7) If I Had Been…: Ten Historical Fantasies, edited by Daniel Snowman

I had read this years ago, but only remembered this after the rather silly ending of the last essay (set in 1982, with ex-President Allende inviting retired General Pinochet for a cup of tea). These ten alternate history essays were written in 1979. I think I bought the book for Owen Dudley Edwards’ take on Gladstone in 1880, killing Irish Home Rule by enacting land reforms (which I don’t see as very likely; the Home Rule genie was already out of the bottle by then).

There are two rather interesting essays exploring the potential for preventing the American War of Independence, one looking at how British policy might have been improved, the other imagining Benjamin Franklin facing down his own hard-liners and making peace in 1775. Both of these take as an important element the British decision to keep Canada rather than Guadeloupe in the 1762 peace negotiations. The arguments are 1) (counterfactual) that a continuing French presence to the north would have incentivised the British colonies of the eastern seaboard to stay in line with London, and 2) (factual) that the details of working out British administration in the newly acquired territory were destabilising further south. The two essays differ on the ultimate settlement – one has Britain and America continuing to be linked in union, the other imagines a more peaceful path to independence à la Canada in real life. But it is a successfully thought-provoking exercise.

Not so sure about the rest. We have four essays on regimes that might have survived if more statesmanship and shrewdness had been shown by their leaders – the French Empire in 1870, Kerensky in 1917, Dubcek in 1968 and as noted above Allende in 1972-3. These are interesting analyses of fatal mistakes made by rulers (admittedly in difficult circumstances) but not real alternative histories. Two others take the premise of German reunification in 1952, and the sparing of the life of Emperor Maximilian of Mexico in 1867, and fail to make either really interesting in terms of their consequences. I think the Maximilian question genuinely is a boring one, but more could have been done with Adenauer. Of course, that’s easier to say now that German reunification has actually happened; when these essays were written in 1979 it was still unimaginable, though in fact only ten years away.

The most audacious of the essays is by Louis Allen, imagining that General Tojo called off the attack on the US planned for late 1941 and satisfied himself with the Dutch East Indies; and then joined with the Germans to defeat Russia; only in turn to be defeated when the Germans turned on them with American help. Tojo develops nuclear weapons and destroys San Francisco and Los Angeles, but still loses the war. I’m not particularly well versed in the history of the Pacific theatre, but it was an interesting read.

I had vaguely been aware of Sylvester McCoy due to his surreal appearances in the children’s art programme Vision On (and later his double act with David Rappaport on JigsawThe Greatest Show in the Galaxy, basically watched because I knew the writing was on the wall and wanted to be able to say I’d seen the very end. As it turned out, it lasted another year, but although I actually had better access to a TV in 1989 I was rarely at home at the right time on Saturday evenings, and so missed the final season. may remember trying to persuade me that I had missed out by showing me Remembrance of the Daleks, but I wasn’t convinced (and still am not convinced by that particular story).

Of course I was aware of the Seventh Doctor as a continuing phenomenon, especially when a college friend started editing the Virgin New Adventures; though even this did not incentivise me to actually buy any of the books. I was rather deterred by their sheer number; I would pass by the relevant shelves in my excursions to Forbidden Planet, but had no really good idea of where to start; and so didn’t.

So really I knew least about the Seventh Doctor when I started to get back into Old Who (after the start of New Who). I began in December 2005 by downloading the two e-books available from the BBC website – Human Nature (excellent, and this was before it got reincarnated) and Lungbarrow (incomprehensible). Over the following few months I dabbled with a few more of the New Adventures, which means that the Seventh Doctor is the only one who I first remember encountering through spinoff novels. In the books he is a heroic wizard, loyal to his companions but also with a hinterland of unexplained angst (or, in Lungbarrow, incomprehensibly explained).

It wasn’t really until 2007 that I started watching the Seventh Doctor TV stories and also getting into the audios. Despite my unfashionable dislike for Remembrance of the Daleks, I have to say that I don’t think any of the original TV stories is as bad as the worst of the two previous Doctors (presumably this is Eric Saward’s absence from the scene). In particular, the two high points of the last season (The Curse of Fenric and Ghost Light) more than balance the considerable weaknesses of the other two stories. Even at the most pantomimey moments in the two earlier seasons, there is an underlying feeling that someone making the programme knows what is going on and actually cares about engaging the audience. (I’ll add that Doctor Who-The Curse of Fenric is one of the best novelisations, and that in general the Seventh Doctor novelisations are of a level of quality matched only by the First and Third.)

The audio adventures are a bit variable, but are generally entertaining and sometimes (Bang-Bang-A-Boom, The Harvest, Flip-flop) excellent. McCoy is particularly good when he gets into bleak!Doctor mode, and one of my disappointments with his TV stories is that he didn’t get to do this often enough; we got a lot of humorous and/or mysterious, but much less of the tragic.

