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purplecatI've been scratching my head over how to cover Time and Relative Dissertations in Space in more detail, since I wanted to talk about several of the essays but didn't really want to make 18 more posts about it. I've opted for discussing each of its four parts in turn. These are not so much reviews as comments and thoughts I had while reading the essays - some of these comments probably arise because I'm approaching them from a computer science direction (my general notes about this in my original review of the book).
How to pilot a TARDIS: audiences, science fiction and the fantastic in Doctor Who
The collection opens with an analysis of two of Doctor Who's "pilots" - i.e., the first episode, An Unearthly Child, way back in 1963 and the 1996 TV Movie. Immediately we are confronted by the problem of the collection's timing since the essay is crying out for the inclusion of Rose in the comparison. David Butler looks, in particular, at the ways the two episodes treat "ordinariness" highlighting that An Unearthly Child starts out very much grounded in the ordinary then then emphasizes the fantastic nature of the TARDIS through the reactions of the ordinary characters. In contrast the TV Movie starts with the fantastic, the background story involving Daleks and the Master, and downplays the fantastic nature of the TARDIS - Grace describes it as "low-tech". He also uses a questionnaire based comparison of the effectiveness of the two episodes which, not entirely surprisingly given both the audience (university students studying film history) and the fact they were shown An Unearthly Child first, overwhelmingly favoured the 1963 episode. The more detailed questions were more revealing, I think, than overall preference - for instance the popularity of the (to be) regular characters in An Unearthly Child while there was little preference for Grace and the Doctor in the TV Movie. Of course, half the interest here was playing "spot the difference" against Rose which, on the whole, came out looking a lot more like An Unearthly Child than the TV Movie. Of course, if you've ever written a putative pilot episode piece of fan-fiction there's also an interesting compare and contrast to be played there*.
*I avoided any real introduction of the TARDIS at all, but also any ordinary characters, setting it all in a Victorian lunatic asylum.
The child as addressee, viewer and consumer in mid-1960s Doctor Who
Jonathan Bignell's effort was one of the more challenging essays in the collection. As I understood it, his main argument attributed the success of the show, and of the Daleks in particular, to the fact that the Daleks were distinctly child-like in their behaviour. He also cites himself a lot, which isn't necessarily a criticism, but I'm always interested in the extent to which people self-cite.
'Now how is that wolf able to impersonate a grandmother?' History, pseudo-history and genre in Doctor Who
Daniel O'Mahoney studies the historical in Doctor Who. Fandom has tended to separate Doctor Who historical stories into "pure" (with no SF elements) and "pseudo" (with SF elements). O'Mahoney notes, instead, a progression from treating history as an unfamilar environment (like an alien world) to treating history as an opportunity to tell genre stories (18th century smugglers, Victorian Fu-Manchu rip-offs, 1920s horror/mystery). He notes that treating history as a setting is no more "pure" than treating it as genre - we know Marco Polo's journey didn't happen remotely as presented in Il Milione (or Doctor Who for that matter). It was only in a few of the BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures (and he singles out Mags Halliday's History 101 and Lawrence Miles' Adventuress of Henrietta Street) where history is presented as a matter of debate and interpretation in a fashion recognisable to a historian. Again it would have been nice to see this perspective extended to the new series. Some of its historicals (e.g., The Unquiet Dead) are clearly history as genre (sometimes several as in the Mrs Brown meets Werewolves and Kung-fu monks of Tooth and Claw) but I wonder what analysis would drive those set in the latter half of the twentieth century? History as nostalgia perhaps?
Bargains of necessity? Doctor Who, Culloden and fictionalising history at the BBC in the 1960s
In the interests of full disclosure I should probably point out, at this juncture, that Matthew Kilburn is an old and dear friend. Matthew (who I refuse to refer to as Kilburn since it makes it sound like we met at public school) looks at both the historical Doctor Who stories of the 1960s and the BBC's production of Culloden which was, so far as I can tell, what we would now term a drama documentary made, in part, with a cast of amateurs. Despite their differences (Culloden was attempting to draw parallels with Vietnam and challenge attitudes to reconstruction and the use of actors) both have an emphasis on social rather than political history, in particular the presentation of the lives of ordinary people rather than historical figures. In the end both can also be deemed a failure but possibly for different reasons. Watkins was challenging the BBC hierarchy and Equity while Doctor Who's historicals were considered "less exciting" than their Science Fiction counterparts. Matthew covers the environment surrounding the Doctor Who historicals in some detail, that surrounding Culloden is allotted less space and I wasn't entirely convinced the comparison added much to the general analysis of the approaches to presenting history in Doctor Who in the 1960s. He muses that the production team may have abandoned the historical just as they were finding a successful approach to them, as literary adaptations (or, I guess, History as genre to use O'Mahoney's terms).
