Harry’s Place

There’s a book in the tradition of english catastrophe novels called ‘the death of grass’ that I thought was rather hard on northeners who even on the point of starvation due to crop failure were still after raping the protagonists southern totty.

Turning right didn’t usher in war-mongering, or that crazy woman PM. Just removed The Doctor from the equation, and Lord of the Flies resulted.

Still strained.

What a dull post. Come on HP. There’s more going on around the world. Get yer heads out of yer arses and get something interesting up there.

Oh yeah the surviving londoners in the film 28 days later
*SPOILERS*

…had a narrow escape from post apocalyptic sex crazed northern soldiers too come to think of it.

In that case, fuck off, BC. No-one is forcing you to read HP.

Yes, Wales-born RTD, who has spent most of his adult life living and working in Manchester, obviously has it in for northerners.

And, of course, “It” could never happen here, not in dear old Blighty. Why, the very notion of us locking-up foreigners in detention camps is… ridiculous.

SOUTH Wales born, which puts him in a bit of a grey area there tbh.

I had no idea that southerners were so contemptuous of northerners. Here, it’s the other way around.

A lot planets have a north to be contemptuous of; although Donna is hardly high class.

Gregg, it was a similar issue over Ama Sumani (I’m sure I’m going to be called history’s greatest monster again). Atrocious as the detention centres are, they are for individuals who have no legal - not moral, as with death camps - status in the UK. Members of precisely the same ethnic or religious or political or social classes may easily be granted residency.

I had no idea that southerners were so contemptuous of northerners. Here, it’s the other way around.

It’s hardly all one way, is it?

Living here in the mid-Atlantic region makes it possible to be contemptuous of both.

We northerners in London are easily spotted. If anyone mentions “Piccadilly” my first thought is of a railway station in Manchester. And I rate Russell T Davies and his contribution to Dr Who.

Okay, this must be a spoof post. I am sure Davies feels duly chastised… not.

The Doctor is the ultimate liberal interventionist.

If he can do something to make a difference, he does.

He fights the totalitarians who want to “upgrade” humanity (i.e. the Cybermen). He vanquishes the totalitarians who want to destroy all those who they regard as inferior (i.e.the Daleks).

so at HP, Neil D who writes small pieces of trite and blinkered shite with neither any intelletual nor entertainment value is criticising Russell T Davies. Funny.

..or intellectual, come to that.

The Doctor is the ultimate liberal interventionist. ..

and he does it without assuming that Ronald McDonald or Reverend PrettyStraightGuywhoShitsCorkscrews are capable and honest brokers who he should throw his weight and the blood of millions behind.

Kotch,

He collaborates with a unit of the British Army!

Kotch, that’s as ludicrous as the title essay. Except those millions of Daleks he killed. And spider-woman he was so keen to watch die that, without Donna, he died himself. And the Vashta Nerada he threatened with a hideous fate because it’d killed someone he liked.

And very good looking some of them were, Neil.

errrm.This is a tea -time childrens show right?

Russell T Davies’ plots sometimes do, from time to time, include slightly heavy handed iterations of bien pensant prejudices. However, they are not so obtrusive that they spoil his episodes.

I don’t think that anything in particular was supposed to be read into the turning right rather than left: it had to be one, and it might just as easily been the other way round. I don’t think he was suggesting that Northerners were more likely to embrace fascism in an emergency, than the Southerners. The “meanies” in the episode were whoever ‘the powers that be’ were, and the Army.

He collaborates with a unit of the British Army!

He co-operates with UNIT - United Nations Intelligence Taskforce, IIRC.

Robin Hood, that really was rubbish.

Alec Macpherson:
Gregg, it was a similar issue over Ama Sumani (I’m sure I’m going to be called history’s greatest monster again). Atrocious as the detention centres are, they are for individuals who have no legal - not moral, as with death camps - status in the UK. Members of precisely the same ethnic or religious or political or social classes may easily be granted residency.

