Notes on Doctor Who and History: 'Space Babies', 'The Devil's Chord' and 'Boom'

I have neglected this series of posts about Doctor Who and human history for a long time. My Doctor Who rewatch stalled over a year ago early in Season 2 (largely because I found 'The Rescue' painfully bad), and I'm not likely to get back to it too soon. But, we've got new Doctor Who at the moment, and of course he's going to go back to the past, so it deserves writing about. Let me say right at the start, these are not reviews of the episodes concerned per se, though value judgements may creep in. Also, there are likely to be spoilers, so don't read these before you've seen the episodes if you don't want to be spoiled.

'Space Babies' is mostly set in the far future, though there are a couple of slips backwards in time. The Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) takes Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson) back to a beautifully-realised Wyoming 150 million years in the past. There, we get a brief gag that derives from Ray Bradbury's short story 'A Sound of Thunder'. There is also a flashback to Christmas 2004, the day on which baby Ruby was abandoned at the Church on Ruby Road, the one place the Doctor says he can't take Ruby, and therefore the one place we are guaranteed to visit before the end of the season.

But the historical meat of the first three episodes is, of course, to be found in 'The Devil's Chord'. The episode begins in 1925, with a character whose sharing a name with the third Robin (of Batman and... fame) may or may not be a coincidence. 1925 isn't sketched out in any particular detail, but it doesn't need to be. Then we switch to Ruby, asking to go to February 1963 to see The Beatles recording their first album, something the Doctor considers a much better idea than wanting to go to the Titanic or Bethlehem, presumably at the time of the birth of Jesus. (Incidentally, I don't think television Doctor Who has gone to either event, though there is a photo in 'Rose' of the Doctor with a family he persuaded not to go on the doomed liner, and in 'The End of the World' he says he was on a ship that is presumably the Titanic. No surprise that spin-off materials involve both events.)

Doctor Who has, of course, been to 1963 before, in 'An Unearthly Child', which is referenced here, and 'Remembrance of the Daleks', which is not. On neither occasion did 1963 look quite as it does here. The Beatles have also been on Doctor Who before, not that you'd know this from iPlayer, where the short clip of them playing 'Ticket to Ride' has been excised from 'The Executioners' (episode 1 of 'The Chase'), though fortunately not from the Blu-Ray, so it is still possible to watch William Russell's painful attempt to look 'hip'). 'The Devil's Chord' finds a very neat diegetic way in which to get around the fact that even Disney can't afford to license a Beatles song for this episode.

The Doctor and Ruby change into outfits that are very much Swinging London. But Swinging London didn't really exist until 1965, and the Doctor's suit is more redolent of 1967-1969. In 1963, most men dressed like accountants. Most bands dressed like scruffy accountants. Even The Beatles had yet to don their trademark collarless jackets. The truly hip (the Beat Poets, and the like) dressed all in black.

A rare photo of John Lennon in the style of glasses he wore up to 1966.

There are more anachronisms. Cilla Black wasn't even signed to a management contract by Brian Epstein until September 1963, so there's no way that she would be in a recording studio in February. John did wear glasses in the studio (though he whipped them off whenever he thought there was a camera nearby), but the round National Health 'granny glasses' were something he didn't adopt until 1966. The Beatles' hair was a lot shorter in early 1963 than it became later, and Ringo didn't even have his hair brushed forward.

Now, people can, and have, responded to lists of the anachronisms by saying 'look, it's just a silly fantasy episode, it's not meant to be the real Sixties'. To which I say, yes, that's my point. The episode presents an artificial idea of what 'The Sixties' was like. And what interests me is how and why that's been put together. So, John wears those glasses because those are the John Lennon glasses, the ones that everyone expects. The boys have longer hair because that's what everyone thinks The Beatles looked like. (Crueller writers than me might suggest such tactics are necessary because the actors don't look much like The Beatles, but then neither did Christopher Eccleston or Peter Capaldi.) The female singer could have been the more plausible Helen Shapiro (a friend of The Beatles) or Alma Cogan (a future friend of The Beatles), but that would make the viewers go 'who?' Everyone knows Cilla, and that she was associated with The Beatles. Pronouncing Brian Epstein's name as 'Epsteen' would be authentic - that's how Brian himself pronounced it - but the pronunciation as 'Epstine' is pretty ubiquitous these days (I try to avoid it when I do internet radio about the Beatles). When we see the famous Abbey Road zebra crossing, we expect there to be a white Volkswagen parked on the left, and don't worry that the car must, therefore, have been abandoned for six years.