McCoy’s last TV appearance as the Doctor was of course to come to San Francisco (as played by Vancouver) and get shot. But more of that tomorrow.
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The posts I feel most pleased with aren’t always the ones that generate the most discussion, as previous years demonstrate. Since 22 December last year, these got more than 20 comments:

4 January: A totally unscientific poll – 29 comments (Early soundings on the presidential election.)
9 January: A question – 45 comments (How do you pronounce ‘Chivas Regal’?)
16 January: Punchier, pacier, funnier – well, we’ll see – 25 comments (Torchwood starts again.)
28 January: January Books 9) Interview with the Vampire – 21 comments (I hated it.)
3 February: The Lisbon Treaty: My Take – 21 comments (It’s no big deal.)
19 February: The Four Things anti-meme – 21 comments (Turned into college nostalgia.)
22 February: The Friday question: money – 49 comments (Was I an unwitting participant in money-laundering?)
23 March: Etymology – 26 comments (Why ‘down’ and ‘town’ are originally the same word.)
11 April: Becoming Belgian – 37 comments (Putting in our citizenship application.)
20 April: Reassure my sensitive soul – 24 comments (I take offence at an Amazon website comment)
24 May: Eurovision liveblogging – 22 comments ("Azerbaijan: Good Lord!")
14 June: The Name Game – 28 comments (Namesakes.)
27 June: Punctured at both ends – 23 comments (Health issues, some voluntary, some less so.)
29 June: The Worst Who stories – 34 comments (Poll on the subject.)
8 July: Responsiveness – 31 comments (Writing to MEPs about the EU communications package.)
13 July: Following on from last week’s question… – 42 comments (Which was the best Doctor Who story?)
17 July: Comment spam – 21 comments (A minor annoyance.)
17 July: Doctor Who: The Best of the Best – 29 comments (Analysing the 13 July poll.)
6 August: Local cuisine – 26 comments (The Ulster specialty that my wife doesn’t like.)
13 August: This is a long shot, but… – 20 comments (Appeal for information about the bubonic plague.)
3 September: Get a grip! – 27 comments (My incorrect prediction that Sarah Palin would be a boon to McCain’s campaign.)
1 October: Political transitions – 20 comments (More gossip from college days.)
6 October: General strike – 37 comments (The Belgians were revolting.)
11 October: Today’s question: tea – 36 comments (How do you take it?)
29 November: Inspired by somebody else – 21 comments (Should I read/see Twilight? The consensus appeared to be: No.)

Thanks to everyone who reads, commenters or not.

It was half past 1573, and Queen Elizabeth was very annoyed. A long-running feud between Sir William Fitzwilliam, the chief governor (“Deputy”) of Ireland, and Sir Edward Fitton, one of the other English officials in the Irish governing Council, had sparked a squabble between their followers in which one of Fitton’s men was killed by a follower of Fitzwilliam’s. Fitzwilliam, using the royal power delegated to him as Deputy, issued a general pardon to his own man, not only for the killing but for all crimes he might have committed; when Fitton complained about this, Fitzwilliam had him arrested, but then had second thoughts and released him the next day. Fitton had meantime written directly to the Queen to complain about his treatment. Having heard both sides of the story, she wrote this stinging rebuke to Fitzwilliam and the other members of the Irish Council.

THE QUEEN TO THE DEPUTY AND COUNCIL OF IRELAND.

We have received your letter of the 12th of June, in the which, for the matter of pardon granted, and also touching Sir Edward Fitton, having read and considered the whole that you have written, and likewise that he hath written, of that matter unto us, we cannot but mislike that you the Deputy should be so hasty to give such and so general a pardon upon the slaying of a gentleman: for, where the corrupt jury of the coroner’s [in]quest did find it but se defendendo, it may easily appear that was no true verdict, and that it was a murther; or else you would not in that case have made out a general pardon, but a particular pardon upon the indictment, and, of course, as in like cases are wont.

Given under our signet at our manor of Greenwich, the 29th of June 1573, the 15th year of our reign.

One of the difficulties I have had in approaching the Irish history of this period is working out exactly how the government functioned. There is presumably some good analysis somewhere, but I have seen no explanation of what the respective powers of the Lord Deputy and the Council actually were. Of course, there was no written constitution, so the powers of government were pretty much what the people in government said they were. This letter is therefore not only a scolding for errant minions, but a political text written by the queen to her minions.

Interestingly, she does not dispute Fitzwilliam’s right to issue the pardon. She does, however, make it clear that she thinks it was a bad idea, and refers not to the specifics of the case but to the general principle that “murther” should be prosecuted according to the law.

The constitutional principle she is keenest to assert, however, is the duty of dissent in the government. She accuses the Irish Council of failing to discharge their responsibilities by not standing up to Fitzwilliam and accepting his arbitrary rule, both in issuing the pardon and in his subsequent treatment of Fitton. She reminds the older councillors that her father sacked a previous Lord Deputy for insulting one of his councillors (I am still trying to work out what incident that refers to – perhaps the recall of William Skeffington in 1532). She describes her own style of ruling as “moderate”. (So you can forget about the image you have of Miranda Richardson from Blackadder.)

Obviously I took an interest in this letter because of the namecheck of my ancestor. Nicholas White had recently been appointed to the Council as Master of the Rolls and Keeper of the Great Seal; he was distrusted by the other members of the Council because he was, er, Irish. I find Elizabeth’s sentence about him rather obscure, but she seems to be giving him due credit for protesting against Fitzwilliam’s imprisonment of Fitton (though he seems to have been silent on the question of the pardon). White, of course, had a hot line to Lod Burghley in London.

Elizabeth’s style is a bit rambling, isn’t it? But I suppose that when you are queen you can write any way you want to.

Having missed the glorious Caves of Androzani when it was first broadcast, but been assured how good it was, I managed to catch The Twin Dilemma the following week. I vaguely remembered RobotCastrovalvaDoctor Who and the Auton InvasionThe Twin Dilemma as the worst Who story ever, for a number of reasons, though here I will just concentrate on the lousy way in which the Sixth Doctor is introduced: attacking Peri and then expecting the audience’s sympathy and affection. A new character who has started his appearance by terrorising the only surviving established character just can’t do that.

