Dr Who: A time of reading

Exterminate! Regenerate!: The Story of Doctor Who by John Higgs is a book about the history of the show through a largely metatextual lens. It was recommended to me by a friend, and while I'd never read Higg's work before, he seemed to tackle interesting stuff in his other books like the Lightning Seeds, William Blake and the connection between the Beatles and James Bond.

And it was a fun read that only took a couple of days to get through. It is highly unlikely that any history of something that has been going pretty much non-stop for more than 60 years could ever be contained to a single book.

It has some fun ideas, although it went back to the 'Time Lords are really a metaphor for BBC management' a few too many times, and does spend a lot of space on what the personal history of each actor who played the Doctor brought to the role. 

But it also glosses over a lot of the show's history, and while every single aspect of this show has been covered in considerable depth elsewhere, it leaves this chunky hardback feeling rather thin, especially as things ramp up in the 21st century. (Not everybody who was turned off by the clear storytelling failures of the Chibnall era were angry little misogynistic boys upset that the Doctor was now a woman - that was the one clear success of that period.)

So an easy read, and one I got through quickly. But after an entire lifetime of reading about the production of this show and the eternal themes it brings up, I need more meat in my literary sandwich.

And it doesn't get much meatier than the About Time books by Tat Wood, Lawrence Miles, Dorothy Ail and occasional chums. These thick and chunky reference books are hard to get around these parts, so I only manage to pick them up years after they were published, and Volume Eight was my most recent find.

And that volume was about one single year of Dr Who, and took me a fucking month to get through it, and that is very much a compliment.

Because these books are dense with fact and opinion and analysis. I feel sorry for the authors having to think about the contradictions that inevitably pile up with this amount of material - a long devotion to all things Who means not stressing the small stuff too much, or it will all collapse. But I truly appreciate their efforts, and their dedication, and the huge amounts of trivia they bring to the table.

I'm probably fortunate that I only get my hands on one of these books every couple of years, because they require a lot of time to get through, and I don't have and police box to skip through it.

But this is most definitely my kind of book about Dr Who. I always appreciate a new perspective, no matter how slight, but it's all the meaty details that I crave in my Who diet.

Don't go chasing numbers

My job is to write and edit online news stories, updated by the minute for the third biggest news website in the country. It's very busy keeping on top of everything, and one thing I don't have time to do is keep track of the numbers, or worry about them too much.

Getting the readers' attention and keeping them engaged is apparently what it's all about, but I don't have time to worry about it, when there are 12 more stories to sub in the next two hours. Besides, there are other fine people whose entire job is based around getting the numbers to go up, so they can stress about it. 

When you're putting news stories on the homepage, and deciding what to do, you have to go with your gut. And it usually works. If I think it's interesting, many other people seem to think it's interesting. In the 10 years I've been in the current job, the numbers have exploded, thanks to an influx of resources and some keen editorial judgement.

But the main reason I don't worry too much about it is that I don't trust a fucking thing I ever see on the internet and I think that a lot of the numbers are pure bullshit.

I know this because the stats have gone complete bullshit on this blog, getting hundreds of thousands of hits in the past few weeks. It broke the million hits mark in September, when I was usually happy to get about 10k a month.

I don't get excited about these figures, and am certainly not going to try and leverage it in any way, I'm just going to keep doing my thing. Because it's not people reading my intense thoughts on X-Men or Sapphire and Steel, it's almost certainly AI scrapers, sucking up all the copy I've published and turning the words I write into their general mush.

They're just fucking parasites - literally, because I'll never use their products, so any interaction is strictly one-way - and I can only hope my garbled grammar and general bullshit help break AI just a little bit more.

Numbers are good for management - gotta hit those KPIs - but they mean nothing to me. It might be nice to have a million people reading this stuff, but I'm just happy with the real people like you. 

Most of us would probably shake Nixon's hand

It does feel hilariously quaint with its idea that major political figures could be shamed and actually feel shame, but the Frost/Nixon movie does feature some terrific performances, and my absolute favourite is when Sam Rockwell's character makes a huge fucking deal about having no respect for Nixon, but still shakes the disgraced former president's hand when it is offered to him, because he doesn't want to be rude.

So the movie may not have aged as well as it hoped, but that bit with the handshake just felt like one of those moments that says so much with so little, and is as relevant today as it ever was. 

And just because we're on the subject of Nixon, I have to share my favourite Adam Curtis film, about how we're all Richard Nixon now, and what we see when we look in the mirror, because Nixon really was a great metaphor for the US in the 20th century and beyond:

Sin City: She's sure as hell kept in shape

The comic book medium is all about the sequential art, but then sometimes there is just one panel, one small image, that is so striking that it takes your breath away as soon as you see it, and lodges in your skull for the rest of your life.

The above panel by Frank Miller is one of those for me. His Sin City comics can be problematic as hell, but they also still look so beautiful. The black and white stark style brings all sorts of energy to the action, even as it remains moody and dark. His use of rain and smoke was incredible.

There are dozens of tiny little moments throughout the Sin City comics, but this panel from A Dame To Kill For still stands out. It's part of a cheesecake sequence where the femme fatale is taking a nude swim in the night, and is little more than glorification of the female body. It adds little to the plot, other than showing how this woman uses her whole body to seduce the unwary, but is an essential part of the story. 

Look at the angle of this shot, the way the surface of the water is as invisible as bright colours. How do you even come up with the idea of looking it from this perspective, and then leaving the water as a blank void, only the trail of the body betraying the fact that she is not just floating in empty space.

More renowned comic scholars than me could undoubtedly point out that somebody far less famous in the western world did something like this earlier and better than Miller, but this is where I first saw this kind of ambition, and actual delivery on that ambition. It literally took me breath away when I first saw it, and it still does, not matter how many times I see it.

