The Happiness Patrol, by Mick Stack (and Graeme Curry)

Posted on 7 October 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

When I first watched this in 2007, I wrote:

The Happiness Patrol, from the dying days of 1988, is a fairly standard rebels against the system story, lifted by some fairly memorable characters and concepts – especially Sheila Hancock as the dictator, and her vicious pet Fifi. It comes close to looking convincing – the coherent style of the Happiness Patrol themselves is almost genius. I started off being quite impressed by how well the Candyman worked, but I had completely gone off him in the end, and the musician and the census official, while nice touches, didn’t quite seem to integrate into the whole thing. Not awful, but definitely not one of the great ones either.

When I came back a couple of years later for my Great Rewatch, I wrote:

Continuing along this theme of rehabilitation [after Remembrance of the Daleks], I found The Happiness Patrol an excellent piece of sinister dystopia, following on from Paradise Towers. The interaction between Helen A and her retainers and servitors is tremendously engaging, with Fifi one of the great non-speaking parts (like the dog in Two Gentlemen of Verona, only much more vicious); and one wonders why it came as a surprise to anyone to learn that it was a deliberate though not hugely accurate tilt at Thatcherism. Doctor Who does not do space opera terribly well, but this is not space opera, it is allegory played with bitter ironic comedy, and fits McCoy’s portrayal beautifully.

Watching it again I find myself somewhere in between. Great performances, but a lot of running around in circles in terms of plot, no real sense of how the various bits of city connect with each other, and people just standing around to be captured or executed. We’ve had more violent assaults on our willing suspension of disbelief in the Moffat and Chibnall and Davies years since, but it felt like the director was working more on the script than the audience perception.

The second paragraph of the third chapter of Graeme Curry’s novelisation of his own script is:

She could not believe her eyes – the TARDIS was pink. From the shadows of Forum Square they had a clear view of the Happiness Patrol carrying their pots of paint and putting the final touches to their work. Daisy K stood some distance from the others, overseeing the job.

When I first read it in 2008, I wrote:

I wasn’t overwhelmed by the original TV story, but Curry has produced a novelisation which is passionate and convinced – the rather odd plot holes remain, but liberated from cheap-looking special effects, it turns into rather a good yarn. Definitely one of those where the book is an improvement. Also an easy pass for the Bechdel test, with Helen A and her women warriors running around after Ace.

Nothing more to add. You can get it here. (Incidentally I tried tracking Bechdel passes and fails for all the fiction I read this year, but ran out of steam in June.)

Mike Stack’s Black Archive monograph on the story looks at its reception rather than its creation, which is fair enough given the changes in public notoriety the story has enjoyed. The first chapter, “Evaluation” looks at how poorly the story was rated by fans at the time and since, and asks “So, Is it Any Good?” He disarmingly admits its weaknesses: the padding of the plot, the unambitious design, the controversial Kandyman, the ambiguous postcolonial treatment of the Pipe People, Fifi; but comes back to the good performances.

The second and longest chapter, “Political Readings”, starts with the media flap in 2010 when several British newspapers discovered that the story had a critique of Thatcherism, and goes on to point out that spoofs of Thatcher were so universal on TV in 1988 that The Happiness Patrol easily slipped below the radar of contemporary critics. The real target, Stack argues convincingly, is authoritarianism of all kinds.

The third chapter, “Queer Readings”, addresses one of the other key points about the story. Its second paragraph, with the quote it introduces and its footnotes, is:

However, such bold statements are not universal or uncontested. In The Television Companion, Howe and Walker gave only a brief mention to the interpretation of gay themes, tentatively noting ‘some commentators have suggested that there is a gay rights message here’⁴. They do not take this observation further. Tat Wood, in About Time, went further:

‘While we’re debunking fan lore, the dispatched Andrew X (or Harold L, it hardly matters) isn’t wearing a pink triangle badge. Novelist / new series writer Matt Jones’ reading of the story as being explicitly and exclusively about gay rights misses the point, although none of his evidence (except the mention of the triangle badge) is actually invalid.’⁵

⁴ Howe and Walker, The Television Companion, p518.
⁵ Wood, About Time 6, p252.

The chapter points out that the story is actually very ambiguous in its use of queer / gay imagery. Pink is the colour of the oppressor here, not the liberator. The two main male villains escape together at the end – romantically, perhaps? On the other hand, the enforcement of happiness has echoes of the Section 28 debate of the 1980s (weirdly being played out again in attacks against trans people today). Personally I think that the ambiguity is itself rather successful.

The fourth chapter, “Happy Readings”, starts by citing the Easter 2011 sermon delivered by then Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, in which he mentioned the story in the context of the importance of happiness as a societal aim. (I met Lord Williams once, in passing, as I was heading to a meeting at the House of Lords and bumped into him at the entrance to Parliament.) Stack looks at the concept of happiness, and why Helen A is doomed not to find it. (Certainly she ain’t gettin’ much from Joseph C.)

A Coda comes back to the question of whether the story is any good. Admitting his own personal love for it, Stack concludes:

I leave myself open to the criticism that I have credited The Happiness Patrol with more intellectual clout than it deserves. However, what strikes me is the story more than holds its own when held up to scholarly scrutiny. It elegantly depicts totalitarianism, anticipates the reclaiming of the word ‘killjoy’, and provides a parable about the need to negotiate our emotions.

Again, the Black Archives have given me new appreciation for what a Doctor Who story I don’t especially love. You can get this one here.

Incidentally, the Seventh Doctor is proportionately by far the best represented in the Black Archive (apart from the special cases of the Eighth and Shalka Doctors). 64% of the Seventh Doctor’s episodes are covered in Black Archives as of late 2024; the closest of the rest is the Thirteenth with 46%. The gap is even bigger just counting stories: 7 of the 12 Seventh Doctor stories now have Black Archives, 58%, twice the score of the Fourth Doctor, with 12 out of 41, 29%.

(Since you asked, the end of the table has the Second Doctor, with only 13% of his episodes and 14% of his stories, though we have also yet to see any Black Archives covering either the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Doctors.)

Next: Midnight.

The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, by Dale Smith (and Stephen Wyatt)

Posted on 8 August 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

I caught the last episode of The Greatest Show in the Galaxy on first broadcast in 1988; when I watched the whole story for the first time in 2008, the last story of Old Who that I watched first time round, I wrote:

The Greatest Show in the Galaxy is not a bad end to the season (and indeed to my watching all of Old Who). It looks generally good, and performances are all pretty convincing. I did once again find myself wondering about the means and motivation of the villains, in this case the Gods of Ragnarok; and I was left a bit confused by how the Psychic Circus fitted into the planetary society (and also a bit confused by the ending). But it was all fairly watchable. Now I can go back and do it all again.

