"Some believe that a good teacher can easily teach any student. If this were the case, good teaching with no special training would be all that is needed to teach gifted students. However, in my many years of teaching graduate-level courses in gifted education, I have found that good teachers add to their skills and learn new strategies and techniques targeted particularly to meeting the needs of the gifted. Most teachers of the gifted tell me this is the hardest, most challenging, most exhausting and most rewarding teaching they have ever done."
"But you are one of us! You look like us, you sound like us..."
Education Carolyn Coil for CNN dispels ten myths about gifted children:
WHO 50: 1963:
The Pilot Episode.
TV When the first mounting of An Unearthly Child emerged as part of The Lime Grove Story themed weekend on BBC Two in 1991, it seemed like a message from across time, especially since I’d never seen Doctor Who’s real first episode.
This was the first time I’d seen the character’s origins and despite the obvious production problems this was mysterious, shadowy, sinister and in places genuinely scary and looking again recently on beginning a project to watch the whole of Doctor Who from the beginning I could see that part of that reaction was because of the production problems.
The shaky camera work means that we’re not always with the characters at key moments leaving us to imagine what they’re seeing and more spectacularly the faulty placing of a light leads to Barbara creating shadows on Ian’s face that sometimes look as through the darkness of the night could engulf him at any moment, just as the time vortex will later.
Sydney Newman was right to request a remake, of course he was.
The Doctor is too mercurial in attitude to sustain a series and Susan’s proclamation that they're from the 49th century is too solid a piece of exposition, even if the two teachers are supposed to be the protagonists at this early stage.
But nevertheless, this is a rare example (along with Midnight and Scherzo) of Doctor Who at its wrongest, in a form that is indisputably worrying.
And they're off ...
WHO 50: Introduction
TV Tomorrow sees the forty-ninth birthday of Doctor Who and the day a new project begins on the blog.
Every Friday, for the next year, I’m going to write about my favourite story from each calendar year of the show, from 1963 to 2013, write about what I think makes it special and what it means to me.
Each will be accompanied by a new titlebar for the blog.
As you may have gathered this will be slightly more than fifty stories, but Doctor Who Magazine is already doing the seasons, so I had to think of something else.
But I'll keep WHO 50 as the title, because WHO 50(ish) looks a bit silly.
Let's see if I can keep up, shall we?
Sometime Never….
Different types of stories are supposed to be tied to their respective television eras and Doctors. But imagine if, for whatever reason, BBC Books had decided to not publish past Doctor novels but fans had still wanted those kinds of stories, then Eighth would have to have been plunged into them anyway, trapped in a pastiche of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible perhaps or battling Chronovores in the time vortex. Would he be the same character or a kind of generic amalgam, readily transforming himself depending on the requirements of the adventure? The Eighth Doctor novels have been about what they’re not, rather than what they are, the reader buffeted about like the TARDIS in the time stream as the authors desperately grasp towards a answer that doesn’t exist.
Which is presumably why it’s interesting that, when challenging himself to pull together narrative strands and story arcs running all the way from the beginning of the line, Richards decides to offer something that’s both in some respects as traditional a piece of Doctor Who as is authorialy possible in these circumstances but also about as part of the Eighth Doctor strand as is achievable whilst still remaining entirely accessible and also in a strange way looking forward to possible official futures for other versions of the franchise. And I loved it. Loved, loved, loved it. Which is I know the kind of thing you write at the top of a paragraph, but from the moment I began reading on the bus into town (just after my Chrissie Hynde moment), the only time I could spare to put it down was while I was in Chester.
The opening actually has some similarities to the Sarah Jane Adventures story Lost In Time. The Doctor and his companions split off into different time zones to investigate historic events which are giving off huge amounts of temporal energy. There’s Fitz in 2004 attempting to gatecrash an exhibition opening (I know the feeling). There’s the Doctor watching someone not making an important scientific breakthrough. There’s Trix visiting the princes in Richard III’s tower (cf, Rani meeting Lady Jane Grey another ill-fated historical royal) and keeping them amused with a modified version of Cinderella in what’s probably one of my favourite scenes in all of these books. Doctor Who always seems to be at its best when it’s about the nature of fairy tales (“Aren’t we all?”).
