Directory of Lost Causes

I suppose this must be another example of the unbridled irony that is now sweeping the globe, but I've just read something suggesting that in a poll of Whovians quizzed on their preference for the next Doctor, the actor most voted for was James Nesbitt.

I hate James Nesbitt!

I wish I could convey via the keyboard my tongue-tied-ness at this... thing.

I don't get it. All I can say is, I'm definitely, definitely on the wrong planet. What were the choices for the poll? James Nesbitt and James Nesbitt? I mean, surely, if there had been any other choice except James Nesbitt, then, no matter who it was, even if it was Sir Rhodes Boyson, or Les Dennis, every single person who responded would - surely!! - have taken the other choice. Surely?

But it does make me feel a bit better about the fact I haven't written any bestsellers yet. Wrong planet, that's all.

I sent an e-mail to someone recently about the new Doctor Who. That is, the Doctor Who of Russel T. Davies. (One L or two?) I'm not going to look it up now.

Since I am well-known in my neck of the woods for being a Doctor Who fan, and have even played (very badly) Tom Baker's Doctor in a theatrical pro-ject, many thousands of people, androids, Sontarans, Silurians, Ice-Warriors (now there's a monster I'd like to see ressurected, have I already missed it?), Time Lords and robot dogs have asked my opinion on the new series. I see if I can remember now my first impressions.



Before I go on to say anything else, let me say that the entire world should be grateful to Russel T. Davies for renewing interest in the series, and for bringing the Daleks and the Cidermen to a new generation of children who I hope are not too cynical to hide behind the sofa, as of old, as that would be sad. So, the man done good. And I will now preface my observations further, and ominously, by saying that, of course, everyone has their own favourite Doctor, which is probably heavily influenced by which Doctor they grew up with. However, since I have been a Doctor Who fan for about ninety percent or more of my now 36 years, I think I have a right to express an opinion here.

So, my first impressions of the new series. Christopher Eccleston seemed a bit stiff, but had something. I liked him. One thing I immediately noticed was that the episodes were self contained stories (there have since been some longer stories stretched over a few episodes), which seemed to me to eliminate one of the great traditions of Doctor Who, which was the cliffhanger, and particularly the cliffhanger combined with the enticement of a slow build-up. Usually there were four episodes, though this varied. At the end of the first episode you would see, through the crack in a steel bulkhead in some underground lair, a green, mucilaginous claw made of hideous bubble-wrap, spray paint and sugar paper. And we were sore afraid. At the end of the second episode, you would see as far as the shoulder, if that thing may be called a shoulder. At the end of the third episode, there would be a whole army of mucilaginous claw monsters from an art workshop surrounding the Doctor while he grinned and offered them a jelly baby, as if he did not even realise he was in danger of his life, and Sarah-Jane Smith would cry, "Dotor, look out!" And at the end of the fourth episode the Doctor and his assistant would slip quietly away in the TARDIS, leaving behind people too dazed and relieved to question very closely who this man was, where he has gone, where he came from, and why he spoke with such authority.

I suppose I miss that format. I think a lot of the spirit of Doctor Who was contained in that. Why was the decision made to change this. I'm tempted to say someone at a meeting said, "Exucse me, two words, 'Attention span!' Two more words, 'Lack of'."



I felt somewhat let down with this, but I persevered and watched, I believe, every episode of the new series, taking care to see the repeats and so on when I missed one. There were some good episodes. My favourites, as I recall them, were The End of the World, The Long Game, and The Empty Child. Things seemed to be promising.

Some things did bother me, however. I didn't like the introduction of sex. To me, Doctor Who is a children's programme in the best sense of the word. There should be nothing denigrating about such a term. The Doctor, to me, had always been asexual, and this was part of his alien quality. Never mind that off-screen Tom Baker was somewhat like the Rasputin character he once so brilliantly played. He knew very well his responsibilities as a hero for children. The introduction of sex seemed like another thing put forward at a meeting. "Of course, it will all be done in the best possible taste," someone must have quipped, attempting to re-cross his or her legs dementedly in the manner of the one and only Kenny.

