John & Paul

I'm reading Tune In, the first volume of Mark Lewisohn's projected three-volume biography of the Beatles, All These Years. It's a massive achievement; Lewisohn has spent his life in scholarly Beatlemania and this book seems to have tracked down every document, verified and disproved all the myths, and tells a compelling story, despite taking nearly 1000 pages to get to 'Love Me Do'. Well, maybe because it takes that long. 

Because the story is well known, it's fascinating to see it inching forward in such detail. It's also interesting because the slow route (I think this volume alone is close to half a milliion words, not including endnotes) gives a chance to revisit, rethink and, in this story, experience what happened as if it were not inevitable. The detail allows us not to treat the early Liverpool years as a prelude to the real thing; Lewisohn gives us a whole book on The Beatles before they became famous and it becomes so clear how contingent and peculiar their story was.

The first book I read on The Beatles was Philip Norman's biography, Shout! (1981). It's a decent enough narration of the story, but it is rather notorious for its animus against Paul McCartney who is presented as cold, calculating, and conformist, the man who broke up The Beatles for his own gain. It's fine to prefer John Lennon's songs or solo career to Paul McCartney's, of course, but, as a friend of mine recently put it, it's not a zero-sum game. You don't have to hate John to like Paul or vice versa.

One of the many aspects of the Beatles story that remains compelling is the tightly-locked structure of personalities in the group. I'd say most people could find an echo of their own personality somewhere in The Beatles. This may be what leads some people to venerate one Beatles to the exclusion of another. If you fancy yourself as an intuitive artist, a non-conformist rebel, a sarcastic, taboo-breaking misfit, you might align yourself with John. If you believe yourself to be a quiet dreamer, with inchoate spiritual longings, someone who waits in the background to surprise the world with your talent, you might feel drawn to George. And so on.

Of course, no one's personality is that clearly or cartoonishly drawn, though that didn't stop Philip Norman, yet there are archetypes visible here. In Tune In, there's a vivid and thrilling account of the Woolton Village Fete on 6 July 1957, famous as the day John and Paul met. (Dutifully, Lewisohn records conflicting accounts that suggest they may have previously met on a bus or outside a newsagent's, but this was certainly the first time they met as aspiring musicians.) For those who like the simple binaries, there's a snapshot of two very different attitudes:

As they paid their threppance admission they could hear the Quarry Men playing and went straight up to see them. Here, then, were Ivan's friend's - and right off, the singer had it. He looked strong and assertive, clearly the leader, cool in his checked red and white shirt. Paul, the keen guitarist, watched the fingers and couldn't work out what chords he was playing, not yet realising they were banjo chords. And also he noticed the song 'He was singing Come Go With Me, which I thought was fabulous until I realised they weren't the right words. He was changing them. 'Come go with me ... down to the penitentiary' - he was nicking folk-song words and chain-gang words and putting them into the Dell-Vikings song, a clever little bit of ingenuity'. (p. 128)

If you like your John Lennon as the improviser, the bricoleur, the cool rebel, here he is. And now, we go forward around 3 hours and John and Paul are hanging out. Conversation, obviously, turns to music:

Not one to hold himself back, Paul asked John for a go on his guitar [...] The way he held the instrument upside down prompted a few sniggers, but after a minute or two of fiddling  Paul suddenly stopped and burst into Twenty Flight Rock. Here, right away, was talent, already way out of John's league. And it wasn't just that Paul could get through the song from start to finish, singing with a strong rocking voice and playing the chords with confidence, it was knowing all the words. [...] After this, Paul went into full exhibition mode, showing off, confident of his ability and aware of his audience. He demonstrated one or two chords he thought the gathering might not have heard, and he played them some other numbers (Be-Bop-A-Lula was one, something by Elvis surely another). Then, showing real neck, he switched to piano and started belting out his Little Richard routine, yelling alone into the quiet of a cavernous church hall. (pp. 130-131)

And if you like your Paul McCartney as the natural musical genius, the multi-instrumentalist, the perfectionist, the showman, even as the show-off, here he is in full. It's a beautiful pair of capsule descriptions of what they would always be. But here's why you don't have to choose between them. This is what Paul thought of that first sight of John:

My [real] first impression was that it was amazing how he was making up the words. He was singing Come Go with Me by the Dell-Vikings and he didn't know one of the words. He was making up every one as he went along. I thought it was great. (quoted, p. 128)

And here's what John thought of that first sight of Paul:

It went through my head that I'd have to to keep him in the line if I let him join, but he was good, so he was worth having. He also looked like Elvis. I dug him. (quoted, p. 132)

In other words, they saw in each other their opposite and they loved it and that's why it's not a zero-sum game and you don't have to choose because we had both.

2013 in Theatre

This has felt like a year of transition for the theatre. First, some of the biggest companies have seen new artistic directors appointed or hitting their stride (Royal Court, National Theatre, RSC, Donmar, National Theatre of Scotland, Almeida, Headlong, Bush, and more). Second, theatres have been trying new things: secret and surprise theatre, Open Court, new collaborations, ever more blurring between the new writing culture and live art, devised and director-led theatre. There were a couple of new theatres - The Park Theatre in Finsbury Park and the St James Theatre in Westminster (or was that late 2012?) - oh and I suppose I might mention our own new theatre at Royal Holloway which we were very proud to launch as the Caryl Churchill Theatre in the presence of the playwright herself.

