Pick a side. The future or the past?

Funny how things get dredged up. I recently got to thinking about a very old idea of mine. I’ll tell you a bit later what jogged my memory. A long while ago – must’ve been four decades at least – I was watching an old Carol Reed movie called Odd Man Out, about an IRA man on the run in 1940s London. Thinking of spies having to lie low – soldiers, that is, but out of uniform – I got to imagining a society that waged war against its own future.

What kind of a war would that be? Well, one way to do it would be old Nazis plotting revenge against a modern, distinctly anti-fascist Germany, but that felt a bit tired. It hardly counts as a war when a bunch of OAPs set fire to a bus stop or daub a swastika on a wall.

I was striving for something more jolting to the audience’s expectations, which probably meant more science fictional. A war against the future suggested society having reached an impasse that only time could break. So should it be sleeper agents in a literal sense, floating underground in suspended animation tanks until the moment came to rekindle the conflict?

Trouble with that, it’s a little like the core premise of Pyramids of Mars, only with a very different skin (or at any rate bitumen-soaked bandages) over the top. Nobody would notice, but I still felt that treating it that way would be wasting the idea. Obviously the best approach would be to have outright time travel, so that armies could pour out of the past to mow down their own descendents. Firing back could be a knotty problem. But done that way it’s not special. You wouldn’t notice that the interesting thing was a society at war with what it had become. The time travel business would overshadow all that.

Sometimes you just can’t see the way to make an idea work. Hitchcock wanted Cary Grant pursued by a tornado across Indiana. “But how can the heavies manufacture a tornado?” asked Ernest Lehman, who actually had to write the damned thing. Hitch settled for a crop-duster, but he wasn’t happy about it. I know how he feels. The war against the future got slung onto that subconscious junk heap of unworkable gems – or unpolishable you-know-whats. And then I came across a couple of brilliant tweets by Paul Cornell that bought it all back.

I lived through Thatcher, and I have to say, this coming General Election is the one, the future or the past.
— Paul_Cornell (@Paul_Cornell) May 27, 2014

So there you are. No need for a Tardis or a cryonic pod. No need even for superannuated reactionaries blowing up their hippy grandchildren to teach them a lesson. The war against the future is interesting when it happens (as it always does) between neighbours, within families, both sides lining up to decide whether civilization should point forwards or backwards. And I knew that. I’ve read about enough revolutions, hot and cold, throughout history. That’s how to write my story. The answer was staring me in the face all along. Maybe it was just too close for comfort.

From Mytek the Mighty to the TARDIS control room

I was delighted and honoured to be invited to appear at CRoM Con Europe, the convention for comics fans and SF/fantasy geeks. Many thanks to Pops Van Sant, our esteemed host, and Glenn B Fleming, UK comics powerhouse, for including me. I got to hold forth about Mirabilis for a bit, describe my visit to the Doctor Who studios back in the Hartnell era, and as an added bonus I got to meet the guys from the Earth Station One podcast. Their back catalogue of episodes will be the soundtrack to my country walks well into the spring.

At one point we got to talking about Wrath of the Gods, a fabulously scary '60s comic strip set in the mythic age of Greece. It was illustrated by the (also mythic) Ron Embleton, of course, not "Ron Pemberton" as I burbled during the podcast. (I'd been chatting about Inside Number 9 recently; that's the only excuse I've got.)

If you want to skip, I come in after about three and half hours, but listen to the whole thing (there's a part two as well) because there are so many fascinating people with stories to tell and wisdom to impart. Talking of which, here's the time Glenn met Jack "King" Kirby:

And if you've just joined us:

Tear jerkers

“Winning? Is that what you think it’s about? I’m not trying to win. I’m not doing this because I want to beat someone … or because I hate someone or because I want to blame someone. It’s not because it’s fun. God knows it’s not because it’s easy. It’s not even because it works because it hardly ever does. I do what I do because it’s right. Because it’s decent. And above all, it’s kind. It’s just that. Just kind. If I run away today, good people will die. If I stand and fight, some of them might live … maybe not many, maybe not for long. Hey, maybe there’s no point in any of this at all, but it’s the best I can do, and I will stand here doing it until it kills me. You’re going to die, too, someday. When will that be? Have you thought about it? What would you die for? Who I am is where I stand. Where I stand is where I fall.”

