Whomosexuality

John Nathan-Turner took over Doctor Who in the 1980s, he made it much too gay much too quickly, he alienated the kiddies (and, more to the point, their parents) and, over a period of about ten years, he squeezed the life out of it completely.

At least, that's one point of view. The alternative line, in the man's defence, would be to say that he kept the show alive long past the point when TV cultural entropy should by rights have finished it off once and for all. But perhaps we'll never know.

In any case, JN-T's first season as producer kicks off with a very slow boring "brainy" story that is overly padded with pseudo-science and backstory. It continues with a slightly more normal and enjoyable story that is almost devoid of any backstory of any sort, scientific or otherwise. (It's important to the set-up that the Doctor has been to Tigella before. But we learn precisely nothing about Meglos.) Both stories though are fairly devoid of likable characters and both end very abruptly. 

Full Circle therefore feels like the first "proper" Doctor Who story of the JN-T era, with proper monsters, proper characters, a proper mystery, and so on. But it's also very much the first story of the "new" Who era that the new producer was clearly aiming for - and in fact in retrospect it's pretty much proto-NuWho. Tom and Lalla and K9 and the TARDIS are all still there from the Douglas Adams "era" (albeit with a slightly different "look"), but the show itself feels quite different, with a slicker, more self-confident (some might say slightly too self-satisfied) air.

For one thing, by Full Circle the series feels more invested in its own mythology, no longer merely raiding it for ideas or contexts (e.g. in Shada). So now Romana is being recalled to Gallifrey, we hear that the Doctor "lost" his "battle" with the Time Lords, Gallifrey looks very much as we last saw it in The Invasion of Time, and so on. It's to a writer's credit when he can move freely in another author's imaginary universe without having to warp it unnecessarily for the sake of his own story, and now suddenly for the first time the "Whoniverse" has started to feel genuine. Did the Time Lords really need a forgotten prison planet? Did they really need enemies like the Black Guardian - or even the Fendahl, for that matter? Whereas recalling Romana is definitely the sort of thing they would do, and if that leads to the TARDIS shooting off into a different pocket universe - which we later discover was probably created to trap not just an old enemy of the Time Lords but (Tolkien-style!) their Great Enemy - then so be it! The point (again, Tolkien-style!) is that world-building works when the imaginary world comes first and then the stories emerge not just in it but from it. 

The other thing the series is now invested in in a way that it hasn't been for a long time is characters. Most new Doctors used to get potentially disposable male companions in their first seasons almost just to be going on with - in case the new Doctor wasn't quite "physical" enough to be the hero. (Action man Jon Pertwee was the exception that proved the rule.) But Peter Davison was destined to get a veritable team of supporting characters, one of whom was of course going to be the new young male. What was unfortunate of course was that just as he was trying to make the show more "grown-up", with the supposedly brainier scripts (and scrapping K9), JN-T screwed up by simultaneously trying to make it quite artificially more child-friendly and ending up with a slightly weird homoerotic mess. (Gays may like children's TV series - and children themselves, for that matter. But the actual children aren't necessarily going to be too impressed with visuals of men going swimming in skimpy loincloths.)

Because Alzarius's Gomorrah People are not great, by any stretch of the imagination. Why do they steal river fruit, for example, when they could presumably much more easily pick their own? It's a smaller detail than "Who is Meglos?" or even "Why exactly did the Argolins and the Foamasi go to war against each other?" But it could still have done with a bit of explaining. Adric's unlikability meanwhile is clearly deliberate. (He's supposed to be "edgy".) But we don't really see enough of his soul for it to work. He's dickish but we don't know why, but presumably because adult writers just tend to think of teenagers as being dickish. Which is definitely an odd thing to do in a TV-show supposedly aimed at "young adults"!

And the plot of course is still fairly rubbish. The characters flit to and fro as per usual, and the fact that they're now doing it by TARDIS doesn't help. Nor, for that matter, does the lamp-shading (in the story's title, no less!) of their at one point literally going round and round in circles! Where it does shine though, as science fiction as much as anything else, is with its central, character-centred sociological insight. George Baker indeed feels like the first proper actor playing the first real character we've seen in Doctor Who for quite a while. 

