Doctor Who: The Great Detective (Christmas Special Prequel).
TV Poor Doctor. Looking like a grown up Artful Dodger or a refugee from the BBC's adaptation of Bleak House, Eleventh looks none too happy here having apparently retired after the "death" of the Ponds. Unsurprisingly, this isn't the first time in his millennial history the Time Lord's wanted to seek the quiet life. In the 90s, various novelists established that he'd bought a house in Kent (notably seen in The Dying Days) for just such an eventuality, and the Sixth Doctor was seen in, Time & Time Again, an anniversary comics story about the Key to Time having solidly decided he just wants to be left alone with his fishing. Plus there was his side steps in The End of Time, though they were less about retiring and more about sowing his oats. Again.
This is pretty dour stuff for a Children in Need minisode, the slot which previously brought us the joys of The Five Doctors, Dimensions in Time, Born Again and Time Crash as well as innumerable trailers and the teaser to The Next Doctor. It's not a complete story exactly, functioning as a kind of bespoke trailer in the mode of the Trainspotting productions, a hint at upcoming attractions. Not having been watching the television when this went out I'm not sure how it fit into the run of the programmes. Certainly the buffers, with Matt and Jenna (the -Louise seems to be silent) must be designed to keep the atmosphere upbeat. They're funny too, with Matt in full Pat mode, and there's an obvious chemistry between them which should be dynamite in the actual programme.
If anything The Great Detective works as another back door pilot for a Vastra spin-off and presumably we'll all be clamouring for more after the Christmas episode goes out too. Isn't this just fun? These are great characters and it's lovely to see that Strax survived, unless this is set before A Good Man Goes To War which given Moffat's propensity for non-linear storytelling isn't entirely unlikely. Hopefully the Christmas episode and the resulting spin-off also enjoy a voice over from Mark Gatiss with a wavering Scottish accent as he recounts the Conan-Doyle stories which won't fit into Sherlock re-engineered with fantasy elements (some of them not really requiring much work).
Now, here's the trailer for the actual episode, The Snowman:
I'm still going with my theory that Oswin and Clara are two facets of the same character, scattered through time ala Scagra and the Key and that the Doctor will either accidentally keep meeting them or be motivated to gather them all up and make them whole. It would be nice for him to simply be travelling with her though in the typical mode. One of the problems of the last five, was that the jiggery-pokery required in each episode to explain why the Ponds are travelling with with that week.
But then, I've developed the opinion that they should have left properly at the end of The God Complex and everything else after that, with the possible exception of The Power of Three, was a creative team not wanting to let go some characters which had well and truly been finished with, not unlike Logan in Veronica Mars who hung around and around for three seasons despite his story having come to a natural end at the close of the first. We'll return to this subject some other time I expect.
Star Trek: The Next Generation / Doctor Who: Assimilation 2, issue #7.
The cover, as ever, is another misrepresentation of the contents. In reality, the TARDIS spends the battle of Wolf 359 parked in a conduit in Locutus’s Borg cube while the Doctor showing a surprising knowledge of Star Trek’s mythology apparently thanks to a conversation with Picard, offers another synopsis of The Best of Both Worlds to his companions over several pages, along with a philosophical discussion on the wherefores of the Borg’s collections (huh, he, huh huh, he said bondage) and why he can’t interfere in the action due to it being a fixed point in time, presumably because he’s travelled back from the resulting continuity even though in relation to some other stories that makes little sense.
Rarely during this conversation does the Eleventh Doctor sound like himself apart from calling the Ponds, the Ponds. He’s generic Doctor again offering big long speeches which could just as well be Commander Data (who to be fair I realised whilst reading this was the analogous Merlin/Gandalfy figure of Star Trek: The Next Generation, unless it’s Guinan – I’ll get back to you on DS9, though it’s probably Odo). As I’ve discovered from the Eighth Doctor novels, the most successful writers are able to produce dialogue which automatically makes your imagination recall the sound of their voice without much work. At no point does this big speech sound like something Matt Smith would say.
It’s worth nothing that for a few issues now, one of the other story elements, the Doctor’s memory changing to suit the Roddenburyverse hasn’t warranted a mention. Instead of suggesting Picard was the source of this information, we might have expected that the Doctor’s new found knowledge is the source of his expertise in Borg technology. Either this has been forgotten, been resolved and I hadn’t noticed, or it’s never going to be dealt with which seems most likely considering this thing only has twenty-two pages to run. This was just the sort of structuring that sunk Torchwood’s Miracle Day; huge story ideas which seems like they’re going to fuel episodes worth of material quickly forgotten and not mentioned again.
After they return from the Borg sortee, we’re back on the sodding Enterprise for another seven pages which basically exist to rationalise why the ship won’t be able to catch up with the CyberBorg and they’ll have to travel in the TARDIS. The writers obviously have pacing in mind here and to be fair they are chock full of character related moments, the Doctor pretending Amy and Rory won’t be coming, Riker asking Crusher if she can have a go at deBorgifying his friend (which at this late stage just seems designed to remind the reader that Beverley still exists) and Worf giving an astonishingly long speech about the modifications he’s made to the guns they’ll be taking so that the Doctor can offer his objections to them.
This section demonstrates how wrong headed the storytelling has been in this entire series. The key scene should be Data entering the TARDIS for the first time; indeed of all the characters, his reaction is the one that should be savoured, since like the Doctor, he’s the one who experiences everything with a child-like wonder. The writers piss it away in three frames, one of which doesn’t even feature the android. The art’s fine, with a rendering of Data from Encounter at Farpoint (I think), but given the amount of pointless exposition the reader has to endure elsewhere, it’s a shame that the writers haven’t realised that it’s these moments we fans of both franchises cherish (it’s why there’s a special feature on the dvds called “moments”).
Thence to the Cyber-Armada for the infiltration and an eight page action sequence as Worf and the Ponds are separated from Picard, the Doctor and Data as they fight their way through the ship. This isn’t such a horrible idea, and under normal circumstances, there’s plenty which could be done with the Amy and Rory’s reaction to being attached to a warrior who’s still firmly a hero, contrasting the Doctor who might fit that broad description (cf, A Good Man Goes To War), but whose methods are completely different. Except as I said earlier with just twenty-two pages, there simply isn’t the space to explore this fully. The most we get is the Klingon convincing them to carry a gun (that’s not how we roll, hey Amy?).
The issue ends with the Worf and Picard separately swearing in their own language at the sight of many CyberBorg, with the TARDIS’s translation circuit conveniently malfunctioning and as though they’re surprised that having landed on one of their ships that there might be a few of them on board. In rendering the CyberBorg, the artists have gone with the Borg eye-piece over a standard Cyberman shape which is fine, but doesn't live up to their grotesque potential. The artwork in general is better than usual, though it’s becoming increasingly possible to identify the publicity shots being used as reference for the Doctor. It’s the one from the 2011 annual cover! It’s the shot of the Doctor looking worried from The Eleventh Hour!
Well, I for one am desperate for this to finish, except the other night reading Allyn Gibson’s predictions, I had the horrible though that this all going to end on a cliffhanger, the final frame being the Enterprise-D in the Whoniverse surrounded by Daleks in space. Or more Cybermen. Chatting in Forbidden Planet earlier, I heard that this farrago is one of their biggest sellers and given IDW’s propensity to hammer any relatively popular idea into the ground (the many Angel spin-offs), it seems unlikely they wouldn’t return to something which is actually shifting a few issues. But are any of those buyers really enjoying this? Do they think it’s amazing? Or are they like me just wanting to see if it can sonic some deus ex machina from the incisors of a Vulcan Le-matya beast.