There was late and sorry news just before Christmas when a section  of ceiling plasterwork at the Apollo collapsed during a performance of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time. This was traumatic, of course, for the audience caught beneath it and fortunately no one was seriously hurt, but it's also a very broad warning shot about the West End. The economics of running a West End Theatre appear to be pretty bleak; few people have much money to restore and renovate them and little secure prospect of getting a return on their investment if they do. The fact that virtually every West End theatre is locked down as a listed building means that conversion, restoration and rebuilding is doubly or triply complicated and expensive. Most of the West End theatres need much more than a lick of paint or a strengthened ceiling; they need to be gutted and remodelled completely. For what it's worth, I think we need a high-profile public consultation about the future of the West End, convened by the Theatres Trust, that would seriously consider a temporary de-listing all of the buildings' insides and making Lottery funds available to see a rolling programme of renewal and rebuilding, with an eye across the whole of the Estate, ensuring we have a range of different styles, sizes, audience-stage relationships. We need several more 400-500-seaters, more single rakes, more beautiful and flexible spaces, that still offer the West End's sense of event, its array of machines for imagining together, its traditions and elegance, but with more of a sense of the contemporary, the live, and the way we want to watch stories now. We need spaces that can take productions like This House and Curious Incident in the beautiful and thoughtful configurations for which they were designed. It would make a lot of sense to nationalise the West End theatre stock though there's not a hope of getting that (or, probably, any of this) from this ideologically-fixated market-fundamentalist Coalition government.

But how did you like the plays, Mrs LIncoln? The usual disclaimer: I live in London and didn't even make the Edinburgh Festival this year, so my non-London theatregoing was pretty attenuated. I went to Stratford to see Mark Ravenhill's brilliant assault on Candide (pictured, the play a bit better than the production, I felt, which was a little too broad in places, not quite as contemporary in feel as the script) and down to Plymouth to see Solid Air by Doug Lucie (where I felt the opposite; a rather lumpy script disguised by a terrific central performance). Other than that I'm afraid I did the metropolitan thing and sat waiting for the good stuff to come to me. And lots of it did: The Events was a brilliant example of the blurred lines between devising and writing, between new writing and director's theatre, between the precise formality of the written text and the crackling liveness of performance. This response to the Norwegian shooting two years ago had two actors playing a variety of roles alongside an amateur choir, a new one for each performance. The amateurs gave the performance a sense of vulnerability that was vitally precarious; the professionals told a story that organised the experience to enormously affecting ends. It's a lovely playwriting lesson that the most emotionally choking thing I experienced in a theatre this year was someone saying the absurdly simple line 'We both said me'. By the time the choir are singing 'we're all in here', the theatre has turned into the world and everyone around me in the Young Vic were in tears.

Other playwriting highlights for me this year included Dennis Kelly's monstrous The Ritual Slaughter of Gorge Mastromus at the Royal Court, a restless, shape-shifting play which dared to ask difficult questions about our attitude to morality and did so in darkly theatrical ways (why are the villains always the best roles?). It featured perhaps the trendiest cast in London theatre and, with every scene, designer Tom Scutt reimagined the Royal Court stage thrillingly. The moment when the Royal Court proudly tweeted a link to Quentin Letts's one-star review may come to be seen as the symptom of a tectonic shift in the relationship between the print and online critics. Letts's hostility was directed at the play's politics; while I think it was more interested in morality than politics as such, there was a trend this year of the theatre being much more explicitly political in its approach. When you walked into Chris Thorpe's There Has Possibly Been an Incident, the pre-show music was being played into the auditorium at conversation-cancelling volume and the play, despite its quiet precision and pared-down staging, was a similar assault, the words filling the space and the ideas filling your head, taking us from Anders Breivik (again) to Tianenman Square with riddling fluidity. There was the Calm Down, Dear festival of feminist theatre at Camden People's Theatre; who would have imagined such a thing even five years ago? I also really admired Kieran Hurley's Beats which ended up at the Soho Theatre in the Autumn. On the face of it, unpromising - does anyone care any more about the Criminal Justice Act of 1994 which outlawed the M25 rave scene? - but it was a hypnotic, funny, finally enraging show. I found peculiarly fascinating the ending, its own set of repetitive beats, in which Hurley just repeats and repeats the line 'It doesn't mean nothing': a double negative of affirmation that speaks volumes about our bleak political times and the persistent spirit of revolt. I was won over by If You Don't Let Us Dream, We Won't Let You Sleep, probably the most traditional political play of the year; it reminded me of David Edgar, whose If Only... at Chichester was a beguilingly chilling analysis of the Coalition's immigration strategy, built around a brilliant intellectual trick about how to divide 17 camels. Routes by Rachel De-Lahey was a confident and informative examination of the UK Border Agency seen from below.

There were several plays that didn't seem to fit into any particular trend but were no worse for that. Pigeons, a strong and assured new play by Suhayla El-Bushra in the Court's brief weekly repertory season in the Downstairs theatre, sadly notable for the final performance by Paul Bhattacharjee before he took his own life. Elizabeth Kuti's Fishskin Trousers interwove three long monologues telling a haunting and beautiful story of hundreds of years lived on the Suffolk coast. Its poetic quality was a rare one this year. Bitch Boxer was Charlotte Josephine's literally pugnacious debut, a ferocious one-woman play (pictured) about a woman boxer - but also about girls and their fathers, and what we do with our tender hearts - performed by the author with an amazingly winning mixture of cockiness and gawky vulnerability. One of my most enjoyable theatre evenings of the year.

