Their debut gig was at Birmingham’s Barbarellas, supporting a local band called Fashion. People who saw them back then say they were awful. Nick Rhodes has said ‘The original Duran Duran wasn’t so much a group as a series of get-togethers… an evening of pretence with Duran Duran just about sums it up: John has been equally dismissive of the early years. ‘We were really on a bit of an art school trip at the time: he told one journalist. And later, ‘We tried all sorts of line-ups in the early days. In fact we were something of a joke in Birmingham.’
Neil Gaiman’s first ever book, and the last of the Humble Bundle of Gaiman rarities that I acquired a few years ago. I confess that I was never particularly into Duran Duran; they pleasingly drew their name from the film version of classic French comic Barbarella, and recently little U has decided that she likes the video for Save A Prayer.
The kindest thing that can be said about this book is that at least its writer went on to greater things. 1984 was the peak of Duran Duran’s original burst of fame; the five central musicians were all still in their mid twenties, dealing with the sudden acquisition of fame and riches about as well as any self-centred young men do (which is to say not very well). Gaiman can’t quite disguise the fact that the people he writes about are not very nice, or in the end very interesting. Nick Rhodes’ androgynous presentation does leap out as unusual for the time; but Boy George was already taking it further. Not really recommended, and not all that easy to get either.
This was the shortest unread book on my shelves of those that I had acquired in 2015. Next on that pile is The Limbless Landlord, by Brian Igoe.
Second paragraph of third chapter of After Atlas, by Emma Newman:
I’ll watch your back if you’ll watch mine.
This is the second in the four-volume Planetfall series by Emma Newman, which I have read completely out of order. (Third, fourth, first.) I’m afraid this lost me pretty early on when the protagonist, a police detective, was compelled by his bosses to investigate the murder of a former close friend. Sure, he is indentured through an ‘orrible system of cyber-slavery, but really, assigning someone like that is a crazy thing for a police force of any size to do. I read patiently through for the payoff, but it didn’t come. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2020. Next on that list is Killdozer!, by Theodore Sturgeon.
Second paragraph of third chapter of The Postmistress:
There was France and Germany. Austria. England. Poland. Letters printed in straight lines in the comforting typeface of school, the world ordered as neatly as the men now were. Since the draft had begun in October, each man’s number pulled by hand from the War Department’s glass fishbowl and recorded, the roads and rails were full of American boys being sent all over the country, leaning over books and maps in their olive drab, sprawled in the too tight seats moving from Ohio to Omaha. Tennessee. Georgia. The Carolinas. From town the two Snow brothers would go first, then a Wilcox, a Duarte, and a Boggs. Johnny Cripps and Dr. Fitch had numbers so high, it was as good as if they hadn’t been called. They’d never be needed now.
A novel about three American women during the second world war, two of whom are rather boring and live in Massachusetts and one of whom is more interesting and does some gripping journalism from Europe. One of the two in America is a postmistress who doesn’t deliver a letter. It didn’t really engage me. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book by a woman, my top unread book acquired last year and my top unread non-genre book. Next on the first list was 84k, by Claire North, which I have since read. Next on the other two is Intimacy, by Jean-Paul Sartre.
Chris: “It’s about time you had a wee chat with her.”
I picked this up on spec last year from one of the local comics shops. It’s a story of young Dutch people in the occupied Netherlands during the second world war; after it’s all over, the protagonist, Victor, meets up with his ex-girlfriend, Esther, and reminisces in a series of nested flashbacks about the good times, the bad times and the terrifying times with their friend Chris, who got killed by the Germans (this is not a spoiler, the first page shows his gravestone in detail). The plot is yer typical young-folk-under-occupation tale; the art consciously refers to Dutch propaganda posters of the period, and as is often the case with graphic stories sometimes catches feelings and events that mere prose cannot. It’s backed up by photographic and documentary evidence about what happened to the real people on whom the story is based, which I guess makes it more immediate, though personally I’m generally happy to accept that fiction can have truth without being tightly linked to actual historical events.
The title translates as “Splinters”, and a second and final part of the series has now been published with the title “Littekens” / “Scars”. To be honest I made yet another of my mistakes in buying it – I thought it was by a Flemish writer, and it wasn’t until I got to the bits about Queen Wilhelmina that I made sense of the various hints that it was not set in Belgium after all. Still, it was engaging enough that I will probably get the second half.