Then there came David Tennant. I really liked his performance in the introductory episode of his incarnation. Things were still promising. However, somewhere along the line I seemed to lose interest, and it doesn't help that I'm not living in a house with a television at the moment. There's a lot I could say on this, but I kind of feel like it's summed up in this article from The Independent, with a story that very much tows the public line. Here's the quote that struck me:

Why place [Russell T. Davies] higher than Stephen Fry, Sir Elton John or Peter Mandelson? Partly because of the status he has within his industry, achieved by doing the impossible: reviving the Doctor – turning a dusty old joke into a witty, sexy, slick and scary show – and making Saturday tea-time family telly compulsory again. But also because of what his critics call "the Gay Agenda".

That was the line, the one seemingly inserted incidentally between dashes. "[T]urning a dusty old joke into a witty, sexy, slick and scary show". Now, let's have a little think about what is meant by 'dusty old joke'. The show that the BBC cared so little for that many of the old episodes are lost forever, carelessly archived, or perhaps just thrown away. The show whose first episode was broadcast the day that Kennedy was assassinated, so that if anyone actually saw that first episode when it was first broadcast, he or she is my hero forever. The show that has become one of the longest-running television shows in the world. The show where the hero is an alien with two hearts who is far more intelligent than humans and never carries a gun. The show that refused to die, kept alive by fans and writers who wrote Doctor Who books that were never made into TV episodes. The show in which Jon Pertwee dressed as a dandy, Tom Baker wore a ridiculosly long scarf and claimed not to be a fashion expert, and Peter Davison (who once sat in the same Barnstaple pub as me at the same time) wore a set of cricket whites. The show that gave us stories with Tibetan buddhism and giant spiders. The show that was only ever scheduled in the first place as a schedule-filler. The show that made a kind of robot without legs, driven by a blob of nuclear war-mutated slime, the most terrifying thing in the galaxy. The show that had the best theme tune ever, from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop (hello Ron Grainer and Delia Derbyshire). The show in which the Doctor refused to destroy the Daleks when he had the perfect chance to (twice, I believe, correct me if I'm wrong), saying at some point that out of their evil would come a greater good. The show in which Tom Baker met Lalla Ward and gave us one of the finest ever television double acts. The show for which Douglas Adams wrote a story about the Mona Lisa being faked by a malicious alien trapped in splinter-selves throughout history, giving John Cleese a great cameo in the Louvre. The show that dared to cast Bonnie Langford as an assistant. The show that had ecological themes expressed in terms of giant, mutated maggots. Image of the Fendahl (the Doctor offers a jelly-baby to an ancient glowing skull). An Unearthly Child (a strange girl leads her teachers into a police call box that is bigger on the inside than the outside, "But that's impossible!"). The Seeds of Death (Patrick Troughton's Doctor utters the immortal lines, later to inspire a song by The Dead Bell, "You can't kill me... I'm a genius!"). The Ark in Space, (one of my earliest memories, and still, to me, quintessential Doctor Who, even now making me thrill as I watch it again; when I first saw it, in the nextdoor neighbour's house {there was community in those days, and we didn't have a telly in our house}, I didn't just hide behind the sofa, I actually ran all the way back to my own house, and then went back again to watch more). Terror of the Autons (my memory grows hazy, but I believe that this story received a number of complaints that it would give children nightmares because it had familiar objects, such as dolls and sofas, being used as instruments of death by aliens; also, in one of the Auton stories, Jon Pertwee wrestles with a rubber octopus-thing).



This is the dusty old joke. I'm actually not going to let that lie. I'm going to comment further. When I hear people say something like, "Oh, Doctor Who. That was so ridiculous. You could see the sets wobble", and so on, and laughing about the show having a low-budget, what I immediately think is, "You have no imagination. That's why you need CGI, to fill the gaps that your own imagination won't supply. Is lack of money really the harshest criticism that you can come up with? Perhaps you should try going to the theatre, take in a play, see what people can do with a script and a few props, and without CGI?"