That, right there, is why I can't sit through an episode of Doctor Who anymore. Because it’s become one long self-indulgent pantomime, all speeches to the audience about how special the character's feelings are. The show is like one of those manufactured glimpses of a celebrity's life that Hello thrives on, endlessly repeated in an increasingly overwrought tone.

Think back to Jon Pertwee's Doctor. Desperate to escape from Earth, often at loggerheads with his companions, he stood for decency too. But the story wasn't slipped in as a subtext to his angst. And he never needed to get up and tell us what he was all about. His actions showed us that.

The sensibilities of YA fiction have taken over a lot of stories today. In effect the characters are adolescents, with everything that happens in the story being about them personally. There was a point to that when it just applied to Buffy and Spider-Man. They were teenagers. But now, God help us, so are James Bond and Superman and the crew of the Enterprise. So we're going to hear a lot more speeches about how hard it is to be a hero, a lot more tear-jerking farewells as the music swells. Moments in which the show can run out in front of the fans and tell them its manifesto. None of it rings true because we know, don't we, that real heroes don't talk about their heroism. But with this storytelling style, truth is the first casualty. Cordelia would get nowhere. Can't heave your heart into your mouth? There’s no place for you in Doctor Who then, love. The paradigm of the hero now is Goneril and Regan, posturing and speechifying to set the lips aquiver and bring big rolling soap-opera tears to the eyes.

It's populism. Yes, that again. Bad enough that it's wrecking politics, now it's taken root in storytelling too. Every season of Doctor Who is like a barrage of self-congratulatory Trump tweets. The show isn't SF drama anymore, it's one extended marketing campaign for itself. “Maybe there's no point in any of this at all – ” Moffat is surely talking there about having to write the same emotional beats month after month. Endless regenerations eventually hitting the Hayflick limit.

The fans just lap this stuff up, of course. The more a show refers to itself, the more they love it. But nothing can thrive on fan support alone. So I'm hoping we'll see a swing towards richer stories that build quality and a sense of character over time. The Whovian equivalent of Breaking Bad. Not flashy and full of quotable fan faves, but a story that quietly reveals itself to be a modern classic. It could still happen.

A fluid link

Not quite a spoiler today, but a teaser. If you've seen Mirabilis season one, you'll know about the Roman paperweight Estelle found in the gardener's shed. (Which is the same place she got the shears she cuts her hair with, as a matter of fact. No Princess Leia granny buns for the Honourable Miss Meadowvane - she pretty much invented the messy-style emo haircut back in 1901.)

I first saw these strange fretwork globes being discussed on Time Team. Yes, they are real archaeological artifacts. You don't need to know that to enjoy our fantasy explanation of them, though, coming up in the Spring book. Fans of H G Wells and Doctor Who will not be disappointed. Now, that would only be a spoiler if I told you which characters actually get to use the full-size version...