Because sometimes a single panel can feel like it's opening up whole new worlds for you, even if it's just somebody diving into a pool.

School Fun really was top of the class

Even as a little kid, I was all about the action comics when it came to the British weeklies, and I was up and running with 2000ad from a very young age. But I still had a soft spot for the kids humour publications, even if I was never a regular reader.

While I really didn't dig The Beano or Dandy, which were always just a bit too patronizing, I was most definitely a Whizz-kid and would read the odd Buster or Krazy. But there was only ever one of those comics that I was ever really attached to, and it was the short-lived School Fun.

It came out when I was eight, and I was on board with first issue, because school is everything at this age, and it didn't seem condescending at all to have comics set in the world of blackboards and detentions. All the one-page joke strips got up to all sorts of educational hi-jinks, and the drama came in a short serial based around the lovable Grange Hill TV show.

It was awesome, and the first time I remember getting a the first issue of a brand new comic, and vowing to collect the remainder for the rest of time, and then I never, ever saw #2.

It was the first real hole I felt in collecting comic books, the first absence. I was used to there being dozens and dozens of X-Men or Batman comics published before I was born, and 2000ad was more than 160 issues into it before I went for it.  But this was something I had the chance to get right from the start and that plan lasted a whole week or so. 

I ached for it, I still remember having dreams when I was that age, of finding that issue, and the joy I felt in that dream, only for it to burst upon awakening. 

My mate Kyle somehow got that second issue of School Fun a couple of years back. Bit late now, really.

It would be years later before I ever managed to collect the first 12 issues of something, and when it happened, it was fucking X-Force.

I still have that first issue of School Fun that I bought off the shelves all those years ago, although it is barely holding together after all those childhood re-reads. I went through it again recently, and it is still fun. Great art that I never appreciated as a kid, and cracking gags about bangers and mash. 

And I had another one of those nightmares where I was starting school but didn't have my timetable sorted just the other night, so there is still a part of me that still lives in my school days, and still loves comics about it.

Excalibur: Your pathetic illusions don't work on me, Pop

- Excalibur #46 (1991) 

Art and words by Alan Davis 

Inks by Mark Farmer 

Letters by Michael Heisler 

Colors by Glynis Oliver

Crying into my Candy

I don't think I can watch the new documentary about John Candy, because I can't even watch the trailer for the film without getting embarrassingly emotional about it, and I figure that a couple of hours of that would legitimately kill me.

The part where Candy's voice catches when he says that line in Plane Trains and Automobiles is honestly one of the most heartbreaking things I've ever seen. 

Showing, not telling

As I've got older, my tastes in comic books has regressed in one very specific way. I used to be all about the writer, and would put up with mediocre art if it had a great script, but now it's the artist that is the main draw. I just like things that look good, and am also craving comics that can tell a good story with a minimum of dialogue.

It's much easier to do this in a live action medium, but I'm still impressed how talented filmmakers can tell stories without the huge crutch of dialogue. 

There are silent sequences in many, many movies, but ones that have no spoken parts whatsoever tend to be animated, like the wonderful Robot Dreams, or the quiet brilliance of Shaun The Sheep, or the frenetic eternity of Roadrunner cartoons, 

They can say so much without uttering a word, and all telling very, very different kinds of stories.

There is less of this in live action films, and those that do go for it, like the recent Silent Night from John Woo, feel more like a gimmick than genuinely innovating. 

Some great movies tell their stories in action and movement, with the most obvious being the Mad Max films, which barely stopped accelerating. They didn't have to be told how much of a respected badass Furiosa was, because it's there in her movements, and actions, (although this didn't stop them making a full-length backstory for her).

They gave John Wick a whole background in book binding when he briefly retired from Baba Yaga duties, but never needed to really get into it, because everything you need to know about his precision and care is in the way he shoots some scum in the face

Great dialogue can make a film - best of decade film lists were usually talkfests (with odd exceptions like the aforementioned Angry Maxwell) - but I'm still baffled by the argument that you could prove Game of Thrones was scientifically worse in later seasons because there was less dialogue in his last episodes.

But film is such a visual medium, and the way the people move across the screen can tell you anything, without saying a word. 

In space, nobody can hear you bang on about class warfare

Who does genre belong to, anyway?
 
There's a particular writer I generally respect, but has this irritating habit of making proclamations that sound impressive, even though they are, on closer examination, completely full of shit. (And no, there will be no naming of that writer here, because this is not about naming and shaming in any way.)

Usually it's easy enough to dismiss these proclamations and move onto the other meaty analysis that I went there for, but there was one that came out a few years ago that I've never been able to let go, and it was their flat, bland statement that science fiction was a "thoroughly middle class genre".

Which I can't get with at all. The realms of hardcore collectors might be largely middle class, because they have the kind of disposable income to buy high-end prop reproductions, slabbed pieces of fried comic gold, or nice statues to go on their shelves. And maybe it's true that something like Doctor Who has been almost exclusively produced by just the right sort of people, and maybe a lot of the creators are able to get their start through public school connections and the funds to finance it, but I truly believe genre belongs to everybody, and science fiction in particular.

After a lifetime of toil, I'm still working class to the core. Solidarity forever and all that. And I've been immersed in fabulist fiction my entire life, and so have many, many people I've shared smoko rooms with.

The dream of a better world, and the consequences of the failure to achieve it, that belongs to everybody. We can all look up at the stars and dream of something bigger and better out there, or go deep inside how heads to imagine the far future. It doesn't matter what level society thinks you belong, we can all go there.

If anything, it's the people in the gutter who long for the stars the most.

It's still a class of people thunderously under-represented in modern science fiction - movie critics are still banging on about how the crew of the Nostromo are so representative, and that movie is nearly 50 years old - but the audience is all of us, for all time and space.