When I came back to it for my Great Rewatch in 2011, I wrote:

And finally for this run, once again I enjoyed The Greatest Show In The Galaxy more than I was expecting to. The storyline is awfully simple – the Psychic Circus as a deathtrap set by ancient powerful beings, the Doctor and Ace trying to escape from it and destroy it – and there is therefore an awful lot of circular plotting before the dénouement, but somehow the extra bits tacked on to the plot all add to it. A particular cheer for T.P. McKenna’s fraudulent Captain Cook as a parody of the show’s central character, and the earnest fan played by ~~Adrian Mole~~ Gian Sammarco who finds that the object of his fascination is a fatal obsession; but Jessica Martin and Chris Drury are excellent too, and the whole thing just looks so much better than we were getting two years ago (or even one year ago). Let’s hope they can keep up the standards for a few more years.

What struck me this time round was how symbolic it all is. The story seems somehow not very concerned with creating a convincing secondary world, but instead with managing the characters in a particular plot and emotional space. And yet it gets away with it.

The second paragraph of the third chapter of Stephen Wyatt’s novelisation of his own script is:

‘There’s something not quite right about all this,’ the Doctor mused.

When I read it in 2008, I wrote:

Wyatt’s book is not really an improvement on the TV original. Shorn of (for once) decent production values and the compelling performances of the actors, the holes in the plot and clunky scene-setting are more apparent, and Wyatt, having written a TV script, is reduced to reporting what we saw on screen without being able to add much to it. Fails the Bechdel test – each female character is rigidly paired off with a male, and on the rare occasions that they converse it is always about one of the men (usually the Doctor).

Nothing to add too that, sixteen years later. You can get it here.

Dale Smith wrote the punchy Black Archive on The Talons of Weng Chiang which I reviewed a few months ago; he has also written a Tenth Doctor novel that I liked and a Seventh Doctor novel that I didn’t. Here he has done what some of the best Black Archives have done, by taking a story that I had not really thought about very much and making me think about it a lot more, the thoughts going in some unexpected directions. He has also blogged about the process of writing it.

The opening chapter, “What Did You Say Your Name Was?” looks at the over production situation on Doctor who at the time the story was made and draws many parallels about what we see on screen and what was happening behind the cameras.

The second chapter, “Tears of a Clown”, looks at clowns in general and why Ace is right to be scared of them.

The third chapter, “Let There Be Rock”, looks at quarries, and then slides into an argument that the comics artist Alan Moore is a formative and pervasive influence on Andrew Cartmel’s era of Doctor Who. Its second chapter is:

This view of quarries is certainly reflected in Cartmel’s era on the show: outside of season 24 – where one story featured three separate quarries but Cartmel had limited ability to course-correct – only three stories featured quarries, and only two used them as alien planets³. Of those two stories – The Greatest Show and Survival – both used Warmwell Quarry in Dorset. Part of this was the simple reason that only these two stories featured any significant time spent on alien worlds, as Cartmel’s realisation that the BBC could do period drama very well led him to move the show to more Earthly settings. But that shift didn’t result in Doctor Who becoming completely studio-based: the production team settled into alternating between studio-based and location-based stories for the rest of their run, with The Greatest Show being intended to be studio-based until circumstances forced a rethink.

³ Doctor Who Locations Guide, ‘Season Twenty-Four’, ‘Season Twenty-Five’, ‘Season Twenty-Six’. The third was Battlefield (1989), which used the Castle Cement Quarry in Kettleton for pyrotechnics work when Ancelyn crashes into a hill on arrival, presumably on the grounds that quarries are less concerned about things blowing up than Rutland Water.

The fourth chapter, “Fingerprints of the Gods”, looks at the role of magic in Doctor Who, particularly in the Cartmel era.

The fifth chapter, “Forward”, is sheer but entertaining self-indulgence on Smith’s part; it takes the history of Doctor Who, the history of hip-hop, and finds parallels between them despite the rather imperfect rapping delivered by Ross Ricco as the Ringmaster. It is unusual subject matter for a book on Doctor Who, but Smith succeeds in making the case.

A Black Archive that I like more than the story it is about. You can get it here.

Incidentally the Seventh Doctor is the first Doctor to have more than half his stories and episodes covered by Black Archives. (Apart from the special cases of the Eighth Doctor and the Shalka!Doctor.)

Paradise Towers, by John Toon (and Stephen Wyatt)

Posted on 12 April 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

Paradise Towers was first broadcast at the point that I was an undergraduate and no longer watching Doctor Who regularly, so I did not see it until 2008 when I watched the whole of Season 24. I wrote then:

I actually loved Paradise Towers, apart from the music and one ill-inspired character. The whole concept of the abandoned tower block with its feral inhabitants is done, not fantastically well I admit, but at least with the courage of its convictions. Richard Briers as guest star clicks with the show in a way that Paul Darrow utterly failed to do in Timelash. The Kang chants and warping of familiar phrases are also great, and Mel actually gets something to do. This is more like Doctor Who than anything broadcast since The Caves of Androzani. (The two flies in the ointment are the awful music and the character of Pex – some blame Howard Cooke for his performance, but basically Pex doesn’t fit awfully well with the setting.)

When I came back to it for my Great Rewatch three years later, I wrote:

And suddenly we seem to have a complete step change with Paradise Towers, a glorious story which merges comedy and horror – Richard Briers dressed up as a Hitler-like bureaucrat; girl gangs with extraordinary slogans; cannibalistic little old ladies; a hero who isn’t terribly heroic; an evil architect and a swimming pool. I don’t know what it is, but there is a sudden injection of energy and confidence into the show at this point that, in my view, lasts for most of the rest of Old Who’s run. The Doctor may not have much of a clue as to what is going on, but we are urging him to work it out and we get there at much the same time as he does. My daily watching of the old episodes has become a pleasure again, rather than a chore.

I’m interested to see that on both occasions, watching the story in sequence with those before and after, I noticed what a different beast it is to its predecessors. I wrote in 2011 that “I don’t know what it is”, but since then, I have read Andrew Cartmel’s reminiscences so it’s clear that Paradise Towers was his first real commission as script editor, and that he was successfully stamping his mark on the show.

