitchen and some rather more threatening dancing dolls.
16 April 2005: broadcast of Aliens of London. A spacecraft crashes into the Thames; the Doctor is among experts on aliens summoned to 10 Downing Street, but all is not as it seems.
iii) date specified in canon
16 April 1746: Battle of Culloden, followed by the events of The Highlanders (1966).
Delicious LiveJournal Links for 4-16-2011
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Hugh Grant, journalist, taped conversation – not in the order you might expect.
Whoniversaries 15 April
15 April 1922: birth of Peter Moffatt, who directed State of Decay (1980), The Visitation (1982), Mawdryn Undead (1983), The Five Doctors (1983), The Twin Dilemma (1984) and The Two Doctors (1985).
ii) broadcast anniversaries
15 April 1967: broadcast of second episode of The Faceless Ones. Polly and Ben have disappeared; Jamie meets Samantha Briggs; the Doctor is knocked out by gas.
15 April 1972: broadcast of second episode of The Mutants. The Marshall forces the Doctor to work with Jaeger, while Jo is a captive of the Solonians.
15 April 2006: broadcast of New Earth. The Doctor and Rose visit a far-future hospital where they encounter some former acquaintances.
iii) dates specified in canon
15 April 1912: the Titanic, struck by an iceberg late the previous evening, sinks in the early hours of the morning in the North Atlantic with over 1500 lives lost, as seen in the 1979 DWM comic strip Follow that TARDIS!, Kate Orman’s 1993 novel The Left-Handed Hummingbird and the 2010 Big Finish audio Wreck of the Titan, also referenced in The Invasion of Time (1978), Rose (2005), The End of the World (2005) and Voyage of the Damned (2007).
15 April 1912: birth date of Charlotte Pollard, companion of the Eighth and Sixth Doctors in many Big Finish audios.
15 April 1980: birth of Samantha Jones, companion of the Eighth Doctor in many BBC-published novels.
April Books 19) Toujours Tingo, by Adam Jacot de Boinod
Sequel to The Meaning of Tingo, with more strange words from other languages. I actually found this a bit more impressive and better organised than the first volume, with some very interesting idioms which I may try out for myself: the Puerto Rican expression for being very nervous which translates as “like a crocodile in a wallet factory”; or the Swahili saying that the day you decide to leave your house naked is the day you bump into your in-laws. And I loved the French tongue-twister, “Combien de sous sont ces saucissons-ci? – Ces saucissons-ci sont six sous.”
April Books 18) The Not So Star-Spangled Life of Sunita Sen, by Mitali Perkins
Nice little novel about a Californian teenager whose grandparents from India come to stay for a year, adding a sudden awareness of cultural difference to the usual bundle of teenage angst. There’s a particularly good bit when Sunita realises that Casablanca and The Secret Garden are told entirely from the white folks’ point of view. Otherwise, I’m out of the target market for this but I would certainly buy it for kids who are in that market.
Election Essay 2: What will change in this Election?
Written for Stratagem, 14 April 2011
This will be the twentieth election held at regional level in Northern Ireland. The old Stormont House of Commons managed twelve elections between 1921 and 1969; we then had elections for an Assembly in 1973, a Constitutional Convention in 1975, another Assembly in 1982, a Forum in 1996, and this will be the fourth Assembly election since the Good Friday Agreement. It is, however, the first time since 1969 that we have voted for a devolved system of government that was actually operating at the time of the election.
At the same time, of course, we have the tenth and quite possibly the last elections for the 26 local government districts, which also go back to 1973. The 690 places to be filled by voters – 582 local councilors and 108 members of the Assembly – are a record for any one day since the 1970s reform of local government (I do not recall how many local councillors were elected before then).
In addition, voters will have a chance to participate in the UK-wide referendum on changing the voting system to the Alternative Vote, which would elect the House of Commons in single member constituencies using the same method as is used, in multi-member constituencies, for all other elections here. I’m not aware of any other occasion when the whole of Northern Ireland voted simultaneously on three different questions.
