DR WHO AT 50 ,THE  MONSTERS AND THE CRITICS

Peter  Davison  was followed by the other two members of the 80s B team Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy. In my opinion Davison was the worst of the bunch with his insipid school masterish doctor.Of course the script writers were still capable of providing him with the occasional interesting story such as Castrovalva based on the cult artist and student poster favorite  M C Escher.There was also the Cyberman adventure Earthshock and of course Kinda based  like James Cameron's Avatar on the the novel The Word  For World is Forest by Ursula LeGuin Basically though it was all a great step down from the glory days of Tom Baker's doctor.It was in these years that the mass audience began to peel away leaving behind a program that appealed to the fans.The next doctor Colin Baker with his clownish costume and thuggish manner continued the process.The program also took a decidedly kinky turn with the scantily clad Peri  the most sexualised young woman to ever star in the role of doctor's companion  In one story she was on the verge of being eaten by a humanoid alien cannibal chef and in another turned into a feathered bird creature a la Histoire D'O.,Probably the most original story of the Baker years was The Revelation Of The Daleks inspired by Evelyn Waugh's satire on the American funeral industry The Loved One.Lastly came Sylvester McCoy who strangely managed an almost last minute rescue of the program which unfortunately did not pay off at the time.Last but not least was the role that  narcissistic producer Jonathan Nathan Turner with his abusive attitude to fans played in the death of 80s Who.

Dr Who At 50 The Monsters And The Critics

In 1982 when Peter Davison took over from Tom Baker in the role of Dr Who the program  was still a land mark of the BBC schedules.Peter Davison was the youngest actor to play the part and seemed to many to lack the necessary gravitas to pull it off.He was however nationally known in Britain for his role as a young vet in the hit series All Creatures Great And Small.One immediate break with the past was the moving of the program from a Saturday to a weekday.The Guardian even remarked on this in a leader which was titled Tardis lands on the wrong day.This switch was probably the first step on the downward progression towards cancellation.For eighteen years during its various seasons Dr Who had always been part of everyone in Britain's Saturday night.Whether you were a child watching it with your family or a teenager watching it before you went out for Saturday night fun with you friends it was part of the ritual of life.There is a method to slowly destroying something whereby you start to make small unwelcome changes to see what reaction you get.After all life is about change and surely we have to embrace them?.For example " I seem to have broken your leg ,that will certainly change your life .You will have to adapt to the change".

Dr Who At 50 The Monsters And The Critics

The Dr Who A Team consisted of William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton ,Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker.They carried the series all the way from its start in 1963 up to 1981,eighteen years in all.They were all excellent character actors who had screen as well as TV experience before they took on the role of the Doctor.Each was very different from the other and provided a unique take on the role of Doctor.William Hartnell was a veteran screen actor who had starred in gangster films such as Brighton Rock and Odd Man Out and in war films such as The Way Ahead where we played a tough Sergeant licking a new platoon into shape.He was later to reprise this role in comedies such as Privates Progress and the first Carry On film Carry On Sergeant.He later became almost stereotyped in the role as Sergeant Bullymore in the TV series The Army Game Britain's comedy answer to Sergeant Bilko. Patrick Troughton had acted in Olivier's Shakespeare films and also in Ray Harryhausen's Jason And The Argonauts.Jon Pertwee was a veteran comedy actor who had acted in British comedy films and in BBC Radio comedy.Both Troughton and Pertwee were Royal Navy veterans who had seen action in the Second World War.Pertwee had been trained in unarmed combat hence his action role in his version of the Doctor.Tom Baker the longest running Doctor in the A Team who in the end had come to set a bench mark for the role was also an excellent character actor who had movie experience appearing in one of Ray Harryhausen's Sinbad films.These four Doctors saw the programme become a national treasure in Britain during the 60s and 70s a seemingly permanent part of the cultural landscape. When Tom Baker stepped down from the role in 1981 it seemed the series would be good for another eighteen years. yet eight years later it was gone seemingly for good.