Fiona Moore observed to me that at least since the 1980s people have forgotten how different the early 1960s were from the late, and indeed how much fashion was limited in its distribution. (For an example of this latter point, watch Get Back or Let It Be and compare how The Beatles dress with how roadie Mal Evans or even director Michael Lindsay-Hogg dresses, let alone all the people on the street listening to the band play on the rooftop at Savile Row.) Television quite often prints the legend rather than the reality; the Doctor and Ruby's outfits are all part of this, perhaps slyly sent up by the fact that they change out of outfits that actually were more suitable to 1963 (Russell T Davies' Doctor Who is nothing if not knowing). This is a phenomenon that can be seen in other television, such as, if perhaps to a lesser extent, in the recent television version of The IPCRESS File, also set in 1963. It's much more obvious in fantasy versions of the sixties such as the Austin Powers movies, and the Doctor's suit looks like a deliberate nod in that direction. This sort of conflation is a thing we tend to do to historical periods; note the way cultural differences between the Victorians of the 1840s and the Victorians of the 1890s can get elided in popular culture, or, to choose my own period, differences between first-century Rome and fifth-century Rome. 

This is an episode filled with elements derived from various bits of the 1960s, and especially The Beatles' career. Matthew Kilburn rightly draws attention to the 'Aeolian tones' recalling the 'Aeolian cadences' that music critic William Mann attributed to The Beatles in 1963, and Maestro's outfit in the latter stages has hints of The Beatles' outfits for Sergeant Pepper, and more obviously the hussar jackets that almost everybody seemed to wear in the second half of 1967. Several people have rightly observed that the plot of 'The Devil's Chord' owes quite a bit to The Beatles' 1968 animated movie Yellow Submarine. And the musical number at the end has its roots in endless 1960s pop musicals (though not any The Beatles made, with the possible exception of Magical Mystery Tour) - though again, Austin Powers is perhaps a more immediate influence.

It's a shame the final chord played by John and Paul wasn't the last chord of 'A Day In The Life', but you can't have everything.

The engagement of 'Boom' with the past is largely with the show's own history, in particular 'Genesis of the Daleks'; the main plot is based on the landmine scene from Part One of that serial, with Ruby Sunday in the role of Harry Sullivan. This follows the previous week's call back to 'Pyramids of Mars'. Apart from that, we get the Doctor singing 'The Skye Boat Song', but there's no commentary along the lines of 'I nearly met Bonnie Prince Charlie once'.

Octavia

Christopher J Garcia has done an issue of The Drink Tank on Ancient Rome, and I have a short piece in it about Octavia, the sister of Augustus. Lots of other interesting stuff in there as well.

Upcoming MANCENT and LRAC events

 

I've got quite a few events coming up. I've just started a MANCENT course on the Trojan War. We're coming up to week 2, but you can still book for the whole course and get the recording of week 1. You can also buy a ticket just for this week's session. 

I also have a couple of myth walks, one along the South Bank on 8 June, and one down Pall Mall to Hyde Park, on 15 June. 

The full MANCENT summer programme is here.

I'm also doing another Roman London walk for LRAC on 1 June.

Finally, these are the last few days for Eastercon members to catch up on recorded sessions they missed. These include me talking about Mercury, horror in antiquity, unusual methods of transport, and Stanier locomotives, plus lots of other people being interesting. Catch-up expires 30 April.

The Trojan War: Myth and history?

 

I have a new blog post up on the MANCENT blog, about the 'history' behind the Trojan War. This is to do with my upcoming course on The Trojan War, for which you can book tickets here.