Dance with Adam Curtis.
Film An experiment in pictures and music:
"I have always been fascinated by the way music can completely change the way you watch film - and how you feel as you watch the images."Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin, dance me through the panic 'til I'm gathered safely in, lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove, dance me to the end of love."
For the last year or so I have been collecting all sorts of footage of people dancing that I found in the BBC archives. In all I gathered over two thousand shots culled from all kinds of programmes. I then cut some of them together to music by the wonderful 70s German band Neu.
I think it gives a sense that we are all together in the dance."
The Last Resort.
The story begins in the middle. The Fitz and Anji are investigating the Good Times travel agency which is taking tourists back in time to the more interesting parts of world history, Ancient Egypt, the Wild West, the Tudor period, that sort of thing. Except they’re treating them like modern destinations, creating resorts with time ports, hotels and modern infrastructure and on the assumption that it isn’t their own past have created instabilities in the timeline which are apparently allowing travellers form other dimensions to fall through too.
Except some of that may be true, because after a couple chapters the novel begins again with, identical chapter numbers, some of the same action in a slightly different order, as we see the many deaths of one of the interlopers, Jack, an amateur teenage time traveller from Mars whose intervention we assume must be one of the reasons this reality is in a mess. There’s also Iyeeye, a Leela-like primitive with time sensitive gills who also manages to throw herself back through chronology into this mess, everything creating ripples, ripples, ripples which lead to the destabilization of time.
In other words, this isn’t a novel with a beginning or middle and only a hazy notion of what a conclusion is for. In places its rather like reading a Choose Your Own Adventure novel in order (which is a surprise given what I said during my History 101 review) or watching Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 21 Grams with its complicated flashback and flashforward structure as we’re forced to piece together what caused this mess, what’s motivating the characters and understand why there are multiple versions of our heroes running around.
The obscurity of this is purposefully increased by Leonard’s decision to provide the story from the point of view of the Jack and Iyeeye or the Doctor’s companions none of whom are entirely privy to the Doctor and Sabbath’s plans (yes, he’s back) and exactly what’s happening and why. It’s a brave move but often incredibly frustrating, as though a much longer novel has had all of its more important exposition and action chopped out which sometimes has the effect of making this reader concentrate so much on each scrap of information, he forgot to become involved in the story.
So like an Alan Renais or Andrei Tarkovsky film, you let actions and images wash over you in the hopes that some of it will stick and make sense. In places, whole chunks of text are repeated which is a great way to fill pages but never quite seems skippable since the author obviously wishes us to notices the subtle differences between. We’re also unsettled by the non-appearance of the Doctor for half the novel too. Seems strange to have a Doctor-lite episode in text form, though it does increase the climate of fear. Perhaps I'm a traditionalist, but I like my Time Lord front and centre unless production requirements work against it.
For all that, did I enjoy The Last Resort? Bits of it. The idea of the past literally becoming another country to be visited is a good one, But it’s also strong enough to have been used in a story with far less complexity than this and so the implications of it aren’t really explored to their fullest extent. It’s the image of a train running through a pyramid stretched to its fullest extent. The time cops too, patrol officers summarily killing interlopers from other universes is also an untapped seam.
A passage in which Anji notices reality shifting around her as she attends a meeting is also extremely impressive, with board members snapping in and out of existence entirely unaware of it themselves and the skyline of the city outside shift and changing like a giant architectural block puzzle. It’s an occasion when a scene which could not be easily created for television, at least on a television budget and with short a tiny shooting schedule is described lucidly without resorting to the dense surrealist language which can often infect this series.
That’s also true of the climactic scenes when thousands and millions of TARDIS, all with Doctors, Fitz and Anjis begin appearing in one place for various reasons ala the final moments of the Parallels episode of Star Trek The Next Generation. Again, I wish there was more room to investigate the ideas, there’s certainly enough for another novel, especially with it’s The Girl Who Waited questions of sacrifice and whether it's ok for just a select few, some unique examples to survive, thrown together from different versions of the TARDIS from different timelines.
The hitch is, with so many versions of the different characters throughout the book, and without a single viewpoint character, it’s nearly impossible to work out who we’re supposed to sympathise with, whose story it’s supposed to be. As Battleship Potemkin demonstrates, situational drama with multiple protagonists is fine, but when we’re already familiar with those protagonists but we’re not sure if the versions we’re with are the same as the ones we’ve been following. Unlike The Girl Who Waited, they’re identical.
On screen, visual clues would provide some clear delineation between the Anjis and Fitzs but on paper it’s all very confusing and perhaps it’s supposed to be, but Leonard seems to forget that as Steven Johnson explains in Everything Bad Is Good For You, even the most complex television needs some informational "flashing arrows" to keep its audience orientated. Now that I think about, perhaps Leonard does mean for us to follow a single Anji and a single Fitz, but we’re disorientated because the author shifts to other versions rather a lot.
So in the end, as with the rest of this alternative universe arc, I probably endured it more than enjoyed it and as with the rest of this alternative universe arc the best moments are when Trix wanders in (because it has to be Trix), is entirely charming to whoever she’s bumped into and the novel feels like it’s being written by someone else, arguably a more superior writer (Is that possible? Did Justin Richards add these passage afterwards? Or rewrite just as a story editor might on television?). I also love the moment at the end when it’s hinted the Doctor knows all about her presence.
I’ve a little bit to wait, just a couple of days, before I can read the next book, Timeless, and I do want to read what happens next. In the real world, these books had entered by-monthly publishing ironically just as the new television series was announced and I am aware that some of the past Doctor novels which filled in the gaps are connected to the EDAs. I’d thought about reading the relevant ones, but decided to leave them for a different project and another time. I’ve only nine EDAs left and I want to get them read before Christmas …
Reckless Engineering.
As contemporary reviewer Finn Clark points out, there tend only to be two different types of alternate realities, the totalitarian regime and the post-apocalyptic horror and after The Domino Effect’s attempt at the former it is a bit dispiriting that we’ve plunged into the latter so soon and just as David Bishop covered all the tropes of the former almost the point of recreating the Worm that Turned from The Two Ronnies (which was set in 2012), so Walters gives us almost every element of the other genre, with religious zealotry, medievalism, cannibalistic mutants, cannibalistic outlaws, morally ambiguous leadership and a technologically superior class (albeit embodied by a single person) who has all the answers.
At least, unlike The Domino Effect, when faced with the (alternate) reality of this, the Doctor and his pals grok the situation immediately and have the conversations they should have been having at the top of the previous two books. But there’s a sense of déjà vu as they’re dragged through this new world, into Totterdown near Bristol, the main town in which the story is set with its muddy, rundown architecture and fruity-smelling population though in fairness the author describes such things with relish, especially the inn where they spend the evening. The drinking holes in these novels are always vividly drawn for some reason. The author says he lives in the real Totterdown, “it’s nothing like the place described in the book”, he says in his bio, “(except on Saturday nights).”
As the cover indicates, it’s the point of divergence, which offers some variation with the introduction of some celebrity sparkle in the form of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who unwittingly is one of the catalysts towards the world’s destruction and finds himself as temporary companion for the Doctor as he works to set the timeline straight. He’s rather in the position of HG Wells in Timelash though; the story doesn’t particularly pinion around him, he could in theory be any Victorian philanthropist, though it’s nice that Kenneth Branagh’s finally been given a part in the franchise (at least in the version I had playing my head).