And now we have "a witty, sexy, slick and scary show". I have no objection to witty or scary, especially in combination, but "slick" and "sexy" sounds to me like a Justin Timberlake album.

All this is brought on by a number of things, but in particular by my catching the episode The Wasp and the Unicorn this weekend. I suppose I wasn't hugely impressed. However, I thought Catherine Tate was okay. I hear a lot of people are pissed off with her. No, I'd say she's one of the better assistants. At least she doesn't seem to be a device for teenage soap opera.

Well, I'm going to attempt to finish the first draft of my novel Susuki tonight, so I'll wrap up here, even though there's more to say.

Oh yes, this one goes out to Lawrence Miles. I've never met you, but I'm willing to bet you're a good bloke.

I've had an exhausting weekend, with a lot of work and little sleep. Now it's Monday. I've slept late. I'm unemployed and there's nowhere I have to be, so I think I shall attempt to write a little something about the weekend.

When I got back last night, I uploaded some photographs from the weekend into a new photo album. During the course of the weekend, I tried to ask those people of whom I had taken photos whether they minded if I used them on my blog. I think I managed to ask most people, and sometimes got a response to the effect that there was no need to ask. Well, if you're like me then there really is no need to ask. I don't consider my physical appearance to be copyrighted to me (and even feel this is the equivalent of wanting to censor people's thoughts about me). My image is just part of the world like, well, like that hedge, that lamp-post and so on. However, we are living in uptight times and I feel the need to ask permission about these things. Despite this, there are some people I didn't manage to ask, because I forgot, or didn't have time, or couldn't be bothered. So, if I didn't ask your permission, and a photograph of you appears in this album against your wishes, please let me know, and I shall remove it without being offended, or without showing any outward signs of offence, anyway. (I didn't mean to suggest you're uptight.)

I'm not going to write at great length. For a start, I'm becoming more and more unhappy with the kind of thing I'm writing on this blog. It seems to me that I have fallen, without meaning to, into the the trap of writing like a columnist. Journalistic idioms and paradigms are all-pervasive these days, and one absorbs them by osmosis. Thus I have felt the need to come up with conclusions and so forth for what I'm writing, as if life has any conclusions, and as a result, I have written things that aren't strictly true (in a spiritual sense) for the sake of format and to create a satisfying read. There is a word for this kind of writing, and that word is 'trite'. Besides which, I originally started this blog, well, first of all as a kind of experiment, but secondly in the hope that I could just relax and write whatever I wanted without caring whether or not it was any good. And I usually write these things in a single sitting and, well, that's not always long enough to produce a well-rounded, fully-realised sketch, essay, vignette, or whatever it is that I am attempting. And... I'm only really writing this entry as an introduction to the photo album, anyway. So, please don't expect it to make any sense whatsoever.

Perhaps it would be easiest for me, on this occasion, to think of the blog entry as one of those round-letters, or whatever they call them - a letter addressed to many people. Such letters usually contain many 'thank you's, so I suppose I could start there, and since I don't want to sound like an actor with an award, I won't thank people one by one at tedious length. I should definitely thank Peter Harris, however, for casting me in the role of Tom Baker's Doctor Who (I'm assuming it was Peter's idea). There's a scene in Austin Powers: Goldmember, in which he is chatting to a pair of Asian girls at a party. Believing himself to be in luck he takes a piece of paper headed, "Things to do before I die" and crosses off, from a very long list, the item, "Sex with Japanese twins". (Actually, their comedy names do not sound even vaguely Japanese, and would probably be unpronounceable to most Japanese.) For me such a list would contain, somewhere near the top, "Play the lead role in Doctor Who". So, well, one down, three million ten thousand five hundred and eighty six to go. Thanks also to Peter Smith and Mr Robinson for helping me with practical matters such as transport, to anyone I scrounged fags off, to whoever bought the drink and so on. In case it needs saying, I had a good time and didn't hate anyone.