State of Decay on the other hand feels like a throwback to an earlier era of Doctor Who, and in many ways it is. And oddly enough that's actually a Good Thing. As such, slap in the middle of this "new"-style season, it has a gloriously old-school feel to it. There's dear old Terrance on the DVD extras, spinning his old time wisdom about the changeless character of Doctor Who, and his writing is a very welcome reminder of what proper backstories used to be like. After Morbius had riffed on Frankenstein and after Fang Rock had done the same with Who Goes There?, doing an alien version of Dracula was a very logical next step for Dicks in his exploration (or exploitation, if you like) of the "classic" horror genre. And somehow his story doesn't feel out of place.

Then of course there's Warriors' Gate, which looks weird and feels weird because it's supposed to be weird, and arguably its lack of backstory is for once acceptable as part-and-parcel of its mysterious appeal. (And yes, sometimes that works, as it does in Ghost Light. And sometimes, as in The Greatest Show, it doesn't.) But then The Keeper of Traken is a genuinely appealing premise that's been butchered into fitting into the usual Doctor Who to-and-fro format, and its pseudo-science certainly can't stretch nearly far enough to cover all its Tolkien-eque elements.

The best news about Traken (albeit sad, in context) is that it's the one story in which Tom and Matthew absolutely shine together. Contrary to collective fan memories, Tom is not grumpy and aloof but (for the first time!) warm and even avuncular to his young male companion. After six years in the role, Baker was a dog that was clearly quite capable of learning new tricks. His brother-sister relationship with Sarah Jane was glorious, his attitude to Leela was explicitly teacher-pupil, and after the whacky flirty alien "thing" he had going on with Romana it's surprisingly painful in retrospect to note the beginnings of an authentic man-boy relationship that was then suddenly cut short by the Fourth Doctor's regeneration into Peter Davison.

Finally Logopolis sums up the whole season quite perfectly - visually (and aurally!) appealing, but with a huge mass of altogether unfinished confusion under the surface. Characters pop up and then become best friends with hardly any explanation, the science wouldn't cover a postage stamp, and the plot is at times quite bizarre. Never mind who the Watcher is. Why does the Doctor want to measure a police box? Why does he think landing the TARDIS in the River Thames will flush out the Master, who he knows has his own TARDIS? How does doing maths change reality, let alone stop the universe from cooling down? And why does that cooling down make people (and constellations) disappear? And how does beaming a message from a 20th century Earth radio telescope (and can one even do that?) keep a CVE open?

Nyssa and Tegan's off-on relationship with the TARDIS obviously prefigured that of the Matt Smith companions. (And why not? It worked for the Brigadier and UNIT - sort of!) But in real life it also led directly to the slightly sinister and in fact deeply unpleasant - not to mention dramatically highly questionable - decision to kill off Adric. (Once it had become the done thing for companions to go and come back whenever their actors' agents felt like it, the only way for JN-T to be sure he'd never see Matthew Waterhouse again was to have his character blown to little bits.) But was this bit of gay spite foreseen from the outset? It's difficult to say for certain. There was no "showrunner" in those days - just what Sydney Newman would have valued as a "creative tension" relationship between producer and script editor.

What is clear though is that the show's second big reboot at the beginning of the 1980s - with higher production values, more cerebral scripts, a tighter mythos and a larger cast - was superficially more radical than Jon Pertwee's "real world" colour relaunch at the beginning of the '70s. But it would turn out to be a much wobblier structure than anyone (with the possible exception of Tom himself!) could have thought at the time.

Another Country

I saw this film on an old DVD that had been given away free with some Sunday 'paper. I just managed to save it from the recycling bag.

I must say, I hadn't expected much, but it was still bitterly disappointing. It's beautifully set and, up to a point, quite attractively cast. Colin Firth, it turns out, was marvellous even when he was cute. Rupert Everett, similarly, turns out always to have been awful. But there's Guy of Gisburne from Robin of Sherwood as well, smouldering away in the background looking blond and posh and, well, just smouldering. And there's even a young Cary Elwes - not even bothering to act, but just being posh and cute and lovely and sweet and smiling oh-so-nicely and... Aaah!