There were some excellent revivals this year. Arnold Wesker's Roots at the Donmar looked good as new, with two fine performances by Jessica Raine and Linda Bassett. By a very clever bit of casting, Lindsay Posner showed that The Winslow Boy was more than just a brilliant piece of pastiche, but actually a rather affecting portrait of a family torn apart by justice. Port at the National started slowly but Kate O'Flynn (in the lead role) and Marianne Elliott (director) eventually found a scale and grandeur in the play that filled the Lyttelton. Headlong's The Seagull with a hilarious and weirdly sensitive text by John Donnelly was pretty great. I saw two good, very different Ibsens: Richard Jones's crazy 1970s Public Enemy has stuck in my memory for good reasons; Richard Eyre's crisp Ghosts was superficially traditional but made it feel like you were watching the play for the first time. The same might be said of Nick Hytner's Othello a play which, God help me, I studied for A Level and yet was so clean and clear that whole scenes took place that I swear I've never seen or read before. As we left for the interval, my wife said 'That was amazing - I can't wait for the next episode' capturing brilliantly the production as Your Next Box Set. After being disappointed by Jamie Lloyd's shock-and-awe assault on Macbeth at Trafalgar Studios, I enjoyed Eve Best's Globe production of the play, which managed to be surprisingly funny (The Globe always makes plays funny) and genuinely supernaturally fearful. I mostly adored the all-female Julius Caesar, a prison riot of a production which featured, from Cush Jumbo, the greatest Mark Anthony I've ever seen. The most richly fulfilling revival was, in truth, a complete reinvention that turned the play inside out: Katie Mitchell's Fräulein Julie (pictured) was Strindberg's play as seen through its apparently least important character, while we watched much of the play silently through exquisitely-composed live video projection of scenes which we could only glimpse through windows onto a film set. 

I don't see a lot of musicals but everything I saw this year I liked. The Scottsboro Boys is a jaw-droppingly brilliant satire on racism, with Kander and Ebb's unflinching political edge and performed by a sensational ensemble cast. The revival of A Chorus Line was great; a really innovative and still remarkable show, completely without spectacle. This could not be said of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, a production which got quite outrageously scorned by a lot of the critics, principally for failing to be Matilda and for being expensive. In fact, it's an inventive, touching, tuneful and slightly subversive show and I'd urge you to give it a try. Douglas Hodge gives one of the performances of the year.

At the other end of things (is it the other end?), I thought Forced Entertainment's Tomorrow's Parties was their best show in years, a steely battle over the future, filled with nostalgia for the time to come. Bryony Kimmings's Credible Likeable Superstar Model was another explicitly political piece, timely in its earnestness (it felt somehow part of the year's brilliant Everyday Sexism and No More Page 3 campaigns), but subtly complex in its complicated use of the child performer. I loved Anthony Neilson's Narrative, upstairs at the Court, a show about which one will eventually say that everyone who saw it went out and formed a theatre company, so brilliantly, idiotically enjoyable was its collage. Ontroerend Goed's Teenage Riot skewered precisely my prejudices by dividing me internally between the shock of seeing young people's perspectives taken absolutely seriously and the stern wish to see them clear this bloody mess up and go to your room. At the same venue was Henry the Fifth (pictured), a retelling of Shakespeare's play and the historical story by Ignace Cornelissen, that was completely delightful and endlessly enjoyable. And then there was Tim Crouch and Andy Smith's what happens to the hope at the end of the evening which, as ever with these guys, asked us to think about who we all are, what friendship means, by asking us to think about theatre. It's one of the great evenings I've spent in the theatre this year.

There were several evenings I failed to spend in the theatre this year, including Chimerica, Grounded, Leaving Planet Earth, Scenes From a Marriage, My Generation, Mission Drift, Crime and Punishment, Paul Bright's Confessions of a Justified Sinner, The Radicalisation of Bradley Manning, and Fatherland, because of cupidity or indolence or just failing to book for things. I saw loads more than this but if it's not here I either (a) hated it or (b) have inexplicably overlooked it. An evening of theatre that I enjoyed, despite not spending it in the theatre, was the National Theatre's 50th anniversary celebration which was broadcast live on BBC4 and, it seemed to me, showed that finally how far we've come in representing theatre on video. It's not theatre, but it's also not just florid-looking people shouting embarrassingly on telly either. The evening was well judged - lack of women writers aside, which is more the fault of the previous 50 years than the celebration itself - nicely affectionate without being sentimental, with just a few gobsmackingly great moments.

Overall, I thought this was a good year. And it's the ever-greater proximity between experimentalism and new writing that made what happens to the hope... and The Events and There Has Possibly Been an Incident my shows of the year.