Weird tales of old England

Leo and I do a whole bunch of work-for-hire jobs to finance the Mirabilis issues that are what we really care about. Because that's the life of a self-publishing comics team - not too dissimilar to bank robbers working in Starbucks to pay for the acetylene torches, I guess. But every so often we do at least get to work on something we're honestly passionate about. One such project is the Binscombe Tales series of weird tales that we're editing on behalf of Fabled Lands LLP.
My first encounter with the Binscombe Tales was in the late 1980s when John Whitbourn (a very old friend and fellow role-playing gamer) was one of several guests at a ghost story evening chez Morris. We had a nice dinner, a little fine wine, and settled down around the fire to entertain ourselves with some cosily spooky stories; an activity that mankind has only been doing for - what? - twenty thousand years and more.
Then John got up and produced the story he'd brought, the first (as it later turned out) of an ongoing series. As he read, a chill dark hand closed over the group. We were transported to a suburban street under dim street-lamps, hurrying past with just a nervous glance across the road at an ordinary but suddenly sinister bus shelter. With the final words, you could hear the sigh of long-held breath and we looked around at each other with that bright-eyed smile that says you know you've just had the bejasus scared out of you. Everyone that evening had come armed with a tale to tell, and there were talented, experienced writers there, to be sure, but there was no disputing who was the storytelling king of the fireside.
"Waiting for a Bus", the story that gave such a shudder to those dinner party guests who were privileged to hear it first, was picked as one of DAW's World's Best Fantasy Stories of the very next year. It has been widely anthologized since, as have other Binscombe Tales. Everyone who reads one of these stories will immediately recognize a fresh and authentic voice in English horror-SF-fantasy. And yet, until now, only a small cult readership has experienced the special delights, dreads and wonders of the Binscombe Tales series. Originally issued as limited-edition hardcovers thirteen years ago, the books are now out-of-print and fiercely sought by collectors.
These are stories in the tradition of Clarke's White Hart and Pratt & de Camp's Gavagan's Bar - themselves inspired, no doubt, by the tall tales of A J Alan and Dunsany's Jorkens yarns. John Whitbourn's stories are inventive, often whimsical, but unlike those earlier series there is a real bite to them. The Binscombe Tales will entertain you, but also they will unsettle you. Characters and relationships develop, usually not quite as you expect. The crackling fire and the convivial clink of glasses in the Duke of Argyll (the Binscombe local) often disguises a pitiless disregard of strangers' wellbeing. As a writer, John Whitbourn has bags of originality (check out his story "Hello Dolly", in the Fifth Book of After Midnight Stories, which happened to precede Amy Pond's domestic nightmares by well over a decade) and he is gifted with a compelling and engaging narrative voice; but it is that lacing of stark truth that, for me, elevates the Binscombe Tales out of genre into literature.
Well, connoisseurs of the uncanny, the outré, the darkly surreal and the just plain odd need look no further. In a few short months, Fabled Lands Publishing will issue the complete Binscombe Tales in a three-volume print edition and a set of Kindle chapbooks too. And in the process, Leo's and my comics "fighting fund" will be topped up with the wherewithal to see us safely through another three or four issues of Mirabilis. Doing well while doing good, I call that.

The day I met a Dalek

It wasn’t the winter of the Big Freeze, with its twenty foot snowdrifts and the sea turning to ice. That was the year before. But car heaters didn’t count for much in those days – not in our big old refrigerator-doored grey Wolseley, anyway. So it must have been very cold that January night. But discomfort doesn’t matter, of course, to a boy who’s going to meet a Dalek.

Television Centre burned with lights. It wasn’t three-quarters empty then. The curved face of the building made me think of opening the Tardis doors to find an alien city. There had only been half a dozen episodes of Doctor Who broadcast, but already most things made me think of the Tardis. The real raw London wind, as my dad led me across the BBC car park, was not so chilling as that low, mournful soughing in the boughs of a petrified forest. No hum of traffic thrilled like the radiophonic pulse of a Dalek control room. Six years old, and I already knew that my natural home was the world inside the head.

Daleks. It was as if I’d been waiting for them. Like they were an inevitable discovery, not something somebody had just dreamed up. And meeting one for real – that didn’t seem then, as it does to me now, like the most incredible and lucky privilege. It seemed like it was naturally bound to happen.

Dad was an electrical engineer and in early 1964 he was doing design work for the BBC. Not on Doctor Who itself – that really would have been proof of a benevolent god – but some complicated stage machinery for Billy Cotton. His friends in the workshops may have included Ray Cusick – not a name anybody knew back then, even though Terry Nation was already my J K Rowling.

“DAL to LEK,” said Dad as we crossed the cavernous workshop with its pitted green lino floor. “So that’s one volume to cover A to C and then another for the next nine letters?”

“But, Dad, it’s true. It said so in the paper.”

Beyond the shelves full of wire and brown boxes of rivets was a wide space between drill-lined workbenches. Sharp parings of aluminium littered the floor. A group of men in long beige work-coats waited for us there. They parted and I got my first glimpse of it. You just can’t add a Dalek to a real-life scene without causing a tingle at the back of the scalp, even back then when they’d had two or three appearances at most. Its presence behind the group made them seem for a moment like prisoners.