The last two Assembly elections, in 2003 and 2007, both saw pretty big shifts towards the DUP and Sinn Féin, and away from the formerly dominant SDLP and UUP. Those who believe in the swing of the electoral pendulum will expect that at some point the natural cycle of democracy will move voters in the other direction, and that at some point in the future the mantle of leadership within each section of the community will return to those who previously bore it. This, after all, is what we are used to from our neighbours: the alternation between Labour and Conservative in the UK, or between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael in the Republic.
I am not so sure that this will happen. It seems to me more likely that Northern Ireland’s politics is characterized by having dominant parties and challengers within each bloc of voters – nationalist, unionist, and cross-community – and that in fact it is the position of the challengers which is more vulnerable; in other words, in historical terms, I think it is the SDLP or UUP who are as likely to be replaced by different junior nationalist or unionist challengers than once again to overtake SF and the DUP. (It should also be said that the pendulum model is failing anyway; the current UK coalition slightly changes the picture there, and the collapse of Fianna Fáil earlier this year, makes their return as a dominant party seem doubtful.)
I feel that the 2011 Assembly election will be one of consolidation, not change. I admit that there is little to go on; no votes have been cast or counted in Northern Ireland since last year’s Westminster election (and a local council by-election held the same day). Opinion polls are notoriously unreliable. But there is no sense of welling dissatisfaction within the ranks of DUP or Sinn Féin supporters, or of swelling confidence from SDLP or UUP supporters, which will drastically upset the 2007 results. Perhaps there is an element of that from Alliance, which now has both a minister and an MP, which may enable a gain or two; and we also have challenges to the system both from Jim Allister’s TUV and from éirígí. There will be change of detail, of course – the passage of time and the new constituency boundaries make sure of that. But the big picture is likely to be pretty much the same when the new Assembly meets in mid-May. And stability is not necessarily a bad thing.
Whoniversaries 14 April
14 April 1973: broadcast of second episode of Planet of the Daleks. The Daleks capture the Doctor; Jo links up with Wester the Spiridon; a second Thal ship lands.
14 April 2007: broadcast of Gridlock. The Doctor returns with Martha to New New York, where everyone is locked in a perpetual traffic jam, unwittingly serving the Macra.
Doctor Who Rewatch: 20
My practice in this rewatch has been to take Old Who six stories at a time. This then is a particularly brief, but significant, run.
Taken on its own merits, Logopolis is a bit unsatisfactory. The first couple of episodes have way too much exposition and info-dumping, and the last two episodes are basically about establishing the Master and the new Tardis team, and getting rid of the Fourth Doctor.
But actually, watched in context, I can see why it gripped me at the time; the revival of the Master, the role of the Time Lords, and the CVE’s all link back rather satisfactorily to the earlier stories in the season, and the episode and a half actually set in Logopolis, and then the final battle between the Master and the Doctor, ending in his regeneration, are effective. And it does make sense to have the departing Doctor bid farewell to all of his companions, as the Fifth and Tenth were also able to do; this is a story about goodbyes and it’s appropriate.
And the music is particularly good.
Incidentally, when we reach the police box on Earth in the first episode, this is after a run of 23 episodes set elsewhere – the last time we saw Earth was at the very beginning of The Leisure Hive. It is the longest sequence of non-terrestrial episodes in the show’s history.
I’ve written up my views on the Fourth Doctor and Tom Baker many times before (here, here and here, for instance); so I’ll just note the points that occurred to me while watching this time.
First off, although the peak in terms of story quality is very definitely the end of the Hinchcliffe-Holmes era, Baker’s own peak, in terms of how much fun he himself is having, is a couple of seasons later, with Douglas Adams as script editor and his relationship with Lalla Ward blossoming. When it’s under control, most particularly in City of Death, the result is amazing. Unfortunately Graham Williams was normally unable to keep things under control.
Second, though the Fourth Doctor is something of a clown, he has a dark, gloomy, unknowable side which we did not see in the previously funniest doctor (Troughton), drawing on Baker’s own personality as revealed in his memoirs and interviews. His speech about parting company with UNIT is rather odd in story context but delivered with great passion. When he leaves Leela on Gallifrey, she asks K9 if the Doctor will be lonely, and K9 replies, “insufficient data”. In a sense it’s the wrong question; the Fourth Doctor often seems lonely and alienated.