Meanwhile we’re introduced to the Council of Eight who we’re to presume are the Time Lord replacements created when the diamonds were introduced to the big bang at the close of Timeless. Richards plays another blinder here by making them all something of one of the Doctor’s incarnations and writes each in the style of Hartnell, Troughton and the rest. That stops them from becoming too much like their local governmental counterparts on Gallifrey, though the scenes seem designed to deliberately ape the endless discussions in The Deadly Assassin, The Five Doctors and the like. Nevertheless, these are product of the Eighth Doctor line and Richards injecting some irony that for all the various races and time machines we’ve “seen” in the line all attempting to fill the gap left by the Time Lords, the Council was already in place.
Before long, everything culminates or seems to at the exhibition opening, which is being held at a Museum of Archaeology and the section which most resemble nuWho. You could imagine these scenes being partially shot at the National Museum of Wales, with Matthew Macfadyen cast as Professor Fleetward, the academic who aids the Doctor in assembling a crystal skeleton from pieces found across time and Mark Heap as the stuffy museum director. Or the other way around. Just like The Lazarus Experiment, the Doctor and his friends spend ages being chased by a monstrosity but like The Big Bang, their world has (somewhat) diminished to just outside the walls of the building. There are moments here, as the Doctor attempts to take charge of a public rabble, which are just the stuff of his Tenth edition.
Then the real coup as the novel doesn’t just begin to tie-up loose ends from the Eighth Doctor line but also the Past Doctor novels. Past Doctor novels which I haven’t read. Apart from Wolfsbane. But I’ve enough of an inkling of what happens in Bullet Time and elsewhere to know that that the Doctor’s companions were being offed and its here we find out why. One member of the Council, the figure analogous to Eight, Sabbath’s associate, has been pulling them from time because of the uncertainty they cause due to their association with the Doctor. The methodology is a mixture of murderous and mysterious but the solution, played out across several chapters is ingenious (even if I did manage to predict its main pillar) (not that it spoiled things at all).
It’s the EDA’s equivalent of Journey’s End or Neverland, probably entirely incomprehensible to newbees but satisfying payback to readers who’ve been following the novels from the start. Which isn’t to say it was adored on publication. Matt Michael in Doctor Who Magazine suggested it lacked a wow factor and sense of occasion. I disagree. In one section, Trix and the Professor are beamed into the far future to poignantly witness the big crunch with the keepers of the final museum in the universe (cf, The End of the World and Douglas Adams) something even the television series hasn’t tackled yet (though it's come perilously close on a few occasions). Plus there are a few significant deaths, permanent deaths, both horrible for different reasons.
Richards’s characterisation of the regulars is of a high standard too. In a rarity for this line, he happily has the three of them chatting away in the TARDIS console room, gently taking the piss out of each other, Trix having become a solid member of the crew despite her better nature. If Fitz spends most of the novel in Mickey/Rory-like bewilderment, Trix continues to quietly become one of the franchises most impressive companions, almost metafictionally aware that her disguise capabilities are not the norm, oscillating between being entirely confident of those abilities and waiting for someone to see through her mask. At the climax she’s afforded a punch the air moment as potent as Martha Jones’s giggle in The Last of the Time Lords. As it stands, it’s a tragedy that she’ll only be around for another six novels.
Sometime Never… was published at a strange moment for the franchise which is reflected within. The contents suggest that when he wrote it, the official future of Doctor Who was with the Richard E Grant vampiric version of the Ninth Doctor and there are scenes which are meant to tie-in with the simultaneously published novelisation of Scream of the Shalka, a point Richards underscores in a contemporary interview for DWM. Except in that same issue’s Gallifrey Guardian is an early chat with Russell T Davies on his plans for the series and so it’s also possible to conjecture that Richards wanted to clear out as many continuity cobwebs as possible to give the Eighth Doctor line more of a stand alone feel just in case new readers happen upon them in the bookshop. He was hedging his bets.