Dad and his friends went off to talk shop, leaving me with the Dalek. Maybe it was ten minutes, though it could have been hours and still not enough. I was never the kind of kid to go in like Flynn with a new toy. I probably walked around it dozens of times just brushing the surface with my fingers. Details remain sharp nearly fifty years later. The hemispheres down the side – bobbles, as I called them – are my first memory of light blue. Anything that I’d seen of that colour previously was overwritten. A neural map of my brain at that moment would have seen it glowing like the LHC, counting and memorizing the panels on the sides, the metal bands, the Perspex disks behind the eye. The lights – ping pong balls, I think – that flashed when the Dalek was speaking. The ball joints on which its limbs swivelled.

The eye itself, that was a gaze thrilling to meet. I knew the alien mind that lay behind it like my own. I had to look up to meet its eye, the same way a Dalek looked up at Thals and humans. It was part of the key to its psychology, that small hectoring thing ranting with tinny hysteria as it swung its eye-stalk up to scrutinize you.

The gauze grille around the head was easy to see through with the light behind it, making the casing look disturbingly hollow. I pulled at the sucker arm and it telescoped out and out. So far! A Dalek could reach out and grab you from right across a room.
It wouldn’t need to, though. Because there was the gun. What an artefact of absolute perfection. A design that expressed alien violence, cell-smashing radiation, extermination. A device that would flip you like a negative and leave you without a spark of life. Oh, I wanted one.

The adults came back and one of them lifted the top off. The casing divided below the torso, the head and arm section coming away to reveal a plain wooden interior with a little seat.

“You could sit inside it,” suggested Dad, but I didn’t want that. I preferred the Dalek interior that I saw in my mind’s eye: something small, vulnerable and fearful surrounded by electronics and armour, gazing out at the world through a screen. With a gun. With that gun.

“I’ll make you one,” said Dad as we drove home. I didn’t even need to tell him; he just knew. And fifty years later, I realize I was the luckiest boy ever.

Darkness is too easy

Back when I was working in games I saw a lot of concept pitches. If you’re picturing the likes of Pikmin or Ico or LittleBigPlanet – well, that would’ve been a job to get in early for. Instead, what actually seemed the most common effusion of the collective unconscious was a succession of dark, edgy takes on something like Alice in Wonderland or The Wizard of Oz.

In these pitches, Alice/Dorothy had usually gone psycho, confined to a mental asylum, her family dead or abducted by stark horrors that had pursued her from Wonderland/Oz. And from there it’s a paint-by-numbers to decide what had become of the Tin Man (cyborg), Cowardly Lion (serial killer), Scarecrow (cyborg serial killer) and so on. Those same writers would even have pitched Dark Pooh if Disney weren’t standing guard over Hundred Acre Wood with a very big stick indeed.

The reason why that’s such a heart-sink is not because I don’t like stories with a bit of darkness. More than a bit, in fact. My fave comic of all time is Sandman. No wait, it’s Watchmen. No, maybe it’s Swamp Thing. Whatever – all of those had darkness but they had light, beauty and humanity too. And, in the case of Sandman, real sweetness.

But plain unadorned darkness is just too facile. My wife Roz used to ghostwrite a middle-grade action-adventure series for a brand name author. The heroes were mid-teen crime fighters but the readership was centered on 10-12 year olds, meaning that sex and violence were mostly just hinted at. Over dinner one evening, for fun, Roz and I envisaged a YA version of the series, revisiting the characters a couple of years on and going right into the abyss with them. The kid whose obsession with computer hacking had given him a dangerously detached view of justice. The one who achieved his dream of joining the army but quickly became traumatized by the realities of modern warfare. The rich one, who had hardened and become arrogant working for her father…

In a dark pit struggling to reach the light. It almost writes itself. Trouble is, that’s so easy to do. And nothing good in writing is accomplished with ease.

As well as being the lazy writer’s option, a story of unremitting darkness is tonally boring. It’s way harder to write hope and humor and humanity alongside the horrors – which is why I value TV shows like Buffy, Fringe and Doctor Who. Yet in comics these days we so often see the stories copying the least original videogames, with heroes constantly being maimed or disfigured or driven mad. And, trust me, relentless twentysomething angst is not the way for comics to tap back into a broad market.