I caught only two more Six stories first time round – Vengeance on Varos, which starts with the gratuitously violent torture scene, and The Two Doctors, which ends with the gratuitous stabbing to death of a minor character. Both of them also have their good points (and in particular, The Two Doctors has risen in my estimation since I got to know Troughton’s œuvre, and the novelisation is the best of the Six books) but the nastiness of the violence genuinely put me off. I was too young to remember them, but at least the fight scenes in the Third Doctor stories were on the whole interestingly staged. This was just shock tactics. I caught a few minutes of Timelash but worked out pretty fast who Herbert would turn out to be, and didn’t see anything else to interest me. (Especially not Paul Darrow.)

This meant that I missed out on the two really good Sixth Doctor stories, Revelation of the Daleks and Mindwarp. The former is the most interesting Davros story apart from Genesis of the DaleksTrial of a Time Lord season which exploits the story-within-a-story format (and fascinated Baker sufficiently that he wrote a sort-of sequel). Both stories have a much more satisfactory Doctor / Peri dynamic, and Baker gives the Doctor a believable mixture of passion and compassion (when he’s not under external influence, that is).

Baker’s rehabilitation for me has been completed by his excellent work for Big Finish. Untrammelled by dodgy visual effects, and benefiting from decent and even intelligent scripts, he has played a more heroic and warmer Doctor than he was allowed to on television, while keeping the zany extroversion which was his most attractive character trait.

My favourite of his plays is the early Bloodtide, featuring Charles Darwin and the Silurians, but there are loads of other excellent ones as well – mostly featuring the audio-only companion Professor Evelyn Smythe, as played by Maggie Stables. (Though there are some with Peri, a couple with Mel and one or two in other categories, notably The Wormery which is another excellent one.) Another good Evelyn story, Jubilee, was the basis for the Ninth Doctor televised story Dalek. More recently he has teamed up with Charley Pollard, previously encountered as an Eighth Doctor audio companion: there are two new CDs from Big Finish waiting for me to listen to them which will, I hope, take that story further.

So, in summary, this was one case where I tested the fannish received wisdom (“his TV stories aren’t great but his Big Finish work is much better”) and found it to be true.
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The entire government has now resigned (BBC link). Good riddance to Leterme; let’s hope they (meaning the political class as a whole, and the Flemish Christian Democrats in particular) choose better next time. This crisis – indeed, the continuing uncertainty since the elections of last year – was largely a result of his political incompetence.

We now return to our usual scheduled commentary on Doctor Who and linguistics.

The Minister of Justice has resigned. The president of the Court of Cassation did indeed send an expanded note to the Speaker of the House today. It concludes that “bearing in mind that my investigations have been somewhat limited, I have not found legal proof of an attempt to impede the course of justice, but there are undoubtedly important indications in that direction.” The letter is scathingly critical of the Minister of Justice, and almost as directly critical of the prime minister. It’s difficult to believe that Leterme can survive; but it’s also difficult to believe that he is still there!

Astonishingly, prime minister Leterme is still in office this morning. His bacon was saved yesterday after further correspondence arrived in the Belgian parliament from the judicial system, this time from the prosecutor in the court of appeal, which seemed to give some hope that there were good if technical legal grounds to challenge the original decision to suspend the BNP Paribas takeover of Fortis.

I’m more than a little amazed. These technicalities were conveniently discovered by precisely the judge who Leterme is accused of influencing; and the prosecutor’s letter, though only publicised late yesterday, is dated earlier in the week. It seems reasonable to suppose that the president of the Court of Cassation was also aware of these issues when he wrote his stinging note to the speaker of parliament yesterday; he has promised an expanded report today.

Who knows? Maybe it is just a remarkable coincidence that the one judge in a three-judge panel who discovered technical flaws in a judgement inconvenient to the government also happened to be the one judge in the three-judge panel who had been directly contacted by the prime minister’s office. Stranger things have happened.

It will be astonishing if the president of the Court of Cassation does not substantiate the allegations he made yesterday about political interference in the judicial system. It’s a pretty serious thing when the head of the highest court in the land accuses the prime minister of violating the separation of powers. But then, I find it also astonishing that Leterme is still in his job this morning, after the way he keeps changing his story.

Back when Tom Baker’s Doctor dominated Saturday nights, a different sort of doctor dominated Sunday evenings: the BBC’s TV adaptations of the memoirs of Yorkshire vet James Herriot (whose real name was Alf Wight). There were three solid lead actors: Christopher Timothy as Herriot himself, Robert Hardy as his boss and later partner Siegfried Farnon, and, as Siegfried’s much younger and somewhat dissolute brother Tristan, a newcomer called Peter Davison. Davison was to an extent the comic relief of the three, Timothy doing straight man and Hardy the jolly patriarch. The show became a cult – its depiction of simpler days in a rural England full of eccentric characters and basic virtues was an attractive refuge from the rather depressing late 1970s.

So it made a certain amount of sense that Davison should move from one kind of escapism to another. Not to me at the time, I must say; for me, he was immediately the new bloke, not the “real” Doctor at all. Davison was (and remains) the youngest actor to play the role; his vulnerability was a complete change from Baker and my dim memories of Pertwee (if I had known Troughton’s Doctor then as well as I do now, I would have appreciated more what he was doing); and his affection towards his companions was charming but also a bit confusing given that there were so many of them.

