As Silently as a Shadow

It's been a stressful week as an absentee landlord but this morning, I'm only a few hours away from the return of Doctor Who to our tv screens (or multimedia players). I was pretty disenchanted by Steven Mofatt's version of Who before the summer break however, aside from The Doctor's Wife, so expectations are not high for the next batch of convoluted soap operatics. This time round, I'm going to blog about my recent Who adventures in other media.

In The Eye of the Jungle, the Tardis arrives in the Amazon rainforest in the Ninenteenth Century and our crew encounters a British zoological exhibition. They soon become prisoners, however, of a party of alien experimenters who are fusing animal species to create a perfect warrior. Yet again, I found this audio exclusive rather bland and boring. There was no sense of the current iteration of Who- the romantic subplots and time paradoxes that are the spine of the narrative. Also, it's read by David Troughton and since I naturally associate his voice with the Target audiobooks, it feels an odd fit for the story. As the second Doctor's son and a occasional guest performer over the series' long history, there's a kind of unstated deference to his role as reader and yet the Dorset accent he uses for Amy Pond is comical. (Although, while largely inappropriate, there are some similarities to North-East vowels -at least, the Moray kind- so he is accidentally on the right track.) Unfortunately, this is the kind of story that, in previous decades, would have become a bland, inoffensive and inessential Past Doctor book.
It may be that the solo reader voice of Audiogo talking books lends them their soporific quality. Big Finish's Companion Chronicles range, focusing as it does on one or two of the Doctor's friends, may not be full-cast but the byplay of two actors is possibly more dynamic to listen to. My latest purchase was A Town Called Fortune.

It's not very gallant but that's hardly a flattering snap

I tend to buy these discs online now, unless I'm in Glasgow (and that may happen even more rarely ) but when I was in Inverness to watch some lunchtime theatre a fortnight ago, Fortune was on the shelf at Heroes For Sale.This is the first Chronicle for Evelyn Smythe, the Sixth Doctor's Senior Citizen companion. Age aside, Evelyn is unusual in that we have already heard how her adventures with the Doctor will end. I have had a problem with Evelyn since Nu Who began: the Doctor's life on the run would surely be too strenuous for an academic lady of advancing years with a heart condition. But, on the other hand, Maggie Stables' performance is so warm and sympathetic that Evelyn has become as strong a character as the wondrous Barbara Wright.
 Fortune is a Wild West tale of jealousy and revenge, performed with great charm by Stables and Richard Cordery in the Dean Martin role of Sheriff Sam. Big Finish is partial to a bit of musical theatre but the saloon bar song was oddly catchy and far more believable and atmospheric than, for example, the Brechtian ballad in The Gunfighters. So, again, inessential but a pleasant reading

A few blogs ago, I discussed how I had reimagined Peter Davison's Fifth Doctor, whom I'd followed fervently nearly thirty years ago but whose tv adventures underwhelm me now, in middle age. Earlier this month, I finally got around to buying a copy of the collected Fifth Doctor DWM comic strips, The Tides of Time. This is also the title of the kaleidoscopic first story arc for Doctor Five, by writer Steve Parkhouse and Dave "Watchmen" Gibbons and it presents an intriguing version of the gentleman cricketer. A welter of comic book concepts collide with the world of Who with greater frequency here than in the earlier fourth Doctor strips: the vibratory illusions of the Event Synthesiser, vibratory illusions, the mental landscape of the great Matrix Data Bank, the Black Arts, the Higher Evolutionaries of other worlds and UFO spotter Maxwell Edison.
Max's name, referencing the Beatles' "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" is a clue to one of the cultural forces that shape these comics: simply put, the creators are old hippies. Despite what a decade of Channel 4 clipshows might have led you to believe, Head Shops, Heavy Metal and Heroic Fantasy (i.e. Sword and Sorcery) were powerful influences in the very early 80s.
The second great influence on ToT is 2000AD. The satire, superheroics and epic sweep of Judge Dredd, Strontium Dog and Gibbons' Dan Dare entered the Whoniverse with Doctor Who Weekly. Previously, Doctor Who's comics incarnation consisted of whimsical storybook adventures in TV Comic, followed by apocalyptic Seventies sci-fi in the Pertwee Years. The Oxbridge humour of Douglas Adams is fused with the dystopian visions of US movies in 2000 AD and while the former was a significant part of Who's TV ethos, the latter would become more influential in the Saward Era. Here, they appear together.
The third influence is Marvel comics. DWM was a Marvel Monthly at this point. The (literally) shadowy Time Lord operative Shayde bears a noticeable resemblance to Wally Wood's Faceless One from the Doctor Doom serial in Astonishing Tales.