And I suppose the rest of the film could so easily have been like that - a sort of Sound of Music with cricket. And one can feel that it's what the filmmakers really wanted to do. But the convention by the 1980s was that beautiful blond young men were always evil, beautiful old schools were evil, the military and the British Empire were always evil - and buggery was a beautiful, liberating thing.

Oh, fuck it! It's moral drivel from beginning to end. It's a film about communists in England at a time when England already knew about the horrors of Lenin and Trotsky. What makes it worse is that it was made at a time just when the whole gruesome Soviet experiment was already starting to fall apart. (Having said that, the BBC made The Curse of Fenric virtually as the Berlin Wall was tumbling. For failing to gauge the mood of the times, no one has ever beaten the British media-Establishment - and that, in some ways, is a comforting thought.)

The film's moral inadequacy has an inevitable knock-on effect on its characters. The "good", left-wing characters are almost all drawn hideously badly. Everett is supposed to be a sympathetic gay character but he's not: he's the most annoying, snivelling excuse for a gay stereotype ever seen. And Firth is a splendidly enjoyable prick, but he never grows or develops. Just to expand on that unfortunate metaphor, his character remains limp throughout: he starts out as a prick and carries on as a prick all the way until the end - when he's still a prick; and there's never any clue as to why he's a prick. He's just a prick. And a Marxist prick at that!

The goodies are of course gays in denial and sadists and militarists and (worst of all!) praying Christians. Again, the inadequacy of the writing is such that we don't even find out whether they're supposed to be hypocrites or fanatics. All we're supposed to take away (or rather, because this is a film that was really only ever playing to the gallery, it's a prejudice that we're supposed to take to it) is that Christianity and the military are yucky and nasty. And that's all there is to it.

The most interesting characters in the film are Fowler - who is played by far and away the most handsome young hunk on display - and his favourite fag. The fag himself is a standard-issue, handsome little prepubescent love-muffin. But he is the only character towards whom anyone in the film shows any genuine affection or tenderness, and Fowler is the one character who shows it. (It's just one line: 'All right, Tomkins! You've done a decent job on my boots.' or some such.) But then a film that really explored the human condition, and tackled the emotional relationships - hero worship vs. emerging paternal fondness - between young men and younger boys, in school or out, would have been unthinkable in pro-Marxist 1980s Britain.

It would be even more unthinkable now.

Morning Routine - American Psycho (1/12) Movie CLIP (2000) HD

Was The Big Bang Theory the most conservative TV comedy ever?

When I first watched (or perhaps I should say caught sight of) The Big Bang Theory in daily early-evening repeats on E4, my initial response was simply to write it off as a cross between Friends and Frasier - those two 1990s stalwarts of America's sitcom export market, who taught us between them that it's OK to jump into bed with anyone you feel like provided you're young and attractive, make lots of arch, quippy remarks about everything, and somehow make enough money in your dead-end job to live in a palatial high-rise apartment.* It took a while for the penny (ahem!) to drop that this was actually quite a good formula for a sitcom - tried and tested, and only eventually (i.e. after a decade or so) becoming tired and testing.

The oddest thing for me about The Big Bang Theory in retrospect though isn't even its longevity, so much as its particularly peculiar brand of conservatism. For all its obsession with making up-to-date references to geek culture and "real world" science, there was actually something strangely old-fashioned about the multi-camera/studio-audience format. In fact although the sexual mores were 21st century, The Big Bang Theory was pretty much hawking the same American Dream as its sitcom predecessors had in the heyday of comic-books and astronauts in the early 1960s. The characters all live in clean and tidy houses and apartments. Religion, it has to be said, doesn't get much of a look-in, but at the same time when married female characters get pregnant "choice" is not even mentioned. And by the end of the series it turns out that friendship and family, intelligence and hard work, and eventually marriage and children - in that order, unusually enough - are the important things that make for personal fulfillment and happiness.

What made it feel even more old-fashioned in the dying days of the Obama era (not to mention amidst the woke hysteria that greeted Trump's election) was that it was a survivor from the time of Dubya. Back in them thar days, for example, it was still acceptable to have dark-skinned comedy characters like Apu and Rajesh in mainstream TV-shows. (Once the One become President, interestingly enough, it became politically incorrect to make fun of such people: for all their talk about not punching down, it was only once they finally had an opportunity to punch up that America's comedians stopped punching at all. I suppose it's funny how nakedly political political correctness can be!)