I’m not sure if I saw Pyramids of Mars when it was first broadcast in 1975; I know I did catch the edited rebroadcast in November 1976, which got a larger TV audience than any previous episode of Doctor Who, and I also remember devouring the novelisation by Terrance Dicks at a young age. Once New Who had rekindled my fervour, it was one of the first DVDs I got. When I watched in 2006, I wrote:
Pyramids of Mars (1975) – from Tom Baker’s second year as the Doctor, which also included The Seeds of Doom and The Brain of Morbius, surely near the top of any fan’s listing of best stories. This is the one with the mummies and ancient Egyptian gods. It survives pretty well, and the DVD commentaries give it extra value – in fact it’s particularly touching that Michael Sheard, who of course died last August, obviously really enjoyed reliving his Who days via fandom and especially cons. The one serious problem is the special effects towards the end… but more than compensated for by the mini-documentary about Philip Hinchcliffe’s influence on the show.
When I returned to it for my great rewatch, I wrote:
This is a strong season of Who in any case, but it would have been even stronger if as originally planned Pyramids of Mars had been the first story of the season. It starts with the Doctor declaring his independence from UNIT, proclaiming a break with the past, and ends with UNIT HQ being destroyed (well, the building on the site anyway). The Doctor restates his fundamental purposes several times in the first episode, reminding us that this is a show about an alien Time Lord, not UNIT’s eccentric Scientific Adviser.
In other news, it is a particularly good story: Holmes as so often comes up with a good script, where pace and wit disguise the occasional hole in the plot, and stellar performances from Bernard Archard, Michael Sheard and Gabriel Woolf, as well as Baker and Sladen, combined with Paddy Russell’s inspired directing and some excellent design – note particularly how seamlessly we move from studio to location shots – make this one of the most effective stories of one of the better seasons. As it happened I was able to watch most of it with 11-year-old F and so can confirm that it remains good family viewing after 35 years.
Lewis Greifer, who wrote the first version of this script, also wrote an episode of The Prisoner (The General, the one with the teaching computer). He would qualify as the only person to have written for both great cult shows, had Robert Holmes not preformed such radical surgery on Greifer’s original text as to leave it unrecognisable (and, one suspects, much better).
Rewatching this time, I found the story mesmerising and fascinating, and I frequently found myself just replaying particular scenes to enjoy them still further. In my two previous write-ups I failed to pay adequate tribute to Elisabeth Sladen’s performance as Sarah Jane Smith. She really crackles in a way that few previous companions did (with the possible exception of Barbara, right at the beginning). It’s her third season in the role, but the first where she is mainly travelling on her own with Tom Baker’s Doctor, so the relationship has in a sense been rebooted.
I happened to see Sadie Miller, Elisabeth Sladen’s daughter, on a panel at Gallifrey One on Friday, and she commented that Tom Baker’s deep love for her mother, who died eleven years ago, still comes through in every interaction she has with him. That love is almost half a century old now, and I think it’s here where we really see it starting to take hold. We take the format of the Doctor with one lead female companion as being standard now, with the Peter Davison and Jodie Whittaker eras as exceptions, but this is actually where it starts. You can get it here.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of the novelisation is:
The Doctor listened, puzzled, as the sound of Namin’s movements suddenly moved away from him. The second pursuer, the larger one, was moving too. The sound came closer, then died away, as it moved past him somewhere just out of sight.
A good novelisation of one of the great stories. Dicks has topped and tailed the narrative with an explanation of the Osirians, and a nice vignette of Sarah going back to see what the local newspapers said about it all at the time. Again, some of the effects work better on the page than on the screen. (Though the written word can never give us the excellent performances of the guest cast here.)
I devoured the novelisation again on my flight to Los Angeles on Thursday. It’s still a good read. Terrance Dicks’ crisp and simple prose pulls the screen onto the page, with Sarah (who he had of course introduced when he was script editor) as the viewpoint character. You can get it here.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of Kate Orman’s book on the story is:
While the chinoiserie of Talons draws on the single source of Fu Manchu fiction and films, Pyramids of Mars is the inheritor of a longer tradition of ‘Egyptomania’ which started in the early 19th century with the deciphering of hieroglyphs and the publication of the multi-volume, richly-illustrated, and wildly successful Description de l’Égypte115. France and Britain, rivals for control of Egypt, shipped home obelisks from the city of Luxor to stand in Paris and London. In Victorian Britain, Egypt was everywhere: at exhibitions, public mummy unwrappings, and the opera (Verdi’s AidaPyramids. 115 Lupton, Carter, ‘“Mummymania”’ for the Masses’: Is Egyptology Cursed by the Mummy’s Curse?’. MacDonald, Sally, and Michael Rice, eds, Consuming Ancient Egypt, p23.