Verdict

On a plane recently I watched The Verdict, a 1982 Sidney Lumet film, starring Paul Newman and James Mason. It's a creaky and dated film, saved by some very good performances. It's got a great reputation; voted by the American Film Institute the 91st greatest screenplay of all time. Adapted from a novel, the movie concerns a drunken and washed-up lawyer (Frank Galvin, played by Newman) who is gifted an easy medical malpractice case, where the thing to do is just to press for a good out-of-court settlement, make everyone a bit of money and get his own career back on track. In fact, he decides to take the case to trial, and against all the odds succeeds.

The screenplay is by David Mamet. There are some good character touches and Mamet keeps things gritty, rather than sentimental. But the moves in the plot are pretty clunky and the ending is out of nowhere much. Possibly Mamet's just following the novel - I haven't read it - but what might work in a book as a kind of legal procedural needs some rethinking in narrative terms. The drive to find the hidden witness ( a nurse who knows that a key document was falsified) evaporates in court when the judge rules her evidence inadmissible. The problem is you feel cheated, but in narrative rather than moral terms. It also features Mamet's characteristic misogyny: Galvin meets and starts a relationship with Laura (played by Charlotte Rampling). Some way through the trial, Galvin discovers that Laura is in the pay of his trial opponent and is spying on him, feeding his strategy back to them. Galvin's reaction is to find her and punch her to the ground. At the end of the film, Laura is now the washed-up drunk and we see her sprawled in her bed tearfully phoning Frank; the final scene has Frank in his office moodily ignoring the phone. It seems as if the great triumph of the movie is his grand repudiation of women.

It made me think about Mamet and his bizarre drift from perhaps the most brilliant playwright in America to a washed-up, right-wing jobbing writer, incapable of capturing even a flicker of his previous quality. His drift to the right has been a long time coming; the sort of comments he made to the press around the time of Oleanna (1992) suggested contempt for liberal values, but it was only in 2008 when he wrote a notorious essay for Village Voice entitled 'Why I Am No Longer A Brain-Dead Liberal' that he came out as a fully-fledged neo-liberal conservative, an admirer of Hayek, a Romney supporter, an opponent of gun control, and a scourge of liberal pieties. This has been accompanied by a decline of his playwriting powers. He would undoubtedly like to believe that his plays are still great, it's just that the liberal theatre establishment has turned against him. But it's just not true; the plays are now thin and shapeless. His once-famous dialogue has decayed into a series of barbs and one-liners, smart remarks about this and that. In particular there's a strange tendency for the characters to twist their words into gnomic utterances that one fears the author believes is wisdom. This from the beginning of 2012's The Anarchist:

ANN. What have you been doing?

CATHY. I've been studying. As usual.

ANN. And what have you learned?

CATHY. In the larger sense . . .

ANN. . . . all right.

CATHY. I hope that I've learned to be reasonable. At least I have studied it. Most importantly.

ANN. Most importantly. 

CATHY. Yes.

ANN. Reason more than patience?

CATHY. One might think the pressing study would be patience. But patience, of course, implies an end.

ANN. "Patience implies an end".

CATHY. Well, yes.

ANN. As?

CATHY. One may be patient only for something.

ANN. Such as?

CATHY. A deferred desire, or the cessation of discomfort . . .

ANN. Revenge?

CATHY. Well, that would fall within the rubric of desire deferred.

ANN. And reason teaches?

CATHY. Reason would teach the abandonment of the unfulfillable wish; and, so, of the need for patience. It therefore may be said to be the higher study.

(The Anarchist, New York: TCG, 2012, pp. 7-8)

They sound like an impersonation of intelligence. Compare it to Glengarry Glen Ross (1983), his masterpiece I think, which early on gives us this exchange:

LEVENE. [...] All that I'm saying, things get set, I know they do, you get a certain mindset . . . A guy gets a reputation. We know how this . . . all I'm saying, put a closer on the job. There's more than one man for the . . .  Put a . . . Wait a second, put a proven man out . . . and you watch, now wait a second – and you watch your dollar volumes . . . You start closing them for fifty 'stead of twenty-five . . . you put a closer on the . . .

WILLIAMSON. Shelly, you blew the last . . .

LEVENE. No. John. No. Let's wait, let's back up here, I did. . . will you please! Wait a second. Please. I didn't 'blow' them. No. I didn't 'blow' them. One kicked out, one I closed . . .

WILLIAMSON . . . you didn't close . . .

LEVENE. . . . I, if you'd listen to me. Please. I closed the cocksucker. His 'ex', John, his ex, I didn't know he was married . . . he, the judge invalidated the . . . 

WILLIAMSON. Shelly . . . 

LEVENE. . . . And what is that, John? What? Bad luck. That's all it is. I pray in your life you will never find it runs in streaks. That's what it does, that's all it's doing. Streaks. I pray it misses you. That's all I want to say.

WILLIAMSON. (pause) What about the other two?

LEVENE. What two?

WILLIAMSON. Four. You had four leads. One kicked out, one the judge, you say . . .

LEVENE. . . . You want to see the court records? John? Eh? You want to go down . . .

WILLIAMSON. . . . no . . .

LEVENE. . . . do you want to go down-town . . . ?

WILLIAMSON. . . . no . . . 

LEVENE. . . . then . . . 

WILLIAMSON . . . I only . . . 

LEVENE . . . then what is this 'you say' shit, what is that?