Both these last two essays emphasised to me the way in which Doctor Who essentially abandoned the historical after 1967. Even the "pseudo-historical" wasn't really to (re)surface until 1973's Time Warrior and I can count the pseudo-historicals before the Sylvester McCoy era and the appearance of the history-as-nostalgia strain on my fingers. This seems remarkable given the show's "adventures in time and space" remit.
How to pilot a TARDIS: audiences, science fiction and the fantastic in Doctor Who
The collection opens with an analysis of two of Doctor Who's "pilots" - i.e., the first episode, An Unearthly Child, way back in 1963 and the 1996 TV Movie. Immediately we are confronted by the problem of the collection's timing since the essay is crying out for the inclusion of Rose in the comparison. David Butler looks, in particular, at the ways the two episodes treat "ordinariness" highlighting that An Unearthly Child starts out very much grounded in the ordinary then then emphasizes the fantastic nature of the TARDIS through the reactions of the ordinary characters. In contrast the TV Movie starts with the fantastic, the background story involving Daleks and the Master, and downplays the fantastic nature of the TARDIS - Grace describes it as "low-tech". He also uses a questionnaire based comparison of the effectiveness of the two episodes which, not entirely surprisingly given both the audience (university students studying film history) and the fact they were shown An Unearthly Child first, overwhelmingly favoured the 1963 episode. The more detailed questions were more revealing, I think, than overall preference - for instance the popularity of the (to be) regular characters in An Unearthly Child while there was little preference for Grace and the Doctor in the TV Movie. Of course, half the interest here was playing "spot the difference" against Rose which, on the whole, came out looking a lot more like An Unearthly Child than the TV Movie. Of course, if you've ever written a putative pilot episode piece of fan-fiction there's also an interesting compare and contrast to be played there*.
*I avoided any real introduction of the TARDIS at all, but also any ordinary characters, setting it all in a Victorian lunatic asylum.
The child as addressee, viewer and consumer in mid-1960s Doctor Who
Jonathan Bignell's effort was one of the more challenging essays in the collection. As I understood it, his main argument attributed the success of the show, and of the Daleks in particular, to the fact that the Daleks were distinctly child-like in their behaviour. He also cites himself a lot, which isn't necessarily a criticism, but I'm always interested in the extent to which people self-cite.
'Now how is that wolf able to impersonate a grandmother?' History, pseudo-history and genre in Doctor Who
Daniel O'Mahoney studies the historical in Doctor Who. Fandom has tended to separate Doctor Who historical stories into "pure" (with no SF elements) and "pseudo" (with SF elements). O'Mahoney notes, instead, a progression from treating history as an unfamilar environment (like an alien world) to treating history as an opportunity to tell genre stories (18th century smugglers, Victorian Fu-Manchu rip-offs, 1920s horror/mystery). He notes that treating history as a setting is no more "pure" than treating it as genre - we know Marco Polo's journey didn't happen remotely as presented in Il Milione (or Doctor Who for that matter). It was only in a few of the BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures (and he singles out Mags Halliday's History 101 and Lawrence Miles' Adventuress of Henrietta Street) where history is presented as a matter of debate and interpretation in a fashion recognisable to a historian. Again it would have been nice to see this perspective extended to the new series. Some of its historicals (e.g., The Unquiet Dead) are clearly history as genre (sometimes several as in the Mrs Brown meets Werewolves and Kung-fu monks of Tooth and Claw) but I wonder what analysis would drive those set in the latter half of the twentieth century? History as nostalgia perhaps?
Bargains of necessity? Doctor Who, Culloden and fictionalising history at the BBC in the 1960s
In the interests of full disclosure I should probably point out, at this juncture, that Matthew Kilburn is an old and dear friend. Matthew (who I refuse to refer to as Kilburn since it makes it sound like we met at public school) looks at both the historical Doctor Who stories of the 1960s and the BBC's production of Culloden which was, so far as I can tell, what we would now term a drama documentary made, in part, with a cast of amateurs. Despite their differences (Culloden was attempting to draw parallels with Vietnam and challenge attitudes to reconstruction and the use of actors) both have an emphasis on social rather than political history, in particular the presentation of the lives of ordinary people rather than historical figures. In the end both can also be deemed a failure but possibly for different reasons. Watkins was challenging the BBC hierarchy and Equity while Doctor Who's historicals were considered "less exciting" than their Science Fiction counterparts. Matthew covers the environment surrounding the Doctor Who historicals in some detail, that surrounding Culloden is allotted less space and I wasn't entirely convinced the comparison added much to the general analysis of the approaches to presenting history in Doctor Who in the 1960s. He muses that the production team may have abandoned the historical just as they were finding a successful approach to them, as literary adaptations (or, I guess, History as genre to use O'Mahoney's terms).
Both these last two essays emphasised to me the way in which Doctor Who essentially abandoned the historical after 1967. Even the "pseudo-historical" wasn't really to (re)surface until 1973's Time Warrior and I can count the pseudo-historicals before the Sylvester McCoy era and the appearance of the history-as-nostalgia strain on my fingers. This seems remarkable given the show's "adventures in time and space" remit.