New article on Doctor Who by me

There's a new issue of Doctor Who fanzine The Terrible Zodin out, the penultimate issue. I have a piece in it, on why Doctor Who is a mythology, and how that affects the way in which we approach the show, and in particular issues of canon and continuity.

Mini-Masterclasses at Eastercon

The Science Fiction Foundation are running two Mini-Masterclasses at Eastercon, one at 12.00 on Saturday, led by Paul March-Russell, and one at 10.30 on Monday, led by Tony Keen. Both have limited sign-ups. Paul will be leading a discussion of Sheree Renee Thomas, 'The Parts That Make Us Monsters' (Strange Horizons, 2020). Tony will be leading a discussion of Arthur C. Clarke, 'The Nine Billion Names of God'. We recommend that participants read the stories in advance.

My Eastercon 2023 schedule

This is my programme for the Eastercon over this weekend.

https://

A Greek and Roman Mythology Walk around London

In June I am leading a myth tour of central London for MANCENT. It's a chance for people to experience the sort of things I teach to Notre Dame students. https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/a-greek-and-roman-mythology-walk-around-london-tickets-602666239947

I am taking on Prostate Cancer UK's challenge of walking 11,000 steps every day in March. Please donate if you can.

I'm taking on March the Month (prostatecanceruk.org)

Notes on Doctor Who and history: ‘The Reign of Terror’

[Apologies for having left this series of posts for a while; my rewatch has rather stalled.]

‘The events will happen just as they are written. I’m afraid so, and we can’t stem the tide. But at least we can stop being carried away with the flood!’

At the beginning of ‘The Sensorites’ (Doctor Who’s first engagement with the future of the human race, and with anything resembling space opera), there’s a conversation amongst the TARDIS crew where they go back over all their previous adventures (though not, as Neil Perryman notes, ‘the weird one with the scissors’). The Doctor and Susan reminisce over an visit to England in the reign of Henry VIII, before Ian and Barbara joined them. This seems to have been a fairly typical adventure; the Doctor and Susan had to get themselves locked up in the Tower of London, because that’s where the TARDIS was, i.e. once again they’d got separated from their ship, and had to find a way of getting back, a plot mechanism that drives every story in Season 1 (except the weird one with the scissors), and indeed drives ‘The Sensorites’ and ‘The Reign of Terror’. But what is interesting is I think that this is the first reference to English history explicitly made in Doctor Who (unless we are to think of ‘An Unearthly Child’ as taking place in what would become England, of which, as I note in a comment I’ve recently made on my discussion of that story, I don’t think we can be sure).

But let us leave behind ‘The Sensorites’, a story that starts trying to do something interesting with the concept of ‘monsters’, but is too long and diffuse. Instead, we turn to a proper treat, ‘The Reign of Terror’. Here we are, on a number of levels, in different territory from the previous historicals. In contrast to the remote (at least to the original viewing audience) locations of ‘Marco Polo’ and ‘The Aztecs’, we are now in Europe. We are not yet in England (or Britain), even though the story begins with the Doctor swearing, over Ian’s scepticism, that they are in Somerset (and in a way the Doctor’s right that they are in England, because France is, as ever, reconstructed in a studio in London and, in an innovation for the series, in the fields of Denham, in Buckinghamshire). We do have our first English characters not from the twentieth century, in the ill-fated Webster and the spy James Stirling (as is often the case, printed sources are inconsistent on whether this should be spelt ‘Stirling’ or ‘Sterling’).* And we are in the French Revolution, specifically summer 1794, at the height of the so-called Reign of Terror. This was a period that was definitely taught in British schools in the 1960s; in the very first episode of Doctor Who, Susan borrows a book on the French Revolution from her teacher, Barbara (in Ian Marter’s novelization of this story, he has Barbara remember Susan borrowing the book in the earlier story; presumably the book is still somewhere in the TARDIS).