I expect my main issues are as follows. Firstly, the story arc continues to be a mess. Now we’re back to something akin the mission outlined in Time Zero, with the Doctor attempting to put histimeline back in primary position but there’s now a hint that the threat is from real world quantum physics with an infinite number of timelines threatening to collapse in on themselves. Or something. I don’t know. But neither Anji or Fitz seem on board with the mission, complaining that it means that none of the people they meet and become friends with will continue to exist, even though Anji’s main goal is to return to her own 2003 in her own universe. Sometimes.
At various points both Anji and Fitz turn against the Doctor for his treatment of the people he meets some of whom in theory die at his hands as he pursues his goal channelling his earlier self in some respects, and although it’s true he comes across as a bit of a heartless bastard, as he says they wouldn’t have existed in the first place if the timelines hadn’t been interfered with. The greater good and all that. To an extent that’s a problem for the reader too in relation to our enjoyment of the novel since none of the characters beyond the TARDIS team will have more than a conceptual happy ending. But in series fiction, characters don’t tend to return anyway so we shouldn’t necessarily be worried about temporal bloodbaths, but we do. It’s odd.
If you thought that last paragraph was confusing you should try reading the last hundred pages of this book which is chock full of Moffatesque time paradoxes and temporal engineering and the Doctor conveniently forgetting which universe he’s in and universes collapsing and various versions of characters running around and trying not bump into one another (in ways which make Mawdryn Undead look as simplistic as a strip in TV Comic). Even as I write this, I’m still not sure how things resolved themselves though I think it involves something akin to the paradox machine in Last of the Timelords. I can follow River Song’s timeline perfectly well but not this and it’s all written down.
Apart from Brunel, none of the characters are that interesting either. There’s a Brontesque object of desire called Aboetta, who spends much of the novel trying to decide if she’ll stay with an expositional poet, Malahyde who’s the other reason for this apocalyptic world or one of the security guards at Totterdown in what amounts to an even muddier version of Wuthering Heights, an outlaw priest whose as mental as Owen Teague in Torchwood’s Countrycide and a rabble of similar humans. Even Fitz is rendered a bit blandly, becoming part of apocalyptic world and forgetting the Doctor, Anji and his adventures in the TARDIS but not for long enough that when he returns with his memory split in half we can really understand his existential crisis.
Yet, oh yet, there are many worthwhile moments. At a certain point, Anji and the Priest find themselves trapped in a dying reality that seems to consist only of a beach, a cliff and a florescent sea and Walters perfectly captures their hopeless loneliness. When a younger Malahyde becomes lost in the TARDIS, he meets a luminous girl who takes case of him who’s otherwise not appeared in the story who I’m betting is probably Trix stowing away and biding her time in what’s probably my favourite scene of the book (and funny how that happens). Plus there’s a genuinely exciting action sequence in the remnants of Bristol when the mutant cannibalists attack and our heroes become separated.
Plus the reason for apocalypse is logically thought through, with everyone on Earth forced to age forty years leading to only the children surviving in adult bodies and those lucky enough to have something like an education passing down what understanding they possibly have from an 1840s education. But again, like The Domino Effect, I would have liked to have seen how this panned out globally or out in the universe. Like that previous book, it's almost as though these events have existed in isolation and no consideration is given as to how the Cybermen might be interested in a planet like this Earth which could barely throw up much of a resistance if it wanted to storm in a steal the minerals.
In the end I’m still just sort of well yeah hum. It’s not awful, it is at least readable, there’s some nice character business here and there, the story joins itself up even if it doesn’t really hold together at the end, it’s just sort of, well, yeah, hum. Perhaps the characterisation of the Doctor just rubbed me up the wrong way. It is odd how reckless he is with human life, at least one death happening in such a way that we’re not sure if he knows his volunteer isn’t going to survive and although it’s brave to throw the moral quandary in the reader’s face, it does seem strange that the author engineers his story so that this TARDIS crew are divided in a way which is similar to the New Adventures. At least there’s no Sabbath in this one.
The Domino Effect.
Having said goodbye to her friends for apparently the final time, again, Anji decides that since the TARDIS has, typically, landed in Edinburgh instead of London that she should look for her contemporary pal Mitch as his place of work. When she visits her place of work and finds a crater, does she begin to suspect that she’s in the wrong reality still? No, she tries to ask the locals for directions. When some of the people are horrendously racist, does that offer a question mark for her? No. When she notices that everyone is wearing out of date clothing? No. When she tries to pay for a newspaper and the seller won’t accept her money? No, not at all. When she’s told she can’t fly to London from Edinburgh? Nope.
For fifty pages, Anji is made to stupidly wander the streets of Edinburgh faced with evidence that reality has changed, something which would have been entirely obvious from the moment the TARDIS lands and at no point does she even countenance that the reason they’re still using old money is because reality wasn’t put right at the end of The Infinity Race. At first, it seems as though the author is offering a satirical commentary on how some people in the London assume that people north of the M25 all live in a time warp, with Anji communicating a few barbs to that effect. She even wonders if the TARDIS has deposited her in the wrong time despite all evidence to contrary.
Brilliantly, the Doctor Who Reference Guide's synopsis tries to rationalise this by suggesting that the racism she encounters is so awful (which it is) "that at first the other anachronisms and bizarre comments fail to sink in" which isn't what happens and still doesn't excuse the sheer level of obliviousness involved not least because of everything the character will have seen in the previous two years worth of books. She's not early Dana Scully. Her rational brain doesn't simply reject anything which can't be explained, like the fact that she's apparently the only Asian in Scotland. When she decides to go and catch up with Fitz, despite what the DWRG says, it's because she doesn't understand what's going on, not because she's realised the timeline's still wrong.
From there, even after having eventually met up with the Doctor, at no point do they have a conversational follow up to Time Zero about what Sabbath has done to the universe and what they’re going to do about it. The Doctor at one point even says that they need to find out when the universe has diverged so they can travel back in time and put them back on track, which makes no sense in relation to his Time Zero conversations about there being multiple universe. After about a hundred a pages of this, I even went off and grabbed Time Zero and reread the final few pages just to make sure I’d misunderstood what was said. No I hadn’t. These characters have contracted collective amnesia.
How could this have happened? Someone reading this might even know and I’d be interested if you want to contact via social media or in the comments. Bishop can't have written this entirely in a vacuum since it mentions events in Siberia and the Absolutes of the System from History 101 and he thanks the other authors in the acknowledgements. Presumably the book was read by the editors before publication who someone didn’t see the discontinuity. A have a few guesses. The publication order of the novels changed, ala The Curse of the Black Spot and Night Terrors in season 6 of nuWho, but there wasn’t time to make the necessary rewrites. There was a publication gap of three months between this and The Infinity Race so the editors could have decided that the ongoing premise needed reintroducing in case new readers were coming on-board, ignoring the fact that the methodology makes no overall narrative sense.
All of which said, I still enjoyed The Domino Effect because I tend to enjoy alternative history stories anyway, from Marvel’s What If? comics through to Sliders. I've even written my own. Although it takes a few hundred pages for the protagonists to cotton on, it’s not much of a spoiler to indicate that this Earth suggests what might happen if computers hadn’t been invented or at least the technology was suppressed. No internet, no credit cards and televisions and radios still utilising valve technology. Without easy global communication, the British Empire is still ascendancy and immigration is at a bare minimum. Women have lost the right to study or wear trousers. So although it means there’s no Mail Online, like I said, philosophically it’s a Mail reader’s dream world.