The additional weirdness, nothing to do with Davison, was that the programme had shifted to weekday evenings. This was a bummer if you had music lessons downtown and had to zoom in and out in time to catch the latest episode. Still, I kept the faith, and was there for the defining moment of the first Fifth Doctor season, the death of Adric at the end of Earthshock. It’s a badly flawed story in many ways, but it was a brilliant stroke from JNT to keep us watching. It is unfortunate that the very next story was the one widely regarded as the worst of all Fifth Doctor stories, the abysmal Time Flight, at the end of which Tegan is casually abandoned on contemporary Earth. The new Doctor’s affection for his companions didn’t seem to be shared by the production team; so why should the audience take an interest either?

That, and music lessons, and perhaps just growing up a bit, led me to drift away from regular Who over the next two years. I caught some of the stories at the time – Mawdryn Undead, The King’s Demons, The Five Doctors, Terminus, Planet of Fire – but unaccountably missed The Caves of Androzani when it was first broadcast (and I totally agree with the fannish consensus that it is the best of his run). When Davison took the part, he had said that he wouldn’t be the longest-serving Doctor, but he didn’t plan to be the shortest either; I regretted that he didn’t keep his promise (though it depends on how exactly you tally Troughton’s tenure).

So I followed him more or less as an ex-Doctor – baffled by his dismal sitcom with Matthew Kelly, Chalk and CheeseA Very Peculiar Practice, where he plays yet another doctor, servicing the staff and students of a disintegrating university (I’ve been re-watching that recently, and it is just superb). In fact, I think that he’s had the best post-Who career of any Doctor; also, of course, given his age, he will probably have the longest post-Who career of any Doctor. Also of course he writes music.

Getting back into the programme from a couple of years ago, I found the Fifth Doctor central to the first book in the Missing Adventures range, and then also Davison reviving his performance in the Big Finish sequence of audio plays. Not all of these are great; but the Fifth Doctor stars in several of the outstanding ones in the range – The Mutant Phase, which is the first one that is really good; Spare Parts, Marc Platt’s sober examination of the origin of the Cybermen; Omega, a far better piece than Arc of Infinity to which it is a sequel; and gloriously The Kingmaker.

And, of course, apart from Tennant, he is the most recent Doctor to appear on our screens, in Time Crash (for which the script editor was one Brian Minchin, who I mentioned yesterday). Just as Davison overtly took Troughton as a basis for his performance, Tennant is clear that he takes Davison as his basic reference point. But more of that on Christmas Eve.

In conclusion, I have forgiven Davison for Not Being Tom Baker, and come to appreciate the empathic young technical wizard, both on the screen and the continuing audios. But I haven’t quite forgiven JNT for making it all look cheap rather than magical.
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The president of the Court of Cassation, the highest court in Belgium, wrote a private and confidential letter to the Speaker of the lower house of parliament today, in which he basically says, in a somewhat roundabout way, that the Prime Minister attempted to exert political influence on the judicial process concerning the BNP Paribas takeover of Fortis. This private and confidential letter, not surprisingly, rapidly became public. The Belgian federal cabinet has been in session for the last two and a half hours; apparently they are not discussing if Leterme will resign, but how many other ministers will resign with him.

There is no coverage of this whatsoever in English-language media. If you can read Dutch, http://www.hoofdpunten.be/ is a pretty good resource though the fact that you get the same agency story several times over is annoying. I don’t know of anything similar in French.

It looks like our prime minister’s time is finally up. I have always thought that Yves Leterme had a tin ear for the highest politics; it now turns out that he doesn’t quite grasp either the principle of separation of powers, or telling the truth.

If he goes, as I think he must in the course of today or tomorrow, I think he will be the first actual head of government in Europe to lose his job because of the financial crisis. And weirdly, it’s not because of the crisis itself, but because of the way he handled it. Several months back, a bailout plan was devised for Fortis (which happens to be my own bank); it was to be sold to the French, specifically to BNP Paribas. Last week, a Belgian court ruled that the transaction would have to be suspended for two months pending consultations with existing Fortis shareholders. Not especially good news for BNP Paribas (or for the bailout plan), but there we are; the courts are independent and make their own ruling.

Or are they? It seems that Leterme’s office, and Leterme himself, was in contact with the judges in advance of the court decision. Granted, the decision they made was not the one Leterme wanted, but the perception that the prime minister was attempting to interfere in the judicial process is hugely damaging. What is worse is that Leterme’s story kept changing over the course of the day yesterday: he wrote a letter to his own Minister of Justice laying out a chronology of his contacts with the court, which was then contradicted by other evidence and then indeed by his own account; he stunned the Belgian parliament yesterday by reading out correspondence between the Minister of Justice and the wife of one of the judges from his Blackberry. His coalition partners are threatening to revolt against the government, and the murmurings from within his own party are gathering pace.

And I see in the news just now that BNP Paribas has pulled out of the Fortis deal. I think that seals Leterm’s fate.

As luck would have it, I have an appointment this afternoon downtown in the Belgian parliament. An interesting day to be there, I suspect!

Edited to add: Not very surprisingly, my meeting was cancelled. And the prime minister is still there.

I wrote yesterday of the interloper with curly hair, a scarf and a floppy hat who had replaced the real Doctor Who when we came back from a year in America in 1974. But really, the newcomer took barely five minutes to establish himself as the one and only, the genuine, the authentic Doctor in our hearts. And for the next seven years, Tom Baker wasthe Doctor – he was certainly my Doctor – in a way which brooked no competitors.

It’s partly that he was the Doctor at the point that I started to pay attention to the programme as a regular thing to watch on Saturdays. Those are formative years, and people have commented on how the first Doctor that you remember clearly shapes your expectations of the whole show. I have vivid memories of watching at least part of all the Season 12 stories (except The Sontaran ExperimentThe Making of Doctor Who.

