Jack in the box

Five Ood like predictions about The Pandorica Opens.

1) Rather than containing the most evil thing in all creation, the Great Vampire in a Mara skin coat for example, it will contain something as threatening as a pale green Sunday.

2) Matt Smith will be made to recite dialogue which sounds more like a DVD commentary entitled The Plot Explained rather than an actual character talking.

3) Yet again we will learn that the Doctor only meets people bound up the fate of the Universe and his destiny.

4) Not only will it be a cynically written, Moffat does Doctor Who-by-numbers, fanboy fetish but fandom will love it simply because it is a cynically written, Moffat does Doctor Who-by-numbers, fanboy fetish.

5) Remember how the original Star Trek considered cliched time paradox storylines as cutting edge sci-fi drama? Well, here we go again... forty years later...

A rose by any other name...

The tragedy of a great man who could not reconcile his genius to the world around him... Soon to be in the West End after Andrew Lloyd Webber and Graham Norton use more public money to cast a private enterprise in Any Ear Will Do


Ok, this week stood on the edge of greatness but fell short.

The programme makers seem to harbour a near all-consuming cowardice in regards making drama. This probably stems from a patronising belief that a wider audience, children included, would not have the intellectual capacity to deal with something genuinely affecting.
Calling the episode Vincent and The Doctor was misleading as it was not really about either. Any time the script started to approach some form of character integrity it was undermined by the need to have a pointless monster stomping around. Essentially the episode had a story smothered by the production teams need to play upon shallow hokum and turn historical figures into a celebrity of the week.
The episode did not need a monster. It was pointless. The actual story, albeit struggling to emerge, was about Vincent, Amy and the Doctor. The idea of Amy trying to change the tragedy of Van Gough’s suicide, with the Doctor knowing the inevitability of history, would have made an episode above anything on TV that week. The best points of the episode were the ones separate to the usual monster mash we have come to accept. Amy presenting Vincent with the sunflowers; Van Gough’s bi-polar swing from melancholy to anger making him unpredictable to be around; the great mans disregard for his own work. These were some of the best written scenes the show has seen since RTD wrote for the Christopher Eccleston era. However, before you think I’ve gone soft in the head and started saying nice things for a change...

I have a problem with Curtis and much of his work. Firstly he is prone to sentiment. The final scenes of Vincent in the gallery were just wallowing and a cheap shot to provide an emotional denouement for the audience. The drama would have held the context on its own. The second problem is that Curtis deals with what we shall loosely term “issues” in the way that all middle class, champagne socialist, liberals like to. He lectures in the belief he is making a difference when, in actuality, he is just conscience soothing. By telling others of the importance of Africa or mental health issues he may believe he is making a difference. No, this is just a messianic conceit. Look at how Bono lectures others on poverty whist wearing designer clothes or how Slumdog Millionaire made people feel better about third world poverty because it portrayed hope in, what is really, an endlessly hopeless situation. It has nothing to do with resolving a situation but everything to do with exploiting it for a selfish moral reassurance and sustaining of self-worth. People who genuinely care about these issues do not make fortunes from shoddy rom-coms and then tell others about how guilty we should all feel. They dedicate their lives to their cause. Anything else is just the worst kind of self-deceit imaginable.
Incidentally, I’m pretty sure Van Gough is unlikely to have used the phrase sonny... ever, in his whole life. If you’re going to write stay true to the characters.

Anyway, next week it is a Gareth Roberts story. I’ll be giving it a miss, that man has already wasted an hour and a half of my life.

If it stinks like it, then it probably is...

A brick, a possible last word in the phrase Chibnall writes with all the subtlety and ingenuity of a...




Last week I suggested Chibnall had no talent for writing drama. In fact he makes you realise just how good Pip and Jane Baker actually were.

This week not only would I underline everything I said previously but also point out the script was misogynistic.

Yes, we are most definitely in the Moffat era now. Tonight we were taken back to the old everything bad that could ever happen is down to women theme which underpinned Jekyll. Yes, we had two Silurian females whose dialogue was taken from every bit of clichéd rhetoric imaginable and it was the human woman who murdered just to provide some shallow hokum. No story, no characterisation, no drama just mindless, badly written prejudice.

There really is no point in making a comparison between tonight’s episode and the original Hulke story. It would be like trying to compare profanities daubed on a wall of Bedlam using blood and shit with The Second Coming by Yeats. Well, maybe. I suspect the Bedlam daubing would stink less than anything written by Chibnall.

I’m playing Requiem from Pink Elephants by Mick Harvey just for you Chibnall. Twice as loud as I was last week.

A Glove Across the Face

OK, now I'm really pissed off.