Dr Who At 50 The Monsters And The Critics

The BBC in its 50th anniversary celebrations seems to have largely glossed over the problems the show had in the past and the weaknesses that brought it low.Dr Who has now been played by eleven actors and promotional material often seems to treat them all equally. However when we look more closely at the pattern of doctors we see four doctors from 1963 to 1981 then from 1982 to 1989 in only seven years we go though three doctors with an 18 month gap in 1985 to 86. accelerating into oblivion.The next time a doctor appears it is for a TV movie in 1996.This his only appearance is sufficient however to admit him into the pantheon. I will call the first four doctors of the 1960s and 70s the A team and the 1980s doctors the B team.The A team and their producers and writers turned Dr Who into a hero while the B team and those behind it saw him become a zero with cancellation the end of the process.In the next post I will examine the nature of the A team.

Dr Who at 50 The Monsters and the Critics

The current celebration of the 50th anniversary of  of the first broadcast of Dr Who in November 1963 is undoubtedly a milestone in popular culture.Unlike many other popular culture icons such as Sherlock Holmes or James Bond the good doctor is not the creation of an author but that of a media corporation the BBC at one of its most creative periods.The title of this piece referring to the monsters and the critics is taken from a short book by JRR Tolkien Beowulf  The Monsters And The Critics which I have playfully appropriated to my own use.I will come to the many monsters and what they have in common and what makes them monstrous later on.The critics have been far more deadly enemies to Dr Who than the Daleks his chief monster adversary and when they combined criticism and power in the BBC management they in fact succeeded in killing the program for 16 years.There was also a hiatus of about 18 months in the mid 1980s  so for nearly 18 out of the 50 years there was a no Dr Who.Dr Who seemed at one time dead and buried and the corporation that created him was happy with this state of affairs and contained some active enemies of the doctor keen to keep him off the air.Yet at one time in the 1960s and 1970s the doctor seemed one with the Zeitgeist as much part of the popular culture as The Beatles or The Rolling Stones. So how did the death of Dr Who come about ?.

Dennis Wheatley ,Edgar Rice Burroughs And Rider Haggard Conclusion.

Edgar Rice Burroughs had never been to Africa when he started writing his Tarzan tales.His main influence was however an old Africa hand Rider Haggard the author of King Solomon's Mines and She both of which have been filmed several times.Rider Haggard was as prolific a writer as Edgar Rice Burroughs and he even created a hero adventurer the white hunter Alan Quatermain an obvious ancestor of Indiana Jones.The stories blend the African settings that Haggard was familiar with and lost world themes built on the legacy of the Ancient World.All seem to be available free online for anyone who wishes to read them. Rider Haggard's
Alan Quatermain has recently been revived by Alan Moore in his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen graphic novel series.The pulp fiction of the 20th century now largely exists on line or in ancient  paperback collections filling the book shelves of the over fifties.They are a rich treasure but one which may be lost to younger generations.Hopefully the steam punk genre may come to the rescue as it is easy to go from Wells and Verne to Burroughs and Haggard. An Update in November 2013. Dennis Wheatley's back catalogue is now becoming available on Kindle with most of the black magic stories now available at reasonable eBook prices.

Dennis Wheatley, Edgar Rice Burroughs,Rider Haggard and The pulp Masters.

Most of Edgar Rice Burroughs work is available in eBook form much of it free.Earlier this year Disney tried to revive the fortunes of Burroughs Martian tales with a block buster version of A Princess of Mars retitled John Carter.As a Burroughs fan I thought it did justice to the book although it did not catch on with the general public.I suppose Burroughs science fiction would appeal to the retro sci-fi enthusiasts of steam punk so like the sci-fi of Wells,Verne and Conan Doyle it will hopefully survive in a niche market.The audience of teenage boys who once lapped up such fictions I presume now do little reading instead playing fantasy and science fiction video games and watching DVDs on such themes.Since the Disney animation of the 1990s Hollywood seems to have finally lost interest in Tarzan.Probably the whole Tarzan theme is now too un- PC for them to touch anymore.A shame really as like Dracula and Sherlock Homes he was once a character familiar to everyone.

Dennis Wheatley ,Edgar Rice Burroughs ,Rider Haggard And The Pulp Masters.