I commented in yesterday’s write-up of Simon Guerrier’s The Evil of the Daleks that these books have varied quite a lot in the attention they give to the script vs the performance. This one is unusual in that there is very little discussion of the actual TV programme. A quick search reveals that the main text does not mention director Paddy Russell, or of the stars Tom Baker and Elisabeth Sladen, or most of their acting colleagues, at all. (Three of the guest cast are mentioned briefly, once each.) Orman has concentrated almost entirely on the script and its sources, with a few references to casting, design and effects, but none at all to acting or cinematography. Everyone must write the book they want to write, of course, but this is the least complete guide to any story that I have yet read in the Black Archive series.
On the plus side, it’s a very deep dive into the roots of the script, which as noted above was originally written by Lewis Greifer and then heavily revised by script editor Robert Holmes. I love the story, as repeatedly stated above, but it invites and deserves critique of its treatment of race and gender (Sarah is the only woman seen, all the other characters, including non-speaking extras, are men).
The chapters cover:
Briefly, the question of why the story is set in 1911
At length, Egpytian mythology and its depiction of Set, rather different from what we are told about Sutekh in the script.
At length, mummy fiction.
Briefly, Mars in science fiction.
At length, the links between pyramids and the occult.
a conclusion which finishes with a personal reflection:
Growing up with the ABC’s constant repeats of Doctor Who, I was never troubled by the frequent failure of the special effects to look realistic. It didn’t matter that, when Sutekh sends the TARDIS key through the time tunnel and into Scarman’s hands, it’s obviously dangling from strings; what mattered was that Sutekh had control over the Doctor and the TARDIS. When I was a little older, I remember thinking the show could be seen as a dramatisation of real events. Obviously, the strings weren’t there when Sutekh really sent the key through. It was a useful way to excuse internal contradictions, errors of science and history, and other blemishes: the TV show was only an attempt to approach the truth of the original – so that multiple, seemingly incompatible attempts were all valid. Later still I could see how this could be applied to Doctor Who beyond the small screen. Novels, comics, audios, and so on, are all efforts to reach some basic truth – most importantly, I think, about the nature of the Doctor himself – which none of them can ever precisely define. Perhaps the Egyptians’ ‘multiplicity of approaches’ could be a useful alternative approach for a fandom obsessed with continuity and canonicity.
The eleventh of the generally excellent Black Archive series of short books on individual Doctor Who stories addresses The Evil of the Daleks, the last story of the fourth season of the show, first broadcast soon after I was born in 1967, written by David Whitaker and directed by Derek Martinus, both big names in the history of Who. It had seven episodes, but only the second of the seven survives in video. When I first listened to the audio tape of the story, narrated by Fraser Hines from a script by Sue Cowley, I was taking B out of the way so that F could enjoy his seventh birthday in 2006. I wrote:
Spent most of this afternoon driving to the Ardennes and back, so finished listening to The Evil of the Daleks, the last story of Patrick Troughton’s first season as the Doctor, and the one voted the Best Ever Doctor Who Story by readers of Dreamwatch in 1993. Only one episode out of seven survives on video, and I haven’t seen it (yet).
I have to say that I was very unsatisfied with the plot of this classic story. The Daleks’ plan to manipulate the Doctor, and the Doctor’s attempts to manipulate Jamie, are both unrealistically convoluted as well as being very out of character. We never find out how the Daleks got photographs of the Second Doctor, whom they otherwise met only on the planet Vulcan, and of Jamie, whom they did not otherwise meet at all (unless you believe the Season 6B theory). (We also know that the first two episodes of Evil of the Daleks are contemporaneous with The War Machines, so the Daleks would have been better off trying to grab the First Doctor who was elsewhere in London at the same time.) When we hit the nineteenth century, Arthur Terrall’s presence is not very satisfactorily explained, and the fact that he is a robot is just left hanging (or rather, Ruth is told to take him as far away as possible, as if this will somehow cure him of being mechanical). And it seems difficult to imagine that the Daleks are so bad at keeping track of individual units, however de-personalised they may be, that they simply lose track of the first three humanised Daleks. (The Discontinuity Guide further asks, “Why not just kidnap the Doctor and Jamie? Why does Terrall get Toby to kidnap Jamie? Since Jamie is so essential to Dalek plans, why are the traps set for him so lethal?”)
Having said that, the acting is great, and it’s clear from the BBC photosnaps that the series looked fantastic (Maxtible’s beard!!!!!). It’s also a really great idea to return to the Dalek City on Skaro (apparently the first time the Doctor had ever been seen to return to any planet except Earth) [other than a return within the same story, eg Kembel]. And I loved the Victoriana; I especially liked Waterfield’s horror-filled explanation, “We had opened the way for them with our experiments. They forced me into the horror of time travel, Doctor” – sounded very HP Lovecraft! And the references to Poe were clear (and even at one point explicit). And Troughton is great, dominating every scene (and this partly accounts for the flagging pace of episode 4 when he was on holiday).
So anyway, more good than bad, but I’m very sorry not to have actually seen any of it.