The idea of setting a story in the French Revolution was, according to the volume of Doctor Who: The Complete History that covers this (which I don’t have to hand), originally the idea of William Russell. But I strongly suspect that the period was not far from script editor David Whitaker’s mind. After all, Susan’s borrowing of a book on the French Revolution is there in Anthony Coburn’s script for the first episode, and expanded upon in the remount (as discussed below)—a scene I expect derives from Whitaker rather than Coburn. 

Early on in this story, Susan tells Ian and Barbara that the Reign of Terror (and specifically the Reign of Terror, not just the French Revolution in general) is her grandfather’s favourite period of history (Marter has the Doctor repeat this to a French peasant boy). We can well believe it. We know that the Doctor has been here before; when Susan borrows that book on the French Revolution, her first response is ‘that’s not right’. Clearly, we are meant to infer from that, at least in hindsight, that the Doctor and Susan have already visited this period of Earth’s history. In the first novel, Doctor Who and the Daleks, David Whitaker expands on this; Barbara recalls a thirty-page essay Susan wrote on Robespierre that included details of his walks and his clothes. One wonders, if Whitaker had actually written this story, whether it might have turned out that Robespierre already knew the Doctor and Susan, which might have smoothed their way, or caused a lot more problems. One also wonders exactly what it was that appealed to the Doctor about a period where the wrong word to the wrong person could get your head rapidly separated from your body (in Marter’s novel, the Doctor mourns that he has missed the Storming of the Bastille, something he always enjoys—but which, of course, belongs to a much earlier phase of the Revolution).

One suspects that Whitaker might have wanted to write this story (Simon Guerrier’s forthcoming biography of Whitaker may have something to say about this). For quite a while, Whitaker had intended writing the final historical of the first season, at first planning a story set in the aftermath of the Spanish Armada; but, in keeping with Whitaker’s instincts to avoid obvious British history, the story was to be set in Spain, looking at what the defeat of the Armada meant to the Spanish, a topic rarely treated in English classrooms. But it became obvious that, with the work he needed to do script-editing and rewriting the other stories, there simply wasn't time for Whitaker to write the final story himself, and he would have to get someone else in. Enter Dennis Spooner, a friend of Terry Nation, who had not written for Doctor Who before, but was an experienced television writer, having written for The Avengers and Fireball XL5, among others.

Evidently, Whitaker decided he was going to keep the Spanish Armada story for himself, and it was deferred to Whitaker’s outline for the second season, along with a number of other suggestions, for stories in Ancient Egypt, the American Civil War, and the Roman empire, of which only the last came to fruition. (I suspect Whitaker may have already decided in his own mind—if not actually told anyone else of his decision—that he was going to move on from the script-editor’s role at the end of the first production block, and so would have more time for writing episodes.) So, with the Armada held over, Spooner would have to write in a different setting. According to Spooner (who actually wanted to write a science fiction story, but like any jobbing writer, did the job he was given, which on this occasion, was a historical), he was given a choice of four subjects, from which he eventually chose the French Revolution, after discussions with Whitaker and producer Verity Lambert. David Howe, Mark Stammers and Stephen James Walker rather imply in The First Doctor Handbook that the setting had already been decided upon before Whitaker met Spooner, but that may be the result of compression in their account.

The important point is that Spooner had a different approach to the historicals from that practised by Whitaker and John Lucarotti. In a chapter I wrote over a decade ago,† I characterised this as the difference between being concerned with history, and being concerned with story. Lucarotti’s two scripts so far are very concerned with getting the historical details right; the plot rather emerged from a consideration of the history. Spooner, on the other hand, was most influenced by earlier fictional depictions of the period that he was writing about. The biggest influences on ‘The Reign of Terror’ are Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities (from the most recent—1957—BBC adaptation of which the Doctor Who serial borrows a shot of the guillotine, and probably some costumes, though to the audience the novel would be most familiar from the 1958 movie starring Dirk Bogarde), and Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel, rather than Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution. One consequence of this is Spooner’s desire to put the most famous person about at the time, Napoleon Bonaparte, into the story, despite the facts, as the Napoleon I Society pointed out after broadcast, that not only was Napoleon unlikely to have supported an attempt to overthrow Robespierre, he was nowhere near Paris at the time of Robespierre’s fall. (By the time of Jon Pertwee, of course, it will turn out that the Doctor and Napoleon were friends.)