And residency can be withdrawn, and is a matter of government policy and judicial review. And naturalised citizenship remains a matter of Home Office discretion. It’s not hard to imagine a government policy of seperating out naturalised citizens in such changed circumstances. Hell, there’d be nothing to stop the government putting natural born citizens into labour camps - and it came damn close in the 1930s.

Neil D:
He collaborates with a unit of the British Army!

Operating with a UN mandate. ;)

Gregg, there was *nothing* similar to this as the Nazi period. The victims were either fully integrated citizens of the respective countries or no less disenfranchized than others. Saturday’s episode saw selection based only on citizenship and not ethnicity (black African female paratroop?).

Michael Winterbottom, when he was good, did this far more convincingly in Code 46.

Operating with a UN mandate. ;)

As they are now? Remember the first series when the UN vote was tricked into authorizing the use of nuclear release codes.

Remember the first series when the UN vote was tricked into authorizing the use of nuclear release codes.

Groan.

Anyway, I really ought to put on record that I even enjoy Davies’ episodes (I never said he was talentless).

BTW I hear Conor Foley thinks the crimes of the Daleks and Cybermen have been much exaggerated. He’s got a book coming out about it.

To be fair to Conor, he’d be more likely to argue that it was the wider threat from the Daleks and Cybermen which is exaggerated, although their crimes remain terrible in themselves.

The Sontaran, on the other hand, are the anti-imperialists’ gift… manufactured warriors which turn against us.

And, damn it, I claim credit for the Daleks/Cybermen Nazi/Communist comparison!

RTD did Midnight, which was pretty good and apolitical and a more serious attempt to represent the mass-hysteria of the 1930s..

Gregg, there was *nothing* similar to this as the Nazi period. The victims were either fully integrated citizens of the respective countries or no less disenfranchized than others. Saturday’s episode saw selection based only on citizenship and not ethnicity (black African female paratroop?).

I don’t really see your point. The selection was based on immigration, and that seems entirely in keeping with British political trends over the past fifteen years. If They were going to come now - and They’re not, but if They were - then don’t you think They’d come first for the people the media has been demonising, whether they’re refugees (or “asylum seekers” as the Newspeak has it) or economic migrants, for years?

As they are now? Remember the first series when the UN vote was tricked into authorizing the use of nuclear release codes.

Yes, by false claims about weapons of mass destruction.

And, damn it, I claim credit for the Daleks/Cybermen Nazi/Communist comparison!

There are generations of fanzine essayists contacting their lawyers right now.

Yes, by false claims about weapons of mass destruction.

Did the UN vote in approval based on this in this world take place when something was on my back? It was UN mandated, it was legal. What’s the problem?

Furthermore, have nuclear weapons been authorized in this world? The deceit came from the enemy, in the same was that Saddam Hussein
played the inspectors for a game.

The selection was based on immigration, and that seems entirely in keeping with British political trends over the past fifteen years.

Again, it is not the image of their removal from the bosom of the state which I’m objecting to. It’s the death camps.

There are generations of fanzine essayists contacting their lawyers right now.

What really? Great minds think alike.

But the Doctor was himself a Northerner at the start of Series One -he explained his accent to Rose by saying that “Lots of planets have a North”.

I blame the beetle on her back - which was a rather strange aspect of a very enjoyable episode. I also thought that Catherine Tate was very good in this episode. My kids and I are really looking forward to seeing the concluding episodes.

Did the UN vote in approval based on this in this world take place when something was on my back? It was UN mandated, it was legal. What’s the problem?

Well, if it had worked, it would have destroyed the planet so the Slitheen could have sold it for scrap. Which seems like a bit of a problem.

Furthermore, have nuclear weapons been authorized in this world?

We have yet to hand control of them to the UN. AFAIK, anyway.

Again, it is not the image of their removal from the bosom of the state which I’m objecting to. It’s the death camps.

They weren’t called “death camps”, they were called “labour camps”. The notion that one may follow on from the other is there, obviously, because that’s how the process started in Nazi Germany. But it’s not necessarily implicit, and there are other historical parallels. As I said above, Britain did come close to consigning the unemployed en masse to labour camps in the 1930s (we got as far as sending over 100,000 long-term unemployed to such camps for “hardening”, effectively jailing and punishing them for the crime of being unemployed in the midst of an economic depression).

