This morning, under the orange streetlights, the vehicles in the car lot are rimed with frost. Few tv programmes are more evocative of this time of year for me than The Five Faces of Doctor Who, the 1981 repeat run that, of course, began thirty years ago last week. I'm staggered by that realisation because it coincided with my first few weeks as a Fresher studying for a BA at Strathclyde University. I barely knew Glasgow then; travelling from my dad's house in Chapelton on the number 70 bus to Cathedral Street, most days I had lunch in the coffee shop in Fraser's or the Kardomah cafe on Buchanan Street. The boundaries of my experience of the city were marked by the old La Scala cinema on Sauchiehall Street (now Waterstone's) on one side and Candleriggs Market on the other.
Every Little Thing She Does by the Police was Number One. Also in the charts: Altered Images's Happy Birthday (a Glasgow band at Number Two!); Labelled with Love by Squeeze; Under Pressure by Bowie and Freddie; and the Jam's Absolute Beginners (I'm still two years away from reading Colin MacInnes and becoming a Jam fan with the Snap! compilation.) A nuclear missile fell 17 feet at the Holy Loch; it carried ten nuclear warheads. Just ten, though. Poland was in crisis and Princess Diana's pregnancy with William was announced.
Here are some of the comics I was buying in the Virgin Megastore or Lewis's in Argyle Street. The first mail-order era was almost over for me:
I was really shocked by the YJ storyline; and is that really Phoenix in the Rangers?!
(No, it turned out to be a cosmic waste disposal error)
I really liked the costume design for Kismet (above) and The Vanguards were a one-off trio of sci-fi heroines
The Titans were a huge hit for DC at the time, perhaps even eclipsing the X-Men and Miller's Daredevil. I was drawing and writing stories of my own team of Edinburgh-based superheroes, The Protectors (Horus! Terra! The Lynx! Black Belt!-er, not very Scottish, although their HQ was in the Castle Rock). I'd dreamed them up that spring, walking the dogs. They were very heavily influenced by Wolfman and Perez, Dial H and, of course, Doctor Who.
Five Faces was such a significant event because it gave Who fans a chance to see b/w tv stories from the Sixties. There had been. of course, regular Dr. Who repeats during the mid-to-late Seventies, usually on weekday evenings in summer. Big hits like The Robots of Death or slightly more surprising selections like The Sun Makers. But November 1981 was my first opportunity to see An Unearthly Child in its entirety for the first time in my life.
I've written here and on MySpace before about the late Monday afternoon lectures on Communication (which would now be labelled Media Studies) in the Royal College and the hour or so it took for my bus to climb out of Glasgow to the glaciated, mossy fields of South Lanarkshire on those dark, autumn nights. I had set up a cassette recorder next to myb/w portable tv to tape the soundtrack of each episode.
Eight months earlier, Tom Baker had plunged from that radio relescope and regenerated into Peter Davison. It's easy to deride John Nathan-Turner for the campery and froth of mid-80s Doctor Who, which sits uneasily next to Eric Saward's penchant for macho gunplay and body horror. But JNT was a tireless promoter for the show and keeping it in the public eye during the long gap between seasons with a series of classic repeats was an inspired decision.
As someone who was being exposed to older tv texts as part of a Post-Structuralist degree course, I was conscious of the cultural merit of Five Faces but as an overly-earnest early Eighties Who fan, it was simply thrilling. Five four-part stories were screened for five weeks, at 5.40 on BBC2; this was a couple of years before 24-hr broadcasting in the UK and although the early-evening time slot was ideal for kids, it wasn't so much for students and working people: hence the tape recordings. Domestic VHS recorders were also very rare- it was largely schools and colleges that utilised them.