This was a fundamental moment in my own appreciation of sf in general, not just of Who in particular – that it was possible to write about it in an analytical (if not necessarily critical) way, and to fit this week’s Who into a tradition over a decade old. When The Deadly Assassin was broadcast, my brother and I were ready for it, and we religiously noted every episode from then on.

There’s something to be said for the idea that we all think Who was best when we first started paying attention to it. Yet there’s also the objective evidence of poll after poll of fans rating the top stories of Old Who as coming from the Fourth Doctor era – and in general, those early seasons, with Hinchcliffe as producer and Holmes (gosh, Robert Holmes!!) as script editor, as the consummate peak in quality of Old Who. Somehow the personalities gelled – Holmes with his subversive, anti-establishment instincts, Baker with his fundamental anarchism, and Hinchcliffe with his tendency towards the gothic and commitment to making things look right. And so we had The Deadly Assassin, Genesis of the Daleks, The Talons of Weng-Chiang, which gripped me on first viewing and which still grip me now. I still think that in terms of concentrated quality, the run from The Deadly Assassin to Horror of Fang Rock is difficult to beat in any other sequence of Who stories. (To remind you: the three in between are The Face of Evil, The Robots of Death and The Talons of Weng-Chiang.) We were very lucky to have this feast in front of us.

(Incidentally in the middle of all this, in the summer of 1978, my cousin Brian was born; and he grew up to be a Doctor Who script editor. But that is a story for next week.)

Tom Baker’s combination of eccentricity, a powerful moral drive and a general air of being not quite human still defines the nature of the Doctor for me, and I essentially rate the others in terms of how close they approach his portrayal – particularly his alienness; it’s very important that he is not really one of us. The only two of the others who come close in my humble opinion are Hartnell and Ecclestone. I’m aware of course that this is a totally subjective set of values.

But I just want to throw one further thought into the mix. Baker always claims these days that as the Doctor he was channelling himself more than anything. He was born to be an alien – his home district of Liverpool was so detached from England politically that it had elected an MP from the Irish Nationalist party until a few years before his birth. His father was mostly absent (probably not so rare) and Jewish (probably rarer), making the Baker family an oddity in that peculiarly intense, devout community. No wonder he ran off to become a monk; no wonder it didn’t work. Baker’s accent now is impeccably Received Theatrical Pronunciation; but he must have started very Scouse. (Stretching a point a bit from a previous post: accent apart, his persona is reminiscent of the weird male relatives who one encounters at Irish family occasions. At least I used to encounter them; maybe I am now becoming one myself.)

Back to the sequence of stories. The rest of Season 15 after K9 arrived was less exciting; but then we had the Quest for the Key to Time, and even if the plots weren’t always great, the spark between Baker and his Estonian Time Lord assistant was always fun. We missed the next year due to being on non-BBC land (though it turns out the only real loss was missing City of Death), and returned in time to watch Tom Baker’s last season, but now with our understanding mediated by Doctor Who Magazine. In retrospect, that last season – Season 18 – combines an elegiac mode for the star’s imminent departure with the rather more vulgar flair that Old Who’s last producer brought to it. It was decent enough fun, but no longer the real thing.

(I will just point out that the reason Romana II looks a bit like a minor member of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy is that Lalla Ward actually is a minor member of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy [I once held a scholarship named after her great-grandmother, a scientist in her own right who was killed in a freak accident with a newly invented steam-driven motor car]. No wonder there was a spark between the working-class Merseyside Catholic lad and the upper class Ulsterwoman; and no wonder that that didn’t work out either.)

Baker’s refusal to participate in The Five Doctors rather confirmed my idea that Doctor Who had ended in 1981. We still had the novelisations (not fantastic) and increasingly the videos to go on. Some of the best Missing Adventures and Past Doctor Adventures that I have read feature the Fourth Doctor (admittedly I haven’t otherwise sampled them widely).

It may be a little unfair to say this, but perhaps Baker has been liberated since the death of Jon Pertwee, more than 20 years ago. He is the senior surviving Doctor, with no elders looking over his shoulder. He has established himself as a reliable eccentric, culminating in his weird but authoritative autobiography, and his other surreally confessional appearances on retrospective documentaries. Long may he last.
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I have four Big Finish audios to write up, but three of them are pretty unremarkable and can wait until a later post.

The Settling, by Simon Guerrier, takes the Seventh Doctor, Ace and Hex to Drogheda and then to Wexford in 1649, where, inevitably, they get mixed up in Cromwell’s invasion of Ireland – Hex ends up as a confidant of Cromwell’s, while the Doctor and Ace get involved with the civilian victims of the unfolding tragedy.

Doctor Who has, in general, almost no relationship with Ireland. The Irish characters in the entire TV canon can be counted on the fingers of one hand (Sean in The Underwater Menace, Flannigan in The Wheel in Space, McDermott in Terror of the Autons and Casey in The Talons of Weng-Chiang, with a generous half a finger for each of Chip in New Earth and Brannigan in Gridlock, neither of whom as characters can ever have been near Ireland). Irish people are less visible than black people in Who of any era; meanwhile entire stories are set (if not necessarily filmed) in Scotland and Wales.