Spooner also has rather more humour on display than pervious historicals, though here Spooner’s instincts are somewhat moderated by Whitaker’s script-editing. Spooner would be completely given his head in the next historical, ‘The Romans’, by which time Spooner had taken over Whitaker’s role as script-editor. Of course, from the humour perspective, it’s not Spooner’s fault if, three years later, the Carry On team brought out a far funnier pastiche of Orczy in Don’t Lose Your Head, though inevitably it shapes how we see this Doctor Who story now (as I was writing this piece, I initially typed ‘Scarlet Fingernail’).‡

Spooner’s adapts well to a fundamental problem the story has to confront: on a BBC budget, there was simply no way that they could have crowd scenes around the guillotine, even the fairly limited ones that characterise the 1958 movie (and, indeed, Don’t Lose Your Head). So almost everything takes place inside rooms, particularly at the Conciergerie prison. This is fleshed out with a few small, tightly shot street scenes, the footage from the 1957 Tale of Two Cities showing the guillotine falling, and some footage from an educational film, The French Revolution, showing a horse-drawn carriage riding through forest, which is used (twice; the second time reversed) for the TARDIS crew’s journey from Paris back to the countryside where their ship is. 

Other points to note: This is a story replete with recalling previous adventures, with callbacks to the likes of ‘An Unearthly Child’ (though not the weird one with the scissors), amid a sense that maybe the TARDIS crew’s luck may really be about to run out this time. (As a side note, if people watching were aware that this marked the end of the first season of Doctor Who, they might have perceived there being a very real possibility that Ian and Barbara, or even Susan, might depart in this story, possibly not surviving it.) We get Barbara as history teacher again, lecturing everyone about how, no matter how bad Robespierre and his Jacobins and the Reign of Terror are, the royalist government that existed before the Revolution was also pretty awful, and deserved to be overthrown, good people supported the Revolution, and good things would come of it. Such nuance is not always a feature of Doctor Who. We also get, once again, Everybody Fancies Barbara, Especially the Villains. And as the text commentary on the DVD notes, this story sees the introduction of a feature that will be maintained in later historicals: regional English accents indicate working class characters, Received Pronunciation means upper class. 

And once again, the nature of the TARDIS crew’s involvement with history is addressed. Barbara tries to tell James Stirling that Napoleon will indeed turn Revolutionary France into a military dictatorship. The Doctor tells her not to waste her breath. She says that she’s learnt that history can’t be changed from her time amongst the Aztecs. The Doctor replies with the words quoted at the top of this post. Then, at the end of the episode, back in the TARDIS, there’s a conversation, slightly trimmed from what was in the original script, about what might have happened had they told Napoleon what was going to happen to him, or tried to shoot him. The Doctor is insistent that nothing they could have done would have made a difference. This last scene in particular feels more like Whitaker than Spooner; it echoes a lot of the themes in the prologue Whitaker wrote for Doctor Who and the Crusaders, which I’ll discuss when I get round to ‘The Crusade’. (In a way, this view will be reinforced by 'Vincent and the Doctor', where the message is that you can show someone's future to them, and be believed, and yet still history will play out as written.)** 

In the next story, ‘Planet of Giants’, the TARDIS crew actually manages to return to London in 1964, but have been shrunk to about an inch high (they also find themselves embroiled in a rather poor Avengers plot). But along the way, the Doctor reveals that he was in London during the Zeppelin raids of the First World War.

Finally on this general topic, I rediscovered a piece that I’d written on Doctor Who and history for the Open University’s OpenLearn site. I had quite forgotten about this. I think it’s still a sound discussion of the issues, though, as this post suggests, I would move the change in emphasis of the historicals forward from ‘The Romans’ to ‘The Reign of Terror’.

* And please tell me that someone has written a story around the fact that Stirling’s alias here, ‘Lemaitre’, is the French for ‘Master’.