I suppose I should now explain, for those who don't know, what the whole weekend was about. I have always known these events, held twice every summer (with occasional exceptions), as 'leukemia weekends'. But I assume that's just shorthand, and that the actual title of these events is a little more wordy. The Wolf and Water website describes them as "annual residential weekend(s) for children with cancer & leukemia." What this actually means for someone like me, taking part in the weekend, is that a number of children, either being treated for leukemia or cancer, or the sibling of such a child, come to the Beaford Arts Centre for a kind of arty/community theatre cross between summer camp and a murder mystery holiday. There is a script of sorts for the staff, or crew, which I did not read this year, but there are no lines to learn. We have to stay in character (and in costume) throughout the weekend and ad lib our way through whatever adventure scenario has been prepared. Because a great deal of flexibility is needed to put the children at the centre of this experience, and make them feel in control of the direction the adventure is taking, even if this is not always strictly true, there are also a great many staff meetings throughout each day to take stock of what has happened and plan what will happen next. Ideas are put forward and written down in a large notebook, and the word 'facilitate' is used a great deal, as in, "Peter, would you be able to facilitate the finding of the memory-crystal message in the dustbins after lunch, so that we can discover the kidnapped Emu of Sadness tied up in the art room at about quarter past two and facilitate the dealing-with-kidnap trauma workshop for two thirty, where someone can facilitate the kids making trauma masks based on their own experiences?" (I just made that one up.) Because we will have been working, in character, all day, the final evening meeting tends to turn into a social occasion that extends into the small hours. I believe that the word 'facilitate' was originally introduced into these meetings by Mr Robinson, to whom we are very grateful, as it would undoubtedly be impossible to get through the meetings without this crucial item of vocabulary.



So, I hope the concept of the weekend is now absolutely clear to all.

The people who turned up for this weekend were mainly the same crowd who had been there for Harrisstock, about which I wrote previously. As on that occasion, I left Twickenham to catch a train to Reading at about 11.10-ish. Or I would have, if there had been any train. Not one, but two trains to Reading were cancelled, and I had to wait a full hour, thereby missing my Reading connection. I don't know about you, but I think it's time we rose up against the so-called train service we have here in Britain. They insult us every day with rising fares and a transport system that only seems to get worse and worse. Then they have the temerity to put up posters a) about how wonderful they are and b) telling you not to get angry at their staff. They know they can get away with this insidious attack on our morale, and that is why they do it. We must resist. We must track down those responsible for the innumerable delays and cancellations and demand a full compensation, backdated at least to the beginning of privatisation and, if they refuse to pay up, we must kill them and hang their corpses from signal boxes as an example to all of those who are RUINING services in this country. Today, the train service, tomorrow, the Post Office.

Anyway, I did eventually manage to get to Exeter St. Davids, where I was met by Ed and Andy, who were also to be picked up there by Mr Robinson. During my journey, it had come to me that having a wish come true is not always an easy thing. I now felt a weight on my shoulders, as of responsibility. It wasn't actually responsibility. It wasn't that I was thinking about other people. It was just that, after the initial elation of realising that I was finally going to be Tom Baker as Doctor Who, my thoughts turned to how I would play this role, and I remembered, with a sinking feeling, that I can't actually act. I thought of some of my correspondence with Mr Harris (or perhaps I didn't, but simply find it easy retrospectively to insert such thoughts at this point of the story). He wrote to ask of my dietary requirements for the weekend. I wrote back to tell him of my current vegetarian status and to ask who I would be. In answer to this last question, he replied, "as ever, yourself". It was only afterwards that I received the e-mail about my role as Tom Baker. The e-mail was headed simply, "tom baker", and my first reaction, before reading it was, "Oh no! Has something terrible happened? Has Tom Baker died?" I should put in here that I tend to react like this to vague e-mail headings. A family member once sent me an e-mail with the headline of "Mother", and I almost had a panic attack, fearing the worst, only to find the contents were very mundane. So please, when you write an e-mail to me, try and make the headings quite specific, so that you don't trigger any of the fears that lie buried just below the surface in the minefield of fears that is my heart. Anyway, as I was saying, the e-mail was that in which I received the news that I was to be the fourth doctor. Oh frabjous joy! as they say, and this after I had been told I would simply 'be myself'. Could I combine the two in some way, perhaps?