Well, I have revised my opinion of Evil of the Daleks upwards thanks to watching the reconstruction. I still rate it below Troughton’s debut story, The Power of the Daleks, because the plot has some large holes (why go to the bother of the elaborate entrapment via the cafe in 1966? how is the Doctor supposed to spread the Dalek Factor through history? what’s up with Terrall anyway?) and also I just don’t like Victoria (though again, maybe I will change my mind after doing her stories in sequence).
There are a couple of things about Evil of the Daleks, however, that really appealed to me this time. First, Marius Goring as the deranged Maxtible is a compelling vilain, especially as backed up by John Bailey as Waterfield – together they are the two sides of the scientist character portrayed by Lesterson in the previous story. Second, Dudley Simpson is on top of things as composer – the Daleks have a “diggerdy-dum” leitmotif, Victoria has a more wistful theme. Third, while I’m not a huge fan of turning the Daleks into something else by giving them humanity, Whitaker handles it better here than Helen Raynor did in Daleks of Manhattan / Evolution of the Daleks. Fourth, it’s a nice early example (or perhaps foreshadowing) of the steampunk subgenre.
Finally, the two episodes on Skaro are an excellent climax to not just this story but the five Dalek stories of the black-and-white era; the return to their home planet somehow gives the Daleks more cultural depth than they previously had, with the thrilling appearance of the Emperor and the excitement of the civil war. So more of a thumbs up than I expected.
I took advantage of family travel earlier this month to experience Evil of the Daleks in two different ways – the Fraser Hines/Sue Cowley audio that I had first listened to in 2006, and the brand new animation released last year by the BBC, which I watched in colour rather than black and white, though I made an exception for the surviving episode 2. As it happens, I met Rob Ritchie who did much of the work on the animations on Thursday evening in the bar at Gallifrey One. He was interesting and disarming about the challenges of the process, and the flaws of the final result, none of which I spotted when watching. I have to say that I still feel that the telesnaps reconstruction, with Fraser Hines narration, which I watched in 2010 is the version that works best for me. But the animation does take us to places where the recon cannot go.
Somewhat sheepishly, I will admit that I liked the story as a whole even more this time than previously. Troughton is on top form; the varied settings keep you guessing as to what will happen next; Maxtible and the Emperor are suitably deranged; the essence of what makes us human and the Daleks monsters is core to the plot; we move from a stolen blue box in Gatwick to planetary destruction. And Victoria is given a new home by the Doctor and Jamie. I am amused at myself for liking this story more every time I experience it.
You can get the audio here, and the DVD including both animation and telesnaps reconstructions here.
The second paragraph of the third chapter of John Peel’s novelisation is:
‘Bit of a bad area, know what I mean?’ the driver observed. ‘You want me to hang around?’ He was obviously hoping for another fare, since he’d overcharged the Doctor outrageously for their trip here.
This was the last official Target/Virgin adaptatation (a few remaining stories were produced in book form by fans subsequently) and therefore also the last Second Doctor novelisation and the last in the impressive series of five Dalek novelisations by John Peel. I have to say that I am among that heretical minority who regard the original story here as of less than top quality: the plot is absurdly convoluted, requiring both the Doctor and the Daleks to behave out of character, and Victoria as a new companion is awfully wet. But having said that, Peel improves on the original in a number of ways, giving the characters more comprehensible motivations, and embedding the narrative in the Dalek continuity he has been developing. I still preferred his others, but this is a good effort.
Oddly enough I also met John Peel the night before last, in the bar at the Marriott; he chortled with delight when I told him I had just been reading this – it had been great fun to write, he said. It shows.
I would add to the points made above that Peel resolves a number of points left hanging by the original TV plot – in particular, the situation of Arthur Terrell, who is not semi-robotic as I had thought, but a victim of Dalek experiments on mind control. You can get the novelisation here (for a price).
The second paragraph of the third chapter of Simon Guerrier’s monograph is:
The Daleks were – and remain – a key part of Doctor Who. Their first appearance, in the second Doctor Who story, helped establish the series, and their subsequent stories saw peaks in the numbers of people watching. When the production team took the risky step of recasting Doctor Who’s lead actor in 1966, they cushioned the blow by having this new incarnation immediately face The Power of the Daleks. Viewers stuck with the programme.