Second only to Dennis Wheatley  in terms of ubiquitous paperbacks was the pulp writer Edgar Rice Burroughs.During the post war paperback revolution pocket sized paperbacks were sold in news agents, station book stalls and automats.Edgar Rice Burroughs with his brand leader Tarzan was a favorite for these venues.As well as Tarzan he also wrote science fiction of a dated variety set on Mars (Barsoom) Venus (Amtor) and the hollow Earth Pellucidar. Edgar Rice Burroughs was also a fairly conservative writer and also like Wheatley a man  of action.His last exploits when he was quite old were as a war correspondent in the Pacific during the Second World War.He had been living in Hawaii at the time of Pearl Harbour so when the war came to the Pacific he managed through his fame as the creator of Tarzan to be credited by a newspaper as a war correspondent.

Dennis Wheatley,Edgar Rice Burroughs and The Pulp Masters

There seem to be few current editions of Dennis Wheatley apart from a couple of the occult novels published by Wordsworth books but such was his popularity that second paperback and hard back editions from the 1960s and 70s are still available at very cheap prices on line.As yet there seem to be no Kindle versions of his books which one would have thought the literary estate would seek to remedy especially in regard to the occult novels.His Conservative views are now deemed politically incorrect which may also be preventing any revival of his works.In the 21st century the horror writer Clive Barker championed him in his TV series and book The A to Z of Horror and there was a television program devoted to him entitled a Message To Posterity.This revolved around a letter left by him in a time capsule in the late 1940s warning the future about the danger of a socialist communist dictatorship. A number of cultural talking heads discussed him and his books in the program.The critic John Sutherlan devoted  a chapter of his cultural autobiography  Magic Moments to his novel Such Power is Dangerous which he favorable reviews.He contrasts him with Aldous Huxley a literary writer who he also read as a teenager.There has also been the recent biography by Phil Barker entitled The Devil is A Gentlemen.There are also several blogs devoted to him .Whether this will result in a revival only time will tell.

Dennis Wheatley,Edgar Rice Burroughs And The Pulp Masters.

During the Second World War Wheatley  worked at on secret ops with Ian Fleming the future creator of James Bond.Wheatley  had created his own secret agent Gregory Sallust who is similar in many ways to the future Bond and who featured in a series of thrillers set during the war.Wheatley has his hero meet various real historical persons in these stories such as Hermann Goering and Hitler.After the war Dennis Wheatley continued his prolific output down  the 1970s.His books are exercises in pure escapism within a realistic 20th century setting (apart from the historical).Like most pulp fiction the message is conservative with heroes coming from the upper class and living the good life.His lost world stories are his most fantastic with visits to Atlantis, another to a lost Atlantean civilisation in the Antartic ,a lost civilisation of 17th century English cavaliers in the Sargasso sea and a visit to Mars by flying saucer.These stories are all mixed in with struggles against the Nazis in World War II and the Communists in the Cold War.His chief claim to fame however is his novels which combine conventional thrillers with Black Magic and Occult themes.

Dennis Wheatley,Edgar Rice Burroughs And The Pulp Masters.

Way back in the 1960s one of my favourite authors was the paperback thriller writer Dennis Wheatley. I must have devoured most of his oeuvre during those years .His output was prodigious and contrary to received wisdom  only a small number were concerned with the black magic and occult themes for which he is now remembered that is when he is remembered at all.Much of his work consisted of thrillers set before and during the Second World War in which he served as an adviser to Churchill's War Cabinet.He also wrote historical novels set during the French revolution and Napoleonic Wars and the late 19th and early 20th centuries.As well as the Black Magic novels he also wrote novels of the lost world variety which date back to Edgar Rice Burroughs ,Rider Haggard and Conan Doyle.I believe on modern creative writing courses the students are advised to write about what you know.In Wheatleys case this involved a year in the Kaisers Germany studying the wine trade prior to the Great War,four years in the trenches, a partnership with a Raffles style gentleman crook Eric Toombes,the Roaring Twenties as experienced by someone in the wine trade invited to all the wild parties,meetings with the worlds leading Occultist Aleister Crowley,marriage to a wife who subsequently worked for MI5 and a place in the planning department of Churchill's War Cabinet.He was also King George the Sixths favourite novelist.

Philip K Dick,Pohl And Kornbluth The Men Who Saw The Future.