† ‘It’s about Tempus: Greece and Rome in “classic” Doctor Who’, in David C. Wright, Jr. and Allan W. Austin (eds), Space and Time: Essays on Visions of History in Science Fiction and Fantasy Television, Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2010, pp. 100-115.

‡ Carry On director Gerald Thomas was also, at least partially, sending up his brother Ralph’s 1958 version of A Tale of Two Cities.

** The theme is, of course, also taken up in Marter’s novel: ‘it was immensely frustrating [for Ian] to be able to see into the future and yet not be able to do anything to change it!’

Werewolf by Night review

 

And there's another review by me on FA Online, this time of the Werewolf by Night special.

She-Hulk: Attorney at Law review

I have a new review up on FA Online, one of the comics-based media reviews which seems to be all I do these days. This time it's of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law.
 

Spring 2023 MANCENT courses

The full Spring 2023 MANCENT course portfolio is now available, including my course on screening Roman Britain.

Science Fiction Movies in the Twenty-First Century: Boldly Go to a Galaxy Far, Far Away

I'm teaching a short online course on the twenty-first century science fiction movie in the spring. Unfortunately, you can't study it unless you're a high school/secondary school student.

Science Fiction Movies in the Twenty-First Century: | Global Scholars | Office of Pre-College Programs | University of Notre Dame (nd.edu)

 

'It's this wretched country': Roman Britain on Screen

For my spring MANCENT online course, I'm taking a journey through movies and television dramas set in Roman Britain. Come and join me and other interested students! You can join live or watch the recordings later.

Full course: 'It's this wretched country': Roman Britain on Screen - whole course Tickets, Mon 9 Jan 2023 at 19:00 | Eventbrite

Or you can join individual sessions: 'It's this wretched country': Roman Britain on Screen -individual sessions Tickets, Multiple Dates | Eventbrite

Kevin O’Neill (1953-2022)

I wrote an appreciation of the great Kevin O’Neill, one of the finest comics artists of the past half-century, and an artist whose work I have admired and loved for forty years.  

Kevin O’Neill (1953-2022) - FA Online (comiczine-fa.com)

Article by me on the influence of Jackson's LOTR on ancient world movies

Sometimes I actually finish stuff. This piece of mine came out about a month ago. I think it's a pretty important piece, with a lot of my ideas about ancient world movies in the twenty-first century.

https://thersites-journal.de/index.php/thr/article/view/223/376

Doctor Who, 'The Power of the Doctor'

Spoilers follow (but it’s been a few weeks now).

And so the Jodie Whitaker/Chris Chibnall era ends much as it began, with a story that seems to have sharply divided its viewers. On the whole, I am with those in favour—there was enough in here to make me smile, and it was at least better than the atrocious ‘Legend of the Sea Devils’. 

A number of the flaws that have blighted the Chibnall era, and indeed, all of New Who, are still present. Everything is at a frenetic pace, except for those moments where you actually want them to get on with it (why are regenerations so drawn out these days?), and the music overpowers every scene. But at least the ninety minutes means that the story has enough time to breathe, and the pacing seemed right, unlike in the previous special, where the story didn’t seem to have got out of the first act before running out of time. 

I have to say I am now a bit bored with Sacha Dhawan’s Master. He certainly throws himself into the role, but it’s rather one note eeeeeevil here. Again, this is a general problem with New Who, where the Master has often been pointlessly sadistic; Roger Delgado’s Master was certainly nasty and ruthless, but never pointlessly so.

What I really liked, and what I can understand some people will have hated, are the fan-service moments. It was great to see Davison, Colin Baker, and Sylvester McCoy, all back, and particularly great to see Paul McGann, whose Doctor we never saw enough of. Also, good to see Jo Martin. And the penultimate scene, in which many of the Doctor’s past companions gather, including William Russell’s Ian Chesterton, brought a tear to my eye. I was even happy to see Bonnie Langford.