Here's the line-up, in transmission order:
Despite kindling a thirty-year love affair with the Krotons ("Direck-shun poiiiiint?") I'm not going to discuss these particular stories at this time in "Place". Instead, I want to commemorate the season with a short series of blogs that will take us up to this year's Doctor Who Christmas Special. Each post will look at new adventures of various Doctors or dvd presentations where appropriate. We can't have an Eleven Faces season because of a dearth of new material for Doctors Two, Nine and Ten. (Walking to work the other morning, I nearly stepped on the limbless torso of a David Tennant action figure, outside the gourmet chocolate shop. An ignoble end for the most popular Doc since Baker T.)
In cyclical fashion, we're starting with the Eleventh Doctor. I think Matt Smith's portrayal is the most charisimatic since the return of Dr. Who six years ago. I'm not particularly happy with the tone or direction of the series, especially the extensive and distracting focus on River Song (much as I enjoy that character). However, popular genre writer Dan Abnett captures the youthful fizz and fun of Sweetie and the Ponds and pits them against a Classic Sixties Who monster in The Silent Stars Go By
This is a tinselly, festive book, light as air, although a busy October, travelling back and forth to Glasgow, has meant it took me just over four weeks to read. The plot is very, er, familiar: a superstitious peasant culture has arisen from the remnants of a highly technological one. The story then is essentially the same as the 10th Doc book Wooden Heart and the 6th Doc Missing Adventure audio Leviathan. Abnett, however, introduces an element of social comment that's quite apt for kids in an era of imminent double-dip recession: it's all the fault of the rich. Rory Williams-Pond is quite a heroic figure yet again. I wonder if, like me, Abnett finds Amy unappealingly distant and abrasive? Stars is a very accessible if derivative read and the author has a nice turn of phrase. I enjoyed it much more than last year's whimsical Moorcock hardback: eight out of ten Talmars.
I should have followed my own instincts and judgement but on the back of a DWM review, I tried the opening episode of AudioGo's third season of pastiche 4th Doc adventures. The pun-tastic Serpent Crest: Tsar Wars revolves around the clever-clever joke that Michael Jayston played the tsar and Tom Baker played Rasputin in 1971's "Nicholas and Alexandra". In this audio, Tom plays Space Rasputin and the Fourth Doctor. Except, of course, it's Tom playing Tom Baker, the panto septuagenarian who likes to boom "Goodbye, old cock" at aliens. And at the sixty-minute mark, the plot simply seemed to expire.
I haven't enjoyed any previous instalments of this series because I'm not engaged by the approach. I've grown to love Season Seventeen, when my earnest 17-year-old self rejected it as embarassing. But at the core of the self-indulgence and spoofing , there's the wit and intelligence of Douglas Adams. Paul Magrs is a writer and academic who is saturated with intertextuality, who plays games with narrative and language; he seems to have deconstructed Doctor Who Weekly circa 1979 to the extent that it merely sounds parodic. Tsar Wars with its Robotov Empire might have worked well as a comic but the arch dialogue and the drab whimsy seem flat and stilted on audio. I appreciate that Tom may be unwilling to evoke a performance of over thirty years vintage but I hope there's more authenticity in the upcoming Big Finish adventures. And I really don't want to hear Mrs. Wibbsey again. Two out of ten Talmars.
"Tonight's Skybase winning lottery numbers are 19...70...and 2!"
Yes, there is some poor acting; the sets are a bit samey; the message is unsubtle and it's two episodes too long. But it's ambitious and highly imaginative; Jo is terrific and I'm growing to love patrician Pertwee all over again. Seven out of ten Talmars
Next: Eating her curds and whey.
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Regarding La Scala, too many old cinemas in Glasgow with a bit of history to them are now vanished. It's a crime.
ReplyDeleteRegarding Chapelton, I once had an aunt and uncle who lived there (before relocating to EK's old village in the mid-'60s). I remember visiting them one day and passing a cemetery en route, which had an empty birdcage in it. A memorial to someone's dead pet I can only assume.
That was back in 1964 or '65, and I've sometimes wondered over the years if it was still there. Unlikely I know.