Topics covered in Philip K Dicks books include parallel universes such as the Axis controlled America in Man In the High Castle but also the Neanderthal earth of Cantata 140,Schizophrenia and mental illness, artificial life forms,global heating in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Edrich,everyday domestic appliances such as doors and taxis that talk to you, artificial realities produced by drugs which are controlled by the supplier of the drugs, cryonic suspension of the dead with whom it is possible to have a conversation,The Penfield  Mood organ on which you dial up your moods for the day, a device which produces animated film versions of novels where you decide the animation style ie Moby Dick animated by,Dali or Picasso.A key trope is always the impossibility  of defining what is actually real or not in such a world.A child for example can watch real footage of an elephant and CGI footage of a dinosaur probably not understanding that one is real and the other not.Philip K Dicks world is now our world, we actually live in Philip K Dicks universe ,perpetually asking ourselves the question is this for real?

Philip K Dick,Pohl And Kornbluth The Men Who Saw The Future .

During the 1960s and 1970s Philip Dicks out put of science fiction novels was considerable.At the time they were naturally enough only known of and read by readers of science fiction which was still a vast literary field  which had been going for decades.This is pretty much over now as anyone can see who walks into a bookstore and looks at the section devoted to science fiction and fantasy.This is mostly devoted now to modern fantasy novels.The writers who dominated the science fiction field in the mid and late 20th century have largely disappeared and those under 50 are unlikely to have even heard of them.The one exception to this rule seems to be Philip K Dick whose work is still in print and readily available.This to someone who was a reader of science fiction and to whom Philip Dick was only one author among many has always struck me as rather strange.Why Philip K Dick of all people ? ,an author who was so poor at one time he was reduced to eating pet food.

Philip K Dick ,Pohl And Kornbluth The Men Who Saw The Future

Philip K Dick first started publishing science fiction short stories in the science fiction magazines of the early 1950s.His first published science fiction novel was Solar Lottery published in 1955.His novel a future dystopia in which life chances for the population are decided by lottery was quite prescient .At that time the notion that the state would actively promote the vice of gambling would have seemed far fetched yet it has now come to pass and is taken for granted.However at this time despite his small success as a fairly minor science fiction author Philip Dick was actually trying to become an author of mainstream literary fiction.The novels he wrote in the 1950s such as Confessions of A Crap Artist,The Broken Bubble of Thisbe Holt and In Milton Lumky Territory among others  are tales of suburban Californian life.It seems Philip Dick was following the same groove as Richard Yates with stories of post war America with its affluence combined with conformism.It seems probable if these books had been actually published Philip Dick would have dropping the science fiction in favor of  social realism.Like Richard Yates he would no doubt be largely forgotten now.Instead the literary novels loss turned out to be science fictions gain.It is hard to imagine Riddley Scott directing a block buster based on In Milton Lumky Territory.The key text which bridges the two worlds is The Man In The High Castle   set in California in 1961.The characters are similar to the suburbans who feature in his unpublished 50s novels.However the California they inhabit is occupied by the Japanese as a result of Americas defeat by the Axis powers in World War II who have partitioned the country in the same manner that Germany was.Philip Dick won a Hugo Award for the novel and after this largely stuck to writing science fiction.

Philip K Dick,Pohl And Kornbluth The men who the saw future .

Pohl and Kornbluth's next collaboration Gladiator At Law continued the vision of The Space Merchants with corporate lawyers instead of advertising executives as the protagonists.The book was published in 1955 at the height of Americas post war boom .However the future depicted is far from optimistic with the post war  housing developments turned into slums dominated by gangs of feral children. The population is  divided into corporate serfs or  welfare drones  with entertainment laid on in the form of gladiatorial games a prophecy which looks all too likely to come true. This vision was one in direct opposition to that for example being turned out for Americans by Walt Disney's Tomorrow Land  for example.In fact the world of the early 21st century has turned out to resemble that of Pohl and Kornbluth rather than Disney.

Philip K Dick,Pohl And Kornbluth The men who saw the future ..