An infinite number of monkeys would have struggled to write something as bad as Chibnall in their first few hours of typing.

Doctor Who: The Hungry Earth

So, let me explain just why what happened tonight is as far from good as is possible to create in easy to digest points (a) for the idiotic wasting which fandom has become and (b) in the hope that Chibnall gives up writing for a while and re-thinks his life priorities.

1) Dialogue. Malcolm Hulke stated in Writing for TV to avoid cliché and constant questions. Chibnall did neither. If a character was not asking a question they were spouting something which has been heard throughout the history of bad drama since TV began.
2) As stated before bad drama is dangerous. It corrodes culture and damages the evolution of the human race.
3) If incapable of creating genuine mystery and tension just take the Spielberg opt-out clause of putting a child in danger.
4) Hulke wrote stories. Chibnall writes plots. If you do not understand why a plot is bad then I suggest you fuck off right now and watch Avatar because there is no hope for you (it's a pointless piece of shite but has lots of pretty colours to keep you amused).
5) Hulke’s stories were imbued with moral complexity and questioning, there was no overall right or wrong but people being led by instinctive notions of fear and racial prejudice. Tonight Chibnall reduced the Silurians to a green, scaly version of Al-Qaeda.
6) The Silurian's were previously tragic in their motivations. They were in danger of extinction and wrestling with the problem that evolution had overtaken them and their place in their world was irrevocably lost. For Chibnall they are just an excuse to have a B-movie green monster re-modelled on the creature from Predator and the Tractors from Frontios. There is a difference between theft and revisionism. The Hungry Earth was theft, badly executed.
7) Incidently, it is a different race the Doctor met before not a different species. At least get the basics of science correct.

I’m playing Requiem from Pink Elephants by Mick Harvey just for you Chibnall.

WAR! Huh-huh. What is it good for?

Although Gok-Wan had done his best with a daring little khaki number she still felt frumpy compared to her best friend.




Victory of the Daleks: Not so much rewriting Doctor Who history but more mutilating it and leaving it to die in a gutter.

Ok, it featured all the trade marks of a Gatiss script - criminally bad dialogue (his episode of Poirot is embarrassing to watch for this reason alone), no characterisation, cliché after cliché, jingoism and nothing much else. Like most of the Gatiss stuff it really just borders on being a very expensive, self indulgent fan-boy dream.

It also ventured the theory that any fat bloke can be made over to look like Winston Churchill.

Remember people this is all new Doctor Who because the Daleks now come in Technicolor.

Perhaps the best way I can explain it is with a story.

Many years before the show returned I was looking after my nephew and a few of his friends. My nephew had started watching Doctor Who (thanks to my video collection) and decided to show them Remembrance of the Daleks. They loved it. In fact they loved it so much they all begin playing out their very own story. It featured the Daleks in World War II. They were working with the Nazis. The Daleks had camouflage armour. It ended with a battle between spitfires and Daleks. In space. They then got bored and created the epic Prison of the Daleks.
Basically everyone has had this idea at some point, and probably done it much better, before rejecting it as a bit too obvious.

Incidentally just showing a crack at the end of every episode does not constitute a story arc.

Still next week we have the first meeting with River Song. And the Weeping Angels. In a two parter. Bloody hell. You know what, I'm sure there is something else I can be doing with my life.

Makako en Konvenig
April 2010

End Game

Think of this as a Requiem Mass

Le Chiffe had offered Bond a straight choice of tortures. Watching The Eleventh Hour or having a brick repeatedly swung into his balls. Bond instantly went for the less painful brick option.



Ok, deep breaths. I mean I thought it would be bad but that... That was just taking the piss.

Actually it was just acutely depressing, a bit like watching the autopsy of a childhood sweetheart.

It really is hard to know where to begin. How can you criticise a catastrophe?

Lets be honest, it was not Doctor Who but what a bunch of media execs and crowd pleasing hacks think people perceive Doctor Who as being. The best way to describe it is in cliché. Zany and madcap are the best I can think of. Obviously this is the problem. Doctor Who is no longer a drama programme, it is made as light entertainment. Hence why we have a series of non-linear, sense defying events linking together based around some excuse for a plot. Also, just to get on my favourite soap box, it had no story. There was a plot, when they could be bothered, but actually it managed to do or say very little. Quite frankly I thought The End of Time was patronising, this was just insulting.
Some time ago I wrote an article accusing J K Rowling of holding back the evolution of humanity. The Harry Potter series does nothing but perpetuate the lowest form of magic wand writing. Like C S Lewis before her Rowling creates a world where faith restores all and the only concern is for the fictional world the work inhabits. There is no conception about common human consciousness and the world we exist within. It is a cultural low simply because it is so detached from any significant meaning or value and only able to offer the formative and inquisitive mind nothing but shallow distraction. Rowling has actually helped do nothing more than lower cultural expectations to that of mere idle thrill.
This perhaps explains how Doctor Who has become locked in its present moribund sterility. The show is being made by people who seek to emulate the success of something which has no intrinsic worth. It is a programme made to gather the greatest number of viewers possible. Orwell was wrong; the proles are not distracted by pornography but the cheap, the tawdry and meaningless glass prism. Artistic expression has become the basest form of communication, that which distracts us from the process of existing and merely allows the clock to tick by the seconds of our lives without us caring.