Except not everything is completely tied-up, still plenty for Lance Parkin to deal with in The Gallifrey Chronicles as and when. The Doctor is still an amnesiac even if he has a better understanding of himself and his potential past than before. Fitz is also still in flux, not quite sure of his own history. Gallifrey is still gone and Richards introduces a few new questions about that in Sometime Never… without making it too clear if they’re rhetorical or not, especially in relation to one of the deaths which I’ve been desperate to comment on but I don’t know who reads these reviews (or why) so I thought it best to keep on the left hand side of caution. But it will be good to get back to something akin to a more typical Who format, self contained stories which just happen to feature this TARDIS team, even if just briefly.
This Year's Christmas Moment.
Life Every year, at around this time, I have a Christmas moment, or the moment when I physically realise that Christmas is coming. Sometimes someone says something, or I see something, or hear something, and the intellectual understanding of the upcoming date becomes fused with the rest of my body and I can't help smiling. Sometimes it lasts seconds, sometimes minutes, sometimes as was the case a couple of years ago on a visit to Manchester, a whole day.
This year it's been late. Despite present buying, despite watching for news of Christmas television, despite walking through Liverpool One at night the other Sunday through the giant sparkly reindeers and past the massive decorated trees, nothing. I was with a friend who'd challenged me to list my top five favourite Doctor Who stories so I was probably distracted. He wouldn't let me have Marco Polo because I hadn't "seen it" and I was fishing around for an alternative. Nevertheless, the usual triggers weren't working.
Then, thankfully, this morning, it happened. I was waiting for the bus into town and Chrissie Hynde's 2000 Miles began on my mp3 player. I knew it was there, I'd added it and the rest of Christmas Hits 2007 last night. But as soon as the opening guitar riffs hit my eardrums, well, reader, I weeped tears of joy. It's rare the reaction is quite that intense, but it's not been the best of years (are they ever?) and perhaps Christmas means more, but for these three and a half minute duration, I was transported. Thanks Chrissie.
This year it's been late. Despite present buying, despite watching for news of Christmas television, despite walking through Liverpool One at night the other Sunday through the giant sparkly reindeers and past the massive decorated trees, nothing. I was with a friend who'd challenged me to list my top five favourite Doctor Who stories so I was probably distracted. He wouldn't let me have Marco Polo because I hadn't "seen it" and I was fishing around for an alternative. Nevertheless, the usual triggers weren't working.
Then, thankfully, this morning, it happened. I was waiting for the bus into town and Chrissie Hynde's 2000 Miles began on my mp3 player. I knew it was there, I'd added it and the rest of Christmas Hits 2007 last night. But as soon as the opening guitar riffs hit my eardrums, well, reader, I weeped tears of joy. It's rare the reaction is quite that intense, but it's not been the best of years (are they ever?) and perhaps Christmas means more, but for these three and a half minute duration, I was transported. Thanks Chrissie.
Emotional Chemistry.
Obviously, Simon A. Forward’s Emotional Chemistry’s only influenced by Russian literature rather than simply quoting from it, but he makes a good stab at offering epic sweep across the novel's much shorter duration than those old literary doorsteps and to an extent that does make it somewhat as difficult to read. With dozens of characters introduced (just as those old novels do) and across three or four time zones (as you might expect in science fiction) it’s not always possible initially to get a fix on whose landscape is whose (and I will admit to having to refer to a synopsis from the Wikipedia) (sorry Simon).
But after about eighty pages, the story begins to settle down and it slowly becomes clear that the keeper of the locket, Dusha, a girl in the 1812s is somehow being replicated across time as late as 5000 and that a general from that time is desperate to become united with this earlier version. The Doctor, having investigated a painting of the girl with magical properties and stumbling into to these vortex crossed lovers finds himself agreeing to aid the couple because somehow he’s known to them, though is memory, senses and their recollections suggest its not the current version of him that was involved (too young apparently).
Fitz, finds himself subconsciously frogmarched into the offices of dodgy businessman Garudin, who has technology with the properties of the door at the back of the filing cabinet on Floor 7½ in Being John Malkovich to allow a person to astrally project themselves back in time and inhabit the body of some historical figure, which he’s using to stalk Dusha via a friend of the family. He’s the book’s main antagonist, a viscous puppet master attempting to control the past for his own lustful ends and there’s perhaps some thematic interest here about how some historians have the same tendency, vicariously twisting the past to suit their own thesis.