(Plays: 3, London: Methuen, 1996, pp. 5-6)

Everything that is great about this latter scene is bad about the former. This scene is incomprehensible: it's a shock - we are thrown suddenly into a world, with terminology ('closer', 'leads') that we are unfamiliar with. In The Anarchist, we're thrown into a set of ideas being sedately exchanged that we don't care about. In Glengarry, a baffling situation starts to resolve into a personal relationship; we begin to feel that Levene is being aggressive because he's on the back foot; Williamson is more diffident in the debate because he holds all the cards; there's a story here and we want to know more. In The Anarchist, no such relationship truly emerges; it's static on a deep level. In Glengarry, we begin to paint a whole world around this scene: the leads, the judge, the court, the ex, the situation where we are, the situation where we're not - brilliantly, he sets the first act of this workplace play not at work - but in The Anarchist it just remains static and empty and arid. Levene has a speech that feels like someone speaking wisdom - the speech about luck - but we know it's got a purpose; it's being said to have an effect; it may not be something Levene particularly believes. In The Anarchist we sense that the ideas are not part of any kind of situation; Mamet actually cares about these ideas and wants us to follow them and engage with them. But they are neither followable or engaging. The halting rhythms are now not about character or situation or even realism, they are the unlovely self-love of a writer who has stopped being interested in language, only in the things he wants to express. And that's why he's stopped being any good.

But what struck me, watching The Verdict, is that the reason why Mamet used to be so good is that he has always been attracted to the Right: the cut-throat entrepreneurs of Glengarry Glen Ross, the hopeless individualists of American Buffalo (1975), the illiberal liberals of Oleanna, the vicious misogynists of Sexual Perversity in Chicago (1974) - and indeed the vested interests and crude misogynists of The Verdict. Horrible though the ending is in moral terms, it's probably the most profound and stirring moment in the movie. It was because he was drawn to these people, fascinated by them, but troubled by his own feelings for them that he is driven to show them, expose them, lay them bare, in all their complexity and fascination to him. There was a transition period in the 1990s, where these tensions were brought to thrilling crisis: in particular, Oleanna, a play which he seems to have written as an attack on political correctness, but with such troubled complexity that the play is one of the most brilliant presentations of the complexities of the debates over liberalism, free speech, gender, and sexual exploitation that I know, even if I suspect Mamet doesn't realise how good his play is. It's a play that comes from a great playwright trying to explore his troubled feelings.  

Now, unfortunately, he is untroubled by his feelings about this right-wing world and the writing has consequently become thin and flat. The Verdict isn't as great as Mamet could be, but it's still better than anything he's been able to write in the last decade. Mamet has become a terrible writer which is a pity, because at his peak, there was no one in the world who could write like David Mamet. 

The Day of the Doctor

It must have been a thrilling moment when Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat realised that the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who would fall on a Saturday. A propitious opportunity to celebrate the programme where it belongs: on a Saturday night, in the heart of family television. Their second thought must have been, but how the hell do you write a 50th anniversary special? It has to do so much: it has to celebrate its past, but still stand alone as a satisfying story; it has to pay tribute to previous doctors, but not take the shine off the current incumbent; it needs to be bigger and more epic than ever before, but since the 2005 reboot, Doctor Who has become at times preposterously epic and getting any grander would be, to put it mildly, a risk. In 1972 and 1983, there were shows that celebrated the past: The Three Doctors united Hartnell, Troughton and Pertwee to fight Omega; the The Five Doctors brought Troughton, Pertwee, and Davison together with Richard Hurndall standing in for the now-deceased Hartnell and a few stray video clips of Baker to fight, um, The Master, Cybermen, Daleks, Yeti, a balletic silver robot, and President Borusa.

The Five Doctors showed exactly what the problems with these celebrations can be. In the desire to reflect the whole history of the programme, the story ends up being a jigsaw of Doctors, former companions (the Brigadier, Sarah-Jane Smith, Susan, Jamie, Zoe, Liz, Mike Yates...), and arcane bits of Time Lord history. The story, such as it is, is squeezed. Indeed, the story - in which various doctors and companions are plucked from their time streams to do battle in a 'Death Zone' - is as close to just saying 'we're just going to put these actors in a room and let them do what they want' as makes no odds. The story was entirely backward looking.

By comparison, this year's The Day of the Doctor is a triumph. It's a decent story, with only three Doctors (one of whom is basically new, but more of that later), two villains from the past (Daleks and Zygons), a little bit of Timelord history being rewritten, and a lovely lovely lovely cameo for Tom Baker, who turns up at the end, barking mad as ever, stealing the scene from Matt Smith. There are some rather good Moffatisms (aliens hiding in paintings, some paradoxes with time, and some pretty brilliant jokes) but he's also channelled some Russell T Daviesisms too (the Tardis landing in Trafalgar Square with the Doctor hanging off the edge, the sneaky appearance of Peter Capaldi, the saving of Gallifrey). Matt Smith and David Tennant play off each other very well and John Hurt is a magnificent Doctor, with all three bitchily scoring points off each other (Matt Smith's Doctor calling David Tennant's Doctor 'Dick Van Dyke" being a particular joy).