The best of the horror comics have heroes who are surrounded by darkness but who haven’t got darkness in their souls: Hellboy, B.P.R.D., even (believe it or not) John Constantine. And the authors of those books don’t gratuitously wallow in the darkness of their stories; they remember they are telling underworld myths that must lead the heroes back to the surface world. Like Alice, emerging from the rabbit hole disturbed, enchanted, altered – a far more interesting fate than simply being forever scarred.

Stories - how long is too long?

How do you know when it’s time to bring the curtain down on your characters? I got to thinking about this because Kevin McGill of the edutainingly brilliant Guys Can Read was lamenting this week what a damp squib the Smallville finale turned out to be.

I haven’t seen many episodes of Smallville, but after ten seasons there are only two places a show can end up. Two different kinds of whimper that can supplant the bang of a timely end. One is when the show runs out of steam. You keep tuning in because you care about those characters, but you know they’re not going to be hitting balls out of the park ever again. Case in point: the final season of Babylon 5. That wasn’t Mr Straczynski’s fault, but it was still an exhausted winding down, best forgotten, of what had been at times the most exciting SF show on television.

Or the show can spiral into the sucking singularity that is narrowcasting. I’m a devoted Buffy fan, but I’m not sure that anyone could pick it up at the start of season seven and have any idea what was going on. I began to get a whiff of the narrowcasting bouquet this week with the Doctor Who fan discussions (in which I took part, got to admit that) about whether or not Rory is still an Auton. And if that means nothing to you – okay, you got it; that’s narrowcasting.

Stories have an end, even when they’re about characters we really love. You may not want to admit it, but your parents’ story ends when you leave home. After that it’s all reunion shows – usually “The One with the Cranberry Sauce”. And endless reunion shows are fine for real people whom you love, but in the case of fictional characters then it really is time to boot them off Reichenbach Falls.

The Norse gods had Ragnarok. The British Empire had World War Two. Beowulf had his dragon. The end dignifies what came before, and sometimes redeems it. Stories need endings. At the close of a well-crafted tale you should be sad to leave the characters – even the bad ‘uns – but you know it’s right. Their story is over. “I feel… cold,” says Captain Barbossa, and it’s such a brilliant culmination of everything that’s gone before that it ought to be the end. Only the magical might of Calypso and the million-dollar demands of Disney could undo so absolutely essential a demise.

Ongoing comic book sagas risk the calamity of too long a life more than most. Sandman is great because it built to a definite conclusion. If we properly cherish what we were given in Watchmen, we won't ask to read the ongoing adventures of Nite Owl and Silk Spectre. Conversely, at a full century of issues, even the freshness of 100 Bullets was starting to feel more than a little stretched out. Knowing when to take a last bow is the mark of an effective performer.

Because of this, Leo and I are resolved that Mirabilis will run to issue #40 and sufficit. After the green comet has gone and normal service is resumed with the beginning of the real year 1901, whatever happens to our characters after that is up to you. Gentle breath of yours must fill their sails - Shakespeare thereby acknowledging, as he threw aside his pen for good, that ultimately all great stories are merely enablers for the reader’s own imagination.

Stay in your seats

Now that we're gearing up to get the Gazetteer completed before the end of the year, it's an opportunity to go through the files and admire some of the incredible paintings Martin has already done for it. Try this one - an hommage to the classic Dr Who adventure "Talons of Weng Chiang", as well as a salutary lesson to the stage magicians of the Edwardian music hall not to put on too spectacular a performance in a year when the miraculous is as common as card tricks. Derren Brown would get burned at the stake!

Ain't broke

Well, I say it ain’t broke - but the voices, they’ve broken, haven’t they? Big and deep equals scary, obviously. We all know that, especially if we’re in marketing. And tall. Tall is threatening. Really, really tall. And big, like those Cybermen toys that sold so well last Christmas. When you think about it, why didn’t all the early Who team, people like Verity Lambert – why didn’t they get that? Big, tall, deep voiced. Like a Bad Dad. And easy to package so it fits on the shelves at Toys-R-Us. Golly, it’s a wonder the Daleks ever got going without ticking those boxes, isn't it?

That’s the committee view. It took one man to create the Daleks, and one man to design them, and after half a century it’s taken a committee to bugger them up. There are criticisms of the Daleks' brief off-screen appearance in the Paul McGann movie, but at least the producers of that understood what made the Daleks the best sci-fi villains of all time. Listen to them shrieking for the Master’s blood. They’re like angry children. Shrill, self-centered, hysterical. The Daleks are paranoid. They’re fanatics. You can’t reason with them. That’s why they’re scary.