Third, a point I haven’t really had a chance to make elsewhere: Matt Smith is doing pretty well by Fourth Doctor fans like me. He has that alien quality which I particularly value in the role, and which the Fourth Doctor (and also the First and Ninth) particularly excelled at. I hope he’ll keep it up. And I hope that the new Fourth Doctor stories that Big Finish are producing with Tom Baker, Louise Jameson and Mary Tamm live up to my expectations (and particularly that they are better than the two series of audios done by the BBC with Baker as the Doctor and Richard Franklin as Mike Yates). Smith is not yet my favourite Doctor, but I can’t rule out that he may be some day (as I could with any of Baker’s successors after their first year, usually after their first story).
So, at the end of the year, waiting for the next season and the new Doctor, we had the first ever spinoff story: K9 and Company: A Girl’s Best Friend. Even the greatest fans of Sarah Jane and K9 must admit that it is a little disappointing. This starts with the opening titles, which feature Sarah dynamically reading a newspaper and drinking a glass of wine, and K9 even more dynamically perched on top of a wall. The key to the mystery (itself disappointingly banal) is then revealed to the sharp-eyed in the first couple of scenes, as Juno Baker’s rings are visible even though she is wearing her high priestessly robes and mask. (Though later on Sarah is at the Bakers’ apparently at the same time as the ceremony of human sacrifice is taking place, which is a bit confusing.) And the subplot about Aunt Lavinia’s whereabouts goes nowhere, after absorbing much emotional energy.
Elisabeth Sladen is sensibly not trying too hard, and Sarah comes across as a return to form as the independent and intelligent journalist we first met. But to give her a posh young male sidekick, as was done here and in the Pertwee audios of the 1990s, was a mistake. She works much better as the leader of an ensemble, as Big Finish and Russell T Davies proved; and RTD’s great insight was to make the young male sidekick her adopted son.
Getting back to the real stuff, Castrovalva is certainly the weirdest introductory story for any Doctor. Davison’s vulnerability and weakness is very unsettling for those of us used to the idea that the new Doctor gets up and goes after passing Autons, Daleks or giant robots. The story works reasonably well as a device to introduce us to Nyssa and Tegan as characters, Adric being detained elsewhere.
I do love the concept of Castrovalva itself. I am a big fan of Escher (misspelt ‘Esher’, like the London suburb, on the DVD extras), and I love the way that Doctor Who brings his vision to life here, with some very good misdirection (hunters turn out to be friendly; Shardovan not the villain; Portreeve is the Master). It is a shame we don’t get there a bit earlier.
My two biggest complaints about the story both relate to the Tardis: the cringeworthy animation of the Doctor levitating, and the extent to which the Master, with Adric’s help, is able to penetrate it just enough for plot purposes and no further.
Again, the music is good.
Four to Doomsday is the first story since Underworld, shown four years before, in which the Doctor is the only Time Lord. After the high weirdness of Logopolis and Castrovalva, this starts out looking like it will be an equally strange story, but unfortunately resolves into a standard alien invasion plot by insane aliens who have a rather dull obsession with human cultures. The camera work in the ‘entertainment’ scenes is notably unadventurous, showing the other characters sitting around watching something they obviously don’t understand and raising the question in the viewer’s mind as to why they are doing the same thing themselves.
And it is a dismal story for Adric, who starts off with a sexist outburst against Tegan and Nyssa, and then makes an unconvincing job both of siding with the Urbankans and then of seeing the error of his ways. Of the regulars only Janet Fielding turns in much of a performance. (She appears to be, er, having fun as she operates the Tardis.) Davison, in his first filmed story, is also unsure of himself. (Worst line: “The devils!” uttered almost conversationally.)
I had forgotten quite how fantastic Kinda is. Even the snake at the end is not as bad as I remembered. But it’s a brilliant tour de force of explorations of reality, possession by spiritual forces, possession by colonial agents, about speaking and not speaking. Again, Janet Fielding is the best of the regular cast, but everyone is good, especially of course Simon Rouse as the increasingly deranged Hindle, and Mary Morris – only in two of the four episodes, but bloody hell, what a performance – as Panna. But nobody is actually bad; Nerys Hughes and Richard Todd, big name actors hired to perform auxiliary parts, lift it; even Matthew Waterhouse, delivered with yet another Adric-as-potential-traitor script, more or less rises to the occasion; and though I see some fan criticism of Sarah Prince as Karuna I must say I find her performance pretty luminous and interesting.