Screening Britannia: Horrible Histories: The Movie - Rotten Romans

Horrible Histories: The Movie – Rotten Romans. UK. Directed by Dominic Brigstocke. Screenplay by Jessica Swale with Giles Pilbrow and Caroline Norris. Starring Emilia Jones, Sebastian Croft, Nick Frost, Craig Roberts, Kate Nash, Rupert Graves, Alex Macqueen, Lee Mack, Warwick Davis, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Alexander Armstrong, Chris Addison, Derek Jacobi, Kim Cattrall, and Rattus Rattus. Amazon, Ingenious, Silver Reel, BBC Films, Attitude Film Entertainment, Citrus Films, Scholastic Entertainment Inc., Lion Television. 2019.

I showed this to my Roman Britain students at the end of 2022, and again at the end of last year. The first time, they had asked for The Eagle, but I could find neither my own copy not that of the university library (both have since turned up). They nevertheless enjoyed this replacement, as did I. 

Horrible Histories, for those who don’t know, originated as a series of humour books detailing the funnier and grosser elements of history for an audience of children. It became a successful television comedy series for children, and then in 2019 a movie. Interestingly, the movie relies less on the regular TV cast, who are mostly in background roles, if there at all; instead, it turns more to stars who have been brought in for this occasion – the biggest coup is Hollywood's Kim Cattrall, but there's also Lee Mack, Rupert Graves, etc. (And even, in a small role, Ncuti Gatwa; truth be told, he’s a bit anonymous in his role as a legionary, but in the behind-the-scenes feature, star quality pours out of him.)

The topic chosen for this movie is Roman Britain, specifically the revolt of Boudica in 60/61 CE. It’s quite a bold move to treat the Boudica story as a comedy. Unless one is to count a brief mention of her in Carry on Cleo, the only other all-out comedic treatment I am aware of is an episode of the TV Horrible Histories called ‘Bolshy Boudica’ (2015), where the Iceni Queen is played by Lorna Watson (the one of Watson and Oliver who didn’t get to be on Doctor Who), from which this naturally recycles some material, but surprisingly little (and which I really need to watch again). Other than that, the most light-hearted portrayal is in an episode of Xena: Warrior Princess (‘The Deliverer’, one of the grimmer Xena eps).[1]  Other versions tend to be extremely bloody and violent, and wallow in the nastier elements of the story. 

As a consequence of being a comedy, and even more as a consequence of being made for children, albeit for children expected to revel in the grosser parts of history, some of the more horrific moments in the story are toned down here. There’s no room for the rape of Boudica’s daughters, nor is the battle of Watling Street the bloodbath that Tacitus describes, though, from a distance, we do see lots of dead bodies lying about. Rather than dying in battle (the common cinematic outcome) or taking her own life (Tacitus’ account), Kate Nash’s Boudica quietly slips away when it’s obvious that the battle is lost. There is then a reconciliation song-and-dance number between Britons and Romans. (Oh yes, this is a musical, drawing upon styles as diverse as modern rap and Celtic folk.)

Elsewhere, the violence of the revolt is touched upon, but skirted around. Colchester is seen in flames, as is London (from a distance), whilst the destruction of St Albans is merely mentioned. None of the violence in the narratives of the ancient sources is depicted; you don't see any civilians being slaughtered. Nor is there the common link into the English folk horror tradition that Boudican stories often have, because the role of the Druids is very much reduced here. They are present, fought by Rupert Graves’ Suetonius Paulinus, and all looking like refugees from an Eisteddford (though fighting like ninjas). But they are only seen at Anglesey. There are no Druids around the court of Boudica herself, as there often are in movie versions (see, for example, 1927’s Boadicea, 1967’s The Viking Queen, and 2002’s Boudica). 

Other than that, a lot of standard elements of the Boudica story do make their way in. It is the avarice of Catus Decianus (Alexander Armstrong) that provokes the revolt. A common issue in these productions is the fact that, even in these post-imperial days, a British audience wants to identify both with Boudica, as a British heroine and proto-Elizabeth I, and with the Romans, since there’s a long tradition of the Britons seeing themselves as heirs of the Romans. It is common to negotiate this divide through the provision of bad Romans, who provoke the revolt, and much more sympathetic good Romans, who try to avoid conflict, and only very reluctantly take part in the battle. Here, the good Roman is Attilius Minus, known as Atti, played by Sebastian Croft in a performance that owes more than a little to that of Tom Rosenthal in Plebs. The bad Romans are Decianus, Nero (Craig Roberts), and Agrippina the Younger (Kim Catrall, relishing the opportunity to do some serious scenery-chewing). 