I mean: why they were scary. Now that they’re big and gruff and pantomimey, you wait and see: the stories will all be about puncturing that pomposity. Don't worry children, there's no bully in the world that you can't see off if you just show him a bit of cheek. “Here’s a biscuit, I’m going to blow up your ship with it.” Rubbish - you can’t do any deal with a Dalek. You can’t say, “What do you mean?” and have it say, “I don’t understand.” They don’t engage with other life-forms that way (that’s their weakness, incidentally). They don’t bother with threats and boasts: “Pest control” – lazy writing, that; just prole-pleasing. To talk like that means you are engaging with the other person, that you have some inkling (and care) how he thinks. But it's when we come up against the wall through which connection cannot flow that, with a prickle of dread, we realize we are dealing with the Other.

The scariest thing about Daleks: they are untroubled by doubt. Put a floppy-haired schoolboy with a fake-blokey accent up against a Taliban theology student, see how much of a meaningful dialogue you’d get then. Turn the Taliban teenager up to eleven and give him a gun. Hate is all about fear. “Conquer and destroy”, geddit?

Look at what the Daleks were up to in The Invasion of Earth. Robotizing people, burning out their brains to enslave them. That’s creepy shit, man. Those little bastards were evil and relentless. Hate and fear were all they knew. Even the movie version, dumbed down and jokey, couldn’t help but deliver some real chills. Now we have “running to and fro" stories that are full of twaddle about DNA and empty threats and bloodlines and blowing up walking bombs and – yawn. It's like a Marvel crossover on fifteen double espressos. When did the Daleks cease to have a plan? When the writers ceased to have a clue.

It’s easy to knock the BBC. Well, it is if they make decisions on the basis of bone-headedness and greed. The new Dalek design was apparently imposed by order of BBC Marketing, who want more toys to sell. Allowing marketing to drive content is always a mistake (and, ironically, it's usually a commercial mistake as much as a creative one) but this is particularly iniquitous in Britain because of the TV Licence Fee, a form of poll tax levied on UK households if they want to watch any live television broadcasts, whether supplied by the BBC or another network. This makes the British viewing public the primary investor in the BBC itself; therefore to treat them as gullible punters who you can fleece of a tenner for a crap plastic toy is really unforgivable.

The one glimmer of intelligence in the whole sorry spectacle may be the message in a bottle Mark Gatiss planted, presumably after seeing exactly what the committee had cooked up to emerge from the magic cabinet – er, DNA replicator thingy: “We're talking about a totally outrageous paradigm.” Hmm, I know I’ve heard those words before...

Well here, for a generation who may never know, is an example of how single-minded the Daleks really were. “Every problem has a solution.” Yep, except the problem of the BBC committee.

SUSAN: Can't we stop them? Can't we do anything?
DOCTOR: Just a moment! I haven't told you how we came to this planet.
DALEK: It does not matter now.
DOCTOR: But…but it does! I have a ship capable of crossing the barriers of space and time. Surely this would be invaluable to you?
DALEK: A ship? What do you mean?
DOCTOR: A machine.
DALEK: I do not believe you.
DOCTOR: But I have!
SUSAN: It's true! We have!
DALEK: You are not capable of creating such a machine.
DOCTOR: You took a part of my ship away from one of my companions - the young man.
DALEK: What did it look like?
DOCTOR: A small rod with metal at either end. It belongs to my ship. A fluid link containing mercury. Examine it for yourselves. You will see it's part of a complicated machine.
DALEK: Yes, I have it here.
DOCTOR: Well, let me show you the ship, explain it to you, help you to build another.
DALEK: A bargain for your lives?
DOCTOR: Yes.
DALEK: Where is this machine?
DOCTOR: In the petrified forest outside the city.
DALEK: Good. When the neutron operation has been completed, we will find a way to travel outside the city limits.
DOCTOR: No!
FIRST DALEK: We will examine your machine.
DOCTOR: No! Not unless you stop what you're doing. Otherwise, I won't explain its secrets to you and its philosophy of movement.
DALEK: Now that we know of the machine, we can examine it for ourselves.
DOCTOR: But you can't operate it without me!
DALEK: Every problem has a solution.