Unfortunately, because of the delay to my journey caused by the villainous people who run the trains, we arrived at the Beaford Centre too late to take part in setting up the theatrical environments, which was, of course, deeply disappointing. In fact, there was not even much time left for me to learn the basic concept of the story. Since I was not in every scene, and missed some of the early story-exposition scenes, I think my grip on the plot during the weekend was not the best. However, if I attempt to summarize, the story went something like this: Doctor Yes has invited the children, hearing that they are some of the sharpest minds in Devon, to assist him with investigations of some kind. I'm not sure what those initial investigations were, though. I think they must have been something to do with his wife Beatrice, for whom he was grieving because she had somehow been turned into a baboon and was now being held captive at Whipsnade Zoo. My entrance, along with two other Doctors - the Christopher Ecclestone and the David Tennant versions - and Rose Tyler came when Doctor Yes used a machine he had constructed to try and capture some UFOs. Instead of catching any UFOs, however, he managed only to pluck the three Doctors and Rose, and a dog called Jackie Chan (played by Intrepid) out of the ether (and out of the Tardis). My entrance, which came last, was made as I grappled with what I believed to be a Cyberman, who had sneaked into the Tardis in order to do mischief. The Tennant Doctor, however, identified this creature as a Ciderman, intent not on intergalactic domination, but on travelling the universe in search of booze. The Ciderman introduced himself as Archie and claimed to hail from the planet Newcastle. Much of the rest of the adventure was taken up with the search for the Tardis, which had not been plucked out of the ether with us. Archie was also searching for his drinking partner Sid, from whom he had been separated. When we eventually managed to track down Sid, it transpired that he had been drink driving and had wrapped the comandeered Tardis around a lamp-post whilst making a trip to the offie for Rizlas. As chance would have it, the three Doctors were then informed that they were about to have a once-in-a-millenia inspection for the renewal of their Time Lord license. Without a Tardis, it looked like they would fail and be stranded forever on Earth in the present. With the help of the kids, however, we managed to build a fake Tardis and make dramatic reconstructions of the Doctor's adventures to convince the inspectorate that the Doctors were, indeed, worthy of the license. There yet remained the fact that the Tardis had been written off. This was solved when the Ecclestone Doctor remembered a dream which led to a buried box containing a letter from himself stating that ... and I begin to lose it round about here again ... he had decided to stay at the Beaford Centre to look after the Tardis tree, and that we must make Tardis seeds, which would grow into adult Tardi, so that the other two Doctors could collect their new vehicles from the future - with a little help from Doctor Yes' apparatus - and come back to say goodbye. The final part of the adventure had us all writing those things that were the best and worst experiences in our lives, or our most valuable memories, or our hopes and fears, on a piece of paper to put into Tardis seeds of our own design, which we then ritualistically hung upon the Tardis tree whilst the Cidermen played tranquil music upon the xylophone.



Naturally, I'm missing out a lot in that synopsis.

When it came time on Sunday to leave, I cadged a lift again with Mr Robinson, accompanied by Ed and Andy, who would be taking the same train as me. It was a pleasant summer day - like the ones I remember, before global warming had brought us the recent intolerable heatwaves - wind was streaming through the car windows, and I looked out at the hedges surrounding the fields in the Devon countryside as it passed by. I grew up in Devon, and to me there is a timelessness to its landscape which is the closest thing I can think of to the word 'home'. There's something of a tradition in Wolf and Water, after each show or project, to talk about our favourite bits from the whole thing. This is what we did in the car as we drove to Exeter St. Davids. Perhaps my favourite bit was when the three license inspectors were ushered into the newly built fake Tardis and were shown a film - made during the weekend - of the Doctor in a football match with Cybermen. Before the film started, a group of us played the Doctor Who theme tune on electric guitars while everyone else sang along. At that moment I really felt as if I was in an episode of Doctor Who.