Another standard device is to have a romance that crosses the divide between Roman and Briton; Boadicea and The Viking Queen both do this, and so does Horrible Histories, with Atti falling for precocious villager Orla (Emilia Jones); the difference here being that Atti and Orla’s romance has a happy outcome, culminating in the big song-and-dance number that unites Britons and Romans. Also, because the characters are young adults, the romance never gets much beyond them being BFFs. (A thing I have recently come to notice in screen stories of Roman Britain is the preponderance of child or young adult protagonists; fully understandable here, but also to be found in Britannia and other productions aimed at a more adult audience.) 

Like most comedies set in the ancient world, a lot of the jokes rely on the placing of modern stereotypes and situations into ancient dress. So, for instance, the build up to the Battle of Watling Street is presented as if it were a modern sporting event, whilst there are also ancient traffic reports by Chris Addison, where the eye-in-the-sky is merely up a tree. But there are a surprising number of gags that seem aimed at an older audience. Rupert Graves’ Suetonius Paulinus talks about himself in the third person, much as Julius Caesar does in his Commentaries. There’s a marvellous moment in which it becomes obvious that the person impersonating Derek Jacobi’s classic turn as Claudius is in fact Jacobi himself. Lee Mack's character, Decimus Maximus (albeit that his full name is, I think, never stated on screen, only in the behind-the-scenes feature), is surely meant to recall Maximus Decimus Meridius in Gladiator. I also suspect that the sequence where Atti is in search of gladiator’s sweat, whilst being one of the ‘weird but true’ facts on which Horrible Histories prides itself, perhaps also owes something to the mare’s sweat running gag in A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum. And there is more than one call back to Life of Brian. All of this raises the question that Movies We Dig brings up in their episode devoted to this movie; who is it actually for, given not everything is aimed at children?

There are also some of the standard jokes about the remoteness of Britain. Nero initially thinks that the outline of Britain on the map was actually a weird stain, and refers to Britain as ‘the stain’ for the rest of the movie. And of course some soldiers form the testudo, because they always have to in Roman movies.

I like the movie much more than Movies We Dig do, but they do raise some legitimate issues. They make the interesting point that the movie has difficulty negotiating the transition from a sketch show to a longer narrative. The selling point of Horrible Histories was the weird bits of real history displayed in a funny fashion, and the educational element of the show was always underlined by telling the audience which bits were true. There’s hardly any of that commentary here, just a couple of brief segments at the end where the sources for Boudica's death are mentioned, and some stuff about Agrippina and Nero. A lot of other examples, such as Sycophantus (Alex MacQueen) explaining to Nero that one cannot crucify Roman citizens, and that sewing someone in a sack with a snake, a dog, a rooster, and a monkey and throwing them in the Tiber is the punishment for killing one’s own father, are only really noticeable if you're attuned to Horrible Histories' way of presenting this sort of material. (It’s perhaps also worth noting Horrible Histories can be a bit imprecise when it comes to the things that are true. For instance, there is a reference to dogs licking wounds being a recognised medical technique, which it was, but as far as I can find out this was the case in the Greek and Roman worlds, whereas here it is attributed to the Celts.) 

Another point Movies We Dig make is how traditional this all is. The final song is essentially all about how, in the end, the Roman occupation of Britain is a good thing, because of all the benefits it brings, even if some concessions to the essential brutality of Roman rule are made. This is very much the mid-twentieth century picture of Romanisation. Equally traditionally, the Britons are universally referred to as Celts, a term that has rather gone out of fashion amongst archaeologists, though popular television programmes still use it. But, as Gideon Nisbet said a long time ago, popular culture remains very firmly rooted in ideas that most academics abandoned a long time ago.

Nevertheless, I still like this movie, and would recommend to to anyone.

If you’re interested in learning more about Roman Britain on screen, I’m running a course from mid-January. 

