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About Time 2
The About Time series are reference works providing a story-by-story guide to Dr Who. Where these differ from the half dozen or so other story-by-story guides I have on my bookshelves, is that they seek explicitly to analyse the Dr Who stories in the wider context of the culture, specifically the media culture, of the time. They started out with the later Doctors (3, 4 and 5, IIRC) and then skipped back. This is the first of the "sixties" books I have read and the first which I have found more irritating than enjoyable.
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parrot_knight and daniel_saunders keep notes of the inaccuracies that appear in the About Time books. For once I was grateful that my mind does not retain facts in the same way since I have enjoyed these books but, given their nature, inaccuracies would be extremely galling. However, possibly because of this, I became increasingly aware, as I read About Time 2 of the way in which Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood make unsupported assertions. For instance, "What nobody who wasn't there in 1969 can really grasp is the degree to which waiting was part of the space experience in the Apollo years.". Now Lawrence Miles is, I believe, younger than I am, so he certainly doesn't remember anything about the space experience in 1969. I've no idea how old Tat Wood is. Does this sentence mean "Tat remembers 1969 and Lawrence doesn't and Lawrence can't grasp the degree to which...."? I have a vague memory that Tat Wood is an academic of some description specialising in popular culture. So its possible he has a paper "Differing generational expectations about the rapidity of events in space as depicted in visual media" sitting in his filing cabinet somewhere. While I can see it would have been inappropriate to mention this as an inline citation - would a bibliography really have hurt the book?
Lawrence Miles has a bit of a reputation for quitting projects. I have a feeling that he has an extremely good instinct for when a project is getting stale and beginning to recycle ideas and insufficient cynicism to stay with it anyway either for the money for out of any sense of duty to the readers. On the whole I admire this. Interestingly Tat Wood is going it alone for About Time 6 and I do wonder if part of my dissatisfaction with this book was a feeling that on the larger scale Miles and Wood had said what they wanted to about the classic series and were beginning to recycle their argument. Certainly some of the formula seemed to wearing a bit thin. The "What nobody who wasn't there can appreciate..." line quoted above appears as a recurring motif thoughout.
As well as the story by story breakdowns Miles and Wood accompany each section with an essay. Usually these essays are entertaining continuity games of the "how to we fit all the dalek stories together" variety. This sort of thing is obviously a rather specialised sport but Miles and Wood probably have their market pretty well pegged here. At any rate I personally quite like reading this kind of speculation. However early in this volume we have "Why was a McCrimmon Fighting for the Pretender?" which verges on the incoherent. I think they were really writing about what happened to Jamie McCrimmon after he was returned to his own time zone though it was difficult to tell. The next one, "How Many Atlantises Are There?" wasn't much better although it did at least make sense, but suffered from too many asides which were not, in my opinion, interesting enough to justify their inclusion. I was amused by the final essay "Did Doctor Who end in 1969?" which reminded me powerfully of a spoof article I wrote during the "JNT MUST DIE" days of 1980s Who fandom in which I suggested that Doctor had essentially been on a downhill spiral since the second episode which introduced the Daleks and forever changed the direction of the show from Sydney Newman's "educational science and history" vision to the "monster of the week" style which Miles and Wood so complain of in this volume. In fact you can't help get the feeling from this that they don't really much like the Doctor Who of the Troughtan era and perhaps it is this dissatisfaction that rather sours it. The best essay in the volume is "Was Yeti-in-a-Loo the Worst Idea Ever?" in which they more or less argue that the entire premise of the Pertwee years was misguided. I'm not entirely sure I agreed with it but it was argued with eloquent passion.
An alternative explanation for my dissatisfaction lies outside of the book itself. When I read the books about later Dr Who I remembered watching the episodes at the time, and I remember the surrounding Basil Brush, Star Wars, Buck Rogers milieu. I wasn't watching between 1966 and 1969 and I read this book without nostalgia tinged glasses.
I was interested to learn that both
parrot_knight and daniel_saunders keep notes of the inaccuracies that appear in the About Time books. For once I was grateful that my mind does not retain facts in the same way since I have enjoyed these books but, given their nature, inaccuracies would be extremely galling. However, possibly because of this, I became increasingly aware, as I read About Time 2 of the way in which Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood make unsupported assertions. For instance, "What nobody who wasn't there in 1969 can really grasp is the degree to which waiting was part of the space experience in the Apollo years.". Now Lawrence Miles is, I believe, younger than I am, so he certainly doesn't remember anything about the space experience in 1969. I've no idea how old Tat Wood is. Does this sentence mean "Tat remembers 1969 and Lawrence doesn't and Lawrence can't grasp the degree to which...."? I have a vague memory that Tat Wood is an academic of some description specialising in popular culture. So its possible he has a paper "Differing generational expectations about the rapidity of events in space as depicted in visual media" sitting in his filing cabinet somewhere. While I can see it would have been inappropriate to mention this as an inline citation - would a bibliography really have hurt the book?Lawrence Miles has a bit of a reputation for quitting projects. I have a feeling that he has an extremely good instinct for when a project is getting stale and beginning to recycle ideas and insufficient cynicism to stay with it anyway either for the money for out of any sense of duty to the readers. On the whole I admire this. Interestingly Tat Wood is going it alone for About Time 6 and I do wonder if part of my dissatisfaction with this book was a feeling that on the larger scale Miles and Wood had said what they wanted to about the classic series and were beginning to recycle their argument. Certainly some of the formula seemed to wearing a bit thin. The "What nobody who wasn't there can appreciate..." line quoted above appears as a recurring motif thoughout.
