In his essay on Lovecraft, Michel Houellebecq writes:
To create a great popular myth is to create a ritual that the reader awaits impatiently and to which he can return with mounting pleasure…
It occurred to me, after watching the recently broadcast Doctor Who story, The End of Time, that Doctor Who is just such a ritual. It is something that in many ways is becoming more difficult in the modern world – a ritual of shared national experience. (Perhaps the 'national' part of that statement seems vaguely distasteful these days, but it were not so, if I were speaking falsely, then there would have been no scene in the abovementioned story in which Bernard Cribbins re-enacts World War Two by shooting at things with some sort of thinly-veiled ack ack gun.) The ritual of shared experience, of course, was, for a long time, the very meaning of television, in Britain, when there were so few channels you could count them on the fingers of one hand and have digits to spare.
If Doctor Who is one of the few things that remains in that tradition of ritually shared experience, that roller coaster ride of common values, it also occurred to me that, if I ever could, I can no longer share in that ritual.
I've just looked up a clip from the old Doctor Who:
Watching this now, I realise how utterly hopeless is the task – if I were to take it on – of trying to convince a modern audience that the old Doctor Who is superior to the new. Nonetheless, I believe that to be the case. A modern audience would see, first of all, a low budget, and… last of all, a low budget, and… it's not just that though. If it were just that, the implication would be that the only virtue of the old show was a low budget.
Let's run through it. First of all we see some kind of furry, anthropomorphic lion-thing passing a paw over the head of another lion-thing, this one supine. Perhaps this looks absurd, but I'm not sure it's any more absurd than the prickly aliens in The End of Time. I think that, rather than relative absurdity, what might turn off a modern audience is precisely what attracts me, the fact that the atmosphere that prevails is not in the absolute mainstream of fashion. There is an eerie, uncomfortable feeling here that one could never encounter in the new Who, simply because the committee behind the new Who is so intent on airbrushing out absolutely everything that might alienate the average reader of FHM or whatever the female equivalent is these days.
Incidentally, part of this eerie quality comes from the music, which is distinctly leftfield compared to the bombastic symphonic music of the new series.
Next, the Doctor, Romana and one of the lion-things walk through some abstract 'special effect' that is, in fact, E-space, to the Tardis, and a farewell scene takes place. I could go on here about how much I love the background, how it actually feels like the action is taking place in some sort of abstract environment (would Plato's realm of forms have a similar background, for instance?), but these subtle aesthetic points are very difficult to explain, and perhaps I can best say everything I want to by talking about the farewell, anyway.
The farewell scene, for the character of Romana, who was leaving the show, takes approximately thirty-two seconds.
I'm sure that there is an episode of Tom Baker's Doctor Who somewhere in which the Doctor says, "I hate protracted goodbyes." The Doctor was always trying to slip off without saying goodbye, in fact. (I have just Googled the phrase, "I hate protracted goodbyes", but Google draws a blank here.) I have seen Tom Baker talking about this episode and his farewell with Romana, and he spoke about how it was very sad for him that Romana was leaving the show, but that in his acting he was doing the very British thing of "playing against the lines". If you have a sad line to deliver, why labour the fact that it is sad? Why telegraph? If it's truly sad, the audience will know without being told. To me there is a kind of edginess to this scene because the goodbye is obviously hurried and so much is left unsaid. The sadness was, in a sense, off-camera, with the viewer, and with the actors. It was unspoken but understood.
Compare this to the goodbye at the end of The End of Time. It is incredible to me that something so emotionally contrived, so mawkish, so syrupy and drawn-out, could still be considered the very cutting edge of family entertainment. It seems we were told in advance that we would need tissues for this episode (in the Radio Times?). The very idea of being told to cry at Doctor Who is offensive and alien to me. Doctor Who was never meant to be weepy. It was a whimsical and weird adventure show with rubber aliens, and if you did cry, as a child, because someone left the show, it was simply because you loved the show so very much, not because someone had told you to cry and had brought out the violins.
Not long ago, a friend of mine, asking me for my impressions of the U.S. since I have been a few times, told me of someone else he had known who had found Americans "emotionally feeble". I suppose he was talking about the kind of thing that one sees on shows like Oprah Winfrey and so on. I can't say that it was a phrase that particularly rang bells with my own experience of the U.S. However, if the new Doctor Who really is a representative ritual of shared national experience in Britain, then it is certainly a phrase I would apply to this country in our current century.
The Doctor always hated protracted goodbyes, but the protracting of goodbyes is the very essence of the new show.
Emotionally feeble.
And in this ritual I cannot share.