It’s not too difficult to understand this reticence, at least from the Old Who perspective. Doctor Who is, after all, an entertainment show, and for most of its run it was rather tricky to engage with Irish issues both tastefully and entertainingly. (Supporting evidence: So You Think You’ve Got Troubles, the unsuccessful sitcom starring Warren Mitchell as a Jewish businessman sent to Belfast.) A couple of the Pertwee novelisations mention the Northern Ireland troubles in the background; if any of the spinoff novels go there, I have not yet encountered them. Turning the focus around, Daragh Carville’s magnificent play Regenerations (download link here) takes Sophie Aldred and Tom Baker to Belfast to bring peace both to the local Doctor Who fans and to the city more widely.

Guerrier’s choice of setting for The Settling, therefore, is pretty brave. Making the story a pure historical tale is also pretty challenging – you can just play it for laughs (which can be done successfully – The Romans, The Crusaders, The Kingmaker and stretching a point The Unicorn and the Wasp) or, as Guerrier has done, go for the more risky didactic approach, more demanding of both cast and audience. This can fail miserably (eg The Marian Conspiracy), but it can work well – witness the early Hartnells, The Witch Hunters or The Council of Nicæa. It works here (though the inclusion of the bloke who is going off to found the Royal Society is a bit gratuitous).

Cromwell is one of the dividing points between me and many of my fellow leftie liberal friends from the neighbouring island. In England in particular, he is a liberal hero, having abolished the Divine Right of Kings and ensured the supremacy of Parliament. But for me it’s impossible to separate that from his direct personal responsibility for the slaughter in Ireland. Guerrier makes a decent effort at reconciling the two sides of Cromwell in The Settling, and the play is carried by Clive Mantle as the man himself and Philip Olivier as the Doctor’s Scouse companion Hex, discovering first that there is a human being behind his Irish grandmother’s stories of terror and then that the stories of terror were true after all. Indeed, it’s Olivier’s best outing yet as Hex, with a framing narrative of him and Ace safely back in the Tardis, trying to talk through the trauma. It’s a shame that, in sequence, it’s rather overshadowed by The Kingmaker which was released immediately before – it’s a lot better than the immediately following stories, with a bleak atmosphere of grief and savagery.

The history, of course, isn’t perfect. Guerrier presents Drogheda and Wexford as the last Irish bastions of loyalty to the recently executed Charles I, which Cromwell therefore wishes to suppress, and while that’s basically true, it’s quite far from being the whole truth; both local and European politics, and in particular the religious/sectarian elements of the conflict, are rather underplayed. But one cannot expect too much detailed attention to the canvas of the seventeenth century in 100 minutes of the adventures of a roving timelord. The Settling is well worth a listen.

My earliest distinct Who-related memories are not of the programme itself, but of the 1971 Sugar Smacks breakfast cereal promotion (described at http://cuttingsarchive.org.uk/miscella/1970s01.htm, though this site has a malware warning) where different boxes featured different members of the cast; we had one with the Brigadier, and a UNIT badge to cut out. My next memory is of Michael Aspel promoting the new Dalek story (1972’s Day of the Daleks, by later reckoning) on his weekday kids programme.

The first bit of Who I can definitely remember seeing is the end of Frontier in Space where, to be non-spoilery about it, the Master reveals his secret allies. We then lived for a year in a non-BBC territory, and when we came back the Doctor had been replaced by an impostor with curly hair and a scarf. I’ll save my thoughts about him for tomorrow.

Well, although the real Doctor had gone, it seemed entirely possible to re-live the Pertwee era through the Target novelisations, which we raced through as they became available from library and bookshop. (On a tangent, I can’t quite believe that Eason’s, formerly Gardner’s on Botanic Avenue has now closed – it surely takes a special talent to fail to turn a profit on a bookshop/newsagent in the heart of the university area.)

Getting back to the point: Terrance Dicks gets an awful lot of stick for churning out rather dull adaptations to dead tree format of the original TV stories, and for other periods of the show it is fair criticism, but for the Third Doctor he really put his back into it – this was, after all, the time when he was script editor, and I can imagine him doing the stories the way he had really wanted them to be, rather than the way they came out. In his books (and others’ as well) the Doctor comes over strongly as a rather grand yet witty and, of course, good-hearted personality.

I’ve already written about the disappointment of the original version of The Three Doctors not being as good as the book; the other story shown that month in 1981 was Carnival of Monsters, which is average for Robert Holmes (and therefore well above average for Who). Two years later, he was back in The Five Doctors, and I took Frontier in Space with me to Bosnia in 1997, the first Who video I ever bought; and the first Who DVD I bought, in 2005 just as New Who was about to start, was The Green Death. The Third Doctor’s was the golden age just before my firm memories of the programme.

And my crashing disappointment over the last two years has been to discover that the Third Doctor stories are in general duller than I expected; and worse, that the witty personality created in the novelisations is based on a sarcastic and scornful screen persona, who is sometimes blisteringly rude to his colleagues from UNIT, and almost always patronising to Jo Grant (herself one of the wetter yet longer-lasting girl companions).

It’s not just the Doctor. The decision to put him in UNIT as scientific adviser, based in contemporary (or near-future[!]) England, changes the whole show and makes it very static and monster-of-the-month; and the occasionally laughable special effects don’t help. The most dynamic aspect is the loving coordination of the fight scenes, which aren’t really to my taste. I will give Letts and Dicks (and indeed Holmes) credit for establishing some of the more durable aspects of Who – the Master, the Autons, the Sontarans, Sarah Jane Smith – and indeed the Pertwee/Delgado and to a lesser extent the Pertwee/Sladen interactions show him at his best. But in general, I’m afraid I rank the Third Doctor as tenth out of ten.