[1] About which I have a chapter coming out this year.

Obituary for John M. Burns.

There's a new post by me (with a little help from Will Morgan) on FA-The Comiczine: An obituary for John M. Burns.

My Spring 2024 MANCENT teaching

I'm repeating my Mancent online course on Screening Britannia from this January. Anybody who fancies joining, you can sign up through Eventbrite. Anyone who pays the full course fee will get the recordings. Alternatively, you can book for individual sessions here. 

I'm also doing a London mythology walk for MANCENT, going down Pall Mall and towards Victoria. 

And finally, another walk I'm doing for MANCENT is a visit to Roman Colchester. 

 MANCENT's full Spring 2024 prospectus can be found here.

New post on FA-The Comiczine: An obituary for Ian Gibson

 

There's a new post by me on FA-The Comiczine: An obituary for Ian Gibson. 

Journey Planet with a photo-essay by me

There's a new Journey Planet out, on Jack the Ripper in fiction. It includes a photo-essay by me on Ripper locations, then and now. This is, I think, the first time I've been in JP since the Arthurian issue in 2021. 

Doctor Who comics reviews

So I had a series of reviews of Doctor Who comics published on The Slings and Arrows Graphic Novel Guide this week. The big one is The Fourth Doctor Anthology. This contains 'Doctor Who and the Star Beast', the basis for the first of the 60th Anniversary specials. Also: the 1986 Summer Special, which reprints 'Doctor Who and the Iron Legion'; Doctor Who Classics Volume 1, which includes most of the Mills and Wagner strips in colour; Doctor Who Classics Volume 2, which is mostly Steve Moore scripts, with Dave Gibbons artwork; Doctor Who: Dave Gibbons Collection, which brings together all of Dave Gibbons' work on Doctor Who, covering the Fourth and Fifth Doctors; and finally, The Tides of Time, which collects all of the Peter Davison/Fifth Doctor comics stories.
 

Doctor Who, 'The Eaters of Light'

 

Doctor Who, 'The Eaters of Light' (UK, dir. Charles Palmer, scr. Rona Munro, starring Peter Capaldi, Pearl Mackie, and Matt Lucas, BBC, 2017)

Roman Britain is one of the historical periods that is fairly central to the British imagination, so one might have expected Doctor Who to have visited there quite a bit. But, as I argue in a piece in the latest Terrible Zodin, Doctor Who, at least in its early years, went out of its way to avoid the obvious historical periods. It is true Malcolm Hulke, co-writer of the successful Target Luna/Pathfinders sf serials for ITV, submitted an outline for a serial set in Roman Britain (referred to as 'Britain 408 AD', a purely descriptive title), which at one point was planned to be the sixth serial in the first season. But even that avoided the standard periods for Roman Britain on screen (which I discuss here), instead setting itself in 408 CE (or 400 according to a summary David Whitaker wrote in September 1963), at the end of Roman Britain. When the final years of Roman Britain do appear on screen, they are generally connected to the reign of King Arthur (who will then be treated as a historical figure), but David Whitaker's summary of Hulke's story makes no mention of Arthur. In any case, Whitaker changed his mind about this serial, feeling it was overcomplicated, with an ending too like that of 'An Unearthly Child' (the full story), and instead commissioned Hulke to write up another submission, 'Hidden Planet', about a duplicate Earth the other side of the Sun. This was in turn abandoned in 1964. Hulke resubmitted 'Britain 408 AD' in 1965, for the second season, but it was rejected by new script editor Dennis Spooner, because by this point the programme had already made 'The Romans', and Spooner didn't want to repeat himself. (Hulke would have to wait until the Patrick Troughton era and 'The Faceless Ones' for an onscreen credit.)