Except it’s also dystopian in its clamping down on dissident thought with Fitz captured and sentenced as a terrorist for a bombing in a café (ala The Battle of the Algiers film) that he didn’t commit. The book’s been criticised for being pretty clichéd in this regard, but it’s still shocking to see the UK twisted into this ultra right wing fundamentalist vision, with Kreiner hauled in front of a television camera to confess to the crime. For all of its weaknesses in story arc terms, there’s an engrossingly realistic approach to Fitz’s treatment which sharply contrasts to the usually jokey approach the Doctor and his companion have to being captured on most days where its more of a means to an end.
There are anomalies. This Earth apparently exists in the universe where aliens haven’t been invading the planet for its entire lifespan, so there’s no apparent need for UNIT, something which again isn’t mentioned, though its implied that one of the characters is some twisted alternative version of the Brigadier. What life is like outside of this Britain is a bit fudged and the idea that computers have been suppressed successfully across history isn’t quiet justified through the included flashbacks since it doesn’t take into account what might be happening in the Far East where population ratios would sure dictate that someone would develop a computer eventually outside of Babbage or Alan Turning.
Sorry, yes, forgot that. It’s also a celebrity story with the return of Alan Turning much as he was in The Turning Test, still played in my mind by Derek Jacobi. Much of the novel is spent explaining how he managed to survive albeit in captivity and is pretty poignant though it does lead the Doctor to turn into Picard in Yesterday’s Enterprise and start questioning if he has the right to change the timeline back even though as has already been established this is just one timeline of many and it's simply that they’re in the wrong one, or that the wrong one has muscled in and taken a-list status. Or something. Frankly, if Time Zero made all this seem perfectly lucid, The Domino Effect has confused everything again.
There are a couple of good twists, a few narrative dead ends (who is the attractive woman with the red hair supposed to be? Compassion? Trix?) and an eye-rolling moment which then becomes another decent twist. The action sequences are exciting and lucid (two things which aren’t always the case in these novels) and Bishop has an excellent sense of geography with the reader completely aware of their orientation in both Edinburgh and London, despite the variation livery in both cities. Even the pubs are real. At one point the characters visit the Lord John Russell and here it is on Google Street View.
Throughout the book, I rationalised that the collective amnesia had been a thing. The Doctor also experiences fits, which seemed to indicate that the three of them were physically and psychologically being interfered with in order to misunderstand events. Instead in the babble intensive finale they were revealed to be something else, something wrought by the mystical being controlling the timeline via a Star Chamber populated by John Le Carre characters. So at the conclusion, instead of remember their real mission, they simply restate those mission intentions albeit in a slightly skewed manner and now I’m left in a state of confusion and regret. Oh goodness.
The Infinity Race.
The presumed sequel to the previous novel would have been for the Doctor and his companions to immediately find themselves mixed up in an obviously alternative world, perhaps a different version of Anji’s present. Instead, the model boat is a clue which invites them to the planet Selonart, a water world where huge luxury yachts participate in a trans-global regatta where they’re immediate faced with apocalyptic explosions, the loss of the TARDIS and an increasing awareness that Sabbath is still attempting to unify the timelines on an epic scale. With Earthers enslaving the locals because of their unique navigational abilities, Messingham is also commenting on colonial attitudes.
So we’re presented with a story which might as well be taking place in the primeline, give or take a military organisation which we’re told doesn’t exist there. This isn’t uncommon for this line of books. When the lost Sam arc began early on, the next book along, Legacy of the Daleks, was an unrelated jaunt to Earth post-Dalek invasion, revisiting the older Susan. On television, we’re still awaiting an explanation of how silence will fall when the relevant question is asked. There’s an element of stringing out the audience, or in that case, the reader, except in his case, we’re meant to accept that this is the natural continuation even ending on a note which suggests that Time Zero’s cliffhanger has been resolved. What? Like this? I hope not.
Perhaps if Messingham had stuck to a single story idea, the results would have been more enjoyable. But having set up the infinity race, it quickly becomes apparent that it’s merely cosmetic and that the eventual cosmic experiment which provides the antagonist climax could just as well have been supported by a base full of dodgy scientists (you could even argue that The Infinity Race overall is simply Kinda at sea). The author’s clearly well researched his marine vehicles. Wouldn’t it have been fun to have the goal of the Doctor and his companions actually be geographic locations, perhaps racing against Sabbath in his submarine. The cover of the novel promises much in that regard.
There are other problems. It’s a relatively short book, with larger font size and expansive line spacing, but it curiously took as long to read as others thanks to the authors decision to write half of it in the first person from the metafictional points of view of Anji and Fitz for no particularly good reason and in with neither of them sounding entirely correct. Both seem to have lost a few IQ points since the last book, and although some of the contemporary references are about right, Anji’s attitude is more akin to when she first stepped on board the TARDIS. At the close of Time Zero she seemed to have embraced the adventure. Now she’s moaning about wanting to go "home" again.
This Eighth Doctor too sounds surprisingly generic, floating between Third (he calls Anji “my dear” at least twice which is just wrong) and Fourth and although some of that could be attributed to him being seen from his companion’s perspective, it also occurs in the third person sections. It’s a testament to how well-defined this multi-media version of the character is that when an writer doesn’t quite seem to capture his voice, it’s as obvious as in one of the past Doctor stories. He too is less sure of himself than in recent novels. Messingham also seems to suggest he’s still only got the one heart when its been established triumphantly in the past two that his other one’s grown back.
The book could also be at the epicentre of explanations for why L. Miles is so critical of the treatment of his creation Sabbath, of the character becoming a Master knock off. His appropriation of help from a race of Warlocks smacks of similar joint ventures with especially the Delgado incarnation (Autons, the Daemons) as does their sudden but inevitable betrayal. He’s disguised again. The Doctor’s treating him as some great rival or adversary. He’s monologuing. While it’s a treat to have an antagonist for the Doctor who isn’t the Master, it has to be remember that he isn’t the Master, even if he has a single goal once again rehearsed through here. He’s an apparent human from the eighteenth century. I hope there’s going to be more about that.
I genuinely hadn’t meant to be quite some mean when I began writing this. There are some good elements. The realisation of the cube-headed alien species, the Selonarts is an interesting Kiplingesque variation on the usual xeno-biological approach to Who aliens, their simplistic English paying off well at the end. Indeed the realisation of the world, the differences between the light and heavy water which layer the biosphere, the descriptions of the plasticy resort work well. But there’s just something about the writer’s style which I didn’t enjoy. To be honest, perhaps it’s as simple as being addressed as “folks” by one of the Doctor’s companions. This version of Fitz just doesn’t seem to fit the one writing the journals in Time Zero. Yes, perhaps it’s just that.
Lydia Corbett profiled.
Art Lydia Corbett was a real life example of the character Marion Cotillard played in Woody's Midnight in Paris, one of Pablo Picasso's favourite models, abeit later in life than he appeared in that film. The Lady Magazine has an entertaining profile with comparison images:
"I knew what a very great artist Picasso was, but at the time I was a shy, naive girl and very afraid of men. He wanted me to pose in the nude but I refused as I was too nervous and modest. He was hoping I would say yes but I never did. So he painted picture after picture of me with the ponytail, in a variety of styles, from realistic to cubist to more or less abstract, over a three-month period."That ponytail was copied by models and girls alike, even inspiring Brigitte Bardot.
How to cook the perfect fried egg.