Pohl and Kornbluth's  magnum opus The Space Merchants is 60 years old this year.A key science fiction text it is extraordinarily prescient with its vision of a world run by corporations ,its culture defined by advertising and its environment wrecked by overpopulation and pollution.When I first read it back in the 1960s when the Cold War was still in existence I was surprised to find no mention of either the Soviet Union or Communism which seemed to have mysteriously disappeared.This seems to have been the most prescient feature of all of the novel   for the softly and silently vanishing away of Soviet Communism, Americas great Cold War bug bear is the most astonishing fact of our times.At the time the novel was written in the early 50s at the time of the Korean War such a demise for Communism would have seemed more far fetched than speculations about space travel.At the time of publication Senator McCarthy was hunting communists ,in The Space Merchants the enemy are not commies but consies ,conservationists the novels term for those we now call  greens.

Philip K Dick, Pohl and Kornbluth , The men who saw the future.

Philip K Dick is Hollywoods favourite science fiction writer the inspiration for films going back thirty years both adaptions of his own novels and also for works using similar themes. His work first appeared in science fiction magazines and in cheap paperback novels in the 50s ,60s and 70s.At the time popular depiction of the future barring the possibility of nuclear war were generally fairly positive. Dicks stagnant ,high tech,alienated,scuzzy , run down future turns out to have been fairly accurate as a prediction.However the future depicted in his books was actually originated by Frederick Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth in their novels The Space Merchants and Gladiator At Law.Pohl and Kornbluth are largely forgotten now but in the 1950s and early 1960s they were the cutting edge of science fiction

The Hobbit ,The Inklings And The New Middle Ages Final Part

H G Wells in his 1941 book The Outlook For Homo Sapiens raised some interesting points about a return to medieval conditions.He envisaged a world in which large scale systems such as rail networks,postal systems and international trade might break down but radio broadcasts,simple light aircraft and fire arms would continue to exist.Fire arms are very simple machines and there are plenty in working order that are a century old.Existing supplies of fire arms will last for centuries if well maintained and ammunition can be made in simple work shops as they are in the tribal areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan.Distilled Spirits are another  a fairly simple technology which people in the future would be unlikely to forget.We can already see signs of such a scenario in the combination of crumbling infrastructure and advanced digital technology which exist in parts of the early 21st century world. The probability is that the future will resemble the past rather than the dream of progress dreamt by the 20th century .The reappearance of such evils as slavery and piracy is proof of this.

The Hobbit ,The Inklings And The New Middle Ages

In 1994 the BBC 2s nightly cultural round up show The Late Show produced its own program on the new middle ages fronted by journalist Benjamin Wooley who has recently published a book on Doctor Dee Elizabeth the firsts Merlin.The Late Show was the kind of program that has been removed from the BBCs major  channels as part of the dumbing down process and now confined to its cultural ghetto BBC 4.In this program Wooley looked forward to the new millennium as part of a return to medievalism.Part of the doomier predictions made in the program was mention of the Black Death which was linked to various 1990s bogies such as AIDs ,SARs and avian flu.In the nearly twenty years since the  program was broadcast global pandemics have been conspicuous by their absence so in that respect there has been no return to medieval conditions.Likewise the feared rise in global temperatures and melting ice caps has failed to materialize.The most interesting prediction in the program and one which proved correct was that of the demise of the printed word in the wake of the internet.As the Internet had only been open to the general public for a few years at that point this was quite an accurate prediction.

The Hobbit ,The Inklings And The New Middle Ages.

In the 20th century the medievalists always cut a slightly absurd figure as their ideology seemed incongruous in the face of the then modern world as it was with its strong nation states,industrialism ,secularism and ideology of progress.Now in the 21st century articles on what has been dubbed the new middle ages are quite frequent.The  rise of China the old middle kingdom and the resurgence of Islam has produced a world that resembles the late middle ages in many ways. Science fiction novels in the 20th century frequently depicted future worlds which combined high technology with feudal social structures.Nowadays the idea of a technological society in which large chunks of the population are semi-literate and semi numerate has been realized.The wealth that the population is surrounded by seems to appear as if by magic divorced from human effort and manufactured in distant continents which they would be hard put to identify on a map.As in the middle ages the clerisy which still has some   actual  some understanding of the world and how it functions make up only a small proportion of the population.