Then there’s the regeneration itself, and the since well-publicised return of David Tennant. This is not too much of a surprise. We knew Tennant was coming back for the 60th anniversary, and it’s as good a way of bringing him in as any; the 50th anniversary special had established that the Doctor can revisit old faces. If the whole Ncuti Gatwa thing had turned out to be a bit of Russell T. Davies misdirection (not entirely beyond him) I would have been annoyed, but it is obvious that Tennant is only back for the specials, and will then move on again. And if this means that RTD will finally do right by Donna Noble, then I’m for it. It’s just a pity we now have to wait for a year (hopefully we’ll get Gatwa quite early in 2024).

So, farewell Jodie Whitaker. Like Peter Capaldi, it felt like we never got to properly know her Doctor before she was gone. But I’m glad she was there.

Quick round-up of stuff

 

I have been remiss in publicising the 2022 Virtual Conference of the International Society for the Study of Egyptomania. I am speaking on the Sunday. I am not talking about the Doctor Who serial 'Pyramids of Mars'—that will be the subject of John J. Johnston's keynote, which immediately follows my paper. Instead, I am talking about some serials from ITV's rival to Doctor Who, The Tomorrow People.

I don't do as much reviewing as I used to for The Slings and Arrows Graphic Novel Guide, but one review, of Marvel Masterworks: Avengers 19, did come out a few months ago. This volume includes Avengers #200. I have expressed my opinion on Avengers #200 before (a 'big stonking faeces of a story'), and my views have not changed. Which is a shame, as the other stories here are okay.

Finally, in the most recent issue of Foundation I have a review of the Cartoon Museum's now finished Luther Arkwright exhibition, which I quite liked, but thought it could have been better.

Maureen Kincaid Speller and Gocha R. Tsetskhladze

 I woke up on Monday to the news that Maureen Kincaid Speller had died. This wasn't a surprise - I'd known about her cancer for a while, and her husband, Paul Kincaid, had posted on Facebook to say that she was near the end. But it was still upsetting. I'd known Maureen for as long as I'd been in wider fandom - indeed, she and Paul were among the first people outside local groups I'd really met, when they came and visited one of the pub groups in Manchester. I wasn't around in her glory days of the 1980s and 1990s, when she ran the BSFA, a role from which she was just stepping down about the time I first started getting involved in cons on a wider basis. Mind you, I would venture that Maureen was no less important in fandom, broadly defined, for the past twenty years - she was just slightly less visible, running the APA Acnestis, and more recently acting as the reviews editor for Strange Horizons and assistant editor for Foundation.

Maureen was a good friend, kind and generous. I saw her regularly in the 2000s in London, and then less regularly in the 2010s, when we were at the other end of Kent from her and Paul, and they didn't go to London or conventions as often as they once had. I last saw them I think in 2019, when, unexpectedly, they dropped in to the Eastercon. I'd meant to go and visit this summer, but rail strikes and Maureen going back into hospital put paid to that.

Maureen was a brilliant critic, and an important part of the sf world. If it was not always recognised how important she was, that's partly because a lot of her work was, as I say, less visible, partly because she never pushed herself as much as she could, partly because Paul got a bit more attention, and partly, I'm sorry to say, because she was a woman, and not always taken seriously in the very male world of sf fandom of the twentieth century. But she was important. There was a booklet collecting some of her criticism published by the BSFA a few years ago, and the British Fantasy Society rightly gave her the Karl Edward Wagner Award at the weekend; sadly, she probably never knew that. I am sad that her voice has been stilled, and that we will never get the definitive book on Alan Garner that everyone who knew her knew she had in her to write.

A few hours later, I learned of the death of Gocha R. Tsetskhladze, a titan of the archaeology of the Greek colonies on the Black Sea. I hadn't seen Gocha in over twenty years, but back in the day we were friends, and I participated in the seminar series he ran with Anthony Snodgrass in Cambridge, that became Greek Settlements in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea. I think I am right in remembering that was one of the rare occasions I was invited to present, rather than responding to a call for papers, and I thank him for that. It's certainly the only time I ever dined at a Cambridge College High Table.

Both were taken from us far too young, and I shall miss them both.