But what are you saying, that rounding immigrants up and carting them off into detention is fine, so long as you aren’t going to kill them?

Whenever RTD writes the episodes they always descend into grand guignol. There is also a strong Messianic strand in the plays, the episode where the doctor went to a hospital-plant run by cat-nuns-nurses, reminded me of ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’, in the scene where all the paralysed and injured beggers emerge from the rocks and sing about being healed. (You can tell I’m a Biblical scholar!!!). I don’t like the Dr being ’sexed up’, Dr Who should be above all that, he should be avuncular and calming, totally dispassionate. On the other hand my husband and kids love it, so who am I to judge? ‘The Empty Child’ storyline was teh stuff of nightmares. The plaintive voice of the child asking ‘Are you my Mummy?’ haunts me still.

Alec

the Daleks=Nazis is pretty old. If you ever watch Genesis of the Daleks (from Tom Baker’s time) you will see the Kaled military dressed in black, clicking their heels together and sieg heiling. Terry Nation’s script ends with alot of the action taking place in Davros’s bunker. Humerously, a young Guy Siner plays a Kaled General (he later was famous for Lt. Gruber in Allo Allo).

I don’t get the Cyberman = communists though. Care to explain your reasoning? I thought it was merely a horrific picture of what happens if we replace our body parts with mechanical parts which is not beyond present medical science now

I also thought that Catherine Tate was very good in this episode.

Catherine Tate has been fairly excellent all series. However, it has to be said that the kids still pine for Martha and Rose, in that order.

I am won over by Catherine Tate.

PS: I know who the new Doctor is going to be. And I’m not telling…

SPGB Gray:

Cyberman think that humanity is perfectable, and set about doing it, whatever the cost. (These are RTD Cybermen - the original ones were just malevolent androids)

Who wrote the recent Oog episode or the one with the creatures made of fat? Both were blatant anti-corporation screeds and the Doctor was so self-righteous at one stage that even Catherine Tate told him to shut the f* up.

The Doctor is the ultimate liberal interventionist.

I would say that he is liberal-left fantasy - he is implicably against violence and ‘the man’, but actually Gets Things Done. You’re right, though, if he was a true lefty he’d just stay at home forming committees with himself.

I’ve just remembered that Aled [1] Jones and Frosty the Snowman ’saw’ a war for oil in that episode. Nazi camps weren’t called death camps either, and it was abundantly clear where the Italians were going. England was not to be for a racially pure English. As I said, RTD made a better stab in Midnight.

I don’t have an original thought in my head, SPGB. Did William Hartnell not take delight in pointing out Jewish poduction crew to the Daleks?

[1] I know it’s a different name in case there’s a Welsh reading

Cyberman think that humanity is perfectable

Next to the Star Trek’s Borg the Cybermen look more closely related to the Tin Man from ‘The Wizard of Oz’ than a tyrannical invasion force.

SPGB, the Cybermen dearly want everyone to be upgraded, but will delete anyone who disagrees.

White Doctor, black Doctor, whichever Doctor catches dalek is good Doctor.

Anyone else catch the bit in the Atmos episode in which the Doctor, wearing a respirator, asks, are you my mummy?

Yes, that was great!

The new Dr Who is the most inane tv I’ve seen in ages. Is that really supposed to be the ebst UK tv offers? I hear its very popular. With who? Morons perhaps.

Its cheap, tacky, some of the worst acting I;ve ever seen and the BBC acts like its some sort of quality tv. That is the joke. Give me US tv dramas anayday such as CSI, Sopranos, The Shield, Deadwood, and Damages (which is bloody brilliant - cant wait for the new series, William Hurt joining the cast).

I would say that he is liberal-left fantasy - he is implicably against violence and ‘the man’, but actually Gets Things Done.