Over much of the show's existence, Roman Britain was something only vaguely alluded to. The Doctor and his companions are thought to be from Britannia in 'The Romans' (1964), because Vicki and Barbara are overheard talking about London/Londinium. Similarly, in 'The Fires of Pompeii' (2008) Donna is thought to be Celtic/Welsh when she tries to speak Latin. You could argue that the Romans who menace the Doctor at the end of Episode Two and beginning of Episode Three of 'The War Games' (1969) are in Britain - it's not stated, and the zones in 'The War Games' are from conflicts from all over the planet, but the sequence was filmed in Sussex (the Doctor says the Roman time zone was 2,000 years ago, which would rule out Britain, but it's not clear whether he is being precise, and whether he means that in relation to 1917, the time zone from where they crossed over). In 'The Stones of Blood' (1978) the Doctor makes reference to having read Caesar and Tacitus on the Druids when discussing Druidism with sect leader De Vries. And in Battlefield (1989), the Doctor gets mixed up with post-Roman Arthurian legends, though suggesting that they had their origins in the eighth, rather than fifth or sixth centurires.

But the first actual definite television visit of the Doctor to Roman Britain is in 'The Pandorica Opens' (2010), where the Doctor meets River Song at Stonehenge in 102 CE. Even this doesn't engage closely with the typical periods of Roman Britain on screen, and has to be treated as one of the outliers, along with things like Chelmsford 123. The typical periods have been engaged with by non-television Who; so audio adventure 'Wrath of the Iceni' takes place at the time of the Boudican revolt (and is a fully-fledged 'pure' historical, with no aliens interfering with history), and another audio, 'Living History', takes place during Julius Caesar's invasion (a rare non-comedic treatment of Caesar's landing, perhaps due to the presence of a Dalek).

All of which is an excessively-long preamble to talking about 'The Eaters of Light', the point at which Doctor Who most closely engages with the tropes of Roman Britain. It engages with the supposed 'disappearance' of the Ninth Legion. As you may know, there are essentially two theories about what happened to the Ninth. Theodor Mommsen suggested that it was destroyed in some battle in the north of Britain. The discovery in the twentieth century of evidence suggesting that part of the Ninth was present in Nijmegen until c. 120 CE called Mommsen's theory into question (and it's hard to believe that, had he known of the Nijmegen material, he would have ever come up with the idea in the first place), so while the disappearance of the Ninth in Britain continued to fuel popular culture in the form of Rosemary Sutcliff's 1954 novel The Eagle of the Ninth, or the 2010 movie Centurion, the scholarly consensus rejected the notion. However, in recent years, scholars such as Miles Russell, Neil Faulkner, Nick Hodgson and Simon Elliott have come out in favour of the Mommsen idea.

Interestingly, Rona Monro has the Doctor (Peter Capaldi) and his companion Bill (Pearl Mackie) take different sides of the argument - Bill, who did a school project on the Ninth, believes that they left, whilst the Doctor says they were wiped out. The Doctor is, of course, proved right, though, being a modern Doctor Who story, they were destroyed by an alien menace.

Ninth Legion stories are often connected with Hadrian's Wall, but not here. The location of the action is moved to somewhere near Aberdeen (far further north than most people think the Ninth might have penetrated). But that location, as Juliette Harrisson has observed, allows the episode to be a love letter to Scotland, from where star, showrunner and writer all hail (though Monro is the native of the Granite City, Capaldi and Steven Moffat coming from Glasgow and Paisley respectively). A series of standard Scottish jokes about the weather are trotted out ('It's Scotland. It's supposed to be damp.'); but these also fit a standard trope of Roman Britain, where it rains all the time. Another standard trope of Roman Britain is its remoteness from the rest of the empire; here this can be linked to the perceived remoteness of Scotland from the rest of Britain. 

Other standard trope are to be seen. The Picts around Aberdeen (Picts are actually anachronistic for the second century) all have their faces painted. There is a Boudica equivalent in teenager Kar. The use of child protagonists is also something I have realised is to be seen a lot in Roman Britain tales.

And then there's folk horror (here, I am in considerably sympathy with Louis Bayman and K.J. Donnelly, who argue in the introduction to their edited collection on Folk Horror On Film that the defining characteristic of folk horror is that the horror arises from the people, customs and practices of the folk themselves, rather than anything outside that). Who has, of course, engaged with folk horror on many occasions, starting with 'The Dæmons' in 1971, continuing through 'The Stones of Blood' and 'The Awakening' (1984), through to more recent fare such as 'Human Nature'/'Family of Blood' (2007, directed by the same man who does the job here). So, much of 'Eaters of Light' takes place in dark woods, and though the threat is external, it is bound up in the Picitish traditions. Nobody mentions Druids, but there is a stone circle and a cairn, the Devil's Cairn, in fact (a name with echoes of Devil's End from 'The Dæmons').   