I was watching one of those awful TV programmes about TV programmes. One of the people who thought themselves fit to offer an opinion was Phil Collinson. Watching some of his contributions it became clear as to why Doctor Who has become nothing more than a cheap entertainment programme. His main contribution focussed on Emmerdale. He explained, quite excitedly, how the plane crash story line was epic drama. No. No, no, no, no. It was not epic and it was not drama. It was just an awful and exploitative attempt to get ratings.

Soap opera generally works on three principles of expression.

1) The Sentimental (relationship issues)

2) Conflict (relentlessly nasty people doing relentlessly nasty things to each other)

3) The exaggerated grotesque (disaster, murder, rape, child abuse and any other personal assault or invasion)

None of these principles actually equate to good drama, if anything they are the antithesis of it. What Collinson failed to grasp was the difference between spectacle and drama (yes, I’m banging this drum again) When a soap opera deals with an issue like rape or child abuse it is not to explore the human psyche, it is an attempt to get ratings. This is the worst possible motivation and ultimately dangerous. Bad drama does more harm than good. After the success of The Accused Hollywood & American TV spawned many imitation rape dramas, not because they cared but because they were popular and had an audience. These films were more or less the same, for instance the attacks were by strangers or new acquaintances, and the victim always showered after the attack etc All these dramas did was build up a stereotypical scenario for sexual violence. The consequence was that many real life rape cases were jeopardised because they did not correspond to the scenario which was being represented by the movie making community.
Today most television writers have to work for soap opera in one form or another. New writers at the BBC are sent to write Doctors, graduate to Holby City and move to Eastenders. Here lies the issue. Training writers, directors or producers through the medium of soap opera can only warp and destroy any future expression of dramatic integrity.
What I am saying is to suggest a story line where a plane drops onto a village is dramatic is absurd; it is nothing more than the pornography of populism. Yet this obsession with success and tabloid approval is the philosophy which motivates modern Doctor Who. Everything has to be generic. This explains why this new era actually has very little new in it (Weeping Angels, Cybermen, Silurians, Daleks, River Song, Doctor meeting female child who obsesses over him into adulthood). There can be nothing which may upset the bland rut the show inhabits.
Even the theme has been given a makeover to make it as bland and passionless as possible. The original theme perfectly summed up the show, increased heart rate and escalating fear until our hero arrives to save the day. It was, like most of Grainer’s work, a musical definition of content (think The Prisoner as another). Even the Sylvester McCoy theme, until 6.20pm tonight the worst of all versions, had some fortitude. However now we have something so lacking in drive, distinction or originality it simply saps your energies. At this point I should also draw attention to the incidental music, as subtle as a foghorn. Through a loudspeaker. Directly next to your ear.
Also, the silence is coming. Just what we needed... more ropey faith and psychic divination prophecies. Begining of a new era my arse. It is just the old one only worse.

Oh crap I've just remembered Gary Russell knows where I live.

He really does.

I would suggest any man who refers to the mind behind The End of Time as a genius seriously needs to find a darkened room and take a few days to re-assess their priorities. For a start when you have two hours of television where every character can only talk about the plot and the enormity of what will be or is happening surely he twigged there was a problem.
Yet this is the man who ran Audio Visuals and Big Finish. The Audio Visuals tapes were a small group of fans making Doctor Who stories, some just plain terrible, some distinctly average and occasionally, as with Minuet in Hell by Alan W Lear, touching genius. Minuet in Hell by Audio Visuals should not be confused with the Big Finish re-make. The first version was original, daring, dramatic and understood the mythologies which under pin Doctor Who. The Gary Russell re-write was not and he is now charged with making the show for real.
Part of my issue with the modern show is that no one actually seems to understand its mythology. It is not a sci-fi show, yet they believe it is. The interesting conflict between old and new will be in the upcoming vampire story. Christopher H Bidmead always spoke about hardcore sci-fi but actually did the opposite. He builds mythologies (see Warriors Gate or Keeper of Traken as an example, he practically rewrote them from scratch) For Bidmead a vampire was not a Hammer Horror throw back but a form inimical to life, unleashing themselves on reality and feeding on whole worlds. I suspect the new series will simply go all Hammer Horror.
Understanding the difference between a sci-fi show designed to hold the attention and making drama is part of the Who mythology. The last Doctor Who story of the old series, Survival, saw a writer using the mythology of the show to explore ideas and concepts. The End of Time saw a writer so arrogant he could not actually be bothered to write anything beyond a masturbatory sci-fi fetish.