This really is one of the best Black Archive volumes that I have read so far, and also I think the longest. Some earlier ones went rather far into the literary origins of particular Who stories, perhaps because there wasn’t all that much to say about the actual stories in question. Guerrier looks at that a little, but doesn’t waste too much time on it, and is much more interested in telling the story of Evil of the Daleks – both production and reception – as a social process, carried out in real time by real people. As I’ve done before, I’ll list out the (few and long) chapters in summary:
London, 20 July 1966: Looks at the difficulties of analysing a story that is mostly lost, and at the production background and influences on the fist episode and a half (no woman appears in the 1966 scenes; originally Ben and Polly would have been in the first two episodes, and the Samantha Briggs character from The Faceless Ones would have been the new companion);
Outside Canterbury, 2 to 3 June 1866: looks at the Victorian setting of the middle episodes and Victoriana in general, but also at the character of Maxtible (Marius Goring, the lead guest star, had a fixation with Henry Irving and his play The Bells, which is one of the artistic source for Evil) and what we learn about the Doctor;
Skaro: Date Unknown: goes into great detail on the Daleks and on what Terry Nation and David Whitaker might have argued about, given that Whitaker arguably had an equal share in their creation; and
Earth, 1967-2017: looking at the reception and preservation of the story over fifty years – lot of deep research into how and where the scripts were preserved, featuring in places my old friend Rebecca Levene; the Beatles’ song Paperback Writer was played during the original cafe scene in the first episode, but has been dropped from releases of the sound track for copyright reasons; new photographs and off-air recordings keep coming to light.
Guerrier ends by appealing for the animation of the missing episodes which has since been accomplished, but also (as usual for these books) has a decent bibliography. It’s a really solid piece of work.
My one complaint is that yet again the footnotes have been botched on the epub version. Clicking on any of the hundreds of footnote links in the text takes you to the start of the footnote section rather than to the relevant footnote itself. When you have found your footnote and ty to click back to where you were in the main text, you are taken instead to the start of the relevant chapter – and these are long chapters. No blame attaches to the author for this, but really, publisher, this is not rocket science and you got it right in several of the others.
Next in the sequence of Black Archive monographs about individual Doctor Who stories, this time it’s the 2003 webcast which briefly promised to be a new start for the show, and was then blown out of the water by BBC Wales. I rewatched the actual story again, having been underwhelmed on first watching in 2012 when I wrote:
Scream of the Shalka is the reboot that didn’t come off. It is a shame in some ways because it has its strengths – notably the animation, which is far ahead of the other three in quality, Paul Cornell’s story-line of alien beings breaking into our world from an unexpected direction, and Sophie Okonedo’s performance as one-off companion Alison, and Derek Jacobi, not for the last time, as the Master. (Also keep an ear out for a brief appearance by David Tennant as a minor character.) But the biggest problem is Richard E. Grant’s Doctor, a pale and vampire-like presence whose arrogant character lies somewhere between the low point of Pertwee’s Doctor and the mid-point of Colin Baker’s for likeability. (Which is to say, not very high.) In the last episode we are told – by the Master, no less – that the Doctor is dealing with the scars of some dreadful conflict too awful to describe, an idea brought into NewWho also; and he gradually mellows throughout the story. In the end it feels a bit like The Movie, a false start, which relies a bit too much on continuity and does not do enough to make this about a character you would want to watch another seven, or twenty-six, or fifty years of. (For instance, Old Who fans will be baffled that the Master is now n sevraqyl ebobg; those new to Who will wonder why they are meant to care.) And there is an awful lot of screaming, though of course the clue is in the title.
This time around, I took it at an episode every evening, mostly glancing at the iPad while cooking, and it works maybe a little better at that pace, with the tension of the narrative tightly linked to the episodic structure (Cornell after all knew his stuff, as a reasonably experienced screenwriter). It’s also worth noting that the Shalka!Doctor is dealing with the recent loss of a dear companion, and presumably if this continuity had been prolonged we’d have learned more about that. You can (still) watch it here.
I also revisited Cornell’s novelisation. Second paragraph of third chapter:
The figure was green, its features smooth, like a polished marble statue. Its mouth was flexible and muscular, the only part of it that spoke of function over form. It was androgynous, and had no need for clothes. It was a representation of a human-being as seen from a distance, as seen from a superior culture.
I was really surprised and pleased by how much I enjoyed this book, the novelisation of the webcast story starring Richard E. Grant as the other Ninth Doctor. Perhaps it is partly that, at least in the opening pages, it so consciously draws on the style of the Dicks and Hulke novelisations of the Third and Fourth Doctor stories which meant so much to fans of the same sort of age as the author and me. But also a lot of the sequencing that didn’t quite work for me in the webcast seemed to me to be much better here: the Master’s new situation, the reasons for the Doctor’s emotional coldness, the back story to Alison’s relationship. We do miss out on Conor Moloney’s performance as Greaves, though. Perhaps the last week of work before the Christmas hols was a bad time to watch the webcast; I am certain that if I had read the book before watching it, I would have enjoyed both more.