What struck me watching it, though, is that the story was pretty well hamstrung by the refusal of Chris Ecclestone to take part. It seems kind of obvious that the story was originally conceived with Ecclestone playing the John Hurt role. Think about it: Ecclestone's Doctor was the one haunted by the Time War and his part in it. The story is therefore just about Ecclestone meeting his two successors who collectively rewrite history to save Gallifrey and absolve the Doctor himself from his moral responsibility for the destruction not just of the Daleks but of his own people too. In a sense, it's the conclusion of a story arc set in motion eight years ago. But Christopher Ecclestone refused to take part which spoiled the plans. Instead, Moffat is forced to create an extra doctor, the so-called War Doctor, who did all the things that plainly we have hitherto been assuming Ecclestone's Doctor did. John Hurt, despite being a very different actor, has the same dour demeanour, the same contempt for the childishness of his successors, that would certainly have been Ecclestone's attitude in the story. 

John Hurt is a bonus, of course. Certainly the most astonishing actor to play the role, he brought a level of gravitas to the story that even the deeply serious Ecclestone wouldn't have managed. But it's at a bit of a cost. Basically, it's rather messy: Steven Moffat has been rather scornful of the fans worried about whether this means all subsequent doctors are shunted up, Ecclestone moving from tenth to eleventh, Tennant from eleventh to twelfth, and so on, but he's wrong. Either John Hurt was the tenth doctor or he wasn't. There is a bit of internal Doctor Who mythology that says the Doctor can only have thirteen incarnations; now, this will be easy to revise (and, in fact, in The Five Doctors it seemed this could be extended by the Time Lords, if they wished), but it hasn't been revised yet, so Peter Capaldi, being the 13th Doctor (including Hurt) should be the last. Moffat's scorn for this as some kind of nerdish fanboy consideration is mistaken; it's about the internal consistency of the fictional world,l the pleasures of the show's mythology, and the nature of the viewer's engagement with different levels of narrative. In some ways, Moffat's disdain for the niceties of his decision remind me of the increasing tendency of his stories to be tied up by high-concept low-coherence technobabble rather than serious narrative resolution. This decision, I think, was forced on him by Ecclestone's intransigence, but it doesn't do to fudge it and then mock people for pointing out the fudge.

That said, it's a pretty good story. The Zygons are a bit superfluous and their story sort of evaporates, but there was so much rip-roaring narrative glee and the performances of all the principals were so good that it would be hard to hold the Doctor-chronology against Steven Moffat. He managed to square a circle and provide the programme with a wonderful celebration of its first fifty years.

I Was a Teenage Doctor Who Fan

In some ways, I am still a teenage Doctor Who fan: there is nothing that connects me more directly to the feeling of being eleven yerars old than the first Tom Baker title sequence (see above) and the slightly modified Delia Derbyshire arrangement of the Ron Grainer theme tune with its whooping screams and juddering bassline. But I was a teenage Doctor Who fan, something that until around 2005 I was slightly embarrassed to admit. And by Doctor Who fan I mean a serious Doctor Who fan: I joined the Doctor Who Appreciation Society at a point when membership was barely in double figures; I recorded and repeatedly listened to stories that I'd recorded on sound cassettes; I went to conventions; I started a Doctor Who society at my school; I ran three fanzines (Vortex, Demnos, and CVE, since you ask); I had all the Target novelizations. I wrote impassioned analyses of stories in other journals, interminable think-pieces about whether the apparent continuity errors across the show's then-twenty-year history could be reconciled, and debated the merits of different Doctors with an intensity that in a less stable society would have spilled over into civil unrest.

It's hard to explain exactly why Doctor Who so captured my imagination, though I am currently so far from being alone, it doesn't seem something that requires explanation. In a way, it was accident. For various reasons, my parents didn't buy a television until 1976: in fact, not until the 31 January 1976, when we sat down with our new portable black & white TV and watched the first episode of The Seeds of Doom. The magic of that story was heightened by the magic of watching our first television. What if we'd bought a TV a month later? Would I have been so enthusiastic to start a story halfway through? What if we'd bought our TV during the summer break? What if we'd bought our television to coincide with The Horns of Nimon? Perhaps my enthusiasm would have been stillborn. But instead, we sat down to watch one of the great classic-era Doctor Who stories, a Quatermass-inspired epic about a man who turns into a giant carnivorous vegetable (trust me, it's still really great). I loved that first episode and had nightmares for a week. I was sufficiently scared in episode 2 to be stopped from watching it while it was still on. I didn't see episodes 3 and 4. In consolation for an accident at a swimming pool, where I slipped on the steps and cut my chin (yeah, I still got the scars) I was allowed to watch episode 5 and then it was my birthday party for episode 6 and my mum bowed to the clamour of all us seven-and-eight-year-olds to watch the show. And I watched it ever after.

It was, I can say now with the benefit of perspective, a pretty great time to start watching Doctor Who. Tom Baker was a pretty great hero for a kid to have: astonishingly eccentric, all teeth and curls, taking everything as seriously as a child and with a child's fearless levity. After the rather establishment figure of Jon Pertwee, this was a bohemian, morally ferocious, disrespectful of authority, tall as a bus, with the best costume in the world. When this Doctor Who got scared, you knew you were in trouble. The Philip Hinchcliffe/Robert Holmes (producer/script editor) era was, by common consent, the finest period of the programmes history, productive of stories that you can still show to people without mockery. In the gap between The Seeds of Doom and the next season's The Masque of Mandragora the BBC repeated The Planet of Evil and the winter break gave us edited versions of Pyramids of Mars and The Brain of Morbius, two solid-gold scary-brilliant classics. The next season brought us such joys as The Deadly Assassin, The Hand of Fear, and Robots of Death. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be watching Talons of Weng Chiang was very heaven. The Hinchcliffe/Holmes era worked by taking classic horror, thriller and science fiction stories and re-working them in the Doctor Who universe: Pyramids of Mars is a 'Mummy Returns' story; The Brain of Morbius owes a great deal to Frankenstein; The Deadly Assassin nods to The Manchurian Candidate; Robots of Death is basically an Agatha Christie locked-room whodunit with robots (a genre for which the phrase 'what's not to like?' might have been created).