Food ... or at least Felicity Claoke's version of it:
"Frying obviously involves adding fat – that's why it's so popular. Bacon fat is the traditional choice in this country, and still advocated by Delia, but very few of us eat enough of the stuff to have any around: I often use it if I'm doing eggs and bacon for breakfast, but although the flavour's good, it does make for a messy looking egg. Delia also suggests substituting groundnut oil, which creates the opposite problem – it's clean, certainly, but deliberately neutral tastewise."No one fries them quite like my Dad. Or cooks bacon. He's very good at breakfasts in general.
The Accuracy of US Polling.
Politics Nate Silver takes a hindsight look at which polls were most accurate in the US election. He finds that most of them overestimated the Romney vote, especially Gallup:
"It was one of the best-known polling firms, however, that had among the worst results. In late October, Gallup consistently showed Mr. Romney ahead by about six percentage points among likely voters, far different from the average of other surveys. Gallup’s final poll of the election, which had Mr. Romney up by one point, was slightly better, but still identified the wrong winner in the election. Gallup has now had three poor elections in a row. In 2008, their polls overestimated Mr. Obama’s performance, while in 2010, they overestimated how well Republicans would do in the race for the United States House."One wonders if there isn't a correlation with the 1992 UK general election when the Tories scraped another win despite the polls suggesting everything would be going Labour's way. In the analysis, it became apparent that the public were embarrassed to admit they were voting Conservative and either lied or simply refused to take part, a kind of Obama version of Shy Tory Factor.
Time Zero.
Everything about this novel just works, even the synopsis: “With Fitz gone to his certain death and Anji back at work in the City, the Doctor is once more alone. But he has a lot to keep him occupied.” Wait, what? Did I miss a few? Luckily I tend to read these things without looking at the back first, so there wasn’t a pointless glance at the TARDIS Index File to make sure, but isn’t that enticing? Even the cover’s fun, with an ice-TARDIS shivering in a cavern, the designers Black Sheep’s style having developed far since some of the earlier dodgy examples (Longest Day).
All of this actually happens at the top of the novel as recent events take their toll and Fitz decides he needs to adventure alone for a while, on an exhibition into Siberia with George Williamson whom they met in Camera Obscura and Anji finally being dropped home, the Doctor having gotten the hang of flying the TARDIS properly (his accuracy becoming pretty important as this story progresses). But as the synopsis indicates they’re all still inextricably drawn to Siberia chasing aspects of the same problem, another time machine with the capacity to destroy the universe.
Which should sound derivative, but as is always the case in Doctor Who, it’s all a matter of approach. The authors utilises some slightly tricksy structuring with a string of short, snappy chapters jumping backwards and forwards in time rather like the TARDIS, with plenty of incidents and motivations, including from the regulars, never quite being explained only coalescing as the novel reaches its conclusion. The opening scene, a hilarious Blue Peter pastiche during which another 70s televisual controversy occurs isn’t explained until at least two-hundred and fifty pages later.
Richards, at least initially, seems to be purposefully mashing genres together. Fitz’s portion is essentially in a classic adventure films, Scott of the Antarctic crossed with The Land That Time Forgot, good men and true battling against the elements towards some fantastical outcome. Anji’s back in a Richard Curtis film, back at work in 2001, dealing with the grief that surrounds Dave even though she’s somewhat resolved her own through travels in the TARDIS. The Doctor’s in a modern detective drama, attempting to discover what happened to Fitz without interfering with the timeline.
Meanwhile in Sibera, a 90s James Cameron film is playing out as a research team investigating black holes is invaded by mercenaries looking for the above time machine and slowly all of these other genres find themselves folded into that and everything starts to feel more and more like Doctor Who as pages go on (though Doctor Who’s big enough to contain all of those elements anyway but we’re more clearly in a base under siege scenario albeit with human aggressors and a more complex scenario to uncover than a simple alien invasion).
Just as Camera Obscura pulled in the various interests of Mark Gatiss, so Time Zero is almost a microcosm of Steven Moffat’s work on the new series, especially in the Eleventh Doctor era. There are time paradoxes, of course, but the ultimate problem leads the Doctor to expounding on elements of temporal mechanics and quantum theory, on the fundamental nature of the Whoniverse and whether it exists as a single timeline ala Lance Parkin’s AHistory or whether each of his decisions leads to a new junction and the creation of a whole new universe.
It’s worth noting that the ultimate assumption doesn’t contradict the new series. He’s decided that there’s a single “master” universe, the Parkin version, but that the web of time does indeed produce offshoots when it can’t resolve changes in the timeline wrought by time travellers like him, in other words, the one with the airships or the one with the eyepatches. That’s a tangent, but the point is that this is a return to the kind of complex storytelling which made up the earlier arcs in the EDAs and now finds itself plastered across Saturday night tv.
But the ultimate aim of the antagonist is to bond all of these realities, though he believes them to be infinite, into a single timeline with the potential side effect that all that ever was and ever could be happen simultaneously ala The Wedding of River Song. As I’ve said before although these aren’t new ideas in science fiction terms, it’s impossible not imagine Moffat having read these novels himself and stored these ideas away in his RAM-like brain and that he’s now feeding off them. At this point, River Song is essentially Iris Wildthyme fused with Bernice Summerfield.
There are also character, story and structural elements that feel familiar. When Moffat’s first episode of Sherlock went out, I joked on here about how great it was to finally have the Eighth Doctor on television little realising how much of his portion of Time Zero contains scenes that are just like that series, especially a particularly clever moment when the Doctor bluffs his way into a crime scene. Perhaps what we’re seeing is Richards’s own interest in Arthur Conan Doyle but there’s clearly a some genetic interconnections between the two franchises.
PROPER SPOILERS BEGIN HERE. Plus there’s the subtle introduction of a companion before her time. Rather like the pre-awareness of Jenna Louise-Colman’s casting before Asylum of the Daleks, I’m not so unaware of the basic shape of these novels that I don’t know that there is a companion called Trix and she’ll be along soon. But I didn’t know she’d be appearing in Time Zero and that she’d be revealed to have been in half of the story before that revelation, and that the Doctor would apparently know who she is.
How did this work during publication, I wonder? Did readers then know that a new companion would soon be introduced and was this a bit of a surprise teaser ala Oswin? She’s very much at the back of things, but personality wise, she’s not that far away from the Moffat style sparky female which some critics have suggested Oswin is also an iteration. But she clearly has a something about her, bit of the Lady Christina de Souza, I expect. Mysterious, perplexing and with the potential for a love hate relationship with the Doctor. Would anyone like to make a guess on casting? Winslet? Paltrow?
The connecting tissues between the, I nearly wrote episodes, novels is knitting closer together too, with Sabbath’s motivation for seeking the time machine in the last novel finally being revealed here. As ever, thanks to the text format, I didn’t guess who he was masquerading as this time. Unlike the Master in a dozen stories, I’m not sure that we’re supposed to and unlike the Master in a dozen stories, it’s not a trick which should be played too often otherwise we’re likely to assume that any of the characters are him in disguise which has the potential to undermine our sympathies.
There are other oddities. It’s revealed here that the note the Doctor carried about in the Earth arc wasn’t written by Fitz, something the Time Lord realised only recently. Since it’s the author who initiated that idea writing, it isn’t necessarily a retcon, but it does slightly undermine one of the more poignant elements of that series of stories, the moments when the amnesiac Eighth took out the little slip of paper which provided him some comfort that his questions would be answered. I hope that wasn’t Sabbath too.