It does show the value of watching Who in sequence. Taken as an attempt at a serious big-picture SF story, it would probably fail because of the limited means available. But when one bears in mind the production constraints, and considers the story as a televised theatrical piece, it really ought to blow you away. I don’t have time or energy to wax more lyrical on the subject, so just let me refer you to a brilliant write-up of the story here.
The weirdest thing about The Visitation is that Richard Mace almost seems the central character, the Tardis crew appearing out of nowhere to disrupt his world. Of course, this makes perfect sense if you know the history behind Eric Saward and Richard Mace, but it seems almost a throwback to, say, The Space Pirates, of the Doctor and companions being more acted upon than actors in the story.
The story itself, alas, is pretty poor, with far too much hanging around in woods and dungeons and the Tardis until everyone can be got in place to cause the Great Fire of London. As I’ve said before, I really hate the idea of the Tardis becoming a taxi for alien predators; here we get the Terileptils’ android rather gratuitously forcing its way into the Ship, and then Nyssa able to pilot it to the precise point required by the plot. But once again, the music is very good and helps distract from the inadequacies of the rest of the story.
These six stories have seen Tom Baker’s envoi, the first and unsuccessful spinoff, and four stories of Peter Davison trying to establish himself – two successful, two less so. Also for the first time since 1965, we have had three regular companions travelling with the Doctor in the Tardis. It is, frankly, too many; but I know that it won’t last for much longer…
< An Unearthly Child – The Aztecs | The Sensorites – The Romans | The Web Planet – Galaxy 4 | Mission To The Unknown – The Gunfighters | The Savages – The Highlanders | The Underwater Menace – Tomb of the Cybermen | The Abominable Snowmen – The Wheel In Space | The Dominators – The Space Pirates | The War Games – Terror of the Autons | The Mind of Evil – The Curse of Peladon | The Sea Devils – Frontier in Space | Planet of the Daleks – The Monster of Peladon | Planet of the Spiders – Revenge of the Cybermen | Terror of the Zygons – The Seeds of Doom | The Masque of Mandragora – The Talons of Weng-Chiang | Horror of Fang Rock – The Invasion of Time | The Ribos Operation – The Armageddon Factor | Destiny of the Daleks – Shada | The Leisure Hive – The Keeper of Traken | Logopolis – The Visitation | Black Orchid – Mawdryn Undead | Terminus – The Awakening | Frontios – Attack of the Cybermen | Vengeance on Varos – In A Fix With Sontarans | The Mysterious Planet – Paradise Towers | Delta and the Bannermen – The Greatest Show in the Galaxy | Battlefield – The TV Movie >
Whoniversaries 13 April
13 April 1924: birth of Christopher Tranchell, who played Roger Colbert in The Massacre (1966), Steven Jenkins in The Faceless Ones (1967), and Andred in The Invasion of Time (1978).
13 April 1951: birth of Peter Davison, who played the Fifth Doctor from 1982 to 1984, and subsequently. Happy 60th birthday, Peter!
13 April 1984: death of Richard Hurndall, who played the First Doctor in The Five Doctors (1983).
ii) broadcast anniversaries
13 April 1968: broadcast of fifth episode of Fury from the Deep. Weed and foam spread throughout the refinery.
13 April 1974: broadcast of fourth episode of The Monster of Peladon. The Pels unite against the Ice Warriors, but the Doctor is unable to prevent Ettis from firing the sonic lance.
Delicious LiveJournal Links for 4-13-2011
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Many translated versions of the maps from The Hobbit.
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Parsing the Russian translation of the map in The Hobbit.
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My answer: not this year.
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The Transnistrian Infundibulator (nothing to do with the fact taht I am currently in Moldova).
Election Essay 1: Will Martin McGuinness be returned as First Minister in the new Assembly?
(Written for Stratagem, 12 April 2011)
The St Andrews Agreement is perfectly clear: the nominating officer of the largest political party after the election gets to nominate the new First Minister of Northern Ireland; the largest political party of the other designation shall nominate the new Deputy First Minister.