Russell T Davies talks about Doctor Who

I have to admit that Doctor Who is not nowadays, for me, absolute must-see TV. That's no reflection on the show itself, just that it is after all the apotheosis of broad-appeal British light entertainment whereas the few television dramas I go for tend to be US cable output. But I do often find something to enjoy in Who when I see it (when they're not mucking up the Daleks, anyway). And I have great admiration for Russell T Davies, a writer who knows exactly what he's doing and has the chops to pull it off.

In particular, he's succeeded in bringing a depth of feeling to the drama - an emotional dimension that used to be treated quite sketchily, if at all, in the old days. Few TV writers are better at adroitly interplaying "the determination of incident" and "the illumination of character" as Henry James put it.

The main lesson I try to learn from RTD is to tell my stories with pizzazz and showmanship. If old Who was watched from behind the sofa, new Who is definitely on the edge of the seat. Here's an edited interview Davies gave at BAFTA where he talks about his impressive regeneration of the series.

That said, I suspect the show will be more to my taste next season with Stephen Moffat in charge. Allez, Monsieur Davies!

Strange planets in a strange galaxy

This is a selection of my colourisation work. I use no industry software, no clever computer programs and no automated processes. It is just me being artistic painting each frame of video one at a time, This video represents months of work, so do please like it and share it. pic.twitter.com/wxKuqZbT8T

— BabelColour (@StuartHumphryes) August 25, 2018

Talking of larger-than-life characters, there were few bigger or badder than Bill Hartnell's Doctor in his prime. Here was the archetypal Trickster figure, sabotaging his own ship just to have an excuse to visit the mysterious metal city on the edge of the petrified forest. And see how well that worked out.

Playing the Doctor as a cross between Odin and Loki, Hartnell gave us an inquisitive, irascible, haughty, ruthless, twisty old rascal - quite unlike the lead in any other TV drama, and certainly a million miles away from the action hero with magic - er, sonic - wand that those BBC morons have turned him into. Oh, there I go again. Ahem. Sorry.

Anyway, here's some rather nice colorization work by Stuart Humphryes of some of those episodes from the Hartnell years - the ones the BBC didn't erase, that is. It's interesting to see how striking some of the shot compositions were (pretty amazing, in fact, seeing as they were turning out a new episode every week throughout the year) and it reminds me that, before his memory problems became too obvious, Hartnell played the least pantomimey of all the Doctor's incarnations, apart perhaps from the great Paul McGann.

Btw all this discussion of compelling Trickster-figures just makes me think how much I would love to be living in the timeline where Robert Carlyle took the part. Sigh.

The idiocy of the system

At the height of its early-70s success, with millions tuning in every week to watch first Jon Pertwee and then Tom Baker at the hexagonal console, Doctor Who was nonetheless facing a budget squeeze. At the time, a BBC executive was rolled out sometime between lunch and the cocktail hour to explain that, although Doctor Who was a drama series, it was paid for by the Light Entertainment department, don't you see, so really it's a bit of a drain on resources and all that. Oh go on, then, just a small one.

I remember thinking, “Why don’t you just pay for it out of the drama budget, then?” How naïve I was. As if that simple solution wouldn’t have occurred to the big swinging dickheads at the Beeb. The problem was that nobody actually had the ability or the will to make it so. The system had defeated them, the BBC corporate structure itself, like one of those huge computers from old sci-fi pictures that takes over the world and nobody can shut it down.

Prof Thomas Schatz wrote a book, The Genius of the System, in which he argued that Hollywood in its heyday benefited from a structure that allowed commercial creativity to thrive. And it makes sense. Corporations are like artificial intelligences. They have directives, criteria for selecting goals, and protocols for how to achieve them.

More often than genius, though, we get to experience the idiocy of the system. A petrochemicals company dumps waste into the ocean despite a daily fine of $1 million, and everybody says that’s stupid, that’s evil. Well, the company is just an AI. It calculates the cost of refining the waste and weighs that against the fine. $1m is small change, so sploosh.

