Whomosexuality 2: Planet of Fire

I discovered a few months ago that I'd never actually seen Planet of Fire. And if you don't mind the (literally?) smouldering homo-eroticism it's actually surprisingly good.

Peri - who with the possible honest exception of Leela is the only bona fide sexiful TARDIS girl - does literally seem to have gone to Greece on an archaeological expedition composed entirely of gay guys. I mean, "Kurt" and "Howard"? Really? And then they find an "intriguing" underwater dildo. Clearly the poor lass is recovering from a breakup and wanted to take a break from the cheerleader squad with the "safe" boys. Did Yankee passports really look like that though? Bit weird if they didn't! It's hardly adding anything to Peri's character to show that she's "well-travelled". And what sort of person leafs through her passport like that anyway? There's also something mildly problematic about the script's requiring Nicola to flounder about like a wilting violet when in actual fact she clearly is absolutely fit as a fiddle.

Turlough meanwhile has never been camper. "Doctor, you're showing off!" But his indignant "Earthlings!" when he sees Peri pretending to drown does seem to suggest a lingering taste for heterosexuality - except that he does also wear budgie-smugglers under his hot short shorts. (You know - just in case!) Actually why is Strickson still playing Turlough as camp and weird and nerdy? (Does one have to ask?) Surely by this time Turlough should be one of the good guys? "If you're holding back anything that might help the Master, our friendship is at an end. I know we only became friends in the first place because you were trying to kill me, but I do have limits." (One is reminded though that back in the 1980s a macho hero's "brother" could just as easily be his boyfriend IRL.)

Peter Davison does at least keep the Doctor in character - a glass of water and absent-mindedly paying with alien currency is oddly true to form even for his most "normal" of Doctors. Later on we even get the half-moon specs back again. Yes, I know it was the youngest actor at the time to play the part over-compensating, but surely kooky uncool fogeydom - as with Matt Smith's tweeds and bow-ties - is part and parcel of what the Doctor and Doctor Who are all about? And surely only a Time Lord could get away with a waistcoat like that on holiday!

Peter Wyngarde meanwhile ought by rights to be an object lesson in why you shouldn't have "proper" actors in Doctor Who. (In the apocryphal but immortal words of Lord Olivier, "I'm too fucking grand.") But in fact he goes to show how a competent actor can make a sound concept work even in the most unpromising of productions. Yes, there's a real problem that unless you listen to the dialogue (duh!) there's no obvious distinction between Sarn and Earth. (They both look like Lanzarote.) But in truth most of the time the special effects are used sparingly enough for them to have held up over the years. (Admittedly the running around stuff with the miniature Master would work better with Kay Harker in The Box of Delights later that year.)

Then of course there's the plot! Logar = Loki, as in the Norse god of fire? Nice! ("What does he look like, this fire-lord? I mean, what does he look like naked?") And the first non-sexy female in the entire story is literally a sceptic Karen. (I wonder how this will work out...) Of course by this time Doctor Who was in its twenty-first year, so for any long-term viewer there would by now have been a teeny growing sense of been there, done that. Sarn? Sounds like Karn! Is that life-giving sacred flame not just a little bit too familiar? The whole "the Doctor comes from <insert deity's name here>" has been a thing in Doctor Who since literally the Stone Age in literally the series' first serial. And of course there's something fundamentally silly about science-fiction encouraging scepticism about "organised religion" - as if a genre that permits space wizards and time travel can really have a problem with a straightforward philosophical proposition like the existence of God.

Alas, by the time Turlough reveals that he's deposed ancien regime in exile (very cool - albeit second generation!) it feels a bit late in the day to do anything "interesting" with the character. And the very eccentric solicitor on Chancery Lane sounds like a genuine piece of Doctor Who whimsy. So why didn't we hear more about him ever? (Presumably he was the one who got young Master Turlough packed off to Brendon in the first place!) Mind you, the people of Trion do use Arabic numerals, and they send their exiled princelings to English public schools. Wouldn't you say that's quite eccentric?

(a) Looks like a panicky response to the Afghanistan debacle!
(b) Are the Canucks and the Kiwis being frozen out of Five Eyes because they both currently have Far-Left governments, so even Biden's people don't trust them at the moment?
(c) The EU? "Seriously"? (🇪🇺 = 🤡🤡🤡) https://t.co/0RDt17y1iK

— Man in Black (@AlekHidell1963) September 16, 2021

'The Blue Cloth', by Maurice Heerdink

(via The Blue Cloth – The Maurice Heerdink Gallery)

(via Literary Magazines for Socialists Funded by the CIA, Ranked - The Awl)

For the lolz!

Happy and Glorious (2012)

Daniel looking fab in a tux. because why not? Buck Palace looking fab, as always! And Her Maj just being fab - because she is!

Is The Happiness Patrol really so bad as one remembers?

Or rather, perhaps, imagines that one remembers?