A case in point was Rose Tyler's farewell from the show… or was it Donna Noble's big forgetting of everything? It all blurs into one big orgy of touchy-feely mawkishness. I think it was the latter, actually. Myself and a certain Mr. Wu had watched the episode, and been unimpressed. Immediately after it had finished, Mr. Wu was telephoned by someone who asked what we had thought, and he relayed our general lack of enthusiasm. He was greeted by the rather wonderful response, "You have the heart of a German Dalek."
Hmmm.
Well, I'm afraid, as far as the ritual of the new Who goes, I must number myself not amongst the members of this nation, but as one with German Daleks everywhere.
My goodbyes have already been said. The world to which I belonged has already gone. Its passing was not telegraphed and nobody noticed.
Goodbye to that world.
"You were the noblest Romana of them all!"
Quentin – Just ordered a book I fancied after a review in the Sunday Times – City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s by Edmund White – what caught my eye and I and thought of you was a quote from Capote to White where he says – “you will no doubt become a good writer, but it’s a horrible life” – is that true? If so why? Rob
Quentin – Yes I understand – apologies for not relating my post to the subject matter of your original post – HP Lovecraft interests me greatly however – I’ll have another read later and respond better – although through luck rather than judgment I see my comment is connected however obliquely …
Hello Rob.I can’t speak for Capote on that one, but I can give my own answer. To give my answer, I must make the assumption that I’m a good writer. An assumption that anyone has to make if they are not to give up writing altogether, anyway, though giving up may not be a bad thing.I was actually just speaking to someone about this very thing earlier today. I don’t write with the principle in mind that it is bad to be popular. I would like what I write to be popular, and I write what excites me most, or try to. As the years pass, however, I increasingly find that what excites and interests me is precisely what turns off most of the reading public. I could go into great detail about this, but one very simple way of putting it is this: If you try to do something different and interesting in music, although it might mean that you are not a superstar on the scale of Madonna, people will be interested precisely because you are doing something different, and you will be able to make a name for yourself and even make a living. If you try to do something different and interesting in literature, on the other hand, everybody hates you. Publishers hate you, readers hate you, small dogs make a point of biting your ankles, and so on. That is my experience of the matter.There are a handful of people who do appreciate things written by people who actually care about writing, and I, in turn, appreciate their existence, but, sadly for me, they are far too few in number to enable me to support myself by writing.For this reason, my energies being divided between writing and scraping together the money to eat, I have found myself going more or less nowhere in either direction.That would be my own interpretation of Capote’s statement, but there are many other ways it could be interpreted.
I am a big fan of Lovecraft myself.It occurred to me after my last comment that Capote’s reasons may well have been different to mine, depending on when he made the statement. After all, I believe that he was one of the most successful writers alive in his day. Then again, he may not have been thinking of himself as a good writer, or he may not have been anticipating precisely his own fate for Edmund White.But Capote was, apparently, very unhappy, and if the film Capote is anything to go by, this was largely due to his experience of writing In Cold Blood. There are, as I said, many reasons why being a good writer can be bad for a person. In very simple terms, I remember Burroughs writing something along the lines that a writer is always bad news, because, “No trouble, no story.” I think possibly the worst thing about being a good writer today, though, is simply that literature just doesn’t seem to meaning anything anymore in the world at large. There are still good writers out there – they continue to emerge, and to write new works – but it’s hard to get the sense that this is really of any significance to anyone. Having said that, I wonder if it’s even possible to do anything of any significance in music now, either. I don’t think music can ‘matter’ to people any more when they complain nowadays if they ever have to pay for it. That’s the ultimate in disposability.My hope is that our current situation is actually returning us to the way things were before the printing press and before recorded music, when writing and music were, I suppose, less regulated. This may return value to music and literature by making them more a part of the texture of everyday life… by which I mean, by not seperating the means of producing these things so much from those who are the readers and audience. On the other hand, the situation is very different now, and it just seems that things are being taken for granted and that no one really values anything anymore.I’m afraid that’s all a bit jumbled, but I have to do some writing now, before dinner.