This time round was the first time I had watched the story in isolation – both in 2008 and 2011 I watched it in sequence. I was pleasantly surprised by how well it held up. Yes, the production values are poor, but the story actually lampshades it by referencing the decaying tower block environment. Richard Briers is a delight and so are the two old ladies. Pex annoys me less every time; I find the character easier to accept as a send-up of hero tropes. And I actually found the music easier on the ear, especially the riff on the them tune of the show while the Caretakers are holding the Doctor captive in Episode Two.

The one thing that jumped out at me this time is that all the speaking characters, though not all the people we see on screen, are white. That is an opportunity missed. Several of the non-speaking Kangs (and one of the Janitors) are clearly of African or Asian descent, including Nisha Nayar who got a small speaking role in the Ninth Doctor two-parter Bad Wolf / The Parting of the Ways and has done a fair amount of Big Finish work.

The other really important thing to note is that Stephen Wyatt is the only graduate of Clare College, Cambridge to have written a Doctor Who story – so far. (The only Clare alum to have directed a Doctor Who story is Dan Zeff, who I served with on the 1988-89 JCR Committee.) Wyatt also wrote the novelisation of the story, and the second paragraph of its third chapter is:

At first Mel thought she was hearing things. She was sitting dejectedly in a grimy ill-lit corridor in Paradise Towers and someone was offering her a cup of tea. It was so unlikely Mel thought her mind must be going.

I read it at the same time as first watching it in 2008, and wrote:

Wyatt has the courage of his convictions here: a reasonably strong story in the first place, and the opportunity to overcome the weaknesses of the production (the Kangs on paper can be teenagers, and we don’t get the awful music, though Pex as a character is still an anomaly). An easy pass for the Bechdel test, with the scene where the old ladies are about to eat Mel a particular delight.

Nothing to add to that; an above-average novelisation, just about. You can get it here.

As noted above, both TV story and novelisation easily pass the Bechdel test.

John Toon’s Black Archive monograph on Paradise Towers won the Sir Julius Vogel Award last year (2023), as his previous volume on the Fourth Doctor story Full Circle had done in 2019. I complained about the Full Circle analysis that I would have liked more on the actual production of the show; and the Paradise Towers volume delivers that, for a very satisfying read. It has been richly informed by extensive correspondence between Toon and Wyatt, so that we hear the original author’s voice more clearly than in most Doctor Who analyses.

The first chapter, ‘Reception’, starts by pointing out something I had not realised – not everyone liked Paradise Towers as much as I did. I often find that alleged classic stories are not to my taste, but it’s much rarer to discover that a story I rather admire is not held in such high esteem by fandom. Toon argues that the story’s reputation has improved dramatically in the last couple of years, basically since the Blu-Ray was released, but he shows convincingly that it went down badly at the time and since – featuring at 193 out of 200 in the DWM poll of 2009, for instance.

Toon then goes on to explain the rushed process of writing and production. It all makes a lot more sense when you realise that Pex actually was supposed to be a muscle man, but they couldn’t find one in time who could actually act and were left with Howard Cooke; and that the Caretakers apart from Richard Briers were supposed to be overweight and middle-aged; and that the music was hastily rewritten because the originally commissioned score didn’t fit the way the story was going.

The second and longest chapter, ‘The Foudnations’, looks in detail at the similarities and differences between Paradise Towers and J.G. Ballard’s novel High-Rise, and a few other sources: 2000 AD for the mega-city, A Clockwork Orange and Lord of the Flies for the youth gangs, Toyah Willcox for the Kangs’ style.

The third chapter, ‘Windows’, makes the cases successively for interpreting Paradise Towers as a queer story, a camp story and a Gothic story. (I vote for all three.) Its second paragraph is:

There’s an anecdote often told by Andrew Cartmel about a script conference between himself, Stephen Wyatt and John Nathan-Turner that took place on 16 March 1987¹. According to Cartmel’s recollection, Nathan-Turner expressed concern about the cannibalistic habits of Tilda and Tabby, in response to which Wyatt confided, ‘You realise that they’re also lesbians?’ Wyatt corroborates this story, and further recalls that he suggested Nathan-Turner might tempt the tabloid press with the headline ‘Dr Who in Lesbian Cannibal Bondage Horror’². This suggests a creative team keeping a wry eye on opportunities for sensationalism rather than seeking to give representation, sympathetic or otherwise, to non-heteronormative lifestyles. And yet Paradise Towers does lend itself readily to queer interpretation. In large part, this is likely due to the nature of Doctor Who itself in 1987.
¹ See, for example, Cartmel, Script Doctor, p53.
² Email conversation with author. The ‘bondage’ in this case would be Tilda restraining Mel with her knitting, but more on that anon.

The fourth chapter, ‘The Towers’, begins by pointing out that it’s really rare for Doctor Who to address architecture as a topic, and then goes on to sketch the appalling history of Brutalism and the British high-rise block.

The fifth chapter, ‘The Great Architect’, chases the architecture theme still further, with glances at Le Corbusier, Peter and Alison Smithson, Ayn Rand and Margaret Thatcher, in a very satisfying hunt for truth.

A brief conclusion pulls it all together.

Driven to produce a set of scripts quickly to break ground on Doctor Who’s 24th season, Wyatt and Cartmel created a story as rough-edged yet multi-faceted as the concrete estates they wanted to comment on. It overlays serious issues of shoddy social housing and uncaring architects with comedy fascist Caretakers, punk gang children in their twenties and cuddly teatime cannibals. But for all that, it has a comfortable charm. Be it ever so humble, some of us call it home.

Recommended for fans of the Seventh Doctor era, and of architecture. You can get it here.

Battlefield, by Philip Purser-Hallard (and Ben Aaronovitch, and Marc Platt)

Posted on 17 February 2023 by fromtheheartofeurope

When I first watched Battlefield in 2007 I was not at all impressed.

Battlefield must have been the killer blow which led to the cancellation. It is simply awful. The story is incomprehensible, the direction (particularly of the all-important action scenes) both uninspiring and incoherent, the supposed killer-end-of-the-universe monster is atrocious, and the background music some of the worst of all time. I haven’t seen much late-eighties Doctor Who, but I shall be very surprised if I find another story as bad as this. I am among that minority (even among the small number who have watched it) who thought Ben Aaronovitch’s other story, Remembrance of the Daleks, was bad too, so it comes as little surprise to me.

Surely the programme’s makers must have realised what a risk they were taking with an uneven writer for the opening story of a season where the entire programme faced cancellation? [In retrospect this was very unfair of me, and I have enjoyed a lot of Aaronovitch’s other work.] Ye who complain about Torchwood, or about how not quite every story of new Who comes up to the standards you have come to expect of Buffy or Battlestar Galactica, some time please sit down and watch Battlefield, and marvel.