Meanwhile Trix, whose becoming an increasingly attractive creation is on the trail of the locket in various time zones, utilising her abilities to slip into a variety of situations from art dealer to ambassadorial assistant. It’s through her we’re introduced to Aphrodite, a goddess with the grace of Galadriel, and my favourite sequences in the book as Trix experiences the world of said goddess, the kind of hyperglycemic paradise that might appear in a Tarsem Singh or Vincent Ward film with its endless pools and views of the whole of creation. As you might imagine Fitz is quite taken with her. I was too.
There's some fun continuity in here. The war in the future is actually the conflict described by Magnus Greel in The Talons of Weng-Chiang and although this isn't a direct sequel, it's a rare occasion for the EDAs, particular post-amnesia of specifically placing the story within a recognisable Whoniverse. As the Doctor Who Guide notes also, "though she is not referred to in this novel, one of the refugees from Napoleon’s forces is a merchant’s daughter who will become Ileana de Santos, leader of a werewolf clan which the Fifth Doctor encounters in (the audio) Loups-Garoux."
All of which dovetails nicely into the kind of love conquers all conclusion sometimes beloved of the televised revival (cf, Evolution of the Daleks) in which the Doctor bends creation to keep a couple together (partly because creation will itself bend if they’re kept apart). If nothing else, the book’s spurned me towards finally reading some Tolstoy once this and other projects are completed. Apparently reading these great books on a Kindle seems like less of a challenge. Presumably because a volume which is typically a foot thick is reduced to a slab of light plastic, not quite as graceful, but lighter in the hand.
Timeless.
Books In the last couple of days, I’ve been reading through the various review of this Eighth Doctor series published in Doctor Who Magazine. Vanessa Bishop covered them for years when she was the sole writer on Shelf Life, then Matthew (Matt) Michael took over when labour on the section was diversified starting with Lance Parkin’s Father Time. As is often the case with distance from publication, the reviews say more about their authors than the books themselves, with Bishop ranking as something of a fan and Michael, not so much. While hers are generally positive, his are generally negative. But in any case it was useful to see how often my own opinion dovetailed and divided with there’s which is roughly with equal measure.One of the results is I’ve also been able to see the covers for the first time in ages and see the moment when the new series was announced and how that correlates with the publishing of these novels. The reviews for The Last Resort and Timeless went out in the October 2003 issue which would have been published in September I suppose. By January 2004 with its horrendous picture of Colin, there’s a stop press circle on the cover indicating that a new series is in the offering. The reason this is interesting is we, meaning me, or I, can now look out for the moment when it became apparent that the EDAs would soon be finishing and it’s clear the editors and writers are working towards a conclusion.
There’s no evidence of it in Stephen Cole’s book which seems mainly to exist to clarify and provide some kind of climax to the mess that has been the alternative universe story arc and offer some form of forward direction towards the overall narrative which began with The Adventuress of Henrietta Street. The result is pretty brilliant, a definite return to form for a series which tends to be pretty directionless at the best of times even if in jettisoning the alt.universe thing, it literally jettisons it, offering a resolution within a couple of chapters of the start of the novel in a way which makes, with the exception perhaps of the boat explanation, the last three books feel entirely superfluous.
The book opens with a “previously on…” section in which Fitz, Anji and Trix are making a documentary (yes, really) about their exploits in these alternative universes. Having entirely regained their sense of character, they’re also spectacularly jaded and there’s a general feeling of there having been at least six more novels that have been missed out one of which would presumably have included a moment when the Doctor and everyone found Trix in the TARDIS. There have been few subtler companion introductions. She’s just sort of already in the group and it’s almost like Season 20 opening with Turlough already on board. The Doctor turning up on her shoulder in The Last Resort is apparently as close as we’ll be coming.