As well as the story by story breakdowns Miles and Wood accompany each section with an essay. Usually these essays are entertaining continuity games of the "how to we fit all the dalek stories together" variety. This sort of thing is obviously a rather specialised sport but Miles and Wood probably have their market pretty well pegged here. At any rate I personally quite like reading this kind of speculation. However early in this volume we have "Why was a McCrimmon Fighting for the Pretender?" which verges on the incoherent. I think they were really writing about what happened to Jamie McCrimmon after he was returned to his own time zone though it was difficult to tell. The next one, "How Many Atlantises Are There?" wasn't much better although it did at least make sense, but suffered from too many asides which were not, in my opinion, interesting enough to justify their inclusion. I was amused by the final essay "Did Doctor Who end in 1969?" which reminded me powerfully of a spoof article I wrote during the "JNT MUST DIE" days of 1980s Who fandom in which I suggested that Doctor had essentially been on a downhill spiral since the second episode which introduced the Daleks and forever changed the direction of the show from Sydney Newman's "educational science and history" vision to the "monster of the week" style which Miles and Wood so complain of in this volume. In fact you can't help get the feeling from this that they don't really much like the Doctor Who of the Troughtan era and perhaps it is this dissatisfaction that rather sours it. The best essay in the volume is "Was Yeti-in-a-Loo the Worst Idea Ever?" in which they more or less argue that the entire premise of the Pertwee years was misguided. I'm not entirely sure I agreed with it but it was argued with eloquent passion.
An alternative explanation for my dissatisfaction lies outside of the book itself. When I read the books about later Dr Who I remembered watching the episodes at the time, and I remember the surrounding Basil Brush, Star Wars, Buck Rogers milieu. I wasn't watching between 1966 and 1969 and I read this book without nostalgia tinged glasses.
no subject
As I've said before, these books are a great missed opportunity. Read as a conversation between two fans in the pub they are very entertaining and informative; "ambitiously definitive", they are not, though they could serve as the framework for one after extensive factchecking.
no subject
It would have been nice to see About Time 6 actually discuss these stories bringing the same sense of opposing perspectives to the tale.
no subject
I agree about the "anyone who wasn't there" business. Tat Wood, according to something he wrote in one of his fanzines, turned 18 during Logopolis, which would have made him six in 1969. It isn't impossible for him to remember coverage of the Apollo landings, but a six year old's definition of 'a long time to wait' is rather different to that of an adult.
As for Miles' absence from the next volume, other theories are:
he's too ill (he's a manic depressive and agoraphobic, according to his on-line "diary");
he hates late eighties Who too much to say anything Mad Norwegian's lawyers will allow to go into print;
he's fallen out with Tat Wood (I have no idea if that's true, but he was very rude about him here).
In fact you can't help get the feeling from this that they don't really much like the Doctor Who of the Troughtan era
I'm not quite sure what Doctor Who they do like. Not Troughton, Colin or Pertwee, and they're split on the Williams era and early eighties. Only Hinchcliffe and parts of Hartnell have got an easy ride from them so far.
no subject
he's too ill (he's a manic depressive and agoraphobic, according to his on-line "diary");
Indeed Miles' diary makes his illness sound extremely unpleasant. Certainly if its as bad as it sounds it seems unlikely he'd be capable of the kind of sustained effort required to produce About Time 6. I've not been reading the diary long enough to know if its an ongoing problem though or one which has become significantly worse in recent months.
he hates late eighties Who too much to say anything Mad Norwegian's lawyers will allow to go into print;
he's fallen out with Tat Wood (I have no idea if that's true, but he was very rude about him here).
In the past Lawrence has generally cited "artistic differences" usually with a deeply (and frequently unprofessionally) personal thrust to the criticism as his reason for leaving projects but I've often felt that in reality it has boiled down to "this is getting stale, I'm not doing it any more" with the unfortunate addition of "you are an idiot (and possibly morally bankrupt) if you can't appreciate the fact" as a parting shot which obscures the real reason. This is just speculation though...
Fascinating reading
Anyway (gasp) my point is, you raise a really interesting point. For me, I'd only enjoyed the About Time books (having read the 1st, 2nd and 3rd volumes and about to begin the 4th) because - combined with Wikipedia and more in-universe style guides - they seemed to offer such an all-encompassing view of the context of the show. But you've certainly made me scratch that opinion a little bit - I must admit, I just re-read those final essays about the Yeti-in-a-Loo business, and they don't really seem to mesh with the vibe I got from the 3rd volume, namely that Miles and Wood REALLY understand and 'get' the Pertwee era. Once I figure out how to browse these journals, I'll have to check out the blogs of those esteemed gentlemen you mention, and further understand the holes in the authors' seemingly impenetrable armour.
Thanks again!
Re: Fascinating reading
EDIT: In fact I note both