Anyway, I should not be wholly negative. [Indeed.] Nicholas Courtney puts in one of his best performances as the Brigadier, and has a great confrontation scene with Jean Marsh playing the chief villain. (The two of them had appeared together in Doctor Who 23 years earlier, playing brother and sister galactic agents in The Daleks’ Master Plan.) But that’s about it; even McCoy and Aldred seem to have little idea of what is going on.

Curiously I was much more forgiving when I reached it in my Great Rewatch:

In my last post I recanted my previous disdain for Remembrance of the Daleks, and uneasily anticipated that I might have to do the same for Battlefield. And so it proved to be; I take it all back, or almost all. Even if the precise background to the intrusion into our world of the Arthurian mythos as interplanetary battle is not really spelled out, it is generally pleasing, and especially pleasing to see the Doctor made to play the role of Merlin in someone else’s drama. (He is definitely more of a Merlin than a Prospero.) The many effects all work to enhance the story, and we have the excellent Bambera / Ancelyn subplot (it was nice to be watching this so soon after Bambera’s return in Tony Lee’s play Rat Trap for Big Finish) and the Ace / Shou Yuing spark too.

Most importantly for us longterm fans, we also have the final return (for Old Who) of Nicholas Courtney as the Brigadier. It allows him to return to military heroism as he did when we first saw him stalking Yeti in the Underground, rather than the blimpish buffoon of the later Pertwee years; even better, we have Courtney sparking against Jean Marsh as they did, briefly, in 1965 in The Daleks’ Master Plan. The moment when the Brigadier chops the Doctor in order to take the final confrontation himself is fantastic, as is the Doctor’s reaction when he thinks the Brigadier is dead (as had been the original intention of the script). It’s a strong enough start to a strong season.

Rewatching it now, I confess I have swung back again to my first take. It seemed to me incomprehensible and badly made. The direction is dull and the music intrusive and inappropriate. Nicholas Courtney is still very good, but (having been reading some military memoirs recently) I wondered about the nature of UNIT hierarchy, and who precisely was giving him orders to go to Carbury and why these were not communicated to Bambera. The final scene is terrifically stupid, though at least it established that the Seventh Doctor can cook.

The novelisation is a different matter. The second paragraph of the third chapter of Part 1 is:

The roads were slippery with the wet green leaves stripped from the trees by the storm. Zbrigniev’s training took each obstacle of debris in its stride, but although the onslaught had died, the UNIT car never topped fifteen miles an hour.

I wrote in 2008:

I’m not the greatest fan of Ben Aaronovitch, who wrote the original script, but Platt has taken the story and makes it work really well on paper. It makes you realise just how much of the TV version’s problems were down to poor direction, bad music and lousy acting. We get some lovely back-story for the Brigadier and Doris; we get just enough explanation for the Doctor being Merlin to leave room for further speculation without just being stupid; we get the Bambera/Ancelyn relationship decently treated as well. Interestingly Platt has broken the story up into four parts which more or less coincide with the episodes as broadcast, the only novelisation where I remember this being done. [Actually not the only one; see also: Galaxy Four]

An easy pass for the Bechdel test, with Ace and Shou Youing defending each other against the forces of darkness (in the book, we are not distracted by their awful acting).

I still agree with all of that. The middle and end of the story still don’t make much sense, but the beginning is very well developed and that gives you enough momentum to keep going. Intriguingly, Platt’s future Doctor has red hair. You can get it here.

I was very curious as to how Philip Purser-Hallard would approach this story for the Black Archives. In his earlier monograph on Dark Water / Death in Heaven, he persuaded me of some of the redeeming features of a story that I still don’t like very much. Other Black Archive writers have tried the same – thinking here of L.M. Myles on The Ambassadors of Death. But there are other possibilities – James Cooray Smith, writing on The Ultimate Foe, my least favourite of all the stories so far covered by the Black Archive, analyses in forensic detail just how it came to be such a mess.

Purser-Hallard disarmingly admits in a prologue that many of the criticisms of Battlefield are valid, but “despite the story’s various missteps and mishaps, it succeeds in certain important respects, and it is this tension in which this book is most interested.”

The first chapter, “One Painstaking Layer at a Time”, looks at the first two versions of the storyline, both of which made better sense, and the changes made to the script at the last moment. He makes the point that the armour worn by Morgaine and her knights should have been obviously high-tech, as described in the script, and the decision to just use ordinary armour instead had a serious impact on the quality of the story as broadcast.

The second chapter, “Daleks, Master-Plans”, starts by comparing and contrasting Battlefield with Remembrance of the Daleks, and then looks at the Cartmel Master Plan, and the (slim) possibility that Bambera might have returned in future seasons if Old Who had not been cancelled.

The second paragraph of the third chapter, “This Thing About King Arthur”, is:

One method is to construct a science-fiction story with parallels to a myth – more often than not a classical myth – and usually to flag the fact in dialogue. This is the approach taken to, for instance, the myths of Jason and the Golden Fleece in Underworld (1978), the Minotaur in The Horns of Nimon (1979-80) and the Minotaur again in The God Complex (2011). Another is to suggest that elements of various mythologies are real, but explicable through science fiction tropes, generally ancient visitations by aliens – the view taken of the Titan Kronos (and the Minotaur again) in The Time Monster (1972), the Egyptian god Set in Pyramids of Mars (1975), and the apocalypse-heralding Norse monster Fenrir in The Curse of Fenric. (This is also a common approach to invented alien religions, for instance in The Face of Evil (1977) and Planet of Fire (1984).) A third variant consists of stories where, rather than inspiring a myth, the alien takes advantage of an existing one to deceive the superstitious locals. In the earliest example of this, The Myth Makers (1965), the alien masquerading as Zeus is the Doctor himself; a more recent one is the Mire warlord who impersonates Odin in The Girl Who Died (2015).

The chapter looks at sources for Arthuriana: Roger Lancelyn Green, Boorman’s Excalibur, The Mists of Avalon, the comic series Camelot 3000 and the BBC series Knights of God which starred Patrick Troughton but was not shown until after he had died. (I am surprised not to see T.H. White or Monty Python on that list.)

The fourth chapter, “The Legendary Arthur, Yes”, looks in detail at the Arthurian roots of various characters and concepts in Battlefield, running into problems with Bambera who is not a brilliant match for Guinevere. This chapter alone takes up a quarter of the book. I think this is trying a little too hard.

The fifth chapter, “Builder of Worlds”, points out that Battlefield is set not in 1989 when broadcast but in an unspecified near future where the UK has a king and various other things have happened. (God be with the days when you could get a vodka and coke, a lemonade and a glass of water for much less than a fiver.)