I shouldn’t exaggerate. In the end, I do like them all. There are a lot of pretty decent Third Doctor stories – some already mentioned, but also Inferno, The Curse of Peladon, and The Time Warrior to name but three. But I have to say that on the whole I would strongly recommend getting hold of the novelisations before dabbling in the originals.

Obligatory spinoff media note: the 1990s audios are average Pertwee if a bit incoherent plot-wise; there are a couple of rather good novels available (legitimately!) on-line here and here. The Third Doctor plays in the Companion Chronicles series have been noticeably weak.
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I don’t know either of these writers, but I found their articles compelling:

Grokking EULEX, a Heinlein take on Kosovo
“Mademoiselle Corbet, vous êtes trop blonde”, anthropology among the Saharawis.

I was born during the Second Doctor era (between episodes 3 and 4 of The Faceless Ones, to be precise), so as with the First Doctor my early experience of the Troughton stories was through the novelisations (which were, on the whole, better) and the reference books and DWM articles. In 1981, the BBC showed The Krotons on the basis that it was (then) the only surviving four-part Second Doctor story; Troughton popped up again the next week when they repeated The Three Doctors. Both were rather disappointing; the former is a rare misfire from Robert Holmes, and the latter, which must have delighted fans back when it was first shown, suffers badly from the fact that the Terrance Dicks novelisation, which we all knew well by 1981, is far better than the TV original.

But then Troughton came back again for The Five Doctors, in which he totally stole the show from the other members of the cast; and on that basis I was prepared to forgive The Two Doctors, a rather odd story which I liked much more on rewatching it this year than I did first time round. The next I heard of him, he had died, appropriately enough while attending a Doctor Who convention.

Some time over the next two decades I managed to see and enjoy Tomb of the Cybermen and watch with some bemusement The Seeds of Death. I also read Invasion of the Cat People, still my only Second Doctor spinoff novel, an early Gary Russell effort which did not impress.

Getting back into Who two years ago, I decided to get the audios of the 1967-68 “monster season”, but started – wisely as it turned out – with Power of the Daleks, one of the strongest opening stories for any Doctor. After I’d got through the first few audios, I also watched The War Games which must be surely the best closing story for any Doctor bar The Caves of Androzani. My scientific judgement is that there are more distinctly bad Second Doctor stories than First Doctor stories, but the high points (most mentioned already, plus also The Mind Robber) are very good indeed. This seems to reflect the circumstances of a talented production team trying their best in straitened circumstances and quite often managing to pull it off.

Troughton’s own performance is quite unusual. One of the unfortunate things about the loss of so many of his stories is that we miss the contrast between his scruffy appearance and his very posh diction – I now regret listening to so many of the “missing” stories first, before I had formed a good mental image of what I was missing. (The Second Doctor has now returned vicariously and invisibly in the Companion Chronicles, which have at least been fun if not always great literature.)

There is a perennial and rather pointless debate about who was the “best” actor ever to play the Doctor. There can be little doubt that Troughton was the most versatile, the one who slipped most easily into the biggest variety of other parts elsewhere (I remember him also from Treasure Island and The Box of Delights, for instance). I think he may also have been the actor who delved least deeply into his own personality for his portrayal of the Doctor. Hartnell, Pertwee and Tom Baker were all pretty clear that their Doctors were extensions of their own personalities. For Troughton it was different – if you have seen the home movie footage of the location filming of The Abominable Snowmen, there’s a strikingly visible difference between his being in character and his being Pat the lead actor, even though the film itself is silent.

His Doctor was also markedly more human than Hartnell, indeed warmer to his companions than any others (except perhaps Davison, who consciously drew from Troughton; and to a lesser extent Tennant, who consciously draws from Davison). He is, I think, the Doctor who we most often see being actually frightened – it is impossible to imagine any of the others ejaculating “Oh, my giddy aunt!” The Second Doctor somehow seems more knowable than most of the others; and though it’s not what I want from the Doctor, I have to admit that Troughton does it well.
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One journalist’s comment on President Bush. (Various versions of this floating round, combining to several million views on YouTube so far.)

Paul Cornell has a wonderful project of his Twelve Blogs of Christmas; I missed out on NaBloPoMo; but I thought that in the run-up to the broadcast of The Next Doctor on Christmas day, I would try to do a series of posts on each of the ten Doctors so far, and rather than do my usual more analytical treatment I would explain what each of them means to me.

William Hartnell’s Doctor was very nearly the last I got to know. I was born after he had departed the scene, and he died before I had really got into watching it; my exposure to him as a young fan was the early novelisations, the rebroadcasting of An Unearthly Child in 1981, and the records of The Making of Doctor Who and the Jean-Marc Lofficier books (and also the flashbacks from Doctor Who Monthly in the early 80s). Once the new series started, my enthusiasm generally picked up, but my first choice of First Doctor story to rewatch was The Chase, which is a bit unfortunate as it is one of his least impressive. I bought the DVDs of the first three stories as a nostalgia exercise, and browsed a couple of the historicals; but what converted me to appreciating the glories of the First Doctor was the amazing story arc that is The Daleks’ Master Plan.

It’s still one of my favourite Who stories ever, helped of course by the wonderful Kevin Stoney as Mavic Chen, and also by the grim ploy which sees two and a half companions killed off (Bret Vyon being the half), but also by Hartnell’s sheer energy and conviction in the title role – by this stage he was the only one left of the original team, and I guess he must have felt even more proprietorial than ever about the show and his part in it. If ever you have five hours to spare, invest them in listening to the audio with Peter Purves’ narration, or watching the reconstructions and the three surviving episodes. (I listened to it during a wonderful drive across Cyprus a year ago, appreciating the Mediterranean landscape while listening to the drama on Kembel, Desperus, and other planets.)