Naah, he always says that he is against violence, but is perfectly happy blowing things up, if he really has to.

There was a distinct hippyish outlook to Doctor Who during the Jon Pertwee years, when the writers were Buddhists or something.

Of course, Tom Baker - in Genesis of the Daleks - refuses on pretty spurious moral grounds to destroy the Daleks at the moment of their creation. Fool!

PS: Leela, the warrior savage companion, was named by writer Chris Boucher after Leila Khaled: the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terrorist

David T: I agree that the Doctor is the ultimate liberal interventionist. Which makes the character of Harriet Jones all the stranger.

Neil D: Without the enlightened residents of London, Northern England becomes a veritable Hobbesian nightmare.

It is the experience of refugees that was portrayed as Hobbesian, not The North.

Yep, we are one disaster from turning into a group of goose-stepping genocidal racists

No, we are a series of major disasters away from it. Start by nuking London and moving millions of people to the rest of the country with no work for them to do, prevent aid arriving from the US by wiping out 20% of their population, then finish off any hope of recovery by turning the atmosphere of the earth to poison and igniting the sky. Political extremism has happened historically after less.

Greg: Cybus Industries are New Labour. “Oh look, he’s made them into a Brand!”

Of course, Tom Baker - in Genesis of the Daleks - refuses on pretty spurious moral grounds to destroy the Daleks at the moment of their creation.

He didn’t refuse, he asked the moral question of whether he had the right to commit genocide.

Before he could answer, he was told that there was no need to.

Now, yer Eccleston Doctor, written by Davis, did wimp out. He would have wiped out the Earth at the same time, though, so it’s not equivalent.

Before he could answer, he was told that there was no need to.

Was he? I can’t remember how that cop out worked. Remind me.

Oh well I guess for the poor Brits, the Dr Who fantasies is the closest they’ll ever come to landing on Mars :-) Its embarassing; we’ve got the pratt Doctor and the Yanks have Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica and numerous other excellent space series.

Our version of cosmic tv adventures matches up well with our paltry real-world endeavours in space. Dear me.

It’s a kids program so it’s not really up against the Sopranos or CSI. Trouble with RTD is he can’t seem to stop dropping clunking obvious political parables into his grown up scripts like the torchwood spin off which is supposedly for adults to enjoy.

There was no way the Doctor was going to be the PM of the day, so in comes Harriet Jones. Even the Doctor thought she was taking Earth to a new Camelot.

I gave up on Who when RTD shovelled in that utterly unnecessary “make sure you create the welfare state” malarkey in Series One.

(and to supporters of the Welfare State - ask yourself this: if its so good an idea, why, in 60-odd years, has it hardly improved anything at all?)

Its embarassing; we’ve got the pratt Doctor and the Yanks have Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica and numerous other excellent space series.

Ah but we do have, lest we forget, Blake’s 7, which Sky are currently remaking…

And, the best SF series ever written came from the UK, the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. That’s worth putting up with a few dodgy Doctors. Incidently, Douglas Adams cut his teeth writing scripts for Doctor Who, so at the very least, we have that to thank it for.

the only Buddhist I know of during the Pertwee years was Producer Barry Letts.

Politics did sometimes get a look in in the old series. The Curse of Peladon was an allegory for the European Union vote, the Mutants was supposedly to do with apartheid, whilst the Green Death and the Invasion of the Dinosaurs had an anti-pollution/green tinge. In Terror of the Zygons from 1976, Tom berates humans for being dependant on a mineral slime (oil) and the Brig receives a call from the PM…a woman.

I am sure there are lots more!

The reasons given for Cybermen=communists is just plain daft. Communism is all about creating the material conditions in which all have the possibility to develop themselves to their full potential, which involves free access to food, education, healthcare, etc and which cannot be anything but a democratic society. When Marx famously put it as from each according to ability, to each according to need it was a clear recognition we all vary as people and we vary ourselves with age.
The Cybermen are uniform creatures who are what they are to avoid the decay of the body, illness and the “weakness” of emotions.