The sixth chapter, “Is This War?”, examines the story’s depiction of the military and the Doctor’s relationship with them, and the concepts of “honour” and “shame”, the latter of which is used euphemistically by Bambera as a swear word.

The seventh chapter, “Sufficiently Advanced Magic”, points out that the 1988 and 1989 stories had more overtly magical content, and that Morgaine’s witchcraft is in the end her undoing.

The eighth chapter, “Britishness, and Other Identities”, looks at how the story’s heterogenous concept of Britishness is developed further in Aaronovitch’s (excellent) Rivers of London books, and also looks at just why that last scene is so bad.

The ninth chapter, “It’s Only a Trap”, comes back to the Bambera/Guinevere question, and also looks at how future incarnations of the Doctor might appear in the current Doctor’s story. As noted above, Platt’s future Doctor in the novelisation has red hair.

In the conclusion, Purser-Hallard rather disarmingly confesses that “for many years – 16, to be precise – [Battlefield] was my favourite story.” (Sixteen years from 1989 takes us to the dawn of New Who.) I’m really charmed that he managed to resist the temptation to go full-on apologetic for a youthful enthusiasm, and instead provided a thoughtful analysis.

But I still wonder about a few things, notably, why are the direction and the music so awful? It’s a book that answers a lot of questions, but not all of them are the ones I would have asked.

Anyway, you can get it here.

The Curse of Fenric, by Una McCormack (and Ian Briggs)

Posted on 25 August 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

When I first watched The Curse of Fenric in 2007, I wrote:

The Curse of Fenric had been strongly recommended to me, and I adopted the suggestion that I watch the extended director’s cut version on the DVD rather than the show as originally broadcast (in keeping with the non-sequential traditions of the show, this was actually the last story of the four that I watched, during a three-hour stopover in Ankara airport last Friday).
Well, it is indeed a good story – most memorably, Nicholas Parsons, of all people, playing it straight as the doomed vicar Mr Wainwright; a setting in the second world war that actually looks a bit like it might be the 1940s; vampire villains which now seem an eerie foreshadowing of Buffy; secret codes and ancient evils, and the crucial importance of faith. Indeed, of the four last stories, it is the one which most resembles classic Who at its best.
I was not utterly convinced by the plot; I never like stories which crucially depend on some unbroadcast and untold past adventure of the Doctor’s. And although I did like Tomek Bork’s portrayal of Sorin, I was not totally convinced by the behaviour of the Russian soldiers (and to a lesser extent of the British) – as soldiers, that is. However, in general, this was a good ’un.

When I came back to it for my Great Rewatch, I wrote:

I watched the original version of The Curse of Fenric this time rather than the director’s cut, and noticed only one significant difference – we cannot hear what the Doctor is saying when he makes his profession of faith to ward off the Haemovores, whereas the director’s cut makes it clear that he is reciting the names of all his companions in a litany. It’s another excellent story, with the plot of human conflict being exploited by non-human forces which has a venerable pedigree in Who, and the continuing accumulation of details about what the Doctor may really be up to – and, almost two years after her arrival, more about what Ace is there for – I think only Turlough acquires a comparable amount of back-story in the course of his time in the Tardis, and Ace’s tale works much better. My only quibble about The Curse of Fenric is that I have never been impressed by the Haemovores, whose costumes are a bit cheap-looking to the point that we have to be told to be scared of them by scary music.

Rewatching, I wasn’t quite as impressed as I had been on previous occasions – and I note that both times I had seen it before in the context of the rest of the season; this was the first time I had tried it as effectively a standalone. It feels frankly a bit under-directed; too often the actors are just moving from point A to point B without doing much else, and the cinematography is workmanlike rather than interesting. Also this time around I watched the original TV broadcast, which is not as good as the subsequent edits, and that may have been a mistake. I’m glad that Cartmel was trying to revive the show, but he had not yet got there.

Here’s a weird one for you. Pyramids of Mars, already covered by the Black Archive, and Full Circle, also already covered by the Black Archive, were broadcast on exactly the same calendar dates as The Curse of Fenric: 25 October, 1 November, 8 November and 15 November, in 1975, 1980 and 1989 respectively. The first two were shown on Saturday nights, and The Curse of Fenric on Wednesdays. The day after Episode 3 was shown, the Berlin Wall fell.

When I first read the novelisation in 2008, I wrote:

Ian Briggs, on the other hand, does a masterful job with The Curse of Fenric, perhaps the most adult of any of the Who novelisations (in the sense of talking about sex). The most striking change from the TV original is that the vicar, Mr Wainwright, is explictly young (rather than Nicholas Parsons). Apart from that, the whole narrative feels very soundly rooted both in itself and in Who – particularly with Ace’s introduction in Dragonfire (which of course Briggs also wrote). For once, the Doctor’s-hidden-past motif actually seems to make sense rather than feeling like a bolted-on idea (the only other story that achieves this is The Face of Evil). An excellent read.
Also a comfortable pass for the Bechdel test, what with Phyllis, Jean and their landlady on the one hand, and Katharine, Audrey and the Wrens on the other, with Ace wandering between them.

The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

A thin trickle of villagers, all dressed in their grey Sunday best, were making their way home down the country lane. Only Miss Hardaker, a sharp-faced spinster in her fifties, and two teenage girls lingered on the church porch where the young vicar listened patiently. Miss Hardaker was determined to make her point.

Rereading the novelisation, the same points struck me again; it’s a surprisingly adult book for the range, with the London girls and Ace bantering about sex. And given the timings, it does make more sense for the vicar to be a young man, rather than 66-year-old Nicholas Parsons. There are a couple of good interludes as well, one of which appears to have a drown-up Ace marrying a Russian aristocrat ancestor of Sorin’s. It’s one of the best of the 160+ novelisations.

Both of my Black Archive reads for this month are by writers who I consider friends. Una McCormack is a sparring partner on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/unamccormack/status/1473947186853523459

In this monograph, she has gone for an approach of developing at length four of the interesting themes of The Curse of Fenric, rather than an all-round justification of the story, and as someone who loves the story less than she does, I found it helpful and redemptive. I love most of all the Black Archive books that explain to me why I like some of my favourite Doctor Who stories; but I probably get more out of the ones like this that challenge me to think again about some that are less high up my personal list.

The short introduction sets out her stall, making the link between the timing of first broadcast and the Fall of the Wall, and asserting boldly that “The Curse of Fenric is the best story in what was, at that point, the best season yet of Doctor Who. In other words, I love it.”