We're also finally given an explanation for the flame elemental from way back in The Burning. Unlike television, the novels due to their sheer volume won't necessarily have born repeat experience. I wonder how many readers would have cottoned on to that element of the story; perhaps a proportion of their small audience will have discussed such elements online and that might have fixed such things in their mind, but read that novel back in 2008 (admittedly longer than during publication) and had entirely forgotten about that aspect of it.
What makes the climax so special is that it’s so unexpected. The coda looks like its going to be some fun about the Doctor selling Fitz’s journal to the bookshop so that his younger self can pick it up (shenanigans ala The Big Bang) but it’s the Doctor’s detective work and which slowly reveals that nothing is as it seems and I’d expect most readers are in Anji’s position of having a slightly shaky history but Fitz, being closer in time and the Doctor who practically lived through it who’re able to fill in the blanks.
But more than that, rather than simply the TARDIS landing in the wrong time and have them discover it there, we have a conversation in which the three of them actively know what they’re up against, what needs to be done and choose the adventure, almost licking their lips with anticipation at what’s to come. Even Anji, who like Tegan way back when has been moaning about the Doctor’s inability to get back to her own time has decided the TARDIS is her home. Antagonistic companions are never as much fun as those who choose to follow the Doctor’s mission.
It's also a big huge cosmic problem and these novels have always seemed to be at their best when there's a big huge cosmic problem to solve. The multiverse is collapsing, and its up to the Doctor to save it by simply being in the right universe and selling a book to the right shop at the right time. How very Doctor Who. Some of the contemporary reviews suggested this was the work of someone who was essentially doing everything that should be in a Who novel rather than producing something inspirational. That's unfair. From here, Time Zero looks to be one of the best of the series. Just thirteen left now. That's a television season...
But it was worth it.
Politics Finally, I feel as though I'm half awake again. Sitting up until some ungodly time followed by precious few hours of sleep always has a knock on effect and as I age that knock on effect seems to last longer and longer. I'm only thirty-eight but I spent yesterday with all the cadence and gait of a zombie. Usually, despite being male, I can multi-task pretty well, listen to music and write and sing but yesterday, everything occurred pretty much one thing at a time.
But it was worth it. Obama, as expected, at least by those of us who followed the numbers, has his second term in office and hopefully he'll be bolder in his choices without his re-election campaign to worry about. The Republicans in the house aren't any more likely to give him an easier time, what with their own re-election chances constantly in the spotlight, their focus shifting from the national to local stage, but the US president may find himself more capable of starting with more expressive ideas that are trickier to dibble away at.
It's just unfortunate the televisual versions were so unremittingly boring and/or awful. I stuck with the BBC for much of the night and although Bio-Dimbleby attempted to inject some excitement aided by Katty Kay and her hipster glasses (swoon), this was simply a burst of excitement as predictions were released followed by another hour of speculation and chatting and filling and excessive amount of explaining the differences between the electoral college and popular vote despite the BBC having spent months essentially ignoring it.
Flicking across the channels, I assiduously avoided Sky News for obvious reasons, glanced at ITV whose coverage the entire night seemed to consist of throwing together an electoral college calculation based on speculation even vaguer than at the BBC and Al-Jazeera who seemed to have more correspondents on the ground than the other networks but on the occasions I watched singularly failed to ask the man or woman in the street exactly why they had their political convictions rather than simply their ignorant opinions.
Perhaps I should have listened to the radio. Thank goodness for Twitter, which let me know what was happening on what sounded like the far more entertaining US networks. It was here that I heard about the Karl Rove meltdown on Fox News, vicariously hoovering up the details like the football fan standing on the hill overlooking the stadium who doesn't have the binoculars and hanging on the every word of their friend. Imagine Emily Maitlis doing Megyn Kelly's walk into the anonymous office at the back heckling some researchers.
Here's what would have improved the BBC's coverage: less live presentation from behind a desk, more about the story of the campaign, about the candidates, about the history of US elections in general. Knowing which states were going to be reporting their statistics, packages could have been produced for the intervening hour highlighting what was important about that state electorally, perhaps even some archive clips ala Saturday Kitchen, like the moment in Stephen Fry's America when he met Mitt Romney.
Tricky in a live context perhaps, especially if there's a breaking news story, but there were precious few of them across the night and given how long it took to agree that Obama had won the presidency in comparison to the other networks and twitter and the people in the two HQs, speediness wasn't always on the BBC's agenda anyway. Instead of attempting to pretend to be like the other networks despite clearly not having the same budget, this would have been a chance to do something different, something Reithian, despite the potentially small audience. Oh, well.
But it was worth it. Obama, as expected, at least by those of us who followed the numbers, has his second term in office and hopefully he'll be bolder in his choices without his re-election campaign to worry about. The Republicans in the house aren't any more likely to give him an easier time, what with their own re-election chances constantly in the spotlight, their focus shifting from the national to local stage, but the US president may find himself more capable of starting with more expressive ideas that are trickier to dibble away at.
It's just unfortunate the televisual versions were so unremittingly boring and/or awful. I stuck with the BBC for much of the night and although Bio-Dimbleby attempted to inject some excitement aided by Katty Kay and her hipster glasses (swoon), this was simply a burst of excitement as predictions were released followed by another hour of speculation and chatting and filling and excessive amount of explaining the differences between the electoral college and popular vote despite the BBC having spent months essentially ignoring it.
Flicking across the channels, I assiduously avoided Sky News for obvious reasons, glanced at ITV whose coverage the entire night seemed to consist of throwing together an electoral college calculation based on speculation even vaguer than at the BBC and Al-Jazeera who seemed to have more correspondents on the ground than the other networks but on the occasions I watched singularly failed to ask the man or woman in the street exactly why they had their political convictions rather than simply their ignorant opinions.
Perhaps I should have listened to the radio. Thank goodness for Twitter, which let me know what was happening on what sounded like the far more entertaining US networks. It was here that I heard about the Karl Rove meltdown on Fox News, vicariously hoovering up the details like the football fan standing on the hill overlooking the stadium who doesn't have the binoculars and hanging on the every word of their friend. Imagine Emily Maitlis doing Megyn Kelly's walk into the anonymous office at the back heckling some researchers.
Here's what would have improved the BBC's coverage: less live presentation from behind a desk, more about the story of the campaign, about the candidates, about the history of US elections in general. Knowing which states were going to be reporting their statistics, packages could have been produced for the intervening hour highlighting what was important about that state electorally, perhaps even some archive clips ala Saturday Kitchen, like the moment in Stephen Fry's America when he met Mitt Romney.
Tricky in a live context perhaps, especially if there's a breaking news story, but there were precious few of them across the night and given how long it took to agree that Obama had won the presidency in comparison to the other networks and twitter and the people in the two HQs, speediness wasn't always on the BBC's agenda anyway. Instead of attempting to pretend to be like the other networks despite clearly not having the same budget, this would have been a chance to do something different, something Reithian, despite the potentially small audience. Oh, well.
It's Gonna Be a Long Night.
Politics On this occasion, Julie Miller of the New York School of Performing Arts is correct as we await news of who is going to be running the free world for the next four years. It's always seemed slightly strange that we have to endure midnight counting for the UK's elections and we'll still be sitting up until four o'clock in the morning watching the arithmetic of the US's electoral college.
Personally, I'm standing with Nate Silver. Obama will win this election. He has to. The alternative leaves the world shrouded in even greater darkness than we experienced during the Bush years because Romney's a cleverer unit and will be able to learn from his predecessor's mistakes.