Someone in the car asked me how it had been finally to play the Time Lord. It was a little unfortunate that my energy levels had been so low much of the time, as I had not been able to give the role my all, but had drifted on auto-pilot. However, there had been a few moments, here and there, when my energy was up, that I felt I had become the part. How I had decided to play the role was, well, nothing that earth-shattering in the end, but simply to take the fantasy in both hands and enjoy it. And, in this regard, it felt great to be one of three Doctors. I think we provided a wonderful portfolio of Doctorliness. In particular, Jay's portrayal of David Tennant's Doctor made me want to go and watch the Tennant episodes I had missed.



I've more or less finished now, except that I feel like recording a couple of curious thoughts I had about the weekend. The first of these came to me when we were all in a circle and doing the kind of warm-up excercises long-familiar to me from my work with Wolf and Water. One of the exercises involved everyone saying their name and giving an action to go with it, such as a karate kick or a wiggle, or anything at all, and everyone then repeating their name and copying the action in unison. The feeling came back to me that I had when I did my very first drama work with Wolf and Water - "Oh my God! I've got to say my name and make some kind of silly movement!" In my life, just saying my name to people has, from childhood, been a painful business, symptomatic of a wider self-consciousness that has, at times, been crippling. When you are standing in a circle like this, and your turn is coming, you have no choice. You have to just stop thinking and do something. So there was a minor resurgence of my self-conscious dread on this occasion, and looking through the lens it gave me, I had what some people call a Naked Lunch moment. I saw a great number of the species known as homo sapiens, dressed in peculiar costumes, gathered in a circle, making strange noises and gestures. In fact, for me, such Naked Lunch moments are not uncommon in my work with Wolf and Water. Perhaps because most of us were wearing costumes, it struck me that clothes say a great deal about human vulnerability. In one very obvious way, they cover our nakedness and help us to pretend that we are not animals. But that does not mean that because clothes hide our vulnerability they are always associated with strength and imperviousness. Wearing what are considered strange clothes can make you feel very vulnerable. I have had the experience many times in my life of suffering verbal abuse from strangers purely on account of the clothes I was wearing. Clothes must not only hide our nakedness, they must also hide us completely, like a kind of camouflage, if they are to make us feel less vulnerable. If some people attack us on account of the clothes we wear, I do believe it is because at some level they are reminded of their own vulnerability, and they do not like to be reminded of it. They may think - if they think at all - that our strange clothes mark us out as pretentious, and hate us for this fact, forgetting that the human species, in the very act of wearing clothes, is inherently pretentious. The fact is, I don't like to be reminded of my vulnerability much, either, and I think that's basically what self-consciousness is about. How did I get over it on this occasion? By reminding myself that all human beings have the same vulnerabilities. This is an incredibly important fact to acknowledge, and this is why, to give a fairly bland example, literature that has some kind of subtext of intellectual superiority bores me and strikes me as the equivalent of macho bluff. One of the things that I appreciate about Wolf and Water is that it provides an environment in which people can be vulnerable without anyone feeling threatened by it. I think the world would, in fact, be a better place if such an environment could be extended beyond an enclave like Wolf and Water and into the world at large. We would be able to wear those fantastical costumes that make us so vulnerable every day, without suffering abuse from those who wish to deny they are vulnerable.

The second thought I had is really just an extension of the first. Ever since I was a child I have wanted to be famous. Now that I have grown up, I still have that feeling, but I realise that fame in worldly terms is not what I understood by the word as a child. I remember a conversation with Peter Harris in which he said that, in the days when communities were smaller, you could more or less choose who you lived with, and a community could really be a group of like-minded people who got on well with each other, but that a modern city is basically full of strangers with conflicting goals and interests. I think that what I really meant by 'fame' when I was a child, was 'community'. I wanted to be part of a group of people in which everyone mattered.

Anyway, the train journey back from Exeter was not so bad. I have arrived back in the big city again, or on its outskirts. I'm wondering what I'm going to do next with my life, and how I'm going to support myself.