The first chapter convincingly positions the story and the entire era in the context of a decade of Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher (who as it turned out would last only another year), and the culture wars waged by government supporters, particularly on and in the BBC. The solution to the chess puzzle of the story is, after all, for the pawns to break ranks and join forces against their common oppressor.

The second chapter points out that this is the first Doctor Who story to explicitly use the Second World War as a setting. (Surprisingly, the Nazis in Silver Nemesis are not named as such.) The war itself is of course a crucial cultural historical experience for the UK, as for other countries. But it’s interesting to look, as McCormack does, at the other later presentations of the war in Who, some of which work and many of which don’t, and to explore the good and bad side of using it as the background for a Who story.

The third chapter looks at Ace as a character, arguing that her arc is the first example of the more modern approach to companions that we have seen in the New Who era, and applying some good feminist analysis to the Doctor and his relations with the women who he tracvels with. The second paragraph of the third chapter, including a quote from Joanna Russ, is:

Russ, in her essay, and in typically acerbic fashion, rapidly sketches and dispenses with the clichés of science fiction: the ‘intergalactic suburbia’ in which the 1950s household remains intact and the woman is wife, mother, and home-maker; the ‘passive and involuntary’ women as prizes or motives for space-faring ‘He-Men’; and the domineering Amazons of matriarchies, waiting to be brought to heel by the arrival of men. Her most illuminating criticism for our purposes, however, is of Ursula K Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. This novel, published in 1969, a Nebula Award winner and generally accepted to be ground-breaking in its treatment of gender, concerns the inhabitants of the planet Gethen, who have no sex or gender, except that every four weeks they pass through a cycle in which they become either male or female, and sexually potent. The story is motored by the arrival on Gethen of a male human observer, who becomes immersed in Gethenian culture and politics. Russ skilfully argues this is a book from which women are absent:

‘It is, I must admit, a deficiency in the English language that these people must be called “he” throughout, but “put that together with the native hero’s personal encounters in the book, the absolute lack of interest in child-raising, the concentration on work, and what you have is a world of men.’⁴

⁴ Russ, ‘Image of Women’, p215.”

The brief short chapter reflects on myth and Doctor Who, and the way in which Cartmel was setting up the Doctor as a mythic figure and using themes from mythology to help tell the story.

I guess my biggest complaint about the book is that it’s a bit short. But you can get it here.

Operation Volcano, by Ben Aaronovitch and Andrew Cartmel

Posted on 16 August 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

I realised a couple of weeks ago that I had paid for a couple of Humble Bundles of Doctor Who comics published by Titan over the years, and now had dozens of unread books to add to my Librarything catalogue. (Which is going to mean a big jump in the number of unread books that I log at the end of this month.) I’m going to go through them in order of internal chronology, hopefully at a rate of one a month, which will be enough for several years to go…

So that means starting with Operation Volcano, a collection of Seventh Doctor stories first published in 2018 as a three-shot series and then collected as a graphic novel. The majority of pages are taken up with the title story, by no less than Andrew Cartmel and Ben Aaronovitch, which takes the Doctor and Ace to Australia for an adventure of alien infiltration with Group Captain Gilmore. It’s a well done, densely written adventure, which perhaps shows that the comics medium does not suffer the same limitations as the screen.

Second frame of third part of “Operation Volcano”:

There are also three shorter stories in the volume. “Hill of Beans”, by Richard Dinnick, takes the Psychic Circus from The Greatest Show in the Galaxy to a planet ruled by a president who looks just like Donald Trump. the art is by Jessica Martin who played Mags in the TV story and whose character features here. I’m afraid it did not really work for me.

“The Armageddon Gambit”, by John Freeman and Christopher Jones, is a less ambitious but more successful Doctor-and-Ace-outwit-the-aliens tale. Given that it is the third story in the book, I’ll give you its second frame as well.

(I think we know the answer to the alien commander’s questions)

Finally, an unexpected treat: a six-pager from Paul Cornell and John Stokes, “In-Between Times”, which explores the relationships between Ian Chesterton, Barbara Wright, the First Doctor and the Doctor’s granddaughter Susan. Rather lovely; and I suspect it may be the most recently published new First Doctor comic as of the time of writing.

You can get Operation Volcano here (if you didn’t get the Humble Bundle like I did). Next up is an Eighth Doctor volume, A Matter of Life and Death.

Human Nature/The Family of Blood, by Naomi Jacobs and Philip Purser-Hallard (and Paul Cornell)

Posted on 14 April 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

So, the 13th in the Black Archive series of analyses of Doctor Who stories reaches a particular favourite, the 2006 Tenth Doctor two-parter Human Nature / The Family of Blood. It was in fact the first and only Who story so far to be based on a novel, Paul Cornell’s 1995 Seventh Doctor novel Human Nature. So I’m going to take the novel first, even though (as is my usual practice) this time round I watched the TV episodes and then re-read the novel.

Just in parenthesis – the first Doctor Who TV story based on a previously published book was actually the first Seventh Doctor story in 1987, Time and the Rani, which is draws heavily on the Sixth Doctor “Make Your Own Adventure With Doctor Who”/”Find Your Fate” game book Race Against Time, also by Pip and Jane Baker, published the previous year (and handy when they needed to write a story in a hurry, as we’ll see with my next entry). However, that is not a novel. There are other cases as well, of course, with Blink based on a short story and Dalek to a certain extent on a Big Finish Play; and Gareth Roberts plundered two of his own comics for The Shakespeare Code and The Lodger.

Back to the original Human Nature novel. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

The Captains sat at the back, and the boys at the front, and all of them stood to attention as he entered. He caught a paper dart happily, glanced at it, tweaked the wing a notch and threw it back, straight into the hands of the boy who threw it.

When I first read it in 2005 – before the TV story was transmitted – I wrote:

This Seventh Doctor plus Bernice Summerfield New Adventure is really rather good. Paul Cornell here asks the unaskable: what if the Doctor were to try being human for a while, to live and love like the rest of us? He has managed to get to the heart of the Doctor’s mythos. I found it very satisfying, and raced to finish it, to the point of waking up early this morning to do so. It’s the first of the Doctor Who books I have downloaded that I would really like to spend money on for a dead trees version.

Bits I particularly liked: I thought the character of Verity resonated particularly effectively. “Verity” of course means Truth, and she holds the key to the truth about the Doctor’s character; the name of course also recalls the real-life origins of Doctor Who; and the character herself is of course a very close reflection of Neil Gaiman’s Death.