Talking of arrogant writers with masturbatory fetishes...


Moffat announces Doctor Who and The Gimp Men for Christmas Day.






I have many problems with the average Moffat script and quite sure many have been outlined before. However there is one area of concern which I have probably never discussed until now.

Moffat has a view of woman which mirrors that of a sexually frustrated adolescent male who has over dosed on porno.

In Press Gang you have a will they/won’t they relationship between a cocky teenager and his uptight (translate as frigid) woman boss. The lead female character was always made out to be somewhere between aloof and nasty simply because she spurned the rejections of her suitor.
In Coupling you just have a minefield of sexual neurosis being portrayed as the way young single women really act.
In Jekyll we have the ultimate and rather sickening assertion of original sin as truth with the “it’s the woman who makes him a monster” revelation.
In Who an unmarried teenage mother was at the centre of the problem; The Girl in the Fireplace is about a woman obsessed with a stranger (incidentally I know what the French court of that time really did in their fire places, and behind their curtains, so trust me, she would have stank like a sewer) In Blink you have a young woman get playfully amused by a naked man appearing in her friends house. So to Series 5. Karen Gillan and that uniform. We see Amy as a little girl who grows into a kiss-o-gram. In a sexy police uniform. Like the woman from TGITF she develops a sexual mania for the Doctor which builds in intensity over the years.
The Eleventh Hour piled up as much innuendo and flippant sexual humour as a mutated Carry on Film. Moffat can only portray women as objects of sex or in relation to the male perception of their sexuality. What we see is a writer obsessed with justifying his own neurosis rather than exploring them. Instead of writing a story he simply writes a prime time entertainment programme, with an audience of children, where women dress in sexy outfits and suggestive remarks are which have no relation to story, plot or characterisation. His whole writing career is defined by an attitude bordering on the sexually immature.


The Tenth Doctor.. no wait a sec, The Eleventh Doctor... or some 2 dimensional catchphrase spouting joke from The Fast Show... Who can tell the difference these days.








Whatever you do, don’t put him in a trap. Why you should not do this eludes me but I guess when we now have the lead character too busy telling us what kind of man he is every few seconds to actually do anything interesting none of us will ever find out.
The Tennant Doctor actually told us his character, repeatedly without ever actually doing anything to demonstrate it. The Smith Doctor appears to be on the same course. Instead of a character or performance we will get sound bytes and more of the same tired tricks of personality we had from Tennant only with different hair and wildly exagerrated to the Nth degree.

Examination question: Can you spot the difference between these shows?










Doctor Who is now undistinguishable from Merlin or Robin Hood. The BBC has a formula and their sticking to it. It’s called stagnation.
When no one in the BBC cared about Doctor Who it had freedom. Yes, it could be bad but it could also be a sublime demonstration of what Television is truly capable of. Now it is tarnished and the same as every other piece of fetid rubbish which erodes the cultural consciousness; the show only ever regresses in upon itself and never moves forward.

I actually do not care if I see Doctor Who again. What would be the point in watching anymore?

Screw you guys, I’m outta here.

Makako en Konvenig
March 2010

What the 'king hell are they up to?

Escapees from the 50's sci-fi B-movie genre found a kindred spirit in Moffat.


Yes, I know I'm not meant to be doing any new posts but I'm distinctly p***** off.

Why not bring back the Silurians and Sea Devils only to re-design them so they look like every other alien reptile men in shite sci-fi history. I mean reptiles = lizards = green... well you can see the clumsy, hamfisted, could not credit their audience with a minute bit of intelligence thinking behind this.

Recidivistic, patronising and downright insulting.

I bet Chibnall writes the bloody script as well just to really give that one huge kick in the ghoulies.

Having just recovered from the slurs of ignorant apes who did not know if he should be called a Silurian, Eocene or Earth Reptile he now faced demands for major cosmetic surgery to make his appearance more generic and acceptable.


Makako en Konvenig
Jan 2010

PS
Geronimo! What? Is that the kind of thing the Doctor says these days? Is that meant to make us think Oh wow, he is as wacky and exciting as the last fella... he says things like geronimo, so much better than real dialogue or character.