And the core of it all is Hartnell himself. Sure, he did fluff the odd line; but he totally commands the scene, in a very visual way – it is striking that so few of the novelisations of his stories really capture his performance (and it is sad that so much of the visual evidence has been lost). The relevant Missing/Past Doctor Adventures, and more recently the Companion Chronicles, do their best but it’s not the real thing. Even his appearance in The Three Doctors, sadly, isn’t the real thing – yet it’s nice that he is enshrined as the authority figure to whom the two junior Doctors must defer. (Richard Hurndall makes a decent effort in The Five Doctors, but the spotlight is elsewhere.)

I’m a child of the Fourth Doctor era, as I shall explain (all being well) on Thursday, so for me the ‘real’ essence of the Doctor’s nature is in the alien benevolence that Tom Baker brought to the role. The only other actors to approach the part in that way were Hartnell and Ecclestone, and it seems to me that Baker restored some of Hartnell’s original magic to the show which the two in between had moved away from.

In a sense, though, it’s unfair to compare Hartnell to the others, because there were no other Doctors to compare him to at the time. Watching his stories, you have to get into the idea that this was a moment on Saturday nights when the surreal was still unusual rather than established; even in the worst moments (and there were several, especially among the more sfnal stories) there’s a feeling that if it doesn’t quite work, it’s because it is new, and different, and unexpected for everyone. I find his performance iconic – in the most literal sense, in that his image graces all of my livejournal posts about Doctor Who.

I wouldn’t subject a non-fan to any of his longer stories, or anything which is incomplete. But most of the surviving four-parters (and Planet of Giants, The Rescue and The Edge of Destruction, which have only two or three parts) are entirely presentable to people who don’t know much about the First Doctor but are willing to give him a try. The only exception is The Space Museum, though even there the first episode is pretty good. I also like treating visitors to the third episode of The Dalek Invasion of Earth, because of the chase across London, though it’s a bit light on the Doctor.

So, this series of posts is starting on a high note. Tomorrow I’ll tell you about the Second Doctor.
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I’m very pissed off with the Moroccan journalists who tried to gatecrash me on Thursday. The latest nonsense is on-line here and in French here. In case they take it down, the text is as follows:

Belgian MP, SNPM decry preventing Moroccan journalists from attending Polisario conference

Brussels, 12 Dec. 2008 (MAP)- Belgian MP Denis Ducarme questioned the Belgian Interior minister, Patrick Dewael, on the banning of Moroccan journalists and some Belgian civil society activists, Thursday, from attending a press conference, organized by the polisario separatists at the international press center in Brussels.    

The organizers had behaved in an aggressive manner against Moroccan journalists, who were unwelcome at what was called “a private meeting between diplomats and the press,” while opening widely the doors to the representatives of the Algerian media.    
Other journalists, MP Denis Ducarme, and several civil society actors were also denied access to the room to attend the press conference, that was announced by several media.    

In a question filed Friday to the interior minister, Ducarme  said he was on the spot and could see for himself that access to the conference venue was strictly regulated and that the Moroccan journalists have been denied entry to the room although they are members of the Association of Professional Journalists of Belgium (AGJPB) and hold press credentials issued by the Belgian interior ministry.    

The Belgian parliamentarian made it clear that it is everyone’s duty to “preserve our model of democracy” based on fundamental rights and public freedoms, including the freedom of the press.    

He also wondered whether the organizers of the press conference on Belgian soil were not subjected to the principles of the freedom of the press and the free access to accredited journalists.     

Morocco’s Press Union “Syndicat National de la Presse Marocaine” (SNPM) decried, in turn, this incident saying it is “grounded on neither legal nor professional bases”.    

Such attitude “unveils the organizers’ false claims about their commitment to human rights,” the SNPM said in a press release, documenting similar incidents that took place in Spain, Italy and France.

“Polisario” members have no right to do such things to the Moroccan journalists, who only fulfill their professional duty, the union added.    

The SNPM also sent letters on this incident to the Brussels-based Federation of International journalists, the Belgian Union of Journalists, Reporters without borders, and other international bodies, asking them to condemn these acts and issue a solemn protest to the “polisario”.

I love how I am the one who behaved “in an aggressive manner” by simply asking them to leave before we called the police; there’s obviously nothing aggressive at all about turning up with a crowd of ten people including two cameramen and demanding access to a private event.

It is news to me that Belgian law and customs allow anyone with a press card to attend anything that they want, whether or not they have been invited. I do hope that the Minister of the Interior contacts me as a result of Ducarme’s letter to clarify this.

Given what Morocco is doing in the occupied territories and to Saharawis living in Morocco proper, it’s pretty offensive to be accused of human rights violations for keeping a private event private.

I shall be seeing Ducarme on Thursday and look forward to clarifying with him if he is a unwitting stooge in these Moroccan propaganda stunts, which are essentially intimidation tactics, or if he is a willing stooge. I fear that the latter is more likely.

Meanwhile I’m glad to say that the actual meetings which I was organising went pretty well.

Here, for reference and my own convenience, is my Christmas dinner recipe, in metric quantities:

ROAST LOIN OF BOAR
WITH JUNIPER BERRIES
(to feed 6 people)

A boned and rolled loin of wild boar will feed about 4 adults per kilo, and is delicious eaten hot or cold.