There is also a great deal to enjoy and appreciate. The Roman survivors are ethnically mixed, as they might well have been. They have names like 'Cornelius' and 'Lucius'. Which are the sort of names screenwriters give randomly to Romans, but they are actually the sorts of names, citizens' names, that members of a legion would have. That Bill is considered a bit weird not for being a lesbian, but for not being bisexual is a nice moment, though I'm not sure how rooted it is in Roman social mores. But I did enjoy the callback to the speech of Calgacus from Tacitus' Agricola: 'They make deserts and they call it peace.'

The Doctor claims to have lived in Roman Britain, to have 'governed, farmed, juggled', all presumably in adventures not seen on screen (but perhaps even now being written for Big Finish). He also claims to have been a Vestal Virgin, second class. Given that this is before it had been established that the Doctor had been a woman in the past, one wonders precisely what is meant by that. 

In general, there is a lot of food for thought in this episode. The main issue with it is that, like much of modern Who, the story doesn't really have time to breathe properly. It could have done with a second episode.

Writing about Doctor Who

There's a new issue of The Terrible Zodin out. I have a piece in it on history in the first season of the show, and contribute to sixty great things about Doctor Who (with a series of answers that are very '70s-centric).

And while we're on the subject of Doctor Who, I also have a piece in the upcoming volume 6 of Vworp Vworp!, which you can pre-order here. (My piece, which didn't make the highlights list, is on the history behind the Stone Age episodes of 'An Unearthly Child'.)

So this is a thing I've been working on for the last couple of weeks, the show guide for the upcoming NMRS show. https://www.nottingham-modelrailway.org.uk/showguideautumn2023.pdf

#AcWriMo and Screening Britannia

It's November. For many people, that means #NaNoWriMo, writing the first draft of a novel in thirty days. I sometimes think of that, but whenever I get started, I always end up after a few days declaring everything I have attempted to be utter shit. However, there's an equivalent for academic writing, #AcWriMo. I did a bit of that last year, and made some progress on a book project that I probably still can't reveal. This year, I'm going all out, but aiming at completing much of the first draft of my book on Roman Britain on screen. I hope to write about 1,000 words a day.

However, I have built up a backlog of Screening Britannia blogposts recently, as a result of teaching my online Screening Britannia course (which you can still book onto and receive all the past recordings of the class up to this point). I'm really enjoying teaching this material, and it's opening up new perspectives that I might not otherwise have fallen upon. In particular, I am starting to realise the importance of the English folk horror tradition to the portrayal of Druids, and to why Roman Britain narratives so often use the Druids. Fortunately, there's a new Routledge Companion to Folk Horror just come out, which is even affordable as an ebook. Anyway, since those posts and my planned book are intimately interrelated, I am going to write them, and count them against my daily word count target. This is the first. 

A couple of months ago I finally put up the 2015 version of a paper entitled 'A Wild West hero: Motifs of the Hollywood Western in four movies about Hadrian’s Wall', which considers four movies, King Arthur (2004), The Last Legion (2007), Centurion (2010), and The Eagle (2011). The paper is incomplete, especially in the references, which will be fixed when I rework the material for the book. But for now, at least it's out there.

As part of preparation for my course, I rewatched Boadicea (1927), which I wrote about in 2020. At the time I thought it was the earliest screen version of Roman Britain, though I have since discovered that there is an earlier version of Cymbeline, from 1913. But I also discovered something about Boadicea. The version I watched on YouTube is not in fact the full movie. This version is less than half an hour, but it is obvious from this description on the BFI website that the full movie was about ninety minutes. All sorts of extra details are lost. Two people seen at the beginning starting a fight with the Romans about paying taxes actually have names in the full version. There's also a love subplot between one of Boadicea's daughters, here named Emmelyn, and a good Roman by the name of Marcus. (One of the ways Boudica narratives reconcile an audience that wants to be heirs to the Iceni queen's British heroism and at the same time the 'virtues' and values of Roman civilization is by including good Romans, who essentially want to live in happy co-operation with the Britons, and bad Romans, who provoke the revolt.) This love plot idea is later picked up in fake-Boudica movie The Viking Queen (1967), and I wonder if John Temple Smith, who devised the story for the latter movie, was familiar with Sinclair Hill's silent epic.