I like the Slitheen episodes - the aliens are in no.10. Also the SWP is the only party to have been “seen” in the series, breaking an unwritten rule, as there are posters in Father’s Day

David T

one of the Kaleds says that Davros has agreed to a meeting and that they will force him to accept their demands on the Daleks. (Unbeknown a Dalek force is coming bak from the Thal dome…..)

Yes I am a fan! :-)

I don’t get the Cyberman = communists though. Care to explain your reasoning? I thought it was merely a horrific picture of what happens if we replace our body parts with mechanical parts which is not beyond present medical science now

Whilst Daleks as Nazis was Terry Nation’s explicit intent from the start, the Cybermen as Soviets is an audience response thing.

Fundamentally, it’s that they’re about dehumanisation - and there is (or was) a widespread perceptions that the Soviet system was fundamentally dehumanising. They represent the death of personality, as all individual features and emotional responses are removed. All the tropes of Cold War paranoia about Soviet infiltration are there in their appearances from Troughto through to Colin Baker - they want to conquer humanity, they sneak in (subverting businessmen, hiding underground, hibernating until they think they’ve been forgotten - in one story, they literally hide under beds), and whereas the Daleks want to exterminate all those who are different, the Cybermen wish to indoctrinate people who aren’t like them (”you-will-become-like-uzzz” is the closest thing they have to a catchphrase in the original series).

Of course, while the conversion thing does lend itself to this communist reading, it probably comes from Kit Pedler’s original intention, that these are “space monks”. This was subsumed in the final script he produced for the first Cybermen story, in which they are the humans from Earth’s “twin” who turned to cybernetics to avoid their own extinction. At that point, their leader has the title “Regos”, which suggests some sort of monarchy. Then there’s the fact that in the one story where they explicitly try to invade the Earth, the Russians are key allies in defeating them. In their last appearance in the original series, they are briefly allied with some actual Nazis, one of whom compares them to Wagnerian giants. And in the new series, they were created by an arch capitalist so he could rule the world (although if you squint really hard, I suppose there’s something Stalinistic in their new catchphrase, “delete”). So, there are plenty of counters to this comparrison.

But the point that I find most interesting, and which seems to most explicitly link them with communism, is the name of the Cybermen’s second homeworld, introduced in their third and probably most definitive appearance: “Telos”, the Greek for “goal” which gives us “teleogical”, and in the context of beings with such an explicit collective identity, this is clearly the teleology of Marxist historicism. The same story gives us Cybermen entombed like so many dead Lenins whilst the cyber-sympathising Eastern European villains dismiss the Anglo-American heroes as “decadent”.

Minoan:
Its embarassing; we’ve got the pratt Doctor and the Yanks have Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica and numerous other excellent space series.

Excellent? BSG is a cure for insominia and nothing more.

The Yanks have po-faced space opera which takes itself too seriously and actually is filled with forced political parables. What we have in DW is fun, funny, heart-warming, mind-bending, literate and daring, with heroes who are nerdy scientists, shop girls and office temps, not jumped-up military types and scheming politicians.

Morgoth:
I gave up on Who when RTD shovelled in that utterly unnecessary “make sure you create the welfare state” malarkey in Series One.

Actually, that was Steven Moffat.

(and to supporters of the Welfare State - ask yourself this: if its so good an idea, why, in 60-odd years, has it hardly improved anything at all?)

Well, for one thing, we haven’t had any more labour camps.

The Yanks have po-faced space opera which takes itself too seriously and actually is filled with forced political parables.

So you haven’t watched Firefly then, which surpasses anything the UK has produced.

So you haven’t watched Firefly then, which surpasses anything the UK has produced.

The film was very good. The series was very patchy.

OK then, the Cybermen are Stalinists, rather than generic Communists.

Yes, I did notice the SWP posters!!!

Firefly?

The series was GREAT

The film was unintelligible without having seen the series.

Take my love. Take my land.
Take me where I cannot stand.
I don’t care, I’m still free.
You can’t take the sky from me.

At last, Harry’s Place is getting to grips with the real issues.