In actual fact the sub-textual racism of the way Raj's character was treated is quite troubling, dramatically at least as much as politically. Yes, it's lamp-shaded from time to time. Raj does occasionally call out his friends' ignorance about his culture. But it never changed the fact that the show's writers' fundamentally didn't know anything about people like him or indeed know what to do with him in particular. Even Enoch Powell thought that to all extents and purposes Indian people are basically like white people, but as far as the The Big Bang Theory was concerned they may as well be from Mars. So for most of the show's run Raj says and does comparatively little, and when there's a female character in the room he doesn't say anything at all (because he has selective mutism - hilarious!) and by the show's end he's the only one of the main cast who's still single (but he still has a Felix and Oscar-style relationship with Howard - hilarious!). In short, that Rajesh Koothrappali was only ever in the show as the token ethnic was definitely "problematic", and not just in the hip modern sense of the word. (The only other non-white regular character in the series is a black lady who works in HR. I'm not quite sure what that means, but just saying.)

Even more absent than unwanted pregnancies and ethnics, oddly enough, were gays. Perhaps one underestimates how spoiled one was for gay gags when watching actual Friends and actual Frasier (not to mention Ellen, or indeed their 1990s contemporary series on this side of the pond Absolutely Fabulous), but so far as I can remember there were no gay characters in The Big Bang Theory to be laughed either at or with. Indeed, most of the "comedy" of Raj and Howard's relationship depends on the ancient gag that they're not gay but they behave as if they are. Jim Parsons, who plays Sheldon, actually came out of the closet during the show's run, but his character on screen remained fussily heterosexual. And if there was an episode when one of show's character's started questioning his or her sexuality (like Frasier did one time, as did Malcolm and Reese, etc. etc.) I certainly don't remember it.

A legitimate question then I suppose is Why? Until he started fornicating with Amy (and he'd use the word himself), Sheldon Cooper was arguably the most moral character on American television (at least since Capt Janeway returned to Earth) - hardworking, clean-living, generous to a fault and (for all his annoying quirks) utterly loyal both to his friends and to non-optional social conventions. One possibility is that an old-fashioned format leads to an old-fashioned sort of show, complete with old-fashioned characters and golden oldies-type humour. After all there's only so much in-depth character development you can do when you have a studio audience always waiting for the next gag, and so the tendency is to cleave to perennial archetypes (or, if you like, the same sorts of stock characters who have been serving comedy for literally thousands of years). And so the show's first episode started with the original straight man joined with the idiot savant with a heart of gold, who were then in turn joined by the blonde bimbo with hidden strengths (the chief of which ends up being an ability to hold her liquor), the quippy Jew-boy with hidden weaknesses (especially his mom and his blonde Catholic wife), and, of course, the token ethnic.

By the end of the series, interestingly enough, all the important story-arcs have been tied up. Having started their first episode with a single timeless male-male relationship†, the show then built outwards eventually to include suitable female partners for all its male characters (apart from Raj, of course, but even including Stuart!). Penny meanwhile has given up drink (because she's up the duff), and Raj and Howard have accepted that their friendship is special but in a non-gay way. Most importantly though, Sheldon has got a Nobel Prize and used his speech to thank and apologise to his friends and to tell them he loves them. If this is "conservatism" then it's both old-fashioned and unapologetically elitist to boot.

Wisely though, the show's writers end the final episode with a final scene that is a return to the show's beginning. Nobody gets on a 'plane to LA. No one goes off to become President. No one gets married who wasn't already. We see the same group of friends, albeit with their relationships deepened and their circle expanded, returning to the same apartment and to their same positions, eating together around the same table and implicitly (slightly Simpsons-style) in front of the same TV-screen. And so even the show's ending is comfortingly conservative: a reminder that true growth and prosperity are ultimately spiritual in nature, and that "change" is not always either necessary or desirable.

*The Simpsons at the same time could somehow afford to live in a similarly palatial suburban villa, though their show at least had the sense to hang a lampshade on that from time to time.
†Apparently the only thing that worked in the show's ill-fated pilot episode was the relationship between Parsons's Sheldon and Galecki's Leonard.