At both the last two elections in Northern Ireland, Sinn Féin had more support than any other party, with 171,942 votes to the DUP’s 168,216 in the 2010 Westminster election, and with Bairbre de Brún winning 126,184 first preferences to 88,346 for the DUP’s Diane Dodds in the 2009 European election. If the unionist vote is again sufficiently dispersed, and SF are able to retain their level of support, Martin McGuinness could look forward to swapping jobs with Peter Robinson.
However, I do not think that this is likely. Not because I anticipate any slippage in SF’s support – they have consistently delivered results in the 25%-26% range for the last several elections, and I see no reason to anticipate that this year will be drastically different. But I do expect the DUP at least tomake up the 3,700 vote difference from last year, and probably more than that.
The 2010 and 2009 elections were notably bad results for the DUP, for slightly different reasons which largely no longer apply. Both elections saw Jim Allister and his TUV eat into the DUP’s core vote. But Allister’s 13.7% in 2009, where he was unable to win a European seat despite being a competent incumbent, had dwindled to a mere 3.9% in 2010, at a time where the DUP’s leadership were under the cloud of unprecedented scandal and one would have thought it a good time for alternatives to break through.
More important, in 2010 two independent unionist candidates, both supported by the DUP, gained over 21,000 votes each in constituencies where the DUP was the largest unionist party in the last Assembly election. It seems a fair extrapolation that, if Rodney Connor and Lady Sylvia Hermon had not stood, and there had been a DUP candidate on the ballot paper in either or both of North Down and Fermanagh – South Tyrone, the extra votes gained would have been enough to make the DUP the biggest party in the election.
The DUP had an exceptionally good election in 2007, winning 36 Assembly seats on 30.1% of the vote – the best result in percentage terms for any party in a regional election since 1973 (unless one tallies together the various divided factions of the UUP in that year). That is unlikely to be repeated. But they were almost four percentage points of vote share, and eight seats, ahead of SF in the 2007 election, and I would be astonished if they lost even half of that margin this year. The DUP are likely to remain the largest single party.
More interesting, perhaps, is the competition for third place between the SDLP and UUP. The SDLP, like SF, have delivered consistent results in the last few elections, in the 15%-17% range. They actually won more votes than the UUP/Conservative alliance in 2010 (where the UUP vote is perhaps depressed by the Rodney Connor and Sylvia Hermon factors, but was also enhanced by the DUP’s travails). Alban Maginnis was a hair behind Jim Nicholson in first preference votes in the 2009 European election. But the SDLP was also – just – ahead of the UUP in the 2007 Assembly election, with 105,164 first preferences to the UUP’s 103,145.
Those 2,000 extra votes actually delivered two fewer seats for the SDLP, and one less minister in the Executive. Their own disorganisation lost a seat that they should have won in West Tyrone, and the UUP benefitted from other parties’ disarray in Upper Bann to win a second seat that they should not have won. Under the Single Transferable Vote, that can sometimes be the breaks. But if I were looking for interesting bets in this election, I think that the margin in both seats and votes between the third and fourth placed parties might repay scrutiny more than the margin between the winners and the runners-up.
Whoniversaries 12 April
12 April 1989: death of Gerald Flood, who played Kamelion in 1983 and 1984, and also King John in The King’s Demons (1983)
ii) broadcast anniversaries
12 April 1969: broadcast of sixth episode of The Space Pirates. Caven is defeated and captured; the Space Pirates are neutralised.
12 April 1975: broadcast of sixth episode of Genesis of the Daleks. The Daleks take over the bunker, killing everyone including (apparently) Davros; but the Thals bury them for centuries.
12 April 2003: webcast of “No Child of Earth, part 3”, tenth episode of Death Comes to Time.
Delicious LiveJournal Links for 4-12-2011
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"Melissa Kite in the Daily Telegraph has been doing that other thing the No side have been engaged in for weeks now, deliberately shutting down their brain functions and going on about how complicated it all is… By her own words, it took Melissa an hour to count eight votes. I’ll say no more on the subject."