I thought Turn Left was great but to imagine it was a polemic in favour of putting our faith in the liberal metropolitan Left is literalism gone bonkers. It’s just a Sliding Tardis Doors fantasy.

As for the inevitable collapse into authoritarianism, surely this was merely suggesting that the liberal democracy we take for granted is in fact very fragile and so should be cherished? Not everything on telly is a broadcast from the Bolshevik Broadcasting Corporation Hive Mind.

Then again, I didn’t like the dis against Leeds. I have lived there and it is lovely. I’m sure it’d still be delightful even if Roundhay Park was a refugee camp.

BTW David T, a point of order:

Cyberman think that humanity is perfectable, and set about doing it, whatever the cost. (These are RTD Cybermen - the original ones were just malevolent androids)

The originals were themselves cyborgs, the result of gradual replacement of the whole body by prostheses until there was nothing left, and not a simple “brain into metal suit” procedure as in Rise Of The Cybermen. That made the old ones far more sinister as far as I’m concerned, as well as CLEARLY allegorical to the strategy of entryism…

Thanks,

I have already had to ask a UK based friend NOT to tell me the details of the latest series.

snarl

Yep, we are one disaster from turning into a group of goose-stepping genocidal racists, especially if Northern whippet-owning sterotypes are left to their own devices

Enough of this blatant whippetophobia. I have two whippets, and I’m as soft, as Southern and as effete and limpwristed as anybody here.

I have already had to ask a UK based friend NOT to tell me the details of the latest series.

Well, then, you’ll definitely want to avoid this.

Interesting what was said above about Leela. The one-eyed delivery driver in ‘Futurama’ is called Leela. Do you think Matt Goening is a fan? Also, one of the slimy extra-terrestials has a spaghetti mouth, rather like the Oouds. Do you think there’s a bit of cross-fertilization going on?

Chiwetel Ejiofor should be the next Doctor.

Not that I care, because I think the programme’s naff.

Chiwetel Ejiofor should be the next Doctor.

Nah, let’s have Dr Mark Sloan (I mean Dick Van Dyke) as the next Doctor.

one of the Kaleds says that Davros has agreed to a meeting and that they will force him to accept their demands on the Daleks. (Unbeknown a Dalek force is coming bak from the Thal dome…..)

I couldn’t remember the details. :-)

Alternate Earth Cybermen == New Labour.

Oh and red dwarf twats the smeg out of the po faced yank series. And it was made in Manchester.

Sylvester McCoy was my favorite Doctor. The storylines also tended to be pretty dark and there were times when the Doctor behaved fairly appallingly, often using Ace as bait to draw out his foes. Typical Realist behaviour, imho.

spgb gray: ‘Politics did sometimes get a look in in the old series.’

Probably the classic example was ‘The Curse of Fenric’, when McCoy was the Doctor, which was set in WWII and involved a Viking curse, vampires, Soviets, and an Alan Turing-esque codebreaker.

Faith (whether religious or political) was the only way to defend yourself against the vampires. Hence the Soviet captain Sorin is safe because he still believes in the proletarian revolution (!) but the poor CofE vicar is dead meat because his faith in the Bible is weak.

I have greatly enjoyed this series of DR.who and will miss rtd.
but the most scary thing about the end of a series of dr who is not whatever monster is imagined up to challenge the doctor but the far worse threat of the return the shit filled trash that is robin hood

I thought Hyperdrive was a pretty good pisstake of the selfrighteous, ultra competent (american) peacekeeper in space trope.

My sign reads “We are all Daleks”

Watching the episode “Midnight” right now (as someone who doesn’t pay a lot of attention to who the writers are before watching) I’ve got to say yes, Davies is absolutely horrible. But as a writer, not politically. He wrote an episode with all of the worst traits (aside from the shakey-cam) of the horrible Blair Witch movie (the characters are all such assholes you’re hoping and praying they die terrible deaths and wondering how such rotten bastards wound up together by chance). Blink was one of the few best episodes of television I’ve ever seen, and this was one of the worst.