After that, there’s a Fanthorpian moment when the Doctor realises how he can resolve everything and with the help of a mysterious child he does. It’s actually pretty staggering and a less avid reader might be disgruntled but somehow Cole makes it work because actually, in the end, we're just happy that it’s over even if its conclusion is purposefully anticlimactic and as a slightly sticky flashback structure works itself through we’re back in Anji’s time, 2003 conveniently thanks to the year or so added on in Time Zero, and mysteriously on the tail of a serial killer whose work doesn’t just seem as “simple” as a killing spree, that there are intergalactic implications.
The rest of Timeless has what is often described in film as an “elevator” story, in which the goal of the protagonist shifts as the stakes are raised or/and the antagonist changes. There’s always a bigger fish. As the story works itself out, we’re able to appreciate Cole’s brilliance in presenting quite complex science fiction ideas in an accessible manner featuring realistic human beings in way this series hasn’t always been able to accomplish. We’re quickly on notice that the serial killer is a means to an end and there are enemies with much greater plans and that those plans have cosmic significance. Their ultimate prize is nifty and sets up everything which will presumably occur in upcoming novels.
It’s just the sort of thing the Eighth Doctor novels have been good at. Sending a human back in time so that his DNA becomes part of the make-up of the universe destroying diversity and making it so that every species which develops is human is mind boggling. It’s somewhat a precursor to the Immortality Gate from The End of Time, but in the Star Trek The Next Generation episode The Chase, it’s almost a rationalisation for why the aliens in that universe are mainly humanoid; they all share a common ancestor which sent its genetic make-up across the stars (an metaphorical retelling of our own evolution, nomadically spreading out as we have from somewhere in Iraq) (thanks Michael Wood).
But also like nuWho, it’s real human beings caught up in it. There’s Guy Adams, apparently the most important man on Earth, but whose own relatives want to kill. The scenes when his boss, girlfriend and even his own mother turn on him with various ad-hoc weapons are generally played for laughs but they seek to round out his character in a way which is rare for these books. There’s also Stacy Philips, the forthright American chasing the serial killer whose been keeping her updates on his actions. She’s introduced to the story by the Doctor and the sexual tension in their scenes echo those with Grace in the TV movie during sections in which, if we didn’t know better, it’s as though she’s being set up as a new companion.
Which is probably why I've taken to her at such an early stage. Matt Michael suggests she’s a concept companion in the style of Leela, and while that might be true, she’s a good contrast to Anji whose resolutely been written as realistically as possible no matter which alien world she’s found herself on. It’ll be good to have a companion whose basis is resolutely fantastical again ala Compassion, whose slightly skewed opinion of the universe was always entertaining. With a few exceptions we mostly see her through Fitz’s eyes and he doesn’t trust her, or rather doesn’t trust that when she’s being nice to him, it’s not simply so that she can reach some other goal.
Cole also has the job of writing out Anji and for once in this series, she doesn’t die or turned into some other thing. Rather like a companion being parked in case the actress decides to return to the series, she simply goes on with her life. What interesting of course is that she’s presumably being written out because the writers feel like they’ve done everything they can with her in contrast to the television series where often an actor decides to leave because they feel the writers have done everything they can with it, or more accurately haven’t and don’t seem to want to change.
I’ll admit to being quite emotional about her leaving. Funny. A contemporary review online has suggested she was the best companion ever and though I don’t think she was that, you can see her DNA in of nuWho’s television companions especially Amy Pond with their desperate grasping towards normality within whatever time period or dimension they find themselves even if the writers could never quite agree on her back story with her wandering ethnic origin which is expounded on at some length here (with a nice explanation). The highlights have clearly been her screwball comedy-like interactions with Fitz, with him building towards becoming respectable so as not to disappoint her.
But it’s not quite the end of the story arc. That seems to be upcoming in Sometime Never … with Emotional Chemistry in between. After that? Well, I have a vague hope that having realised the new series is coming back we’ll return to something more akin to a stand alone series with less angst for the Doctor and more of a sense of pure adventure, of the literary Eighth Doctor in slightly more traditional settings. At this point I’ve little clue what’s coming but in a way, these novels because of the rapidity with which I’m working through them feel just as present and exciting as the Moffat era which is probably fitting since for nearly a decade they were one of the official continuations.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)