Some of the similarities between Shalka continuity and New Who are even more noticeable here: that the Ninth Doctor is suffering PTSD after an awful war in which many people he cared about were killed, and that the new companion chooses to travel with the Doctor rather than remain in a (dull) interracial relationship. (As in Rose, there is also a monster leader underground controlling its minions who burst into the normal world to terrify humans, and the Doctor must descend to their lair to do battle, but those are fairly standard plot elements.)
The book also comes with a long afterword – a quarter of its total length – including the original story proposal and the author’s account of how the story came to be made, told with Cornell’s typical enthusiasm, but with first-hand accounts patched in from the production team as well. This may have turned out to be just a sidetrack in Who history but we are lucky that it is so well chronicled, including the story of how Cornell, on honeymoon in New Zealand, had to get a friend to break into his house to transmit the script to the BBC after an email went astray. It certainly adds to what is already a good book for fans to track down.
Not much to add this time. I really enjoyed the return to both the novelised story and the lengthy afterword. You can get it here.
Second paragraph of third chapter of Jon Arnold’s monograph, with footnotes (the third chapter is about the Master):
The role played by the Master was originally intended to be played by a holographic representation of a former Doctor. Cornell suggested that this should be the fifth Doctor, as ‘his kind and open personality would provide a nice contrast with our rather more harsh and edgy Doctor.’112 This was a contrast he’d used before, in his New Adventures novel Timewyrm: Revelation (1991), where the fifth Doctor was portrayed as an almost saintly presence in contrast to the seventh Doctor, who carried the weight of the universe on his shoulders. This would have given Shalka a very different flavour; the fifth Doctor was established as an unambiguously heroic figure, and whilst he often demonstrated a dry sense of humour, any edge to the relationship would have had to come from Grant’s Doctor, rendering him even less sympathetic than he initially appears to be. Cornell changed this setup for two reasons: firstly because he felt that holograms had been overdone in telefantasy shows113, and secondly so that this assistant could have a ‘complicated, somewhat dangerous relationship’ with the Doctor and be ‘programmed to do the nastier things that our emotionally wounded and defensive Doctor couldn’t bring himself to do’114. Essentially then, this version of the Master would retain the amoral methodology he had often demonstrated in his prior television appearances but, with apparently less selfish aims, he was now redefined as a hero. 112 Cornell, Scream of the Shalka, p202. 113 The obvious telefantasy antecedents Cornell is referring to which feature holograms able to assist but not interfere would have included Quantum Leap (1989-93), whose main character Sam was assisted by Al, a hologram of a person from Sam’s original time; the Emergency Medical Hologram called ‘the Doctor’ in Star Trek: Voyager (1995-2001); and possibly even the command hologram from Mighty Morphin Power Rangers (1993-95). He may have also been referring to Red Dwarf (1988-99 and since revived) and Stargate SG:1 (1997-2007); however, the holographic characters in these series serve very different roles. Holography was relatively uncommon in the series to this point, only appearing under that name in The Talons of Weng-Chiang (1977), The Leisure Hive (1980), Time and the Rani (1987) and Dragonfire (1987). The series’ use of holograms has become more common since 2005. 114 Cornell, Scream of the Shalka, p202.
Arnold actually wrote the very first of the Black Archive series, on Rose which came out the year after Scream of the Shalka and thoroughly stole its thunder. The actual analytical content of the book is the shortest of any of the Black Archives I have seen so far. Given that Scream of the Shalka turned out to be a dead end in continuity, there is not a lot to say, and most of it had already been said by Paul Cornell.
However there’s one particularly interesting point covered off by Arnold in the first chapter, which is on the nature of the Doctor; namely, why is it that the average viewer (Arnold quotes Russell T. Davies and Elizabeth Sandifer, but I would agree with them) finds Grant’s performance rather lacking in vigour, while those who were present at the actual shoot (Paul Cornell and James Goss, both of whom I would normally regard as reliable witnesses) describe him as thoroughly and energetically engaged in the recording? Arnold’s answer is that the medium itself is the issue:
The problem is that each line is delivered clearly and in full before the next line begins; everyone politely waits for the other person to fully finish speaking before they begin their line. As Who’s Next‘s verdict on Shalka notes, this feeling of the ‘in-the-room intimacy of a radio drama […] sits oddly when you’re watching pictures on a screen at the same time.’82 Conversations therefore rarely develop the energy of genuine interaction between two people, and instead feel like two people speaking in the same place and same time but not actually communicating. Whilst animation ameliorates this to a degree by the simple use of close-ups and characters facing each other, it drains the energy and emotion from performances; we don’t get proper reactions to build a scene. 82 Clapham, Mark, Eddie Robson and Jim Smith, Who’s Next: An Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to Doctor Who (2005), P390.