Doctor Who went slowly downhill from there. The era of producer Graham Williams had some high points (The Horror of Fang Rock, the Key to Time season, City of Death) but it suffered from the BBC's insistence that the scariness be toned down and from the growing uncontrollability of Tom Baker. The high points were in the writing: Douglas Adams's City of Death is a terrific script, immensely clever and very funny ('What a wonderful butler: he's so violent!' 'You're a beautiful woman, probably'); I still maintain that Robert Holmes's script for The Ribos Operation is the most beautifully-written classic series stories: the heist idea is brilliant and the dialogue between the two con artists is wonderfully funny, the Graff Vynda K backstory is compelling, if you can watch the story of Binro the Heretic without welling up, you're a sterner man than I. By the time we get to Creature from the Pit and Horns of Nimon, the show is in serious need of a refresh. John Nathan-Turner's first season was superb, horribly spangly new titles and arrangement notwithstanding, with a newly serious, brooding performance from Tom Baker and several tremendous stories that genuinely bring you into fuly-realised other worlds: Full Circle, Warrior's Gate, The Keeper of Traken are all pretty great bits of TV; State of Decay pulls off a Doctor Who vampire story very effectively and the first episode of Logopolis is one of the best starts to a story I can remember (though rather let down, I think, by the rest). 

This season was helped by a certain injection of cash. John Nathan-Turner hoped these rises would be continued but the BBC executives were not willing to give it, despite the enormous sums that Doctor Who brought in from overseas sales and merchandising. As a result, despite the embrace of new technology, Doctor Who's advances were much slower than the science fiction around it (Star Wars, ET, etc.) and it started to look stale. The rubber monsters and wobbly sets that hilarious people always like to claim Doctor Who was filled with date from this era, with minor atrocities like Warriors of the Deep's Myrka from 1984, basically a pantomime horse that even the cameras seem reluctant to look at. 

A note on this though: when people worry about rubber monsters, there's a case to be made that they are being anachronistically literal. Kinda (1982) is a very good story, a strange Buddhism-inspired tale about posession, colonialism, Janovian therapy and the dark sides of one's own mind. At the end of the story, the 'monster' emerges: the Mara. And the Mara turns out to be a gigantic pink inflatable rubber snake (left). No, it's not particularly well realized but in 1982, on Doctor Who's budget, in fact on most people's budget, it was never going to look that great. But I don't remember being mortified by the effect when it appeared on my TV. On the DVD of this story, Rob Shearman (writer of Dalek [2005]) makes the very good point that before CGI, we didn't necessarily expect that what we were seeing was supposed to literally be what the fictional world looked like. We saw the effect, I think he suggests, and imagined the Mara. Television in the 1970s and 1980s was, as is well known, very theatrical in the way it was shot: in a studio you effectively created a theatre set, with the cameras in the audience positions, and you videoed scenes, rather than took individual shots. It was the emergence of lightweight cameras that allowed film language into television. And that in turn allows a much broader sense of realism, much more intimate performances, and so on. In the theatre, we are very used to understanding what we're seeing as a version, a notation of a fictional world; there's the theatre architecture, the lights and blackouts, and one's fellow audience members that you have to ignore for starters. Perhaps, the rubber monsters were fine because we just saw the monsters and imagined them as much more terrifying.

But the show was going downhill. John Nathan-Turner, as the recent biography by Richard Marson makes movingly clear, was desperate to shore up the programme, despite the beginnings of multi-channel broadcasting that would see ever-dwindling audiences and diminishing will from the BBC to support this rather expensive old embarassment of a show. He particularly enjoyed getting guest stars; his business logic was that a household name would possibly get Doctor Who some column inches in the press which might, in turn, lead to higher ratings; his personal logic seems to have been that he was a vaudevillian at heart and genuinely did not see any harm in casting, say, Bonnie Langford as a companion. Some of the guest stars, to be fair, were perfectly good: Nicholas Parsons has a very creditable role in The Curse of Fenric (1989). But it can sometimes look like outright sabotage when an excellent story like Earthshock (1982) has to accept Beryl Reid as the captain of a space freighter. Ironically, JN-T was helping to bring the programme into the new television world where film rather than theatre was the model, yet he cast Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy as the Doctor, both excellent actors but very theatrical figures, seemingly unable to underplay.  When the camera crash-zooms into Colin Baker's face - as it always seemed to do at the end of an episode - I always feel I want to sit a few rows back to get the proper effect. Doctor Who wanted people to hide behind the sofa, but not for this reason.