Paul Mason (whose wife Keiko is currently preparing the Japanese version of Mirabilis episode one; thank you, Keiko) mentioned something in an email that gives a perfect illustration of the idiocy of a system:

“Our television is network-capable, but I can't see any point in connecting as all the technological effort seems to have gone into the DRM preventing the network connection being used to show free content. Which is easy to show by simply connecting a computer up to the TV.”

Likewise, book publishers are expending effort on DRM and going to expensive junkets – er, conferences - on “the digital future” and they aren’t getting the point either. It’s not a digital future, it’s a digital now. They are trying to figure out ways to slot electronic publishing alongside print, or use it as a kind of lead-in to print. Bzz – WRONG. Now, okay, print isn’t dead, whatever you’ve heard to the contrary, but it’s just one part of the whole and it’s going to be at the prestige end at that. The publishers need to get to grips with electronic “books” (in many forms) as the broad and overwhelming majority of what their business will be - and to understand that any attempt you make at imposing artificial controls on content will simply drive the market elsewhere.

The media are changing. But the systems are all old and stupid. They were built for a different world – the world of bookshops and DVD stores and broadcast television. They don’t know how to cope when content can be delivered digitally across an international network. The necessary change cannot come at the lower levels: the individual nationally-based networks or publishers. It has to come right from the top, from the media conglomerates that bought up all these pieces and now need to break them down and rebuild them into a completely new structure.

Oh for a Tardis to show them all this. But would it make a difference? There are plenty of clever people in TV and book publishing and games. They all know about the meteor that’s about to hit the media industries. But the companies themselves only have dinosaur brains. Can they adapt, or will they have to undergo the most drastic motor of evolution we know of: extinction?

Every problem has a solution!

Okay, so I know this is the Year of Wonders and not Skaro, but I had to put in a link to this feature on Down the Tubes about a Dalek TV series that never got made. (It was posted up around my birthday, when I was having my first beer since New Year's Eve - hence the long hangoverish delay in flagging this up.)

I actually did try (here's hubris) to get a Dalek TV movie going with the Sci-Fi Channel. This was before Russell T Davies's reimagining of Doctor Who, so not quite as long a shot as it sounds - the Daleks hadn't been on air for years. But Nation's agent explained that the BBC, although not actually having the rights, could stick their oar in to any production involving Daleks. Well, I've had some dealings with the BBC and I knew enough to drop the idea right there...

I'd heard years ago that Nation spent a while trying to get a Dalek series going in the USA, and that the stage play on which "Power of the Daleks" was based (see earlier post) had originally been written to pitch that. I assume the idea would have been to follow the history of the Daleks, along the lines taken by the Dalek comic strip in TV21.

I know at least one six-year-old who would have given every penny of his pocket money from then till the present day to see that ;)

You know, for kids

Ian Chesterton had already jumped across the chasm but he was roped to Antodus, the cowardly Thal, who of course made a hash of it, slipped and fell, almost dragging Ian down with him.

Now it wasn't actually Ian, it was Roy Castle, but I was willing to look past that for the pleasure of Daleks. In colour. On a very big screen. And just as he had in the original, Antodus sucked it up and sawed through the rope holding him, allowing Ian to scramble up to safety.

And then... and then... we heard a plaintive cry from below. Antodus was clinging to a rock and there were smiles all round as he plaintively called up, "Hey, get me out of here."

Smiles all round? From Roy and co maybe, not from me. I was outraged. I'd watched the TV version when I was six years old, and with all the Biblical ruthlessness of children I expected Antodus to fall to his death in the movie version too, his fear of everything redeemed by that one act of self-sacrifice. Even though it was Roy Castle he was saving, not the real Ian, that moment of courage meant something. Having him live meant something too... it meant the movie producers were treating me like a little kid.

It scarred me forever, that little bit of bowdlerization. Which is a good thing btw. We are nothing without our psychic scars; like Kirk, I need my pain. That particular scar means that I will never, ever voluntarily patronize my readers. Children respond to honesty in storytelling. Doctor Who was dark, bleak, fascinating and often violent. You want pratfalls and cosy outcomes? Go see a pantomime.

When I'm writing for kids, I'm writing for the kid I was. And kids like me like it without sugar-coating.