Virtual Hadrian's Wall Walk

I am joining in with Classics for All's virtual Hadrian's Wall walk this September. Please sponsor me. https://classicsforall.enthuse.com/pf/tony-keen

Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne

I have a post up on the MANCENT blog to promote my forthcoming course on Greek and Roman mythology, talking about Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne. If it ends a bit abruptly, it's because there's a second part, which will come soon. 

https://mancent.org.uk/?p=4929

Review of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

Over on FA Online—The Comiczine, I've written a piece about how I don't care for the misogynist tropes in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. 

 
http://comiczine-fa.com/reviews/doctor-strange-in-the-multiverse-of-madness

Notes on Doctor Who and history: 'The Aztecs'

‘But you can’t rewrite history! Not one line! ... Barbara, one last appeal. What you are trying to do is utterly impossible. I know, believe me, I know.’

‘The Aztecs’ is the big one in terms of how early Doctor Who views history, as embodied in that quote. John Lucarotti returns as writer, following up a period in which he was interested, having lived in Mexico. So the research is, once again, very solid.

Barbara wants to change the Aztecs, to get them to give up what she considers ‘evil’ in their culture. The Doctor, in the quotation above, insists that you just can’t change history like that, implying perhaps in his last comment that he himself has tried and failed. Although, strangely, he later tells Cameca, the Aztec woman to whom he has accidentally become engaged, that the gods wish an end to human sacrifice, thus indulging in a bit of the attempting to change history that he has told Barbara she should give up.

Eventually, Barbara is persuaded; indeed, she gives up surprisingly easily, once Ian convinces her that Tlotoxol, the High Priest of Sacrifice, represents mainstream Aztec opinion, rather than Autloc, High Priest of Knowledge. This is probably good, because in the end Barbara’s plan is essentially a white saviour narrative. But while she can’t change the Aztecs, she can change one man, Autloc. This is the ‘wiggle room’ that Doctor Who will exploit time and time again.

The Doctor, meanwhile, is still not a moral crusader. His sole objective is get back the the TARDIS, from which he has, once again, been separated. At the same time, he clearly feels some responsibility not to muck things up. It is interesting how very dedicated he is to this. The Doctor’s attitude to how to behave while in fifteenth-century Mexico is an extreme version of Star Trek’s Prime Directive. Not only must he and his companions sit back and accept human sacrifice, they must actively participate if circumstances dictate. It is hard to imagine any other Doctor taking so extreme an attitude.

Barbara is history teacher supreme again, with a detailed knowledge of the Aztecs. (Meanwhile, Ian reveals hidden l33t fighting skills.) And the costumes and set design excel again, making the most of the studio bound restrictions.

Once again, Aztec Mexico is an interesting choice for a setting. Even more so than ‘Marco Polo’, the setting is devoid of white Europeans (well, if we ignore all the white European actors portraying the Aztecs). This is not a setting that would commonly come up in an educational context, or a televisual one. And having decided to choose the Aztecs, the show takes an unusual angle on them. Most dramas about the Aztecs would have chosen to look at the arrival of the Spanish conquistadores. In Doctor Who, the fact that they will come drives Barbara’s actions, but they do not appear, not do any of the Aztecs have the slightest idea of what is about to happen to their world.  

Again, there is excellent design and costume work, even though designer Barry Newbery apparently found reference material hard to find, and costume designer Daphne Dare had to get around the fact that historical evidence suggests that male Aztecs often wore little more than loincloths, and Aztec women went around topless.

One last point: I find it extremely interesting that ‘The Aztecs’ was in production at almost exactly the same time as Peter Shaffer’s The Royal Hunt of the Sun was in rehearsal for the Chichester Festival. Of course, Shaffer’s play is about the Incas, not the Aztecs, and includes the conquistadores. I have no idea if anyone involved in Doctor Who was aware of the National Theatre production, though it’s entirely possible that they did, as members of the cast of ‘The Aztecs’ may well have auditioned for Royal Hunt. In any case, I find the coincidence of two productions about pre-Colombian American cultures interesting.