But I am nervous. Nate gives Obama's chance of winning at over 90%, yet watching the ignorance of voters, especially Romney voters about what's been happening in their own government over the past four years, not understanding why their president has been unable to enact many of the things he's promised gives me pause.
Camera Obscura.
Books Find above one of my favourite web finds, not that I can remember where I found it, and to this day I’m not sure if it’s a fake or not. Oh, I’m sure you could analyse the lighting on the book, seek artefacts, be a bit Snopes, but isn’t it more pleasurable to assume that during the shooting of the Come Into My World video, Kylie would retreat to her trailer between naps spend time with Camera Obscura, Lloyd Rose’s ode to Victoriana (perhaps lent by her stylist Will Baker who is a fan) and it was her appreciation of the spin-off range which led to her agreeing to appear in Voyage of the Damned a few years later as well as the Dance of the Cybermen bit in her Showgirl tour.
The book opens with the inscription “To Paul Cornell” but it might as well have been “To Mark Gatiss” since as the title might indicate, Rose’s book is replete with just the sort of influences which have infused Gatiss’s work before and after its 2002 publication date from The League of Gentlemen, through Big Finish’s Phantasmagoria, The Unquiet Dead and a dozen radio and television documentaries, not to mention Sherlock. It’s all here, the séances, orientalism, drug-induced hallucinations, hallucinations without stimulants, lunatic asylums, Holmes references, carnivals, steampunk machinery, magicians, illusionists and smoking.But I wouldn’t insult Rose by suggesting her appealing novel has anything to do with Gatiss’s approach to the material. For all of this period detail, the novel is really about elucidating the relationship between the Doctor and Sabbath, defining their belief systems and modus operandi in what’s sure to be a titanic struggle across upcoming novels. As in some previous novels, both are drawn to Victorian Britain by time disturbances which have the capacity to implode the cosmos, but this time, for various reasons, they’re forced to work together and each becomes increasingly appalled by their rival’s working methods.
So the actual A-story, such as it is, the effects of a time machine made of mirrors on the local population, the monsters and monstrosity it creates, mostly provide a backbone to a three hundred page discussion between the Doctor and Sabbath on the nature of time, who its champion should be and how best to approach that. As the baddy, Sabbath’s is of course murder and that the overall web of time should be protected at any cost, that there are acceptable losses in the face of the death of billions. The Doctor on the other hand thinks a single life is as important as any other.
The brilliant twist, and hey spoiler, is that after he pulled the Doctor’s dying heart from the Time Lord’s chest, Sabbath installed it in his own body as protection against the rigours of time travel, which has left them both genetically connected, the wounds effecting one, effecting the other. So when the Doctor is at various points savagely attacked, he has a bit of the Captain Jack about him (stop it), his body reconstituted and made whole. He spends most of the book in a zombie like state on the edge of death, but continues to keep ticking along, safe in the knowledge that his current arch-enemy won’t simply try and kill him.
The writing is vibrant, bright. But Rose also includes some of the longest dialogue scenes these novels have ever seen, whole glorious passages between the Doctor, Anji and Fitz or the Doctor and Sabbath discussing things, each other, the plot, stuff without the usual tendency of these novels to paraphrase what’s been said. True, without them his companions wouldn’t have much to do, they’re mainly a sounding board or sit around being concerned about their friend's well being physically and mentally, but for once, we’ve a genuine sense of what it must be like for them together between adventures.
The story does meander. There are many shifts in location and perhaps intentionally we’re not always entirely clear about the passage of time. There is one exciting moment when the Doctor says he’s visiting Liverpool, but the most we “see” is the interior of an anonymous theatre, a hospital and Lime Street station and none are much described, though it is pretty thrilling to imagine the Doctor, Fitz and Anji dashing about the 1893 version of my city (even if Paul McGann himself was born in Surrey which was a huge surprise when I found out) (more recently than I care to admit) (well ok, while I was writing this review) (sorry).
I finished reading the book last night after the council’s firework display and despite the distracting bangs from amateur rockets, I was entirely riveted. Contemporary reviews were overwhelmingly positive (TV Zone gave it 8/10 apparently) and I can see why, it’s an amazing book, but it’s also a book which is best read than written about which is presumably why I’m struggling to find anything to write about. Even the supporting characters are vividly drawn, from the members of the carnival to the aristocrats in charge of the machine especially at the climax when those plans are demonstrated to have gone horribly wrong.
The one controversial element is a moment when the Doctor purposefully enters “the land of the dead” or some such in search of information from a character who’s been murdered. As with The City of the Dead, this is Rose taking another detour away from Who’s usually rational universe into the metaphysical and it’s not entirely explained exactly where the Doctor is, the afterlife we’re meant to presume, but I was more intrigued than appalled. Perhaps Torchwood’s experimentation with this material via the gauntlet and The Satan Pit’s discussions have just made it seem less alien to the franchise than it might have been at time of this novel’s writing.
It’s worth also noting that for the first time in reading these novels I had a physical reaction of the kind which is usually generated by the television series, just before the end. I won’t give away the reason, but people who have read the book and will know what I’m talking about, and it’s a testament to how dimensional the novel’s version of the Eighth Doctor is as character, a creation, that my mouth opened and I let out a whimper of satisfaction and pleasure. I used to go on and on about how the Big Finish Eighth Doctor series was crucial listening for all fans. Perhaps just as many of these novels are also essential.
Presidential Health.
Politics If you're still trying to get your head around the rumours that President Bartlett has multiple sclerosis, remember that previous presidents have had their fair share of medical complaints. Pity William Henry Harrison, whose inauguration led to his premature death:
"Desiring to deny his advancing years and to look vigorous and powerful, Harrison refused to wear a winter coat, let alone a hat, during his speech. He followed this exercise in oratory by walking in a long and weather-hampered inaugural parade. Alas, the president contracted a bad cold that advanced into a severe case of pneumonia. Harrison died only 32 days after being sworn in -- the shortest term of presidential office in the history of the United States."We're still awaiting the details of the President's condition but hopefully he'll remain healthy enough to continue his good work in turning around our country. Meanwhile, here's a photo of Nixon jumping.
Maurice Sendak interview.
Books Maurice Sendak has a lovely interview in The Believer from Emma Brockes, usually of The Guardian's parish. Here he is on the election, sorry, the US election:
"I can’t read the papers anymore. I just feel sorry for Obama. I want him so much to win. I would do anything to help him win. He’s a decent, wonderful man. And these Republican schnooks are so horrible. They’d be comical if they weren’t not funny. So. What’s to say, what’s to say? It’s very discouraging. Which is probably why I’m going back in time. I’m a lucky man, I can afford to do that. I can afford to live here in silence, in these trees and these flowers, and not get involved with the world."He's exactly how you'd imagine the author of Where The Wild Things Are to be. More sweary perhaps.
Football is broken.
Sport As I think we can all agree, mostly because it's a fact, I know nothing about football. But I do seem to spend some time in the back of taxis where radios tend to be tuned to either commentaries of live games or discussions about the sport which means that I also seem to spend a lot of time talking about this sport I know nothing about.
This evening, during Liverpool one-all draw with ... Newcastle United, the taxi driver was becoming increasingly huffy as his team failed to achieve, what sounded like, any great standard of football. At one point he growled and turned the sound down, a sure sign, as I've observed that things weren't going his way.
He began criticising some player or other and how much players cost and that Liverpool just aren't any good this season and asked me why Liverpool just weren't very good this season. I said I didn't know, which is true, but largely because I didn't even know, until I just looked it up, just how badly Liverpool have been playing this year.