I also very much liked the human relationships of the book. I caught on to the true nature of Shuttleworth’s liaisons pretty early on; the John Smith and Joan Redfern relationship was neatly done; and the Epilogue, which the author admits he had doubts about putting in, was very effective.

Great lines, too:

“You may know me as mild-mannered John Smith, history teacher, but secretly I’m the Doctor, universal righter of wrongs and protector of cats.”

“So what did you say to him,” the Doctor asked.
“That he believes in good and fights evil. That, with violence all around him, he’s a man of peace. That he’s never cruel, or cowardly. That he is a hero.”

Sure, the book has its flaws, as mercilessly pointed out by some of the Doctor Who Ratings Guide reviewers (though most of them loved it). I’m with the Discontinuity Guide folks, though. I don’t think I’ve read a better Doctor Who novel.

When I reread it in 2011, I wrote:

This is still the only Who novel to have been adapted for television rather than the other way round. I first read it, gulp, seven years ago – the first Seventh Doctor novel I ever read – and would have been rereading it anyway as I shall be rewatching the TV episode soon.

Now that I have read the previous 37 New Adventures, I still think this is one of the best in the series. It is better than most Who novels as a standalone (though Niall Harrison found the continuity heavy going), the major reference to previous novels being to Benny’s loss of her lover in the Albigensian crusade. The Doctor is absent from most of the book and needs to be explained to his own alter ego, John Smith, whose final sacrifice is very effective.

An easy Bechdel pass with Benny bantering with a group of women at a bar in the prologue.

Coming back to it now, I still think it is very effective, and I still think it is one of the best Doctor Who novels ever (and I’ve read a lot more of them since 2011). It is amusing that one of the baddies tries to convince Benny that he is the Tenth Doctor, of all incarnations to choose. The schoolboys are really horrible, with the brutality against Timothy particularly awful. I had also forgotten that one of the boys turns out to be n Gvzr Ybeq va qvfthvfr. But the other thing about the BBC online version (downloaded by me years ago and retained ever since) is the rather lovely artwork by Daryl Joyce. Sadly that’s been dropped from the newly edited version, which you can get here.

The other thing I should say probably at this point is that between reading the book and watching the TV story, I met Paul Cornell at a convention in Dublin, and we have been friends ever since, last seeing each other in Los Angeles in February, and hopefully again this coming weekend at Eastercon (where I am a Guest of Honour this year, and he was a Guest of Honour ten years ago).

So, finally to the TV story. My comment on the first episode when first broadcast was:

Crumbs

There is much more to be said than this, but I will save it until next week.

I didn’t in fact get around to commenting further the next week, but when I got around to the rewatch in 2013 I wrote:

It was good to come back to Human Nature / The Family of Blood so soon after rereading the book, though inevitably it meant doing a bit of compare and contrast; I won’t do this in detail, since Niall Harrison did it back n 2007, but the things that jumped out at me were the following:

Positive points

* On the screen, the appearance of David Tennant playing a different character who happens to look like the Doctor is far more effective than the gradually revealed Mr Smith of the book

* Likewise, Jessica Hynes’ performance as Joan brings far more to the concept of the Doctor’s human self’s lover than did the book, though age of course means she is a very different character

* Similarly, the watch rather than the cricket ball, and the Book of Impossible Things, exploit the TV format beautifully

* The Family of Blood are gloriously sinister, far more so than the Aubertides

* And basically the fact of the Doctor being human because of the threat from the Family makes much more sense than the original idea of the Aubertides just happening to home along just after the Doctor has arbitrarily decided to try the single-heart club.

Less positive points

* The fate of the Family of Blood still bugs me. The Aubertides in the book are defeated in a fair fight; the Doctor’s meting out of judgement on the Family seems cruel – who made him the judge?

* The battle scene doesn’t work for me. The tragedy of real life war, especially the First World War, is that the other side is human, and the linkage between fighting scarecrows in 1913 and fighting Germans in 1915 seems to me both leaden and mistaken. Frankly turning the entire school to glass would have been a better solution (though technically more difficult).

* The fantasy life-with-Joan-and-kids section is too obvious a borrowing from The Last Temptation of Christ.

* Poor Martha gets much less of a look-in here than Bernice in the book; apart from Blink it’s probably her least visible episode.

It should be added that during the 2020 lockdown, two short story sequels to the TV story taking forward the Daughter-of-Mine plotline were written by Paul Cornell and released on Youtube, later published as part of the Adventures in Lockdown anthology. In case you missed them, here they are, both really short:

Coming back to the 2007 two-parter, I still like it a lot. Tennant’s characterisation of Smith is the heart and soul of it, and reminds us what a versatile actor he actually is. The battle scene grated less for me this time, I guess because having read a lot more about the First World War in the meantime, I’m now more tolerant of different takes on it. One also appreciates knowing that it is setting up one of the most spectacular reveals in the whole history of Who in a couple of episodes’ time.

One interesting aspect is that before this, there had been very few Doctor Who stories set in schools (I listed them here). Now there have been loads, including an entire spinoff series, thanks in part to having a companion who was explicitly a schoolteacher. Of course, for most kids, the boarding school is a fantasy environment anyway.

Paul Cornell is the first New Who writer to get two write-ups in the Black Archive series (from Old Who, David Whitaker has already got there); it should also be said that he’s been a fantastic advocate for the show over the years, even though he is concentrating on other things at the moment, and is probably the most visible writer in broader SF fandom who has emerged from Doctor Who. This is possibly the most extended analysis of his work that I have seen (though saying that may expose my ignorance); the earlier Black Archive volume on Scream of the Shalka concentrated much more on the production than the story.

There is lots to write about here, and Naomi Jacobs and Philip Purser-Hallard give themselves an extra burden by opting (correctly) to write about both the TV story and the book; it would have been weird to try analysing the former without the latter. I think even if you don’t love both stories you would find it a pretty satisfactory analysis.

The chapters cover:

A straightforward comparison of book and TV story, looking at the different plot elements and the way in which they were changed from page to screen and from Seventh to Tenth Doctor (and from Benny to Martha).
An examination of war, peace, cowardice and trauma in both versions of the story and in the Whoniverse more broadly.
A brief survey of schools in the Whoniverse and a briefer examination of the concept of family in this story (in both versions). The second paragraph of this chapter is:

Interestingly, though, both these absences [stories about school and/or family] have been filled during the 21st century, by successive showrunners. Russell T Davies embraced family relationships within the series’ drama, bringing relatives particularly to the fore in his companions’ backstories and present conflicts, while Steven Moffat would make more extensive use of school settings in 2013-16 than all of his predecessors, as well as increasing the prevalence of child characters.