This is one of the most interesting production-related insights I’ve gleaned from the Black Archive series so far.
Just for completeness, the (few) chapters of Arnold’s monograph cover:
the nature of the Shalka!Doctor, as already discussed, and his roots in Dracula, Sherlock Holmes and Cornell’s other work;
Alison as a companion;
The Master, as noted;
Scream of the Shalka as a reboot story;
a conclusion to the main narrative: “It’s a brave, flawed attempt to find a future for Doctor Who when no-one thought it had one.”
an appendix debating the extent to which Scream of the Shalka is canon;
another appendix looking at “The Feast of the Stone”, the only other published story in Shalka!Doctor continuity;
a final, very long appendix presenting the sequel which came closest to being made, Simon Clark’s “Blood of the Robots” (other script proposals by Paul Cornell and Jonathan Clements were recycled elsewhere in the Whoniverse; the one by Stephen Baxter has not resurfaced).
If you’re intrigued by the possibilities of the Shalka!Doctor continuity, this book will tick your boxes. You can get it here.
One of the more plausible interpretations of The Shining covered in the documentary movie, Room 237 (2012), is that the movie is a reworking of the Theseus and the Minotaur myth. At the end of the film Jack dies inside a hedge maze, a location that Kubrick added to King’s novel. The association of Jack with the Minotaur is foreshadowed elsewhere in the movie: there are moments when Jack appears taurine-like – as if he’s a bull about to charge; there is a poster of a skier who looks like the Minotaur beside another of a cowboy riding a bull; and in another scene, Jack’s wife, Wendy, makes a comment about leaving a trail of breadcrumbs, reminiscent of Ariadne’s thread. The God Complex is far more explicit in its mining of the Minotaur myth, but its association with The Shining extends far beyond this shared mythical inspiration.
Next in the sequence of Black Archive monographs on individual Doctor Who stories, which I am reading at the rate of two a month in an attempt to catch up. (Both this and the next one in sequence are numbered #10 on the cover, but it seems that this is really #9.)
The God Complex is one of my less favourite episodes in one of my less favourite series of New Who, and I didn’t write it up at the time, nor did I recommended it in my epic “Which New Who to Watch” post. In case you need your memory refreshed, here’s the “Next Time” trailer:
It’s the one where the Doctor, Amy and Rory are stuck in a hotel with a few other characters, of whom the best developed is Rita, played by Amara Karan; but it turns out that the hotel is a prison for a Minotaur. Personally I didn’t feel that the plot held together at all, and the scene at the end, where the Doctor basically kicks Amy and Rory out of the Tardis to start their lives without him, was disappointingly underdeveloped. But others differ; here, for instance, is Matt Smith reflecting on what the story might have told us about the Doctor:
In a panel at Dragon Con 2017, Matt Smith revealed his own theory for what was in the mysterious Room 11 in The God Complex and it’s much darker than you’d expect. #DoctorWho#MattSmithpic.twitter.com/It95XFR3PJ
Driscoll is clearly also a fan of the story, finding a lot more depth to it than I had imagined was there. The chapters are as follows:
The symbolism of the Minotaur, and modern treatments of the story in and beyond Doctor Who;
The roots of the story in Orwell’s 1984 (surveillance in particular);
The roots of the story in The Shining, film rather than book (hotel horror, obviously, though he also blames it for the weakness of the closing scene);
The roots of the story in previous Who stories about bases under siege and about religion (though I think he misses a couple of interesting examples on religion);
A rather good chapter on fear and terror as storytelling devices;
A more confused chapter trying to work out what the story is trying to tell us about faith and religion;
A long chapter on the Doctor’s fallibility as a hero;
A chapter on the role of the companions in Doctor Who;
a concluding short chapter wondering what the hell the symbolism of the fishbowl is meant to be?
Driscoll likes the story more than I did, but is not unaware of its flaws. I went back myself and watched it again to prepare for this post, but I think it will be a while before I repeat the effort. You can get Driscoll’s book here.