Here's what I did say, and I'd be interested to know what people who do know something about football think. I should add that since the following is an outsiders view based on taxi listening, sitting through sports headline and whatever else is in the air in Liverpool where you can't get away from it, that any omissions are due to my ignorance.
Football is broken.
Liverpool especially for the purposes of this argument.
As I said to the taxi driver, the problem with most teams is that they have star players, iconic players, who've been with the club for so long they're like furniture. So you have a figure like Steven Gerard who's become a Liverpool icon and who the club and fans can't imagine their team doing without.
The problem then is that the club and its manager basically spend their time plugging the gaps in the team behind these strikers hoping against hope that they'll be able to pass the ball to them. But there's a hierarchy, different levels of competence and also presumably a certain element of superiority. But rarely do they work as a team.
This doesn't seem like a good way to build a team. Plus there's the money factor, the salaries of all these players, the money paid in transfer windows, sponsorship, endorsements, advertising, broadcast rights, people outside the clubs with vested interests in what goes on within club, controlling to some degree, the bullshit which has nothing to do with the game.
Now, here's what I don't understand.
Such things can't have escaped anyone else's notice. People know this, especially football managers, club owners and fans who do know something about football. But it's become so engrained as to how these things are, the status quo, how things must be, that such finance and politics have become as much a part of the drama of the game as the game itself.
That's not sport. It's soap opera. And people are turning up every Saturday, paying huge ticket prices to watch the tip of a huge iceberg. To an extent I imagine, if you are a fan and follow the game, the politics, the finance, the gossip, the match itself could at times seem as exciting as the non-interactive highlights packages on the Football Manager computer game.
Why? Why put up with this? Partly I expect because it's fun. It gives people something to talk about, fills the papers, fills sports slots on television, that stuff. I'm biased. I think that the national game takes up too much of the national time and money which could be spent doing more interesting things. But I also know it gives purpose to many people.
Even though it's broken.
Here's my solution.
Dump the team. Sell all of your players. Then hire a whole new team of players who're just finishing in youth squads, who're essentially all graduating to a senior team at the same time, no experience but bags of talent and then work them and keep them, with an equally talented but less experienced in seniors manager until they start winning matches.
This won't be easy. There are contracts and whatnot, the business of the game. There will have to be a lot of trust from backers and vested interests about this "long game" that for the first few seasons there won't be many wins if any. The team may even be relegated. Not good if you're trying to attract some decent sponsors.
Plus I don't know how this works in terms of the transfer window which seems to happen while the various competitions are going on. I am confused on that point. The world of football seems to work like a self perpetuating organic machine with diseases that feed off themselves.
Yet, I can't imagine that a youthful team, all beginning at the same time with similar experiences, working together to get better, all very Hollywood sport film, probably Moneyball, with a strong team ethic could play much worse than the really expensive players for whom the game has become just a job.
All it takes is for one of the clubs, possibly Liverpool, to give it a try, ask for the trust of the fans and everyone else that what you're doing is building not just a better team that everyone can get behind but also a better sport, one in which the players are passionate about the game more than anything else.
The taxi driver told me something else which partially inspired this. He told me he is the manager of an under-nine's team. He told me that team has only been playing together for four months but are already at the top of their given league and winning matches with five goals.
He described the tactics but also how they'd bonded, how seriously they are taking the endeavour how much training they're doing both with that and other squads, doing athletics. He seemed genuinely proud of his team and their accomplishments, even more so than his beloved Liverpool.
Wouldn't it be great if he could be as proud of Liverpool too?
This evening, during Liverpool one-all draw with ... Newcastle United, the taxi driver was becoming increasingly huffy as his team failed to achieve, what sounded like, any great standard of football. At one point he growled and turned the sound down, a sure sign, as I've observed that things weren't going his way.
He began criticising some player or other and how much players cost and that Liverpool just aren't any good this season and asked me why Liverpool just weren't very good this season. I said I didn't know, which is true, but largely because I didn't even know, until I just looked it up, just how badly Liverpool have been playing this year.
Here's what I did say, and I'd be interested to know what people who do know something about football think. I should add that since the following is an outsiders view based on taxi listening, sitting through sports headline and whatever else is in the air in Liverpool where you can't get away from it, that any omissions are due to my ignorance.
Football is broken.
Liverpool especially for the purposes of this argument.
As I said to the taxi driver, the problem with most teams is that they have star players, iconic players, who've been with the club for so long they're like furniture. So you have a figure like Steven Gerard who's become a Liverpool icon and who the club and fans can't imagine their team doing without.
The problem then is that the club and its manager basically spend their time plugging the gaps in the team behind these strikers hoping against hope that they'll be able to pass the ball to them. But there's a hierarchy, different levels of competence and also presumably a certain element of superiority. But rarely do they work as a team.
This doesn't seem like a good way to build a team. Plus there's the money factor, the salaries of all these players, the money paid in transfer windows, sponsorship, endorsements, advertising, broadcast rights, people outside the clubs with vested interests in what goes on within club, controlling to some degree, the bullshit which has nothing to do with the game.
Now, here's what I don't understand.
Such things can't have escaped anyone else's notice. People know this, especially football managers, club owners and fans who do know something about football. But it's become so engrained as to how these things are, the status quo, how things must be, that such finance and politics have become as much a part of the drama of the game as the game itself.
That's not sport. It's soap opera. And people are turning up every Saturday, paying huge ticket prices to watch the tip of a huge iceberg. To an extent I imagine, if you are a fan and follow the game, the politics, the finance, the gossip, the match itself could at times seem as exciting as the non-interactive highlights packages on the Football Manager computer game.
Why? Why put up with this? Partly I expect because it's fun. It gives people something to talk about, fills the papers, fills sports slots on television, that stuff. I'm biased. I think that the national game takes up too much of the national time and money which could be spent doing more interesting things. But I also know it gives purpose to many people.
Even though it's broken.
Here's my solution.
Dump the team. Sell all of your players. Then hire a whole new team of players who're just finishing in youth squads, who're essentially all graduating to a senior team at the same time, no experience but bags of talent and then work them and keep them, with an equally talented but less experienced in seniors manager until they start winning matches.
This won't be easy. There are contracts and whatnot, the business of the game. There will have to be a lot of trust from backers and vested interests about this "long game" that for the first few seasons there won't be many wins if any. The team may even be relegated. Not good if you're trying to attract some decent sponsors.
Plus I don't know how this works in terms of the transfer window which seems to happen while the various competitions are going on. I am confused on that point. The world of football seems to work like a self perpetuating organic machine with diseases that feed off themselves.
Yet, I can't imagine that a youthful team, all beginning at the same time with similar experiences, working together to get better, all very Hollywood sport film, probably Moneyball, with a strong team ethic could play much worse than the really expensive players for whom the game has become just a job.
All it takes is for one of the clubs, possibly Liverpool, to give it a try, ask for the trust of the fans and everyone else that what you're doing is building not just a better team that everyone can get behind but also a better sport, one in which the players are passionate about the game more than anything else.
The taxi driver told me something else which partially inspired this. He told me he is the manager of an under-nine's team. He told me that team has only been playing together for four months but are already at the top of their given league and winning matches with five goals.
He described the tactics but also how they'd bonded, how seriously they are taking the endeavour how much training they're doing both with that and other squads, doing athletics. He seemed genuinely proud of his team and their accomplishments, even more so than his beloved Liverpool.
Wouldn't it be great if he could be as proud of Liverpool too?
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