I loved the David Tennant Dr., but my intentions are not necessarily pure. I was innocent of Dr. Who until fairly recently, so I am not entirely qualified to comment except to say that the show is fun and sometimes a bit mawkish, as you’ve said. I doubt that I’ll watch further iterations of the Doctor–mainly because I’m stuck on Tennant, and that’s just a matter of taste.As to Americans being ’emotionally feeble’–I think that is VERY true, for the most part. It’s something that has bothered me before and annoyed me on several occasions. We seem to be overgrown children, incapable of experiencing any emotions more complex than what most toddlers have. Our popular culture does nothing to help this, either, or our unquenchable love for happy endings, reasons for everything, and tidy plotlines. Good and Love conquer all, or else we take our toys and go home.Excuse me–I seem to have emerged from a months’-long silence with an excess of things to say…
It does seem to be often – though not always – true, that the first Doctor a person sees, or takes particular notice of, becomes the definitive Doctor for that person. Tennant looked good to me in his debut episode, but ever afterwards I felt I was waiting for him to reveal hidden depths. I still feel that Tom Baker was the most successful at conveying an alien quality. It seems to me that the premise of having an alien as the hero of a show is such a great one that it should really be made the most of, whereas the producer of the new series seems to think it’s innovative to play down that idea, and Tennant has played a very human Doctor as a result. I don’t think he played a human Doctor badly, but it’s been the whole approach that has ultimately turned me off.I can watch the new Who, and have done, but it no longer feels like something that is part of my personal world. If I think too much about the fact that it is supposedly the same show as one of the defining shows of my childhood, which really helped shape my imagination, then I do find myself becoming quite sad. Therefore, it’s just best for me to think that this was Russel T. Davies’ attempt to make a British version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.We seem to be overgrown children, incapable of experiencing any emotions more complex than what most toddlers have. Our popular culture does nothing to help this, either, or our unquenchable love for happy endings, reasons for everything, and tidy plotlines.As intimated in my above post, I’m lucky enough to have had mainly good experiences during the times I’ve been in the States, but that’s not to say I’m enamoured with everything in the culture. I have a strange attraction for the happy-ending thing in Hollywood films, but they have to be reasonably old films for me to find this attractive. In the newer films, it’s just as likely, or perhaps more likely, to annoy me. This is a question of aesthetics, and I’m glad that someone in the world is feeling hopeful, as these films tend to suggest. However, where it becomes objectionable is where people demand their happy ending at the expense of other people, and, unfortunately this attitude has fed into U.S foreign policy. But apparently this century will not be an American century, so we’ll all be complaining about some other country throwing their weight around soon. Possibly.
“Therefore, it’s just best for me to think that this was Russel T. Davies’ attempt to make a British version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”Oh, most definitely!And as you say, it is good to have someone being hopeful in the world–I know it’s not me, ha.Best,Melissa
Michael writes:I have only just read this. Bloody great post Q. I really only watch modern Who to better appreciate Lawrence Miles’s jokes and criticisms about it. But he’s been silent about the finale, apart from a few lines in a sidebar, and you’ve written the essay I expected him to write. I actually swore at the screen when the creature turned up to say ‘Now we will sing you to your sleep.’I also object to the relentless music, which alternates between the video-gamey and the syrupy ‘You must feel emotion.’Also to the boyish, obvious-totty Doctors. I think the DVD of ‘City of Death’ would be one of the things I would bury in a time capsule to represent the lost world and its beauties. All that’s best about Britain comes out of sheds rather than factories.(Apropos of which I hope you saw the BBC4 documentary on Oliver Postgate over Christmas. If not you should see if any of it is on Youtube.)
And as you say, it is good to have someone being hopeful in the world–I know it’s not me, ha.Maybe hope is overrated, anyway. It can be tiring when one is forever being compelled to care about things.I have only just read this. Bloody great post Q. I really only watch modern Who to better appreciate Lawrence Miles’s jokes and criticisms about it. But he’s been silent about the finale, apart from a few lines in a sidebar, and you’ve written the essay I expected him to write.Thank you. Miles’s blog posts though are far more extensive and detailed than my own. (Maybe I should join Twitter, after all, as it might suit my increasingly throwaway style.) This post of his is almost everything you need to know about the new Who:http://beasthouse-lm2.blogspot.com/2009/08/captain-jacks-guts.htmlMy own views differ slightly from his, as I am rather more tolerant of the notion of cult tv (depending on what that means, I suppose) and of nerdism (again, depending on what that means). But I suppose, on these particular points, Miles is writing as something of a professional insider. I think my view of horror fiction changed after I became familiar with a horror writing scene. When I was merely a reader of these things (I suppose I mean horror fiction) there was no need for me to worry about the constrictions (restrictions?) of the scene, because they were not constrictions to me. If I got bored with the genre, I could go elsewhere, or read the good books again. I didn’t have to care about where it was going, and… stuff like that (I’m afraid I’m very tired, and my mind is dull). I have the impression that Miles has experienced constrictive social atmosphere and scene politics analogous to that which has made me rather disillusioned with horror fiction. And he’s probably had much more of his version of this phenomenon than I’ve had of my version, since I’ve tended to keep to myself, actually. Anyway…I was vaguely thinking of doing a blog post on those few things on the Internet I think worth visiting habitually, and Miles’s blog would be on the list.Oh, I didn’t see the Postgate thing. I’ll have to look it up.
Michael writes:I’ve long thought Miles should write a funny novel set in the SF writing/fandom scene, and it sounds like you could do the same for horror.