 Chapeaux from the House of Mysterio. New York, London, Paris, Gallifrey, Latveria

Shayde is a magical character, despite his prophetic and very 80s role as Time Assassin, so unfortunately his presence robs the Doctor of any sense of peril. There are echoes of Nick Fury's Jim Steranko (and Dali) in the Matrix scenes and the surreal fairground sequence is pure psychedelia, which brings me to my final cultural influence: the debut of Channel 4 reverberating back through time! Although in reality, the channel would not begin broadcasting until after these strips were published and well after Davison's first season  and although repeats of The Prisoner (1.) were still two or three years away, I think the colour Diana Rigg- Avengers repeats signified a shift in direction. I'm suggesting a turning away from the Edwardian dreaming of Brideshead Revisited and Chariots of Fire  toward the Sixties as reflected, for example, by arch pop hits from Mari Wilson, Tracy Ullman and the Maisonettes.(2.) After an uncertain and chilly start to the decade with riots and soaring unemployment, I think the UK cast an ironic eye on Swinging London, as the new media hierarchy exalted their teenage years as young Mods. (This is a process that will peak with Live Aid and the subsequent debut of Q magazine and actualised by the Levis 501 ads: the Tasteful Orthodoxy, where pop music becomes a heritage industry)

Although it's bitty and self-indulgent, ToT is far more imaginative, bizarre and thrilling than virtually anything that happens in the Davison Years. The gestalt organisms, White Holes and warring timelines went on to  inform RTD's Time War but if Parkhouse's Branson-esque, hippy/punk vision of Who-as-Future Shock could have been realised on tv, it would have been unforgettable.

Returning to the Sixties, I recently finished re-reading Doctor Who and the Crusaders. These reprints are beautiful things, edited and presented with care and thoughtfulness, and including production details for both the original serials and the Target range. I think Crusaders was the third  book from that range that I read as a child but like its predecessor, Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters, it unsettled me.Maybe I sensed there were disturbing undercurrents of sadism and sexual power beneath its surface. Certainly, the anthill torture which Ian undergoes was one of the most disturbing ideas contained in a Who book, then or since. Also, (whisper it), I found its story of courtly intrigue and religious war a bit dull. I've returned to it after thirty-odd years with two or three viewings of the surviving tv episodes behind me. The illustrations are, although I wouldn't realise for a couple of decades, very faithful to the actual cast's likenesses. But the writing has a power that went undiluted for its intended readership, from the magical introduction with the Tardis crew playing Martian chess (Jetan?) and that reference to the talking stones of Tyron that William  Russell reprises for the 1999 video box set. I feel Whitaker was to Sixties Who what Robert Holmes was to the Seventies: an iconoclastic writer who informed how we think of the series and its concepts and whose work overshadows his contemporaries.

Finally, for this entry, the three-fold problem of Torchwood. Firstly, I realised I might have enjoyed this much more if Jack had sacrificed his immortality at the climax of Children of Earth so that Miracle Day could have been Gwen's story as the next head of Torchwood. Secondly, the CIA characters are dreary stereotypes but I found their story about twisted civil servants and immolation distasteful and sensationalist. But the biggest challenge was Jack's Twenties New York Adventure. I'm sure the fanmen would have been thrilled to see the parasite that infected Owen's wife (it was, wasn't it?) and the references to the Doctor and his companions. But those very references threaten narrative collapse: they imply everyone on the Doctor's world (even if he was rebooted into another contnuity by the Pandorica, one with Dalek Eternals and no Cyberking)- Wilf, Donna, Sylvia, all at Bannerman Road and UNIT, and all the Joneses, are now immortal. And it's all Rose Tyler's fault, more or less. I blame comic books.

1. The Prisoner seems to me an overt influence on ToT: the cricket sequence in Part One and reprised in Part Seven is uncannily like the one in "The Girl Who Was Death")
2. Nostalgia-as-retreat, of course, appears in the Victoriana craze of the 60s and the iconography of WWII that is employed in Britain right up to the present day; or the Jazz Age fad of the Seventies that informs The Sting, Bugsy Malone, My Resistance is Low, The Continental and even Donna Summer's I Remember Yesterday.

Still to come: Venus and Mars, ERB-style; Vampire Tales 2; and JLA Retroactive

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