Unfortunately, while the BFI does possess the archive materials for this movie, so it is not, technically, 'lost', they do not have a viewing copy, so it has so far proved impossible for me to see the full-length Boadicea.

I was able to watch Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves (1991). This is, of course, a pretty silly movie; one can quite see why Mel Brooks thought it ripe for parody in Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993). My reason for mentioning it here is the notorious scene in which, it is commonly stated, Robin (Kevin Costner) goes from Dover to Nottingham via Hadrian's Wall. And actually, this isn't a fair criticism. By all means, have a go at the movie for suggesting that one can get from Dover to Nottingham in a day on horseback. But, whilst scenes with Costner and Morgan Freeman playing Robin's Moorish ally Azeem were filmed up at Sycamore Gap, by the famous tree (sadly recently chopped down, for reasons that are currently obscure), at no point does anyone say they are at Hadrian's Wall. Indeed, diegetically, the movie is quite clear that the scene is taking place on Robin's own lands, not far from Nottingham. The Wall happens to be a convenient location to suggest a degree of antiquity. We should no more read it literally as Hadrian's Wall than we are meant to believe that the medieval city of Nottingham is actually at Carcassonne, or that Nottingham Castle is actually at Bodiam. Both of these were locations used in the movie, but these pass without comment.

I was delighted when the four missing episodes of The Complete and Utter History of Britain (1969) turned up unexpectedly. Unfortunately, this has little effect on my work, as the only Roman Britain sketch was in the first episode (and then cut for broadcast), which has long been available on DVD. Still, at least we can now watch Michael Palin playing Elizabeth I as a bawdy music-hall drag act, which justifies the whole series on its own.

Finally, there are a couple of books coming out that are going to be relevant to my work. Jen Williams new fantasy, Talonsister, is set in a fantasy version of immediately pre-Roman Britain; sadly, there's not going to be time for me to read it before Novacon next week, where she's the guest of honour. And in December, my friend and former Open University colleague Katy Soar has edited a collection called Circles of Stone, an anthology of weird tales of Britain's pagan past. I feel sure there will be Druids.

The ancient civilisation that inspired US democracy

A couple of months ago I was interviewed by Alistair Gill for an article about the Lycian Way. I don't get many requests arising out of my work on Lycia, and I was happy to do this. The article has finally appeared. I'm only quoted once, but I think quite a lot of what I said informed what Alistair wrote about the historical background. 

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20230906-the-ancient-civilisation-that-inspired-us-democracy

An Introduction to Greek and Roman Mythology

A bit late to publicise this, but I'm teaching another online Notre Dame course for high school students. Applications close on Friday. https://precollege.nd.edu/courses/an-introduction-to-greek-and-roman-mythology/

A Walk around the Roman Walls of London

On October 14, I'm leading a walk for LRAC around the Roman Walls of London. Tickets: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/a-walk-around-the-roman-walls-of-london-tickets-715966183127

Screening Britannia course update

I have delayed the start of my MANCENT course on Roman Britain on film for two weeks, due to health reasons. It will now run 18 September - 27 November. Tickets still available. All sessions recorded, so you don't have to attend live if it's inconvenient.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/screening-britannia-roman-britain-in-film-television-full-course-tickets-678280474157

Autumn MANCENT programme

The Autumn MANCENT programme is out. My course on Screening Britannia starts a week on Monday. https://mancent.org.uk/?page_id=5363

A Greek and Roman Mythology Walk around London II: Embankment

 

If you're around London and at a loose end Saturday afternoon, there are still places available for my Manchester Continuing Education Network London mythology walk.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/a-greek-and-roman-mythology-walk-around-london-ii-embankment-tickets-678177947497