The whacky central idea is actually so whacky it has a surprising amount going for it. The lesbo feminists of the future have taken over, they're carrying out a vigorously efficient programme of "population control", and they are forcing everyone to wear pink and to be happy - on pain of death. So one can ignore the heavy-handed anti-Thatcherite "satire" (which had been done better by dear old Lenny Henry - the best black Doctor we still haven't had) and indeed the general air of gay misogyny that permeated much of Sly McCoy's era. (Whether they were aiming at Mrs T. herself or - closer to home, so to speak - at the likes of Mary Whitehouse, it is on reflection disturbing how many villainous, middle class "older" white women featured in old-rite Who's last three seasons. Disturbing, that is to say and, after the Rani and the Rezzies and Morgaine and Miss Hardaker, more than just a little monotonous!*)

Unfortunately though it does still all feel as if it's been done before. By the time we got to Dragonfire of course Doctor Who had gone straight through the post-modernism looking-glass and out the other side, so the space amazons themselves certainly weren't a problem. Back in the 1960s they'd have been a lazy cliché (as they almost were in the unmade Patrick Troughton story The Prison in Space): by the late 1980s though they were more of a knowing dig. And dystopian societies where it was frowned upon to look unhappy had been done in well remembered TV-series like The Prisoner and of course Doctor Who's own The Macra Terror. And post-modern lines like 'It's tasteless, smug, and, worst of all, it's badly constructed. I mean, who writes that stuff?' even feel vaguely old hat by now. And all-in-all it does just feel too much like Paradise Towers. The macabre surrealism has been turned up to 11 (and the Kandy Man is actually a verifiably iconic monster), but even brief moments of Fritz Lang-inspired horror noir can't quite touch the mind-spinning inventiveness of Dramarama's two anti-Thatcher TV plays 'A Young Person's Guide to Getting Their Ball Back' (1983), which of course featured our own dear Patrick Troughton in a supporting role, and 'A Young Person's Guide to Going Backwards in the World' (1985).

In fact the one really, really big problem with The Happiness Patrol is that it is quite simply not very good. It's not entirely clear whether the low-budget, whimsical, satirical tone of much of Season 24 really worked. Personally I'm quite happy with it, looking back: Time and the Rani is significantly better than people think it was (if you don't mind the ludicrous "science"), Delta and the Bannermen is cluttered and disjointed but also strangely haunting, and Dragonfire (once you get the joke) is genuinely funny and charming. And even Paradise Towers can be excused as a brave attempt to do something "interesting" (i.e. Doctor Who's version of J G Ballard's High Rise - and as such an unusual excursion for the show into actual "hard" literary science fiction!). At the same time though none of them is perfect, of course. We still get baddies without backgrounds or motivations - the Chief Caretaker and Gavrok especially! Minor characters are slaughtered en masse (in Delta and Dragonfire) with barely a blink of an eye. (The inclusion of a funeral scene - one of surprisingly few in Doctor Who - at the end of the Dalek story may have been an attempt to rectify that.) And there's an awful sense in which the "change of tone" that had been demanded for The Trial of a Time Lord (with Bonnie!) reaches its ne plus ultra here (with Richard Briers and effing Ken Dodd!). When Ben Aaronovitch then did a proper story set in the real world with actual "interesting" characters we surely hoped that we'd left surrealism behind.

So going back to all the silliness of the last season with The Happiness Patrol really was particularly traumatic - the shit sets, the shit performances, the shit plotting (with the Doctor's "escaping" on a go-cart† making the teeny-weeny quadbike in The Day of the Daleks seem positively credible by comparison, with his getting the drop on the supposedly terrifying Kandy Man in exactly the same way twice, and with Ace escaping and getting recaptured off screen with no explanation whatsoever), and of course dialogue so shit that it claims to be post-modern. Does the Doctor make an anti-war speech? If he does it's certainly not so memorable as Jon Pertwee's quietly wise words at the end of The Planet of the Daleks - but then perhaps that's partly because Pertwee had actually fought in a real war whereas the most dangerous thing Sylv had ever done was stick a ferret down his trousers.

No, The Happiness Patrol really has almost nothing to recommend it, and it well deserves its consistently abysmal rating. The premise is terrible, the acting is terrible, the execution is terrible. And the "satire" (such as it is!††)? That's terrible as well.

*In fact one might almost wonder about some of the young male writers' relationships with their mothers, given quite how much they all seemed to detest dominant females. But there we go!
†Odd that even after they'd got rid of the sonic screwdriver in the early '80s the Baker and McCoy Doctors still managed to make do without it!

†† It manages to be both banal (because in real life Mrs Thatcher did not employ secret policemen or rigged juries or the death penalty, and she certainly wasn't a totalitarian) and so bland that it's almost unnoticeable (which it was - because despite the actress being convinced that she was playing Helen A "as Mrs Thatcher", whom she "hated", no one at the time batted an eyelid).

Patriotic and Sexiful

(via 谢梓秋攝影作品之雄壮肌肉的男体诱惑 - 深圳同志)

The term "sexiful", oddly enough, is from one of my favourite Bond moments, in You Only Live Twice - even though the reason I remembered the scene when I was a kid was more because it featured 007 and his oriental chum swimming nekkid than because of the girls.

As usual I'm not quite sure what's going on in this set, but the artist apparently is the Taiwanese photographer Xie Ziqiu.

On this day in 1944, an experimental Nazi V-2 rocket reaches an altitude of 176 km, becoming the first man-made object to reach outer space. The German rocket technology would be crucial for the post-war Soviet and American space program. Crucial for the Cold War as well. pic.twitter.com/KFsg6LleyI

— Klaas Meijer (@klaasm67) June 20, 2021