Second paragraph of third chapter (a long one, spread across two pages, which is why the footnote numbers are repeated):
It is true that thanks to the dangers and squalors of the [tenth] century, invasion, rebellion and faction, there is no longer, at any rate in France and England, an educated society. One misses the voluminous correspondence of the ninth century, of Alcuin and his Venerable Fowl, of Hrabanus Maurus, of Servatus Lupus, hoarding manuscripts like a magpie and clamouring like Petrarch for more. There is scholarship, but it is not present diffusedly. Bruno, young brother of Otto the Great and Archbishop of Cologne, does his best to maintain a school of the humanities there, and summoned to it an Irish bishop from Trier to teach Greek; there are colonies of Greek and Irish monks at Toul and at Verdun.1 From Toul, indeed, or rather from a monastery prison in Toul, comes the odd little tale of the calf that ran away, and his adventures with the wolf and the hedgehog and the lion and the otter—the first rough draft of the Roman de Renard. The writer of it says frankly that he himself had misspent his youth nor plied his book, and the calf is his vagrant self, and that is why the metre is so clumsy.2 At Glastonbury, Dunstan was brought up by Irish scholars (William of Malmesbury pauses to reflect on their continuing reputation in music and geometry, though their Latinity—he writes in the twelfth century—is no longer so pure as it was).3 Begging letters addressed to his successor from Liege prove that the fire still burns there. One clerk with humility and confusion of metaphor pleads that as an unworthy pup he had licked up sufficient crumbs from under the bishop's table (Notker of Liege was a sound scholar) to qualify him to enter the English apiary as an obedient bee;1 and another, about a journey and a loan of money and a borrowed horse, bears out the Vicar of Wakefield's experience that the conjunction of a scholar and a horse is not always fortunate.2 The light never quite goes out; though Gerbert in quest of it flickers across Europe like a will-o'-the-wisp. 1 Sandys, History of Classical Scholarship, i. 503, 505. 2Ecbasis Captivi (Grimm and Schmcller, Lateinische Gedichte des X and XI Jahrhunderts). 3Vita S. Dunstani, i. 4 (Stubbs, Memorials of St. Dunstan, pp. 256-7). 1Vita S. Dunstani, i. 4 (Stubbs, Memorials of St Dunstan, p. 387). 2Ib. p. 390.
This was the book that made the reputation of Helen Waddell, the medievalist from my own corner of County Down. It's a study of the lyrical tradition of poetry in the Middle Ages in Europe, tracing influences across geographies and cultures. I found the writing very dense; written very chattily as if these were all people whose reputations we already knew, with minimal context and footnotes mostly to works available only in well-equipped university libraries. I'm really surprised that it did so well on publication in 1927; perhaps the readers of the 1920s were more au fait with early medieval literature than I am.
Still there are some fascinating details in there. It's always interesting to be reminded of the career of Gerbert of Aurillac, which is crying out for an accessible biographical treatment, either factual or fictional. The same goes for the murky story of the Viking Siegfried (or Sifrid, as Waddell calls him). There's the mysterious figure of the Archpoet. And more locally it's interesting to see Liège popping up as an important centre of culture.
She supplies a lot of translations of the lyrics, to which she brings her own good ear for a phrase; here's the Archpoet's Estuans Interius, as set to music by Carl Orff in the Carmina Burana a few years later, with the original text (which fairly bounces along) and Helen's translation.
Estuans interius
ira vehementi
in amaritudine
loquor mee menti:
factus de materia,
cinis elementi
similis sum folio,
de quo ludunt venti.
Cum sit enim proprium
viro sapienti
supra petram ponere
sedem fundamenti,
stultus ego comparor
fluvio labenti,
sub eodem tramite
nunquam permanenti.
Feror ego veluti
sine nauta navis,
ut per vias aeris
vaga fertur avis;
non me tenent vincula,
non me tenet clavis,
quero mihi similes
et adiungor pravis.
Mihi cordis gravitas
res videtur gravis;
iocis est amabilis
dulciorque favis;
quicquid Venus imperat,
labor est suavis,
que nunquam in cordibus
habitat ignavis.
Via lata gradior
more iuventutis
inplicor et vitiis
immemor virtutis,
voluptatis avidus
magis quam salutis,
mortuus in anima
curam gero cutis.
Seething over inwardly
With fierce indignation,
In my bitterness of soul,
Hear my declaration.
I am of one element,
Levity my matter,
Like enough a withered leaf
For the winds to scatter.
Since it is the property
Of the sapient
To sit firm upon a rock,
It is evident
That I am a fool, since I
Am a flowing river,
Never under the same sky,
Transient for ever.
Hither, thither, masterless
Ship upon the sea,
Wandering through the ways of air,
Go the birds like me.
Bound am I by ne'er a bond,
Prisoner to no key,
Questing go I for my kind,
Find depravity.
Never yet could I endure
Soberness and sadness,
Jests I love and sweeter than
Honey find I gladness.
Whatsoever Venus bids
Is a joy excelling,
Never in an evil heart
Did she make her dwelling.
Down the broad way do I go,
Young and unregretting,
Wrap me in my vices up,
Virtue all forgetting,
Greedier for all delight
Than heaven to enter in:
Since the soul is in me dead,
Better save the skin.
I'm glad I have read this at last, and I'll put some of Helen Waddell's other works on my reading list now. You can get it here.
This was my top unread book acquired in 2018. Next on that pile is 84k by Claire North.