The scripts suffered as well. I have sometimes reflected that had I been the age I am now in 1985, it would not have been that hard to get a writing gig on Doctor Who. Frankly, if they hired Pip and Jane Baker (authors of the terrible Rani stories and the idiotically-named Terror of the Vervoids, a title which sounds like Doctor Who in self-parody mode but sadly was meant seriously), I'd surely have stood a chance. Season 23 was a murderously poor idea: a 14-week single story in which the Doctor is on trial by the timelords and we are shown four stories that somehow form part of the evidence. What the charge was, how the evidence was supposed to fit, and what actually was going on was left risibly undercooked (I have had the Valeyard explained to me a few times, but I am none the wiser); the trial story frame slackens our grip on the four adventures, and the adventures make us resent the absurd frame. Illnesses, serious fall-outs, and the participation of Pip and Jane Baker meant that the writing suffered badly. The last season showed a notable upturn but by that point it was too late and the show was cancelled.

I'd left it behind by then. The last story I can remember watching and enjoying was The Caves of Androzani, a beautiful, strange, sinister story with some terrific performances and an inspired - though apparently unintended - use of direct address to camera. I didn't watch Colin Baker's stories when they went out and caught only a couple of random Sylvester McCoy episodes. When the show's cancellation was announced, I felt a flicker of sadness, but probably felt that given how badly it had lost its way, that the act was a kindness. In 1996, when an attempt was made to bring the show back, I watched, fearing the worst and found all my ferars confirmed, as a misshapen story unfolded that seemed wholly unsure whether it wanted us to participate in a festival of nostalgia or a contemporary drama. (In doing so, I evidently watched it much less perceptively than Russell T Davies, who saw in the TV Movie several very good ideas that I did not detect and incorporated them into his mid-2000s reboot.)

But something else was happening. When I was growing up, the previous episodes were things of mystery. I had a copy of The Making of Doctor Who by Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke which included the (inaccurate) titles and (tantalisingly brief) descriptions of all the former stories. There were the Target novelizations which offered a way into those stories, though they were still very cautious about eelving too much into the past while I was an active fan. That we might ever get to see the old stories seemed unthinkable. When the Doctor Who Monthly Winter Special of 1981 published its interview with Sue Malden, revealing just how few of the Hartnell/Troughton stories still existed in the archives, it was like being bereaved of a relative you'd never met. The magazines and fanzines published photographs of stories and more detailed plot summaries, so gradually one could build up a bank of knowledge, but it was all like the Buzzcocks bootlegs I used to buy from Portobello Road market: they were all hiss and crackle will some vague intimation that music may have taken place at one time if you listened hard enough (this experience became Static, by the way). It seemed to my young mind that Doctor Who had in insurmountably vast history that I could never hope to know. It shocks me slightly now, in the 50th aniversary year, to think that I joined Doctor Who only 13 years into its history and have travelled with the Doctor for 37 years.

Video recorders became fairly common in the early eighties but Doctor Who didn't seem high on the list for release. The first story released on VHS was the perverse choice of a rare Tom Baker dud, Revenge of the Cybermen, and it was priced at £40 (which is something like £120 in today's money) and thus completely beyond the pocket of me or any of my friends and so we didn't see it. However, around the time the show was cancelled, the stories started to come out on VHS and the price came down and, glory be, some of the missing episodes started showing up: The Tomb of the Cybermen in Hong Kong, most of The Ice Warriors in a cupboard at the BBC (and, only this year, two almost complete stories in a television relay station in Nigeria). I bought a couple of these as they came out. Some others I caught on cable TV, where they'd become a popular time-filler for UK Gold. But at the very end of the decade, the stories started coming out on DVD, starting, again unpropitiously, with the misconceived 20th anniversary special, The Five Doctors. But thanks to the immense diligence of the Restoration Team, the classic-series DVD releases soon established themselves; each one with immaculately restored picture and sound, and bolstered by hours of accompanying documentaries, production notes, contextual materials, Easter Eggs, interviews, and features - my favourite (for some reason) being 'Now and Then' which visits the locations of the stories to juxtapose how they looked in the broadcast stories and how they look now. The DVDs are remarkable; they are like the Arden editions of Doctor Who.

I bought a couple. Then a couple more. And soon my teenage Doctor Who completist attitude kicked in and now I have a hall cupboard filled with an absurd collection of these DVDs. I found myself watching the blogs as blogs came into being with the result that when the return was announced in 2004, I was as giddy with excitement as if I'd still been 12. And I've watched it ever since, this time with, it seems, the entire rest of the world.

What did Doctor Who give me? I think that immersion in a massive ongoing story with details and evidence and legends and myths was a tremendous preparation for being an academic. I think the intense immersion in story shaped some of my love of narrative writing. And the luck of coming to the programme during Tom Baker's era gave me a love of irreverent humour and a certain political nonconformism. The Doctor and his companions dropping in and out of many worlds offered a reassuring vision of alternative families that overwhelmed any attachment I might have developed for the conventional unit. Baker's eccentricity seemed to me, as a boy, a pure good, valuable in its own sake, thrilling when exerted against the military mind, from the Brigadier to Davros. I would be a quite different person without Doctor Who in my life and I love that, in its fiftieth year, it's still around for us to make a fuss of. It represents something of the same progressive Britishness as the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics.

Mind you, I bet David Cameron grew up with Jon Pertwee's Doctor.