A really meaty chapter looking at the story in the context of Christianity, given Cornell’s well known interest in religion; themes touched on include self-sacrifice, the nature of divinity, justice, resurrection/regeneration and temptation. This chapter alone is almost worth the cover price.
Another very meaty chapter matching the plot of both book and TV story to the Hero’s Journey of Joseph Campbell.
A brief conclusion, followed by four brief appendices.
A brief table of correspondences between characters in the book and TV story.
Speculation on the life-cycle of the Family (which would no doubt have been expanded if the authors had known about the two 2020 stories).
A thought on the Doctor as Merlin.
A brief attempt to force both versions of the story into the same continuity.

As I hope will be clear from the above, I think this is one of the better Black Archive books looking at one of the better New Who TV stories and also at one of the best spinoff novels. Recommended. You can get it here.

Ghost Light, by Jonathan Dennis (and Marc Platt)

Posted on 4 December 2021 by fromtheheartofeurope

When I first watched it in 2007, I wrote:

Ghost Light is an entirely different matter [from Battlefield]. I approached it with some suspicion, in that I had found several of Marc Platt’s other offerings (Downtime, Auld Mortality, Lungbarrow) tough going. And indeed, Ghost Light is tough going too, but I very much felt it was worth the effort: intricately constructed, well acted, beautifully shot; certainly the best story I’ve seen that was broadcast between Caves of Androzani and Rose.

One of my big complaints of Who of this era is that so little effort seems to have been put into getting the settings right: Ghost Light does not suffer from this problem – from the beginning, and indeed all the way through, you feel convinced that this is a Victorian mansion, even when it turns out that the butler is a living Neanderthal and there is a spaceship in the basement.

Also the Doctor’s bringing Ace back to the scene of her childhood crimes is, if I’m not mistaken, practically the first attempt ever to link a companion to his or her back story.

It is, however, a story very far removed from the normal territory of Doctor Who – surrealist play meets Agatha Christie, perhaps – and despite the quality of the drama it must have further created doubt about what Doctor Who was actually for. Still, apparently this was the last story of the old series actually filmed (although the third last to be broadcast) and it’s nice to feel that that the cast and team must have felt they were going out on a high.

Returning to it in 2011, on the last leg of my Great Old Who Rewatch, I wrote:

I was amazed, rewatching Ghost Light, by just how good it is. Densely packed with literary and cultural and scientific references, transformations, and bizarre imagery, it is a real feast for the viewer. Even if I am still not totally certain I know what it was all about, I find it utterly fascinating; the cast seem to be reasonably surefooted in the peculiarity of what is going on, and the music and sets all add up as well. Having had my view of the worst Seventh Doctor story confounded on this rewatch, I felt confirmed in my view that Ghost Light is the best; and as it was the last story actually filmed, we can say that Old Who ended on a real high.

In the years since I wrote that, Marc Platt has continued writing Who scripts – I think that of the Old Who writers he is actually the only one still really active (Rona Munro has done one TV episode, but that’s it). You cannot accuse him of not keeping the faith. I recently much enjoyed his Fourth Doctor two-parter, The Skin of the Sleek / The Thief Who Stole Time, though I don’t know if I will ever get around to writing it up.

However, on the third time of viewing, but the first time watching it out of context with the rest of the final season of Old Who, I have to say that Ghost Light did not work for me as well as before. There are massive holes in the plot, which are only just covered by the energy and bombast of the leads, especially McCoy. If you are in the mood, you don’t worry about it not really making sense; this time round, I just wasn’t in the mood.

And there are a couple of scenes where actors are standing around with their hands by their sides, waiting for their next line, which is never a good sign.

The second paragraph of the third chapter of Marc Platt’s novelisation is:

The ponderous clock reached its third stroke. In the darkened study, white gloved hands touched the shoulder of a girl who sat motionless, staring into the fire.

When I first read it in 2008, I wrote:

After enjoying most of Marc Platt’s other work, including his novelisation of Battlefield, I was looking forward to reading this. I’m afraid I was disappointed. Once again, I realise just how vital the direction and acting of the TV version can be; and the intensely visual and subtle original just loses most of its vitality and mystery on the printed page. In particular, we lose the striking visual appearance of Nimrod the Neanderthal and of Light himself, who comes across as just some random and rather dull megalomaniac with super powers.

Scrapes through the Bechdel test: in most of the Ace/Gwendolen scenes they are talking about Josias and/or the Doctor, and the one exception is when they fight, and are then interrupted by Control. A fight is barely a conversation, but I suppose it will have to do. (Mrs/Lady Pritchard appears to communicate with the maidservants by telepathy.)

I have been very inconsistent in my application of the Bechdel test; maybe I’ll start being systematic in 2022. Anyway, It was originally intended for films, not books. Apart from that, nothing to add to my previous assessment. You can get the book here.

The second paragraph of the third chapter of Jonathan Dennis’ Black Archive monograph on Ghost Light is:

[Referring to the ghost story] It’s a popular story genre of course. Myths and stories of haunted places date back to tribal times; there’s a haunted house story in the 1,001 Nights⁵³. As I mentioned before, one of the characters in Ghost Light, Mrs Grose, is taken directly from one of the most popular haunted house stories in literature, The Turn of the Screw (1898). Scarcely a year goes by that there isn’t a movie released about a haunted house, usually more than one. Last year (2015) has seen a remake of Poltergeist (1982), and Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak, which isn’t just a haunted house story, it’s a Gothic haunted house story in the same vein as those Ghost Light was pastiching.
⁵³ ‘Ali the Cairene and the Haunted House in Baghdad’.

As with my rewatch of the story, unfortunately I didn’t get much out of this. It’s a bit of a grab-bag of source material and script analysis, without looking at the actual staging of the TV story as much as the others have done, or indeed at its reception and subsequent reputation. So it’s the first miss of the first six Black Archives for me; which after all is not such a bad strike rate.

(On a positive note, the footnotes work fine, unlike in the Image of the Fendahl volume.)

The chapters are:

telling us firmly how unusual Ghost Light is;
arguing (unconvincingly) that it uses other literary and film sources more than other stories (though with an amusing coda on similarities with The Rocky Horror Picture Showpointing out that it is a haunted house story, and the Steven Moffat likes these too;
a cursory look at hypnosis and mind control;
even shorter on “Java” as a euphemism; and
a long and confused chapter on evolution and class.

The completist will want this, but I think there’s more interesting commentary to be found elsewhere. Anyway, you can get it here.

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