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But the 2011 protesters are different not because just Facebook and Twitter replaced sms. They are different in a deeper sense. The current protest movements are not stricto sensu youth movements, but a blend of young urban middle-class facebookers, mild and not so mild conservative islamists, and (sometimes radical) leftists. Compared to the 2000-2005 wave of youth movements the current protest movements can be equally romantic, but they are less organised, with no chain of command, no training, and ultimately more fluid. This is sometimes a weakness (only the Muslim Bortherhood seemed organised enough to provide the public good of crowd management during the protests in Egypt). But it is also partly a strength since they are also more inclusive and more open to people that are not urban middle-class kids and their social base is ultimately larger. This also makes them more dangerous to the regimes.
April Books 17) In The Heart of the Desert, by John Chryssavgis
Several years ago I read the collected sayings of the Desert Fathers (and Mothers)Rūmī, who was able to develop profound philosophical insights while living his daily life without fleeing from society or concerning himself too much with mortification of the flesh. Again I observed that there is a certain amount of eremitical one-upmanship here, and while there are many reflections on how to set one’s soul right within oneself and with God, there’s not a lot about other people, who are usually an important part of whatever problems one may have. So I fear that the Desert fathers may not be for me.
April Books 16) On The Subjection of Women, by John Stuart Mill
It’s a slight cheat to blog this separately from Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women, because they are bound between the same covers of my Everyman edition. But they are definitely different books, written decades apart, so there you go.
Mill’s argument here is in favour of political equality between the sexes, in particular that woman should be allowed to vote, a proposition to which he gently demolishes all the opposing arguments. He is less passionate than Wollstonecraft but has better one-liners:
Women who read, much more women who write, are, in the existing constitution of things, a contradiction and a disturbing element…
…laws and institutions require to be adapted, not to good men, but to bad.
If no one could vote for a Member of Parliament who was not [themselves] a fit candidate, the government would be a narrow oligarchy indeed.
I was also struck by his invocation of women rulers throughout history, in particular:
The Emperor Charles the Fifth, the most politic prince of his time, who had as great a number of able men in his service as a ruler ever had, and was one of the least likely of all sovereigns to sacrifice his interest to personal feelings, made two princesses of his family successively Governors of the Netherlands, and kept one or other of them in that post during his whole life (they were afterwards succeeded by a third). Both ruled very successfully, and one of them, Margaret of Austria, as one of the ablest politicians of the age.
To divert onto another topic entirely, this made me realise how little I still know about Belgian/Dutch history. The princesses in question are Charles V’s aunt Margaret of Austria, his sister Mary of Austria, and his daughter Margaret of Parma. Must read up that period some time.
April Books 15) Monsters of Men, by Patrick Ness
This turns out to be the third in a trilogy, the two previous books being The Knife of Never Letting Go and The Ask and the Answer, neither of which I had read: it’s a huge long young adult book about conflict between humans and indigenous inhabitants on a planet where telepathic projections (‘Noise’) are common but not universal, both among the locals and among their Earthling invaders. It’s an unusual comment to make about a book, but the typography is startling – not just a different font for each viewpoint character, but also letters jumping around the page for dramatic effect. My copy came with a transparent dust jacket with more jumbled words on it. The writing is dense but also gripping – very tight first-person POV from the teenage couple who are the centre of the story, and from the alien forces acting upon them; the plot veers from conflict to deadly threat to negotiation to assassination, a real roller-coaster. I do wish I had started with the first book, especially if it’s as good as this (and it won the Tiptree award so cannot be completely devoid of quality).
Whoniversaries 11 April
11 April 1940: birth of Sheila Dunn, who played Blossom Lefavre in The Daleks’ Master Plan (1965), the computer voice of the Electromatic company in The Invasion (1968), and Petra Williams in Inferno (1970). She was married to television director Douglas Camfield
11 April 2005: death of John Bennett, who played General Finch in Invasion of the Dinosaurs (1974) and Li H’sen Chang in The Talons of Weng-Chiang (1977).
ii) broadcast anniversaries
11 April 1964: broadcast of “The Sea of Death”, first episode of the story we now call The Keys of Marinus. Arbitan, Keeper of the Conscience of Marinus, sends the Tardis crew to find the lost keys of the machine.
11 April 1970: broadcast of fourth episode of The Ambassadors of Death. The aliens go on the rampage at the Space Centre.
11 April 2009: broadcast of Planet of the Dead. A London bus is transported to a desert planet via a wormhole, its passengers including the Doctor and high-class thief Christina de Souza.